When I returned to my house in Lancaster I finished ‘Marked for Life’, full of new energy and attack. I really luxuriated in the magic and the strangeness and set my characters into the very heart of a mysterious adventure, and a wilderness of snow. I realized that I loved novels in which everyone is turned completely upside down and must reinvent their lives by the end of the story.
I decided that my books would always be about people learning to reinvent themselves. All my heroes would come to the conclusion that their life is for living their way, and they can remake themselves into anything they want. That’s what I learned from writing that story and that novel that year.
At some point I sent my story off to an open submissions call for New Writing, an annual anthology sponsored by the British Council and published by Vintage Books. That year’s edition was being edited by AS Byatt and Alan Hollinghurst. As you once always had to do with these things, I sent off my manilla envelope with my story plus a stamped self-addressed envelope inside, and I promptly forgot all about it.
Then, almost a year later, I returned alone to Newton Aycliffe, to house-sit while my family was abroad. The place had been untenanted long enough for a pile of post to build up in the hallway. When I arrived with my crates of books and belongings the heap (of bills, mostly) was about as high as the letterbox itself. I spent a whole evening sifting them and there, right at the bottom, was an envelope bearing the British Council logo. A grand-sounding lady called Dr Harriet Harvey Wood was keen to tell me how the editors had loved ‘Patient Iris’ and how they would pay me a hundred pounds for my story. My very first published story!
This triumph was enough to keep me going—spiritually, creatively—through another year of writing and teaching and finishing ‘Marked for Life.’ It was another year again before New Writing 4 was published and there was to be a party in a bookshop on Charing Cross Road in London celebrating the anthology’s release. Luckily, that very day there was a rather large review of the book in the Guardian by James Wood, who seemed like a very clever and percipient critic indeed in that he spent quite a long time praising ‘Patient Iris’ extravagantly.
I was, as we say in the north, chuffed as muck.
And it made going to a launch party with lots of fancy and literary types knocking around, all knowing each other, wittering away, glugging Frascati, somewhat easier. Knowing that, even though everyone else was already published and exceedingly well known, mine was the story that the reviewer had singled out that very same day—I felt fantastic.
It must be added, I felt fantastic for the first and last time at one of those kinds of parties. I had my secret identity, as author of the story that everyone ought to read first and admire for its bravery, vividness, etc, and if anyone asked who I was, I could tell them my name and they’d know who I was. I’d just have to add—as ever—the right way to pronounce my name (It’s a silent G—Mars. It’s misspelled Irish from 1898…)
Anyhow, as I saw, this was the first and last time I felt fantastic at such a party. (Though there was that do, two years later, in Waterstones in Islington, for New Writing 6, when the writer chosen to bore us with reading her story out loud went on for so long, I had time to quietly chat up the wine waiter, find the bookshop staff room, have a clumsy snog with him and return in time to applaud and pick up the wine glass my agent had been holding for me. But that had nothing to do with feeling good about my writing…)
Also at that first book party, I talked to a publicity lady from Random House, and she had read Marked for Life. How was that even possible? I asked. So habituated was I to sealing up envelopes and sending them into the void, I couldn’t even remember mailing off my novel, last year’s draft, to her boss, the chief editor at Chatto and Windus. This lady from publicity had read it and loved it, and today’s review in the Guardian gave her the impetus to tell her boss, and to come to this party organized by her colleagues at Vintage in order to ask me: did I have an agent? Had I sold the book? Would I be interested in Marked for Life being published by Chatto and Windus...?
And that’s where it was all happening, in a bookshop—long gone, ‘Books, etc’ it was called—on Charing Cross Road. In the heart of London, a long way from Phoenix Court. On the day of my first ever review in March 1995. Many things have gone right and wrong with my writing career since then and there are a lot of things I might, in retrospect change…but that first evening out as a published author was one of the best ever times. It was a real coming out moment.
Within eight months Marked for Life was out in hardback. But it wasn’t publication that changed my life forever—fat chance!
My life was already changed and I’d done it for myself in the first place. I’d done it by creating this imaginary world for my stories to happen in. Whatever happened after that, I’d always have Phoenix Court to go back to.
Paul Magrs
Manchester
April 2016.
PATIENT IRIS
SHE HAS A FRIEND CALLED PATIENT IRIS WHO LIVES AT THE TOP OF THE town by the Roman remains.
Irises take a good while to open. She thinks if you place them by the window they stand a better chance.
Iris is patient. She watches men reconstructing the Roman remains.
At the top of the town you can see all of South Shields, the grey flank of North Shields, the blue
