I am now about to embark upon the round of promotional activities, which is always appreciated – if no one were taking an interest, that would be a very sad thing for the book – and yet which is also hideous. I will soon have my photograph taken by professionals who usually deal with attractive human beings, who can be safely enlarged across newspaper pages without causing public distress; we will both know that many things are very, very wrong with this picture. Still, I must try not to look as if I would rather slit my throat than be repeatedly humiliated in this manner. I must somehow stand at an angle that implies I have written something readers might like and smile a smile that makes me seem human, or at least not dangerous. Over time, I have got slightly better at this, but not much. Sometimes circumstances are kind, or I know the photographer, or we can chat about lenses, or light, or puppies, and pretend that the photos aren’t happening. Sometimes occasions inform against me. For example, I was once snapped exhaustively in Paris quite close to the offices of Vogue. Parisian passers-by – who tend to be dapper, suave and socially engaged – made no secret of the fact that they were finding it very hard to work out why their arrondissement suddenly had a blighted gonk lurking in it for a photo-shoot, rather than the usual, achingly gorgeous succession of Brazilian lingerie models. For a long moment they would stare, then they would reflect and then they would make an internal statement which ran something along the lines of ‘Ah . . . the Before picture’. Or, indeed, ‘Ah . . . she must have been in a terrible accident and can no longer model lingerie, only surgical corsets and veils. Quel dommage!’
And then there are the interviews, during which – as a contractual and career-sustaining obligation – the author must be enthus-iastic about his or her own work, must be coherent about his or her own working process, must not say anything that inadvertently damages or embarrasses a friend or loved one, must try to appear in some way interesting and must not mention anything inept or controversial, or comment upon anything to do with the Wonderful World of Literature that might blow up in his or her face later, causing untold woe. Given that I have broken all of these rules at one time or another, I’m kind of past saving. I do try to steer as sane and uncataclysmic a course as I can. This causes me stress, which causes me to make the mistakes that I am stressed about avoiding. There have been occasions when I have steadfastly and repeatedly shot myself in both feet and gone on to double-tap some additional pairs of shoes in the cupboard for good measure. There have been interviews when journalists have turned up determined to be nice, no matter what – even bringing gifts with them – and others have arrived and seemed entirely pleasant before putting together the type of knife-job I would think of as worthwhile only if I were anyone of whom anybody had actually heard. And then there was that time when an ex-boyfriend phoned up repeatedly with scathing comments upon my person until even the knife-wielder in receipt of his revelations became slightly uneasy. There is nothing like any kind of public exposure to make friends, enemies and total strangers act oddly around you. Sometimes, they give you free fruit. (Proper famous people get cars and suits and electrical goods, I know, but once-every-four-years-in-a-weekend-supplement people get fruit. Or maybe it’s just me. I look as if I need fruit . . .) And sometimes I don’t get any fruit at all.
When I first started writing, I used to read most of the interviews. I would think, ‘I shall study this and find out useful stuff about me that I didn’t realise and can put to work in my ongoing processes of personal improvement. It won’t all just confuse and scare the crap out of me.’ In fact, interviews have – over the years – informed me that I dress badly, look ill, have a dingy flat and illogical furniture, while creating an alternative persona for me, which is mildly useful as a way of being in public without getting threadbare, but which is bewildering as an artefact. I do have chums who are interviewed far more than me, and I have never learned anything about them from the press that I didn’t know already, beyond random facts that might mean I can provide them with slightly more accurate Christmas presents. This isn’t surprising – they are my friends, of course I know them better than someone they met for an hour in a hotel suite or a moderately quiet restaurant. But print seems so authoritative . . . If you’re in any way unhappy with feeling as if your arse has been shoved out of a window for no good reason, then it’s probably best to keep away from the thought of interviews, or their printed actuality, and to concentrate on being profoundly grateful that someone is helping you sell ten or eleven extra books.
Which is the point to remember: I am trying to assist my work. I did what I could to help it be alive – it came to me to be expressed, and I was grateful and I put the hours in as best I could. A number of other people at my publisher’s have also put in their hours. I am mainly worrying about the next novel – but they are still working on this one. And now this novel has left me. It has slung its metaphorical haversack over its brave, small, metaphorical shoulders and is trotting off to do some Youth Hostelling in Indonesia without me. I’ll worry, but there’s no more I can do, beyond trying to get people to look out for it and maybe pat its head as it goes by and not murder it, slice it up and make it disappear into a series of oozing airline holdalls. Which brings us to the reviews. Onwards.
LII
APOLOGIES FOR THE unscheduled break from blogging. I wasn’t waylaid by an endless stream of A-List book-launch activities, fervid searches for an unhackable phone and invitations from the Big Brother production team. I was simply ill. Again. Which gets tedious. I now have a specialist for whatever is wrong with my stomach and everyone telling me to rest in order to beat the post-viral/recurring-viral labyrinthitis. Picture me earlier this month in a small, boiling flat somewhere in Soho, lying down, throwing up, having panic attacks and listening to helicopters grind overhead to deal with full-blown or incipient riots. And crying if I had to do something complicated – like putting on my shoes, or trying to discuss my schedule with my editor. I was a bit tired. Writing a novel in eleven months instead of thirteen isn’t a good thing. I console myself that writing two books a year gave Muriel Spark hallucinations. I’m not bloody surprised.
Meanwhile, we may want to discuss the fact that book launches are always fairly horrible, even setting illness aside. And this isn’t just my opinion – I have checked with other writers, painters and creative sorts, including actors, who you would think were simply gagging for engagement with the wider public, and the feedback has been comfortingly similar. It seems that for many of us representing our work in the wider world always feels both disappointingly anticlimactic and weird. At a certain level you’re aware that, even if you could call yourself an artist at other times, you are currently much more of a pimp. And, given that you’re more than half way to pimping yourself . . . well, your job description gets rapidly less appetising.
At this point, all those of you who haven’t been published will wish to shout at your screens/HTC’s/iThings/looted BlackBerrys, ‘Yes, but . . . you’ve got it now. You are published. You do earn your living. Shut up and stop moaning. I will be delighted when I am published. I will be dancing in the sodding street, thank you very much.’ And I know how you feel. And I thought that, too. But I was wrong and it may be that you are wrong also. Perhaps.
When you’re writing, when matters are actually going well and your work is being with you and you’re with it – that’s a cause for dancing in the street. When you’ve found someone insane enough to pay you – real cash money – to pay you for doing something you love, and the pressure of payment hasn’t thrown you off . . . by all means why not have a go at something pavement-related and terpsichorean. When the first draft is finished, done, the final slope clambered up and you’ve got skinned knees and are exhausted, but you made it . . . dance away. Absolutely. When the final rewrite, the final twiddle, the dearGodatakeitawaybeforeIkillit stage has been passed and it’s in the big, threatening envelope or, more likely, has been attached and emailed as per contractual blah-di-blahs – well, that’s probably a
n excuse for naked living-room dancing. Or else, and do feel free, you may prefer something more al fresco, which could help you to get arrested and therefore start the whole publicity machine running, albeit a touch early. And when you open the big box of author copies and there it is – your book . . . Your shiny, genuine book, in person and in your hands . . . Dance while you can, I’d say.
But publication is funny – in the sense of being not remotely amusing and not really very much to do with you. Publication is what your publisher enjoys – if that special blend of moderate concern, review-checking, subscription-checking and moving on to what’s next from whoever’s next can be called enjoying. Publication is when something with which you’ve spent a lot of time definitively walks away and belongs to other people, who either get it, or don’t get it, or write to you about it, or trash it in the press, or love it in the press (best to keep away from either) and it all feels . . . odd. On the one hand, you’re thinking of what’s next for you – or trying to – and seem strangely far away from the material you are suddenly being asked to discuss (quite possibly with an audience present), and on the other hand, here are all these strangers fossicking about in stuff that was quite recently only your stuff. Your book slept with you and travelled with you and woke with you and nagged you and delighted you and drove you crazy and tired you out. Now it’s just another volume on a shelf – you hope – in a bookshop, much the same as all the others, and it belongs to everyone but you. You are the only person who can’t pick it up and read it. In fact, why on earth would you ever want to? And how lovely, and yet really quite dispiriting, it is that people will read it – this thing it took you years to build – in a few days and then that’s that. They’ll read something else. You’re over. The launching experience is, to be frank, mainly lonely. I don’t say this to discourage you, not at all. I say this as an encouragement to get your fun in early – enjoy the parts that are real, that are about writing. Be glad and then more glad and then absolutely grateful if anyone, any human being, tells you that you gave them pleasure with your work. If you got one person through some hours in a good way, thank them for saying so and thank them again and thank providence for the opportunity to be of service – that’s the only thing that really matters, or could be worthwhile. Truly. And try to defend the part of you that has to be kept soft and tender, the simply loving place from which you write. Keep it safe from the writing-related experiences which are not soft and tender or simple and loving at all.
So I will tell you, and then choose to forget, the launch day I spent mainly feeling lousy and oppressed and dizzy and worrying about a number of matters, including my inability to recover. I will forget about suiting up – because my suit knows what it’s doing – and being steered out to a bookshop reading that felt very much like an absurd opportunity to celebrate the accumulated failures of my life. I will forget having to concentrate rather too hard on putting one word after another for an audience who had bothered to turn up and made an effort, and who were courteous and in no way responsible for my wanting to vomit and lie down. I will forget wanting to curl up and cry while signing books, when there is nothing wrong with signing books and it is very nice when people want them. I will forget about having dinner in a dizzyingly loud restaurant with three people I knew only slightly who were very kind, but who also just wanted to get on and have some good grub and a laugh – only there I was, the inconvenient spectre at my own feast. I will forget about being sick on or near my editor’s shoes while he escorted me through a hot and weaving and vomiting Soho, within which I seemed simply more of the same, although not drunk and not stoned and not determined to party – just being led to my temporary home with instructions to cease trading forthwith and take a proper rest.
In four or five years it will all be faded and simply a story. And – if I’m lucky – around about then I’ll be doing it again. But I hope better. I do hope for better. And for all of you also. Onwards.
LIII
AS SOME OF you may know, I’ve spent decades participating in literary events, many of which involve Q&A sessions. So I am used to audience queries that are just plain bonkers, or refer to dark conspiracies that mean enquirers will never themselves be published, or properly appreciated, while sneaky Illuminati and/or Lizardpeople like myself are given favourably termed contracts and buckets of baby mice on demand. I am also familiar with questions asked both in reality and in episodes of Murder, She Wrote: ‘Do you write with a pen, or use a refurbished shuttle from a Portuguese handloom?’, ‘When do you first pick up your shuttle of a morning?’, ‘How long before you have to break off and eat some baby mice?’ and the inevitable ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’
Many of the above are now regarded as uncool and avoided by more savvy literary audiences, even though an attentive new writer might conceivably find something encouraging about X’s yellow legal pads, or W’s penchant for vellum, or N’s fondness for scribbling on the backs of ginger lumberjacks. And if an audience is sitting there, reproachfully expectant once the Where From Question has been asked, then some kind of response probably should be forthcoming. I have known writers who routinely refuse to answer questions posed onstage, but unless they are genuinely being intruded upon, this tends to mean they come across like a date who kisses your ear and then slaps you for letting him. Not answering the Where From Question can leave a lingering sense that perhaps the typist under scrutiny acquires ideas under the counter from seedy back-street inspiration dens, or cheap foreign ideas, bred in conditions involving cruelty and inadequate hygiene. And then there’s the ideas provided by Satan at the cost of my mortal soul option.
Am I happy about answering the Where From Question myself? Not hugely. This is partly because the area – though ill-defined – is hedged about with superstition. If I look at it too closely will it disappear? And it’s partly because my answer will occur in a wider context which renders it absurd. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the demonic bargain scenario began to lose currency just as authors lost their allotted role as people who performed, albeit minor, acts of creation and invention. It once seemed likely that human beings who could make something out of nothing were divinely inspired, or rattled by demons, or somehow Connected. This could make priests of poets – which isn’t healthy for anyone – but it also gave respect to the craft and opened the possibility that imagining and creating might be human as well as divine. Then literary criticism – which has to involve research – remade the writer as a kind of self-obsessed photocopier, regurgitating cheap repros of reality, pinching bits of friends, lovers and acquaintances, then sewing them together and making the monstrous results limp off to people unsurprising little worlds. Fiction became autobiography. Or Commentary. Or Essay. Which is to say, not fiction at all: not powerful, mysterious, wonderful and overwhelming, but only something which can be fitted neatly into a PhD essay, or a review of the type that suggests the reviewer is privy to certain intimate facts about the character and circumstances of the author without which the reader will be lost. If the reader would be lost without those facts, of course, the piece of writing wouldn’t work. Writing is about communication, not which parties you attend.
So now the tail wags the dog. Readers who love all kinds of fiction – including the most fantastic of fantasies – have to shut up about their passions for fear of being considered silly. Writers who spend their lives chasing ghosts, angels, demons, syllables and the shapes of things unknown aren’t allowed to articulate how disturbing and fantastic and marvellous this process is. Meanwhile, the essays and the reviews flourish in the context they have constructed. It is very largely a dead context. It is a context many fine academics loathe. It is a context within which every mind is dreamless, has no whims, no thoughts of the past beyond accurate accounting, no hopes for the future, no intuitions about the present and, above all, no inspiration. Inspiration originally referred, as you will know, to the idea of being filled with divine spirit, some kind of transforming, burning Othern
ess, the sense of having an idea, a thought, a need, breathed straight into your lungs. I don’t, as a writer and as a reader, ever want writers or readers to be locked away from the power and the beauty of that. Any individual might interpret it differently, but its absence would always be no fun at all. Its denial would be emotionally, psychologically and even morally debilitating. I’m not saying that creation is always Good – it’s patently not. But without it, we can get very short on remedies for Bad very quickly, and the stories we tell ourselves shrink around us and reduce what we feel we can be.
To return to Q&As, there is now, quite naturally, an expectation that the Where From Question will be answered with something that refers to the author’s personality and life, to people from whom he or she has stolen this or that, to a type of plagiarism from reality. This would, apart from anything else, be crushingly simplistic. Yes, the story does come through the author and is of the author. A tale of a murderous baker with one eye, as expressed by John Banville, might not at all resemble that expressed by Richard Curtis. The work will reflect the passions of the writer – it’s unlikely that an author will commit to a novel about philately unless it really is something they want to be around for months. Then again, if an idea arrives and is insistent and involves stamp-collecting, then an enthusiasm for the sticky little buggers must be cultivated, because fantasy must be given the certainty of lived experience. (I know we live in an X Factored world of instant results, but an illusion of lived experience accessible to another is best created by hard work, not by living the experience – that bit’s for you, not the reader.) The author’s beliefs probably won’t be transgressed – it’s unlikely that I’ll write about a woman who’s scared of mice and wants only to cook for Her Man, and yet . . . if one arrived to be expressed, I’d have to. The process of personal commitment, exploration, loss, surprise and puzzlement fluctuates and coheres. Initial ideas are shaped and reshaped, sometimes consciously, sometimes – once again – in a rush of pressure which can seem external.
On Writing Page 20