Zoo Time
Page 34
Verdant or otherwise, was I the only person in Soho, I wondered, carrying a book qua book? Ought I to have hidden it inside my jacket? I was the only person in Soho wearing a jacket, too. Or down my trousers?
It was as I was thinking about where or whether to conceal it that I saw Ernest Hemingway go over. It must have been a heavy fall, however it happened, because his notebook had come apart and leaves from it were being scattered by the careless feet of pedestrians. It was only paper. The streets of Soho were full of paper.
People are good, whether they are readers who respect the page or they are not. My new humanitarian philosophy: keep people away from art and judgement, where they are as lost souls, and they are, behaviourally speaking, wonderfully good. Was that another title for me? People Are Good – and no sooner did the tramp fall than passers-by rushed to see how he was and to assist him to his feet. ‘I’m trained in first aid,’ I heard one woman say, ‘tell me where it hurts.’ Shame she didn’t ask me. But on Hemingway it was a wasted, thankless piece of kindness; he did not raise his sightless eyes to her or to anyone else, and would not, frankly, have been very pleasant to make physical contact with.
We are all good in our own way. Some looked after the man, I went after his papers. Assuming this was the same book he’d been working on since Vanessa and I first encountered him, and possibly for years before that, it was a magnum opus, the labour of many hundreds of weeks. In which case every page was precious. And who else but I gave a damn about them? I chased down as many as I could, standing on them before bending to pick them up, the way I imagined the acolytes of the Sibylline oracle would have run after the leaves of her prophecy when they blew from the mouth of her cave. The Cumaean Sibyl had ‘sung the fates’ on the leaves of oak trees and when they scattered they scattered. What she had prophesied was lost. What did she care?
Ernest Hemingway, too, seemed not to care. Let his leaves blow where they chose.
But I cared.
It was my intention to return the pages I had retrieved, whether he wanted them or not, but I was word-deranged – a man who could not walk by a discarded cigarette packet without pausing to read it – and I could not resist stealing a look at what he had been writing all these years. Not a vulgar, competitor’s curiosity, I hope, not a thief ’s or a scoffer’s, but the respectful wondering of a fellow worker with words. How good was he? What did he know that the rest of us, who lived lives so much more compromised and comfortable, who preferred not to let our testicles hang out of the holes in our trousers, who lacked his austere, friendless dedication – what did he understand that we did not?
I quickly saw that for all their density not one of the scattered leaves of his notebook was different from any other. What he had to say, he went on saying, for page after page. And what he had to say was forceful, incontestable, not to say beautiful, in its clairvoyance:
O
OOOOO
OOOO
OOO
OO
O
O
OO
OOO
OOOO
OOOOO
O
A Note on the Author
An award-winning writer and broadcaster, Howard Jacobson was born in Manchester, brought up in Prestwich and educated at Stand Grammar School in Whitefield, and Downing College, Cambridge, where he studied under F. R. Leavis. He lectured for three years at the University of Sydney before returning to teach at Selwyn College, Cambridge. His novels include The Mighty Walzer (winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize), Kalooki Nights (longlisted for the Man Booker Prize), the highly acclaimed The Act of Love and, most recently, the Man Booker Prize-winning The Finkler Question. Howard Jacobson lives in London.
By the Same Author
Fiction
Coming From Behind
Peeping Tom
Redback
The Very Model of a Man
No More Mister Nice Guy
The Mighty Walzer
Who’s Sorry Now?
The Making of Henry
Kalooki Nights
The Act of Love
The Finkler Question
Non-fiction
Shakespeare’s Magnanimity (with Wilbur Sanders)
In the Land of Oz
Roots Schmoots: Journeys Among Jews
Seriously Funny: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime
Whatever It Is, I Don’t Like It
Also available by Howard Jacobson
In the Land of Oz
The Sunday Times bestseller
On what he calls ‘the adventure of his life’, Howard Jacobson travels around Australia, never entirely sure where he is heading next or whether he has the courage to tackle the wild life of the bush, the wild men of the outback, or the even wilder women of the seaboard cities.
In pursuit of the best of Australian good times, he joins revelers at Uluru, argues with racists in the Kimberleys, parties with wine-growers in the Barossa and falls for ballet dancers in Perth. And even as vexed questions of national identity and Aboriginal land rights present themselves, his love for Australia and Australians never falters.
‘A marvellous read ... he is a comic explorer in the grandest mould’
Financial Times
‘The most successful attempt I know to grip the great dreaming Australian enigma by the throat and make it gargle’
Evening Standard
‘A wildly funny account of his travels; abounding in sharp characterization, crunching dialogue and self-parody, it actually is a book which makes you laugh out loud on almost every page’
Literary Review
The Finkler Question
Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2010
Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular former BBC radio producer, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite very different lives, they’ve never quite lost touch with each other – or with their former teacher, Libor Sevcik. Both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed, and together with Treslove they share a sweetly painful evening revisiting a time before they had loved and lost. It is that very evening, when Treslove hesitates a moment as he walks home, that he is attacked – and his whole sense of who and what he is slowly and ineluctably changes.
‘Full of wit, warmth, intelligence, human feeling and understanding’
Observer
‘I don’t know a funnier writer alive’
Jonathan Safran Foer
‘How is it possible to read Howard Jacobson and not lose oneself in admiration
for the music of his language, the power of his characterisation and the
penetration of his insight?’
The Times
Whatever It Is, I Don’t Like It
‘Nobody does it better’ Observer
Howard Jacobson brims with life in this collection of his most acclaimed journalism. From the unusual disposal of his father-in-law's ashes and the cultural wasteland of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to the melancholy sensuality of Leonard Cohen and the desolation of Wagner's tragedies, Jacobson writes with all the thunder and joy of a man possessed. Absurdity piles upon absurdity, and glorious sentences weave together to create a hilarious, heartbreaking and uniquely human collection.
‘The driest wit in print today; he is also the wisest man I know as anyone reading this book will confirm’ Philip Kerr, Scotsman Books of the Year
‘At his best, he's Orwellian .... At his least best, he's still in the top five newspaper columnists around’ Observer
‘When he applies his wit and rich, creative firepower, the most serious subjects can take off into the most successful flights of fancy’ Independent
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First published in Great Britain 2012
This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 2012 by Howard Jacobson
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Extract from Women by Charles Bukowski reproduced
by kind permission of David Grossman Literary Agency
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