Zoo Time

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘My hero,’ Poppy said.

  ‘Not exactly St George and the Dragon.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have been so afraid of a dragon.’

  Nor, I thought, would a dragon have squelched so disgustingly beneath my flip-flop.

  ‘I’m not sure where we go from here,’ I said, still not wanting to move in case the thing remained horribly alive.

  ‘I am,’ Poppy said, pouring us both a brandy.

  ‘I’m shaking,’ I said.

  ‘So am I,’ she said.

  I held out a hand. She took it. We both laughed.

  Was I taking advantage of her drunkenness?

  Yes. But she was of an age, wasn’t she, to make it clear what she did or didn’t want.

  I pulled her to me and kissed her on the mouth. ‘Good brandy,’ I said. I laid my free hand on her hip, fingers pointing downwards, extending my palm to feel as much of her as I could.

  She pushed me away, laughing more nervously this time. ‘Go,’ she ordered.

  ‘I can’t,’ I reminded her, ‘I’m standing on your spider.’

  ‘You can’t stand there all night.’

  ‘Can’t I?’

  There are moments of trembling collusion in the lives of men and women, when the sacred rules governing decent society reassert themselves only to be broken. Right shows its face for the final time, in order that we can relish wrong.

  Zoo time.

  ‘Do it,’ Poppy’s expression dared me. ‘Do it if you’re man enough.’ So I did it.

  TWO

  The Mother-in-Law Joke

  22

  Blocked

  Not long after Merton’s suicide, I discovered in the pages of the Scrivener – the house journal of the Scrivener’s Society, one of the many authors’ societies to which I subscribed – a yellow circular, a) remembering Merton and lamenting publishing’s great loss, and b) setting out a plan of action for dealing with writers’ constipation. The two were not seen to be connected, though in a profession as susceptible to suggestion as ours, one calamity easily triggered another.

  Costiveness had long been known to afflict writers of every sort – though fiction writers in particular as they had the least reason to leave their desks and the most reason to be stressed – but of late it had reached near epidemic proportions. It goes without saying that we weren’t rushing to make it public. On top of all the other stupid questions we were asked whenever we gave an interview – such as what time we started work, where we got our ideas from, could we name a book by any living writer we admired – we didn’t now want to be asked to list our favourite laxatives.

  But it was precisely that reticence, according to Thor Enquist, the General Secretary of the Scrivener’s Society, that was the problem. The more reluctant to discuss constipation we were, the more constipated we became. We had, he said, to let go. A cliché which had on me, at least, the very opposite effect to the one intended.

  Barely had that letter arrived than Errata, the journal of the Jotter’s Club, devoted half an issue to writers’ physical well-being, the greatest modern threat to which, in the age of the computer, was – and it behoved us as writers to call a spade a spade – confinement of the bowels. If members signalled it was their wish, they would convene a conference on the subject in Conway Hall in Holborn.

  There followed a list of doctors who, as fellow writers and sufferers, were offering their services to members at a knockdown price. In the meantime, we could all do worse than pay close attention to the enclosed diet and fitness charts. And not to forget walking. The greatest threat to the modern writer was that we had forgotten how to walk.

  I hadn’t. Not that it was doing any good. But I liked, after a morning’s work, to mouth-write my way along the Thames at Barnes, and then later, when we moved to Notting Hill, up and down Ladbroke Grove, avoiding any bookshop. I’d do the same around Fitzrovia and Soho after I’d called in on Merton or Francis, or Marylebone after I’d been to see my ophthalmologist. Other than the tramp who looked like Ernest Hemingway, I did more walking around London than any writer I knew. I was a feature of the city. Travel guides pointed me out to tourists. People smiled at me; sometimes they were ex-readers, most of the time they were not – mainly they just wanted to remark on the fact that they’d seen me on Jermyn Street a week ago, and on Wigmore Street yesterday, and now here I was on Savile Row. How amazing was that?

  More amazing to me was that wherever I went I saw Ernest Hemingway, either sitting down outside a pub or café, or walking in the middle of the busiest main roads, oblivious to the abuse, writing, writing, writing. His shoes were down to nothing – mere cardboard pulp – and his buttocks were completely out of his trousers. How long before I looked the same? But I excited no companionable curiosity in him. Not once did he notice me. His eyes never left his reporter’s pad and his hand was never still.

  What was he writing? A journal of the city? The story of the circumstances that had brought him to this? Behind the beard was a strong face, inside the filthy clothes was a powerful frame; he could have been anybody – an actor fallen from favour, a dramatist who wrote plays too searching for these cardboard-pulpy times, a novelist who used words of too many syllables for his readers. Or maybe he was just one of us, no more tragic or unsuccessful, simply constipated and needing to walk his constipation off.

  Though, in that case, why was he so often to be seen sitting down?

  Because he was a writer, that was why. He’d begin his day, hoping a long walk would loosen his bowels, but then a sentence would occur to him, and that sentence would beget another, and soon he’d forgotten everything but the words.

  He wrote and wrote, furiously at times, his fingers gripping his pen like a dagger, flipping the pages of his pad over as though even they were an unbearable impediment to the flow of his thought. Had Vanessa been with me she’d have urged me to get closer to read what he was writing, and then give him all my loose change, but on my own I lacked the courage for either of those acts of impertinence.

  The surprising thing about the Scrivener’s Society and the Jotter’s Club was not the interest they had suddenly started to take in their members’ bowels, but that they existed at all. Authors’ clubs, whether mere bureaux offering services related to the business side of our profession or more elaborate watering holes for writers needing to get out, had mushroomed in the years I’d been writing. Some writers belonged to more of them than I did and yet my wallet could no longer hold the memberships cards I possessed, each offering me advantages I didn’t want, such as help with my finances from a London firm of stockbrokers, the opportunity to buy books I would never read at a 15 per cent discount, or advice on self-publishing – the last refuge of those who dreamed of showing the world it had been wrong to reject them, though the world seldom was. Viewed from one perspective there was no explaining this steep and sudden rise in the membership of authors’ societies. The logical consequence of there being fewer and fewer readers for any but a handful of books of the sort Merton had shot himself rather than publish was surely a reduction in the number of writers. Only the fittest survive and we weren’t the fittest. But neither evolutionary nor market forces worked in literature as they did elsewhere. For every reader that went missing a hundred new writers appeared to take his stroke her place. Soon there would only be writers. Was one explanation, therefore, that authors’ societies provided a sort of refuge for a profession for which there was now neither justification nor employment, a shelter for the otiose on the banks of the Styx where they could gather and console one another before the ferryman finally came for them?

  We will all go together when we go – was that our motto?

  Was it any wonder we were constipated.

  Though constipation was incident to anyone who spent too much time sitting in one place, I didn’t for a moment doubt that the severity of it I experienced was writing-related, the direct consequence of trying to make an art of language in an age of mechanical communication. When my words flo
wed and were allowed to flow, so did I. When they didn’t, I didn’t. A blockage is a blockage. I’m not talking writer’s block, in which, as someone who was married to one, I happened not to believe. I’m talking the refusal of reciprocity. The warm reception of a book, first by Francis, then by poor Merton, then by Josephine Public, had always facilitated an easy bowel movement, whereas the hint of a demur from my publisher or my agent or a series of bad reviews made me feel niggardly of myself, resentful of all I had given, and determined to keep myself to myself from that time on. An American novelist friend, living in London, reported a direct correlation between the number of weeks his novels were on the New York Times best-seller list and the frequency of his visits to the lavatory. Too many weeks at the top and he would end up with acute diarrhoea and have to suck on an Imodium every hour, too few and his wife who happened to be a doctor put him on a diet of Miralax, Lactulose, malt soup extract and hot curries.

  My experience was less extreme in its variability. For all the walking I was doing I was constipated full stop. And all the Lactulose in Christendom wasn’t going to help me. So while I was secretly grateful for the lavishly illustrated stool charts which both the Scrivener’s Society and the Jotter’s Club had sent, I didn’t hold out much hope of them doing the trick.

  And then, to make things worse, Vanessa found them.

  ‘What the fuck are these? Recipes for bread rolls?’

  I told her she was disgusting.

  ‘If you’re frightened you’ve got bowel cancer go and have a colonoscopy.’

  Vanessa had as many as she could fit in. Her mother the same. They were colonoscophiles.

  In this they were not exceptional. Everyone we knew had had, or was having, a colonoscopy. It was like eating in expensive restaurants – it was all there was left to do. Soon they would be performed on the same premises, simultaneously. But until then I couldn’t face the procedure.

  ‘I’m not frightened I’ve got anything,’ I said.

  This wasn’t true, but I was frightened I had so many things – being found dead and purple-faced on the lavatory after a heart attack, for example – that colon cancer was the least of my worries.

  ‘Try walking more,’ was Vanessa’s advice. ‘Try leaving the house. Try giving me my turn.’

  I was constipated, by her reasoning, because she wasn’t writing her novel.

  So why wasn’t she constipated because she wasn’t writing her novel?

  It was a mistake to have asked her that.

  ‘Don’t make unwarranted assumptions,’ she said. ‘Just because I don’t kick up the fuss you do doesn’t mean I’m idle.’

  She put her index finger up to her temple and made a whirring motion with it, denoting a novel at work on itself even as we bickered.

  I wished I could have said the same about my bowels.

  Writing and marriage to me apart, Vanessa was a lucky woman. Constipation was not in her nature. Why, then, the colonoscopies? It’s a good question. I could only assume that they were social events for her. That she liked watching the video of the camera travelling deep inside her colon. Or that she was having an affair with her colonoscopist. She was, anyway, someone who moved her bowels with consummate ease. Poppy the same. They were out of the WC before anyone knew they’d been in it. They were like wild animals. Had we lived on a savannah I didn’t doubt they’d have nipped out the back door and used that. As indeed they did on the road from Perth to Broome via Monkey Mia.

  Which had to mean, since neither of them was writing, that they weren’t cut out to be writers. Just as my constipation proved that I was.

  The Mother-in-Law Joke wasn’t going well. I didn’t like my hero, Little Gid. It was precisely my constipation that told me this. I’d rise early, full of writer’s juice, take a pot of tea up to my desk, glance at what I’d written the day before, visit the lavatory not expecting complications, and feel my bowels seize. Little Gid’s fault.

  So what was wrong with him?

  Not enough was wrong with him, that was what was wrong with him. He was too unremarkable. Inadequately, insufficiently feral.

  You can feel like this about your own characters. Once they assert their independence from you – and if they don’t do that you should try another job – you are free to dislike or even despise them. It can work the other way, too. You start off hating their guts and halfway through the book you can’t imagine ever enjoying life again outside their company. This was something Vanessa never quite understood about novels. From the first page of the few chapters she’d written it was clear whom she intended to murder and obvious on every line thereafter that she would sooner take her own life than spare his. His stroke hers? No – just his.

  ‘Novels aren’t acts of violence on their characters, Vee,’ I told her once. ‘Flaubert didn’t write “Emma Bovary was a fuckwit and deserved everything she got”.’

  ‘That’s because Emma Bovary wasn’t a fuckwit who deserved everything she got.’

  ‘I’m so glad you see that.’

  ‘Charles Bovary was a fuckwit who deserved everything he got.’

  I rolled my eyes.

  ‘You write yours,’ she said. ‘I’ll write mine.’

  In fact my novels started out as acts of violence too, but it was an article of artistic faith with me that I should relent. Or go in the other direction and fall out of love with those of my creations I’d originally been enamoured of.

  But Little Gid bored me from the start and went on boring me. By putting too big a distance between us, by not making him a full-time writer or comedian, or at least some version of myself unchained – a chancer, a trickster, a word-risker – I ended up resenting him for getting what I’d laboured hard for without putting in the work himself. You could say I was jealous of him. Little Gid and Pauline/Poppy – never! I couldn’t see what she would see in him. More than that, I couldn’t see what I’d seen in him. Things were bad out there. There were a hundred writers for every reader, publishers were shooting their faces off, agents were going into hiding, some lunatic was depressing my sales on Amazon by overpraising my work, Primark would soon be selling books for the price of a bag of crisps, a national newspaper was rumoured to be employing reviewers who were still at school, awaiting their GCSE results, and my answer to this was Little Gid! What antidote to the great depression of our time did Little Gid provide? What walls would tumble when Gideon puffed out his cheeks?

  What was it my old teacher Archie Clayburgh used to say? Read viscerally, with your bowels, boys. No wonder my bowels were failing. There was nothing visceral about Little Gid. The guy had no balls. He lacked rudery. He wasn’t the cause of my constipation, he was my constipation. A hero I had to squeeze out of me but who remained resolutely locked inside.

  What did that say about me? Was I locked inside myself ?

  Something made me decide to go to Wilmslow to visit Jeffrey Dearheart.

  23

  Less is Less

  The day I’d earmarked for the visit north – I wasn’t able just to catch a train to Wilmslow, I had to fill my diary with red exclamation marks, as though readying myself mentally as for a trek into the Interior – I received a phone call from Margaret Travers, Merton’s secretary. Merton’s replacement had finally been appointed and wanted to meet me. Could I make lunch the following Wednesday at 1 p.m.?

  You must never sound too eager. ‘I’ll just check my diary,’ I said, rustling paper. ‘Yes, if I move a couple of things, yes, I can make Wednesday at 1 p.m. Just. Who is it?’

  ‘It’s Margaret.’

  ‘No, who’s the replacement?’

  ‘There can be no replacement for Merton.’

  I heard tears in her voice. Apparently she had wept every day since Merton did what Merton did. Had they been lovers? The word was not. Though she wore belted raincoats in the style of vamps from black-and-white films of the 1950s, and though her voice was suggestively husky, and though she had always pronounced the name Merton as if it were molten, Margaret
Travers was a secretary of the old style, simultaneously faithful to her husband and her boss. When she said there could be no replacement for Merton she meant in her heart, innocently, as well as in publishing.

  ‘I know that. I meant who’s his –’ I couldn’t find the word, if the word wasn’t ‘replacement’ – ‘who will I be having lunch with?’

  She lowered her voice, as though not to upset Merton. ‘Sandy Ferber.’

  I knew a Sandy Ferber. He’d owned a highly successful minimalist gallery in Hoxton, providing one Turner Prize-winner after another, from which he went on to run a small but influential art press – Less is More – specialising in elegantly produced artists’ monographs in octodecimo, after which, quite out of character, he popped up as the fiction supremo at a bookshop chain that soon afterwards went into receivership. In the short time he was there he’d rationalised fiction so that there wasn’t any, boasting that he read at least one sentence of every novel published, deciding on its viability-or-not by opening it at page 100 and if there was too much happening in the way of words he wouldn’t buy. I had celebrated his fall from eminence with an article in the Bookseller, offering it as my view that he chose page 100 to sample because any novel that had a hundred pages in it was already too long for his exquisite concentration. The closure of the chain that had appointed him was, in my view, the logical extension of his credo. As was the disappearance of the book, and, not a moment too soon, the disappearance of him.