by Toby Litt
Facetious is the shortest word in the English language including all the vowels in alphabetical order.
Writers look askance at winners, at winning. What we win – or far more often don’t – are Literary Prizes, and these are not contests we can do much to try to win. Yes, we can write the very best book we are capable of, and hope prize judges like it when they come to read it – one or two years later. Or we can even try to write the type of novel – reassuringly chunky, emotionally wrenching – that judging committees seem to favour. But we can’t actively take part. It’s not sport. We aren’t present to clip away Ian McEwan’s heels, to throw Hilary Mantel to the ground.
Most writers are likely to feel oppressed by gaining rather than losing a prize, because it will be for something accomplished by an earlier version of themselves. Prizes are given to writers for who they once were. The winner of the Olympic 100 metres final was the fastest man on that day; the Booker Prize winner was the person who completed that novel six months or a year earlier, and perhaps even more so they are the person who had the idea for that novel six or seven years before that. The writer may feel that they are struggling to get back to that previous self’s level. Almost certainly, they will feel they have gone beyond that stage, in insight if not in quality of prose.
Writers look at winners as if they were not exactly cheats but annoying favourite children of an openly unjust father. The pet child, outside the family, is usually everybody’s pet hate. Writers, tribally, view Winners as our oppressors. We are the goers-away, the mullers-over, the grumblers, the questioners of the whole society that creates few winners and many losers. For most writers, to win is to become a traitor to the tribe. It is through our losses that we became writers. The instantly and repeatedly rewarded individuals become something else: monsters. We, we console ourselves, are ugly, but we have the prose style. I have always lulled myself with those words from Leonard Cohen’s song ‘Chelsea Hotel #2’ – ugly, but…
There are no wins within language. A novelist can’t beat the English tongue. Nor is it possible for her to defeat the Novel or the Short Story. Perhaps, in gamer slang, you could say about them – if they wrote innovatively enough – that they ‘pwned’ a form. Maybe it would be accurate to say, ‘Hey, in 1921, James Joyce was really pwning The Novel – that Ulysses smacked down everything else.’ The most that any writer can hope to do is invent a popular genre – as Walter Scott did the historical novel or Edgar Allan Poe the detective story – although what comes after you will almost certainly be superior.
Wrestling with language, that isn’t how I think of what I do with words. The wrong kind of struggle, on the page, will leave traces of damage in the finished rhythms, word choices.
I am frustrated by the poverty of words in English describing smell or scent. But it’s not something with which I wrestle. The words I need are not difficult to use, they are just absent – not being able to get a grip on them is the issue.
I love writing ghost stories, but I wouldn’t say I had wrestled with the ghost story genre. I entered into it and it, like a spirit, entered into me. The only haunted house an artist can enter is her own psyche. Unless I am the right person to write that genre, right at that moment, the writing won’t come out right. Grace is our daily bread.
Booker, Pulitzer, Nobel – the future renders every literary prize null. All writers, in regard to posterity, are in the position of drug cheats – their glory can be taken away, found to have depended upon falsity. That people in the past thought something great is of historical interest, nothing else. It’s what people in the present think that counts, perpetually.
Most of what most of us writers produce is, in this context, failed. And I sometimes feel that, within my lifetime, I have seen The Canterbury Tales and Paradise Lost, fading, failing. The present finds them too antiquated, too demanding, too ambitious, too Christian.
In which case, what hope of surviving do this afternoon’s anxious typings have?
About macho writers, American ones, as promised. And pencils. This used to amuse me so much that I began collecting examples. The problem, for many male American writers, is that they imagine they have to justify what they do as not-cissy, or they have to show that although, okay, they do write, and writing is a bit of a cissy activity, they themselves are demonstrably not-cissy. In order to achieve this slight of hand, they have to realign writing with manual labour.
Hence, pencil abuse. Hemingway said that he sharpened twenty pencils before starting work on a story. Ben Hecht wore down an estimated seventy-five to a hundred pencils a week. But the winner is John Steinbeck. He sharpened twenty-four pencils each morning and wrote with them until each one was blunt. After many years of doing this, he had to use his left hand to slide the pencil between the fingers of his hugely calloused writing hand, because that hand could no longer pick a pencil up. Every few months, he sandpapered down the calluses so he could keep writing.§
Why? Because he was a man, a real man, dammit, and writing (to avoid being cissy) has to appear more like carpentry than mental arithmetic. A good writer shapes, hones, polishes. It’s not just about desk work. A writer does not merely risk back-strain reaching out for their copy of Roget’s Thesaurus. A writer does not spend hours debating with himself whether to employ Oxford Commas. A writer doesn’t merely keep typing whatever comes into his drifty head. (Even if, really, that’s what most of us do.) No, they sharpen pencils and more pencils.
European male writers don’t tend to bother with posturing. They accept that writing is cissy. Most of them are not bothered being thought cissy or gay or effeminate. I mean, imagine Kazuo Ishiguro looking at himself in the mirror in the morning, wondering if he was ‘Man Enough.’
*
I once felt like I was a winner. It wasn’t a prize, but it came close.
Being chosen as one of the Granta Best of Young British Novelists seemed the literary fictional equivalent to being selected for the England Under-18 Football Squad.
Squad, not team – only eleven were in the team. Some might be substituted on or off, during the match, depending upon injuries, tiredness or lack of performance.
Of the twenty of us, brought together in 2003, some have gone on to carve out successful international careers, scoring lots of big match goals: Sarah Waters, David Mitchell. Others are still there or thereabouts in the Premier League: A.L. Kennedy, David Peace. Others, like me, trog along in the Championship. One or two seem to have given up the game entirely.
This is all what you would have expected. But, at the time I was chosen, my inclusion felt as if it proved something: I hadn’t wasted my life.
There was a launch party. Everyone glammed up, in the way writers only tend to for the Booker or Baileys’ Prizes. I wore a pale suit and the most beautiful tie I’ll ever own – a silk neither green nor grey nor gold, but something amazingly in-between. Six or seven photographers surrounded me and went click click click, using flashes. This was more lens-attention than I’ve received at any time, before or since. But, curiously, I have never seen a single photograph taken at that party. Which makes me wonder whether they were really photographers or actors paid to say, ‘Over here’ and do catastrophic things to all of our egos.
‘This,’ I thought, ‘is what Elizabeth Hurley’ – flash! flash! – ‘must feel.’ You remember Elizabeth Hurley, don’t you? No? Well, no matter. ‘This is how Salman Rushdie must feel.’
I heard that Salman appeared at a Chelsea Football Club home match and, being spotted, the fans – having no other chant prepared – sang, ‘One Salman Rushdie, there’s only one Salman Rushdie’. He’s really the only truly famous writer of our time.
This is lucky. Fame is bad for writers. A writer needs to be able to sit on the top deck of a bus, and hear how people talk when they don’t think anyone is listening. Invisibility is a necessity. Bob Dylan can never enter a room that doesn’t contain Bob Dylan – and those rooms have too much in common for him to be interested in them. He’s no longe
r going to overhear good material. Why go out? (He doesn’t go out.)
Successful writers have lots of readers, and enough income not to have to do anything but write. Some of the Granta bunch became very successful.
Let’s not be falsely okay with this – I wanted what they seemed to have, and I still want it. But I know I have already had more attention than is usual for a writer. (Over here, Toby.) I may already have had more attention than is good for a writer. (Click, I still hear it.) My ego craves another chance to do its giddy little dance. Look at me, oh, look at me. Also, a couple of prize wins would allow me to have bits of my house that are falling apart put back together.
Most of all, I would like to be able to do the being-successful thing with the greatest reluctance. After months of persuasion, to grant an interview – like a king. Writers who are in this position can get the maximum publicity without seeming to pursue any publicity.
But then, of course, give me any success and I’d want to mess with it. I’d follow a genuine bestseller up with anything but a sequel. I’d do it again – but upside down and back to front and under a pseudonym.
Because if you do it the way other people do it, you haven’t proved – to your self – that you’re better than other people. This is how I think. And if you’re not better than your contemporaries, no one in the future is going to need to read you.
You must always be, drumroll, a smartarse – and we all know what people like to see happen to a smartarses.
*
The Totleigh Barton centre in Devon is a medium-sized white farmhouse that once belonged to the poet Ted Hughes.
I was there in the summer of 2005 with the novelist Ali Smith, teaching a residential creative writing course for the Arvon Foundation.
Many writers ‘do an Arvon’ once a year, as a welcome way to earn £1,000 and perhaps sell a dozen of their books.
Both Ali and I had novels that had been entered for that year’s Booker Prize. Hers was called Hotel World, mine was called Ghost Story. We also shared the same publisher and the same editor.
I had tried to prevent myself going too often to the computer in the centre’s office, and checking the Booker website, to see if the longlist had been announced. I had wanted to avoid knowing when the announcement would be made – I knew it was imminent.
One morning, halfway through the week, Ali (who hadn’t been going to the centre’s office at all) got a phone call, then another phone call, then another. I knew this because, at Totleigh Barton, there is only one small patch of grass within which you could get a phone signal – and that patch was right outside the converted goose shed in which I dormed. Ali was on the phone all morning. My phone did not ring.
When I checked the website, Hotel World was longlisted, Ghost Story wasn’t.
In the first moment, losing is like bad heartburn – at least, that’s how it feels to me. I blush and sweat but the worst thing is the losing hitting me right in the chest; somewhere in the middle, between the lungs. I feel like a great alien ball of burning iron has appeared there, sizzling away just to the right of my heart.
When they lose, sportspeople often say they feel ‘gutted’. But that feeling comes a little later, because the iron ball of defeat has only just started to sink down through my body. I feel it dragging my face along with it, forcing a frown as my face melts from the inside.
Oh God, I hope no one speaks to me now. What could I say?
After the first moment is over, I feel diminished, older. What I want most of all is for time to reverse – can’t everyone just back up to the moment before this happened? Then we can run it again the way I wanted it to go. But still the loss is there, I can feel it descending within me. Around it, I feel the whole of me getting heavier and smaller and less worth being.
As soon as the ball scorches my stomach, I feel nauseous, and when it evaporates my intestines, I feel completely undermined: I know I will never be able to speak to anyone and make eye contact again.
Hitting my pelvis, the ball of loss sends agony down my femur bones but is diverted forwards.
Out it falls, to lie briefly on the floor in front of me – invisibly – as I stare down, before it burns off toward its rightful home, the boiling core of the world.
Despite the damage it’s done, it remains unchanged. The failure I started with was the failure I ended up with. All I can do is change my attitude towards it. And I feel – because I can’t put it any better than an athlete – I do feel completely gutted.
For the rest of the week, Ali was extraordinary. She didn’t tell the Arvon students of her listing. She commiserated with me in a way I found genuinely consoling.
On the morning she spoke on the phone to everyone congratulating her, I was fiercely jealous. I was burning with resentment.
So, I went for a walk.
I’d been to Totleigh Barton before, and I knew there was a longish hike down high-hedged country lanes that took you round in a big circuit.
It was what I needed. I set off.
The day was blue sky gorgeous. I tried to let it cheer me up, but I just became angrier and angrier. I was a failure. My efforts to write the novel had been a waste. If I couldn’t even get longlisted – and it was a long longlist – what was the point? Ghost Story was just as good as Hotel World, wasn’t it? Perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps I was rubbish, and no one had told me. Perhaps I should give up writing. But Ghost Story wasn’t a bad book. Round and round, the same thoughts.
I knew that this was an important moment. I wasn’t sure I’d ever write a better book than Ghost Story (I’m still not sure if I have) – so this might have been my last chance to win a big literary prize and become one of those writers who seem, for a while, to be everywhere, to be the writer everyone should read. And who, for the rest of their writing lives, can be reasonably certain of being published and making a living and having a house that doesn’t need a lot of fixing.
I felt shit.
I kept walking.
And then, fairly desperately, I remembered what are known as the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths.
I had always been interested in Buddhism, ever since my best friend Luke introduced me – when I was a mystical 11-years-old – to Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and to the works of Lobsang T. Rampa. Rampa’s books detailed his youth in Lhasa, watching flags fly above the Potala Palace, and his initiation into the mystical secrets of Tibetan Buddhism. After his third eye was opened, Lobsang astral travelled, experienced powerful cosmic visions, was exiled from his homeland and had long conversations with his cats. Lobsang T. Rampa was, it later turned out, the pseudonym of Cyril Henry Hoskin. Cyril Henry Hoskin wasn’t a Tibetan lama, writing his spiritual autobiography, but an English plumber.
Since then, I’d read some more reliable books on Buddhism; enough to be able to remember the basics of the Four Noble Truths.
I knew about the first Truth, which said that suffering was inevitable, and the second Truth, that explained how suffering arose – that suffering comes from not getting what you want.
I was so jealous of Ali, one of the people I like best in the world, and so angry that my own book – that I – hadn’t been recognized, that I was suffering an extraordinary amount of pain.
Unnecessary pain.
I looked at the green hedgerows and kept walking. Everything around me looked wonderful. It was a fantastic day. I was healthy. My family was safe.
Not a word of my book or Ali’s book was different than it had been before.
Why was I angry? What exactly did I want? Wasn’t I, right then, the clearest possible example of suffering through wanting something intangible?
I had allowed myself to become attached to something non-existent, and now I was suffering not because of anything I’d lost but because of not having gained this non-existent thing.
Being longlisted would have been good for my writing career, but I doubted it would have boosted me as much as not being longlisted was killing me.
I decided to acce
pt I wasn’t going to be a winner. Not just in this case, with this prize, but possibly, probably, with every prize from now on.
It would be too much to say that I came back from that walk a Buddhist. But I had wrestled with myself. And the only thing that had given me any purchase was an idea of the Buddha’s.
I thought his Truths might have some truth in them.
If I was going to be a loser, I was going to have to find some way of living with that.
* Sometimes, even speech isn’t needed, just presence, silence. A baddie greets Clint Eastwood, sarcastically; Eastwood says nothing. The baddie has no follow-up line. Eastwood still says nothing. The baddie becomes embarrassed and then, to cover this, becomes angry. Eastwood has won.
† Martin Amis, ‘Norman Mailer: The Avenger and the Bitch’, The Moronic Inferno, Penguin, 1987, pp. 57–73.
‡ As reported by Julian Barnes in the article ‘Trap. Dominate. Fuck’, Granta 47 ‘Losers’, edited by Bill Buford, 1994.
§ I can’t find the website or book in which I read about Steinbeck’s macho mania. If you do, please let me know.
8
C&WW VS. WWE
28 March 2015
All winter long I’d been a library rat. I had read books on farming and folklore, the Industrial Revolution and wrestling. I had read and reread Henry & Mary and Wrestliana.
For as long as I could get away with, I’d avoided the non-verbal world. But this was becoming silly.
I’d been looking at illustrations of wrestling throws demonstrated by gentlemen in Victorian dress—
Figure 9. An illustration from William Armstrong’s Wrestling. Two men toppling like a very genteel tree. Leigh says, ‘Get a room, chaps’.
—By now, I knew this was a well-executed back-heel by a wrestler who had gained a tight, high grip on his opponent. But I still hadn’t got myself along to a real match. Typical writerly behaviour, typical me.