As he ghost-wrote Neil Wagner’s autobiography, James Borrowdale says he tried to tap into the cricketer’s mindset and found his voice.
The voice of cricketer Neil Wagner, his Afrikaans accent softened by 15 years in New Zealand, became so familiar over the months we worked together on his autobiography, I sometimes found it narrating my dreams. Potent, bewildering dreams. Their power, I think, owed much to the fact I was also born in South Africa, and that the idea of the life I might have had there if my family had remained has long held a stubborn tenancy in a corner of my mind, the way an itch in an amputated limb is said to survive, forever taunting its doubly unlucky victim.
Come those nocturnal hours, I would float incorporeally through the South Africa of Wagner’s youth, under the blooming jacaranda trees his Pretoria hometown is famous for, into the barefoot suburban evenings of his childhood and over bright green cricket fields surrounded by dry veld – much like those on which Neil began his long and unlikely journey towards becoming one of New Zealand’s greatest-ever bowlers.
In this, my nights bore a striking resemblance to my work day – the four hours of writing time sandwiched between dropping off the kids at kindergarten and picking them up – which I spent with a pair of earbuds plugged into my ears, replaying again and again the conversations, that voice, I was tasked with turning into a book. All Out was published last November by Penguin Random House, seven months after those conversations began in earnest.
As much as it could between the fathers of preschoolers – three on his side, two on mine – a rhythm developed: one long interview over Zoom early in the week, a three-day flurry of words and research and fact-checking at my end, then another conversation to re-examine, challenge and clarify.
Cricketer’s catharsis
As we excavated depths of the depression he fell into at the underwhelming outset of his Black Caps career, or scaled the heights of happiness that a fatherhood long delayed by fertility complications gave him, we tried to carve narrative from the granite block of information and memory. Neil’s near stream-of-consciousness delivery was laid out across 40-plus hours of one-sided conversation recorded in my dictaphone.
Margie Thomson, ghostwriter of Ruby Tui’s Straight Up, compared the dynamic between ghostwriter and author to that of a counsellor and patient; it was an observation Neil also made.
He told me when we were near the end of the process it had helped him make peace with the way his international career ended, thrust upon him in a nondescript conference room in a Hamilton hotel. It allowed him to make sense of a journey that had begun in the city at the heart of Afrikanerdom in the dying days of apartheid and took him up to the moment he could recount it all as the much-loved bowler who became New Zealand’s fifth-highest wicket-taker in test cricket.
Powered by the engine of Neil’s confession, the book started coming together much faster than my writing career to date had led me to believe possible. Twelve hundred words a day, 1500, sometimes 2000 – I re-emerged daily at the end of my shift almost shocked at the depth of my immersion in the world of Neil Wagner, my brain blinking as if against a light flicked on as I suddenly found myself among the swirl of children and mums at a kindergarten pickup. At the end of every other week, it seemed, I had another chapter to submit to the publisher.
Swimming through the waters of Neil’s consciousness, I hardly ever had occasion to doubt my next stroke.
“Words had never come easy for me, but, when I wrote as someone else, the words, the jokes, the patter – it didn’t stop,” wrote JR Moehringer, ghostwriter to Andre Agassi and Prince Harry, in an essay for The New Yorker. I have seldom found myself nodding so vehemently over a sentence: swimming through the surface waters of Neil’s consciousness, I hardly ever had occasion to doubt my next stroke or where it would take me. The contrast with my only previous book, Weed, where I felt I had to drag 70,000-odd words from my mind by willpower alone ‒ could not have been more stark.
A world of books
I grew up in houses full of books. Dickens, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Lawrence, Austen: if the author was dead and canonical there was a fair chance their name was imprinted on some of the paperback spines that oversaw my childhood. Some of those same paperbacks now grace my own shelves; you can open them, feel a sprinkle of ancient desiccated book glue fall on to your forearms, and read somewhere inside the front cover, written in pencil in Dad’s hand, the city – Pietermaritzburg, Johannesburg, London or Cambridge – and the year in which it had been bought.
In childhood, when I read those exotic-sounding placenames, I could trace a map of my parents’ pre-me existence, cross-referencing it with the voluminous photo albums maintained by Mum: Dad in academic regalia, my mum baking in the hot bright light of a beach on the Indian Ocean, or the two of them tramping in the Drakensberg mountain range in the small shorts and carrying the metal-framed hiking packs of the era. The bark of baboons is almost audible through the sepia, and Dad, reclining in the long grass between craggy rocks, was often pictured with one of those same paperbacks cracked open on his lap. To this day, no conversation between Dad and myself feels complete until we have asked each other what we are reading, and delivered our verdicts on each.
I followed that family inclination – my bookishness grew throughout my teenage years, as I left behind the sports obsession of childhood – to university and an English literature degree, then later, casting around for a career in my mid-20s, into journalism. But writing books had always been the objective.
Ordeal in words
In the lead-up to the 2020 referendum on cannabis law reform, that opportunity came my way when an editor from Penguin Random House, having read some of my feature writing on the synthetic cannabis epidemic sweeping deprived sectors of the country, got in touch to ask whether I would be interested in writing a book on the history of cannabis in New Zealand. I said yes, and then spent the next eight months feverishly doing so.
It became something of an ordeal. The mounting pressure of the deadline seemed to catalyse a deeper, ego-denting pressure to adequately put something of myself between the covers of a book, an object my childhood had taught me to place in high regard. At its worst, I had to take weeks away from even thinking about trying to write – instead, painting the house and otherwise pushing the meagre limits of my home-improvement skills. Evidence of the disconnect between how I wanted to write and what I found I had written seemed to accumulate. When I returned to it, I tried to do so with lowered expectations.
When Weed was published, in the middle of Covid-afflicted 2020, my first child was three months old. As I mumbled through various media appearances in support of the book, it no longer assumed the heaviness, the kind of tectonic pressure, that weighed on me as I wrote.
When I was ready to tackle another book and had a good idea for one – accounting for all the ingredients that made the World Test Championship-winning Black Caps side of 2019-21 the most successful in New Zealand’s history – it fell through. I could never quite secure access to the players and, with a contract sitting in my inbox ready to sign, I gave up, wary of the lessons I learnt about putting myself under too much pressure during the process of the first book.
At its worst, I had to take weeks away from even thinking about trying to write ‒ instead, painting the house.
But on a whim, not quite ready to let go of the story but needing a different way to tell it, I flicked an email to Neil, the player in that team I loved watching perhaps above all others, asking if he’d ever considered putting his own story to paper, and if so, would he consider working with me?
A year or so later, when his international career had ended and after lots of back-and-forth and consideration on his part about how much of his story he wanted to share –resolved when he realised there was little point in the enterprise unless he went “all out” – I pulled into his Papamoa driveway. We got started over coffee at his kitchen bench as our toddlers became acquainted over pottles of multicoloured Play-Doh at the dining room table under the ministrations of Neil’s wife, Lana.
Christmas, and the cricket season it decorates, was identified as the best time to shift as many copies as possible; it gave us just under four months to deliver a manuscript. The writing speed that had shocked me was in fact entirely necessary, and in that rush my ego had no chance to find a sufficient handhold from where it might cast the kinds of doubts that had infected the writing of my previous book. I was writing this book, but it wasn’t mine – and, in fact, the experience of immersion in Neil’s world came more and more to remind me of the act of reading.
Just as you can forget yourself in the deep well of someone else’s narrative skill, the more I felt I could leave my writerly ego at the threshold of the project, the better and more easily the words came. I cared about the music of each sentence as much as I always have, but my fingers tapped out the tune as if I’d been playing it for years.
Air in the trumpet
I don’t mean to cast the ghostwriter into a position of passivity. This was still writing, not stenography, and in some ways I am as present in Neil’s book, in the composition of each sentence, as he is. Moehringer calls it the “mystic paradox of ghostwriting: you’re inherent and nowhere, vital and invisible. To borrow an image from William Gass, you’re the air in someone else’s trumpet”. Moehringer contends, correctly I think, that the alchemy between each ghostwriter-author coupling is unique.
At the micro-level of sentence composition and word choice, you have two minds engaged in the process, two personalities intermingling, one person’s experiences relayed through another’s aesthetic senses. At a macro level – of structure and decisions about which events best narrate an entire life – the phenomenon is described well by Margie Thomson. Every ghostwriter comes at the base material, that block of granite, with distinct tools and disparate aims.
“Different things would [be] accented and drawn out, different aspects of their personality and story … emphasised or de-emphasised,” she says.
It’s not hard to make a case that my own history, and particularly its South African counterfactual, drew me to the story of Neil, my almost exact contemporary, who, like me, is Afrikaans on his mother’s side and South African English on his father’s. Perhaps we lingered for longer on those barefoot evenings than another ghostwriter might have done, and that’s no doubt why elements of Neil’s story echoed strangely around my own subconscious: in some ways they felt like mine, too.
The pleasure of reimagining them in someone else’s name was a reminder of the joy of capturing a slice of the world between the covers of a book. If there’s a ghost haunting Neil’s book, it’s only doing so to contend with the pages of its own past.
