My Father writes novels.
He is such an exceptionally able man that he doesn’t need to sit at a desk to write them, or use a typewriter. Instead, he does it on the train, on the way to work. (On the way home, he is usually drunk, and sleeps.) Surrounded by harrumphing commuters engrossed in the Telegraph crossword, My Father balances a yellow lined pad on his knee, and hammers out fictional goings-on in a spidery scrawl that only one person on earth can decipher; his PA Linda, for whom the description indispensable and long-suffering could have been newly minted.
He writes fast. Today, in fact – a typical Tuesday morning, in the early 1960s – he starts a new novel as his train leaves Worplesdon, and completes it shortly after passing through Clapham Junction.
My Father’s new novel is called A Man Who Closely Resembles the Author Gets Ahead in his Career by Behaving Unscrupulously, While Also Deceiving Several Women, but Ultimately Learns Some Painful Lessons.
This is only a working-title. My Father will come up with something snappier while Linda is typing the manuscript.
*
But why does My Father write?
It could, of course, be for the only valid reason that Dr Johnson allowed for any man but a blockhead to put pen to paper: to make money. It’s true that in the early years of their marriage, enduring the unimaginable squalor and austerity of post-war London, my parents are properly poor, at least by our standards. They are living – subsisting – through a time when a can of pears or a chocolate biscuit is a longed-for luxury; owning a car, or even a fridge, the stuff of madcap, glassy-eyed fantasy.
So perhaps we shouldn’t discount the possibility that, when My Father’s career as a novelist begins, he is looking to literature to provide a secondary income – or, at least, to pay for the occasional can of pears, perhaps with evaporated milk.
But what of the true creative impulse? Does My Father burn with a sense of himself as an Artist, with something precious and distinctive to add to the sum of human enlightenment? Does he long to delight the discerning and console the comfortless through the gorgeousness of his cadences, the justness and compassion of his reflections? Is he hoping – like another Joyce or Woolf or Lawrence – to extend the possibilities of prose fiction; to play a part, however small, in revitalising – or re-inventing – the form?
In his middle and later years, he is never seen reading a novel, or heard expressing any view on the redemptive power of literature. At this stage of his life, he reads only political biographies and memoirs, trawling them eagerly for discreditable stories about people he regards as being unjustifiably richer and more powerful than him. We have no way of knowing what he reads when he is younger, though we must assume it includes some fiction, since not even a man as intensely able as my father would be able to write novels of publishable standard without some working knowledge of the form. But there seems to be no evidence in his life or in his books that he is ever driven by a love of language or a desire to fashion from it something beautiful and true.
Perhaps he merely wants to entertain? His novels – particularly the early ones – are well reviewed, by critics who, mystifyingly to modern sensibilities, seem to regard them as coruscating black comedy and social satire. One of them – A Man Almost Indistinguishable from the Author Has a Terrible Time Doing National Service and Gets Into Various Amusing Scrapes Including an Ill Fated Romance with his Commanding Officer’s Daughter – even gets made into a movie. (The film bears virtually no resemblance to the book, not least because the central character – an academically brilliant but bashful young man, ill-suited to Army life – has to be re-imagined as an up-and-coming pop star, rudely forced by conscription to interrupt his musical career, in order to accommodate the talents of the actor cast in the leading role, the up-and-coming pop star Vince Ponsford.)
Or does he write his novels for the satisfaction of practising a craft, the pleasure there is in putting words together well? Towards the end of his life, when the little time he has left is dragging heavily on him, the suggestion is put to him that he might write as a means of occupying himself; something in the memoirs line, perhaps, for the interest of his family. His response is uncomprehending. Write? Without any prospect of publication, admiring reviews, royalty cheques? Why would he want to do that? What conceivable purpose would it serve?
All of which may lead us to conclude that My Father writes because he wants to be a well known writer. Yes, he could certainly do with the money, but what really drives him is a desire for acclaim. For the world to recognise and admire him as a man so extraordinarily able that he can turn out accomplished fictions almost effortlessly, in his very limited spare time. And, in particular, it seems clear, My Father wants to be admired by women. His books are full of ostentatious attempts to demonstrate his perceptiveness about female psychology, and what he obviously thinks is empathy for the ghastly lives led by the kind of women he writes about. My Father writes, we can be pretty sure, to get laid. (“God,” husked Julia, conscious that her skirt was at least three inches shorter than it should be, “how wonderful to meet a man who really understands what life is like for us women these days.”)
*
A contemporary review of my father’s 1963 novel, A Brilliant But Unhappily Married Man with Marked Similarities to the Author Commits Adultery, Thinks He Has At Last Found True Love, but is Consumed by Self-Loathing and Ends Up Killing Himself.
Let us hope that My Father is a nom de plume! For otherwise this exciting young author’s extremely racy third novel – clearly based upon first-hand experience – seems certain to make his journey to work on the 7.46 from Worplesdon to Waterloo very uncomfortable indeed. Which of his fellow-commuters will be first to recognise themselves, and, more scandalously, their sex-mad, gin-sozzled wives, in this coruscating depiction of suburban adultery and spiritual ennui?
Beautiful highly sexed Sarah is married to unscrupulous but successful Gordon, a man so materialistic that he regards his wife as a possession (perhaps, if the expression does not seem too outlandish, we might almost say a “trophy”) of rather less value to him to than his shiny new Rover. Unappreciated, and understandably frustrated, the lovely Sarah allows her roving eye to fall upon Gordon’s oldest friend Stephen, brilliant, but mired in a dead-end job and a loveless marriage, with frumpy Claire, who neglects her husband in favour of her three brattish children.
Can the love, or lust, of a good woman redeem Stephen? Not in My Father’s merciless opinion. His affair with the immensely seductive Sarah quickly spirals out of control, affording him tantalising glimpses of a connubial contentment that always remains detumescently out of reach. Ultimately, when a happy ending rather surprisingly begins to seem a real probability, Stephen’s fondness for the bottle, and perhaps a certain nobility of soul that forces him to relinquish the easy masculine option of making a woman his safe haven, conspire to snatch defeat – and a devastatingly tragic dénouement – from the wide open jaws of sexual bliss.
A Brilliant But Unhappily Married Man (as I will abbreviate the title) is a remarkable achievement; a novel of savage wit and startling acuity that lays bare the state of the relationship between the sexes in 1963. The bleak conclusion drawn from this withering appraisal, from which My Father admirably refuses to flinch, is that a lasting and satisfying love between a man and a woman is impossible, for the simple and, to his mind, irrefutable reason that the sexes hate each other. Men and women, My Father shows us, want different, irreconcilable things; and it is hugely to his credit as a male writer that he is equally perceptive about the female side of this doomed negotiation. He is particularly penetrating (I use the verb advisedly) on the unconscious masochism that makes women want the men they love to hurt them, and unwittingly invite them to do so.
Dissecting the battle of the sexes, though, is only part of My Father’s grand purpose here. His broader intent, triumphantly realised, is to offer us a social – and perhaps also a Socialist – critique of the empty materialism and vacuous hedonism of modern life. The two principal male characters, Stephen and Gordon, now in their mid-30s (coincidentally the same age as the author) first met as rivals for the Chairmanship of the Labour Club at Oxford (coincidentally, again, a position once held by the author). Their youthful idealism, energetically rejected by Gordon, though still a weakly flickering flame within Stephen, is contrasted, to shattering effect, with the “I’m all right, Jack” devil-take-the-hindmost philosophy of today’s hollow men and women.
When, at the novel’s almost unbearably powerful climax, Stephen steps out in front of a speeding bus, in preference to starting a new life with the beautiful woman who has given up everything to be with him, we see him not as a contemptible drunkard and weakling, driven to reject the possibility of love by self-pity and self-loathing, but as an authentic modern-day hero, delivering a clarion-tongued and utterly fearless condemnation of the age we now, despairingly, inhabit.
Bravo, My Father! No need to renew your season ticket; on this showing, you will not be catching the 7.46 for much longer.
*****