Kill Your Darlings

by Terence Blacker

  Let’s all feel sorry for Daddy. At that moment, as I returned to my study, pausing briefly outside Doug’s door, I’ll admit that I was overcome by an uncharacteristic spasm of self-pity. This, then, was where being a parent led – screams in the kitchen, a punch to the scrawny chest of your grown child, blazing eyes, hurt, hatred. An end to the illusion that parenthood, like neighbourhood or brotherhood, involved some sense of belonging, of unity. Maybe it was a phase; perhaps all fathers and sons reach a moment in their lives when they square up to one another.

  At my desk, I stared at the empty screen. What did we expect, we wrinklies, we groans? A prize? An end-of-term certificate for being good mummies and daddies? At this point, when sweetness faded, when the going got rough, it suited us to think of ourselves as social heroes, nurturing the next generation, from nappies to now, bringing them through their moments of ill health and fear and insecurity and loneliness, coaxing them into bed for half their young lives and out of bed for the rest, preparing the next generation but, of course, this great assumed nobility was a lie. Doug was right. We were in it for ourselves. A chapter in The Book of Literary Lists, unavoidably entitled ‘The Pramless Hall’, assembled modern male heterosexual novelists who had not only declined to play the fatherhood game but who actively disliked the company of children. Naipaul, Larkin, Greene, Roth, Richard Ford: the list went on and on. It worried me. Cyril Connolly’s argument that ‘children dissipate the longing for immortality which is the compensation of the childless writer’s work’ seemed altogether too facile, one kind of fertility neatly precluding another. Ford was nearer the mark when he owned up that it was the responsibility, the lack of freedom, which had kept him childless. He went further: ‘I don’t like kids much. I always saw children as little hobbles around my ankle.’ Little hobbles! That was more like it. So he deals with teen crisis in neat, controllable fiction form with the central relationship between Frank Bascombe and his son in Independence Day, as tortured and unconvincing as that between the Swede and his rebellious daughter in American Pastoral. Compare these recalcitrant, rebellious teenagers with the real thing and you begin to see the attraction of the work over the life. The fictional versions argue – they discuss, they rage with articulacy. What would Roth or Ford do with Doug and his squeaks and grunts and ‘owi then’s’? No wonder they run from the churning, unexpressed agony of real parenthood into fiction. ‘Paternity would confine me within those ordinary ways of living,’ said Flaubert.

  Yeah, right, Gus. Like we really believe that.

  * * *

  The Relative Position of Writers in the ‘Risk Factor Listing’ of the Association of Motor Insurers

  1. Accountants, loss adjusters, doctors, solicitors, civil servants. Computer programmers.

  2. Business people not obliged to travel for their work. Manual workers (skilled). Nurses, shop workers, teachers.

  3. Business people obliged to travel for their work. Housewives. Night-shift workers. MPs. Members of the police. Professional sportsmen and women.

  4. TV or film actors. TV presenters, newscasters and weather operatives. Journalists. Taxi-drivers. Advertisers and those working in a general media capacity. Academics.

  5. Comedians. Pop stars and anyone involved in the pop business. Writers (book and general). Stuntpersons.

  * * *

  10

  Under the circumstances, it was perhaps not surprising that, over the next few weeks, I chose to spend rather more time on the literary circuit than usual. My wife was seeking solace in another man’s arms. My son was either roaming the streets or locked away in his room where he spent much of his time talking on a mobile telephone which he seemed mysteriously to have acquired. On the rare occasions when I encountered either of them around the house, few words were exchanged.

  So Peter Gibson became my escape from the unhappy family unit in which I had suddenly found myself. Often, when we met, I would unburden the cares of the family man/writer with an openness which I had not experienced since the days, now over three years ago, when I was last involved with a non-professional lover. Of course, Peter was slightly younger than most of the girls I had seen over the years and, unlike them, had not made that moral compromise in his own life which makes for a sympathetic listener, but he somehow seemed attuned to my inner torment. He explained Doug to me. He understood my unhappiness with Marigold. While he was evasive about his own parents, I formed a picture of them as poor, simple good-hearted folk, buffeted by life and confused by their brilliant dreamer of a son in a way which reflected in an almost uncanny fashion the blindness of my own family to my writerly needs and rhythms. When I pointed out this similarity in our situations – both practitioners of the inky trade, both outsiders somewhat at sea in domestic life – he reacted with a surprise and awkwardness which I put down to natural modesty.

  I was due to spend a day at the Gloucester Festival, a new event scheduled neatly between Edinburgh and Cheltenham, in order to interview Brian McWilliam, a celebrity-criminal whose career path – from robbery with violence to performance artist and now to author, was the kind of success story which appealed to readers of the Professional Writer. It would be amusing, I thought, to introduce Peter to the fantasy world of the literary festival and I suggested that he should join me for the weekend. He accepted my invitation, almost with enthusiasm.

  Yet, when I picked him up at Hammersmith Broadway that Saturday morning, he seemed oddly distracted, behaving almost as if I had tricked him into this expedition. I suggested that he place his bulging canvas shoulder-bag on the back seat but he kept it with him, holding the strap throughout the entire journey. I made a joke about the new school of muggers who loomed out of the White City flats to help themselves to bags and briefcases on the passenger seats of cars waiting at traffic lights, but he merely gazed at the passing cityscape. What the hell? Writers are not well known for their talent for small talk. As the road widened and the traffic thinned on the outskirts of London, I switched on a classical music channel and we made our way west without speaking.

  We were staying at a village pub about five miles from Gloucester, a King’s Arms sort of place, all beams and history and fake Tudor lettering on the outside and fire doors, cheap patterned carpets and the smell of stale cigarette smoke within. My room was tiny, essentially a double-bed and a TV, causing me a brief pang of nostalgia for the days when such a venue would be the setting for some happy, furtive tryst.

  I had agreed to meet Peter for dinner in the ‘carvery’, a grim little room behind the saloon bar, but I was on my second gin and tonic when he turned up, looking, if anything, more rumpled than he had when we arrived. He had, he told me, been asking at reception for a writing desk to be put in his room.

  ‘Writing desk?’ I said. ‘There won’t be much time for writing.’

  Peter opened the plastic menu and stared at its predictable contents as if trying to work out a complicated equation. ‘I may not make it tomorrow,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Make it?’

  ‘To the festival. I’ve got … work to do.’

  I laughed. ‘Give yourself a break. You might learn something at the festival.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear those other voices,’ he said sharply.

  ‘They’re writers.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Peter placed the tips of his fingers to his temples as if even now, in this very carvery, his brain was being assaulted by alien presences. ‘I’m going to finish. It’s all that matters. Sorry.’

  ‘Surely the story can wait a day or so.’

  He looked up, and there was a smile on his face that was almost goofy in its radiance. ‘It’s not a story,’ he said. ‘I’ve been meaning to tell you but, as you always say, if you give it away through talk, then you don’t give it away through writing.’

  ‘That wasn’t me. It was Ted Hughes.’

  ‘It’s a novel.’

  ‘Yes. A novel. Of course.’ I imagine a look of undisguised weariness might have flickered across my face at
this point, but fortunately the moment of awkwardness was broken by a skinny youth in a stained black waistcoat who had appeared to take our order. I watched my guest as he discussed with the waiter the various unpalatable examples of plain English food on offer tonight. Yes, a novel. I really might have guessed it. All my pupils were writing a novel. Sometimes the novel existed only in an embryonic, theoretical form, as yet unsullied by articulated prose. Often the novel was merely pulling on its boots for the long march ahead. Inevitably, though, the novel would have to be discussed at some length. There have been times when it has seemed to me that I have spent half my life listening to would-be novelists unburdening the plot, the characters, the voice, the towering ideas contained in their own glorious, never-to-be-completed fictions.

  When the waiter had gone, I braced myself for the inevitable flood of authorial confidences, but a sulky pout had returned to Peter’s face.

  ‘I shouldn’t have mentioned it,’ he said. ‘I just needed to explain why I had to work tomorrow.’

  ‘You were working on a novel, all the time you were producing stories for class?’

  He shrugged. ‘They were old stuff. Cannon fodder.’

  ‘How very flattering for the rest of us,’ I said with more than a hint of impatience. ‘Did it occur to you that you may have been wasting the class’s time?’

  ‘Oh, come on.’ The colour had risen in Peter’s as he fixed me with those strange sky-blue eyes. ‘You must know better than anyone that, as soon as a work is laid out on the slab for a post-mortem in class, it’s already a stiff.’

  ‘There may be a modicum of truth in what you say,’ I replied coolly, realizing as he spoke that he had identified the essential paradox of learning how to write. The talkers in class, the critics with their firm grasp of theory, the swots and grade-hounds, might win marks and the admiration of their peers but they would never produce work of quality. The writers kept quiet. ‘It had better be good.’

  ‘It is.’

  Our food arrived. Without waiting for me to start. Peter began to eat, spearing the whitebait, neatly tidying it with his knife, then, like a competent, slightly bored conjurer, raising it to the double curtain of hair which obscured all of his face but the thin nose and the strangely predatory mouth. I was annoyed by this last-minute rejection. Although, on the whole, I like the company of young people, there were times when their rapt self-preoccupation, the way they concealed their own egocentric concerns behind the cloak of moral probity, was unendurable. I remembered, for some odd reason, a female student for whom I had plans of a personal nature who had waited until we were at the coffee stage of a rather expensive meal in Chelsea before announcing, with a fine show of bashfulness, that she had decided that our relationship was becoming ‘inappropriate’. I was married; it was a sisterhood thing. Oh, for fuck’s sake. The rage I had felt then (the knowledge that by the time this youthful primness had been eroded by the compromises of maturity, it would be too late for me) was with me now. Who did they think they were, these prissy little purists?

  Peter glanced up and, as if sensing the direction of my thoughts, smiled in a manner that was both apologetic and inexplicably confiding. In spite of myself, I felt a lurch of envy for my own pupil. Of course, he could finish his novel. Did he have to earn a living? Was he trapped in a domestic nightmare? How easy it must be to attend to the call of the muse when everything – money, family support, education, a reason to live – is accorded to you as part of the unchallenged rights of youth. And how typical of the man that he would agree to accompany me to a festival, then queenily withdraw the privilege of his company at the last moment on the grounds that he had to write. Big fucking deal. Did it not occur to him for a moment that I would far rather be working on Insignificance than be obliged to interview some half-witted criminal with a publishing contract, compile pointless statistics about other writers, or indeed teach a group of students with ideas above their talent?

  ‘I’ll pay for the room, of course,’ he said, his mouth full of small fish.

  ‘Don’t you even want to see Martin? Maybe I could introduce you – we used to know each other, you know.’

  ‘You’ve told me. But I was never that much of a fan, to tell the truth.’

  ‘Nor me,’ I said quickly. ‘He’s massively overrated, we all know that. But he’s interesting as a cultural indicator.’

  Peter laid down his knife and fork and ran his fingers through his dark, uncombed hair. ‘You can tell me about it tomorrow night.’

  ‘Yes, of course. So why are you here?’

  He looked away. At the bar, a middle-aged couple sat engaged in lugubrious conversation with the barman. From the look of the woman – teased and lacquered hair, heavy jewellery, high heels – this was their weekly night out. ‘See the world,’ he said. ‘A bit of an adventure.’

  He turned back to me. I held his eyes. If this was mockery, I would make him regret it. ‘It would be even more of an adventure if you came along tomorrow,’ I said quietly.

  Peter shook his head slowly. ‘I make my own adventure,’ he said.

  * * *

  It was not only for personal reasons that I was disappointed by Peter’s last-minute loss of nerve. Over the previous weeks, we had been engaged in a bantering, yet profoundly serious debate about the literary life in a modern age. To my argument that the contemporary writer should be seen moving in the right circles, accept commissions which may represent a small artistic compromise but which kept visible his name, his authorial persona as Mailer has it, Peter would respond with a bewildered purity, an insistence that a serious artist had responsibility only and exclusively to his work. Among several books I had leant him had been Janet Hobhouse’s The Furies and he had taken to quoting from the descriptions of the character Jack, a novelist said to have been based on Philip Roth: ‘the monkish habits of his solitude, the grim, even depressive minimalism of his life … his stony separateness and self-sufficiency’.

  A literary festival would test Peter’s precious ‘stony separateness’. By its very nature – a bookish little world, cut off from vulgar everyday concerns – a festival provided a fantasy version of the writer’s life. Here every novelist, biographer and poet was a success, every career a soaring parabola of prizes and sales and profound, revealed truths. Here every member of the audience adored the printed word, asked intelligent, sensitive questions of the author before queuing for a signed copy of his book with the quiet devoutness of a communicant. Here, in every bar, the talk was not of sex, TV or football but books, books, books. At a festival, even the readers are the cream of the crop and what Brian Aldiss once described as the inbuilt class structure of reading – author, publisher, bookseller, reader – was seen at its most orderly and harmonious.

  I had learnt down the years how to gain the most benefit from these events. I would don my cream linen suit – well-cut enough to represent a healthy royalty account, baggy enough to speak of hours of distracted endeavour at the writing table – swoop down, attend one or two of the more significant readings, conduct an interview if necessary, and spend the rest of my time hanging out at the bars and parties where writers and their entourages gathered. I was well known on this circuit, if not by members of the literary aristocracy, who affected not to recognize me, then by writers on their way up or on their way down, and by the various functionaries from the world of publishing or journalism who made up the numbers. No novelist is truly at home anywhere, even at home (especially at home), but at gatherings like the Gloucester Festival, I felt among my own kind. I was sorry that Peter had been too absorbed in his own project to see me in this context; it might have reminded him that it is not obligatory for a serious writer to lurk moodily in the cave of his imagination like a pious and dreary hermit.

  I drove into the centre of Gloucester, deployed my complimentary parking ticket and entered the cavernous lobby of the town hall to collect my press pass, which I pocketed. A party was taking place in a room adjoining the main assembly room where ma
ny of the readings would take place. I flashed my pass in the direction of the girl sitting behind a desk. On these occasions, I preferred not to identify myself with news-hounds and profile-mongers but to move among my peers and literary compadres as a fiction writer, confident in the knowledge that, while some of my income is earned from journey-work, the heft and texture of my prose sets me apart from mere journalists as surely as do the occasional visits to Grub Street by Updike, Naipaul, Rushdie or even Martin. I like to think that, in every sentence created by a true writer, the mark of the novelist is identifiable in even the roughest company.

  ‘Name?’ The girl was looking up at me with an impertinent smile. ‘It’s a writers’ party. There’s a press reception this evening.’

  ‘I know it’s a writers’ party,’ I said more testily than I had intended. ‘Gregory Keays.’

  ‘Yes?’ She frowned and turned the page of invitees. ‘You don’t appear to be on the list, Mr Keays. It’s really for people appearing this year. If you’d like to come to the press party, you’d be most welcome.’

  ‘That’s impossible. I need to see Brian McWilliam. I agreed to meet him here.’

  ‘Brian?’ Her face lit up. ‘Maybe I should put you down as his guest.’

  I sighed, reflecting, not for the first time, on the many and various humiliations meted out to the professional author. ‘Yes,’ I said icily. ‘That might be a solution to our problem.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Keays. Enjoy the party,’ she trilled.

  I made my way into the room and looked around. It was an A-list gathering, all right. There were travel-writers and political writers, celebrity novelists and novelist celebrities, science writers, eco-writers, confessional memoirists of every sort and description, nature writers, self-consciously kitted out in safari jackets and desert boots, the heroes of the new school of journalistic, recognition fiction assiduously working the room in their leather jackets and tattoos and look-at-me haircuts, bossy veterans of the literary scene, holding forth to any one who happened to be passing. Amid the gatherings of twos and threes (few had the confidence to stand alone, observing, doing a writer’s job, as I was), eager, clotted little knots of partygoers could be seen. At the centre of each of these groups top-of-the-bill types preached the gospel of success to the faithful congregations of publicists, agents, publishers, lovers and general hangers-on without whom they went nowhere. Now that writing genres had been definitively blurred – memoir/novels, novels/travel books, travel books/self-help manuals, self-help manuals/novels – the only division in the literary world that mattered was between the truly famous and the would-be, wanna-be, going-to-be famous. When Cynthia Ozick wrote that ‘the economy of writing always operates to a feudal logic: the aristocracy blocks out all the rest. There is, so to speak, no middle class,’ she might have been gazing upon a gathering such as this.