I was pleased with myself, at least, for not giving him Francis’s name. If anyone was going to punch my agent on the nose, I wanted it to be me.
Convince me, Francis’s expression always said these days. Give me a good reason for attending to your proposal.
I’d been toying for some years with the idea of writing a revivifying sequel to Who Gives a Monkey’s?. Who Gives a Monkey’s About Who Gives a Monkey’s? was one idea, or maybe just Monkey’s Revisited.
Francis breathed hard whenever I suggested this, as though it was a conversation he wasn’t sure his heart would allow him to survive. ‘Move on,’ he always said, pouring himself water from a cooler.
He no longer poured me a glass.
I often wondered whether Francis’s lack of enthusiasm for a sequel could be attributed to his not having been my agent for the original. My first agent – Quinton O’Malley – went missing on the Hindu Kush with the manuscript of my second novel in his backpack. His body was never recovered, though pages of my manuscript continued to be found scattered over a wide area for years after. Had Quinton lost his bearings and gone stumbling through the ice with my manuscript wrapped around him for insulation, or had the novel itself sent him mad? The question, to tell the truth, wasn’t much discussed. A literary agent going missing was too common an occurrence to attract speculation. And neither the Afghani nor the Pakistani police was much bothered to investigate.
Whatever his motives, I didn’t doubt the soundness of Francis’s advice. Most agents were telling their clients the same thing. Move on. Meaning move on from doing what you used to do, from hoping what you used to hope, or from hoping anything; move on from the fantasy that words could make a difference, could make a better world, or could make you a decent living. In some cases it simply meant move on from the idea of being represented by your agent. It wasn’t just Damien Clery who was in trouble. Half the fiction writers in the country had been shown the door by their publishers; the other half made phone calls to their agents that were not returned. Writers needed silence but not a silence as profound as this.
It wasn’t just back list that was a black hole. Front list was no better.
I have said: I was one of the lucky ones. Francis Fowles believed in me, for no better reason, I sometimes thought, than that we were both short. In my experience literature is a tall man’s business – not fiction, maybe, but every other branch of the profession – so there was an automatic, unspoken confederacy of the short between us. Francis’s enemies – publishers he had once persuaded to pay too much, writers he refused to take on, other agents whose writers he stole, literary editors who hated him because they hated everybody – called him ‘the Dwarf ’, but he was by no stretch of the imagination dwarfish, his roundness simply made him appear smaller than he was, as my gauntness made me look bigger, but side by side we were the same size. The other thing we’d shared was constipation, each of us going so far as to recommend the other remedies, though since the Great Decline everyone involved with books was constipated. (Literary editors the worst, but then literary editors were in the worst position: sedentary to no creative end, jealous of every book that landed on their table, each a further nail in the coffin of their own unfulfilled creativity.)
Notwithstanding Francis’s faith in me, I noticed that no title of mine was visible on his shelves. In the past when I’d called on him I’d be kept waiting in reception while he or one of his assistants rearranged the books so that my latest could be retrieved from the pile, dusted and displayed face out. ‘Just been rereading my favourite bits,’ he would say, when I entered his office. But in line with more recent agency practice he had abandoned this subterfuge. The party’s over, he wanted me to know now. The age of sparing a writer’s feelings was past. Displayed face out on his shelves was a new TV tie-in cookery book by Dahlia Blade, a bulimic Kabbalist from an all-vegan girl band, and Blinder, the memoirs of Billy Funhouser, a teenager from Atlanta who’d lost his sight when his adoptive mother’s breasts exploded in his face.
Francis greeted me with a sad smile in which I was to see the ghost of better times. It was no fun for him, any of this. He’d worn bow ties when I first met him. But bow ties no longer went with the territory. Now, to suggest a casualness inimical to his nature and his bulk, he wore a striped slim-fit work-shirt outside jeans. You could tell he had no wife. No wife would have let her husband go out in a shirt like that.
He sat down with difficulty. ‘So?’
‘I need a publisher.’
‘For what?’
‘To publish me.’
‘You’ve got a publisher.’
‘He’s dead, Francis.’
He pulled a face. Dead! Who wasn’t? But he did say, ‘Terrible business,’ and then ask, ‘To publish anything in particular?’
I had another crack at Monkey’s. Half sequel, I said, half essay, half lament.
He held his heart. ‘You can’t have three halves.’
‘Why not? The Monkey on My Back – a discursive novel in three parts.’
‘What would you be half sequelling, half lamenting and half discoursing about?’
I opened my arms as though to introduce him to his own room.
‘My furniture?’
I laughed. ‘What we’ve descended to. The state of the art. The mess we’re in.’
He pretended not to know what I was referring to.
Denial. Who could blame him? It was deny or die.
‘So how many weeks has Blinder been number one?’ I asked, by way of making my distemper more specific.
‘Don’t knock it,’ he said. ‘Ten per cent of Billy Funhouser’s royalties are going to fund a class action.’
‘Against whom?’
‘Against the silicone company, who do you think?’
‘Class action! Are you telling me that exploding implants are blinding children all over America?’
‘You’d better believe it.’
I shook my head.
But Francis always knew when he had me. ‘Books are still capable of being a force for good,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t all have to be navel-gazing.’
‘Who’s navel-gazing?’
‘Monkeys, monkeys . . . Do you want me to tell you how one always knows a writer’s in trouble as a writer?’
I didn’t want him to lose faith in me as a writer. ‘No, Francis,’ I said. ‘I know when a writer’s in trouble. When he resorts to writing about writing. And do you want me to tell you how a man knows he’s in trouble as a man?’ (I didn’t want him to lose faith in me as a man either.) ‘When he starts feeling up his mother-in-law. In my case the two are not unrelated.’
In better times, when authors and their agents were expected to hit the town together, Francis had got us both drunk at the Garrick where he confided to me, among other indiscretions, his ongoing affair with a writer of historical romances with a strong factual slant. Their liaison, he’d told me, was conducted in costume. I’d fallen silent when I learned this, imagining him in petticoat breeches and a peruke. He mistook my silence for erotic envy. ‘Yes, I’m having quite a time of it,’ he’d admitted, looking around the room and blushing. Since then, although the carousing had gone the way of long lunches and launch parties, we’d kept up this tradition of exchanging inappropriate personal confidences – much of them coming from me, and most of them fallacious, in the cause of keeping him as my agent.
‘You’re feeling up your mother-in-law?’
‘In a manner of speaking.’
‘Does that mean you are or you aren’t?’
‘I am and I am not, yes.’
‘Have I met your mother-in-law?’
‘You wouldn’t ask me if you had. She’s a woman you don’t forget.’ I rolled my eyes, as though up and around her thighs.
He waited, chewing his thumb, for me to roll my eyes up and around some other part of her.
‘What’s her name?’
‘What’s her name got to do with anything?’
‘I
want to know who this person is that I wouldn’t have forgotten had I met her.’
‘Poppy.’
‘Poppy!’ He sucked in air through his teeth, as though already, on the strength of her name alone, he was as infatuated with her as I was. ‘Poppy who?’
‘Poppy Eisenhower.’
If it was infatuation before, it was love now. ‘The Eisenhower?’
‘Could be distantly related. Her second husband was American. I don’t think she was with him long enough to find out who his family was. He kicked her out after she’d posed with her cello for a poster advertising a Boccherini concert.’
‘Sounds a bit unreasonable.’
I didn’t tell him what Poppy had shockingly early in our acquaintance told me – that she’d posed for the poster nude. I didn’t think he could take it.
But he was capable of making her nude without my help. Poppy, pose, cello, Boccherini – let’s be fair: the words themselves undressed her.
He shaped one of his eyebrows into a question mark. I shaped one of mine into the answer he desired.
‘So, she married again?’ he pursued after a moment’s lewd, musical reflection.
I shook my head.
‘Then why haven’t you introduced her to me? I know your wife, why shouldn’t I know her mother?’
‘Ah, Francis!’ I said, implying I didn’t dare trust her in his company, the devilish dwarf he was.
To such despicable acts of servility were writers now reduced.
He sat forward in his chair, with even more difficulty than when he’d sat back. ‘Poppy Eisenhower,’ he repeated. He seemed to be searching for an idea that was worrying him. ‘You aren’t thinking of writing about it, I hope? I know you.’
‘It?’
‘Her. Poppy Eisenhower, and you. The situation.’
‘The Monkey and the Mother-in-Law?’
He put his hands together like a supplicant running out of patience. ‘Guy, unless you actually want to go and live with monkeys like Jane Goodall,’ he said, ‘which I would not necessarily dissuade you from doing, but unless you’re going to do that, my final word to you on the subject is forget them.’
‘Monkeys with me are metaphorical,’ I told him.
‘That’s why no one gives one.’
‘All right, no more monkeys. But I like suddenly the idea of writing about my mother-in-law. Why couldn’t I have come up with that? A paean to the older woman.’
‘Don’t. I beg you, don’t.’
‘Are you thinking about Vanessa?’
‘I’m thinking about you. It’d be professional suicide.’
‘Why? I thought older women were all the rage. MILFs, Cougars, now the MILAW. It’s a winner, Francis.’
‘Not the way you’d do it.’
‘How would I do it?’
‘Masculinistically.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means that women wouldn’t like it.’
‘Why wouldn’t women like it?’
‘Why don’t women like anything you do? Because you don’t meet them halfway . . . because you won’t let them in . . . because you write about chimps with flaming red penises? How do I know? Stay away – that’s all I’m saying. Feel her up in real life, if you must. Not on the page.’
‘So no monkeys, no mothers-in-law, no masculinism . . . what does that leave?’
He had an answer ready. ‘A Swedish detective.’
‘I don’t know anything about Swedish detectives. I’ve never been to Sweden.’
‘A boy detective, then. You’ve been a boy, haven’t you? Tell me you’ve been a boy.’
‘I’m not interested in detectives, Francis.’
‘What about a Wilmslow detective? There hasn’t been one of those that I know of.’
‘That’s because there are no crimes to detect in Wilmslow. Except for parking offences and rates evasion. Or being a footballer. I suppose I could at a pinch make him a parking warden, or a rates evasion officer who has his eye on every property owned by the board of Manchester United in order to pay them back for refusing him a trial . . .’
‘Sounds good . . .’
‘. . . and who just happens to be fucking his mother-in-law.’
‘Who just happens to look like a monkey . . . Tell me about it.’
‘Poppy doesn’t look like a monkey,’ I said.
‘I’m sure she doesn’t.’ He sounded very tired. He began rubbing his hand over his face. I half expected his features to be gone when he took his hand away.
‘So where exactly does this leave us, Francis?’ I asked, after a decent interval.
‘Fucked,’ he said with a laugh.
‘Are you describing the industry, my future prospects, our relations, or fiction in general?’
‘All of them.’
‘And a new publisher?’
‘You write the book, I’ll find the publisher. In the meantime I’d stay where you are. But when you do give me a story, make it one I can persuade a publisher he can publish.’
‘I don’t like the way you say “story”. You know I don’t write “stories” in that sense.’
‘You mean in the sense of something happening?’
‘I mean in the sense of plot. People confuse plot and story. They think there’s no story if there’s no machination. Fucking code-breaking, for Christ’s sake. Plenty of things happen in my books, Francis. Even leaving aside the wars my words wage, plenty happens. People look at one another, talk to one another, fall in and out of love. They are driven on by their psychologies and if psychology isn’t story I don’t know what it is. You know what Henry James said about a psychological reason being story enough for him . . .’
‘And you know what H. G. Wells said about there being nothing on the altar of James’s prose but a dead kitten, an eggshell and . . . something else.’
‘A bit of string. So what’s your point? That I should be more like H. G. Wells? Are you recommending I write science fiction now?’
Francis fell silent. He looked, suddenly, about a hundred.
‘Write whatever you fancy. I’ll do what I can,’ he said.
I felt about a hundred myself.
You have occasionally to see your agent, as you have occasionally to see your publisher, but unless you are a writer of what the malignantly illiterate call ‘stories’ you always wish you hadn’t. Frankly, a visit to your embalmer would be more fun. And would certainly hold out a greater promise of something after death.
I wanted to ask him if he really thought we were fucked, or if he was just playing with me. But walking past the books on his desk, the memoirs of Billy Funhouser, martyr to his mother’s plastic surgery, and Dahlia Blade’s cookbook for bulimics, I knew the answer to the question.
Whatever else, fiction was fucked.
7
Room at the Bottom
Talking about answers – there’s an easy answer to the question when did it all start to go wrong for me. From the moment it all started to go right.
You write your first novel and you’ve pretty well said what you have to say. I was twenty-four when I wrote mine, twenty-seven when it was finally published – so I just made it onto the list of the hundred best male writers in Britain and the Commonwealth under twenty-eight – and I might as well have taken the Merton route there and then. Not a reflection on my work. Nothing to do with me qua me, to borrow a favourite locution of Vanessa’s. It’s the rule of nature.
After a prolonged courtship – something else I learnt from Mishnah Grunewald – the male black widow spider of North America mates once and then dies. Even if the female doesn’t eat him he has nothing left to offer. Such things are common among males. You get one go, you give your all, and then it’s curtains. The male novelist the same. You spruce yourself up, you date, you deliver yourself of all your best lines, you impregnate, and you’re spent. Goodnight, sweet prince.
But where the spider offers himself to be eaten, or crawls into a corner to die, the male novel
ist goes on beating his meat to no effect, looking to repeat the performance that so pleased the female of the species the first time round, but without the conviction, the passion or, to be frank, the spider sperm, all the while suffering the excruciations of the slowest extinction of them all – death by creeping invisibility: a day at a time, a book at a time, the novelist vanishing from the shelves of public libraries, from the windows of bookshops, from the recollections of once loyal readers.
Funny, but the minute I think about spiders I see my old primary school English teacher, a man who didn’t suffer my exhaustion of purpose but, on the contrary, at more than twice my age was still enjoying an inexhaustible book-centred curiosity. A different sort of spider, maybe, more of a dung beetle if you consider how he spent his time, but a spider was what he reminded me of whenever, on the way to visiting my demented parents, I called on him in his Cheshire cottage – a spider sitting at the centre of a vast silky web of words, devouring at his leisure.
‘So what are you reading?’ he would ask, squinting at me, the moment we shook hands. It was the same question he’d put to me every day at school, as though whatever I’d been reading yesterday I must by now have finished.
‘Me? I’m a writer now,’ I reminded him. ‘I’m at the other end of the production line.’
It was a lovely Cheshire day, the light creamy, the cows in a nearby field sitting under a tree, the air quiet. It’s a county you forget about, Cheshire, because nothing remarkable ever seems to happen there. Emlyn’s cottage, just half a mile from the house where I was born, had holes in the roof and a garden with a lily pond in it. I don’t know who cleaned it because Emlyn never stirred from the dark of his library. His wife had died. His children had moved away. It seemed an act of tact on all their parts, leaving Emlyn to his books.
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