James Lever on Me Cheeta
Anonymity, modesty and getting published
Congratulations on making it onto the Man Booker Prize 2009 longlist. Cheeta must be the first simian thespian to be nominated for the prize. You tried to remain the anonymous author of Me Cheeta - at what point was your anonymity blown?
Thank you. The Sunday Times figured it out pretty quickly, which was a shame. I never wanted it to carry a name at all. The ideal reader would have picked it up as a slightly irritating non-fictional squib stocked among the biographies, then recognised it as a parody, then seen it becoming a novel, then becoming a better novel, and so on, in concentric circles. I wanted it to be a book that encouraged you to underestimate it, which is exactly the narrator's modus operandi. As soon as you put an author's name on it, it becomes less slippery and the reader can relax to an extent. In general I'm a fan of anonymity: it's a pleasure not to be directed how to read a book; it's a pleasure not to have even the tiniest flecks of authorial biography interfering between you and it.
In post-announcement interviews you've been extraordinarily modest about your achievement - describing Me Cheeta as simply "OK" given the tight publishing deadline. What would you have changed if you had had more time? Or are you now starting to come round to the idea that it might actually be a brilliant book?
Well, I wasn't being modest, though it's very kind of you to say so - there are plenty of novels I wouldn't call OK. To an extent, authors have a duty to be self-critical: contemporary literary culture militates against frankness; the culture wants us to talk as if we were in a junket in a suite at the Dorchester doing interviews for Eviscerator: Final Showdown (‘very proud of the movie; I think we had a gas making it and I really think that shows onscreen') and it really shouldn't be worthy of comment if an author suspects shortcomings in his work. To say how far short you've fallen is only to reiterate how high the stakes are. My own disappointment was that I wished the book had lingered more in the thanatopolis of Palm Springs. I left too much implicit there. For instance, Cheeta keeps being asked ‘What's your secret?' and of course the central secret is that the poor sap isn't even who he thinks he is. His secret is that he's twenty, thirty other animals, all long dead: he never knew Johnny Weissmuller. He thinks he's a star but he's only a brand, with a brand's own awful immortality. I wanted very much to write an autobiography where the protagonist ended up realising he didn't even exist. There are clues scattered around but I'm afraid it all comes across as more of a mood, an annulus of fraudulence, rather than a satisfying revelation. So many sad things I underplayed at the end, I think - but admitting imperfections is different from regretting them. You have to accept what your subconscious came up with and move on. Perfection's not quite what you're aiming for, anyway. You can fetishise it, but the treeline of perfection is about 30, 40,000 words. Above that, perfect's just something which denotes a certain aesthetic - a kind of cathedralic hush to the writing.
Me Cheeta is full of salacious Hollywood gossip, protected by this idea that no animal has ever been successfully sued for libel. But did the lawyers really have to go through the book before publication?
That wasn't so much an idea as a throwaway gag which seems to have been kept alive electronically, to my considerable anxiety. It sounds worryingly like lawyer-bait to me. And I'm conscious that I've stepped into the arena of some monumentally humourless litigators. The general idea was that Cheeta should be at least offhandedly rude about every single human being he mentions other than Johnny Weissmuller. Cheeta's a drunken vainglorious lout - there's a litany of insults he tags Rex Harrison with early on which is (of course) unwittingly a perfect self-description - but the point is that he's fighting to tamp down an inferno of bitterness. He's Primo Levi bent into the shape of David Niven, and the sarcasm comes from that contortion. If he's going to forgive us for our omnicidal enormities, the quid pro quo is that the reader has to endure a little of his jeering en route to forgiving him - the least we can do. Anyway, I hope that stands up in court.
Have you had the chance to go and visit Cheeta yet in Palm Springs?
Yes, but I'm not going.
Me Cheeta is your first published novel but you wrote an earlier novel that was never published. Will you ever return to that novel and/or are you working on something new?
The problem with my novel ‘News Sport Weather' was that it was simply too astoundingly beautiful to submit for publication. I think that even the book's author might baulk at slogging through its uninterrupted brilliance again - it was that kind of book: too busy being brilliant to be any good. There was a time in the early 90's when it seemed to me as if the lag between English prose and the language as it was used had become more than usually vast. I got distracted by that - then I read about fifty words of ‘Infinite Jest' in a bookshop and went home and lay on the sofa for a bit. So, no. You can never go back - that was the book that wanted to be written then and you will never write it, not now, not ever. I suppose you could cannibalise it into a short story called ‘A Novel I Failed To Write' - but then that short story would turn out to be about something else, wouldn't it? At the moment I've got quite a lot of things I like, but I hope to finish a novel at the end of next year. It'll probably be called ‘The Slow Artist' - from an extraordinarily beautiful sentence in Bellow's ‘Herzog'.
Do you think Cheeta has replaced practising his Oscar speech for a Man Booker Prize acceptance speech?
I wanted to start the novel with that speech - its first line is the opening of Kafka's ape story ‘A Report to an Academy'. But Cheeta's speech provokes a riot, and besides, he's dead: so probably not, on the whole.
The Man Booker Prize website attracts a lot of readers who are budding novelists. Although this is your first novel - and it's been extraordinarily well received - you have also been a ghost-writer, a TV script writer and so on. In hindsight, what advice can you give writers about getting their novel published?
You could adapt Everett Sloane in Citizen Kane: "It's no trick to get your novel published - if all you wanna do is get your novel published." I wouldn't presume to advise anyone. What do you say: ‘Give everything'? ‘Write well'? A friend of mine was once having trouble with an agent, and she asked Will Self about it. His advice: "Don't ever forget that you're on your own in this game." That sounds about right. There really isn't much you can say - all the advice you need is there in the books. But good luck.
To download a free audio extract of Me Cheeta to your mobile phone Text MBP to 60300 (text messages charged at your standard network rate) or follow the link http://gospoken.com/a/mbp09 (only viewable on mobile internet) or visit our audio page to listen online.
(Interview by Sophie Rochester)
