by Andy Martin
“I said to him, ‘I used to eat toast off a plate with your face on.’ ”
“Where’d you get it?” I said.
“Mother,” he said.
“The mother who treated you so heinously?”
“Her high point,” he said.
CHRISTMAS GOODWILL
NEWS ITEM in the Sussex Express:
Best-selling thriller writer Lee Child and his wife Jane Grant have donated £50,000 to an animal shelter in the Sussex countryside, the Raystede Centre for Animal Welfare.
Mr. Child: “My wife and I are both animal lovers because animals are always the most defenseless and the most vulnerable and the most in need of help and we were so impressed with what they (Raystede) do that we became really enthusiastic and wanted to support it in whatever way we could.”
LEE CHILD’S NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION
“KEEP ON SMOKING.”
HALF A BOTTLE OF BOURBON
“IS IT A BOOK? I don’t know.” Lee was talking about Make Me. It was the middle of January and we were having a telephone conversation. He had spent Christmas and New Year in Sussex. With his wife and daughter. So I called him up. He’d done some writing, he said, not a lot, but he wasn’t convinced it was all going to fall into place. Reacher 20…maybe it wasn’t meant to be. Maybe Reacher 19 was the end. Make Me would make “a decent short story,” he thought.
Ultimate nightmare. I’m writing a book about his book and he doesn’t even finish?
“I’m counting on a massive burst back in New York,” he said, with his usual optimism. “I’m not dead yet.”
Phew.
“Or maybe I’ll go back to working for TV,” he said. “It’s improved a lot since my day.”
Fuck.
When I put the phone down, numbly, I couldn’t help but think of Bourbon John and the conversation I’d had with him a few weeks before in New York.
Flakes of snow were swirling around us as we tramped through the West Village to the restaurant. Maybe that explained why John needed to drink half a bottle of bourbon. Just to stay warm. Or maybe there was some other reason. He was a young writer, mid-twenties, from the South, in New York on a year’s fellowship. Everyone said he was talented. But he was starting to feel the pressure. Or maybe it was just the Northern chill, getting into his South Carolina bones.
Anyway he had knocked back the half bottle before we’d even gotten out of the door, just standing around waiting for the other guys to turn up. I was sipping, and it was mainly water.
I think it was a Greek restaurant. Somewhere around 6th. I had a Greek salad. There were about ten other people at the table. It was pleasantly warm in there, after the dark midwinter outside. But I can really only remember the conversation with John, sitting on the other side of the table. He kept trying to pour me another drink. Wine this time. I think I had annoyed him by not drinking enough bourbon.
“So what is it you’re doing?” John tried to focus his gaze on me. “Exactly?” He was all wound up by the idea of the Reacher project. He’d read only a couple of Lee’s books, but Lee was the kind of successful writer he half despised and was half jealous of. John was a serious writer. An artist. He didn’t really think Lee was that much of an artist. But at least he was a writer. Whereas I: I was more of a parasite, a sidekick hanger-on, and an academic to boot. He didn’t like academics too much, having dropped out of grad school to write. They weren’t all stories about lonely alienated loser alcoholics desperate to make it and slowly destroying themselves in the big city.
I explained it to him. Looking over the master’s shoulder, trying to figure out what he was getting up to, and where it all came from, and how he did it. That sort of thing. “Not psychoanalysis. Just analysis. The psycho is strictly optional.”
He had been nodding encouragingly, as if getting it. Now he threw back the contents of a bottle of Coors and slammed the bottle down on the table. “Man, I still don’t get it. Tell me that again.” He was really mystified. He probably would have been mystified even without the bourbon. He was a good-looking guy, with a mop of brown hair flopping down over his forehead. Heavy stubble.
I explained it to him a second time. Think of it, I said, as a kind of review—but before the book is even written. While it’s still work-in-progress. Real-time. Going right back to the source and following it all the way down to the sea.
“Now I get it!” he said. John’s apparent delight lasted all of a tenth of a second. He leaned across the table, glared at me, and wagged his finger in my face.
“You are KILLING Jack Reacher!”
I wish I could have said, “I have no idea what you are talking about, you drunken prick!” But the reality was I knew exactly what he was talking about. I said nothing.
“You’re like that guy. The Person from…”
“Porlock?”
“Yeah, that’s the one. You want to fuck him UP, don’t you?” For some reason he put all the emphasis on “up,” which made it sound a lot worse.
John was referring of course to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge started writing “Kubla Khan” one day towards the end of the eighteenth century. I could remember the bit about Xanadu and the “stately pleasure dome” and a sacred river and something “measureless to man.” It was a great short poem. Much shorter, for example, than “The Ancient Mariner.” But it wasn’t supposed to be that short. Coleridge reckoned it had all come to him in an opium-fueled dream and the poem was pouring out of him, just like the sacred river. But then it stopped. At precisely the time that, in Coleridge’s subsequent account, a “person from Porlock” knocked at the door. Porlock really existed—it was a small town in Somerset, a few miles from where Coleridge was living. The man arrived, they talked, he left again, perhaps returning to Porlock. But—this was the point of the story—he had taken all of Coleridge’s inspiration with him. When Coleridge sat down again at his desk to write and pick up where he left off he found that his muse had deserted him. His wonderful vision of Xanadu had curled up and died. He never finished the poem, at least not in the way he originally intended. He just stopped.
I was that man from Porlock, to John’s way of thinking. I was going to take Make Me, and unmake it, suffocate and annihilate the Lee Child muse.
This was all after half a bottle of bourbon, and a couple of beers. And an unspecified amount of Scotch he’d been drinking earlier, so I was told. What does he know anyway? Wanker. At the same time, I felt a guilty stab of conscience. Could I really be putting Lee off his stroke? John wasn’t the first to denounce me as toxic.
“It’s like one of those time travel stories,” he was saying. “You’ve gone back in time. And you’re changing everything. That picture in your pocket—the beautiful picture of a book—it’s like it’s disappearing. The more you look at it the less you see of it.”
He flipped the top of another bottle off with his thumb.
“It’s gone, man. It’s all gone!”
I carried on eating Greek salad. Drank some wine. Talked to people. In the end, I had to surrender. The hazy gaze was drilling into me again. The finger was waving.
“Who was that dude with the cat?”
“T. S. Eliot.”
“No. Quantum guy.”
“Schrödinger?”
“Yeah. Alive or dead? That was the question, wasn’t it. Shove the cat in a box with a 50-50 bomb attached. Dead or alive?”
“Dead and alive, Niels Bohr would say. The states are superposed. Until the wave function collapses.”
“Yeah, well, in Lee Child’s case, he’s definitely dead. How could he not be with you watching him all the time? Like a pervert. Like a voyeur.”
Sometime later I heard Bourbon John had gone back to South Carolina. He couldn’t take the chill in New York.
THE STITCH-UP
CONVERSATION ON SKYPE.
LEE: I don’t want to get framed.
ME: I don’t know how to frame. Why would I want to frame you?
LEE: Are you going to dig
up some dirt on me?
ME: Hold on a second. There’s dirt? What am I missing?
LEE: Nothing.
ME: I’m going to have to do some serious research.
LEE: It’s all myth. Mostly.
ME: Mostly?
LEE: Gossip and rumor.
ME: So…is it true what they’re saying about you?
LEE: Bastard.
NEVER GO BACK
IT WAS A RULE with him. Never go back. It was even the title of his last but one novel. Child was Reacher and Reacher was Child. Of course he had gone back—to slip in a comma. Take out the shit and the piss. Now he was going back again.
He was up to 32,000 words. “It’s acceptable at this point,” he said. It was the last day of January. Subzero in Manhattan. Central Park all white icing. I had to dress up like some kind of spaceman to survive the rigors of walking down to the C train at Spring Street and coming back up again on 86th. Two hats (one borrowed from Joel: “Handmade Persian—DO NOT LOSE IT!”).
He reiterated his rule. “As you know, my method is not to touch what I’ve done.” I had an inkling what his next word was going to be. “Unless…” Me and my prophetic soul. “Unless I really need to.”
Turned out he really really needed to.
Rewrite No. 1: Kansas City
Lee just erased Kansas City. Sorry Kansans! He went back and rubbed it right out. You will look in vain for Kansas City in the pages of Make Me. As if Kansas City had never existed. Adiós sentences like, “It was five hours to Kansas City.” Hola five hours (or something) to…Oklahoma! No KC; OK OKC!
It had a completely different ring to it. No more of the Old West and gunslingers and the Wizard of Oz. We were going to the land of Rodgers and Hammerstein. As high as an elephant’s eye.
“Reacher and Stashower have to go to Los Angeles now. To see the journalist. It’s all a question of triangulation. We still don’t have a clue where Mother’s Rest is. But I have to have some kind of plausible geography. Mother’s Rest makes a triangle with the other two.”
There was a definite tinge of regret in his voice, at losing Kansas City. “I guess it doesn’t matter too much,” Lee said. “But there is a great tradition of music and barbecue in Kansas City.” The idea was that, after all the immense nothingness of Mother’s Rest, Kansas City represented a holiday in the metropolis, full of diversion and bright lights. “With Oklahoma,” Lee said politely, “the contrast is not so great.”
“You mean Oklahoma is dullsville too?” I had never been to Oklahoma. “What about the surrey with a fringe on top and all that?” I wasn’t entirely sure what a “surrey” was, but I had a feeling it was fairly fun.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “You could probably go to Oklahoma and have a good time for a day. Or two. But in terms of world perception, Kansas City is going to have more dive bars and nightclubs. Pity. Oklahoma is going to have to do.”
It was a classic structuralist move. It wasn’t that Lee was uninterested in how the pieces of his puzzle hooked up to the world beyond the book. For example, he had to take geography into account, even if he was being deliberately hazy. But it was more important to him how the pieces all fit together: Mother’s Rest had to sit squarely between Oklahoma and the City of the Angels. Poised, like some kind of fulcrum. Maybe it would be better that way anyhow. Oklahoma would provide more of a counterpoint to the bright lights of Sunset Boulevard.
Rewrite No. 2: Stashower
Something similar applied in the case of Stashower. Lee was going back to fiddle around with her too. Second transgression against the rule. “I punched up a couple of lines,” he said. “I only do that once in a while.” Or twice.
“So are your women based on some kind of precursor? Or any actual women?”
I recalled conversations I had had in the past with other male writers writing about women. Saul Bellow has two types of women characters: one is gorgeous, sensual, funny, loving, sensational; the second is not—more of a Harpy than an angel. “It’s the same woman,” he said (on a Boston campus). “Only after I married her.” Norman Mailer (in a pub in London) didn’t want to talk about Marilyn Monroe; he secretly fantasized about Brigitte Bardot. “I knew I couldn’t have her,” he said. “Whereas the whole of America had Monroe.”
“It’s funny,” Lee said (sitting in his back office, not looking out over snowy Central Park). “I like to think I’m more realistic. I try to make my women characters real and almost ordinary.”
Lee had won a prize in bygone days from a Texas newspaper for The Most Realistic Dialogue in a Novel. “Ha! It isn’t,” he said. Ruth, his daughter, had tape-recorded and transcribed some real conversation when she was studying linguistics. “If you look at what we really say, it’s hilarious,” said Lee. “It’s full of contradiction, stumbles, abandoned sentences, placeholders, fragments, nonsense, pauses. If you wrote like that you’d end up with a thousand pages and no one could read more than half of it.”
So you had to be unrealistic in order to achieve realism—or what the French called vraisemblance, true-seemingness, rather than truth itself. “It passes for realistic even though it isn’t.” And the same is true of the brief encounters in Make Me. “The reality is that if you bump into a random stranger on the street and start having a conversation with her, the chances are that she will tell you to piss off and walk away. The story ends right there, on page one. The probability that you are going to end up spending the next two weeks together, in increasing intimacy, in situations of dire peril, is practically nil. And yet that is just what I am writing. Staggering artificiality! Statistically, it’s like winning the lottery. But still it has to be believable.”
The crux of it all was the relationship with Reacher. “I wanted her to be uncomfortable with what was going on. Whereas Reacher is okay with violence and killing people. She has to be more civilized. Only a patrol cop in a small town by training. She says, ‘I never even drew my weapon.’
“ ‘No shooting, please, I’m a cop!’ ”
“Obviously in Detroit it’s lawless all the time. Apparently Albuquerque has the worst record for police shootings. They shoot people there fairly regularly. Their force was provided with an additional hundred officers. Some political thing. But it was hard to find enough decent guys. In the end they took just about anyone, thugs, madmen, anyone, now they’re shooting all the civilians. But still, statistically, overall, it’s rare to even remove your weapon from your holster. It’s not like the movies, generally. You ever see a policeman with a gun in his hand, pointing it at you?”
“Nope.”
“Exactly. It’s a rarity. Stashower needs to be a fish out of water when it comes to violence. You have to have the contrast with Reacher. An argument. One of the strange things about popular literature—a lot of it is like science fiction. Or fantasy. Most women are not like that.”
“No Pussy Galore?”
“No Ursula Andress either, popping up out of the sea in her bikini. I’m not going to have a thriller woman in my novel. I want to be more realistic, restart the clock.”
“So she’s just like the girl-next-door, then?”
“On the other hand,” Lee said, trying to get the picture straight, “the reader can’t be bored with her. Neither can I! I have to spend months in her company. She has to have something going on.”
I wandered back downtown through Central Park, remembering 61 Hours and winter in South Dakota and even Reacher feeling the cold. Crunching over the snow. Colorless, odorless, I thought, then instantly translating, No colors, no odors, realizing that I was starting to think in terms of four-word no-no sentences all the time. One strange thing: Lee hadn’t lit up the entire time. Not once. No cigarette, no smoke. He was looking pretty damn healthy too. Don’t tell me he’d given up on his New Year’s resolution already.
Make it strange! The old slogan of the Russian formalists applied to the Reacher oeuvre too. Rather like Central Park itself in fact. All the old familiar features of the terrain w
ere there—the Dakota building to the west, the reservoir in the center, the skyscrapers around 59th, and that new tall thin one, still unfinished, that looked like an overextended steeple or spire. But the landscape had also been defamiliarized, transformed by the blizzard of a couple of days before into a fantasy of frozen fountains and silver trees festooned with crystal and diamonds beneath a dazzling sky. That night I even got spun around somewhere between Sixth Avenue and Vandam on account of a snowstorm. I didn’t know where I was anymore.
T. S. Eliot said we couldn’t stand “very much reality,” thinking of the skull beneath the skin. Maybe, it occurred to me, trudging across the Manhattan steppes, the opposite was true. We could stand too much—the monstrous, the horrific, the excessive, and we could stand too little as well—emptiness, lack, absence, “no hills, no dales” [61 Hours]: Look at everything that is NOT here! Reacher seems to say. What we found unbearable was just the steady state, the unvarying quotidian, the flat recapitulation of the same. Reacher 20 was never realism. It was a cunning cocktail of the hyperreal and the hyporeal, the extraordinary and the infraordinary, a cornucopia of violence shot through with great shafts of nothingness. It was a form of aesthetic extremism. Lee, like the snow that enshrouded Central Park, was effecting a purification of the real. Hence Reacher: the purifier.
And he shall purify.
MY LIFE OF CRIME
“THEY’RE ASSHOLES. But no more than any other assholes.”
I thought I had worked out what it was Lee had against farmers. He said it was all to do with having read this book on the history of farming in the U.S. in the twentieth century. How farmers had basically screwed up from the Dust Bowl right through to BSE. I reckoned it was something to do with Mesopotamia.