Conversations With Mr. Prain Read Online Free PDF

her wrists would have pinched. Under her armpits were bulky dress protectors of india rubber. Under the skirt: a crinoline bustle, and layers and layers of petticoats, flannel and white. On her feet, I imagined a pair of tight kid slippers. Her pallid face was that of a long-term prisoner: hopeless, frustrated and resigned. She would daintily negotiate life, forever in danger of fainting for lack of oxygen as she completed the simple tasks her role required: needlework, reading, writing letters, taking a brougham to town, attending church, arranging a society party for her husband. There was a title underneath the painting which gave the woman’s name as Mrs. Oliver Marshall.
    The portrait screeched with frustration. It seemed like a portrait of a howl, as raw as Ginsberg’s, or Munch’s
Scream
, wrapped up inside an ornate package from an age in which Mr. Prain would appropriately belong.
    In the next instant I imagined something of her life. I saw her in a hallway, carefully taking off her gloves after an outing, sighing deeply. She looked sideways to me, sadly, as if she was about to tell me her story. “Listen,” she said. “There’s something you need to know.” There was a drama here. What could it be?
    Imagination is a frightening thing, but it is the
sine qua non
of being a writer. It’s not exactly a gift; it is more a weird mental condition. It overcomes you, and you have to get the images out of your system by transferring them into words. You have to tell. Before there were publishers and printing presses we would tell them to a crowd gathered at an inn, and now there is a kind of new inn on the world wide web. I have seen it written somewhere as the “global inn-ternet,” a virtual crowd ready to listen to your dreams, or throw cabbages at them. We are part of the human condition: writers, story-tellers, bards.
    “At any rate,” said Mr. Prain, checking his nails. “I feel you are confusing two quite different things: getting published and earning a living by writing.”
    I stared at him somewhat blankly for a moment, too affected by Mrs. Marshall. That is how a tale begins, by weaving fantasies around a face one sees in the street, on a train, in a portrait. It runs you over in the middle of tea.
    “True,” I managed to say, “but the first is an initial step toward the second.”
    “Sometimes a very small one,” he said, letting his hands drop.
    “Agreed,” I said, admitting defeat, with a last glance at Mrs. Oliver Marshall. Starving in a garret, giving up writing: I had overstated the case. Perhaps I was getting used to doing that in the Green broadsheet I wrote for every month. You overstate the case to try to highlight the folly of your opponent. You draw a strident conclusion to make a point. How else can you motivate people to consider the ozonelayer or global warming? But there is a time and a place for everything, and overstatement was inappropriate here. I recognised that a touch of humility would not hurt and said, “You don’t have to starve in a garret when there’s the dole.”
    I smiled at the thought of heated debates with my friends about the ethics of exploiting the current system if one was committed to Green concerns. And we were. We were all actively campaigning for awareness of environmental issues in one way or another. My flatmates—musicians—persisted in calling unemployment benefit “the Government Arts Subsidy” and made sure that their songs carried a message about the planet. This gave them a growing fringe following and they were increasingly sought after for performances at fund-raising affairs for organisations like Greenpeace. On rare occasions they would sometimes earn enough payment from a gig to cover their expenses and a considerable amount extra, but that was unusual, and such money was usually ploughed back into the band. It was expensive to hire studios for recording demo tapes and CD’s. They had yet to get a recording contract with a company,