The House of Writers (2 page)

M
Y
upbringing in a council house in the knobbly bits of Aldercrux, with a sister keen on stapling my slacks to the desk, pouring cream down my collar, and ritually tongue-lashing me every time I sat down to write, prepared me for life in The House. The First Floor is a hearty face-slap for those tied to utilities like three square meals, water, electricity, and a moss-free place to urinate. All dolled-up like a decaying aesthete’s mansion (think Des Esseintes), the writing space is a Victorian drawing room with dusty chaise longues (feat. lion’s head armrests), high-backed demithrones, Arthurian tables rakishly ravaged by ink-smeared papers, and bowls of rotting fruit (mostly yellow-blue kumquats). Beside the bookcase, packed with every grandisonant hack who ever tortured the semicolon, one finds the staff—four louche fops sprawled in chairs wearing double-breasted dinner coats talking excitedly in accents that hop between affected RP, Anglo-American, and Indo-Greek. As Elgar says: “Four destitutes posing for a Cruikshank etching.”

Henri Plover, or the “Indominatable,” as he styles himself, is unofficially in charge, but the philosophy on this floor is loaf before you leap—
sit down and sink in think before you sit up and sink in ink—so
no one is really the boss, proper. Henri is a recklessly smiley fellow with weedy centre-parted black hair, bibulous cheeks, and a belly like pork suet—the über-uncle—while London is the grandpa: a plump senior with stately grey prickles and oddly pink lips, always willing to raise his tankard to show off his shiny Proust-faced cufflinks. Marco is skinny and swarthy and says very little (I never spoke to him once, but you may find the key to unlock his quietude), while Elgar is pale and blonde and all about the cheekbones and startling heft of shoulder-to-finger Victorian bling. “We’re thoroughly decent chaps,” London says, “unless you happen to interrupt us.” I made this mistake on my first day and they’ve never forgiven me.

A typical day in the department? Typically untypical. Early morning is time for the “entrapment of
ipsissima verba,”
i.e. to reflect on the correct words, eating Madeira off the plated face of Alice, sipping sherry from the head of Queen Elizabeth I, and flicking through Burton and Cervantes to absorb their essence. Be prepared for nutritional hell. My first, and only, meal was servings of rock-hard Madeira, my mornings spent pounding fistfuls of crumbs into shape for my lunch and dinner, chugging back belly-burning sherry to keep myself hydra-intoxicated enough to blot out a few notions. Around eleven, the chaps retreat to wax their particulars and buff their non-specifics (don’t ask), and you will have some time to read (to impress—
À la recherche du temps perdu)
and dream of healthier meals. “A memory of things repast,” as Henri says. In the afternoon, you will learn to “napalm the
locus communis,”
i.e. to write HQLF sentences (see Henri’s Master’s Class). The evenings are yours. If you can find the House’s caretaker Mhiari, try to blag a block of cheese or lamb, because life expectancy on this floor is limited until you can trick your body to tolerate the S&M diet.

The department is in disrepair. When you step out the lift (at the time of writing the lifts are functioning—but prone to plummets and floods), you will step onto a damp red carpet, strewn with half-smoked briar pipes, tubs of moustache wax, unread back issues of
The Lancet,
burst blazer buttons and farmyard cufflinks, into a corridor sweating through a layer of florally offensive wallpaper, where a tacky pyrite dado rail runs along the wall, forming a sort of tributary for the sweat as it puddles onto the carpet in a shiny hue of beige. Tacky chandeliers filled with moth carcasses, old couscous and socks hang precariously from the ceilings, several weeks off an extravagant accident, while untarnished portraits of the usual suspects hang crookedly on the walls: Henry James, Marcel Proust, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Mann. Never walk anywhere in your socks unless you like the squelch of sweat or icky toes. As the smallest department, they make the least money and have the narrowest readership, so can’t afford maintenance or edible food or running water. As to your sleeping quarters (“fourths of sleep,” as Marco says): a four-poster Victorian bed with an oaky brown canopy patterned with sleeping lions and snakes, framed by ruby-coloured curtains with furry hems and tassels with sheets of purple silk. (Slick with damp, usually, with several strategic buckets placed round the bed to catch falling drips.) As to interior décor: a tatty leather couch with an obese Manx named Madeleine lying sprawled over a throw rug with phoney Egyptian hieroglyphs, dreaming of days when its kind prowled the world as kings, and all manner of pseudo-spiritual clutter on the shelves and mantelpieces—purple gourds stuffed with potpourri; candles scented like lentils; dream-catchers, thought-trappers, soundbiters, and mindlickers; Zodiac calendars with pencilled Latin exclamations
(salvum me fac! cunctis nos adjuvet!);
and stacks of paperbacks from Henry James, all broken-spined and underlined.

Observant recruits will spot the many oil paintings of a stern-looking bald man with ruddy cheeks. This is Paul Andrew Donall, the single benefactor (reader) of HQLF works—a retired mineral magnate who made millions in the Persian Gulf War selling oil to both sides at twice the price. As a seventy-nine-year-old dandy of private means, he has sought to improve himself by reading “brullunt books” and has kindly patronised the dept. with one-fiftieth of his fortune. The writers take guidance on their content from Mr. Donall and tailor their prose style to meet his requirements— fortunately, he favours the long convoluted sentence, lively with many digressive clauses and semicolons, that over the course of three pages ceases to have any parsable meaning, like the late Henry James. He demands a “sturry fur ma pur wee brain tae fulla” (a followable story) but also wants sentences that reach beyond his intellectual powers, while flattering his intelligence by seeming to have a meaning only he can understand. He favours sentences whose meaning is almost entirely cryptic, as though a private Donall lexicon, not unlike the works of Gertrude Stein, only less odious. A man of changeable moods, he once fired the entire dept. minus me, hiring them back a week later! He’s easy to see: a shrivelled prune in a chequered beige blazer and tartan breeks, sporting a cane and miners’ bunnet, with a cravat and pocket hankie horribly prominent. His accent is brusque salaried Glaswegian, his speech the frenzied Gatling of a man no longer required to make himself understood. The writers dance around him like tinkle-toed toadies, fussing with plates of Madeira and sherry and pre-softened Edam! (Best policy: keep shtum when near.)

My first week was a steep learning curve, fraught with smudgy first drafts, damp rooms and vitamin deficiency. At nights, I lay under my heat-insensitive mattress shivering while Marco (my roommate) stayed up until 3am cooing over his early novels, lulling me to sleep with theatrical renditions of Butler Fortescue’s most outrageous admonitions, punctuated by startling cries of “Peerless!” or “Magnifique!” whenever sleep dared to interrupt the programme. Every morning I dozed on a chaise longue, hallucinating water and roast dinners, nodding along as the fops commented on my work so far, reading the worst passages with patronising chortles and my strongest with solemn gravity. “Such ribald ravings of masterful magniloquency!” London said. “These sentences are thick with the clichéd indecision and a recherché juvenescence of Flaubert!” Edgar said. “What outrageously precocious attempts to unite the psychopathomaniacal interzones of Turgenev with the cacopornoformalogical hinterlands of Dostoevsky!” Marco said. I massaged my migraine. Learning to please these chaps is something you will have to teach yourself.

What of the books? Consult the following categories:

1.
Novels about princes reflecting on their affairs with servants and prostitutes.

2.
Death-bed reflections about princes and their affairs with servants and prostitutes.

3.
Monologues about privileged childhoods in Monte Carlo and the impossibility of reuniting the 1920s
Kammerspielfilm
movement with neo-German Expressionist aesthetics.

4.
Unpunctuated confessions from dying poets about their unholy lapse from pure formalism into the grubby intellectual mire of vorticism.

5.
Books where characters fetishise their furniture for hundreds of pages in homage to Des Esseintes’ decadence.

6.
Pompous, pseudo-philosophical tracts written by sexually tormented hermits who asphyxiate themselves in plastic bags.

A short list of their recent novels:
Four Score & Seven Dreams, The Manners of Manny’s Manor, Rendezvous of the Baden-Baden Butlers, The Duke of Bliss, Who Stole My Kites?, Prince Heimlickt’s Adventures in Angioplasty,
etc.

Henri’s Master’s Class

Here’s my brief Master’s Class in High-Quality Literary Fiction for any new recruits to test whether they possess the verbal legerdemain to sign up for our programme. Let’s start with a syntactically simple sentence:

I dropped my pencil on the carpet.

First challenge: increase, twofold, the dramatic quotient of this event. Every minor happenstance for our narrators has some significance, personal or metaphorical. If they pick their nose, it must be reflective of the struggle of the Byzantines to defeat the Ottomans in Constantinople; if they brush away dry skin, it must be emblematic of man’s struggle to find ontological certainty in an indifferent cosmos, etc. If they sneeze in public, the embarrassment must drive them to wild fits of despair, to suicide or murder, and so on. Try now to heighten the drama of that sentence. Our example:

I dropped my prized, cherished old pencil onto the murky, stained, and horrible carpet.

Here, we contraposed the preciousness of the pencil with the beastliness of its destination, and deployed multiple adjectives for cumulative exaggerative effect. Second challenge: imagine this scene as the most dramatic tragedy that has ever befallen any man. Try to squeeze every scintilla of drama and emotion out of this falling pencil. Exaggeration is our speciality; don’t be afraid to overdo it! Our example:

To my unfeasible horror, I dropped my prized and cherished pencil onto the murky, stained, and horrible carpet, and collapsed howling in hysterics at the injustice of a world where such terror and dread could befall such a man as I.

Now, to show you the level of artistry at work, here’s this sentence as it appears in one of our published novels.

To my unquenchable and unfeasible horror, I stood outside myself watching myself, as if my body had floated into a separate consciousness outside my own, hovering outside me like some demon, my pencil describing a 45° arc as it tore itself from my hands, revolving in horripilating loops like the rings of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, searing my heart with fire and hurt, pulling me down to the depths of despair as in Mirbeau’s
Torture Garden,
as my treasured and beautiful pencil, the passion of my heart and my very life’s blood, my one and only love, came crashing to the floor like an orchestra in the fires of Abaddon, swallowed up by the interminable, tormenting flames of the remorseless carpet.

Study the sentence carefully. Read it aloud. Do you see the unnecessary, emphatic verbal repetition (epizeuxis), dramatic exaggerations about corporeal states to create a false sense of profundity, the overly precise description, literary references in similes, and an emotional overstatement of the importance of the pencil? If you think you can make sentences like this, we’re waiting for you in the HQLF department.

A Word from the Team

H
ENRI:
Pray mercy! An intruder! How strange that nature does not knock!

M
ARCO:
Keats?

H
ENRI:
Dickinson.

M
ARCO:
Blast!

H
ENRI:
Greetings, writers! Enter, entrer! Viens ici et dégustez un sherry sur la banquette!

E
DGAR:
Henri, my dear lush, what can those rapscallious hopefuls expect from us in the HQLF department?

M
ARCO:
A new name, for a start!

H
ENRI:
We run the High-Quality Literary Fiction department, erstwhile known as the Henry James Peninsula for Polished Prose Perfection, or the Marcel Proust Sanatorium for Seriously Shimmering Syllables. Step aboard our abode! If you are a passionate purveyor of the anfractuous artistry of the Lord Henry James, the winding words of priestly Marcel Proust, or the epithymetic lyrics of Saint Vladimir Nabokov, this is the floor for you. Here you will work alongside our team of highly skilled logolepts and verbivores to produce novels fit for the finest most finessibly erudite hands and minds.

E
DGAR:
Well said.

H
ENRI:
Remember when Cal (James McIntyre!) came to work for us, his prosaic and proletarian appellation was preformed into a prettier gnome de plum, pending our ponderous and philosophastering peregrinations? I posited Calltonius Inchcome-Hundepheffer.

L
ONDON:
Me, Callismus Avenus-Ephebus.

E
DGAR:
And I, Callimachus Serrismus-Darvu.

H
ENRI:
How silly!

M
ARCO:
Tell them about our books!

E
DGAR:
Dear boy, do you take me for a mattoid?

M
ARCO:
No, but you’re most certainly a fustilugs!

E
DGAR:
Slander!

H
ENRI:
Chaps, please! You’ll petrify our future Masters!