Party Time

This year my publisher held their Christmas party in a champagne bar in Soho. I am always grateful to be asked, of course. Indeed, I’d be distinctly miffed to be left off the list. Nevertheless, I always find the experience difficult. I suppose I’ve just never really learned how to behave at parties.

I generally try to find somewhere on the fringe of the party where I can sit down and quietly go into a trance; and I had managed to lay claim to a reasonably comfortable nook when a young woman came and sat down next to me. I knew right away that she was an illustrator. You can always tell. Generally it’s the shoes that give them away.

Anyway, she asked what I did and I said I was a writer. I knew what was coming because conversations that start like this always end up in the same place – the similarities, or differences, in how writers and illustrators work. Eventually this always leads to an exchange that goes more or less like this.

Illustrator: So you write on a computer?
Me: Yes.
Illustrator: What, the whole thing?
Me: Yes
Illustrator: What, right from the start?
Me: Yes.
Illustrator: But don’t you ever want to use a pen?
Me: Not really.
Illustrator: Not even to make notes or something?
Me: No.
Illustrator: But do you like writing on a computer or is it just because it’s more convenient?
Me: I like writing on a computer. You see it’s like a pen but much better.
Illustrator: (Pause while she considers this.) But don’t you ever feel like, I don’t know, like… you really just want to use a pen?

All the time this conversation is going on, it’s getting harder and harder for us to hear each other, even though we are only inches apart. This is because people are pouring into the bar all the time and the bar staff are constantly going round proffering trays laden with champagne. Consequently, everyone is getting increasingly animated and talking more and more loudly.

The illustrator says something else about using a pen. It sounds suspiciously like ‘But don’t you ever feel you like you just want to get dirty?’ I decide that one of us may be a little drunk and I’m fairly convinced it isn’t me.

‘I can’t really hear what you’re saying,’ I tell her.

She nods. ‘We’d be better of texting each other,’ she says.

I hate texting but I decide to keep that information to myself.

Other Authors

Sometimes there is nothing more disappointing than other authors.

I remember meeting one of my big heroes at a party very early in my career. He was a big man. Physically intimidating. To say that he was drunk was to make a colossal under-statement. He was positively deranged. His eyes were blood-shot, he was unshaven, his clothes were filthy and he looked as though he had been sleeping in the gutter for several days. His wife, a small and desparate-looking woman, kept clutching his arm in an effort to restrain him. Angrily he shook her off.

I have no idea what he was talking about but whatever it was, he was furious about it. He kept cursing and shaking his head like a dog that has just come out of the sea. Spittle flew from his lips as he struggled to enunciate the syllables. In one hand he held an empty beer bottle which he was brandishing like a weapon. The other hand he thrust into his pocket at regular intervals, to produce a silver hip flask from which he drank greedily.

It was my editor who had introduced us. Perhaps he thought I might calm the man down. He didn’t know me very well at the time or he might have realised that calming people down is not really my forte. On the contrary, I seem at times to exercise a kind of psychic induction on people who are already agitated. Perhaps because I am, myself, full of a pent up anger that goes back to my childhood and beyond. Inherited anger, that is how I think of it.

The Inebriated Author must have sensed this in me because he took to me immediately. Bending his face close to mine he muttered angrily about the ‘other bastards in the room’. He could see that I wasn’t like them. I was all right. But ‘those fuckers’. He straightened up and gazed defiantly around the room.

‘I think we should go,’ his wife said, making a hopeless attempt to steer him towards the door. He glared at her as if he might hit her. ‘Don’t be so fucking ridiculous!’ he said. Then he turned back to me. ‘You must come and stay with us in Dartmoor.’ His face was so near mine now that I was breathing his breath and I tried not to wince. The breath of alcoholics generally smells of sick. His smelled as though his insides were full of rotten fungus.

‘We’ve got a cottage there,’ he went on. ‘Nothing grand. None of these people…’ he made a sweeping gesture with the bottle, forcing people standing around him to duck. ‘None of them would ever go there. They’d think it was a miserable hovel.’

It occurred to me that it probably was a miserable hovel. How could it be anything else? But I promised I would go and stay there with him. ‘You’ve got our phone number, haven’t you?’ he asked.

I hadn’t got his phone number since we’d only been introduced a few minutes earlier but I nodded assuredly.

‘Good, then that’s settled. We can get drunk. Properly bloody drunk, I mean. Not like this bunch of pansies. You do like a drink, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do like a drink. Actually I’ve always been absolutely useless at alcohol. I get completely stotious just looking at a bottle of wine but I didn’t think this was the moment to bring that up.

‘It does you good to get well and truly drunk every now and again,’ he said.

I nodded in agreement.

‘You’re all right,’ he repeated. Then without warning he strolled off towards the open window and threw his empty bottle out into the street. We were on the first floor but he didn’t even glance outside to see whether anyone was passing.

At the sound of broken glass everyone in the room turned and looked in his direction. ‘What are you all staring at?’ he demanded. People looked away again quickly. His eye fell on another empty bottle on a nearby table. Immediately he grabbed it and threw it out the window like the first.

Now his wife, who looked as if she might burst into tears at any moment, began positively dragging him away from the window. The editor who had been standing as though turned to stone came back to life and grabbed the author’s other arm. Between them they propelled him across the room while the crowd parted around them like the Red Sea at the behest of Moses.

Suddenly he seemed to abandon all resistance, nodding his head and smiling grimly as if this were exactly how a man of his talent might expect to be treated. If we had put a crown of thorns on his head he would have merely taken it as his due. As he passed me, he stopped and looked me in the eye. ‘Don’t forget,’ he said, ‘Dartmoor. We’ll show the bastards how to get really drunk.’

The following year I heard that he had died of cancer. Ocasionally, I imagine what it would have been like if I’d taken him up on his offer. Horrendous but memorable no doubt.

The Poor Little Match Girl

Deck the halls with sprigs of holly! The party season is upon us!

When I first joined my current publisher it was very small. As in ‘Who’s an ootsy-cootsy little publisher, then?’ They held their parties in the basement of their offices, bought the food from Marks and Spencers and even, in some cases, made it themselves.

Now they are a great big bouncing boy, having eaten and been eaten by other publishing companies with their roots in vast financial enterprises controlled from offices in distant lands of which we little Englanders know next to nothing.

The party is now held on the roof terrace of a club in Shaftesbury Avenue, the Marks and Spencers’ cakes and quiches have been replaced by canapés that are increasingly unrecognisable as actual food. And the place is crowded.

When I say crowded, I mean, ‘Oh my god! If there was a fire in this building we would all be toast!’ And what a hubbub we all make. You cannot hear a word anyone says unless they are leaning so far towards you that they are actually inside your ear, using the cocktail stick from their canapé to tunnel their way through the wax.

However, worse by far than leaning intimately over people you half-know and shouting down their ears, is the fate of those who used to be invited to the party but no longer are. Authors who have been left high and dry on the bank of editorial disinterest as the great flood of more-commercial, more-edgy or simply more-promising authors washes past.

Yes, Christmas is no time to be a failing author. The workhouse is not just something you read about in Dickens before shutting the book with a shudder and opening the Ferrero Rocher. It’s a real place where authors whom Santa is not pleased with this year must earn their keep by writing copy for businesses, lecturing part time, reading other people’s manuscripts, preparing funding applications, running workshops, and all or any of the multitude of other little diversions that we keep in our portfolios for a snowy day.

So as you stand in the corner of the over-crowded room, rapidly losing count of the number of glasses of sparkling wine you have consumed, spare a thought for the poor little match girl you passed on the street. Once upon a time she was an author just like you.

Why I don't like literary parties

I remember the very first literary party I was invited to over twenty five years ago. I was very excited and rather intimidated to be introduced to a writer whose work I greatly admired and who was regarded with something akin to reverence by many critics. To my dismay I soon saw that he was extremely drunk and not at all in a pleasant way. In fact with his psychotic glare and pent up anger he was a distinctly frightening figure.

I quickly sought to make some excuse and disappear into the crowd but he would not hear of it, demanding to know what I thought about all sorts of topics and arguing furiously with any opinion I ventured to advance. But though my views appeared to infuriate him, he seemed to take an inordinate and irrational liking to me, insisting that I come to stay with him in his cottage in Dartmoor (an offer I never took up.)

To my relief, after about an hour of this, he lost interest in me and wandered over to the window. The party was being held in an elegant part of Oxford and we were on the first floor. A moment later I heard the sound of glass shattering. It soon transpired that the eminent author had decided to amuse himself by throwing empty beer bottles onto the paving stones below. Not long after this he was forcibly removed from the party.

‘Is he often like this?’ I asked the host.

‘Oh yes,’ he replied, ‘all the time.’

The author in question has been dead for a number of years but I will not embarrass anyone, myself included, by naming names.

I should not have been surprised. An author and his work are two very different things and a beautiful and profound piece of work may be produced by an absolutely vile individual. This truism was brought home to me more recently when I attended another literary get together in a well-known club in Central London. I was standing in a corner, wondering why I had come since I dislike parties so much, when I was hailed by another author whom I had met before once or twice.

For a couple of reasons my heart sank. Firstly because she is infinitely more successful than I am. (Yes I know that’s not very noble but there you are). But mainly because she is one of the most tedious women ever to walk upon the face of the Earth. It is impossible to have a conversation with her because she does not talk to you, she talks at you and she has one topic and one topic only: herself.

This occasion was to prove no exception. I heard in great detail about how well she was doing and about her plans for doing even better in the years to come. I think if I had fallen to the floor with a heart attack she would not have noticed but would simply have carried on talking until the paramedics arrived and asked her to step aside.

This morning I was out shopping with my wife and, happening to pass a book store I popped inside and glanced about for one of her books. I didn’t have to look very hard. There was a whole shelf of them. ‘I bet they’re complete rubbish!’ I said to myself, picking one up and opening it at the first page. In fact, it was terrific. The conception of the story was intelligent and imaginative. The writing was crisp and robust. The plot moved at a cracking pace. Within a few lines I was utterly gripped. Indeed, I only just stopped myself from buying a copy!

When I went back outside and re-joined my wife she peered at me curiously.‘Are you all right?’ she asked. ‘You look a bit pale.’

‘I’m fine,’ I told her. ‘Absolutely fine.’

I was lying, of course.

A word of encouragement

The writer Jill Dawson once told me that she went to the doctor about some ailment and the doctor, upon learning that she was a writer said, 'I'm going to write a book when I retire.' Whereupon, Jill with considerable sharpness, replied, 'That's interesting because I'm going to be a doctor when I retire.'

I always wish I could come out with a reply like that. But I never do. However, I thought I would regale you with a collection of some of the encouraging comments which I've heard over the last thirty years. So here they are.

1. When I was working as a teacher
Parent: Can’t you get him to read, Mr Keaney. He won’t read for me. I stand over him and I say, ‘You read that book!’ but he won’t.
Me: What are you reading at the moment?
Parent (scornfully): Oh, I haven’t got time for reading!

2. Senior Publishing Executive shortly after ordering a £45 bottle of wine with company credit card.
Have you any idea how much it costs to get a set of posters designed and printed, Brian?

3. Junior Marketing Assistant at party
Your new book seems to be doing well. Must be the cover.

4. Senior Marketing Assistant at same party.
Your new book seems to be doing well. Must be the cover.

5. Same Junior Marketing Assistant at same party but now quite drunk.
I’m glad I don’t work in editorial. You know what authors are like. Oops, sorry, I forgot! You are an author. (Giggles)

6. My brother
Brian doesn’t have a proper job.

7. Teacher whose class I am about to address
Teacher: Now I know that Mr Keaney is going to tell us all about how we should improve our writing by adding lots of lovely describing words. And we know what they’re called, don’t we? Hands up.
Pupil: Adjectives, miss.
Teacher: Very good, Siobhan! Adjectives are the words that make writing come to life and I know that when we listen to Mr Keaney’s writing we’re going to hear lots of exciting adjectives that we can use in our own writing.

8. Bossy middle class father
Do children actually read books any more?

9. Unpublished poet who mysteriously asked me to talk to her writing group
But do you really think there’s any point in books for teenagers? I mean I went straight from children’s books to Jane Austen and George Eliot. Don’t you think we should be encouraging them to read proper literature?

10. Everybody and his uncle
I bet you wish you made as much money as J K Rowling