Lost for Words: A Novel

by Edward St. Aubyn

  Katherine was not a star yet but she was full of promise, and everyone at Page and Turner hoped and expected to see her latest novel, Consequences, on the Elysian Short List. There wasn’t a line he hadn’t pondered and polished. He had boldly changed the chapter order and meticulously tightened the plot. It had been a real collaboration. He had watched some of the sentences form on her computer screen while he kissed her neck and ran his hands over her body, not sure whether he preferred to distract or inspire her. They lay in bed at weekends, Katherine writing the next chapter while he edited the one before. Being so close to her writing made Alan realize that Katherine’s enthralling sexuality was only part of a broader erotic relationship with experience. She wrote the sentences of someone who trails her fingers over the furniture she admires and inhales the scent of a melon before slicing it open, who touches what she can touch, but also expects the most abstruse ideas to turn into sensations as her imagination takes them in.

  He had only just made the Elysian deadline, hanging on to the typescript until the last moment in case there was something still to be done; two sentences turned into one, one sentence broken into two, the substitution of a slightly resistant adjective to engender a moment’s reflection, in short, the joys of editing, all carried out without forgetting the art that disguises art, giving the appearance of ease to the greatest difficulty and bringing clarity to tangled and obscure ideas. It had been a terrible wrench when he handed the typescript to his assistant to get it biked over to the Elysian people on that final afternoon, but he knew that the collaboration would continue. He would help Katherine to find exactly the right way to describe the novel in interviews and, if all went well, the right tone for her speech at the Elysian dinner.

  As his taxi turned into Gloucester Terrace, Alan spotted Didier Leroux and Sam Black, both looking rather crumpled, as if they had been drinking all night and hadn’t had time to go home and change. Sam was a novelist who Alan might one day tempt over to Page and Turner, if he could get him for a reasonable price. Didier, on the other hand, he dreaded seeing, not only because he was an ex-boyfriend of Katherine’s who didn’t seem to know when he was beaten, but also because he was always trying to get Alan to publish his books in England. His latest assault had been at a drinks party of Katherine’s when he’d been trying to peddle his new book, Qu’est-ce la Banalité?.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Alan said sensibly, ‘but we can’t publish a book in England called What Is Banality?.’

  ‘Call it The Anatomy of Banality,’ suggested Didier, following Alan into the kitchen. ‘This will appeal to Anglo-Saxon materialism, and also the echo with The Anatomy of Melancholy signals that it’s a serious work, no?’

  ‘Of all things that don’t need analysing,’ Alan began, but Didier interrupted him straight away.

  ‘Ah, non! We think we know what is banality, but in reality there is something very radical in the concept. When Chateaubriand says, “Everybody looks at what I look at, but nobody sees what I see”, we have the tragic isolation of subjectivity, the heroic vision of Romanticism, and so on and so forth, but the radical moment of the banal is precisely the reversal of Chateaubriand. It announces: “Everybody looks at what I look at and everybody sees what I see”. Epistemologically, this is the pure communism! Communism has not been realized in the state of China, or Russia, or Cuba, but in the state of Banality!’

  As a man who had just come back from a conference in Europe, Alan was wholly committed to a borderless continent of high-speed trains and fluid exchanges of rich cultural traditions, but as he passed the pair he couldn’t help wishing that Didier would go back to Paris where he belonged.

  The conference had turned out to be a trade fair for digital gadgets and fatuous theories. His worst two hours were spent with an extremely pretty Korean-American girl, who gradually eroded the effect of her physical allure by trying to persuade Alan that the future of fiction lay with Alternate Narrative, an ‘empowering and proactive’ software that allowed the reader to choose alternate outcomes.

  ‘It creates a participatory reality,’ she explained, ‘which is like a concrete experience of freedom in our lives and in our creative choices.’ Two boxes appeared on the screen, one saying ‘Kill’ and the other, ‘Don’t Kill’.

  ‘With Alternate Narrative the “language game” really is a language game,’ she said with inexplicable mirth.

  After a while she slowed down and entered into a more reflective relationship with her program.

  ‘It really becomes a mirror for the user’s psyche,’ she said, staring at Alan as if they were trapped down a mine together. ‘I mean if the reader chooses to kill a character, what does that say about the reader’s own “character”. In other words, what narrative are you in? What narrative are you in, in your own life right now?’

  In the end, Alan had bought the program to save Monica from the humiliation of wasting so much emotional effort.

  The taxi drew up outside Katherine’s building and Alan, with a litre of airport vodka and an Alternate Narrative to sweeten his return, hurried inside.

  Katherine was waiting for him in the hall. She was wearing her pale-green dressing gown with nothing underneath. They kissed and then he led her by the hand into the drawing room.

  ‘How was your conference?’ she asked.

  ‘Completely banal,’ he said, sinking into the big armchair. ‘Talking of banality, I saw Didier in the street with Sam Black, just round the corner. I didn’t know they were friends.’

  ‘They’ve become friends through me,’ she said, straddling the armchair, just as he’d imagined.

  She was so perfect it took his breath away.

  9

  Penny had been asked by Malcolm to check out Tobias’s favourite novel, All the World’s a Stage. According to the blurb, it was ‘an ambitious and original’ novel, written by a young New Zealander from the point of view of William Shakespeare. It gave a ‘richly textured portrait of Jacobean London’, as well as taking the reader ‘inside the mind of the greatest genius in all of human history’. Penny felt instinctively that this one would be a survivor. Choosing a New Zealander would be a salute to the Commonwealth and at the same time the theme was patriotic and educational. With the Long List being announced tomorrow, she plunged straight in. She couldn’t wait.

  ‘William!’

  ‘Ben!’

  ‘Do you know Thomas Kyd and John Webster?’

  ‘Lads,’ said William, giving the men a friendly nod.

  Thomas returned his smile, but John continued to scowl out of the window, ignoring William.

  ‘John would as soon bastinado a man’s shanks as shake his hand,’ explained good Master Jonson. ‘He was not yet thirteen when he murdered the blacksmith he was apprenticed to. News came in that day of great Marlowe’s death and John was thrown into the blackest grief. “There’s a great spirit gone,” quoth he.

  ‘“Indeed the tears lie in an onion that should water that sorrow,” quoth the blacksmith, whereupon such a choleric humour came o’er John that he lifted the glowing poker from the coals of his master’s furnace and plunged it into the wretched blacksmith’s entrails. Never a man died with a more astonished expression on his face, unless it was King Edward, second of that name.’

  Before William could respond to this amazing tale of murder most foul, strange and unnatural, John rose up in his chair, in a state of great excitation, and pointed through the window.

  ‘All eyes! All eyes! My lord Essex comes hard upon us with a great retinue of men. How finely caparisoned they are, and point device in their accoutrement.’

  ‘Oh happy horse that bears the weight of Essex,’ said William, straining out of the casement to catch a glimpse.

  ‘See how his mount’s proud impatient hoof doth ring fire from the cobblestones!’ said old Thomas Kyd. ‘How like a god is he in countenance, in bearing how like a king.’

  William sank back down next to Master Ben despondently.

  ‘My pleasure lies in
Essex,’ he sighed, ‘but I wait in vain for any sign, or any summons. I am a mere slave that tends upon the hours and times of his desire.’

  ‘Come, William,’ said Ben, slapping him on the shoulder, ‘enough of that. Let us have one more gaudy night and mock the midnight bell. I have sold my latest play to this innkeeper for five shillings of sack. He understands not a word of it, poor fool, but hopes to sell it for a profit to the Chancellor’s Men.’

  ‘Would I had a play to sell,’ said William, ‘and we would have roasted capons withal, but I only started one this morning and shall not finish it till the morrow.’

  ‘What is its argument?’ asked Ben.

  ‘Why, ’tis a Roman play,’ said William. ‘It tells the tale of Anthony and how one of the three pillars of this world was made into a strumpet’s fool.’

  Penny couldn’t help admiring the way it made you feel you were really in a tavern with William Shakespeare and his pals. That was the wonderful thing about historical novels, one met so many famous people. It was like reading a very old copy of Hello! magazine. She read on eagerly.

  ‘Speaking of strumpets,’ said Thomas, ‘is that not Mistress Lucretia that comes hard upon us?’

  ‘Ah,’ said William, ‘now let us speak of Africa and golden joys. She comes so perfumed that the winds are love-sick that follow her.’

  The fair Lucretia hoisted up her skirts, the better to straddle William’s legs.

  ‘Fye, William,’ she said, clicking his golden earring against her teeth, ‘where is that sonnet you promised me?’

  ‘Why, ’tis in my codpiece,’ said William, ‘for a man is a fool who keeps not a poem in his codpiece, and a codpiece that hath no poem in it is indeed a foolish codpiece.’

  ‘It is a naughty codpiece,’ said John, ‘for it hath naught in it.’

  ‘Ho-ho,’ said goodly Master Jonson, draining his tankard of sack, ‘a battle of wits!’

  ‘With this naught,’ said William, clasping Lucretia by the waist and pulling her towards him, ‘I shall make a copy of thy fair face; I shall so plough thy field with this nothing that it will yield thee a crop of Lucretias. With this round O I shall make thy belly round, and by my death,’ he added, shuddering and sinking backwards in his chair, ‘I shall make thee immortal.’

  ‘Fye, Will,’ said Lucretia, arching backwards and pulling William towards her, ‘keep thy wit for thy plays, for wit is a poor actor that comes on and plays his part and leaves the stage and is heard no more, but the part I would have you play hath more will in it than wit.’

  Penny was definitely going to give All the World’s a Stage the thumbs up. It was chock-a-block with colourful characters and period detail, just like her other favourite, The Enigma Conundrum, a real page-turner about the ‘Enigma’ code-breaking operation at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, which included a marvellous portrait of the brilliant, but alas gay, Alan Turing, the Cambridge mathematician who had done the thinking behind the computer. There was also a portrait of the unsung hero who had built Colossus, the first actual computer, right here in Britain. After the War, this ordinary postal worker had simply got on his bike and gone back to repairing people’s telephones. No commercial fortune, or Nobel Prize, or knighthood for him, just the quiet pride of knowing that he had served his country in its hour of need. Marvellous, inspirational stuff, so unlike today’s attention-seeking, get-rich-quick culture, in which people did things they were completely unqualified for just to get their name in the papers. The novel’s portrait of Churchill was utterly convincing – you could almost smell the cigar smoke and the brandy on his breath!

  Apart from anything else, one actually learned something from such a well-researched book, which was more than could be said of the neurotic musings of a lot of writers stuck at home, reading, writing and thinking about literature. Why didn’t they get out and do something for a change? Work in public service, or in a factory, or teach in a school; get out of their narrow little worlds and meet some real people; anything rather than sit at home all day writing.

  It was a strange experience for Penny to be seeing Jo Cross in the flesh. Although she rather avoided Jo’s op-ed pieces, sounding off on every subject from Abortion to Zimbabwe, Penny was a huge fan of The Home Front, Jo’s weekly column complaining about her husband and children. Jo was a strong advocate of a novel called The Palace Cookbook, published by an Indian firm with only one other book on its list. That was enough to get Jo to take up the cudgels on its behalf, sticking up for the underdog. She appeared to have made a deal with Malcolm, winning his support for The Palace Cookbook in exchange for supporting wot u starin at. Jo was also keen on a book called A Year in the Wild, a Canadian novel about a disillusioned hedge-fund manager who leaves his power-crazed life on Wall Street in order to build a log cabin in the wilderness of British Columbia. Jo said that with the financial meltdown and the state of the environment, it was one of the novels that had come top in her ‘relevance’ test.

  As well as wot u starin at, Malcolm had chosen The Bruce, an action-packed novel that really brought Scottish history alive, and The Greasy Pole, the story of a working-class lad from the Highlands who goes into politics and, without giving the plot away, ends up becoming Prime Minister of Britain, which was a remarkable achievement.

  The only member of the committee Penny really found it hard to take was Vanessa Shaw. She was so frightfully intellectual, but not in fact, in Penny’s opinion, really that clever. She was mad about a novel called The Frozen Torrent, which Penny had been unable to make any headway with. The whole thing was, according to Vanessa, ‘built and unbuilt’ on systematic self-contradiction, just as life was built on the contradiction of death (ugh!). Not only did the text (as if it had just popped up on her mobile phone!) show a deep reading of Beckett, Blanchot, and Bataille (whoever the last two were), but also brought to this ‘self-corroding sensibility’ (good God!), the richness of a profound and original psychological novel.

  In other words, the author had stolen all his ideas and didn’t just contradict himself by mistake (which, let’s face it, happens to all of us, now and again) but actually set out to contradict himself! It made her blood boil to think that this charlatan, with his second-hand ideas and phrases, and his absurd habit of self-contradiction, was going to get his wretched novel on to the Long List.

  Penny glanced at her watch. She’d better get a move on. It was no use dawdling at home daydreaming about past meetings when she was due at the most important meeting yet: the one that would finalize the Long List and take the prize into a whole new phase.

  10

  Now that it was his turn to sit hunched in her armchair, his collarless shirt bulging and contracting with the grief that shuddered through his body, Katherine realized how little she knew Sonny. When she let him in to her flat he had barely greeted her before casting himself down and beginning to sob.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ said Sonny. ‘I’ve been robbed of this year’s Elysian Prize.’

  ‘I didn’t even know that you’d written a novel,’ said Katherine.

  ‘I’ve written an enduring work of art,’ said Sonny, ‘and they haven’t even put me on their Long List!’

  ‘Consequences isn’t on the Long List either, thanks to my idiotic publisher,’ said Katherine. ‘He gave my novel to his assistant to send round on the day of the deadline and she sent your aunt’s cookbook instead. Any other committee would have realized that there’d been a fuck-up and sent the cookbook back.’

  ‘I’m sure you deserved to be on the Long List,’ said Sonny. ‘But I deserved to win!’

  ‘Well, in that case,’ said Katherine, ‘I can’t wait to read this masterpiece of yours.’

  ‘There’s a signed copy at Heywood Hill,’ said Sonny. ‘Don’t tell the book fellow you’re a friend of mine.’

  ‘That’ll be easy enough,’ said Katherine. ‘The only question is whether to camp overnight on the pavement outside.’


  ‘I hope you’re not being sarcastic with me,’ said Sonny, brought upright by pique. ‘My nerves really can’t take it.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Katherine, ‘but I’m disappointed as well.’

  ‘That’s why we should form an alliance,’ said Sonny.

  ‘What for? Being disappointed?’

  ‘For revenge, of course,’ said Sonny. ‘In a more enlightened age, the judges would have been dragged into a public square and horsewhipped.’ His body relaxed for a moment under the softening influence of nostalgia. ‘The furious multitude,’ he went on, his hands spreading artistically as he imagined the scene, ‘would have torn them limb from limb to punish them for insulting their betters! But in these degenerate times, I suppose we’ll have to make do with a hired assassin. Do you know such a person? I tried to get a man sent over from Delhi, but they wouldn’t give him a visa. Red tape!’

  ‘You can’t be serious,’ said Katherine.

  ‘Very well,’ said Sonny, getting up with restored vigour and stepping back into his slippers. ‘I see that you have no pride in yourself, but I am not, nor shall I ever be, in that pitiful condition! We shall see which one of us is truly serious about literature!’

  Katherine waited tensely until she heard the front door close. She could imagine a time when she would have burst out laughing at the absurdity of Sonny’s conversation and the relief of his departure, but she had been too angry in the last few days to laugh at anything.