I Hate Martin Amis et al.

by Peter Barry

  ‘I want to ask Mr Mulqueeny why he rejected my manuscript,’ I said to the young man’s half-turned back as he set off to look for some names. There, it was out. I was quite calm and collected. I was proud of myself.

  It was the young man who was increasingly losing it. ‘But you understand, Mr …?’ he said, turning back to me.

  I gave him my name. Why not help the lad out?

  ‘But I’m sure you understand, Milan,’ (this is a little familiar, I thought) ‘we’re unable to offer individual criticism on every manuscript we receive. It simply isn’t feasible, as much as we’d like to.’ He waved his arms feebly towards the door through which he’d made his entrance with the receptionist. ‘You should see my office. Manuscripts piled …’ Another sentence petered out between us. How high are the manuscripts piled, I wondered: as high as his desk, the ceiling, this building, an elephant’s eye, I had no idea. He didn’t elaborate on the height of the manuscripts, but continued to explain his predicament to me in breathless bursts. ‘Even if we wanted to … You have no idea the number … If you had read our rejection letter … It’s all there … We do the best we can, but of course …’ Unfinished sentence followed unfinished sentence in a staccato of explanations. I tried mentally to catch some of them as they flew past my ears. His hands, as though exhausted by their owner’s verbal excesses, flopped to his sides, and he stopped talking, like a wind-up toy whose battery had run out. He looked at me, possibly hoping I might come to his assistance. The receptionist had pushed him into the front line, and he wasn’t having much success. Having fired all his guns, he now wished to retreat back into the trenches.

  ‘I’d like an individual criticism from Mr Mulqueeny.’ I remained pleasant; after all, he was only a kid. But it wasn’t easy to stay calm. I was beginning to imagine my hands around his neck, squeezing the carotid artery, staring into bulging, upturned eyes. ‘I’m happy to wait until he’s free, as I said to the young lady over there.’ I returned to my newspaper, adding over the top of it, ‘I think I deserve that.’ The young man and the receptionist exchanged a look, as if to say, ‘What do we do now?’

  They were rescued from their dilemma by the arrival of a middle-aged man, probably about ten years older than me, thickset, not tall, throwing open the front door and bursting into the office. He was all bustle and self-importance, I could see that straight away. He looked like someone who had inhaled deeply, but forgotten to exhale. He had glasses resting on the end of his nose, over which he peered at the three of us, a bald head – apart from a sparse arrangement of fine salt-and-pepper hair around the edges – and was wearing a rather shabby, loose-fitting, dark suit. He was clutching at least six manuscripts to his chest with one hand, and carrying a briefcase in the other. I had no doubt that this was the man himself. He’d been out of the office after all. Without saying good morning to his young employees, he dropped the manuscripts onto the table with a peremptory ‘Send these back, Diane,’ and turned to go through to his office. The young man leapt after his boss, determined not to let this life raft drift too far off. ‘Mr Mulqueeny …’

  They conferred together in whispers at the end of the room, the older man turning every so often to scowl at me across the top of his glasses. He said something to the young man, sighed loudly as if it were all too much and disappeared through a door. The young man came towards me. ‘Mr Mulqueeny has kindly agreed to see you for a few minutes. You’re very lucky, this is most unusual.’

  I couldn’t bring myself to thank him; I simply nodded. Was he expecting me to make obeisance with deep gratitude there and then? I wasn’t sure. Five minutes later the receptionist took me through to Mr Mulqueeny’s office, introduced me and left. He was sitting behind a desk, his baby face barely visible above the numerous piles of manuscripts that covered it. He neither got up from his chair nor held out a hand, obviously thinking that by agreeing to see me he’d already extended sufficient civility. I was waved towards a chair, the only one in the small room apart from his own. Even with the desk between us, I was assailed by fumes of alcohol and garlic. It had obviously been a good lunch – probably with some best-selling author, I thought.

  The man with his name on the door didn’t waste time on polite chit-chat. He took a deep breath and started straight in. ‘What some of you people don’t understand is that the book industry is exactly that: an industry. It’s a business. It has profit and loss columns, a bottom line, earnings and dividends and so on and so forth. It’s about money, it’s not about art. People come through these doors with airy-fairy dreams about art, immortality and literature – you can put all of those with capital letters: Art, Immortality and Literature. I’m not interested in those. I don’t give a damn about any of that. Art, Immortality and Literature will never be welcomed through these doors. You know what interests me?’

  I shook my head.Not only did I not know what interested him, I had no idea why he was telling me all of this.

  ‘How much money is in it for me, that’s all that interests me. I don’t give a twopenny-halfpenny damn if your novel is the greatest novel since War and Peace or if you’re a better writer than Conrad, I want to know how much money your book is going to make for me. I want to know if it’s going to help me pay off my mortgage, let my wife buy herself beautiful dresses – which she’s extremely partial to – and allow me to fork out the ridiculous amounts of money I’m expected to pay for my children’s education.’

  As he spoke, he was waving his arms around in the air as if addressing a far larger audience than one. ‘Now, my dear sir, if you can persuade me that you’re the next Michael Crichton, Jean Auel, Stephen King, Danielle Steel – even the next Nick Hornby – then I shall welcome you with open arms. But I suspect you’re more likely to be, at the very best, a one-shot wonder, the author of an autobiography masquerading as a novel, of little literary merit and no page-turning qualities, which will cost a publisher a lot of money to promote and cost me my reputation for having pushed it onto him.’ He burped quietly – ‘Excuse me.’ – before carrying on.

  ‘It’s true publishers pay first novelists a pittance, and I’ll tell you why this is so. It’s because it is more expensive for publishers to persuade the public to buy your novel than it is for them to pay an advance of thousands of pounds to a well-known and already well-established author. That’s what people like you don’t realise. Publishers don’t pay novice novelists £5000 in the hope of getting £5000 back. They want more back. They are speculators, and as speculators they want profits. The fact of the matter is, around eighty per cent of all published novels are failures. Eighty per cent, and I’m talking all novels, not just first novels.’

  It was a tirade. He just went on and on. Beneath the bustling, vaguely literary intellectual there lurked the hard, cold businessman, and the latter was all that was visible to me. Exhausted, if not drowned by the oceans of words that had washed over him throughout his life, Mulqueeny had become indifferent to the struggles of would-be writers. He was impassive towards both me and my book, and my plight was of no interest to him. Eventually he stopped talking, and there was a long silence while he stared at me over his glasses.

  ‘Mr Mulqueeny, I believe I have talent. In fact I know I have talent.’

  ‘My dear sir, they all say that. Try to be more original.’ He yawned. ‘Anyway, you’re too old. How old are you?’

  ‘I’m thirty-six.’

  ‘They like authors to be in their twenties nowadays. Gives them more of a career.’

  I ignored him. ‘All I’m asking is for someone to tell me where I’m going wrong. I’ve written novels – the one I submitted to you was my fourth – and I’ve written short stories, many short stories. And they all come back with the standard rejection slip. No one tells me anything, no one offers me any kind of help or advice.’

  ‘That’s because there are too many of you. There are millions of wannabe writers out there, millions. If I saw every person who asked for help, I wouldn’t have time to do anything else. I
’d have to shut up shop.’ He put his feet up on his desk, amongst the manuscripts, and stared briefly out of the window. Solely for my benefit, he was doing his impersonation of a bored man. But he didn’t fool me. I could see that he was a pompous fool, and he was also beginning to irritate me.

  ‘It’s a vicious circle, that’s what you’re telling me. I won’t have a novel accepted by a literary agent unless I’ve been published, and I won’t be published until I’ve had a book accepted by a literary agent.’

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘That is very perspicacious of you.’

  ‘But how do you know I’m not the next Martin Amis? To pick a name at random.’

  ‘As I said, you’re too old.’ He shrugged and gave me a quick, almost sympathetic smile, but lacking in sincerity. ‘He published his first novel when he was twenty-four.’

  ‘Only because of Daddy.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Of course. Doesn’t everyone?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be so sure. His talent was recognisable, I think, even then.’

  ‘The Rachel Papers is juvenilia. If it had arrived on your desk with my name on the front cover, you’d have thrown it in the bin.’

  ‘That’s your opinion.’

  ‘It’s a fact. Anyway, I’m not yet thirty-seven and Annie Proulx was over fifty when her first novel was published. So was Saramago. I may not be an Oxford or Cambridge undergraduate, but I’m definitely not too old.’

  ‘Those two writers you mention, Proulx and Saramago, are geniuses. You, I am afraid, are not – whatever you might think. You know my advice to you? Give it up. Give up your dream of literary immortality or of writing a best-selling airport novel – whichever dream it is you have – and stick to your day job. Be content with being a waiter, plumber, schoolteacher, journalist, businessman, electrician, undertaker, dishwasher or whatever it is you do, and forget about being a writer. You’ve missed the boat. If you’d wanted to be an author in the eighteenth century, in the days of Jane Austen say, you’d possibly have succeeded. Hardly anyone wanted to be a novelist then. Publishers were crying out for writers. Today every man and his dog wants to be a novelist.’

  ‘Fuck Jane Austen,’ I said, leaning forward in my chair.

  ‘Certainly, but have you seen what she looked like?’ He smiled, obviously amused by my outburst.

  ‘I have talent.’

  ‘If you have talent, sir, if you really have talent, then you’ll be published.’

  ‘But you rejected my manuscript.’

  ‘Then we obviously don’t agree that you have talent, or not sufficient talent.’

  ‘Maybe you wouldn’t recognise talent if it was shoved up your arse.’

  He raised his eyebrows and lowered his feet to the ground. He swivelled his chair round to face me. I now had his full attention.

  ‘There is the possibility that I wouldn’t recognise talent if it was, as you so charmingly put it, shoved up my arse, but I happen to believe that I would. However, in the unlikely event I didn’t recognise it, then you can rest assured someone else would. It might take time, but if you truly have talent, someone out there will eventually realise it. Not necessarily immediately, but eventually.’

  ‘My book was good – is good. The plot is strong, the characters are rounded, the dialogue is excellent, the narrative is well written – it’s good.’

  I was hoping he’d ask for a rundown of the plot, but he didn’t, so I prompted him. ‘Let me remind you what it was about.’ I doubted he would remember it – or even have read it.

  ‘I’m too busy for that.’

  ‘It won’t take long.’ And I started to give him the plot of my rejected novel. After only speaking for a minute or two, I could see he was becoming more and more fidgety. Suddenly he stood up. ‘I haven’t the time for this. I have too much work to do. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to leave. Possibly another day.’

  I too stood up. I went around his desk. He stepped back, stumbling against his chair. I pushed him into it, and it rolled a little over the floor until it came to a stop against a pile of manuscripts. I bent over him, placing my hands on the arms of his executive chair. It squeaked. If I’d been a vampire I would have been repelled by the waves of garlic that hit me full in the face. Mr Mulqueeny looked alarmed. At the risk of sounding like an airport novel … My eyes bored into his. Steely eyes, ice-cold resolve. A vein on the side of my forehead throbbed menacingly. I was determined to get my own way, come hell or high water. That kind of thing.

  ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’ I asked, speaking slowly, emphatically. ‘Then I shall continue with my story. Thank you.’ I straightened up, walked back around the desk, sat down and continued to recount the plot of my novel.

  But I’d lost the thread of what I’d been saying. I found it hard to concentrate. I was too aware of Mulqueeny fidgeting, forever looking at the phone on his desk as if he might find the courage to spring up and grab it. I stopped my sales spiel. He was making me angry.

  ‘You’re not listening, Mr Mulqueeny.’

  ‘I am, truly I am.’ He was nervous.

  ‘Who read my novel at Mulqueeny & Holland? Who read the first three chapters and the synopsis? That receptionist out there? You?’

  ‘No, not me. I don’t read novels.’ He said it too quickly.

  ‘You brought a pile of manuscripts into the office this morning. I imagine they were novels?’

  ‘Yes, that’s true, but it’s most unusual. I normally leave the novels to my readers. We have three or four readers and we go by what they say, by their recommendations.’

  ‘But you could have read my manuscript. You, yourself. It’s possible. Do you recognise the plot?’

  ‘I can’t say that I do.’

  ‘You can’t say that you do?’ I almost whispered it.

  ‘You see, we read so many, so very many manuscripts, it can be difficult to remember them all. Keeping track of everything … You don’t understand …’

  ‘But you only read the first page. It can’t be that difficult to remember one page.’ I started to take my manuscript out of the envelope. ‘I’ll read you the first page. It may jog your memory.’

  He half laughed, holding up a hand. ‘We do usually read a bit more than that. It can be hard to judge a book from the first page, you know.’

  ‘It must be hard to judge a book from the first three chapters and a synopsis, I’d have thought, but you manage that all right.’

  ‘You obviously don’t appreciate the size of our task. Another lifetime would not be long enough. Publishers and literary agents are being crushed by the sheer weight of submitted manuscripts. We receive over three thousand a year. We cannot give careful consideration to every single novel that comes into our offices – as much as we’d like to. It’s an impossibility.’

  ‘My problem is I don’t give a fuck about anyone else’s novel, I’m only interested in mine.’

  ‘I understand. But try to see it from our point of view. The system’s not ideal for us either. It’s a gamble. We have to rely on gut instincts – a quick glance through a few pages, a snap judgement and, if we get it wrong, we miss out on a best seller. It’s easy for people like you to read a published novel at your leisure, to say, this is a book of great literary merit, but I challenge you to pick that same book out of the pile of manuscripts on your desk at the end of every day. When you’re tired, when you’re pushed for time, when all you want to do is go home, put your feet up and have a glass of wine. When you’ve spent the whole day, every day of the week – let’s face it – wading through a pile of dross. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, dross.”

  ‘My heart goes out to you.’ I’d started to pace up and down his office while he spoke. We were going round in circles: I was letting him speak too much, and all he was coming up with was excuses. As for me, I was listening too much.

  It happened quickly. I wasn’t thinking, I just did it. There was a vase of flowers on a cabinet at the end of his desk. It was a tall vase; I thou
ght the flowers were gladioli or something, but I wasn’t sure. I pushed the top of the vase and it fell across the desk, pouring a considerable amount of water onto the publisher’s lap. The effect was good. Water and flowers cascaded everywhere, including over a pile of manuscripts waiting to be rejected – or already rejected – on a corner of the desk. Mr Mulqueeny stumbled to his feet, looking down at his wet crotch, his face a picture of horror. I think maybe it was then that he understood I was serious. His mouth opened. He was gasping for air, as if he might have been a fish emptied out of the flower vase. He tried to dry the front of his trousers with tissues from a box on his window sill.

  ‘I’m interested in my novel, Mr Mulqueeny. As I said to you before, other people’s books are of no interest to me. I want you, or whoever read my book, to tell me why it was rejected. That’s all. Why? That’s all I wish to know. A simple enough question, I’d have thought. I want to know where, in your opinion, I went wrong. I want to know what, in your opinion, I’m doing wrong. I want to know why, in your opinion, my story lacks appeal. I want some guidance and advice. That’s all I’m asking for. Not too much, surely? I don’t wish to argue with you – you’re entitled to your opinion – I simply want some help.’ And I pushed, with deliberate slowness, a pile of manuscripts resting near the edge of his desk onto the floor. Just to add insult to injury.

  He stared at me, wide-eyed, his mouth still open, still gasping. He had one hand resting on his desk as if to prevent himself from falling over. ‘I’ll tell you what …’ He cleared his throat. ‘Excuse me. Let me just have a look at our files. We should be able to find out who read your manuscript, and we can ask them for a more detailed evaluation.’ He smiled in a sickly fashion. ‘How’s that?’

  ‘That sounds like an excellent idea.’

  ‘Please have a seat. I’ll be right back.’

  He edged around me, giving me as wide a berth as possible in the small room – yet I still caught a noseful of alcohol fumes – and scuttled crabwise through the door.

  Over his shoulder: ‘I’m sorry. Your name?’