Zoo Time (17 page)

‘Cheeky monkey’, I am now willing to accept, was what did it. Since it was meant to be a sexual compliment of sorts – wasn’t it? – I couldn’t but wonder what she’d seen in me. Not what she’d
seen
in me, but what she’d seen in me that was chimp-like. From which wondering it was the smallest step to remembering Mishnah Grunewald who had called me Beagle. And there, suddenly, was the novel I knew I needed to write. Courtesy of the woman – or at least one of the two women – I needed to impress.

How strangely inspiration works! Poppy Eisenhower was – or at least she presented herself at the time as being – the least bookish person on the planet, a woman ignorant of Mrs Gaskell and Tolstoy, and yet without her I would not have found my way out of the dark of uncreativity. The Dark Lady of my Sonnets, whose idea of magic realism was Tommy Cooper saying, ‘Just like that.’

It was Vanessa’s belief that because I kept everything for myself I was too selfish ever to be a truly great novelist.

This was a modified version of her earlier belief that I was too selfish ever to write a novel at all.

She was amazed when I finished my first book. ‘I’m walking on sunshine,’ I sang.

‘No, you’re not,’ she said.

And she was even more amazed when a publisher accepted it. But she was generous in defeat. ‘I am proud of you and delighted for you,’ she said. ‘I see it almost as one of my own.’

‘That’s kind,’ I said, not knowing what she was talking about. I had written it in secret, during the first two years of our marriage, either while she was sleeping or out having her nails done with her mother, or while I was standing at the till on a quiet day in Wilhelmina’s.

‘I mean one of my own in the sense that you could not have done it without me,’ she said.

I didn’t mention Poppy’s all-creating touch.

And she was right about the part she’d played. For all my exalted literary ambitions, it was wanting to stick it to Vanessa, to confound her view of me as a fantasist, that turned daydreaming into actuality. Just as one should never discount, when fathoming the origins of art, the influence of an uneducated mother-in-law, one should never underestimate, when measuring ambition, the influence of a jeering wife stroke husband. For jeering, too, is conversation, and conversation, for a writer such as I am, is the midwife of creation.

There’s a word for it. Maieutics. Sounds as though named after a goddess – Maieusis. I didn’t mention this to Vanessa, knowing that that was how she would henceforth want to be addressed: as the goddess Maieusis.

‘And also mine,’ she went on, ‘in the sense of its being the nearest I will get to mothering a child.’

Neither of us wanted a child. Not wanting a child was the only thing we agreed about. I sometimes thought it was the reason we got married, the wellspring of our union – not to engender life. So it seemed a contradiction, on her part, if not a betrayal, to be thinking of my book as offspring.

We fell out over what to call it. My working title,
The Zookeeper
, wasn’t her idea of what you call a child.

‘Nor mine,’ I said. ‘But it’s not a child.’

‘It is to me,’ she said. ‘Can’t you give it a child’s name?’

‘Like what?’

‘
Vanessa
.’

‘You’re not a child.’

‘I was.’

‘It’s not about you.’

She laughed one of her deep, guttural, scornful laughs. ‘Ah, darling,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘why are you in such denial? It’s about me on every line, admit it.’

‘Vee, you haven’t read it yet.’

‘Do I need to?’

‘If you’re going to go on thinking it’s about you, yes.’

She treated me to one of her archest expressions, eyes dancing, lips pleated. The prelude in some households, I didn’t doubt, to domestic violence. In our household such an expression
was
domestic violence. But you couldn’t be married to a woman like Vanessa and not pay a price for it.

‘So what
is
it about?’ she asked.

‘Animality, sensuality, cruelty, indifference.’

She laughed animalistically, sensually, cruelly, indifferently. ‘My point precisely,’ she said. ‘I know how you see me.’

‘Vee, it’s set in a zoo. I don’t see our life as a zoo.’

‘A zoo? You’ve never been inside a zoo in the time I’ve known you. You’ve never taken me to a zoo. You’ve never so much as mentioned a zoo. You don’t like animals. You won’t even let us have a cat. A zoo? You?’

I hadn’t told her about Mishnah Grunewald. Vanessa wasn’t a wife who liked hearing about her husband’s past. We were Adam and Eve. Before us, nothing.

‘I have a rich imagination,’ I reminded her.

‘And what happens in this richly imagined zoo?’

‘Zoological things.’

She paused. ‘It’s about your dick, isn’t it?’

‘It’s about everybody’s dick.’

‘Guido, not everybody has a dick. Half the world doesn’t have a dick.’

‘I know that. The novel is told from the point of view of someone who hasn’t got a dick.’

‘A eunuch?’

‘No.’

‘A gelding?’

‘No.’

‘What then?’

‘A woman.’

She clasped her breasts and feigned a heart attack brought on by hysterical mirth.

‘A woman! Guido, what do you know about women? You have less knowledge of women than you have of zoos.’

I was tempted to tell her about Mishnah Grunewald, and all the other Mishnahs who gave the lie to our demi-Eden. What did I know about women? What
didn’t
I know about women? But this was a moment to stay calm. ‘I have listened to women, Vee. I have observed women. I have read about women. If Flaubert could write from the point of view of a woman, if James Joyce could write from the point of view of a woman, if Tolstoy –’

‘Yes, yes. I’ve got the drift. And what is she like, this woman you know nothing about?’

I shrugged. ‘Volatile, compassionate, beautiful, lovable.’

‘And she’s the zookeeper, I take it, this beautiful, volatile, lovable woman?’

‘Yes, as it happens she is.’

I’d like to have added ‘And she masturbates wild animals’.

‘And there’s a male character in this novel who loves her?’

‘Yes.’

‘And he’s you.’

‘It’s a novel, Vanessa, not a fucking autobiography.’

‘OK – so there
is
a male character in this novel who loves her. And it
is
you. Does he get her?’

‘
Get her?
’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, you know what “get” means.’

‘What he gets is his comeuppance.’

‘Ah, so this is a story with a moral.’

‘No, it’s a story without anything. I’m a nihilist, I thought you knew that.’

‘You’re also a husband. You have a wife.’

‘I know that, Vee.’

‘Whom you wooed and won. And promised to be faithful to.’

Whom!
Is it any surprise I loved her?

‘Yes, I did. But the men in my novel are not me. They are not winners. They are losers.’

‘And does the main one, the one who loves the lovable zookeeper, lose her along with everything else?’

I thought about it. ‘It’s ambiguous.’

She roared her laugh again. ‘There you are then,’ she said, slapping the palms of her hands like Archimedes proving a theorem, ‘it’s about me on every line.’

Quod erat demonstrandum
.

I’d never seen her more volatile, compassionate, beautiful, or lovable.

The goddess Maieusis.

‘Change the names, Vanessa,’ I told her when she first showed me the opening page – which just happened to be the only page – of the novel she was writing.

Since I wouldn’t call my novel
Vanessa
, that was the title she gave hers. The heroine was called Vanessa. The villain was called Guy. They met in a shop called Wilhelmina’s. Vanessa had a mother called Poppy. That Guy was not feeling up Poppy was an accident only of timing and ignorance. I wasn’t at the time doing it, and Vanessa – the real Vanessa – was ignorant of the fact that I wanted to. Which at that stage, beyond occasional drunken fancy, or as a consequence of an angry impulse to hurt Vanessa, so was I.

‘If you think your changing the names fools anyone, you’re a fool yourself,’ was her answer.

But she misunderstood an essential fact about writing fiction. No matter how much you write about yourself, the minute you change your name you change you. And from that tiny germ of difference – as I never stopped telling Vanessa – a superior truth ensues.

‘Bullshit!’ was her considered response to that. ‘What’s a superior truth?’

‘A truer truth.’

She’d pay me back with that eventually, when I caught her in a lying lie.

Change the names, anyway, is the novelist’s credo. Change the names and you change what happened, and it’s only by changing what appeared to happen that you discover what did.

So here, with the names changed, is the invitation to the big event – two years very nearly to the day after mother and daughter stepped up into Wilhelmina’s which, for the sake of the truer truth, had now (if Gid was to be a goer) to be rechristened Marguerite’s.

The Author and Pauline Girodias

Invite the Reader

To the Wedding of Valerie and Gideon

Why Marguerite? Why Valerie and Pauline? Because to my ear they have the ring of characters from superior French porn.

Now, as I write, I recall the only two women who ever roused me – Valerie and Pauline. After Pauline had laid out the outfit it had been decided Valerie would wear for her wedding night, the black silk stockings, the black gloves, the spiked-heel black suede shoes, she undressed slowly before the mirror, perfumed herself and began to rouge her own breasts .
. . That sort of thing.

As for Girodias, Maurice Girodias was of course the founder of Olympia Press, which published my favourite otherwise unpublishable erotic fiction. (A prim tautology: shouldn’t all fiction be erotic?) Not that Girodias was his real name either. He was in fact born Maurice Kahane. Girodias was his mother’s maiden name, a
nom de non juif
chosen by his far-sighted, Nazi-sniffing father Jack in Paris in the 1930s. Maurice wrote warmly about his French mother, describing her as bubbly, charming and piquant, which is how I suppose I could have described my mother had I liked her more, or been possessed of a more charming personality myself.

The father, Kahane senior – born, I’m proud to say, just up the A34 from me in Manchester – was also a publisher of books of the spiked-heel, rouged-breast sort, as well as Henry Miller who was at that time banned in America. Heady days, these, for fiction, with novelists offending all and sundry, words having to be hidden from the authorities, and no one quite the person he said he was. Who was Francis Lengel, author of
White Thighs
? Alexander Trocchi, who else? Who was the innocuous-sounding Henry Jones, author of
The Enormous Bed
(‘Our mouths met, but, at the same time, her hand shot as if uncontrollably down to my trousers and discovered my freshly proved manhood again’)? The innocuous-sounding John Coleman, who other? What a thrill it must have been, how important a writer must have felt – and never mind the obscurity and the poverty – to know that governments trembled every time a woman’s hand shot down as if uncontrollably to a writer’s trousers. My tangling with the names of these pseudonymous heroes is a way of muscling in on the deception. Call it nostalgia. Writing will never be so much fun again.