#17 Dying of Exposure: Horrible Things Famous Literary Men Have Said About Me
This article was first published last year in Status Anxiety, issue 85 of Griffith Review, a wonderful print and online journal that comes out of Griffith University in Australia. My second essay for them, No Secret Passageway, has just come out in issue 87. These essays are behind a paywall which means that, yes, Griffith Review pays their writers!!! So do subscribe if you are able.
IN 2009 MY sixth novel, The Mistress of Nothing, a historical fiction set in Egypt in the 1860s, came out to good reviews. It began to do well. It made it onto one very long longlist, then a shorter longlist, and then onto the shortlist of a prize that, confusingly, doesn’t have a longlist. That shortlist, for the Governor General’s Award for English-language Fiction, one of Canada’s major literary honours, also contained a book of short stories by Alice Munro*, who was, as Jennifer Lawrence said of Meryl Streep, a GOAT. As well as that, another master of the short story, Alistair MacLeod, one of my all-time favourite writers, was on the jury. There was no chance I would win but knowing that MacLeod had read my book was its own special reward.
* Note that I wrote this essay before the horrifying revelations about Munro arrived in our world. There were several other mentions of Munro in this essay which I have edited out of this version because, well, because I can.
Prior to that, I’d managed to sustain a twenty-year career writing fiction without ever wasting a single moment pondering the winning – and the much more common not-winning – of prizes. The prize cycle, with its longlists and shortlists, its outrages and debates, was not on my radar. I thought, Oh, that happens over there; it doesn’t concern me. This seems odd now, living as I do in London, the city where literary hype and scandal originated (at least in the English language; I’m sure there’s been plenty of bitchiness elsewhere in the world over the centuries). Margaret Atwood once told me that she liked coming to London because the gossip and malice is better here than elsewhere. Like Atwood I’m Canadian (this is where the comparisons stop), though I’ve lived in London the whole of my adult life. But I’m an immigrant here, a foreigner as the current government likes to call us, which means that I’m an outsider, and this is part of what enables me to think, Oh, that doesn’t apply to me.
Of course, the ability to remove oneself from the culture is double-edged. While I’m more comfortable on the outside looking in here in the UK, my long years away from Canada mean I’m an outsider there as well. And yes, clearly there is something about this hardly unique arrangement that suits me. I’m happy in my corner, doing my thing.
But, reader, I won. I won the Governor General’s Award for English-language Fiction.
That win brought me firmly into the heart of literary culture with all the exposure it entails (of course, in Canada people die of exposure). And with the win, that crushing and capricious cycle – pre-publication, publication, reception, the longlists, the shortlists, even the book-sales charts themselves – came roaring into focus. And now the prize cycle haunts me every time I publish.
As does the formal photograph that was taken at the prize ceremony in Rideau Hall in Ottawa, a grand event in a grand location. I took it upon myself to hire a dress, something I’ve never done before or since, and, given I was in an unfamiliar city, pay a visit to a hairdresser I’d never met. My curly hair was shorter than usual at the time and she styled it absolutely bone-straight, like a silky valance with slits for my ears to poke through. Combined with the off-the-shoulder vintage black gown (a gown!) and the black-and-white satin shawl, I managed to render myself virtually unrecognisable. I don’t know what possessed me; perhaps it was because, at the time, the Governor General of Canada was the supremely accomplished and glamorous Michaëlle Jean. Perhaps it was because even though I’ve never become a British citizen, I’ve been away from Canada for a very long time.
More than once friends have looked at that photo and asked Who’s that woman winning that prize? And part of me wants to reply: I have no idea.
So, success is not only hard to come by; it is also difficult to own. I want my work to be widely read and discussed, but I also want to hide away. And this leads me to return to the original scene of the crime, one of the reasons why I prefer being alone in my happy corner, why writing itself is so much more fun than being published.
IS IT STILL possible to be a famous book reviewer? I’m not sure – but if it is, James Wood is that thing. When my first novel came out in 1989 – a follow-up to my unusually successful first book from the previous year, a collection of short stories (unusual because Brits don’t much like short stories) – he wrote what was his first-ever review, about my novel, for The Guardian newspaper. This review was an epic stinker, vicious and unrelentingly show-offy, the worst review I’ve ever received. Wood used my novel to stake his place in the firmament of literary life and managed to drive that stake through my heart at the same time (more on vampires later).
The novel…well, the problem with this story is that the novel probably isn’t very good. It has a terrible title. I was trying to write something that I felt reflected the London I knew as a young woman in the 1980s, a world of cheap eateries, anti-Thatcher activism, gay bashing, National Front fascists, homelessness, reggae, post-punk bands and great parties. My mother came to visit me when I was living in an artists’ community of squatted houses in Vauxhall, across the Thames from Westminster. Vauxhall is now the home of both MI5 and the brand-new heavily fortified US Embassy, but at the time the architectural highlights included an enormous derelict cold storage building on the riverbank and an abandoned Marmite factory about ten minutes’ walk away that we used to raid for furniture. When asked by a friend what my life was like, my mum said, Imagine the worst place possible, then fill it with your friends all having a wonderful time. So that’s what I was trying to write about. The novel was published as part of a glossy promotional campaign, along with the first novels of Deborah Levy, Geoff Dyer and Rose Boyt. This campaign also provoked a fair amount of derision, including a second nasty take-down from Wood in Vogue magazine.
I think, with thirty-five years’ worth of hindsight, that part of the reason Wood despised my novel was because I was a young Canadian woman attempting to write about London, a city steeped in centuries of writerly history. What could be more annoying to an ambitious twenty-five-year-old Oxbridge-educated Old Etonian than finding an upstart colonial girl on his patch? (No one since Tony Blair has tried to pretend that Britain is a classless society; in one version of the recent Conservative government’s Cabinet there were more men who’d been to Eton than there were women.)
Unlike what the pundits like to claim – no publicity is bad publicity – that review actually did do a fair amount of damage to my life as a young writer. At the time, the cult of the bright young man was much stronger than the corresponding – perhaps non-existent? – cult of the bright young woman. All those blokes who wanted to be Martin Amis, including Amis himself. My editor at Jonathan Cape for those first two books, Frances Coady, moved away from the imprint (Cape had gone from being an independent on Bedford Square to a cog in a series of corporate takeovers during this brief period). David Godwin stepped in, and David Godwin did not like me. When I handed in a draft of my next novel, he invited me to his office and said, I don’t know what kind of a woman you are, but you can’t publish this novel.
The novel in question, a feminist and literary revision of Dracula, has a bit of sex in it, and Mr Godwin didn’t think nice girls should write about sex. At least, that’s what I took away from that meeting, along with the fact that he was sacking me. Plus, he was wearing bobby pins in his hair.
I don’t know what kind of a woman you are, but you can’t publish this novel.
I did find a publisher for that book, Where Does Kissing End?, the first of several novels I’ve written that tease and play with genre fiction. Unlike my first novel, I’m fond of it still, though I don’t know if it is any good – doubtless Godwin would claim it was not. It came out around the same time as Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula' and Christopher Frayling’s wonderful survey Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula. It might seem hard to believe now, but vampires were rather neglected back then; there was Anne Rice and Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, but it was another dozen years before Twilight arrived, let alone the current marvel that is What We Do in the Shadows. Anyway, I do believe that James Wood’s ruthless review informed David Godwin’s even more ruthless behaviour. Wood went on to The New Yorker and a professorship at Harvard; Godwin became an agent. Despite the best effort of those boys, I continued to write novels while building a parallel – dare I say it? – award-winning career in digital media.
WHY AM I still thinking about this thirty-five years later? That’s what writers do, baby: we let things fester because that’s where the good stuff comes from (as well as the bad). It’s part of the grit, the grist, that keeps us going. The book came out so long ago that the review is not available online, so it doesn’t follow me around the internet. It turns out Wood felt a degree of remorse over it as he brought it up unprompted in an interview in The Guardian in 2018 with a demeaning and untrue story about me weeping my way through my own launch party because of his review; in other words, he raised me from the dead only to kill me once again.
As I write this, I’m about to go back in for another rewrite of a novel that I had convinced myself was finished. You’d think that after publishing eight novels, winning a literary prize or two and establishing myself as Professor of Creative Writing and Digital Media in a university – in other words, after accruing some status – I’d be able to rely on my own judgement over whether a book is ready to submit for publication. But no. Turns out writerly status does not equal editorial wisdom. And this book needs to be strong enough to convince publishers to say yes in an environment where it is much easier to say no. This book needs to be strong enough to make publishers want to invest in its future as well as mine. And in my agent’s well-seasoned and somewhat spicy opinion, we’re not there yet. The good news is that her verdict suits me because, well, I like writing much more than I like publishing.
Publishing is a weird industry, a retail supply service where every day hundreds – thousands – of brand-new, untested products are launched, each one a little bit different to the last. The long-haul career trajectory of most writers is increasingly difficult to maintain with incomes nosediving, as evidenced by multiple surveys. The road is cluttered with novelists brought down by ‘bad track’, their new books rejected because of the poor sales of previous titles. But as readers we still need help to discover good books, to figure out what to read next. As book pages, magazines and newspapers shrink or disappear altogether, it’s no longer clear what impact book reviewers can have on a career. The endorsement of someone whose work – critical or otherwise – you admire remains important to many writers. That blighted first novel of mine was admired in a review written by Ruth Rendell who was, at the time, the Queen of British Crime Fiction. However, it’s taken me six drafts of this essay to remember Rendell’s piece; somehow one terrible review obliterated all other opinions.
The moral is…there is no moral. Reviewers sometimes have an agenda when they hate your work; they sometimes have an agenda when they love it. I’ve had great reviews; I’ve had terrible reviews. In 2009 I won a prize, and I’ve won a couple of others since. I’ve been ditched by publishers and revived by publishers. I’ve kept writing. When Martin Amis died last year, a wash of memories came over me from those heady days when publishers paid for lavish launch parties and, for a brief moment, I was a bright young woman who believed the world of reading and writing was open to me, a person of little status who was therefore a person without status anxiety.