Neil Blackmore Objects Desire of
‘A biting, unflinching study of art and deceit’
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‘Razor-sharp and deeply unsettling while being endlessly entertaining. A triumph’
JENNIE GODFREY
Objects of Desire
Also by Neil Blackmore
Radical Love
The Dangerous Kingdom of Love
The Intoxicating Mr Lavelle
Split My Heart
Soho Blues
Objects of Desire
Neil Blackmore
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Jean Rhys, interviewed near the end of her life:
‘If I could choose, I would rather be happy than write . . . If I could live my life all over again, and choose . . .’
Liz Smith on speaking to Lee Radziwill about a legal dispute between Gore Vidal and Lee’s best friend, Truman Capote:
‘But when I called her and said, “Lee, you really must testify for Truman,” she said, “Oh, Liz, what do we care, they’re just a couple of fags! They’re disgusting.’’’
Author’s Note
This is a work of fiction. The representations of real writers and publishing professionals are as characters in a novel and thus fictional, but based on information, including many actual events, quotes and anecdotes, provided by biographies, diaries and letters, historical research and archive media.
The Objects
W. H. Auden (1907–1973) Anglo-American poet
James Baldwin (1924–1987) American novelist, essayist and civil rights activist
Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973) Anglo-Irish novelist and short-story writer
Truman Capote (1924–1984) American writer and TV personality
Joe Fox (1926–1995) American literary editor
Hugo Hunter (1926–?) Welsh faker
Christopher Isherwood (1904–1986) Anglo-American writer
Arthur Koestler (1905–1983) Anglo-Hungarian writer and alleged rapist
Rosamond Lehmann (1901–1990) British novelist and spiritualist
Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American writer and TV personality
Jackie Onassis (1929–1994) American editor and cultural icon
George Orwell (1903–1950) British writer
Sonia Orwell (1918–1980) British editor and literary executor
Anthony Powell (1905–2000) British novelist
Lee Radziwill (1933–2019) American socialite
Philip Roth (1933–2018) American novelist
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American novelist, essayist, politician and TV personality
Lois Wallace (1940–2014) American literary agent
Angus Wilson (1913–1991) British novelist and short-story writer
Objects of Desire
PART ONE Fame
Gore Vidal
New York City, 1984
From the Oxford Companion to Twentieth- Century Literature in English (fairly recent edition, I should think, a couple of years ago, ’82 perhaps):
Hugo Hunter (1926–) British- born author of two novels, Ordinary Girls (UK Secker & Warburg 1949/US William Morrow 1950) and Tricks (UK Penguin/US Random House 1968), each widely acclaimed as an influential literary masterpiece. Hunter left his native England as a young man after the sensational publication of his first novel and legal issues at home, and has lived in America ever since. Famous for long periods of inactivity, his groundbreaking novels were controversial, acclaimed and condemned in equal part, for their sexually frank inventiveness and damaged, self- destructive characters. His novels were initially seen as a high watermark of late modernism but have come to be viewed as an enormous influence on postmodernism, specifically the development of writing about women and gay people, and theorists admire their formal and linguistic inventiveness. Despite – or perhaps because of – this, his novels have sold millions of copies. He is widely regarded as the most important gay novelist of the mid-twentieth century.
I do know it’s probably in poor taste to start with a close reading of one’s own biography – infra dig, as the English would
say – but I think it important to reveal there are some errors here, some errors and some . . . confessions. As to the errors, firstly: my name is not actually Hugo Hunter. That is a penname, made up by someone who felt my real name was far too Welsh. Secondly: that impacts the ‘native’-ness of England to me, I suppose. Thirdly: on late modernism and postmodernism, all I can say is, oh good grief, people write the most awful shit. Fourthly – and I am sorry if this is going on – on my influence, that is for others to say, but of Forster, Gide, Genet, Mann, Baldwin, Gore – well, not Gore, I mean, come on – and that terrible old misery Patricia Highsmith, what am I supposed to offer? That I am better than them? Just wait for the reveal. And one more, fifthly: mid- twentieth century? Honestly, what bitches these people are! As to my confessions, there is only one. Be aware, I have a tendency to hyperbole. One confession, and it is this. I did not write either of my novels. I mean, I published them, yes. They made me rich and famous, yes, gave me the reputation which I have described above. But I wrote neither of them. I told you to wait for the reveal.
I know you must be sitting there, shrieking: ‘But I loved those books!’ Or at least: ‘I read them!’ Or at the very least: ‘Well, I let people think I have!’ Well, sorry, there it is. That’s the truth of my life and of my literary fame.
*
On the subject of literary fame, it may seem like I know every famous writer in the world, or at least, if not the world, then London and New York, which . . . sorry, but, you know . . . I have known the greats, the not- so-greats, the geniuses who were monsters, the sweethearts who were hacks. I have been captured in photographs – in black tie at awards ceremonies, or in happy snaps at cocktail parties, or sailing on boats with the great and the good around the waters of Mexico or the
Mediterranean. Friendship among the famous is often a distant, transactional thing, some weird version of an eye for an eye. An invite for an invite, an eye for an eye. I don’t complain, I am happy in the social melee of quick conversations, witty bons mots, too much champagne – it used to be martinis – but I take most pleasure in my oldest friendships.
When I think of writers of whom I am sincerely fond, I think of Gore Vidal. Gore – and a few others – have been true friends in whom I feel I can honestly trust. I know that lots of people cannot abide Gore, but I have always been terribly fond of him. For all his flaws – and gosh, there are so many – if Gore loves you and you never betray him, he is a friend for ever, and that’s not nothing. It certainly has great meaning for me, for I grew up without kindness or friendship.
I met Gore when I first came to New York. For years, he has loved nothing more than for me to dazzle and flatter him with my knowledge of literature, with that breath of the canon that I can make him feel on his neck. He also wants me always to talk with the dusty hush of Piccadilly private libraries, the busy, boozy pubs of Fitzrovia, of literary London in the ’40s, a world to which he had slim links and thinks of now as a literary-fiction Golden Age, a fantasy of British bookishness, when in fact, that may be all it is, a fantasy. He will declaim in that sonorous, patrician voice, deep, knowing and molasses-slow: ‘Oh, my gosh, Hugo, a novelist who knows things about writing. Most of ’em ’ – done for some ironic Fieldingian effect – ‘are dumber than pigs, and not half as good-looking.’
A few weeks before the first night of this story, Gore’s partner of thirty-odd years, darling Howard Austen, called to invite me to a party to celebrate Gore’s newest novel. It was one of his historical tomes, the sort that Americans love and think must be a Meisterwerk, because it is six hundred pages long, so that must mean something. This one was about Lincoln, had already
appeared to admiring reviews, was predicted for enormous sales. Howard explained that this was not the launch but rather a private drinks party to be held in Gore’s own honour, a thing very dear to Gore’s own heart. I must have laughed, said something ribald or scurrilous, and made Howard laugh too, because suddenly Gore came on to the telephone. How grand he is, to make Howard ring round to see who is free, and to stand there the whole time, listening in!
Gore barely even said hello. He started to say that it was very intimate – two hundred and fifty people, tops. I could still hear Howard laughing in the background, down the line, and Gore turn aside to snap at him to stop. Gore asked me to suggest a location for the party. I said that these days, everyone loved Hisae’s fish place on 58th Street between Madison and Park Avenues, and he positively screeched: ‘Oh, good God, no, Hugo! If I have to speak to Keith Haring, I shall shit!’ Finally, he told me he had already decided to do it at Delmonico’s. It is very Gore to get you to go through your suggestions, dismiss them all, then reveal he had known what he was doing all along. A six-thirty start, which knowing Gore meant he would be gone by eight-thirty. He would have somewhere else to go that night, would not limit himself to one party, one dinner, per evening.
The evening of the party was one of those warm May nights in Manhattan. Winter was finally gone in New York. I took a cab down to the corner of William and Beaver Streets, and walked towards Delmonico’s, aglow in all its not-quite-ironic nostalgic glamour – lobster Newburg, baked Alaska, all that garbage. To my relief, we were in a private area, catered, so did not have to eat all those meals from the Nancy Astor cookbook. Krug and vodka cocktails, rather delicious canapés. Just when you think Gore is as vulgar as a golden crow, he does something perfect like this.
Very soon after I arrived, I found Howard, gassing away to some Upper East Side matron, sloshing a gin martini halfway down his arm. The moment he saw me, he abandoned the rather dazed-looking woman, screeching my name: ‘Huuuu-go!’ We had not seen each other for a while, although we had – of course – spoken on the telephone. They had moved to Italy some years before, quitting America ‘for good’. Yet Gore returned alone often – to tour his novels, to show off on television, to find boys to fuck without interruption by Howard.
Howard clamped his arm around my waist and kissed my cheek, we talked and talked and talked, and drank until he was sufficiently blotto that, absolutely apropos of nothing, he began to sing ‘Sophisticated Lady’ at the top of his drunken lungs: Smoking/Drinking/Never thinking/Of tomorrow/Nonchalant. I remember that recording Billie Holiday did of the song not long before she died, her voice shot, but all technique and emotion. Modern novelists could learn a thing or two from that.
To my side, I heard Gore’s deep, drawn-out tones: ‘Hugo, if Howard is making you sob, you must be drunk.’
Howard’s head fell against my shoulder. ‘Gore, you know that Hugo’s always drunk, so you can’t blame me!’
They had this strange but beautiful relationship: bitchy, bickering, a snarlingly brilliant prince (copyright, Gore Vidal) and his everyday-girl keeper, who brushed up his life, kept his house clean, never let him down. I always felt like the observer of love in their presence, but an illiterate, thick-headed one, unable to decipher it.
‘My God, Gore,’ I said as I looked him up and down, ‘you’ve got terribly fat.’
Howard reached over to pat my stomach. ‘While the cocaine keeps you so marvellously thin, Hugo!’
Gore lifted his chins regally, swept a hand over his hair, still thick but greyer now. ‘I’ve been going to the gym, Hugo.’
‘What for? To buy cream cakes in the shop next door?’ Gore did not mind the insult. Me using the noun ‘shop’, there in New York, softened it so.
When I met Gore, just after I moved here, he was possibly the most handsome, most exciting boy in Manhattan. We had sex that first night we met, then never again after, which was Gore’s preference, the first fuck is inevitably the best. In the way of gay men, we had become friends – real, lifelong friends. Unoffended by my teasing, he put his arm around me, so that the three of us stood there, in an interlocking line, a jigsaw of high-society queers.
‘Now, tell me, Hugo,’ he started saying, ‘that you have some beautiful, world- changing, culture- disrupting novel cooking and that you, in your Flaubertian way, have been slowly, painstakingly beavering away for years on it, ready to smash our skulls in as you did before.’
This was a joke, at my expense. I have published two novels in my life, one in ’49, one in ’68, and we are in ’84. The point of the joke was that I was not writing a novel, but neither Gore nor anyone else in the entire world knows the truth that I have never written one. Once or twice, people have come close to guessing, but I do not know what I’d do if someone actually guessed. I suppose I’d have to do something!
‘Don’t talk to me about Flaubert and think you can intimidate me, Gore,’ I said, waving a hand in the air, so soigné. ‘I am not one of those dumb bitches who read English at Cambridge or Princeton. I’ve read Salammbô and it’s bloody awful. It took years to write and I would rather read one of Howard’s crumpled copies of Manhole magazine.’
‘Hugo!’ Howard shrieked in protest. ‘They are not crumpled.’ He took a sip of his martini. ‘I iron them flat every time!’
I gave him the side-eye. ‘If Gore still fucked you, Howard, you wouldn’t need such diversion.’
It was well known that they had only had sex for their first couple of years together. After that, like any sensible people, they looked for sex elsewhere. Howard tipped his face close to mine.
‘Darling, if Gore still fucked me, I’d need plenty of diversion.’ He was giggling beautifully, so, so drunk well before seven o’clock. ‘You should find yourself a nice man, Hugo,’ he added. Gore snorted derisively. ‘Hugo doesn’t believe in nice men. He likes mysterious bad boys who fuck him when he’s so high he’s almost passing out, then steal his money and run before he wakes up.’
‘Not true!’ I protested camply. ‘The coke keeps me wide awake, I will have you know.’
Gore cast his eyes around the room in a desultory way, then looked back at me, an interrogative stare: ‘Have you heard from Truman lately?’
And so it begins: Truman Capote. People are always talking to me about Truman Capote. I think I must have hardly seen him in twenty years, spoken to him on the telephone half a dozen times, and usually that ended with one or other of us becoming offensive or offended. Still, people act like he and I are connected at the hip. People always see some kind of connection between us, and in truth, there is, but they could never imagine what it is. Truman, I shall tell you now, is one of the people who almost saw the truth of my life: that I did not write my novels.
Gore hates many people, many him, but Gore hates nobody more than Truman. I will tell you the why of it another time, the legendarily ridiculous dispute between Gore and Truman – one of the stupidest, funniest, faggiest things that ever happened in American literature. But for this moment, all you need to know is that Gore was not asking after Truman out of the goodness of his foie-clogged heart.
‘Why are you asking me?’
Gore sniffed a little, acting all innocent, but fake-innocent, of course. ‘Well, you’re still friends with him, aren’t you?’ The ‘still’ was quite masterful, I will admit.
‘Everyone is still friends with Hugo,’ Howard chirruped. ‘All of New York!’
‘And Truman lives in LA,’ Gore observed sourly.
‘I haven’t spoken to him in years.’
Gore coughed lightly, as if what he was about to say truly did not matter at all. ‘I have heard he is sick.’ I knew old Gore was up to something; I said nothing. His marvellous, mercurial blue eyes fixed on me, laser-like. ‘I have heard he is dying of Aids.’
He said it so matter-of-factly that, for a moment, I was not sure if he had said it at all. It was a whispered sentence one had heard more and more in New York the past year or so, about this guy or that you used to know: I have heard he is dying of Aids . . . It was whispered because it was tittle-tattle, but also a shuddering, shivering confession of fear, an anticipation of our own self-annihilation.
It was hard to say how far into it we were, by now, because it had been a very slow thing. What Aids is more than anything else is some kind of horrible, cruel trick. The moment gay men were freed, it came to destroy us and to prove good people right, to show that we did deserve to die, after all. And so we stood frozen, rooted to our spots, terrified civilians caught before the raised machine guns of an invading army, blinking down the barrels. The disease had come from nowhere, it seemed. We, the gay men of New York, had watched as the torrent churned darkly and gathered out at sea, not quite understanding it was readying itself to smash into our bodies.
I confess I lost my temper rather. ‘Stop it, Gore! I do not find it funny. Not remotely funny.’ I did not care about Truman, I
was talking about Aids. And of course, in such a moment, I was talking about my own fears, whether I might be dying too. Every gay man in New York was wondering at that precise moment: Am I dying too?
‘Oh, Hugo,’ Howard said airily. ‘Ignore Gore, he’s being a bitch.’
‘I am not!’ Gore protested, still staring at me.
‘Gore, stop it!’ Howard snapped, the only person who knows how to handle him. So Gore relented a little, knowing he had gone too far. Of course, apology is anathema to him. Instead, he changed tack.
‘So, who are you going to fuck tonight?’ he said, half coughing on the question. Looking around the room, there were more white peaks on view than in the Alps. I let my ill humour go.
‘I think I’m good as I am. Anyhow, I can stand here and live vicariously through your love.’
The word made Gore prickle. He finds it vulgar. But for the cause of their love, Gore had for years occupied one of the most perilous homosexual public lives in America, in that straight journalists, both sympathetic and antipathetic, casually questioned him about Howard on television, as if it were nothing at all, harmed no one, to out a homosexual on American television in the ’60s and ’70s. How casually liberals kill.
Howard sighed like Marilyn Monroe. ‘Oh, wouldn’t you love to be in love, Hugo?’
At this, Gore smelled blood in the water again. ‘Hugo doesn’t love,’ he announced sharply. Howard told him to stop it. ‘It’s the truth! Every fag in New York knows it. Because every fag in New York has had it. Hugo chose fame. Hugo chooses sex. But he never chooses love. Hugo is incapable of love.’ He loomed closer to me. ‘Incapable!’
Howard slapped Gore’s arm and told him to shut up, apologised to me. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I faltered, convincing no one,
least of all myself. His words had hit me like a brick, right in the centre of my head. To him, it was just a joke, and he moved on, began talking about something, someone, else, some other bit of literary gossip. But I just stood there in a daze.
At eight-thirty, as expected, Gore and Howard tore away, like two honeymooners leaving their wedding reception. I was glad the whole thing was over. I thought of going home but had an invite to a party at Area on Hudson Street. I am often invited to things, with the vague sense that I will likely turn up, and if so, bring a certain dead-eyed glamour to any photograph – or at least some kind of intellectual distinction. There would be dancing, maybe I would be dancing. I could only shudder at the thought of my skinny old body caught in some paparazzo photograph – just in the background, I am only book famous after all, just enough for some spiteful editor who never got round to publishing a novel to include an awful picture of me under the caption ‘HAS-BEEN BECOMES MORON’, my arms high in the air, my shirt tucked into my underpants, while Bianca Jagger stares moodily into the lens.
I felt in a sour mood, after what Gore had said, and of course, when so reminded about one’s own abilities to feel anything, what else can you do but go and get trashed? In the short cab ride across town, I started to feel quite drunk, so inside the club, I drank a lot more, the only sensible thing to do. I could not even remember why I had come, who had invited me. I was just ‘on the list’. Everyone loves Area, just like everyone loves Hisae’s. It is very New York for everyone to love something. In London, of course, you mention such a place and people turn, smirk, say, ‘Oh, dear, no, I don’t think so.’
Once I was there, someone whose boyfriend I knew a little offered me a couple of pills – Lord knows what – and like a fool, the sort of fool who has nothing to do in the morning, I downed
them with yet another glass of champagne. Already the room had started not quite to spin, but to expand and recede, a psychedelic effect, in and out of different corners, like fairground mirrors. I felt my tongue so large in my mouth; the slight sheen of cold sweat across my brow. I became sure I was going to puke: that warm rush, that prickle of perspiration.
I pushed through the churning crowd, stumbling towards the foyer, with its cooler air and staring eyes. Hugo Hunter, look, it’s Hugo Hunter. Rushing into the bathroom, more by luck than judgement the men’s, I stood at the sinks and splashed water on my face. The imminence of my nausea passed. In the cocoon of that space – low-lit, reflective, urinous – the bass of the music on the dancefloor thudded through walls, stealing my own heartbeat, taking over my pulse, invading me, infecting me.
I stared back into the mirror and saw myself, ragged-looking, sweaty, fifty- eight years old. I needed to leave. I needed to escape, from this place, this night, who knows what else. The next thing I remember, I was staggering out on to Hudson Street. Yellow downtown lights enveloped me, as did the sound of traffic, the bright club- people chatter on the sidewalk. I pushed past them to look for a cab travelling north up Hudson, something that would quickly whisk me away uptown. White headlights were flashing past me, narcotically, long blurring colourless lines. I heard a voice behind me: ‘Mr Hunter?’ I did not turn. I was not in the mood to hear how I had changed someone’s life. I just wanted to go home and sink into oblivion. Then again: ‘Mr Hunter?’ Grudgingly I stared into the hurtling, unsettling taxi lights whizzing by, not stopping to pick me up. ‘Mr Hunter?’ Irritably, I turned.
Tall and lean, his body holding itself up in that loose, elastic way young men in perhaps their late twenties have. His skin
had that pale bronze of early summer; his golden hair, more dark blond, fell in loose tresses over his eyes, down past the nape of his neck, out of style now, but with a certain masculine cool. His eyes were dark, a glowing brown. He was handsome, handsome like those boys in school that girls quietly fall in love with, and when they are briefly – momentarily – attentive in return, forever earn a place in the shadows of those girls’ minds.
‘I hope it’s cool for me to talk to you,’ he was saying. ‘I saw you in the club, I wanted to say hello, but . . . but I didn’t want to bother you. So . . . I just wanted to tell you how much I admire your work.’ I felt so high – not in a good way, high like I wanted to puke – that I did not speak for a moment, just stared at him like an idiot.
‘Thank you,’ I finally managed to say. ‘What – what’s your name?’ I asked.
‘Dorff,’ he said.
It was the drugs or the drink, but I found this amusing. ‘What, just Dorff?’
He gave this charming, dopey kind of shrug. ‘Just Dorff!’
‘Well,’ I said, suddenly softly embarrassed, God, I’m so high, ‘it was very nice to meet you, just-Dorff.’
A cab pulled up. Saying nothing, he went and opened the back door. ‘What’s your address?’
I furrowed my brow, felt woozily confused. ‘Pardon?’
‘For the driver.’
‘Oh, I see! I live at 930 Fifth Avenue.’
His eyes widened. ‘Wow, what an incredible building.’
He crumpled his long, lean body to peer into the taxi window, giving my address to the driver. ‘Well, good night,’ I said, opening the back door but with him taking the handle as I collapsed into the back seat – some gentlemanly action that almost never happens to gay men. It was very charming.
As I pulled the door closed, he put his hand against the
window, and there in the early-morning New York neon glow, his fingers danced lightly over the glass. The cab pulled away, I turned to look out the back window, the figure of a man narrowing down to a vanishing speck in the distance.
I did not know then, of course, that in that moment, everything had changed.
Reputation
New
York City, 1984
I do not recall the precise moment I said to myself that I was going to become a famous novelist. Now that I live in a world of such literary prestige and privilege, it amazes me to think that I should ever have imagined it. I was born a nothing, not in Hampstead or on the Upper West Side, but in a place named nowhere, South Wales, the poorest part of Britain, somewhere entirely unaffected by the photograph Hilly Kilmarnock took of her sleeping husband Kingsley Amis’s naked back after she wrote ‘1 FAT ENGLISHMAN/I FUCK ANYTHING ’ on it. (Although frankly, a life without the image of Kingsley Amis fucking anyone is a sweet life, I should think.) My parents would have barely known who he or any other Amis was. (Again: lucky them.)
Despite this, by the time I was sixteen, I was certain that I would be a great novelist. It’s not that I wanted to be famous, not like Gore Vidal or Truman Capote, nor, the Lord save us, Norman Mailer, of whom more anon. I never wanted to be recognised in a supermarket or at the post office. I only ever wanted to write novels, to be acclaimed for so doing. If the novel is the supreme achievement of Western, maybe of world, civilisation, then that was what I wanted: to be part of, to stand among, the great names of literature, to have them look at me, me at them, and wink, and say: We’re it, we’re the ones. But I did not write any great books. I did not write any books
at all, did I? I have wondered from time to time why I cannot write. I mean, very stupid people write books. People who know nothing about literature write books, some of which do very well. Put me in front of a typewriter and a blank sheet of paper – or pad and pen, or blackboard and chalk, or canvas and bloody paintbrush, I’ve tried it all – and nothing comes. In undertaking to learn so much of literature, did I develop some kind of stage fright? Ask me to list one hundred things about Persuasion or The Good Soldier, and watch me go! A blank page, and nothing. And the god of literature turns away from my devotion and mutters to his drinking buddies: ‘I knew it! You can know too much about books!’
The morning after Gore’s party, I woke with a jolt in the living room of my apartment, fully clothed, sprawled out on one of my battered couches. My tongue in my mouth felt like sandpaper on skin, my eyes were dry, my limbs corpse-like. The May sunlight was streaming in through the French windows that face out to a balcony overlooking Central Park. From that angle, I could see that rarest of New York things: clear, unencumbered sky. If I stood up, I would be able to see over the tops of the Park’s trees. My apartment’s corner terrace perches over the end of East 74th Street, gazes on towards the Upper West Side, Central Park West’s taller buildings. The balcony’s edge is only to the level of one’s waist, hardly even that, with iron rails, so that to stand there is almost to hover in mid-air above Fifth Avenue.
I love this apartment. At its heart is the large, long living room which opens to the balcony, with an internal corridor running to the front door, off which other rooms open: the tiny kitchen, three bedrooms, some bathrooms. I bought it thirty years ago, when first I was rich. I bought it to communicate
something about the person I had become since leaving Wales, then London. Even when I lived in California for about a decade, I kept it, against all good sense.
I have always lived here alone, more or less. There have been lovers, many of them, as Gore implied, and most of them I saw once and then never again. Of the others, there were writers who wanted help with their careers: Don and Luis, one called Jack – or maybe Jake. There were boys who wanted to meet writers, like Andy, whose great ambition was to meet William Burroughs (and for all I cannot bear a lot of the Beats, Burroughs is always terribly sweet). When I did introduce Andy to him, Burroughs was off smack, so usually blackout drunk, as junkies often are. He fell asleep during our conversation and only woke up when he fell forward and smacked his face into the table.
None of these boys ever moved in. The strange thing is that I do acknowledge the romance of the idea of love. Not romantic love itself, as charming as that might be, but the idea of intimacy , potential, narcotic. I remember reading the opening pages of A Single Man by my old friend Christopher Isherwood. In the early part of the novel, George, grieving the death of his boyfriend – and concealing it too, from his heterosexual colleagues and students – remembers that static of two bodies in a space, entirely, wholly knowing each other, and then heaves with missing it, realising it is, through bereavement, gone. I do acknowledge what that is, what it might feel like, what I might never have had. I look at Gore and Howard, now after half a lifetime together, and wonder why not me. Perhaps Gore was right: I am incapable of love. That was what worried me, right up until this moment.
Coughing as I finally rallied, I could taste raw alcohol on my tongue. Behind me, from the little kitchen that backs on to the living room, I heard a clatter of cups, the gurgle of the coffee
percolator. I do not have live-in staff, I cannot bear it, but my cleaning lady, Jeanette, comes in six days a week, save Sundays. I have employed her for years and she is consummate with every person she meets at my home: young men whose names I have forgotten, or never knew, scratching their balls in their underpants in the morning, Upper East Side ladies, with white gloves and invites to talk to me about their literary foundations, or dead- eyed debut novelists, who now believed themselves geniuses, who insisted on meeting me, and stared at her brutally, as if she were supposed to be pouring their drinks.
I like Jeanette a lot, and I know that she likes me. We have a lot of fun, and she likes to be scandalised by my escapades, professional or otherwise. She half looks after me and half spends the time telling me about her problems, both real and mundane: getting her sons through college, getting them away from some girl in the Bronx. I had just written one of them a reference for his scholarship application to an English degree at Columbia. The desperate little literature dean must have shit his pants seeing my name among all the cello tutors and volunteer organisers. Or maybe he thought: I haven’t seen that name in years.
‘Good morning, Hugo!’ Jeanette called from the kitchen. ‘You want some coffee, Hugo?’
Ever since I told her that she should not call me ‘sir’, Jeanette has used my name in every single sentence she has ever said to me.
‘Yes, please. Can you just pour it in an IV drip and tap my arms to find a vein?’
‘Hugo! You are too much!’ She trilled with laughter. ‘You had a nice evening, Hugo?’
‘No,’ I said, just being a bitch, which made Jeanette giggle.
‘Did you sleep on the couch again, Hugo?’
‘No,’ I lied.
‘Fibbers go to hell, Hugo,’ she said merrily.
I coughed again. ‘Do you want to split a cab there, then?’
Ha! she cried.
She walked in with a white cup in her hand, no saucer. ‘Was I snoring when you came in?’
‘Yes, Hugo. You drank too much.’
‘Thank you for pointing out the inevitable.’
‘You’re welcome, Hugo.’ She gave me my coffee. ‘Drink that, and I will get you some Alka-Seltzer.’
‘Thank you, you are my guardian angel.’
She laughed to herself. ‘Someone has to be, Hugo.’
The telephone started ringing. Jeanette and I have a longstanding agreement that if I do not answer a call, no one does, unless I am in bed, and even then all calls are negotiable. We let it ring, and my answering machine kicked in, the cassette tape clanking on cogs: ‘Hugo, honey, can you come in today?’ It was my agent, Lois – Lois Wallace, agent to the stars, or at least Don DeLillo and me. She also brought Erich Segal and Love Story to the world, which I suppose made her rich, but let’s not talk about that. A breath – down the telephone wire – a pause for a cigarette to be sucked clean of carcinogens. ‘Like, as soon as humanly possible? I have some news. Some really, really big news.’ Pause. Drag. Faint wheeze of shredded lungs. Then, more ferociously: ‘Hugo, kick whatever boy is lying beside you out, get your ass down here. I love you, honey, but even you need to make some damned money. Get down here in an hour or I will come and burn your building down. OK , bye, I love you, honey.’
Click, my protectress was gone. In the ten years Lois Wallace had represented me up to that point, I had published nothing of note and so not made any big money, not for me, not for her. I suppose Lois must feel like one of those palliative nurses, sitting at the bedside of a dying man, kind, attentive, firm, always
on your side, but truly thinking: Can you either hurry up and die or make your miraculous recovery, please?
I showered and changed my clothes as my hangover chewed at my brain and made my body tremble. Leaving my building, I bought a restorative bottle of Pepsi from a street vendor and hailed a cab. There was no way I was walking thirty blocks. Driving downtown, I almost puked on the soft roller coaster of Midtown’s topography, before we pulled up to my agent’s office, in the thicket of Manhattan skyscraperville. It was about eleventhirty, too early for me to be out in the world.
I elevated up to her office, where her lovely team waved at me from behind their desks and said things like ‘Hi, Hugo!’ and ‘Hey, Hugo!’ as if they were my nieces looking up from their presents Christmas morning. Lois ushered me into her corner office, kiss-kissing both cheeks and telling me there was ‘a lot to go through today’. Oh, God, I thought; there’d never been ‘a lot’ before.
Draining the last of my Pepsi, I sank down into one of those tubular chrome chairs in which no one can reasonably get comfortable. One of Lois’s glorious secretaries brought in coffee, and told me, while Lois was going through her in-tray, about some guy giving her the runaround. ‘Oh, dump, darling,’ I said. ‘Dump. Don’t give him the pleasure.’ The young woman smiled sadly, pushing her loose, curly hair back behind her ears. ‘But I just like him, Hugo,’ she said, before withdrawing.
The glare from the floor- to- ceiling windows scalded my alcoholic eyes. Lois started talking at me. She was telling me about a conversation she’d had: ‘Joe Fox . . . you know him . . . such a great editor . . . he did Truman for a while . . .’ Lois kept relaying her story, and oh, she did not deserve it, but I was not listening. Why should I care about some agreeable lunch she’d had with some agreeable editor – even Joe Fox, legendary
genius-wrangler/fool-fixer at Random House? How could that possibly affect me? The shards of the night before returned to me, what Gore had said, Aids, Truman (fucking Truman, like a homosexual Banquo, always popping up at my own self-inflicted feast!), the drugs, the disco lights, rushing out to the restrooms, sure I was going to puke, and then that handsome young man being kind to me, his vapour trail . . .
‘It’s an amazing deal, Hugo,’ Lois was saying, now at the climax of a revelation to which I was not paying attention. ‘I was blown away by it, to be frank, given – and I mean this, honey, in the nicest way, you know I do – none of us could have expected two million dollars.’
Two million dollars? Why was she saying two million dollars ? A neural wave passed across my eyes and forehead, just hearing those three words. The New York traffic far below wasn’t in on the secret yet; horns kept honking in the distance. The secretaries in the office outside were not in on it; they kept typing.
I looked up at her, focused my desiccated eyes. ‘I’m sorry, Lois, what did you say?’
Her eyes lifted around the room, a consummate actor. ‘Two million dollars.’
She turned slightly in her chair, as if it were all so . . . nothing. But she must’ve been clutching her chest and calling for a doctor when Joe Fox had said it.
‘But what for?’ I asked.
She turned to look at me.
‘For a novel and a memoir.’
There was such a splendour in her eyes. First, she had the pleasure of catching me out for not listening, but then, much more importantly, after ten years of being my agent, finally she might be within a whiff of a payday. ‘But why, Lois?’ I cried. I had not so much as typed a letter to my bank manager in those ten years, let alone written a book.
She shrugged in that way that agents do when novelists ask stupid questions. ‘They feel the time is right.’
And there it was: the perfect publishing answer, with me, the poor stupid writer, none the wiser. ‘Right for what?’
‘For you, honey. It’s been what, sixteen years since Tricks came out?’
‘But I haven’t written a novel. How can you sell an unwritten novel?’
She gave a great whoop of laughter. ‘Honey, that doesn’t matter any more. These days, it’s all about the . . .’ She waved her hand in the air; cigarette smoke circled blue vapour trails. ‘. . . the concept. You sell the concept.’
‘But I don’t have a concept.’
‘Honey, you are the concept. Your whole life and reputation is the concept.’
‘Oh, good grief,’ I mugged, but Lois was not having any of it. She gave me the first of a series of very firm looks, the kind that suggested she was only so far from smacking me in the face. ‘I had lunch with Joe. He was asking me how you were, then started to talk about what happened when Tricks was published, how “it changed the literary landscape”.’ She intoned the words only half-ironically. ‘You know, they really love you down there, Hugo.’ Which was nice to hear, and it’s bad form to admit, but you can get very used to hearing it.
I shook my head. ‘But two million dollars?’ I emphasised the ‘two’ when the ‘million’ was probably the pertinent part. Lois retrieved another goodie from her cigarette pack.
‘It’s as much PR as anything else, honey. Imagine the books pages reporting that !’ Ha, she went, I felt only marginally the wiser. Coffee arrived, she paused to light her cigarette.
‘But, Lois,’ I said again, and I could hear my own turgidity, ‘really, I haven’t written anything. Not a word. I have no ideas.’
Firm look number two. ‘If you want, I can just say no,’ she
said, as if a couple of million dollars were nothing at all and she did not care either way. Oh, agents are geniuses; honestly, they are psychologists!
It was such a lot of money, and I needed a lot of money. ‘A memoir, though,’ I said anxiously. Her eyes returned to mine. ‘What kind of self-absorbed moron writes a memoir?’
She smiled. ‘The sort of moron who’d like two million dollars in US rights, before I even start to sell the British rights, the French rights, the German rights, the Togolese fucking rights. Hugo, honey. It’s going to be a lot of money, and you need a lot of money to keep you in champagne on Tuesday nights, and friends with people who do the same.’ I thanked her for her support. ‘Look, honey, just write the memoir. Anyone can write a memoir. Fucking pop stars write memoirs. Fucking actors. You have written two of the most important novels of the twentieth century.’ Do not smirk, do not roll your eyes! ‘A memoir is a cakewalk, and you have known every important writer since the end of the Second World War. Just spill what you know about Elizabeth Bowen, and George Orwell, and Gore Vidal, and Truman Capote, and James Baldwin. They’re all dead anyway.’
I was just draining the last of my coffee, but had to set the cup down. ‘The last three are not dead. I saw Gore last night.’ She waved her hand as if to say details, details . . . ‘Americans do not know who Elizabeth Bowen was, let alone Angus Wilson,’ I said.
Lois gave me one of her wiliest smiles. ‘No one knows who they are. Yes, I know, readers are idiots who buy whatever is on the marketing schedule. Yes, I know, I know, literary culture is dead, and all we are left with is the washed- up detritus of postmodernism.’
She was mocking me now. ‘I’ve never said a bad word about postmodernism,’ I protested, maybe lied. ‘I quite liked The