Zoo Time (8 page)

After a prolonged courtship – something else I learnt from Mishnah Grunewald – the male black widow spider of North America mates once and then dies. Even if the female doesn’t eat him he has nothing left to offer. Such things are common among males. You get one go, you give your all, and then it’s curtains. The male novelist the same. You spruce yourself up, you date, you deliver yourself of all your best lines, you impregnate, and you’re spent. Goodnight, sweet prince.

But where the spider offers himself to be eaten, or crawls into a corner to die, the male novelist goes on beating his meat to no effect, looking to repeat the performance that so pleased the female of the species the first time round, but without the conviction, the passion or, to be frank, the spider sperm, all the while suffering the excruciations of the slowest extinction of them all – death by creeping invisibility: a day at a time, a book at a time, the novelist vanishing from the shelves of public libraries, from the windows of bookshops, from the recollections of once loyal readers.

Funny, but the minute I think about spiders I see my old primary school English teacher, a man who didn’t suffer my exhaustion of purpose but, on the contrary, at more than twice my age was still enjoying an inexhaustible book-centred curiosity. A different sort of spider, maybe, more of a dung beetle if you consider how he spent his time, but a spider was what he reminded me of whenever, on the way to visiting my demented parents, I called on him in his Cheshire cottage – a spider sitting at the centre of a vast silky web of words, devouring at his leisure.

‘So what are you reading?’ he would ask, squinting at me, the moment we shook hands. It was the same question he’d put to me every day at school, as though whatever I’d been reading yesterday I must by now have finished.

‘Me? I’m a writer now,’ I reminded him. ‘I’m at the other end of the production line.’

It was a lovely Cheshire day, the light creamy, the cows in a nearby field sitting under a tree, the air quiet. It’s a county you forget about, Cheshire, because nothing remarkable ever seems to happen there. Emlyn’s cottage, just half a mile from the house where I was born, had holes in the roof and a garden with a lily pond in it. I don’t know who cleaned it because Emlyn never stirred from the dark of his library. His wife had died. His children had moved away. It seemed an act of tact on all their parts, leaving Emlyn to his books.

He didn’t respond when I reminded him I was a writer. He seemed not to want to know that. He attached no value to writing, only to reading. How that can make any sense I am unable to explain. I tackled him on it once. ‘How can you love the literature and not the making of it?’

He knitted his brows. With Emlyn that phrase meant what it says. He truly did stitch his eyes and brows together, as though to concentrate what was left of his face into the part of it he read with. ‘Who says I
love the literature
?’ he asked angrily. ‘There are books I enjoy reading. There are books I don’t. What do I want with tittle-tattle about the people who write them?’

‘Nothing. But I’m not talking about tittle-tattle.’

‘What then?’

Good question. I paddled the musty air of his library with my fingers. ‘The process . . . the doing . . . the state of writing . . .’

‘I repeat what I have just said to you. What business of mine is any of it? By the time I read the book the doing is long done. The book belongs to me now.’

I understood that. As a writer I even craved it. Never mind me, attend to the words which supersede me. But I had been Emlyn’s star pupil. He had hauled me up, aged ten, onto the platform during school assembly. ‘This boy will go far in literature,’ he said. ‘Remember his name – Guy Ableman.’ He even wrote to my parents to tell them to nurture my ‘rare and precious gift’ – a vote of confidence that was lost on them but meant a lot to me, hence my staying in touch with him over the years, so that he could observe his prophecy come to rare and precious fruition. But since it had, since books were all he cared for and now here was I writing them, couldn’t he have shown me he was proud? Couldn’t he have said ‘Well done!’ to both of us? Wasn’t he even the slightest bit impressed with me for having pulled it off ? Couldn’t he have given some evidence that he at least remembered me?

Apparently not. Whatever he had meant by my going far in literature, he hadn’t meant or hoped that I would write it. A life devoted to literature, for him, was a life devoted to consuming it. For the act of writing itself he didn’t give a monkey’s. I even felt he thought – in so far as he thought about me at all – that I’d let him down rather. Crossed over from the realm of pure ideation into gross manufacture. Become a mechanic. For himself, he found sufficient satisfaction to fill and justify a life simply in reading. Homer, Tacitus, Augustine, Bede, Montaigne, Addison, Thackeray, Herbert Spencer, Spengler, Chaquita Chicklit – everyone.

That he didn’t feel it demeaned him to be reading ephemeral dross, that he could with interest open
Twilight
,
New Moon
,
Eclipse
and
Breaking Wind
the minute he had closed Herodotus, astonished me.

‘How do you do it?’ I asked him.

‘I have the time.’

‘No, I mean how can you
bear
to do it?’

‘You have to read a book to discover you wish you hadn’t, and by that time it’s too late. But do you know? – I almost never wish I hadn’t.’

‘So there’s nothing amiss with civilisation from where you’re sitting, Emlyn?’

He smiled, pulling his blanket around him. It was the smile of a man who’d seen God on his shelves. With outstretched arms he made as though to embrace his walls of books, like a Lotus-Eater pointing to the drowsy long-leaved flowers among which he slept.

That
kind of spider.

The
Arachnidous bibliomani
.

Before he perished in the snows of the Hindu Kush with only my manuscript to keep him warm, Quinton O’Malley had warned me not to let the success of my first novel go to my head. ‘Stay up there,’ was his advice. ‘Don’t sever the roots that have nourished you. Keep working at the zoo.’

‘I don’t work at a zoo,’ I told him.

‘Then keep talking to people who do. If you come to London for a literary life you won’t have anything to write about. I’ve seen it happen a thousand times. Stay with what you know, stay where your inspiration is. There’s nothing doing here. And between ourselves there’s no one worth knowing.’

He sniffed. Not complacency; blocked sinuses. Quinton O’Malley, long-faced, with the bulk of a bear, suffered the cold as no other man has ever suffered it. He froze in temperatures of seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit. Though it was a warm July afternoon when I first met him he was wearing canary-yellow corduroys tucked into grey-flecked merino socks, mountain boots, and was wound around in the wool of a small hillside of sheep. Why such a man should have ventured into the Hindu Kush there is no explaining. But this was the beginning of the Great Decline when everyone at the publishing end of literature, like everyone at the writing end of literature, was acting strangely. It would have been no more or less surprising had he walked off Brighton Pier. Though to do that he would have had to take his turn in the queue behind two novelists, a poet, and the deputy manager of Foyles.

I had sent my manuscript to him after reading that he was the best-connected agent in London, and had a particular interest in the
outré
. The godchild of T. E. Lawrence, the intimate of Thesiger and Norman Lewis, a homosexual who did nothing about it, an agent who numbered three wife-murderers (one convicted) among his clients, he had, in his younger days, hit the bottle with Dylan Thomas, taken opium with William S. Burroughs, shared a depression with Jean Genet, and still, at seventy-whatever-he-was, gave the most louche literary parties in London. He was a member of every club including some reputed to be proscribed. He chaired every committee. If any writer was going to be honoured – whether that meant an OBE, an invitation to tea at Buckingham Palace, or freedom of the city of West Belfast – it would have to be at Quinton’s say-so. Know Quinton and you knew everybody.

‘There’s you,’ I said.

It was all I could do not to stroke him, insalubrious as he was, a man who had gone out on the tiles to get depressed with Genet!

‘Oh, don’t believe what you read about me. I’m an empty shell. You’ve read T. S. Eliot’s “Hollow Men”?’ He banged his chest. ‘He was thinking of me.’

He saw me mentally doing the arithmetic. ‘I was a baby. He heard me cough in the pram and started writing. Wind in dry grass. Rats’ feet over broken glass. You’re better off in Nantwich.’

‘Wilmslow.’

‘Wilmslow.’

I wanted to tell him – with respect, and though I wanted to stroke him for having inspired Eliot to his greatest depths of desolation, if only from the pram – that I thought he patronised me. I was his hetero-provincial writer. No doubt he laughed about me to the metropolitan wife-murdering sodomitic junkies with whom he didn’t share his bed. When he first lit upon
Who Gives a Monkey’s?
in a reject pile – it was a custom of his to flick through one rejected manuscript a day, just to be on the safe side – he thought the narrator was the author: a one-time Orthodox Jewish woman who gave sexual relief to tigers and bred chimpanzees for whom no sexual relief was possible, writing under the pseudonym of Guy Ableman in order to conceal her sex and the fact that her novel was in fact a true story. It was on that assumption that he took the book on. He wanted to show her off and introduce her around. The Chimp Woman. ‘Think twice before shaking her hand,’ I can imagine him telling his dissipated friends. I must have been a great disappointment to him when he met me. A Wilmslow boy in a suit and tie. He wound one of his many scarves around his face and wiped his nose on it. ‘Well, you’re a surprise, I must say,’ he said.

We were in a French restaurant in Kensington. He ate with his coat on and spent the two and a half hours we were together describing the transparent Nordic loveliness of Bruce Chatwin’s eyes.

I bridled at Nordic. Not sure why.

‘You have the opportunity,’ he told me over strong coffee, ‘to lead a new generation of decadents. But stay in Northwich.’

‘Wilmslow.’

‘Wilmslow.’

‘I have to get out,’ I said. ‘Bruce Chatwin didn’t stay in Sheffield.’

‘Probably his biggest mistake. He told me that once.’

‘That he wished he’d stayed in Sheffield?’

‘Not in so many words.’

‘Well, not me. I have nothing to write about up there. I have exhausted the place.’

‘Come, come,’ he said, coughing – rats’ feet over broken glass – and ordered us both a brandy. ‘Provincial life didn’t fail George Eliot.’

‘But it did nothing for Henry Miller,’ I said.

‘And who would you rather be?’

I lacked the courage to say Henry Miller, in case George Eliot, too, had been a drinking friend of his.

‘Tell me what else goes on in your neck of the woods,’ he persisted. I had the feeling he wanted to hear about incest and bestiality.

‘Nothing of the sort you would find interesting.’

‘You’d be surprised what I find interesting. Think. What great events are there? What magnificent institutions? You’ve opened our eyes to Chester Zoo. What next?’

I happened to know there was an annual transport festival in the east Cheshire town of Sandbach, held in commemoration of Sandbach’s long history as a manufacturer of commercial vehicles. We’d once dressed the Transport Queen in the family boutique, free of charge, to show her unbounded gratitude for which she’d let me undress her again at the back of the Foden trucks showroom when the carnival was over. I was fifteen at the time. She was nineteen. I disgraced myself. But now that I had become a successful writer she was writing to me, inviting me to try again.

Fame!

‘Well, there’s a start,’ Quinton said when I mentioned this to him. ‘Love among the autoparts.’

‘Don’t you think it’s a bit small time?’

‘I most certainly do. And hurrah for that. You’ve put the monkeys of Wilmslow on the map –’

‘Chester.’

‘Chester. Now do the same with the beauty queens of Middlewich.’

‘Sandbach.’

‘Wherever.’

‘I’m not sure I can write another novel from the woman’s point of view,’ I said.

‘Then tell it from the man’s.’ He roared with rattling laughter. At the idea of a man having a point of view? Or at the idea of my being one?

But his was a persuasive personality. So I did as he suggested, delved into my own erotic history, researched the Foden steam lorry, and told the tale from the point of view of a man with a blazing red provincial penis – Sandbach man, as libidinous as a cage of unmasturbated chimpanzees, breathing in the fumes of the trucks for which the town was famous.

I never found out what Quinton thought of it. Had it killed him? Had the sheer unforgiving, unremitting
straightness
of it finished him off in the cold? True, he wasn’t morally particular about those he represented. Three wife-murderers, don’t forget. But Sandbach man could have been a step in the direction of unreconstructed, non-Nordic hetero-proletarianism too far.