I was somewhere in Sydney sitting in the back row of an auditorium with Malcolm’s Australian publicist, Melanie, watching Malcolm, Liam, Michelle de Kretser and the panel facilitator, Angela Meyer, mic up. The panel was called ‘What is literature?’ It wasn’t part of Malcolm’s programme, but Kate Atkinson had taken ill overnight and had emailed Malcolm’s publicist personally to ask if he might fill in for her. The Sydney Writers’ Festival organisers were understandably delighted with this solution. Kate Atkinson had been one of the stars of the programme and this was to be her last appearance. Her sessions had been booked out well in advance. Replacing her with the keynote speaker was a neat solution to the problem.
When I saw that Liam was to be on the panel too, I tried to talk Malcolm out of agreeing to the extra session. But this news seemed to amuse him. He said he had enjoyed reading Tangential and was looking forward to meeting the author. Noting the mischievous glint in his eye as he spoke, I let him have his way.
I was finding it hard to stay awake. I was still jetlagged. For the entire week of the festival I had been a bit of a zombie. I had never flown so far in my life. I now know we should have broken the trip with a couple of nights in Singapore as Trevor had suggested. But Malcolm had been for getting it over with in one go. So I relented. Neither of us is a great flier. And then Malcolm got lucky on the second leg and slept most of the way from Singapore to Sydney. He managed almost eight hours’ sleep, something he rarely got at home. But I just couldn’t sleep. While he snored softly I sat watching terrible movie after terrible movie. The last five hours of the last leg had been the worst. They went by so slowly. The lights were dimmed. The rest of the plane was asleep. I felt trapped and on the edge of hysteria. I was so happy when we finally landed. I could have kissed the ground.
And we had flown business class. The poor fuckers in economy must have felt like they were in Abu Ghraib prison.
On arrival in Sydney I’d upgraded us both to a suite overlooking the harbour. But I still hadn’t slept through the night. I was catching two or three hours at a stretch, whenever I could.
I rested my head against Melanie’s shoulder. She was my new best friend. I did everything she told me to do.
Malcolm gave me a wink. I blew him a kiss back. The stagehand was fiddling with each of their mics in turn. The four of them were chatting amiably, Angela on the left of the stage with her notes on her lap, Liam beside her, then Michelle, and Malcolm on the far right. Malcolm looked to be the most relaxed of them all. In fact, the whole festival he’d been like that. Completely chilled. Even before giving the keynote address. He just had no fucks to give anymore.
Malcolm had only agreed to attend the festival because his programme was largely devoted to Helen’s works. The first two sessions Malcolm had participated in were on his memoir of Helen, in which he had taken full responsibility for her suicide. They were emotionally draining for everyone involved. The third session was on Helen’s last novel, All Too Human, and the fourth on his own work. Including the keynote, it was a full programme for any writer. And now he had agreed to this extra session. He was eighty-one years old. He seemed to have more energy than ever. Especially when talking about Helen.
And then there were the publisher dinners, the lunches with other authors, the drinks, parties and trips out to see Bondi Beach, the Blue Mountains and the Opera House, and the overlong harbour cruise.
I was his official chaperone, but I was useless. I couldn’t keep up with him. I kept falling asleep on his or Melanie’s shoulder.
The doors opened and the audience was ushered in. Most were elderly, it being 2 pm on a Friday, but there were a few young hipster types to break up the greys and variations of beige. There were about three hundred people in the audience. And a crew was filming the session and streaming it live onto Facebook.
Liam hadn’t looked in my direction the whole time I had been in clear view, but now, as I was being hemmed in by pensioners, he glanced across and caught my eye for a second. I almost smiled. He looked nervous.
I had successfully avoided him the whole time we had been in Sydney. He was at some of the dinners and drinks, and he had been on the harbour cruise, too, but he’d kept his distance, and I had kept mine.
Tangential had been poorly received by the critics, but his name was enough to get him into the bestseller lists and invited to festivals. His fans on Goodreads, our fans really, had been generous in their praise. He’d earn thousands of five-star reviews, but I knew their praise wasn’t what he sought. The literary world he aspired to join had been silent, neither praising nor damning the novel. Its response could be summed up in one word: ‘meh’. The response all writers fear most.
I lifted my head off Melanie’s shoulder as the session got underway. The panellists happily agreed with the facilitator, Angela, that it was a bitch of a topic to tackle. Amid general laughter from the audience, each writer openly confessed that they had no idea what literature was. Angela apologised to the audience for wasting their time and made to stand up, before turning to her panellists and asking them, ‘as we’re all here’, if they could take a stab at a definition.
Michelle de Kretser handled herself admirably, keeping clear of the traps that lay in every direction.
Liam dived in recklessly and was soon out of his depth.
‘It’s subjective, really. What’s literature to one won’t be literature to another. Definition is impossible. It’s ethereal. Inexpressible. Open to interpretation. And it must be. I won’t be told what literature is, I must discover it for myself.’
‘So how do we teach literature?’ asked Angela.
‘It can’t be taught. You’d need defined characteristics to teach it, and we all just agreed, there aren’t any.’
There was a moment of silence before Angela spoke again: ‘Malcolm, is there any way out of Liam’s paradox?’
‘I don’t believe everything is subjective. I think there are universal truths. Truths we can build upon. Building blocks such as the flesh and blood and bone of our beings. The mechanisms that allow us to breathe, to breed, to run in fright. Our biological selves. Our shared human nature. Our predictable psychological responses. These are far from subjective. And these objective realities give us a firm and consistent point of reference if ever we get lost.’
‘Dr Johnson kicking the stone?’ asked Angela.
‘Yes, if you like. Sometimes we lose ourselves in our own cleverness. And we need the rude shock of a plain fact to wake us up.’
‘So how would you define literature?’ asked Liam, with no small amount of petulance in his tone.
‘I don’t know about you, but I burn with shame when Mr Knightley upbraids Emma Woodhouse for being unkind to Miss Bates. I have been guilty of such behaviour myself. Scoring a point at the expense of another. Via her novel, Emma, Jane Austen has been able to reach out from the grave, and across two centuries, to rap me on the knuckles. How could she possibly do that if everything was relative? Her point is a universal one. Her lesson is as valid today as it was then because at base we have not changed.’
‘So literature is a collection of universal truths?’ prompted Liam.
‘I used to teach writing. I failed most of my students because the one thing I wanted them to learn was the one thing hardest to teach. I wanted them to see the world as it is. It’s harder to do than it sounds. We’re all encased in stories – those told to us and those we tell ourselves. I would say to them, in the safety of that classroom, that most novelists write by dipping their ladle into the great vat of past fictions. In that vat, stewing for centuries, are all the plots, clichés, tropes, themes, character types and common phrases ever used in fiction. Novels written using this method are usually quite successful because they ask nothing of the reader. The reader reads in a pleasant stupor of familiarity. A publisher might describe this kind of fiction as commercial fiction.
‘The fiction I was trying to encourage my students to write was fiction written from direct experience of life. This kind of fiction is much harder to write and is, in turn, sometimes taxing to read. But often only at first. As readers we navigate by signpost, but in this kind of fiction the signposts are unfamiliar to us, almost as though written in another language. We stumble around, we get lost, we might even get frustrated, but there comes a time, if we’re patient, when we learn to see the world anew, as the writer has learnt to see it, and suddenly all of the signposts become clear. And if we’re very lucky, life itself becomes clearer.
‘No one writes exclusively from the vat, just as no one writes exclusively from life. Writing is a series of compromises. Writers from life need to be understood, so they borrow from the vat. Writers from the vat need to be new, so they take from life.’
Malcolm stopped speaking.
The audience seemed to be leaning forward, just as Angela and Michelle were. They expected him to say something more.
He looked across at Angela, then over at me.
‘I just thought of something Dylan Thomas said while giving a lecture,’ said Malcolm: ‘“Somebody’s boring me. I think it’s me.”’
The audience laughed.
‘No, no, Malcolm,’ said Angela, ‘not at all. So you think literary fiction is the consequence of a particular combination of a writer’s direct experience of life and their reading?’
‘Well, of course it is,’ said Liam. ‘Literary fiction is . . .’
‘Literary fiction doesn’t exist, Liam. Not the way you think it does. You set out to write a literary novel as though the word “literary” describes a genre the way the word “crime” does. Literary fiction. Crime fiction. But “literary” describes a quality. It defies genre because it can apply to all genres.
‘I thoroughly enjoyed Tangential, Liam. But it isn’t literature. It’s a work written by a writer steeped in a particular kind of literary fiction. At a guess, I’d say your particular vat was filled with novels by Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, John Banville, Roddy Doyle and, for a bit of extra zest, Will Self. It doesn’t mean your book isn’t any good. It is good and thousands of people have already enjoyed it. And thousands more will, too. And that’s a wonderful thing . . . Bringing enjoyment to thousands of readers. It is, isn’t it?’
Liam stared at Malcolm and nodded.
‘We’re all here because we love reading. Especially novels,’ Malcolm continued. ‘To be honest, I’ve never particularly liked the idea of literature. I’m still suspicious of the word. When I was growing up in London’s East End, it always seemed to be a stick with which to beat the lower classes. As a teen I resented those who read and enjoyed the classics, who went to see Shakespeare at the theatre, who could drop quotes into their conversation. And I was right to. Many people did use literature as a weapon. And they still do. And I would hate for anyone to think that I thought of literature that way. To me, literature is the fastest and surest route to understanding something of this life. At eighty-one, I know how brief our lives are. Mine has flashed by. And any help making sense of the world is still most welcome. The quicker the better. What is literature? Literature is life’s cheat sheet.
‘As my beloved late wife, Helen Owen, said, “Great writing is rare. With so little time on this planet, shouldn’t we spend at least some of that time getting acquainted with the writers most often acknowledged as exceptional?”’
And with that Malcolm placed his hands in his lap and was silent.
For a moment the audience was silent, too. His fellow panellists were looking at him, expectantly.
As the silence lingered, I had an awful feeling that I was the only one in the audience who appreciated what he had just said.
Then the audience applauded all at once. Some stood and whistled. His fellow panellists were applauding, too.
I stood up and raised my hands above my head, clapping like a child.
Malcolm turned and saw me, his face a smile.