Today's amusement - which I was somewhat in need of while I waited in all through a brilliantly sunny afternoon for DHL to come and collect the proofs of the US edition of A Secret Alchemy - is that apparently several national newspapers have been trying very hard indeed to find out who wrote which of the stories in In Bed With. Emails have been whizzing round, beseeching all 24 of us to keep everything under our hats. I can't say that half Fleet Street's outside my door, but I gather there's been a certain amount of pressure exerted in some other quarters. Whether there's a Trappist vow actually written into the contract or not, I can't remember, but it's certainly in the moral contract with my fellow contributors that no one should say anything, in case someone starts a process of elimination. For all I know, some of my fellows would actually prefer that people (their mothers?) don't know they write this stuff. Besides, it's much more fun, and more publicity, this way.
And meanwhile the legend that is Georgina Moore, Headline's publicity director, is getting stuck into the next stage of A Secret Alchemy's career, and I've got a magazine interview in a couple of weeks, though I'm used to those, these days. One way and another it reminded me, in a funny way, of a long-ago post of mine here, Leaving Eden. That post was all about how, when you learn to write, you lose your innocence as a reader. And now I'm realising, though it's much less serious,that one of the odd little side-effects of being a published writer is that I've lost my innocence as a radio listener, magazine reader and so on. (I never seem to get round to putting the TV on, or no doubt I'd feel the same about that.)
It's not, of course, that I ever thought that writers and musicians and the arty opinionati in general just turned up on the airwaves and the pages by magic, or that the only criterion of who gets brought to the nation's attention was aesthetic merit. But these days I'm much more inclined to wonder, when a new young electro-world-music-trio lights up Late Junction, whether somewhere a publicist is doing double-somersaults of joy. And if I time it right on a certain afternoon, I can hear the same Incredibly Famous Actor being interviewed first by Steve Wright on 'Radio Two', then on Radio Three's 'In Tune', and finally on Radio Four's 'Front Row'. Presumably they're only in London for a day or two, and can only spare an afternoon to Broadcasting House, but it doesn't much matter: as an old hand they know their stuff, so even the anecdotes and the nicely-turned little bits of hard-won wisdom are tuned to the different audiences. (I remember I was rather proud of myself when it occurred to me - in New Zealand, where I first tasted this stuff - to ask my publicist what kind of audience the programme I was being dropped into was for.) And, if I'm honest, a piece by or about any writer at roughly my level of career and market can get me thinking not only, 'How interesting,' - though it usually is because I'm always interested in writers talking about their process - nor straightforwardly jealous - it would take time I'd rather spend on my new novel - but certainly, 'How do I get that gig?'
It would be easy to think that it's all just a circus of nothing but one-trick ponies, a swirling mire of made-over faces saying the same things over and over again, and yet that wouldn't be right either. Rowan Williams on Private Passions can stop my breath, and I read the better bits of the weekend papers with a pair of scissors in my hand. I've just cleared the decks enough to get one of the last tickets for the T S Eliot Prize Reading at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Sunday evening. It's about as high-profile as the poetry world gets, and I'll be meeting a gang of friends from the Glamorgan MPhil, who probably last foregathered when one of our tutors, Sheenagh Pugh, was shortlisted a couple of years ago. I'll also be cheering on (or whatever the elegant poetical equivalent is) my supervisor Maura Dooley, who's shortlisted (not for the first time) this year. Yes, it's high-profile, and yes, the Prize and the South Bank and the publishers and even maybe some individual poets will all have their publicity machines grinding away. But I know, because I have a very precious signed copy of Maura's collection Life Under Water on my desk, which I dip into whenever, paradoxically, I need to breathe, that in the end it does come down to real things: real art, made by real people.
