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- Herausgeber: Gothic World Literature Editions
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
A delicious study in paranoia from the master of the modern Scottish Gothic. Ghost-writer Leonard Balmain finds himself drawn into an unwanted complicity with the dark revelations unfolding within that of his subject ― the mysterious Torquil Tod. When Tod's tale turns into murder and sexual betrayal, Leonard realises he knows too much and is in danger of ending up on the very pages of Tod's turbulent history. Black magic, sacrificial murder and cannibalism collide in an uneasy voyage towards, and from beyond, the grave. "A dark, cautionary tale, utterly compelling and charged with Herdman's unwavering sense of irony and his sharp satirical bite." Brian McCabe, The Scotsman. "A story of deception and betrayal, of obsession and confused identities, but more importantly it is Herdman's best novel." Carl MacDougall, The Herald Black magic, sacrificial murder and cannibalism collide in an uneasy voyage towards, and from beyond, the grave. Brian McCabe, The Scotsman . "A powerful evocation of the uncanny psychological bonding between ghost biographer Leonard Balmain and his elusive and sinister subject, Torquil Tod..... Herdman captures very clearly the tone of the dramatic monologues of Hogg and Stevenson, while managing to maintain a contemporary resonance." Douglas Gifford, Books in Scotland "Hogg's and Stevenson's manic private memorists meet the postmodernist theories they anticipated. Cleverly, Ghostwriting investigates the paradoxes of narrative itself ... The novel wears its intellectual sophistication lightly." Gavin Wallace, Chapman
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The author wishes to thank the late Mrs Drue Heinz and the Hawthornden International Writers’ Retreat for the most helpful award of a Hawthornden Writer’s Fellowship.
Ghostwriting
by John Herdman
Author’s Introduction
Ghostwriting is the second in a loose trilogy of novels concerned with the difficulty of truth, the first being Imelda and the third The Sinister Cabaret. This middle work, written in 1995, deals in particular with the opacity of the truth, without at all implying its relativity, far less that it is an illusion. The plot was initially suggested by a newspaper article describing the work of a ghostwriter who earned a living from writing what purported to be the autobiographies of his clients.
The structure of the novel is rather complex, though one hopes not confusingly so. First the ghostwriter, Leonard Balmain, describes his meeting with his client, Torquil Tod, and the relationship that develops between them, “just so that the truth can be known”. He commences his task as a factual and biographical record, but at a certain point and for reasons which are described, he continues it in the form of a work of fiction developed from Tod’s verbal 8narrative. As the action approaches its climax he reverts – again for reasons that are explained – to what he calls “a Factual Summary and Speculative Analysis”, before leaving Tod’s confessions to recount what then transpires between ghostwriter and client, his manuscript ending abruptly in mid-sentence. The novel ends with a commentary on the death of Leonard Balmain by his literary executor, Robert Balingall, who believes that he has been murdered. Ballingall however also draws attention to a counter-theory propounded by a professor of Semiotics, a “literary dilettante” as he puts it, who propounds the view that Balmain’s manuscript is a hoax designed to cover the author’s suicide, and that Torquil Tod is simply a figment of his imagination, a dark alter ego who reflects aspects of his creator’s hidden personality and compensates him for his inadequacies. Ballingall vigorously refutes this thesis.
The confused identities of client and ghostwriter are further seen in the context of events and circumstances which raise questions about the nature of beliefs, whether religious or otherwise, and how they bear upon the central concern with truth; Christian convictions, “New Age” preoccupations and psychological theory interpenetrate to throw light or cast darkness on perceptions of what is real. The truth about the events described in the narratives which make up this novel is for readers to determine, though they may of course prefer to suspend judgment.
GHOSTWRITING
10
Errores quis intellegit?
Ab occultis munda me,
et a superbia custodi servum tuum, ne dominetur mei.
Psalmus 18
(Psalterium Monasticum)
THE NARRATIVE OF LEONARD BALMAIN
12
13
I am not in the habit of answering newspaper advertisements. Indeed, even reading them has always seemed to me a depressing, life-wasting experience. If anyone had told me, when I was twenty-five, that I would one day reply to an advertisement for a ghost writer out of any motive other than that of amused curiosity, I would have laughed in his face. And if I could have predicted the event I would never, I am sure, have taken up the career of letters. But it is a melancholy fact of experience that one does many things at fifty that one would not have contemplated doing at twenty-five. Life, as they say, is like that.
There is nothing like necessity for humbling pride. Youthful genius would sooner sweep the streets than compromise its integrity. Then, one day, someone asks you to write a review. No harm in that, especially if you are fearless and incorruptible, strong-minded and impervious to blandishments. Next thing you know, you are writing a newspaper column which seems at first to be witty and perceptive but after a few months is agreed by everyone to have gone off, to have become bland and anodyne. Then you’re asked to edit an anthology of contemporary verse. If things go badly, you could soon be putting together a collection of obscene limericks or copy-editing a fund-raising 14handbook. And if they go really badly, you could eventually find yourself replying to an advertisement for a ghost writer — and telling yourself that that is, after all, a thoroughly post-modern thing to do.
That is how I met Torquil Tod. And that is how I come to be writing this narrative, writing it in mortal fear that he is planning to do away with me, because I know too much, because of everything that he has confessed to me and bidden me write down about him - why? If I knew the real answer to that I might feel more secure; but Torquil’s motives have always finally eluded me. Quite often I have thought that I had the key, that I had at last navigated the maze of his tortuous psychology, only to lose myself endlessly in its false trails, its dead ends, its provocative contradictions. And it is a characteristic feature of my own psychology that I have never been able to tolerate uncertainty. If I knew that I was doomed I would probably come quickly to terms with the fact, make all the necessary arrangements, settle my affairs, set my sights on higher things. There would be an order to that, a rightness, it might even confer a sense of purpose. But to walk the streets of your native city thinking that you may quite soon be murdered, without being able to say, with any show of reason, why that really is quite likely; without any hard evidence against your potential assassin except what you have written down yourself from the words of his own lips, but which he could categorically deny; without even being certain that you are not a bit crazy yourself — that is just a mess. And I have always hated mess. 15
So why am I writing this story down? Because it’s all I can do, in every sense. I have always respected the truth, and if there is soon to be an end of all my strivings I want it to be known how it came about. Not so that justice can be done on Torquil Tod, for it isn’t my job to see to that; just so that the truth of it can be known, should anyone be interested. Or indeed, even if no one is. All I have ever been able to do with anything is write about it. Not that I have ever been any great success as a writer, as the world sees success — or why should I have been reduced to answering an advertisement for a ghost writer? But it is the one thing I can do, all the same. In everything else in my life that I have attempted my failure has been conspicuous. And in my present circumstances, writing it down is my only remedy.
It was the wording of the advertisement that attracted me: short, literate and to the point. I liked the first sentence, and even more the second: ‘Wanted, writer of established competence to ghost autobiography. Substantial fee offered.’ A phone number followed. I thought about it all day, and the more I thought about it the more was my curiosity aroused. Yet I was somehow reluctant to pick up the phone: obscurely I felt that to do so would be to cross some kind of Rubicon, professional or otherwise. All the same, I knew that I would do so. At ten past six I dialled the number. After three rings it was answered and a somewhat hard-edged male voice said, ‘Hello?’
‘Good evening,’ I said, ‘my name is Leonard Balmain.’ (How I hate my Christian name! But what’s 16the alternative? Len? Lennie, for God’s sake?) ‘I’m phoning about the advertisement for a ghost writer. I dare say you’ve been deluged with replies …’
Why on earth did I say that? Could there be anything less likely? Insecurity, I suppose, giving him a reason to reject me that wouldn’t reflect adversely on myself.
‘No, you’re the first.’ The accent was Scottish, and though rather indeterminate seemed to be middle-class. Our friend didn’t waste words. A meeting was suggested for the following day at two o’ clock, in the lounge bar of a hotel in Murrayfield with which I was acquainted. He specified a table in a corner beside the French windows — ‘It’s secluded and seldom occupied.’ He asked me to bring with me some examples of my work, and for some reason, that quite impressed me. I ventured to ask his name.
‘Oh yes, sorry — Tod, with one “d”. Torquil Tod.’
I am noted for my nervous punctuality. At five to two I was at the appointed spot, and at precisely two o’ clock a man strode in and made straight for the table. Torquil Tod was in his mid-fifties, I judged, just a few years older than myself. He was of average height, lean and energetic, with a thin bony face, rather sharp-featured, worn-looking and neurasthenic with hollow cheeks. His thinning hair, brushed back from his forehead, might once have been flaxen but was now predominantly grey. His eyes were pale blue and reminded me at once of descriptions of the eyes of the young James Joyce — keep-your distance eyes, eyes which repelled intimacy, an effect which might partly, 17but only partly, be attributed to short sight. I thought that he might be wearing contact lenses. He was dressed soberly in a dark green jacket, a checked cotton shirt with a tie, and nondescript trousers. Socially, he was hard to place. A rather conventional person, one would have said.
Tod was straightforward without being forthcoming. He got straight down to business, which was conducted strictly in accordance with the priorities asserted by the advertisement: first he had to establish my competence. It wasn’t enough for him that I could show him published articles and books. He thoroughly scrutinised them, for perhaps fifteen minutes, and seemed to know what he was about. He picked out particular passages which he read with attention, took special note of beginnings and endings, turned pages back to check on some point or other, and in general found his way about astutely. During all this time he made no comment whatsoever and his expression registered nothing of his reactions: I was in acute discomfort.
He closed the last of the books, piled them neatly and handed them back to me.
‘Good,’ he said, ‘I’m quite satisfied that you could do what I have in mind, if you’re willing. Can I get you a drink?’
That was characteristic of the man. If my competence had not been established to his satisfaction, I would not have been worth a drink; but in the right circumstances he could be generous. When we were settled, I with my abstemious half pint of beer and he 18with a whisky, he explained what he wanted of me.
‘As I said in the ad., I want you to ghost my autobiography. Or write my biography, if you prefer it that way: it doesn’t matter whether you write in the first or third person, you will still be ghosting me because throughout you will be dependent entirely on what I tell you and what documentation I choose to let you see. You are to make no independent enquiries whatever, consult nobody apart from myself, look nothing up about me. I would have to be able to trust you on that — that would be a condition of my hiring you — if you were willing?’ He raised his eyebrows questioningly.
I nodded. I was beginning to be intrigued by Torquil Tod.
‘There are two questions it might naturally occur to you to ask me. First — why don’t I do the job myself? The answer to that is straightforward enough — I’m not a practised writer. It would take me too long, and I don’t feel up to making that kind of effort. But I know, all the same, exactly how I want it to be, and I hope that I’ll be able to communicate that to you. You may have to suppress your own literary instincts in order to make it the way I want it.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘The other obvious question is: why do I want the story of my life written up at all? Well, that’s not so easy to answer. Some of the reasons may perhaps become clearer as we proceed with the task — if we do. But of one thing I can assure you: my motive is not vanity. Oh, no — certainly not vanity!’ 19
He let out a sudden, harsh and altogether unhumorous laugh. There was a ghastly haunted look on his face as he resumed.
‘The fact is, some of the events that will be covered are pretty unusual; well, that’s an understatement — actually, I suppose, they’re quite extraordinary. That would be reason enough for the story to be recorded, if I wanted anyone else to know of these events. In fact, I’m not sure at all that I do. Confidentiality, by the way, is of the essence — I can rely upon you absolutely on that, I presume?’ He raised his eyebrows again, and I nodded.
‘So who am I writing for — or rather you, who will you be writing for? You might want to know that. Well, I can only answer: Pour personne. Pour moi.’
I recognised the quotation: Jean Anouilh’s Antigone. It was clear that I wasn’t dealing with an ignoramus.
‘So, you will be wondering, what can I offer you for your services. I said a substantial fee, but you and I may disagree as to what that means. What it means for me is £5,000. That’s all I can afford …’ For the first time he was a little hesitant. ‘It may not seem much for writing a whole book … but then, as I say, there would be no research involved. You would simply be putting into literary form the information I’d supply you with. Anyway— it’s all I can offer you.’
I only appeared to hesitate. If he couldn’t afford more, I certainly couldn’t afford to refuse. Besides, I was already sure that this was a book I wanted to write.
The bargain was struck, then; he gave me an 20advance of £1,000. We arranged that we should meet, initially once a week, in Tod’s flat in the Comely Bank area of Edinburgh. This proved to be a comfortable enough if somewhat Spartan place, which I scrutinised in vain for anything that might throw light on the character of its inhabitant. He evidently lived alone. The furniture was a tasteful mixture of antique and more modern; there was nothing strikingly new or contemporary. There were a few rugs that might have been quite valuable had they not been so badly worn. The pictures on the uniformly cream-coloured walls were tasteful without being distinguished. The books, which I would have liked to browse among, looked inherited, though there were a couple of shelves of more recently published paperbacks. The most striking thing in the study in which we worked was an inspired coloured photograph taken, apparently, by someone lying flat on their back, from the bottom of the well of a spiral staircase, perhaps in some stately home; within the circle formed by the final turn of the gyre was contained a square of ornamental ceiling. The whole gave the impression of a mandala.
During these sessions I had with Tod there was no social chat. I sat taking notes at a bureau facing the wall, beneath the mandala-like photograph; Tod sometimes sat in an armchair on the other side of the room, but often walked up and down in his shirt-sleeves while he talked, his fingers thrust into the back of his trousers. Most of the time he was not even within my range of vision. He was formidably concentrated and to the point, never deviating from the path he had set himself. 21He did not dictate, simply imparting to me the information he wanted me to convert into a connected narrative. His voice was metallic and lacking in emotion. When, occasionally, I asked him a question, he would reply only if it was strictly pertinent and relevant to ‘the way he wanted it to be’, something of which he had a very clear and definite impression. If it wasn’t, he would say so directly. He was never rude, but I was left in no doubt as to the limits of my remit.
