Ten Years in the Tub (130 page)

     
  
How to Stay Sane
—Philippa Perry

BOOKS READ
:

     
  
Rod: The Autobiography
—Rod Stewart

     
  
Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense
—Francis Spufford

     
  
Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
—Cheryl Strayed

T
he first column I wrote for the
Believer
was published in the September 2003 edition, so technically I shouldn't be celebrating for another few months, but never mind: woo-hoo. Woo-hoo for a whole lot of reasons, actually. Woo-hoo because this is the first time I've ever held down a job for a decade; woo-hoo because it's kind of incredible that, in the digital age, a beautiful print magazine about books and the arts has survived; woo-hoo that the insultingly young editors of this magazine have a very short attention span—although in their case, it's too much flash fiction and too many haikus, rather than too much Xbox and MTV—and that they only ever look at the first few pages of the magazine.

The truth is that they don't even know I'm still here, which is just as well for me and my enormous, shiftless family. They hate older people, and if they ever did read right through to the back I'd be taken out, shot, and boiled down for glue, like a lame cart-horse. If you're twenty-three, and you've made a sculpture of R-Patz out of Play-Doh, pastrami, and your father's old Pavement albums, then it's all like, “Oh, hey, come on in! We'll put you on the cover and do a ten-page interview with you!” If, however, all you've done is read books, quietly and patiently, on trains and planes and toilets, and accumulated valuable experience and wisdom over the decades, they don't want to know. You're placed so near the end of the magazine that you're not even in the same time zone as all the cool kids at the front. Ach. The carnival atmosphere seems to have gone flat in the very first paragraph.

In that first column I read a lot of Salinger, a biography of Robert Lowell, and a novel by my brother-in-law. Is there any evidence of flaming youth in that lot? The Salinger jag clearly indicates a youthful disposition, although as I was forty-five years old at the time, you could equally argue that an obsessive interest in the Glass family is a morbid symptom of arrested development. Is there any evidence of decrepitude in the Books Read list above? I rather fear that if the Polysyllabic Spree, the sixty-six staggeringly beautiful young women who control both the contributions to the magazine and the minds of some of the weaker contributors, ever decided to slum it at the back of the magazine, they might be able to use my recent reading matter as an excuse to cut me loose and reduce the payroll. (I haven't read Hanna Rosin's recently published book
The End of Men
, but men have certainly been ended at the
Believer
. There was one working there, years ago, but he was packed off to Missouri—
pour encourager les autres
, presumably.)

Granted, sixty-eight-year-old Rod Stewart is possibly not as fashionable as he once was, although what do I know? You be the judge: he plays Vegas, produces album after album of show tunes, and at Christmas puts on a dinner jacket and performs seasonal songs on prime-time British TV. Is he “in” or “out”? I thought you'd say that. Well, when I was a teenager, he made three or four deathless folk-rock records that are still loved even by those who weren't around when they were first released; and at the time he was the only rock star
who managed to combine an interest in Sam Cooke and Bob Dylan with an interest in football, a combination and an endorsement that meant an awful lot to me in 1972. I doubt whether I'd have read his memoir, however, if a friend of mine hadn't written it (or, as Rod puts it in the acknowledgments, been a “wonderful editor and confidant”). Giles Smith is one of this country's funniest columnists, and his customarily dry, self-deprecating tone is ideal for Rod's rambunctious, incorrigible, occasionally baffling life: there's an extraordinary amount to be self-deprecating about, much of it involving drink, cars, and extraordinarily unknowing behavior in the domestic wings of the Stewart mansions. You wouldn't want to be married to Rod, and you wouldn't necessarily want him and his mates to attend your next poetry reading; on further reflection, there are many, many circumstances and environments where those of a sensitive literary disposition might find the Stewart presence unhelpful. If, however, you don't worry about any of this, and accept that he is safely confined within the covers of his own autobiography, then the book is enormously enjoyable, and Rod is clearly such a generous-spirited and sweet-natured soul that I found myself forgiving him a great deal, especially as he wanders through the narrative with his hands raised in rueful apology.

His attempts to woo back an ex, the model Kelly Emberg, are indicative of the chaotic Stewart decision-making process: he cheated on her several times, she left him, and he embarked on a summer of hedonism before learning that Emberg was seeing someone else, at which point he decided that he couldn't live without her. On learning that she was sailing up the West Coast with her new lover, Stewart booked a plane to fly after her, trailing a banner sporting a proposal of marriage. Between the booking and the romantic proposal, however—a fatal gap that included a Saturday night—Rod met someone else; unable to contact the pilot, he was obliged to hunker down and simply pretend that the offer of marriage had never been made. This is not exemplary behavior, and it certainly doesn't suggest an evolved moral intelligence, but I'm afraid it made me laugh. You could take a more judgmental line than mine, I suppose, but I'm not entirely sure what the point would be, and I doubt very much whether you're the kind of person who would pick up the book in the first place.

I'm almost certain that there was nothing in the pages of Stewart's
autobiography that led me directly to Francis Spufford's book
Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense
, and I should reassure you that you can read either one without having to commit to both; certainly it would be hard to make the claim that the former shone any light on the latter. It could well be, though, that my desire to read the Spufford book is another indication that I'm not as young as I was: I am fast approaching the age where I need the answers to questions of metaphysical speculation.