Phoenix Ark's Blog

If you think you know a truth, stop, and ask yourself if you really do. That is most especially the dynamic when fear steps into the frame, as it did in New York, or at 3000 miles remove. Perhaps it was specifically the case when my agent Ginger Clark told me that Abrams would sue me if I tried to walk away from a situation that was killing me, and which I could not cope with any more. But I am not entirely sure they would or could have done, and it is probably exactly what I should have done for my own sanity.

Yet the tendency to battle is in my blood too, you just do not write epic books without it, and also came out of coming from a legal family. Perhaps it was part resentment at what had happened over Fire Bringer, with a relationship split up years before, that had already harmed my ability to shine with my first novel, and I am convinced saw the US paperback originally shunted into an awful edition, that some young fans could not even read. Macmillan had closed a door, out of my original editor’s departure, my daring to sell another book I had first offered them to Bloomsbury, and the failure of my third novel. A period that then moved towards my Dad’s death. Too much grief, too much me, and as Kipling said of success and failure, triumph and disaster, ‘if you can look on those lying jades as just the same, then you’ll be…”

The truth is I had a lot to thank Susan Van Metre for, and tried to return that loyalty too, in the heat of the crisis, but they would not hear by then that I was somehow not US Public Enemy Number One. Nor could I see they either had much knowledge of or real respect for how difficult writing can be sometimes. What I was telling them about what I needed and need in order to work and create well, rather than having that dictated to me. Trust was at bottom dollar out of what happened over a book called ‘Hew, Screw and Glue’. The other truth is, when you have been with someone at the heart of a company for two years, you no longer see their colleagues as Vice President or Associate Editor, you see them as people you ‘knew’ virtually every day, if only at one remove. If any split up sees the politics of judgments and loyalties come into play, that could not have been more painful than there. But it was an open communication not only with an editor, but a designer and a publicist too.

The whole lot was withdrawn, as a relationship was withdrawn brutally too, because of a senior employee they claimed had ‘nothing to do with my books’ , which I had already experienced in touring was rubbish, and it was very badly handled. The warning had come down months and months before from stony, confident and at times extremely arrogant Susan van Metre ‘we will protect our girl’. As I’ve said before, good for you, the whole ethic of Fell is protection, but protect your authors too, and rather than your editorial advice being ‘give us another Fire Bringer’, as if that happens with the wave of a magic wand, or is like the next packaged book for a supermarket, try to understand the psychological dynamics inside human beings. If I was not worth fighting for as a writer, I just wasn’t, but if I was…

Was I nuts, also caught between my own agent now and Abrams, to argue with that agent that there must be values at play beyond money or success? I not only believe they had those values, which I myself was losing, I know it, yet how people and life can change with that ‘providence in a fall of a sparrow.‘ I did not really want or need an agent, I had done the deal on Fell myself with two people at a company, and it had helped restore all the issues over Fire Bringer. All Ginger Clark really ever did was prod me, and say ‘I’m gonna tell them this, right?’ I had found the way out, myself, but I had dropped ‘the ball’ and the real ‘evil’ in life really is falling in between, especially for a man, perhaps. But it is also about different kinds of love, the kind of love a child needs in order to grow, and the adult simply gives, for something much bigger. Those states are very much in play in that world and, at times, it is a rather peculiar and emotionally fraught one.

Ah, the power of love is a curious thing, makes one man weep and another man sing…!

It does not really help to speak of a personal nightmare again, it just brings back hurt, sadness and anger too, so on to pastures new. In 30 years there have only really been three great drama series on the BBC. The first was I Claudius, dated in style and probably sets now, but extraordinary, and because not only were the cast the greats of British acting, especially Derek Jacobi, but because it was drawn from Robert Grave’s novels, and put such emphasis on the script. It is always about the writing first. It put those expensive historical costume dramas like The Tudors to complete shame.

The second was Edge of Darkness, because the absolutely realistic drama stepped to the edge of the metaphysical. Bob Peck, in the search for his daughter’s murderers, and battling nuclear secrets, but always refusing to be ‘on your side’ was magnificent and if you read the published script, even the ‘stage directions’ speak of the depth of the writer’s vision.

The last and most recent is the remarkable The Shadow Line, written, produced and directed by Hugo Blick. Perhaps it’s obvious that an actor who played The Joker in Batman Returns, should so perfectly walk the line between dark and light. Where the police become the villains, and the villains the heroes, well, one or two of them, and all are aware of and affected by life’s shadow line. Hugo Blick was kind enough to look at an idea from Phoenix, which in the end he rather scorned, but it was useful, and an object lesson in how different writing for TV or Film is to writing novels.

Apparently in an imaginative attempt to reflect the structure of the Double Helix, Hugo sat down to write The Shadow Line, and produced drama shining in its clarity. Moving from mystery and even confusion to chillingly simple revelations. Apparently loved by actors, perhaps because it was not afraid to put almost ‘metaphysical’ dialogue into the mouths of who we imagine are ‘real’ people, and it is profoundly about people, and compassionate too, its structure and dynamic became so compulsive and convincing that it could confront the great issues, and really touched Aristole’s prescription for great tragedy, pity and terror. It was genuinely frightening, truly human and ultimately profound about love, life and survival. It is rather interesting that in jokey moments Blick apparently most associates with the almost superhuman figure of the carefully murderous Gatehouse. ‘You are the threads,’ says the puppet master, and ex spy, in a cheap trilby and sinistre gloves, “I am the rope.” Not an easily comfortable view of what binds man into the dynamic of life, but perhaps Hugo Blick will now write a comedy, in the Shakespearian sense, or maybe, after working with Steve Coogan, he has already jumped straight into the period of ‘the problem plays’.

When, like David Clement-Davies and Abrams editor TB, Neil Gaiman had a failed relationship at a publisher, according to word on the street, anyhow, he luckily did not suffer an equivalent calamity, but turned it to the magical novel Stardust. There are very telling points in it about an author’s intrinsic understanding of the realms of the psyche and imagination, as real to writers as the ‘real’ world, sometimes. First the old man, the classic guide figure in myth, suddenly turning in fright to that hole-in-the-wall he is guarding, and there must be a wall between the ‘two worlds’, and saying he always thought he had been defending the magical kingdom from humans, but actually they really weren’t so nice ‘in there’ either. The extraordinary forces inside the psyche, the potential shape of everything there is, perhaps, are often not very nice at all. But actually its most beautiful element is when that shining Stardust of true beauty and courage blazes with light, to protect her Man and King. So driving out all the forces of hate, control, jealousy, bad magic, age and death, to restore the complete and beautifully human, and confirm life. Like the ending sequence in the film ‘Altered States’, about the human male regressing to the wild and animal. The hero in Stardust learns that the source of his rejection in the human world was not good enough, and wins the archetypal feminine instead. It brings to mind a line from the Jungian psychologist Frank F Johnson though, about how incredibly powerful it is when a woman, active and understanding, does not run in judgement or fear from male anguish or rage, but can stand inside the eye of that potential storm and simply love. But then of course the love has to be real and the man has to be on the right journey too, to ‘capture’ the strength of true goodness and restored balance, and shine again with a burning and magical idealism. We are not archetypes, we are complex people, though we project images onto each other all the time, but anyone who writes into myth believes that those archetypes are real forces too, that can have both shattering and enormously creative consequences.

How moving Alan Yentob’s part dramatised documentary was on Van Gogh last night. A man whose spirit got so mangled in the machine, driven back into poverty, touching madness, yet who, after his suicide, achieved recognition, sales and values in their tens of millions, to hang on the walls of corporations and banks. Like Keat’s journey too, after he had been hammered by critics for Endymion. Van Gogh foresaw the irony of it himself, as we all see how much money and not the spirit is the real driver in the contemporary world, most especially perhaps in the art world. Perhaps it was ever thus. The artist’s grail is to keep telling ‘the truth’, their truth and meaning, in the face of it all, in the hope not only that their art can become visionary, but that those who think they are alone hear that they are not so alone after all. Van Gogh’s most vital relationship was with his brother Theo, who died just six months later, from syphilis, and was buried next to him. Truly heartbreaking, and yet that struggle for light, for love, even for some immortal truth is what survives, to re-inspire again and again. It was WH Auden who wrote that “all that survives of us is love.” Perhaps we should listen to artist’s voices far more closely and respect them far more too. Shelley wrote perhaps the most triumphant tribute to any artist’s really burning spirit in Adonais, in his tribute to Keats, and it might serve for Van Gogh too:

“He has outsoared the shadow of out night,
Envy, and calumny, and hate and pain
And that unrest which men miscall delight
Can touch him not, and torture not again.
From the contagion of the worlds slow stain
He is secure, and never more can mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain.
And when the Spirit’s Self has ceased to burn
With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.”

“I’m sorry I am unable to answer my mobile phone right now but, if you leave me a message The News of the World will e-mail it to me later.”