The House of Writers

by M. J. Nicholls

  “ ‘Terence stepped out the ship with luck in his loins and lions in his underpants.’ People pay to read this crap?”

  “That’s my lions-in-the-underpants scene,” I said. This didn’t recapture my dignity.

  “Miss us?” Rob asked.

  “You know, my grandfather and great-grandfather were writers,” Pete said. I had read the work of Gilbert and Christopher Sorrentino with admiration and found it hard to believe Pete came from the same genes.

  “Yes.”

  “I bet I could write a better novel than you, using my writing genes.”

  “Nope.”

  “Pass me a sheet of A4.”

  I plaintively obeyed. Pete kicked C.G. Higson from his desk to free up space and began his novel as C.G. blankly continued scrawling his Klingon orgy on a Post-it. Rob went off to kick chocolate bars from a vending machine. I sat staring out the window at smog clouds as Pete wrote feverishly, using up my A4 and laughing at his inherited wit. Fours days later, with only two breaks for food and sleep, he showed me his manuscript, detailing the third life and second resurrection of Antony Lamont from Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew (foremost of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds), after moving into a hack novel written by, surprise, yours truly. Lamont, having escaped the scourges of Guinea Red, ended up in a devastating parody of my space western, brimming with parodic dialogue and mock-terrible writing. I read the completed manuscript wincing and laughing at the same time, kicking the fates for making this asshole Pete into a splendid comedic writer like his forebears, and making a mental note of some ideas I could steal for my next book. I took comfort from the fact this novel was too niche to ever find readers and so handed it back safe that my job wasn’t under threat.

  “You know, you should consider working here,” I offered.

  “I don’t have time for that shit. Literature is piss. In fact—” he produced a lighter and torched his brilliant novel, extinguishing the fire with a piss cataract. As I watched a man burn a manuscript ten times better than anything I could ever write, and cackle hysterically, and kick over my desk, and call everyone in the room expendable cunts, I contemplated whether saving the world from ScotCall had been a sensible manoeuvre. He masturbated in my bed and drank all the milk in the canteen.

  The Farewell, Author! Conference

  9

  FINDING nothing else to do, with the night dwindling to mere hours, and the horrible threat of the morning on the loom, the writers cuddled, nuzzled, tickled, touched, stroked, licked, sucked, kissed, and poked one another, on and against the freezers, and afterwards, promised to protect and love one another until the end of time, surrendering to the tantalising delusion of mutual support in an age of self-preservation, mouthing their meaningless words of love which, coming from writers, were far more poetic and cribbed subconsciously from Shakespeare, fighting the sleep that would lead them into the unwanted daylight. I curled up with Linda Tunnet, whose novel A Bee, See? won the Adair Prize in 2039, praised for its skill at “using clichés in a such a manner the reader is momentarily duped into believing the novel has something original to offer,” and mouthed romantic lies into our mutual ears. “I will hold your hand like this until you are a wrinkled old prune repulsive to the eyes,” she said. “I will touch your knee like this until your skeleton is bursting out your flesh,” I replied. “I will squeeze your penis in this manner until the heat death of the universe,” I said. And so on. Following on from this, the writers entertained the delusion that they still had futures, and further works to write, and proceeded to describe their upcoming novels. Joanna Ruocco outlined her novel about a man obsessed with the curliness of kale, whose mania unlocks deep ontological questions and forces us to consider each individual Atom of our very Humanbeingness; Naomi Alderman her novel about a school teacher combating her depression and love for a female pupil and her unfortunate name “Miss Butt” that forces us to consider the plight of the Other in the age of the Self; Ned Beauman his novel about a scientist who invents the controversial pneugenics theory, whereby those taking up precious oxygen with pointless blabber or breathing were deemed more suited to termination, that forces us to consider Compassion and Trust in a world with dwindling room and resources; Shane Jones his novel about a clown whose left testicle swells to spacehopper proportions during a performance, and the ensuing media furore about his accidental exposure in front of children that forces us to consider how the Truth is distorted in the era of Viral Media; Joanna Kavenna her novel about a ukulele player with jaundice who is thrust into the limelight on a TV talent show and struggles to cope with the ensuing fame, and begs for a return to his poor life that forces us to consider the Price of Fame in a Transient Age; Brian Oliu his novel about a computer virus that uproots an internet user’s mental landscape, causing him to return pointlessly to shops where he had no further business to conduct, to return to concluded conversations to see if they might have anything else they wished to say to him after their meetings had concluded, and to stumble with no purpose into shops and buildings with no motive but to distract or lose oneself in the maze of distractions, that forces us to consider Technology’s impact on the Mind and Body; Kamila Shamsie her novel about a secret sect formed during WWII to make unkind remarks about Catholics in addition to the Jews that forces us to reconsider the Parameters of Evil; William Seabrook his novel about a packet of crisps elected Prime Minister of Britain that fails to live up to its promises of 100% more starch content in the House of Commons, a beef ’n’ onion flavour resurgence, and the promise of 20 new combos—caramel ’n’ hops, pear ’n’ lava, lemon ’n’ cardboard, pesto ’n’ ink, banana ’n’ turmeric, olive oil ’n’ brine, Benylin ’n’ peach, hazelnut ’n’ sweat, avocado ’n’ sapling, aspic ’n’ oregano, Polyfilla ’n’ nachos, sports sock ’n’ pizza, s’mores ’n’ elbows, pickle ’n’ toothpaste, oak ’n’ tulip, lime ’n’ stubble, cream ’n’ wool, horse ’n’ halloumi, snot ’n’ air, hair ’n’ time—that forces the reader to consider the Power of the Democratic Process in a Cynical Age; James Yeh his novel about a professor of mathematics obsessed with the mise en scène of Jim Jarmusch movies who beats his drinking problem through the snugger drug of independent cinema that teaches us to appreciate the important of Radical Thought in an Age of Prescriptive Thinking; and Ross Raisin his novel about a murderous stereo that instructs toddlers to slice up their parents and deposit their remains in a sewage pipe that teaches us the importance of Love and Understanding and not listening to Immoral Voices that will Lead Us Astray.

  The Two Poems of Archie Dennissss

  HAROLD Impugns woke to a vexing reality when celebrated poet Archie Denissss arrived at The House upon his 75th birthday. Archie Denissss had written the world’s most popular short-form poem (a senryu—the non-pastoral form of the haiku) called “Hope,” an overly sentimental blip that became every citizen’s number one favourite-of-all-time example of the redeeming and hopeful function of the poetic “arts.” The poem:

  Tomorrow is here

  Let the sun into your heart

  and your life begin

  Archie had written the poem as a Media Studies student at Napier University and published it in the irritating arts journal PoeEatTree alongside Harold Impugns’s first poem “Fitzwaller’s Disgrace,” a deeply moral and metrically daring exculpation of shamed opera singer Harvey Fitzwaller—rendered in a complex scansion of double dactylics with a sonorously emphatic spondee on each third word, Harold’s nine-line poem took over nine months to compose in comparison to Archie’s ten seconds. Thus began Harold’s deep hatred for the “work” of Archie Denissss—a vast corpus encompassing that one mawkish and meaningless poem printed and reprinted in every popular anthology for the next six decades while Harold composed technically ambitious works of increasing depth and power second to John Ashbery and Edwin Morgan and struggled even to publish in obscure university magazines.

  Archie’s poem was reviled among critics for its cheap heart-tugging and the horribl
e clumsiness of the final line. It made little sense when scrutinised. How could tomorrow be “here” when tomorrow is always the next day, no matter what the time of day? At 00:00:00, the tomorrow of 23:59:59 becomes the next day and yesterday’s tomorrow’s present—tomorrow can never backslide to the present tense. As a poetic construction, “Let the sun into your heart” fails because direct sunlight is harmful to the skin and to exposed cardiorespiratory organs. The “poet” was straining for a hopeful message, but the sun is a relentless death-ray that burns up everything in range. Some critics loved the “ambiguity” of this image, suggesting light or dark. This “ambiguity” lent the poem gravitas among its apologist anti-elitist critics, and among the high, low, and nobrow populace.

  A mediocre Media Studies student, Archie was happy to dine out on this one senryu his whole life, earning royalties for the endless reprints and special book versions (including a famous woodcut with one word per page, accompanied by an illustration from artist Debbie Nimmo). He read his poem at Buckingham Palace, 10 Downing Street, The White House, the European Parliament, Tom Cruise’s funeral, and various venues where VIPs cumulated across the world. A new school of so-called Denissssesque poetry sprung up—a term to describe poems that dealt with hope in an “ambiguous” way for both the masses and the eggheads. To his eternal shame, Harold wrote a Denissssesque poem in an attempt to finagle a couple of schmaltzy billions, but was unable to publish due to the upsurge in imitators. Archie wrote nothing new for sixty years.

  When writers became irrelevant to public discourse, Archie’s tours dried up. He lived on his royalties and Monte Carlo hedge-funds until the funds were hedged by gross inflation. He was forced to scrape a living in The House, working on a long-awaited second poem for his ten fans. Harold revelled in seeing his old nemesis reduced to paupery, and his festering lifelong resentment and ever-raging enviousness made a reconciliation impossible (and undesired). Archie failed to recognise Harold, as they had only met fleetingly on the Napier campus, and Archie quit his degree to be an international star in his third week of the first semester. Harold kept his distance at first, plotting the means to slight or humiliate his nemesis, until one afternoon, Archie came to Harold with a request to help him write his second poem. “I haven’t written a poem in almost sixty years. I never thought I’d have to,” he said. Harold set about his plan of destruction. “What you need is a change of direction,” he suggested. Archie was bewildered as he read Harold’s offering:

  Fuck all you cuntheads

  drown in your mass delusions

  I’ll see you in Hell

  “It’s a little, er, strong compared to my first poem. What worked about that one was the ambiguity,” Archie said, as though convincing himself.

  “Yes, exactly. This is a more startling direction for you. No one will have expected such a radical departure from the hope etc. That’s what so marvellous.”

  “And you’re sure I can take this from you?”

  “My gift. I’ve been a huge admirer of yours for years.”

  “Thank you.”

  Archie sold the poem to his ten eager readers. Their initial response was confusion and fear at this startling new direction. However, as disciples of the great poet, they chose to stick by him and purchased “his” next:

  No seriously

  I hate all you fucking cunts

  I piss on your graves

  His readers were soon electrified by this startling new “direction” and believed his bleak and violent imagery was a necessary reflection of the harsh and unremitting post-capitalist world. Harold wearily forged ahead:

  I mean all you lot

  reading this now—fuck yourselves

  and your mums and dads

  His readers adored the meta-mention of themselves and the dark humour in this one. Despite feeling an incredulous rage that people were swallowing this drivel, Harold was in a position to earn more ghostwriting Archie’s comeback poems than his own works, so continued to write sweary fuck-yous in ten seconds for his supper over his own knotty constructions. He put together a chapbook of these in a deluxe edition and charged a fortune. Meanwhile, Archie managed to write his second poem:

  Yesterday has gone

  the sun giving way to rain

  life nears its dour end

  Despite being a far more appropriate “career”-capper, his ten readers reacted violently to this poem, “a saccharine retread of the first,” and refused to cough up a penny. Archie never wrote another poem again and Harold continued to bankroll his fallen enemy, conning his public with random abusive poems in ludicrous abundance. His fans viewed this as a “late spurt” in his career, and paid upwards of £2000 for what was seen as his crowning opus:

  A late spurt my arse

  these poems are fucking shite

  you’re all clueless cunts

  This is the poem Archie would be remembered for when he died two years later from a vitamin deficiency and a general air of abstracted melancholy. Against his wishes and at Harold’s behest, it was chiselled on his headstone.

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  This

  10

  ONCE again I am not writing this novel, The House of Writers. I am not writing this novel (as stated in the previous sentence, and again, pointlessly, in this sentence), because the prospect of writing this novel (title: The House of Writers) fills me with apprehension and fear, and in addition to these formidable blocks, I am laziness personified. I am not a punctual or reliable (or handsome or prolific) writer, I am a deadbeat internet addict with a penchant for slouching back into bed to read better works than mine (works that deepen this apprehension and fear and laziness), or to listen to another indie rock LP while surfing the net to peruse books better than mine, because these books transport me from this mundane life of bed-slouching and never-ending blank pages calling out to me to be fil
led with words on a par with those I read in those aforesaid published volumes I covet so dearly. You might think that with this sort of defeatist attitude, I should be fearless in the face of the blank page, that I adopt a nihilist nothing-new-under-the-sun aesthetic, but this would be a naïve assertion, as there is no such thing as a nihilist nothing-new-under-the-sun aesthetic when the writer (me) lives in the permanent shadow of a thousand nihilistic nothing-new-under-the-sun innovators who have proven, in fucking outstanding prose (better than mine times like a million), that there is nothing new under the sun, so let us rave it up with divine demonstrations of literary prowess instead. The novel I am attempting and failing to write, The House of Writers (I repeat pointlessly, as I repeat this pointlessly, and this, and so on—hoping to fill up space and cribbing some cred for Stein-influenced repetitions [I hate Stein]) aspires to the incomplete, to the self-terminating void in the manner of other fictions by this author (me), whose entire corpus so far is an attempt confront the sheer pointlessness of new fiction in an age when books pour from every orifice, that all the Great Books have already been written, but battling on regardless, knowing this was the feeling in 1960, 1930, 1900, and that if his own drivel might in some small way contribute to his beloved Babel bookpile (Borges reference), then he will have done his work, despite that work consisting merely of comments about him not writing his work, and so on until you cannot take another sentence like this, where the author once again repeats the title of his unwritten novel: The House of Writers.