My Animal Life

by Maggie Gee

  I wanted to write about the Britain I loved, my sense of which stretched back to the ’50s. It was my parents’ country too, the place their generation had fought for in the war, the country my great-uncles had died for. They believed they had risked everything so life would be better, with a new, fairer deal for everyone. The Gees were Labour through and through, and the ideals I grew up with were co-operative, communal, although my father himself, of course, like his father, like so many old Labour patriarchs, was fiercely individualistic and territorial. My father, the bane and the lodestar of my life, who made me a member of the awkward squad, rebelling against him and everything else …

  My aim was to write about a racial murder, yet I was being drawn back into confronting my father, without my knowledge, against my will. I started to create a character.

  This was Alfred White, the park keeper, who ran his fiefdom for the public good, just as Dad believed in his job as a head teacher. I didn’t see Alfred was a version of my father, but looking back, it should have been obvious. Side by side with Alfred was his wife, May White, to whom I gave the name of my mother’s mother, who loved reading, as my own mother did, who wrote poems and had a secret life, like her, and whose favourite book was a copy of Tennyson that Mum had been given as a form prize. The actual copy! And she loved and feared Alfred, and hid things from her husband, as my mother did. And yet, in my head, I wasn’t actually writing about my parents, because if I had consciously told myself that, I would have drawn back, afraid. And so, in the shelter of a cloud of unknowing, I began to write my way into the book.

  Alfred’s park was modelled on beautiful Roundwood Park, my local park, founded in 1900, with its stone sundial and drinking fountain, aviary and flower-beds, its little café, its plane-trees, its roses, its shady lawns where conversation murmured, its gentle hill overlooking the graveyard. But it was also a metaphor for Britain, the country where Stephen Lawrence had been killed. And slowly the book started to come together.

  Alfred White had three children (as did my father). Like us, there were two brothers and a sister: Darren, Shirley, and poor little Dirk. Though there the resemblances really did end, for there was not a jot of likeness to my brothers; neither of them is ignorant, a racist, or cheesily in love with America, like Darren, and though I’d love to look sexy and creamy like Shirley—maybe I am sexy and creamy inside?—I am thin and wiry and always in a hurry. Yet in some way that afterwards I couldn’t deny, Alfred was my father, and May my mother, and the book was my way of forgiving my father, for in the end Alfred would be tested, and my father was never short of moral courage.

  A brief sketch of the plot: there’s a row in the park. A black family has walked on the grass, Alfred remonstrates and is accused of racism, becomes enraged and falls down with a stroke. The family gather round his bedside. Rich, shallow Darren, a journalist, comes back from the States to join Shirley and Dirk. Shirley is the widow of a Ghanaian academic, Kojo. Dirk, the youngest and dimmest child, hates black people partly because he has grown up bathed in his father’s mild, old-fashioned racism, but more actively and jealously because his sister married Kojo. Dirk works in the failing local paper-shop, and when an Indian businessman takes it over, his hatred and frustration boil over into murder. And the parents find out. What is to be done?

  It was the question the whole country was trying to answer. The police investigation into Stephen Lawrence’s death was scandalously poor. Though an inquest would eventually give a verdict of unlawful killing by five named youths, no one was ever convicted or punished. Something had gone terribly wrong in Britain, not just the murder but the way we dealt with it. When the report of the McPherson Inquiry came out, in 1999, the police were found guilty of something new, ‘institutional racism’, and everyone was forced to look at themselves and their own institutions, and ask hard questions. We began to see racism everywhere.

  But I was too early for that changed climate. Many things in my novel must have been shocking. Dirk’s racism was explicit and detailed, and I told it from inside his consciousness, a technique I also used for his father’s more mundane racism. (I did distance the novel’s moral viewpoint from Dirk’s by making him ignorant, in many ways an idiot. His impoverished vocabulary and imagination make his account of the world comic and pathetic. The comedy may have been the hardest thing; some people were too shocked to laugh at him, although my black friends did find him funny.) Black people’s experience of white racism was also shown at length on the page. The book made uncomfortable reading for anyone, but maybe especially for those white liberals who thought that racism was in the past.

  I submitted my manuscript in 1995. After a long pause, HarperCollins turned it down.

  They turned it down! I could not believe it. I was Maggie Gee, on my sixth novel, my career could surely only go upwards. I would choose my agent and my publisher … but no, the publisher had turned me down. Nick took me to Wales. A deep, terrible pain only slowly ebbed as we sat on the sand. By the fourth day I was human again. But an accident had happened, a brutal car-crash. Obviously someone else would jump at the book, but still, HarperCollins had turned me down. (Could I be plucked out of my new glossy world of literary success so easily? I had heard of other well-known authors being rejected, and had always thought, ‘They must have written a bad book.’ But now the same thing had happened to me.)

  If you had told me then what I slowly learned, over the next twelve months of grim education—that my book would be turned down by almost every mainstream literary publisher in London—I do not believe I could have taken it in. It would have been unthinkable.

  I have already confessed I was not careful enough. The book was a little windy and baggy. It needed a good hard edit, another three months of thought and work. Yes, I was also unwise in my tactics, expecting to change agents and publishers at random. I am trying to give weight to the many factors that contributed to my book becoming homeless, for I do believe that, as with homeless people, the problem was too many factors colliding. But I still come to this conclusion: the novel was turned down partly, perhaps mainly, because the subject was unacceptable. Britain didn’t want to think about racism. It wasn’t ready, though one day it would be. In 1995, publishers turned their backs.

  The rejection letters were curious. Too long, too insulting or self-justifying, some just inappropriate: one editor remarked that she ‘simply disagreed’, though generally you don’t disagree with a novel. Many of them used the same adjectives; ‘dark’ was a favourite, which should have been amusing. I put them, one by one, in a file under the desk, and after a few, I wrote ‘DISASTER’ on the cover. As with one miscarriage, you become more prone to fearfully anticipate a second. I was more afraid each time the new agent sent it out, but still I took each letter as a blow to the heart, unwilling to believe it, raging, protesting. (Poor Nick. He could not have been more tested. But he took it all. He was my rock.)

  And, as I already mentioned, a kindly acquaintance, Di Marcus, to whom I will always be grateful, said, ‘This is when character tells.’ My friends: how much they have taught me and helped me. But I wasn’t so sure that my character would help me. I felt weak, angry, fatally wounded.

  What resources did I have that helped me to survive? My husband, Rosa, and the self-belief my parents gave me when I was a child. Nick never faltered; he continued to say, ‘This is your best book. I believe in it.’ In the end I turned on him, furious. ‘You’re deluded. It’s your fault, you should have told me it was hopeless. They can’t all be wrong, surely, can they?’ Stubbornly he kept on insisting they were wrong.

  The immediate worries were financial. I had expected a payment of £35,000, the balance owing on my contract, and had run into debt in anticipation, though I hated debt, because of my background. I had a contract; the money must arrive. It didn’t arrive. My overdraft grew. For a year, the agent kept sending the book out. Drip by drip, confidence and hope were eroded.

  Some money arrived in dribs and drabs. The first, kind and
gentlemanly, agent, the one I should have stayed with, together with Mark Le Fanu of the Society of Authors, leaned on HarperCollins to give me a token pay-off of £5,000. (Later on in the whole protracted saga, the Society of Authors gave me a grant of £3,000 to get me back on my feet again. We authors need our organisations, which line up behind us in hard times; not just the Society of Authors, but Public Lending Right, the stalwart body that collects money from the government whenever people borrow our books from libraries, and ALCS, which protects our copyrights and sends us money we never knew we’d earned. Young writers, join up and support these allies! When you need them, they will be there for you.)

  Then an opportune phone call came from Penny Smith, a lecturer at Northumbria University in Newcastle, who liked my work, and taught my novel Grace, inviting me to do a three-month residency up there, two days a week, and despite the travelling, I jumped at it. My friend Barbara lent me £5,000 which at least plugged the hole I had opened up. Neither of us knew it would take me seven or eight years to pay back. And as the year turned, and the rejections kept coming, I began reviewing for my bread and butter. That most painstaking and generous literary editor, John Coldstream at the Daily Telegraph, perhaps getting wind that I was in trouble, started asking me to review regularly: once a month, then twice a month, then almost every week. Without it I couldn’t have paid my share of the mortgage. It kept me alive, and my name in the papers. But my ego was shrivelling, all the same. Everything had changed. Perhaps I was … finished.

  Depression overwhelmed me; I felt I was drowning. Instead I made myself get up every day and go swimming at the Willesden Sports Centre just down the road, in the very early morning, so that by the time I came home to the emptiness, something good at least had happened, one good thing a day, however small. There was blood in my cheeks, and breath in my body, and the glow that comes with having exercised. My mind and its ambitions had led me astray; my body, recovering its strength, saved me. I put my trust in it, my animal body. I was swimming more lengths: fifty, eighty. I was my father’s daughter. I would go on.

  I asked writers of colour to read the novel. I feared they would hate it, like everyone else, but to them, of course, the racism I wrote about was not unbelievable, nor even remarkable, it was just part of the substance of their days. I was given much-needed encouragement by the novelist Mike Phillips, then writer-in-residence at the South Bank, by Bernardine Evaristo, author of The Emperor’s Babe and Blonde Roots, and by Colin Grant, Marcus Garvey’s biographer. I will never forget their kindness, for their own paths as writers were not entirely easy, but they all took the time to read that long novel, in manuscript, closely and critically, and sent me with advice and a blessing on my way. I needed their critique, but even more, their blessing. It was all I had to keep the show on the road.

  But I still felt terrible shame and unease when other people asked about my writing. I was unable to admit I had been rejected. Yet my internal landscape was slowly shifting. I had been rejected. So what would I do now? The tall agent was becoming more languid, and talked, one day when I went to see him, about another author, very well-known, who had written a book that was turned down. ‘He decided in the end he had to let it go.’ The lesson was indirect, but clear enough. Time had slipped on. We were heading fast for 1997, and I hadn’t had a book out since 1994.

  Down the road from us a couple, Steve and Suzanne, had moved in with a daughter, Isobel, two years younger than Rosa, and the man, Steve Shill, was a writer and director who later migrated to America and worked on The Sopranos and The Wire. As usual, new friends brought new ideas. (Never just stay at home and suffer.) Steve lent me a guide to film structure. At the same time, John Coldstream sent me a book to review called The Next 500 Years, by Adrian Berry, an overview of scientific predictions. It was speculative, but fizzed with ideas. The piece of information that excited me most was that, contrary to what I had always assumed, our temperate climate was not the norm; in fact, the earth’s default state was ice. Ice ages lasted for 100,000 years; arrived suddenly, over ten or twenty years; and were interspersed by temperate periods of only 8,000–14,000 years. And it was 12,000 years since the last ice age. The maths were suggestive. My mind started spinning.

  With both books in my bag I travelled up to Newcastle to do a session with the creative writing students on ‘Structure’. Structure is the weakness of creative writing courses; only brief pieces of writing can be discussed in a two-hour workshop, so some students become brilliant at writing individual chapters of novels, but have a weak overall grasp of structure or story. (And too many twentieth-century novels are weak on story. Yet story is what readers like, and they’re right, it’s what we need from art: stories to help us navigate the confusion of our own life-stories.) I read Steve’s book on film structure on the train, and liked its vigour. Yes, three acts, like every good drama. With plot points and a mid-point, a swoop up to the climax, a dip to the end—I loved this stuff. I sat on the train and redrafted this structure in terms of a 250-page novel. On which page should the plot points come? And the climax? I made a diagram for the students, and suggested that they try it out.

  On the three-hour journey home, things crystallised. I was a writer, but what was I writing? It was time to write myself out of trouble. The only thing I could do was write, and no one, no one could stop me writing (Vic’s daughter would never give up). The two books in my bag, and the students, came together. I took my own advice, and tried it out. I roughed out a story, with three acts, and plot points. We were in the middle of the next century, and an ice age had come upon us very fast. And I remember the excitement of sitting down at home and working into the night on the outline of a story as I followed, scene by scene, my model film structure. I had needed an idea, something utterly different from the rambling themes of the earlier novel; I needed a rope to guide me to the end, for I would not have dared follow my nose again, after my big, loose structure had led me to disaster. Within two days, I was given both things. I took what I was given and ran with it.

  I wrote The Ice People in less than six months. I wrote it as comedy, as satire, though there were links with The Keeper of the Gate: I had a biracial hero, Saul, who was trying to take his son Luke back to Africa, away from the ice that was advancing from the north. The arrow of population flow was reversed. It was Africa’s turn to restrict immigration. This new book was clear and short, with plenty of adventure. It felt totally different from its predecessor. My spirits improved. I was doing what I did. Now life would surely revert to normal. Nick loved the book. I sent it to the agent. He was less expressive, but said it was ‘good’. He sent it to our joint first choice of publishers—and of course there were fewer to send to than before, not just because the publishing world was contracting as more independents were sucked into conglomerates, but because I had been published by several already.

  My hopes were high, but it began again, the catalogue of disappointing letters, and this time it was even harder to bear. I couldn’t believe it, but it re-ran, the disaster movie of rejection. (Yet I knew they were wrong. This time they were wrong. I was absolutely sure this book was good. The other one had been so strange and unwieldy that I could hardly bear to think about it, but this one was carefully edited. I was over the worst of my RSI and the chaotic haste of Rosa’s early childhood. I do have a cool side; I am hard on myself, but my considered opinion was, this book hacked it.)

  Where to go next? I could not give up. I had put the first book aside to drain, but I could not do that with a second. I went for another discussion with the agent. I could see the tall man was wearying of me, but I didn’t want to acknowledge it, because if he gave up on me, I had lost the lot: publisher, book, this man who gave me status. But status, between writer and agent, is a two-way thing. I had not considered how it affected him, this wry, reserved man who liked to win, representing a writer who was being turned down. I should have paid attention to something he said after a rejection letter that was particularly offensive: ‘Yes
… probably aimed at me, not you.’ I did hear something he said that was so terrible I had to hive it off into a part of my brain where I could bear to hear it later. He had a drawling, smiling manner which had become vaguer and less intimate. He still had few words, but these words cut. ‘I wouldn’t say that in the present state of the market it’s a book that demands to be published.’ We were nearing the end of our barren story, but I had to hang on. I had nowhere else to go.