by D. J. Taylor
After that, nothing. Silence. A void. Five hundred years and not a paragraph, not a sentence. Nothing at all. Even now, gazing backwards, I stumble for an explanation. It wasn’t that I lacked offers. All the big names of the period sidled up at some point to enquire if I’d collaborate: Bede, Guthlac … It wasn’t that one lacked suitable material: after all, what with Offa, the Danes, rape, pillage and the beginnings of English nationhood (which was what Alfred liked to call the handful of third-world villages he bullied into paying him taxes) there was plenty going on. You weren’t stuck for things to write about in those days. Fundamentally I suppose – and I don’t want to sound pretentious about this – I was out of sympathy with the zeitgeist. For one who had known Petronius and partied with Plautus all this was pretty small beer. The Homers were showmen, who might have been overly concerned with where the next flagon was coming from, but at least they were artists. By contrast, Anglo-Saxon literature, if you could call it that, was painful in its ineptitude, its meagre scale; all dumb riddles and battle tactics. Later on I would watch knowingly as scholarly acquaintances – Skeat, Tolkien – puzzled themselves over the Finnsburh fragment, always wanting to whisper: ‘Boy, you should have seen the bits which didn’t survive.’ I had hopes of Bede for a while – I wintered out in Jarrow a couple of times – but the guy had no artistry, no sense of what was a legitimate literary device and what was a ham effect. I can remember arguing with him for hours about the scene where the sparrow flies in through the banqueting hall, but no, Bede wanted metaphor, he wanted symbolism. The scene stayed: I quit.
Naturally there were compensations. There were a few public commissions up for grabs – name that church, write this poem about my father – and a fair amount of royal patronage, but it was difficult to get worked up about the subject matter. Alfred versus the Danes? I’d seen the sack of Troy, and this was the equivalent of two shepherds waving sling shots at one another. A paean to Offa’s Dyke? I’d been around when they built Ephesus: this was nothing to crow over, nothing to guide the quill excitedly over the parchment. Looking back at what remains from those grim, poverty-stricken times (and, needless to relate, writing didn’t pay in those days – the man who wrote The Battle of Maldon got a couple of bear-skins), I can occasionally wax regretful over my non-existent output, but then I wasn’t appreciated, I just wasn’t appreciated. I can remember once, around the end of the tenth century, stirring myself from a decade or so of torpor to execute some piece of royal fawning for Ethelred the Unready, something to do with his martial accomplishments, his wise counsels – the exact theme escapes me. It was a sell-out, of course, but I needed the money and for once I took pains, hunkered down in the hut, barred the door to drinking buddies and laboured to produce two dozen sweetly rhymed hexameters in the grand style. The response? The usual thanks-but-no-thanks. Eventually they gave the job to some hoary-headed patriach named Egbert the Bard, whose fractured scrawls and risible punning can still be chortled over in the British Museum by such as care to examine them. It was my last public commission.
So what did I do as the years ground relentlessly on, as Old English gave way to Middle, as dynasties rose and fell, as Jute, Angle, Saxon and Dane gelled themselves up into some sort of recognisable social order? The answer is: I sat there. It’s what writers do, they sit there. There were beckoning noises from afar – I could have gone for a safe court poet’s job at Aachen (that Carolingian Renaissance, so tempting), I could have written sagas – but for some reason the thought of relocation scarcely appealed. You get tired of moving on, of packing and unpacking the quill, the parchment, the typewriter. Several thousand years and a dozen removals into a less than promising career I felt a hankering for permanency, for roots, even if the immediate prospects were far from enticing. So what did I do? The usual marginal, subsistence-level activities: copying for the monks, a spell on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the most ball-breaking hackwork of charters and land agreements. The great outlines, those splendid synopses of work that would change the face of Anglo-Saxon literature lay gathering dust.
Besides, there was that decision, made a few hundred years ago now but still germane, about the future trajectory of my career. Briefly, it consisted of an acknowledgment – painful yet undeniably accurate – that hitherto my energies had been misdirected. In retrospect it was odd that realisation had come so late. For years, it seemed, I had sat around watching people misapply themselves, chase the wrong ends: I mean, we all knew at the time that Gregory of Tours wasn’t cut out to be a travel writer, he was merely constrained by the predominant form. In my own case, it seemed to me that I was less a creator than a collaborator, an enlivening spark, the bright boy who strolls in to impart polish to the great man’s leaden original. Reviewing my successes in this line the evidence seemed conclusive. The Homers, Horace, Bede: I had the credits. All I had to do was wait, wait until some half-decent literature came along.
I had to wait a long time. I yawned my way through another Danish invasion, through the Normans – more military history and if you couldn’t speak French, which I had some trouble picking up, the chips were stacked against you. For a time I hung out with Anselm, but he always cut out my jokes and in the end I simply gave up. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which everybody got very excited about at the time, just left me rigid. It took Gower and Chaucer – a touch vulgar for my taste, but there you are, this was the fourteenth century, they used to crease themselves laughing at cripples in those days – to convince me that something was happening again, that after a millennium and a half of amateurish incompetence I still had a rôle to play. It was a busy five hundred years all right – gone in a flash, as it always does when you’re working hard. At first I concentrated on poetry: Wyatt, Herrick, Spenser – not many a line by those three got by without first being inched under my scrupulous lenses (I was wearing glasses by then, inevitably), but my chief contribution lay in titles, proper names (I can still see the look on Herrick’s face when I advised him that ‘Marigold flouts me’ wouldn’t do, that the readers were looking for aristocratic stuff: ‘Phyllida’ it was). Anthony and Cleopatra was called Hot Nights in Cairo before I got hold of it. My tornado years. Creative breakfasts with Willie – there was only one of him, you’ll be relieved to know – boozy lunchtime sessions with Johnnie Kyd, the odd nighttime jaunt with Chris Marlowe down Bermondsey way and some very queer company indeed. I relished it. A whole new way of life was opening up; a whole new audience gaped and luxuriated before us, and for once we felt wanted. The boys’ expressions of gratitude were quite touching when you paused to think about it – all those sonnets from Willie, Spenser’s acrostic name-checks in The Faerie Queen, ‘onlie begetter’ wasn’t the half of it.
I started writing my memoirs around 1600, updating them every twenty years or so. It’s all in there, all the clotted detail and debris of the succeeding centuries: cruising with Rochester, that interminable pony-ride with Defoe (travel-writing again – you get a vogue every decade or so and there’s nothing the critic can do). The time De Quincey went out of his head and tried to off me with a meat-cleaver, the time I went out of my head somewhere in Greece and nearly got raped by Byron. All the stories that never got told, all the sides to people’s character that somehow eluded contemporary chroniclers, all the flotsam and jetsam of the vagrant literary life. Vagrant, elusive, yet all-seeing. Picture me, if you will, snug around the Strand coffee house fire with Sammy Johnson and that dismal Scots attourney we could never shake off, speeding through Hell Passage with William Makepeace Thackeray bent on some youthful prank. Sombre times too: watching Gissing die in St Jean Pied de Port, coughing out his life by centimetres as H.G. wrangled with the nurse in the next room; attending Firbank’s last illness at Rome (Lord Berners was there as well and a sorry figure he cut, I can tell you). Without going in for anything morbid I did become something of a death-bed frequenter in those days: Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, Carlyle – all drew their final breath in my company. As the clergymen intoned and the nurses s
curried, I alone remained imperturbable. Death found me at my most philosophical, ever ready to console a grieving widow, compose a respectful obit, recite some judicious éloge in which listeners were invited to consider the subject’s demise sub specie aeternitatis.
It was a restless, rackety existence and I knew it couldn’t last, that the role of literary confidant is not indefinitely sustainable, all too prone to irritations, nervous disagreements and vented spleen. I quarrelled quite badly with Meredith and my spat with Herbert Spencer even got into the papers. The early 1900s found me fretful and ill at ease, conscious of waning powers and deep, unconscionable tiredness. I still had sufficient nous to know where the right places to go were, the correct literary hot-spots: Edie’s drawing room, the Left Bank in the twenties with Jim and Ernest and Gertrude; Hollywood a bit later with Scott, Zelda and Bill; Spain a bit later still with Eric and Cyril (who only turned up at the end). They were good times, naturally – taking dictation from Joyce and putting in everything (have you ever noticed how often the words ‘Answer that door will you?’ appear in Finnegan’s Wake) Taking tea with Gertrude and Alice B – boy, were they ever weird. But I was tired by now, oh so very tired. Ten thousand years is a long time in the same job and the language problem had irked me ever since Babel. So around 1940 I decided to downgrade my commitments to the odd prestige commission, the odd celebrity collaboration. (I managed to turn down Uncle Ez at about this time which did wonders for my subsequent reputation.) For a time all went smoothly: I look back on the fifties as a pleasant siesta, interspersed with a few flamboyant stirrings: I tinkered around with the dialogue on Dr Zhivago, I persuaded Golding to change the setting of Lord of The Flies (a boys’ prep school lacked plausibility, I told him sternly). For a while – this was the fifties in England and it was all kitchens and sinks – I even hung out in America, where the atmosphere seemed briefly comfortable. Little Truman. Big Norm. Camp Gore. They were my kind of guys, and we had some good times back there sitting in our rumpus-room at the Rockefeller Institute, alternatively slipping out to sign a new petition against LBJ or buy asthmatic Truman a new inhaler. Good times. It was a shame they had to come to an end, which they did sometime around 1968 when Norman (‘Jeez,’ I can hear him saying as Gore sashayed out for a hank of tissues, ‘what a fag the guy is’) looked me squarely in the face and told me he didn’t like the shape of my nose.
Looking back on the situation, I don’t blame Norman – it was ‘68 and he was in one of his all-American moods, so virulently as to ignore all thoughts of his own ancestry – but it was enough. I quit. Forever. I threw all of Norman’s buddy-buddy letters – alternately suggesting that we should arm-wrestle each other or find sailors to fight by way of cementing a renewed comradeship – into the Hudson, following them with my typewriter and my Author’s Club ID. I refused all of Truman’s invitations to tea (‘but honey’ he would murmer outrageously down the wire, ‘we could have such a fahn tahm’), declined to attend the farewell dinner held in my honour at the Algonquin and set off for home and the fine-tuning of my memoirs. Those memoirs! By now I’d been working on them for nearly four hundred years – the early drafts done in fat Gothic script with the ‘S’s all ‘F’s – and they were shit-hot. I knew they’d cause a sensation – I even had a title, The Writer in Time – but still I hesitated. There had been so many near misses before, so many last-second failures to hitch a seat on the bus-ride to immortality and somewhere, deep within me, I knew this was the last chance, the big one, the make or break. I didn’t know what fate had in store for me. (How could I? That’s the thing about writers, they never know what fate has in store for them.) I just burned on, polishing that phrase, qualifying that character judgment, giving the Homers their collective due, waxing winningly charitable over Aesop’s drug problem. For thirty years I burned on, sequestered in a tiny cottage in Hampshire, resisting the occasional blandishment (Iris, Kingsley, Martin, Juhan – they all tried me at some point), pruning, shaping, discarding, revising, until finally when it was ready – when those thousands of pages were all conflated into a single mighty manuscript – I emerged blinking into the sunlight (very strong sunlight it was too) to find that fate had played its cruellest trick.
For once it wasn’t another writer who was to blame. We first started hearing about Cryptosporidium botrytis sometime in the early 2000s – faint noises that nobody paid much attention to – after all, we had global warming, drought and most of Norfolk was a duck-pond by this time. Nobody could get especially exercised by an obscure leaf-fungus originating somewhere in the Finnish timber forests. Looking at it a few months ago in one of those interminable drama docs they do, I was taken aback by how innocent it seemed: just a few square centimetres of rusty mould, in its preliminary form, barely discernible among the russet tints and hues of autumn. This deceptive air predictably fooled the forest scientists, most of whom assumed that it was a local variant of Dutch Elm which would go away. It wasn’t. It didn’t. Six months later the Finnish timber industry ceased to exist.
What happened? We don’t know. The first scientific reports identified it as a tree virus, a sort of mega-compound of all the moulds, rots and algaes with which trees had been infested since the dawn of time, but with one salient difference: the incubation period. Dutch Elm can leave a tree standing for twenty years. Cryptosporidum botrytis, having killed off the foliage in a week, went to work like a flurry of termites, hollowing out the trunk and reducing the boughs to sawdust. Scientifically monitored for the first time in a national park near Malmo it was seen to account for two thousand hectares of prime larch in a little over three weeks. They did what they could, of course. They stopped all timber exports from Finland. They tried a fire-break – a procedure that meant torching five hundred square miles of forest near the border (you could see the flames in Moscow) and they tried blaming someone, in this case the Iranians who were accused of concocting the virus in the first place. None of these things worked. A month later Cryptosporidum botrytis was in Sweden. A month after that – about the time I put the finishing touches to The Writer In Time – the Russian pine forests went down.
After that the panic set in. The price of wood pulp on the international exchanges went up by 80 per cent, by 150 per cent, by 300 per cent. Paper supplies halved, then quartered. The big mills started revising their estimated outputs on a weekly basis. Publishers started doubling and then quadrupling their prices and reducing their print runs to a fraction. It was all very serious, all very frightening. And there wasn’t anything anybody could do. They tried various expedients, of course. They tried recycling – whole warehouses of old stock, vast libraries of antiquated fiction went to the pulp – and they started using fanciful breeds of wood, previously thought unsuitable for paper production. They imported eucalyptus from the rain forests, spongy swamp saplings from the Far East. At one stage they started experimenting with man-made fibres and there were mad plans to print books on tiny sheets of plastic or strengthened cellophane. I had a contract by this time with one of the big London firms and each week I was called in for a request to cut, to prune, to hack away another chunk of manuscript (in the meantime the books were getting slimmer – novels became novellas, fat biographies became slim monographs, poems became haikus). It broke my heart but I played along. I did everything they told me to do, prised out all the stuff about the Homers, the extended recreation of dining with Dante (who made gurgling noises with his soup, but then we’re none of us perfect). Even then I wasn’t giving too much away – The Writer In Time was billed in the catalogue as ‘an elaborate fantasia’ would you believe. But it was no good, it just wasn’t any good. Three months before publication, the vast 300,000 word chronicle reduced to forty pages, the government announced a moratorium on UK book production.
And for twenty years, that’s been it. Cryptosporidum botrytis has slowed down a bit by now – Scandinavia is a wasted, treeless desert, there aren’t a lot of places it can go to. There are hopes too that the virus will work itself out, gro
w weakened – in fact they did some resowing in Sweden last year and it seems to be holding up pretty much OK. In the meantime we sit and read what we always read. I’ve gone through A La Recherche a dozen times now (how pleased Marcel would be). Several times I’ve pondered some new career – chartered accountancy, pensions, that sort of thing – but inevitably I return to this matter-of-fact brooding, these musings over might-have-beens, this subjunctive life. Inevitably, too, I have my consolations. I go on the radio sometimes and tell them about Aristophanes, Milton, Joyce and Big Norm. (They love it – they think I’m making it up. They bill me as ‘one of our leading humourists’ – they don’t know I was really there.) And sometimes the voices come echoing down the thin, aimless years: dead, billowing voices, and my head is a sound library where Willie tries out a couplet or two and Jim mints another eyebrow-lofting polysyllable. It’s from these moments, perhaps, that I derive my greatest consolation: that, in a world without books, I am the survivor.