Table of Contents
Phoenix Court and Beyond
FANCY MAN | Paul Magrs
Introduction
FANCY MAN
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
Afterword
GLITTERING FAG
BAUBLES
About the Author
More by Paul Magrs
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
I moved to a new publisher in 1998. After three novels and a collection of stories I was moving on and writing a new book. I wanted to write something grand, set over a larger span of time – maybe twenty years or more. The novel was to be the story of a young orphaned girl who falls into the hands of her slightly unscrupulous aunty and who makes good and bad choices and good and bad friends as she moves into her twenties, discovering new places and relationships as she goes.
In many ways (I now see) it was the story of myself in my twenties in the 1990s. But it was also the story of Isabel Archer in Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, a novel I’d read with great attention and enjoyment during my last summer in Edinburgh.
In essays I read about Henry James there was talk of architecture and the structure of his novels: these faultless erections of his. I thought: I’ll have a bit of that, then. So I decided that my Wendy would follow a similar path to James’ Isabel. In a kind of cover version of the old book she would begin in one city and move to others, resisting temptation and the lure of wicked people wanting to exploit her. It would be all about money and finding love and trying to find a place to live and who to trust and what to feel. It would be about sex and self-delusion…
And I wrote all of this in the gaps I could find in my life during my first year lecturing at UEA in Norwich. I was teaching the MA course in Novel-writing, long-established as the oldest, most successful course of its kind in the UK. Most of my students were older than me and some looked askance at someone they clearly felt was callow and not famous enough to be teaching them. Here was this self-effacing northerner with a daft sense of humour telling them all what to do and sharing teaching duties with the Poet Laureate. I often had quite a fight on my hands when it came to showing people at UEA I knew exactly what I was talking about.
In the midst of this I was struggling with my Fancy Man. At some point along the line my new editor – who had apparently loved my earlier books, even sent me fan mail about the first – decided he hated this new one. He couldn’t stand what I was doing with it.
‘Why are all your characters freaks?’ he burst out during a phone call. At first I thought he was joking. My position was that all characters are freaks because, essentially, everyone in real life is a freak, in their own particular way. This had been a constant in my thinking and my fiction from the start. It was precisely what I wrote about: everyone is as fascinating and as fucked up as everyone else. If you look hard enough and sympathetically enough at anyone, you will see that they are freakish and unique and wonderful. If I had a constant theme, this might be it.
Anyway, the editor wasn’t happy about that.
‘Everyone you write about is a transvestite or grossly overweight or they have no legs or something else horribly wrong with them, or they believe in aliens…’
Yes, all of this was fair comment.
Then he said, ‘Don’t you know any normal people in real life? What’s the matter with you?’
Up till then he had seemed such a kindly soul. Really, a gentleman, with interesting stories of his own to tell. But he had seemingly gone off my writing overnight. I remember a parcel of manuscript coming back in the post and when I unwrapped it I found that he had crossed through almost every single page with thick, greasy pencil. (It reminded me of the pencil with which my grandfather the butcher used to work out sums on bloody parcels of meat.)
He’d left hardly any words at all still standing on those four hundred pages of Fancy Man. It was the weirdest thing. I was in a panic. What was I to do with a book where all the words had been crossed out and were somehow wrong?
He told me that I kept going off and getting too interested in secondary characters. He thought I must keep my main character the focus in every single scene. I didn’t agree with that idea at all. Surely one of the great pleasures of novels is all the detours you can take? A novel is a forest we are invited to lose ourselves in.
My then-agent didn’t help much.
My work was developing, as it should, changing from book to book and yes… perhaps this one was even wilder than its predecessors. But why would anyone set out to write a book tamer and less demanding than their last one?
This one had a suicide cult, alien replicants, nasty old witches and a cameo by Marlene Dietrich. All these things were delightful to me. If I made them delightful on the page, I was sure my audience would follow me.
My then-agent said: ‘You should develop and mature more sensibly. You should mature by writing less about northern working class people. Write about more middle class people. Write about the south.’
For some reason it wasn’t until 2003 that I sacked her.
As it happened, Fancy Man was all about moving away from home and finding a whole range of different kinds of people coming into your life. But I guess the message from that daft agent and that daft editor was: only write novels just like other people do. If you want us to sell them and other people to buy them, you’ve got to make it all a bit more… conventional.
I just couldn’t. I couldn’t see what they were talking about when they said
