Kill Your Darlings Read online

  The plot thickened, then thinned, then faded away all together. My lovers usually made the first move for the door; I preferred it like that and made it happen in the various cruel ways that men learn early in their lives. Being abandoned was like finally giving up on a novel that had initially been thrilling but had eventually become torture to write: the agony was soon swept aside by a vast surge of relief. I had reclaimed my life, my future.

  This is a creative primer, not the memoirs of an adulterer. The fact is that while each of the six (seven if you include a brief, intense week spent with the wife of a Welsh opera singer at a writers’ conference in Derbyshire) prolonged romantic events that have occurred during my marriage contained different emotional and erotic dynamics, none of them individually has any bearing on this story. I was unfaithful, severally and serially, from 1984 onwards. I never stopped loving my wife. Marigold and I reached a stage when the adulterer’s symphony – the click of a telephone as, somewhere in the house, the extension is being put down, the casual tearing of incriminating notes, the easy, unchallenged excuses, the single late-night ring – provided an easy-listening backing track of normality to our marriage.

  Now I found myself wondering whether Marigold had started playing the same game out of retaliation or loneliness or frustration. It was difficult to imagine her as a cheat. Infidelity was too childish for her, too trivial and selfish. It occurred to me that, at the very moment when I was the one taking control of my life, expressing my needs in a controlled and orderly fashion with regular, furtive trips to the Agency, she was regressing, or maybe enacting some tawdry act of revenge for those past years of hurt. ‘See?’ She was saying. ‘See how it feels?’

  I did see, and it hurt. I felt sorry for us both, for the young couple we had once been. Over the years, we had let something vital slip through our fingers, something which part of us would long for and regret losing, whatever happened, for the rest of our lives.

  My wife was having an affair. One day I noticed that, on one of the low glass tables, a small silver-framed photograph had made a reappearance after years in some bottom drawer. Marigold and me, in front of our old Saab, leaving our wedding reception for the airport. I seem to be drunk – even when I’m not drunk, I seem to be drunk in photographs – and she’s waving a happy, short-arm, little-girl wave. We look like children, so full of hope, so buoyed up by optimism and plans and the good wishes of the world.

  Was my wife now trying to tell me something? Was it an absurd thought that her fling was no more than a way to catch my attention, to shock our stale and flagging marriage back into some kind of life? Or was it simply that small domestic framed photographs, replete with loss and incipient tragedy, were absolutely the thing this season among feng shui designers? It seemed unwise to ask.

  * * *

  The Writer Speaks of … Success

  ‘Success improves the character of a man, it does not always improve the character of an author.’

  W. Somerset Maugham

  ‘It’s no use. I find it impossible to work with security staring me in the face.’

  Sherwood Anderson

  ‘A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution.’

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  ‘The deepest desire of any writer is anonymity, not to be pointed out in the street.’

  Ted Hughes

  ‘Every success is an eventual failure.’

  Graham Greene

  ‘It is very easy to fall off the tightrope that writers walk; no one is there to catch you. That shame and secrecy about failure is worse than the thing itself.’

  Maggie Gee

  * * *

  8

  So, for a while, we ran with the literary crowd. Two or three times a week, Peter Gibson and I would go out on the town to readings, launches, vernissages, debates – to whatever excuse for a party was being held that particular night. We hung out in clubs and bookshops and restaurants and galleries and the smoky upstairs rooms of pubs. We drank the free drinks, grazed upon the small, damp items of food, listened to the low-grade gossip, watched the process of chat and contact without which no book of significance can be published.

  To be sure, this was not the world of the big-timers. We were among the B-list literati – the sad-sack reviewers whose eyes betrayed a lifetime of disappointment, the books page totties, the twitching agents and book publishers forever combing the scene for the new, the young, the seducible, the corruptible. As we went, I provided Peter with a running guide to the topography of this ill-appointed landscape. Here was the alcoholic editor still living off a reputation gained two decades ago. There was the randily persistent poet touting his ageing charms and faded literary reputation about the room in search of his conquest for the night. Here was the career critic as careful with his friendships as with the phrases invariably included in his reviews to ensure that all-important appearance of his name on the back of the paperback. There was the blowsy literary agent whose availability over the years had provided her with a peerless network of influential men who had once spent the night with her.

  These occasions were essentially about barter, I explained to Peter as we stood on the stairs of one of London’s swankier bookshops gazing down at the literary herd gathered for an annual party. To survive and flourish, you had to bring to the party some kind of currency: new work, youth, contacts, gossip about which author was discontented with which agent, who had delivered which hot new literary property.

  My student smiled in a tolerant, almost regal way. Unlike the female students I had introduced to the book world in the past (functions such as this being as good a way as any of shifting a relationship from the educational to the social and eventually to the sexual), Peter appeared to have no interest in mixing with the influential or the semi-famous, but stood back and observed, like one who knew that soon enough the throng would be making its way to him. Even his inappropriate garb, faded, denim and torn, imbued him with a certain careless dignity.

  ‘And what is your barter?’ he asked me.

  I considered for a moment. ‘My next book. A knowledge of the scene. Maybe an interview in Professional Writer.’ I smiled significantly. ‘The inside track on a promising new talent.’

  Ignoring my last remark, Peter murmured, ‘None of them seem much interested in the books that are all around them.’

  ‘It’s not about books, this world. It’s about introductions, favours, positioning yourself for the right product, the right job. Very few of the conversations down there will be about words on the page. Books are merely the product, the focus of a deal.’

  ‘They don’t read?’

  ‘They all read the same books of the moment. They want to know the secret, to catch a hint from today’s success of what will “work” tomorrow. Mention the name of an author who is out of fashion and you’ll be regarded as deeply suspect. You reveal yourself as a real reader, a lurker in dusty libraries and second-hand bookshops, some sort of ghastly literary enthusiast.’

  Peter was looking at me, that irritatingly knowing smile on his face. ‘Yet here we are, playing the game. You seem completely at home.’

  I sensed a coolness to him now, as if he had suddenly recognized that I had not brought him here out of teacherly generosity, but that he was part of yet another deal. It was true that, over the past few weeks, I had been gratified to see how, soon after I had offered him up, the sharks were circling, sniffing eagerly at his unsullied promise and his lanky beauty. I had smiled as they were rebuffed. He wanted to be the real writer, he had explained. He was not a journalist. They smelt talent, or rather they sensed a look, a personality, who might be promoted.

  ‘At least at this party we’re among fellow authors. It’s not just what is known as “the trade”.’

  We watched the room for a while. It was one of the few parties during the autumn to which only the grandest or most reclusive of authors would decline an invitation. Guests circulated one another warily, assessing who was
here, who had slipped from the invitation list, who was talking to whom, who sought them out for conversation, who avoided them or passed by with a glazed, desultory nod of acknowledgement. Sometimes, dancing attendance upon the more august luminaries, you might see a young journalist or editor or even a favoured critic, enacting the traditional symbiotic relationship of age and beauty, youth and celebrity, ambition and experience. Over the eager, gossipy throng, there seemed to hang the polite, edgy, anxious question with which authors all over the world greet one another. What are you working on?

  At the centre of the room, the veteran novelist Francis Speight, a beaky, grey-haired man, was holding forth to a small, respectful entourage. Most of us who had read his work knew that Speight was nowhere near the top order of writers but, over the past three decades or so, the sheer, bullying volume of his output, the persistence with which he appeared at the right conferences, on the right TV discussion programmes, had established him as a sort of literary eminence. Now, as he talked and talked, he seemed to gaze over the heads of his listeners with a rapt and distant look as if seeing a well-deserved knighthood approaching him across the room.

  ‘Observing the fair field of folk?’

  I turned to see, leaning against the banister in the manner of a Hollywood star making her entrance, the assiduously ambitious literary journalist Tony Watson. He smiled briefly at me and then gazed at Peter with a degree of interest that would have seemed erotic to the few people in this room who did not know that he was married, with a mistress in the BBC and that this queeny air was merely one of his many affectations. ‘Yak yak yak.’ He pouted in the direction of Speight. ‘If they ever give grants to encourage novelists to stop writing, Francis will get my vote.’ He extended a hand downwards. ‘Tony Watson.’

  After I had introduced him to Peter, Watson, without any obvious encouragement, began talking languidly about himself.

  Now in his early forties, with the fleshy, pampered look of a man who has not broken out of a stroll since he left school, Tony Watson had first made his reputation as something of a young Turk, gleefully dismantling work by novelists whose reputations had outlived their talent. Then in his mid-twenties, he had sensed that a new generation of readers was tired of the old critical proprieties, of the widely accepted rule that critics should politely avert their gaze from the declining powers of respected older writers. A new brutality was in the air, a lust for blood. Tony Watson became a Lord High Executioner of the new establishment, a sneering, clever boy who, while trashing the work of others, never failed to point up his own precocious learning and vocabulary and knowledge, not only of what he called ‘the canon’ but of other, newly fashionable traditions from South America or Eastern Europe. Watson tore through reputations, bringing to his judgements a tough-guy swagger, a feline contempt, the compulsively fascinating spectacle of a young prodigy giving his distinguished elders a thorough duffing up from which many of their careers would never quite recover. The almost palpable distaste for civilized values and sagging flesh, now the norm in certain quarters, was then startlingly new. To a world used to the ‘underdog’s snarl’ that Gilbert Pinfold had once identified in literary journalists, this leering sense of his own intrinsic superiority was shockingly entertaining. How dare he? they asked at first. The nerve of this little pipsqueak. But soon, as he became more powerful, they watched him with fear and anticipation. Whom would he destroy next?

  His reputation and influence grew. A collection of essays was published, followed by a rather good, if surprisingly sentimental, account of his life-were-ever-so-’ard childhood which gave the town of Walsall a brief, surprising literary distinction. Then, unwisely, he introduced a new element into his magisterial tours d’horizon: during his regular reports on the state of contemporary British fiction which he had found to be, if not clinically dead, then in intensive care, he would confide his own creative problems, invoking the names of Ozick or Conrad, Gaddis or James. Could it be true? We longed for it to be true. At last, during the course of an essay on the decline of the political novel for the London Review of Books, he declared himself. Tony Watson was writing a novel.

  We waited. A collection of criticism appeared, followed by a TV history of the English novel which saw Tony striding, windblown, across the Yorkshire moors, loitering camply in the East End of London and, less successfully, sporting a helmet with a lamp down a Nottinghamshire mine. He was as confident as ever, yet that generalized, infuriated disappointment which had once been his trademark seemed somehow to have abated. When reviewing new novels, he no longer reacted to their shortcomings as if they were insults specifically and personally directed at him. His references to the work of established novelists sometimes revealed a note of genuine, if haughty, respect that suggested that his secret agonies as a novelist had blunted the edge of his rage. A certain gravitas, plump, self-important and prematurely middle-aged, took hold of his prose. He married a plain but well-regarded Oxford medievalist. Children were produced, followed by the inevitable features and diary columns extolling the joys and travails of the writer-parent. Today Tony, a reviewer for the Observer and, in his more essayistic moments, for the New York Review of Books, had arrived at the position for which he had clearly always been destined, at the very heart of the literary establishment for which he had, fifteen busy years ago, professed such contempt.

  I had not been attending to Watson’s halting conversation with my student until I heard the great critic mention the title of my first novel. ‘Mm?’ I shook my head briefly. ‘Sorry, I was mid-scene.’

  Tony linked an arm through mine as if we were literary compadres. ‘I was just saying to Peter that what the scene needs these days is the sort of wit and intelligence that one found in a certain Forever Young.’

  ‘The world has moved on.’

  ‘There’s always a place for laughter.’ He turned back to Peter. ‘Such a precious gift, that of a comic novelist. When I reviewed Gregory’s novel for the New Statesman, I mentioned Firbank, Leacock and Peter de Vries. Some people thought I was –’ He lifted his hands in a faggoty two-fingered clawing motion ‘– “damning with faint praise” but I’m of the school that there’s nothing quite so serious as humour. Look at Martin. Suddenly he has taken to describing himself as a comic novelist – although, frankly, one has never exactly turned to Monsieur Amis for a belly-laugh.’

  ‘Tony also described me as belonging to the hopeless English male tradition. All fingers and thumbs and premature ejaculation. “Keays offers us the unsavoury face of the clubbable Englishman, who disguises a fear of engagement, of passion, of women, of life under a cloak of facetiousness.”’

  Tony Watson laughed gaily. ‘I meant your character, not you, dear boy,’ he said. ‘And I never expected you to learn it off by heart.’

  ‘What are you working on these days, Tony?’

  ‘Oh, nothing much.’ Watson glanced over my left shoulder to ensure that no one of more use to him than me was in social range. ‘FatherLand’s shaping up well.’

  ‘Surely that title has been used for a novel.’

  Watson grimaced with mock-irritation. ‘It’s not a novel, silly. It’s an anthology. Some rather remarkable new writing about fatherhood, as it happens.’

  It was my turn to smile. This was better than I had expected. Yet another celebration of drooling dads, blubbing over childbirth, gruffly coming to terms with their new domesticated status as they changed nappies, using some mewling infant as a means to investigate, with tearful honesty, their own sensitivity. ‘What a very original idea,’ I said, as seriously as I could manage.

  ‘Got any sprogs yourself?’ he asked.

  ‘Just the one. A teenager.’

  Watson, who had been studying a group of fellow guests across the room, betrayed a flicker of interest. ‘We haven’t done the teenage thing. Most of my gang are rather too young. And I started a little late.’

  ‘I’m not really a domestic writer. I favour the large canvas these days.’

  Wa
tson glanced at Peter and, for the briefest instance, I thought that he was about to deploy the stiletto with some pointless reference to my children’s work The Lonely Giant which I had unwisely discussed with him during the heady moments of completion, but he merely said, ‘We’re not talking domestic. We’re exploring the new memoirism. It would need to be toe-curlingly frank.’

  It occurred to me that a spot of media visibility might not do my career too much harm at this point. My bracingly clear-eyed perspective on family matters would doubtless shine beside the lachrymose self-adoration of my fellow contributors. There was the small question of whether Doug would like his young life served up, however elegantly and wittily, in memoirist mode but then I realized, with a certain relief, that to imagine him reading anything, let alone a book of new writing about fatherhood, was absurd. ‘Sounds possible,’ I said. ‘How much?’

  ‘Five hundred pounds. And fifty for the kid.’

  ‘The kid?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s the other thing. We’re getting a sort of vérité-ish child’s eye view at the end of each piece – the kid bites back kind of thing. So your boy would be interviewed about you. We’d do a little 150-word tailpiece.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Watson must have noticed some sort of change of expression on my face because he muttered to Peter, ‘So difficult these writers.’

  ‘No. It just sounds a tad exploitative,’ I said carefully. ‘I’ve always been careful not to use my family for professional purposes. You’ll remember what David Lodge once said about the wonderful material you can’t write about without hurting somebody –’