High Life

Bad News by Edward St Aubyn is, quite simply, the best book ever written about drugs. Thomas de Quincey, Charles Baudelaire, Jean Cocteau, William Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, Irvine Welsh and Will Self may all be writers roped together like mountaineers heading for the summit, but it is St Aubyn they will find at the top. I first came across the book about five years ago. There it was, quietly glowing away on a friend’s shelf. And from the moment I picked it up I knew it was a work of perfection. It fitted my own experience as seamlessly as a silk glove.

Bad News is the second book in St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose trilogy. Each part covers one day in the life of its protagonist – days that encapsulate the causes, the consequences and the resolution of a cruelly damaged childhood. Patrick Melrose is physically abused by his father, becomes a junkie and then tries to seek redemption after going straight. The first book, Never Mind, set in the South of France, examines a family who find themselves trapped like spiders in a bottle, forced to devour one another. Bad News takes Patrick to New York to pick up his deceased father’s ashes, and traces his descent into narcotic oblivion. The last, Some Hope, is an excoriating attack on upper-class English society, seen as it descends upon a marquee in the country for a grand dinner party at which Princess Margaret is present. Patrick, who has now given up drugs, makes a merciless spectator. Each part is brilliant. But it is the second that unlocked images for me, for I looked into its dark mirror and saw myself. By the time I was in my thirties crack had taken me like an eagle grabbing a rabbit. Heroin was the elixir that soothed my senses and brought me back down to earth. I took drugs as an escape from a life I found unendurable. I took drugs because I enjoyed taking them. The fixing ritual becomes the sweetest form of pleasure – the needle, the belt round the arm, the powder in the spoon, the flame applied. The chemical sweeps around your body like a torch-lit procession. You hear the angels sing. And often, by my side as I lay in this abyss of sensuality, was St Aubyn’s book. Even stoned I knew you must always read stuff that would make you look good if you were to die in the middle of it. Reading Bad News when I was clean, one of the things that astonished me was St Aubyn’s ability to capture the actual effects of drugs, and not simply describe the lifestyle as other writers have done. ‘Heroin landed purring at the base of his skull, and wrapped itself darkly around his nervous system, like a black cat curling up on its favourite cushion. It was as soft and rich as the throat of a wood-pigeon or the splash of sealing wax onto a page or a handful of gems slipping from palm to palm,’ he writes. He describes cocaine as ‘the arctic landscape of pure terror’, a feeling of being ‘empty and fragile as a pane of glass’. St Aubyn dissects society with cruel, exquisite precision. But he is savagely, satirically, wickedly funny too. Take the passage when Patrick, having travelled to New York to pick up his father’s ashes, finds himself storming down Madison Avenue with his father, in a brown paper bag, on his arm.

By the time he reached Sixty-First Street, Patrick realized that it was the first time he had been alone with his father for more than ten minutes without being buggered, hit, or insulted. . . The tragedy of old age, when a man is too weak to hit his own child. No wonder he had died. Even his rudeness had been flagging towards the end, and he had been forced to introduce a note of repulsive self-pity to ward off any counter-attack.

One of the reasons Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’ works so brilliantly is because Gregor never questions why he has awoken one morning ‘transformed into a gigantic insect’. By the same token Patrick never questions why he has become a drug addict. He just has. He is attractive because he appears genuinely to despair of life while never, ever whining about it. Self-pity is, of course, the most destructive of the non-pharmaceutical narcotics. The trouble is it is very addictive and very pleasurable. Patrick will have none of it. Indeed, it is this refusal that helps to give the books their strength. So why is St Aubyn’s work so little known here as to be almost confidential? When the trilogy was first published in America by a press so small that the secretaries probably typeset each book, it was immediately picked up by the New York Review of Books and given a double-page spread. Maybe his own priorities are part of the problem. He is first and foremost a craftsman. Each sentence is honed and polished – full of bite, surprise and attack. I suspect he believes that if you produce such high-quality work, the world will beat a path to your door. It should. But it won’t. Writing has become not so much a career as a personality racket. ‘You have to sell yourself, just to get rid of the damned thing,’ an American girlfriend tells Patrick. But Patrick – an autobiographical figure – comes from a social world in which such effort is ‘vulgar’. Perhaps St Aubyn’s charming inability to sell himself has the same roots. Yet as a writer he is fearless. While other authors stay on the shore, he swims out to sea. His prose is pure heroin.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 5 © Sebastian Horsley 2005