Kill Your Darlings

by Terence Blacker

  I collected a glass of champagne from a passing tray, biding my time. One or two of those in my vicinity held my gaze for an instant but, after a momentary reference to some internal filofax of the useful and famous, looked away quickly. I have, it seems, one of those presences which does not snag in the memory – a writer’s face, if you like. Ten years previously, I might have been hurt or offended by this invisibility, by the fact that I can meet someone whom I had met the previous week without their showing a flicker of recognition but by now I had accepted this as the fate of the serious novelist: to be anonymous, to be everyman, the universal, unremembered face in the crowd is central to our art. In fact, every time I was cut dead by a fellow novelist, I would congratulate myself that in a very real sense, I was the truer, more honestly anonymous writer. I felt sorry for those authors braying greetings at one another at these absurd social events, the bookish luminaries towards whom all heads turned as they enter a room. Famous, they wore what Updike calls ‘the mask that eats into the face’; as writers, they had lost something important. I checked out the largest group and made my way towards it. Almost obscured by several layers of female admirers, who seemed to be swaying and craning towards him, was my interviewee, Brian ‘Pussy’ McWilliam.

  He was a short, lean man, probably in his late fifties, with the taut, tanned skin, broad shoulders and flat stomach of a man who took trouble to keep himself in trim. It was easy to see why producers and picture editors loved to use McWilliam: in those coarse, even features, in that large head adorned by aggressively luxuriant grey hair, the personality of a perversely seductive bully was eloquently expressed. The success of his second career as a wrong-’un turned wordsmith had been as much due to his beautiful, brutal looks, captured for style supplements in a variety of shadowy scowls, as his famously violent and body-strewn past.

  I hovered on the outer circle of his audience. He was, as he might say, giving it a touch of the verbals. Gangsters, actors, tarts, villains, dodgy politicos, geezers who were a bit handy with their fists; his line, perfected over many interviews and one-man shows, was that, while he may have been a bit naughty in the past – he’d be the first to hold his hand up that he wasn’t exactly a choirboy, no way – it was all part of the give-and-take, rough-and-tumble of private business conducted between colleagues in the same line of work. All right, so maybe the line of work wasn’t legal in the strict sense of the word, but he had his code. No civilians. Nothing personal. Nothing nasty. Business only.

  ‘He was a bit silly, see.’ McWilliam’s piercing blue eyes fixed a long-haired girl, who seemed to give a shudder of appalled desire. ‘He did a few things that, at the end of the day, in my book, were well out of order. Not on. I had to give him a bit of a smack. What we call a reminder.’

  I was amused by this performance, with its hint of brutality, safely distant and vague, its stagy, loaded euphemisms.

  ‘Mr McWilliam.’ I edged my way forward through his fans.

  He turned his gaze on me, narrowing his eyes, irritated at the interruption.

  ‘I’m Gregory Keays. I believe we’re talking later.’

  ‘Yeah? The girl at the publisher’s did lay on a few chats. Which one are you?’

  ‘A magazine called the Professional Writer.’

  He gave a little bark of laughter. ‘That rules me out then. I can hardly write my own name.’

  ‘I’m sure our readers will be very interested by that,’ I said smoothly. ‘You have a lot of fans out there who take the magazine.’

  McWilliam shrugged. ‘Want to do it here? Then you can fill in the bits from my talk this afternoon. It’s basically the same old crap.’

  ‘We’ll need some privacy. Just thirty minutes or so.’

  ‘How much do you people pay?’

  I raised a laconic eyebrow. ‘The idea is that it helps the book.’

  ‘Are you getting paid?’ He looked around his admirers and seemed to be enjoying the situation.

  ‘Yes, but I haven’t got a book to sell.’

  ‘Seems all wrong to me. Giving away my material to some geezer I’ve never met writing for a magazine I’ve never heard of.’

  From just behind him, a woman in her late twenties whom I recognized from her statuesque, faux-aristocratic bearing and trim, auburn hair as Tara Winstanley, one of the more fashionable of the new generation of book editors, laid a well-manicured hand upon his arm. ‘Actually, Brian it would really help,’ she said quietly.

  McWilliam glanced at her, a sharp, cold look, and, to my surprise, she blushed and looked away. He looked across to me. ‘The Professional Writer, do me a favour,’ he muttered mutinously, then shrugged. ‘Two-thirty at my gaffe. The Brobury. Ask for the Tower Suite.’

  ‘Fine.’ I turned to go.

  ‘And what do you write then, Mr Professional Writer?’ he asked, in humorous mode once more.

  ‘I write novels.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Forever Young? I was on the Granta list of Best of Young British Novelists.’

  ‘Oooo.’ He made the sarcastic, high-pitched, girly noise that had become a contemporary form of mockery. The women around him laughed adoringly.

  No. I didn’t warm to Mr Brian McWilliam.

  * * *

  Exercise

  You are a small spider hanging from a microphone in the main venue of a major literary festival. Over the period of a weekend, you benefit at close hand from the advice, analysis and public reminiscences of many of the greatest writers of our time. Use the conventions of magical realism to explore in a short story how this experience metamorphoses your life.

  * * *

  11

  There are interviews and interviews. With Julian or Jeanette, A.S. or A.N., even with Martin himself, I would invest a serious amount of time and consideration. Having researched in the archives at the Professional Writer to ascertain areas of special interest and/or sensitivity, I would make a telephone call to the interviewee outlining the general area of discussion. There would probably be a lunch of some kind, an off-the-record sort of event, at which I would establish a writer-to-writer bond of trust and understanding. After an in-depth taped discussion about authorly life and craft, methods of working, ways of relaxation, rate of wordage per day and so on, we might enjoy a ‘warming down’ process – perhaps a trip to the Tate (A.S.) or a couple of frames of snooker (Martin). A copy of the proposed interview would be sent to the subject, followed up by some friendly honing and elaboration over the telephone or, in certain circumstances, a drink at their place.

  As it happens, I have yet to put this action plan into effect. The authors favoured by readers of the Professional Writer (which has nothing approaching an archive in its poky two-room office in Battersea) are those who require the minimum amount of preparation and input: a riffle through the press hand-out, a 30-minute chat (What gave you the idea for…? How did you research the…? What writing routine do you…?), an hour or so to write up the piece. Light and shade, atmosphere, scene-setting, meditations upon the nature of the artistic life; these have no place in the Professional Writer. Tips, how to write the book, find a publisher and get famous are essentially the only items on its editorial agenda.

  So Jeanette and A.S. and A.N. and Martin, writers who clearly belong to a different galaxy of the imagination, are of less interest than the newcomers and flukes. Firm believers in the great literary lottery, our readers pore gormlessly over an interview with the 22-year-old geek whose first novel has made him six figures, the mediocre actress whose career has been resurrected by a winsome, anorexic memoir, the journalist who has cracked some winning formula, the crim who’s the toast of literary festivals, and they take heart. It could be them.

  Out of deference to this fantasy, the magazine’s resident columnist-at-large will neither impose his own views nor allow any expression of the natural superiority and scepticism a long-term professional writer and novelist may justifiably have for the flash-in-the-pan arriviste. I am a camera, yes, but a camer
a directed from a flattering angle in a kindly light.

  Brian McWilliam was a Professional Writer kind of writer – that is, no writer at all. A small-time hood from Peckham, he had finessed a media career out of a past of violence, theft and general unpleasantness which had eventually landed him in Wormwood Scrubs doing a seven-year stretch for robbery with violence. He had always been known as something of an anecdotalist in his circle and while ‘on the in’ as he liked to put it, he had come up with the clever and timely idea of exploiting his vulgar charisma and violent, low-life past.

  A few weeks after his emergence from the Scrubs in the late 1980s, he approached a minor showbiz agent called Barry Storm who, without too much difficulty, found him work on the burgeoning club circuit. McWilliam had a knack of falling on his feet, to which his underworld nickname ‘Pussy’ paid partial reference (he was also relentlessly lustful and had more than once been accused of over-enthusiasm in pressing his attentions on younger female fans), and his brand of raw, hard-eyed humour was what the clubs wanted at that moment. After the saucy but safe radicalism of the stand-up gang – the middle-class boys with fake cockney accents, the career lesbians – audiences discovered a taste for the street, for tales of death and hard drugs and sex taken fast and on the hoof. The bully-boy tactics of the Eighties had brought out the nation’s incipient sado-masochism, teased up its weakness for voyeurism and violence.

  So Pussy McWilliam relived his past or at least relived a past buffed up and polished for public consumption. With his trademark dark suit, his shiny black shoes, his slicked-back hair, his hands which stretched and flexed and danced like glove puppets stripped down to bare knuckle and fingers, he faced up to his pampered audiences and introduced them to real crime, where real blood was shed, where no one had time for relationships or concern for the Third World, where everything was available at a price and everyone was on the take. And, just when the punters were becoming uncomfortable with their own complicity in Pussy’s heartlessness, he would take the edge off his stories with a leavening of humour and sympathy, leaving them with a cleansing aftertaste of remorse.

  His act was too hard for a TV series of his own but on the chat shows, for which he perfected a cleverly sanitized version, McWilliam became a regular fixture. When some law and order debate was briefly in the public eye, producers and news editors would know where to turn for a flip, witty, salt-of-the-earth quote to close their reports.

  Attitudes changed. Those critics who had once railed against the amoral, value-free world which McWilliam glorified and glamorized began to seem increasingly priggish and out of touch with the new spirit of the age. Pussy, it began to be argued, was dealing in a form of post-modernist irony, rough yet surprisingly sophisticated. His was essentially a moral act. The very fact that incidents of casual greed and lust could be recounted with a laugh and a joke provided the inevitable ‘powerful indictment’ of contemporary mores. New subtleties were found in the manner he told his stories. Resonances, variously described as ‘Hogarthian’, ‘Dickensian’ or ‘Runyonesque’, were revealed by anxious, admiring critics.

  Inevitably, Pussy McWilliam caught the eye of a publisher. When an editorial director from one of the more respectable houses took him, accompanied by Barry Storm, to lunch at the Caprice and suggested he write a book, he had, according to rumour, been reluctant, possibly aware that, without the charming delivery, the sinister dancing hands, his true nature would be exposed in cold, revealing prose. The editor had explained (so I imagine) that he was not looking for a mere smack-and-tell memoir but something which appealed to the new hunger for pain and confession. If Pussy expressed a certain lack of enthusiasm for the idea of sitting down in front of a desk hour after hour to work over appropriately sensitive fancy prose, the editor will have casually remarked that these days fancy prose came cheap – it was for sale on every corner. Pussy would provide the chat, the experience, the persona; the publishers would do the rest.

  A year later, Sorted by Brian McWilliam was published and soared to the top of the bestsellers list on an irresistible air current of profiles and author publicity. McWilliam (the feline nickname was quietly phased out at this stage) became the rough geezer du jour. Gloucester was proud to have landed him, as was the Professional Writer.

  * * *

  He was not in his room at the Brobury at the time we had agreed. Or, to be strictly accurate, he was not responding to his telephone. I had been waiting in the lobby of the hotel for a little over fifteen minutes when Tara Winstanley, the editor I had seen in the VIP tent, skipped down the stairs. Her normally well-groomed hair seemed in some disorder and there was a decorous, maidenly blush to her cheeks. As she passed me, she raised her eyebrows in an oddly eloquent gesture of exasperation, either at herself or at her client. McWilliam, I imagined, was not quite as easy and amiable as he liked to pretend.

  Two minutes later, he rang down to Reception to enquire if I were waiting. Not in the best of moods, I made my way upstairs to his second-floor room.

  ‘Greg.’ He appeared, barefoot, at the door and, with a casually imperious gesture of invitation, turned back into the darkened room.

  ‘Gregory,’ I said, following.

  ‘Yeah, sorry about the delay, Greg.’ He drew the curtains. ‘I crashed out – power nap, you know.’

  As the lineaments of the spacious room became clearer, I found myself staring at the wrecked, dishevelled bedclothes on the four-poster bed. Attached to the headboard were a gleaming pair of designer handcuffs.

  Seeing the direction of my eyes, McWilliam looked slightly embarrassed. ‘Something came up,’ he said with an unattractive smirk. ‘I got interrupted.’

  I walked over to the low, glass table by the window, opened my bag, took out a notebook and my tape machine. Frankly, I was in a state of some irritation, and it was not merely the fact had I been kept waiting while an ageing thug had indulged in tiresome sado-masochistic games with one of London’s more attractive new editors that annoyed me. There was a sense of territory being violated. This man, this criminal (alleged criminal; many of the deeds to which he laid claim had never been tried in court nor been confirmed by an independent third party) had, on the basis of one book, which he had not even written himself, marched into the literary world, commandeered our bestseller list, colonized our festivals, and was now taking the cream of our womenfolk, manacling them to hotel beds and casually having his way with them at the very moment when a writer (a real writer, who over the years has sacrificed company, sex, career in order to enter the heart of creative darkness) waited downstairs until he had achieved his tawdry little moment of satisfaction. It seemed all wrong. Tara Winstanley was precisely the kind of publishing woman who, when I was around, exuded literary snobbery, admiring precisely the right books and the right authors, was contemptuous of those caught still admiring last season’s successes. Yet, a matter of minutes ago, she had been in this room skipping out of her designer clothes for an ageing, sub-literate Neanderthal whose reading was doubtless limited to a headline over a pair of breasts in the tabloid press.

  ‘Nice girl, Tara.’ As if reading my mind, McWilliam looked from the far side of the bed where he had been vaguely straightening out the bed linen rumpled and drenched by his lunch-time activities.

  ‘Yes, she has an excellent reputation.’

  McWilliam chuckled. ‘I bet she has.’ He adjusted his crotch vulgarly. ‘What is it with these book women, Greg? I swear, I’ve done rock gigs and comedy festivals, even party conferences, but the only place that I know, I just know, I’ll get lucky is at these book festival jobs.’ He gave up on the bed, wandered over to where I sat and slumped wearily on to the chair opposite me. ‘I’m surprised you blokes get any work done at all.’

  ‘We manage somehow.’

  He considered me for a moment, perhaps noticing for the first time that I was not in the best of humours. ‘Family man, are you?’

  I nodded. ‘Wife and a son.’

  ‘Lucky fella. Never manage
d that. Couldn’t get the hang of the old marriage thing. Just –’ he glanced blearily in the direction of the bed, ‘– this.’

  ‘Yeah, well. Different strokes.’ I reached for the tape machine, then hesitated, unable to resist my own curiosity. ‘Have you known her long?’

  ‘Tara?’ McWilliam looked surprised. ‘I only met her this morning. Swanned up to me and said that she would be looking after me from now on. She was right and all.’ He gazed back at the bed, almost regretfully. ‘It’s a good idea before you go on stage. Relaxes you. If it’s a rough gig, I sometimes just stand there, looking at the audience. You know what I’m thinking? You sad bastards. An hour ago I was up to my oysters in posh crumpet. Nothing can hurt me after that. It’s a self-esteem thing.’

  I smiled. This, I supposed, was the legendary McWilliam charm, the man-to-man act which had hooked so many of the more gullible journalists. ‘How does it work?’ I asked, genuinely curious. ‘D’you just ask?’