Zoo Time

by Howard Jacobson

  And so I had my subject. The good woman.

  In the good old days (to use good in an entirely different sense) when Francis and I used to go out drinking together, before the last few readers had dwindled into no readers, we would while away the hours thinking up titles of books that would be sure-fire best-sellers by virtue of a single word. ‘Anything with the word wife or daughter in it,’ Francis once suggested. We exhausted every possibility then changed the game to titles that would never sell even with the word wife or daughter in them. I won with The Fudgepacker’s Daughter.

  But I had done with pyrrhic victories. And when I called on Carter Strobe and offered him, as though it were a floral tribute to his agenting, the title The Good Woman, I knew from the way he enfolded me in his Ozwald Boateng suit that I was onto a winner.

  I had alternatives in my back pocket, just in case, but he was so pleased with The Good Woman that – with some nostalgic regret, I have to say – I left The Monkey and the Mother-in-Law and The Spider-Monkey’s Wife where they were. No more monkeying for me.

  I thought Carter was going to rub noses with me when I followed the title up with a rough outline. Or at the very least tell me that he loved me. He held me by the ears. ‘This is the one I’ve been waiting for,’ he said, though I hadn’t known he’d been waiting for anything. ‘I’m weeping and I haven’t even read it,’ he said.

  I told him I was weeping and I hadn’t even written it.

  But that was the easy part. You start at the beginning and you go on to the end. Previously I had done it the other way round, giving away what was going to happen at the outset so that readers shouldn’t be distracted into suspense. Now you know where we’re going to end up you can forget about it and concentrate on the sentences, was what, in effect, I was telling them. Roll me around your tongues. Savour me. Reading should be like sex. The end is written in the beginning, so just lie back and enjoy the journey. Who knows, maybe this was no better a strategy than Vanessa’s ‘Gentle reader, get fucked!’ I was done with it, anyway. The past was the past. Alone, distressed and sentimental, I sold my soul to story.

  I had to cheat a bit to get the Holocaust in, but a dream sequence will always make a chump of chronology. Otherwise it was Sierra Leone, the Balkans, Afghanistan, I’m uncertain myself where I sent them, the two women passing themselves off as sisters, fleeing from hellhole to hellhole on the back of a plot so flimsy – but then what plot isn’t flimsy? – that I blushed as I constructed it. How they survived what they saw and what they were subjected to; how they made the selfless choices they did, each one sacrificing herself to ensure the safety of the other, as they journeyed from horror to horror in pursuit of the sweet but simple-minded boy (the illegitimate child of Pauline, passed off as hers by Valerie, after they had both been raped on the same day by the same Biafran soldier); how they watched in helpless horror as Somali pirates stole him from a pleasure cruiser anchored off Shark Bay, and there and then vowed that they would ransack the universe to find him, I can only ascribe to courage. Not theirs, mine. Because it takes tremendous courage – far more than is ever credited – to write what I was writing.

  Goodness, of course, sustained them. The goodness of their devotion to each other, the goodness of their love for the boy, and the goodness they brought to the troubled people they travelled among. That it wasn’t always possible for the reader to know which woman was which – which the Good Woman of the title – I account a master stroke, though I got the idea originally from Dirk de Wolff who had merged them cinematically. Such goodness transcends individuality – that was my point. It doesn’t pertain to a particular woman, young or old – it is the distinguishing feature of woman.

  As it happens, I had always believed that, anyway. I simply hadn’t thought it necessary to spell it out. Where I got such idealism from I can’t be sure: it certainly didn’t come to me in my own mother’s milk. Perhaps I learned it from watching women shopping in the boutique, dressing and undressing, looking at themselves in mirrors, uncertain what suited them, troubled by their appearances, having to think twice about the expense. It made me sorry for them. Not easy being them, I thought. From which it followed that I saw their lives as one long trial, balancing beauty and elegance with all the other calls on their sense of duty. In even the most flibbertigibbety of customers I thought I could detect an underlying heroical sorrow, the struggle to remain a good wife when loucher longings beckoned, to make ends meet, to find time for the tedium of children or relatives long past any usefulness or sense.

  No loucher longings this time. No sex, except by intimation – on pain of death no squish-squish – and no jokes. Writers of pornography obey a single golden rule when it comes to laughter: there is not to be any. A single laugh and the trance is broken. Well, The Good Woman was the pornography of the sentimental, and the same rule applied.

  So no seriousness, either. The age of serious sex was over.

  I say it took tremendous courage to write it, but that’s an exaggeration. In fact it took none. These were coward’s words and I am ashamed to say they came easily to me. I turned on the tap of tears and tears flowed. Once you let idealisation out of the cage, there is no getting it back in again. There are some, of course, who find such idealisation, when it is unloosed indiscriminately on particular women, the deepest of all insults to woman in general – misogyny in its most underhand and deviously destructive form – but they were never going to be my readers. As for historical background it’s a cinch. Skim a couple of books by academics no one’s heard of and invent the rest. Topography the same. When you’ve described one arid mountain range you’ve described them all. Ditto desert. I had watched the desert bloom with wild flowers driving up to Broome with Poppy and Vanessa. And as they had marvelled, I marvelled. Occasionally, in defiance of their captors, one of them would dismount a camel or an elephant or a blood-bespattered jeep to pluck a desert pea (I would, of course, check the genus appropriate to the terrain) and croon. ‘See how beautiful,’ she would say to the Somali pirate who had been a fisherman before toxic waste was dumped in the waters that had been his livelihood, and she knew he saw. Beauty spoke in every language. She would lie with him before he finally released her to a warship belonging to the Indian navy.

  International politics for the men, wonderment for the women.

  As for the poor and downtrodden whose lives my two women touched as they travelled, they were the poor and downtrodden of Wilmslow and Ladbroke Grove without the iPads. There isn’t anything, I found, that I didn’t know already. The Afghan tribesmen looked like Michael Ezra before he’d shaved off his moustache, the well-meaning but ineffective consular Englishmen were Quinton and Francis, the idealists were Merton Flak, the Muslim fanatics were Jeffrey (where’s the difference?), and the Somali pirate with a feel for beauty was me. This was all just watercolour background anyway. I reserved the richness of oils for little Robert, modelled on half the simpleton novelists I knew, but with particular reference to the lashless Andy Weedon, and of course for Valerie and Pauline, who were painted with a thick impasto of sympathy, an intense luminousness of admiration and devotion that no one but I possessed.

  ‘How do you know us so well?’ the Chipping Norton, Chipping Camden and Chipping Sodbury women’s reading groups asked me. It struck them as uncanny that I could understand women as I did. By way of an answer I unmanned myself facially for them. I thought of Vanessa and her mother and my eyes watered. That was how I understood – by letting go of all that stood between me and woman, which wasn’t, to be truthful, very much. Secretly, I marvelled that they should think we were so different. Was there really an entity called ‘woman’ to understand? Was she truly of a different species to man? Before Archie Clayburgh got to me, before I had progressed to the Olympia Press, I had loved reading about Jane Eyre and Little Dorrit and Maggie Tulliver. Girls, now I come to think of it, were all I read about. That they were girls and I was a boy never once occurred to me at the time, nor would it have mattered if it
had. We were sensitives in the shit together, that was all. I turned the pages and immersed myself in slightly prettier versions of me. Not that much prettier either, in Jane Eyre’s case. And certainly no more emotionally fraught. Novels told the story of our common pain, girls and boys, men and women. On the surface, de Sade’s indefatigable embuggerers, like Henry Miller’s down-and-out lickers and fuckers, might have seemed worlds away from the easily bruised charity girls at Lowood Institution where that bastard Mr Brocklehurst unfairly branded Jane a liar, but dig a little deeper and they weren’t. One way or another they all found life hard-going. I wouldn’t be surprised if the embuggerers found it even harder than the charity girls.

  If women readers were unable or unwilling to enter the damaged souls of men as enthusiastically as I had entered the damaged souls of women, that was their affair, but they were imaginatively the poorer for it. As for the understanding they believed they found in me now I was Guido Cretino, it was no more than a deliberate toning down of the language of self in favour of a demonstrative lavishing of tenderness on others. I don’t underestimate that quality. Tenderness is a fine thing. But it is not understanding – you can be tender and a fool, you can be tender and grasp nothing – though in the age of the dying of the word compassion will pass as understanding. More than that, it will be preferred to understanding which, as often as not, is too cruel for people to bear.

  ‘Go, go,’ said Eliot’s bird, ‘human kind cannot bear very much reality.’ It didn’t have to be a bird that said it. I’d have gone for something furrier. But all that mattered was that it was non-human. It takes another species to see us for what we are.

  So was that all they had ever wanted, those who had once identified only with my dead characters – a bit more rosy undiscerning goo-goo? Did they read in order to be spared from seeing what was true? Did they read to be lied to?

  Everyman, I will go with thee and blind thine eyes.

  What I was writing now a monkey with enough time on his hands could have written. I mean no disrespect to my new book-mad, serial readers. Without them there’s no knowing what I would have done. They saved me from losses too keen to bear. They shored me up. It’s possible they lied to me every bit as much as I lied to them. No matter. I kiss the feet of every one of them. But the truth is the truth: what I was writing now a monkey with no time on his hands could have written.

  And do you know what I suspect? Buried deep inside those readers to whom I am eternally grateful, in a place too remote and inaccessible for their conscious minds to penetrate, was the half-belief that a monkey had written it. Or if not a half-belief, then a half-wish. A velleity on the side of apes. Not my kind of monkey-wish, not a longing for the serious and single-minded libidinousness with which Beagle surveyed his burning putz – though there was little in the way of burning putz envy left in me now – but a secret, unexcavated suspiciousness of the artist who knew what he was doing and dedicated his life to doing it, who was not a selector of random words which occasionally came together to make a terrible sense, who ran down language with a will and with a purpose and wouldn’t let it go until it had yielded meaning – his meaning, her meaning.

  Too much self-knowledge and intent spoiled it for those who made a hobby of being cultured, who trotted from Tate Modern to the National Theatre and then on to one of the three or four reading groups to which they belonged, and who in their hearts believed they too had a story to tell and would have told it if only they had had the time (which they might easily have had had they only stayed away from galleries and theatres more), if only they had not had families to bring up, if only things had worked out differently for them, if only they had had the advantages or the education, if only the monkey in them had struck the right keys and come up with the right letters.

  I was under no more illusion about my esteemed readers’ affection for me than I was about my affection for myself, and I didn’t like myself at all. They read the pap I put out not because they loved me, but because they hated Proust at his most dilatory and Henry James at his most sublimely impenetrable and Lawrence at his most finical-erotical-prophetical and Céline at his most odious. In my new incarnation as a writer of what was ‘readable’ I was the antidote to art.

  Poppy died before The Good Woman was published. Francis had, in the end, cared for her and was now wasted himself. ‘They should bury me with her,’ he said. ‘Or at least they should bury my heart.’

  Other than ‘Oh, Francis’, I had no reply. In my own heart I thought it would be right if they buried his. I envied him. Not his few short years with Poppy but the inordinacy of his grief. It denoted a steadfastness I feared I didn’t possess, and of course a goodness I knew I didn’t.

  Vanessa flew back for the funeral and shook like a leaf through every minute of it. She looked very fine, golden from the Western Australian sun, though less queenly than I remembered her at Merton’s funeral. She had marks on her face I hadn’t seen before, deeper, I thought, than could be explained by this new sorrow. It was as though writing had turned her serious, but in the process taken away her vivacity. Not writing had suited her. In her rage and frustration she had bloomed. In her not writing she had been a prodigy of non-fulfilment. Now she was just another practitioner. One of thousands, millions even. Hush, and you can hear them; listen, on a quiet night anywhere on the planet, and you can hear the scratch of their pens or the dead click of their keyboards, as innumerable as the sand which is by the seashore.

  But I could not tell her that. Let her find out for herself.

  We embraced, like old friends who had fallen out, without passion.

  ‘Are you all right, essentially?’ she asked me.

  ‘I am,’ I said. ‘I can see that you are – essentially.’

  She nodded. ‘It’s good to be busy.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I wanted to ask if she was enjoying the frontier life she had surprised me in Broome with the news that she had always craved. But she would think I was being ironic.

  Similarly, I thought, she refrained from asking whether I was still writing about myself and wondering why no one read me. ‘Working on something?’ she asked instead.

  ‘Yes. You?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There is nothing to say once you have decided to call an end; the argument has no spritz in it any longer. And you can’t remember why it ever spat and fizzed the way it did.

  I wished she would tell me to stop stealing her airwaves, to get the fuck out of the cemetery so that she could think her thoughts. It would have pleased me to see her vertiginous with frustration again. Not because I wanted to see her unhappy but because I wanted to see her grand.

  We avoided all talk of Poppy until we were about to part.

  ‘I know it must have been hard for you sometimes,’ she said, ‘having both of us to cart around. I want to thank you for doing it with such good grace.’

  ‘It wasn’t hard,’ I said.

  And then it was my turn to shake like a leaf.

  44

  Spelt From Sibyl’s Leaves

  My follow-up novel to The Good Woman was The Good Daughter. There was no stopping me now. I had The Good Mother ready to go. And even before I began on that I was mulling over The Good Son-in-Law. Though how I was going to keep sex out of that one, I didn’t know.

  It was as I walking home from the launch party for The Good Daughter that I saw the tramp Vanessa had called Ernest Hemingway keel over, like a shot bear, in the middle of the road. I couldn’t tell if he’d been hit by a vehicle or had just lost his footing. At this time of the night in Soho there was no saying what had caused what. Minicabs and limousines and rickshaws were double-parked, picking up and spilling out. Hen nights, stag nights, monkey nights. People lay in pools of their own vomit, waiting for the paramedics. You couldn’t tell, from looking at what anyone was wearing, what the season was. In Soho it had become a perpetual late summer, shirts open to the navel, legs bare to the femur, no matter what the temperature. The restaurants were all
full, booked out, though no one was eating in the restaurant that they really wanted to eat in.

  (That he really wanted to eat in? Forget it.)

  Smokers lounged outside, laughing and coughing, inspecting their mobile phones with that air of urgent wonder that would have made a Martian suppose they had never seen such things until tonight. Everyone had a message waiting, and whoever didn’t, sent himself one. In restaurant queues the latest of Sandy Ferber’s two-minute Unbooks helped while away the waiting.

  No one noticed anything any more, there were no witnesses to any crime, because people did not raise their faces from their screens. How they any longer fell in love was a mystery to me. Eyes used to have to meet in long lingering amazement. But who had time to raise their eyes or be amazed? Perhaps they fell in love, at a remove, through their electronic devices. IthinkIloveyou.com. I felt self-conscious carrying an actual book. It was a first edition of The Good Daughter, still hot from the printer’s, signed by everyone at my publishers, even Flora, though I might not have mentioned that I never did leave S&C – couldn’t do it, couldn’t do it to the memory of Merton, couldn’t do it to Margaret Travers, his no less faithful secretary, who I felt needed me to stay for continuity’s sake, and into the dark interior of whose crackling unbelted raincoat I couldn’t bear no longer to slip my arms, and anyway, with books as verdant and unapocalyptic as I was writing, there was nowhere else to go. Slumdog Press? I was too popular.