Ghosting

Jennie Erdal worked as an editor, translator, and ghostwriter for many years.
Ghosting
is her first book published under her own name. She lives in St. Andrews, Scotland.

This is the way light fell on the picture for me;
for others it will have fallen differently.

London, February 2000

My Darling

A love letter, so they say, is a window on the soul. After all these years the glass may have dimmed a little but I want you to know that the fire in my soul still burns as brightly as the moment I first looked upon you.

Socrates said that if you get a good wife you will become happy; if you get a bad one, you will become a philosopher. The Delphic Oracle pronounced Socrates the wisest man alive, but personal happiness eluded him. I am a luckier man than Socrates.

On this day, your birthday, I write to mark the love that has bound us together in our long marriage, whose mysterious elements are a constant source of wonder. When I think of you there is no single name for what I feel, more a constant singing in my heart.

Without love we are nothing; life consists in the giving and getting of it. For what would we know of love if no one had loved us first? How and where would we begin? In time our children leave us and love elsewhere, in a different way from the way we have loved them. Different, but related. With God's help, this is how life continues, its delicate patterns interconnected by the filaments of love. And eventually, as Larkin understood, what will survive of us is love.

With deep tenderness

A love letter. The love of a man for a woman. What does it tell us? That a man is writing to his wife, that he loves her and feels loved by her, that they have been together a long time and that the love has endured. And what of the man himself? Evidently he is something of a romantic, he is not afraid to express his feelings, he believes in God, and he reads poetry.

What else can we tell from the letter? There is a tendency towards aphorism, and the style is slightly high-flown, perhaps a little gallant and old-fashioned. And like all love letters, it is highly personal, the most intimate form of communication any of us makes, more permanent than a phone call, more romantic than electronic mail. In reading it we feel we are encroaching on something private. It is, as the writer of the letter says, a window on the soul. We have glimpsed into his heart.

Or have we? What if this letter were not written by a man at all? But rather
for
a man, and
by
a woman. Whose heart would it then be?

For nearly fifteen years I wrote hundreds of letters, ranging from perfunctory thank-you notes and expressions of condolence to extensive correspondence with the great and the good—politicians, newspaper editors, bishops, members of the House of Lords. The procedure I followed with a more intimate letter was to type it onto my laptop, double spaced in large font, and print it out. My employer—the sender of the letter—would then copy it painstakingly onto embossed notepaper using a Montblanc pen and blotting paper, signing it with a flourish at the bottom.

All the letters were written on behalf of one man, an extraordinarily complex and charismatic character who made his mark in London's literary set. There was no dictation, no taking of shorthand,
just the lightest of intimations, often accompanied by facial contortions and gestures, which, over the years, I came to understand as one might a private language or a cipher. The tone of the letter, whether angry, ingratiating, reflective or passionate, would generally be arrived at by a kind of osmosis.

The letters mattered greatly to the man who put his name to them, for they often expressed what he was not capable of articulating on his own. They opened doors and gave him an eloquent sophistication, which he coveted but did not naturally possess. The pleasure he derived from sending the letters was evident in the way he often read them aloud before adding his signature. He savoured each sentence, pausing over every nuance, weighing up the effect of this or that word. He loved imagining the letters being received, being read and re-read. Some would be slept on, so he hoped, perhaps even dreamt of. When he was pleased, I too was pleased. We worked well together, and on the whole I was a willing partner, interested in the job and fascinated by the psychological processes involved on both sides. Over the years I learned a great deal about vanity, the desire to belong, the lengths a man will go to in affecting to be something other than he is. And the lengths a woman will go to in colluding with the pretence.

Aside from the correspondence, there were many newspaper articles, speeches, the occasional poem and about a dozen books, amongst them two novels. The books generated lots of reviews and profiles of the man whose name appeared on the cover. A number of literati entered into correspondence with the “author,” unaware that the replies came from a hired hand. We make a great team, the author often said. And we did.

Ghost-writing is not new. It might almost qualify as the oldest profession if prostitution had not laid prior claim. And there is
more than a random connection between the two: they both operate in rather murky worlds, a fee is agreed in advance and given “for services rendered,” and those who admit to being involved, either as client or service-provider, can expect negative reactions— anything from mild shock and disapproval to outright revulsion. A professor at my old university, a distinguished classicist with feminist leanings, was appalled when she heard what I did for a living and pronounced me “no better than a common whore.” This— the whiff of whoredom—is perhaps the main reason why most people opt for absolute discretion.

There is usually also an uneasy alliance between the person paying the money and the person earning the money or “working.” It comes from the awkward interdependence of the dealings—both parties benefit, but both usually struggle to retain self-respect. This can be achieved in a variety of ways: sometimes by adopting a simple, business-like attitude to the proceedings, sometimes through mutual contempt, sometimes through affected indifference to the nature of the transaction, sometimes simply by choosing to lead parallel lives.

In the natural world there are many degrees of interaction and mutual dependence between different species. These range from symbiosis, which we generally regard as good and beautiful, to parasitism, which we tend to view as bad and ugly. In life as in nature, some feed and others are fed upon. But what can appear to be a parasitic invasion can sometimes result in harmony and felicity. What could be more beautiful than an orchid? Yet the orchid depends on a fungus for the germination and growth of its seedlings. For the partnership to succeed, a true symbiotic balance must be achieved and maintained. Otherwise both will wither and
die. The relationship between host and parasite is fragile, easily disturbed; but in true symbiosis the association is intimate and both partners profit.

As in nature, so in life. What follows is a memoir drawn from several stages of a life, but containing at its heart the story of an unusual relationship, part symbiotic, part parasitic. It concerns two people from very different backgrounds: a man and a woman, who, for different reasons, in various ways and over a period of twenty years, came to live off one another, and in a sense to inhabit each other's minds. The story involves deception and self-deception on both sides, a blurring of truth and reality, some bizarre happenings, secrets and lies. Yet it also contains generosity, goodwill, absurdity, laughter, tenderness and a good measure of love.