Gods and monsters
Luke Davies didn't merely write an epic novel about mad, playboy billionaire Howard Hughes - he almost became him, Luke Benedictus discovers
When life imitates art, the results can be addictive
Luke Davies winces as he recalls the moment "the bottom fell out of my world". He was sitting at Waverley Library in Bondi Junction, trying to push on with his long-gestating novel on the life of Howard Hughes. Checking some facts online, Davies was gobsmacked to discover that Martin Scorsese was releasing The Aviator, a mega-budget biopic on Hughes. "My heart just sank - it was truly horrible," says Davies five years on. "I got this sick feeling in my stomach, and paranoia that people would think I was cashing in on the film - but also this weird proprietorial feeling over the material. Plus the fact that it was Scorsese... I just knew it was going to be big."
Davies needn't have worried. The Aviator focused on Hughes' early triumphs as he shoots insanely ambitious films, breaks round-the-world flying records, seizes control of TWA Airlines and beds Hollywood's leading ladies. But Scorsese only told half of the story. The director largely glossed over the madness of the later years when Hughes became a drug-addled recluse so terrorised by his fear of germs that he walked around with his feet encased in boxes of Kleenex. "It's very sanitised and Hollywood in that sense," Davies says of the film. "They just didn't go into the dark places."
Davies held no such reservations. The result is God of Speed, an extraordinary novel that shudders with psychosis, drama and sex. The plot shuttles back and forth through the stoned haze of Hughes' interior monologue as he looks back at his eventful life. The raw biographical details would provide enviable material for any writer, and Davies takes full advantage. There are scenes of explosive action, as Hughes recalls his narrow escapes from multiple plane crashes. But elsewhere Davies slows the pace, to convey a
heightened sense of drugged-out reality as the narrator stares at the droplets of condensation on a glass of iced lemonade.
Davies is grimly familiar with such altered states. Today, he's renowned for his award-winning poetry and earlier novels: Candy (for which he also wrote the screenplay) and Isabelle the Navigator. But for almost a decade, Davies' plans to be a writer were suffocated by heroin. After growing up in Pymble on the North Shore, he was studying English at Sydney University when he slid into hopeless addiction.
Davies' initial fascination with Hughes stemmed from discovering the tycoon's own addiction to a galaxy of uppers and downers. "That was a light-bulb moment," the 45-year-old remembers. "Suddenly Hughes' behaviour was less strange when viewed through that lens. I got a better understanding of this guy who'd been so fully engaged with the world and then retreated so far from it."
Hughes' ludicrous wealth - he earned more money per minute than the average American made in a year - allowed him to indulge his habit until it destroyed him. For Davies, this terminal addiction was a projection of a fate he was lucky to escape. "That was kind of activated in this book," he says. "It was my way of validating my choices of stopping using all those years ago, of imagining the way my mind would work, and the person I could've become if I'd had the opportunity to have kept using without impediment."
The comparison between the pair may seem a little fanciful, but Davies possessed the junkie's equivalent of unlimited wealth: he secured a heroin lab, and learned to manufacture the drug from codeine, meaning a never-ending supply. "All those years of using, I thought everything would be OK if I just had enough," Davies explains. What he found instead was "profound dissatisfaction" as his rocketing habit exposed the hollowness and futility of addiction. "It was like the meaning of my world fell apart," he says, "I felt very vividly connected to what Hughes' reality must have been like. That was when radical change started to loom on the horizon."
Davies kicked heroin in 1990. As he began to rekindle his dream of being a writer, he typed a chapter of God of Speed, but shelved the project for Candy, after realising the Hughes novel was too ambitious for a rookie writer. "That all happened when the fog started lifting at about three years clean," Davies says. "It took those first couple of years before I could see the landscape of devastation behind me, and the hope stretching out in front."
God of Speed ($32.95) is out now through Allen & Unwin. Luke Davies appears next week at Sydney Writers' Festival.