All these happy moments just came back to me, one after the next this morning. I guess they’ll make me sound like a bloody awful name-dropper, but I couldn’t care less. These are all great writers and they were all, in the times I met them, really nice to me. I think it’s good to share those moments and those messages. (And carefully not mention the *awful* moments with *dreadful* writers! Or *terrible* moments with *terrific* writers. I’ll just give you the good bits…)
When I met Gore Vidal it was in the bookstore on campus following his reading and I got introduced by the head of department. ‘This is Paul, he’s a novelist, he lectures in writing here at UEA and this is his partner, Jeremy.’
Vidal looked Jeremy up and down and then stared me straight in the eye. ‘Courage, my boy!’
And I remember going for lunch at Lorna Sage’s house with Doris Lessing and we had a fuss round the drop-leaf table, pulling it away from the wall to make enough space. We were dithering too much, clearly. Doris rolled up her sleeves: ‘I’ll do it!’, giving the table an almighty yank.
I took Iain Banks out for dinner on my second day working there, after his reading. We sat up till two and he told me that he wrote for six weeks in every year and spent the rest of the time playing with bikes and cars. ‘But they’re a very busy six weeks.’
I remember Louis de Bernieres digging me in the ribs while we had dinner and going, ‘Look! She’s eaten the whole thing – bones and all!’ And, indeed, the whole fish had vanished from Muriel Sparks’ plate.
Earlier in the cab, she’d been yelling: ‘That woman’s been saying I’ve been running about the continent for decades… being a lesbian…!’
At a buffet for Frank McCourt the lovely, genial old fella took me aside and said: ‘Writing your books and teaching here at the same time, you’ve got the perfect life, haven’t you? It would be for me too, I think.’
I got a postcard from Beryl Bainbridge: ‘Carry on! As if anything could stop you..!’
I remember Malcolm Bradbury coming out to the Jumbo Chinese restaurant with us and giggling like mad because I was insisting everyone got up and sang karaoke, like it was a part of the course. Humiliating yourself loudly in front of people who don’t care seemed like good training for writing novels.
And I remember W G Sebald – Max – messing about with the venetian blinds, making them go up and down, getting them tangled up as he adjusted them before a Phd panel, just to make the student whose exam it was crack up laughing: to set his nerves at ease. It was the morning of the very day Max died in a car accident, the last day of term before Christmas. I was on a train going to Manchester that afternoon. A five hour journey and a friend in the US texted me the news before I even arrived.
I remember Tony Warren sitting in the foyer of the Midland Hotel and I was telling him, ‘You’ve ruined my life! You made me think it was a sensible thing to have it all out with people. To go over and say, ‘Hey, listen lady!’ And bring up all your grievances.’ And he laughed like a drain. ‘That works for Elsie Tanner but, on the whole, it’s a terrible thing to do!’
Maggie O’Farrell said: ‘You encouraged me! You’ll have no memory of this – but there was a party in a flat near King’s Cross in 1998 and I was telling you all about my novel I was writing and you were so encouraging.’
And it was the Nineties so I had no memory of it at all, until I checked in my diaries – my endless novelised diaries – and there she was! We were friends of friends of friends of some bloke who was dolled up in a wedding dress! And we did have a long talk about novels! When I read my journal back, I completely remembered. (From this I took two things – keep on keeping that capacious journal. Also, carry on being nice and interested to people who tell you that they’re writing.)
And Russell T Davies! In Pizza Express in 1995: ‘Are you a fan, Paul? Are we both Dr Who fans? Are we coming out to each other?’
I remember Alan Bennett and having tea outside a café in Yorkshire when I was 22 and being amazed because he took an interest in the novel I was writing.
We talked about listening in on people and how interesting it always is.
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