It’s not in stock new, he notices, but there are twenty-three available used, starting at £0.01. Homonculus, adele1, and bookzone_uk are all selling them for that price. Harvey thinks: who the fuck sells a book for £0.01? How the fuck are they making any money? How many books do these people need to sell to break even? New, on Amazon, Blah Blah Blah is available at the reduced price of £6.99: so Homonculus needs to sell 699 copies of Blah Blah Blah just to buy one new one.
He shakes his head. Unable to resist another, equally masochistic, impulse, he goes back to Google and types in ‘Eli Gold’. The screen shows Results 1–10 of 1,947,000. None of them about a different Eli Gold. Above the standard search results are the News results, seven or eight different entries all told, but linking onto hundreds of others, saying ‘Doctors uncertain about great novelist’s health’, ‘Literary world fears for Eli Gold’, ‘Gold’s publishers promise reprinted posthumous collected works’, ‘Eli Gold: the last Great Man?’ He ignores them and clicks on the first main entry:
Eli Gold
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Eli Gold, born Eli Goldblatt (born 25 May 1923 in Troy, New York) is an American novelist, poet, screenplay and short story writer, essayist, conceptual artist and literary critic. His most famous works include his first novel, Solomon’s Testament (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize), and his dissection of the state of American marriage, The Compliance of Women. He is the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Frost Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. He is the only person ever to have turned down the Nobel Prize for Literature, offered to him in the mid-eighties. He has had five wives, the fourth of whom, Pauline Gray, committed suicide, apparently as part of a pact with Gold, which he survived. Despite the scandal surrounding this, he is widely considered – particularly since the death of Saul Bellow in 2005 – to be the world’s greatest living writer.
* * *
Contents [hide]
1. Biography
1.1 Early life
1.2 Early career
1.3 Success
1.4 Late work
2. Themes and influences
3. Criticism and controversy
3.1 Plagiarism
3.2 Refusal to accept Nobel Prize
4. Pauline Gray’s suicide
4.1 Details
4.2 Scandal
4.3 Exoneration of Eli Gold
5. List of works
5.1 Fiction
5.2 Essays
5.3 Conceptual Artwork
5.4 Editorship
6.. Quotations
7. References
8. See also
9. External links
* * *
Biography
Early Life
The eldest son of Ernst August Goldblatt, a Jewish-American immigrant from East Prussia, and Helen Harris, a Catholic of Irish extraction from Boston, Eli Gold was born on 25 May 1923 after the family had settled in Troy, a city in New York state.
Yeah, yeah, he thinks. He clicks back to Google from the Wikipedia entry. Two video thumbnails sit at the top of the search results. One, on Veoh, entitled Eli G, Gore Vidal, Germaine Greer arguing on Dick Cavett, 1970, he hasn’t seen before. He clicks on it. It is a middle section of the interview. The camera is on Greer and Vidal, listening. Harvey notes that she was gorgeous, then, and considers searching for some other footage in order to run her through the Linda Ronstadt mill. It cuts from her and Vidal – their faces wear the same archly amused expression – to Eli, who sits opposite, next to the central figure of Cavett. The set is very brown. A book sits on a beige table. There is the sound of scattered laughter, some applause. Eli is leaning back in his chair with the face of a man whose last bon mot went well. He is smoking.
His hair is full and dark and his eyes are alive. He is in a black suit and black glasses and white shirt and black tie. He looks like the famous sometimes do: like Elvis in 1956, or Jagger in 1969, or Margaret Thatcher in 1981 – someone who is not just living in the moment, but living in their moment. The moment is them. Harvey looks at his father, last viewed white-eyed and screaming in a hospital bed, and realizes that he is seeing, here, his father’s apex, his point of peak beauty.
CAVETT: But seriously, Eli – can we address … I mean we have Germaine here. She’s been, well, some would say, stringent in her criticisms of your work.
GERMAINE: I called him a misogynist.
CAVETT: That’s a strong word.
ELI: You know, Dick … fame is like starlight.
GERMAINE: Oh, here we go.
ELI: It is. Whatever you were first seen as, that’s what people still see, years later. And that’s what Germaine, or at least, her – as it were – foremothers, decided I was when I first started out and so now there’s no going back. It’s fixed, from that point way back in time.
CAVETT: You’re saying that’s not a fair description of you, any more? Misogynist?
GERMAINE: Oh come on. [picking up a copy from the table] This is your new book, right? The Compliance of Women?
[Audience laughs]
GERMAINE: Yes, exactly. That says it all, doesn’t it? But there’s more, inside. [she opens it, starts to read] ‘Anyone can fall in love at first sight, thought Willard. It’s whether you can stay in love at second sight. Or third sight. Or five hundredth thousand sight, when the sight may not be quite what it was to boot …’ [to audience] Don’t laugh!
CAVETT: It’s not often I let a guest say that!
ELI: That’s true for both genders, that sentiment, isn’t it Germaine?
GERMAINE: It’s a man speaking.
ELI: But not me.
GERMAINE: What’s your point?
ELI: Is it a misogynist book? Or is it a book about misogyny?
There is some applause, and some sneering from the audience. Greer sits back, shaking her head. Vidal laughs. The camera cuts back to Eli, smiling and blinking slowly. Harvey’s email pings. He pauses the screen, glad to stop scratching this over-scratched itch, and clicks onto Mail, some part of him expecting, as always, redemption.
The email is notifying him about a message to his Facebook page. Harvey doesn’t look at his Facebook page much any more, after the first flurry, the Facebook frenzy, of a couple of years ago. He clicks on the link: it is from Ron Bunce. He sees Ron’s tiny jpg come up by his message – blond, lantern-jawed, the 1950s marine face slightly betrayed by something mental in the staring blue eyes – and then reads what he has written in the message box:
Hi Harv! How goes it! Listen, really pissed to hear about your dad. I’m a fan, too – may have mentioned this – but mainly of the short stories, which are corking. Still he is like, what, 100? And had a fucking good innings, money and fame-wise but more importantly chick-wise. On the bright side – does that mean you’re in the Land of the Free? If so, let me know. You know how much I fucking hate Hymie-Town (no disrespect: although you’re only like one quarter Yid, yes? So scale the disrespect down three-quarters anyways) but I have to come up to Connecticut anyway to hang out with the cops there who arrested a pedo we apprehended in New Haven, on the run from Toledo, before we put the cunt down for many many years of rasping lubricated-only-by-AIDS-infected-spit anal rape.
I’m coming up next week, so if the old man’s still breathing then, let’s have a drink and score some stripper pussy. Or I will and you can watch, if you still insist on taking marriage seriously.
Harvey rubs his eyes. He has not heard from Bunce for over five years. They became friendly at college – Bunce was over for one year from Michigan State University doing a course in, of all things, theology. Actually, this may not have seemed so unlikely on a first meeting with Bunce: his absurdly American looks could be interpreted as respectable – he sometimes wore a tie, his hair remained cropped in a rectilinear blond block at a time when most was gummed and backcombed up to look like enormous sea anemones – and, with thos
e he didn’t know, he was shy, even to the point of stammering. But in private – and this is where the student Harvey, at the time hardly able to breathe for fear of getting the politics of breathing wrong, fell for him – Bunce was absurdly unrestrained: obscene, expressive, ridiculously sure of himself, able, uniquely at the time, to say whatever he wanted, about whoever he wanted, without first checking the utterance with some internal policing mechanism. In later life, Harvey would come to realize that the reason Bunce so fascinated him was that he combined being funny and clever with illiberality, a combination which in 1986 he would have considered impossible.
But lately they had had no contact. Harvey knew from email round robins that he now worked as an assistant prosecutor for some DA’s office in the Detroit area, but that was all. Harvey wasn’t sure whether to respond. When younger, he had been a social optimist: happy to meet new people, or re-meet old people, and to shift his personality around to suit the situation. Now, he only really wanted to see the people with whom he could be entirely himself: the thought of preparing a face to meet the faces that he might have to meet exhausted him. Thus, at home, he only really wanted to see Stella, and perhaps one or two other close friends.
But he was not at home. He was, in truth, a little lonely. He was prepared to risk a small amount of awkwardness: or, more precisely, he was prepared to force himself to be a bit more male than he was actually comfortable being, in order to fit in with Bunce’s idea of him as his friend.
Bunce,
he wrote,
Great to hear from you. Yeah, a night out would be fun: and a relief. It is pretty grim, the whole Dad dying thing. I’m staying at a place called the Sangster. Not in a suite, so if we’re going to be carting a lorryload of hookers back, we’ll probably have to find somewhere bigger. Give a call here when you get to Connecticut, or on my cell, 00447835 381449.
cheers
Harvey.
He gets up from the antique reproduction desk tastefully positioned in an alcove in the room, and wanders over to the window to look out at the elegant internal courtyard of the Sangster Hotel. The climate control system, humming at a discreet level just beneath his sonic notice, protects him from the apparent mugginess of the thickening sky. He wonders again if he is here for business or pleasure: he wonders if the Sangster is a business hotel. He is almost certain that it would describe itself as that, among many other things, but not a pleasure hotel, which sounds to Harvey like a euphemism for a live-in brothel. He wonders how much it would cost – in both dollars and shame – to move into a pleasure hotel and employ the staff to take away all the pain.
His phone rings, shaking him out of his thoughts like an alarm jolting him from deep sleep. The contact glowing on the screen says Alan Agent. Harvey has often wondered why his agent, who is eight years younger than him, is called Alan, a name he thought became extinct in 1971.
‘Alan,’ he says.
‘Harvey! How are you?’
Well … Harvey thinks. Let’s not go into that.
‘I’m OK.’
‘How’s your dad?’
Alan’s tone is sympathetic, but on the edge of efficient. Harvey knows a long description of his father’s medical condition is not actually being asked for. He glances at Eli’s frozen, smiling image on his computer, which has become warped by the video grab. It looks like a Francis Bacon portrait of Eli. It looks, in fact, like the Francis Bacon portrait of Eli.
‘He’s … y’know.’
‘Yes, of course. I feel for you.’
Back when he still thought of himself as a writer, rather than a ghostwriter, Harvey used to have another agent, called David. He and David were friends, sort of. He used to enjoy his calls. He didn’t feel that when David said pleasantries to him not about the matter in hand, it was just stuff that he had to get through before arriving at the matter in hand.
‘Thanks, Alan. I appreciate it.’
‘Did you get the Lark material?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Have you had a chance to read it yet?’
‘Well – you know, I’ve got a lot on my plate at the moment …’
‘She’s in New York.’
At the words, Harvey looks out of the window, expecting to see it – New York; perhaps expecting to see Lark dancing amongst the skyscrapers. Instead, there is the sedate internal courtyard of the hotel.
‘Oh, right …’
‘Her people are taking her round to meet all the American music moneymen now – so that when she releases in the UK, they can coordinate it all simultaneously stateside.’
People? Stateside?
‘Anyway, I’ve had a word with her people, and they’re keen. They think – and so do I – that it’s fortuitous that you happen to be in the city at the moment. I really think you should read that material I sent you on her, work up the pitch, and then we can set up a meet? OK?’
Meet?
‘Well, OK, Alan. But I can’t promise anything. You know, with my dad being the way he is and everything …’
‘Where are you staying?
‘Where am I …? The Sangster.’
‘Fuck. Really?’
‘Yes. My dad is paying. Well, he might be.’
‘That’s where she’s staying.’
‘Fuck. Really?’
‘That’s what I said!’
This is the nearest Alan has ever come to a joke with Harvey.
‘Yes …’
‘But that’s brilliant. That makes everything so easy. Listen, Harvey, I have to go but do have a look at that material. It’s only a couple of pages from the PR company …’
‘OK, OK.’
‘And once you’ve read it, and had some thoughts, I’ll get back on to her people.’
But who are my people? Alan? Are you?
‘This is great news, Harvey. I’m sure this is the one you’re going to get!’
Harvey feels, for a minute, that Alan is going to say ‘Laters!’ But he doesn’t. He just puts the phone down, too busy, clearly, to say goodbye: pleasantries only at the start, never the end.
The one you’re going to get? Is that what it’s come to? An assumption at the agency that Harvey Gold is the client who never gets the gig? He searches on his email and finds the one Alan sent before. He sees the attachment, a PDF: Lark1resend. He becomes filled with a terrible ennui, the sort of thing that used to hit him sometimes during work, but these days before work, at the thought of work: he may be the only person in history to suffer from ghostwriter’s block. With what feels to him like a superhuman effort, he overcomes his disinclination and clicks on Lark1resend. It takes a few seconds to open, the Vaio doing that thing it sometimes does of looking like a very simple operation has caused it to die. In the pause, he wonders if Dizzy’s mantras could work for stuff that you don’t want as well as stuff you do want. They are designed for curbing desire, or at least preventing it from curdling into depression – change your must-haves to preferences – but could it work the other way round? Change your must-nots to oh all right thens? I do not want to have to fucking pitch for this fucking autobiography of this done-nothing fuckwit, but if I do have to, it’s not the end of the world. Something like that. With a whirr and a click, the PDF opens. Oh no, he thinks. Not her.
Chapter 5
– Hi, says the blonde woman.
She is maybe twenty years younger than him. He has seen her here before, hanging around the sidewalk outside Mount Sinai. She always carries an enormous shoulder bag, with the strap across her like a sash, and wears a woollen beanie hat, rows of green and purple and orange. Sure enough, she is wearing it now, even though the temperature, when he checked on www.weatheroutthere.com this morning, is going to be in the eighties.
– Hi, he says, although he prickles at the approach. What does she want?
– I’ve seen you here a couple of times, she says, brightly. He nods, but is uncomfortable with the thought that he has been noticed.
– You’re not a journalist, are you? –
No. I’m not.
She smiles, like she knew that.
– I guess you’re here for the same reason as me, then, huh?
He does not know what to say to this. She is acting like some people do, all familiar, like she has seen his face and decided that they are friends.
– What’s that? he says, eventually.
She smiles again. Her teeth are discoloured, not yellow or grey but just not quite white. She raises herself on tippytoes, and moves her face towards his. He backs off, instinctively, but still her mouth is close enough for her to whisper; he feels her breath in his ear.
– You love Eli Gold.
She hits every word of the whisper, like there’s a full stop between each. She moves back down again and looks at him, wanting to find his eye.
His first instinct is to tell the truth: to say, No, I hate Eli Gold, and have come to bring him justice. However, he knows this would be a bad idea. It is time to Lie for the Lord.
– Yes. You’re right. I’m his biggest fan.
She opens her eyes wide, and waves her index finger this way and that, like he has sometimes seen black women doing on Jerry Springer.
– No way, baby. That … would be me.
He knows how to play along now, so he smiles, which feels strange on his face, like he can feel every little muscle doing it.
The Death of Eli Gold Page 17