Zoo Time

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘Tales! When did you ever tell a tale unless I gave it to you.’

  ‘Name a tale you gave me, Vee.’

  ‘One!’

  ‘Yes, one.’

  ‘Do you know what,’ she said suddenly, turning her face from me as though any sight had to be better, ‘I hate your mind.’

  ‘My mind?’

  ‘What’s left of it.’

  ‘Is this all because I’ve started a new book?’

  Vanessa hated it when I started a new book. She saw it as me getting one over her who hadn’t started a new book because she hadn’t finished, or indeed started, the old one. But she also hated it when I hadn’t started a new book, because not starting a new book made me querulous and sexually unreliable. At least when I was writing a new book she knew where I was. The downside of that being that as soon as she knew where I was she wished I were somewhere else.

  In fact, my question hid a lie; I hadn’t started a new book, not in the sense of starting writing a new book. I had mouth-written a hundred new books, I just didn’t believe in any of them. It wasn’t personal, it wasn’t only my books I didn’t believe in, it was books full stop. If I was over, it was because the book was over. But Vanessa wasn’t aware of the full extent of the crisis. She saw me trudge off to my study, heard the keys of my computer making their dead click and assumed I was still pouring forth my soul abroad like Keats’s logorrhoeic nightingale.

  I even affected high spirits. ‘I’m sitting on top of the world,’ I sang, breaking for tea.

  ‘No you’re not,’ she shouted from her room.

  She was contradictory to her soul. ‘I did it my way,’ I sang the morning after our wedding. ‘No you didn’t,’ she said, not even looking up from her newspaper.

  If my singing irritated her, the sound of my writing drove her to the edge of madness. But so did the sound of my not writing. This was part of the problem of our marriage. The other part was me. Not what I did, what I was. The fact of me. The manness of me.

  ‘You, you, you,’ she said for the umpteenth time that night. It was like a spell; if she said the word often enough maybe I, I, I would vanish in a vapour of red wine.

  We were out to dinner. We were always out to dinner. Along with everybody else. Dinner was all there was left to do.

  It was one of those restaurants where the doorman comes round to greet the diners he knows. Be ignored by the doorman and it’s plain you’re no one. He doffed his top hat to me. We shook hands. I held his long enough for everybody to see just how well we were acquainted. It even occurred to me to call him ‘Sir’ and hold my hand out for a tip.

  After he’d passed on we resumed where we’d left off. ‘You were saying,’ I said. ‘Me, me, me . . .’

  ‘You think you’re the only person out there not getting what you deserve. Do you think I get what I deserve? The spectacle of you wittering on about the extinction of the art of reading makes me sick. What about the extinction of the art of writing? Dirty-minded shopkeeper looking for sex in Wilmslow writes about dirty-minded shopkeeper looking for sex in Wilmslow. Christ, with a subject like that, you’re lucky you’ve got a reader!’

  ‘I wasn’t a shopkeeper, Vee, I was a fashion consultant.’

  ‘Fashion consultant, you! Whoever consulted you on fashion?’

  I wanted to say ‘The women of Wilmslow’, which would have been the truth, but in the context of this argument lacked gravitas. ‘My advice was frequently heeded,’ I said instead. ‘Though not, I accept, by you.’

  ‘You looked after your crazy mother’s shop and drooled over her customers. I saw you, remember. I was one of the customers. And as for heeding your advice – why would I want to look like a Cheshire trollop?’

  She had a point.

  She never didn’t have a point. It was why I respected her. I’d say it was why I loved her but it felt as though I loved her in spite of her always having a point.

  I scanned the restaurant. A psychologist might have supposed I was unconsciously searching for the Cheshire trollop Vanessa had refused to be, but in fact I was wondering if there was anyone here I recognised. It calmed me to think that rich and famous people had nothing better to do with their evening than I had. Ditto less rich and famous people who would be finding it calming to see me there. It’s possible I was looking for them too.

  Vanessa was still ranting about readers and how I should count myself lucky that I had any at all. ‘If you had only one that would still be one more than you deserve and certainly one more than I’ve got.’

  I didn’t point out that the reason she didn’t have a reader was that she hadn’t written anything for anyone to read. And I hadn’t been saying I was the only person out there not getting what I deserved. I’d been saying – well, what had I been saying? No more than that the roof was falling in on all of us. No one was getting what he (sorry: ‘he/she’) deserved, unless he (‘he/she’) was getting more than he (‘they’) deserved. There was, in the new scheme of things, no proportionality of reward. Either you got too much or you got too little. Which was a universal, not a particular complaint. But Vanessa didn’t believe I had a right to voice a complaint of any sort. I was one of the lucky ones. I was published . . .

  And there you have it. Like the rest of the world, Vanessa wanted to be a published writer. She was the promise of the future: no readers, all writers. She’d seen me become a writer, watched the empty pages fill, been present during the initial excitement of publication, and if I could become a published writer, a man shorter than her even when she wasn’t wearing seven-inch heels, a man who said foolish things, fucked foolish girls, stole his own books from Oxfam and all his best ideas from her, why couldn’t she? Hadn’t she written a sample chapter? Hadn’t an important agent said she had what it took?

  ‘That was ten years ago,’ I reminded her.

  I didn’t mention that the agent had his arm up her skirt while he was telling her she had what it took, or that he had since slashed his wrists – though there was no provable connection between those two events. It wasn’t tact that stopped me; Larry’s suicide was simply not worth mentioning. You could count on the fingers of one hand the number of people in publishing still breathing.

  ‘Well, what time do I have to finish a novel? I’m always having to listen to the racket of you belting out yours.’

  When I wasn’t defending my right to make a racket, I was sorry for her. I could see she was at her wits’ end, that non-production was making her ill. It was as though, without a novel on the go, her life had no meaning. Sometimes she would put her fists between her breasts, like a mother ripped from her babies, or a Medea who had killed her babies, and beg me to be quiet so she could think. I was killing her, she told me. And I believed it. I was killing her.

  She kept asking me to leave the house to write, to build a shed at the bottom of the garden, to rent an office, to go away for a year. It was the noise my writing made, the computer waking – ‘Boing!’ – to my presence every morning, the hammering at the dead keys. She was more jealous of my computer than she’d been of Philippa. Sometimes I thought I heard her crouching outside my door, to punish herself with the noise of the detested keyboard. On those occasions I typed gobbledegook at speed to goad her still more. It wasn’t my intention to torment her into greater extremes of jealousy, it was my intention to torment her into getting back to her book. In this I was as crazed as everybody else. Books were over but writing them was the only thing I valued. So long as she didn’t have a novel to her name, yes, Vanessa was a dead woman.

  Everyone was. You wrote or you were nothing.

  ‘Just fucking finish it, Vee.’

  ‘Just fucking finish it! Just fucking finish it! What the fuck do you think I’m doing? Get out of my life and I’ll fucking finish it.’

  I was lucky I wasn’t a dead man myself.

  You know you’re in deep shit as a novelist when it’s not only your heroes who are novelists having troubling finishing their novels but your wife is a
novelist having trouble finishing hers.

  But since the novel as a living form had had it, why did it matter what either of us was doing?

  A fair but stupid question, such as someone visiting from another planet might ask. Life as a living form had had it – life with purpose, life driven by idealism or belief, life that was more than shoving down expensive grub in restaurants that were booked up two years in advance unless you knew the right people, as I did – but we still lived, still made our reservations, still sat at our favourite tables eating food we could no longer taste and could barely afford. Don’t look for logic. The worse things get, the more attached to them we become.

  I called the waiter over. ‘André, another bottle of Saint-Estèphe.’

  He returned with the wine list. He was sorry, no more Saint-Estèphe.

  No more. It was the catchword of the times. Everything was running out. No more of anything. I thought of Poe’s great poem of ecstatic madness – Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore.’

  ‘What did you say?’ Vanessa asked.

  I was starting to talk to myself. ‘Nevermore,’ I said.

  She thought I was describing our marriage. ‘Bring it on,’ she dared me.

  On the way out of the restaurant I noticed an unfinished bottle of Saint-Estèphe on a vacated table. I looked around to see if anyone was watching. Everyone was watching, there was nothing else to do but watch – but what the hell! I grabbed the bottle by its neck and knocked back the dregs.

  The novelist as drunk. I hoped readers of mine had seen what I’d done. Then I remembered I had no readers.

  ‘They call me mellow yellow,’ I sang.

  ‘No, they don’t,’ Vanessa said.

  On the emptied street, Vanessa paused to give a pound coin to a tramp. Not any old beggar or derelict, not a drugged-up Soho layabout or a Big Issue seller, but a tramp of the old school, wind-burnt face, long white beard, trousers ripped all the way to his groin (so better dressed than most of my profession), a who-gives-a-monkey’s indifference to whether anyone noticed him or not. He was sitting on a wooden bench outside a pub, writing in a reporter’s notebook.

  ‘He looks just like Ernest Hemingway,’ Vanessa whispered admiringly, reaching into her bag.

  ‘He seems to be writing longer sentences than Ernest Hemingway’s,’ I whispered back.

  I wanted to see what he was writing but couldn’t, with decency, get close enough. I felt slightly shamed by him, such profound concentration, such fluency of the hand, no need of a computer. Was he the last of the pen-holding, plein-air novelists?

  In so far as she was capable of doing anything discreetly, Vanessa discreetly plonked her coin in front of him. He didn’t look up or otherwise acknowledge her. I knew how he felt. There was a sentence he had to get right, and nothing else existed.

  Vanessa took my arm. She was trembling. All acts of generosity on her own part moved her deeply. I even wondered if she was going to shed a tear. (Were going to shed a tear? Was going to shed a tear.)

  As we walked on, the sound of a coin hitting the pavement and then rolling into the road followed us.

  Vanessa jumped. Anyone would have thought she’d heard a gun go off. I jumped with her. We were all keyed up. A car’s exhaust backfired and we feared another publisher had taken his life.

  ‘If you’re thinking of going back and picking it up for him, I wouldn’t,’ I said. ‘That didn’t sound like a fall to me. It was too violent. I’d say he threw it.’

  ‘At me?’

  I shrugged. ‘You. Us. Humanity.’

  I was secretly impressed. Not just the last of the plein-air novelists, but the last of the idealists for whom only art mattered.

  A question that was sometimes asked: What had a woman as beautiful and confident as Vanessa, who could have married a rock star or a banker or a presenter on breakfast television – who could, for God’s sake, have been a presenter on breakfast television – seen in me?

  The answer I invariably gave: ‘Words.’

  In the century of the dying of the word there were still women who lusted after men to whom words came easily. And vice versa, of course, though the men who didn’t have words themselves were less likely to value them, and were certainly far more frightened of them, than the women. Give a man a word or two more than the common and he’ll always find a woman to revere him. Fill a woman’s mouth with words and she’ll scare the living daylights out of the other sex. Nothing but bags of nerves, the other sex. Every man I knew, a quivering wreck the moment a woman spoke.

  Something else that was dying – men.

  As both a reverer of words in men and a woman whose own words put men off – I’m talking about the words that flowed from her, not the novels she was never going to assemble from them – Vanessa considered herself lucky to have found me. She never said as much to my face, but I understood that to be the reason she had married me in the first place, the reason she had stayed with me and the reason she once flattened a young reviewer whose name was all initials and who had spoken ill of my prose style.

  There’s loyalty for you. But when I thanked her for it afterwards she denied it had anything to do with me. ‘You qua you deserve all you get,’ she said. ‘It was your gift I was defending.’

  ‘I am my gift,’ I told her.

  She coughed and quoted Frieda Lawrence at me. ‘Never trust the teller,’ she said, ‘trust the tale.’

  ‘That’s D. H. Lawrence,’ I corrected her.

  ‘Oh yeah!’ She laughed wildly.

  But her point remained the same, whichever Lawrence she was quoting. The initialled reviewer had traduced the tale, the fragile thing of words spun only incidentally by me, as the farmer only incidentally grows the wheat. (And stolen from Vanessa, anyway.) That was why she trod on his spectacles: so that he would know how it felt to be the word, the wounded logos, kicked when it was down.

  Things dying can have a voluptuous beauty. Only think of the dying of the day or the dying of the summer. So it was with the word. The sicker it grew, the more livid it turned, the more people of an over-refined and morbid disposition fell in love with its putrefaction.

  Would I be around to see it finally pass away? I wasn’t sure, but I could imagine the scene, like the burning of a Viking hero at sea – the sky, as bloody as a reviewer’s nose, painted by J. M. W. Turner; the last of the verbalising men looking into the self-combusting sun, hoarsely mouthing their goodbyes; the women tearing their hair and wailing. Foremost among them, atremble in lacy weeds such as those she’d worn to see off poor Merton, my Vanessa.

  Magnificent in mourning.

  6

  Party’s Over

  Mourning. We were all doing it. The trick was not to let it get you down.

  After Merton died I thought it would be a good idea to see my agent to talk about what next. A living writer needs a living publisher.

  Over the phone, Francis wondered what the hurry was. I could hear the alarm in his voice.

  Like Merton, he dreaded the prospect of a new book. Knowing writers were coming to see them, some agents had taken to locking themselves in lavatories rather than have a manuscript handed to them personally like a subpoena. That was how far the situation had deteriorated. A good day now was one in which no one gave them anything they had to find a publisher to sell to.

  But at least I had an agent. ‘So who’s representing you now?’ other writers would ask me when we met at literary parties. We called them parties but they were more like wakes. Except that at a wake there’d have been more to drink, and fuller sandwiches. Maybe even sausage rolls. I evaded the question. Give another writer the name of your agent and he stroke she would try to steal him stroke her off you.

  Sometimes I’d lie. ‘I’m going it alone now,’ I’d say.

  ‘Can that work?’ Damien Clery wanted to know.

  He was the author of slightly camp, light-hearted social comedies set in cathedral towns – Trollope in a tutu, one reviewer had called him – but was better kno
wn for having jumped his agent from the other side of the desk and broken his nose. Since then, no agency would touch him. No publisher either. For the last four years he had been living off a charity administered by the Scrivener. I found him frightening, not by virtue of his violence of temper but the very opposite. He was the sweetest, mildest-mannered novelist in London. He had golden curls, lovely lilac-coloured eyes, and spoke melodiously. But you never knew when he would turn feral – a word I begrudged him because Mishnah Grunewald had used it of me, though I had never touched an agent’s nose.

  ‘It works fine, Damien,’ I confided, ‘but it means you have to do a lot of legwork. You have to deposit the manuscript on a publisher’s desk by hand. No point posting it. They won’t read it. You need to make personal contact.’

  ‘They won’t let me near. There are photographs of me in the reception area of every publishing house in the country. Security has me out before I can even ring the bell.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said, backing away.

  ‘I suppose I could get somebody else to deliver for me.’

  ‘That might work,’ I said. ‘Though they’d still know it was you from the name on the typescript.’

  ‘Not if I changed it.’ He gulped down a full glass of wine at terrifying speed and then had another idea. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘you wouldn’t be prepared to drop off some manuscripts for me?’

  I backed away further. ‘Would have done so gladly,’ I lied, ‘but they know me too, remember.’

  ‘Yes, but you could say you were delivering for a friend.’

  ‘I could. But I wouldn’t be comfortable doing that if you changed your name. Once it came out that you weren’t who you said you were, we’d both be blackballed.’

  ‘I am already blackballed,’ he said, as though that were my fault. He looked me up and down with his lovely lilac eyes and shook his golden curls. He’d remember me, I was to understand.

  Manuscripts, he’d said. That was the alarming part. Some manuscripts. So how many of them were there? A rejection of a single manuscript can turn the gentlest of us angry. The idea of Damien Clery carting around a whole barrowload of unpublished comic novels from publisher to publisher and being ejected before he made it past reception was even more frightening than the speed with which he was dispatching wine. When he blew his top next there was no knowing the damage he would do.