BLAKE LIVED NEAR THE VILLA TENNYSON, LEAR’S HOUSE IN SAN Remo. At first, there were postcards. The entirety of one early arrival was “Hello!” but the signature encouraged me: “Chakonoton the Cozovex Dossi Fossi Sini Tomentilla Coronilla Polentilla Battledore & Shuttlecock Derry down Derry Dumps.” Communication was patchy. Perhaps he was gambling away his ill-gotten gains at the Casino: unlikely. No more the long letters, the Ballad of Normanside Prison, soul-searching from his cell. I mean, it was a breakdown, wasn’t it? He’d probably grown a beard. The postcards became more occasional, hastily scratched, often showing the same stretch of San Remo beach, as if he’d bought a job lot, generally consisting of only one word: “writing” said one; “breathing” another. Then finally, almost a year later, he really let the ink run free: “Coming home.”
Blake looked healthy, tanned, shaved, surprisingly slim with his shirt tucked in. He did a good impression of being happy to be back, but was no more forthcoming about his missing year than he had been by mail. There was a pile of pages to show for it however, and this continued to grow on the side of his desk. It was more or less the only thing that changed in his room, so you noticed.
He moved his old stuff into a new place, which emptied mine out though I was hardly ever there. He went out drinking with Greg—that was his one regular appointment—but the new focus was a book deal, for which he’d fly under his own flag: James Lewis. Greg had much advice on the subject, about which he knew as little as I did, including “Yeah, don’t have it by Blake Lear, because it’ll look like you’re related.”
Blake wanted to know how my new job was going, and why, of all things, I wanted to be a road manager: “Stop organizing other people. Do your own thing.”
“I like doing something I’m good at. I like being in charge. I always admired Mitchell. I took notes.”
At the mention of Mitchell’s name, he looked up: “God, is this all my fault?”
“This suits me. I feel like I’m putting knowledge to good use.”
He asked about girls, but I never had much to say. Despite my good albeit unconventional education, I was always a bit awkward that way, up to quite recently. Maybe I wanted it to be as easy as it had been, all Disneyland and Monopoly, and it wasn’t. It was the initial bit I found difficult. The road isn’t conducive to lengthy relationships, but it’s good for one-night stands, which aren’t conducive to lengthy relationships. Don’t have sex with people you’re on tour with. That’s the basic rule. Don’t even ask them on a date until the tour is over: so embarrassing if they say no.
As I was closing in on this girl’s hometown once, I sent this text: “What you got on?” It’s perfectly acceptable British textage for “What are you doing today?,” a casual way of inviting her to the show. But she took it the wrong way, was in fact offended, because she was American and thought I was asking what she was wearing, assuming I expected the response “nothing but a smile” or “a nurse’s uniform.” She wasn’t having any of my excuses and that was that. Another time, a woman replied to a casual text of mine with “I’m busty.” Much as I wanted to take it literally, I knew it was a typo.
So back then, I didn’t have a girlfriend. I didn’t want a girlfriend. I was the most, least experienced twenty-year-old in the world. I asked Blake whether he had one. He answered obliquely: “Lear, you know, proposed twice to the same woman; she was nearly fifty years younger than he was. She refused twice and that was that. None of his friends came to his funeral, not one. I don’t want to end up like that.”
How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear, Blake’s novel, was finally finished. He handed over the manuscript, an imposing overly thick, single-spaced doorstop, with the sole remark: “Well, it isn’t nonsense.”
I am not a literary critic. I do a bit of paid writing occasionally for those who ask, generally friends or acquaintances or those who have read my blog (gentlemanoftheroad.com), and I read a lot, but I assumed a lot of it was over my head; Blake was the expert. I told him I enjoyed it, but I can’t say I did. I remember a sinking feeling when I looked at the pile of read pages and realized it was still smaller than the pile of unread pages. When they reached equality, I was ready to be done, and there was still a long way to go; well, halfway I guess, but a long half.
Besides the fact that the book wasn’t terribly exciting, it was hard to tell whether it was a novel or a biography (I’m pontificating; that was one agent’s criticism, verbatim). Most depressing of all was that Blake sought to explain away all of Lear’s nonsense. None of it was allowed to be simply nonsense. Lear was gay but couldn’t face it, therefore his work is full of images of impossible relationships (owls and pussycats, nutcrackers and sugar tongs, etc.). Lear’s health was bad—he was an epileptic; he had bronchitis and chronic asthma; he was a depressive; later he was partially blind—hence those quarantined freaks, the Pobble, the Dong, the Quangle Wangle. His lack of money explained one poem; his fear of matrimony another; his antipathy to noise, perhaps due to tinnitus, another. I’m not saying that biography can’t or shouldn’t inform literature; I’m just saying that the book actually ruined Edward Lear for me forever. That can’t be good.
Perhaps How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear is just what his college Monsignor wanted all those years ago when Blake instead chose to hand in his own nonsense. Perhaps Blake finally wanted his First from Cambridge. As Blake explained away Lear’s nonsense, so Blake explained himself away. He wasn’t putting his own nonsense down to illness or unresolved sexuality; he was saying that nonsense couldn’t just be nonsense, perhaps thereby challenging anyone interested to discover the reasons behind his own. Well, I wasn’t going there. He couldn’t have children, therefore he chose to entertain other people’s: that’s pretty obvious. So, it wasn’t just that the book wasn’t objectively good—though nicely written, even I could tell that—it was that he’d spent almost three years on a project that was, more or less, the burial of the Blake Lear I, we, loved.
There were interesting bits, but mainly for what they told me about the author rather than his subject. Edward Lear too found himself successful, almost overnight, in a field far from the one he had originally envisioned. He had intended to make his money as an ornithological illustrator, but ended up a famous Nonsense writer, rather as Blake, too, had ended up a children’s entertainer by mistake. There was Lear’s childishness, what one critic called his “Peterpantheism,” his fear of “the demon boredom,” his travel fetish. I bet he was a fidgeter, too. Though I’d never associated Blake with the feelings of manly inadequacy to which Lear was prey, it made you wonder about his lack of permanent girlfriends, his scant interest in the peripatetic art of the one-night stand. I remember once looking at an oil painting with him in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, an amazing Eastern landscape called Mahabalipuram; tall elegant green trees either side of a ruined temple. Blake asked me the painter, and I read the little plaque: “Edward Lear. Is that the same Edward Lear? Can’t be, right?” He didn’t answer. When I looked, he was crying. I guess there was a period when he cried a lot, and I should have paid more attention.
If his book had been a success, if he’d ended up chatting on The Book Show, and been asked to write a Top Ten List of Nonsense Poetry for the Guardian website or whatever you did back then, perhaps this would be a different story with a different ending. But the book wasn’t published. And when the wearying, slow-motion process of rejection was complete, when the cycle of phone calls to people who don’t call you back, so you call them again but they don’t take your call and you instead talk to their brusque assistant (who is polite but firm and to whom you realize you may sound a little desperate), when you realize you’re hurrying them to say “no” and that no amount of phone calls will elicit an enthusiastic “yes,” and may in fact ensure a hastening of the final, regretful “no,” when all these things were done and the last name on the list had been crossed out, Blake gave up.
He was afraid where nonsense would lead him; but sense wasn’t doing anything for him either. He couldn’t record under the name Blake Lear; he couldn’t write under the name James Lewis; he couldn’t teach because of his flirtation with the dark side. And because he couldn’t do any of those things, he became a ghost. Blake Lear only haunted us from hereon. He was there; he was around; he floated about in our orbit; he occasionally clanked his chains. He had to find something else, but what can a ghost do? He is insubstantial, not of this world. Society, as Blake once said, it seemed to me rather dramatically, had no place for him. It was right around now that his shirt untucked itself again. He “went floaty,” is, I think, the phrase. His waistline expanded. The adrenaline was no longer keeping him slim. In what I can only assume was some kind of drunken stupor, he decided to put the band back together. About this futile reunion, the less said the better, beyond the fact that it wasted two years.
What can ghosts do? They can ghostwrite.
Jack and Rita had their first child, Charles, aka, to Barry’s disquiet, Chuck. (No one mentioned the paternity suit kid, apparently female, though she exerted a financial toll on Jack that spoke for almost all of his American royalties, siphoned in her direction before they had a chance to cross the Atlantic. In fact, for various reasons, no one made a lot of money from the Wonderkids except the record label, managers past and present, and lawyers; funny that.) Jack was a good dad to the kid in his own front room. He griped about it, but he was generally happy, even when Chuck squirted nappy rash cream into the sound-hole of an old Gibson. Suddenly all the amps were moved to some rehearsal studio and guitars hung out of reach. I helped his new band out every now and then, when I was free and couldn’t be bothered to do nothing. His ultimate compliment: “Nice to work with a professional.”
And then a year and a half later, there was another kid, Johnny, a dark-haired boy to match the earlier fair-haired model. I enjoyed being Uncle Sweet (technically Cousin Sweet, but we were and would remain an unconventional family). I’d been educated into the role, and I knew what to do, but Blake, the man who was born to it, got little out of the experience. Gone were all the games and the card tricks, as if he’d forgotten them. He didn’t even get down on his hands and knees. It was Barry who surprised the family with his willingness to get his cuffs dirty. He also turned out to be a hysterical prognosticator of a child’s future profession: “Perhaps he’ll be a footballer,” if the kid so much as swung a leg; “I wonder if he’ll be a comedian,” when the kid smiled. It was an obsession with Barry: “I think he’ll be a musician, just like his dad.”
Rita was great. Sure, she and Jack met in odd circumstances, but they’re still married. She once told a joke: when the masochist says “beat me, beat me,” the real sadist says “no.” And Jack presumably never said no. So who’s in charge? Their bedroom door was always firmly closed. Just as well. I wouldn’t have wanted to discover any hooks and pulleys or nooks and crannies in the walls.
Jack remarked on the kids’ development with grumpy wonder: “why does color matter so much? Chuck has to eat off a blue plate. If it’s not blue he won’t touch it. Maybe he’s color autistic.”
“Would you play a pink Stratocaster?” I asked.
“No, but that’s totally different.”
One Christmas, he was sifting through a set of twenty-six animals, the first letters of which corresponded to a letter on a particular play mat: “Urial and ibex, what are they? Are they new species? Can’t they come up with something better? I mean, granted they’re in trouble with x, and x-ray fish is the only option, but urial and ibex?”
“What’s wrong with unicorn and imp?” asked Blake. “Like in the old days.” It was the funniest thing he’d said in about three years. At the pub, he was always happy to listen to Greg make the old gags.
“It was always iguana for i,” said Barry, after consideration. “But I don’t remember what u was. Certainly not Urial or Unicorn. It’s political correctness gone mad.”
Blake and he were uneasy together but nothing ever came of it. It simmered, a bit like me and the Terrys once upon a time.
“And how are you keeping yourself busy, Jimmy?” Barry would ask. “Idle hands, you know, idle hands.”
How on earth did Blake fill his days? He’d got into electric trains, I knew that, inspired by Neil Young, who had used to inspire him in other ways. When Blake flipped the switch, his attic became a whirr of activity, scale models zipping around a labyrinthine layout to a futurist soundtrack of chuffing and puffing, perhaps reminding him of the distant days when he was planning his own theme park. Did he spend all his time up there? He took me up once or twice, to show off his new points or something, but never invited his nephews. It wasn’t for kids.
As daft adult hobbies went, even therapeutic ones, one might have hoped for something a little steamier. I honestly had no idea what he was up to apart from perfecting his impression of the Fat Controller.
The first thing I knew about Judith Esther’s The Dark-Headed Clock Trilogy was the first thing most people knew about it. It was everywhere.
You probably had a better idea if you were in primary school, chatting in the playground, or reading a trade journal. But for the rest of us, the ones without children, those outside the publishing industry, there was nothing, a vacuum. And then there was The Dark-Headed Clock.
At first, there were stacks of the first volume on the front tables of bookshops, cheeky Gothic cover luring you in; then its spine started appearing on the shelves you least expected, in friends’ houses, on Greg’s bedside cabinet, behind the prime minister’s head in an interview on TV. Apparently, the first volume, The Toll of the Dark-Headed Clock, was one of those books enjoyed by both children and their parents alike, similar to the Pullman books and the Harry Potter books, of which the Judith Esther book seemed to me—paying the scantest attention—a great rip-off (though I’d never read the Potters, and only seen two of the films, both as hotel pay-per-views, purely as a sleep aid).
Then there were posters in the Underground advertising the second in the trilogy, The Shadow of the Dark-Headed Clock, which morphed imperceptibly into posters advertising a movie of the first volume, featuring many stars, mainly British, directed by a recent Oscar-winning Yank. Waiting at a bus stop in autumn, one looked down to see a frantically ripped-open and then rapidly discarded wrapper from some Dark-Headed Clock trading cards. Christmas would bring Dark-Headed Clock sponsored Christmas decorations down Regent Street as surely as, beneath them, Hamley’s window would bulge with fake snow and Dark Clocks of various shapes and sizes made in China.
In reality, this took a few years, I suppose, but in life as it is lived time, it happened overnight. It was like someone said “Let there be Dark-Headed Clock,” and there was Dark-Headed Clock, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It was one of those phenomena that is felt everywhere, in casual jokes on TV chat shows, in the pop charts, in Halloween costumes, in questions in the Houses of Parliament, and in comment, for and against, in the newspapers; some liked its message, some didn’t.
The Dark-Headed Clock Trilogy consisted of the classic Toll, the superior sequel Shadow, and the climactic Midnight in the Dark-Headed Clock, the biggest seller of them all, whispered by some to be a disappointing finale, though the franchise had by now reached critical mass and couldn’t possibly underperform. And I will also remind you that it was about twin boys, one with blonde hair, Bill, and one with dark, Ed, their father conspicuously absent in fine fairy story fashion, who discover (Toll), confront (Shadow), and battle (Midnight) a secret cadre of scientists perpetrating an enormous and terrifying fraud upon the general populace for their own selfish gain.
The trilogy was heavy on the Christian allegory (lauded by none other than the Archbishop of Canterbury, attacked by no less than Richard Dawkins), and even seemed to include—to the distress of rationalists everywhere—a subliminal course in self-realization, combining Christian philosophy with elements of those weird books like The Secret, which sell a million copies but no one really knows what they’re about or why anyone is reading them. There was a whole lot of Lion, plenty of Witch, and shelf upon shelf of Wardrobe, and certainly no need for me to read them. You just picked up on them by osmosis.
I do remember thinking one specific thing however, one night on public transport going home. There were thirty people in the carriage, and six of them—20 percent!—were reading one or other volume of The fucking Dark-Headed Clock. And what I remember thinking, knowing whatever it was that I knew of these books: Blake would have absolutely hated them.
Well, of course, Blake did hate them. Unfortunate, really, since he wrote them.
I mean, that’s a bush I can’t beat about, and you’ve probably figured it out, if you didn’t already know. By the time Blake did announce his authorship to the world at large, the moment had passed; the clock had tick-tocked its last and would never be wound again. There were six separate volumes by the end; Blake had made all the money there was to be made, and would be making that money for most of the rest of his life. I’d been wondering if he was skating by on whatever Wonderkids royalties trickled his way, along with the poster revenue, but no, he had another source of income we knew nothing about.
We knew nothing about it because he wasn’t proud of it. He didn’t like it. The books had hardly been his idea. They started life as a joke. Greg’s mate, Kirk, the wordsmith behind many hastily-remaindered rock biographies, at whose house they occasionally gathered after last call to smoke pot and listen to Johnny Cash, had started, one stoned night, to muse aloud: “You know what someone should do? A Christian twist on those Harry Potter books. That would be huge.”
It was one of those conversational gambits that open the door on many silly suggestions and puns. The books could have died then and there, stillborn, in a lengthy stoned sketch, but, it was agreed between toke and exhalation that such a series, if written, would clean up. Blake stayed up that night and wrote the synopsis for the first three—based on a silly idea he’d had years before, a silly idea for which I had rescued the doodled blueprints from the WonderBus—and, over a subsequent drink, told Kirk he’d found a plot: it was something he could do, and he needed something to do. Kirk, only mildly miffed (he didn’t envy Blake the epic task, though he would always take credit), explained that he’d recently had a meeting with a children’s book editor who had expressed the desire for something to capitalize on Harry Potter, which had set him thinking in the first place. Not his bag, obviously, kids and all that. Why didn’t Blake meet with the editor?
That is apparently how books are sold, not actually by writing them in dignified solitude at a distance: who knew? A three-book deal was put into place by an agent delighted to oversee this relatively sure thing (she hadn’t remembered a rejection letter she wrote Blake for How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear: “the contemporary marketplace is not forgiving enough for this kind of book”) and Blake found himself with a signed contract, a decent advance against a very good percentage, and some fairly tight deadlines. He didn’t want them under his own name, James Lewis, because he wasn’t sure of their merit; no one suggested the books be published under the name Blake Lear. Blake suggested a mysteriously Christian looking pseudonym: a Christian name, as it were. He didn’t want to do any promotion for them at all, in the unlikely event that any was required, and it was generally agreed that a Pynchon-esque air of mystery with regards to the author would be appropriate. “Judith Esther” it was: two consecutive books in the Catholic Old Testament.
The first copy I ever saw, Blake finally reminded me, was on one of my rare trips to his place.
“What’s this bootleg-looking book?” I asked.
“Some crap someone sent me,” he replied, shelving it. It was the advance reading copy of the first volume. He cleaned his desk up better after that. Certainly I never saw, as you do on authors’ shelves, the spines of every first edition, including translations into various dialects of Chinese.
How did I finally find out?
Greg, of course. The man couldn’t keep a secret. The publishers managed to keep the pseudonymous author’s identity strictly under wraps—it was a contractual obligation on the part of both house and author—going so far as to put a picture of a middle-aged woman on the inside back cover, with a fake biography. She lived in Tuscany where she wrote in peace and seclusion. As the books got more traction, people presumably thought it peculiar that Ms. Esther didn’t court the limelight at the Hay Festival, but I don’t know that her identity was a mystery people were dying to solve. If anyone had been, all he would have to do was hang out at the Coachy and talk to Greg for five seconds. The man simply couldn’t be quiet about knowing famous people, even fictional ones.
So we’re at our table, just by the general knowledge machine, and in shambles Blake. I’m fresh off a big summer festival badly timed against the European Championships, there’s conversation to be made, Greg is temporarily mute for some reason, and I remark, quite innocently, that there was a moment in the bus on my last tour with the Britpop band when every single person was reading one of the Dark-Headed Clocks. This was around the publication of the third volume, when all of London was bracing itself to queue at Tower Records at midnight to buy Midnight in the Dark-Headed Clock. At its mention, Greg looked particularly pleased with himself.
“Do you want to tell him or shall I?” he asked Blake.
“About the football tickets?” Blake answered vaguely.
“No. About the . . . you know . . .”
Blake sighed. “Greg, we love you because you’re Greg, and you are Greg, but how can you be so unfailingly Greggy all the time? Doesn’t it tire you, playing yourself?”
“I haven’t told him anything, not a word,” said Greg in his own defense. “He brought it up.”
“So what?” said Blake.
“Well, then it’s like lying and I never lie.”
“We know you never lie.”
“What?” I asked. “You’ve got to tell me now.”
“Look,” said Blake. “It has to be a secret, right?” I liked the sound of it, whatever it was.
“But Greg knows it,” I pointed out. “It can’t be a secret.”
“Unfortunately,” said Blake, “Greg was there when it happened. But he’s sworn to secrecy, and so are you. I mean, you really are. Money depends on it.”
“Mum’s the word,” said Greg.
“I’m Judith Esther,” said Blake, under his breath.
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“I’m Judith Esther. Judith Esther am I.”
“You wrote the Dark-Headed Clock?”
“Yes.”
“Under the name Judith Esther?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve ghostwritten the books for a real person called Judith Esther. She makes all the money.”
“No. Judith Esther doesn’t exist. I make the dough.”
“So you’re rich.”
“I stand to be.”
“Right.” I said. “Who knows?”
“Greg and everyone he’s ever met, though somehow it’s still under wraps, probably because no one believes him.”
“Yeah, he did once say he knew Madonna.”
“I didn’t,” said Greg. “I said I’d met Madonna.”
“But you hadn’t.”
“Yes, but I only missed her by a few moments.”
“Anyway,” continued Blake, “apart from Greg, there are no other threats to my security apart from my agent, my publisher, Jack, my dad; oh and Kirk, who came up with the idea originally.”
“And that old lady on the back cover of the book.”
“That’s my mum,” said Greg.
“Mum’s literally the word,” Blake confirmed.
“She’s no longer with us. Probably turning in her grave.”
“Blake, you wrote this best-selling book?”
“I wrote that best-selling book.”
“You couldn’t get your last book published and you are now a best-selling author under the name Judith Esther.”
“In one.”
“Jesus Christ,” said Greg in exasperation. “It’s not rocket science.”
“I understand, Greg,” I said. “I get it! I’m just trying to take it in.”
“Look,” said Blake. “The books are what they are. There was a niche to be filled, and I filled it. I’m quite fond of Ed and Bill, and some of the baddies, but I’m not big on the overall message.”
“Which is that Science is bad and Christianity is good.”
“That,” said Blake with a smile, “is a grotesque simplification of the Dark-Headed Clock Trilogy.” There was an element of pride in his voice.
“Is that a yes?”
“Yes.”
“And you don’t believe that.”
“Not at all. Which is why it’s very important that no one knows anything about Judith Esther, because, basically, the books originated in a cynical marketing ploy.”
“People think they’re sincere, right? Everyone assumes Judith Esther is Christian. This isn’t all part of some lengthy religious conversion you’ve had that started in jail?”
“Might be,” said Blake, and he winked. “None of your business.” He was joking, being serious, and joking. “But the important thing is: no one ever knows. The deal depends on it. My job depends on it. My pension depends on it. I was going to kill them off at the end of Volume Three but that became, literally, and contractually, impossible. They’re bizarrely immortal. So we’re going for three more.”
“But the third one isn’t even out yet.”
“Sweet, I’m on the fifth.”
“How’s it going?”
“I cannot legally tell you.”
“And isn’t there a film of the first one about to come out?” He nodded. “All I can say, Blake, is congratulations.”
“I’m really happy for their success. My bank manager is very happy. My father is for once proud of me, though he keeps on about whether I’ll ever have success under my true colors, like he fears the name Lewis will disappear off the planet. It’s lucky Jackie’s got some kids. But please, please, just forget you ever knew it.”
“It’s not a joke, right, Judith?”
“I never lie,” said Blake. “As sure as my name is Judith Esther. And Blake Lear.”
He could still surprise you: perhaps there was life in the old dog yet.
Blake’s circle of acquaintance was small, and he traveled often, always alone. His secret success was easily forgotten; he had everything he wanted, but he didn’t want much. He bought a house, bequeathed me the apartment, went through a girlfriend here and there, sisterly figures with whom he shared space for a time, rode the Dark-Headed Clock wave as long as he was able and, as far as I knew, played no music at all. He didn’t approve of my chosen profession, thought it a waste, and, as any father would, encouraged me to do anything but. He liked me to play the guitar for him, though—it was the only workout his old Takamine got.
There was another pseudonymous trilogy after the Dark-Headed Clock, but, because he couldn’t legally write it under the same name, he was back to square one; it never caught on. Years passed. Middle-age spread. He went about his business and I went about mine—“Road Scholar Tour Management” (I know). I even persuaded Mitchell to start up the American chapter—now there was always a chart, a schedule, an itinerary. Without wishing to bore you, and believe me, Blake never wanted to know a thing about it, we were the first vertical touring company: we offered it all, from driver (of buses we owned), merch management, tour management, all the way to therapy and AA meetings. We got good. Our motto was: “Hands On! Hands Off!” You know, I’ll even teach a band to take a look out of the window, go for a walk. I see Road Scholar like one of those universities that takes on promising athletes: you’ve got to educate them too. Every now and then I think of Clement’s; we’re in loco parentis. Mitchell was a bit that way for me. Blake was just loco.