Our very first breakfast as a family.
May 1, 2015
WELSH RAIN GODS PISS onto the roofs, festival tents, and umbrellas of Hay-on-Wye and also on Crispin Hershey, as he strides along a gutter-noisy lane, into the Old Cinema Bookshop and makes his way down to its deepest bowel, where he rips this week’s Piccadilly Reviewto confetti. Who on God’s festering Earth does that six-foot-wide, corduroy-clad, pubic-bearded, rectal probe Richard Cheeseman think he is? I shut my eyes but the words of his review slide by like the breaking news: “I tried my utmost to find something, anything, in Crispin Hershey’s long-awaited novel to dilute its trepanning godawfulness.” How darethat inflatable semen-stained Bagpuss write that after cosying up to me at the Royal Society of Literature bashes? “In my salad days at Cambridge, I got into a fistfight defending the honor of Hershey’s early masterpiece Desiccated Embryosand to this day I wear the scar on my ear as a badge of honor.” Who sponsored Richard Cheeseman’s application for Pen UK? Idid. I did! And how does he thank me? “To dub Echo Must Die‘infantile, flatulent, ghastly drivel’ would be an insult to infants, to flatulence, and to ghasts alike.” I stamp on the magazine’s shredded remains, panting and gasping …
TRULY, DEAR READER, I could weep. Kingsley Amis boasted how a bad review might spoil his breakfast, but it bloody wasn’t going to spoil his lunch. Kingsley Amis lived in the pre-Twitter age, when reviewers actually read proofs and thought independently. Nowadays they just Google for a preexisting opinion and, thanks to Richard Cheeseman’s chainsaw massacre, what they’ll read about my comeback novel is: “So why is Echo Must Diesuch a decomposing hog? One: Hershey is so bent on avoiding clichй that each sentence is as tortured as an American whistleblower. Two: The fantasy subplot clashes so violently with the book’s State of the World pretensions, I cannot bear to look. Three: What surer sign is there that the creative aquifers are dry than a writer creating a writer-character?” Richard Cheeseman has hung a KICK ME sign around Echo Must Die’s neck, at the very time I need a commercial renaissance. It isn’t the 1990s, when my agent, Hal “the Hyena” Grundy, could pluck a Ј500K book deal as easily as a plug of mucus from his giant honker. Now is the official Decade of the Death of the Book. I’m hemorrhaging Ј40K a year on school fees for the girls, and the little pied-а-terre in Montreal’s well-heeled Outremont neighborhood may have put a smile back on Zoл’s face but the expense has rendered me financially mortal for the first time since Hal the Hyena got me my book deal for Desiccated Embryos. My iPhone trills. Speak of the devil, it’s a message from Hal.
gig kicks off 45mins o brother where art thou?
The Hyenas are howling. The show must go on.
MAEVE MUNRO, SALTY captain of BBC2’s flagship arts show, gives a let’s-roll nod to the stage manager. I’m waiting in the wings, miked up. Publicity Girl scrolls through her messages. Stage Manager asks me to check that my mobile is switched off. I check, and find two new messages: one from Qantas air miles and one about garbage collection. In our marital halcyon days, Mrs. Zoл Legrange-Hershey would send Knock ’em dead, Genius–type texts before my gigs, but these days she doesn’t even ask what country I’m going to. Nothing from the girls, even. Juno will be playing remotely with her schoolfriends—or perverts pretending to be schoolfriends—on Tunnel Town or whatever the latest app is, while Anaпs will be reading a Michael Morpurgo book. Why don’t Iwrite kids’ books about lonely children forging bonds with animals? Because I’ve spent two decades being the Wild Child of British literature, that’s sodding why. In publishing it’s easier to change your body than it is to switch genre.
House lights dim, stage lights brighten, and the audience falls silent. Maeve Munro’s telegenic face shines and her trademark Orcadian lilt fills the tent. “Good evening, I’m Maeve Munro, broadcasting live from the Hay Festival, 2015. Ever since his debut novel Wanda in Oils, published while its author was still an undergraduate, Crispin Hershey has earned his stripes as a master stylist and a laser-sharp chronicler of our times. Our most lusted-after gong, the Brittan Prize, has—scandalously—eluded his grasp so far, but many believe that 2015 could finally be his year. With no further ado, reading from Echo Must Die, his first novel in five years, please join me and our very proud sponsors FutureNow Bank in welcoming—Crispin Hershey!”
Solid applause. I approach the lectern. A full house. Sodding well ought to be—they already moved me from the six-hundred seater PowerGen Venue to this “more intimate setting.” Editor Oliver sits in the front row with Hyena Hal and his newest client and the Next Hot Young American Thing, Nick Greek. Let silence fall. Rain drums on the marquee roof. Most writers would now thank the audience for coming out on such a bad night, but Hershey treats ’em mean to keep ’em keen and opens Echo Must Dieat page one.
I clear my throat. “I’ll jump straight in …”
… my last line dispatched, I return to my chair. Swing high, sweet clap-o-meter; not bad for a contingent of securely pensioned metropolitans stuffed with artisanal fudge and organic cider. They guffawed as my protagonist Trevor Upward got duct-taped to the roof of the Eurostar; squirmed when Titus Hurt found a human finger in his Cornish pastie; and thrummed at my dйnouement in the Cambridge pub, which flowers into Audenesque rhyme when spoken aloud at festivals. Maeve Munro gives me a cheerful that-went-well face; I give her a why-wouldn’t-it? face back. Hershey spent his boyhood among thesps, and Dad’s habit of ridiculing my brother and me for garbled diction has borne plump fruit. Dad’s last words, as my memoir recounts, were “It’s ‘whom,’ you baboon, not ‘who’ …”
“To kick off the Q and A,” Maeve Munro addresses the tent, “I have some questions of my own. Then we’ll turn it over to our roving mikes. So, Crispin, on last Friday’s Newsnight Review, eminent critic Aphra Booth described Echo Must Dieas ‘a classic male midlife crisis novel.’ Any response?”
“Oh, I’d say she’s hit the nail on the head,” I take a slow sip of water, “ if, like Aphra Booth, your notion of ‘reading’ is to skim the back jacket in the green-room loo a minute before going on air.”
My quip earns a fake smile from Maeve Munro, who is often seen wining and whining with Aphra Booth at the Mistletoe Club. “Right … And as for Richard Cheeseman’s rather lackluster review—”
“What christening is complete without a jealous fairy’s curse?”
Laughter; gasps; Twitterstorm ahoy. The Telegraphwill report the line on page one of their arts section; Richard Cheeseman will get his gay-rights group to give me the Bigot of the Year Award; Hyena Hal will be thinking Publi$ity, while Nick Greek, bless, looks puzzled. American writers are so sodding niceto each other, hanging out in their Brooklyn lofts and writing each other’s references for professorial chairs. “Let’s move on,” says Maeve Munro, her fluty trill flattening, “while we’re ahead.”
“What makes you think you’re ‘ahead,’ Maeve?”
Little smile: “ Echo Must Die’s protagonist is, like yourself, a novelist, yet in your memoir To Be Continuedyou dub novels about novelists ‘incestuous.’ Is Trevor Upward a U-turn, or is incest now a more attractive proposition?”
I lean back, smiling, while my interviewer’s fan base expends its gur-hurs. “While I’d never lecture a native of the Orkney Islands, Maeve, on the subject of incest, I would maintain that withoutshifts in viewpoint, a writer could only write the same novel ad infinitum. Or end up teaching uncreative writing at a college for the privileged in upstate New York.”