Conversations With Mr. Prain

by Joan Taylor

  I fudged my answer. “I like my job. As far as jobs go, it isn’t bad, recycling books. It’s boring sometimes, telephoning about or internet searching for the last volume of Proust for some old biddy in Bloomsbury, but in many ways a boring job is precisely what a writer wants. Most writers I know work at jobs they’ve no real interest in because their hearts are in writing. They don’t get promoted. They don’t really want promotion. They’re up late at night working at their craft, hoping that this new typescript will be the one to strike a chord, but they’re tired from their mundane job, and they find it hard to squeeze out that last drop of effort good writing requires. The more boring and quiet the job, the more energy you can preserve for writing, or at least that’s the theory. If it gets too boring, or you really do go on the dole, you sink into a state of such frustration that all you can write is satire. But then, that sometimes makes you a good comedian. I’ve got friends who started off as serious writers and now do ‘Jongleurs on the Road.’ ”

  “So how do you find stimulation?” he asked.

  “Well, from the Market itself,” I said, looking at the table-cloth and a pink rose-bud in a glass vase. “There are people to talk to.” I paused, so that he would recall that he was included in the category. “I can work on lines of poetry during quiet times.” I paused again. “I’ve met some intriguing personalities. There’s always something to see and talk about. You know how it is. It’s a fun place: there are carnivals, juggling displays, street theatre performances, all this zany action.” He knew. Wasn’t that why he enjoyed listening to me tell tales of the Market? “Some of my writer friends envy me my work. At least it’s something to do with literature, not like paper-pushing in an office. Still, I work six days a week; sometimes seven, if I need to buy a lot of new stock. I try to take Monday off, but that doesn’t always work out. So in the end I don’t have much time. I don’t know what the solution is really.”

  Aware that he was observing me as if I were a laboratory experiment, I would not tolerate more than a few seconds of silence.

  “I could give up sleeping so much,” I continued. “The experts say we need only six hours, and I cling to eight.”

  “Poor Stella. If you only had time.” These words could have been sympathetic, except that they were said perfectly coolly. For a moment I wondered if he was being snide. There was a velvet quality in his voice that I distrusted. I was vaguely annoyed that I had let myself sound self-pitying with mention of sleep. Anyway, it was a lie, because lack of time partly resulted from my choice of priorities. I did not have to spend so much time at my friends’ places discussing life, love, politics, the world. I did not have to go out to all the plays, films, exhibitions and concerts that always seemed so necessary. I could stop going to parties. I could limit my environmental activism. It was just that my desire to write about the world paralleled my interest in participating in it, and whilst participating in it you cannot also write, unless you’re the type to scribble in cafés, which I have always thought pretentious.

  “From our previous discussions,” he added. “You’ve never seemed the stereotypical writer, if you’ll pardon the narrow classification. You seem a rather social animal, almost too full of joie de vivre; not at all one to starve in a garret, not the suffering artist. It’s rather strange. One isn’t accustomed to discover that a … colourful woman like you is trying to be a serious writer.”

  I was taken aback at this sudden honesty, this appraisal of how I appeared to him. I was not sure whether he had heaped insults upon me or complimented me as a special find. I was “trying to be a serious writer.” I was trying, but had not succeeded?

  “Uh huh?” I responded, in as ambiguous a manner as possible.

  “I would not have expected poetry from one of such an ebullient nature. I suppose I always imagine poets to be introverts, and rather depressed.”

  I waited. Would he say anything about the quality of my poetry? Was this a prelude to a commentary on my work? I waited, but he did not continue on this subject.

  “When you write poetry, for example that piece you were penning the last time I came to Camden, why do you do it, do you think, if it isn’t purely to express? What are you hoping to achieve? Who will read it?” He was testing again.

  “Well I do want to express things. Poems just bubble out all of a sudden. I get a line … or an idea. I think I just want to look at some little thing of my experience and … tell the truth.”

  “Truth?” he queried.

  He knew, by his calculating questions, that he was inciting me to provide an animated self-justification of myself as writer. It was becoming increasingly difficult to sit like a lady sipping tea. He could see that I was attempting to secure another persona around myself this afternoon, one which was more polite and reserved than usual. Attempting then to control, at least, the volume of my voice and therefore sounding too soft and secretive, I said, “I think it’s important to keep peeling away veneers to find out what is true and real. I sometimes feel like a detective trying to piece together clues of a crime when the villains have obscured them so ingeniously that, on the surface, there is nothing to see. A Sherlock Holmes sees because there are, after all, minute fragments of the truth scattered amid the fabrication. Isn’t that why we all love detective stories so much? We want the truth beneath the lies of our existence. I think people want to read poetry which expresses the truth.” I clenched my fists, nervous at enunciating such a little profundity, unsure of myself.

  “Do you? Perhaps that’s one reason poetry doesn’t sell. People are actually uncomfortable about the truth.”

  “But that’s what writing is all about, not just poetry, but novels, plays.”

  “Some of us just like a good read.” His eyes glinted.

  “But isn’t it more than that?” I went on. “What’s a good read? I think, personally, that people crave to know the truth, because the world is so full of lies. Perhaps more so now than ever. A story is a quest, but a manageable one. People can’t explore very much in their own lives, because that’s too dangerous, but they can do it in a tale.” He seemed sceptical. Perhaps I was not being very clear. “Sometimes, as a writer, one feels a sense of mission.”

  “Then are you a prophet?”

  Another insult? I did not know how to reply. Walt Whitman made himself sound like a prophet, so did Blake, and Ginsberg. But this was dangerous. Proceed with caution.

  “I wasn’t trying to sound incredibly grand,” I said.

  “Oh no. I know. It’s an interesting subject, though, isn’t it—the writer as prophet? Would you like to explore that? Do you think writers of today have a prophetic function?”

  Lord, I thought. Danger. Keep Out.

  “Some writers,” I said. “Some are entertainers. They’re the ones who make money, as you said.”

  “Ah, did I? There are excellent writers who also make money.”

  “Can you be a rich prophet?”

  He smiled. “That sounds anomalous, but it isn’t necessarily. After all, I found myself wondering how a woman like you could want to be serious writer. The two images did not fit. Why shouldn’t a prophet be popular and make money? I fear you want to dismiss all fiction that gives us publishers any monetary return for our investment. It’s true that bestsellers are rarely written well, but there are exceptions. And they are the treasure we all look for: a handful every year.” He eyed me carefully. I looked down at my tea cup, distracted suddenly by “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

  And I have known the eyes already, known them all-

  The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

  And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

  When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

  Then how should I begin

  To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

  And how should I presume?

  Oh help me now, Thomas Stearns Eliot! This was all an intellectual exercise. It did not matter to him that it was so important to m
e. I was an interesting specimen he wished, for obscure reasons, to examine from all angles. Tied to the tea table, I was in some ways expected to perform. Perhaps he liked games of strategy, I thought. He was making our discourse into a game of chess. He would move one piece of his army of subjects and I would have to respond. He was in control.

  I sighed, attempting to grasp a rush of ideas. How could I put it? “All right, then let us suppose writers do have a prophetic function, because a prophet asked society to see: injustices, history, future possibilities, ambiguities, truth. Back in ancient Israel a prophet roamed about and cried out prophecies to the populace at a city’s gates, where people gathered and discussed things. But the world is too big now. It’s no use shouting aloud at Hyde Park Corner. If you want to communicate a message, you have to publish, or make a film, or broadcast it on television or radio or put it on the internet. In days B.C. you needed just a voice and the air we breathe to transmit it, but now you need mechanical media, and because the media is artificial, it has to be paid for. And because people can make money from owning the media, and want to make money, then they have to think about a market—unless you manage to interest an idiosyncratic small publisher or put it on the web, but actually, despite what we would all hope, I always worry that people only read any poetry or stories there for three minutes of idle curiosity. So supposing Isaiah lived today, he would have to consider whether his prophecy would sell.”

  “Or else become a politician.”

  “Yes,” I said, wondering if he was joking, or perhaps he was talking about the French: poet-politicians like Alphonse Lamartine or, now, the intriguing Dominique de Villepin.

  “Go on,” he said.

  Go on. Go on. Something else was crying, Stop! I did not listen. “The city gates of today are in the hands of people like you, Mr. Prain. It is as if you charged an entrance ticket, and only the most popular prophets were allowed to speak. Despite what you say about the allowances publishers make for ‘quality fiction,’ you’ll always be looking for a financially viable operation. The entertainers amuse the crowd, and if there is a popular ‘prophet’ who also happens to be a true one, that’s more than a rarity. It shows consummate skill to write on two levels. Meanwhile, you’ll pay millions for the rights to publish the paperbacks of Dan Brown or—”

  “Not I,” he replied, with his hand on his heart.

  “Yes, but you see what I mean.”

  “A dismal view, if I may say so.”

  “Is it so very different to what you were saying before?”

  “In what way exactly?”

  I pulled worriedly on a lock of hair, wishing there was a way out of this discussion, not sure what subject there might be which would make me feel comfortable under the circumstances. I was caged, and in a certain panic I accused him. “Prophecy is proven by time. I suppose it’s up to you, in a sense, to be the tester of spirits.”

  “Yes. One needs to distinguish between genuine inspiration and delusion, the true artist from the dilettante. But you say that as if you don’t think I’m qualified for the role.”

  “Of course you’re not. In a way, no one is.”

  An outburst of this sort of flagrant cheek amused him. He felt no threat. “So writing that has no prophetic function is the entertainment of which you are so dismissive, but no one is truly qualified to assess its worth. No one can distinguish between true and false prophets.”

  “You haven’t done, because what you publish at Coymans is mostly from false prophets: writers who have had their novels published, but who have compromised themselves for the sake of sales, and dare not write what they really feel.” He was gaining pleasure from my audacity. “Or you publish writers who are extremely commercial, because their vision is just exactly what the public wants—it confirms the dominant preconceptions. It sounds clever, and entertaining, but it enables people to reconcile themselves to injustice and confirms apathy. True prophecy always preaches some kind of revolution.”

  “Ah, so fiction as pure entertainment is irredeemable to you, then, even though you claim people like detective stories for rather profound reasons.”

  A chorus of voices shouting, Stop! did not deter me. “The people who entertain, purely, well, let them do it,” I continued. “They offer a panacea—all those rags to riches flummeries and action adventures which snare the dreams of people who cannot or dare not change their own lives. True prophecy, wherever it occurs, in art or outside it, does not offer us alter egos through which we can escape the drudgery of our own lives. It confronts us with the real world. Why should people want to read something that makes us uncomfortable with the way we live? Writers have to sugar-coat their themes with tasty plots if ever they want to say anything meaningful. Publishing is just another entertainment industry nowadays.”

  Mr. Prain smiled wryly. “There was always a market for romances, thrillers … consider the hack writers of Grub Street, or the Author’s Farce by Henry Fielding. I don’t think publishing has been so very ideologically sound in the past. It isn’t as if anything has suddenly changed.”

  “Oh yes, and there’s always been a temptation for a writer to produce complete bullshit.”

  This last word jarred badly in the circumstances. The voices whose pleas for the immediate cessation of my tirade had gone unheeded moaned and lamented. I should have said “nonsense,” “trash,” anything but “bullshit,” so very loudly, in Mr. Prain’s company. With him, one did not use such words. It burst out as something I wanted to say to him, but somehow it rested like a judgment on everything I had been saying. Did I write always for high ideals? I wanted to explore truth, truths. But I also wanted to spin a yarn. I couldn’t help it! What were my 25 folk-tales about? Truth, or just a good story? It was true I wanted to awaken people to the truth about western society’s responsibility for global exploitation, environmental pollution and Third World disasters, but much more than that my written work was a processing of countless dreams: great caverns of fantasy that I would fall into and ascend from slowly, which often seemed to have no rhyme or reason, no moral, no ecological or political perspective at all. I had to make something out of all these imaginings that possessed me. The truth was that for most of the time I did not know why I wrote. Self-expression. My imagination just happened, and the writing followed. Wasn’t that the truth? Very often, I would understand the true purpose of stories and poems years later. With Mr. Prain, I felt I had to sound as if I was in control, that I approached writing seriously with a recognised, rational plan, or else I feared he would dismiss me as just what I knew I seemed to him: too “colourful” to be serious. The theory that a lightweight mind accompanied my blonde curly hair was not a new preconception about me. In this story of Goldielocks, there was just one bear, who had lured the girl into his house, to sit on his big chair.

  I had fallen into a snare. He had glanced away at my word. Silence for a moment. I looked up at the misericord, and when I looked back at him I realised that instead of looking prim and offended at my language he wore an amused expression, an expression which displayed some definite satisfaction. He had wanted to excite me, provoke me into animation, so I would forget to be serious and controlled. He would induce too much emotion in me, and I would forget my genteel politeness. He would trick the Eliza Doolittle to make a slip, to remind me that I was not a respectable English lady, but something altogether inferior. I felt I had to say something else quickly to cover up this mistake.

  “Writers can never be sure of their own work, no matter how much they believe in it. That’s why we all crave positive feedback.”

  And this was an opportunity for him to say, “Yes, Stella, and let me give you positive feedback right now. I’ve read your work and it’s stupendous.” But instead there was a stark silence in which a question mark hung sneering in the air, a silence that was broken at last by Mr. Prain offering more tea and asking why I had not eaten my cake. I looked again to the ogre’s face in the misericord and shivered.

  “Are you
cold?” asked Mr. Prain, observing my discomfort.

  “No, thank you,” I replied, putting up a semblance of fortitude. In fact, the room was a little cold. The luxuriant warmth of the August day did not penetrate the bricks of this vast old house, and the sun was shining at the front, not here at the north-facing back of building, where we were sitting in one of the shadiest rooms. I was wearing a summer dress, one which I had bought at the Market from an antique clothes stall, a short 1960s shift dress made from a floral cotton print fabric. Such a nostalgic image was not quite my style. I had worn it especially for the occasion, and had forsaken a cardigan positive that I would have no need of it. I had swept my hair up into a kind of fat, wormy roll, and the nape of my neck was therefore exposed to the air. I had not imagined we would sit indoors on a day like this. Mr. Prain was wearing a cream cotton suit, brown shoes and socks, a cream and brown tie and an off-white shirt. Perhaps this was casual attire for him, though it did not seem so to me. We must have appeared to belong to another decade. The room would not have given us away, full as it was of the past. I had had no prescience of this scenario when I had set off from Camden. I had imagined tea on the lawn, a walk through the grounds. I had not expected to be cold.

  A couple of twittering sparrows landed briefly on the outside windowsill of the open window, seeming to me like two giggling children you might pass in the street, two city children you fear may be laughing at you as you walk by.

  It was all very well discussing writing and its role, I thought, but this was not what I had come to tea to talk about. In my eagerness to impress him as a serious writer I had not been honest. I wanted to be put out of my jitteriness. It was impossible to feel normal when he would not give me a clue as to what he felt about the typescripts I had given him to peruse. I sensed now that he was stalling. I had again that uneasy feeling that we were working at cross-purposes, that something else was going on. This time it was stronger, more conscious, and yet I could not put it down to anything in particular that he had said or done. I felt the way out of the quagmire was to confront.