Her master's voice
Caroline Moorehead
GHOSTING by Jennie Erdal Canongate, £14.99, pp. 273, LON 1841955620 £12.99 (plus 12.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848
For almost 20 years, Jennie Erdal, translator from the Russian of
Leonid Pasternak's memoirs, earned her living as a writer. She published articles and hook reviews, collections of interviews, letters to editors and newspaper columns on a wide range of subjects. She even produced two erotic novels. She was successful and well reviewed. However, all this writing was not for herself, or indeed as herself, hut for Naim Attallah, publisher and funder of Quartet books and the Literary Review, Ghosting, Erdal's account of two decades of invisible authorship, is an extraordinary and very funny story. It is also the subject of an angry feud, for ghosts are not meant to be seen in the light of day, and her longtime subject and employer has taken strong exception to her corporeal appearance. The wrangle promises to be as pleasurable to the literary world as the spat over telling lies between Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman that so entertained the reading public in the early 1980s.
In 1981, Jennie Erdal was taken on by Nairn Attallah to manage the Russian list for Quartet books. She had three small children and lived in Scotland, and Attallah offered her 15,000 a year and allowed her to do much of her work from home. From time to time, she came to meetings in London, when she would he introduced to and observe the harem of well-connected and glamorous young women who famously filled his office. It was only when her marriage fell apart a few years later that Attallah decided that they would write a book together — or rather that he would interview a series of famous and rich women and that she, pretending to be him, would turn the interviews into a book. Together, they concocted the questions. The celebrity women — running to 1,200 pages — proved good material, and were soon followed by a collection of wellknown men. Erdal got a generous bonus. And so a writing partnership of sorts was born. Jennie Erdal ceased to edit the Russian list and turned her attentions and, from her wry and humorous account, much of her life to acting as Attallah's amanuensis. The nickname he went by and the one she uses to describe him in Ghosting, thereby avoiding too blatant a betrayal, was Tiger, after the pelt of a huge South China tiger that hung behind his desk. All went well until he had the idea of writing a novel. It would be, he told her, a love story, very sexy, very passionate and very revealing.
What must have been an extremely difficult task at the time — how, as she asks, can you write from another's heart? — makes excellent and comic copy now. To avoid having to write about sex, she made her sexy passages more and more excruciatingly absurd and embarrassing, certain that this would cause Attallah to decide to drop them altogether. Knowing of his revulsion for all bodily fluids — he didn't like people who coughed — she made her characters slurp and slither with 'droplets of moisture' and 'sticky deliciousness'. And the more outrageously she wrote, the more he urged her on. To her astonishment, the first novel, though proposed as a serious contender for the Literary Review's Bad Sex Prize, also drew respectful reviews. Tiger was overjoyed, Erdal got a raise and her teenaged children were mortified. A second novel was proposed and written, though by now Jennie Erdal was finding her metier ever more difficult. If fiction is ultimately drawn from personal experience, she asked herself, just whose experience was it that she was drawing on? Among the many funny incidents she records — at the Frankfurt book fair, at Attallah's house in France, in his palatial offices in London — she describes the day when he took exception to her using Larkin's lines in his/her weekly newspaper column , 'They fuck you up, your mum and dad', directing her to substitute the word 'screw' instead.
It is not easy to be a good ghost. There may be a liberating feeling of irresponsibil ity — after all a ghost receives neither public praise nor public blame — but ghosts need to please their employers, while producing a style that sounds both authentic and entertaining. Jennie Erdal, it is plain, was an outstanding ghost, in that she turned out, month after tnonth, year after year, written work that earned good reviews and steady sales. Her rendering of Attallah's voice was so convincing that no one appears to have known what was going on. And while she wrote, turning her employer into an established figure in the literary world, she pondered the nature of translation, the interpretation of the work of others, whether in a different language or for another person. Ghosting is not only her account of an extremely peculiar writing life, but a memoir of her own childhood, in a household in which questions of any kind were frowned on, and where she perceived, very early on, the intricacies of language and its chaotic, discordant power.
And then the ghost turned. Something of Attallah's narcissism and single-mindedness began to madden her. When he rang up 47 times in a single day to check something she had written she found it no longer endearing but tiresome. She remained fond of him, appreciative of his generosity and touched by his vanity and frailties, but she needed to get away. The parting, as described in Ghosting, was amicable. But Attallah, perhaps not surprisingly, felt differently. At first supportive of her project, he soon felt betrayed. His response has been to write a book of his own, The Old Ladies of Nazareth (Quartet, 110, ISBN 0704371162), a short morality tale, 71 pages long, about two elderly sisters in Nazareth, modest, poor, sickly ladies of great kindliness, never speaking ill of others and imparting a sense of virtue and goodness to their only grandson, who is able in later life to draw on his memories of their simple and worthy routines to sustain him during periods of vicissitude. Only, as he reveals in a final paragraph, the old women were his grandmother and great-aunt, and he was the small boy.
However this literary squabble ends, Jennie Erdal has written a book that is hugely enjoyable to read, touches on profound questions about language and writing, and provides a vivid and often affectionate, but fairly merciless, portrait of an exasperating, despotic, self-deluding but in the end likable figure, with the tantrums of a small child and the plumage of a peacock. More important for her, perhaps, she has proved that she has a true writing voice of her own, which she can now take in any direction she likes. As for Attallah, he too has gone beyond the morality of his tale, for The Old Ladies of Nazareth, simply written and pleasant to read, is proof that his writing voice in the end needs no ghost. What is more, as he reports somewhat smugly, writing presents few problems: he tossed it off in three days, not having planned it. It simply happened.
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