‘What happened to Sonny?’ I asked. I was mildly curious, but the effort of putting the question was enough. My interest in him had, I found, faded before she could reply. Sonny was out of it. Out of the screenplay.
‘Ah, yes,’ she smiled; so transiently it was possible to miss it, ‘Sonny.’ He evaporated as she mentioned his name. A shadow slithering across a tile floor. Moisture at the pool’s edge. ‘I do see him sometimes in the corridor. But what’s left to say? We can never decide who’ll nod first.’ Freelance producers, it seems, come and go with the seasons: the realpolitik marches on. Only researchers are immortal. ‘I believe they’re sending him to… Paraguay.’ She made it sound like a one-way ticket. They don’t want him back. Ever.
This whole episode was cranking into back-lot Dostoevsky. The unshaven beer-breathed trio, in from the river; rancid with boredom. Swamp scum. Drooling, mumbling glossoplegics awaiting their next appointment with the Grotesque. Outpatients sharing a squeaky banquette with their fantasy salvation, a golden-haired Slav. A soft-spoken waif who chose to live and work in Whitechapel; to involve herself with demonstrably unhealthy material, morbid life-forms. And all to the despair of her family who suffered so much, and worked so long, to escape the place and all its memories. Our children, in one afternoon, unpick the ambitions of a generation. How innocently they enact our unspoken nightmares!
Jon Kay, ever the literalist, tried to lay his head on Sofya’s lap. He leered up at her. A lost soul crying for a mate to share his purgatory. She made a tiny adjustment to the line of her coat. Kay’s pipe-dream died. He slid floorward, and began to snore.
Sofya probed me, discreetly, about the fate of my tale, He Walked Amongst the Trial Men, which had initiated all this termite activity: brought us out on to the rivers and railways. (That stuff had been recycled more times than a Brick Lane pint.) It was her business to gather information, to interrogate, to forget nothing. The story, which she invoked, had originally been commissioned by the magazine, Butts Green, a defunct student publication from Cambridge, kibitzed into multinational stardom by the hard-nosed marketing strategies of Bull Bagman, its American proprietor. The magazine, which had previously limped along on a diet of unpaid effusions from E. M. Forster (Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Thom Gunn — and anybody else who wanted to audition for Faber), now showcased the hottest properties in World Lit. If you were a near ‘name’ or a future ‘maybe’, one issue would confirm your bankable status.
But Bull and I shared a trivial secret. I knew all about Bull’s previous identity. He was once a terminally distressed fenland bookdealer, going under the stagename of ‘Mossy Noonmann’. Fame, in the form of a libellous caricature in a forgotten novel, did him in. Put paid to the old lifestyle (if that is what you could call it). Tourists clogged up his cellar, staring at him in disbelief, as at a chained lunatic. And worse: the landlord noticed the long months of rent arrears. The commercial advantages of an instant eviction. Mossy was defenestrated, unhoused, cut loose. Most of his ‘stock’ gave itself up voluntarily to the exterminator. The rest made a dash for the drains.
Two months later, and forty miles south, Mossy was riding into Silicon City. A change of name, a change of pitch: he was a power in the land once more. And this time — it was for real! The wilder his schemes, the more the bankers loved it. He couldn’t ask for enough money. But he could try. He’d been trained in the right school. All the 1960s scoundrels were getting out of books and into publishing. Much more scope on a sinking ship. Room to manoeuvre. And, anyway, the Americans had stopped buying antiquarian literature and started collecting imprints, conglomerates, prestige Georgian properties.
‘Bull loved bits of White Chappell,’ said the worthy young man, deputed to make the offer. ‘He never finishes anything. He skim-reads. But he has the hunch you could work up something lowlife, London, topographical — basically, downriver.’ I didn’t answer. I was lost in admiration for the style of my potential patron, who was occupied with a courageous, single-handed revival of the Colin Wilson look. Drab: with balls.
We were sipping our tepid half-pints in an unlikely hostelry, off Trafalgar Square, crammed to the doors with paroled business folk. I hadn’t partied in this zone since my eldest daughter was born in the (transferred) cockroach hospital around the corner. The ambulance, on that occasion, had broken down a mile shy of its destination. We walked the streets, carrying our suitcases (how much stuff do you need for an unborn child?); into the building, stepping over the sprawled ranks of junkies puking on the floor of Casualty.
‘I hope you don’t object to line-editing,’ warned the bespectacled go-between. ‘Bull likes to keep a tight grip on the text. That’s the house style. Delusions of empire building. He thinks he’s putting out the New Yorker. He chops everybody. Except Jeanette Winterson. And Martin Amis, of course.’
I was caught off-balance: being asked for a ‘piece of writing’, and promised real money, the front window, display space alongside the cash register. I went along with it. I should have known better. But now, a year and a half later, I was living (living?) on kill fees; and feeling like a resurrectionist when the graveyard has just been covered in concrete.
I showed Sofya the great man’s final letter of rejection. ‘I’m confused by it, confused about what is being depicted… I remain at a loss.’ We were, up to that point, and despite our cultural differences, in complete agreement. The man had sweated as he wrestled with this thing. The typescript was devastated by saline smears, honey blobs, burns, wine-spits. Holmes could have gathered up enough ash for a library of monographs. Bagman truly wanted it, wanted to hack and slash, transplant, transpose, transform: until his ‘piece’ came into a focus that would hold. He wanted to achieve a finished object that could be honourably exploited.
I dragged the spurned and tattered rewrite from my pocket and shoved it across the table. Pencilled comments speared the margins: a messianic tutorial. ‘Who is “I”?’ was the first controversy. An existential dilemma that stopped the present writer dead in his tracks. On that single incisive challenge the whole schmear hangs. ‘Who is “I”?’ Answer that riddle, or get out of the maze. The slippery self-confessor, the closet De Quincey (I, Me, You, He), speaks of‘the Narrator’, or ‘Sinclair’: deflects the thrust of the accusation. The narrator exists only in his narration: outside this tale he is nothing. But ‘Sinclair’ is a tribe. There are dozens of them: Scots, Jews, Scribblers, Masons, Cathars (even Supernaturals, such as Glooscap, the mangod of the Micmacs). It’s an epistemophiliac disguise. A small admission to win favour: a plea bargain. And what gives this self-designated ‘I’ the right to report these events? How deeply he is implicated? Is he (I) a liar? Can we (you) trust him?
This was beginning to pinch. I (‘I’) let my gaze drift down the lovingly assembled beds of words until I (‘we’) arrived at the sentence reading: ‘The man who had shot, and lost, the definitive Minton.’ ‘WHAT IS THIS?’ screamed Bagman’s reasonable pencil. What is this? As if he suspected it (Minton) of being some species of effete English porcelain. Should I have provided a footnote on the Soho Scene in the 1940s and 1950s, on John Deakin the photographer, on John Minton? Should I have credited Daniel Farson? Was Minton now forgotten? Even among all the kiss-of-life attempts to revive the flaccid corpse of British Romanticism? Did it matter if these strange names remained unidentified, mysterious? Which names, if any, would have been acceptable? Mervyn Peake? The wrong sexual persuasion. The Roberts? Colquhoun and MacBryde? Worse. They only exist as fictions in the untrustworthy memoirs of Julian Maclaren-Ross. Francis Bacon, perhaps? Too many of them. And they’re all too famous. (But you will notice if you check back to the first tale that I have, in fact, acted on Bagman’s excellent advice, and rejigged the sentence.)