Zoo Time

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘What fault are you referring to?’

  ‘The inability to feel pleasure. Psychologists call it anhedonia.’

  ‘Psychologists! Are you saying I should be sectioned for not finding what you write diverting?’

  I thought about it. A strange negative energy came off him, as though he possessed the gift of sucking vitality from the room. I felt the breath of life leaving my body. It was either him or me. ‘Well, I hadn’t quite put it to myself like that,’ I said with brutal unsubtlety – what could I do? he brought out the brute in me, just as Diana must have brought out the brute in her men – ‘but now you mention it, yes, I think the madhouse might be the only place for you.’

  ‘In a straitjacket?’

  His voice possessed that very quality of weightlessness he admired so much in literature.

  ‘You are,’ I said, ‘already in a straitjacket.’

  A week later he was found dead, slumped at the wheel of his car, in an underpass in Paris. He wasn’t, of course, but a man can dream.

  Wrong to blame it all on Bawstone. No publisher with a business brain allowed the word ‘funny’ to appear on a book jacket. Merton had banned it from his list years before. He tore his hair when anything made him laugh. ‘What am I going to do with this?’ he’d ask. It was even possible that something had made him laugh just before he took his life. Maybe I had. Maybe I’d asked him what chance he thought I had of winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.

  All this apart, the comedy phenomenon needed explaining: if no one wanted funny, why the triumphant march of the comedians? Something didn’t make sense.

  Take my mother-in-law . . .

  What if Francis was wrong? What if a comedian who fucked his mother-in-law was the hero of sexual transgression everyone was waiting for?

  It’s hard to embark on a story uncertain whether your hero is a comedian or a climate scientist. There comes a moment, and it comes early, when you must make the leap and see the story through with him.

  What did I know about climate science? If it was hot in my study, I put on the air conditioning. If it was cold I imagined lying in the arms of my wife’s mother. Climate science.

  Anything further would entail research and I didn’t do research. In this I was out of step with my neutered associates. Research was what desperation had driven them to. Especially research into the latest developments in epigenetics, particle physics or quantum mechanics. There’d been a time when novelists were proudly indifferent to all of this. The boffins did matter, we did the human heart. But we’d lost faith in the human heart, which meant we’d lost faith in ourselves. We weren’t important, they were. If we could hitch a ride on their wagon, maybe we’d get to where they were going. And where was that? Search me. Relevance? Contemporaneity? An audience?

  Whatever we were hoping, we no longer stood up for ourselves. It wasn’t even a two-way street – we’ll bone up on you if you bone up on us. The scientific community’s response was that we weren’t worth boning up on. You aren’t where it’s at, sunshine. So any twopenny-halfpenny proponent of string theory believed he could do his job and not acquaint himself with the uses of metaphor or the seven types of ambiguity; any climatologist could draw his graphs in serene and unchallenged ignorance of Henderson the Rain King.

  Well, if they weren’t reading us, I at least was not reading them. Whatever else he was or wasn’t going to be, my hero wasn’t going to be a climate scientist.

  Take my mother-in-law – I just have.

  It was that word ‘just’ I found hard to resist. The idea of a comedian coming out to entertain his audience with the smell of his mother-in-law still on him. It was a disgusting concept which confirmed Vanessa’s view that I was a disgusting person.

  ‘Person or author?’ I’d always asked, to be on the safe side.

  She never missed her cue. ‘Both.’

  And that was leaving my disgusting thoughts about her mother out of it.

  If my tentative hero had the taste of his mother-in-law on his fingers, I had the taste of his fear on me. The scene described itself. A comedy club in Chester, housed in the back of a riverside pub. Monday. First-timers’ night. Thirty people in a grimy room, simultaneously desperate to laugh and not expecting to be amused, their feet in puddles of warm beer. Not being a beer drinker myself, I associate its smell with human hopelessness. Warm beer, rats’ piss, failure. My hero would be smelling of all three. I saw him gnawing his fingernails behind the torn black sheet which served as a curtain. Then out into the limelight, tapping the microphone because that was what he’d seen real comedians do.

  Take my mother-in-law – I just have.

  Not a laugh to be heard. Too subtle for a Chester audience? Too gross? Francis said not. Francis said not gross enough. But Francis wasn’t Chester. Get off the stage, I heard them shouting, anyway. Don’t give up your day job.

  In which event I could have it both ways. My first-person narrator would be a comedian and a comedian manqué, a comic who never was. He would try out his riff and keep his day job, and his day job would be mine, he would do what I had done before the rabbit hole of publication had opened for me to fall through like that pervert Lewis Carroll’s Alice – he would be in the ladies’ fashion business, tending his parents’ shop. A fashion consultant.

  This had been my world. I knew it inside out. Certainly I understood it better than I understood Chester Zoo, the wild smell of Mishnah Grunewald on my skin notwithstanding. I even began to wonder whether that was when it all went wrong: the day Mishnah called me ‘feral’ and I went in search of the monkey in myself. As a novelist, never mind as a man, wouldn’t I have done better had I stuck with retail? Quinton’s words: don’t sever your roots, stick with what you know.

  Without question, Vanessa would be scathing. The moment I put my hero in charge of a lacy little boutique in Wilmslow she’d accuse me of shedding the last pretence that I was interested in somebody not myself. ‘Solipsistic shit!’ she’d called me when I’d written as Mishnah Grunewald – a Jewish woman zookeeper. ‘Solipsistic shit!’ she’d called me when I’d written as an unprincipled van salesman on the loose in Sandbach. She was hardly going to think any better of me when I wrote as a comedic Wilmslow fashionista with artistic pretensions and parents identical to my own.

  But then Vanessa was not going to see this novel until it was too late for her opinion to count. Normally I presented her with a typescript hot from my computer. But how do you give your wife a novel about a man – a comedian or a fashion consultant – who’s in love with his wife’s mother? I’d deny the similarity of course. This is a work of fiction, Vee, for Christ’s sake. Any resemblance between the characters and persons living or dead . . . But she’d never swallow that. In her soul Vanessa didn’t believe in fiction. Her own work-in-progress, now in its second decade of non-completion, didn’t even bother to change names. The heroine was Vanessa, the bad guy was Guy. Once you changed anything, Vanessa maintained, you lost the ring of truth. So I had no hope of persuading her that I had entirely made up the story of a Cheshire-born shop assistant who’d formed an unnatural attachment to the mother of his wife, a woman in all particulars identical – because I too loved the ring of truth – to Vanessa.

  Which left me with only two courses of action: either I’d risk ending the marriage, or I’d not write the book.

  A no-brainer – as people with no feeling for language, readers who didn’t read me, readers who didn’t read anyone, the wordless walking brain-dead – chose to put it. A no-brainer.

  12

  Little Gidding

  In my head I called him Gid, my comedian who wasn’t. Gid, short for Gideon, not to be confused with Guy, short – in mock-heroic Vanessa-speak – for Guido.

  Guido was what she called me the first time we slept together. Geeeedo! Like Sophia Loren wheedling her way into the forgiveness of Marcello Mastroianni. She climbed on top of me and blew the name into my eyes. Guido, Guido . . . At a stroke, Wilmslow became Naples. I c
ould smell the pungent lava of Vesuvius floating on the lavender-blue waters of the Mediterranean. See Wilmslow and die. With Vanessa astride me, death would not have been so terrible. Life with Vanessa astride me was better even than death though, and life crooked its libidinous finger at me. Guido, Guido . . .

  I believed it. I was Guido. I even began to dress differently. More Italianately. More Armani than Boss. Soft black crêpe. The jacket like a second skin. Guido, Guido . . . And I was fool enough to think Vanessa believed it also. Maybe she had, at first. But eventually the name snagged on the ridiculousness of things and became ridiculous itself. ‘Use your nose on me, Guido,’ I recall her saying. I bridled at that, I’m not sure why. Was it the idea of being sexually adroit only by virtue of my nose? I acceded, nevertheless, and even enjoyed it, but I was never entirely free of the sensation that she was making light of me, even denying me, phallically. Henry Miller wouldn’t have minded, but D. H. Lawrence would. Eventually, when Vanessa called me Guido I did not see the Bay of Naples, I saw Mount Derision, and below it the Slough of Despond.

  I say ‘eventually’ as though it just happened over time, but in fact Vanessa hit upon a very particular usage of Guido that took the gloss off it. We were a few years into our marriage. I’d published a brace of novels, the first of them still generating sufficient interest for me to be invited to the sort of festival that would put up a poetry tent in a field, next to the hamburger and noodle stalls, as a diversion, mainly for the older visitors, from the main business which was music. I didn’t enjoy these gigs. Not my sort of readers, that’s if they were readers at all. They sat on cushions on the grass expecting someone to recite something with easily graspable rhymes and hypnotic rhythms, in the spirit of the music from which they were taking a short break. The writer on before me did lineless free association on the spot, as the spirit moved him. ‘Heroes, zeros, losers, users, holding hands, folding wands, kissing, missing, missing what? missing nought, in love no ought, whatever teachers taught, bodies warming, love-ties forming . . .’

  Amazed that anyone could detect in language the consonance of terminal sounds, the woodland folk banged their little hands together.

  ‘Shouldn’t be here,’ I whispered to Vanessa as we stood at the back of the tent drinking beer from biodegradable plastic cups. ‘This is no place for prose.’

  ‘Whooh!’ she shouted, punching the air with her free hand. Not in response to my words but the performance poet’s. As someone who sweated hard over every line and had nothing to show after four hours at the computer but a few random swear words addressed to the readers she didn’t have, she was bowled over by the impromptu.

  ‘Don’t do that whooing shit,’ I told her.

  ‘Why not? Because it’s not you I’m whooing?’

  ‘Because it’s not seemly, for one. And two, because he’s crap.’

  ‘Whooh!’ she shouted. ‘Yeah!’

  The impromptu poet was so touched by her appreciation that he began to hymn her beauty. ‘Lovely lady, be more bravely, come into my parlour, a little farther, still more farther, fuck your friend (unless he’s your father) . . .’

  I had agreed to do this gig only because Vanessa fancied the idea of a trip to the country.

  ‘Let’s camp,’ she’d said.

  I thought about it. ‘Let’s not,’ I’d said.

  ‘Go on. It would be such fun. We could build a fire. We could cook sausages. I could suck your dick under the moon.’

  ‘You could do that in our garden.’

  ‘You have no poetry in your soul, Guido.’

  This was why she was paying me back, first by whooing at the performance poet and then by joining a small queue to buy a collection of his poems.

  ‘How do you collect poems you make up on the spot?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘Don’t be cretinous,’ Vanessa said.

  ‘How am I being cretinous?’

  She didn’t tell me. I was too cretinous to be told. But after I’d done my reading – ten pages of my most dense discursively lubricious prose containing references to characters the audience knew nothing of and events they couldn’t possibly comprehend, which might be why there was barely any audience left by the time I’d finished – she picked up the word again. ‘Cretin,’ she said.

  I was sitting staring into space behind my pile of books for which there was, to no one’s surprise, not a single taker. I could smell burgers and pizza. I could hear jazz. Opposite me flags fluttered and the litter police made sure that people graded their crap before putting it into bins. Though there was no bin I could discern for the crap impromptu poet’s crap impromptu poetry. Other than me, everyone was being lovely to everybody else, twittering like little love birds.

  ‘It’s not me that’s the cretin, Vee,’ I said. ‘Illiterate twats.’

  ‘What did they do wrong? They came, they sat, they listened –’

  ‘– they left . . .’

  ‘What did you expect, you cretin?’

  ‘Knock off the cretin,’ I said.

  ‘I won’t. Guido Cretino.’ She laughed at her own music. Vee the performance poet. ‘Have you met my spouse, the distinguished louse, writer of fiction with his dicktion, Guido Cretino?’

  And the name stuck.

  A rule of thumb when choosing a name is that it should look arresting on the page. I’d never been a Bill and Mary novelist. Life is banal enough, in my view, without a writer replicating it. But you can also strive too hard. Beaufield Nubeem, for example, or Tyrone Slothrop. Gideon was feasible and yet still caught the eye. Erudite reviewers would make something of the biblical Gideon being a feller of trees, God’s agent in the slaying of the Midianites. Thus, a feller of the decencies. In fact, I only ever chose a name for its sound and its appearance, not its meaning. Only after the reviewers had been to work did I know why I’d called X, X. And by that time it was too late to disabuse them. Gideon worked for me aesthetically, and because I could abbreviate him to Gid, which worked for me because it looked like gad, as in the gadfly – a small sexual irritant, goading his mother-in-law into what he hoped at last would be sexual frenzy.

  Goading, giddying, Gidding.

  ‘Little Gidding’, someone at the TLS was going to notice, the last of Eliot’s Four Quartets. ‘Is Guy Ableman telling us he has finally come to feel what Eliot called “the laceration / Of laughter at what ceases to amuse”?’

  Finally?

  That ‘Little Gidding’ was also an ironic reference to any one of a number of Henry James’s flaccid heroes – those still waiting for their lives to start, for the beast in their jungle to rouse himself and leap, for the sacred terror of which they walked in fear to strike and tear their throat – I could count on the London Review of Books to point out.

  Such dense literary affiliation, and all I was after was a gadfly name that sounded teasingly like my own.

  Gid, anyway – maybe Little Gidding was better after all – Little Gidding – or why not simply Little Gid? – would manage, as at his age I managed, Wilhelmina’s of Wilmslow. I’d have, eventually, to fictionalise that – the Wilhelmina’s and the Wilmslow. I was only lending him my past. But for the time being we were in this thing together, running the shop, with the assistance of a couple of competent and voguish girls with no A levels, while our parents, cruising the world on its profits, wondered what to do with it – sell, come back and run again themselves, or pass down to the next in line, in my parents’ case to me, an ingrate fantasising about being Henry Miller while waiting for my younger brother to finish his business education, in Little Gid’s a more contented personality who did occasionally, without any reason to suppose he had the aptitude, think about being a comedian.

  Whatever its congeniality to either of our personalities, Wilhelmina’s was, as I like to go on remembering, for I hadn’t always been down on my luck, an aromatic and exclusive boutique, stocking demonstratively upmarket clothes – the Rifat Ozbeks, Thierry Muglers, Gallianos, Jean Paul Gaultiers and of course Dolce and Gabba
nas of the day – to women who would rather shop locally than have to find somewhere to park their Lamborghinis in Manchester, Liverpool or Chester, not that they’d find what Wilhelmina’s sold in Liverpool or Chester. Being younger than me – a novelistic ruse devised to throw autobiography hunters off the scent – Little Gid would number footballers’ wives among his clients. And if they weren’t footballers’ wives when they went in to his shop, they sure as hell would look like footballers’ wives when they left. Either way, they trusted him. They put themselves in his hands. Gid Pet, they call him. Gid Darling. Gid Angel. They felt that that something that had rubbed off on him, rubbed off on them. He accompanied his parents to Paris and Milan, then later he would go on his own. Met couturiers. Met models. It was worth going into Wilhelmina’s just to sniff the catwalks of Europe on him.

  On me, too, for the brief time I did what he did. Guy Dear. Guy Angel. My heart wasn’t in it but I was fashionably thin, liked putting my hands on women’s bodies, and had pretty much the same taste as our clientele. Which did not yet include footballers’ wives. They were not a discrete species in my time. The difference between Little Gid and me wasn’t only a difference of chronology but of class. My Wilhelmina’s was genteel. By Little Gid’s time chav had happened. Jean Muir had lost her rail to Versace. But the designer labels, the trips to Paris and Milan, the couturiers, the models – these I too enjoyed in a provisional, Henry Millerish sort of way, by which I mean I wished the fashion houses had been whorehouses, actual whorehouses with real, working, thirty-pound-an-hour whores in them, for whorehouses belong to literature as couture never can. Like attracted like, anyway, so any number of well-turned-out women made the trip to Wilmslow if they didn’t already live there. Half of Lancashire, half of Staffordshire, all of Cheshire. Hence Vanessa, who had idled with the idea of being a model herself, as she idled with the idea of everything, and might have made it but for those incipient literary ambitions which have done, and I don’t doubt will continue to do, long after we are dead, such damage to us both. And hence her mother, Poppy, who for a short while had been a model, of a sort, and who was loosely connected to my mother, Wilhelmina.