‘Work, work, work!’ he cried. ‘Will it never end? Now you’re asking me to write a trash novel that my present publisher will turn down, and so leave me free to go to another publisher with a real no holds barred genuine 22-carat Blaskin. Do I understand you to mean that I’m to write two novels instead of one?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Pour me another drink.’
Bill obliged. ‘You’d better come up with something better than that, Michael. Can’t you see Major Blaskin’s upset?’
‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do,’ I said, ‘and this is final. I’ll write the shit novel, Bill will do the Sidney Blood and you can get on with the proper novel for your new publisher — as soon as you’ve written your lecture. All I want is a title.’
Blaskin was very pleased with my arrangements. ‘Call it SPOOF.’
‘Then I want something to eat.’ A good heart, plus a sense of humour, were fatal for survival. I had promised too much. You had to be halfway good to cover two hundred pages with trash. I wouldn’t know where to start, and was too proud — and stupid — to ask Blaskin for advice, for whom such work was as easy as breathing in and out. I could have done the Sidney Blood tale better, but had palmed that off on Bill, who was already scribbling notes on the back of a cake packet: ‘It’s nice to have something to do again, Michael. You’re a winner. Never at a loss for a solution.’
Inside I groaned, but outside I grinned and said it made me happy to help. I spoke my adventures with Moggerhanger into a tape recorder, and Blaskin put it into a padded envelope for his secretary, Jenny Potash. He already had a wad of material from Bill, but I didn’t tell him (and he didn’t see Bill look up from his cake packet and wink with his wolf-like Worksop eyelid) that Bill was the biggest liar in the world.
I set the spare typewriter and a box of Croxley Script on the kitchen table, and made a couple of false starts on some crazy tale of adventure. Each time I screwed the paper into a ball and threw it to Dismal he caught it neatly in his jaws and carried it to the trash basket.
Write the first thing that comes into your mind, I told myself. That’s how they all do it. It never fails. So I began to type, and knew straightaway that it was the third time lucky — as long as I could keep my fingers pecking at the keys.
It’s true, of course, that you bite the hand that feeds you, but usually there’s no other hand close enough. Langham ran away with his best friend’s wife, thinking that because he was his best friend he wouldn’t hold it against him. In any case his wife had led him a dog’s life, made his existence positively dismal, so he thought he was doing him a favour. But when he saw him standing in the doorway with a stubby handgun pointing in his direction, Langham knew he must have been wrong.
I didn’t even stop to read, otherwise I’d have admired it for so long that I wouldn’t have got any further. The secret that came to me naturally was: go on, no matter what trash comes out of the typewriter. Maybe having an old man for an author was at least half the battle.
John Weems caught them in amorous passion on the rush matting of Tinderbox Cottage.
I described every object in the place, giving its price and history, shape and colour, which took ten pages, before letting the reader (and myself) know whether Weems the husband was going to kill Langham the lover or not. I had fun. They wouldn’t know until the end of chapter two — neither would I — maybe not even till halfway through the book.
I thumped away and by midnight thirty pages had shot out of the roller. Dismal followed the carriage back and forth in a very encouraging way so that I even did the first sentence of Chapter Two:
The sound of his piss rattling into the pan was like the noise of her voice calling him.
Then I stopped. The others were asleep, Blaskin in the bedroom and Bill on the sofa. Dismal was nodding on the rug at my feet as if made of foam rubber. I picked up the first page of Blaskin’s lecture:
Begin by telling them that if the fantasy of truth is fact, the truth of fantasy is fiction. That’ll get ’em. Then go on to confess (there’s no better word for it) that I treat the novel like a symphony. I mean, in the way of alternating comedy and tragedy, farce and seriousness. I aim for perfect harmony out of widespread chaos. Many individuals inhabit the continent of a novel, but I’m the Big Chief who marshals their actions and emotions, which lesser folk put down to fate. From wanting to write a novel of serious intent at which there are nevertheless places where you laugh, I will henceforth weave a patchwork of interwoven set pieces, each with its tragic or comic mark, but all related by the desire of the hero to find God among the ruins of his moral but all too human ineptitudes. God help me, isn’t that enough? Change course, if you can, without drowning in the Seven Seas of Ambiguity. I wasn’t made for this. I’m only a writer.
I persist in writing novels (I’m glad you asked me that one) because I don’t yet think that ‘the novel’ as an art form has reached its apogee. No author should get lost in its twentieth-century cul-de-sac. I try to cure myself of the habit of thinking that the next novel will be my best. If I persist in this belief I will end by assuming, with many critics and reviewers, that the novel is dead — though a more ridiculous statement I’ve never heard. The best novel is the one you’ve just written.
England’s writers have always been attracted by the demotic. While their limitations in this endeavour have sometimes been obvious, the result has often been fair to middling. Some people like a good sprinkling of the demotic because it opens a window on what they would otherwise never have a hope of understanding. Others like it because, hearing it every day, it reflects their own life. Some may dislike the demotic because they see those who use it as a threat to their way of life. Most writers are unable to use it because if they did they would sound fake or patronising. And another reason is that every time I fart I get a pain near my heart. Say in lecture. Stop this waffle, and make ’em laugh. That’s all they want, and who can blame ’em?
It was a poor start, but what could you expect from someone who was better at telling lies than trying to find out what he thought? Sifting through Bill’s pile of paper, I was both appalled and impressed. He’d got the Sidney Blood tone perfectly, but on some pages he’d outblooded Blood in obscenity and violence to an extent that even I had to stop reading. It was bound to be a success. Blaskin didn’t know how lucky he was to be running such a dedicated workshop. I took a lamb chop from the fridge and threw it to Dismal as a reward for his cooperation and encouragement.
Restless after being cooped up writing for hours, I put on my Burberry and took a late tube to Piccadilly. I’d cashed money from the bank and it burned a hole in my pocket, so at The Hair of the Dog I flashed the blanket membership card that Moggerhanger issued to his inner circle and went in. One or two drinkers were flush against the walls, and Kenny Dukes sat near the bar. I bought drinks for us both. ‘Here’s the skin off your lips.’
Such a phrase, straight out of Sidney Blood, brought him back to life with a smile which showed his battered teeth. ‘I hear you been to Spleen.’
‘That’s right,’ I said.
‘A cushy billet.’
‘I’ve seen worse.’
‘Like Peppercorn?’
‘That was great,’ I said. ‘I’m in love with the place. The rats were very friendly.’
He shuddered. ‘I hate rats. When I went up there I slept outside. But the fuckers came out and ran all over me. So I walked up and down the lane all night. Don’t talk to me about rats.’