Kill Your Darlings

by Terence Blacker

  ‘I am, so far as I am aware, being neither a cunt nor an arsehole.’

  ‘You’re up to something, I can tell. I’ve known a few cold bastards in my time but you’re right up there. You’re in the wrong business, you know that?’

  ‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

  ‘Listen, Greg. This is me insisting, right? I like a clean slate. And I’m going to have one. End of fucking story. Tell me what you want from me.’

  I smiled, victorious as I accepted defeat. ‘I’ll try to think of something,’ I said.

  * * *

  The Top Ten Unusual Writing Techniques of Great Writers

  1. Johann Von Goethe used to write his poems on the backside of his child-wife Christiane.

  2. Henrik Ibsen hung a portrait of Strindberg over his desk, saying, ‘He is my mortal enemy and shall hang there and watch while I write.’

  3. Benjamin Disraeli would take time to dress himself immaculately in evening clothes out of respect for his readers.

  4. Leo Tolstoy would wear a peasant herder’s smock.

  5. Edith Wharton wrote in bed and threw her pages on the floor for a secretary to pick up and transcribe.

  6. Ernest Hemingway used to write standing up without any clothes on. Only with passages of dialogue would he sit down to type. The rest was handwritten in pencil.

  7. Vladimir Nabokov wrote on cards, standing up at a lectern.

  8. Peter Ackroyd writes lying down, eyes close to the page, believing that he works best in a state of semi-slumber, occasionally dropping off.

  9. Michael Crichton eats the same meal and wears the same clothes every day that he writes a novel.

  10. Gregory Keays listens to fifteenth century plainsong as he works to remind him that writing is a form of prayer.

  * * *

  37

  Two months remained before the publication of my breakthrough novel. After an impossible few weeks, I had completed Brian McWilliam’s moral thriller. At some point in the future, I would reach for one of my many works in progress and tease it back into life. But right now I was tired of fiction. I turned to the work you have before you.

  For some time, I had wanted to examine the creative impulse within me while providing guidance and encouragement to the thousands, possibly millions, of would-be scribes who lack the confidence to invoke their own private muse. I am, after all, ideally qualified for such a task, having both taught the art of fiction and having personally experienced the highs and lows of the literary life. For a title, I resolved to turn to one of the phrases which echo through writing courses across the English-speaking world. Less is More seemed a touch lacklustre. Show, Don’t Tell was inappropriately skittish. In the end, I settled for that old favourite of writing class and film school, Kill Your Darlings.

  A memoir-manual: even in this golden age of literary cross-fertilization, there will be those who will find in these pages a hybrid too far. Where is the dappled evocation of the writer’s childhood of a traditional memoir, they will ask – the fond yet modest account of his later triumphs? What on earth is the point of a creative primer that contains little or no practical guidance as to plot or narrative, irony or closure?

  In a sense my unseen critics are right. One day, perhaps, when I am something of a ‘grand old man of English letters’, I shall set down a full record of my life (Speaking Volumes: A Writer Remembers is the title I have in mind). As for a collection of ‘tips’ for the aspirant novelist, there are countless such volumes already available, thanks to the earnest efforts of hard-working, sincere (but rarely published!) creative-writing teachers.

  Kill Your Darlings would be both more and less than the memoirs of a novelist. It would be a candid account of my sojourn in a writerly heart of darkness and the act of self-rescue which released me, leavened by insights and quotations from our literary heritage. Opening with the events subsequent to the success of my first novel, it would close on the triumphant publication day of my second.

  I have worked at speed, putting down in this first draft my most intimate thoughts and deeds as the events of the past year have unfolded, in the knowledge that this is, essentially, a first draft, a ‘writer’s cut’, of what will be submitted to the public gaze. As I near completion, the possibility of publishing these thoughts and memories as they stand has nagged at me: how easy it would be to pander to the current vogue for public confession by presenting myself, naked and vulnerable, serving up my family and friends in bound and printed form. In the end, though, I have elected to hold my peace, for the moment. There are too many people who could be wounded by the truths to be found in these pages to justify publication, too many areas in which the naïve reader might misread the complex imperatives of the creative impulse, for it to be wholly satisfactory as a work of art. The writer’s task, after all, is primarily to be understood.

  So KYD, in its present version, is for me. Once completed, it shall be consigned to a bank vault until the day comes when I shall once more inspect these pages. At that point, I shall make amendments to the more personal material, and certain of my more precious darlings will quietly and humanely be laid to rest. Perhaps, bearing in mind Updike’s advice that ‘a fiction writer’s life is his treasure, his ore, his savings account, his jungle gym,’ I shall weave some of the garish, colourful events of the past year into a work of the imagination, confident that their message of inspiration and hope to writers everywhere will remain as clear and bright as a cloudless summer sky.

  * * *

  Affirmation

  Today I shall remember that the first step towards becoming a writer is to impersonate one. I shall keep a notebook into which I will put observations and overheard remarks, I shall prowl the streets. I may drink inappropriately, make outrageous remarks, sleep with strangers. I may wear odd socks, stare out of the window, allow my eyes to fill with tears at unexpected moments. These things may not make me a writer, but they will put me in a writing place.

  * * *

  38

  ‘We tear out a length of gut from our bellies and serve it up to the bourgeois,’ says Flaubert. ‘Once our work is printed – farewell! It belongs to everyone. The crowd tramples on us.’ This morning, as I sit at my desk on the day of publication, I too await the cruel attentions of the crowd. By the end of today, the novel which has often seemed as much a part of me as my spleen or my liver will be gone. Yet, unlike Flaubert, I feel no sense of loss or compromise. terpsichore 4:2, now it is completed, belongs to the multitude: it will survive without me, just as I shall survive without it. Like Tolstoy, Gregory Keays believes that the novelist should only write when he leaves a piece of his flesh in the ink-pot each time he dips his pen. Yet, once the work has gone, it is yesterday’s flesh. Life-blood that has been lost will be replenished from within and so the process of death and rebirth will be repeated. Such is the lot of the writer.

  From the moment when I delivered the manuscript to Fay Duckworth, terpsichore 4:2 had been drifting away from me. Sold to a publisher, with a price on its head, it became merchandise, to be shaped by the eager, grubby hands of editors, designers, sales folk – people whose job it is to render the personal public, to transform the complex inner turmoil of a soul into a neat, recognizable product.

  By the time it was first set up in type and its pages bound into book form, it was already grown. At meetings attended by jaded mediocrities, it had been given clothes, a face, an image to present to the world, a career path. Its future and personality were decided. Some books are fated to be besuited drones which will dutifully but dully earn a small but respectable living; others will be zany mavericks, loved by a small but loyal group of affectionate friends. terpsichore 4:2 was one of those rare entities whose destiny, from those first meetings, was to be a prince among volumes. Before it had achieved anything, it was a literary over-achiever, walking, like one or two of Doug’s friends, a golden path from childhood onwards. Contracts and praise and money had fallen like manna upon its youthful brow. When it was an adole
scent, a mere callow proof copy, it had been introduced to people of judgement and influence, members of the élite who could help its progress through the world, or crush it underfoot. They had (according to reliable reports) been impressed by its sensitivity, wisdom and wit. There was, it seemed, something blessed about the young book which made those who encountered it feel as if, merely by turning its pages, they were privately sharing in its good fortune. It had charisma, a politician’s skill in making each person it encountered feel privileged and special and want nothing but good things for it.

  Today, my novel will be published. There seems no doubt that it will fulfil its promise out there among the ordinary public – good folk whose favourable opinion has, to all intents and purposes, already been decided for them. All that remains is a moment of matriculation, a smiling formality, after which the glittering future will become a dazzling present. A launch party.

  I have, over the past month, paid my dues to the bitch-goddess of publicity. I have subjected myself to questions of varying intelligence and impertinence from journalists and profile-hounds, giving a good sense of myself while retaining the central mystery, the living question mark, which is the essence of the serious artist. Bearing in mind Saul Bellow’s warning about the danger of modern novelists becoming their own theoreticians, I have neither attempted to explain my work nor engaged in fashionable self-analysis. I have walked a fine line between the showy reticence of the Salinger school of literary hermit and the crude exhibitionism of chart-hungry thriller-writers.

  Interviewers were predictably anxious to meet me in the dream house. Unlike my wife, I elected not to deploy my personal life as a marketing prop and, with one exception, have insisted on meeting my interlocutors and their attendant lensmen in one of the smarter West End restaurants or in a room at the Ritz.

  The exception was none other than Tony Watson who, at my suggestion, had been appointed to interview me on behalf of the Sunday Times. To show the world that there was nothing evasive or odd about Gregory Keays, I had invited him to 23 Brandon Gardens.

  Rather touchingly, this commission revealed the full extent of Tony’s fall from impish, brilliant young destroyer of reputations to obedient, middle-aged hack. Expressing doggy gratitude that I had put his name forward for such a prestigious feature, he had willingly acceded to the various ground rules which I established: no hint that my marriage was moribund, only a passing mention of Doug, all quotes from friends, former colleagues and fellow writers to be cleared in advance, no undue emphasis on the Peter Gibson episode and, if at all possible, some inclusion of a quote from Martin. As a final bulwark against inaccuracy, I was to have a final, unofficial view of his copy before it was filed to the newspaper.

  No amendments were needed. With his usual eye for the line of greatest personal advantage, Tony Watson elected to present himself in print as a loyal friend to the author he was now interviewing, a contemporary who, unlike many others, had continued to believe in my talent through even the darkest hours of the last decade, a fellow toiler in the literary vineyard who was so close to me that, in some inexplicable way, he shared in my success.

  It was a sound piece of journalism, from which I emerged as a complex, thoughtful novelist who, while not unacquainted with sadness and disappointment, had deployed the pain of life to the profit of art. There was a lively intelligence to the Gregory Keays that Tony portrayed, but also an unforced sense of humanity. No icy, ivory-towered intellectual, he was above all a human being who had engaged with the real world, perhaps sometimes recklessly, but with the passion and commitment of a true artist. The article, a five-page title feature, was illustrated by a full-page portrait (Gregory Keays at his desk, pen poised over a manuscript, careful dishevelment all around, Donovan sleeping on a chair in the background providing a humorous, domestic touch), a small shot of me during my writer’s walk (the dosser in a doorway offering a deft indication of the darker aspects of my work), the black-and-white photograph of my family on a beach in Cornwall back in 1982, and, inevitably, the Snowdon Granta portrait, with a long-haired version of myself standing uneasily between Jeanette and Salman.

  What of the quote from Martin? Tony Watson would only say my contemporary and fellow writer had been unable to help us on this occasion. It took little effort to imagine the background to this haughty, mean-spirited response. He would have remembered me, of course; Forever Young will have been recalled with some subtly insulting compliment – ‘snappy exuberance’, ‘zestful comic brio’ or the like. He would have been pleased to hear of my return to form but would regret that he was unable to look at the copy of ‘the new thing’ which Tony sent to him. He was at a critical point in his own ‘stuff’ and it was his custom when fully ‘cranked up’ only to read familiar work by favourites – Bellow, Nabokov, the ‘big guys’. Apparently, the sound of ‘other voices from other rooms’ had a corrosive effect on the ‘swing’ of his own prose.

  Bastard! Snappy exuberance … other voices … the new thing. I could hear the bored drawl, the hint of a dismissive sneer as he drew wearily on one of his loathsome little roll-ups. Not so long ago, he had boasted in an interview that he would toke away now and then in the evenings at the recreational drug of his choice. It seemed that, while staggering around pie-eyed with a fat joint in his hand had, presumably, no effect on the sainted ‘swing’ of his prose, he was unable, when ‘cranked up’, to dip into a work of vibrant, intellectually serious fiction with a view to penning a few helpful words. Somehow this niggardly refusal to acknowledge the talent of a contemporary spoke more eloquently of the true nature of the man than all his books and interviews put together. In one small-minded gesture, he had confirmed the flaw which will for ever set him among the competent and the workmanlike rather than the truly brilliant: he lacked a great writer’s common spark of humanity.

  Naturally, I confided none of these feelings to Tony Watson, accepting the snub with the smiling grace of a man for whom the snivelling rivalrousness of a contemporary was a matter of supreme indifference, but later, after my interview was concluded, I found myself afflicted by feelings of justified writerly disappointment. I thought of the countless occasions when I had recommended to my students the Eighties novel, the London novel, even his absurd little police procedural, when I had quoted in class some languid, carefully rehearsed Martinian bon mot about style, research or the literary life, when I had drawn upon one of his tawdry galère of one-dimensional characters (Highway, Talent, Self, Clinch, Six) to make a point about characterization. We were peers, we had been celebrities on the same list: how much, really, would it have cost him to acknowledge, briefly yet generously, the stupendous success of a fellow writer? But no, that simple act of comradeship was, it seemed, beyond him.

  I would rise above the slight but I would remember it. Some time, maybe some time soon, Martin would pay.

  Admittedly, I was in a volatile state during those weeks before publication. As with all major literary events, a certain amount of controversy had attended the general sense of public anticipation. A tiresome scrap had developed within the books industry concerning some ineffably dull ‘trade’ matter (Price-cutting? Embargoes? Discounts? The details escape me). Because the prospects for t42 were generally held to be more glittering – and, for those who cared about such matters, more profitable – than most other volumes, it was my book (together with one or two others) which became the focus of controversy in professional magazines and, in one case, the home pages of a national broadsheet.

  Although it is not the role of the author to become embroiled in disputes of a squalid, fiscal nature, the name and features of Gregory Keays somehow came to represent at this time the fate of the individual in an age of heartless corporatism. For many people, I suppose, I became a sort of contemporary hero, a living emblem of the fragile yet enduring integrity of an artist whose work is caught up in a business dispute, like a butterfly buffeted hither and hence in a force-ten gale.

  Meanwhile, interviews were published, previe
ws appeared. I was ‘Face of the Week’ in the Shepherd’s Bush Gazette. Showing unwonted generosity, the Professional Writer devoted an editorial to my forthcoming novel, noting solemnly that ‘fiction is a long game and, as readers of this magazine know, Gregory is nothing if not a stayer’. My name became something of a fixture in arts-page diaries and gossip columns.

  Although the froth of celebrity hardly impinged upon my outlook – like Ford Madox Ford, I am of the opinion that the serious author should eschew personal publicity ‘as you would shrink from soiled underwear’ – my son had become intrigued by the fuss surrounding his newly famous father. One morning, I took a break from working on this volume to find him in the kitchen, leafing through copies of the previous week’s press stories which my cuttings agency had sent me.

  ‘I don’t believe this stuff,’ he said, staring down at an evening paper profile in which I was described, if memory serves, as ‘the Lazarus of literary London’. He clasped his brow in a mock-comic manner. ‘Like, suddenly you’re this big news.’

  ‘It’s all nonsense,’ I said modestly. ‘Cyril Connolly once wrote that the serious author should step off the moving staircase of fame and subject everything he creates to the supreme critical court. Would it amuse Horace or Milton or Swift or Leopardi? Could it be read to Flaubert? Would it be chosen by the Infallible Worm?’

  ‘The what?’ In the past, any kind of bookish reference would have caused Doug to raise the drawbridge, but now he laughed openly and with apparently genuine humour.

  ‘The Infallible Worm. The discriminating palates of the dead. He meant –’

  ‘That your work isn’t any cop unless a load of stiffs go for it.’

  I smiled indulgently. ‘Not quite how Cyril would have put it, but that sort of thing. All this –’ I waved a dismissive hand at the pile of over eight or nine press cuttings ‘– has no significance at all. The writer’s duty is to articulate the voice, concerns and sensibility of his generation and to send it echoing down the years.’