The House of Writers (28 page)

A
ND
in a similar vein, meet Hank Zepon.”

“Hi.”

“Yeah. Let me explicate. I was struggling to fend off the taxman while writing novel number four,
Getrude’s Garters,
a pornophantastical hallucination involving Ms. Stein, so I invited donations in return for a namecheck in the text. I received £5 donations from a thousand people, so £5000. This was enough to survive for the next year, allowing me to complete the novel. I chose to insert the names during a hallucinogenic episode, where Gertrude recalls all the people she had insulted over a six-month period. This proved a lucrative method of reader sponsorship. You can’t trust readers to actually buy copies of your novel. Even your most admiring fans will wait for the library stock, or borrow from friends, or torrent ebooks, when that was still an option. I’m told all the computers have exploded outside, or some such bollocks. Anyway, my next novel,
Kafka’s Pantaloons,
was an eroticophilosophico exploration of the sexual kinks of Franz. This time, 689 people donated. I think some people felt cheated by my long list of their names, expecting a more subtle insertion. So this time I had the names more casually inserted in such passages as: “Felice strapped on her dildo and, approaching Franz’s parted buttocks, noticed out the window her friends Paul Thompson and Linda Stewart walking past.” And: “Dora lowered herself on to Franz’s rigid cock and asked whether he had written back to Julie Driscoll and Nigel Parsons before jiggling into penetration.” This proved more successful. For the next novel, some 300,000 people had donated, meaning I had some work to insert them. I had to write a novel in the manner of Perec’s
Life A User’s Manual,
rife with lists, so I wrote
The Hopscopalypse
, about a plague that descends at random on various towns, including several pages listing the dead in each chapter. The novel was panned by Adam Mars-Jones in
The Telegraph,
who wrote: “Zepon’s latest reader-funded production drowns in its own making.” Meaning: too many names. I had made the cardinal mistake of becoming too avaricious. My next novel received 69 donations. This made no difference, as I had made £150,000 with the previous, allowing me to survive in luxury for a long time. I wrote
The Full Sixty-Nine,
a sequence of pornohomoeroticophilosophico tracts interspersed with hardcore fucking. This proved so popular, 3,382,818 people donated £5 for a namecheck in my next book. I made £16,914,060. All I had to do was write this novel and retire forever. I had almost three and a half million names to insert into my novel. These alone, providing each consisted of two names, would take up 6,765,636 words, longer than
Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus, Á la recherche du temps perdu, Zettels Traum, Clarissa,
and
Poor Fellow My Country
combined, with room to spare for an
Infinite Jest.
I made things easy for myself by writing a meta-novel about a writer attempting to write the longest novel in history (this endeavour minus the creativity had been attempted in halfwit conceptual artist Nigel Tomm’s
The Blah Story,
where the artist had cut and pasted ‘blah’ in various permutations over 23 enormous volumes), so I could include the names as lists for a few pages without provoking the reader’s ire. The whole thing took over five years, during which time I suffered a nervous breakdown. I wanted to write a work of art and not be written off as a cash-hoovering has-been. I was up to 7,181,819 words, with 2,639,182 names left to insert when I collapsed in the street, the millions of names rolling in a permanent tickertape in my brain, causing me to haemorrhage cerebrally. I recovered a month later to discover some supporters had withdrawn their monies, forcing me to search and replace them with another. A million people believed I wasn’t able to complete the work. I had to prove them wrong. Two years later, I delivered the finished novel, entitled simply i, to be published in thirty volumes, one volume per month for two-and-a-half years. The publisher predicted astronomical sales, but the poorly received first five books led to the novel being shelved. The subscribers demanded their cash back. I had to return a fortune and privately publish a revised version. I cracked up when one subscriber ranted at me on TV for ‘failing to deliver.’ I punched his face to Picasso. After paying £500,000 bail, I fled for Switzerland. I came here to try and sell the original version of my novel, and finally be recognised as a genius. This didn’t happen. I ended up in this ward for nutsos.”

“That is not the word we use,” the doctor said.

“What happened?” Erin asked.

“Other writers stole sections and sold them as their own novels.”

“Of course.”

“Thanks for that, Hank.”

“Yeah. Cheers.”

P
ETE
and Rob, having picked up the pertinent information that I used to be a writer, struggled through the throng to The House. Starting on the first floor, they Tweedledeed and Tweedledummed around looking for me and making brattish diversions. Their inquisitiveness took them to my desk as I was typing out part of my space western. Pete, in his Swiss-cheese boots, and Rob, still resplendent in his sweat-drenched bus driver’s shirt, arrived like two flairless hobos at my desk, attracting the shifty-eyed contumely of my colleagues, who looked up from their intergalactic saloon shootouts to flash their aggrieved miens. Pete launched my stapler towards the ceiling and leaned over my manuscript, making exaggerated sniffing sounds and a peee-eeeew gesture. He read aloud:

“ ‘Terence stepped out the ship with luck in his loins and lions in his underpants.’ People pay to read this crap?”

“That’s my lions-in-the-underpants scene,” I said. This didn’t recapture my dignity.

“Miss us?” Rob asked.

“You know, my grandfather and great-grandfather were writers,” Pete said. I had read the work of Gilbert and Christopher Sorrentino with admiration and found it hard to believe Pete came from the same genes.

“Yes.”

“I bet I could write a better novel than you, using my writing genes.”

“Nope.”

“Pass me a sheet of A4.”

I plaintively obeyed. Pete kicked C.G. Higson from his desk to free up space and began his novel as C.G. blankly continued scrawling his Klingon orgy on a Post-it. Rob went off to kick chocolate bars from a vending machine. I sat staring out the window at smog clouds as Pete wrote feverishly, using up my A4 and laughing at his inherited wit. Fours days later, with only two breaks for food and sleep, he showed me his manuscript, detailing the third life and second resurrection of Antony Lamont from Gilbert Sorrentino’s
Mulligan Stew
(foremost of Flann O’Brien’s
At Swim-Two-Birds),
after moving into a hack novel written by, surprise, yours truly. Lamont, having escaped the scourges of
Guinea Red,
ended up in a devastating parody of my space western, brimming with parodic dialogue and mock-terrible writing. I read the completed manuscript wincing and laughing at the same time, kicking the fates for making this asshole Pete into a splendid comedic writer like his forebears, and making a mental note of some ideas I could steal for my next book. I took comfort from the fact this novel was too niche to ever find readers and so handed it back safe that my job wasn’t under threat.

“You know, you should consider working here,” I offered.

“I don’t have time for that shit. Literature is piss. In fact—” he produced a lighter and torched his brilliant novel, extinguishing the fire with a piss cataract. As I watched a man burn a manuscript ten times better than anything I could ever write, and cackle hysterically, and kick over my desk, and call everyone in the room expendable cunts, I contemplated whether saving the world from ScotCall had been a sensible manoeuvre. He masturbated in my bed and drank all the milk in the canteen.

F
INDING
nothing else to do, with the night dwindling to mere hours, and the horrible threat of the morning on the loom, the writers cuddled, nuzzled, tickled, touched, stroked, licked, sucked, kissed, and poked one another, on and against the freezers, and afterwards, promised to protect and love one another until the end of time, surrendering to the tantalising delusion of mutual support in an age of self-preservation, mouthing their meaningless words of love which, coming from writers, were far more poetic and cribbed subconsciously from Shakespeare, fighting the sleep that would lead them into the unwanted daylight. I curled up with Linda Tunnet, whose novel
A Bee, See?
won the Adair Prize in 2039, praised for its skill at “using clichés in a such a manner the reader is momentarily duped into believing the novel has something original to offer,” and mouthed romantic lies into our mutual ears. “I will hold your hand like this until you are a wrinkled old prune repulsive to the eyes,” she said. “I will touch your knee like this until your skeleton is bursting out your flesh,” I replied. “I will squeeze your penis in this manner until the heat death of the universe,” I said. And so on. Following on from this, the writers entertained the delusion that they still had futures, and further works to write, and proceeded to describe their upcoming novels. Joanna Ruocco outlined her novel about a man obsessed with the curliness of kale, whose mania unlocks deep ontological questions and forces us to consider each individual Atom of our very Humanbeingness; Naomi Alderman her novel about a school teacher combating her depression and love for a female pupil and her unfortunate name “Miss Butt” that forces us to consider the plight of the Other in the age of the Self; Ned Beauman his novel about a scientist who invents the controversial pneugenics theory, whereby those taking up precious oxygen with pointless blabber or breathing were deemed more suited to termination, that forces us to consider Compassion and Trust in a world with dwindling room and resources; Shane Jones his novel about a clown whose left testicle swells to spacehopper proportions during a performance, and the ensuing media furore about his accidental exposure in front of children that forces us to consider how the Truth is distorted in the era of Viral Media; Joanna Kavenna her novel about a ukulele player with jaundice who is thrust into the limelight on a TV talent show and struggles to cope with the ensuing fame, and begs for a return to his poor life that forces us to consider the Price of Fame in a Transient Age; Brian Oliu his novel about a computer virus that uproots an internet user’s mental landscape, causing him to return pointlessly to shops where he had no further business to conduct, to return to concluded conversations to see if they might have anything else they wished to say to him after their meetings had concluded, and to stumble with no purpose into shops and buildings with no motive but to distract or lose oneself in the maze of distractions, that forces us to consider Technology’s impact on the Mind and Body; Kamila Shamsie her novel about a secret sect formed during WWII to make unkind remarks about Catholics in addition to the Jews that forces us to reconsider the Parameters of Evil; William Seabrook his novel about a packet of crisps elected Prime Minister of Britain that fails to live up to its promises of 100% more starch content in the House of Commons, a beef ’n’ onion flavour resurgence, and the promise of 20 new combos—caramel ’n’ hops, pear ’n’ lava, lemon ’n’ cardboard, pesto ’n’ ink, banana ’n’ turmeric, olive oil ’n’ brine, Benylin ’n’ peach, hazelnut ’n’ sweat, avocado ’n’ sapling, aspic ’n’ oregano, Polyfilla ’n’ nachos, sports sock ’n’ pizza, s’mores ’n’ elbows, pickle ’n’ toothpaste, oak ’n’ tulip, lime ’n’ stubble, cream ’n’ wool, horse ’n’ halloumi, snot ’n’ air, hair ’n’ time—that forces the reader to consider the Power of the Democratic Process in a Cynical Age; James Yeh his novel about a professor of mathematics obsessed with the
mise en scène
of Jim Jarmusch movies who beats his drinking problem through the snugger drug of independent cinema that teaches us to appreciate the important of Radical Thought in an Age of Prescriptive Thinking; and Ross Raisin his novel about a murderous stereo that instructs toddlers to slice up their parents and deposit their remains in a sewage pipe that teaches us the importance of Love and Understanding and not listening to Immoral Voices that will Lead Us Astray.

H
AROLD
Impugns woke to a vexing reality when celebrated poet Archie Denissss arrived at The House upon his 75
^th
birthday. Archie Denissss had written the world’s most popular short-form poem (a senryu—the non-pastoral form of the haiku) called “Hope,” an overly sentimental blip that became every citizen’s number one favourite-of-all-time example of the redeeming and hopeful function of the poetic “arts.” The poem:

Tomorrow is here
Let the sun into your heart
and your life begin

Archie had written the poem as a Media Studies student at Napier University and published it in the irritating arts journal
PoeEatTree
alongside Harold Impugns’s first poem “Fitzwaller’s Disgrace,” a deeply moral and metrically daring exculpation of shamed opera singer Harvey Fitzwaller—rendered in a complex scansion of double dactylics with a sonorously emphatic spondee on each third word, Harold’s nine-line poem took over nine months to compose in comparison to Archie’s ten seconds. Thus began Harold’s deep hatred for the “work” of Archie Denissss—a vast corpus encompassing that one mawkish and meaningless poem printed and reprinted in every popular anthology for the next six decades while Harold composed technically ambitious works of increasing depth and power second to John Ashbery and Edwin Morgan and struggled even to publish in obscure university magazines.

Archie’s poem was reviled among critics for its cheap heart-tugging and the horrible clumsiness of the final line. It made little sense when scrutinised. How could tomorrow be “here” when tomorrow is always the next day, no matter what the time of day? At 00:00:00, the tomorrow of 23:59:59 becomes the next day and yesterday’s tomorrow’s present—tomorrow can never backslide to the present tense. As a poetic construction, “Let the sun into your heart” fails because direct sunlight is harmful to the skin and to exposed cardiorespiratory organs. The “poet” was straining for a hopeful message, but the sun is a relentless death-ray that burns up everything in range. Some critics loved the “ambiguity” of this image, suggesting light or dark. This “ambiguity” lent the poem gravitas among its apologist anti-elitist critics, and among the high, low, and nobrow populace.