After Bathing at Baxters (7 page)

I don't know when it all started – let's be honest, the really early stuff leaves me cold these days, it doesn't have the immediacy it used to, doesn't have the
glamour
. There were those first inscriptions, hasty scrawls you understand, filled in next to the chalked parodies of bison and tiger. In any case, nobody at the time knew what I was doing. Hour upon hour I'd watch as some benighted fellow-troglodyte ran his paw along the line of hieroglyphics, trying vainly to decipher them, but there was never any true meeting of minds. ‘This is literature dummy,' I'd shout at him. ‘This is the
future
' – but no, never a flicker of interest. They were so stupid, those cavemen, so numbingly dumb: intellectual discovery had no allure. What with the bison hunts and the shindies with rival tribes it was just one long party. But I kept my head down through those grim, pre-literate years, as Stone Age gave way to Iron Age, as Iron Age gave way to Bronze – I learned all the latest tricks when the opportunity presented itself. I was a dab hand at Runic and I have slight claims – together with a druid whose name I now forget – to having invented Ogham Script. And though it was good to be in at the dawn of civilisation, these, it had to be acknowledged, were limited skills: they didn't impress anyone. Bent over your piece of granite, out over the windy heath, file in hand, you were unhappily conscious that the real action was going on elsewhere, that Ogham Script was nothing compared with the wheel or the latest hi-tech battle axe. Later on, sitting round the camp-fire as the boys toasted their victories or sang those Iron Age drinking songs, you could be pretty certain that someone would murmer ‘You writer fairies' in the direction of our corner. We weren't popular, even then.

Things were better a few millennia later when I hit ancient Greece. For one thing, literacy was actually a point in your favour – being introduced to someone at a party as a scribe no longer provoked skirls of philistine laughter. Why, there were even jobs going in it. Plus, the materials had improved: no more hammering away on the walls, they had goatskin parchment by then. Better still, for the first time in history literature had a social scene, a
salon
. Poetry readings, drama clubs – we partied with the best of them. Naturally I hung around with everybody who was anybody: Homer, Aristophanes, Aesop, Homer … I don't want to damage any illusions, but in fact there were three Homers – you don't seriously imagine anyone could have written all that stuff on their own?– and they weren't called Homer when I knew them. Plus, the blindness thing was a gimmick – what Homer I, who was up on this sort of trick, called a sales promotion aid – and far from original. I don't want to make any apologies. It was something everybody did at the time: there was Aristophanes with his limp, Menander's string of race horses. You had to give those boys credit, they could manage their careers, even to the extent of impeding other people's. Modesty forbids me to dilate, but that scene in the
Odyssey
, the big scene where Nausicca and her handmaidens discover Odysseus washed up on the beach … It broke my heart when Homer II put it in without telling me, without so much a credit or a by-your-leave. ‘Business pal', he shrugged – all the Athenian literary editors were familiar with that shrug – when I reproached him with this oversight, ‘just business'.

I was writing myself, you see. The habit goes back a long way. Even at this early stage I cultivated a varied output: a few verse fragments, epigrams, a play or two. But they were an unprincipled crowd in those days, people got wind of what you were working on and bang went your intellectual property rights. And not just the Homers. I can remember one evening about two and a half thousand years ago, putting the finishing touches to a slick little comedy, a proto-feminist farce in which the housewives of Athens tell their old men: no more sex until the war stops, when some drinking buddy arrived to drag me out to an Aristophanes first night. You guessed it,
Lysistrata
. I still have the letter I wrote him somewhere. It didn't do any good. These things never do.

Temporarily disillusioned, momentarily undone, I lay low for a while after that. I needed a change of scene, I needed
diversion
after a thousand years or so of resolute hackwork. Even then, you see, the writer found himself up against those eternal social pressures – parties, women, networking. So I took time out. I spent the best part of a century in Macedonia collecting material for a travel book – that sort of thing was very much in vogue just then, what with the
Odyssey
, what with all the talk about new horizons and the quest motive. I cultivated the critics – time spent with the critics is never wasted, let me tell you. I went on a fifty-year drinking jag with a succession of Greek poets, and then spent a couple of decades drying out in a shepherd's hut on Knossos. Idleness you reckon, that typical writerly inertia, that demure, doe-eyed inability to get things done? You'd be wrong. I'd prefer to call it an awareness of possibilities. Naturally, I was aware that the great masterpieces of early civilisation weren't getting written but it wasn't a problem, I could wait. After all, I had all the time in the world.

For all that, it was a bad time for writers. Has there ever been a good time for writers? This one was specially bad. Too many wars, too much dislocation, distraction, call it what you will. Too much heavy shit. It hit the writing community – we were calling ourselves that even then – particularly hard. All those Greek city states, all those benign dictatorships we'd thought would be good for aeons were going down like ninepins. Plus, we couldn't look to their successors. Everyone knew the Romans didn't appreciate the finer things in life. Still, I hung in there. What with the invasions and the politics there was a run on war poets, military correspondents, that sort of thing. I did my best. I covered one of the Punic wars (in which nothing ever happened, just marches and rain, nothing you could write home about); wrote an eye-witness account of the fall of Troy in heroic stanzas: no use asking, they didn't survive. Such reverses had a predictable affect on a sensitive temperament. Back from the Peloponnesian wars – Thucydides had got there first in any case – I had a writer's block lasting two hundred and fifty years.

Obviously it was time for a rethink, it was time for a re-evaluation of strategy. Fundamentally, this meant asking myself just exactly what I wanted to achieve as a writer. What were my goals, my aims, ambitions? After all, these things vary. I got super-reflective around this time, while Carthage blazed and Hannibal forged westward over the Alps (I could have covered them both – I had offers), I even thought about writing philosophy at one point. But the circumstances weren't favourable. It was all military history in those days – Livy, Tacitus, Plutarch – you know the names: serious stuff and not a smile among them. I scraped a living for a while as a publisher's reader, but it was obvious that my suggestions, my proud experience, went unheeded. I can remember arguing for hours with Caesar about that first sentence, which seemed to me to lack impact, to impart an irretrievable dryness, but it was no good, he wouldn't listen, and
Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisi sunt
it was. Of course I made mistakes: telling Pliny that those nature notes wouldn't sell was one, and telling Catullus that his poems wouldn't get past the censor was another, but I made them in good faith. Meantime, I gave myself a good three hundred years to finish my next – OK my first – major project, a verse drama on the Roman conquest of Britain. I wrote closing lines early in 410, as the wind fanned the flames on Capitol Hill and Alaric's boys used the contents of the Municipal Library as firelighters. Once again I was a victim of circumstances, once again I was that fatal literary casualty, a man out of time.

Looking back, viewing it all with the hindsight of eternity, you can't imagine the effect that the sack of Rome had on literature. For a start, it destroyed some promising careers: Scrotus, Alba, Plauditus – I don't suppose you've ever heard of them (let's face it, nobody
has
ever heard of them) but they were very big in their day. At the same time, in the case of the major reputations it gave posterity an entirely lop-sided view. You might remember Martial for those steely epigrams, but what really sold were the smutty limericks and the poems about his ex-wife. All gone. All gone the same way as Q. Horatius Flaccus's
Tales of the Sensual Life
and Marcus Aurelius's harem memoirs.

Seldom has a profession come so near to extinction. Seldom has a profession stared so transfixedly at the brink and then shakily retreated. For a thousand years or so writers had been going around producing searing analyses of social problems, hymning martial accomplishments and taking money off indulgent patrons, and suddenly all of it – the social problems, the martial accomplishments and especially the indulgent patrons – had ceased to exist. We did what we could. We took off for Egypt, Gaul, Asia Minor, Morocco-anywhere in the Empire where the social order hadn't broken down and there was still a spare desk. I spent twenty years in a field in what has since become Norfolk with a gang of terrified Anglo-Roman
bourgeoisie
, waiting for the Saxons to arrive. When they did turn up, when the great clinker boats came nosing into the deep-water creeks, the sense of
déjà vu
was almost tangible: that primitive, penumbral murk, those drinking songs around the camp-fire, and mass illiteracy. For one who had been around at the dawn of civilisation, it was all very much like old times. I suppose you'd say, with that usual indulgent nod in the direction of the creative intelligence, that it was a Godsent opportunity, that it was history being made, and to be sure I couldn't resist keeping a diary of those meagre, intense years, but it was less about Celt and Saxon, rack and ruin, the birds making their nests in the tumbledown churches, and more about lice, scurvy and not having enough to eat. All this was compounded, naturally enough, by a shortage of materials. The ink ran out around 450 – I tried making my own out of dye, but you really need a professional – and the books started disappearing. No one quite knew where – I suspected the locals of eating them – but by the end of the century my travelling library, all those first editions of Seneca and Sallust, was down to a handful. By the dawn of the sixth century I was reading the same bedside book – a copy of Plutarch's
Lives
it was then – for ten years at a stretch.

What do I remember of those fugitive, eerie Dark Age days? Not much, except that an Anglo-Saxon cow byre is not the most congenial of literary milieux. (I know Faulkner wrote his first novel lying on a coke heap but then he didn't have to share it with Snorri the goat-herd, whose idea of a pleasant evening in was to get paralytic on turnip wine and talk about his mother back in Frisia.) For a time I considered alternatives – at one point I nearly lit out for Merovingia where something like a literary scene was supposed to be happening, and there was a time when I seriously thought about becoming a monk in Ireland – but gradually as time passed these drawbacks mattered less. They mattered less because by now I had made an important decision about my career. Naturally, in a trajectory that had already lasted several thousand years. I had made important decisions about my career before. There was the decision to get involved in this whole business in the first place (that was back in the days of Cuneiform, which everybody thought was a dangerous innovation that wouldn't last); there was the decision, made about the end of the first millenium B.C. that tragedy was pretty much played out as an art-form, and there had been various other minor shifts and adjustments in perspective. But this was something different. It involved – let us be frank about this – re-evaluating my whole status, eyeing up the entire rag-bag of writerly aspirations. It happens to us all, no doubt: you look back at what you've written in the past, you sift through the unpublished stuff, argue with yourself over its merits. I spent a year or two doing that, out on the Norfolk flats with the wind sweeping in from Jutland, and it was the most depressing period of my life to date. At its close I took the contents of the goatskin bag which had accompanied me thus far on my travels – everything, the poems, the plays, the letters from Horace and Propertius, and threw them in the river. Then I went back to the byre, found Snorri and got stupendously drunk.

After that, nothing. Silence. A void. Five hundred years and not a paragraph, not a sentence. Nothing at all. Even now, gazing backwards, I stumble for an explanation. It wasn't that I lacked offers. All the big names of the period sidled up at some point to enquire if I'd collaborate: Bede, Guthlac … It wasn't that one lacked suitable material: after all, what with Offa, the Danes, rape, pillage and the beginnings of English nationhood (which was what Alfred liked to call the handful of third-world villages he bullied into paying him taxes) there was plenty going on. You weren't stuck for things to write about in those days. Fundamentally I suppose – and I don't want to sound pretentious about this – I was out of sympathy with the
zeitgeist
. For one who had known Petronius and partied with Plautus all this was pretty small beer. The Homers were showmen, who might have been overly concerned with where the next flagon was coming from, but at least they were artists. By contrast, Anglo-Saxon literature, if you could call it that, was painful in its ineptitude, its meagre scale; all dumb riddles and battle tactics. Later on I would watch knowingly as scholarly acquaintances – Skeat, Tolkien – puzzled themselves over the Finnsburh fragment, always wanting to whisper: ‘Boy, you should have seen the bits which
didn't
survive.' I had hopes of Bede for a while – I wintered out in Jarrow a couple of times – but the guy had no artistry, no sense of what was a legitimate literary device and what was a ham effect. I can remember arguing with him for hours about the scene where the sparrow flies in through the banqueting hall, but no, Bede wanted metaphor, he wanted
symbolism
. The scene stayed: I quit.