Zoo Time

by Howard Jacobson

  He didn’t respond when I reminded him I was a writer. He seemed not to want to know that. He attached no value to writing, only to reading. How that can make any sense I am unable to explain. I tackled him on it once. ‘How can you love the literature and not the making of it?’

  He knitted his brows. With Emlyn that phrase meant what it says. He truly did stitch his eyes and brows together, as though to concentrate what was left of his face into the part of it he read with. ‘Who says I love the literature?’ he asked angrily. ‘There are books I enjoy reading. There are books I don’t. What do I want with tittle-tattle about the people who write them?’

  ‘Nothing. But I’m not talking about tittle-tattle.’

  ‘What then?’

  Good question. I paddled the musty air of his library with my fingers. ‘The process . . . the doing . . . the state of writing . . .’

  ‘I repeat what I have just said to you. What business of mine is any of it? By the time I read the book the doing is long done. The book belongs to me now.’

  I understood that. As a writer I even craved it. Never mind me, attend to the words which supersede me. But I had been Emlyn’s star pupil. He had hauled me up, aged ten, onto the platform during school assembly. ‘This boy will go far in literature,’ he said. ‘Remember his name – Guy Ableman.’ He even wrote to my parents to tell them to nurture my ‘rare and precious gift’ – a vote of confidence that was lost on them but meant a lot to me, hence my staying in touch with him over the years, so that he could observe his prophecy come to rare and precious fruition. But since it had, since books were all he cared for and now here was I writing them, couldn’t he have shown me he was proud? Couldn’t he have said ‘Well done!’ to both of us? Wasn’t he even the slightest bit impressed with me for having pulled it off ? Couldn’t he have given some evidence that he at least remembered me?

  Apparently not. Whatever he had meant by my going far in literature, he hadn’t meant or hoped that I would write it. A life devoted to literature, for him, was a life devoted to consuming it. For the act of writing itself he didn’t give a monkey’s. I even felt he thought – in so far as he thought about me at all – that I’d let him down rather. Crossed over from the realm of pure ideation into gross manufacture. Become a mechanic. For himself, he found sufficient satisfaction to fill and justify a life simply in reading. Homer, Tacitus, Augustine, Bede, Montaigne, Addison, Thackeray, Herbert Spencer, Spengler, Chaquita Chicklit – everyone.

  That he didn’t feel it demeaned him to be reading ephemeral dross, that he could with interest open Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Wind the minute he had closed Herodotus, astonished me.

  ‘How do you do it?’ I asked him.

  ‘I have the time.’

  ‘No, I mean how can you bear to do it?’

  ‘You have to read a book to discover you wish you hadn’t, and by that time it’s too late. But do you know? – I almost never wish I hadn’t.’

  ‘So there’s nothing amiss with civilisation from where you’re sitting, Emlyn?’

  He smiled, pulling his blanket around him. It was the smile of a man who’d seen God on his shelves. With outstretched arms he made as though to embrace his walls of books, like a Lotus-Eater pointing to the drowsy long-leaved flowers among which he slept.

  That kind of spider.

  The Arachnidous bibliomani.

  Before he perished in the snows of the Hindu Kush with only my manuscript to keep him warm, Quinton O’Malley had warned me not to let the success of my first novel go to my head. ‘Stay up there,’ was his advice. ‘Don’t sever the roots that have nourished you. Keep working at the zoo.’

  ‘I don’t work at a zoo,’ I told him.

  ‘Then keep talking to people who do. If you come to London for a literary life you won’t have anything to write about. I’ve seen it happen a thousand times. Stay with what you know, stay where your inspiration is. There’s nothing doing here. And between ourselves there’s no one worth knowing.’

  He sniffed. Not complacency; blocked sinuses. Quinton O’Malley, long-faced, with the bulk of a bear, suffered the cold as no other man has ever suffered it. He froze in temperatures of seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit. Though it was a warm July afternoon when I first met him he was wearing canary-yellow corduroys tucked into grey-flecked merino socks, mountain boots, and was wound around in the wool of a small hillside of sheep. Why such a man should have ventured into the Hindu Kush there is no explaining. But this was the beginning of the Great Decline when everyone at the publishing end of literature, like everyone at the writing end of literature, was acting strangely. It would have been no more or less surprising had he walked off Brighton Pier. Though to do that he would have had to take his turn in the queue behind two novelists, a poet, and the deputy manager of Foyles.

  I had sent my manuscript to him after reading that he was the best-connected agent in London, and had a particular interest in the outré. The godchild of T. E. Lawrence, the intimate of Thesiger and Norman Lewis, a homosexual who did nothing about it, an agent who numbered three wife-murderers (one convicted) among his clients, he had, in his younger days, hit the bottle with Dylan Thomas, taken opium with William S. Burroughs, shared a depression with Jean Genet, and still, at seventy-whatever-he-was, gave the most louche literary parties in London. He was a member of every club including some reputed to be proscribed. He chaired every committee. If any writer was going to be honoured – whether that meant an OBE, an invitation to tea at Buckingham Palace, or freedom of the city of West Belfast – it would have to be at Quinton’s say-so. Know Quinton and you knew everybody.

  ‘There’s you,’ I said.

  It was all I could do not to stroke him, insalubrious as he was, a man who had gone out on the tiles to get depressed with Genet!

  ‘Oh, don’t believe what you read about me. I’m an empty shell. You’ve read T. S. Eliot’s “Hollow Men”?’ He banged his chest. ‘He was thinking of me.’

  He saw me mentally doing the arithmetic. ‘I was a baby. He heard me cough in the pram and started writing. Wind in dry grass. Rats’ feet over broken glass. You’re better off in Nantwich.’

  ‘Wilmslow.’

  ‘Wilmslow.’

  I wanted to tell him – with respect, and though I wanted to stroke him for having inspired Eliot to his greatest depths of desolation, if only from the pram – that I thought he patronised me. I was his hetero-provincial writer. No doubt he laughed about me to the metropolitan wife-murdering sodomitic junkies with whom he didn’t share his bed. When he first lit upon Who Gives a Monkey’s? in a reject pile – it was a custom of his to flick through one rejected manuscript a day, just to be on the safe side – he thought the narrator was the author: a one-time Orthodox Jewish woman who gave sexual relief to tigers and bred chimpanzees for whom no sexual relief was possible, writing under the pseudonym of Guy Ableman in order to conceal her sex and the fact that her novel was in fact a true story. It was on that assumption that he took the book on. He wanted to show her off and introduce her around. The Chimp Woman. ‘Think twice before shaking her hand,’ I can imagine him telling his dissipated friends. I must have been a great disappointment to him when he met me. A Wilmslow boy in a suit and tie. He wound one of his many scarves around his face and wiped his nose on it. ‘Well, you’re a surprise, I must say,’ he said.

  We were in a French restaurant in Kensington. He ate with his coat on and spent the two and a half hours we were together describing the transparent Nordic loveliness of Bruce Chatwin’s eyes.

  I bridled at Nordic. Not sure why.

  ‘You have the opportunity,’ he told me over strong coffee, ‘to lead a new generation of decadents. But stay in Northwich.’

  ‘Wilmslow.’

  ‘Wilmslow.’

  ‘I have to get out,’ I said. ‘Bruce Chatwin didn’t stay in Sheffield.’

  ‘Probably his biggest mistake. He told me that once.’

  ‘That he wished he’d stayed in Sheffield?�
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  ‘Not in so many words.’

  ‘Well, not me. I have nothing to write about up there. I have exhausted the place.’

  ‘Come, come,’ he said, coughing – rats’ feet over broken glass – and ordered us both a brandy. ‘Provincial life didn’t fail George Eliot.’

  ‘But it did nothing for Henry Miller,’ I said.

  ‘And who would you rather be?’

  I lacked the courage to say Henry Miller, in case George Eliot, too, had been a drinking friend of his.

  ‘Tell me what else goes on in your neck of the woods,’ he persisted. I had the feeling he wanted to hear about incest and bestiality.

  ‘Nothing of the sort you would find interesting.’

  ‘You’d be surprised what I find interesting. Think. What great events are there? What magnificent institutions? You’ve opened our eyes to Chester Zoo. What next?’

  I happened to know there was an annual transport festival in the east Cheshire town of Sandbach, held in commemoration of Sandbach’s long history as a manufacturer of commercial vehicles. We’d once dressed the Transport Queen in the family boutique, free of charge, to show her unbounded gratitude for which she’d let me undress her again at the back of the Foden trucks showroom when the carnival was over. I was fifteen at the time. She was nineteen. I disgraced myself. But now that I had become a successful writer she was writing to me, inviting me to try again.

  Fame!

  ‘Well, there’s a start,’ Quinton said when I mentioned this to him. ‘Love among the autoparts.’

  ‘Don’t you think it’s a bit small time?’

  ‘I most certainly do. And hurrah for that. You’ve put the monkeys of Wilmslow on the map –’

  ‘Chester.’

  ‘Chester. Now do the same with the beauty queens of Middlewich.’

  ‘Sandbach.’

  ‘Wherever.’

  ‘I’m not sure I can write another novel from the woman’s point of view,’ I said.

  ‘Then tell it from the man’s.’ He roared with rattling laughter. At the idea of a man having a point of view? Or at the idea of my being one?

  But his was a persuasive personality. So I did as he suggested, delved into my own erotic history, researched the Foden steam lorry, and told the tale from the point of view of a man with a blazing red provincial penis – Sandbach man, as libidinous as a cage of unmasturbated chimpanzees, breathing in the fumes of the trucks for which the town was famous.

  I never found out what Quinton thought of it. Had it killed him? Had the sheer unforgiving, unremitting straightness of it finished him off in the cold? True, he wasn’t morally particular about those he represented. Three wife-murderers, don’t forget. But Sandbach man could have been a step in the direction of unreconstructed, non-Nordic hetero-proletarianism too far.

  Who knew what Quinton thought, or even if he thought anything? Maybe he’d only ever taken the manuscript away to line his boots.

  I went ahead with its publication agentless anyway, suggesting to Merton, who had published my monkey novel, that as no one could now prove otherwise, we take the killer route on the jacket. This book is dangerous. Think twice before you read it – especially at altitude.

  But Merton no more liked putting the word ‘dangerous’ on the jacket of a book than he liked putting the word ‘hilarious’. ‘Another life-changing masterpiece from the prize-winning author of Who Gives a Monkey’s?’ was what he plumped for instead.

  People compared me to John Braine and Alan Sillitoe. Tuesday Night and Wednesday Morning meets Room at the Bottom. Which was a comedown, I thought, from Apuleius and the Marquis de Sade. Though one reviewer did say that he thought the screams of chimps on heat were following me around the north-west of England, while a second (who turned out to be the same person, reviewing me under another name) wished I’d stuck with the territory I knew best – the monkey house. In a third review, for the London Magazine, again under another name, Lonnie Dobson, aka Donny Robson, aka Ronnie Hobson, delivered his most deadly verdict. ‘In his debut novel Guy Ableman made an entirely unsuccessful job of imitating a woman; in this his second, and we can only hope his final novel, he has made an entirely unsuccessful job of imitating a man.’

  Shortly after publication I ignored poor frozen Quinton’s advice and moved to London. At first, this pleased Vanessa and her mother who were city girls at heart. But gradually they began to wonder if they’d done the right thing. In Cheshire they had the air of louche women who’d been expelled from somewhere else and were only waiting for their reputations to catch up with them and they’d be off. In the city, everyone looked like that. They were still a sensational pair, but they didn’t bring the traffic to a halt.

  Me neither.

  There is a school of thought that has it that London was the end of me. But there is also a school of thought that says I never began. My work changed, that much we can agree about. It lost some of its raw verve. It became more orderly in its disorderliness. Wandering about the streets of Wilmslow with a cigarette dangling from my bottom lip I’d been able to believe I was anathema to respectable society and wrote accordingly. The minute I settled down to write in London I felt respectability settle on my shoulder. ‘For a man of the big cities,’ Henry Miller once wrote, ‘I think my exploits are modest and altogether normal.’ That’s what big cities do: they normalise what elsewhere would be thought outlandish. The monkeyman who had become my trademark hero cut a poor dash in west London. Wilmslow and Sandbach, if they didn’t quite excuse, at least explained him to a degree. He was like the beast of Bodmin Moor, a creature made fascinating by his out-of-placeness. But once transport him to the pubs and clubs and lonely-wife bars of the capital and the fascination ebbed away. What made a man a rough diamond in the north, made him just one more loutish boor in Westbourne Grove. He was like too many men trying to go to seed in the big city.

  But it would have made no difference had my third and fourth novels been works of genius – Middlemarch, Cranford and Sexus, Plexus and Nexus rolled into one. They would still have vanished within weeks of being published, and would barely have lasted longer when – and not so much when as if – they got their second wind as paperbacks. Readers had changed. Expectations of the book had changed. In a word, there were none.

  When did my books stop appearing in the bookshops? Where did my oeuvre go? My question was a general one: every novelist in the country capable of writing sentences with conditional clauses in them was asking it. We were all being written out of history. Was three-for-two to blame? Was it the celebrity memoir? It had all happened so quickly. Your work was on display in alphabetical order of title, spines showing, as though for all eternity, then it wasn’t. It coincided with bookshop staff not knowing who you were. One day their eyes fell out of their heads with the excitement of seeing you. The next they didn’t know you from a mere member of the non-book-buying public. ‘Name,’ they’d say when you turned up to sign books. ‘How do you spell that?’

  Was it happening to Kundera? Was it happening to Gore Vidal? ‘That’s V, i, d, a, l.’

  Mailer was dead, Bellow was dead, Updike was dead. Was it having to spell their names in Borders that had killed them?

  And now Borders itself was barely breathing.

  There were no doubt a thousand explanations for this, but paramount among them was Flora.

  8

  So What Are We Going To Do With You?

  Had I needed to plead mitigating circumstances for shoplifting one of my own titles, I’d have added Flora to the extensive list. Not Flora the margarine, but Flora the legendary paperback publisher in whom the art of unpromoting any male novelist who wrote in the first person, made light of life or described intercourse with a woman from the man’s point of view, was honed to the highest level of sophistication. In her younger days, Flo McBeth had put together her own imprint of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women writers whose husbands, brothers or fathers had refused to allow their manuscripts to leave the
house. What was remarkable was not only the quality of the work Flo and her staff rescued from obscurity, but the apparent frequency, even as recently as 1940, with which men of all classes of society – afraid for one reason or another of their womenfolk’s creative spark – had repressed it. Flo’s enemies wondered aloud if some of these recovered works were frauds, but if they were then who had written them? Flora herself? In which case her skills as a pasticheur were no less prodigious than her skills as a publisher. Either way, she was able to quit the world of books as a young woman, wealthy, with an unequalled reputation and a CBE. Then, after a retirement which she was said to have found irksome – she’d made the book person’s mistake of going to live in the country (rolling fields, smell of hay, silly sheep, baa baa, and time to read all one wanted to read) – she was back in the role of publisher of a paperback list that had always been boldly masculinist in spirit, that’s to say comprised books she didn’t want to read.

  It was a strange appointment all round. Was the Swedish group who had bought Scylla and Charybdis Press looking to have it quickly wound up? And what was Flora herself up to? Was she avenging those generations of silenced women by extinguishing in men the same spark that men had attempted to extinguish in them? No one knew her motives, and certainly none of the writers she’d taken over was prepared to speculate for fear she would unpromote them even more than she already had. Flora it was, anyway, who at the age of sixty had made a notable return to the profession just in time for the paperback edition of my third novel.

  In fact, for all that it had been a mistake to set it in Westbourne Grove, The Silent Shriek hadn’t gone down too badly in hard covers. ‘A novel that subtly enacts its own futility’ was the worst Jonny Jobson had found to say about it in the Yorkshire Post. Not exactly complimentary, but after what he’d written about The Lawless (my novel set in Sandbach) I felt I was on my way back up again. It didn’t sell more than a couple of thousand copies, but then no one expected hard covers to sell more than a couple of thousand copies. Paper covers hardly much better, come to that. Paper was simply a second bite at an apple that had gone rotten. Only with Flora there wasn’t even an apple.