by Paul Magrs
Table of Contents
Phoenix Court and Beyond
FANCY MAN | Paul Magrs
Introduction
FANCY MAN
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
Afterword
GLITTERING FAG
BAUBLES
About the Author
More by Paul Magrs
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
I moved to a new publisher in 1998. After three novels and a collection of stories I was moving on and writing a new book. I wanted to write something grand, set over a larger span of time – maybe twenty years or more. The novel was to be the story of a young orphaned girl who falls into the hands of her slightly unscrupulous aunty and who makes good and bad choices and good and bad friends as she moves into her twenties, discovering new places and relationships as she goes.
In many ways (I now see) it was the story of myself in my twenties in the 1990s. But it was also the story of Isabel Archer in Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, a novel I’d read with great attention and enjoyment during my last summer in Edinburgh.
In essays I read about Henry James there was talk of architecture and the structure of his novels: these faultless erections of his. I thought: I’ll have a bit of that, then. So I decided that my Wendy would follow a similar path to James’ Isabel. In a kind of cover version of the old book she would begin in one city and move to others, resisting temptation and the lure of wicked people wanting to exploit her. It would be all about money and finding love and trying to find a place to live and who to trust and what to feel. It would be about sex and self-delusion…
And I wrote all of this in the gaps I could find in my life during my first year lecturing at UEA in Norwich. I was teaching the MA course in Novel-writing, long-established as the oldest, most successful course of its kind in the UK. Most of my students were older than me and some looked askance at someone they clearly felt was callow and not famous enough to be teaching them. Here was this self-effacing northerner with a daft sense of humour telling them all what to do and sharing teaching duties with the Poet Laureate. I often had quite a fight on my hands when it came to showing people at UEA I knew exactly what I was talking about.
In the midst of this I was struggling with my Fancy Man. At some point along the line my new editor – who had apparently loved my earlier books, even sent me fan mail about the first – decided he hated this new one. He couldn’t stand what I was doing with it.
‘Why are all your characters freaks?’ he burst out during a phone call. At first I thought he was joking. My position was that all characters are freaks because, essentially, everyone in real life is a freak, in their own particular way. This had been a constant in my thinking and my fiction from the start. It was precisely what I wrote about: everyone is as fascinating and as fucked up as everyone else. If you look hard enough and sympathetically enough at anyone, you will see that they are freakish and unique and wonderful. If I had a constant theme, this might be it.
Anyway, the editor wasn’t happy about that.
‘Everyone you write about is a transvestite or grossly overweight or they have no legs or something else horribly wrong with them, or they believe in aliens…’
Yes, all of this was fair comment.
Then he said, ‘Don’t you know any normal people in real life? What’s the matter with you?’
Up till then he had seemed such a kindly soul. Really, a gentleman, with interesting stories of his own to tell. But he had seemingly gone off my writing overnight. I remember a parcel of manuscript coming back in the post and when I unwrapped it I found that he had crossed through almost every single page with thick, greasy pencil. (It reminded me of the pencil with which my grandfather the butcher used to work out sums on bloody parcels of meat.)
He’d left hardly any words at all still standing on those four hundred pages of Fancy Man. It was the weirdest thing. I was in a panic. What was I to do with a book where all the words had been crossed out and were somehow wrong?
He told me that I kept going off and getting too interested in secondary characters. He thought I must keep my main character the focus in every single scene. I didn’t agree with that idea at all. Surely one of the great pleasures of novels is all the detours you can take? A novel is a forest we are invited to lose ourselves in.
My then-agent didn’t help much.
My work was developing, as it should, changing from book to book and yes… perhaps this one was even wilder than its predecessors. But why would anyone set out to write a book tamer and less demanding than their last one?
This one had a suicide cult, alien replicants, nasty old witches and a cameo by Marlene Dietrich. All these things were delightful to me. If I made them delightful on the page, I was sure my audience would follow me.
My then-agent said: ‘You should develop and mature more sensibly. You should mature by writing less about northern working class people. Write about more middle class people. Write about the south.’
For some reason it wasn’t until 2003 that I sacked her.
As it happened, Fancy Man was all about moving away from home and finding a whole range of different kinds of people coming into your life. But I guess the message from that daft agent and that daft editor was: only write novels just like other people do. If you want us to sell them and other people to buy them, you’ve got to make it all a bit more… conventional.
I just couldn’t. I couldn’t see what they were talking about when they said make it more normal. Looking back, I can catch a glimpse of the kind of thing they might have wanted me to do. Make the romance more orthodox. If it had to be gay, keep it light and vanilla. Put in fewer unicorns and alien replicants. Keep the sex fluffy rather than quite so in your face. Less melodrama, fewer cocks, fewer flights of ludicrous fancy. And maybe don’t make every single character a writer..? (In ‘Fancy Man’ almost every single character is busy writing novels, memoirs or letters, or they are bursting into some kind of ragged verse to express their feelings. But this was just a joke of mine. In any other literary novel (Iris Murdoch, say) no one would turn a hair if all the characters were writers, philosophers or critics. Why shouldn’t that also be true in novels written by me? In novels about hairdressers, shop girls, lottery winners..?
Because it isn’t very realistic or true to life, comes the answer…
But I never started off writing novels in order to be true to life. I wanted to be true to my characters and a fully-imagined world of my own. I wanted to interrogate the myths and lies of realism and break it apart from within. When you come from a working class background the literary world expects you to write gritty realism, so you can look back on squalor and make everyone shudder. Well, fuck that for a game of soldiers, I thought.
The other route you can escape into as a non-posho literary author is horror, sf or fantasy. But they were kind of a boys’ gang then, and mo
stly still are. What I really wanted to do was to take the outrageous tropes of those bastard genres and put them into literary novels. I wanted to create a wonderfully spicy stew of fictive elements…
Anyhow, somewhere between teaching all those courses that year, fighting to convince people I knew what I was on about, and editorial difficulties and ultimately the cancellation of my fourth novel (did I fall or was I pushed? The book was cancelled either way…) I lost my confidence. Somewhere between the devil and the deep blue sea. I found myself alone with my manuscript and all my confidence suddenly gone. My great new editor had said my book was nonsense and my agent couldn’t help.
The book, as far as I could tell, was ruined.
This felt just like being a tightrope walker, jolted out of his delicate spell of concentration. He looks down, sees the ground, and wobbles. He needs to get his balance back right away or he’s going to plummet to his doom.
So I put Fancy Man away. Up in the attic in the house I’d bought in Norwich. Every copy of the manuscript. The one where I chopped it down to half its length. The one where I excised all the Magical Realist elements. The one where I chopped out all the aliens and cocks. The version where I edited out the long section set in the brothel above the gay sauna on Leith Walk, run by the woman with no legs. The version where I’d hacked each scene into exquisitely arty, poetic fragments… Every single copy I put away out of my sight.
Then I went and did my best to forget all about it. My year with Wendy and Timon, Aunty Anne, Colin, Belinda, Captain Simon, Uncle Pat. I abandoned the freakish lot of them, people who’d been as real to me as anyone I knew in 1998.
I got on with life. I started a whole new novel in 1999 – Modern Love, which was a very dark domestic thriller with no fantasy at all and lots of murders. It came out with a different publisher – my third – in the year 2000, when I was thirty.
Time moved on. Eventually we moved cities and jobs and houses. I chucked out boxes, folders, files, papers, letters and manuscripts. I chucked out, I thought, every remaining version of the doomed ‘Fancy Man.’ My partner Jeremy despairs at me throwing stuff out. I prefer to clear the decks, but he won’t hear of it.
Anyhow – fast forward to 2016.
There’s the marvelous news that Lethe want to republish my first three novels, with new covers, introductions, added extras and contemporaneous short stories. I’m cockahoop. Writing these introductions for them, I still can’t resist grinning at the very thought of these books being made available again.
Then, when I’m racketing about in old boxes in the Beach House at the bottom of our garden (we live in Manchester now, in a leafy enclave down by the railway lines) I find something interesting amongst my old files. Amid the letters and old stories and notes and ideas I find ‘Fancy Man’ again.
I assume at first it’s the tidied-up version. The truncated version. The bowdlerized or bastardized version. But it’s none of these. It turns out to be the four hundred page version. It turns out I hadn’t binned it after all. Not even in a fit of pre-millennial self-loathing and pique.
Here it is. It spent six years in the Norwich attic, then ten years in the Manchester cellar and then a year or two mouldering in the Beach House. It’s damp and blotchy and warped.
I read it all again, very slowly.
And I love it, all over again.
It seems very me. Me as I was at twenty-nine. Not as hampered and crushed down and worried and care-worn as I became a little later on.
It’s like finding a little clone of yourself, or a recording of your voice with your friends, or a set of photographs of a happy time you didn’t even know had been printed.
So.
I feel confident all over again about the Fancy Man phase of my writing career. The novel reads like a missing link in my books and it should rightly slot into 1999 – right between Could it be Magic? and Modern Love. Now the whole story can be told. It’s been restored and polished up and put with the others.
I hope you enjoy it. Even though it’s full of freaks, oddities, aliens and cocks. Welcome back to the end of the twentieth century.
Paul Magrs
Manchester
April 2016.
ONE
My sisters were fearless and I could never understand that. I was the youngest, so was I the protected one? They bred and fed me on the titbits of the world they saw. I thought the world was something that would gobble you up, soon as look at you. Some days I became too scared to leave the house, and certainly night saw me indoors.
My sisters were out on the streets. “Like cats on heat,” our mother would say. It was a harsh way of putting it, but I could see she was scared for them. My mother was scared of the whole world. Mandy, my eldest sister, said it was our mother who unsettled me.
I was the third child. The dregs. I was the last scrapings from our mother’s womb, the last spitter spatter of use from our father’s balls. Half-heartedly they whipped me up, my eldest sister said, and I was the best they could muster.
Was I offended?
I pictured this conception. I saw it in the fluffing up of pink candy floss, when they jab a naked stick into the vibrating metal tub and you watch, standing at the candy floss caravan window. How the strands and strands of spun pink toffee whirl and attach themselves in a claggy, gorgeous beehive. I loved the way it looked like genetic material coming together in a hasty massing of life.
So I wasn’t offended.
My eldest sister also said my mother breast-fed me and she was so short on milk I got curdled, watery stuff like the water you have left after poaching eggs. Our mother had hit a fearful, confused middle age by then and her milk no longer came with brio.
My sisters watched her feed me in the evenings and they looked at each other. They were amazed by her loss of nerve. By then we were in the poorest place we had ever lived. It was the hardest of times we had fallen on: all of us in one room, sharing a balcony and walkway with hundreds of other families. Under layers and layers of balconies. It was the first home I remember. My sisters lost no time in telling me that we had come down in the world, and that I was their Jonah.
My two sisters looked at our mother and were embarrassed by the squelch and slap of my feeding noises. They stared at her tits and the fatness of the orange settee.
They said that was when they started to feel scorn for her. She had let us all down, they said.
We lived off the Golden Mile. A breath (a smoky, lipsticky, fish and chippy breath) away from the promenade, where all was glitter and tack and nostalgia.
The Golden Mile makes me think of...
Fat ladies on toilets
Skinny men at keyholes
Magicians pulling rabbits
Strongmen flexing and testing their muscles
Blue comics...
I love the word blue (don’t you?) for everything risque. It puts me in mind of...
Colour of oil and rare sea birds
dredged onto beaches
nuns’ knickers
tadpoles
bush of pubic hair in the dark
Bluebeard himself.
Between the gold-painted Tower and the hoops and skirts of the rides at the fair, the sea sucked... pushing up the rubbled belly of the beach... drawing back a long slow suck of sand...
At night you’d get the illuminations on the water... an underwater jamboree competing with the shore... showing up green and gold and red, the letters on signs and logos and hoardings reversed and a-quiver... the lights leeched out like blood flowing over your teeth—gingivitis—when you suck your teeth too hard... and your gums, soft, swollen, bleed.
This was my town.
My mother would sing and sing as she worked in the kitchen.
She cleaned things till they shone, even formica. Home smelled of bleach to me. Bleach still reminds me of home. My mother would wash and hang the dishcloths on the shiny, silver taps to dry. Nothing smelled worse than a foisty dishcloth, she said.
She would sing a
song about her golden chances passing her by. It’s the only line of that song that I remember. What was that song? When I asked her she would say, ‘Was I singing?’
For years I spent more time with my mother than the others did. They were at the age of going out and not coming in again until they had to. Crawling home with the dawn, with their money all spent and yesterday’s knickers back on.
“Those sisters of yours,” my mother would say. “They’re running wild. Now, you’ll be a good girl, won’t you? For your poor old Mam?”
We lived in that town up against the sea... and we were
barricaded from the sea by the Prom (diddley-om-pom-pom)...up and down, all weathers, folk would go up and down the Prom...in the long stormy winters...we were scared of floods, even though we lived in a tower block...but the water could still get in, up the shafts of lifts...rising level by level...and then the concrete pebble-dashed chipboard towers would tumble and topple...I could see the whole of north-west England crumbling into the brown grey sea...bad as that perilous crust of California.
They sent out sandbags in preparation—like in war-time—to lie at our doorways, to hold back the tide...like Midas, or Ming the Mighty, or Moses...or, who was it? Canute! Oh, my head for names...watch out for my memory. I might be what the expert—the bloody expert—Mandy calls an unreliable narrator. Ay, that’ll be right. But I’m one who’s been surrounded by unreliable narrators, all my life... buggers! ...everyone I’ve ever known...they’ve all been up to it...telling their own sides.
And watch out for when I jump ahead of myself...and tell some of the story in advance. Don’t worry. I live in the end. In case you were worrying. I already know the surprises to come.
I hate surprises. Life springs too much shit on you as it is. Astrid, the woman in the Leith Walk launderette, would have something to say on the subject. “Jesus God! What are you trying to murder me, with shock?” She was a German Sikh.
And yet...I don’t like softening blows. I hate prolepsis. Like nibbling as you’re cooking. Means you’re not hungry afterwards.
And watch out when I go third person! It’s still me, still all me! To me it’s just like looking in a mirror and trying my hair a new way...doing something different with my hair my eyes my face...But believe it or not...I’m fairly consistent. I am! I am!
