The Birth of Love

by Joanna Kavenna

  *

  He was sweating though the room was cool, full of manufactured cold air. Like the other men, he had taken off his jacket, and undone his tie. As if they were saying, now we are among friends, that was what he thought it meant, all their loosened collars, their jackets slung over the backs of their chairs. With the trousers of his suit wrinkled, a smart suit he had been forced to borrow, never having had much need for one before, Michael saw their faces blurring and re-forming, and he tried to say, ‘I rather enjoy … hearing all of your opinions … For a long time I lacked readers …’ He wiped his temple again, and because he was floundering, Sally stepped in.

  ‘Michael is very tired. He has been working on this book for many years. He is a little overwhelmed, I believe.’

  They nodded and murmured back at her. And Michael breathed more easily, because Sally had granted him a respite. So he slouched a little in his seat, and took another slug of wine.

  *

  He only had tenuous impressions, warped by his nerves. Peter Kennedy, head of Giraffe Books, the imprint which had finally published him, was leaning towards him – they were all leaning towards him. He was embarrassed to discover that they were trying to encourage him. So he leaned forward politely because Peter Kennedy was saying, ‘I’d like to propose a toast anyway. To The Moon.’

  *

  Michael tried to smile, and while Peter added a few more words of praise he pushed his grey hair back, and fiddled with his cuffs, and there was a general murmur as they all lifted their glasses. And Sally said, ‘I am just so glad you decided to publish it, Peter.’

  *

  Under the table, Michael wiped his palms together. The talk continued; he was glad when the debate surged around him. And while they talked, he saw the room was filled with soft afternoon light; furtively he watched Roger Annais marking his words with a beat beat of his hands and Arthur Grey nodding twice in return, and there was someone else saying, ‘I’m writing to The Times about Lamott today; anyone want to sign it?’

  Yes, they said. ‘Email me the letter when you’ve drafted it,’ said one, and another said, ‘Don’t you want to wait, to see if there is any more fuss?’

  ‘No, I think I’d like to speak now. I know my opinion already.’

  ‘One can only hope it will strike a general chord.’ Roger Annais marked his words with a beat beat of his hands and Michael caught Arthur Grey staring towards him – their eyes met, and Arthur Grey half-smiled, half-nodded, then looked away.

  *

  One can only hope, thought Michael. For them, there was an intellectual point to be made, a debate for the letters pages. Beyond him, a controversy raged, something he did not understand. More important than his book, something which reverberated widely. For him, there was the business of the reviews-this sense of judgement, of a public reckoning – perhaps this was why his hand kept trembling when he lifted his glass, why he was drinking such a steady stream of wine. And Sally was pressing his arm, to let him know she was there. ‘It’s hard, the first book,’ he had heard her saying earlier, to a friend of hers. Into her mobile, she had said, ‘Especially at his age.’

  *

  There were reasons why you became a writer. Diffidence, a fear of social events. An affinity for solitude. Perhaps even misanthropy. You had to like sitting alone in a room. You had to be able to conjure your best thoughts and phrases alone. It seemed to Michael that some people were writers because they wrote better than they talked. He talked very badly, and had never – until now – been asked about his books. He had hardly been called upon to justify or explain them. He had not minded this much; he thought such explanations would be redundant anyway. How could you express something more plainly in a hasty phrase than in a meticulously worked sentence? Surely you were more likely to traduce yourself, to expose all the inner contradictions of your crafted prose? Yet recently they had been asking him to parse his phrases. They had been saying, ‘When you wrote … what did you mean?’ ‘When you said this … what did this mean?’ Sometimes he tried to explain that it was not him, it was a narrator. ‘But you wrote the narrator,’ they said, which was true enough. ‘But I am not the narrator.’ ‘But what did you mean when you made him say …?’ ‘Can you be more plain?’ they asked, but he wasn’t sure he could. He had become a writer so he could avoid his kind, so he could evade the false intimacy of the office and days spent in the company of others. He had been a solitary child; his own mother had told him so. ‘People need you more than you need them,’ she once said. In youth he suffered through a few office jobs; he shuffled papers and was ignored by his colleagues – he had been too quiet to interest them, so they left him alone. He dragged himself through these jobs and then he spent years as a language teacher. I am, you are, he is. We are, they are. John likes to go to the cinema. Do you like to go to the cinema? Then he got a job teaching creative writing at Hendon College of Further Education, when he simply wanted to be alone with the thoughts in his head. He wanted to live within these thoughts; they were compelling enough to him. If he could have made a living from writing, he would perhaps have never left his room. He might have been a true recluse, his desk turned away from the window, oblivious to everything except the page. His pen moving through space. The hours moving onwards.

  *

  ‘Sally tells me you have spent years writing?’ Arthur Grey was asking, as if he had read Michael’s mind. It was a benevolent enquiry, he heard the kindness in the man’s voice, and so he said, ‘Yes, most of my life …’

  ‘You were struggling? I mean … to earn money?’

  ‘I did odd jobs … But it was not … very elegant …’

  ‘Michael has been rather ill,’ said Sally, protectively. ‘He wore himself down writing and – now – worrying.’

  ‘It is the uncertainty,’ said Michael. ‘The sense that one’s words … are not one’s own; that they might mean in ways one … didn’t expect … It was not my intention … all of this …’

  ‘Of course it wasn’t. Art was your intention,’ said Arthur Grey. ‘But I interrupted you, you were saying …’

  ‘I was trying to write about conviction …’ – and the table nodded – ‘… about those who propose something that is not generally thought, and how they are dealt with. About those who are convinced of what they say, to the point that they continue to speak, even when everyone has turned away. And I felt that … all things being unknowable, all real things, all real mysteries, then … well, who can stand, really, and say, “I know; I understand”? I wanted to write … something about this … impulse … to tell others what is true …’

  *

  Their polite silence made things worse, kept surging into the cracks in his sentences.

  ‘I wanted to ask why some people are raised … aloft, and others cast down … into darkness,’ he said.

  They nodded back at him.

  *

  He wanted to tell them that he couldn’t remember precisely what he had been thinking of at the time. That it was a long time ago, a few years, that he started thinking about this book. He could not quite remember what it was, the original spark, the kernel he had begun with. He had been interested, for a long time before he even began his book, in the history of medicine, and then he read about Ignaz Semmelweis, this man who had driven himself mad. He was gripped by the story of Semmelweis, that was sure enough. So he started writing about Semmelweis, perhaps he intended to write only about him, but then other strands emerged. The whole thing took months, then years. His narrator rattled on – he supposed it was himself, some aspect of himself – so he set this man rattling on, and the whole story became – or to him it seemed this way – a metaphor, for any system of belief. It might be Christianity or it might be evolution, or the idea that humours governed the body. While he was writing, it occurred to him that there had been a time when medicine was founded on entirely different principles, then accepted as persuasive – the beneficial properties of leeches, or the uses of phrenology. And people had
been convinced of these ideas. And there had been a time when mainstream science assumed that continental drift was impossible, and Wegener was branded eccentric. History was littered with such characters, proposing theories that offended the norms of their profession, finding themselves ostracised. And he thought the same was true of religions, in the end, that each new religion set itself up against others that had gone before, that the history of mankind was littered with discarded gods and goddesses. Something about Semmelweis’s frantic talk of mothers, his obsessive devotions, made him think of all the crones and goddesses who had been worshipped for thousands of years and then shoved aside. Artemis, Isis, Ishtar, Ashtoreth, Brigid, Cybele: their temples burned, left in ruins, their powers spent. And there was something else he didn’t even manage to formulate entirely, something which lurked beneath, but he wrote because it was a habit and he couldn’t stop himself, and he wanted to be published because he was vain – perhaps that was it, he simply wanted to be able to look at his published books, feel the glossy covers. He wanted to tell them all – Arthur Grey and Alice Mortimer and Roger Annais – that he only meant – his narrator only meant – that much had been forgotten, much remained obscure and perhaps unknowable. That it was madness to presume to know. Even to speak – to write – was perhaps madness, and he hardly expected anyone to agree with anything he wrote. Even as he drove words onto the page, he assumed his opinions were his own small maniacal perceptions, and he didn’t think they would necessarily chime with anyone else’s. Because of this, he felt quite alone.

  *

  He wrote his novel, and sent it to his agent, Sally Blanchefleur, who was impatient with him at the time and thought he would never do well. She had been his agent for years and it was clear her patience was wearing thin. The previous novel he sent her, she had not liked at all. She had taken months to respond, and finally she wrote, ‘Michael, I am sorry, but frankly I am not convinced.’ Nothing more than that, a terse note, after all his years of writing and the months she had taken to reply. He wanted never to speak to her again, after that, but she was the only agent who had ever replied to him, and he knew no others. So instead he badgered her on the phone, begged her for answers. ‘You are an intelligent man but you have to decide what you want,’ she told him, a trace of boredom in her voice. ‘Either accept your circumstances, or try to write something more … palatable to the general reader.’

  *

  Palatable, he had thought, sitting in his little room, in his flat in South London. To become palatable. That was the challenge she had set him. At fifty-five, to live in a small flat in South London pursuing unwanted projects; it was foolish to resist. But he found he was intractable, he couldn’t do it. He didn’t want to masquerade as someone else, and anyway he lacked the necessary daring. He simply couldn’t do it. ‘It wouldn’t hurt if you became a little more digestible’ – that was another phrase Sally used. The public appetite, the general palate, had no taste for him. Sally had been loyal, but now her loyalty was laced with fatigue and perhaps an element of pity. Poor old Michael Stone, better ring him. ‘Never mind, sometimes you can create your own audience,’ she would say. ‘Perhaps you’ll be the exception.’ But he felt she didn’t really believe it.

  *

  He had been writing for himself, that was the thing. He had been alone in a silent room and he had forgotten there was any chance of being overheard. Like being schizophrenic. You spoke to yourself and then you answered. You did not need to clarify your words; you were content with suggestions, half-fashioned thoughts. And then someone else invaded your cosy talk, this conversation you were having with yourself. Someone eavesdropped, heard half of what you were saying, or even less perhaps, and then they began to talk over you. They said, ‘So this is what you mean.’ Not even ‘what I think you mean’. Simply ‘this is’. First one, then a group of them, saying loudly and firmly, ‘This is the meaning of your rambling indecisive prose. We will explain.’ They got more loquacious. They talked and then they condemned you.

  *

  With The Moon everything had been different. ‘Well, Michael,’ Sally said. ‘Perhaps we might finally find you a publisher.’ He wanted to sob with relief. ‘There are many problems,’ she added. He listened, gripping the phone. ‘Men are unlikely to read a book about childbirth. It’s unfortunate, but there’s not much to be done. Women might just, but they’ll get put off by your obscure doctor. And the title too – the title is rather awkward.’ But he didn’t want to change the title. ‘It sounds like a dreary symbolist novel,’ said Sally. ‘And this rambling narrator, who seems mad himself. It’s as if you want to talk about everything, in one book. You can’t talk about everything in one book. It’s boring and it bores the reader.’

  *

  But he did want to talk about everything, the universe as he found it, not that he was much of an interpreter. He wanted to cry out how beautiful he found it, but how he was mired in darkness and knew nothing at all. Perhaps he wanted to find a way to express his ignorance. Sally explained to him – rather sternly – that he should take her advice, she was trying her best – she had been ringing around everyone she could think of, and finally – she could hardly believe it herself – she had found him a publisher. That sent him into nervous joy for a few days, and then they backed out. The editor was sorry. ‘Terribly sorry. Not my decision,’ he wrote. On second thoughts, they had decided it was not right for their list. They had thought carefully – ‘agonised long and hard’, wrote the editor – and they simply didn’t want the book. ‘They don’t think it’s worth it,’ said Sally, and now she lined up beside him. She phoned him regularly to give him progress reports. Finally she found Peter Kennedy who told him he loved the book and paid him almost nothing, but no one else would consider it at all, and so - Sally explained - he really had no choice.

  Sally was brisk and unsentimental. ‘It’s a good novel, I’m not saying it isn’t a good novel, but it will be tough to find it a large readership,’ she said to him on the phone. ‘I’ve been talking to Peter, we were discussing the vogue for historical dramas, perhaps there’s something in that – but still, there’s only so far they can go.’ Michael tried to explain – once again he tried, though of course he was never persuasive – that wasn’t the point, but she was already talking over him. ‘Look, you have to relax a bit,’ she said. ‘I’ll get some friends to throw a launch party for you. And we’ll have a nice lunch on the day. Then you just have to hope the reviews are kind.’ And now she had them, hidden in her bag. She would not show them to him, she did not want to spoil their nice lunch.

  *

  ‘Would you like some more wine, sir?’ the waiter was saying in his ear. He nodded and held out his glass.

  ‘How is the lamb?’ said Sally.

  ‘Very good,’ he said.

  They were speaking quietly, and the talk continued around them. She put her hand on his arm again. ‘You do look pale, Michael. Is there anything else you would like?’

  ‘I wish I had done everything much better,’ he said. ‘I wish I had …’

  ‘It’s important to sustain a sense of humour about all of this,’ said Sally. ‘It’s a sort of game. Not the work, the work is very important. But the launch, this, the business surrounding you. That’s a sort of game. It can be fun, even.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If you are too worried about what people think of your work, you will only be disappointed,’ she said.

  ‘I am not disappointed,’ he said. ‘I am …’

  She waited politely, with her fork raised.

  ‘ … in shock,’ he said.

  *

  Then the waiters came and began to clear the plates away.

  *

  ‘Michael, what will you do after this?’ said Alice Mortimer.

  ‘Perhaps … I would like to go on holiday,’ said Michael.

  They smiled at him, laughed a little.

  ‘Are you working on another book?’ said Roger Annais.

  ‘I don�
��t have any ideas at present. I have been … well, it has been hard to focus on my work …’

  ‘Of course it has,’ said Alice Mortimer. ‘I remember that, you feel you have to test the water, before you start again.’

  ‘We need more wine,’ said Sally, holding up her hand. ‘We really should have another drink.’

  *

  Michael looked down. They had taken his plate away. He had hardly touched the food, he had merely drunk the wine. So now his head was thick with wine and if anyone wanted to speak to him this afternoon, he would be drunk.

  *

  He would pass the rest of the day stewed in wine, and tomorrow – perhaps tomorrow – things would be different. It was an irony that after all these years of hoping for an audience, of imagining that was what he needed, he found these people so bemusing. He longed for the privacy of his room, where he sat for years without anyone noticing. Unsullied, immaculate in his obscurity and failure. The river coursed along beneath him, dragging everyone else along. He saw them dragged along each morning, surging towards the Underground, and he thought of them being poured into London, into their offices. And then they flooded home at five and six and seven o’clock, short and fat and tall and broad, conveyed by the current, subject to its force. He surveyed everything from his tower and thought he had escaped it. He surveyed them from the safety of the shore. He had been voluntarily beached for years. And now, somehow, he had been dragged in. Here they all were, these people who swam with the current and he was there too, but they were swimming along, buoyant and accustomed to their state, and he was drowning even as they spoke to him.