Making the Cat Laugh (26 page)

It is a well-established fact (not acknowledged enough) that in journalism there are only eleven basic ideas. The reason journalists over the age of twenty-five get cynical and start to fall over in public houses is that in their cradles they have been cursed with a particular kind of limited intelligence. They are bright people, but a Bad Fairy has ensured that they are bright enough only to discover the eleven basic ideas for themselves. What they are not bright enough to notice is that everything they do has been done before. Then one day they realize – to the dismay of the Really Good Fairy who gave them the brains – that they have run out of ideas. Disillusioned, they are obliged to stand back and watch as other, younger people – the fairy-dust still sparkling on their shoulders – start to discover the eleven ideas all over again.

New ideas are, therefore, pretty exciting things within journalism, and I can’t remember the last time anybody had one. But as an example of how desperate everybody is, let us take the example of the word ‘Bratpack’. Within minutes of its coining, this term had been picked up and applied to just about everybody – movie directors, teenage actors, Manhattan writers – before finally coming to rest in the Loose Ends studio in Broadcasting House. That was just the beginning. The next day somebody said, ‘Yeah, but how about ‘‘Ratpack’’ as a term
for the media journalists who write about (and occasionally join) the ‘‘Bratpack’’?’ Brilliant, as Basil Fawlty might say,
Brilliant.
The richness of imagination was of such quality that even the originators themselves seemed impressed.

So I thought I’d join in, get a share of the action, start an entirely original (if a bit derivative) genus of nomenclature. We all want to make our mark, and this seems a simple enough method of doing it.

My first thought was that one could refer to all clever French writers – de Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus – as the ‘Baccalauréat-pack’. What do you think? By the same token Indians, like Jhabvala, Narayan and Desai, might be called the ‘Ghatpack’ (not to be confused with the American tough-guy detective grouping ‘Gatpack’). On a more serious note, writers publishing their work secretly in totalitarian states might be called, simply, the ‘Samizdatpack’. Smartipants writers might be termed the ‘Eclatpack’, while successful, well-heeled NW3-based novel-a-year writers could rejoice in any of the following: ‘Cravatpack’, ‘VATpack’, or, well, ‘Fatpack’. This only leaves the blockbuster writers, who, I think, can be pretty neatly summed up in the term ‘Tatpack’.

So there you are. A complete new terminology. Please watch out for any appearance of these terms, for which copyright application is already in the post.

On Sunday morning, a thirty-eight-year-old unpublished poet named Clive was mournfully twiddling a pencil at his special poetry-composing desk, huddled in a greatcoat, when the telephone rang. He paused before answering it, feeling sorry for himself. ‘Nothing rhymes with telephone,’ he said, his face puckering uncontrollably; ‘in fact, why do I bother?’ He picked up the receiver. ‘Hello?’ he croaked.

It was his mother. She sounded agitated. Clive, alarmed, snapped his pencil in half, and then looked at it, aghast.

‘Clive, I’m worried,’ she said. ‘Have you read today’s
Sunday Times?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Then you don’t know! Oh, that I should have to break such news to my own son! Clive, it says here that a professor in America – is Kentucky still in America? I expect so – has established from studying a thousand important twentieth-century dead people that poets are by far the most at-risk group for depression, paranoia and suicide!’

‘Yes?’ Clive shrugged. ‘So what?’

‘So you never told me that! You said, ‘‘Mum, I want to be a poet,’’ and I
let
you! You were so sweet, with those big brown eyes, Clive, and you said, ‘‘If I can’t be a poet, Mum, I’ll kill myself.’’ And now I discover you’ve chosen the very profession in which the risk is greatest! You tricked me, Clive!’

‘You’re hysterical.’

‘Who is this Sylvia Plath he mentions? Is she a friend of yours? What about W.H. Auden? Is he making you depressed, too? Give up this poetry madness, my son, before it is too late!’

Clive spent the rest of the day indoors. Like Jean Cocteau, he knew that poetry was indispensable, although indispensable to what exactly, he didn’t feel qualified to say. He was deeply offended by the sweeping accusation of poet-paranoia, yet didn’t dare go out to buy the newspaper, for fear he would find an immense placard outside the shop, screaming ‘Poets Are Loonies! Official!’ So instead he wearily copied out some of his old verses – in his best wiggly handwriting, on lined paper – and made packages to send to
Marxism Today
and
The Economist
, choosing ‘Lines on the Wedding of Prince Andrew to Lady Sarah Ferguson (revised)’ and ‘Why Is This Black Dog Following Me Around? – An Allegory’. He didn’t know
whether these magazines printed poetry, though he somehow felt sure they used to. Last week his submissions to
The Listener
and
Punch
had both been returned with just the bald, scribbled legend, ‘Not known at this address’. Clive had taken these harsh rebuffs very much to heart.

Suddenly, at about six o’clock, the phone rang again. It was his mother. ‘Clive. I’ve been looking at this article, and you’ve got to tell me something. Were you gloomy by the time you were thirteen?’

‘Gloomy?’

‘Just answer the question.’

‘Well, yes. I suppose I’ve always been …’

‘So it’s not the job that makes you depressed? It’s because you’re sensitive, or high-minded or something, that you chose this particular job in the first place?’

‘But poetry isn’t a job, Mum, more a result of a struggle in the poet’s mind between something he wants to express and the medium in which he intends to express it.’

There was a pause.

‘Why do you always talk like that, Clive? Do you think Albert Einstein talked to his mother like that? No, he didn’t. And why? Because he wasn’t a wimp of a poet, depressed all the time!’ She hung up.

Clive wondered whether it was worth phoning back, to make the point that the lives of poets and scientific pioneers were not strictly comparable. He might mention, too, that being an unpublished (and therefore failed) poet was about twenty times more life-endangering than being (say) W.H. Auden, who rarely contended with stinging letters from
Caravan and Trailer
(‘I read your poems with interest, Mr Auden, but I can’t imagine why you sent them’). But he decided not to bother, and immediately cheered up. He would write an epic poem about rejection letters, simply for his own amusement. To say that writers are generally depressed, he reflected with
satisfaction, is on a par with saying that Kentucky professors tell people precisely what they know already.

I don’t know what a reservoir dog is. I mean, I know that a new heist-movie called Reservoir Dogs has just opened, which is where the expression comes from; but after that my information runs out. Evidently the film is rather nasty but brilliant, is set in a warehouse after a failed robbery, and has a great central performance from Harvey Keitel. But curiously there are no dogs. And there is an infamous torture scene, and lots of blood, and fantastic suspense about which of the six conspirators tipped off the police. Yet the canine input, as such, is small. In short, then, nobody should buy a ticket under the illusion that Reservoir Dogs represents the relaunch of the animal picture. If the organizers of this week’s Cruft’s have bought it as a treat for the last day of the show, they should reconsider.

I raise this matter not just because I am irredeemably literal-minded, but because when the director of the film appeared on
Moving Pictures
(BBC2) he seemed to be saying that actually he didn’t know what the title meant either. He just liked it, and when producers had frowned and tut-tutted, he had fobbed them off with a fancy answer about French gangland argot, which like prize mutts they had fallen for. Quentin Tarantino is his name, and this is his first film. He seemed young and over-excited, and was evidently a stranger to the benefits of personal grooming, but to say that he was wised up to the movie business would be like saying Edward Scissorhands was sharp. He knew perfectly well that a title like Reservoir Dogs raises images in people’s minds, but no awkward questions. Also, that the moment it enters common parlance (‘Seen Reservoir Dogs yet?’), it tucks itself into a
nice safe corner of the memory where semantics does not intrude.

Obscure titles have one great advantage, of course: they flatter the punters. This explains why so many up-market book titles take allusions from other writers, or invoke the names of famous intellectuals. A little while ago there was a spate of titles so obviously following in the footsteps (or possibly claw-prints) of
Flaubert’s Parrot
by Julian Barnes, that I began to suspect a directive had gone out from publishers, with the promise of a bag of nuts for the best entry:
Balzac’s Horse
,
Schrödinger’s Cat
,
Foucault’s Pendulum
,
Aubrey’s Raven
,
Kafka’s Dick
. I remember vowing at the time that if I were ever to write a novel, I would hitch my skateboard to the bandwagon and plump for
Einstein’s Tick
, or
Savonarola’s Bum
, or
Darwin’s Teapot
, and hang the consequences. It wouldn’t matter that the book didn’t fit the title, because obviously the allusion is so clever it doesn’t have to. And if pushed, like the director of Reservoir Dogs, you could just make something up (‘Darwin’s teapot? Well, obviously, it stands for bone-china fragility in a tough survivalist world’).

Mainly, however, you would rely on the fact that somewhere in the back of the collective mind there are philosophical things such as Occam’s Razor, which sound fantastically difficult and all-encompassing and seriously paradoxical, and just right for a modern book. In the end, by the way, I pretty well settled on
Heidegger’s Bactrian
for my own novel. It’s a title that suggests all sorts of things, including two handy humps of water for emergencies.
Occam’s Wash-Mitt
I will preserve for another occasion. And just to cover all the angles, I will give my book the full title of
Heidegger’s Bactrian: Now a Major Motion Picture Starring Daniel Day-Lewis.

Meanwhile it is slightly worrying to realize how unthinkingly all titles are assimilated in one’s mind. No sooner have you heard of David Mamet’s
Glengarry Glen Ross
than it becomes
simply something to get your tongue round, not to ask damn-fool questions about. Recently I met a man who had seen
Pygmalion
at the National Theatre and who clearly had no idea where the title came from, but had not let this trouble him for an instant. Fair enough. Not everyone carries a
Larousse Classical Encyclopedia
in their coat pocket. As far as he was concerned,
Pygmalion
was the name of a famous play by George Bernard Shaw; why did it have to
mean
anything? Indeed, I just wish I’d said it was French gangland argot, or something, to see how far I would get.