The Executor

by Blake Morrison

  The second conversation came during one of our Soho lunches, about a famous writer who’d just died.

  ‘In two years his work will be forgotten,’ Rob said. ‘His life hasn’t been interesting enough.’

  ‘You once told me that being alive on the page is all that matters.’

  ‘So I did. So it is. But to most readers, a boring life means a boring oeuvre. You should learn from my mistakes, Matt. Live out loud, Zola said. My poems might have been better if my life had been more adventurous.’

  ‘Stop talking as if it’s over.’

  ‘It might as well be. No one under forty has heard of me. I’m not big news.’

  ‘How many writers are?’

  ‘I should have been cleverer at managing my career.’

  ‘You’ve won prizes.’

  ‘The odd one.’

  ‘And you’re highly respected.’

  ‘Killer word, isn’t it? I’ve had the establishment pat on the back. But readers? True readers? From outside the coterie? I’ve never had those.’

  ‘You’ve never tried.’

  ‘More fool me. My only hope is that people will come round to me after I’m dead.’

  I can’t date the first conversation, but I know the second took place in November 2013, because I have the email Rob sent shortly afterwards, which refers to it. Luckily, I keep all my emails, or our office provider does. And on the train back to London, having left Jill’s at 2.30 with about half the contents of the first crate annotated, I did a word search on my iPhone and tracked it down.

  ‘Here’s the Kipling review,’ he wrote, ‘a little on the long side but I hope you can accommodate it. You’ll see I talk about posthumous reputations. I was being flip the other day. Of course it’s outrageous that writers should live on in the public mind only because they’ve had exciting lives. Wordsworth had it right: “if their [poets’] work be good, they contain within themselves all that is necessary to their being comprehended and relished”. I enjoy biographies. But I don’t approve of them – nor of letters and journals being made public. It would be like our email exchanges being hacked into. That’s all biography is – a form of hacking.

  ‘Enough pomp from Pope. As you’ll have guessed, I’ve begun to fret about the reception of my next collection (now due in March, by the way), which is no less private, occluded and (yes) “formalist” than its predecessors. What’s he hiding, the reviewers will say, why doesn’t he tell us straight? Well, fuck’em.’

  There he was, at fifty-eight, already issuing implicit instructions to the literary executor he had yet to appoint. His Kipling review had more in the same vein – a dismissal of life writing. Leonie called it ‘rambly’. It turned out to be his last for us.

  ‘You have to admire Rob,’ I said to Marie that night, while watching television. After the spaciousness of his study, the living room felt small and cluttered. The sofa, too, which we’d got cheap.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘For putting his faith in posterity.’

  ‘Posterity. Hah!’

  There wasn’t anything good on. The choice had been between a celebrity chef and a documentary about complete strangers getting married. We’d tossed for it and I won. Marie doesn’t like losing. I’d have done better not to mention Rob.

  ‘You’re like one of those rich Americans who have their bodies preserved,’ she said. ‘What’s the point? Cryonic suspension, poetic immortality: they’re a fantasy. People die. And the stuff they do in life dies too.’

  ‘Great literature has an afterlife.’

  ‘It’s that Christian upbringing of yours. Be a good person and you’ll go to heaven. Be a good writer and the future will redeem you. Except that you’ll be oblivious to your redemption. You’ll be dead. You won’t know.’

  I folded my hands together, in a gesture of prayer, as though suing for peace. The young woman in the documentary was buying a wedding dress. She chose one that emphasised her cleavage. Whoever he is, her mother said, he’s going to like that.

  ‘Don’t you want to be remembered after you die?’ I said, putting my arm round Marie.

  ‘By my children. And a few friends.’

  ‘Rob didn’t have kids. His poems will be his only legacy.’

  ‘I understand that,’ she said. ‘It’s you I don’t get. You’ve all your life ahead. If you’re going to write a book, why not write one that appeals to people now? Surely the great writers – Shakespeare and Dickens and so on – were popular in their own lifetime?’

  ‘There’s also Kafka or Gerard Manley Hopkins, who –’

  ‘But they’re the exceptions, right? On the whole, most writers who survive were successes in their lifetime. And most writers who were failures in their lifetime don’t survive.’

  The husband-to-be in the documentary was standing at the aisle. Oh my God, he kept saying, terrified by what he was about to do. When his bride arrived, in a white dress with a deep cleavage, he said it again, in a different tone.

  ‘Rob wasn’t a failure,’ I said.

  ‘No, but at this rate he’ll make you one. Looking after him is stopping you getting on with your own writing.’

  ‘He’s not stopping me,’ I said. ‘Life is. The job, the kids, marriage.’

  ‘Thanks a bunch. How do I stop you?’

  ‘It’s not anything you do. It’d be the same whoever I was married to.’

  The bride and groom were saying their vows, tearful relatives behind them.

  ‘You’d rather live on your own?’ Marie said.

  ‘I’d have more time.’

  ‘More time and no life.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be torn in different directions. I’d be single-minded. Like Rob. Rob didn’t compromise his vision.’

  ‘Rob was an arsehole. His idea of vision was looking at himself in the mirror.’

  The couple in the documentary were getting acquainted over champagne in their honeymoon bedroom.

  ‘OK,’ I said, giving in. ‘Shall we switch channels?’

  Jill was friendlier when I turned up for my third visit. There was still no welcome kiss but she allowed me to stay the full day. In fact, it was me who thought of leaving early. After the indolence of the previous week, I worked hard. By three, all the items in the first crate had been itemised: six notebooks, with handwritten drafts for the thirty-four poems in Rob’s first collection, Homeboy; dozens of typed sheets, with further drafts and revisions; a statement supplied to the Poetry Book Society, which had chosen Homeboy as one of its recommendations for the autumn; letters from his then editor, Charles, with various queries, and copies of Rob’s replies; exchanges with his New York editor about the American edition of the book and, some years later, with his German, Swedish and Italian translators; four draft cover designs, three draft blurbs, two sets of proofs; and photocopies of the eleven poems that Rob omitted from Homeboy, but had published in magazines before it came out (they weren’t especially good poems, but they would help fill out a Collected). It was dull curatorial grind. I’d hoped to find a journal, but could see no sign.

  I did make one discovery. While dipping into one of the later crates – to relieve my boredom – I came across a poem, ‘Pigtail’, that had briefly landed Rob in trouble.

  The crime scene was a rented Bangkok bedroom.

  Or had I no choice, left to roam like a wolf

  After midnight, unused to such freedom,

  Dope-hazed and half-pissed? I’d guess she was twelve.

  I’ll be gentle, I said, untying the bow

  Of her pigtail before my hands slithered

  Down to the nub and perforation below.

  Has she forgotten? Blanked it out? Or did

  My actions scarcely matter when each night

  Other punters did the same? Let me take the rap.

  I like to think I’m almost human, but I’m not.

  She was innocent and I fucked her up.

  The poem had appeared in a special ‘Sexuality and Gender’ issue of a small magazine:
Rob said he sent it as a favour to the editor, a former student of his. He quickly regretted the poem, as ‘melodramatic and metrically inept’, but the editor failed to send proofs and next thing the magazine had gone to press. The story would have ended there, but for a Luton schoolteacher using the poem as a starting point for a sixth-form debate on sex tourism. The church-going mother of one of the pupils spotted the photocopy and complained to the head teacher: was such material suitable for teenagers? Dissatisfied by the head’s lukewarm response, she went to the local paper, which ran a story (‘On page 3, appropriately enough,’ Rob said). The story was then picked up by the national press, first as a news item, then on the op-ed pages: at what age, columnists asked, should children be expected to discuss issues such as paedophilia? How convincing was the apology offered by the sex offender in the poem? Had he – had the poet – honestly faced up to the horrific nature of the ‘actions’ described, i.e. child rape? Rob declined several invitations to respond, including one from me (I was working for an online magazine at the time): ‘Just read the poem,’ he said. He was sanguine when we talked about it later – all water off a duck’s back, he said. But a couple of the writers quoted defending the use of the text in school were dismissive of it as poetry, and Rob didn’t include it in his subsequent collection, despite the fact (something he told me at the time, which I promptly forgot about) that he’d revised it.

  The revision was there in the crate, paperclipped to the first version, along with several more drafts (including variants on the perforation image such as ‘narrow as the slit in a ballot box’), before the poem ended up not as a fictional confession about a rape in Bangkok but as an autobiographical vignette – the memory of a sexually exploratory episode from Rob’s teens, during a holiday in the Med. If anything the second version was more melodramatic than the original: though both he and the girl had been ‘kids’, Rob accused himself of committing a ‘crime’, if only because she was the more ‘innocent’. I didn’t go for either poem, but was struck by how he retained the structure (three quatrains rhyming abab), and many of the same images, while making the narrative more authentic. A scholar might make something of that.

  Not all my time was wasted, then. And I worked hard, as I say. But if I’m honest – more honest than I could be with Jill or even Marie – not all that work was on Rob’s archive. After failing to get on with it for months, years even, I found myself jotting down ideas and phrases for my novel. Perhaps it was the silence that inspired me. Or the fact of sitting in Rob’s chair. Or the invitingly empty notebook I’d brought, very few pages of which were needed to make my inventory. At any rate, some of the ideas I’d been struggling with took shape, or rather the voice I needed became audible. It wasn’t Rob’s voice. But his presence, or lived absence, was inspiring. He’d found the perfect place to write, and by making me his executor had made it possible for me to write there too. The house was a sanctum and the street a haven, empty of its residents – middle-class professionals – from morning till evening. The lack of kindred spirits didn’t matter to Rob. He’d talked himself out in Brandon. The hands-on stuff was all that counted and you did that alone. By the time I packed up that day, I’d four pages of notes towards my novel.

  Jill wasn’t in the house when I came down to say goodbye. I went out the back door, past the terrace, bird feeder and fish pond, and found her by the raised beds down the end of the garden. Trowel in hand, she was kneeling in the earth next to a set of tall bamboo canes tied together like a wigwam. She looked flustered to see me, as though I’d caught her in the nude.

  ‘Impressive,’ I said, pointing at the red flowers on the canes.

  ‘Runner beans. I’ve mangetout, spinach and courgettes growing, too.’

  ‘Do you do it all yourself?’

  ‘Since Robbie, yes.’

  ‘Did he help out, then?’

  She laughed. ‘I helped him.’

  ‘You mean he liked gardening?’

  ‘Did he never tell you? When he wasn’t writing, this is where he came. The veg patch. I told him he should call his next book that.’ She laughed again. ‘He had bonfires here, too,’ she said, nodding at a metal brazier.

  ‘What did he burn?’

  ‘Twigs. Leaves. Newspapers. Some of his writing, too. I don’t know what exactly – stuff he didn’t want to keep. Ash was good for the soil, he said. He’d no interest in growing flowers, though. He left them to me.’

  ‘Well, you do a great job,’ I said.

  ‘How’s it going?’ she said, ignoring the compliment, or unwilling to forgive me for the last time we’d talked about the garden. ‘How much longer will you need?’

  ‘I’m done for today.’

  ‘In all. To sort everything out.’

  ‘I’m only on the first crate,’ I said. ‘There are five more. Going through them is taking longer than I thought.’

  ‘So you’ll need to come again?’

  ‘If I’m going to make a proper job of it.’

  ‘You must, obviously, but …’

  ‘Unless you’d prefer me to take everything away.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or gave me a key, so I’d not be intruding on your days off.’

  ‘Let’s go on as we are. I’ll keep Fridays free in future.’

  ‘Not just alternate ones?’

  ‘Every Friday for the next couple of months. Then you’ll have finished.’

  ‘With any luck.’

  7

  At the end of my MFA I returned to England and moved back in with my parents. Despite the praise I got for the novel I’d been working on, I knew it was no good and scrapped it (unlike Rob, who’d have kept them for future scholars, I also threw away all my workbooks). Wasted words, you could say, but I’d learned something, if only to distrust well-meaning encouragement. To begin with, my parents were pleased to have me back. But as the weeks became months they began to grumble: why did I never get up before midday? When was I going to get a job? etc. To placate them, I made myself useful, walking the dog, going to the shops, cooking dinner, whatever was required. After Brandon, the rural isolation felt oppressive: the empty fields, big skies and bitter winds. Occasionally, I’d meet old schoolmates down the pub or go to the cinema in Norwich; I even briefly hooked up with a former girlfriend. But the priority – so I told everyone, including myself – was the novel. A 1,000-word-a-day routine would see it done pretty quickly, I thought. Routine’s not my strong point, however. There were always distractions, some (such as job applications) unavoidable, others (such as computer games) self-imposed. The novel went nowhere much, but eventually, nine months on, a friend from uni found me some subbing shifts on a listings magazine. When I left home to share a house in Hackney with him and six other guys in their twenties, a meagre 20,000 words went with me.

  Rob stayed in touch after my departure: occasional postcards would find their way to East Anglia and I’d send gossipy, grumbling replies. He still talked about moving back to the UK and of placing his poems with a London publisher. But I didn’t expect it to happen. As an iconoclast with an English accent at a lowly American university, he had some kudos. In the wider world he’d be nothing. So when he wrote to say he’d found a place to live in London, I was surprised, to say the least. It was several months before he summoned me (it really did feel like a summons) to a pub in Tufnell Park. I ought to have recognised him; it had been only two years. But I was halfway through a pint of Guinness at the bar before the man in the suit at the corner table looked up from his paper.

  ‘Where’s the beard gone?’ I asked after we’d hugged.

  ‘It was getting too grey.’

  ‘And what’s with the suit?’

  ‘London’s not Brandon,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to look like a lumberjack. This feels more comfortable.’

  By ‘this’ he meant not just the suit and shaved chin, but the white shirt and Oxford brogues.

  He’d got some teaching at Birkbeck.

  ‘Just an evening a w
eek,’ he said. ‘More than enough.’

  ‘If you can live off that …’

  ‘I’ve saved a bit. And my mother’s helping. I feel bad, but she can afford it. She’s living on her own in a five-bedroom house, for God’s sake. It’s time she downsized.’

  From the pub we went on to a meal in a Turkish restaurant, then back to his flat. It was a large basement conversion with two bedrooms and a rear patio. He used the second bedroom as his study and, to avoid the risk of visitors (‘especially my mother’), had removed the bed. The floor-to-ceiling bookshelves were crammed with volumes shipped back from Brandon (‘It cost a small fortune’); a cork board hung in the only remaining wall space, with six postcards from the National Portrait Gallery pinned to it – Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Coleridge, Eliot and Auden (‘the only English poets who come up to scratch’). His desk was tidy, the living room sparely furnished (leather sofa, Navajo rug), the pine table in the kitchen well scrubbed. It seemed very grown up: the domain of someone dedicated to his own idea of himself. My ambitions seemed paltry in comparison – since beginning regular subbing shifts I’d done little or no work on the novel. Even if I’d wanted to, the house where I was living (overpopulated, noisy and chaotic) would have made it impossible.

  ‘So,’ I said, several whiskies in, ‘you couldn’t stand Brandon without me.’

  ‘I wanted to get back to Europe.’

  ‘Europe? Spoken like an American.’

  ‘London’s OK for now. One day I’ll move to Italy or France.’

  It was something he’d say repeatedly over the next few years. And he did travel abroad now and then – British Council trips, a week-long workshop at the Shakespeare & Co bookstore in Paris, a two-month residency in Rome. Europe remained an important idea for him. Its writers and artists seeped into his work. But he didn’t stray far or for long. And when he finally moved it wasn’t to France or Italy but to Hadingfield, half an hour from where he grew up.

  He’d written enough poems for a collection, he said, and now he was back would start trying publishers (‘It’s a good moment – British poetry’s in need of a new voice’). It sounded like hubris to me; no one here had heard of him. But I hid my doubts while he laid out his plans.