I was, of course, also noticeably oppressed by the fact that I was waiting to hear. The research, the writing, the rewriting, the fretting and tinkering: they all end in this – waiting to hear. I have never met anyone who even remotely enjoys this part of the book-producing process. I’ve been writing professionally since 1989, but this will only be my thirteenth book. (And let’s ignore the implications of thirteen.) This is only the thirteenth time that I have footled about, gone for walks, tried to start other things, sketched hollow-sounding plans for the coming months, stared blackly at the ceiling and generally failed to avoid the constant, low-level nausea generated by waiting to hear. I woke up in the morning and waited, I prodded at lunch and waited, I watched Holmes subject himself to a number of unfortunate triple-comb-over options, and still I waited. For those of you unfamiliar with the heady emotional tumble drier that is the post-handover-pre-verdict hiatus, try to imagine one of those insultingly lengthy TV elimination-round pauses which somehow elongates over days or weeks, blends with your driving-test outcome, the announcements of every important exam result upon which you have ever relied, every time you’ve asked someone lovely to have a coffee, or hold your hand, or subject you to intimate forms of relaxation and every naked-on-the-roof-of-Sydney-Opera-House-while-your-parents-and-in-laws-and--primary---school-teachers-render-you-in-watercolours anxiety dream you’ve ever had. Only it’s less pleasant than that.
Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t the same as waiting to hear if someone you love is okay, or if your scan came back clear. But waiting to find out if my book successfully scrapes past my editor does mean that three years of research, one year of full-on typing and a whole range of ideas, technical developments and experiments and personal commitments are being assessed simultaneously. The fact that things have gone well before doesn’t mean they will again. And if they fail, then there will either be a mountain of additional and disheartening work to do – when 2011 is already looking very full – or the beast is past saving and I lose a significant portion of my income. And I’m a big, rubbishy, shameful failure in an area of which I am fond. On a more personal note, the waiting to hear phase of things seems always to remove my ability to celebrate the completion of a book. The moment when I have, in many ways, done all I think I can bleeds effortlessly into the moment when I start to wait and when, if the outcome is good, the book begins to leave me and belong to a succession of other people. This time around I have a friend who has seen fit to cheerlead through all the stages of construction. In effect, he has done my celebrating for me and I have, in turn, been happy that he is happy. That’s as good as it has ever got. Which is, perhaps, perfectly fine. The end of a book marks the point when my mind consents to become obsessively interested in whatever’s next – and it’s healthy and necessary to move on.
At which point, Dear Reader, I can confess to feeling slightly grubby for having kept you yourselves waiting. The many failings of the Christmas telly schedules (and the shocking preponderance of sofa ads, to say nothing of his devotion to the editorial arts) meant that my editor set to and read my offering with alacrity and an email recently arrived stating that the thing has been deemed acceptable. This doesn’t mean that anyone else will like the book, that I won’t tinker with it more, that the novel genuinely is any use, or that it will prosper, but I am not unrelieved to know that it will get a chance to go out and make its way in the world without me and I can see how it fares.
And – setting my friend aside for a moment – I would like to thank all of you who were supportive during 2010. It was very kind of you to take the trouble. And we are all in this together – as I’ve heard said elsewhere – trying to make things properly for people we’ll probably never meet, being in favour of creation rather than destruction. I hope, if you’re writing, that all goes well. If you’re thinking of writing, then a new year is as good a place to start as any. And if you’re reading, I hope that you have all you need and unlooked-for pleasures besides. There’s nothing like writing a novel to get in the way of sustained reading, but now I can get back to the stacked volumes beside my bed and start enjoying the particular miracle of eloquent marks on paper pulp again. Onwards.
XLI
NOW THEN – BOOK signings . . . I spent a goodly portion of yesterday afternoon sitting in my study and signing book-plates to be pasted at a later date into (I have to assume) books that I have written. On the one hand, this spares the readers involved having to be in the same room with me – which many would say is a mercy – and, on the other hand, it does tend to magnify the high levels of absurdity that book signings have always impressed upon me. There I was, in my own home, producing well-wishings, congratulations and comments for people about whom I know nothing at all and trying to pretend that the addition of my cramped and childish scrawl will in some way make a book more lovely. If I am told, for example, to recommend myself warmly to Maureen with, ‘I know you’ll enjoy this’, I am aware that I’m really speaking on behalf of the kind (if misguided) friend who thinks Maureen’s life will be improved by a spot of ALK typing. If I have to say, ‘With love and kisses to Sidney’, then love and kisses will be copied out and presumably reach Sidney, but the whole procedure will leave me feeling a little as if I’m suddenly thinking more of myself than is wise or accurate, and indeed handing out favours of a more intimate nature than I would associate with a business transaction.
There are, of course, worse signing scenarios. Much worse. I am not a genre writer or a major seller, so I have rarely been left behind a table in a bookshop simply in hopes that would-be readers will spot me – like an unlooked-for phalarope, or a bargain set of kitchen containers – and be immediately moved to make an impulse purchase and have it defaced by the author forthwith. But this doesn’t mean that I have absolutely avoided the hour after humiliating hour of waiting, trying not to make eye-contact with browsers who are plainly wondering who the hell I am, and being presented with perhaps one, maybe even two copies of my work, either by people who were clearly feeling sorry for me or mad-eyed stalkers who try to touch me inappropriately before stealing the mug of cold tea I have been nursing in order to give myself anything, anything, anything at all to do, because there’s nothing I can do. (Make notes? For what: another book no one will buy? Read someone else’s book? Which is clearly doing better than yours. Read your own book? No one else will. Hide behind a newspaper? They can still see you. Cry? And so you bloody well should . . .) Nothing else at all that won’t simply make my position even more excruciating.
More hopeful are the signings that take place after readings – unless you’re reading with someone ridiculously successful, as a kind of warm-up act for them . . . How clearly I recall that evening when I was on the bill with Martin Amis and Richard Ford. Dear God . . . Average Ford and Amis queue-dweller, ‘We’ve been waiting for three months outside the building – so glad we got in. This is little Martina – she was conceived in the queue. And Richard – he’s two now . . . We love you. Can we touch your hair? Sorry we’ve talked so long – we know you still have 3,000 other people to deal with . . .’ First person in ALK queue, ‘Hi. We met when we were both on holiday in Jordan. Um . . . I thought I’d turn up. So . . . You write books, then?’ Second person in ALK queue, ‘I work here. You might as well sign this . . . keep you busy.’ And that was my queue. And Mr Ford got me to sign a book for him, because he is a kind man. Not that Mr Amis isn’t – he was just being borne shoulder-high across the foyer by admirers and didn’t have his hands free.
Size matters. And you can’t just walk away when you’re done. Nobody leaves until the last book is Sharpied . . . if that means you have to engage your tiny clutch of people in deep conversation, sing songs from shows or open your wrists to pass the time, then so be it. This is literature, baby – nobody said it would be easy . . .
Signings after events where you’ve been flying solo may be slightly less soul-destroying. It could be that book-buyers, or owners, will attend a reading by you to deepen their e
xperience of . . . well, you don’t really want to consider, but perhaps something that might mean they need a book to be signed. On long tours – especially in Germany, for some reason – this may combine tiredness and repetition in a manner that means I actually forget how to produce my own signature, and experience all manner of existential chaos while dutifully scrawling, ‘Viel Glück, Heinrich!’ and then something that would mean a cheque (in as far as such things still exist) would be instantly invalidated.
And then there are the imaginative readers and venues with extravagantly leather-bound visitors’ books who will wait until your ebb is low and chuck in a casual, ‘Oh and just draw anything you want . . .’ And suddenly there you are for all time on big posh pages between Václav Havel and Maya Angelou or suchlike, simply proving that you have no artistic ability at all, shouldn’t be there and are a fraud, an upstart impostor and someone whose volumes should be burned at every opportunity.
Add in my long-running inability to know what on earth to say to people who have been kind enough to stand in a queue in order to speak to me and whose names I will inevitably misspell (oh, the number of wrongly dedicated books I have had to hide away and pay for later, after providing replacements . . .) and you have a whole bundle of nightmares and possibilities for failure and offence.
But better to have the opportunity to be publicly shamed and to go wrong horribly than not. Of course. Better to be published than not. Of course. And – even more of course – the printed dedication page, the one I get to have neatly printed in every copy beforehand, provides me with an opportunity to do something useful in a book, something I can be happy about. Over the years and the books, I have been able to thank my mother for being my mother, to let my grandfather be happy about a small memorial to his wife and to remember him when he was also gone – to express the affection I never adequately articulate in person. It’s the best I can do. Onwards.
XLII
THE POST BELOW appeared at a time when the sale of public forests was being seriously considered.
Defending the arts – it can seem a peculiar and foolish thing to do. I’ve been working in the arts since what retrospectively seem the kind and smiling days of Thatcherite funding cuts. Now I’m watching what amounts to the UK’s Closing Down Sale. Soon, the public forests and rights of way will go, as will the post offices, the educational opportunities for the weak and the regional and the poor. And people with disabilities who live in residential care will lose their transport benefits, because why would anyone in residential care ever want to leave the building and, goodness me, wouldn’t ‘normal’ people be mightily disturbed if strange and possibly non-voting social outcasts did get out and about? (Obviously the homeless non-voting outcasts will continue to be outside all kinds of buildings in increasing numbers.) And on it will go, like the original type of juggernaut. So why, when everything seems to be threatened – health, education, heritage, sport – even mention the arts?
If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you’ll be aware that I do feel very strongly that it’s legitimate to defend the arts, even in the harshest of times. You’ll also be aware of the usual arguments fielded against anyone positioned on the side of the arts – views which have been endlessly recycled in the media over the last decades and which now mean the principal activity within many arts is apology. This is, I would point out, a landscape which many observers abroad with an awareness of European history find both alarming and bewilderingly self-destructive.
You’re just defending your own job. You’re an artist and therefore a middle-class tosser with no idea of the lives ordinary people lead and should shut up, because everything about you is suspect in ways I can’t quite describe.
You know what? Yes, I am defending my own job. It’s a great job – and I would like other people to be able to have ones like it: long, but flexible hours, adaptable practices, poorly unionised – it’s the kind of job Neocon Capitalism wants me to have. Sadly, it also involves reasonable experience-related pay and very few industrial injuries, or diseases. It’s work that does not depress or demoralise the worker. It involves dignity and high degrees of job satisfaction, both of which tend to give an artist the energy and ability to have and express opinions – sometimes political opinions – should they wish to. While a high-profile piece of bad art, self-indulgent art, patronising and watered-down art, uncommunicative art tends to produce blanket condemnations of all arts everywhere, the pieces of art that people love: the songs on their iPod, the design of their iPod, the Angel of the North, the mural at the end of their street, the play they saw on a school trip that made them into a slightly different person, the stained glass in their church, the picture on the card from someone significant, the movies they’ve collected on DVD . . . that art tends to be so personally and deeply enjoyable and loved that it becomes a part of individual personalities. Good art stops being art – it becomes a way of being happy, of receiving something beautiful and human from strangers, of exploring one’s identity, of being not alone. This is the average end-product of a good-quality and satisfying job in the arts sector of British industry. Why would I be a tosser for defending this?
Yeah, but you’re an artist – I repeat, you don’t know about ordinary people.
Wherever an artist comes from, the default classification for an arts worker tends to be Middle-Class. This means that people can come into the arts from all kinds of backgrounds and places and be granted (or be cursed with) Middle-Classness. This kind of social mobility can be hugely confusing for observers who want everyone to stay where they’re put. (And, while we’re about it, the arts are relatively gender-blind. Women can do very well in the arts without being punished for it too heavily.) Having gained an income and a trade through the arts, artists who suggest that others should have the same opportunities are dismissed as Middle-Class wankers for saying that access to the arts shouldn’t be restricted to the Middle (and perhaps Upper) Classes.
My personal experience – which is actually nobody’s business but my own – would be that I was brought up by working-class parents who had educated themselves into Middle-Class jobs. I got through the last years of my schooling and all of my university education with the aid of the state – being, by then, the child of a divorced working mother with limited resources. I then spent around ten years working with people in prisons, hospitals, daycare centres, elderly care homes. I even worked in the homes of people with special needs. Together, we used the arts to improve our lives. And lives really were improved. Finding a means of expression when people usually shout at you or ignore you is something significant. Creating a piece of art which means others view you as human, rather a problem or a freak, is a remarkable thing. (Although it can scare the crap out of politicos who want to shut down your facility, or who are trying to pretend that just because you have cerebral palsy, or use a wheelchair, or are very old and will die soon, you won’t mind losing what few pleasures you have, or jumping through increasingly arcane and humiliating hoops to gain the minimal aid that would help you contribute to your society and gain a minimum level of comfort and contentment.) The arts aren’t about self-indulgence, they’re about being fully and visibly alive.
No, the arts are elitist and self-obsessed. What about the baby who needs an incubator? Would you take the money away from a baby?
As I’ve just pointed out – and as I have pointed out for more than two decades – it takes a great deal of effort and what amounts to wholesale economic censorship to make the arts elitist and, even then, because they are nourished by personal enthusiasm, they can still break out in unexpected ways and among unconventional people. The arts communicate the humanity of others to us and our own humanity to them. Dictators, police states and every colour and composition of oppressive regime seek to control the arts, because they know that will give them enormous levels of control over their population. The book-burnings, the intimidation, the arrests and executions of artists, the specific targeting of much-loved ar
tworks – they serve a purpose. They reduce those private and sustaining joys that a population can cling to, unite around, and they reduce the information we need to remind us that other human beings are human, that they shouldn’t be robbed of dignity, shouldn’t be harmed or destroyed.
In the UK, increasingly unresponsive and self-regarding governments have imposed ever greater financial and moral burdens upon the electorate, while coincidentally suppressing the arts – muzzling one of the few ways we have of communicating with each other at emotional depth. The arts also represent one of the few ways we have of communicating with our leaders – of representing ourselves in a public forum to people dangerously isolated from the consequences of their own actions.
A straight – and completely mythical – choice between the baby’s incubator and a poem? The incubator wins every time. The poet would write the poem anyway. Poets will write less if they never get paid, thrive less, or give up. So we get fewer poems and, long-term, the poems are part of why we try to make sure there’s an incubator there for the people we don’t know, will never meet, don’t understand, don’t like. The arts are part of what gets us through the day, especially in the harshest of times. Onwards.
On Writing Page 16