On the sofa, sobbing, moaning. ‘There, there, Jean,’ he says, with a dash of de Gaullian Resistance spirit. Hand on the shoulder. ‘We will overcome, in the end. We will never let the Boches win.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ says Cocteau, batting away the hand, picking up that morning’s newspaper, open at the Arts section. ‘Look at this review. They’ve completely trashed my novel!’ Or latest play. Or exhibition.
‘Writers – we have to get our priorities right,’ Lee said, sympathetically. ‘Everything else is secondary.’
We were having lunch in Le Pain Quotidien. I had automatically picked up the small pot of milk they had put on the table and was on the verge of pouring some into my coffee. Lee gave me a look. ‘Of course,’ he said, like some Grand Inquisitor keeping a stern eye on the heretics, ‘if you’re going to be the kind of person who puts milk in perfectly fine coffee …’ I put the pot down again.
I genuinely wanted to know how Lee reacted to reviews. Even though his book wasn’t technically out yet, they were starting to appear. The New York Times weighing in, then the Star-Telegram (Fort Worth) and the Oregonian. And the Huffington Post. All positive, by and large. ‘A brilliantly crafted mystery and one of Child’s best,’ said the Huff Post. He wouldn’t have to start reaching for the ‘Neglected Work of Genius’ defence just yet (my personal favourite, when it came to my own stuff, was ‘succès d’estime’ or perhaps, at a stretch, ‘cult classic’).
Only a boxed quote in the Star-Telegram struck a slightly regrettable note:
EVEN THOUGH THE MISCAST TOM CRUISE SEEMS DETERMINED TO RUIN THIS CHARACTER ON THE BIG SCREEN, THE LITERARY VERSION OF JACK REACHER IS FASCINATING
– David Martindale
Lee had a degree of clinical detachment where reviews were concerned. Didn’t ignore them, took them seriously, but didn’t take them to heart. Didn’t go all prima donna when they were good or throw a Cocteau-like tantrum when they were bad. ‘There’s a subjective element to reviews, of course,’ he said. ‘But there’s an objective element too. And you can quarrel with it objectively. I know if it’s well paced or not. I don’t need someone else to tell me.’
I once vowed to go and have a word with Dirk Bogarde after he misconstrued, in a review for the (London) Times, my description in Waiting for Bardot of hitching a lift in a Ford ‘Consul’ car (back in the sixties) as having something to do with the British Consul in France. And then there was that Dutch translator who just flat out omitted my classic ‘porridge’ metaphor in Walking on Water. I was booking the flight to Holland when I heard from another Dutch friend he was already dead. Lee was sympathetic to President Truman, who wanted to go and give a black eye to some reviewer who had slated the latest by his daughter Margaret. But he took a broadly utilitarian line towards what people wrote about him – What difference would it make to sales?
Apart from occasional references to telephone-number advances, we had spent most of the time when he was writing Make Me speaking about art or possibly craft. Now it was time to revert to the bottom line. Unlike most writers, Lee was not embarrassed by talk of money. He embraced the cash-nexus, the idea that, fundamentally, writing was a job. I had once worked night shifts at the Ford factory in Dagenham, England, around the time he was interviewing strippers. Lee liked the ‘car’ metaphor for books. ‘There’s an apocryphal story, about a kid who becomes an apprentice at Ford and one of the senior managers takes him to one side and says, “Do you know what we make here, son?” “Cars?” says the kid. “Nope,” says the old-timer. “Money.”’ For Lee, art and commerce were all one, there was no contradiction. Build a better car and people will buy it.
‘The pressure keeps building,’ Lee was saying. It was something Roger Federer had said. Winning so much can be a monkey on your back. People expected you to keep on winning. ‘I recognize the syndrome,’ said Lee. ‘You’re never satisfied. Not unless you can be No. 1 for fifty-two weeks of the year. Which is practically impossible. You have to get over it.’
He assumed failure was normal, failure would be in some sense liberating. Success is only failure postponed. ‘I’m just trying to postpone it as long as possible.’
I mentioned a writer character in Franzen’s Purity who writes something ‘bloated’ and gets slaughtered in The New York Times. Classic writer’s nightmare. ‘I wish I could do bloated,’ said Lee. ‘I’m getting too economical. There’s minimalist and then there’s …’
‘Child said nothing. Two-sentence novel. They’ll be wanting their money back.’
‘If I could only work out in advance which one is going to be the stinker. Then I’d stop at the previous one. Get out on top. I’d like to retire on a high.’
I think I had worked out why he kept up his quasi-religious schedule. The double-barrel approach. Worrying about the next book spared him from worrying too much about the last one. It was like that little gizmo you could use to attenuate muscle pain by delivering regular electric shocks. The cure for pain was another kind of pain.
Over time Lee had learned to live with the anxiety factor. It was like walking around with a bullseye on your back. He had been touring one of his books around the UK a few years ago. He was in a chauffeur-driven car, sitting in the rear with his agent. They’re discussing figures. He’d come out at No. 5 that year. His agent says, ‘No. 4 would have been better.’ The driver turns around for a moment. ‘Why don’t you wake up and smell the roses?’ he says. Point duly taken. He was doing nothing but drive all day for a living. At least they got to be driven around, whether at No. 4 or 5 or whatever. Whereas he, the old driver, was down around No. zillion.
‘Yep,’ Lee said. ‘Could be worse.’
Dedicated fan that he was, he had been following the England vs San Marino game on his phone in Le Pain Quotidien. ‘Rooney scored,’ Lee said. ‘Penalty. That means he’s equalled Bobby Charlton’s record [for the number of goals scored for England – forty-nine]. Seems bizarre, I know.’ Neither of us were great Rooney lovers. ‘But you can’t argue with the numbers. Rooney’s coming out on top.’
If they were dogs, Lee would be a greyhound (red setter possibly) and Rooney would be a bulldog (or maybe pitbull), but there were clearly points of comparison. For practically the whole of the previous year, I’d been hymning the artistry and the poetry and the music and all of that as Lee actually wrote the book, but it was finally coming down to sheer numbers. It was all about the stats. What was the score? Who was winning?
The publishers loved his style, they loved him, but if his books sucked in sales, then he would pretty soon be persona non grata. ‘Lee who? Oh him, yes, he used to be quite good, but he went out of fashion. Yesterday’s man. It’s all Lagercrantz now. He’s working on the twentieth in the series.’
Jack Reacher (6ʹ5ʺ, 250 lbs of solid muscle, direct, technophobe) vs Lisbeth Salander (4ʹ11ʺ, 90 lbs, thin, tattooed, savvy, techno-anarch). Literarily speaking, they were both in the pirate class. Swashbuckling outsiders, unmoored from the main. Adept at killing. They had a lot in common. But they were sworn enemies.
The game was afoot.
8 I’M NOT AN AUTHOR
‘Well,’ I said, whipping out my copy of Purity, and flourishing it, like a white rabbit pulled out of a hat. ‘I don’t think you’ll have to lose
