Julian Barnes from the Margins

Exploring the Writer's Archives

Vanessa Guignery

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350125032
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Exploring the archives of the Man Booker prize-winning novelist Julian Barnes – including notebooks, drafts, typescripts and publishing correspondence – this book is an extraordinary in-depth study of the creative practice of a major contemporary novelist.
In Julian Barnes from the Margins, Vanessa Guignery charts the genesis and publication history of all of Barnes's major novels, from his debut with Metroland, through Flaubert's Parrot and A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters to The Sense of an Ending.

1

Metroland: Everything that got away

Julian Barnes published his first novel Metroland in 1980 with Jonathan Cape (with an advance of £750), five years after he (and twelve other contestants among several thousand applicants) had won a ghost story competition sponsored by the Times and Cape. The judges of the competition were Kingsley Amis, Patricia Highsmith and actor Christopher Lee, along with John Higgins of the Times and Tom Maschler of Jonathan Cape.¹ Not only was Barnes’s winning story ‘A Self-Possessed Woman’ published in The Times Anthology of Ghost Stories (1975)² – along with Penelope Fitzgerald’s first published story, ‘The Axe’, at the age of 61 years – but another requirement was that the author submit his first novel to Cape.

Metroland provides one of the most interesting opportunities for archival research not only because of the many revisions and deletions to which the novel was subject but also because in 2007 and 2012, Barnes annotated the copy he had given his parents upon its publication in 1980 before handing it to the literary charity English PEN.³ The copy was sold (along with fifty other annotated first editions by Kazuo Ishiguro, Graham Swift, David Lodge, Tom Stoppard, Nick Hornby, J. K. Rowling, Margaret Atwood, Seamus Heaney and others) at an auction at Sotheby’s on 21 May 2013. It was bought by the Morgan Library & Museum in New York which displayed it (along with Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam) in a show called In the Margins in May 2015. On the first page of Chapter One in that annotated copy, Barnes wrote down a series of questions which had guided him during composition:

You write the first section of the first part of your first novel. What questions does – & must – it therefore ask?

What effect does any art – not just the one you have begun to practise – have on someone who comes into its orbit?

And further, if it does have an effect, is that effect measurable?

Or if not measurable, at least observable?

And if so, what signs of its effects can we look out for?⁴

These pressing questions could have been daunting for a budding writer and Barnes worked on Metroland for seven to eight years (between 1972 and 1979 when he was between the ages of 26 and 32), with long periods of time when he put it aside.⁵ He recalls: ‘it was a long and greatly interrupted process, full of doubt and demoralization … I had absolutely no confidence in it. Nor was I convinced of myself. I didn’t see that I had any right to be a novelist.’⁶ He showed the typescript to his friends, the poets Craig Raine and Christopher Reid. The former said Barnes should ‘re-read Great Expectations and put in a wanking scene’ – Barnes did not confess he had never read Dickens’s novel the first time – while the latter advised him to ‘put it away in a drawer as [he] would feel differently about it in a year’s time’.⁷ Such lukewarm reactions were hardly going to boost Barnes’s morale and may have reminded the young writer of Flaubert’s own experience when, at the age of 27 in 1849, he read the manuscript of his first book to his friends, an episode Barnes later recorded in Flaubert’s Parrot: ‘Gustave reads his first full-length adult work, La Tentation de saint Antoine, to his two closest friends, Bouilhet and Du Camp. The reading takes four days, at the rate of eight hours per day. After embarrassed consultation, the listeners tell him to throw it on the fire’ (29). The book would only be published twenty-five years later in 1874 and Flaubert’s first novel, Madame Bovary, eight years later in 1857 when the author was 35 years old.⁸

Metroland itself might never have been published. On 3 October 1978, the first reader at Jonathan Cape concluded it was ‘worth going into it’ as the author might be ‘able to rewrite it’, but on 17 November 1978, the second reader, despite praising many aspects of the book, recommended to ‘pass this one up’, advising the young writer to ‘put it aside, as achieved intention, and get on with the next one’.⁹ Fortunately, editor Liz Calder overrode the second reader’s advice and asked for substantial revisions before publication. In his acceptance speech for the David Cohen Prize for Literature in 2011, Barnes recalled his first encounter with the editor: ‘I date the start of my literary career from an evening in late 1978 or early 1979, at Tuttons wine bar in Covent Garden, where I met Liz Calder for the first time. She was then at Gollancz but about to move to Cape, and she told me that she was willing to publish my first novel, Metroland’ (3.1).

Barnes’s miscellaneous notes and the various annotated drafts at the Harry Ransom Center reveal how many careful revisions went into this first novel and how much material was discarded. In the process, the novelist resembles the biographer as defined in Flaubert’s Parrot: ‘The trawling net fills, then the biographer hauls it in, sorts, throws back, stores, fillets and sells. Yet consider what he doesn’t catch … think of everything that got away’ (38). Concentrating on ‘everything that got away’, this chapter proposes to exhume some of the deleted passages or chapters from Metroland to try and understand what led the young novelist to end up with a much denser text than the original.¹⁰

1. Faltering starts

In an interview in 2014, Barnes said that ‘the passage that probably gets most work in any novel is the first page but very often the first page is nowhere near the first page that you write’.¹¹ The examination of the writer’s papers reveals that this was particularly true for Staring at the Sun, Arthur & George and The Sense of an Ending whose original incipits greatly differed from the final version. Metroland is no exception to the rule as the original drafts did not include the first two pages of the book – an untitled prelude describing Christopher and Toni’s visits to the National Gallery (11–12) – but different versions of what was to become the start of Chapter One. In the annotated copy of the book, Barnes wrote in 2012 next to the first sentence of Chapter One: ‘when I think of the book (which I occasionally do) I always remember this as being its first line’ (Morgan Library 13), that is, ‘Cut privet still smells of sour apples, as it did when I was sixteen’ (13). One isolated page of an early draft of the novel reveals an essential narratological difference in the formulation of that sentence. Indeed, while the published text uses the present tense and the first-person pronoun, the early draft page employed the past tense and the third-person pronoun: ‘Cut privet still smelt of sour apples, as it had done when he was sixteen’ (1.10.8, my emphasis).

Whereas Metroland is written in first-person narration and gives direct access to Christopher Lloyd’s voice and thoughts as he reminisces about his past and reflects on the present, this early draft page offered a drastically different option through the choice of a third-person narration and an inner focalization through the mind of a character named ‘Paul Battersby’, the unique occurrence of this first name and family name in the various drafts (with such phrases as ‘Paul thought this’, ‘Paul stopped’, ‘Paul Battersby’s mother’).¹² This is the unique page in the whole archive which is written in the third person, thereby suggesting that Barnes experimented with both narratological possibilities at a very early stage of composition and swiftly opted for the first person which suited the tone of this Bildungsroman better. More than forty years later, Barnes would take the reverse option for his novel about the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, The Noise of Time (2016), which he started writing in the first person but had to stop after four pages: ‘I didn’t know why it wasn’t working, it just wasn’t working at all, and I had just done it in the wrong person. I went back to it about nine months later, and started in the third person.’¹³

In an interview in 2013, Barnes revealed that he had planned to experiment with various narrative voices in his first three novels:

at the very beginning I had a rough plan that I’d write my first book in the first person, the second book in the third person, and the third book from the point of view of a woman. That got slightly derailed and that third book became my fourth book. But that was really just a plan to instruct myself in the various technical skills necessary to write a novel.¹⁴

His second novel Before She Met Me is indeed written in the third person and Staring at the Sun which was pushed aside for a while by Flaubert’s Parrot is written from a woman’s point of view. The choice of first person for Metroland may be explained by the fact that Barnes said in several interviews that the book was partly autobiographical,¹⁵ especially in the first part, and that he had a friend called Toni (like Chris’s closest friend in the novel) to whom he sent the book but who did not like it.¹⁶ On the annotated copy of the book, he wrote at the beginning of Part Two: ‘Part One was – topographically & spiritually – very close to home. Proper invention starts (or begins to start) here’ (Morgan Library 73). In a handwritten note in the archives, Barnes reminded himself to make ‘[e]arly physical descriptions of me, Toni’ (1.10.6, my emphasis), the first-person pronoun thus confirming the parallels between the fictional Chris and Barnes himself. Some thirty years later in Nothing to Be Frightened Of, when referring to his first novel, Barnes mentioned ‘the (at times all too convincingly autobiographical) narrator’.¹⁷ Going further, one may suggest that a thread could be woven between the voices of Chris in Metroland, Tony in The Sense of an Ending, Paul in The Only Story and Barnes himself in Nothing to Be Frightened Of.

In regard to Metroland, Barnes’s shift of names from Paul Battersby to Christopher Lloyd occurred as the novel developed in the writer’s mind. On a page of random notes, the author wrote: ‘names earlier surname – ordinary m-class: Finlay?’, and underneath ‘Christopher?’ (1.10.5). The final choice of family name must have come fairly late as that same page of notes already includes the titles of all chapters for Part One (as well as the epigraphs for each part, although these could have been added later),¹⁸ thus suggesting that Barnes was still undecided about his hero’s family name at that stage.¹⁹ In a first-person novel, the narrator’s first name usually only appears in dialogue when used by other characters, hence its relatively late appearance in Metroland, in Chapter Three, when the protagonist’s mother, after her son asks her ‘Mummy, what’s an oonuch?’, tells his father: ‘Christopher wants to know what a eunuch is’ (22).²⁰ His surname is revealed in Chapter Five when Chris refers to his family’s origins: ‘The Lloyds (well, our Lloyds, my father’s Lloyds at least) came from Basingstoke’ (32) – a name which may sound ironical (as suggested by the comment between brackets) given the Lloyd’s of London insurance market (to which Barnes devoted an essay, reproduced in Letters from London)²¹ but is an ordinary lower to middle-class surname of the type Barnes had in mind (just like Battersby in the first version).

When compa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the Text
• Introduction
• 1 Metroland: Everything that got away
• 2 The case for/The case against
• 3 A chronology (of sorts)
• 4 Flaubert’s Parrot from ignition to composition
• 5 The Barnes apocrypha
• 6 Staring at the Sun: A novel of forking roots and paths
• 7 Fragments of stories: A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
• 8 The Porcupine in the making: Writer and translator
• 9 A dictionary of Julian Barnes
• 10 Arthur & George: Beginnings and endings
• 11 Nothing to Be Frightened Of as an echo chamber
• 12 The Sense of an Ending: Time in reverse
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index
• Copyright Page