The Girl On the Page

by John Purcell

  Where does he think the young writers of today should be looking? India? Africa? China?

  ‘They can work that out for themselves.’

  And does he think the mass reading movements of recent times – Harry Potter, Twilight and Fifty Shades etc. – adversely affect modern writing?

  ‘We’re talking exclusively about serious writers, are we not?’

  I nodded.

  ‘They wouldn’t have read them. So zero effect.’

  Does he think the internet has a positive or negative effect on writing?

  ‘Positive. It is a tool. A very good one for research. And it is bringing people together. It is opening our eyes to lives unlike our own. I have heard it said that the internet gives people the answers they want to find. But this is not exclusive to the internet. It comes down to the questions you ask. And your dedication to the task. In 1950s London it was easy to find answers that suited your beliefs, if your beliefs were those shared by your neighbours, but it was almost impossible to find answers to questions no one wanted asked in the first place. The struggle to find or establish alternative viewpoints was a daily one.’

  When I turned the conversation around to his own work, Taylor was evasive. He was much happier extolling the virtues of his wife Helen Owen’s novels. When pressed to speak about A Hundred Ways, his tone was dismissive. But this was before the Man Booker win.

  Our interviews were postponed after the death of his son, Daniel Taylor. When next we met, some six months later, Malcolm had won the Man Booker and was celebrating his eightieth birthday in the reception rooms of the exclusive retirement village in Richmond where his long-time literary agent and friend, Trevor Melville, resides. Melville, who recently turned ninety-two, gave a moving speech to the audience of twenty or so close friends and fellow writers, which ended with the most recent sales figures for A Hundred Ways. It has sold a quarter of a million copies in the UK alone.

  When I found a quiet moment, I asked Taylor what it was about A Hundred Ways that attracted so many readers.

  ‘Success like this, obscene success, is always a sign of some kind of failure. I could name twenty writers whose most popular book was their least successful artistically. A Hundred Ways must be pretty terrible to be so loved.’

  The last time we met you were just finishing a new novel. When can we expect to read it?

  ‘I destroyed it. It wasn’t working.’

  That surprises me, as at the time you excited me by saying you thought it your best work yet.

  ‘Which was clearly a sign something was desperately wrong.’

  And something was desperately wrong. In a year when the world mourned the loss of David Bowie, Prince, Muhammad Ali, Carrie Fisher and Leonard Cohen, Taylor was mourning the loss of his son and then, a few weeks later, the death of his wife of fifty years, Helen Owen.

  Malcolm Taylor has said nothing publicly about these deaths. And when I alluded to the subject he pulled away from me. We are left with the tribute to Helen Owen he made in his Man Booker speech, where he credited her with keeping him on the right path and called her ‘one of the world’s greatest thinkers and writers’.

  After speaking briefly with Trevor Melville at the same event, I did learn that Malcolm was working on a couple of new projects. The first of these is the publication of Helen Owen’s final novel, All Too Human, which he has edited, and then, early next year, a memoir, Helen Owen: A Writer Observed.

  So, as many of the biggest publishers call in focus groups and analyse big data in an effort to anticipate the needs of a cashed-up new generation of readers, some of the country’s remaining boutique publishers continue to do what they have always done – publish great work by great writers, like Helen Owen and Malcolm Taylor, and allow time and good taste to work their magic. You don’t need to be a wizard to work out which approach will win the day.

  Chapter 67

  All Too Human

  Max and Amy talk on the phone:

  ‘Thank you, Max, we’ve just read the article. Knowing what you know, you were very restrained.’

  ‘Nobody needs to know any of that.’

  ‘When will you publish?’

  ‘Next week. But not in my magazine. You’ve heard, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes. I am sorry.’

  ‘Never mind. After all you’ve gone through, the passing of a literary magazine is nothing.’

  ‘You had a great story. He still hasn’t spoken to the media at all and you chose not to go ahead. It might have saved you.’

  ‘I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t right.’

  ‘It would’ve sold copies, though, and you know it. So thank you.’

  ‘That’s what it was all about, wasn’t it? Choices like this?’

  ‘In a way.’

  ‘I did write about it, though. I just haven’t shown you. And I promise, no one else will see it. It’s not for publication. I had to get it all down. You and Helen. Daniel’s suicide. Malcolm’s weird novel, his false grief. Helen’s three manuscripts, her guilt, his rejection of her, her suicide on the night of his win. It’s so dark. Later, in a few years, I’ll write a book about it. A novel, perhaps. I’d love to see your diaries on it all one day.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t.’

  ‘Amy?’

  ‘Yes? . . . Oh . . . No, don’t say anything. I know what you’re going to say. I need time, Max. That’s all.’

  ‘Where are you? It sounds like you’re at the beach.’

  ‘That’s Malcolm. He’s in the pool. We’re in Tuscany, just outside Lucca. I’ve dragged him here to finish his memoir. I’ll send pics. It’s gorgeous here.’

  ‘How’s he doing?’

  ‘He’s a mess. We both are. But writing about Helen seems to be helping him. We’ll be back in London in September. We’re launching All Too Human. Did you read the proof copy I sent you?’

  ‘It’s extraordinary, Amy. You and Malcolm have done a brilliant job.’

  ‘Helen was a perfectionist. Especially with this one. It meant the world to her. We hardly did a thing to it.’

  ‘Even so, it must have been hard for both of you.’

  ‘Harder for Malcolm. Helen wrote the book for him. She saw it as her salvation, a way of winning back his respect. She all but begged him to read it. But the manuscript had remained unread on Malcolm’s desk.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘Malcolm was inconsolable when he first read it. I didn’t think he’d recover. He lost weight and interest in everything. It was too much for him. He loved her – more than anything – and he knows his cruelty brought her to self-destruction. He isn’t the man he was. He’ll never be that man again. But the work has given him a focus. He won’t let Helen down again.’

  ‘All Too Human cements her reputation as one of the greats.’

  ‘Stop, you’ll make me cry . . . Sorry, I’ll let Malcolm know you said so.’

  ‘I’ve written a review for The Guardian. They’ll publish it in September. I’ll send it through.’

  ‘No need. I trust you.’

  ‘Amy, just out of curiosity, how much of the M&R mess was down to your influence?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘You don’t know what I mean? The Bookseller announces a record eight-figure deal between HarperCollins and Jack Cade, and you pretend to have had nothing to do with it?’

  ‘That was their doing, not mine.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘After all that’s happened they’re still going to publish Helen’s more commercial novel. They’re planning to call it The Winter Rose. A friend sent me a draft cover. It looks like a fucking Maeve Binchy. Malcolm is understandably horrified and has urged them to reconsider, but . . .’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘Julia is a fucking bitch. Even though we’ve offered to pay back the advance, she’s still going ahead.’

  ‘So you took Jack Cade from her?’

  ‘After she tried to take Jack Cade from me first.’
r />   ‘So you think Julia was behind Liam’s change of heart?’

  ‘Of course! She would have whispered all kinds of bullshit into his ear as she stroked his cock. She knows Liam loves playing the bestselling author. She knows he hates it when anyone suggests publicly that I’ve played any part in his success. Like Malcolm did magnificently in his speech. It’s a sore point with him. That’s why he calls me his editor and never his co-author. So she convinced him to dump me. Not knowing the true nature of our arrangement.’

  ‘Surely Liam knew.’

  ‘Liam should have known. It was all in black and white. He really should have read the original contract more closely. He was, essentially, a hired gun, after all. I now have three Liams working around the clock on the new Mark Harden thriller for HarperCollins. It will be the best one yet.’

  ‘I doubt Liam’s okay with that.’

  ‘Publicly, he has to be. Publicly, he retired on his own terms. Privately, I don’t give a fuck.’

  ‘I don’t think he has much “privately” anymore. The tabloids are loving his decline. Gail’s interview with Hello! magazine was pure gold. Did you read it?’

  ‘I helped write it.’

  ‘You’re the devil.’

  ‘I wish I was. Then I’d find a way to stop Julia publishing The Winter Rose.’

  ‘You’ll think of something. You always do.’

  ‘I have Alan going over the contract and the correspondence between M&R and Helen, looking for something Malcolm and I might have overlooked. Hopefully something will come up.’

  ‘I’m sure it will. And what news of your own novel, Amy?’

  ‘Who told you about that?’

  ‘A little birdy.’

  ‘It’s coming along.’

  ‘Can you tell me what it’s about?’

  ‘It’s just a silly love story.’

  Epilogue

  I was somewhere in Sydney sitting in the back row of an auditorium with Malcolm’s Australian publicist, Melanie, watching Malcolm, Liam, Michelle de Kretser and the panel facilitator, Angela Meyer, mic up. The panel was called ‘What is literature?’ It wasn’t part of Malcolm’s programme, but Kate Atkinson had taken ill overnight and had emailed Malcolm’s publicist personally to ask if he might fill in for her. The Sydney Writers’ Festival organisers were understandably delighted with this solution. Kate Atkinson had been one of the stars of the programme and this was to be her last appearance. Her sessions had been booked out well in advance. Replacing her with the keynote speaker was a neat solution to the problem.

  When I saw that Liam was to be on the panel too, I tried to talk Malcolm out of agreeing to the extra session. But this news seemed to amuse him. He said he had enjoyed reading Tangential and was looking forward to meeting the author. Noting the mischievous glint in his eye as he spoke, I let him have his way.

  I was finding it hard to stay awake. I was still jetlagged. For the entire week of the festival I had been a bit of a zombie. I had never flown so far in my life. I now know we should have broken the trip with a couple of nights in Singapore as Trevor had suggested. But Malcolm had been for getting it over with in one go. So I relented. Neither of us is a great flier. And then Malcolm got lucky on the second leg and slept most of the way from Singapore to Sydney. He managed almost eight hours’ sleep, something he rarely got at home. But I just couldn’t sleep. While he snored softly I sat watching terrible movie after terrible movie. The last five hours of the last leg had been the worst. They went by so slowly. The lights were dimmed. The rest of the plane was asleep. I felt trapped and on the edge of hysteria. I was so happy when we finally landed. I could have kissed the ground.

  And we had flown business class. The poor fuckers in economy must have felt like they were in Abu Ghraib prison.

  On arrival in Sydney I’d upgraded us both to a suite overlooking the harbour. But I still hadn’t slept through the night. I was catching two or three hours at a stretch, whenever I could.

  I rested my head against Melanie’s shoulder. She was my new best friend. I did everything she told me to do.

  Malcolm gave me a wink. I blew him a kiss back. The stagehand was fiddling with each of their mics in turn. The four of them were chatting amiably, Angela on the left of the stage with her notes on her lap, Liam beside her, then Michelle, and Malcolm on the far right. Malcolm looked to be the most relaxed of them all. In fact, the whole festival he’d been like that. Completely chilled. Even before giving the keynote address. He just had no fucks to give anymore.

  Malcolm had only agreed to attend the festival because his programme was largely devoted to Helen’s works. The first two sessions Malcolm had participated in were on his memoir of Helen, in which he had taken full responsibility for her suicide. They were emotionally draining for everyone involved. The third session was on Helen’s last novel, All Too Human, and the fourth on his own work. Including the keynote, it was a full programme for any writer. And now he had agreed to this extra session. He was eighty-one years old. He seemed to have more energy than ever. Especially when talking about Helen.

  And then there were the publisher dinners, the lunches with other authors, the drinks, parties and trips out to see Bondi Beach, the Blue Mountains and the Opera House, and the overlong harbour cruise.

  I was his official chaperone, but I was useless. I couldn’t keep up with him. I kept falling asleep on his or Melanie’s shoulder.

  The doors opened and the audience was ushered in. Most were elderly, it being 2 pm on a Friday, but there were a few young hipster types to break up the greys and variations of beige. There were about three hundred people in the audience. And a crew was filming the session and streaming it live onto Facebook.

  Liam hadn’t looked in my direction the whole time I had been in clear view, but now, as I was being hemmed in by pensioners, he glanced across and caught my eye for a second. I almost smiled. He looked nervous.

  I had successfully avoided him the whole time we had been in Sydney. He was at some of the dinners and drinks, and he had been on the harbour cruise, too, but he’d kept his distance, and I had kept mine.

  Tangential had been poorly received by the critics, but his name was enough to get him into the bestseller lists and invited to festivals. His fans on Goodreads, our fans really, had been generous in their praise. He’d earn thousands of five-star reviews, but I knew their praise wasn’t what he sought. The literary world he aspired to join had been silent, neither praising nor damning the novel. Its response could be summed up in one word: ‘meh’. The response all writers fear most.

  I lifted my head off Melanie’s shoulder as the session got underway. The panellists happily agreed with the facilitator, Angela, that it was a bitch of a topic to tackle. Amid general laughter from the audience, each writer openly confessed that they had no idea what literature was. Angela apologised to the audience for wasting their time and made to stand up, before turning to her panellists and asking them, ‘as we’re all here’, if they could take a stab at a definition.

  Michelle de Kretser handled herself admirably, keeping clear of the traps that lay in every direction.

  Liam dived in recklessly and was soon out of his depth.

  ‘It’s subjective, really. What’s literature to one won’t be literature to another. Definition is impossible. It’s ethereal. Inexpressible. Open to interpretation. And it must be. I won’t be told what literature is, I must discover it for myself.’

  ‘So how do we teach literature?’ asked Angela.

  ‘It can’t be taught. You’d need defined characteristics to teach it, and we all just agreed, there aren’t any.’

  There was a moment of silence before Angela spoke again: ‘Malcolm, is there any way out of Liam’s paradox?’

  ‘I don’t believe everything is subjective. I think there are universal truths. Truths we can build upon. Building blocks such as the flesh and blood and bone of our beings. The mechanisms that allow us to breathe, to breed, to run in fright. Our biological selves. Ou
r shared human nature. Our predictable psychological responses. These are far from subjective. And these objective realities give us a firm and consistent point of reference if ever we get lost.’

  ‘Dr Johnson kicking the stone?’ asked Angela.

  ‘Yes, if you like. Sometimes we lose ourselves in our own cleverness. And we need the rude shock of a plain fact to wake us up.’

  ‘So how would you define literature?’ asked Liam, with no small amount of petulance in his tone.

  ‘I don’t know about you, but I burn with shame when Mr Knightley upbraids Emma Woodhouse for being unkind to Miss Bates. I have been guilty of such behaviour myself. Scoring a point at the expense of another. Via her novel, Emma, Jane Austen has been able to reach out from the grave, and across two centuries, to rap me on the knuckles. How could she possibly do that if everything was relative? Her point is a universal one. Her lesson is as valid today as it was then because at base we have not changed.’

  ‘So literature is a collection of universal truths?’ prompted Liam.

  ‘I used to teach writing. I failed most of my students because the one thing I wanted them to learn was the one thing hardest to teach. I wanted them to see the world as it is. It’s harder to do than it sounds. We’re all encased in stories – those told to us and those we tell ourselves. I would say to them, in the safety of that classroom, that most novelists write by dipping their ladle into the great vat of past fictions. In that vat, stewing for centuries, are all the plots, clichés, tropes, themes, character types and common phrases ever used in fiction. Novels written using this method are usually quite successful because they ask nothing of the reader. The reader reads in a pleasant stupor of familiarity. A publisher might describe this kind of fiction as commercial fiction.

  ‘The fiction I was trying to encourage my students to write was fiction written from direct experience of life. This kind of fiction is much harder to write and is, in turn, sometimes taxing to read. But often only at first. As readers we navigate by signpost, but in this kind of fiction the signposts are unfamiliar to us, almost as though written in another language. We stumble around, we get lost, we might even get frustrated, but there comes a time, if we’re patient, when we learn to see the world anew, as the writer has learnt to see it, and suddenly all of the signposts become clear. And if we’re very lucky, life itself becomes clearer.