Kill Your Darlings

by Terence Blacker

  I sat in silence, like a child being admonished.

  ‘You made your choice, didn’t you. On the one hand, a child and a wife; on the other hand, a book, a story. Maybe you’d make the same decision again.’

  ‘A surprising number of novelists remain childless.’

  ‘But you didn’t. So what would it be – book or child?’

  I raised my eyes and said nothing.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘But after this one it will be different.’

  ‘You mean you’ll actually finish it?’

  ‘It’s going well. I think it might win prizes. When it’s out there, I’ll do some reviewing, a bit of telly. I’ll lighten up. We’ll spend more time together.’

  ‘It’s too late, Gregory. You’ve lost your son and now you’ve lost me.’

  ‘I think you’ll see me differently when the new book comes out. It will be like the old days, the Forever Young days. Maybe I’ll get on to the list of Granta’s Best Middle-Aged Novelists.’

  Marigold didn’t smile. ‘It’s too late,’ she said.

  * * *

  Affirmation

  Writing is my companion. I can talk to it through the darkest hours. One day, it will talk to me.

  * * *

  24

  For reasons that seemed insignificant at the time, Peter Gibson’s funeral had been delayed. I had proposed that I might deliver a few eloquent, heartfelt words at the ceremony but the family, no doubt overcome by the gravity of the event, had told Mike Summers that they wished the occasion to be private. So, in a brief respite from terpsichore 4:2, I elected to write a note of condolence to his parents.

  A non-writer might assume that the professional wordsmith would find letter-writing an easy task. The opposite, of course, is the case. For one who weighs every phrase, who holds it up to the light before deploying it, the casual informality of a ‘quick note’ is particularly difficult to achieve. How often, reading the letters of the greats, does one sense that a phrase seems too written, too well turned, to be entirely natural, like a man in immaculate morning dress at a pub? Yet, on the other hand, too relaxed and chummy a tone in my letter to Mr and Mrs Gibson might also seem inappropriate, even patronizing. I am not ashamed to confess that the letter took me a full three hours to complete. For the true writer, nothing requires more effort than apparently effortless prose.

  Dear Mr and Mrs Gibson

  Words are never adequate on these occasions but I wanted to add my small voice to the tributes you will have been receiving for Peter, whose tragic death has affected us all, staff and students alike, at the West London Institute, where I am Senior Tutor in Creative Writing.

  Peter was a remarkable student – perhaps as promising a young writer as it has been my pleasure with whom to work during my ten years here. Although his talent had yet to achieve the full flower of maturity, the work that he had produced under my guidance already revealed a sure, lyrical touch and a clear-eyed honesty which indicated that here was ‘the real thing’.

  Under these circumstances, I have conceived the notion that a suitable tribute to his career at the Institute might be a small memorial volume consisting of some of the work he contributed to my class. I would be happy to put together this little book and would very much appreciate the chance to discuss it with you at some future point. I am frequently attending writers’ conferences and literary festivals in the Midlands and hope you would not regard it as an intrusion on my part if I rang to make an appointment with your good selves.

  In the mean time, my thoughts and condolences are with you as, like Wordsworth with Thomas Chatterton, I contemplate, with fondness and grief, that ‘marvellous boy,/ The sleepless soul that perished in his pride.’

  Yours ever

  Gregory Keays

  Having transcribed my handwritten letter on to the personal notes file on my computer, I dispatched it with many a thought of the way it would be received in Wolverhampton. Working on my novel, I had naturally felt close to the good folk who had brought Peter into the world and nurtured him as best they could. Although I had yet to meet them, and Peter had rarely spoken of his home life, I established a writerly contact with them which, dare I say it, was as valid and true in its way as any so-called ‘real’ acquaintance.

  I had somehow imagined Peter to have been raised on some bleak and devastated estate, but the address that Mike Summers had given me, Clematis Crescent in Meadowfield, gave me pause. Then I remembered that the developers of thirty years ago liked to give their most blighted projects an air of fake pastoralism with names plucked from the kiddy fiction of yesteryear. Just as today’s headlines – ‘Riot in Bluebell Village’, ‘Tinkly Stream Rocked by Crackhouse Bust’, ‘Gangbang on Sunnybrook Farm’ – mock the delusions of yesterday’s pot-head idealists, I had no doubt that Clematis Crescent would be a tangle of concrete and weed, while the hilariously named Meadowfield (abutting Forest Wood, perhaps, near Borough Town, adjoined by Stream River) would be as vernal as the local rubbish tip.

  In my writerly eye, I had seen Peter’s childhood with crystal clarity. He would have been a quiet, studious, awkward boy, a worry to his mother and father. While his peers were going out, kicking balls about, joining gangs, engaging stickily with gum-chewing, hard-eyed members of the opposite sex, growing towards a doomed, deprived adulthood in the accepted proletarian way, he would have stayed at home, growing inwards rather than outwards, acquiring words and thoughts through his reading but rarely expressing them. The blare of a television, the smell of frying, Dad sitting dead-eyed on a threadbare sofa, perhaps a can of lager in his hand, Mum ironing angrily nearby, Peter reading. Through the din, the unhappiness and disappointment, he would be consuming books as if his life depended on it. There would be regular family events, moments when Peter would have felt like a changeling, a freak within the Gibson household. Chortling, dewlapped aunts would make clumsy jokes at his expense, uncles would ruffle his hair and ask him what team he supported, cousins would dart looks of undisguised suspicion and antipathy in his direction. As he grew older, he will have taken to speaking up now and then, expressing awkward yet oddly irrefutable views in the flat, confident monotone in which he was later to read his stories in class. When members of the family gathered, wary and jealous of the son whom Ted and Doreen (as I imagined Peter’s parents being called) had, against all the odds, brought into the world, they would attempt to silence him with the usual jeers (‘Ooh, ‘ark at Einstein down there!’ ‘Swallowed the dictionary, have we?’ ‘Bloody hell, talk about more brains than sense!’), and he would turn those clear, unblinking eyes on them, casting a chill on the entire party (‘If looks could kill!’ ‘Ullo, he’s gone into a brown study’ ‘What you lookin’ at, sonny boy?’) Later, after the guests had gone, his mother would sit slumped in the room strewn with plates and glasses, gazing blankly at the screen, her eyes watery. His father, blundering around the flat looking for his cigarettes, would swipe Peter across the back of the head (‘Ow, what was that for?’ ‘You know, you bloody little snob, I’ve a mind to take you outside and show you what happens to sons who show their parents up.’ ‘I didn’t.’ Thwack! ‘Don’t answer back, you bloody little yahoo. Why can’t you be normal like all the other lads?’ ‘I am normal.’)

  But he wouldn’t be normal. He couldn’t be. He was a writer.

  Meeting them now would be a difficult encounter. I imagined them, sitting there in a room smelling faintly of yesterday’s cigarettes. In one corner, on an absurdly large TV, a game-show would soundlessly mock the drab, banal misery of their world. Now and then, as I spoke my tribute to Peter with quiet, moving conviction, their eyes would not be on me but on the fake, tinselled gaiety being enacted on the screen, as if that was their world, not this searing insight into a universe of art, of pain and death. They would be suspicious at first: more words. They had always known that all those words would do Peter harm and they had been right. And yet, when I finished, my words (eloquent, spare, yet bearing an emotional cha
rge) will have reached them. For a few seconds, we would be united, the great social and intellectual gulf between us forgotten as we each of us remembered our own differing versions of Peter Gibson. The moment would pass. Dad might raise the question of clearing Peter’s flat; we would discuss what needed to be done in a manly way, while Mum, wet-faced, went to the kitchen to put the kettle on. I would, as sensitively as I could manage, turn to my own practical matters, I would make to leave. There would be heartfelt shakings of the hand, muttered thanks for my journey, an awkward embrace from Mum, perhaps. After I had left, they would turn up the TV and watch without another word.

  * * *

  As it turned out, Meadowfield was not a slum, but a neat, suburban overflow from the main conurbation nearby. Nor were Mr and Mrs Gibson (Ted and Doreen turned out to be Bob and Sally) quite as I had imagined. When, after a couple of weeks, I had not been granted the courtesy of an acknowledgement to my letter, I wrote again, inventing a literary conference in Wolverhampton – a nice touch, which made me smile as I wrote it – that I was due to attend. Would it be convenient if I called by to introduce myself and discuss Peter’s memorial volume?

  The following day, I received a call from Bob Gibson. He had a distinctive sing-song voice, the sort of mannered, self-conscious Englishness which, in happier times, would probably have been replete with ‘heigh-ho’s’ and ‘cheery-bye’s’. There was a careful politeness evident which suggested that grief had almost, but not quite, broken down his sense of good form and I felt a passing stab of guilt as I pressed my case, mentioning the amount of time and effort I was putting to Peter’s commemorative volume. Etiquette reasserted itself, and I was in.

  Driving north two days later, I gave some thought to the etiquette of post-suicide introductions – specifically, how best to convey respect, concern, polite affection and deep, sincere regret in those all-important first few seconds. A mere handshake was too buttoned-up to be acceptable, a hug too aggressively heartfelt. I considered the shake-hug which has become popular in media circles (grasp of the hand, eye contact, inward tug, embrace, all in one fluid movement) but rejected it on the grounds that it was too frankly emotional to play in Wolverhampton. The gesture I finally arrived at, after some rehearsal in a lavatory cubicle at a service station, involved a moment of attractively shy hesitation, followed by a spreading of the hands in mute, eloquent despair, then a lunge forward for a firm (possibly two-handed) handshake, eye contact maintained throughout, a sorrowful smile playing about the lips.

  I reached the neat dreariness of Meadowfield rather early and pulled the car into the side, switched off the engine, rolled down the window and, for five minutes or so, watched the little community where my pupil had once lived go about its business.

  It was strangely quiet here, the voices of children, a barking dog, the sound of a distant piano seeming muted, sleepy. I thought of the great chroniclers of middle-class urban life (Cheever, Updike, the Alices Macdermott, Munro and Hoffman) and wondered what private hells and heavens they would read into the scene – the fathers who drank too much and lusted after secretaries, the mothers engaged in quiet, unhappy affairs, the children glimpsing scenes through half-closed doors, hearing the tail-end of urgent, illicit telephone calls, catching suburbia as they grew older, like a disease – but somehow Meadowfield resisted such overheated imaginings. On a small, perfectly square lawn across the road, a white cat lay stretched in the sun. Down the pavement, a dark-haired woman walked with two young children, going home at an easy child’s pace, pointing at the cat, talking. I could see why Peter had to leave, why he had invented a childhood so alien and odd. This was no place for a writer.

  The Gibsons lived in the heart of Meadowfield down one of the many roads that led to nowhere. As I drew up behind a silver saloon car of middle-management style, I noticed, standing at the window, a tall, white-shirted, balding man with a trim moustache, staring from the gloom in a vaguely proprietorial way.

  I had not forgotten the need for a wordlessly eloquent self-introduction but, irritatingly, Bob Gibson threw me off my rhythm by briskly opening the front door as I walked up the path and firmly extending a hand. I moved into my prepared routine but, even as I danced back, waving my hands expressively, I realized that the impression might have seemed more effete than mournful. Looking mildly startled, Bob held his position until my hand finally made contact with his and then, with a cursory nod, turned back into the house.

  I followed him through a dark hall, where a small pile of bills and bank statements lay unopened on the hall table, and into a sitting-room. A faint smell of pizza hung in the air. ‘Sorry about the mess.’ He waved a hand in the direction of a dining-room table covered in files and notepads and what looked like history books, ‘The daughter’s doing her mocks. She’s decided she wants to work downstairs since –’ He sat carefully on the sofa, gesturing towards an armchair, ‘– since this term.’ He smiled, almost daring me to connect his daughter’s insecurity to their recent family tragedy. ‘Sally’s just getting us tea. She’ll be through in a minute,’ he said.

  It seemed sensible to delay my carefully planned address until both parents were present, so I filled in the slightly awkward moments during which the reason of my visit remained unclear with easy, fictional chatter concerning my meeting at a writer’s conference in Wolverhampton to discuss the status of the contemporary novel, the implications of global interconnectedness on traditional linear narratives, the changing public role of the author. I can talk easily and interestingly around these topics and, as I spoke, I studied Peter’s father. Now that he was seated, I saw that there was something slack and defeated about him, like a man of military yearnings who had failed his medical and ended up in the Catering Corps. In his tidy beige trousers, white short-sleeve shirt and rubber-soled shoes, he dressed with the unconvincing vulgarity of a golfer. Only in his expressionless eyes, and the slight sag to his shoulders was there any indication of the effects of recent events.

  ‘I didn’t know there were any writers in Wolverhampton,’ he was muttering when his wife entered bearing a tray. ‘Ah, Sally,’ he said, standing up, clearly relieved that any further exploration of the town’s literary wealth was unnecessary.

  Tall, dressed in a modestly becoming cardigan and skirt, her grey hair mysteriously giving her a manner that was both distinguished and yet almost almost wanton, Mrs Gibson was an even greater surprise to me than her husband. She put the tray on a small table in front of the sofa and smiled.

  ‘The teacher,’ she said, shaking my hand as easily as if I were a dinner-party guest.

  ‘Writing’s my main job,’ I said. Then, aware that my response might have seemed over-hasty, I added quickly. ‘But, of course, teaching is a great love of mine.’

  ‘Writing was important to Peter, too. He told us he was going to a class although, I must confess that he never actually mentioned you by name.’

  ‘The best teachers are invisible,’ I said. ‘For us, it’s the kids who count.’

  Her eyes fixed on mine, wary yet naked, and, in that instant I saw Peter, his face beside me on the pillow.

  ‘Take a pew,’ Mr Gibson said, waving a hand in the direction of a neat, small armchair. Mrs Gibson sat down beside her husband on the sofa, taking a closer position to him than is entirely normal in couples who have been married for some twenty or so years.

  I allowed a moment of silence. Then, looking from one parent to the other with a sort of rapt sincerity, I said quietly, ‘I’m just so sorry about what happened.’

  There was a barely perceptible intake of breath from Mrs Gibson, as if, for a few seconds, she had forgotten why I was there.

  ‘You’re very kind,’ she said. ‘I’m sure there was nothing anyone could do.’

  ‘He was an exceptional student.’ I paused, gathering myself and my thoughts. ‘Almost all of those I teach are not in love with writing – they long for something different, the life of the writer. They think there’s this magic process that will somehow
make their lives whole, give the triviality and mess of their suffering a shape, a public, artistic validity. But Peter had come to terms with this strange non-thing called “writing”.’

  Mr and Mrs Gibson were looking at me with what I took to be curiosity.

  ‘He had discovered the sacred vocation beyond the millions of demons whirling suggestively around, between him and his work, beyond the fear of feeling piddling and foolish,’ I continued. ‘He had realized that he must cut through, beat on regardless to soar above the petty, the niggling and the nagging. He had discovered that, no matter how much you finally achieve, the pursuit has its own innate dignity.’ I sat back, momentarily overcome by emotion.*

  Bob Gibson seemed moved, too. Sitting, unnaturally calm, at one end of the sofa, he looked past me as if seeing someone he knew passing the window. When he chewed at his top lip in the way that men with moustaches do, I was aware of a certain tremble, a quiver of the chin. After a few seconds of silence, during which I became aware of the sound of a guitar being strummed from somewhere upstairs in the house, he looked back at me, his eyes unmistakably damp.

  ‘Bollocks,’ he said.

  I smiled calmly. ‘Perhaps it would only make sense to a writer.’

  ‘We’ve always encouraged him to write,’ said Mrs Gibson. ‘From primary school, he has always had good reports for English. Some lovely work. A real imagination. Peter has a truly original talent.’ She smiled as if reading the reports for the first time. ‘We clung to that, didn’t we, Bob. We thought that, if he can only believe in his stories, then one day, eventually, he’ll believe in himself.’

  ‘Confidence is everything, isn’t it?’ said Bob Gibson. ‘It’s the great gift we all want to give to our children. And the more we push it on them, the less confident they feel.’