Henri’s Master’s Class
Here’s my brief Master’s Class in High-Quality Literary Fiction for any new recruits to test whether they possess the verbal legerdemain to sign up for our programme. Let’s start with a syntactically simple sentence:
I dropped my pencil on the carpet.
First challenge: increase, twofold, the dramatic quotient of this event. Every minor happenstance for our narrators has some significance, personal or metaphorical. If they pick their nose, it must be reflective of the struggle of the Byzantines to defeat the Ottomans in Constantinople; if they brush away dry skin, it must be emblematic of man’s struggle to find ontological certainty in an indifferent cosmos, etc. If they sneeze in public, the embarrassment must drive them to wild fits of despair, to suicide or murder, and so on. Try now to heighten the drama of that sentence. Our example:
I dropped my prized, cherished old pencil onto the murky, stained, and horrible carpet.
Here, we contraposed the preciousness of the pencil with the beastliness of its destination, and deployed multiple adjectives for cumulative exaggerative effect. Second challenge: imagine this scene as the most dramatic tragedy that has ever befallen any man. Try to squeeze every scintilla of drama and emotion out of this falling pencil. Exaggeration is our speciality; don’t be afraid to overdo it! Our example:
To my unfeasible horror, I dropped my prized and cherished pencil onto the murky, stained, and horrible carpet, and collapsed howling in hysterics at the injustice of a world where such terror and dread could befall such a man as I.
Now, to show you the level of artistry at work, here’s this sentence as it appears in one of our published novels.
To my unquenchable and unfeasible horror, I stood outside myself watching myself, as if my body had floated into a separate consciousness outside my own, hovering outside me like some demon, my pencil describing a 45° arc as it tore itself from my hands, revolving in horripilating loops like the rings of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, searing my heart with fire and hurt, pulling me down to the depths of despair as in Mirbeau’s Torture Garden, as my treasured and beautiful pencil, the passion of my heart and my very life’s blood, my one and only love, came crashing to the floor like an orchestra in the fires of Abaddon, swallowed up by the interminable, tormenting flames of the remorseless carpet.
Study the sentence carefully. Read it aloud. Do you see the unnecessary, emphatic verbal repetition (epizeuxis), dramatic exaggerations about corporeal states to create a false sense of profundity, the overly precise description, literary references in similes, and an emotional overstatement of the importance of the pencil? If you think you can make sentences like this, we’re waiting for you in the HQLF department.
A Word from the Team
HENRI: Pray mercy! An intruder! How strange that nature does not knock!
MARCO: Keats?
HENRI: Dickinson.
MARCO: Blast!
HENRI: Greetings, writers! Enter, entrer! Viens ici et dégustez un sherry sur la banquette!
EDGAR: Henri, my dear lush, what can those rapscallious hopefuls expect from us in the HQLF department?
MARCO: A new name, for a start!
HENRI: We run the High-Quality Literary Fiction department, erstwhile known as the Henry James Peninsula for Polished Prose Perfection, or the Marcel Proust Sanatorium for Seriously Shimmering Syllables. Step aboard our abode! If you are a passionate purveyor of the anfractuous artistry of the Lord Henry James, the winding words of priestly Marcel Proust, or the epithymetic lyrics of Saint Vladimir Nabokov, this is the floor for you. Here you will work alongside our team of highly skilled logolepts and verbivores to produce novels fit for the finest most finessibly erudite hands and minds.
EDGAR: Well said.
HENRI: Remember when Cal (James McIntyre!) came to work for us, his prosaic and proletarian appellation was preformed into a prettier gnome de plum, pending our ponderous and philosophastering peregrinations? I posited Calltonius Inchcome-Hundepheffer.
LONDON: Me, Callismus Avenus-Ephebus.
EDGAR: And I, Callimachus Serrismus-Darvu.
HENRI: How silly!
MARCO: Tell them about our books!
EDGAR: Dear boy, do you take me for a mattoid?
MARCO: No, but you’re most certainly a fustilugs!
EDGAR: Slander!
HENRI: Chaps, please! You’ll petrify our future Masters!
LONDON: Shall I tell the readers about my latest epic? My protagonist is a dastardly duke writing a novel while cancer devours his bowels. I had the most eerily plosive gastrointestinal cramp during composition and this discomfort is reflected in the wild stenographic rhythms of my prose. Shall I read you an excerpt? I like to read my old books exactly one year after publication, to de- and reconstruct the Himalayas of my artistry.
EDGAR: Stop him!
LONDON: “I steered my prized stallion along the promenade, terpsichoreally light-tripping upon the gauche gravel outside the hideous edifice of Ghastly Manor—”
HENRI: Good grief!
LONDON: “I had tripped the light fantastic at Count Ebenworth’s ball, but now I trembled at the night so drastic, as the various rectosigmoid horrors surged anew in my cavities, and another wrenching night swaddled in the arms of pain and suffering awaited me—”
MARCO: My conchas, my auricles!
LONDON: “Retiring to the oak-brown depths of my boudoir, my pills arranged like so many tormented sinners as etched into the incomparable artefacts of Hieronymus Bosch, I faced the night with the grim assiduity of a matador gazing into the eyes of a rampaging bull as it limbered for an attack and—”
EDGAR: Leaping Lords! Zounds, man! Cease! Desist!
LONDON: There’s no need to be pigglewiggles.
MARCO: You made that word up.
HENRI: You’re all pigglewiggles! So, patient readers, if you fancy frolicking with the chaps and myself, please send an application to Marilyn at The House. We hope to be hearing from you soon!
LONDON: Every burden is a gratitude, and made to be shaken off.
MARCUS: Shakey?
LONDON: Diderot.
MARCUS: Blast!
This
I
IAM writing this novel about The House of Writers on the twelfth floor. I am supposed to be working on a steampunk adventure set in a Hoosier brothel in which the locomotive drivers have gone on strike. But I would rather be writing this novel. I call this a “documentary” novel as the structural mode is fragmentary, hopping up and down the floors, flitting between first- and third-person narrators as one might find in a television doc. The term applies to works where the characters are based on real people and real events are reported in fictional form, a famous example being Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and an obscure example being Alan Burns’s The Angry Brigade. The reportage in this novel ranges from autobiographical narrators (Cal McIntyre is based on me, both in terms of naïve impishness and asexual allure, although as a narrator he is a mere reporter), to direct snatches of dialogue overheard, stolen memos, emails, papers, and dramatisations of stories I have been told by loose-lipped liars. All this adds up to a skewed representation of a shambolic organisation. Structuring this narrative in a linear manner would be a gross misrepresentation of what life is like in this building. In fact, I had to restrain myself from including pages of people simply screaming at the top of their lungs, despite the prospect that might have been somewhat amusing and more “experimental” than the lump you have before you already. I will be popping up now and then to address the reader (who?) and tell you various things about my personal life that you were often curious about but didn’t have the gumption to quiz me on.
The Trauma Rooms
I
ERIN lost her stapler. She interrogated Gam Aintpol, whose stapler theft had taken on mythic status in the northwestern corner of the office, shaking his skeletal frame until the truth seeped from his nose (snot implied honesty), and raided the cupboards, drawers, and hidden partiti
ons, encroaching into the western corner of the office, where Rain Beezquix tongue-lashed Erin for her violation with the phrase “sheer brasserie and chronic gall,” seeking to show her magnif off-the-cuff way with words, and failing. She ventured into the fire-exit corner, finding a door with a Munch scream motif—a convenient decoy for a massive stationery hoarding—and stepped into a sub-corridor with a long stretch of doors on either side. It seemed improbable so many cupboards could exist in such a narrow portion between the main floor and the back stairs, but she didn’t have time to question the architectural quirks of The House, she was seeking a stapler with which to bind her first three chapters for her reader, Boril Soxmond from Bulgaria. She opened the first door where a manic man in a robe launched himself at her.
“Am I the BOLDEST AND BRIGHTEST VOICE OF A GENERATION?! Can I have ... can I have ... have the Pulitzer now?” His scabbed fingers dug into her shoulders and she stood stunned by the door. From the bathroom, a man in clothes appeared.
“Max! Release that woman! Max, you are the most significant British novelist on the scene since Martin Amis. Your voice is a breathtaking original. You have taken the novel to fresh and daring new places, and have a thrilling career to come,” the dressed man reassured the manic one, cooing him back to his wall-mounted bed where he sucked his thumb and muttered the words the dressed man had uttered.
Erin was taken to the bathroom, where the dressed man revealed himself as a doctor treating a rare kind of trauma caused by an overexposure to hyperbolic praise from critics during his patient’s early days as a writer.
“Max’s dad was the editor of WeWuvBookz, the most influential book website in the world at the time, and had arranged for his son to be praised up and down as the Next Best Thing. Max became dependent on the four or five pages of praise in the inside of each book and on the back and front covers, and when his dad was run over by a tractor, Max’s fame dipped and reviewers labelled him a flash-in-the-bedpan and other such insults, causing a complete mental breakdown. He took to running around in the nude screaming “I am the voice of a generation!” and other slogans. No idea why he stripped off to do this, it’s something the mentally ill never do except in books.”
“Sorry for barging in. I had no idea this place existed. I was looking for a stapler.”
“This is one of the ten trauma rooms. Each room houses a different trauma victim. I tend to each of them.”
“Oh. Good.”
“I find that—”
Before he could utter what he found, Max burst in naked in a second panic.
“Am I good? Am I good? AM I ANY GOOD!?”
“Max! You are a ... talented, verbally inventive, outrageously funny, and heartbreaking talent on a par with ... Norman Mailer. Help me out here, please,” the doctor whispered to Erin.
“Erm, all right. You’re a fantastic writer.”
“IS THAT IT?!”
“No, more than that. You’re a—”
“She means you are a voice vibrant with warmth and humour. Your sentences pirouette like ballerinas across the page, your language is at once rich and accessible, erm ... you construct complex metaphors and dazzling similes, and your use of zeugma is second to none in the history of literature.”
“—sensational wordsmith, I was going to say, absolutely, categorically, worthy of the Booker, the Nobel, and the Pulitzer all at once.”
“Steady.”
“YOU TAKING THE PISS?!?”
“No! I mean that your talent will one day earn you those awards, probably. You are brilliant but at a realistic level, people don’t resent you because you have this Godlike skill for writing, they love you because you are simultaneously intelligent and down-to-earth ... the common man and highbrow critics adore you.”
“You see, Max? You are loved and respected for your abilities. You are the frenetic and fizzing spokesman for a lost generation.”
“Yes. Frenetic and fizzing ...”
“Let’s head back to bed.”
“Frenetic and fizzing . . .”
“Sometimes he has nightmares as his head hits the pillow. This can happen three or four times before he settles down for the night. One of the hardest patients I have had to treat. I have pasted reviews around his room and sometimes he is content to sit rocking back and forth reading these for hours. A sad case. I can’t seem to devise a solution to his trauma. Short of rediscovering his success, there is little I can do. We know he will never become a best-selling novelist again in his lifetime. Such a shame.”
“What is his surname?”
“Grain.”
“Yes. I remember his novels. Terrible.”
“Oh yes, the most despicable piffle. His father ruined him. Now that you are here, perhaps you’d care to meet our other patients? One of them was loose earlier, so might have nabbed your stapler. Shall we?”
“Erm ... I suppose. I need my stapler.”
“Yes, that’s it. Let’s head to the second room,” the doctor said. Erin didn’t appreciate the manner in which he placed his arm on her shoulder, to lead her and hold her back from a possible retreat, but without her stapler, she was bereft—her Bulgarian reader would not read sample chapters in loose leaf form—so she ambled down the ink-scented corridor to meet the second of the ten crazies.
Books no longer in print
DON’T You Forget About Me: The Unauthorised Simple Minds Biography; Poltroon’s Advance; The Little Green Lie; Imaginative Quantities of Fractal Rings; Don’t Look Back: A Brief History of Sodomy; The Everlasting Story of Norah Jones; Poltroon’s Defeat; How to Talk About Apps You’ve Never Downloaded; Gorgeous George’s Last Stand; Eat Me!: Michael Bentine’s Guide to Underrated Snacks; Nick Hornby’s Top Forty Albums; Whatever Happened to the Chuckle Brothers?; I Am the Beautiful Strangler; Muzak vs. Silence: A Debate; The Huge Blue Truth; Fourteen Perspectives on Dan Brown’s Inferno: A Study Guide; Do Frenchmen Eat Custard? (And Other Utterly Random Questions About Our Coastal Cousins); The Bald Superstallion: An Unofficial Colin Mochrie Handbook; Horatio’s Nutcracker; A Concise Overview of the Scottish Novel; Buttered Hysteria; Six Perspectives on an Abomination; Bored in Bethlehem: The Pilgrim’s Guide to Livening Up That Epiphany; Gargoyle Gilbert’s First Fall; Eden Prison: Various Angles on Paradise; Kristal’s Visions; It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got That Swing: Guidebook for First-Time Hangmen; H from Steps: The Trial and Imprisonment of Britain’s Biggest Paedophile; Nick Hornby’s Top Forty Singles; The Official Guidebook to Badgers, Badgers! We Love Thee!: A Hexagrammic Musical; Just William!: The Unofficial William Hague Biography; The Ultimate Guide to Traffic Signs in Peru; Godard is Not Great: How Jean-Luc Poisons Everything; Interdenominational Darts: A Player’s Manual; Cereal Murderers: The Shocking History of the Kellogg Twins; Nick Hornby’s Top Forty TV Shows; Je ne suis pas un animal: Un Guide de L’homme-éléphant; Year of the Purple Artichoke; Swastikka Masala: A Guide to Nazi Curries; Whiffy the Wondersnake Strikes A Gain!; Guerillas in the Mist: The Disappearance of the South Vietnamese Army; Islamabad or Islamagood?: A Religious Forum; Alice Never Lived Here: Why the Films You Love Don’t Exist; Hmm-Yup!: The Complete Hansen Story; Nick Hornby’s Top Forty Nick Hornby Novels; Todd Number: A Disappearance; Sick in the Shtetl: Coping with Jewish Ennui; Only Kidding!: The Secret War Diaries of Adolf Hitler; A Beer and a Bonk: The Complete Guide to Scottish Nightlife...
Mhairi
I
BEFORE I became Queen Momma of The House, I lived in the poorest quarter of Stockport—a town outside Manchester known for its fantastic cocaine and heroin distribution networks and the most addicted populace per capita. I worked in a seafood restaurant, serving lobster thermidor to balding perverts prone to inserting their tongues and noses into whelks to simulate cunnilingus; in shoe retail, squeezing the plump feet of odoriferous spinsters into ill-fitting stilettos; in a swimming pool catching bloodied bandages in nets and rescuing infant rotters from drowning; in a homeless shelter, fending off inebriated attacks and tempting invitations to have vigoro
us tramp-sex in their rooms. When the homeless shelters closed down under a new government initiative (the homeless were to perform a town-wide sanitation service in exchange for a night sleeping in corridors and doorways) I too was among the jobless masses and to remain there for longer than I had conceived after graduating from my English Literature degree.
The Bulldog Brethren (TBB) had won the 2039 English elections and set about implementing their “policies,” the first of which was to drive out the remaining immigrant population and the un-and under-white elements polluting British professions. To cope with these hopeless times, I fell in with a band of nihilists who introduced me to the pleasures of heroin and cocaine, and I became an addict within two weeks. We hung around in disused office blocks listening to Peter, Paul and Mary, inserting ourselves into the 1960s counterculture in a doomed attempt to imagine what such carefree living might have been like—contriving pleasure-visions of riding pink clouds into portals of infinite love and understanding ... ending up in viscous fogs being attacked by Alsatians and wolves while TBB leader Neil Himes blustered us to death with his threats of people with tanned complexions working in British curry houses.
To fund the habit, I took a position in their Intelligent Persecution Unit, performing acts of abuse on long-settled immigrants to “suggest” a return to their own countries (in most cases, “their own countries” meant nations in which their grandparents hadn’t been born or lived). I was instructed to poke them in public (a repetitive torture technique designed to irritate them on trains or buses or in queues or lifts), to have loud conversations with strangers about how brilliant Britain is doing without its immigrant population, or onto more disgusting behaviour such as posting (British) shit through letterboxes. I had taken up heroin to escape the state of the nation—TBB had created mass unemployment due to culling various industries and opening up sweatshops on the Isle of Man to replace most of the low-skilled work available. My generation had no hope of finding work. I ended up having to perform these disgusting duties in order to receive my unemployment benefits.
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