Fortnightly Fiction.

By PETER ROBINSON.

Some time ago it was the fashion, and perhaps it is so still, to append to the title of a novel the words: a true story. Well, that is a little innocent deception …

—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg.

‘SUPPOSE YOU’LL be putting us all in your next one,’ I found myself adding by way of parting shot to our sportive conversation, ‘a whodunit set on some campus—curiously like our own.’

‘No, no,’ said Isobel, our current creative writing fellow, ‘I’m afraid it can’t be done, not anymore, it can’t.’

‘So how come you can’t anymore?’ I asked, enchanted as ever by her faintly purple hair, her vintage sleeveless blouse and frock.

‘You know as well as I do,’ she came right back. ‘The way things are now, you couldn’t make it up!’

‘Absolutely right, I couldn’t,’ I conceded, distantly ruffled by the promptings of some long-abandoned novelistic ambition of my own, ‘but I haven’t the least doubt you can!’

‘Wish I could,’ she said, doubtless protesting too much, ‘and it’s kind of you to say so, but, no, what I mean is however satirically exaggerated you make it, to produce your deflationary bathos, your academic comedy, reality, such as it is, immediately outdoes you—and it’s not that funny anymore, now is it?’

‘True, true,’ I had to admit, even as darkening over that early autumn sky came arches of leaves casting much longer shadows across the beach café’s tubular chair-strewn apron, the leaves’ serrations on that maritime blue overtopping thick undergrowth, its patches of light and dark.

As we stepped back into brightness across the parkland boundaries, with Isobel pointing her aquiline profile into the onshore breeze, I was wondering just what could be missing from the scene. But perhaps it was simply that the usual term-time litter hadn’t yet manifested itself on lawns and meadows. Against the sun’s glare, and curiously alive in such proximity to Isobel’s lightly tanned shoulders, I narrowed my reading-strained eyes. Across those cloud-shadowed spaces of the campus there emerged that landscape in permanent transition, a landscape with, hidden beyond the trees, its curve of bayside shore.

There was still, on that late September day, despite the distant figures of latest and returning students, an evacuated air, an air of phony-war about the place.

There was still, on that late September day, despite the distant figures of latest and returning students, an evacuated air, an air of phony-war about the place. The vacation’s holiday atmosphere hadn’t yet quite dissipated, the foreign language classes not entirely gone. It still clung to the drought-parched lawns at the heart of our delightful campus, as the adverts promoting our courses endlessly underlined—consciously imitating the style of 1930s railway posters.

Here in Jurassic Park, the Weymouth campus of the University of Dorsetshire, its ravishing, seaboard, late September light only faintly diffused by those few wisps of cloud, we had stepped from the Humanities Building, a converted art-deco-style hotel with central clocktower, Isobel and I, hoping for one of those Indian-summer autumn terms. Something of the sort would at least keep us going till the clocks changed and winter’s Cimmerian darkness descended.

‘Jurassic Park’ was, of course, the students’ largely affectionate nickname for our campus, though it might have been their witticism prompted the widely circulated quip that our poor vice-chancellor, with his independently commissioned and all-too-costly review of practices and processes, was trying to turn a dinosaur into a mammal in the space of a single academic year.

Isobel—Isobel Guest—oh come on, you know, the best-selling fiction writer, award-winning author of Take It from Me and a string of other best sellers, had confided not long after starting with us that she would be keeping a notebook for her ongoing project, and it was probably seeing one of those blue student jotters with Careful or you’ll end up in my next novel printed on the cover that set me off trying to tease her with the idea of us all appearing in her next magnum opus.

Nevertheless, as we wandered towards the esplanade, Isobel did admit that joke about Jurassic Park was exactly the kind of detail she would have stolen for her imaginary campus novel—but, as she repeated for my benefit, it couldn’t be done, no, not anymore, it couldn’t.

        ♦

THE PREVIOUS ACADEMIC year and a half had been taken up with adding more classrooms to the back of our bankrupt hotel, gifted sometime in the 1960s to the university. The swelling student numbers made possible by the government’s removal of the recruitment cap meant that the timetabling people were barely able to find lecture rooms that could house these vast new intakes. Management had grand plans to convert the Nothe Fort into a School of History, Politics and International Relations, to turn Cattistock’s disused brewery into the Student Union.

They were looking into the possibility of renting a retired cruise liner moored in the harbour as student accommodation, or even repurposing the old prison on what Hardy in his fiction called the Isle of Slingers, that granite fortress attached to the mainland by an umbilical cord of stones. And even as Isobel and I were strolling down across the campus, out towards the sea, a yellow earthmover emerged from the back of the Arts Faculty’s perpetual construction site.

Beside each of their heads, in a thought-bubble issuing from half-open mouths like a stream of ectoplasm, was an enormous question.

The site’s building yard had been concealed behind a temporary wooden wall thoroughly clad for Open and Visit Days with a continuous series of images, ones encouraging parents and potential students to consider us as the ideal place to come for three ever more expensive years. There were the five-times life-size faces of our hand-picked celebrity graduates, researchers, professors and others. Beside each of their heads, in a thought-bubble issuing from half-open mouths like a stream of ectoplasm, was an enormous question.

‘What next?’ asked the Art Department’s famous pop musician.

‘Can you mend a broken heart?’ inquired our leading cardiologist.

‘What am I doing here?’ was, of course, the philosopher’s puzzle.

‘Can money make you happy?’ our world-leading economist would ponder.

‘Will climate change make us any warmer towards each other?’ was Meteorology’s best shot at something sufficiently eye-catching.

On my way to a lecture last term, striding down the whispering gallery of the Department’s main corridor, I had happened to overhear this series of posters being referred to as the ‘Big Heads and Dumb Questions’ campaign. Even our senior administrator, Mary Wilson, who liked to say that a little smile for everyone would get you through the working week, had contributed to our staff’s pastime of coming up with ever-more facetious answers.

‘“Can money make you happy?” No, of course it won’t,’ she’d say, ‘but it will keep a roof above your misery.’

It would be a day of seaside chiaroscuro effects. After finishing our drinks under one of the beachside café’s outdoor sun-umbrellaed tables, Isobel suggested we take a brief loop around the campus, just as figures in fur hats and trilbies would go for walks in the woods during the Cold War—as if we too intended not to have our conversation overheard, bugged, or otherwise reported to the powers that be.

Isobel had put her sunglasses back on as we turned and headed towards the Department. I narrowed my eyes once more against the glare the better to appreciate the svelte outline to another of her tailored floral summer outfits.

Fluttering red pennants were inviting us all to the brave new worlds of transferable skills and employability.

Beneath the sky, at a distance, glinting through trees, I caught a glimpse of our reconfigured park lake. Fluttering red pennants were inviting us all to the brave new worlds of transferable skills and employability. What the banners spelled out if the wind were blowing hard enough in the right direction was Limitless Potential, Impact, and Ambition. Now they flapped in the breeze, a spaghetti of lettering putting on airs.

What the banners spelled out if the wind were blowing hard enough in the right direction was Limitless Potential, Impact, and Ambition.

The cow parsley all around was nearly head high, waving its undulant dismay. I watched the thistledown come into view, a couple of students passing us by, their hair ruffled by the breeze, as was each tuft and leaf.

‘It’s like a Caucus Race,’ said Isobel, ‘where all win and all have prizes, the whole world dazzled by its own supposed success.’

‘True, true,’ I heard myself saying again.

‘Have you seen the student recruiting advert at the station,’ she asked, ‘the one with the girl in boxing gloves?’

‘I’ve seen a lot of posters,’ I said, ‘but no, not that one, I don’t think.’

‘It’s of this young black girl, about eighteen-years-old, in boxing kit with bright blue gloves, and the slogan reads are you ready to take on the world?’

‘In other words,’ I said, completing the joke for her, ‘come to us and treat everyone else as your punching bag!’

‘Quite so,’ said Isobel, ‘and why is it always sport or entertainment is promoted as the way to get even if you’re BME?’

But even as Isobel was getting into her stride, a seagull came swooping down to follow a little gaggle of new students past the row of street food shacks.

‘Well, yes,’ I said, but got no further.

‘I mean, for instance,’ Isobel continued, ‘if I were to write a scene in which some manager were to say: ‘We need you to undertake a risk assessment regarding the residual humanity in the Humanities Faculty’—and when someone like you looks aghast at the thought, he adds: ‘No, there’s no need to worry, we’ll be providing you with a template to facilitate your compliance’—wouldn’t the joke about ridding the Humanities of its humanity sound absurd? Well, of course it would; but as you know, that’s exactly what they’ve been succeeding in doing.’

But even as Isobel was getting into her stride, a seagull came swooping down to follow a little gaggle of new students past the row of street food shacks. It would grab at scraps, attack and drive off other flustered birds, its yellow-angled beak and steel eyes hurtling from a clouded, ill-fed, greyed-over world, seeing red, you might say, and, my goodness, how it cried.

‘No, no one would believe it,’ our novelist repeated, ‘though, look, here it is, staring us in the face—this whole place with its banners suspended from the health & safety lampposts like a cross between a holiday camp and a Nuremberg rally!’

♦

Yes, she wanted to do a campus novel—though not one written about the campus, but by it.

I WASN’T, OF course, going to argue the point with Isobel Guest, and, after all, when it came to campus novels, we had, the pair of us, already done our best to have one perpetrated. Really, you couldn’t say we hadn’t tried, for no sooner had Isobel arrived for her year with us than she came to me with an intriguing proposition. Yes, she wanted to do a campus novel—though not one written about the campus, but by it.

Naturally I was intrigued and thought it might prove a great recruiting sergeant for our fledgling writing courses. Keen to find out more, I arranged to meet her for another brain-storming session, some blue-sky thinking in the sandpit, as they like to say, and easy enough for us with a campus down near the beach among the holidaymakers and children.

We were heading back for our conversation to one of the beach coffee outlets and would find a table facing the sea. Isobel switched off her mobile phone.

‘My idea,’ she said, ‘is that “The Campus Novel” would be a group-written fiction invented by the students and published online from week to week or month to month, depending on how regularly we could come up with a new episode or chapter.’

‘Well, that’s different,’ I exclaimed. ‘But how, in practice, do you think it would work?’

‘Like a script committee for a soap,’ she came back, ‘or, you know, as they do in Hollywood.’

‘So it would be a kind of serialization,’ I supposed, beginning to catch on, ‘like Dickens might have done it, or maybe Dumas, with his team of writers—and you recruit the writers from the campus—mostly students, but there would have to be teaching and support staff involved too, wouldn’t there?’

‘Well, that’s where you’d come in,’ said Isobel.

‘And would people simply volunteer to be in it, like a student writing society, however good they might be, or not, or would there be some kind of process for getting accepted into the team?’

‘The best way to nurture a feeling of belonging, you know, inclusion, diversity, and all that, would be to let anyone who wants to get involved get involved,’ said Isobel, evidently making it up as she went along—which, to be fair, is precisely what she gets paid for.

‘And how would you set it going? What would it be about?’

‘Well, I guess death would have to come to Pemberley in one form or another,’ said Isobel with a snort.

‘And how would you prevent it from wandering out of control like a picaresque epic without a single author to keep it more or less on track?’

‘That’s the danger,’ she said, ‘but also the risk—and without risk where’s the fun?’

‘But however would you look after the quality issue? I mean, there’s no knowing what some of the young people might come up with.’

‘That would be the job of the creative writing fellow, of course; and if there are lots of takers, well, then, we can break them into groups and allocate different episodes to each one, with the requirement they collaborate to make sure there’s continuity between the chapters.’

‘Come to think of it,’ I put in, ‘there could be an editorial group whose sole job was to make sure each episode was reasonably consistent as regards continuity, the characters’ names, styles of dialogue, plausibility, and so on.’

‘Yes, that would cover the dangers you were talking about, and there would have to be additional remuneration for the creative writing fellow if they were to take on the editorial work required to make the weekly installments fit to post.’

But then I hadn’t felt on my pulses the fickleness of trade publishing and the precariousness in never knowing where your next plot was coming from—

‘Of course,’ I said, though privately a little surprised she had brought up the question of money. After all, Isobel Guest was able to pay off the mortgage on her Dorsetshire cottage with all that literary fiction combining feminism and comedy, whilst, with her left hand, as it were, turning out detective novels like Dog in the Manger under a pseudonym. Could she really be fishing for a boost to her salary, or even a part-time post of some kind? But then I hadn’t felt on my pulses the fickleness of trade publishing and the precariousness in never knowing where your next plot was coming from—or if your agent could possibly finesse it into an advance big enough to allow you to write the damnable thing.

♦

ISOBEL HAS SUFFICIENTLY enthused me, though, and I could already imagine ‘The Campus Novel’ website updated monthly where it would steadily grow and evolve. It might even catch on. And since it was on the internet, what with social media and such like, our student writers might even go viral.

‘Leave it with me,’ I said, already thinking my first move would be to take her idea to Patrick, Patrick Greaves, chair of the University Arts Encouragement Forum, and see whether he and his fellow stakeholders might be inclined to support an application for start-up funding.

Located at the front of the tower in our ex-seaside hotel, perfect setting for a Christie mystery, Patrick Greaves’ professorial-size office was very different from my own.

Located at the front of the tower in our ex-seaside hotel, perfect setting for a Christie mystery, Patrick Greaves’ professorial-size office was very different from my own. There were no photos of yawning babies to keep him on his toes. There were no cards from students with thanks for last year’s teaching, no group photos of classes going all the way back to the teacher’s infant school. Nor did his room have any books in it. There were a great many box files on the shelves, which I imagined must contain decades of paperwork.

Nor was there any idea of being made to feel at home, no little domestic additions, like throws on the sofas, coffee tables and cushions, so I perched up on the edge of a student chair in the horseshoe seminar arrangement. With his mane of blond hair, his pointed beard and slightly drooping moustaches, Patrick couldn’t help reminding me of General Custer making his last stand. He had closed the lid of his laptop and appeared to be giving me, well, most of his multitasking attention.

‘Interesting,’ he said on hearing my summary of what Isobel Guest had said, ‘but have you costed setting up the website? And who would be tasked with uploading the materials? Would it fall to the creative writing fellow and members of the English Department to screen the new content for anything that required a trigger warning?’

‘In my experience,’ I put in, ‘when the students are producing the reading matter, as in creative writing courses, they are more than able to manage the degree of risk involved in sharing their writing.’

‘Fair enough,’ he said, ‘though I suspect that publishing online with completely open access to anyone on or off campus would require policy guidelines different from the closed educational setting of a seminar. I can look into the legal issues if you would like.

‘Thanks, yes, but I’m sure we can readily devise a handbook of parameters for the in-coming creative writing fellows,’ I supposed.

‘We could find ourselves with an Archers or Mousetrap. Had you thought of that?’

‘Then there’s the question of a salary or at least a regular honorarium for the fellow,’ said Patrick, turning to the last point Isobel had made which I’d faithfully relayed while sketching out the project. ‘There I do see a substantial issue, because surely such funding should normally come out of the sponsoring department’s budget and might well be an issue for Human Resources concerning the open-ended renewal of temporary contracts. Have you spoken to your Head of School about this initiative?’

I had to admit that I hadn’t, hadn’t yet anyway. But then, lightening up, and by way of a decisive, a telling afterthought, Patrick Greaves concluded: ‘I mean, in practice, how would it ever end? We could find ourselves with an Archers or Mousetrap. Had you thought of that?’

♦

LONG EXPERIENCE OF such meetings meant that before he had effectively dismissed me I could picture our stakeholders putting one through the heart of this particular Dracula, could see the fictional writing on the wall, even if not in glowing letters, and sure enough, Patrick closed our meeting by suggesting I go back to Isobel with his qualms, talk to my Head of School, and see if we couldn’t together work up a fully costed, revised proposal—over which he would be only too happy to cast a cold eye.

And so it was, to cut a long story short, that even though I’d sounded out some of our students and found them more than willing to give it a go, neither the funding for the website nor any honorarium would be forthcoming. For such an initiative didn’t count as a one-off event, so fell outside the Forum’s usual remit, while the School was as cash-strapped as ever and hadn’t the budget for such ancillary activities. But they didn’t dismiss Isobel’s scheme for a novel written by the campus entirely. We were advised to set up a blog, get the thing going, and see how it went. Then, if it proved successful, back we could come to the powers that be, and they might reconsider.

And Isobel Guest’s still ravishing face visibly fell as I relayed the idea of setting up a blog.

‘Typical,’ said our writer-in-residence when I reported the substance of my exchanges with Patrick, and what had come of my forlorn follow-up encounters. And Isobel Guest’s still ravishing face visibly fell as I relayed the idea of setting up a blog. Nor did it seem much of a reassurance when mentioning that this pet scheme of hers was by no means the only ingenious project proposed in the autumn, scoped through the spring, only to be scrapped come summer.

‘Unbelievable,’ said Isobel Guest.

‘Wonder if it’s always been this bad,’ was all I could manage by way of fellow feeling, gazing at the clouds floating by above the central white tower and blue trim of our Humanities Building, this converted hotel in which our offices had once been the holidaymakers’ bedrooms. Isobel said nothing in reply.

‘I am sorry,’ I found myself saying to our famous fiction writer. ‘I know how much you’s set your heart on getting your communal campus novel up and running.’

‘Not really,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid you’ve been bit.’

I was speechless.

‘It was only to see if anyone would take the idea seriously,’ Isobel continued, ‘and funnily enough, nobody, not even you, could see the tease in it.’

‘But, but …’ I said, visibly stung at discovering, after all my efforts, that I might be the victim of a practical joke, my incipient paranoia making me wonder whether Patrick Greaves had been in on Isobel’s jest. Nor was I able to conceal a shamefaced note in the corporate-speak that then came foaming from my mouth: ‘But I thought your aim was to enhance the student experience—you know, renew our T&L contract, make a decisive intervention, a beneficial change …’

‘Oh, no, not more ch-ch-ch-changes,’ she said, imitating the chorus of that ear-wormy old pop anthem, at which, after a moment’s pause, Isobel Guest, with her faintly purple hair, her vintage sleeveless blouse and frock, turned and insouciantly smiled me one of her mock-collusive goodbyes.

♦

PETER ROBINSON helps edit poetry for The Fortnightly Review. Alongside Retrieved Attachments, recent publications include English Nettles and Other Poems; his translations from Pietro De Marchi, Reports after the Fire: Selected Poems; and The Personal Art: Essays, Reviews & Memoirs. Peter Robinson: A Portrait of his Work, a collection of essays and a bibliography edited by Tom Phillips, has also recently appeared. A collection of his stories, Foreigners, Drunks and Babies, was published in 2013. An archive of his work in The Fortnightly Review is indexed here and an audio track of ‘Dreamt Affections’ is here.

Images: Ornella Trevisan.