She just rubber-stamped what the other judges said Mr Flint commented on his way to collecting a £2500 bursary which comes with a commitment
“She just rubber-stamped what the other judges said,” Mr Flint commented on his way to collecting a £2,500 bursary, which comes with a commitment from Amazon to promote his first novel. According to Zadie Smith, “the relationship was brief and the prize was months later.”This must, of course, be right – he’s 32, she’s 25, brief relationships happen – but the story points up one of the less widely publicised aspects of the literary world. Writers tend to be possessed of a generous and powerful libido – there’s something about sitting alone all day dreaming up stories that gingers up the hormones. By the time many of them emerge for that evening’s launch party or library reading, they are ravening beasts of sexual need.It is not, in fact, poets who are irrepressibly randy – a rumour put about by the Poetry Society – but novelists. Hungry for new experience, fiction writers are never happier than when skipping perilously along the dangerous edge of intimacy and are able to note it all down in the morning under the general heading of “research”.Who are the lucky beneficiaries of all this energy? A few writers are in the habit of sleeping with their readers, but it is tiring, demeaning work which only rarely pays dividends in terms of sales.
Others, out of a grim sense of duty, attempt to seduce someone from their publishing house – almost always a terrible misjudgement. British publishers are famously undersexed and are usually content to restrict to themselves to one “brief relationship” a year, usually at the Frankfurt Book Fair, where certain establishments on the Bahnhofstrasse exist for this very purpose. A small number of them, it is true, avail themselves of a literary casting couch, but few authors, having put up with lengthy, droning conversations about international copyright, have found it a rewarding experience.So, traditionally, writers have ended up with one another. “No writing is without what Barthes called the love-me element,” as Frances Wilson wrote in her book Literary Seductions, a study of such authorial liaisons as Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s, Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin’s, and Robert Graves and Laura Riding’s. “This desire to be desired is writing’s appeal.”What is different today lies in the system of patronage, formal and informal, upon which the modern book world depends. Established authors are expected to help their less well-known confrÿres with introductions to agents, good-natured reviews, the odd puff of praise for a book jacket.Yet, because a great army of sneaks and whistle-blowers are on hand to report to the nearest arts page gossip column any open link between critic and author, judge and judged, only the brief relationship is safe from prying eyes. If that is now also to become a subject of disapproval, and authors are no longer allowed to look favourably on any work by someone with whom they once slept, however briefly, then the literary scene will become incomparably duller – indeed, it may not be able to operate at all.Any sensible person will welcome the story of Smith and Flint as the upholding by young writers of a great literary tradition Flint’s prize-winning novel, incidentally is called Button.
I can’t wait to read it.terblacker aol
More from Terence Blacker. Rather than add to the global quantity of jeers, sneers, smears and nasty personal remarks, let us raise our sights and consider the factual basis of political reality. Rather than add to the global quantity of jeers, sneers, smears and nasty personal remarks, let us raise our sights and consider the factual basis of political reality.
This won’t take long. There’s almost nothing there.Let us take as our text the Whitehall production of Much Ado About Mandelson. This entertainment highlights our ex-minister’s involvement in the Dome-sponsoring Hinduja and his passport application.
Did Mr Mandelson, when Dome minister, call the Home Office to enquire about the billionaire’s application or not?His position can be summarised as follows: I didn’t make the call My office made the call. Oh, I made the call myself did I, Jack? No, Alastair, I didn’t make the call I wasn’t asked all weekend about making any call I don’t remember making the call I didn’t forget anything about any call I made the call but my office made more calls than I did. I am not a liar.His own piquant summary consists of one proposition held with customary conviction: “I came briefly to be persuaded that my recollection was entirely wrong.” He didn’t say which recollection was entirely wrong, but then he didn’t have to. They all were.When Norman Baker asked in a written question precisely what Mr Mandelson’s involvement in the passport application was, the minister tried to pressure the Home Office to keep his name out of the answer, saying: “I did not see why my involvement needed to feature”.Well, it was merely the answer to the question being asked.