Tony Hale (24:40)
My Purple Scented Novel. You will have heard of my friend, the once celebrated novelist Jocelyn Tarbett, but I suspect his memory is beginning to fade. Time can be ruthless with reputation. The association in your mind is probably with a half forgotten scandal and disgrace. You've never heard of me, the once obscure novelist Parker Sparrow, until my name was publicly connected with his. To a knowing few our names remained rigidly attached like the two ends of a seesaw. His rise coincided with, though did not cause my decline then his descent was my earthly triumph. I don't deny there was wrongdoing. I stole a life and I don't intend to give it back. You may treat these few pages a confession. To make it fully, I must go back 40 years, to a time when our lives happily and entirely overlapped and seemed poised to run in parallel toward a shared future. We studied at the same university, read the same subject, English literature, published our first stories in student magazines with names like Knife in your eye. But with names like that, we were ambitious. We wanted to be writers, famous writers, even great writers. We took holidays together and read each other's stories, gave generous, savagely honest comments, made love to each other's girlfriends, and on a few occasions tried to interest ourselves in a homoerotic affair. I'm fat and bald now, but then I had a head of curls and I was slender. I like to think I resembled Shelley. Jocelyn was tall, blond, muscular, with a firm jawline, the very image of the Ubermensch Nazi, but he had no taste for politics at all. Our affair was simply bohemian posturing. We thought it made us fascinating. We did very little to or with each other, but we were happy to have people think we did a lot. None of this got in the way of our literary friendship. I don't think we were properly competitive at the time, but looking back, I'd say that initially I was the one who was ahead. I was the first to publish in a real grown up literary magazine, the North London Review at the end of our university career, I got a good first. Jocelyn got a second class degree. We decided that such things were irrelevant. And so they turned out to be. We moved to London and took single rooms just a few streets away from each other. In Brixton I published my second story, so it was relief when he published his first. We continued to meet regularly, get drunk, read each other's stuff. And we began to move in the same pleasantly downtrodden literary circles. We even began at roughly the same time to write reviews for the respectable national press. Those two years after university were the height of of our fraternal youth. We were growing up so fast. We were both working on the first novels. And they had much in common. Sex, mayhem, a touch of apocalypse, some violence, some fashionable despair, and very good jokes about all the things that could go wrong between a young man and a young woman. We were happy. Nothing stood in our way. Then two things did. Jocelyn, without telling me, wrote a TV play. That sort of thing, I thought at the time, was well beneath us. We worshipped at the temple of literature. TV was mere entertainment, dross for the masses. The screenplay was immediately produced, starred two famous actors, was passionate about a good cause, homelessness or unemployment. That I had never heard. Jocelyn men. It was a success. He was talked about, noted. His first novel was anticipated. None of that would have mattered if I had not at the same time met Arabella, an English rose, ample, generous, calm. A funny girl who remains my wife even today. I'd had a dozen lovers before then, but I got no farther than Arabella. She laid on everything I needed by way of sex and friendship and adventure and variation. Such a passion was not enough in itself to stand between Jocelyn and me. Or me and my ambitions. Far from it. Arabella's nature was copious, unjealous, all embracing. And she liked Jocelyn from the start. What changed was that we had a child, a boy named Matt, on whose first birthday Arabella and I were married. My Brixton room could not accommodate us for long, so we moved farther south, deep, deeper into the postal districts of southwest London. First to Southwest 12, later to Southwest 17. From there one reached Charing Cross by a 20 minute train ride, which itself began only after a 25 minute walk through the suburbs. My freelance writing could not support us. I found a part time teaching job at a local college. Arabella became pregnant again. She loved being pregnant. My college job turned full time just as my first novel was published. There was praise, there was mild damnation. Six weeks later, Jocelyn's first novel was out, an instant success, though it didn't sell much more than mine. In those days, sales hardly mattered. His name already had a ring to it. Mm. There was a hunger for a new voice and Jocelyn Tarbet sing, saying more sweetly than I ever could, his looks and his height. Nazi is unfair. Let's say Bruce Chatwin with Mick Jagger scowl, His high turnover of interesting girlfriends, the beaten up MGA sports car he drove fed his reputation. Was I envious? I don't think so. I was in love with three people. Our children seemed to me divine beings. Everything they said or did fascinated me. And Arabella continued to fascinate me too. She was soon pregnant again and we moved north to Nottingham with teaching and family responsibilities. It took me five years to write my second novel. There was praise a little more than last time. There was damnation a little less than last time. No one but me remembered the last time. By then, Jocelyn was publishing his third. The first had already been made into a movie starring Julie Christie. He'd had a divorce, a news house in Notting Hill, many interviews on tv, many photographs in lifestyle magazines. Oh, he said hilarious, scathing things about the Prime Minister. He was becoming our generation's spokesman. But here's the astonishing thing. Our friendship did not falter. Certainly it became more intermittent. We were busy in our separate realms. We had to get the desk diaries out well in advance in order to see each other. Occasionally he traveled up to see me and the family. By the time of our fourth child, we had moved even farther north to Durham. But usually I was the one who traveled south to see him and his second wife, Joliet. They lived in a large Victorian house in Hampstead, right near the heath. Mostly we drank and talked and walked on the heath. If you'd been listening in, you would have heard nothing between us to suggest that he was the star and that my literary prospects were fading. He assumed that my opinions were as important as his. He never condescended. He even remembered my children's birthdays. I was always installed in the best guest room. Joliet was welcoming. Jocelyn invited friends around who all seemed lively and pleasant. Oh, he cooked big meals. He and I were, as we often said, family. But of course, there were differences that neither of us could ignore. My place in Durham was friendly enough, but child trampled, crowded, cold in the winter. The chairs and carpets had been wrecked by a dog and two cats. The kitchen was always full of laundry because that was where the washing machine was. The house was afflicted with many ginger colored pine fittings that we never had time to paint or replace. There was rarely more than one bottle of wine in the house. The kids were fun, but they were chaotic and noisy. We lived on my modest salary and Arabella's part time nursing. We had no savings, few luxuries. It was hard in my house to find a place to read a book or to find a book. So it was a holiday of the senses to pitch up at Jocelyn and Joliet's for a weekend. The vast library, the coffee tables supporting that month's hardbacks, the expanses of dark polished oak floor, paintings, rugs, a grand piano, violin music on a stand, the banked towels in my bedroom. Oh it's awesome shower. The grown up hush that lay around the house, the sense of order and shine that only a daily clean lady can bestow. There was a garden with an ancient willow, a mossy Yorkstone terrace, a wide lawn and high walls. And more than all this, the place was pervaded by a spirit of open mindedness, curiosity, tolerance and a taste for comedy. How could I stay away? I suppose I should confess to one solitary strain of dark sentiment, a theme of vague, unequal I never gave expression to. Honestly, it didn't trouble me that much. I'd written four novels in 15 years, a heroic achievement given my teaching load and hands on fathering and lack of space. All four were out of print. I no longer had a publisher. I always sent a finished copy of my latest to my old friend with a warm dedication. He would thank me for it, but he never passed comment. I'm quite sure that after our Brixton days he never read a word of mine. He sent me early copies of his novels, 29 to my 4. I wrote him long appreciative letters about the first two or three. Then I decided for the sake of our friendship's equilibrium, to respond in kind. We no longer talked or wrote about each other's books, and that seemed fine. So you find us past midlife. Around the age of 50, Jocelyn was a national treasure and I. Well, it was wrong to think in terms of failure. All my children had processed or were processing through university. I still played a decent game of tennis. My marriage, after a few creaks and groans and two explosive crises, was holding together, and the rumor was that I'd be a full professor within a year. I was also writing my fifth novel, but that was not going awfully well. And now I come to the core of this story, the seesaw's crucial tilt. It was early July and I headed from Durham to Hampstead, as I often did straight after marking final papers. As usual, I was in a state of pleasant exhaustion. But this was not the usual visit. The following day Jocelyn and Joliet were going to Orvieto for the week and I was going to house sit, feed their cat, water their plants and make use of the space, the silence to work on the meandering 58 pages of my novel. When I arrived, Jocelyn was out running errands and Joliet made me welcome. She was a specialist in X ray crystallography at Imperial College. A beautiful sleek woman with a warm low voice and a very intimate manner. We sat drinking tea in the garden, swapping news. And then, with a pause and an introductory frown, as if she had planned the moment, she told me about Jocelyn. How things were not going so well with his work. He'd finished a final draft of a novel and was depressed it had failed to measure up to his ambitions, for this was supposed to be an important book. He was miserable. He didn't think he could improve it, nor could he bring himself to destroy was she who suggested they take a short holiday and walk the door dusty white tracks round Orvieto. He needed rest and distance from his pages. While we sat in the shade of the enormous willow, she told me how downcast Jocelyn had been. She had offered to read the novel, but he had refused, reasonably enough, for she's not really a literary sort of person. When she'd finished, I said airily, well, I'm sure he can rescue it if he can just get away for a while. They set off. The following morning I fed the cat, made myself a second coffee, then spread my pages on a desk in the guest room. The huge dustless house was silent, but my thoughts kept returning to Joliet's story. It seemed so odd that my ever successful friend should have a crisis of confidence. The fact interested me. It even cheered me a little. After an hour, without taking any sort of decision, I wandered toward Jocelyn study. Locked in the same open minded spirit, I wandered into the master bedroom I remembered from our Brixton days where he used to keep his marijuana. It didn't take me long to find the key at the back of his sock drawer. You won't believe this, but I had no plan. I just wanted to see. On his desk I A huge old electric typewriter hummed. He had forgotten to turn it off. He was among the many word processing holdouts in the literary world. The typescript was right there in a neatly squared off pile, 600 pages long but not vast. The title was the tumult. And underneath I saw in pencil fifth draft, followed by the previous week's date. I sat down in my old friend's study chair and began to read. Two hours later, in a kind of dream, I took a break, went into the garden for 10 minutes, then decided that I should get on with my own wretched attempt. Instead, I found myself drawn back to Jocelyn's desk. I hesitated by it, then I sat down. I read all day, paused for supper, read until late, woke early and finished at lunchtime. It was magnificent, by far his best, better than any contemporary novel I remembered reading. If I say it was Tolstoyan in its ambition, it was also modernist, Proustian, Joycean in execution. It had moments of joy and terrible grief. His prose sang more beautifully than ever. It was worldly. It gave us London. It gave us the 20th century. The depictions of the father, five central characters, overwhelmed me with their truth, their brightness. I felt I'd always known such people. Sometimes they seemed too close, too real. The end, a matter of 50 pages, was symphonic in its slow unfolding grandeur, sorrowful, understated, honest. And I was in tears, not only for the plight of the characters, but for the whole superb conception, its understanding of love and regret and fate and its warm sympathy for the frailty of human nature. I stood up from the desk. Distractingly, I watched a battered looking thrush hopping backward and forward across the lawn in search of a worm. I do not say this in my defense, but again I was empty of schemes. I experienced only the glow of an extraordinary reading experience, a form of profound gratitude familiar to all who who love literature. I say I had no plan, but I knew what I would do next. I simply enacted what others might only have thought. I moved like a zombie, distancing myself from my own actions. I also told myself that I was just taking precautions, that most likely nothing would come of what I was doing. This formulation was a cushion of vital protection. Looking back now, I wonder if I was prompted by rumours of the Lee Israel Forges or by Borguet's Pierre Menard or Calvino's if on a Winter's Night a traveler or an episode in a novel I'd read the year before. The Information by Martin Amis. I'm reliably informed that Amos himself derived that episode from the evening of drinking with another novelist. The one memory fails me with the Scottish name and the English attitude. I heard that the two friends entertained themselves by dreaming up all the ways one writes might ruin the life of another. But this was different. It may sound improbable, given what followed, but on that morning, I had no thoughts of causing Jocelyn any harm. I was thinking only of myself. I had ambitions. I carried the pages into the kitchen and tipped them into a plastic bag. I took a taxi across London to an obscure street where I knew there was a photocopying shop. I came back, returned the original to Jocelyn's desk, locked the study, wiped my prints off the key, returned it to his sock drawer. Back in the guest room, I took from my briefcase one of my empty notebooks. I'm always giving them for Christmas. And got to work, serious work. I started making extended notes for the novel I had just read. The first entry I dated two years in the past. I deliberately strayed from the subject several times, pursued a relevant idea, but kept coming back to the central line of the story. I wrote at speed for three days, filling two notebooks, sketching out scenes. I found new names for the characters, altered aspects of their past, their surroundings, details of their faces. I managed to work in some minor themes from my previous novels. I even quoted myself I thought New York would serve for London. Then I realized that I could never bring in any city to life the way Jocelyn had. So I returned to London. I worked hard, and I began to feel that I was being truly creative. This was, after all, going to be my novel as well as his. In the remainder of my stay, I typed out my first three chapters. A few hours before they were due to return, I left Jocelyn and Joliet a note explaining that I had to return north for an example. Examiner's meeting. You might think that I was being a coward, that I couldn't face the man I was stealing from. But it wasn't like that. I wanted to get away and keep working. I already had 20,000 words, and I was desperate to press on. At home, I told Arabella truthfully that my week had been a complete success. I was on to something important. I wanted to spend the summer holidays developing it. I worked through the rest of July. In mid August, I printed out my first draft and made a bonfire in the garden of my photocopy. I made a mass of corrections on the pages, typed in my marks, and in early September, the new draft was ready. Let's face it, the novel was still Jocelyn's. There were brilliant passages of his that I left almost intact. But there was enough of my own writing there to allow me a sense of proud possession. I had sprinkled the pages with the dust of my identity. I'd even included a reference to my first novel, which one of the characters is seen reading on a beach. My publisher, in one of those savage clear outs of the so called mid list, had with profound regret, let me go. I was contractually free. Rather than self publish on the Internet, I chose to go with an old fashioned vanity press called Gorgeous Books. It was a dismayingly rapid process. Within a week I had in my hands an early copy of the Dance she refused. The COVID was purple with gold embossed letters and flowery copper plate, and the pages were faintly perfumed. I inscribed one and sent it registered post to my dear friend. I knew he would never read it. All this was achieved before I resumed teaching in late September. During the autumn, in my free time, I sent the book around to friends, to bookshops, newspapers, always making sure to enclose a hopeful little note. I gave copies to charity shops in the hope of gaining a humble circulation. I slipped copies onto the shelves of secondhand bookshops. I heard by email from Jocelyn that he had put the tumult aside and was working on something new. I knew now that I had nothing to do but wait and hope. Two years passed. I made my usual visits to Hampstead and we avoided, as we often did, talk of our own work. In that period, I did not hear from a single person, apart from my wife on the subject of the Dance she refused. Arabella was swept away by it, indignant, then furious that it was ignored. She told me that my famous friend should be doing so, something to help. I told her calmly that it was a matter of pride not to ask him. On trips to London, I distributed more copies of the Dance and in secondhand bookstores. By Christmas almost 400 copies were out in the world. Three years separated the appearance of the Dance she refused and the tumult. As I had expected, friends had told Jocelyn that he'd written his best and he must publish when he did. The press was also, as I'd expected, a sweet chorus of songbirds in fluting ecstasy. I hung back in case the process had set in. Train found its own momentum. But since no one had read my perfumed version, nothing could happen. I was obliged to give the matter a shove. I sent my creation in a plain envelope to a bitter, gossipy critic on the London Evening Standard. My unsigned note said in Courier 16 point, does this remind you of a highly successful novel published last month? Much of the rest you will know. It was the perfect story. A wild storm surged through my house in Josslyn's all the correct ingredients. A wretched villain, a Quiet hero, a national treasure knocked flying from his pedestrians or dishonest fingers deep in the till. An old friend down on his luck, betrayed whole passages lifted, whole conceptions stolen characters too. No plausible explanation from the guilty man whose friends now understood his reluctance to publish tens of thousands of copies of the tumult removed from the shops and pulped, and the old friend nobly refused to condemn, unavailable for interviews. And of course a genius revealed. Best book in years, a modern classic. A mild man loved by his students and colleagues, dumped by his publisher. Books out of print. Then a scramble to procure the rights, all the rights to the backlist as well as dance agents and auctions involved, film rights and movie people involved. Then the prizes. Booker, Whitbread, Medici, critic circle in one long noisy banquet, copies of the gorgeous edition selling for £5,000 on Abe Books. Then, as the dust settled and with my books still flying off the shelves, thoughtful articles on the nature of literary kleptomania, the strange compulsion to be caught, and acts of artistic self destruction in late, late middle age. In emails and phone calls with Jocelyn, I was cool. I sounded offended without saying so, keen to break off, at least for now. When he told me how baffled he was, I cleared my throat, paused, then reminded him of the copy I'd sent. How else could it have happened? Finally, I gave one interview to a California magazine. I became the authoritative version, picked up by the rest of the press. I allowed the journalists access to my notebooks, rejection slips and letters, copies of the hopeful notes I had attached to my purple copies. He saw my crowded circumstances. He met my cheerful, charming wife and friendly children. He wrote of my dedication to the high cause of my art. My quiet reluctance to criticize an old friend of the indignities of vanity publishing, suffered without complaining. The rediscovery of a brilliant backlist comparable to the John Williams phenomenon. Courtesy of the American Weekly. I became a saint in my private life. All predictable enough. Eventually we bought a big old house on the edge of a village three miles out of Durham. A stately river runs through the grounds. At my 60th birthday, two grandchildren were in attendance. The year before, I'd accepted a knighthood. I remain a saint, an exceedingly rich saint, and I'm close to becoming a national treasure. My sixth novel didn't do so well with critics, though the sales were rolling. Esque, I think I might stop writing. I don't think anyone would mind. And Jocelyn? Also predictable. No one in publishing would touch him, nor would the readers. He sold his house, moved to Brixton our old stomping ground, where he says he feels more comfortable. Anyway, he teaches creative writing, night classes in Lewisham. It pleases me that Joliet stuck by him, and there are no issues between us. We remain close. I've forgiven him completely. He often comes to stay and always has the best guest room, facing the river where he likes to fit, fish for trout and row for miles. Sometimes Joliet comes up with him. They like our old university friends, who are kind and tolerant. Often he cooks for us all. I think he's grateful that I've dropped any hint of accusation that he ever looked inside that purple scented edition. Sometimes, late at night, when he and I are sitting by the fire, it's a vast fireplace, drinking and raking over this curious episode, this disaster, he tells me again his own theory, which he's been refining over the years. Our lives, he says, were always entwined. We talked over everything a thousand times, read the same books, lived through and shared so much. And in some curious way our thoughts, our imaginations fused to such an extent that we ended up writing the same novel, more or less. I cross the room with a bottle of decent Pomerol to refill his glass. It's just a theory, I tell him, but it's a good hearted theory, a loving idea that celebrates the very essence of our long, unbreakable friendship. We're family. We raise our glasses. Cheerful.
