But even though I was the last author to talk to Merton Flak alive, the fact that he had a gun in his filing cabinet at least proved he must already have been thinking about doing away with himself. Nor did I think I was wholly to blame for the crisis in publishing, the devaluation of the book as object, the disappearance of the word as the book’s medium, library closures, Oxfam, Amazon, eBooks, iPads, Oprah, apps, Richard and Judy, Facebook, Formspring, Yelp, three-for-two, the graphic novel, Kindle, vampirism – all of which the head of marketing at Scylla and Charybdis Press mentioned in her eulogy (with some embarrassment, I thought, since she was an inveterate Yelper herself and blogged regularly on weRead) as contributory to poor Merton’s taking the drastic step he had. Of these, I was as much a victim as anybody else.
Metaphorically speaking, at least, we all had pistols in our filing cabinets. Even those publishers who still had writers, even those writers who still had readers, knew the game was up. We laughed at what wasn’t funny – dry, cancerous explosions, like the guffaws of crows – and fell into moody silences, as though anticipating the death of someone we loved, in the middle of what in better times would have been animated not to say scurrilous conversation. We had stones in our gall bladders, our spleens were engorged, our arteries were clogged. At one time, war or plague would have thinned our population out. Now, unread, we were dying of word-gangrene. Our own unencountered words were killing us.
But there was no solidarity in disaster. We dreaded gatherings and parties in one another’s company for fear of encountering someone exempted from the common fate, someone who had broken rank, had received a sliver of good news, a whisper of interest from the gods of television or film, an endorsement from E. E. Freville, otherwise known as Eric the Endorser, a man who at one time would have given anybody a puff for a glass of cheap white wine but after hitting the endorsement jackpot with a succession of Nobel Prize-winners (‘Unputdownable’; ‘I laughed till I cried, then I cried till I laughed’; ‘A page-turner of page-turningly epic proportions’) had become a literary personality in his own right and was now said to be reading books before endorsing them. I myself, on account of a number of extraordinarily favourable not to say bizarre reviews I had suddenly started to get on Amazon – ‘Cross Mrs Gaskell with Apuleius and you come up with Guy Ableman,’ was one of the more recent – had become an object of mistrust to other writers. What was I doing different? Why did I have readers? I didn’t, as it happened, I just had stars on Amazon. To tell the truth, though no one believed it, every time a new and more extravagant review appeared – ‘A verbal spermfest! With his latest novel Guy Ableman surpasses anyone who has ever dipped a pen in the incendiary ink of erotic candour’ – my publishers reported a drop in sales.
‘Strange,’ Merton had admitted, ‘but it would seem that people don’t want to be told what to like.’
‘You mean in the way of erotic candour?’
He swatted the phrase away. ‘I mean in the way of anything.’
I had a suggestion. ‘In that case, why don’t we submit our own reviews to Amazon saying that my books are ratshit?’
He wouldn’t hear of it. People didn’t want to be told what not to like, either. And besides, slagging himself off on Amazon in the hope of increasing sales was an impropriety no serious writer would ever live down. ‘It could even be illegal,’ Merton reckoned, looking around to be sure no one was listening.
That last lunch I had with him, in a restaurant the size of a matchbox, was our first for more than two years. But for his rubbish wardrobe – British Home Stores chinos of the sort wives buy for husbands and on which he’d wiped his hands of hope a thousand times too often, and some sort of trekking jacket found in one of those safari shops at the Eros end of Piccadilly – I wouldn’t have recognised him. He had lost half his teeth and all his hair. Never a talkative man even when times were good and the Pauillac flowed, he sat slumped over his food, a barely touched glass of house wine in front of him, not eating his beetroot salad, his elbows digging into the diners on either side of him, revolving his head violently as though wanting to shake out more teeth. ‘Mmm,’ he said, whenever our eyes or knees met. Not knowing what else to do, I began ripping at my fingernails under the table.
There are ‘mmms’ which denote quiet acceptance of the state of things, the slow workings of reflection, or simply embarrassment. Merton’s ‘mmms’ were none of these. Merton’s ‘mmms’ indicated the futility of speech.
For which reason they were infectious. ‘Mmm,’ I said in return.
In the old days when a publisher took one of his writers out to lunch he’d ask how the work was going. But now, like all publishers, Merton dreaded hearing. What if the work was going well? What if I had a book to show him? What if I was expecting an advance?
Eventually – as much to bring the afternoon to an end as to start a conversation, because the way things were going I would soon have no fingernails left, and because I cared for Merton and couldn’t bear what he was going through – I said something. Not, Christ, these chairs are uncomfortable, Merton, not Do you remember when you used to take me to L’Etoile and we ate cervelle de veau, not spotted dick? but something more sympathetic to his state of mind. A couple of senior publishers – immediately castigated as dead white males – had gone public that weekend about the decline in the literacy of new writing: manuscripts turning up misspelt, ill-punctuated and ungrammatical, an uneducated jumble of mixed metaphors, dangling participles and misattributed apostrophes, less where there should have been fewer, mays where there should have been mights, mights where there should have been mays, theres for theirs and theirs for theres. We hadn’t only forgotten how to sell books; we had forgotten how to write them. I didn’t doubt that whatever else was at the root of Merton’s depression, misattributed apostrophes weren’t helping. ‘You look,’ I said, putting my paper napkin to my mouth, as though I too was in danger of losing teeth, ‘like a man who hasn’t read anything halfway decent for a long long time.’
I wanted him to see I understood it was hell for all of us.
‘No, the opposite,’ he said, probing the corners of his eyes with the tips of his fingers. He might have been trying to prise oysters out of their shells, except that he couldn’t any longer afford oysters. ‘The very opposite. The tragedy of it is, I’ve had at least twenty works of enduring genius land on my desk this month alone.’
Merton was famous for thinking that every novel submitted to him was a work of enduring genius. He was what was called a publisher of the old school. Finding works of enduring genius was why he’d entered publishing in the first place.
‘Mmm,’ I said.
Talking works of enduring genius made Merton almost garrulous. ‘It would be no exaggeration,’ he exaggerated, ‘to say that eight or ten of them are masterpieces.’
I pulled a couple of hairs out of my moustache. ‘That good?’
‘Breathtakingly good.’
Since none of these was mine, no matter what they said on Amazon, I had to labour to be excited for him. ‘So where’s the tragedy?’ I asked, half hoping he’d tell me that the authors of at least four or five of them were dead.
But I knew the answer. None was suitable for three-for-two. None featured a vampire. None was about the Tudors. None could be marketed as a follow-up to The Girl Who Ate Her Own Placenta.
It was even possible that none was free of the charge of dangling a participle. Though Merton was a publisher of the old school, the new school – which held that a novel didn’t have to be well written to be a masterpiece, indeed was more likely to be a masterpiece for being ill-written – had begun to wear away his confidence. He didn’t know what was what any more. And whatever was what was not being submitted to him.
‘Do you know what I am expected to require of you?’ he suddenly looked me in the eyes and said. ‘That you twit.’
‘Twit?’
‘Twit, tweet, I don’t know.’
‘And why are you expected to require it of m
e?’
‘So that you can do our business for us. So that you can connect to your readers, tell them what you’re writing, tell them where you’re going to be speaking, tell them what you’re reading, tell them what you’re fucking eating.’
‘Spotted dick.’
He didn’t find that funny. ‘So why particularly me?’ I asked.
‘Not just you. Everybody. Can you imagine asking Salinger to twit?’
‘Salinger’s dead.’
‘No bloody wonder.’
He fell silent again, and then asked me if I used the Internet. Used the Internet – you had to love Merton, he was so out of touch.
‘A bit.’
‘Do you blag?’
‘Blog? No.’
‘Do you read other people’s blags?’
‘Blogs. Sometimes.’
‘The blog’s the end of everything,’ he said.
The word sounded uncouth on his lips. It was like hearing the Archbishop of Canterbury talking about taking a Zumba class. The blog belongs to yesterday, I wanted to tell him. If you’re going to blame anything you should be blaming myBlank and shitFace and whatever else was persuading the unRead to believe everybody had a right to an opinion. But it was rare to hear Merton open up and I didn’t want to silence him almost before he’d begun. ‘Tell me more,’ I said.
He looked around the room as though he’d never seen it before. ‘What’s there to tell? Novels are history, not because no one can write them but because no one can read them. It’s a different idea of language. Go on the Internet and all you’ll find is –’ He searched for a word.
I offered him expostulation. A favourite word of mine. It evoked the harrumphings of bigoted old men. Only now it was the bigoted young who were harrumphing.
Merton seemed happy with it, in so far as he could be said to seem happy with anything. ‘Novelists find their way to meaning,’ he said. I nodded furiously. Wasn’t I still finding my way to mine? But he was speaking to the unseen forces, not to me. ‘The blog generation knows what it wants to say before it says it,’ he continued. ‘They think writing is opinionated statement. In the end that is all they will come to expect from words. My own children ask me what I mean all the time. They want to know what I’m getting at. They ask the point of the books I publish. What are they on about, Dad? Tell us so we don’t have to read them. I can’t come up with an answer. What’s Crime and Punishment on about?’
‘Crime and punishment.’
He didn’t appreciate my facetiousness. ‘So you think their question is fair? You think a novel is no more than its synopsis?’
‘You know I don’t.’
‘Do you have children? I can’t remember.’
‘No.’
‘You’re lucky in that case. You don’t have to see how badly educated they are. You don’t have to see them come home from school having read a scene from King Lear – the one in the rain, it’s not considered necessary to read about him when he’s dry – and thinking they know the play. It’s about this old fart, Dad.’
‘So what do you say to them?’
‘I say literature is not about things.’
‘And what do they say?’
‘That I’m an old fart.’
These were more words than I’d heard Merton utter in a decade. But they were to be his last. ‘Mmm,’ he said when he saw the bill.
Later that afternoon, without twitting about it to anyone, he did what he had to do.
If you discounted the book-stealing, the mouth-writing and the hair-pulling, I was in better shape than many. I was certainly in better shape than poor Merton. I still dressed well, couture being in my veins, bought expensive shoes and belts, and tucked my shirt into my trousers. (Slovenly dresser, slovenly writer.) But by no stretch of the imagination could I have been said to look like someone who was thriving. I was in my forty-third year – ancient for a twenty-first-century novelist, and certainly too ancient to go on appearing on any of those lists of writers under whatever that I had once graced – but I could have passed for someone ten or twelve years older. I’d let my gym membership lapse, upped my wine consumption to more than two bottles a night, and stopped trimming my eyebrows or having my hair cut.
Anyone would have thought I didn’t want to see out. (Which in point of fact I didn’t.)
But more worrying was that no one wanted to see in. I was like a garden no one gave a monkey’s fuck about.
5
Me, Me, Me
Make allowance for the self-pity intrinsic to a dying profession. In truth, Vanessa gave sufficiently a monkey’s fuck as to say she thought I needed a holiday. And never mind that she’d been saying I needed a holiday, needed to be off, needed to be somewhere else, needed to be somewhere she wasn’t, for the nearly twenty years we’d been together.
‘A holiday from you?’
‘From your work. From yourself. Be somebody other for a while.’
‘I’m always somebody other. Being somebody other is my work.’
‘No it isn’t. You’re always you. You just give yourself different names.’
I sighed the marital sigh.
‘Don’t make that noise,’ she said.
I shrugged the marital shrug.
But she was flowing. It was exhilarating, like being swept away in a warm river. ‘Get away from yourself. And if you think you need a holiday from me as well, then take one. I won’t stand in your way. Have I ever? Look at me. Be honest with me.’ She slipped her hand between my thighs. ‘Be honest with yourself. Have I ever?’
In the excitement I forgot the question. ‘Have you ever what?’
She withdrew her hand. ‘Stood in your way.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Thank you for being honest.’
I waited for her to slide her hand back. Wasn’t that how a wife was meant to reward a husband for his honesty?
‘But this isn’t a green light for one of your literary flings,’ she went on. ‘I’ll know. I always know. You know I’ll always know. You get soppy with me on the phone and shitty garage flowers start arriving twice a day. In which case enjoy yourself, just don’t expect me to be here when you get back.’
‘If I get back . . .’
That might sound like a man looking for a way out. But I wasn’t. I loved Vanessa. She was the second most important woman in my life. What I was looking for was something to write about that somebody not me wanted to read about. If she left me I’d have been heartbroken, but at least heartbreak is a subject. It’s not abuse but it’s still a subject.
‘Don’t threaten me with empty threats,’ she said. If I was running low on ideas she was running low on humour. Not that jokes had ever been her strong suit. She was too good-looking to be a joker. At forty-one she could still walk on seven-inch heels with blood-red soles without her knees buckling. And you need serious concentration for that.
‘Come with me,’ I said, picturing us strolling arm in arm down some Continental promenade together, she towering over me in her sado-spikes, men envying me her legs. Our stopping every now and then for her to stoop and slide her hand between my thighs. Men envying me that.
‘I can do fine on my own,’ she reminded me.
‘I know you can do fine on your own. But life isn’t all about you. I don’t do fine unless you’re with me.’
‘You, you, you.’
‘Me, me, me.’
‘And where would we go?’
‘You choose. Australia?’
Now that was picking a fight. We’d been to Australia the year before, to the Adelaide Festival – where else? – in the hope I might get a book about a writer going to the Adelaide Festival – where else? – and had very nearly come unstuck. The usual. Fan of writer in need of a fillip (fan is even called Philippa: get that) tells how she’s trembled over every word writer writes whereupon writer checks the coast is clear, takes fan outside and trembles over every button on her dress.
Did Vanessa know? Vanessa knew everything.
‘What are you proposing – that you stay here? You’d go mad here.’
‘No, that’s you. You’d go mad here. You already are mad here.’
‘And you’re telling me you’d keep chickens and grow wine?’
‘I’d get some peace.’
Ah, peace! The one person you don’t get married to, if it’s peace you want, is a writer. You’d have more chance with a bomb-disposal expert.
So my suggestion, when we were back home, of an Australian holiday, was purposely provocative. Novelist provokes wife – there was surely a novel in that.
In the event we stayed in London and talked about a divorce.
‘Don’t threaten what you can’t deliver,’ she said.
Actually, the idea was hers. I reminded her of that. Divorce was the last thing I wanted. I still enjoyed her bruising company, still got a kick out of looking at her. Her face was like a small hall of mirrors, all sharp edges and bloody reflections. When I looked at my face in hers I saw myself cut to ribbons.
The halo of red hair around her head – the blood fountaining from mine.
The slightly snaggled front tooth, which looked loose but wasn’t – the state of my brain.
So why had I vanished into the South Australian night with Philippa whom I did not get a kick out of looking at? Because she was there. And because I had a reputation for wildness to keep up. Don’t ask with whom. With myself.
And because Vanessa threatening to divorce me was exciting.
‘You don’t have to tell me it’s my idea,’ she said. ‘All your ideas are my ideas.’
‘I grant you that. I don’t have any ideas. I’m not a philosopher. I’m an anti-philosopher. I tell tales.’
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