Authors: Jonathan Coe
I felt no inclination to correct him on that point, but couldn’t make up my mind whether to nod or shake my head, and so did neither.
‘Michael,’ he said, leaning forward, ‘allow me one favour.’
‘You’ve got it.’
‘Allow me, for one moment, to speak as your friend, and not as your editor.’
I shrugged. ‘Feel free.’
‘OK, then. Speaking as your friend, and not as your editor – and I hope you won’t take this the wrong way – may I just say – in a spirit of constructive criticism, and personal interest – that you look fucking terrible.’
I stared back at him.
‘Michael, you look as though you’ve aged about twenty years.’
I struggled for words. ‘What … Are you saying that I look old?’
‘The thing is that you always used to look so young. Back then, you always looked ten years younger than you really were, and now you look ten years older than you really are.’
I thought about this for a moment, and wondered whether to point out that in that case, allowing for the eight years which had gone by in the meantime, I should really have been looking as though I’d aged about thirty years. But instead I just sat there, my mouth opening and shutting like a land-locked fish.
‘So what happened?’ said Patrick. ‘What’s been going on?’
‘Well, I don’t know … I don’t really know where to begin.’ Patrick got up at this point, but I carried on talking. ‘The 1980s weren’t a good time for me, on the whole. I suppose they weren’t for a lot of people.’ He had opened a cupboard, and seemed to be staring at the inside of the door. ‘My father died a few years ago, and that hit me quite hard, and then – well, as you probably know, ever since I split up with Verity, I haven’t had much –’
‘Do I look older?’ Patrick asked suddenly. I realized that he was peering into a mirror.
‘What? No, not really.’
‘I feel it.’ He sat down again, with an exaggerated flop. ‘It suddenly seems all such a long time ago, you showing up in my office, full of youthful promise.’
‘Well, as I was saying, so much has happened since then: first there was my father dying, which was all a bit of a blow, and then –’
‘I hate this job, you know. I really hate what it’s become.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ I waited for him to elaborate, but there was just a heavy pause. ‘Anyway, and then, as you know, since Verity and I broke up, I haven’t been all that successful when it comes to –’
‘I mean, it’s just not the same job any more. The whole business has changed out of all recognition. We get all our instructions from America and nobody pays the slightest bit of attention to anything I say at editorial meetings. Nobody gives a tinker’s fuck about fiction any more, not
real
fiction, and the only kind of … values anybody seems to care about are the ones that can be added up on a balance sheet.’ He poured himself another beakerful and took a deep swig, as if it was neat whisky. ‘Now, here –
here’s
something that’ll make you laugh. This’ll really crease you up, this will. I read a new novel the other day, in typescript. Do you want to guess who it was by?’
‘All right, tell me.’
‘A friend of yours. Someone you know a lot about.’
‘I give up.’
‘Hilary Winshaw.’
Once again I found myself at a loss for words.
‘Oh yes, they’re all at it now, you know. It’s not enough to be stinking rich, land yourself one of the most powerful jobs in television and have two million readers paying good money every week to find out about the dry rot in your skirting-board: these people want fucking immortality! They want their names in the British Library catalogue, they want their six presentation copies, they want to be able to slot that handsome hardback volume between the Shakespeare and the Tolstoy on their living-room bookshelf. And they’re going to get it. They’re going to get it because people like me know only too well that even if we decide we’ve found the new Dostoevsky, we’re still not going to sell half as many copies as we would of any old crap written by some bloke who reads the weather on the fucking
television
!’
His voice rose almost to a shout on the last word. Then he sat back and ran his hands through his hair.
‘So what’s it like then, her book?’ I asked, after he had had time to calm down a bit.
‘Oh, it’s the usual sort of rubbish. Lots of media people being dynamic and ruthless. Sex every forty pages. Cheap tricks, mechanical plot, lousy dialogue, could have been written by a computer. Probably was written by a computer. Empty, hollow, materialistic, meretricious. Enough to make any civilized person heave, really.’ He stared ruefully into space. ‘And the worst of it is they didn’t even accept my bid. Somebody tipped me by ten grand. Bastards. I just know it’s going to be the hit of the spring season.’
There appeared to be no easy way of breaking the ensuing silence. Patrick’s eyes were popped out like a frog’s as he looked straight past me, and he seemed to have completely forgotten that I was in the room.
‘Look,’ I said at last, making a big show of glancing at my watch. ‘I really have to go and keep another appointment quite soon. If you could just give me a few pointers about the stuff I sent you …’
Patrick’s eyes slowly turned in my direction and came into focus. A dreamy, rueful grin spread over his face. I don’t think he had heard me.
‘Then again, maybe none of this matters,’ he said. ‘Maybe there are more important things going on in the world and my little problems don’t count for much at all. Perhaps we’ll be at war soon, anyway.’
‘At war?’
‘Well, it’s beginning to look that way, isn’t it? Britain and France sending more troops to Saudi Arabia. On Sunday we expel all those people from the Iraqi Embassy. And now the Ayatollah’s joining in and calling for a holy war against the United States.’ He shuddered. ‘I’m telling you, the implications of this situation look pretty grim from where I’m sitting.’
‘You mean that as soon as the fighting starts, Israel is going to get involved and before we know it relationships in the Middle East will be even worse. And then if the United Nations breaks up under the strain, the whole Cold War situation is wide open again and we could be looking at the possibility of a limited nuclear war?’
Patrick’s glance expressed pity at my naivety.
‘That’s hardly my point,’ he said. ‘The thing is that if we don’t get a biography of Saddam Hussein into the shops in the next three or four months, we’re going to get crapped on by every publisher in town.’ He looked up at me with a sudden desperate gleam in his eye. ‘Maybe you could do one for us. What do you say? Six weeks’ research, six weeks’ writing. Twenty thousand upfront if we keep all the overseas and serial rights.’
‘Patrick, I can’t believe I’m hearing this.’ I got up, paced the room a couple of times and then looked him square in the face. ‘I can’t believe you’re the same person I had all those discussions with eight years ago. All that stuff about the – permanence of great literature; the need to look beyond the horizons of the merely contemporary. I mean, what’s the business doing to you these days?’
I could see that I’d caught his attention at last and, from the way his face was rapidly falling, that my message had a chance of getting through. So I decided to press the point home.
‘You used to have such faith in literature, Patrick. I’ve never known faith like it. I used to sit in this chair listening to you talk and it was like a – like a revelation. You taught me about the eternal verities. The values which transcend generations and centuries, and which are encoded in the great imaginative works of every culture.’ I couldn’t keep this bullshit up for much longer, that was for sure. ‘You taught me to forget about everyday truths, ephemeral truths, truths that seem significant one day and irrelevant the next. You made me see that there’s a higher truth than any of that.
Fiction,
Patrick.’ I thumped the manuscript which was still lying on his desk. ‘Fiction – that’s what’s important. That’s what you and I believed in once, and that’s what I’ve returned to now. I thought you of all people would understand that.’
He was silent for a little while, and when he spoke again, his voice quivered with emotion.
‘You’re right, Michael. I’m sorry, really I am. You came here to get my opinion about something you’ve written, something you feel very deeply about, and all I can talk about is my own problems.’ He waved me back to my chair. ‘Come on, sit down. Let’s talk about your book.’
Determined to retain my advantage, I held my hand up in a gesture of deprecation and said: ‘Perhaps it’s not such a good time. I have this other appointment, and you maybe need a little longer to think before you can reach a decision, so why don’t we –’
‘I’ve already reached a decision about your book, Michael.’
I sat down immediately. ‘You have?’
‘Oh yes. I wouldn’t have called you in here if I hadn’t.’
Neither of us spoke for a few seconds. Then I said: ‘Well?’
Patrick leaned back in his chair and smiled teasingly. ‘I think you’d better tell me a little bit about it first. The background. Why you’ve written a book about the Winshaws. Why you’ve written a book about them which seems to have started out as a history and turned into a novel. What on earth gave you the idea?’
I answered these questions truthfully, precisely and at some length. After which, neither of us spoke for a few seconds. Then I said: ‘Well?’
‘Well … I hardly need to tell you that we have a serious problem with this book, Michael. It’s flagrantly libellous.’
‘That’s not a problem,’ I said. ‘I’ll change everything: names, locations, timings, the lot. This is just a beginning, you see, it’s just a basis. I can cover my tracks, make the whole thing practically unrecognizable. This is just the start.’
‘Hmm.’ Patrick put his forefingers together and laid them thoughtfully against his mouth. ‘Well, what does that leave us with, exactly? That leaves us with a book which is scurrilous, scandal-seeking, vindictive in tone, obviously written out of feelings of malice and even, in parts – if you don’t mind me saying this – a little shallow.’
I breathed a sigh of relief. ‘So you’ll publish it?’
‘I think so. Subject to your carrying out the necessary revisions, and, of course, providing it with some sort of ending.’
‘Absolutely. I’m working on that at the moment, and I expect to come up with something … soon. Very soon.’ In my exhilaration I felt a sudden rush of warmth towards Patrick. ‘You know, I was sure that this book was perfect for the market right now, but I can’t tell you how much I needed to hear you say this. I was worried, you know, with it being so different from my other novels –’
‘Oh, not that different,’ he said, with a wave of his hand.
‘You don’t think so?’
‘There’s a definite stylistic link between this stuff and your last book, for instance. I could recognize your voice immediately. In many ways, this has the same strengths, and the …’
‘… and the what?’ I asked, after he’d tailed off.
‘Pardon?’
‘You were about to say something. The same strengths, and …?’
‘Oh, it doesn’t matter. Really.’
‘The same weaknesses, that’s what you were about to say. Isn’t it? The same strengths, and the same weaknesses.’
‘Well yes, if you must know.’
‘And what does that mean?’
‘Oh, we don’t want to bother about that now.’
‘Come on, Patrick, tell me.’
‘Well …’ He got up and walked to the window. The car park and the brick wall didn’t seem to inspire him. ‘I don’t suppose you can remember, can you, what we talked about the last time we met? That last conversation we had, all those years ago?’
I remembered it vividly.
‘Not offhand, no.’
‘We talked a lot about your work. We talked a lot about your previous work, and your future work, and your work in progress, and I ventured to make a small criticism which seemed to upset you, to a certain extent. I don’t suppose you can remember what it was?’
I could almost remember his exact words.
‘Can’t put my finger on it, I’m afraid.’
‘I suggested … well I suggested, to be frank, that there was a certain element of passion lacking from your writing. You don’t remember that?’
‘Doesn’t ring a bell.’
‘Not that this suggestion in itself would have caused you to take offence. But I did also go on to suggest – and here I really was being a bit presumptuous, I suppose – that the explanation for this might lie in the fact that there was also a certain element of passion lacking in – well, how shall I put this? – your life. For want of a better word.’ He watched me carefully: carefully enough to be able to say, ‘You do remember, don’t you?’
I stared back at him until my indignation got the better of me. ‘I don’t know how you can say that,’ I spluttered. ‘This book is full of passion. Full of anger, anyway. If it communicates anything at all, it’s how much I hate these people, how
evil
they are, how much they’ve spoiled everything, with their vested interests and their influence and their privilege and their stranglehold on all the centres of power; how they’ve got us all cornered, how they’ve pretty well carved up the whole bloody country between them. You don’t know what it was like, Patrick, having to surround myself with that family for so many years; day after day with no one but the Winshaws for company. Why do you think the book turned out like that? Because writing it all down, trying to put down the
truth
about them, was the only thing that stopped me from wanting to kill them. Which somebody should do one of these days, incidentally.’
‘All right then, let me put it another –’
‘So how you can say there’s no
passion
in it beats me, I must say.’
‘Well, perhaps “passion” is the wrong word.’ He hesitated, but only for a second. ‘In fact it wasn’t even the word that I used when we first had this conversation. To be absolutely blunt, Michael, I pointed out that there was an absence of
sex
in your work – sex was the very word I used, now I come to think of it – and I then went on to speculate whether this might mean –
might
mean, I go no further than that – that there was also, and equally, a parallel and … concomitant absence of … sex … in your … Let me put this another way: there’s no
sexual dimension
to your writing at the moment, Michael, and I only wondered if this might possibly be because there is no – or at least not much – sexual dimension to your … to your life. As it stands.’