Whatever it is, I Don't Like it (5 page)

Better, anyway, if we must part from America, that we do so over The Chatfield Pant, not its foreign policy. Trust the small things, I say. Burdened with the information that his uncle had murdered his father in order to get into his mother's pants – pants, note, not pant – Hamlet loses himself in meditation. But let him find Polonius behind the arras, listening in, and he can act swifter than an arrow. Snooping we know what to do with. Murder and incest are more difficult. So goes the world around. In the end, we leave the enormities to God.

This, in the light of the hysterical abuse being heaped by the day now on America. ‘The current American elite is the Third Reich of our times,' thunders John Pilger, picking up the vogue for calling everyone you disagree with a Nazi. But then Pilger always was more Timon than Hamlet, his speciality the big crime. Without doubt, Pilger's apocalyptic prose has served us well in the past; the trouble is, it of necessity grows hungry by what it feeds on. Now a bigger crime, and now a bigger still, until there is no differentiation left.

Forget the Third Reich. Be guided, rather, by The Chatfield Pant.

‘Keep Smiling' – Franz Kafka

Of the pains and sorrows incident to the life of man, the publication of a book ought not to be the most excruciating. Since everybody has a book out now – a self-help manual, a children's book, a self-help manual on the writing of a children's book, a memoir of the time you tried to write a children's book, a self-help manual on how to write a memoir of the time you tried to write a children's book – the anticlimax of publication is common knowledge. But some writers still manage to rise to the occasion. Myself – and if you think this is a roundabout way of announcing the appearance of my new novel, you are right – I find the whole thing hell. Nothing to do with reviews or sales. It's book-signing that upsets me, not the having to do it but the being unable to do it – the mess I make. I don't know how other authors fare, but every book I sign I deface.

My pen is always wrong. Wouldn't you think I would know by now to be sure I have a decent pen on me? I used to swear by fountain pens, but the last time I used one I leaked all over the title page and in the act of apologising profusely – you know the style: head thrown back, arms waving – I leaked all over the people queuing for my signature. Is there a greater crime an author can commit on publication day than to blot his readers?

So it's been a ballpoint ever since. But even ballpoints can smudge. Last week at Hay I smudged about twenty pages. Horrible globules of sticky ballpoint ink on the first and final flourishes of my signature. In panic I tried faking hay fever, hoping that a surreptitious handkerchief would serve as blotting paper, but you soon discover that your readers are no keener on having bits of tissue sticking to their books than they are on your sneezing into them. There might be professions where fans will take anything from their idols, a filthy paper handkerchief included, but novel writing isn't one of them. Thereafter, whenever a blob or gloop of inky gunk appeared I just smiled and closed the book abruptly. With a bit of luck the pages will have stuck together by now.

I am also illegible. Other novelists note the time it takes me to finish a signing session, supposing that I must have twice as many readers wanting my book signed as they have. In fact, the length of my queue is to be explained by the number of people coming back a second or a third time to get me to decipher what I wrote for them originally. As if I knew! ‘How do you expect me to remember that?' I ask them. ‘We're not asking you to remember,' they say, ‘we're just asking you to read it.' I have to explain to them that I'm a writer not a reader. ‘So what was it you wrote?' they want to know. ‘I'm the wrong one to ask,' I tell them, ‘I'm illegible. But it's probably my name.'

In fact, it's never
just
my name. I am temperamentally incapable of writing
just
my name. I don't do legible and I don't do brief. While we were at Hay my partner got John Updike's signature. ‘To Jenny, with best wishes and cheers.' Imagine being able to do that! ‘Best wishes and cheers.' You might ask why ‘Best wishes'
and
‘cheers', but still and all, such pithiness! I've never managed anything so economical in my entire career. Even the ‘To' I can't pull off. I always think it should be ‘For', implying that the book was written with this very reader in mind, or that I am making a gift of it, which of course I'm not. But most times I no sooner write ‘For' than I realise it is inappropriately personal and might conceivably cause the reader problems, especially if she's a woman and her husband sees it, so I cross it out and write ‘To' instead. Add the crossing-out to the blobs of ink and strips of tissue and that's not a pretty page they're left with.

After which I can't just toss off a ‘Best wishes', can I? I've got a first-edition Kingsley Amis that says ‘Hi!' Such a disappointment. You hand over your book to a master of the language and he writes ‘Hi!' Call me foolish but I feel I owe my readers more than that – more in the way of words and, quite frankly, more in the way of feeling. As the book, so the inscription, surely. If your subject is the horror of the human condition you must convey a flavour of that in your message. Line up to get your
Brothers Karamazov
signed and you're not going to be satisfied with ‘Have a good one! – Fyodor Dostoevsky'.

And yet the last time I wrote ‘Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery – Kind regards, Hay, 2004' I got the distinct impression that the recipient was unhappy. Seeing what had happened, the next person in the queue was very firm in her directions. ‘Make it to Ann,' she said, ‘without an e.' Simple, you'd think. ‘To Ann.' But no. ‘To Ann without an E,' some demon made me write. ‘With love, with an E, from the author' – and then what was I going to say? – ‘with an A.' For which blather I had next, still writing in her book, to apologise. ‘Forgive this nonsense – with two Es,' I went on, before it dawned on both of us that this would end only when I had defaced every page.

I got the shop to give the poor woman her money back at the finish. I gave them all their money back. That's another of the reasons I dread publication. I end up thousands of pounds out of pocket.

Rigoletto

Just blown the best part of two hundred smackers staring into the back of someone's bald head. This is called going to the opera. More precisely going to the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. I visit Covent Garden infrequently for this very reason: if I'm going to spend my children's inheritance on a seat, I believe I should at least be able to see something from it.

I can just about reconcile myself to the cost. Seats for a coming Madonna concert at the O2 Arena are said to be changing hands on eBay for £700, which makes an upside-down bucket with your back to the stage of the Royal Opera House cheap at half a million. In fact, I'm lying when I say I can reconcile myself to the cost. I am of the generation that believes paying £100 for anything is irresponsible. I grew up in a house that cost half that. For £100 my parents were able to feed and clothe three children from the moment of our birth to our leaving home eighteen years later. And have enough left for a celebration party when we'd gone. Like everyone else I eat at expensive restaurants – what choice do I have? – but I still find any bill over £20 for two (three courses, champagne, Shiraz, but no dessert wine) criminally exorbitant, whereas people under forty we dine with consider anything under ten times that amount a snip.

But all right, opera's different. You're paying for more than a night out. You're paying to be reconnected to civilisation and, if laziness and too many dinners have stopped you listening to the music you loved when you were young, you're paying to be reminded of who you once were, what you once felt, the melodious idealism which once made your heart flutter like a caged bird. And the building is exhilarating. And the bar is good. And people make more of an effort with their appearance than when they go to any old theatre, though still not a sufficient effort in my view. Grand opera requires that the audience too be grand. Dinner jackets should be mandatory. Would you want to be Rigoletto howling for his daughter in a sack while looking out at an audience in jeans and cardigans?

All the more reason, then, when you've gone to the trouble and shelled out more than a banker earns in thirty seconds, to expect a view of something other than the bald head of the person in front of you. I know there are seats in the Royal Opera House from which you can see the singers, but these, like a place at Eton, have to be bought for you before you're born. I exaggerate only slightly. Turn up at the box office a month before a production expecting a seat you can see from and they look at you as though you're insane. So how is a man with a life to lead supposed to know where he is going to be a month from now? Opera itself teaches that our lives change from happy to sad, from purposeful to pointless, in the course of half an aria. But the decent seats at Covent Garden are bagged years in advance by people prepared to bank a) on their continued existence, b) on their precise whereabouts, and c) on the music they're going to be in the mood to listen to.

Couldn't they reserve a few good seats for opera's natural audience – the existential chancers and cultural vagabonds of our dull society? And couldn't they, at the same time, insist that anyone over six foot three – actually, five foot three is where I'd draw the line – sits in row Z?

The bald man in front of me is, I would guess, six feet dead. I know I should thank my lucky stars he is bald. At the opera you get many a shock-headed person trying to look like Simon Rattle – half the time, for all I know, it
is
Simon Rattle – which means you can see neither over him nor past him. But as it happens there are two shock-headed people in front of the bald man, so although I can twist in my seat to see either side of him, all I get to see is them, twisting in their seats to see round the Simon Rattles in front of them.

I tell myself I'm here for the singing not the acting. I spend a quarter of any opera I like with my eyes closed anyway, so what the hell – just spend it all like that. But this is a notoriously raunchy production that's been kicking round the repertoire for years – a
Rigoletto
that's all humping (the pun is not mine) – and I want to see if it's as naff as it's been made out. The sexing up of opera rates as one of the great absurdities of our time. See an opera in Germany and it's invariably set in a fetish club and sung in shiny leather sado-shorts. Even Mozart's
Requiem
. But this is London where we are meant to have a keener sense of the ridiculous. Only not on this occasion. Naff it decidedly is – fellatio and cunnilingus to music, or at least I think what they're doing is fellatio and cunnilingus, but given how far back from the stage I am and how many impediments to seeing anything there are, it might just be a more than usually excitable bridge evening at an old persons' home in Pinner.

And now, of course, it becomes positively unseemly, my bouncing about in my seat, craning my neck, lifting myself up by the roots of my hair, to ascertain whether those really are bare breasts on the serving wenches, or just flesh-coloured bodices. Do I care? Does it matter if that's a nipple or a brooch? Thwarted, whether it matters or not, I fall to counting the hairs on the bald man's head, all 117 of them. Three warts. Four liver spots. And a bruise, sustained, I imagine, the last time he ruined an orgy at the Opera House for someone less sweet-tempered than me.

And yet in the end, somehow, somehow, the music works its magic. By the time we reach the magnificent quartet, mixing mellifluousness with cynicism, answering hope with desolation, tempering rage with love, I have forgotten where I am and it is worth it after all. Art doing what it's supposed to do – making life supportable. But must there always be these obstacles to refined emotion? Does sublimity have to be quite so bloody expensive, uncomfortable and fatuously staged?

Pie Pellicane

A pelican crossed my path on Boxing Day. Not in flight, on foot. And not in Queensland or in Florida but in London. You feel there should be superstitions associated with such an event. When a pelican crosses your path on Boxing Day it means you're going to go on a long journey, or inherit a fortune, or lose your heart to a beautiful feathery white woman with a big mouth and an inordinate appetite for fish. Unless pelicans materialise vengefully on Boxing Day in a spirit of bird solidarity with the turkey you stuffed and ate the day before. When a pelican crosses your path on foot on Boxing Day you know that the next time you gorge on flightless fowl you'll choke on it.

Whatever the auguries, I was out strolling in St James's Park with my wife, enjoying the wintry sunshine, relieved to be walking off the previous day's excesses, when a pelican cut across us. We were approaching the Blue Bridge in a westerly direction, and he was approaching it in a easterly direction, on foot, as though he'd just come from the Palace. Since he wasn't going to pause, we did, allowing him to get on to the bridge without obstruction. It is a strange experience meeting a pelican, pedestrian to pedestrian, and it must have been even stranger for those already on the bridge observing him coming towards them. You don't expect to meet a pelican on a bridge.

In fact, I know this pelican. He's the sociable one who sometimes joins you on a bench in St James's Park and tries to eat your mobile phone while you're filming him with it – though I'm sure he does that only because he knows it makes a better photograph. Even by pelican standards he has a piercing eye and a wonderfully Italianate beak, all distressed umbers and citric yellows and patina'd verdigris. He also has more pink in his feathers than you expect of a white pelican – as though a flamingo long ago sneaked in between one of his forebears' sheets. Some consciousness of his individually fine deportment, despite the inherited absurd appearance of his species, must explain his conviviality. Food has nothing to do with it. He perambulates more like a human than a bird, in order to be seen and admired.