Whatever it is, I Don't Like it (33 page)

And I suspect I am not alone in feeling this. Certainly every time I whisper to my companion to get her to explain what's happening everyone in the cinema turns around to tell me to shut up, which I take to be the proof that they're having trouble following as well. So I must assume that the fault is not in me but in the movie-makers, who want us not to comprehend because incomprehensibility is now the measure of cinematic authenticity.

This can't be the case in actuality, of course, because if criminals had as much trouble understanding one another as I have understanding them no crime would ever be committed. But then crime for cinema buffs is not crime as it is for criminals. Why we are so keen on watching killings from the comfort of our cinema seats at the moment is a subject for another day, but there can be no question that there's some
nostalgie de la boue
in the wind, a hankering for the brutalities which, for most members of BAFTA, daily life does not provide. And concealed in this hankering for brutality is a further hankering for a time before language. It is as though we have entered an anti-evolutionary period in which we wish to roll back civilisation and with it the words that mark us out as civilised.

However you explain what's going on in America, I date the demise of verbal communication in this country to our rejection of received pronunciation. Rather than be spoken to by a snob we understood, we chose the Babel Tower of warring regional accents – a trade-off of intelligibility for equality. Now we live in an anti-elitist dialect-democracy where no one knows what the hell anyone else is talking about. A godsend for the capitalists who can with good conscience locate their call centres in places where nobody can assist you or otherwise purposefully take your call because you can't understand them and they can't understand you. Recently a person from the deep north-east of England attempted to sort out inconsistencies in my mobile phone account. ‘Aylike Baader–Meinhof mullhi mead ya doont you cal coolate Gloria Steinem, anything else I can help you with?' he said.

‘Forget it,' I told him. ‘I might as well be talking to a Dutchman.'

‘You calling me a douche bag? I won't be spooken to like that,' he said.

I'd have had him rubbed out, had I only known how to communicate with criminals.

Leonard Cohen in Concert

 

These have been a serious few weeks, our country locked in profound moral debate about aesthetic judgement versus popular appreciation, the boundaries of good taste, the rights and wrongs of telling radio audiences whose granddaughter you've been knocking off, the case for universal suffrage when it comes to deciding who should win
The X Factor
or remain on
Strictly Come Dancing
. Anyone just landed from Mars watching John Sergeant's farewell dance to a standing ovation of solemn tears and eulogy would have supposed we were saying goodbye to a leader who had led us through war, famine and the plague. Certainly Sergeant spoke to the nation as though he'd done that and more. Those whom the television gods would destroy they first make vain.

What Sergeant forgot was that he'd entertained us because of what he couldn't do, not because of what he could. Incompetence is a great virtue to the English, but only so long as it's wedded to modesty. Imperfection with no delusions is what we like.

‘Ring the bells that still can ring' is my motto. ‘Forget your perfect offering – there's a crack, a crack in everything.' I have, of course, stolen those words from Leonard Cohen. Why not? In complex moral times we need whatever guidance is on offer.

Leonard Cohen isn't somebody I'd put my mind to much until the other week when I went to see him at the O2 arena in Greenwich. I and fifty thousand other people, not doddery exactly, but not of an age to pull a knife whenever someone disrespected us by breathing in our direction. Not the same audience, in other words, as attended the Urban Music Awards the night after. Trouble waiting to happen, if you ask me, the minute you call someting Urban Music. What's in a name? Everything. Urban is a moral anagram of armed. But who's going to come jingling weaponry to an evening entitled
Leonard Cohen
? You would as soon take a gun to a bar mitzvah. We, anyway, were just there for the words, the music and a dollop of nostalgia. Is that why the urban young are so jumpy – they don't have enough to remember? Certainly there's less room for knives if you're loaded down with recollection. And of course you move more slowly.

I read Leonard Cohen with passing interest, in the sixties. I liked a number of his poems whose names now escape me and was aroused by his novel
Beautiful Losers
, described by someone as the ‘most revolting novel written in Canada', a compliment it's hard to gauge until you know what other revolting novels have been written in Canada. I could suggest a few but this isn't a provocative column. After Leonard Cohen I'm in beautiful loser spirits – ‘Dance me to the end of love' spirits, decadently moony, feeling it's all over but still hoping for another chance, ‘For flesh is warm and sweet.'

Sound a bit 1960s? Well, there you have him. And there you have me too. After the sixties, when he started to put his poems to music, I fell out of interest with him. Singing, singing, singing – why had everyone suddenly burst out singing? Thereafter, since I wasn't a buyer of albums, I lost track of his career, didn't know if he was dead or alive, couldn't remember a line, even of the most revolting novel written in Canada, and never expected to think about him again. Now here I am in his audience, and now here he is, a devilishly attractive man in his middle seventies.

Some men do old age better than they do youth. Especially melancholy-sensual men who can't decide whether they're happy or not. The not knowing, like the not eating, keeps them lean. He is fascinatingly attenuated, as laconic as a snake on grass, with a face lined by a lifetime's amused and desperate indulgence of the appetites, by which I don't just mean wine, women, infidelity and betrayal, but also rhapsodic spirituality alternating with ecstatic doubt. A meanings man. It's corny in its way, as well as beautiful. All existentialism when it's life style is corny. But there's a crack, a crack in everything. And you won't be popular unless you're corny.

I like it that he doesn't jig about. Such a change to see someone on a stage, immobile – as still as thought. We have the attention span of children. A thing will interest us only if it sparkles and moves. Madonna, Michael Jackson – people come back from their concerts raving about how well they move as though moving is a virtue in itself. I don't get it. If you want moving ring Pickfords. Leonard Cohen barely stirs, limiting himself to crouching over his microphone into which he whispers with hoarse suggestiveness. When he does essay a ghost of a dance he gets an affectionately ironic cheer for it.

I would have wished the audience to follow his example. It's all a bit cultic for my taste, fans whooping and waving like born-again Christians at a hymn-singing hoedown whenever he starts a song they recognise. I'm thinking about this, wondering if they'd be whooping if he hadn't put his poetry to music, wondering why the words alone won't do, when I hear those great lines from the song ‘Anthem'. Ring the bells etc. Forget your perfect offering. There's a crack – a crack in everything.

It's like a reprimand to people of my temperament – life's complainants, eroticists of disappointment, lovers only of what's flawless and overwrought. Could he be singing this to me? You expect too much, mister. You are too unforgiving. Not everything works out, not everything is great, and not everyone must like what you like.

I've been taught this lesson before. I remember reading an essay by the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa in which he argues for the necessity of vulgarity in serious literature. Thomas Hardy said a writer needed to be imperfectly grammatical some of the time. Mailer told an audience that not everybody wanted to ride in a Lamborghini. And now here's Leonard Cohen saying the same thing.
Forget your perfect offering. There's a crack . . .

And then comes another, still more wonderful, clinching line – ‘That's how the light gets in.'

Savour that! At a stroke, weakness becomes strength and fault becomes virtue. I feel as though original sin has just been re-explained to me. There was no fall. We were born flawed. Flawed is how we were designed to be. Which means we don't need redeeming after all. Light? Why go searching for light? The light already shines from us. It got in through our failings.

Had I known how to whoop I'd have whooped.

Noe-Beaver

 

Omitted mention, in last week's panegyric to San Francisco, of a lovely little park, the size of an apron, situated in the gay suburb of Castro at the junction of Noe and Beaver Streets. You heard me – Noe and Beaver Streets! What chance of finding – in the heart of this predominantly male homosexual Shangri-La – a well-tended, spiky-shrubbed community garden (with locked gates) called Noe-Beaver? – beaver being, as I don't have to remind my raffish readers, American slang for the female pudenda.

Odd, in that case, that the gay women of Castro haven't sought to change the name of the junction. To Yess-Beaver, say, or Moore-Beaver. Or Noe-Schlong.

Could be, I suppose, that they are all too grown up in San Francisco to care or notice. But while I am standing there, one foot in Noe and the other in Beaver, marvelling at the happy conjunction, I overhear a gay man, who happens to be wheeling a small child in a pushchair (children in pushchairs being must-have items if you're gay in San Francisco), discussing quinoa on his mobile phone. I am able to deduce – don't ask me how – that he is talking to another gay man who also has a child, and neither is sure how many quinoa cookies make an adequate breakfast for a two-year-old. ‘So where are you speaking from?' the father on the other end of the line must have asked, because the reply comes back, ‘Noe-Beaver', followed by a laugh.

So it isn't just me.

People think you make these things up. Tell them it's novelist's serendipity and they look at you suspiciously. Which is inconsistent of them considering how biographical everyone is in their reading today, convinced that the only story you have to tell is the story of your life. Until, that is, you stumble upon Noe-Beaver. Then they think you're fabricating.

Coincidentally – except that there is no such thing as coincidence if you're a novelist – I was interrogated on just such writerly matters at Heathrow airport en route to San Francisco. One of those random security spot checks. Not the sort that goes ‘Has any terrorist packed your case for you? Are you carrying a samurai sword? What about nail scissors? Enjoy your flight.' No, this was the business. Cases on the table, security guards with surgical gloves sliding their fingers under the collars of your shirts, even your cufflink box examined for secret compartments. I approve of exhaustive baggage searches. Better if they're happening to someone else, but as a person of vaguely Middle Eastern appearance I submit to them philosophically when stopped, because if they let
me
past without a second glance who else might be slipping through?

As far as I could tell, though you can never be entirely sure, the writerly interrogation had nothing to do with airport security. It was more about the Sikh security man's ambitions to write a novel himself one day. How he knew I was a novelist I can't imagine, unless that's just something you can tell from a person's wardrobe. Novelist's shoes – maybe I'd packed a few too many pairs of those. What he wanted to know, anyway, was how you start. ‘Where do you get the words from?' he asked me.

A tough one, that. ‘You immerse yourself in words,' was the best I could manage in the circumstances, ‘and at last they come to you. Words are your medium. If you don't have those, you might as well forget it.'

Not true, of course. There are countless successful novelists who have no words. But I took the liberty of assuming he wanted to be a good novelist.

And I was right, because his next question was one only a good novelist in embryo could have asked. ‘But you must employ so many words,' he said. ‘Don't you worry you might one day use them up?'

He was a charming man with impeccable manners and teeth worth about a million dollars apiece where I was going. If you sell your teeth, I wanted to tell him, you'll make far more than you will writing novels which evince concern for words. But I could see that the other security staff were losing patience. They hadn't stopped me so that their literary colleague could start a conversation about the exhaustibility of language. There were things of more suitcase-associated importance they needed to discuss, such as the number of ties I'd packed for a three-day trip to San Francisco. Almost as hard to explain the ties as where words come from. I just happen to be a word and tie person. Even though it's unlikely I'll wear one (a tie, I mean) where I'm going, I like to travel with a variety, one for each shirt – and I travel with a multiplicity of shirts (hence the boxes of collar stiffeners) – just in case.

A nutter? Maybe. But they can't stop you from flying for being a nutter. So it was thank you and have a good flight, or it would have been had the indefatigable Sikh not found a final question for me. ‘And the stories? Where do they come from? Do you sit at your desk for years on end and make them up?'