This is how it happened. The big flood scoured out our town, one of the most vulnerable on the West Coast of the South Island of our tiny country, New Zealand – “The Wild West Coast” the tourism brochures say, and it’s true as true. We sit on a flood plain next to a mighty river spilling into the sea from an immense catchment. Three days of solid rain and we had a plain flood. The river cut a branch and swept into the swamp bordering the far side, then jumped the bank of the main course, and took most everything loose that was below knee high and mushed or bent, or crushed, or just broke into bits what it didn’t drag into the deep. For months afterwards the beaches above and below the river mouth were clogged with debris, some easily claimed or forsworn, much unrecognisable, coated with pestiferous muck, treasures for the crusher at the tip.
That was my spot – counting in the masses of condemned whiteware, of vehicles, televisions, stereos, bed frames, and linen, and crockery, and anything that was stored somewhere below flood level that hadn’t headed out to the ocean, piled up at the tip for the big machine to mangle.
I’d been there years. They call me Garbo, for “garbologist”, Australian slang for my non-profession. A perk – for perquisite – was to latch on to whatever caught my eye, on the quiet like. It’s been a nice little earner, all in all – been at it from the start. Easy, no bother. My place was spared, too, just out of town up a rise, my garage full of booty waiting to be passed on to new owners via the internet.
This lot came from a derelict house got caught in the waters. The gang cleaning it out after the flood mounded it all up in a big metal box they call a skip in New Zealand and some other places a dumpster, and it was brought early one morning and tumped onto the transfer concrete pad, where the machines would turn it to pulp for shipment to the nearest big city.
“It’s mostly paper,” the gang boss told me. He would tip me when there was something that might turn into cash. I’d pass something back to him. “Mush now. Some books. An old bike. Clothes. The fella who stayed there died a while back and no one had cleaned it out. Seems the rellies are in Australia or somewhere anyway and haven’t got back, or cared. Dunno. Anyway you take a look. There’s a steel trunk you might fancy, fucked over and locked, but maybe you can clean it and spring it open.”
So I went and looked, left the bike and took the trunk. It was that large but it was heavy, and I had to drag it using one of the handles on the end. It was painted red, and mostly coated in dried brown goo that I washed off using the high pressure hose behind the office. That made it a lot lighter and when it dried I shoved it into the back of my van and took it home.
I stuck it in my garage and forgot about it for quite a long time. There was plenty other material to be cleaning up and shifting. That flood came close to making me rich.
Once I got to it, I almost took it back. It was dented more than a little, and the clasp that kept it shut would be ruined if I busted it, as I’d have to do to open it. Still, I was curious enough, and after cleaning up the outside proper, smashed it open.
Inside was a neatly arranged set of cardboard boxes – as I found out later, A4 size. They took up almost all the space. Some held microcassette tapes, labeled with dates of days and months but not year. There were transcriptions headed with first names, all women, except for two boxes that were headed “Quayle”. Finally, there was a cloth bound box, tied off with a ribbon. In it was a bunch of typed pages, the top one headed Wannabe. I read it all, and took it to a fella I know in the village, who has a reputation as a writer. He read it, and asked to see the rest of what was in the box.
I showed him, and he said, “The manuscript and the other stuff – it’s about Simon, Simon Quayle. But I’m not sure it’s by him, though you could never tell. He wasn’t easy to figure.”
Quayle, he said, had had a blog on the internet. It was called Quayle’s Mayles. It’s still there, quite a few years after he died. Things on the internet can hang around like that. I went to the library and looked at it.
The writer fella told me Quayle was considered eccentric by everyone who knew him, who didn’t count up to many. He’d moved to the town some years before he died, bought his place, and while he wasn’t a recluse, kept to himself more than not. Apart from his blog, he had published novels, e-books, but what Wannabe says is that they didn’t sell.
“You could publish the manuscript,” the writer said. “It was his, whether he wrote it or not, but he’s dead. No one wanted it. So it’s yours. People might find something in it.”
I had it digitised – that’s what it’s called – and stuck it as a kind of preface on the blog, feeling very clever. It went viral, a little bit. People commented, and the comments are in an appendix at the end, after a section that covers some people mentioned in the main part. I had some help doing that. I had an asterisk put beside their names in the main text – always helpful, I am.
Now I’m putting it out there, proper. I’m saying I wrote it, but it’s only to say someone wrote it. Maybe it was Quayle after all. Maybe it was one of the others in the book, or someone who only knew about it all, wrote it and sent it to him.
Wannabe, by Garbo. Has a feel anyway.
Chapter One – Cornering Quayle
“That’s him!”
“You think so, Sasha?”
“Yes for sure – looks like the photo on the blog, only older.”
“That’s an old photo and it’s not very clear. . .”
“Look – we’ve been here for two weeks and if it’s not him, well, it’s not. Maybe he’ll know him. No one else seems to. This town’s not that big for someone not to know him.”
“OK.”
“So let’s go.”
He was standing outside a Salvation Army “thrift store”, window shopping the display of an array of cookware so when they walked up to him he didn’t react.
“Simon.”
He turned then, puzzled.
“Do I know you?” He smiled and stuck out his hand and Rachel took it and gave it a shake.
“No – no, you don’t,” Rachel smiled back. “I’m Rachel – Rachel Smiley ha ha – and this is my colleague, Sasha Fitts. We’d like to buy you a coffee.”
His eyebrows went up. “Oh?”
“We have a – a proposition,” Rachel pushed on. “We’ve come all the way from Chicago. . .”
His eyebrows stayed up.
“To a little town on the West Coast of the South Island of New Zealand? To see me?” He shook his head.
“There’s a catch.” He glared at them. “There has to be.”
Sasha broke in. “Of course. But it’s a catch you just might like. Let’s coffee.”
He squinted at them. “All right.” He gestured at the main street, a few paces away. “There’s one I go to – a few minutes.”
As they walked past a motley of shops he said, “There must be something about me I don’t know about.”
Sasha grabbed his elbow to pull him to face her.
“That’s right,” she nodded. “But it’ll become crystal clear, if you let it.”
“I don’t want to go back there – to the US, if that’s what this is about.”
“You won’t have to do that,” Sasha smiled. “But why wouldn’t you want to?”
“I’ve made a life here. I like it.”
“You could still go back – for visits.”
“No thanks. You folks are off the wall. I read the news.”
“It’s not personal then.”
“No – political.”
Sasha gestured at the street scene, a congeries of older wooden buildings and newer concrete structures housing an assortment of offerings, their disarray exploded by an international style petrol station of garish colours atop concrete scoped with a flying buttress over the pumps.
“This is better?” She caught Rachel’s glare but carried on. “I mean, it’s not paradise exactly, is it?”
He laughed. “Well, you’re seeing it at its lowest ebb just here. But it’s not the town, which is nice enough actually – the district is truly beautiful. Have you seen the sights?”
Sasha reddened. “No. We’ve – we’ve been here, walking the streets, looking for you. Coffee,” she spluttered. “We need it, and to talk.”
“I’m not sure I should be honoured, or terrified.” He looked at them quizzically. “All right – coffee. Just here.” They were outside a cafe in a tumbledown wooden two-storey offering just the same on the ground floor.
“We’ve not been to this one,” Sasha said, to be saying something.
“We’ll treat.”Rachel wanted to steer the conversation.
There was a courtyard and after collecting their coffees they took a table under an awning. He had an espresso, called in the local lingo a short black, while they both had creamy latte.
“So,” he said after a sip. “Tell me.”
“Right.” Rachel was ready. “We’re students at the university, doing our doctorates in literary psychology.”
“Literary psychology?”
“Yes. It sounds stupid, doesn’t it?”
“No – not stupid, but very different.”
“It’s partly about analysing writers through their work, but finding the evidence when possible through their lives, their biographies and interests – that kind of thing. So it works both ways – analysing the writing shows something about the writer, but analysing the writer shows something about the writing – about why what’s written is written and how it’s written.”
“I see. And you want to analyse me? My books are out there, such as they are. I’m not important enough to talk to really – especially not to come all this way to talk to.”
“Oh, but you are. You’re alive, so we can talk to you while it’s obviously not possible with dead people.” Rachel gave him a sober look to counteract the joke. “But it’s different from historical writers beyond the fact that they’re dead. You might be offended, but you might instead look at this as an opportunity to get your work to a larger public.”
“You mean because I’ve been a failure, your dissertation might help with marketing.”
“Yes,” Rachel confirmed. “Exactly, in factly.” She smiled. “We’ve sent a proposal and had it accepted by a publisher. Most of the dissertation is written but you will be the feature.”
“I see.”
“I hope you do,” she confirmed. “You see, our topic is internet fiction. Literally millions of writers have taken to the internet to publish. One e-book publisher lists more than half a million titles and the bulk of those are novels. And that’s just one.”
“And?”
“And most of the authors we’re talking about put out a few books at most, and give up. The market is very crowded in the first place, and the quality of their work isn’t much either.
“You’re different,” she went on. “We know from your blog that you’ve been writing for a generation. You’ve tried conventional publishers and they’ve not been interested, though it looks to us you’ve been fairly half-hearted about conventional publishers and about marketing. Also you’ve started and abandoned a number of projects but you’ve published nine novels. And though they haven’t done well, you keep going. You write about it on your blog and you’re honest.
“You would be surprised perhaps to know that there aren’t that many like you. So in one way you stand out for online perseverance while in another you’re an exemple that fits everyone.”
He got the drift.
“You’re doing an account of the wannabe and you want to use me.”
“Yes.”
“And you think I’ll cooperate.”
Rachel blushed.
“Yes. Well, we want you to. We think you have a reason, even though it’s a little embarrassing to begin with.”
“And that reason is?”
“We’ve read your books. They’re not bad – not classics but they’re not meant to be. Your blog makes that very clear. They haven’t had any marketing push, and the issue with the internet is that even the most fragrant lily of a novel would find it hard to get noticed among the weeds. Our thesis will show your books in a better light than just poor quality by a wannabe who sees more in what they write than is really there.”
“I see.”
“But the angle is partly that you haven’t given up, in more than twenty years. You write about that on your blog, and those blog posts are interesting in themselves, but we can go into it in more detail.”
“And?”
Sasha broke in.
“We can write about you whether you cooperate, or not. If you do, we’ll interview you about your writing and your life, and bring them together. Otherwise it’ll just be our dissection of your work, and your life from what you’ve revealed in your blog.”
“Maybe that’s my life as I want to reveal it.”
Sasha wasn’t deterred. “Yes, maybe – but novelists expose the private life in the act. You’ve tried to conceal it. We can see that. We want to talk about that.”
“You mean, what I don’t want to talk about.”
Rachel played soft cop.
“You’ll have the chance to read what we write, and comment, and your comments will be included. It’s important that you have that.”
Sasha: “If you agree.”
He drained his coffee and looked away. “I need to think about it. If I agree, we’ll have a written deal, a proper contract.”
“Oh definitely.”
He stood up.
“Let’s meet here tomorrow – afternoon tea, three PM, OK? I’ll decide overnight.”
“Oh definitely.”
Chapter two: Simon
He told them later that he really had had enough, and he knew it, not too long before they found him. One Wednesday in February, as a howling wind took his plastic greenhouse and blew it across his lawn, he turned off everything that he could in his life up to that moment. The greenhouse, a failure anyway, its plastic shell flapping in the wind as he unhooked it from the plastic rods that had come apart under the force of the gale, was consigned to its constituent parts. Like his life, he thought, as he made the decisions.
He would keep up some of his old connections but they never saw him or had much to do with him anyway – it was more a matter of form. After so many years, they had their lives and he had his, and he was living in an isolated stretch of country. What he didn’t want them to do was think of him cracking up and alerting the people who do things to people who crack up, with drugs. . .and restraints. . .and worse.
In his mid-seventies he had already outlived a few of his literary heroes – Celine*, who died at 67, the same age as another of his writing models, Dashiell Hammett*. Celine claimed that in his dotage he would like to be at a harbour, watching the ships come in and go out, idly, to be left alone.
Maybe that was true. He didn’t think so. Celine wanted glory, and got dishonour. He spent his last years writing a “chronicle” of the end of days the way he saw it, and had lived it, spewing venom through his pen. He sought revenge and told readers of his last book that in 200 years he’d be taught in high school. And if that was true, it would be a different world, a world without Jews. Celine was the most outrageous anti-semite ever to write a line against them.
And he himself? After nine novels that had gone nowhere? Was his sudden decision to upend his life a confession of failure that would allow him to live quietly, if not watching boats go in and out, at least enjoying the seashore and forest in the isolated region where he’d fetched up? It was a fitting home for him and he knew it – self-exiled from the US, self-exiled now from New Zealand society as he moved in it, frustrated, failing, angry?. . .time to just live quietly? Maybe – maybe not.
Hammett had done that – kind of. He hooked up with a woman much younger, and had pretty much stopped writing from the mid-1930s to his death in 1961. He devoted himself to Communist politics, and went to prison in the 50s for refusing to testify about his activities. . .those very definitely weren’t the days! He thought nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. . .
Whatever! He just knew he needed to change in a radical way and he was going to do it. “The same only different”, he smiled to himself. He wanted just to walk away from everything he’d ever done, every place he’d ever been, everyone he’d ever known but because he couldn’t, at least he could build a fence between all that and how he lived from then on, for as long as there was for him. . .It was an internal revolution, hard to see from the outside, but it would be real enough and in the end, after he was gone, more obvious to those who had known him.
As so often in his life, this would turn out to be a mirage. The two women from Chicago brought with them baggage he’d kept out of his public work, even his public life, insofar as he had one, and were about to rub it into his face. If he’d known, would he have agreed?
Chapter Three – Deal
It was all there in black and white on the university letterhead – the dissertation outline, the application for the grant, the award of US$30,000 to Rachel S and Alexandra F. He handed the folder back to Sasha, who all but snatched it from him.
“So,” he said. “What’s next?”
They had walked from the cafe to his cottage near the edge of the town. It wasn’t tumbledown like the buildings on the main street, but it was small, originally built for workers in the local coal mines, and sold on when the mines had gone. He had made it comfortable for his taste – photos he’d taken, bric a brac he collected, paintings and weaving he’d acquired over the years. It felt nice to him, and he hoped they appreciated it, but they gave no sign. Maybe another time they would talk about it.
“You need to sign an agreement – to let us talk to you, to answer our questions.”
“What if I want to back out, half way through?”
“You wouldn’t want to do that,” Rachel purred. “But if you do, you do. It would mean you wouldn’t get the chance to comment on the text at the end – and you would want to, wouldn’t you?” She smiled, sweetly fake he was meant to see as sweetly fake, to appreciate as humour.
“I’ll sign.” And he did. “We can start now if you like.”
“Oh, we do like,” Sasha smiled. “We’ll tape it, and transcribe it later.” She grinned. “We’ll take notes too. OK?”
He nodded.
“Let’s start with the start! Ha ha. When did you decide to be a writer? There must have been a time, when you knew, or chose, or realised – how you put it to yourself.”
He answered first obliquely – that he wished they were more eager in their question, that they were some kind of groupies that he’d imagined writers might inspire – no, that he knew existed, who were inspired, but only by successful writers, the kind he wasn’t. Instead these two PhD students, who’d come from the other side of the world to quiz him, were not at all inspired, and weren’t readable either, at least not yet.
“In my teenage years,” he at length got to the point. “When I discovered I could do it, that it was something I was good at.”
“That mattered to you.”
“Oh yes. I was shy and felt intimidated by the world. Everything seemed so dangerous, except for books and when I was much younger I read a lot – history and mysteries mainly. There was a history range for kids, “Landmark” I think it was called, that served up propaganda about American heroes. Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone. . .and the mysteries, the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, more propaganda really, though of course I didn’t know that at the time.”
“And you grew your skill from that?”
“Yes. I just learned by reading. This was how a paragraph was. This was a sentence. This was the structure of a story. By the time I was reading adult material, like Agatha Christie*, and later, more serious thriller writers, it was part of my understanding of how the world worked – how a book worked.”
“It was a refuge from reality, from the threatening world?”
“Yes and no. It was a tool, and a key to the world, to being able to navigate in it. It was something I could do that others couldn’t do so well, when there were so many other things I couldn’t do, or do well.”
“It wasn’t fantasy versus reality?”
“That’s an oversimplification. Imagining the world, giving it a structure. Sure. When I was young my family moved around a lot, and I first really became conscious of abstractions in Alabama, and didn’t understand them much at all. Having a picture of the world and seeing real things in the world that I didn’t understand and didn’t like, brought fantasy into it. But fantasy was only an aspect.”
“An extension?”
“I’m not sure. Do these semantic differences matter to you?”
“Yes but what’s important is that they must matter to you.”
“What are you driving at?”
“If the basis of your life, that took you into writing and then into fiction, was fantasy – that the real world was too scary, so you took refuge there.”
“The real world was too scary for many people. Alabama in the 1950s was both confusing and threatening.”
“To you personally?”
“To any sensitive person and any black person.”
“Those are equivalents?”
“Oh, of course not. I would have to be very naive or arrogant or both, to think that.”
“Let’s go back to the beginning – when you decided to be a writer. How long did it take you to make good on your plan?”
“A long time. I did other things that relied on literacy but weren’t writing.”
“As?”
“I planned to be university teacher but found that intimidating too. Then I tried to be a teacher. Then a librarian. It was only when I was about 40 that I happened into journalism. I was lucky and had the chance to learn on the job so to speak and discovered I could do it. That gave me the confidence to push into the profession without training, using my analytical skills. And journalism was fun as well as very educational. I learned a lot and felt constructive. Understanding what news is, sniffing out stories – it’s a cut above the other professions I took on or played around with.”
“And during all that time you still had the idea of fiction writing as a profession.”
“Definitely. I began a few novels but never completed one. The most finished was a kind of Gothic romance I worked on in my mid-thirties. Even after becoming a journalist I still had the idea. I had thought that being a journalist would enable me to write fiction but it was too hard. I couldn’t do the two at once. I’d start something on holiday, but it fizzled once I was back working. Novel writing really needs application, as I found even when I had a few done.”
“What were you thinking in terms of writing during those years?”
“Frustration that I wasn’t doing it. Learning – reading the writers I admired and trying to emulate their work. Thinking about when I could start.”
“What was it that made you want to as you got older? Not just as a tool, but a career?”
“I thought it would make me independent, not needing to work for others or depend on others for an income. If you know Marx you understand about the intuitive alienation of work in our system.”
“More?”
“Yes, I thought it would complete me as a person, heal the inadequacies I felt. Be admired. Make my opinions matter. I thought and still think that novelists have opinions that matter and that mine do. Become sexually attractive. A successful novelist was a kind of magician to me, someone with power, able to exercise it without responsibility for it.”
“Are there other professions in that position?”
“Potentially any artist, but plastic artists don’t get that cachet, the mana of working with language. Film directors are the closest. Like novelists they make moral and political points using words and images. They create fictions that are real. These days they are probably more attractive than writers.”
“Would you like to do that? Write scripts? Direct films?”
“Yes, yes I would if I had the chance. I could even try on my own. I’ve bought a camera and will spend some time learning how to use it if I live so long. For a writer it is an extension of writing, but a film-maker might come to it differently.”
“Once you started writing fiction how long did it take you to finish your first book?”
“About three months. I was in Britain, travelling around, and set things wherever I went after working out the basic storyline. I finished it in the Lake District, went to Manchester, bought a PC, got a place to stay and typed it and did extra drafts. Then I tried to interest an agent and a publisher and though I got a few nibbles, nothing came of it. The second one took a year, and the third one about six months. The fourth a year. After that I stopped counting. When e-publishing came in, I thought it was the way to go for me. As you’ve pointed out, a lot of other people have thought just the same. There’s a reason for that, or reasons.”
“You didn’t feel, after the rejections of your first novel, that you needed to learn more?”
“I always need to learn more. As I’ve gone along, I’ve continued to learn. In the sense you mean it, it’s not really relevant.”
“You haven’t been tempted to take a formal course?”
“Actually more like put off. I’ve been a professional writer and editor and know how to play by the rules of genres, and beyond. Raymond Chandler* had a three-word course – ‘Analyse, and emulate’. It’s good advice but doesn’t make it easy.
“And to be honest, I distrust the idea of creative writing courses. There are techniques that can be learned but there’s something about structuring those techniques into a course that feels wrong. I’ve read a few books.”
“You’ve done everything that way haven’t you? Spurned journalism school, spurned creative writing courses.”
“Guess so. I dropped out of teacher’s college, but I finished library training. That was my once, you might say.”
“And spurned the mechanics of publishing – getting an agent, trying for print publication once e-publishing was available.”
“I tried more than I’ve told you, but yes.”
“What do you think that says about you?”
“I am sure you’ll tell me.”
“I’m asking you.”
“Don Quixote with a keyboard – that’s what you’re getting at, isn’t it?”
“Well?”
“If that’s what this is all about, I’ll be one of millions in terms of writing novels for publication.”
“Yes and that’s the prime reason we have sought you out – someone who is like others, but who has gone on and on. You’ve spent decades at it. You’ve meant to do it since you were an adolescent, you say, but once you were writing you kept going for a generation.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve never asked yourself why?”
“Not more than a hundred times a day.”
“Seriously.”
“I am serious. I wonder about myself – constantly.”
Chapter Four – Zoom Boomer
“What do you think?”
“He’s more self-aware than we might have wanted, but it hasn’t changed my feelings. It’s only the first session, too. We’ve got a plan. Let’s stick to it.”
They had walked much farther along the beach than they had intended. Grey sand stretched for a long way, past where they could see, an angled plane backed by piles of driftwood washed up by countless storms. Their rental car was parked with others on an access road, surrounded by vans peopled by tourists, in the country for its scenic wonders. The beach scene itself was framed by a range of mountains also stretching beyond view.
Without needing to comment, they turned and headed back towards the car. It would take half an hour, or more.
“We should get him to show us around,” Rachel ventured. “He’s been here a while and should know some private spots most wouldn’t see. It’ll make it more special. We can work it in to the narrative.”
“It’ll make us like him,” Sasha objected. “Like Nazi monsters could be – in person, they were pleasant. It’s what they got up to at work.”
“I think it’s the other way around,” Rachel said. “He needs to see us as decent, with a reason, when it’s all over and he knows everything. Otherwise he’ll complain he was doubly duped, and it will blunt the effect, in public when we get published, and with him. We want him to see us as having a reason, a good reason.”
“So you don’t think we’ll change our own attitude.”
“No, I don’t. It’s a PhD. It will always be a PhD, and even if we fell in love with him, it would have the same focus. He’s already agreed to it. He just won’t know the rest until we want him to, and it flows out of the original premise.
“And you know, he’s just as you say about the Nazis and more. He means well but has never done well, not really. Certainly not as a writer, as an adventurer, as what he says as a Don Quixote with a keyboard. It won’t get him arrested, but it won’t earn him any brownie points.”
Sasha put her arm through Rachel’s and smiled. “Yes all right then. I’d like to see the district, just as you say. And we’ll be able to nail him even better maybe, if he tries anything on.”
“We can work it. He might. He doesn’t know about us.”
Chapter Five – Tour guide
“You want to see the sights.” He smiled. “There are plenty if you’re really keen.”
Rachel nodded as Sasha pretended to be bored.
“Don’t you think it will interfere with your project?”
“We can talk at the same time,” Rachel countered. “We’ll record it too. It’s OK to do the transcriptions. We’ve experimented at the beach, where the wind and waves make background noise. It can be done. We don’t mind. And anyway,” she grinned, “It might be boring, just in your cottage all the time. Boring for you.”
“OK. We’ll do Charming Creek to start. It’s different – but yes, it’s charming. We can take my car.”
The ride up the coast passed through lowland scrub, the range sharp above, often clad with pines. Rachel asked about them. “Are they New Zealand trees?”
He laughed. “No. Californian – Monterrey pine. Here’s a short course on New Zealand. Pay attention now.
“These islands,” he said, “are the last land mass of any size to be settled by humans. The latest research says first contact was about 750 years ago – well, somewhere between 500 and 800 years. Polynesians came first and then Europeans. The Dutch sailed past in the 17th century but were put off by the locals and didn’t land. About 1770 the English came under James Cook, who made contact. That marked the beginning of the connection with the wider world beyond Polynesia. By the time Cook arrived the locals had stopped travelling to and from their previous staging posts.
“So these islands are a kind of living experiment of what happens when humans come into contact with untouched wilderness. And as a laboratory not much good can be said about it in one way, but plenty that’s good can be said in another.”
“How so?”
“The Polynesians who came found an abundant resource of large flightless birds. They’re known now as moa – the word in Polynesian for chicken. The moa didn’t know how to escape humans so for a time it meant easy pickings and the Polynesians went back to where they came from and brought lots of eager settlers. Unfortunately it didn’t take too long to kill the birds off. By the time Europeans arrived they were long gone, and the locals were mostly living on the shellfish and seals along the coast. They had it hard too – no metal resource, and no clay for pottery, what we take for granted today, part of cultures just about everywhere else for thousands of years. It wasn’t because they were incapable – the resources weren’t there. They had to make do with substitutes that were nowhere near as good.
“The Europeans similarly found a paradise of resources that were both limited and quickly exploited – first whales and seals, then timber, gold, and finally settlement meaning coal, farming, introducing new species aimed at creating now industries. They could get the metal and the pottery from somewhere else and what they thought they could use to improve things, they could bring in. Those pine trees, for example – they grow very quickly here, and are exported as well as used in the country. Along the top of that range you see is a stretch of coal seams, still mined – we’ll go past where they put it in rail carriages to send away.
“So whatever damage to the environment the Polynesians did the Europeans have done with knobs on. They cleared the forest more quickly than at any time in history anywhere in the world, and it’s a unique flora, unlike any anywhere else. Plenty of bird species died off, and others have become what they call ‘rare and local’. Introduced animals have ravaged the original natural world – deer, an Australian marsupial called the possum, not like the Yank one, stoats, weasels, wallabies, goats, Himalayan tahr, rabbits and hares, rats, mice, even wild cats. They destroy the plants and the remaining bird life and some have an effect on the farm animals – rabbits especially but also possums that spread disease.
“Since the end of World War Two a lot has been done to repair the damage. There’s now an ambitious scheme to make the country predator free. It’s hard to say it will work but it’s a scheme. It shows an awareness.”
“You said there were good aspects. . .”
“Yes, we do become aware of the consequences of our actions, and take some steps. If we get to talk politics we can talk about that. That’s good. And the evidence is that nature itself, if given a chance, will recover over time. Of course the extinct species won’t come back unless we develop ways of doing it, but the ones under threat can recover and thrive. Where we’re going today will show you how quickly things can turn around.”
“You haven’t written about New Zealand in your books,” Sasha interjected. “You’ve been here most of the past 50 years, and you know a lot obviously. So why not?”
“I may with another one, but your point is fair enough,” he said. “I’ve felt uneasy about it. Most of the immigrants to New Zealand come from Europe, especially Britain, or from the Pacific Islands, and Asia. It makes me feel a bit of an interloper writing about the place. My experience is so far from universal that it doesn’t fit really. As of European descent, it has always made more sense to me to write using that part of the world as a backdrop.”
“But not the US either.”
“Quite.”
“Why not?”
He didn’t answer. After travelling along the coast for some distance, he turned inland and a short time later they were on a dirt road winding uphill through forest.
“In New Zealand it’s called bush,” he explained.
“It’s really pretty,” Rachel gushed.
“It is – and what you see here is not primeval. All of the country we’ll see today has been previously logged – the trees cut down. What is here now, is regenerating. Of course there will be the odd tree that wasn’t thought worth felling, but basically it’s all regen.”
The track he had taken them to walk, turned out to follow a rail line that had been, he said, put in for coal mines though initially the area had been used as a timber resource. As they walked they encountered relics from the mining days, some of them enormous cast iron contraptions.
“What’s most interesting about this to me,” he said, “is how quickly nature is overwhelming these relics. I’ve found thick bits of iron in the bush corroding into nothing, dropped there when the bush was gone. So this is a good aspect of the human impact – that it is massive, but more temporary than we may flatter ourselves.”
“The bush as you call it is very unusual,” Rachel said. “It looks tropical.”
“It is, in a way – or a lot of it. Many of the species’ relatives are tropical. New Zealand sits at the foot of a land chain that we can see with a bit of imagination running down from the Malay archipelago, now broken up and much of it sunk. When the flora got here, it was a lot warmer and it’s stayed though the climate has cooled. So much of the bush is evergreen. The leaves don’t fall off.
“The flora tells a grand story, really. I’m not an expert but once there was a great continent that New Zealand and South America were part of. New Zealand broke off from Australia first and only later from South America and the plant story shows that. There are ferns in Australia and New Zealand that are related, but the angiosperms, the flowering plants that developed later, are linked to the Malay, and there are some species linked to South America.”
He laughed. “It’s interesting to me but I’m hardly scientific about it. What’s more interesting is the role of our species here. That’s something the world should take more notice of and doesn’t. We’re in a lab and we’re the rats – very much the rats.”
They fell silent, walking along the disused rail line with its iron tracks pushing out of the turf. The tramp took hours, threading through bush along a river bouncing and splashing over rocks, surging through ravines. They passed through a tunnel to reach a waterfall from a tributary, a deafening spectacle of power.
After watching a few minutes, he said, “The track below is closed off by a landslide. “We’ll have to go back.” On the other side of the tunnel he continued, “I’m afraid you’re not getting much in the way of interview. Are you sure you want to do this again?”
“Definitely,” Sasha grinned. “We do. We’ll manage some questions now and then. Don’t worry – we’re on target for our project.”
“Then fine.”
“But let’s go back,” she said. “I’ve had enough nature for today.”
Chapter Six – Where did you get that idea
“Let’s talk about your influences,” Rachel urged. It was the next day, back in his cottage. “Not the ones from your childhood but later. We can double up if need be.”
“Why thrillers?” Sasha started.
“It’s true thrillers were something I took to as a teen. Lots of people do. Agatha Christie was probably my first love in the genre. There were a few others – Josephine Tey, Dorothy Sayers, later Margery Allingham. The appeal was the puzzle. It might sound odd but for me, I took to them at the same time I got fascinated by chess, so there’s something in the puzzle aspect.”
“So the violence wasn’t part of it.”
“No. The violence in those puzzle books is denatured. There’s hardly any blood really. Victims are just there, to provide the ‘it’ in ‘whodunnit’. Eventually I graduated to more realistic work, but it was a process, not a sudden change. And I learned a lot from Agatha Christie about writing – about structure especially – how to sustain suspense.”
“So at this time – you were thinking of becoming a writer and you were admiring the puzzle story.”
“Yes, I realised I could do it, and I found that I could write and read too, in school. All the things I couldn’t do were eclipsed – I couldn’t play sport well, though I wanted to. I couldn’t get girls otherwise than my patter, and I really wanted to. Nothing else worked for me. I thought – language was my best tool.
“But you know – I liked it, loved it! I liked reading and I saw the if you like political purpose of literature – of changing minds, changing lives, changing society! In high school I began to read more serious books alongside the thrillers, and I wanted to write them too. But I didn’t think I was able enough.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Goodness! I was a teenager. I wasn’t well-read enough. I didn’t understand the mechanics of writing enough. I wouldn’t have put it that way at the time, but I felt it intuitively. The first serious writer I admired was Mark Twain*, both as a journalist and a novelist. I felt American then. I also read Bret Harte, and then the transcendentalists, especially Thoreau*. Walden was beyond me but Thoreau’s humour wasn’t, and I was persuaded as well as impressed by the essay on civil disobedience. It made me an anarchist before I became at all knowledgeable about political theory.”
“We’ll want to talk about politics later but go on about literature.”
“The serious American writers who emerged later, in the20s and 30s – Steinbeck, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald – didn’t really appeal to me. They weren’t exciting enough and I felt – and still feel really – that they weren’t serious enough. The intellectual grunt that would make their writing worthwhile was missing. I’m sure this is not fair but it’s how I felt.”
“Henry James?”
“He bored me.”
“You still feel the same way?”
“Haven’t read him. My literary education went another way. “
“Which was?”
“Through thrillers I eventually found the British, and then more serious British writers, and then through them, Europeans and finally the world. Talking with you has made me think about this, about my evolution as a reader as well as a writer. I wasn’t conscious of this at the time, but it’s how it came out.
“I still feel – still am – very ignorant about many aspects of literature. You’ve mentioned Henry James but he’s only one of a great number of writers I am sure are very important that I just haven’t read, American and English as well as other cultures.”
“And?”
“And what I was really looking for was writing that changed literature but also changed the world, or at least how we see the world. I was very alienated. My family travelled a lot when I was young as I said and I saw a lot of suffering and I had I suppose grand beliefs about changing it. So there I was, someone who fancied himself a writer also wanting to use writing to make those changes. I was ignorant about so much! But in fairness to me, as I grew older and found out about a lot of things, my instincts if you like were sound enough. But of course I couldn’t be sure.”
“And did you find the writers?”
“Over about a decade I’d say I did. Hammett was any teenager’s hero – a former detective who wrote detective stories. But he was a communist too, and he went to prison for his beliefs. When I found that out and read his books with his politics in mind, they had something in them that rewarded that reading.
“Celine was almost his exact contemporary – born and died the same year. He was on the other end of the political spectrum, but he was a writer’s writer and really did show the underbelly of life, though in a surprising way – he made you laugh while he was showing it.
“And if Celine lost the argument shall we say, he wasn’t afraid though he was prudent and hid in Denmark after the war. He paid.”
“More?”
“In a way that’s getting ahead, talking about Celine and Hammett as politically engaged. I got hooked on the British spy thrillers both as an extension of Agatha and as an extension of Hammett and Raymond Chandler, the so-called hard boiled detective writers. Len Deighton very obviously drew his inspiration from them. What’s odd about that in terms of me is that while I didn’t like the objectivist writers of that period in American letters, like Hemingway, I was strongly influenced by these two, especially Hammett. He really impressed me for his very stark style. I’d love to be able to write so well.”
“What about later writers? Serious ones too?”
“At university of course we got them – Iris Murdoch, John Fowles, Virgina Woolf, Thomas Pynchon. . .I was attracted to the ones who were more experimental, like Pynchon, Fowles, the Beats. I read Kerouac thinking he was more original than he was – I didn’t realise he was copying Celine. The same with Henry Miller, who I really just read for the sex.”
“And more?”
“In contemorary fiction? Not really, for a long time. In my thirties I got sick of contemporary fiction apart from a select few, like Garcia Marquez*, who was a Celinist. Instead, I realised I was really ignorant about much older writing, and wanted to make up for it, starting with the Greeks. The Renaissance in England turned me on to that, and that is still a happy reinforcing duality – learn from Shakespeare* and his contemporaries, and go back to the Greeks. I’m especially a fan of Euripides* and of the philosophers, the Stoics* and Epicureans*. To me they never grow old.”
“More?”
“Yes, from there I’ve tried to make up for my lack of understanding in other periods – the 19th century especially. I’m still learning about that, though I’ve knelt at the Austen* altar, and Balzac* – and of course the Russians. Dostoevsky* was a brief flirtation in my 20s, but later I made a meal of him.” He stopped.
“This must be really boring to you, just an endless list.”
“It’s not at all,” Sasha protested. “What’s interesting is how broad and deep your reading has been.
“That’s kind of you to say, but I’ve known people who would scoff at my allegedly deep reading. Anyway, I did find my way back to contemporary fiction a little bit anyway. I’ve been reading Thomas Bernhard*, the Austrian, and Philip Roth*, the American. You know, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral really made me able to agree to talk with you.”
“Why?”
“Roth is honest. He doesn’t conceal his weaknesses, almost rubs them in your face. Reading Roth made me ashamed of trying to hide my failings. Bernhard is also very honest in a different way. Then you turned up.”
“So you’re being brave with us – and you are!” Sasha laughed. “A good brave man!”
“Very funny.”
“It’s time we shifted focus and it’s a nice way to start,” Sasha said. “The writer as hero. We’ve been over the reasons you write as an individual – as you might say as an ego, but really only skated over the more noble motivations, if you like.” She smiled warmly. “So many of your favourite writers were Quixotes, weren’t they? Not in the same way, but different ways – Celine and Hammett on opposite ends of a political spectrum, but there is more to it.. .”
“Yes, that’s true. My grandiose way of seeing writers – changing the world with the pen. I think that’s why I lost interest in contemporary writers – it’s no doubt unfair but so many are too middle class, focused on the needs and aspirations of an individual rather than changing society, on examining how society affects people. I think that’s been lost in contemporary fiction so I moved away from it. And meanwhile of course I’ve had my autodidactic plan – just to educate myself. One Euripides is worth a thousand John Fowles.”
“So you left the individual out of your books, the individual you.”
“Well. . .maybe an idea of me peeps through, but far from a realistic one. I don’t really matter, do I? My slogan for my writing has been to have a serious purpose in a frivolous genre.”
“Yet that serious purpose could be better served some other way, don’t you think?”
“You mean politics.”
“Yes – taken broadly.”
He frowned. “I don’t think that’s fair really. There is more than one way, and they inter-relate. Zola for example and his defence of Dreyfus in France. Dreyfus would not have been exonerated without Zola. I’m sure I could think of many more examples.”
“Zola was a novelist but J’accuse was an essay, a pamphlet,” Sasha objected. “He used his fictional reputation to draw attention to the cause.”
“That’s true,” he conceded. “And people saw Celine’s anti-semitic pamphlets in the same way, though at least arguably they were extensions of his fiction, which was always semi-autobiographical. The Gadfly by Voynich might be a more appropriate example. It was in its time a famous revolutionary tract though it was a novel.
“And,” he continued, “Shakespeare’s work includes penetrating analysis of political ideas, in a way I’d be very pleased to emulate, if I had the talent.”
“As?”
“Henry the Sxith part three. . .all the history plays really but most importantly, Troilus and Cressida*.”
“Why that one? Troilus I mean. It’s almost unknown.”
“It’s quite a savage attack on masculine attitudes and their effect on society as a whole. You’ve read the blog, you’ll have seen the essay on it.”
“Yes – it’s very interesting. It’s good to talk about that in another way, later.”
“What other way?”
She said nothing for a minute. Then – “What are the points you’re trying to make in your books? What you’d hope would change the world, or at least change behaviour.”
“As you know there’s a take on women. I try to portray women as hero, sometimes kick-ass like others do, but more than that – using empathy to make changes as a way of just doing things differently from how we poor males have done them. I’m not sure I really succeeded, but I have tried.
“And,” he went on, “I’ve been forthright in portraying lesbian relationships as not only valid but for many women the best way to live. My female characters are often bisexual or just women’s women. I think that matters, and in one of my books I’ve had the women come together in old age.
“It’s strange, that aspect,” he observed. “I’ve suggested to women in their 70s and 80s who have to watch their spending and who live alone often in a house too big for them, that they would be better off financially and emotionally in a loving relationship with another woman, but they resist very strongly. It’s something I think will come, but not yet. But you know, I think I’m ahead of the curve in that way.”
“And men?”
He laughed. “My male heroes are sensitive new age guys, I guess you could say. Snags. They’ve got more grit to them I think, but it’s that arena of moral and social life.
“More broadly, the themes are also against hatred of the usual kinds – racial and ethnic. I dwell a lot on anti-semitism because it’s very emblematic. It stands for a wide range of appalling behaviours.
“My main focus you might say is on ethics, on the choices people have on how to treat others. Everyone has the choice of being evil, of doing evil, of harming others, or of standing up for what I’d say are progressive values, and I try to explore those issues in terms of relationships and in terms of larger causes and issues. That’s why I dwell on Nazism and other kinds of intolerance.”
“Yes, you have very strong women in your novels and the male heroes are almost unbelievably nice.”
“Ha ha. Yes, I suppose so. But the bad guys are still bad, just as I’ve had bad women. It’s the choice that’s the point – how people live. Evil to use a general term is always available to anyone really. Choosing not to do evil is the beginning of a moral life.”
“That’s a sort of negation, choosing not to do things, rather than choosing to do things. Don’t you think that’s odd?”
“If you put it that way but it’s not odd to me. Choosing the good over the bad is an effort the way I see things. If it wasn’t we wouldn’t have bad in the place it is in society. Adam Smith’s* first book was called the Theory of Moral Sentiments. It’s an interesting take – that we do good things not because they are good but because of fear of punishment, of the pain that the consequences of bad behaviour can bring.”
“Do you agree with that?”
“I’d like not to, but there’s definitely something in what he says. Smith was an odd fish himself. He might have been gay; it’s hard to say. He might have been generalising from his own experience. Scotland is a country dour – motivation from fear of reprisal.”
“You’ve lived there.”
“Yes, and loved it. It’s a very perplexing place though. People can be very insular, and outsiders, even those with Scots backgrounds like I partly have, can find it difficult to be accepted.
“Anyway of course what I’d want to see is people doing good things because it feels good to do them. Smith wouldn’t have agreed. I think the basis of his thinking was individual egotism, selfishness, or as others of that time called enlightened self-interest.”
“You don’t agree.”
“No, not really. I think people want to be loved and do things hoping to be loved, but they can be more spontaneous than that – more open to the good in others and in life, and more willing to be good simply because they know it is good. That can be hard, but it’s something I see people do.”
“And you?”
“I don’t want to talk about me in that way.”
“Why not?”
“It seems wrong.”
“You want to pretend you’re not a subject in your books even though you can’t help but be.”
“Your literary psychology.”
“Yes, our literary psychology. It’s why we’re here, remember.”
“The way I see things, readers shouldn’t take who I am as the point of my books. There’s a much larger purpose, and if I fail to live up to that purpose, it doesn’t negate the larger meaning.”
“Don’t you think that’s an easy out?” Sasha smiled a self-consciously false smile. “Other people should strive to be perfect, but you don’t need to try even.”
“That’s not fair to other people, and it’s not fair to me.”
“Why not?”
“The psychology and ethics in my books recognise fallibility. Humans are fallible. It’s a given. People can recognise virtue as recommended by someone and see the failure to be virtuous in that someone. It’s not rocket science and it’s not hypocrisy. Sorry.”
“Well, then – you can just forgive yourself anything.”
“Not at all. You can recognise you’ve done wrong, and do something about it.”
“But according to you, you know you’re doing wrong as you do it, know you’re making that choice.”
“The logic of this argument is going to get tortuous.”
“It’s not me who is making it so, if it is so.”
“OK. The way I see things, we learn to be virtuous, learn what virtue is, according to the culture that surrounds us, that nurtures us and teaches us. All those lessons come from the truth that people aren’t by nature virtuous in terms of the whole, of the group – I think that’s the bottom line of what Adam Smith was on about, though it’s very open to question whether we behave virtuously through a fear of pain, unless we take that as metaphorical – fear of shame for example.
“When people go against that grain, it might be for a higher purpose, or so they tell themselves, or it might be naked self-interest. In my books the characters usually don’t agonise over things; they have made a choice at some stage, and act on it. Generally the heroes in the novels win out, and are rewarded if you like for their virtue, or at worst forgiven for their wrong actions and rewarded for their right ones. That’s not like real life as it’s not in many other books besides mine. If my books are preachy in that way, it is really only as others are.”
“Do you think they really reflect your values as you really live, and have lived?”
“No. I think they reflect the values I would aspire to living. I’m a human being, not a paragon of virtue, and more than that even – I’m a learning human being. If there is something that I can point to with some small amount of pride, it is that I do learn. I’d say I’m more open to learning than your average reindeer. If there is something I want to know I head for google, and if it says things persuasively I didn’t think were true, I’m ready to change my understanding.”
“Huh.”
“Huh?”
“One of the writers you haven’t mentioned in our talks but wrote about in the blog is B Traven*. He kept his real life as completely obscure as possible, I’d say, and it looks as if you admire that about him as much or more than the contents of his work.” Sasha looked less than kind. “Traven said that the only biographer a writer needs is the work; his wilful obscurity, if it did other things, was pointed at his art. This might be a bit challenging for you but what he wanted to do is different from what your work has done, which is to erase you as a person. Isn’t that so?”
“I’m sorry – I don’t get you.”
“What you’ve told us, so far, about the reasons you wanted to write, to be successful as a writer, mean you get a place to hide, not only because of your feelings of inadequacy that you had to begin with, but from your actual life, the things you have done, and the ways you have done them.”
“That’s stretching a long bow surely,” he objected.
“Is it?” Sasha flashed a grim smile at him. “You might think Rachel and I have just turned up on the off chance, without being thorough. If you do, you’re wrong.”
“Thorough in what way exactly.”
“Mr Wants to Be Anonymous isn’t going to be, anymore, when the thesis is published. We’ve spent a lot of time getting in touch with the people you’ve known, and we’ve heard lots. You’ll get a chance to read their opinions of you.”
“Literary psychology.”
“Exactly. You’re a predator, and you’ve used this bizarre life choice to conceal your real motives We’re going to do justice to your many victims.”
“You’re distorting everything about my writing and about my life.”
“Oh? You’ll have a chance to challenge the real words of real people about you. We’re not fabricating anything.”
“Yes you are!” Even he seemed surprised by the heat in his voice. “There are things I’ve done I’m not proud of, like any person. But that’s very far from the way you are portraying things.”
Sasha grinned. “You’ll get your time to explain it all away. It’ll be fun for all of us. And there’s more – so much more!”
“Maybe I don’t want to continue.”
“Oh, I think you will, hard as you might find it. After all, if you don’t there won’t be your side of the story. It’ll look like what it is – a coward seeking to avoid the consequences of his actions.”
Chapter Seven – Sharp edges
He took them to a pub outside the town, where there was a table that afforded privacy. “I didn’t want to have you at my place.”
“Oh?” Rachel smiled with sharp teeth. “You were afraid we’d attack you?”
“Just afraid. You alone with me could make big trouble. Who’s to say what went on, when it’s the word of you two against mine? As you will understand, I’m not very trusting at the moment.”
Sasha’s soft cop cut in. “Well, it’s all nice and safe here. Where shall we start?”
“I’ve thought a lot about the last time. You’ve got more to attack me with, you say. Well, I’m not sure I care enough but I’ll keep going for a while. What bothers me about this is that you are linking my writing and my reasons for it with the lowest common denominator of anyone’s personality, and that seems quite wrong to me.”
Sasha wrinkled her nose. “Relevant, surely.”
“Oh, a little bit. When you brought this up I thought of J D Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut who fell foul of the morality crusades. They were very different personalities, yet got the same harsh treatment. I’m not in their class as a writer of course – no one has heard of me. But they both seemed to be driven to write, and so am I. You plumb that and say that because I behaved in such and such a way, that my work is evil – or something like that, that it is the reverse of what it says, that my messages – of love and tolerance and social change for the good of all people – are bunkum, or at the very least devalued.”
Sasha started to interrupt but he raised his hand.
“I think that is just wrong. We don’t know much about Shakespeare, for example, which invites people to fill in gaps in the knowledge and some people have chosen to portray him as a pretty nasty sort of fellow. Does that diminish the warmth and humanity of the writer? Do we get something less from As you like it or Twelfth night? I just can’t agree.”
Sasha tried again.
“No,” he said. “Let me finish.” She backed off. “There are things in my life, things I have done, relationships I’ve had, that I’m ashamed of. I’m willing to discuss those in a general way, but I’m not willing to talk about individuals, even if they have been willing to talk to you about me. That’s their choice. I don’t really want to hear what they say if they haven’t already said it to me, and they probably have, so I don’t need to hear it again.
“There are good things I’ve done too, and decent relationships I’ve had. I can talk about those generally too but I don’t think it’s right to talk about them as if I was a hero or something. My bad aspects if you like won’t allow it. How that fits into my writing – well, yes, let’s talk about that. But if you’re trying to make me a devil in a snag suit, really not interested.”
“Huh.” Rachel crossed her arms in a huff while Sasha stared past him.
“Well, we’ll have to think about what you say,” Sasha said. “We brought some of the comments from your past life with us, but if you don’t want to hear them, we won’t give them to you or read them. We’ll listen to you. So we’re listening – tell us about the bad and the good.”
“All right. Thinking about how I’ve lived, I can see how people would think I am or have been a predator of vulnerable women. It is true I’ve been involved with that kind of woman, but it is true too that may be reflection of my own vulnerability and feelings of inadequacy.
“But that’s not the full picture – in reality, or how I saw it at the time. I see myself as an enabler, not a predator. One of my past partners called me a ‘rescuer’, and that would be fair too – I see people I think have some potential in some way, but face barriers of one kind or another, which is what vulnerability is, and think I can have a role in helping them realise their potential. Once involved on a platonic level, it can lead to an intimate one, though it needn’t and hasn’t always or even often. That’s not good or bad in principle – either way. Sometimes in my life, it’s stayed platonic, and others not.
“Any or all of those haven’t always worked out in any way at all, and especially in intimate ways. After all, I am alone here, and though there might be a woman who would hook up with me out there somewhere, there isn’t one now! But there have been success stories, women who have gained from being part of my life, and that’s pleasing for them, that they’ve found a way to realise themselves. I get satisfaction from that too.”
“What about men?” Sasha wanted to know.
“As friends, I have a few. Even the vulnerable ones though are resistant to help, so the kind of thing people talk about when they talk about predators, doesn’t usually come up. A little, but not a lot. Sexually – well, tried it and didn’t really like it. I’m the wrong generation or something. I like women, and if I was a woman would very likely be a lesbian. You’ve read my books and know what I think about that.”
“Mmm.”
“But what I really want to say about this is that I feel strongly that I’m on Traven’s side, both in his politics and in his approach to his art – as you said, that the only thing that should matter about a writer in terms of the writer’ work, is the work itself. I’ve tried very hard in my books to keep me out of them, apart from my interests.”
“What do you mean, interests.”
“For example, in one of my books the protagonist is a fan of modern art, likes jazz and blues, and is a befuddled student of Celine. All those interests are interests of mine. It makes it easier to write that way – to write about what you already know. The character concerned isn’t otherwise like me – he is, among other things, a murderer, and I’m not.
“You can find many of my interests in my books, but you won’t find me, in other words. My sharper critics – yes, touche! – say this is a weakness, that my characters aren’t real.”
“Do you agree?”
“Yes, in a way at least, I do. My books are after all genre novels, though they are meant to be a cut above if you like. My characters are bound to be stock to some degree. That’s true of genre novels in general – the characters are ‘typical’ but have or are meant to have some qualities that make them stand out, good or bad. That’s what sells them.”
“So you don’t agree at all that you are hiding behind your books in order to shall we say plunder the delights of women?”
“No. I think my relationships with women are complicated, but not in that way, through my writing or in any other way.”
“Complicated? How?”
“You’ll know from reading my blog that I think our time is a time of the coming to power of women in society generally, starting in the developed countries and extending out. I don’t think this is an issue of equality but leadership. Several of my books are based around this understanding. If you’re reading ‘me’ in my books you might read that I am in awe of ‘woman as woman’, intimidated even by talent and intelligence. What I was saying about being an enabler rather than a predator fits into that. I see talent that just needs a nudge as it were and want to give it.”
“And sex?”
“My books have a lot of sex in them. Over time I’ve massaged it to make it less direct. But I think sex is something that our society needs to confront in all its aspects, good and bad. And what I think is true is that the bad is a reflection of our inability to confront these issues. When it’s all out in the open, in plain daylight as it were, the urges that bring men to commit sex crimes, may be much diminished. Right now, in a time of transition, they may get worse, regardless.”
“And you don’t think you commit them, or have done?”
“You’ve made me think about this, and no, I don’t – the women in my books, and the women in my life, have always had what nowadays is called agency. They make decisions, they are responsible for their actions just as much as I am for mine. If I was able to persuade them of something and their personalities were weak and they agreed over misgivings, and later regretted it, it was nonetheless their decision. It is profoundly disrespectful of them to think otherwise, disrespect by you. Much of the distress caused over this issue is needless and harmful to the people who are their own victims. You pretend to be on their side while diminishing them as people. That’s shameful.
“Nothing I have done in decades of relationships, sexual and otherwise, comes anywhere near the kind of thing reported in the media. My worst excesses might be called assertive. Oooh!
“There are women from my life who won’t have anything to do with me. Maybe you’ve met them and interviewed them. I don’t have bad feelings towards them, and if I have regrets, and of course I do, they are honest regrets, not guilty ones. That comes from respect for the women’s agency – for their ability to make decisions.”
“Huh.”
“Yes, ‘huh’. It’s how life is now. You know I think one of the problems for women today is that they are given power, which is good, at the same time that they are made victims by the media, which is very bad. My books are very woman focused in that sense, or they are meant to be – to give women power even in situations where they don’t have it, so they can overcome the victim stuff.”
“You’re trying to save men from their sins, make it OK.”
“No I don’t think so, either in my life, or in my books. The way I see it is that men are on the defensive now and their responses determine their moral value. Basically, today, men don’t know how to behave. It’s a very confusing time for them. They can be terrified or certainly scared of being accused of being a predator or worse, so it’s safer to do nothing. That’s true of me. I don’t try anymore. If women don’t want to signal to me somehow that they are interested in me, I don’t want to risk it. Once it was simply fear of rejection. Now it’s fear of accusation, which is the same as guilt in these parlous times.
“For men who can’t figure things out, violence is a real choice. I don’t excuse that, in my life, or in my books. Once I had a friend who beat up his wife and tried to justify it to me. I cut him off, ended our friendship, and supported the wife. What that male behaviour shows is the difficulty some have of coming to terms with changed realities.”
“So as to you, you are on your own through choice?”
“Yes, though of course I’d be open not to be. I don’t have a for sale sign outside my house though. I just don’t want to be misunderstood and then labelled as people have already. Like you have.”
“Yes.”
“One of the great isms that the times won’t deal with is ageism. I’m not an ageist, and my relationships not only with women but with men don’t have any age boundary once adulthood is reached. So I’ve had relationships with younger women and women my own age and with women older than I am. Arguably people like me should be celebrated for our open mindedness. Instead, the focus goes on the younger women and I become a predator.”
“Which you say you are not.”
“We’ve been through this – insofar as it is relevant, I see myself as an enabler.”
“And in your books?”
“Men, or the women they’re involved with?”
“Both.”
“Here’s a good example. In one of my books, a character is very good looking. She knows it, and wants to become a model. Her looks have however put her in a straitjacket and the men who approach her are only interested in sex. In the course of the book she is coerced by an alcoholic into sex. She was able to distinguish even in the act between the reality of rape and the act of sex. And she was able not to take on victimhood. She had agency, and her agency let her in the end realise her dream.
“The message,” he went on, “was that people can be abused but their attitude can keep them safe. Pedro Almodovar, the Spanish film maker, pushes that idea much farther. In his best films murderers become angels of mercy, rapists save lives. I’m not agreeing with this, but pointing it out.”
“You admire Almodovar. One of our interviewees told us.”
“Yes I do. You’ll probably know that as I am, he’s also an autodidact!”
“But you don’t necessarily agree with his morals, or lack of them.”
“I think what he is doing is exposing the complexities of life and countering conventional morality with them. I’ve got a book on the film Talk to her, which I think is his masterpiece. One of the contributors attacks him for the central issue in the film. A man obsessed with a young woman in a coma, rapes her. She becomes pregnant, the man is arrested. He is told that the woman has died as a result of his crime but instead, while the child is born dead, the birth process wakes the woman up. Not knowing this, the man kills himself.
“Now the morals in this film are without doubt troubling. They are meant to be. Almodovar in interviews said he was not defending the rapist, but not judging him either. So this turns out to be a very dextrously handled theme of moral ambiguity. In a later film, a woman who murdered the mother of the local hippie by setting fire to the hut where her own husband was sleeping with the hippie’s mother, returns years later to nurse the hippie who is dying of cancer. In this same film the mother of a teenage girl who kills her stepfather when he is trying to abuse her, manages to conceal the murder and in the end, nothing bad happens. I think the morality of that film is cleaner than Talk to her. It’s easier to accept that the killers concerned were at least prompted if not justified, though the nursing is a kind of redemption. Nonetheless there is an irony, an insistent resolution that goes beyond good and evil. So yes, very Nietzchean. I suppose.”
“Huh.”
“Yes, huh. You like that.”
Chapter Eight – Red raver
“Let’s talk politics.”
It was a fine day and they were at the shoreline at a village half an hour away. It had once been a thriving gold rush town, but had shrunk to no more than a few hundred. At the shore, where ships bringing miners and supplies had beached, there was a picnic area and he’d brought them to it, in the open air, the salt breeze bracing. They sat at the picnic table and stared at one another warily.
“You’ve tired of the predator angle – so soon?” He smiled less kindly than he might have.
“We’ll come back to it.”
“I see. Very well, politics.”
“Your books are plainly liberal or even radical and in some of them you defend Marx. You’ve used themes about the Holocaust, and campaigned shall we say against neo-Nazism. Is there any parallel in your private life?”
“Yes.”
“Well?”
“You’ve seen the blog.”
“Mostly you skate over your career.”
“If you’ve found out more of it, write about it.”
“Really.”
“Yes, go on. You’ve got quite a lot of information about my private life so you can hardly have missed my political past, or present for that matter.”
“Why are you so reluctant?”
“I’ve been an activist, but never important. I have a sense of proportion and decency.”
“Decency?”
“Yes, decency. In civil rights especially, I’ve been on the right side, but never aspired to leadership. That’s for others.”
“Why?”
“For minorities, for the oppressed, it’s their struggle, their suffering, and their achievement. Surely Sasha you would agree with that.”
“So what do you see as your role?”
“Humility first and foremost. If you’re a member of a dominant culture, you need to be careful about how you go. It’s not that hard. Then support where you feel you can be effective.”
“What about socialism? Marx? You were more forward with that.”
“Yes. The way I see things the trouble with Marx is Marxists! Or people who think they are. I’ve always, right from the first when I was convinced by Marx, felt he has been ill-served by his followers, especially since the Bolshevik revolution. That was a distortion of Marx.”
“And how have you got on?”
“Badly. I was influential for a time but only controversially.”
“Ah. Can you explain that?”
“The difference between so called liberals, or leftists and conservatives or rightists centres on control, on whether the state decides and people obey or whether people decide and the state enables what they can achieve. That’s an oversimplification but it will do. Liberals think they get into power based on a programme and pass laws. They might see these as enabling but often they are redistributing, what their opponents call handouts. Whether these be good or not, for the politicians, . the way I see things, that’s just a power grab. Laws should be open enough to enable people to do things that benefit the community as a whole.
“So what’s happened, it seems to me, is that control mechanisms have become synonymous with left wing politics, which is not only anti-Marxist, but contains elements of fascism. There are historical reasons for that.
“On the other end of the spectrum, the rhetoric of individualism and freedom is a mask for a different kind of control, by business and finance. What conservatives fail to see is the ongoing development of society that involves the power of the powerless as Havel* put it – the reliance of business on its workers. That’s evolution towards socialism. Marx is clear about that if somewhat vague. After all this process was only beginning when he was first writing. The future is still uncharted territory. Many though not all steps in that evolution have to be fought out. Some business people are more enlightened and you can find out about that – they realise that their best bet is to be generous with wages and conditions, to turn workers’ creativity loose. Many of the ‘new tech’ entrepreneurs have followed that mantra, even if in other ways they come up short.“
“So you’re not a participant any more.”
“In big ticket politics – not really, more an observer. I write a bit and make comments online but not much. It’s only a part of life and the substratum of life if you like is an area still being fought over, and where my writing and life are meant to be and have whatever influence it might have.”
“More?”
“To be fair to me, when I’ve seen social developments that seem to be embodiments of what Marx was on about, I’ve been active and supportive.”
“Name a few.”
“The most recent is a food giveaway. It gets food that would otherwise be thrown out by supermarkets and cafes and anyone who wants can come to get it. It’s staffed mostly by volunteers, about half of them clients and the other half do-gooders like me, so there’s a cross fertilisation of people who wouldn’t meet otherwise. There’s an upskilling for the street people and many of them get jobs. The place is run by two people who split a single minimum wage, and the premises are provided by the local council. So it’s socialism as I see it developing out of the society we live in now. A good sign of that is that it’s a Christian project, not a left wing political one – but exactly as I would want it to be as a socialist: people solving problems, seeing needs and meeting them.”
“More?”
“Well, I am one of those ‘recovering’ types with a few 12-step fellowships – AA for alcohol and NA for all drugs including alcohol. I’ve been going for a long time – thirty years. “
“It’s important to you.”
“Yes it is. I was pretty messed up by substance abuse, and you could say my life was saved by getting out of that world and into the real one.”
“Ha-ha.”
“Well, it’s so. Other people can maybe handle having a vacation from reality, but I couldn’t. I was the problem, not the drugs.”
“What do you see happening in the world today, politically?”
“My chance to pontificate!”
“Yes, well.”
“OK. I’ll be brief. I think the world is struggling to become a world, all linked up – truly global. It’s a dynamic and inevitable process insofar as anything can be inevitable. It’s not painless but what happens is that national interests become more and more synonymous with global interests, and those who are left out initially do find a place, if a lesser one, eventually. There are winners and losers and adjustments have to be made, but are made over time. Some countries resist and become aggressive.
“That’s a long struggle. The way to trace it is to follow the division of labour, which any sensible person can see is progressively globalising. It’s not just China, but everywhere. Apparently a passenger jet has parts from 45 countries.
“Globalisation will end up as socialism. No one knows what that’s going to be like but social ownership and control will eventually become more efficient than private ownership and corporate control. It will develop from it through increased worker control at the coalface as is said.
“So that’s it – the big picture. In that context there’s a lot going wrong, but if you agree with what I’ve just put out, you’ll have a focus on where to put your energy.”
“What about the other big issues – race and gender? How do they fit in?”
“Both are in some way about how to both grow and slice up the pie of material life and control of it. You already know how I see race and as a male, it’s unlikely I’ll be trying to be a power in a woman dominated society. I don’t agree with Thomas Berger* about the coming dominance of women. I think it’s good, or at least should be good.”
“You don’t think it’s about equality.”
“Not really. It’s like socialism – we can’t know until we see it on the horizon, but woman power is power, after all. One of the things that’s often claimed is that women bond together much more easily than men, and overcome racial and class barriers. If it’s so you are on the march and it’s a good thing.”
“Huh.”
“Yes, huh.”
“Do you feel your writing goes with your politics and do you feel that explains your failures?”
“Yes.”
“Come on, explain.”
“I was being a bit facetious, but only a bit. My politics is quite important in a theoretical sense, in terms of understanding where things are going, but very minor in an activist sense. As we’ve discussed, the analysis points to a certain kind of activism which is important but not earthshaking, and for the participants, often without any political consciousness at all. That’s both a good thing and a bad thing. So the politics is hopeful but it’s success through ongoing failure really, every failure ekeing out a tiny, often all but imperceptible gain. And my books mirror that politics. There’s not much to be done, to make a joke about Lenin, and what there is to be done, is small. So who wants to read about that?”
“You don’t think there’s an existential message that people could pick up on?”
“Oh, sure. But plenty of other writers, writing serious books unlike my frivolous books, address these existential issues.”
“Better than you? You’re more cynical than that, or you say you are.”
“Well, they write a different kind of book for starters. My books follow the standard formula of thriller fiction. They have heroes and villains, and depending on the book in question allow the characters internal monologues. But they aren’t what I call bourgeois fiction. The characters aren’t dwelling over individual midlife crises but engaged with big issues like Nazism, or corruption. When they have personal issues they are meant to exemplify larger social issues, about sex for example, or violence.
“But you know that my books don’t sell and theirs do. That’s not what readers today want I guess, or I’m just not good enough.”
“We think your books are middle grade in quality. If you had gone the way of an agent, got one, and got published and marketed you wouldn’t be living in a cottage like the one you have. You might not be a best seller, of the blockbuster type, but you’d sell.”
“So it’s my foolish eccentricity.”
“You said that.”
“Am I not allowed bitter irony?”
“No, but we are.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’ll come to that. Is there anything else you would like to say about your politics?”
“Are you going to hammer me? Do you have some secret information you think will expose my many inadequacies as a political activist?”
“That’s an interesting way of putting it. Actually, we’re not sure. It depends on what happens later.”
“I see.”
“So do you want to say anything more?”
“It would help if you told me what you are trying to get at.”
“What we’re trying to tease out of you is how your personal life is connected to your political life.”
“Hmmm. You know that is one of my hobby horses I bet.”
“Tell us.”
“Insisting that politicians be consistent in their politics with their personal lives is unfair, I think. Gladstone is the example I like to use. He was a liberal British politician who wanted to do good things for the common people. It seems he also liked to be tied to the frame of his bed and thrashed by women in maids’ costumes, or something like that. What is the connection there? Does there have to be one? In one sense, yes, but in another not really, is the way I see it. Gladstone’s demons were his own business.”
“Yet there must be some connection.”
“Yes, there must – but it’s less important than looking at his public life and accomplishments or failings. Leave the welts on his backside to his ghost to savour.”
“You link that to your own private life.”
“Certainly not. I am not a sadomasochist.”
“No, but you can use the Gladstone example to excuse your own behaviour that might be in contradiction to your political beliefs and actions.”
“And that would be reflected in my writing you mean too?”
“Yes, as you would say – certainly.”
“I would say it’s troubling to anyone who is aware of the private lives of famous people. Sartre and Beauvoir scandalised their most ardent supporters as predators of adolescent women, and they were criticised for moral failings towards a young Jewish woman during the German occupation. Other French writers and celebrities have been very public paedophiles, and in the 19th century paedophilia could almost have been an accepted pastime. Halevy wrote a book, Cardinal, about it and Degas illustrated it.”
“Do you defend the paedophiles?”
“I just said it’s troubling. I’m not sure about the past but historically has an unpleasant aroma to me. Today certainly paedophilia is a terrible thing. But it’s easy to get wrapped up in the values of our time and forget that those in the past weren’t living in them. Sartre’s friends reproached him for bedding teenage girls using his fame and apparently he excused himself on the grounds of being physically ugly. That seems strange to me. If a teenage girl threw herself at me today I’d be out the door before she could get her kit off.
“What is more troubling to me is his career under the German occupation during World War Two. After the war he was a zealous anti-Nazi but during it he was more flexible. Again you had to be there I guess but his post-war actions were not consistent with his wartime shall we say exploits. It looks from here like he rode the wave both times, and to me it’s not a good look.”
“And this is more important to you than the sex.”
“It’s public and that makes a difference in the importance stakes, but the private life is not irrelevant.”
“You’re still trying to avoid the issue, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, stop and come to grips with it.”
“You’re pursuing me on two tracks, and I’m not sure I like either of them. You’ve already told me you’ve talked to people in my past who may have good reason to dump on me. I’d say most of them – not all, but most – come from the time when I was abusing drugs, and wouldn’t actually know me as I have been since then. Of course I don’t know but I suspect that. The others – well, it’s as it is.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Sobriety hasn’t made me perfect. I can still wake up in the morning and think, why did I do that?”
“And?”
“And the difference for me is that when I act badly I have tools provided by the recovery fellowships to be able to deal with them, not to let them fester in others’ minds, or mine.”
“What’s your personal life now? You don’t seem to have one really.”
“Yeah. It makes me feel a bit more sympathetic to Sartre and Beauvoir. That’s a joke. My values today don’t let me do the kinds of things they felt were fine and it means, my ugly can’t be overcome.”
“You want to have sex with teenage girls?”
“You weren’t listening. Seriously I thought you understood that I am talking more generally. I’m not an age-ist, but I am not very taken with teenage girls. I mean that women don’t seem to be attracted to me and I don’t have the old tricks I got up to, to win them even for shall we say an exploratory fling.”
“Tricks.”
“I don’t think that is unusual at all. I’m talking about how humans behave. There are strategies people use, signals they send and so on. Have a look at the first bit of Kerouac’s Dharma bums. The protagonist pretends to be deeply spiritual and Buddhist so he can get sex. That sort of manoeuvre is mostly denied me by my values now.
“But I’d rather be alone as I am today, than out there playing those games.”
“Huh.”
“Yes huh again. You want to say I’m a slow learner. OK, I’ll agree. But I’m not alone.”
“You are very much alone.”
“Touche. As you must realise, I mean that others have made the same mistakes. The issue is whether they do learn from them or go on repeating them.”
“And you?”
“We’ve been over this before.”
“Quite.”
“So what’s next? More huh, huh? You seem to have been through all the aspects of what I do, of me, of writing. . .I don’t know what can be left.”
“There is something. You will be surprised, we’re sure of it.”
“Very good. Tell me now, or wait until next time? We’re about done for today I’d say.”
“Oh, next time. . .when we’ll have all the time we need.”
Chapter nine – Show and tell
“What are we doing today?” They were at a sheltered bench looking out at the coast near Cape Foulwind, a striking promontory named by James Cook who had been unable to come close to the shore for the weather. Sasha was quiet at first as Rachel led the questions.
“We’re starting looking at a few photos.”
“I’m not sure. . .”
“Oh, we are. Here – do you recognise this person?”
“Yes – yes, I do. Seattle, on one of my junkets. She picked me up on the street. I was drunk.”
“And?”
“And we went somewhere and eventually I went back to my hotel.”
“Went somewhere.”
“Yes. You must have talked to her, as you have her photo. She looks quite different from when we met. In this photo she looks defeated. Then she was very positive, cheerful. She was wearing bright orange shorts and a white tee shirt as I recall. I liked her and was sorry we didn’t have more time.”
“More time.”
“It’s just about sex with you, isn’t it? That’s not how I saw that encounter, and I don’t think it’s how she saw it either.”
“Very good. How about this one?”
“I’m not sure. She’s familiar but – it looks a long time ago. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge of my life.”
“Do you think I look like her?”
“A bit. Are you related?”
“Yes – she is my grandmother.”
“I see. And you – hang on, are you saying this woman is known to me?”
“You’re being delicate.”
“Well, I am trying. Why are you really here – the two of you? Is there something about this that is not at all about my books, or my writing, or anything literary?”
“No, it is completely about those subjects. It’s just has a personal angle, the angle that got us interested in the first place.”
“So out with it.”
“Sasha and I met years ago, online, researching our family histories. It turns out we share a gene pool, and the gene pool we share happens to come from you. We’ve confirmed it using a swab we took the day we met, when we had coffee.
“Sasha is your daughter, and I am your grand-daughter.”
“What?”
“That’s all you have to say – what?”
“I’m shocked. Surely you can understand that.”
“Oh, perfectly. So you should be. We’ve written it all up, apart from the last few talks we’ve had, but the conclusions won’t change. Would you like to read it?”
“To be honest, I’m not sure.”
“Well we could give you the precis orally.”
“Not sure about that either. Not sure I should even be here now.”
“What’s the matter? A bit shy to meet your daughter and grand-daughter? You should be thrilled! Shouldn’t you?”
“Being ambushed is not a thrill.”
“Agreed. But once the shock has worn off. . .”
“Will it ever? You’re going to do a hatchet job on me, show me as a thoroughly despicable human being -”
“Thoroughly despicable male.”
“Alright, male. I’ve been very honest with you, while you have been deceiving me from the first.”
“We thought you wouldn’t agree to participate if you knew, and anyway it’s been such fun!”
“It’s my turn to say ‘huh’. Sasha, how is your mum?”
“She was murdered by her pimp ten years ago. He didn’t like her attitude.”
“I’m really very sorry.”
“Are you?”
“Of course.”
“You’re just like the other clients. You were just there for the sex. Yeah, I heard what you said before, but I don’t believe you.”
“You mean you don’t believe your mother was an interesting person?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t know what you mean.”
“You were there, exploiting her.”
“You can say that. She approached me. I was drunk, but I could have said no, that’s true. But she was very positive, a bright cheerful woman. I liked her, liked being with her. It would have been fine to sit for hours in a cafe, talking. It was clear what it was about, but if she was for example hard and totally businesslike, I wouldn’t have been interested.”
“You think going to prostitutes is fine really, don’t you?”
“No, not really. There was a time in my life when I went to them, searching for something that isn’t usually there. It’s legal in this country and I am grateful for that. But I decided that it wasn’t really me, and haven’t gone for some years now. It’s not from a lack of respect for the women, or for what they do. That’s insulting to them. You seem to be doing that – even insulting your own mother. But for me, it’s that the sex part of a relationship needs to be only one part, that the personality of both people needs to be included, and I found it unsatisfying on most occasions, spending not a small amount of money on an experience that wasn’t really that great. When it was, I would have liked it to be ongoing and outside the business aspect. I respected your mum and enjoyed my time with her well outside the business if you like.”
“So you say. You were just drunk.”
“I was drunk. It’s not an excuse.”
“So what do you think, your daughter standing here in front of you – to tell you, fuck you?”
“I don’t think much. I just feel awful.”
“Poor diddums. Isn’t that what educated people say?”
“I’ve made my peace with your accusations, and I don’t think it’s in a bad way. You’re heard me say so, plainly not believing a word. That’s an issue for you, not for me. It would be nice to make a peace with you. But it doesn’t look likely.”
“No, it’s not likely. It’s impossible.”
“You’re going to be like a tag team wrestling match – Rachel standing there waiting her turn, all worked out, phony as too.”
“Phony? This is completely real.” Rachel stamped her feet, her arms crossed.
“What about your mother and grandmother, Rachel? What do they have to say about all this?”
“They were killed in a car crash when I was five. I wouldn’t know except for a diary my grandmother kept when you were seeing her. I was raised by my father and an unrelated stepmother.”
“That’s very sad. Both of you have had a hard time.”
“It’s very real but you say we’re phony.”
“Oh, real in one way, and of course that’s what stands out. But in another it’s fake. You’ve spent all this time playing with me, and you’re still doing it. I can complain about that – to you, and to the public when it’s time, not that that will matter much. You mean to make me a pariah.”
“You’re not stupid. I’ll say that for you.”
“A Celine for a new age – or if I had my way, a Bernhard. He outraged Austrian society as much as Celine did the French and humanity in general, but for good reasons, unlike Celine.”
“You mean you’ll get some satisfaction out of being a leper to the rest of humanity?”
‘Yes! In Bernhard’s way, and even Celine’s to his own satisfaction – feeling wronged and certain I was wronged. I don’t know – what do you want me to do?”
“Write a confession, then kill yourself would be a start.”
“I see. Why don’t you write the confession for me? I’ll sign it, but as for the suicide, I think you’d rather I didn’t.”
“We’d rather?”
“You will have to live with that. It might seem great right now, but after – people will accuse you. They’ll say you drove me to suicide, and that will be true, won’t it? And it will be true in your hearts too. I know something about guilt – you’ve spent quite a bit of time pointing this out. It’s not something I would wish on you. You’re my daughter, Sasha, and my grand-daughter Rachel. That’s not my idea of a good parting gift from me.”
“Huh.”
“Yes, huh. If I wanted to be mean to you, I’d agree.”
“Of all the self-serving. . .”
“Anyway, why not write out my confession for me? It won’t matter to me how much you put the boot in; I want you to feel justified, to feel good about this entire exercise, and if that will do it, it’s worth the doing. Don’t you think?”
“You are going to make me vomit.”
“Oh, dear. Rachel, help her.”
“You help her, you insufferable little snotrag.”
Chapter Ten – Twisting the knife
“You’ve read it.”
“Yes, Rachel. I have. Every word, more than once. There’s a symmetry meeting in this cafe, where we first talked.”
“Well?”
“Let me start with the things that are personal to you. What your grandmother wrote about me was true. I was totally inadequate as a man – more, as a human being. It was a strange time in my life. I was moving to this country and just waiting for the day, to fly to Hawaii and take a cruise liner to a new home. Everything else got parked. I had had a girlfriend in another state, and was too ashamed to tell her. Eventually I got the courage to ring up and was relieved that she wasn’t home. We kind of got over it, but we stopped communicating.
“Your grandmother was fun. We had some fun together, but it wasn’t meant to be anything, and it wasn’t. Our sex life was terrible because I was terrible at sex then. Otherwise, she was in thrall to a Hindu guru and I was keen on drugs. But we did things together. It was OK.
“When I got to Hawaii I sent her a box of Chinese sweets and got a letter in reply. Then I never heard again. I didn’t know she was pregnant. She may not have told me out of kindness or out of common sense – that I was just not much as a man, or as a human being.”
“As you are still not.”
“So she was wise to break off contact.”
“Very humble.”
“True, that’s all.”
“What about the others? Skip Sasha for now. She’s at the motel, too upset to see you.”
“She might feel better later and come to spray more acid, you mean. In terms of the others you mention, that’s their perspective. It’s real to them. What could I say? If any of them was here right now, I wouldn’t try to change their minds about me, about what happened between us. There wouldn’t be any point. But I know for certain that there have been women in my life who appreciated me, appreciated our time together, who didn’t resent what happened between us. You’ve either not found them, or they’ve not wanted to talk, or they have talked and you’ve chosen to leave them out.
“If you decided they didn’t belong in your hatchet job, Rachel, that’s very dishonest of you. You should be ashamed if that’s so.”
“Huh.”
“Yes, huh. The specific things that have been said about me that you’ve put in, are embarrassing of course, and many of them are true enough. Especially in my drinking years, I was a very selfish, self-absorbed, stupid man with the emphasis on the man. I was drunk a lot of the time. I took a lot of drugs. Getting sober and clean woke me up and helped me grow up but a few of my relationships since then haven’t been what I’d have hoped.
“Now, you know I’m alone. I’d like a partner, but maybe I’m just not suitable as a human being to have partners.”
“So when we write that you were cruel to women, you won’t deny it.”
“It’s a distortion. For me I wasn’t trying to be cruel apart from one or two moments in my life when I was desperate to get out of a situation. I felt guilty then, driven to be that way, so it was human, and you’re being very unfair to put it how you have. Generally I was just self-centred, thoughtless. It was all about me and for them, it just should have been all about them, and that was what human relationships were meant to be, the way I saw things.”
“So they weren’t sacrifices for your art.”
“If I put it that way at the time, I was being an asshole.”
“You were an asshole then, and you are an asshole now.”
“Thanks but you’re avoiding the question. Did I put it that way?”
“Not that we have been able to establish, but inside your head, it was probably true. That’s what you told yourself.”
“That’s wrong.”
“The writers that grabbed you. What do you think about our take on them?”
“Well, it’s an opinion. Everyone is entitled to them. But I disagree. No, let me rephrase that. You say that I was attracted to writers like Traven, and Hammett and Celine because they were extreme and that resonated with me – their extremism, not the content of what they had to say.
“I think that’s so poor an analysis that it’s an embarrassment to you, not to me. What drew me to them was the content. After all, the others there in my gallery of greats aren’t labelled extreme, though in some ways you could say they were. Shakespeare? To me the greatest writer in any language? Euripides?
“What got me about any writer I’ve admired is the truth of what they were saying, or what I saw as the truth. They cut through the shit. Celine’s anti-semitism was awful. So was Dostoevsky’s. I’ve spent years trying to see how it was that they could hold ideas about Jews that they did yet still have profound insights into the human condition.
“So what you’re saying is wrong. They were extreme as anti-semites and I was repelled by that while being forced to acknowledge their penetration into the mysteries of life in other ways. Traven? His anarchism and his revolutionary enthusiasm sprang from his time. The events he wrote about were based on real events involving real people. He brought them to life. They’re not like today, though those horrific times could come back.”
“Politics? Marx?”
“Again, we have to see Marx in the context of his time. The fundamental insights are true, or not. I’d say they’re true, as we’ve discussed and you’ve ignored. Marxism took strange pathways that had little if anything to do with Marx apart from concealing power with a patina of social justice. The Bolsheviks promised to solve Russia’s problems. Insofar as they did that, they replaced them with new and even worse ones. Ditto the Chinese. China’s march to socialism has been over the bodies of millions – depending on who you’re listening to, even tens of millions. That’s not what my socialism is about – and can’t be about, by definition.
“People who say these things against Marxism pass over the excesses of capitalism, which are real and documented. Power not only corrupts as the saying goes, it kills. The history of the United States has massacres aplenty littering its founding centuries. I’ve paid my dues about that. You make me ugly for the doing of it.”
“It’s ugly because you’ve just latched on to something to make yourself look good.”
“That is just not true. The criticisms you make of my books are contradictory for that reason. It might be very fair to say that the politics in them prevents the characters coming alive. But if that’s true, I’m not there either. You can’t have it both ways.”
“Can’t we?”
“No. The people I admire, the Shakespeares and Travens and Marxes and the rest, are in my books because I think they have a lot to say about life and how we navigate it. I want to share that enthusiasm – if I may be so bold, that insight. It’s not about me, but about those luminaries. When you try to make it about me, you reduce yourselves to being cheap and nasty. You want to score points you’re not able to score fairly, so you cheat.”
“So you say.”
“Yes, so I say! Rachel, you’ve made a mess of me, but while you’ve been doing it you make a mess of your general cases, about wannabe artists. Your largest point that makes any sense is that inadequate human beings pursue success in eccentric ways because they’re not capable of playing the game the way normal people do. That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?”
“Yes, partly.”
“As an examination of the literature, it’s a very fair point. But it doesn’t entirely explain the phenomenon.”
“Why not?”
“Because the way the rules are made, they can be quite right in breaking them, in seeking to succeed using their eccentric methods. The examples are telling, like the rejection slip JK Rowling supposedly got for her first Harry Potter novel, advising her to give up writing. She kept submitting, but others might just as well not bother. The conventional publishing world is awash with submissions and people like me know that and want to short circuit it. It’s hardly terrible.
“The trouble is, that those of us doing it are in exactly the same situation, as you use as your starting point. Conventional publishers are unreachable for most writers, and the way around them, to reach readers, is a thicket of wannabes. That’s sprouted a parallel universe of wannabe publishing aids, which for some strange reason carries a cost.”
“So.”
“So it’s very fair of you to cite me as representative in that sense. But you go further. The implication is that wannabes are flawed human beings whose inadequacies explain their status as wannabes. I think that’s pretty unfair as a general point. What is more likely to stick is that they aren’t very good writers. They try a few, and then go on to something else. That’s just human. Good writing is hard. You acknowledge that I’m better than the average at least.
“So when you are being unfair to me, you’re being unfair to them. I hope you stick that in.”
“You strike such a noble pose! Underneath we both know it’s bullshit.”
“You’ve got my genes so you should know. I’m sorry – I shouldn’t have said that.”
“The personal part of this project is working your genes out of my system. I’ve got some distance that Sasha can’t have. You’ve been right there in front of her from day one here, and it’s torn her up.”
“She didn’t have to come. Once here, she didn’t have to stay. She’s chosen all this, as you have too. And the way it looks to me, you’re being more than faintly materialistic. You’re hoping for a big seller on the back of my failings. I’m beginning to get annoyed by you, Rachel. I can understand and empathise with Sasha even though it is patently obvious to me that I am not the source of her problems. But from our time together, I can imagine she and I developing a bond of some kind, and I’m very sorry that she can’t.
“You – you say you can have distance. OK, but not so much distance that you can’t reach out for a cheque.”
“That’s cruel. You say you’re not, but there you go.”
“Yes, I see that. I’m sorry – you’ve provoked me enough, and hurt me enough and I’ve lashed out. Do you think it’s my genes in you that make you as cruel to me as you are?”
“We are being cruel to try to wake you up to your nature.”
“And you haven’t?”
“You haven’t killed yourself yet.”
“That’s really what you want? For me to kill myself?”
“When you do you’ll be symbolically atoning for all the slights and hurts and cruelties and more than men have ever done, and we can honour you for that. It’s the only way we can honour you at all.”
“Wow! So you regard me as a representative of the male of the species, and worthless for that. Is that it?”
“Precisely, Sherlock.”
“I am not worthy.”
“Saying that is what makes you worthy.”
“Rachel do you appreciate irony? You’re good at dialectics but there’s something odd about your sense of humour.”
“Spare me.”
Chapter Eleven – Riposte
Statement by Simon Quayle
Even before I begin I need to preface the beginning. The manuscript from Sasha and Rachel includes an offer from me for them to write what follows. This hasn’t happened. I am writing this, taking up the original offer of my daughter and grand-daughter to include my response to their work. It’s interesting in its own right, without me there. The social psychology of the person they want me to represent is a phenomenon brought on by the internet, exploding the vanity press model into something far greater. There are dialectical realities in this that offer fruitful opportunities for insight into contemporary life, and Sasha and Rachel have plumbed them.
Their desire to use my work, and my life, to explore the wannabe phenomenon is also justifiable, and even inspired. As they said to me at the beginning, I am a bit different from the norm in that I have persevered for more than a score of years hoping to crack it, and I haven’t. The thicket thrown up by the multitudes is a new barrier for writers and their estimation of the quality of my work – not great, but not at all bad, a view I would accept – allows them to analyse the structure and function of the wannabe world.
It’s a credit to them that they didn’t stop at literary analysis or the sociology that analysis prompts. Their work encompasses the whole of humanity and in the doing of it turned into a classic that deserves to be thought epochal. It hasn’t seen the light of day yet, but when it does should be sensational for its scope.
In order to make their case, they have needed to make me into a monster, a monster made personal by their relationship to me. Until they appeared with their proposal about my writing, I did not know they existed. To discover previously unknown children and grandchildren would have been a shock in any context, but to have them involved in discussing my work and its meaning in the negative way they have chosen, is a double blow. I am still reeling.
Their case is, however, far larger than my pitiable self. They use me to accuse half of the human race of the qualities they find so repulsive in me. This half’s crimes are also personal, and not merely irredeemable, but incapable of change, if I understand them rightly. Usually the views of someone like me would be taken as progressive. Not so to Sasha and Rachel, and this is a shining strength of their analysis.
Yet they don’t finish even there. They attack those in the other half of the human race, the part they share, with the sin of acquiescence to the wrongs perpetrated by “my” half.
The bar they set for moral behaviour is therefore very high. Is it justified? I must, by the definition of their charge sheet arguments, defend or agree for all those they impugn.
Thanks a lot!
It’s easy to be dismissive of their claims, not only about me, but about the human race and its place in the planet’s life cycle. I won’t be so glib. Some years ago, one of my failed novels dealt with this issue. I called it The End. It wasn’t nearly so good as I wanted it to be, and with the benefit of hindsight I might have written a book on a similar theme but with much different characters, story line and philosophy if with a similar outcome. And today, as I write, there is a movement, “near term extinctionism” that claims the human race is doomed, and rightfully doomed, for its excesses, and for some of those following this idea, the best and most moral stance to take is to get out of the way of the rest of the planet as quickly as possible, so it can get on with recovering from the insult that has been the human race.
So Sasha and Rachel can plausibly argue that they have found another way in to this argument, and that it’s more telling precisely because it has nothing scientific about it. It’s literary, philosophical, analytical, if you like behavioural, and thus finds its grounding through a quest for truth that is holistic rather than scientific.
I think I’m not explaining myself very well here. Let’s say they’ve put up a case to answer and have thrust me into the position of answering it. Not to do it would be a form of cowardice equal to the one they wish on me – suicide. Right now at least as I write, I’m brave enough not to finish myself off. You, reader, stand behind me if you do as the indictment is that whether we see ourselves as a species as part of nature or separate from it, we are a danger to the whole. As a person, as a man, as a member of the human race, I stand accused, on every level – but you too, stand with me in the dock on at least some of these. How will you plead?
For the whole of human history – that part of evolution that is known about through writing and so is traceable through literature – almost all of our species has laboured under the lash of patriarchy. It’s fundamental to patriarchy’s definition that descent from one generation to the next is traced via the father. Copious evidence shows that there was a pre-literary time when descent was traced through the mother. There are echoes and reflections of matriarchy in living cultures now.
Why does patriarchy matter? Property or its equivalent, and thus power, resided there. There were consequences for all women, and for men too in the shape of who got what, who was trained to do what, who was listened to, when and why. When it’s considered that genuinely representative government has only become a commonplace in the richest countries of the world in the last two centuries and that women’s right to be part of this is for not a few countries less than a century old, it is plain that the power of male dominance still percolates through even the most developed societies, or has done until recently, and in more traditional societies, rules supreme. The end of legal male dominance in European law is quite recent really, and elsewhere is unlikely for some time.
So among educated, ambitious, say virtuous women, misandry is socially understandable – an active dislike of the male of the species.
Of course that’s arguably unfair to individuals and that is the nub of this discourse. Men can see the changes that are taking place in society today, just as clearly as women. Are they by their gender ruled incapable of judgment and virtuous action both in relation to women, to society as a whole? To the earth we share?
Sasha and Rachel accuse me thus. They document not only my failings as a man, but also my attempts to change, to become a better human being. They don’t care about that. Nothing is ever enough.
And it’s not for want of trying. It’s hard to say whether in their account I can earn some credit for trying, but even if I do, I remain a man, in both a position of privilege and of harm. So every man sits.
For many men and women that’s a position that is risible, or just worthy of contempt. Yet they press on – the world as it is, is a mess. It’s not the war of the sexes but the desecration of the planet, by our species, and that species is male-dominated. It becomes a matter of desperation not only to save the environment from bizarre and fatal outcomes but from the species itself.
Buried under all this are the many crimes they poke at males for their use of women.
Their premise, the idea they used to start their inquiry, is striking. “Wannabes” are definitely a phenomenon of our contemporary life, whether in writing, or in other areas of the arts. Millions of people are individual members of this tribe, if not tens of millions, and their motivation is escape from the dread reality of otherwise endless uncertainty. To be famous – maybe. But to be wealthy enough to avoid the dangers of sudden financial disaster or grinding, everyday poverty, of being “trailer trash” or worse, homeless on the streets – certainly.
This is not new. Thoreau remarked that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”, and this at a time when the United States was growing at a rapid rate, with abundant opportunity. In Europe at the same time, by contrast, Marx was detailing the terrible poverty of that vast mass and the alienation that accompanied it. Since then, for developed societies, the wealthy ones of the world, things have surely got better! Yes? If we answer yes, it is nonetheless undeniable that the desire to escape the clutches of the system, to be able to exist independently of it, is the driving force behind the wannabe, who may be found in any society with a purchase that can be gripped and held.
The wannabe thus exists at the crux of all that is ailing of our life today – effectively wanting to escape wage slavery using the market that creates it. And yes, as they’ve laid out in their account, that explains me from the time I was an adolescent – and explains many millions more.
They go on to explain my quirks, the aspects of my individuality, in the most searing, uncompromising, unforgiving manner possible. There is no way to plead “not guilty” to their accusations, and I don’t want to. I want to plead, instead, “human” and turn their accusations around: that whatever my faults, the road to my hell was genuinely paved with good intentions and the outcomes, despite their own self-pitying claims, are far less evil than they would have them be.
These are, no doubt, judgment calls, and my judgment surely was often wanting, especially in those times when I was self-centred and absorbed, full of belief in myself that was wholly unwarranted. My literary crime, that they have failed to set out as clearly as they might, was principally bound up in an unwillingness to do the work needed. Yes, they charge me with avoiding the graft involved in playing the game, taking courses, getting on the ladder of literary success, instead aiming for the top rung, or somewhere up the rungs, more or less on my own. It is true, and it is part of my personality as it must be true of so many if not all those faceless wannabes I represent.
Their wounds, that they display so openly are in another category, and if they are shaming to me, and they are, they are also wrongly posed. Until they appeared in my life, having built up a portrait of me on the basis of my personal history, ready to slash and burn, I had no idea they existed, and could have had no idea. They have been very wrong to launch their attack on me based on their own lives, and I want to set this out very clearly: they wrong not only me, but their mothers and grandmothers.
All our lives would have been changed if I had known the consequences of my actions then. Who knows what this might have meant? But I strongly resent their implicit attacks on their own kin, who made choices, took actions, that I would not condemn. Nor should they.
And I wonder too if the other testimonies they have relied on to build their psychological case against me, are as wholesome as they would maintain. I don’t know these details, and don’t want to know. But the onslaught of bad vibes sent my way is unrelieved, though I know and go on to know individuals in my life who would not sling the same arrows of outrageous fortune. For this, as well as their poorly focused understanding of their own life histories, they stand as much condemned as they condemn their unlucky and unhappy target.
This failure of charity is not unique to Sasha and Rachel. They are joined by legions of self-important, judgmental neophytes in the culture wars of our time. I mean them no disrespect they do not deserve and argue only that when they fail to respect others, and in failing that, fail to respect themselves.
Their reality is that they too are wannabes, trapped indeed overwhelmed in the contradictory compulsions of modern life, whether in the capitalist nexus so cogently portrayed by Marx yet so little understood in his own time and after, or in the authoritarian slave labour societies risibly claiming to be socialist. Sasha and Rachel seek to use the extraordinary circumstances of our relationship to make a big splash. They very well may succeed. They may even lead to some sales of my books, as they promised at the beginning. If so the taste would be very sour indeed.
Chapter Twelve – Turnabout
He answered the door to find Sasha on the stoop, smiling weakly. He didn’t know what to say, or even to invite her in.
She tried to invite herself.
“May I come in, please?”
“Sasha, it’s probably not a good idea.” He looked at the sky. “It’s not going to rain. Let’s sit at the table out back.”
“OK.”
He led the way to the table, an old one encrusted with aged lichens he’d got from a neighbour moving. “So,” he said as they sat, “Rachel said you were too upset to see me. I’m too wary of being on my own with you. You might accuse me of something.”
“True.” She glanced at her hands before looking up at him. “I need to explain something, and ask you some questions. Rachel won’t know.”
“How can I be sure of that?”
“You didn’t attack me when you could have. I know that and you know it too. You know you’re not my father.”
“Yes, I do know that.”
“But you didn’t’ say anything.”
“No.”
“My mom was very complimentary about you. You had the opportunity, and turned it down because there were other people there. And you paid the pimp without causing any fuss. And she enjoyed talking with you, as you said you did with her.”
“That’s right.”
“Why didn’t you object?”
“Sasha, first of course I was shocked. I knew what had happened – that nothing happened. But I didn’t know what your mum told you. Maybe there was another man she didn’t want to associate with being your father, and wanted you to think of me that way. That would be a real compliment. Anyway, you said you had DNA and I knew it would come up negative if I forced the issue but chose not to. You had your plans and – I didn’t want to upset you more than you already were. If anything I say is bad, you’ll just make it worse. That’s still how I see it.”
“What happened was that Rachel found you, and I knew you’d been with my mom – that you knew each other. So we had a project to work on, together. I made up the rest, and got control of the DNA testing and didn’t show Rachel.
“I was terrified of what you’d say and when you didn’t contradict me, I didn’t know what to think. I had to get away.”
“Oh.”
“Now I’m in trouble. We’ve done a lot of research. I’ve read your response, and I think that you stand up for yourself and our argument is actually dishonest. You’re not perfect, even to justify misandry. You’re a deeply flawed man, you’ve done some bad things. But what you say is true – we did talk to people who were generous about you, but Rachel worked it that we didn’t need to use them.”
“I see. Why are you in trouble?”
“I’m afraid Rachel will find out everything. The project will be ruined. No PhD.” She smiled sadly. “It would matter to me, you know.”
“You could save it by deleting everything about your relationship with me. You might keep Rachel happy by highlighting hers – put it in a preface or introduction. She still might not be happy with you, but you have been a colleague.
“Her grandmother’s critique of me was very fair and true,” he confessed. “As I wrote. I wasn’t much then, as person, or as a man, in any way that matters. It’s been a steep learning curve. And I’m sure there are motes in my eye that are gigantic but remain invisible to me. When it’s all said and done, I’m a poor, fallible male.”
“She’ll want to cut me out of the project. What can I do?”
“You’re asking my advice?”
Tears formed in her eyes. “Yes.”
“Are you sure this isn’t a trick? Are you recording?”
“It’s not a trick and I’m not recording.”
“Well, I think you should wait to see how Rachel responds to the truth. Even if she downgrades you a bit she can hardly put the PhD up with content from you, and not include you, somehow. You might be an associate or something, but you’ll get the paper. You’re clever. You’d find other interesting topics to write about for publication, once you’re in the game.”
“It’s not a game to me.”
“Of course not. I’m really very sorry. I was just using an expression.”
“Synonymous with my mother’s profession.”
“Yes of course. I didn’t think. I’m doubly ashamed.”
“You’re being facetious.”
“Sasha, no, I’m not. I’m trying to think out loud. OK? You’re letting me be human for a change. Let’s keep it going.”
“Huh.”
“Yes, huh. You know, I think reality is about to interrupt our attempts to avoid it. Who’s coming? Ah. Hello Rachel.”
“You bitch!”
“Rachel, you’re being unfair to Sasha. You don’t understand.”
“Keep out of this, Simon Quayle. I’ve got your number even if she hasn’t, and I’m going to ring it and ring it and ring it until you’re dead.”
“Well, I have another number and it reaches the police. I’m going to ring it if you don’t calm down, sit down, and talk this over like an adult. Sasha doesn’t need this and nor do I.”
“You know all about it, it seems.”
“I know something about it and I understand why Sasha has been as she has.”
“Which is.”
“She knew about me. Her mother had talked about me, and not unkindly – as I talked about her when she first came into our conversation. You had shall we say another perspective. Your project was an exciting one and she wanted to be part of it. I’ve acknowledged the truths in your account. They should be enough for you but they aren’t.”
“Huh.”
“Yes, huh. You want me to be somebody I’m not and have elevated my transgressions from simple human failings into the failings of the male of the species. There’s some truth in it, but not enough and you know? I think you know that. You’ve deliberately suppressed the positive accounts of my relationships and of my actions in relation to people in general and women in particular.
“In a way, Rachel, Sasha has saved you. If you go ahead and publish as you have written it out now and it becomes the sensation you think it ought to be, the truth will come out and your reputation will be seriously damaged. I’m not sure you can recover from it.”
“You shit.”
“Yes maybe. Well I do! We all do. You know, I think we could produce a much better account of your subject if we worked on it together. I haven’t suggested this to Sasha but it’s not a bad idea. I’ve learned a lot from the interactions we’ve had, and I could rewrite it myself to make it something much better than it is. I am after all a writer, if a male writer.”
“You fucking shit.”
“It’s not repetitive, Rachel, but your language is tiresome. Maybe you should go away, wait until you’re calmer, and then come back and we can talk through this turn of the screw like adults as I’ve already tried to persuade you to do.”
“Sasha, you come with me. We’ll talk this through and come back here and show this creature what he’s really like.”
“Rachel, I’m not coming right now. I’m talking with Simon. When we’re finished I’ll come. You go.”
“Will you come later?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe I’ll go to another place. It’s pretty hard with you being as you are right now.”
“You’re going to stay with this animal. Aren’t you? Honestly Sasha I never believed.”
“I don’t think so. Simon wouldn’t want me here, and in the way you mean it, I don’t want it either.”
“Sure.”
“Rachel. This is my home. You arrived here unannounced. You can leave now and I won’t be sorry. But you can stay if you calm yourself and open your mind a bit.”
“To you, and your beguiling ways.”
“Well, you can put it that way. But I think I’ve been much more decent about this entire affair than you will allow.”
“You just want to sell books and make a lot of money.”
“It would be nice to do that, but the really important thing to me is to be read. I’ve put most of my books online for free. Only the publish on demand titles cost, and they don’t cost much.”
“Huh.”
“Oh yes, huh. Rachel you take the biscuit. You really do.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Like in your country, take the cake.”
“Oh.”
“Well, you seem a bit calmer. Let me say a few things. Just listen.”
“All right.”
“First, it is true I knew that Sasha was not my daughter from the first time she identified her mother. I knew what happened between us, after all. The DNA test had to be bogus. We didn’t have sex. But I didn’t know what her mother had said to her, and I didn’t know why Sasha was behaving the way she was.
“It turns out she was acting out because she was afraid of being caught out. It was embarrassing to her. She’d played along with your ideas and lied to you to stay part of the project. I understand that. Sasha comes from the bottom. Practically anything goes to get off it.
“She expected me to challenge her on the DNA test, and it confused her when I didn’t. And even when I wrote my riposte to your thesis and didn’t mention it, it finally overwhelmed her. She came to see me. She was honest, or so far as I can tell, honest about everything. I admire her for that. You shouldn’t criticise.”
“Huh.”
“Now there’s a problem, a big one, with your thesis. I mean that in terms of the document and what you’re trying to show with it. The way I see it, you’ve tried too hard – tried to achieve too much. There’s a lot there that’s worthwhile, especially the material about the writers who are so much a part of me. They stand out for their own achievements, and there is a focus there, through my work, poor as it is, that shines a light on them that’s not often lit.
“But it’s also true that a lot of the misandric material is both relevant and real. I don’t disagree with the thrust, and some of what is thrust onto me is all too painfully true. Men are a big problem for the planet, not just for society, and I’m a man.
“But there’s no charity in it, and I think that’s a fatal weakness. You would be attacked for that, and deserve it. You think my track record is so poor I should take my life. If I were to do that, your triumphalism would turn to ashes very, very quickly. I feel sure of it.
“There is a way you can turn this around, if you want to do it. Pull your heads in a little bit, allow me and all the other wannabes some space in your hearts, show how it is difficult and even impossible for almost every wannabe to escape the torments that drive them – you can do that. That’s enough. You’ll have done a service to humanity, exposing the reality of our desperation – a powerful and profound critique that will resonate right off the pages of Walden into the hearts of millions. How’s that?”
“You want to be let off, that’s all.”
“Rachel – you’re not listening!”
“Sasha, you’ve ruined everything.”
“I have not! Simon is talking sense, and he’s not absolving himself. Can’t you see?”
“No.”
“Well, you stay here if you want, Rachel. I’m going.”
Chapter Thirteen – The screw keeps turning
“Rachel.”
“You must be Dick Tracey.”
“OK, sorry. What do you want?”
“To come in and talk.”
“That’s not really acceptable to me. You might have something in mind I’m not going to like. I don’t want to be alone with you in private.”
“All right. We’ll go somewhere else.”
“Out the back is fine, like with Sasha. It’s public.”
“Yes, OK.”
“So. What do you want? How is Sasha?”
“I don’t know. She’s vanished.”
“Uh-oh. Have you told the police?”
“Not yet. I’ll wait a little – until tomorrow. To be honest, I thought she might be with you.”
“That would be a very dangerous thing for her to do.”
“What – you might try her on?”
“No – you might draw the wrong conclusions, as your questions suggest.”
“Yes, I might. Maybe I already have. She’s in there maybe.”
“Rachel, you just go in and have a look, and I’ll wait here.”
“Yes, I will.”
“That didn’t take long. Well?”
“She’s not there, but you are.”
“What do you mean? It’s my home.”
“You said it yourself, once. Snag – sensitive new age guy. That’s you. You may as well have had wallpaper made to match.”
“Fair enough. What happened with Sasha?”
“She admitted everything to me, said she was sorry, that I should let you help and she wouldn’t interfere. Then she left.”
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
“Text?”
“She’s not answering.”
“Rachel, I really think you need to call the police.”
“I want to wait.”
“What if I text? Sasha and I were getting on, at last. Rachel, I don’t want to interfere in your relationship, but it is important she’s OK.”
“Here’s the number.”
“Phone’s not in service.”
“What does that mean?”
“She’s turned it off. It means call the police.”
“No. I’ll wait until tomorrow. She said she wouldn’t interfere. I think that means she’s just gone somewhere, to stay out of the way, so we can negotiate, not that I want to very much.”
“You don’t have to do anything so far as I’m concerned. All that’s really happened is a leg of your tripod has been cut away. You’ve still got two more.”
“Which are.”
“You heard the last time you were here. You could delete the sections about Sasha’s mum and our relationship without too much bother, bring your kinship with me to the front, and do some rewriting to show how your appreciate the desperation of at least one wannabe. You can easily cull that out from the personal stuff that has driven you. There’s also some gold to be gleaned from the dross of my influences, how a wannabe is likely to find inspiration – much of it from minor figures, though some of the majors, like Austen, Christie and Shakespeare among mine. I think you were on to something about Traven, and Celine, if in different ways.”
“Huh.”
“Yep. Huh. That’s what you should call your thesis.”
“Wannabe’s a great title.”
“Agreed, but huh is popular with you too.”
“I want to go look for her.”
“Do you want company?”
“No, but I probably need it.”
“She liked it in that old gold mining town when we were there. Maybe. . .”
Chapter Fourteen – Washed up
The rental, a red Toyota two door, was in the carpark by the bay. Rachel hardly waited for Simon to pull in next to it before jumping out and heading up the track that led to the head of the bay. Simon trailed behind, keeping a rueful eye on the water lapping the edge of the bush. He didn’t want to say why.
When he reached the top, the waves were crashing onto the rocks in front of the bench put there to admire the view. Rachel was standing on the bench, shielding her eyes as she scanned the water.
“We should call the police.”
“She might be further along the track,” Rachel objected. “First let’s be sure. . .”
When they had walked the loop track both ways and no sign, Rachel said, “I want to be alone now.”
“Don’t you think we should call the police?”
“You deaf? I want to be alone. Go back to the car. I’ll come soon.”
After half an hour, he rang the police. It took another half an hour for them to arrive. When they searched the track, there was no sign of Rachel.
Sasha came walking down the access track from the main road. She’d been at a tourist venture gliding down a river in a rubber tube.
“I told her I would be in touch,” she said. “I don’t know. . .I don’t like having the police around.”
“The police in this country aren’t like the ones you’re more familiar with,” he said. “Rachel’s missing now.”
“Oh God.”
Two days later her sodden body washed ashore near the beach of the bay battered and loose, her clothes ripped and her face mauled by the rocks along the bay. Simon had to identify her – Sasha was in the local hospital, sedated.
The end
Appendices
Chapter Fifteen – The influences
Simon Quayle’s blog, Quayle’s Mayles, is largely a compendium of essays on his favourite authors. Many of these are for most readers obscure. Here are sketches of the most significant.
Celine (1894-1961; real name Destouches) was lionised when his first novel Voyage a bout de la nuit (1932) appeared in his native France. His second, Mort a credit, cemented his reputation as a master stylist. That reputation sank almost without trace after he revealed a deep-seated and vitriolic anti-semitism in three book length pamphlets. In the closing days of WWII he and his wife left the country, winding up in Denmark before an amnesty allowed them to return to France in 1951. Celine never stopped writing and an end of civilisation trilogy restored his reputation a little though his anti-semitism never failed to evoke hostility.
Celine’s “black humour” and unique style set him apart and for Quayle, added to a penetrating depiction of life as it really is. Quayle was all but obsessed with the writer and visited his youthful home and final resting place in Paris, the site of the first of his final trilogy in Germany, and the apartment block in Copenhagen where he hid with his wife after fleeing France. He appears in several of Quayle’s novels, once as a central character. Quayle explained his fascination by the contrast between his insights and his crazed anti-semitism.
(Samuel) Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) was unique among detective story writers in having been a detective. His later partner, Lillian Hellman (1905-1984), said many of his characters were based on real criminals he had known in his detecting days. Poor health sent him writing, and he was successful as a short story writer and novelist, with five published in not many more years (1929-1935) – Red Harvest, The Dain Curse The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key and The Thin Man. The Maltese Falcon was a successful film in the 1940s starring Humphrey Bogart. Hammett’s cynical approach to law enforcement was a sort of cover for his political views, which became Soviet-aligned Marxist. He was later heavily criticised for failing to denounce Stalin and the Soviet Union during the purges of the 1930s, as many disillusioned American intellectuals had done. Quayle was less inclined to criticise from a fear of judging on the basis of anachronism. He admired Hammett’s keeping to his beliefs as he also admired his sparse and laconic writing style.
Agatha Christie (1890-1976) was the acknowledged master of the “puzzle” detective story whose most famous creation, the Belgian Hercule Poirot, has been made into a long running television series and films. Christie claimed to have been the first woman to surf, learning the sport in South Africa, and was also the subject of an extensive search in the 1920s when she went missing not long after her husband left her for another woman. She was discovered living under another name in a resort, apparently affecting amnesia as a character had done in one of her early novels. The scandal was never explained and when she wrote her autobiography it wasn’t mentioned.
Christie’s skill at plot structure impressed Quayle, and he also followed other puzzle story writers of the 1920s and 1930s as a teenager and young adult – Margery Allingham (1904-1966), Josphine Tey (1896-1952), Ngaio Marsh (1895-1982), and others. Quayle felt Christie’s Crooked house was her masterpiece.
Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) became the best-known detective story writer of the “hardboiled” school associated with Hammett. Chandler was a more “elegant” writer whose character Philip Marlowe’s bleak humour became the model for both detective writers and spy novelists, in particular Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar, 1915-1983) and Len Deighton (1929-) respectively. Chandler’s essay “The simple at of murder” wrote off the puzzle writers for lack of realisim and credited Hammett with giving “murder back to people who commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse”. Chandler initially impressed critics more than Hammett but the years have been less kind to him.
Mark Twain (1835-1910) was known for his humour and Quayle enjoyed him that way in his younger days but later came to appreciate him as a cynic, a political progressive and an anti-racist. He thought along with others that Huckleberry Finn was his best book but also liked his journalism (Life on the Mississippi, Roughing It, Innocents Abroad) and his late, bitter long story Mysterious Stranger.
Philip Roth (1933-2018) was a late discovery of Quayle’s. He liked the honesty of the American, and his critical take on the struggle of Jews in America to be accepted by a society that despite the freedom Jews found there, implicitly anti-semitic. He found American Pastoral and The Plot Against America very well written and provocative, and his openness about sexuality refreshing.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), the American essayist more well-known than well-read, author of a celebrated tract on civil disobedience, and the philosophical essay Walden. Quayle liked Thoreau’s ironic sense of humour, and his surprisingly realistic political philosophy wedged in among outlandish yet sly digs at convention.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) also a celebrity whose writing is less well-known than his name by a great margin. Quayle spent years studying his work and claimed to have added a sordid footnote to Romeo and Juliet while advocating for Pico della Mirandola as the model of Prospero in The Tempest.
Quayle argued that Shakespeare was very sympathetic towards women and that his almost unknown Troilus and Cressida was an attack on the evils of masculinity, hundreds of years ahead of its time.
Euripides (ca 480-ca 406 BC) was Quayle’s favourite classical dramatist for his breadth of humanity. He especially admired Iphigenia inTaurus, the Medea, The Bacchae and The Trojan Women. Quayle immersed himself in the classics beginning in his 40s and never stopped. He was also interested in classical philosophy and followed the Stoics and Epictetus (ca 50-ca 135 CE), Plato (ca 425 – ca 348 BC), and Plotinus (ca 204-ca 270 CE), among, he said, a multitude.
Jane Austen (1775-1817) was the first “modern” writer to Quayle. He admired her light prose style and her wit, and her ability to touch on “taboo” subjects without attracting odium.
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) was one of Quayle’s favourite authors for his psychological insight and his willingness to treat difficult subjects.
Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) was as eccentric as Celine or Dostoevsky – both were seen as influences on he Austrian writer. While Celine was identified with the ellipse, Bernhard never saw the need to have a second paragraph, and used emphases like italics all but randomly. Quayle admired his progressive politics as well as his empathy for those in despair.
B Traven (1882?-1969) concealed his true identity well past his death and the name of the “real” writer remains controversial though It seems he was born a certain Otto Feige in a town now in Poland, becoming an actor and anarchist agitator before landing up in Mexico in the 1920s. His revolutonary “Jungle” novels and other stories brought him fame and notoriety for his determined anonymity.
Vaclav Havel (1936-2011) was a playwright and essayist whose manifesto Power of the Powerless inspired dissidents throughout the European Soviet empire before it fell. Havel went on to become the president of the new Czechoslovakia and presided sorrowfully over its separation into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Chapter Sixteen – Reactions
Extract from a letter from Alexandra F, Professor of Literary Psychology, United States
It is true that decades ago a colleague and I took a summer holiday in New Zealand. Rachel Smiley, my colleague and friend, was tragically drowned on the South Island’s West Coast. I returned home immediately.
I have never heard of Simon Quayle, and did not know or meet him while in New Zealand, or at any other time. The details allegedly identifying me, and my background, are complete fiction. My mother was a middle class housewife in Illinois, not Washington State, and my father sold insurance. They lived peaceful lives, and died accordingly.
How the author of this novel acquired my name and my profession is unknown to me. I am mortified and expect its withdrawal from circulation immediately.
Extract from a letter from John Quayle, Edinburgh, Scotland
My father did not write Wannabe. He never told me who did. How he came to have the manuscript is unknown to me, but he wrote a few years before his death that it had come into his possession and he meant to keep it secret. Unfortunately, my profession has kept me away from New Zealand and I was unable to deal with his effects at the time.
My father wrote me thus; “A novel about me has been written and the manuscript and supporting material given to me. I’m reluctant to judge but don’t think it would be a good idea if it was published, at least while I’m alive so I’m keeping it in the shed behind my house. After I go, you may do as you wish but I would prefer that you destroy it.”
Extract from a letter from XY, Seattle, WA
Whatever Sasha is playing at, is up to her. But I’ve known that girl since she was a small child in Seattle. The details in the “novel” Wannabe are true and correct, and Sasha comes off well enough in it so I don’t see what she is complaining about. Housewife. . .insurance. Huh.
Extract from a letter from the Smiley family.
Rachel was a good person. She had very fixed ideas about the roles of men and women in society, but would never have persecuted someone as she is depicted doing in Wannabe. Whoever wrote it should be ashamed.
Extract from a letter from YZ, Wellington, New Zealand
Simon had a problem with women. He idolised them but was obsessed with them. They felt uncomfortable around him and didn’t last long in relationships. He helped me but I had to keep him at arm’s length. The picture of him in Wannabe as an abuser is wrong and his own is closer to the truth. But Simon wasn’t a well man. His books hid him.
From AB, Palmerston North, New Zealand
He had a reputation of being interested in younger women. That much is true. As to the rest, it’s hard to say. I didn’t like him, but he was generous to me.
From CD, Christchurch New Zealand
He wasn’t like the book, but he was an asshole. He didn’t die soon enough by at least fifty years.
From EF, Westport/Kawatiri New Zealand
He wasn’t a bad chap. Kept to himself, and offended no one. I don’t know what the fuss is about.
From GH, English Department, Victoria University, Wellington NZ
It’s hard to know who should be most embarrassed by Wannabe – Simon Quayle, Alexandra F, Rachel S if she was alive, men, or women. The book appears to be an attack on men, but is more an attack on an attitude of some women, of misandrists. It’s a scurrilous document, as noteworthy for its bad style as for its content. It is surprising it has survived into print. The author appears to be anonymous – wisely.
From IJ, English Department, Victoria University Wellington NZ
My colleague GH misses the truth in Wannabe. It is a cunning book, a literary hoax, while a searing indictment of humanity itself. It is sadly all too apt for our time, and is not at all badly written.
An anonymous letter from the United States
Huh.
The Written World 