In the end, one task extricated me from this state of funk – a task that was to prove as cathartic as it was painful, which would lead me through the darkest tunnel eventually into a dazzling light.
Soon after I had returned to the house in a state of shock after Peter’s death, I realized that, in a moment of distracted misery, I had taken from his flat the project upon which he had been working. At first uncertain what to do with these notepads, I had placed them in my ‘Work in Progress’ file drawer, where I traditionally kept unfinished manuscripts. Unable to work the next day. I had, on an impulse of mournful curiosity, opened the drawer and extracted the first of the pads.
I started to read. Three hours later, I was still reading.
What Peter Gibson had written was not a novel to change lives, although it did admittedly change mine. The later claim, made on a radio arts show, that it was ‘the most life-affirming evocation of youthful sensibility since The Catcher in the Rye’ simultaneously exaggerated and underrated its importance. Yet I was utterly absorbed. Work by students or friends is invariably difficult to read with pleasure – voices and memories from the real world draining the life from the pages – but these pages were so bright and so confident that, within moments of embarking, I had become oblivious to the fact that behind every syllable and thought was not just a student or a friend but a former lover.
Such was the work’s authenticity of tone, its masterly creation of atmosphere and effortless stylistic elegance, so superior was it to anything that Peter had produced in class, that I briefly imagined that, in his later state of mental delusion, he had solemnly copied out some lesser known masterpiece and lightly updated it.
But no. Even if the self-conscious stammerings and mannered flourishes of his class work were nowhere to be found here, a distinguished, resonant echo of them was unmistakable and, besides, the setting and tone of the novel were too precisely of the moment to have been lifted from the past. Reading it a second time the following day (the original manuscript was slightly longer than it is today), I heard my pupil’s voice in every word.
He had been playing us along with his stories: what he had offered week after week were the chippings and shavings off this magnificent construct. Perhaps I should have been hurt, but then I have always been a writer first, a teacher second. Any sense of pique or even jealousy soon gave way to the simple heartfelt admiration of one creative artist for another. I felt closer to Peter than ever before – closer even than I had felt during the night in Gloucester when we made love.
It was, I imagine, that very closeness, aligned perhaps with a sense that our relationship was what is vulgarly known as ‘unfinished business’, which helps explain what happened next. In one of those responses that the creative artist can no more explain than understand, I began to jot notes in the margin of the first chapter, to rearrange material.
Soon I was scribbling extra paragraphs, using (significantly, I see now) my blue writing pen rather than my green editorial biro. At some point I must have glanced at the absurd, passionate tangle of words, his and mine, the growing confusion of paper through which something utterly ordered was emerging, switched on my computer and started writing, from the first page of chapter one, leaving, as is my wont, the typing of the title page to last. Soon the tips of my fingers were numb, my forearms were aching.
How did I feel? Like an impotent man making love for the first time in years. The words flowed – Peter’s words, my words, suddenly the division between us seemed meaningless. It is a short opening section, as is now well known, and no more than four hours later, it was complete.
What had begun as a sort of grief therapy, a way of distracting myself from the churning confusion of my life, quickly became an obsession. I would be awoken at five or six in the morning by thoughts of the day’s writing, the plot pulling me in. For the first time since writing the final chapters of Forever Young, I would work for an hour before breakfast, go downstairs to consume in rapt silence the cardboard-and-cowshit breakfast cereal my wife inflicts on her family in the name of Buddha (there’s a connection between active bowels and spiritual validity that I have never had the energy to question or resist) before returning, almost at a jog, to my desk. There were days when I simply forgot to shave; the telephone, an old friend in less productive times, was ignored.
I would emerge from my study, after ten or eleven hours work, smelly, unshaven, blinking, so caught up in the imaginative universe I was creating that I felt like an alien in the actual world.
I was creating? Yes, I. Quite early in the enterprise, it became quite clear to me that, for all its brilliance, Peter’s work was not so much a novel as a research document, a collection of notes. It has been said that, just now and then in a novelist’s life, a fiction descends upon him, like an act of grace, as if it had been there, ready and fully-formed, simply waiting for him to pick up his pen. Here, it seemed to me, was my act of grace, my reward for years of agony, humiliation and non-completion. I had, during the brief time when I had known him, provided Peter Gibson with the benefit of my frequently dispiriting experience of the inky trade. Now, in the mysterious way of things, he was giving back to me, not only on his own posthumous behalf but on behalf of the hundreds of would-be writers for whom I have toiled down the years. If Peter had lived, he might have been able to transmute the words on these notepads into a mature work of fiction but he had not. I was proud to take up the task on his behalf, subsuming the raw material he had hewn out of the rockface of youthful experience into my own work. If, as the testament of writers from Tolstoy to Greene quoted in my Muse of Fire confirms, the true writer needs to be both creator and editor, I had, at last, managed to establish that inner equilibrium.
It felt good. The prose had the optimistic swagger of Forever Young. There was a depth and subtlety of characterization which I felt I had not achieved since the early (only) chapters of Accidents of Trust. I have always striven for a gritty social authenticity in my fiction but, apart from the stories of my foray into dirty realism Tell Me the Truth About Love, About Love, I had never managed the moving painterly detail of everyday lives that I was achieving here. In the short stream-of-consciousness sections of the text there were echoes of my uncompleted prose poem Vermilion. Its thematic sub-structure developed many of the ideas I had been exploring in Insignificance but whereas that work, I can now admit, was so ideas-led that any kind of plot was like a drowning child caught in a rip tide of theory and internal musing, the new novel’s galloping narrative carried ideas on a breathtaking joyride of forward movement. As for the disappointment that was to be expressed by the less generous critics (the merest, self-serving trill of reservation, in most cases) that some of the mordant wit of Forever Young had given way to a plainer, gloomier vision, that is easily explained. Humour darkens with the years, sometimes becoming indecipherable from tragedy. It is a process that might have been traced through Accidents, Adultery, Gap, Lies, Insignificance, not to mention many of my shorter works had any of them been completed and published. The fact that they had not subtracted in no way from the real, experiential journey that lay behind them.
I would be the last to play down the influence of the late Peter Gibson upon my work. As I alchemized the rough ore of his research, reordering, compressing, honing, expanding, bringing life to the dry, arid path of his narrative with my own dashes of colour, or sometimes simply following that path by directly transcribing his handwritten work on to my computer (‘copying’ would be a harsh but not entirely inaccurate description), I became aware of a new energy, a sense of direction that I had all but forgotten was within my gift. Innocent, guileless, unaware of the traps and obstacles that litter the path of the long-distance writer, Peter Gibson had, as I had so long ago, reached that winning-post, that moment when the novelist, muscles aching, brain fuzzy with exhaustion, can write ‘The End’ and sink to the floor. As I reran that race, making it an incomparably more lively and sophisticated event than it had previously been, the fact that my
predecessor had achieved closure (before achieving closure in a different and more tragic sense) offered me a beacon towards which I moved with the speed and directness of an arrow. Some might say Peter’s contribution, his general marking out of a track, was a minor contribution to the final work that saw publication; not me. I had been a writer for whom completion had become the most daunting and intractable aspect of my work. Simply by finishing what he had started, my student was nothing less than an inspiration to me.
No wonder that, even in the excitement surrounding the acceptance of the novel, I insisted upon a full-page dedicatory note, stating simply and eloquently, ‘To Peter Gibson, 1976–1998. With gratitude and admiration’. Somehow it seemed the least I could do.
The title, incidentally, was entirely mine. Noting musical imagery throughout the novel, I played around with the term ‘terpsichore’. A list of titles, including such clonkers as Terpsichore of Life, Not Yet the Terpsichore and The Terpsichore of Angels was drawn up. Finally, and in a semi-humorous reference to modish modernity which I was sure Peter would have appreciated, I arrived at the title which now denotes a significant landmark in late twentieth-century literature.
terpsichore 4:2.
We were on our way.
* * *
The Writer Speaks of … Self-criticism
Everything that is written merely to please the author is worthless.
Blaise Pascal
Read over your compositions and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
Samuel Johnson
In a writer, there must always be two people – the writer and the critic. And, if one works at night, with a cigarette in one’s mouth, although the work of creation goes on briskly, the critic is for the most part in abeyance, and this is very dangerous.’
Leo Tolstoy
A tale from which pieces have been raked out is like a fire that has been poked. One does not know that the operation has been performed, but every one feels the effect.
Rudyard Kipling
It is in order to shine sooner that authors refuse to re-write. Despicable. Begin again.
Albert Camus
When it comes easily, throw it away. It can’t be any good.
V. S. Naipaul
* * *
23
I was distracted. I see now that, as I worked a shift of nine or ten hours, events beyond the study door were changing in ways which would have a profound effect upon my life. ‘When you’re writing a book,’ Alan Sillitoe has pointed out, ‘you’re 2,000 feet underground with your little miner’s lamp, picking away at a seam. The atom bomb can drop for all you care. And worse, your children can go to analysts. You’re just quarrying away to produce another book. “Why did I do that? To alleviate the pain of the world that would kill me if I didn’t.”’
My child was not going to analysts, but he was spending more time away from the house. Marigold and I had given up speculating as to where he went, even though he now sometimes stayed away for up to two days. We were both busy – me with my novel, Marigold with her decoration and her lover – and, separately, we may have reached the conclusion that for Doug to be involved any project, however odd and nefarious, was preferable to the life of solitude, gloom and masturbation that he had previously been leading.
One morning, my wife left the window and door of his room open, allowing the stale acrid smell of adolescence to waft through the house, reminding me inescapably of the last time I had seen Peter. It was at about this time that I found thoughts of my son and memories of my student had become weirdly conflated: I heard Doug’s booming, adolescent voice behind the words I was transcribing, imagined Peter returning to the house to crash about the kitchen, pale, hostile, but alive.
Soon Marigold was making brave little sorties into Doug’s room to empty an ashtray or waste-paper basket, to remove a few coffee cups in which mould was gathering. Once, emerging from my loft to replenish my supply of coffee, I found her on her knees in Doug’s room, talking to herself with a sort of dazed disapproval as she lifted a grey sheet to peer under the bed. My wife’s neat, girlish arse has never lost its power to move me and the sight of it there, taut against designer jeans, evoked in me a startlingly powerful feeling of tender, melancholic lust. I knelt down to pick up a stray cigarette carton and laid a hand between her buttocks. ‘Nice butt,’ I said, quoting a private catchphrase from happier times.
‘This is just too revolting for words,’ she muttered, surprising me by not moving away.
‘Couldn’t you let Miguela do it?’
‘Certainly not. What would she think of us?’
‘She’s from Venezuela. I’m sure she’s seen worse on the barrios of Caracas.’
In reply, Marigold raised the sheet slightly.
I winced. ‘Yes, well. Maybe not.’
Sighing, my wife sat back on her haunches. ‘I remember when he used to smell so sweet. I’d hold him to me before he went to bed just to get that pure scent of childhood. He was all warm and soft and –’ she laughed, ‘– pyjamay.’
‘You wouldn’t want to do that now.’ I stood up, leaving my hand on her neck but, oddly, it felt more uncomfortably intimate there and, after a decent interval, I withdrew it.
‘This is a man’s job, Gregory.’ She smoothed down the sheet. ‘There are some things that a mother shouldn’t see.’
Something in that self-mocking primness reminded me of the old days. I looked down at my wife, as she knelt at my feet. It was worth a try.
‘When Georges Simenon took a break from writing, he would visit his wife as she worked with a secretary in her study,’ I said. ‘“What d’you want?” she would ask. “You,” he would say. And they’d go to the bedroom. Afterwards, he would return to work, refreshed and energized.’
‘Was Simenon the one who wrote three novels in a month?’
‘I could write three novels in a month under the right circumstances.’
‘Clear this out and I might see my way to accommodating you.’
I glanced into the room. It might be argued that it is as much part of the writerly experience to delve among the porn magazines and tissues stiff with dried semen of a teenage son as it is to sit in an opium den in Saigon or hang out among the lowlifes of west London, yet somehow I doubted whether Graham Greene or Martin would be asked to do such a thing. ‘I’m under a lot of pressure,’ I said feebly.
Marigold stood up, once more her irritated, wifely self. ‘Bloody men,’ she muttered, and what once had been a humorous refrain now seemed filled with despair and boredom. She pushed past, a breast brushing my arm, and made her way down the stairs.
Nice butt. Bloody men. I might just see my way to accommodating you. The days when we would tumble into bed, day or night, and laugh at the idiot insistency of our desires, seemed so close and yet so far away. There was a time when my wife could sense when I was retreating into the melancholy interior of my authorly soul, when she would follow me and bring me back to her and to the world, holding me in her arms, talking and talking, making love to me with slow, soothing, pastoral sway. Sometimes she would hold me close to her and bury her face in my hair. ‘My writer,’ she would breathe, and this whispered confidence, this secret that we shared, would make me strong.
That evening Marigold and I spent time together, talking. We sat in the bright sitting-room, with its perfect décor and appropriate room-temperature, glasses of chilled white wine in our hands, and attempted, with only a slight sense of strain, to make the best of what we had.
Over the years, the territory covered by our conversation had become more circumscribed. Once we had talked about sex: when we were not fucking, we were talking about fucking. Then we had enjoyed comparing notes about our burgeoning careers. For years, Douglas provided common ground until he too became a source of conflict, even embarrassment.
This process of disengagement was reflected in our social life. The small set of youngish couples within which we moved dispersed as
we hit our thirties, becoming too successful or not successful enough, too married or not married enough, for us to feel entirely at ease with them. For ten years or so, we found common cause with disparate group of men and women whose children were the same age as Dougie. The anxieties of parenthood were so all-absorbing that a sort of weird comradeship developed and vast intellectual, political and social differences were forgotten in our devotion to our great common project. But when our children reached the age of eleven or twelve, changing schools, shifting up (or, in Doug’s case, down) a gear, these fellow foot-soldiers became the enemy. The competitiveness which we now realized had always been there became ugly and explicit. Parents whose children were skipping up the straight and narrow, passing exams, making new friends, joining teams, developing ambition or a social conscience became boastful or patronizing and lowered their voices sympathetically when asking about Doug and his less glorious progress. Those of us with children whose only A’s were in angst, anorexia, anger and acne grew silent, weary of social gatherings where we would field enquiries with effortful optimism. He’s very absorbed in the new music. He’s becoming something of a silent intellectual. Of course, he has always been something of a loner.
Burdened by our disappointment, our resentful conviction that not all of this sadness and failure was our fault, that some responsibility must lie with them, our children drifted away from the friendships which had once seemed so sincere. Or perhaps the friendships had never been sincere at all and, just as Mummy and Daddy were tolerating, for the sake of the children, the company of cheery, dull, sincere, tennis-playing fools with whom they had nothing in common, so the children, out of deference to their parents, had hung out obediently with their happier contemporaries, those accountants, producers and managers of the future.
Kill Your Darlings Page 17