Allan Massie's new tale of alcoholic expats in Rome draws from a deep personal well

Published on Thursday 4 June 2009 13:36

ALLAN MASSIE IS SITTING ACROSS an empty fireplace from me in an armchair in the library of his frankly idyllic home outside Selkirk, almost silhouetted against a small window behind.

The window is open a couple of inches at the top – enough to let in the fortissimo birdsong from the trees surrounding a lake choked with lillypads at the back of the house. Enough too, he shows me later, to let in a fledgling robin to a nest its parents have made on top of some German translations (Ich Tiberius, Ich Augustus) of his Roman novels; novels that, as Gore Vidal once said, "mark him out as the master of long-ago historical fiction".

I can see the halo of white hair, see the smoke from his cigar unwinding towards the ceiling, but his face is in darkness. No matter: I already know it, not just from occasional meetings but from the picture bylines in at least three Scottish newspapers that mark him out as Scotland's leading political and cultural columnist, or from the jacket covers to books such as A Question of Loyalties and Death of Men now firmly ensconced as modern classics. On top of which he has also been chief fiction reviewer for this newspaper since 1976 – which must surely be some kind of record.

I'm at his house to talk to him about his 20th novel, but I'm only there five minutes before I realise that I am also going to be talking about the first story he ever had published, back in 1972. In it, the main character was an alcoholic writer called Tom Durward, who resurfaces in the new novel, set in Rome in the late 1990s, still an alcoholic, but one who seems to be well on his way to recovery. Come Martini hour, he might still feel twinges of longing; come twilight, when the city bars start to fill and the sounds of conviviality within spill out onto the pavements outside, he might still feel dangerously lonely – but even if he hasn't yet abandoned the booze for good, at least Durward appears to be successfully staying clear of it.

The new novel is called Surviving, because that's what most of its characters are doing. They'll gather, about a dozen of them, at the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in the hall of Rome's American episcopal church. Some of them, especially people like Durward, will feel vaguely embarrassed at being there in the first place, like agnostics at an evangelical service. They'll be diffident about testifying, ambivalent about appealing to a higher power for help. Yet they also know that those people around them are the ones they can count on in their hour of need, the ones who will phone each other in the morning to check that everyone is all right, the ones who will understand, who allow them hope.

Massie knows whereof he writes. In the early 1970s, he was an alcoholic. Like Durward, he attended those AA meetings in Rome, and in Surviving the portraits of some of the minor characters are even drawn directly from life. Of all the 20 novels he has written, this is, he says, by far his most personal.

The Massie that I and many thousands of his readers think we know, therefore, is altogether different to the one attending those AA meetings at the American Episcopalian hall in Rome. The Massie we think we know is a commentator whose work is marked by its clarity of thought – forcefully argumentative, but never over-strident, even when going, as he often does, against the tide of public opinion – and, in fiction, by its perceptiveness about the plight of individuals caught up in history's maelstroms.

In Surviving, we get a glimpse of how different he might have been in the days before he became, as he describes himself, "a retired alcoholic". "Drink heightens feeling," F Scott Fitzgerald once said. "When I drink it heightens my emotions, and I put it in a story." The younger Massie, the 1970s version anyway, might have agreed. "Up to a certain point, alcohol is life-enhancing: you feel a different slant on experience," he says. "An awful lot of writers fall prey to drink. It's partly the image of what a writer is, especially in America: you could hardly name a good American writer in the last century who wasn't also a drunk – Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald …

"I was reading a lot of Scott Fitzgerald then, and when he was coming out of a drinking bout he used to have a nurse looking after him. In my first published story, I made that happen to Tom Durward too. He was in a pretty bad state in that story, so it's quite nice having him in a lot better state in this one."

Better, but still not completely recovered. "If you're dry – as he is – rather than sober, you're still in a sense saving yourself up for that next drink." In Rome, Massie admits, he felt that same temptation, and for the same reasons.

"I always found the hour when the light fails when you're in a city is often the time when you feel lonely and vulnerable. It's often a time when the city is at its most beautiful too; Rome certainly. I can remember one of my first days in Rome standing at the top of the Spanish Steps as the light faded and feeling absolutely miserable."

Even with his face in shadow, I can sense Massie is uneasy at talking at length about his alcoholic past. At 70, he hardly belongs to our confessional, breast-beating generation, and in any case Surviving is about far more than surviving alcoholism alone: it's a literate and perceptive story of friendship and the extent to which it can be relied on – not least when covering up murder.

It's in such scenes that we see Massie's true skill as a novelist. Already he has shown the fallibility of his group of expats on the edge, has drawn in the links between them, and revealed how they try to support each other even though the prospect of being let down is ever present. This is, it strikes the reader, friendship of a different quality to the kind non-alcoholics know: it's never overtly stated, but there's a deep humanity to it, such as one may occasionally find among patients in a hospice.

Gradually, Massie puts those bonds of friendship, at once strong and fragile, to the test: there will be a body to be disposed of, an escape plan to draw up, and all to be accomplished without alerting some members of the group and driving others to drink. There's enough tension here even without the presence of the actual murderer in the group, but in Surviving it comes with a further dimension of thought, morality, and literary awareness.

I'll leave it to readers to discover the other members of Durward's AA group and the myriad ways in which they are interlinked beyond just their membership of it. This might be unfair, but it is Durward who is the prime mover in the plot – as well as, I suspect, the character with the most in common with his creator.

In fact, that identification could hardly be clearer. At the end of the story, Durward imagines how he would begin to tell the story, and comes up with precisely the opening dialogue that Massie himself uses. There are further parallels too. In the novel, Durward recalls being lured by Norman Douglas's travel classic Old Calabria to travel there in Douglas's footsteps. "That's something I did too – and for the same reason," says Massie. "I was 24 and wanted to write a biography of Douglas, and I read everything I could about him. And that scene in which Durward mentions going to an old wine shop in Capri and coming across a couple of old men who had been pallbearers at Douglas's funeral – that happened to me too."

"Writing a novel," says Massie from the shadows, "is often looking at paths that you might have taken but didn't. You can write about how different things might have been if you had. And with this one – well, Rome does mean a lot to me, and one of the real pleasures in writing this novel was revisiting it in my imagination. I didn't do any research – I think it's probably better not to go back – but a little distance is quite helpful."

But in bringing Tom Durward back to life, I wonder whether or not Massie was doing something slightly different. It's the other characters in this book who kid themselves on that if only they wrote a good novel, they'd never need to drink again; who drown in self-pity; who make excuses for drinking.

Durward doesn't. He knows that booze kills good writing rather than inspires it. He knows that the reason alcoholics drink "is our inability to accept ourselves as we are, at our true worth".

He has, in other words, already learnt the real trick to surviving. Already, there's an unfooled maturity to him, an acceptance of the vagaries of literary fame, the beginnings of wisdom. At this point, Tom Durward is very like the 70-year-old novelist sitting opposite me in a room near Selkirk filled with cigar smoke and birdsong. But what I realise more than anything, as I talk to Allan Massie, is how hard-won all that wisdom has been.

&#149 Surviving, by Allan Massie, is published by Vagabond Voices, price 10. Allan Massie will be talking about his novel at the Nairn Festival on Friday, 12 June (tickets: nairnfestival.co.uk) and at the Borders Book Festival in Melrose on Sunday, 21 June at 8:30pm (tel: [phone]).