Chapter Two. The "Originals".

Authors are by and large an unimaginative breed. We, their uncreated, are acutely aware of that, never having received the breath of life from them. But what I’m getting at here is that they hardly ever just “think us up” as they’d like you to believe. Usually we are “based on” actual people they’ve encountered, not loosely based but lazily. (Authors are fundamentally lazy.) And neither is it usually the case that authors are acute observers of human behavior, with penetrating insights into character and motivation. Basically authors are good at word association and daydreaming. What comes out of that often looks like something solid and real, but it’s as flimsy and two-dimensional as the Cactus Hollow Main Street set from any given western. Proust is no better than Danielle Steele in that respect. I’m not saying that if I’d been written, I’d still be a phantom. But it’s readers who give flesh to authors’ creations.

Arthur and I were based on a pair of friends who my author knew casually when he attended university. Both of them were involved with the local theatre company. They used to indulge publicly in running gags, such as pretending to be Hitler and Goering as same-sex lovers, exchanging endearments with each other: Adolf, mein liebchen… Hermann,mein schatzi… My author didn’t know what to make of this extroverted and campy behavior at the time. He was naïve enough to think along these lines: --They’re acting like a pair of gay lovers. –But they wouldn’t do that if they really were gay, they wouldn’t want anyone to know. –So they aren’t actually gay, they’re just being outrageous. He encountered clue after clue that told him otherwise: They’d appeared in a play one summer in Halifax, a play about the raid of a gay bar in Montreal which was staged in a gay bar. They “outed” a friend of my author’s whom they had seen with his boyfriend in the same bar. Another friend complained that “Arthur” had come on to him one night. And so on. It was painfully obvious, at last even to my author. But so much for the much-touted authorial powers of observation. I don’t think the fact that my author is an at best mediocre example of his kind matters one bit. Most of them are like that.

How closely would he have stuck to the originals? He intended to recreate the lovebird-pantomime pretty much as it occurred, but with John Lennon and Paul McCartney as the smitten ones, or possibly John Lennon and Brian Epstein. A central episode of his novel was to be the outing of – let’s call him Leonard; immediately following which the fatal car trip would have taken place. (Which of course was wholly fictional.) Apart from that, I would have been one of those characters observed from without, and thus would have been quite close to the original – who my author found erotically fascinating, in that he was handsome, amoral, and usually somewhat drunk, a combination which made him seem a mixture of danger and vulnerability. Arthur on the other hand would have been given an inner life, that ran counter to his outward persona. He would have been melancholic and anxious, prone to weird speculations on the nature of selfhood. As my author had never troubled himself to get to know the real “Arthur” this would have been pure – not invention, but projection - of his own inner life.