Journal of a Novel #5

16/2/21

Last night I loaded an old stack of paper into my printer in order to have a hard copy of John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist, which I’d just found a PDF of, to hand (that’s the American writer and teacher John Gardner, by the way, not the bloke who wrote a load of Bond books).

Later, reading it in my living room while my girlfriend sat next to me, I paused at page eleven, turned to her, said, Very funny. Lockdown has amplified our shared silliness, and it’s not unusual for us to leave each other little notes, either cute or dumb or both. Turning now to page eleven I saw, beneath the copy like an optical illusion, a scrawling message, black biro behind the printed text. With the pages on my lap, I couldn’t see clearly what it said, though; assumed it was a quick scribbled taunt, written by my girlfriend as a tired third-lockdown tease while I’d been in the toilet. As I picked it up, I realised I hadn’t left the room since starting the book, and before I could say, Oh, don’t worry, I remembered what it actually was — though remembered might be too generous a term.

I rotated the paper — what was written was done so many years ago on a blank page, and Gardner’s words were now superimposed on top of my own epistle, which was upside down compared to the direction the document was printed — and was sent back to, I think, circa 2014, when I came home one night, utterly fucked (drunk, drugged) and wrote on a piece of A4 pulled from my printer the words Sorry — I love you all. Tay x. I then took a load of pills — or what I perceived to be a load, but in reality was probably fewer than ten — taped the paper to my laptop’s lid, and went to bed. In the morning I woke up fine, depressed and ashamed, sure, but otherwise fine; if anything, the pills had allayed my hungover headache, and I felt better than I had on many other mornings. For whatever reason, however, I put the piece of paper back in its stack, where it stayed until last night.

Other than including the incident as a scene in my novel (if I’m even remembering it right — I’m pretty sure that’s how it played out, but I was a state back then, and can’t be sure), I’d never thought much about the ‘suicide note’, if that’s even what it was, but when I saw it yesterday, faded behind John Gardner’s introductory notes about what the beginner novelist can expect from their chosen career, I was hit with equal parts hilarity (we managed, after much sad confusion, to curtain the discovery with vital black humour, Was that all I was gonna say?, etc.), and a shuddering nostalgia of disbelief (Did I really do that?).

Seven years removed from the note’s composition, I see the last words of a potential suicide mingled with those of a man (Gardner) outlining, in language perfect for a potential writer both excited and dispirited about what may or may not lie ahead, in sentences foundation-deep for their recondite understanding of the terror involved when sacking everything off in artistic pursuit, exactly what it takes to become not just a writer, but an artist of merit — and I can’t help but smile. If you’d’ve said, seven years ago, that my doggerel declaration of calling it a day would in the future be overlapped by the words of a book I printed out because I was closer than I’d ever been to getting somewhere, anywhere, with my art, I’d’ve said, Bollocks, or sighed a Fat Chance pregnant with hope.

And while I’m still far from shore (agent-less, awaiting representation, nervous for emails back like they are bloodwork), I have an image in my head of, upon some kind of publication, putting the page in a frame and hanging it above my desk, where every day I could look at how, beneath the caves of my inverted letters (the Y of ‘You’, the canyon the two joined up Ls in ‘All’ make), the words — part of Gardner's first paragraph, ‘The Writer’s Nature’ — printed there now seemed to reflect on what was once written:

The better the writer’s feel for language and its limits, the better his odds become.