Gregory Keays is a writer whose brilliant future is behind him. Corroded with envy, Gregory watches as his contemporaries produce better work and live happier lives while he teaches community college composition classes and compiles books about other books. One day, Gregory is convinced, the world will recognize his talents. In the meantime, his marriage to a new-age feng shui artist has become cold and distant, and his relationship with his reclusive teen-age son is in free-fall. But when a brilliant student enters his life, Gregory is offered one last, glorious chance to save his career.
Soon, however, Gregory's Faustian pact with success unravels around him, and he must turn to darker, more duplicitous means to secure his fame. Set in the dangerous world where real life and literary ambition collide, Kill Your Darlings is an unforgettable novel of ego and delusion, villainy and the betrayal of love.
Gregory Keays is a writer whose brilliant future is behind him. Corroded with envy, Gregory watches as his contemporaries produce better work and live happier lives while he teaches community college composition classes and compiles books about other books. One day, Gregory is convinced, the world will recognize his talents. In the meantime, his marriage to a new-age feng shui artist has become cold and distant, and his relationship with his reclusive teen-age son is in free-fall. But when a brilliant student enters his life, Gregory is offered one last, glorious chance to save his career.
Soon, however, Gregory's Faustian pact with success unravels around him, and he must turn to darker, more duplicitous means to secure his fame. Set in the dangerous world where real life and literary ambition collide, Kill Your Darlings is an unforgettable novel of ego and delusion, villainy and the betrayal of love.
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Overview
Gregory Keays is a writer whose brilliant future is behind him. Corroded with envy, Gregory watches as his contemporaries produce better work and live happier lives while he teaches community college composition classes and compiles books about other books. One day, Gregory is convinced, the world will recognize his talents. In the meantime, his marriage to a new-age feng shui artist has become cold and distant, and his relationship with his reclusive teen-age son is in free-fall. But when a brilliant student enters his life, Gregory is offered one last, glorious chance to save his career.
Soon, however, Gregory's Faustian pact with success unravels around him, and he must turn to darker, more duplicitous means to secure his fame. Set in the dangerous world where real life and literary ambition collide, Kill Your Darlings is an unforgettable novel of ego and delusion, villainy and the betrayal of love.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250095589 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 08/25/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 473 KB |
About the Author
Terence Blacker wanted to be a jockey when he grew and up. In fact, he could ride before he could walk, and his childhood hero was the great steeplechaser Mill House (a horse). He lives in Norfolk, England.
Read an Excerpt
Kill Your Darlings
By Terence Blacker
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2000 Terence BlackerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-09558-9
CHAPTER 1
He was no Chatterton, that was for sure.
The hair was dark and matted, splayed across a grey, stained pillow-case. The skin on his face, once so luminously pale, was now blotchy and flushed beneath an uneven growth of beard. Dimensions which, when contained and clothed, had conveyed an air of distracted intelligence (as if his unusual tallness had allowed him to breathe a purer air, less contaminated by everyday life), spilt across the bed in an almost comical attitude, a lanky man running away from life. On his stomach and chest, there were flaky psoriatic blotches of purplish red. Only his eyes, light blue, gazing at the ceiling with a sardonic disdain, as if trying to outstare his Maker, reminded me of the man I had known.
The place did not yet smell of death, but a thick fug of unwashed clothes, putrefying food and stale tobacco hung in the air, suggesting that, towards the end, his personal habits had taken a dive. The hard, scrawny stubs of countless roll-ups were strewn over the bedside table and the carpet. Bottles – wine, beer, whisky – were on the floor and, beyond them, a number of battered plastic-covered library books lay face down like small animals closing in to feed off the corpse. A pile of discarded clothes lay in the far corner of the room.
Upstairs, someone turned on a television and the distorted din of gunfire, screams and urgent American accents drowned out the sound of children playing football in the courtyard below. Through the window, stained brownish yellow by tobacco fumes, the sun shone high over the roofs of the neighbouring houses.
For the first time, I noticed, on a small table beneath the window, a brown envelope, bearing the words 'Mum and Dad'. Beside it was a stack of notepads, which I recognized. I left the envelope and pushed the pads into my leather bag.
Soon the world would come crashing in, changing everything for ever. On some inexplicable impulse, I walked over to the bed. Kneeling, I laid my head on the pale, sad crater of his stomach, breathing in the musty, young male smell which had not yet faded from him. With the tip of my left index finger, I traced the trail of fine, dark hair that led from his navel downwards. Gently, I took him in my mouth. He was cold, hard and sweet. Eyes closed, I lay there for several seconds, tasting him, taking him in, remembering things past.
A few moments later, I stood up, slung the bag over my shoulder, and reached for the telephone.
Exercise
Construct a scene in which the following three items play a part: a bed, a letter and the sound of gunfire.
CHAPTER 2We are used to walkers and talkers around here. Shouters, self-exposers, drinkers on street corners. They are as much part of neighbourhood life as the vast turds (probably dog, although even that is not certain) to be found on our pavements. Most afternoons, the dusty, litter-strewn streets are positively singing with soliloquies. At the check-out counter of the dimly lit, lino-floored local supermarket, a queue of warbling, unsteady members of the local community stands waiting to be supplied with tobacco, cans of cheap lager, half-bottles of vodka. Outside, a man and a woman of indeterminate age sit drinking cider and staring, glassy-eyed, at the passers-by. Down the road, on the tiny patch of grass in front of the Pentecostal Church, a ginger-haired dosser lies sprawled, asleep. Beside him, gazing at the world with a gentle, martyred air is an ancient greyhound, ribs showing through its dull grey coat.
For those of us across the border, there is something reassuring about this hinterland of west London that is not quite Shepherd's Bush, that falls short of Hammersmith, that aspires hopelessly to Chiswick but never quite makes it. Other parts of the city may go up or down, develop or decline, but this little corner of urban mediocrity remains unchanged. Occasionally, like well-meaning members of an international body trying to grow crops in the desert, investors and property dealers have attempted to 'lift' the area with housing projects, offices, wine bars and shops selling antique pine. The area is given a name – 'Starch Green' or even 'Starch Green Village' – but soon, within six months or so, anonymity returns, the desert reasserts itself, the new buildings are vandalized and left empty, the shops and bars make way once more to the only enterprises which can survive here – betting shops, newsagent food-stores run by exhausted Asians and bargain emporia selling kitchenware from East Europe or cheap, garish plastic toys made in China.
Friends from other, less exciting parts of town occasionally wonder whether this is a suitable area in which to raise a child. The answer, so I used to think, was easy. From the earliest age, the young (my own sweet son, for example) are provided with a secret garden. They learn the inevitabilities of urban life: a car radio left overnight in a car without a burglar alarm will be stolen; a sapling newly planted in the park will be snapped off.
On even the shortest walk, they are provided with an ever-changing variety of street show and park theatre. One day it will be two elderly drunks brawling feebly under a battered oak in the park, the next a family exemplifying every kind of domestic dysfunction. An astonishing variety of physical impairments are on display while even those with a full complement of limbs, eyes and ears can behave in a startlingly entertaining manner – marching self-importantly down the middle of the road, directing traffic, compulsively collecting litter in a ten-yard area.
At first, briefly, our children are alarmed by this circus of everyday grotesques. By the time they reach five or six years old, they are merely curious and amused.
Look, Daddy, there's a man without any clothes smashing the car windows.
Look, Daddy, that man hasn't got a face.
What's that woman doing under that tree, Daddy?
All right, Dougie, don't stare. Keep walking.
So when, on an October afternoon touched with the first melancholy chill of approaching winter, a man emerged from Brandon Gardens, talking to himself, no one would have looked twice. While his clothes and a certain ascetic thoughtfulness might have set him apart from the nutters and soliloquizers who thronged the streets, there was something studiously anonymous about him. As he reached the High Street, he seemed to merge with the scenery.
An actor perhaps, learning his lines? A businessman rehearsing an address to the board? No, the scene he was reliving and enacting (I was reliving and enacting) was one created by his own imagination. It was from a work called Insignificance.
On the day that would change my life, my marriage, redefine my position within the community, and launch my career into a churning ocean of achievement and exposure, I took my usual twenty-minute walk to the West London Institute in excellent spirits. To the world at large, I would have appeared a man at ease with himself, in his forties, his light hair receding with dignity, a square-shouldered, confident walk in his brown corduroy teaching suit, something of a paunch, teeth perhaps rather more prominent than conventional good looks would demand, a certain artistic shagginess adhering to his person.
I made my way through the park, the territory of dogs and children. In this part of London, animal life is raffish and untamed, with dogs and their owners representing a sort of sub-species of their own which roam the territory, rending the air each morning and evening with growls, snarls and screams of rage or fear, canine or human (it is difficult to tell), and marking their territory by spectacular evacuations dumped everywhere but in the enclosures provided by the council for the purpose. In some parks, small dog-free zones have been established where, in a weird reversal, pensioners and mothers with prams sit behind a wire fence as if they were the penned animals and the rampaging beasts outside, the humans.
Yet, through sheer weight of numbers, the army of children holds sway in the parkland ecosystem. Here, mothers or minders sit with them during the week, slumped dull-eyed on benches, or resentfully pushing swings. At the weekends, middle-class fathers emerge briskly after breakfast to spend quality time, running, kicking balls with urgent, clumsy enthusiasm, all the while conveying important information about life and the world to infants bewildered by this brief overload of adult energy. When children become old enough to be bored by the company of their parents, they abandon the inner sanctums of play for the wider plains of parkland where, occasionally skidding on dogshit, they play football in small groups, mixing with children who have wandered alone through this part of London almost since they could walk. Sometimes after school, as on that October afternoon, games would coalesce so that eventually the whole park seems to become one vast football match, involving all ages, which can be joined or abandoned at leisure.
By the time I reached the High Street, I was striding with the purpose of the seriously employed. I took the steps to the Institute three at a time, nodding vaguely at the three smokers standing bleakly on the top step like people contemplating suicide. Shouldering the glass door, I entered the lobby to be enveloped in the institutional fug which pervaded every part of the building as if the doomed hopes of the students who had passed through here had left spores of despair in the atmosphere that would soon contaminate this year's intake.
Perversely, because there was hardly a day when I did not feel compromised by the demands it made, I felt invigorated when I entered the building. Everything here – the stale, cabbagey smell, the sound of voices echoing down the stairs, the creaking, rumbling lift, the noticeboards bearing grimly cheerful, ill-designed posters opening up ever more avenues of self-improvement – reminded me of my own relative freedom, of my status as an independent spirit in this land of the tenured and salaried.
I entered the staff common room on the first floor where four of the regular teachers sat gloomily on the threadbare orange furniture. As I spooned instant coffee into a mug by the kettle, two of them (Pottery and Cinema Studies) glanced up, then resumed their conversation in low, discontented tones. With the exception of Anna Matthew (Mind and Body), with whom, some years back, I had dallied for a few brief and happy weeks, the regular staff viewed me with a certain antipathy, jealous perhaps of my reputation beyond the Institute. Taking some circulars from my pigeon-hole, I left the room to make my way to Seminar Room 4D.
I like to make something of an entrance when I meet my new class. On this occasion, I bustled in, exuding the distracted air of a man caught up in the world of the imagination. Without looking at anyone, I reached into my bag and pulled out a few pages of Insignificance. For a moment, I stared at the sheaf of paper abstractedly before realizing that I was not, in fact, holding notes for a class. Putting the pages away, I took out a blank pad, a pen and a finished copy of Forever Young, and laid them in a neat line before me.
After a sustained pause for contemplation, I looked up, the dazed smile of a startled dreamer upon my face.
'My name is Gregory Keays,' I said. 'And I am a writer.'
Affirmation
Today, as I write, I shall soar above the mundane and homely. I shall keep my appointment with an angel.
CHAPTER 3I like coming home. In the past, when my wife and I used to share a social life, our friends would proselytize on behalf of other, more obviously artistic parts of the capital but living here suits us both fine; recently it has become one of the few areas of agreement between us.
Our house, described in more than one press profile as a 'dream home', is set off by a teeming backdrop of urban life. To the west of us is a landscape of avenues and plane trees, houses with cats and security systems, a tennis club, a terrace of shops containing a wine bar, two estate agents and a delicatessen; to the east, the wasteland of the wild inner city, romping with misbehaviour, dancing to the thump of a million sound systems. Sometimes, turning into my road after one of my afternoon walks, my heart lifts, and I see 23 Brandon Gardens as a sort of cottage that is on the edge of a cliff, yet is safe and secure, overlooking a great sea thrashing with contained disorder.
Even in the gathering gloom after that first lesson of the new term at the Institute, there was something distinctive about the Keays residence – the way the house (there really is only one word for it) nestled at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac next to the park, exuding an elegant warmth with which inhabitants of other houses in the road occasionally and unsuccessfully tried to compete.
Often, I have heard my wife, Marigold, explain to a visiting journalist the importance of contrast between the interior and exterior. Outside, it is trim, draped in wisteria and creeping vine, a superior woodman's cottage which stands out, in this bleak urban landscape, like an illustration from a fairy-tale. Inside, another contrast: the décor is white and spacious and almost formal. The house's insulation from the world outside, combined with this severe lack of clutter is said, by my wife, to induce a state of calm and well-being in those who dwell in it although she has sensibly never expressed this view to interviewers when her husband or son has been in earshot.
That night, as I entered the dream house, the jangle of Marigold's stress-reducing Sri Lankan wind-chimes above the front door causing their usual knot of irritation in my stomach, a low thud, like a heartbeat, filled the faintly scented air and reminded me that some aspects of domestic life resisted design, retained their essential clutter.
Dg. Dg. Dg. Even in his choice of music, Doug had managed to impose his uncompromising seventeen-year-old persona on his surroundings.
I walked into the immaculate, spacious kitchen, poured myself a large whisky, then glanced at the note my wife had left that morning on the kitchen table while I was still in bed (like many creative people, I take time to 'get going').
1. Donovan's fur-balls
2. Speak Doug
Picking up the latest edition of the Professional Writer, I wandered into the living-room where I sat, leafing through it, on the expensive sofa Marigold had recently bought. Although I love my home, I sometimes feel out of place in Marigold's design scheme. I had, for example, never quite worked out how to sit on this vast item of furniture with any degree of comfort or decorum. The seat was just too long, the back just too short: any attempt to relax involved adopting the posture of a poleaxed boxer collapsed against the ropes.
Maintaining the spare, effortless charm of the dream house has, of course, required considerable effort and money. With each new profile or style feature, the décor will have been updated and upgraded. Paintings by yesterday's hot new artists will have been quietly traded in for today's hot new artist. The small concessions to everyday life (magazines on the impossibly low coffee-table, invitations on the mantelpiece) will have been ruthlessly culled. Something subtle and expensive will have been done to the floorboards, a new, attention-grabbing feng shui gewgaw will have been hung, or stuck, or floated somewhere. The few objects of decoration to be found amidst the arctic bleakness of the ground floor are regularly scrutinized to ensure that no object that was deemed desirable last year is now utterly unacceptable on environmental, religious or political grounds.
Then, of course, there was the bedroom. At some point, as the snoop of the moment lobbed soft and simpering questions to their celebrity interviewee, Marigold would refer to her favourite room – the place where she can retreat from the world to be simply Marigold Keays – private person, mother, and (a flash of the eyes, a suggestive softening of the lips) wife. The hacks would beg. They would implore. In their shrivelled-up journalistic souls, they would know that no lifestyle fantasy is complete without the bedroom.
No cameras, Marigold would say. Just a quick look. It's probably an absolute sty at the moment.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Kill Your Darlings by Terence Blacker. Copyright © 2000 Terence Blacker. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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