Zoo Time

by Howard Jacobson

  My pen hovered over the paper. Write the book. Write the book of me. Mad in Monkey Mia. No story, fuck the story, fuck anything happening – de Wolff was right: if readers wanted something to happen, let them happen – no event, no action, no furthering or unravelling of plot, just the brain (which should be plot enough for anyone) rolling around in pain like one of the dolphins beneath our rowing boat. ‘One should go cuckoo!’ Henry Miller had written. ‘People have had enough of plot and character. Plot and character don’t make life.’

  But what if people had had enough of life?

  I made life, anyway, whether they wanted it or not, I made life, going crazy over my mother-in-law whose knee I’d finally touched after nearly twenty years of thinking about it and who was now allowing a lascivious film-maker’s quasi-sodomitic lickspittle in powder-blue pyjamas to pull at the lips of her vagina while the stars fell out of the heavens in amazement, or shame, or rapture.

  Henry Miller, the devil he was, once transcribed the sound the petal lips of a vagina made when you opened them. Squish-squish. ‘A sticky little sound,’ he called it, ‘almost inaudible.’

  Squish-squish.

  Jesus Christ.

  Try getting away with that today. Try getting the sacred music of the labia past Flora McBeth.

  And try getting a moment’s peace, once you have heard it, yourself.

  Squish-squish . . .

  The things one suffers when one is serious about one’s art.

  19

  The Baton of Literature

  The first time I used the word ‘cunt’ in a book I lay awake imagining I would be struck dead. Not by Vanessa, by God.

  In the morning I crossed it out.

  The next day I put it in again.

  In the morning I crossed it out.

  It was my second book. I could never have used it in my first, whatever Archie Clayburgh’s teaching and J. P. Donleavy’s example. You need to grow into cunt.

  In the end I asked Vanessa what she thought.

  ‘Is it used in a swearing context or a sexual context?’

  ‘Sexual.’

  ‘Is it used with love or used with hate?’

  ‘Well, certainly not hate. With desire.’

  ‘Then be bold,’ she said.

  In the morning I put it back.

  That night Vanessa asked to hear the passage with cunt in it. I read it aloud to her. ‘Take it out,’ she said.

  I asked why.

  ‘Because you’re embarrassed. It doesn’t come naturally to you. But if you want to leave it with me I’ll fix it.’

  The next day she handed me her amendment. Where I’d made my way gingerly to the word, as though entering some holy of holies before which I started in mortal terror, Vanessa had peppered the page with cunt. He asked to see her cunt, she showed him her cunt, he said he’d never seen a cunt as beautiful before, she asked how many cunts he had seen in that case, he said he’d seen cunts enough, she asked how many cunts were cunts enough, he said he wasn’t prepared to enumerate in the matter of cunts, she told him he was a cunt and he could fuck off.

  ‘I think you’ll find the scene works better now,’ she said.

  Without her knowledge I amended her amendment. Not entirely. I left in more than my original one. And felt all right about it too. But I hoped that when Vanessa came to read the book in manuscript she wouldn’t notice my failure of nerve.

  If she did she didn’t say anything. But the reviewer in the Financial Times offered it as his view that ‘Guy Ableman appears to have written this novel for the sole purpose of saying cunt’.

  I was, needless to say, deeply hurt by this.

  Vanessa wasn’t sympathetic. ‘You can’t say I didn’t warn you,’ she said. ‘The cunt.’

  There are writers who start feuds with reviewers. They send furious letters accusing them of damaging a profession already beyond repair, they pick fights with them at parties, or they go out of their way to review with redoubled savagery any book the reviewer goes on to write. For over a year I kept an eye out in book catalogues for anything by the Financial Times reviewer. ‘This book is written with the sole purpose of showing that its author is a cunt,’ I planned to write, though I accepted I might encounter resistance from whatever literary editor I wrote it for. But in the end I forgot about it, and when he did at last publish a book it was a children’s story about a cat that fought cancer, and I could see no way of harnessing a cunt to that.

  The best way of handling a cruel review, a distinguished elderly novelist I had shared a platform with at a literary festival told me, was to write to the reviewer thanking him for his insightfulness, and further, if he did happen to be a writer himself, to review him, when one’s chance came, with a magnanimity that would put him out of countenance for the rest of his working life. ‘There’s no shame harder to bear,’ he told me, ‘than that of being reviewed with enthusiasm by someone you’ve given a real drubbing to. Particularly if you never know for sure that the person you drubbed, and who has been so kind to you, is aware you drubbed him.’

  ‘Is that a shame you’ve experienced yourself ?’ I asked him.

  He nodded. ‘In 1958,’ he said, ‘and I have lived in a torment of guilt and uncertainty ever since.’

  We were sitting in the sun outside the writers’ tent. Our event was just over. Neither of us had signed any books though there’d been four hundred people in our tent, each of whom had clapped enthusiastically at the end. Too old to afford a book, I presumed. Probably too infirm to carry one. You only have to do the mental arithmetic. Four hundred multiplied by the average age of the audience which was sixty-five. That’s 26,000. Between them our audience had been alive longer than Homo sapiens. I don’t say that’s taxonomically accurate, but you get the picture. And it could only get worse. Eventually the average age of the audience would be a hundred, and there’d be more of them. Literary festivals filled a gap in the calendar of the retired. It was one stage before chair-dancing. Soon there’d be funeral parlours on site. You wandered into a tent, you clapped a writer you’d never heard of, you didn’t buy his stroke her book, and you rolled over. Writers the same. The elderly writer I’d shared the platform with a case in point. Would he make it out of here alive? Would I, come to that?

  A photographer, no doubt thinking along those lines himself, took our picture. Neither of us expected him to have anywhere to sell it, but it was nice to be noticed. Children sat on the grass colouring in books. I had friends who were writing colouring books as a last resort. ‘You have to go where the readers are,’ one of them told me. ‘But colouring-in isn’t reading,’ I protested. ‘It’s all about the way you look at reading,’ he said. Every day I combed the obituary pages of the newspapers, expecting to read he’d swallowed a mouthful of crayons.

  ‘Ah, sun,’ the old writer said.

  I agreed with him. ‘Ah, sun,’ I said.

  ‘Burning out, you know.’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘Fortunately, I should just beat it.’

  ‘Lucky you,’ I said.

  We must have both drifted off because suddenly there was a helicopter on the lawn. A famous television newsreader got out, pushing her hair back from her face. She had just published a novel about a poor girl who made a lot of money by becoming a television newsreader.

  ‘Who’s she?’ the old writer asked me.

  I told him what I knew.

  ‘Live and let live,’ he said.

  This was not a sentiment I agreed with but he was too old to contradict, enjoying the last rays of a sun that was too old itself.

  Before we parted he took my hand. The top of his middle finger, I noticed, was almost worn to the bone. I had read that he still wrote all his books with a pencil, and I wondered if the ruined finger was a consequence of this. ‘In a manner of speaking,’ he told me. ‘This is the finger I erase with.’

  ‘You never thought of using a rubber?’

  He shook his head vehemently. A rubber was too techn
ological for him. ‘I have to touch the words,’ he said, ‘even those I reject.’

  I nodded as though I were just the same, not wanting him to know the amount of electronic gadgetry I relied on to get a single sentence into the world. Shame on me. We were all busy wondering where readers had gone – there was even going to be a panel discussion of that very subject at the festival that evening; it was sold out – but what if the readers had simply followed the writers out of the room? You don’t write as you should, they were saying – you don’t touch words as the writers you admire once did, your keyboards take the living stuff out of language, your sentences no longer bear the warm impress of you – so why should we stick around to be short-changed?

  ‘I have a confession to make,’ the old author told me.

  I waited. Was he going to say he’d been writing on a computer for years and that the eraser groove in his finger was a fraud?

  He sat up in his chair and blew his nose. ‘I once gave you a real drubbing.’

  He made it sound as though we’d boxed each other as boys and he had won. An outcome I didn’t for a moment doubt, had the fight itself only been chronologically possible.

  He saw my confusion. ‘In a review. I wrote some cruel things.’

  I waved away his concern. ‘Water under the bridge,’ I said.

  ‘Not to me,’ he said. ‘I fear I was ungenerous. Smutty, I called you.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’

  ‘You remember?’

  ‘I remember somebody calling me smutty. I recall they said the same about Lawrence and Joyce.’

  ‘Lawrence, yes,’ he said, ‘the one not of Arabia, I presume you mean.’ He seemed uninclined to turn this into a conversation about the place of smut in literature. ‘There was too much sex for me, you see, in yours,’ he went on, ‘but, well, that was a relative complaint. How much sex is too much sex?’

  ‘However much you don’t want to read about,’ I said.

  ‘But I don’t want to read about any.’

  We laughed at that together. I tried to remember the review, but couldn’t. Unusual, to forget a bad review. Was he lying? Did he simply want to give me a bad review now?

  He asked what I was working on at the moment. I told him it was a novel about my mother-in-law. ‘There’ll be no sex in that one, then,’ he said.

  I smiled and got up to go. He hoped I’d understand if he stayed where he was. Old joints. I nodded. His legs, crossed at the ankles in a little bow, were stretched out in front of him disconnectedly, as though they belonged to someone else. He wore white summer flannels which would not have been long enough on a man six inches shorter than he was. Above his schoolboy’s black socks – black socks under white flannels! – his flesh looked sad and vulnerable. ‘No man should ever expose that part of himself,’ my mother had always said. In pursuance of which philosophy she forbade my father from ever crossing his legs. I was an avid pupil of her teaching myself. We die from the feet up. No matter how distinguished we are in mind, down there we are the ignoble, dying animal.

  He apologised again for his damning notice and presented me with a proof copy of his new novel. One a year he wrote. One a year since 1958. All in pencil and all set in the same council offices in Chesterfield. Readers had loved him once, now he struggled to sell a hundred books. Word was that this would be the last he’d be able to find anyone to publish. The municipal novel, too, it seemed was over.

  I got him to sign it for me. ‘I’ll treasure this,’ I lied. What was one more lie?

  He gave me the longest, sweetest smile. As though he were passing on the baton of literature.

  Only afterwards did I seriously wonder if he could be trusted. Had he truly given a book of mine a drubbing? Or had he made all that up so I would take his advice and by way of revenge shame him with a good review?

  But why go to such lengths of subterfuge? Did getting a good review still matter when you were eighty-five, when you had written more than thirty novels, and when there was no one out there to read the review or the novel, no one to give a monkey’s either way?

  Sick, the lot of us. Still sick, no matter how old and reverend, with the sickness that had made us novelists in the first place.

  20

  Big in Canada

  I never discovered whether Vanessa actually slept with Michael Ezra. She had plenty of opportunities. Once that second novel of mine was published and I was able to hand Wilhelmina’s over to Jeffrey Gorgeous, I moved my little family down to London, not immediately to Notting Hill, but to rural Barnes where I rented a cottage so that they shouldn’t miss Knutsford too much, and there in a back room overlooking a garden, I wrote the next. Since I wasn’t available for conversation, Vanessa planted sweet peas, explored the towpaths of the Thames with her mother, and when they got bored with that caught the train back to Macclesfield to visit friends in Knutsford or, while they were up there, to shop in Manchester. Why they needed to shop in Manchester when they had London I didn’t understand. But Vanessa told me they had a routine worked out in Manchester, and I didn’t question her. It was always possible that the routine included Omar Ezra, croupier.

  When the writing was going well I didn’t much care what her routine included. I was glad to have the cottage to myself. The women were a distraction when they were home, the sound of them talking as agitating as mice scratching about in the thatch, not making it absolutely impossible for me to work but always keeping me sensuously receptive to them. When they played the cello together they closed the door of what they jokingly called the music room – it was in fact Poppy’s boudoir – but again I strained to hear them. And of course I imagined them playing naked. They played more plangently, I thought, when naked, more Dvořákianly, though this was baseless fantasy, sometimes good for me to indulge, sometimes not, depending on what I was writing. Once in a while they would burst into my study uninvited, like a delegation from the World of Fun, and bend invitingly over me, their hair aflame on my neck. Hadn’t I done enough for the day? Didn’t I want a short break? Didn’t I want to join them for tea, biscuits, a game of Scrabble, a movie on the television?

  Three in a bed?

  My rancid mind. Scrabble was as far as it got. Though even there I once managed to find a spare ‘t’ to which to add my seven-letter ‘roilism’, thereby earning 50 points for using all my tiles and beating down a wasted challenge from Poppy.

  Disingenuous, was she? Playing me on a long lead? Or quite simply innocent?

  It goes without saying that two women are more disruptive of a man’s peace of mind than one. But Vanessa and Poppy were more than the sum of their parts. Each trebled the other’s eruptive force. I’ve described the minor and even sweet disturbances to my work they caused, but some days, especially when they were not getting on, it was like living with a hundred women. They would fight over what to cook, what to plant in the garden, what day of the month it was, whether it was hot or cold, and which double cello piece they should practise. Poppy always wanted Vivaldi, Vanessa Brahms. Unless Poppy wanted Brahms, in which case Vanessa wanted Vivaldi. They would shout ‘Hush!’ to each other in their loudest voices so as not to disturb me – the ‘literary fucking genius is trying to work’ – but the literary fucking genius could go fuck himself if Vanessa had a complaint about her mother’s unreasonable behaviour to voice. Then, she would barge into my room with a list of grievances going back to before she was born, not scrupling to ask if I were free to discuss this or any other matter; whereupon, hearing herself traduced, Poppy would barge in behind her to appeal to my impartiality, her hair a storm of electric activity, as though Vanessa, among her other sins, had been wiring her up to the mains. It wasn’t, of course, my impartiality she was appealing to; it was my partisanship on her behalf, a thing I was wise enough to conceal when I could, though on some occasions, as when Vanessa berated her for dressing like a slut, with her skirts ‘pulled up to her arse and her tits half out’, I couldn’t help but take her side. Poppy argued that cleavage had always been
a problem for her because her breasts started higher up than most women’s, and I agreed.

  I don’t doubt that had I listened harder I’d have realised they were fighting over specific men, with whom, in Vanessa’s view, Poppy had exceeded the propriety expected of the mother of a woman who was acting the slut herself.

  Or maybe I listened just hard enough, knew exactly what was going on and liked it, because the wild-cat atmosphere made me feel bohemian, a writer of the pulsating night-time city living in a whorehouse at last. Even if we were only in Barnes.

  To this degree, at least, their interruptions, though unlooked-for, were inspirational. I lost an hour to their technicolour commotions but wrote a week at full pelt on the strength of them.

  If Vanessa were sleeping with the croupier, or indeed anybody else, her mother’s always travelling up to Manchester with her had to be explained. Vanessa didn’t need a chaperone, and I very much doubted they were enjoying him in tandem or by turn. For all their apparent freedom from convention, they were not liberated enough for that. So did Poppy just hang around in the foyers of hotels? And if that were all, why didn’t she stay behind some days and share the solitude of the house with me?

  How she managed to make me feel we were on the brink of having an affair all those years before we got to Monkey Mia without ever saying or doing anything that couldn’t have been reported to Vanessa or the local vicar, I am unable to explain. Either she had a genius for innuendo in which nothing was really innuendoed, or drinkies got her into trouble which she was only by the skin of her teeth, or by the strength of her innate sexual refinement, able to get out of. To the third option, which was that I imagined the whole thing, I give a degree of credence – a feverish imagination being necessary to the business I am in – but only a degree. I didn’t imagine the countless occasions on which she brushed against me when we passed drunkenly on the stairs or in the hall and she would pretend that the static we gave off kept us in the same magnetic field a fraction of a second longer than in truth it did; or the pressure on my shoulder of her breasts (which started so much higher up her chest than other women’s) which was like being poked by a pillow; or the looks of fearful knowingness we exchanged some nights as though we stood on the rim of an active volcano; or the degree of domestic undress she permitted to become habitual between us, until Vanessa put a stop to it; or the unsubtlety of her flirting with my fellow writers when we threw a publication party, which I was able to explain to myself only as a plain manifestation of how badly she needed to flirt with me.