I, Lucifer: Finally, the Other Side of the Story

Now . . . Gunn. Gunn and suicide. You’re thinking: For heaven’s sake why?

It takes patience to drive people to suicide. Patience and a particular voice of reason. It’s not going to get any better. It’s only going to get worse. You need this pain to stop. It’s perfectly all right to want this pain to stop. All you need to do is lie down and close your eyes . . . It took me a while to hit on just the right tone, part disinterested physician, part forgiving priest – their twin implications: You need it; It’s okay.

But Gunn. What brought it on? What – apart from his dead mother, Violet, A Grace of Storms, and Wordsworthian melancholy over the loss of childhood’s celestial light – happened?

There’s a long story and a short one. If you don’t believe in God or free will there’s really only one long story, an anti-morality tale in which no one’s to blame for anything. (Another place my reasonable voice came in handy, that, getting the universe reduced to matter and determinism.) The short story, on the other hand, the tabloid leader, is Penelope. Not that Penelope – though the name of Gunn’s ex is apposite, since he thought of her as, among other idealizations, a paragon of female fidelity. (And enjoyed with peculiar and shameful relish at my suggestion a porn video in a Manchester hotel – up there for book signing; ‘. . . sensitive and insightful . . .’ the Manchester Evening News – called Penelope’s Passions, which tale follows its classical progenitor in all but one significant detail: Penelope works her carnal way through the entire host of suitors and most of her household staff as well, ending the flick in a state of such cross-eyed satiation that one wonders whether she’d be capable of recognizing Odysseus should he scupper plans for Penelope’s Passions II by actually making it home . . .) Oh but these digressions! The trouble with knowing people, you see, is that everything’s relevant. Nothing is a digression. Even Gunn knew it. Dear old cabbage-face Auden, for example, a copy of whose Collected Poems when pulled from Gunn’s shelf opens itself like a robotic hussy at ‘The Novelist’, wherein we find Wystan’s observation that the budding Dickens or Joyce must

Become the whole of boredom, subject to

Vulgar complaints like love, among the Just

Be just, among the Filthy filthy too,

And in his own weak person, if he can,

Dully put up with all the wrongs of Man

Lest ye become as gods yourselves, didn’t I tell Eve, the first prospective novelist? Was that a lie? Must know All and tell Some. Which is lying by omission. No artist knows everything (yea, even this artist – piss-artist, sack-artist, con-artist, body-artist) but since every artist knows more than he can tell, all art is lying by omission. And if God is the only artist who knows Everything, how enormous that sin of omission is! Who, I ask you, humbly, is more worthy of the Father of Lies tag? You write this incredible book – but there’s a catch: only you can read it – and what is Creation but a book only God can read? What remains untold is occult, and what remains occult is feared, and what remains feared is not infrequently worshipped. Quad erat demonstrandum.

But to return to young Gunn. Who, in recent months, has found himself staring into the pocked bathroom mirror and pronouncing the words ‘young gun’ aloud, exploring the shocking inapplicability of the metaphor with haggard and bilious irony, much in the way one might explore with one’s tongue, perversely, the still-painful cavity of a recently extracted tooth. It’s one of his habits of despair. He’s got a quiver of them, and looses them by the hour until come evening he stands before his reflection Saint Sebastianized once more and lullabyed closer to his heinous sleep by my voice of gentle reason: She used to call you Young Gunn. She let it fall from her lips like a sweetly spoken spell mingling tenderness and tease. Along with Angel and Deckalino and Gunneroo and Baby and Boy and Honey and – the crucifier – Love. Speaking aloud the names no one else will ever call him to his own unpitying reflection is one of his habits of despair. As is alcoholism. As is pornography. As is Violet. As is the replayed tape of silence between him and his dear departed mother. As is the daily refined map of his own fraudulence –’. . . sensitive and intelligent . . .’ as the Manchester Evening News had it – which phrase he repeats, gutturally, just before crashing drunk to his knees in a Shaftsbury Avenue gutter, or projectile vomiting into the unjudgemental mouth of his Clerkenwell bog.

Heavens how this tongue runs on. I have no knack for brevity. And you none for patience, no doubt – so forward ho! (Besides which, there’s the Temptation in the Desert Scene to write this afternoon. Harriet laughs when I show her the material. Candy from babies, she knows. Criminally, candy from babies.) He is the bow of burning gold and these are his arrows of despair – but still we’re no nearer the why or how.

If Gunn were writing of Penelope he would perfect her, since he never got beyond their romance and into their reality. So let me, at least, be clear. She wasn’t a saint. (If only she had been. Saints, they’re a barrel of laughs, they are, perpetually on the verge of conversion to sin. They can’t help it. Extremes always nudge their opposites in the small hours.) She was pretty enough, but not so much that you’d still have shagged her if she was completely bald. She was lucky, actually that she hadn’t turned out astonishingly gorgeous, because she wouldn’t have been quite strong enough to resist living off the benefits that condition confers. (Astonishingly gorgeous people are rarely good, for the simple reason that they don’t need to be. Hell’s absolutely stuffed with the souls of ex-stunnas and hunks, whereas Heaven’s been in a more or less perpetual state of talent-famine since human beings first started biting the dust.) Anyway, Penelope. (You see what happens when an angelic intelligence starts telling the stories of human beings? One needs parentheses of virtually infinite regress; one of those Russian dolls – only an unimaginably fertile one, with not half-a-dozen versions of herself within but several billion – such an enormously long time before you get to the last, the first, the point of origin or expiry . . . Remember, Lucifer, we are concerned here only with Gunn’s decision to end his life . . .)

Penelope’s gone down to university in London (with her tangled tawny hair and her green leather jacket and her chipped maroon nail varnish) to study Literature and to Fall in Love. And she’s met black-eyed and tea-coloured Declan Gunn.

‘I like your forehead,’ he says, when she opens her eyes one morning. Six months in they’ve arrived at the speech of lovers – cockily tangential and thriving on apparent non sequiturs. ‘It’s sometimes like a cat’s. And your hair comes out of it in exactly the way it did when you were five.’

‘I want a tomato and some honey and some yoghurt,’ she says. ‘In my dream, I thought I’d had a baby, but when I looked down at it in my arms, it was an almond slice.’

‘And when you were at primary school,’ he says, ‘the teacher would be aware of you staring out through the window at the playing field, and he would know absolutely that you weren’t listening to a word he was saying, and the surface part of him would be irritated, but the deeper, aesthetic part of him would love you for your cat forehead and your absolute indifference to where you were and what he was trying to teach you.’

‘What’s the most important thing?’ she says, changing again.

‘Angel Delight,’ Gunn says.

‘Truth,’ Penelope says, moving her fingertips over him, mapping her ownership, guiltlessly avaricious. ‘Truth is the most important thing. Being true. Not being false.’

‘I know.’

‘But really.’

‘I know.’

‘Then Angel Delight.’

He can’t quite believe it, of course, his good fortune, his utterly undeserved luck in having found her. They delight in telling the truth to each other about the world. They’re only nineteen, so it’s not much of a world.

‘We must have babies,’ Penelope says, clambering on to him, easing herself down.

‘Eh?’

‘Not this minute,’ she says, feeling him inside her. ‘But eventually. Because if we don’t, then ugly, stupid, unkind people will, and the forces of evil and meanness will win.’

Gunn’s in a state of near mesmerism: his body’s rich torpor, the late morning’s heat. Their window is an ingot of warm gold. I don’t deserve this, he’s thinking, watching the light jangling in her hair, feeling the precise amount of her bodyweight she’s holding back – an appallingly erotic restraint – This will all have to be paid for.

He’s right.

Now – good gracious me look at the time! I only even mentioned Penelope because she’s part of what drove our Gunn to the blades and the bath. This is the way of it down here, I perceive, the frightful drudgery of finding the causes – then worse, finding the words. The immeasurably long time it all takes. Had Gunn stopped talking years ago he might have started living. It even occurred to him; predictably, when it did, he went away and wrote about it.

My dears, we’ve wandered from our course here. My fault, I know. And now I’m afraid the pull of the world draws me from this. I have, as you know, got places to go. I have, as you know, got people to see.