Research (7 page)

It was about this time that John called me up and invited me out to lunch. He told me he wanted to pick my brains about my army service in Northern Ireland for his follow-up novel and I pretended I was happy to let them be picked, although in truth I rather envied his success and hardly wanted to see him for fear that this might show. On the principle that lightning never strikes in the same place twice I’d let myself imagine that John’s being published made it much less likely that the same good fortune would happen to me. But I put a smile on my face and went along to a restaurant near Masius in St James’s Square called Ormond’s Yard, bit my tongue and congratulated him effusively and thanked him for the signed copy of his novel which, of course, I’d not dared read in case it was actually any good. I’m afraid this is a very typical reaction among writers. No one reads anyone
else’s stuff if they can possibly avoid it: we’re an insecure, spiteful, jealous lot. Nothing confounds like a good friend’s success; and as Gore Vidal once said, ‘Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.’

‘
The Tyranny of Heaven
? What’s that?’ I asked John. ‘Shakespeare?’

He shook his head. ‘John Milton. If you’re looking for a good title you’ll find there are lots of good titles in Milton, old sport. Shakespeare, no. Don’t waste your time looking for a title in fucking Shakespeare. He’s been raped more than a Berlin housewife. But Milton’s great. Nobody reads Milton these days.’

‘Congratulations,’ I said, inspecting the signature and the dedication in his novel. ‘I understand it’s already a bestseller.’

‘True. But it’s America where I want to make it big, not here. In publishing terms this country is a sideshow with goldfish.’

‘Easier said than done.’

‘Not really. Whatever it is you’re writing my advice is to make the thing American-centric, if you’ll pardon that word. Get yourself an American hero and you’re halfway to the big money, old sport.’

Old sport
. He used to say that a lot; and since John’s favourite book is
The Great Gatsby
and ‘old sport’ seems to be Jay Gatsby’s favourite phrase, I sometimes wonder how much of Gatsby there is in John. He is as he would tell you himself, entirely self-invented: describing his own humble Yorkshire origins he used to say, ‘It doesn’t matter where the fuck you come from; what matters is where you’re going.’ And that is John’s whole philosophy, in a nutshell.

‘I just happen to be English, old sport. But that’s not who I am or who I want to be. Yorkshire is a dump. I hate the place.
Never want to see it again. Cold. Miserable. Men in flat caps with pigeons and racing dogs and ill-fitting false teeth and homespun philosophy that all sounds like a Hovis commercial. The only people who care about it are the poor bastards who have to live there. Not me. I can’t wait to live somewhere else. Tuscany. Provence. The Bahamas. To live somewhere else and be someone else. That’s the great thing about being a writer, Don. You have a perfect excuse not just to make up the story that’s in the fucking novel but your own story, too. You can invent yourself at the same time as you create the novel. It’s wonderfully liberating to become someone else. You haven’t asked my advice but I’m going to give it to you anyway. Make yourself more American, yes, even to the extent of using American spelling. After all, it’s America where a publishing fortune is still to be made. Which is why I’ve already mortgaged my house to pay for the advertising campaign that will accompany the book’s publication in the US.’

‘Jesus, John, is that wise?’

‘Probably not. But I don’t think that making big money has very much to do with wisdom, do you? It’s about having the balls to take a risk. History shows that all great fortunes are based on taking risk. What is it that T. S. Eliot says? Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. I truly believe that, Don. The greatest danger would be not to take a risk at all. Of course, the ad spend would be doubly effective if I had a paperback and a hardback out at the same time. I mean you can always sell the paperback on the tail of the hardback. So it’s a bit unfortunate that the money I’m spending will be only half as effective as it might have been. That’s my one regret about all this: that I didn’t have two products ready when I made the publishing deals.’

John sighed and lit a cigarette and stared across the yard because it was a nice day and we were sitting at the three or four tables that were grouped outside Ormond’s’ front door. His use of the word ‘products’ was telling. John has never quite lost the adman’s phraseology; even today when you meet him – twenty years after he left Masius – it’s more like talking to David Ogilvy than David Cornwell. Some writers talk about metafiction and genre and romans à clef and unreliable narrators, but John talks about the USP and the brand and focus groups and distribution and point-of-sale.

‘So what is it that you want, John? You’ve dug your tunnel out of the advertising
Stalag
. You’re out and you’re as free as Steve McQueen on a motorcycle and yet you don’t really seem like you’re happy although there is any number of copywriters who would love to change places with you. Even the ones who are gods at trendier ad agencies like GGT and AMV. To me who’s going back to write a couple of shitty radio commercials this afternoon for Ribena it seems like you have it all, pal: a three-book deal, plenty of money, some social significance, no boss, no nine-to-five, no Monday morning client meetings at fucking Perivale.’

Perivale in West London was where another dull-as-ditchwater Masius client was to be found: Hoover.

‘I could go on with that list but I would only depress myself so much that I’d feel obliged to fall on my Mont Blanc.’

John shrugged. ‘I want what anyone in this business wants, old sport: success, money, and then lashings more of both. I want the same thing that Ken Follett, Jeffrey Archer, Stephen King want when they sit down in front of the word-processor: one international bestseller followed quickly by another. My only regret right now is that I can’t write these books any faster. I mean, I’ve got this three-book deal that’s worth a
million bucks if you add together the Yanks and the Brits and the Japs and the Krauts. But at the rate it takes to write a book I’m going to need at least another eighteen months to write the next two because quite frankly the actual writing part leaves me cold. I’m someone who needs a damn sight more than a room with a fucking view to make me write five hundred words a day. I mean I’m only human, right? Of course, I figure there will be some royalties by then; even so, the big money – the fuck-off money, which is a really substantial advance against future royalties – is still a way off. Meanwhile I’ve got all these ideas for half a dozen other books down the road. No, really, I’ve got files full of ideas. Sometimes it seems there are just not enough days in the week.’ He grinned. ‘Sorry, old sport. I know that’s not what you want to hear when you’re trying to finish and publish your own book. But that’s just the way it is right now. I’m older than you by a decade, which means that I’m a man in a hurry. I want a taste of that outrageous Stephen Sheppard type money while I’m still young enough to enjoy it.’

Stephen Sheppard was a British novelist who wrote a novel called
The Four Hundred
that, back in 1976, Ed Victor, the literary agent, had famously – every newspaper in Britain had covered the story – sold for one million pounds.

I thought for a minute. ‘There is a solution, perhaps.’ I said. ‘Albeit an unorthodox one in the ascetic, left-liberal world of publishing.’

‘Oh? I’d like to hear it.’

‘At the English bar there exists a practice called devilling, when a junior barrister undertakes paid written work on behalf of a more senior barrister. The instructing solicitor is not informed of the arrangement and the junior barrister is paid by the senior barrister out of his own fee, as a private
arrangement between the two. It’s a way older barristers have of making themselves even richer than ought to be possible. So, why not something similar for you? In other words you could pay me a fee to write one of your books. You give me the plot in as much detail as you can manage and then I do the hard slog of knocking out one hundred thousand words; I give it back to you six months later and you edit the manuscript I’ve provided to your own satisfaction – putting in a few stylistic flourishes to make it truly yours. Or taking a few out, as the case may be. It’d be like what Adam Smith says regarding the division of labour in the manufacture of pins. It strikes me that you’ve always been the one with a powerful – not to say overactive – imagination and that you’re better at creating stories than you are at writing them. Which is where I might come in. In a sense you would just carry on being the creative director, so to speak, and no one need ever know. I can even sign some sort of non-disclosure agreement. Meanwhile, you write the other book; then you hand both books to your publisher in quick succession and claim the balance of the advance.’

‘Go on.’

I didn’t know that I could say very much more about this, but now that I’d mentioned it I rather liked the idea of quitting my job and using John’s publishing windfall – what was left of it – to stay at home and subsidize my own writing; so I was selling it now and selling it with more than a hint of flattery.

‘After all, you wouldn’t be the first to pull a stroke like this. Shakespeare may have had a similar arrangement with Thomas Nashe when he wrote
Henry VI, Part One
. Or with George Wilkins when he wrote
Pericles
. And with Thomas Middleton when he wrote – something else.’ I shrugged.
‘Don’t ask me what. But I rather think Elizabethan theatre was a bit like the modern film industry. With one writer replaced by another at a moment’s notice. Or writers stepping into the breach to help someone out with a first act, or a quick polish. That kind of thing.’

‘You know, that’s not a bad idea, old sport.’ John deliberated for a moment. ‘That’s not a bad idea at all. A bit like Andy Warhol’s factory, in New York.’

‘Precisely. I suppose you might even argue that the Apple Macintosh is the modern equivalent of the silkscreen printing process. A technology that makes for the rapid reproduction and alteration of the basic creative idea.’

Back in the 1980s – and following the famous Ridley Scott
1984
television commercial – every writer coveted a Macintosh computer. John actually owned one; whereas I was making do with a cheaper and certainly inferior Amstrad; but even that seemed a vast improvement on the IBM Selectric typewriter which is what they gave us to use at work.

‘How much would you want? To do what you’ve just described.’

‘Let’s see now.’ I shook my head. ‘Naturally, I’d have to give up work. I mean, to write a whole book in six months – I couldn’t do that and continue to be a copywriter. I mean, we’re talking nine to five here to produce that many words in that amount of time. So it would have to be enough money to allow that to happen.’

‘You were on twenty grand a year when I left.’

‘Twenty-five, now. They gave me an extra five to make up your workload after you left. I’d be taking a risk, of course. Giving up work like that. To do something as chancy as
this. If it doesn’t work out then I’m out of a job without the means to pay the mortgage.’

‘You’d really give it up? Come on, Don. You love it. All those nice dolly birds to shag. I sometimes think that’s why you came into advertising, old sport. For the birds.’

I shook my head. ‘That’s bollocks and you know it. I’m fed up with it. Just like you were, John. If I have to write another telly commercial for Brooke Bond Red Mountain coffee I think I will scream. Besides I’ve already shagged all the birds I’m ever going to shag at Masius. They’re wise to my act. I need to move on. But no one at another agency is ever going to take on a copywriter from Masius. We’re like lepers. So, this might just be my ticket out of St James’s Square. I can subsidize my own novel with what I make from writing yours.’

‘I’d have to see a few specimen chapters.’

‘You mean my novel?’

‘I don’t mean your advertising copy. I know how crap you are writing that. David Abbott you’re not, old sport.’

I shrugged. ‘As if I ever gave a damn about writing copy. Look, you don’t need to see my novel. You know I can fucking write. I had that story in
Granta
, remember?’

‘Oh, yes. I’d forgotten about that.’

‘Unless that is you’re not serious. Because I am.’

‘Of course I’m serious. Writing all day and every day like Henry fucking James is a royal pain in the ass, Don. No wonder authors all look like swots. Did you see that picture of those Best of Young British Novelists? Christ, if that’s what the young ones look like … No, it’s putting the plot together that I enjoy, not typing all day and night like some tragic bespectacled cunt.’

‘I really don’t mind it at all,’ I confessed. ‘I feel like my life has some meaning when I’m in front of the keyboard.’

‘I don’t know how you have the patience.’

‘That’s what Northern Ireland teaches you, John: patience and an appreciation for the quiet life. Whenever I sit down at the typewriter I tell myself, “Count yourself lucky; it’s not the Falls Road.”’

‘So, how much?’ he repeated. ‘That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. Or not, since I’m not about to pay you anything like that.’

‘Twenty-five grand.’

‘Fuck off. Ten.’

‘I can’t do it for ten. I can’t take the risk. Twenty.’

‘Twelve and a half.’

I shook my head. ‘Fifteen. And with a bonus if the book is a bestseller.’

I could see John doing the maths in his head. ‘Agreed.’

We shook on it and then continued with the minutiae of further negotiations for a while – delivery dates, penalties for failing to meet John’s deadline, bonus payments; then John said, ‘You know if I can make this arrangement with you, Don, there’s no reason I couldn’t make it with someone else.’

‘I’m sure you could find someone cheaper than me, John. Perhaps if you were to put a small ad in the back of
Books and Bookmen
. Or
The Literary Review
. Writer in a Hurry Seeks Amanuensis. Must be able to spell “amanuensis” and write bestselling novel to order. Thomas Pynchon need not apply.’