The Last Laugh
Towards the end of a particularly congenial dinner party a couple of months ago, our conversation turned to the current crop of bestsellers and movies. Since the portions had been lavish and the wines well chosen, judgements were inclined to be generous. In fact, the only subject to cause any major disagreement was Gavin Anderson’s latest romantic comedy The Last Laugh.
“It’s the ultimate feelgood movie,” enthused a strait-laced solicitor, surprising us all.
“I think it’s Gavin’s best yet,” agreed our hostess, who liked to ally herself with talent even if she wasn’t personally acquainted with it.
“Mawkish, sentimental balderdash,” countered her husband, who preferred to set the cat among the pigeons.
“What’s this one all about?” asked a pretty young botanist who, as it happened, actually had spent the previous six months up the proverbial Orinoco.
“Boring boy meets fabulous girl,” our host told her flatly. “Boy loses girl to much more interesting and attractive best friend. Girl sees error of ways and goes back to boring bloke. The end.”
“And I didn’t believe a word of it,” put in a slightly sloshed dentist with a skin problem. “Complete fantasy from start to finish.”
“All right, so it may have been a bit contrived,” chimed in the solicitor’s wife, “but what does that matter so long as it works? I was in floods.”
“As a matter of fact, it might not have been as contrived as all that.” Everyone’s eyes turned towards a genial young television producer who had been drafted in at the last minute to partner a lonely nursery teacher. “I have it on good authority that this particular story was based on fact.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Well, I actually worked with old Gav a couple of years back and he told me the plot of this new movie he was writing. He said he first got the idea at university…” And he proceeded to tell us the following story.
Like the hero of the film, Gavin Anderson had apparently always wanted to be in the theatre because of the girls, but unfortunately his ambition was thwarted by two factors: Gavin was a lousy actor, and he had always been terrified of women. He was forever putting them on pedestals or – which was worse – becoming hopelessly infatuated and never having the guts to do anything about it. But though he might have been a moral coward, he had a kind of bravery which resided in a steadfast refusal to admit defeat, and even stronger than his attraction to the opposite sex was his determination to make his name.
But that lack of stage presence was a real problem. Compact of stature, gentle of voice and diffident to a fault, he made little impact on casting directors so time after time the future most successful screenwriter of his generation would read for Macbeth, Tamburlaine or Cyrano de Bergerac and end up clumping on as a spear carrier or third citizen from the left at the back of the crowd. There is a scene in the film where the hero gets confused at an audition for Othello and causes great hilarity by announcing from the stage that he will be reading for the part of Igor. Apparently this actually happened to Gavin. The humiliation of the moment followed him home like a thick fog and he sank beneath its clammy weight into a pit of depression.
Yet, unable to accept that picking over the scab was not the best way to let the wound heal, he couldn’t keep away from shows. One night he went to see an outdoor production of Blithe Spirit to scoff at the lead, but he got bored before the interval and started to tiptoe out. Behind the banks of seating he collided painfully with an assistant stage manager carrying a load of paper cups to the refreshment tent.
It was the real thing at last. Gavin fell down a failed actor and came up covered in styrofoam but transformed, transmogrified by love. Amazingly he found the courage somewhere to ask whether she was free for a drink afterwards. Even more amazingly, in his experience, she was. They talked, they laughed, they found common ground at every turn, and within half an hour he had stumbled upon two hitherto undiscovered truths: that it was possible to relax completely in the company of a woman, and that walking her home in the moonlight was every bit as romantic as it was supposed to be.
But he barely had enough time to register all this before Angela (“Talk about your nominative determinism,” added the producer in an aside, baffling some of us) ruefully announced that she had an essay to write. Gavin had no time to choose a strategy so the heat of the moment made him opt for nothing less than absolute candour. Gripping her elbows he said tensely, “Look, I know we’ve only just met and it probably doesn’t matter but I think I’ve fallen in love with you. Sorry.” And this incredibly beautiful woman, who must have heard every opening gambit in the book, looked him straight in the eye and replied calmly, “Well, it’s my roommate’s birthday on Saturday. Why don’t you come to our party?” Then she was gone and Gavin, not wanting to tempt fate a second time by calling round again just to make sure she meant it, spent the next forty-eight hours in a state of painful euphoria.
He had no resources with which to deal with the situation. Such a moment of instant empathy had never happened before, so no sooner had the joy subsided than the doubts set in. There was only one thing to do, and that was tell his best friend all about her.
Now this best friend, Pete, was the complete antithesis of Gavin. He was one of those raffish, disreputable individuals that women seem to go for – at least within the pages of romantic fiction. If Gavin was anal, Pete went around with his backside hanging out of his trousers. And not only his backside: Pete Gainsborough had once been banned from the town’s leading restaurant for obscenely imitating an elephant while only moderately drunk. He was frequently unkempt, often uncouth and forever unrepentant, but over and above any other distinction he knew his women and was undeniably popular with both sexes – a good mate to one, a potential mate to the other. In short, he was everything Gavin wasn’t, but since he had absolutely no chance of learning to be like him, Gavin had decided the next best thing would be to cleave to this mighty man in the mournful hope that some of his magic might rub off.
So now we find Gavin struggling to share the secret of Angela with the most sexually dynamic man in his year. He could barely get the words out in his effort to convey the nature of the hammer blow which had floored him and the utterly overwhelming physical reality of the person who had delivered it.
“You jammy beggar,” was Pete’s first response, voiced, as ever, the moment the thought occurred to him. It was followed almost immediately by his second: “Any chance she’ll have a sister at this party?”
And at this point Gavin uttered the words which were to change the lives of three people forever. “I don’t know. I won’t be going.”
“You what?”
“Who am I fooling? I probably dreamt it all anyway. Girls like that just don’t drop into the laps of blokes like me. I may not know much about myself but I do know I’ve got a very conventional taste in women which means if I like her, then any number of other guys she’s met before me will like her too. She’s bound to have a boyfriend. And I don’t think I could face that. ‘Hello Gavin. I’m so glad you could make it. Come and meet Hugo, my fiancé.’” And his slender frame literally shuddered.
“Now look,” Pete said, “that’s just a risk you’re going to have to take isn’t it? If she’s all you say then you’ve just got to go for it.”
“We both know I’ve never gone for anything in my life without first sitting down and thinking about it long enough to put me off doing it.”
Let it be said here in Pete’s defence that he spent the next forty-five minutes urgently trying to kindle a lick of fire in his friend’s belly. He cajoled, he joshed, he jollied him along and, when that didn’t work, he resorted to sarcasm and simulated anger. But nothing helped. Gavin’s mind was made up and with each passing minute was becoming ever more rigidly set against any possibility of change. In the end Pete spoke through his genuine exasperation. “So this is the person you’re going to be for the rest of your life is it? Scared to do anything in case it turns sour on you. What if for once it doesn’t? The first girl who’s ever shown any real interest in you invites you to a party to meet her friends and have a good time, maybe get a bit tiddly and let your hair down for once, and you’re not even going to turn up? That’s not just dumb, Gavin, it’s – how can I put this in terms even you might understand? – it’s rude. Your dad would turn in his grave.”
“My dad,” Gavin replied bleakly, “probably felt this way about my mother once. It didn’t stop him walking out.”
So Pete retired defeated and a little later Gavin wandered back to his room to sit staring out the window, or gaze blankly at the wall, or do whatever it was he did these days to get over the latest crushing blow his own insecurities had dealt him.
As for Pete, it took him all of a second and a half to make up his mind to go to the party in Gavin’s stead. He felt no qualms about this. He’d given it his best shot. He’d tried to make his friend see sense, and had discharged his duties as a mate. Now it was every man for himself. Yet even while he conditioned and carefully blow-dried his hair in readiness that afternoon, there was no thought of potential conquest. His main impulse was nothing more sinister than a simple curiosity to see this paragon who had sent his admittedly over-sensitive friend into such paroxysms of angst. He even called by Gavin’s room on his way out to give him a final chance to reconsider. But Gavin had deliberately immersed himself in Rachmaninov – the Second Piano Concerto no less, which was always a bad sign – and he was too far gone to reach.
So Pete pitches up to this party with his cheapo bottle of plonk and a tu’penny ha’penny gewgaw of a gift for a hostess he’s never met, and the second he sees her he knows who she is by the feeling of utter catastrophe that hits him, in his turn, like a plummeting meteor. A single glance from those suddenly widening eyes and he knew that he too was a goner. Through the confused rushing sound in his ears and the thump like a jackhammer in the middle of his chest, he gamely tried to explain that Gavin was indisposed, having been called away by a sudden family crisis… But even as he chuntered out the words he knew he didn’t want to waste a second discussing that no-hoper. There was barely enough time to take this girl in his arms and fill the air with urgent breathless talk of you and me and us, and a whole lifetime suddenly seemed too short a span to do that mystical union justice.
For her part Angela, too, tacitly understood that after the proprieties had been duly observed and they had established that for reasons of his own Gavin wouldn’t be joining them, they owed it to themselves to get on with their suddenly rapturous lives. Indeed, as Gavin had foretold, there was a boyfriend of sorts hovering alertly in the background – but he had already begun to fade into insubstantiality the moment Pete walked into the room.
Was there guilt in those first hurried kisses snatched behind the kitchen door that first hour? Did the weight of their betrayal dog their footsteps as, bound up in each other’s arms, they eloped from the party as soon as decency allowed, stepping briskly through the golden morning streets to formally consummate their union? Was there, ultimately, anything other than a weary amalgam of annoyance and relief as they awoke some hours later to the sound of the bedroom door opening and the sight of Gavin Anderson shambling in, as was his wont every Sunday morning, juggling a tray of three coffee cups (he knew his friend so well) and this week’s essay for Pete to crib from?
The moment of realisation was awful, and all the more awful because that was all there was. Gavin silently took in the scene then, with withering dignity, simply put down the tray on the crowded coffee table, closed the door behind him and walked away, never to speak to either of them again.
The happy couple went on to enjoy a relationship more fulfilling than either of them had known before. Through Pete’s influence Angela unbent a little, sloughing off many of the negative and judgemental attitudes she had adopted as an armour against the world. After a lifetime spent taking herself even more seriously than others did, mainly by dint of her exceptional beauty, she learnt to laugh at herself more while he, in an unwonted fever of anxiety not to lose sight of her in any part of her life with which he was not familiar, followed her into the theatrical world and even ended up treading the boards himself, carrying the occasional spear in a crowd scene. For him it was never more than a game, but such exposure to a more creative and colourful life than he was used to proved a passport to other things, so that some time later, beyond the cloisters of academe, he found his professional options much broader than he had once secretly feared they might be. So together they grew up and in time grew apart because they had become different people. And soon they parted, amicably, without regret or rancour, to follow their separate paths.
That’s the story the handsome stranger at our table told us and, give or take a few secondary characters to pad out the subplot and the addition of a tear-jerking finale wherein the hero proposes to the heroine on the stage of the Olivier Theatre in front of a stunned and wildly enthusiastic full house, that’s the basic plot of Gavin Anderson’s award-winning film.
After he’d finished speaking there was a moment’s silence while we all made our moral judgements and replayed our favourite scenes according to individual prejudice. Then the pretty young botanist piped up, “You seem to know an awful lot about it. I say, you’re not Gavin Anderson in disguise are you?”
“I’m afraid not. With his income, I only wish I were.”
“No, you’re really this Pete character aren’t you?” said our host. “Come on Alex, admit it.”
“Oh sure. I hope I’m just the kind of person to try and earn a bit of spurious kudos by boasting I once stole Gavin Anderson’s girlfriend.” And he winked at the little nursery teacher, who blushed happily.
“What did happen to Angela in the end?” asked the solicitor solicitously.
“She still acts. In fact, she’s done rather well for herself. But I’m afraid her stage name is a secret which even wild horses could not drag from me.”
The conversation moved on at this point, but over a final coffee we returned briefly to the subject of the film’s allusive title.
“Who really does have the last laugh I wonder?” mused our hostess.
“Perfectly obvious I’d have thought,” her husband told her. “The duff actor who gets the girl, of course.”
“I meant in real life. Knowing what we know now…”
“It could be referring to this Pete character couldn’t it?” offered the botanist. “He loses the girl but ends up enjoying a much more interesting and fulfilling life than he would have done had he not met her.”
“By that reasoning,” scoffed the dentist, by now pretty far gone, “why not say it’s the girl? Not only has she become a famous actress, she can go around telling everyone she was the inspiration for Gavin Anderson’s latest heroine.”
“In which case it’s probably Gavin Anderson himself having the last laugh by getting back at a couple of so-called friends who once did the dirty on him,” reasoned the solicitor.
“But that’s what writers do isn’t it?” suggested our hostess eagerly. “And if Gavin can turn a painful experience into a work of art that gives pleasure to others, well, good luck to him I say.”
“Especially when he makes a ton of money into the bargain,” put in the nursery teacher, revealing an unexpected streak of cynicism.
“What do you think the title refers to?” asked the botanist shrewdly, turning to our man on the inside.
The television producer weighed his words. “For what it’s worth,” he replied at last, “and insomuch as any title means anything, I think it’s probably a symbolic reference to the final occasion on which Gavin was happy. After that he became immune to it and gave himself up to his work. ‘This was the last time I knew love and hope and since then there’s been nothing but solitude and success’, something like that.”
“Hea-vy,” murmured the nursery teacher.
“But I shouldn’t worry about it too much,” he said, giving her a grin. “After all, they had to call the movie something didn’t they?”
Dissolve – as they say in the movie business – to a few months later. I had more or less forgotten all about the evening when, idly browsing in a local bookshop, I came across a prominent display stand packed with copies of Gavin Anderson’s screenplay for The Last Laugh in large-format paperback. As it had just won him a BAFTA, with Oscar-buzz growing, interest in his work had doubled overnight and he was even due to attend a signing session later that afternoon.
As I casually flicked through a copy, my eye was caught by the dedication: ‘To Pete and Angela, two friends from the past whom I once loved and lost.’ Reading further, I even found an explanation for that enigmatic title: in an introductory note the author described how this had been simply a last-minute whim of the producer’s and nothing to do with any of the characters involved, real or imaginary, much less the wounded psyche of the writer himself. (Gavin’s original title, incidentally, had been A Lover and His Lass, which was considered far too literary for general tastes.) So in the final analysis it could well be the newly enriched producer himself who has ended up having the last laugh on everybody. But as our informant at the party had suggested, it probably doesn’t do to look too closely at these things.
I went to replace the book, but then on a whim of my own I decided to join the queue of fans when the author himself finally arrived in a flurry of PR, press and pandemonium. When my turn came, I offered him the book open at the dedication. It had obviously been a long day, and he took it from me with a tired, distracted smile.
“Any particular message?” he asked, pen poised. Then he looked up.
“You choose,” I said.
He scribbled briefly, handed the book back and reached for the next. As I turned away I glanced down at the page. Just underneath the printed dedication, in a stern and steady hand, he had written: ‘Dear Pete. You still owe me one girlfriend. Love Gavin.’
2002
PS
During my second year at Oxford, I went to an outdoor production of Alfred Jarry’s historically controversial classic Ubu Roi (nope, me neither), and the girl who served me a dry bit of cake in the interval was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I tried and failed, but years later I wrote this short story about it all, tacking on a neat little twist I’d invented. As in My Writer, it was to some extent another technical experiment in which I was deliberately trying to adopt not just the writing style but the mental processes of, in this case, a somewhat self-satisfied narrator who had no pretentions to being a writer at all. I stole the framing device from Woody Allen’s short story The Shallowest Man. On the whole, I was rather pleased with the result. A novelist friend I showed it to, however, thought the whole thing a failure on every level, supplying notes in the margin to prove their every single point.
Now, while the basic rules of any writing are essentially the same – be as engaging as you can while using the fewest words possible – it is also true that the novelist whose preferred idiom is the hard-boiled detective thriller may not be the best person to assess the effectiveness of, say, a romantic drama set in 5th-century BCE Greece.
One of my friend’s main criticisms, for instance, was that they found the characters at the party smug and uninteresting. But – dare I say it – they were meant to be that, in order to contrast with the (hopefully) more dynamic and proactive trio at the story’s heart. My friend also disapproved of the framing device itself – “Who is the story meant to be about? You waste all that time setting up these background characters who have nothing to do with anything” – but to my mind both are equally important. Artists (I think I was trying to say) create at great personal expense for the benefit of the majority who have nothing better to do but lounge around at parties discussing them, sniping and praising, but inwardly glad they don’t have to expend any emotional energy or relive any psychic trauma in the course of their own working day.
Moreover, my friend found the Gavin character “pathetic” (I think because they thought he was based on me), and therefore completely rejected the notion that he could possibly be in with a shout of winning an Oscar (a single big red exclamation mark in the margin at that point). Certainly I would agree that if you are writing a character who is meant to be wittier, more intelligent or psychologically perceptive than oneself, the best you can do is simply evoke such qualities; you can hardly aspire to illustrate them with practical examples of their excellence. But in my story I was simply stating the accolade as a fact, I hadn’t attempted to provide any putatively Oscar-worthy dialogue to bolster my thesis. (Gavin’s film of course, is obviously a mix-and-match of any three Richard Curtis films, and if he’s not a good enough template of artistic success and worldly triumph, I don’t know who is.)
And my friend found the language bland, holding up the phrase “treading the boards” as an example of a cliché so hackneyed as to be unusable. But the whole point of my choosing this character as the narrator was because he wasn’t an author, he wasn’t trying to impress, he was literally ‘trying not to write’, and my view – not that I ever consciously aspired to having a view at all – was that his absence of style is itself a form of style.
For what it’s worth, I like the mood, I think the pacing is good, and I believe the structure works – the intro party, then the set-up of the Gavin/Pete relationship in broad strokes, the details of the fateful party in close-up, the aftermath again in more general terms, the closure back at the party, and then the coda with the (hopefully surprising) twist. This is a deliberate alternation of, as it were, close-ups and montages. I tend to think of scenes in filmic terms because it seems to me you can’t describe something you haven’t already seen in your head, and this holds equally true for both close-ups (line by line dialogue) and montages (general background detail, telescoping a considerable period into a few lines, scene setting).
And I believe you should always listen carefully to the dialogue as you write it to make sure it sounds natural and plausible. It should certainly have a different tone and a more relaxed rhythm compared to formal narrative voice. The convention is that even a first-person narrator has total recall of everything that has been said, but given that, it is right that this should always sound like proper speech. I don’t believe, by the way, that you should spend too long reading it out loud to make sure it’s sayable; we all know what normal people sound like when they’re talking, far too many discursions and hesitations and ums and ahs: unreadable – just remember that each phrase should be no longer than a natural breath, and it is more often than not allusive rather than on the nose. But book speech also has its own rules which make it slightly different from the even more naturalistic form demanded by TV, the cinema and stage plays. It needs to sound right, certainly, but first it has to read right. A passage like this, for instance:
“What do you think the title refers to?” asked the botanist shrewdly, turning to our man on the inside.
The television producer weighed his words. “For what it’s worth,” he replied at last, “and insomuch as any title means anything, I think it’s probably a symbolic reference to the final occasion on which Gavin was happy…”
comes with its own in-built rhythm, bestowed by the action described around the actual words. You have to read it more or less at the same pace the characters speak and act.
My narrator even editorialises:
“I think it’s Gavin’s best yet,” agreed our hostess, who liked to ally herself with talent even if she wasn’t personally acquainted with it.
“Mawkish, sentimental balderdash,” countered her husband, who preferred to set the cat among the pigeons.
Generally, the narrator should not give their own gloss on what has just been said, and a copy editor might question my narrator’s faulty literary technique here, but the point is, that lack of technique is my narrator’s, not mine. He is not a neutral observer, he has his issues with his dinner companions, and wants to make sure we’re aware of that. (Why? Goes to character, m’lud.) And he hasn’t thought to run his MS by a professional editor, he’s giving it to us straight. As a non-author, he lacks the requisite confidence to know when he has made his point, so he doesn’t trust the dialogue alone to delineate character; basically, he both shows and tells.
And who precisely is he anyway? Why is this person writing this particular story at all? Who is he writing it for? It must mean more to him than perhaps he is willing to admit, even to himself, else why write it out now, and in so much painful detail? Surely it’s because he’s trying to persuade us about something that he’s only just coming to terms with himself, something he recognised for the first time at that bloody party.
Maybe there’s a clue in the fact – and I don’t think I’m only making this up now so that the thing appears more interesting or mysterious – he is alone at the party. He is with these people but not of them. He’s even judgmental: look at the adjectives and adverbs, his slightly condescending attitude. But who precisely is he? What does he do? Is he even a he? We never find out until the last few lines. He makes sure to tell us how the others have each found their niche – the solicitor, the dentist, the nursery teacher, the TV producer, we never know their names, only what they do for a living – but our narrator? We have no idea. And maybe he feels sidelined, hence his bitterness. Maybe he wanted to be something but missed his way, and now feels the lack of a defining role?
And maybe he has a right to a little bit of sympathy as well – after all, we only have the TV producer’s story to rely on, which is itself a précis or a reinterpretation of whatever story Gavin chose to tell him about the genesis of his movie. After all, as it turns out, our narrator was actually there, he knew the truth of it whereas the TV producer only got a sanitised version from a professional creative artist, and Gavin himself could have had his own reasons to spin the story in such a way that might well have exaggerated his own hurt in an attempt to attract more sympathy from his hearer than was his due. Maybe the account Gavin gave to the TV producer was simply his own first draft of the story, scribbled down, as it were, like Graham Greene’s original opening the The Third Man, on the back of an envelope?
(The narrator could even conceivably be the waiter, hired for the evening, building up his part. I’ve only just thought of that, but even that almost fits.)
So who was right in the end? My friend, the professional author, who had known me for years and by now might simply have been fed up of reading my milquetoast stuff? Or me, who genuinely thought I was trying something new here and could well have been deluding myself? Who knows? Looking back, all I can say is that on this occasion, my opinion needed to outweigh my friend’s otherwise how could I ever write anything again, much less go on to make a career sitting in judgement over anyone else? A good author needs all the mental fortitude of a good editor, with the additional confidence to believe they are right when they genuinely feel they have achieved what they set out to achieve, together with the emotional maturity to admit when they are wide of the mark – even though, as far as The Last Laugh is concerned, I still believe I was a lot more right than I was wrong.
And if you’ll indulge me, there is a final acknowledgement to be made. The lovely lady in question knows who she is, if you ever get to read this all the way over there in New Zealand, I still wish I’d gone to your party. If I had, maybe this story would have had a different ending – assuming, that is, it ever needed to have got written down at all…