So I make an effort. It’s only polite. Over the past twenty-five years I have genuinely tried to find a way of scrubbing up that would actually look as if I am scrubbed, or at least up, rather than simply highlighting my available deficiencies. My own Author Appearance Anxiety has created a number of imaginatively disastrous ‘looks’, including the my fatter, taller sister is a social worker and lends me her clothes, the reserve policewoman, the apparently lesbian solicitor, the yes, everything is leather because it’s warm and doesn’t crease – it doesn’t mean I want to tie you up or hit you for your, or indeed my own, entertainment – please go away now and my current: this is quite a nice shirt and at least I’ve been able to get a haircut now my neck’s better – and I have a nice coat: it’s willing to tolerate me until a better author comes along. Add in the variously benign, malevolent or over-enthusiastic attentions of TV make-up personages in a number of locations, the effects of exhaustion, jetlag and a poor/odd/worrying diet and the ability of all photographers everywhere to catch exactly the angle and expression to immortalise me for ever as a demonic gonk/idiot non-savant/botched facial-transplant case – when, from the best of angles, I am usually close to all three – and you can understand why I would prefer to – very literally – draw a veil over many proceedings. As age and gravity assert themselves, my incipient goatee becomes luxuriant and my teeth remain as equine as ever, I can be sure that matters will only deteriorate. Although this should have very little to do with me, or my job, it does. And I am sorry for it. I will, in fact, take this opportunity to assure you, Dear Readers, that I am as sorry for it as I can be and will remain so. There is no more that I can do. Onwards.
XXX
AND AS THE summer asserts itself, albeit damply, I am reminded yet again that there is an optimum temperature range for typing. If – as I have been lately – I am trapped in bad-tempered, green-aired and broiling old London, the chances of my being able to batter out more than a paragraph without lapsing into a shallow coma are almost nil. Suddenly, the ghastly similarities between typing and what I imagine to be the irritatingly intermittent joys of auto-erotic asphyxiation come galloping to the fore. Oh, this is all right. Think I’m getting somewhere. Yes, quite nice, probably – especially if we fiddle about round that corner bit for a while and then – Hello . . . now why am I on the carpet? Even when I’m conscious, I spend an unhealthy amount of time battling urges towards languid strolling and trying to find a snake I can look at while I’m in pyjamas.
(That was a literary reference, not a euphemism.)
This means that I am working mostly at night – which does not sit well with the numberless work-related things I am supposed to do amongst people who operate – perversely, in my opinion – during the hours of daylight.
Naturally, my earliest years as a typist (in Dundee) were characterised by the opposite problem: an inability to keep even slightly warm. Dundee is cold and basic rented accommodation is colder. Sitting/crouching/lying still and thinking and occasionally writing illegibly (because you have no computer – they were rare in those days – and you are embarrassed to even look at what you’re producing) is particularly cold. And at that point in my life all forms of heating beyond huddling under blankets were unaffordable. I spent a great deal of time looking as if I had been prised loose from an outside toilet on the Trans-Siberian Railway. I write lying down partly because my spinal column was designed by a drunk monkey, but mostly because I have spent so many long, sniffling, miserable hours lurking in my own bed or those of cheap B&Bs, or bleak borrowed houses, trying to stay alive long enough to reach the end of the next paragraph. I have become accustomed to writing in bed and in several layers of clothing. Not that there is any shame in wearing hats, coats and/or scarves indoors – this can be bracing and dapper. It’s having to do so that can be depressing. I still feel the cold more than the average person and, during the winter months at home, I may still leave my living room briskly, putting on my jacket and shapka as I go, whistling merrily and feeling that the journey along the corridor to my study is all I ever really want to know about walking to work. It would only be colder outside.
I only mention this in case any of you have been experiencing unusual difficulties in putting one word after another and have, perhaps, not considered that you may simply be paying inadequate attention to your operational parameters. Perhaps a cold shower would be advisable. Or else a hot one. You decide.
Meanwhile, some of you may have noticed that I have been spending rather more time than usual on the radio. This is always a pleasure – radio people take care of words, are generally very courteous and offer room for more reflection and flexibility than you might find in other media. In fact, the only drawback is one I bring with me – the immense need to swear.
I do not swear much (unless provoked) and wouldn’t normally swear at an audience at all – unless I was giving a reading and there were Bad Words on the page in front of me. Or possibly in the context of a comedy club, where swearing becomes a kind of comforting descant on everything from ‘Hello’ to ‘Why is your hand in my pocket? And your leg in my trousers?’ (And goodness knows why it’s less offensive to have someone say fuck at you when they’ve carefully written it down first, pondered it lovingly, considered other alternatives and then settled on fuck very firmly all over again – surely that should actually be more disturbing that just hearing them exclaim fuck spontaneously when they, for example, stub their toe on the lectern – but I digress . . .) Should I, however, be doing something live for a radio programme – or, as also occasionally happens, for the telly – there will always be the moment when someone charming with a clipboard appears to gently murmur, ‘Of course . . . not that we think you would, but . . . you would want to avoid swearing . . .’ Which naturally fills me with an unbearable desire to do nothing but yell obscenities and blasphemies for the duration. This would be why, for example, I spent a portion of one evening last week hopping up and down a corridor in Broadcasting House, quietly reciting every allegedly appalling word I could think of – just to get them out of my system. It’s the only way.
Apart from anything else, the murmured requests for verbal restraint are more than averagely heartfelt at the moment, if you’re involved with a BBC broadcast. Even the slightest additional misstep from the Corporation – perhaps caused by an obscure Scottish novelist getting all Anglo-Saxon and causing a retired and much-loved ophthalmologist in East Cheam to choke on his suppertime rarebit in the absence of anyone qualified in the Heimlich manoeuvre and provoking Overpaid, Elitist BBC Bastards Kill Popular Friend and Uncle headlines – could mean the entire licence fee is redirected to fund bankers’ bonuses and the hunting of immigrants through woodland for sport. And, although it has many failings – we all do – I like the idea of the BBC, and we could still rebuild it and make it better and happier with itself and therefore kinder to its viewers and listeners – all could go well and is not past saving. I’d hate its demise to be in any tiny way my fault.
I have – as a person interested in words – been informed of the BBC’s graded list of Words That Will Get Us All Fired. You’ll be relieved to know that orgasm isn’t listed, and perhaps surprised to learn that what I will voluntarily choose to call the C-word is only in second place. The very worst thing to say is currently a term implying that a person and his mother are involved in relations frowned upon by conventional society and which force any subsequent offspring to search card shops for the Happy Father’s Day to My Loving Brother options. Obviously, the Beeb interviews a lot more 1970s pimps than I had hitherto realised.
Not for the first time, this has led me to reflect on my own ambivalence towards swearing. On the one hand, many of the words involved are melodiously and perfectly formed for the purpose and, frankly, there are few things more dandy – and indeed stimulating – than hearing someone who is genuinely good at swearing, someone who works with imagination, eloquence and poise. On the other hand, the words English uses as terms of abuse are almost uni
versally terms for lovely (or at least interesting) activities and areas of the body which it is either wonderful to have or delightful to be offered for one’s temporary recreation and/or mutual fun. So I have decided, as an exercise, to try and adopt words that would be more logical for me to use when stressed or outraged – and not just flirting in a shouty manner, which would lead me back to the usual repertoire. I have, during readings where the young and tender were present, already used Blair, Blairing, and so forth, but I truly don’t want that in my mouth regularly, so I don’t think it’ll do. Death is short, to the point and something I don’t enjoy in others and will probably find oppressive for myself . . . Poverty is definitely offensive and has a good feel to it as a word . . . as some of you may remember, I have a soft spot for ’sblood, but that would sound massively eccentric when I need no further help in that direction . . . And, given the burden laid across my every waking minute, there is always novel to consider . . .
Perhaps you, Dear Readers, can assist. (Without swamping the poor old site with offensiveness, which will simply be disappeared.) Or you could try to construct your own lists at home for improved entertainment and expression. Onwards.
XXXI
AH, THERE ARE days when you leave me moist-eyed and jolly, there really are. (There are other days when – a very few of – you make me want to change my address and wear a knee-length hat, but we’ll let that pass.) You made me proud, you did, with your ready responses to the last blog: your twunt and your frigbiscuits did my heart good. Thank you for reinvigorating my already enthusiastic faith in your imaginative and pleasing use of language and for making me reflect, yet again, that politicians, advertisers and fibbers of all varieties really don’t know how massively they underestimate you and your linguistic sophistication. And a special hello to Ian Lawther. Both my sainted mother and I are now using fox cakes in our everyday exchanges and it is working well for us.
I feel we must all have another targeted exchange of views soon – perhaps with a real prize for especially excellent involvement. Although, of course, Mr Lawther does in a very genuine way now possess the reward of having made my mother grin. Very few people – apart from noisy children who have fallen over and hurt themselves – can do that. And, naturally, the cash I have available for prizes and postage is limited, so not winning might be less of a disappointment than opening a recycled envelope full of personally signed elm leaves – which is about what this month’s surplus would run to. Meanwhile, I have just (I hope) put the finishing touches to an essay on writing workshops and have therefore knocked away the last major obstacle between me and the novel and our being welded ever closer, as I desperately try to get everything done and as it should be by the end of December. I do indeed catch myself telling those kind enough to enquire about the beast, ‘It’ll all be over by Christmas’ and then shuddering appropriately. Not that typing more than anyone healthy ever ought to is in any way comparable to being under fire at the Somme – I am simply squirming under a slightly tighter deadline than I am used to.
In fact, now that we mention it, I’ve never really had a deadline for a novel. But this time around, the health and sanity of the British publishing scene mean that I am already discussing covers and cover blurbs for something which is roughly half-completed and for which I have only just signed a contract. One minute I am ambling along with my hands in my pockets, flirting ardently but gently and with no legal obligations, and the next I’m roughly handcuffed to what may – I’ll admit – develop into a lovely, warm and clean-limbed partner, but which I, as usual, fear may turn out to be, at best, a corpse and, at worst, some kind of brain-eating undead gentleman who will embarrass me at parties. If I miss the deadline, I miss the mystically calculated ideal time for novel release in 2011 and my editor has to disembowel a whole field full of goats and consult their entrails before he can select another in 2012. (The goats aren’t, strictly speaking, essential to the process – he just gets tetchy when publications don’t go to plan . . .)
I am trying to remain calm and to kid (sorry!) myself into thinking: Well, if it has a cover and cover copy, then it must exist . . . All must be right with the novel. I have played a similar trick on myself with my notebooks for years – each book I intend to write has a notebook containing . . . well, yes, notes – but nothing that finished or, as things progress, that massively helpful. The notebook seems to be a way of getting to the point where I can start – and I know everyone is different in this area, I’m just saying how it is for me. Despite it being full of scared nonsense, illegible essentials and unhinged suggestions, I like to stare at the (tightly closed) notebook and pretend that it is, in fact, full of the novel, neatly written down by hand, and all I have to do is type it up again and maybe do a spellcheck. There are mornings when this is convincing. Not many mornings, to be sure, but I cling to their spasms of dewy hope.
Turning back to that essay, I am glad I put an end to my major distractions by writing about workshops. This isn’t so much because I like them – in fact, much of the essay was taken up with detailing what can go wrong with workshops and how unuseful the standard let’s sit round in a circle and read ourselves and each other with inadequate attention in a strained setting before allowing the blind to lead the deaf type of workshop can be. But it also allowed me to remember the sheer wonder of a successful workshop. Apart from anything else, a good workshop can allow us to see – as closely as we ever will – writers writing, writing happening, the thing itself. There are few things better than sitting in a room which is suddenly united in action, which suddenly has that tingly, ozoney feeling of something on its way – of whatever inspiration is taking shape, of words struggling, or plummeting, or bubbling through. When we work ourselves, we’re too engrossed in the process to really be aware of it – to be frank, once we’re aware, it tends to have gone away. When we see it in others – perhaps as part of group authorship, perhaps in a series of solo contributions – then there are moments when we can actually grasp the ungraspable, when we can see a very specific type of joy: the way a face clears and becomes beautiful when it is absolutely focused; completely itself and yet open to something other than itself, touched.
Part of what annoys me about the deadline and contract side of publishing is that it really has nothing whatever to do with writing, nothing to do with that beauty – the same beauty you see when someone is really reading, completely engrossed. I always say that writers and readers are misunderstood, because if you glance casually at people who are reading and writing, you may simply see people who appear serious, frozen. But if we happen to glance at people just before they kiss (not in an intrusive or unpleasant way, I would hope), then their expression is the same – oddly solemn, intent. And yet nobody ever suggests that kissing is dull, or pathetic, or a bit of a waste of time. I happen to believe that giving and receiving a kiss operates very much along the same lines as giving and receiving a word – it’s simply that the giving and receiving are done in different rooms at different times – they are still an attempt to touch, be touched, be recognised, to exist in passion, to be human.
I was reminded of this when reading Last Words of the Executed, a very fine book edited by Robert K. Elder. One fragment records the mass hanging of thirty-eight Dakota Sioux men. The St Paul Pioneer stated, ‘We were informed . . . that their singing and dancing was only to sustain each other – that there was nothing defiant in their last moments . . . Each one shouted his own name, and called on the name of his friend, saying in substance, “I’m here! I’m here!”’ It occurred to me that when we write fully and honestly, when we speak from who we are, mortal human being to mortal human being, it comes down to this – that we sustain each other with musics and dreams of motion, that we say who we are, that we reach out to the friend who is beyond us, out of sight – and this is perhaps defiant in the deepest possible way and is perhaps a type of love and is certainly very much alive and – I think it bears repeating – beautiful.
Onwards.
/> XXXII
THE STOMACH TROUBLE referred to in the post below was, in fact, an undiagnosed ulcer.
Ah, it was bound to go pear-shaped, Best Beloveds – all major obstacles to our sweaty unification had been tumbled away, all chaperones had been dodged, misdirected or anaesthetised – finally, it was just me and the novel in the smallest, brownest London hotel room I have ever suffered. (And those of you who know London will realise that England’s capital is heaving with minute, dun-coloured cells and establishments generous and imaginative only in their provision of misery with an added option of mild disease.) It was going to be a lovely weekend – possible cover designs had been emailed, an actual real live contract had been signed (for some reason I had been finding it light and relieving not to sign a contract and simply to write) and a genuine coin-of-the-realm advance had been received and banked – we were all set . . . You’re guessing there were tears long before bedtime? Well, of course. It’s always awkward: that first time when there’s nothing in the way, you’ve been hoping, expecting, daydreaming, but now – here it is. Here you are – one half of a couple. Ish. You’ve dumped your bags and coat and suddenly an inviting tryst feels very like waiting alone with a stranger for something possibly awful to happen in a cramped space which includes an embarrassing bed. Perhaps you fumble about round a paragraph here and there and find that you’re not in the mood – many of the words are in the wrong place and a bit, somehow, chilly.
On Writing Page 12