Need I say how much I admire your own work? The austerity, the depth. When, may I ask, can we expect another ‘slim vol.’?
He sadly posted this letter on a wet Sunday afternoon in Leeds. He hoped that the postmark might testify to his mobility and grit.
Yet, really, he felt much steadier now. There had been a recent period of about five weeks during which, Alistair came to realize, he had gone clinically insane. That letter to Sixsmith was but one of the many dozens he had penned. He had also taken to haunting the Holborn offices of the Little Magazine: for hours he sat crouched in the coffee bars and sandwich nooks opposite, with the unsettled intention of springing out at Sixsmith – if he ever saw him, which he never did. Alistair began to wonder whether Sixsmith actually existed. Was he, perhaps, an actor, a ghost, a shrewd fiction? Alistair telephoned the LM from selected phone booths. Various people answered, and no one knew where anyone was, and only three or four times was Alistair successfully connected to the apparently permanent coughing fit that crackled away at the other end of Sixsmith’s extension. Then he hung up. He couldn’t sleep, or he thought he couldn’t, for Hazel said that all night long he whimpered and gnashed.
Alistair waited for nearly two months. Then he sent in three more screenplays. One was about a Machine hitman who emerges from early retirement when his wife is slain by a serial murderer. Another dealt with the infiltration by the three Gorgons of an escort agency in present-day New York. The third was a heavy-metal musical set on the Isle of Skye. He enclosed a stamped-addressed envelope the size of a small knapsack.
Winter was unusually mild.
‘May I get you something to drink before your meal? A cappuccino? A mineral water? A glass of sauvignon blanc?’
‘Double decaf espresso,’ said Luke. ‘Thanks.’
‘You’re more than welcome.’
‘Hey,’ said Luke when everyone had ordered. ‘I’m not just welcome any more. I’m more than welcome.’
The others smiled patiently. Such remarks were the downside of the classy fact that Luke, despite his appearance and his accent, was English. There they all sat on the terrace at Bubo’s: Joe, Jeff, Jim.
Luke said, ‘How did “Eclogue by a Five-Barred Gate” do?’
Joe said, ‘Domestically?’ He looked at Jim, at Jeff. ‘Like – fifteen?’
Luke said, ‘And worldwide?’
‘It isn’t going worldwide.’
‘How about “Black Rook in Rainy Weather”?’ asked Luke.
Joe shook his head. ‘It didn’t even do what “Sheep in Fog” did.’
‘It’s all remakes,’ said Jim. ‘Period shit.’
‘How about “Bog Oak”?’
‘ “Bog Oak”? Ooh, maybe twenty-five?’
Luke said sourly, ‘I hear nice things about “The Old Botanical Gardens”.’
They talked about other Christmas flops and bombs, delaying for as long as they could any mention of TCTs ‘’Tis he whose yester-evening’s high disdain’, which had cost practically nothing to make and had already done a hundred and twenty million in its first three weeks.
‘What happened?’ Luke eventually asked. ‘Jesus, what was the publicity budget?’
‘On “’Tis”?’ said Joe. ‘Nothing. Two, three.’
They all shook their heads. Jim was philosophical. ‘That’s poetry,’ he said.
‘There aren’t any other sonnets being made, are there?’ said Luke.
Jeff said, ‘Binary is in post-production with a sonnet. “Composed at —Castle”. More period shit.’
Their soups and salads arrived. Luke thought that it was probably a mistake, at this stage, to go on about sonnets. After a while he said, ‘How did “For Sophonisba Anguisciola” do?’
Joe said, ‘ “For Sophonisba Anguisciola”? Don’t talk to me about “For Sophonisba Anguisciola”.’
It was late at night and Alistair was in his room working on a screenplay about a high-IQ homeless black man who is transformed into a white female junk-bond dealer by a South Moluccan terrorist witchdoctor. Suddenly he shoved this aside with a groan, snatched up a clean sheet of paper, and wrote:
Dear Mr Sixsmith,
It is now well over a year since I sent you Offensive from Quasar 13. Not content with that dereliction, you have allowed five months to pass without responding to three more recent submissions. A prompt reply I would have deemed common decency, you being a fellow-screenplay writer, though I must say I have never cared for your work, finding it, at once, both florid and superficial. (I read Matthew Sura’s piece last month and I thought he got you bang to rights.) Please return the more recent screenplays, namely Decimator, Medusa Takes Manhattan and Valley of the Stratocasters, immediately.
He signed it and sealed it. He stalked out and posted it. On his return he haughtily threw off his drenched clothes. The single bed felt enormous, like an orgiast’s four-poster. He curled up tight and slept better than he had done all year.
So it was a quietly defiant Alistair who the next morning came plodding down the stairs and glanced at the splayed mail on the shelf as he headed for the door. He recognized the envelope as a lover would. He bent low as he opened it.
Do please forgive this very tardy reply. Profound apologies. But allow me to move straight on to a verdict on your work. I won’t bore you with all my personal and professional distractions.
Bore me? thought Alistair, as his hand sought his heart.
I think I can at once give the assurance that your screenplays are unusually promising. No: that promise has already been honoured. They have both feeling and burnish.
I will content myself, for now, by taking Offensive from Quasar 13. (Allow me to muse a little longer on Decimator.) I have one or two very minor emendations to suggest. Why not telephone me here to arrange a chat?
Thank you for your generous remarks about my own work. Increasingly I find that this kind of exchange – this candour, this reciprocity – is one of the things that keep me trundling along. Your words helped sustain my defences in the aftermath of Matthew Sura’s vicious and slovenly attack, from which, I fear, I am still rather reeling. Take excellent care.
‘Go with the lyric,’ said Jim.
‘Or how about a ballad?’ said Jeff.
Jack was swayable. ‘Ballads are big,’ he allowed.
It seemed to Luke, towards the end of the second day, that he was winning the sonnet battle. The clue lay in the flavour of Joe’s taciturnity: torpid but unmorose.
‘Let’s face it,’ said Jeff. ‘Sonnets are essentially hieratic. They’re strictly period. They answer to a formalized consciousness. Today, we’re talking consciousnesses that are in search of form.’
‘Plus,’ said Jack, ‘the lyric has always been the natural medium for the untrammelled expression of feeling.’
‘Yeah,’ said Jeff. ‘With the sonnet you’re stuck in this thesis-antithesis-synthesis routine.’
Joan said, ‘I mean what are we doing here? Reflecting the world or illuminating it?’
It was time for Joe to speak. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Are we forgetting that “’Tis” was a sonnet, before the rewrites? Were we on coke when we said, in the summer, that we were going to go for the sonnet?’
The answer to Joe’s last question, incidentally; was yes; but Luke looked carefully round the room. The Chinese lunch they’d had the secretary phone out for lay on the coffee table like a child’s experiments with putty and paint and designer ooze. It was four o’clock and Luke wanted to get away soon. To swim and lie in the sun. To make himself especially lean and bronzed for his meeting with the young actress Henna Mickiewicz. He faked a yawn.
‘Luke’s lagged,’ said Joe. ‘Tomorrow we’ll talk some more, but I’m pretty sure I’m recommitted to the sonnet.’
‘Sorry,’ said Alistair. ‘Me yet again. Sorry.’
‘Oh yes,’ said the woman’s voice. ‘He was here a minute ago … No, he’s there. He’s there. Just a second.’
Alistair jerked the receiver away
from his ear and stared at it. He started listening again. It seemed as if the phone itself were in paroxysm, all squawk and splat like a cabby’s radio. Then the fit passed, or paused, and a voice said tightly but proudly, ‘Hugh Sixsmith?’
It took Alistair a little while to explain who he was. Sixsmith sounded surprised but, on the whole, rather intrigued to hear from him. They moved on smoothly enough to arrange a meeting (after work, the following Monday), before Alistair contrived to put in: ‘Mr Sixsmith, there’s just one thing. This is very embarrassing, but last night I got into a bit of a state about not hearing from you for so long and I’m afraid I sent you a completely mad letter which I …’ Alistair waited. ‘Oh, you know how it is. For these screenplays, you know, you reach into yourself, and then time goes by and …’
‘My dear boy, don’t say another word. I’ll ignore it. I’ll throw it away. After a line or two I shall simply avert my unpained eye,’ said Sixsmith, and started coughing again.
Hazel did not come down to London for the weekend. Alistair did not go up to Leeds for the weekend. He spent the time thinking about that place in Earls Court Square where screenplay writers read from their screenplays and drank biting Spanish red wine and got stared at by tousled girls who wore thick overcoats and no make-up and blinked incessantly or not at all.
Luke parked his Chevrolet Celebrity on the fifth floor of the studio car park and rode down in the elevator with two minor executives in tracksuits who were discussing the latest records broken by ‘’Tis he whose yester-evening’s high disdain’. He put on his dark glasses as he crossed the other car park, the one reserved for major executives. Each bay had a name on it. It reassured Luke to see Joe’s name there, partly obscured by his Range Rover. Poets, of course, seldom had that kind of clout. Or any clout at all. He was glad that Henna Mickiewicz didn’t seem to realize this.
Joe’s office: Jim, Jack, Joan, but no Jeff. Two new guys were there. Luke was introduced to the two new guys. Ron said he spoke for Don when he told Luke that he was a great admirer of his material. Huddled over the coffee percolator with Joe, Luke asked after Jeff, and Joe said, ‘Jeff’s off the poem,’ and Luke just nodded.
They settled in their low armchairs.
Luke said, ‘What’s “A Welshman to Any Tourist” doing?’
Don said, ‘It’s doing good but not great.’
Ron said, ‘It won’t do what “The Gap in the Hedge” did.’
Jim said, ‘What did “Hedge” do?’
They talked about what ‘Hedge’ did. Then Joe said, ‘Okay. We’re going with the sonnet. Now. Don has a problem with the octet’s first quatrain, Ron has a problem with the second quatrain, Jack and Jim have a problem with the first quatrain of the sestet, and I think we all have a problem with the final couplet.’
Alistair presented himself at the offices of the LM in an unblinking trance of punctuality. He had been in the area for hours, and had spent about fifteen quid on teas and coffees. There wasn’t much welcome to overstay in the various snack bars where he lingered (and where he moreover imagined himself unfavourably recollected from his previous LM vigils), holding with both hands the creaky foam container, and watching the light pour past the office windows.
As Big Ben struck two, Alistair mounted the stairs. He took a breath so deep that he almost fell over backwards – and then knocked. An elderly office boy wordlessly showed him into a narrow, rubbish-heaped office that contained, with difficulty, seven people. At first Alistair took them for other screenplay writers and wedged himself behind the door, at the back of the queue. But they didn’t look like screenplay writers. Not much was said over the next four hours, and the identities of Sixsmith’s supplicants emerged only partially and piecemeal. One or two, like his solicitor and his second wife’s psychiatrist, took their leave after no more than ninety minutes. Others, like the VAT man and the probation officer, stayed almost as long as Alistair. But by six forty-five he was alone.
He approached the impossible haystack of Sixsmith’s desk. Very hurriedly he started searching through the unopened mail. It was in Alistair’s mind that he might locate and intercept his own letter. But all the envelopes, of which there were a great many, proved to be brown, windowed, and registered. Turning to leave, he saw a Jiffy bag of formidable bulk addressed to himself in Sixsmith’s tremulous hand. There seemed no reason not to take it. The old office boy, Alistair soon saw, was curled up in a sleeping-bag under a worktable in the outer room.
On the street he unseamed his package in a ferment of grey fluff. It contained two of his screenplays, Valley of the Stratocasters and, confusingly, Decimator. There was also a note:
I have been called away, as they say. Personal ups and downs. I shall ring you this week and we’ll have – what? Lunch?
Enclosed, too, was Alistair’s aggrieved letter – unopened. He moved on. The traffic, human and mechanical, lurched past his quickened face. He felt his eyes widen to an obvious and solving truth: Hugh Sixsmith was a screenplay writer. He understood.
After an inconclusive day spent discussing the caesura of ‘Sonnet’’s opening line, Luke and his colleagues went for cocktails at Strabismus. They were given the big round table near the piano.
Jane said, ‘TCT is doing a sequel to “’Tis”.’
Joan said, ‘Actually it’s a prequel.’
‘Title?’ said Joe.
‘Undecided. At TCT they’re calling it “’Twas”.’
‘My son,’ said Joe thoughtfully, after the waiter had delivered their drinks, ‘called me an asshole this morning. For the first time.’
‘That’s incredible,’ said Bo. ‘My son called me an asshole this morning. For the first time.’
‘So?’ said Mo.
Joe said, ‘He’s six years old, for Christ’s sake.’
Phil said, ‘My son called me an asshole when he was five.’
‘My son hasn’t called me an asshole yet,’ said Jim. ‘And he’s nine.’
Luke sipped his Bloody Mary. Its hue and texture made him wonder whether he could risk blowing his nose without making yet another visit to the bathroom. He hadn’t called Suki for three days. Things were getting compellingly out of hand with Henna Mickiewicz. He hadn’t actually promised her a part in the poem, not on paper. Henna was great, except you kept thinking she was going to suddenly sue you anyway.
Mo was saying that each child progresses at its own rate, and that later lulls regularly offset the apparent advances of the early years.
Jim said, ‘Still, it’s a cause of concern.’
Mo said, ‘My son’s three. And he calls me an asshole all the time.’
Everybody looked suitably impressed.
The trees were in leaf, and the rumps of the tourist buses were thick and fat in the traffic, and all the farmers wanted fertilizer admixes rather than storehouse insulation when Sixsmith finally made his call. In the interim, Alistair had convinced himself of the following: before returning his aggrieved letter, Sixsmith had steamed it open and then resealed it. During this period, also, Alistair had grimly got engaged to Hazel. But the call came.
He was pretty sure he had come to the right restaurant. Except that it wasn’t a restaurant, not quite. The place took no bookings, and knew of no Mr Sixsmith, and was serving many midday breakfasts to swearing persons whose eyes bulged over mugs of flesh-coloured tea. On the other hand, there was alcohol. All kinds of people were drinking it. Fine, thought Alistair. Fine. What better place, really, for a couple of screenplay writers to …
‘Alistair?’
Confidently Sixsmith bent his long body into the booth. As he settled, he looked well pleased with the manoeuvre. He contemplated Alistair with peculiar neutrality, but there was then something boyish, something consciously remiss, in the face he turned to the waiter. As Sixsmith ordered a gin and tonic, and as he amusingly expatiated on his weakness for prawn cocktails, Alistair found himself wryly but powerfully drawn to this man, to this rumpled screenplay writer with his dreamy gaze, the curious
elisions of his somewhat slurred voice, and the great dents and bone shadows of his face, all the faulty fontanelles of vocational care. He knew how old Sixsmith was. But maybe time moved strangely for screenplay writers, whose flames burnt so bright …
‘And as for my fellow artisan in the scrivener’s trade: Alistair. What will you have?’
At once Sixsmith showed himself to be a person of some candour. Or it might have been that he saw in the younger screenplay writer someone before whom all false reticence could be cast aside. Sixsmith’s estranged second wife, it emerged, herself the daughter of two alcoholics, was an alcoholic. Her current lover (ah, how these lovers came and went!) was an alcoholic. To complicate matters, Sixsmith explained as he rattled his glass at the waiter, his daughter, the product of his first marriage, was an alcoholic. How did Sixsmith keep going? Despite his years, he had, thank God, found love, in the arms of a woman young enough (and, by the sound of it, alcoholic enough) to be his daughter. Their prawn cocktails arrived, together with a carafe of hearty red wine. Sixsmith lit a cigarette and held up his palm towards Alistair for the duration of a coughing fit that turned every head in the room. Then, for a moment, understandably disorientated, he stared at Alistair as if uncertain of his intentions, or even his identity. But their bond quickly re-established itself. Soon they were talking away like hardened equals – of Trumbo, of Chayevsky, of Towne, of Eszterhas.
Around two thirty, when, after several attempts, the waiter succeeded in removing Sixsmith’s untouched prawn cocktail, and now prepared to serve them their braised chops with a third carafe, the two men were arguing loudly about early Puzo.
Joe yawned and shrugged and said languidly, ‘You know something? I was never that crazy about the Petrarchan rhyme scheme anyway.’
The Penguin Book of the British Short Story Page 77