But the reason I write this is that at the same time as feeling Lovborgian empathy with Mr Coren’s loss, I also feel intensely envious. You mean, your novel has just gone? Just like that? How absolutely fantastic. Personally, I have reached the late laborious paranoid stage in my own creative outpouring when its unfinished state gnaws at me like a constant reproach, and its mewlings for attention drive me mad with guilt. Which is why, whenever someone innocently asks, ‘How’s the novel?’ I actually feel like screaming, or pulling a gun. ‘Novel?’ I want to yell, waving the weapon in dangerous circles. ‘Did you ask about my novel?’ I fumble with the trigger, wildly push back my fringe, and take a swig from a bottle. ‘What do you know about it? Just what do you think you know about it? You know nothing,’ – I start to sob, here – ‘Nothing, nothing …’ The outburst tails off. I drop the gun. I give myself up. It’s all over.
People are only being nice, when they ask. To the enquirer, ‘How’s the novel?’ is like saying ‘How’s your Mum?’ – friendly, concerned, non-judgemental. All that’s required by way of response is, ‘Fine thanks, how’s yours?’ But unfortunately this simple question, when filtered through the cornered-animal mentality of the weary last-lap novelist, is transformed into the sort of sneering insinuation that makes homicide justifiable. ‘It was peculiar,’ friends say to one another, when I pop out of the room. ‘All I said was ‘‘How’s the novel?’’ and look, she bit my hand.’ ‘Tsk, tsk,’ the others agree, shaking their heads and peeling back the fresh bandages on their own nicks and flayings. ‘How did you get those bruised ribs again, Terry?’ ‘Well, we were at dinner, and she’d put down her knife and fork, and I said brightly, ‘‘Have you finished?’’ That’s all. And she flew at me.’
They don’t realize how sensitive you can get. They don’t know what it’s like to live constantly with this Tiny Tim of an unfinished book, sitting trusting and wistful in the inglenook of your consciousness waiting for you to fix its calipers and make it well. It’s such a drag. My novel can do nothing independently; I can’t pay somebody else to look after it in the afternoons; and if ultimately it gets botched, it will be nobody’s fault but mine. So I keep thinking of Mr Coren’s novel, kidnapped by ruffians, and considering whether, all in all, this unkind fate would not be preferable. ‘How’s the novel?’ people would ask, automatically ducking sideways and shielding their faces with their arms. ‘Oh, didn’t I tell you?’ I could say dolefully (as if sad). ‘It’s gone.’ ‘What?’ ‘Yes, I left it outside a supermarket, and just my luck, someone lured it away with a packet of crisps.’
The historical Saint Valentine was clubbed to death, you know. And now, seventeen centuries later, by means of one of those great arching ironies to which history is so partial, the rest of us are being clubbed to death by St Valentine’s Day. We are bludgeoned with love, and I am not sure I like it. Formerly St Valentine’s was one of those optional festivals, like Septuagesima, which you could celebrate at your own discretion. It was also, I always thought, associated with the finer, more delicate aspects of love: tremulous, unspoken, violet-scented. But a heavy hand in a red velvet glove has taken care of such love-heart nonsense, and St Valentine’s has turned overnight into an excuse for relentless Channel 4 extravaganzas featuring wall-to-wall exhibitionism and rumpy-pumpy. A certain grossness, it must be said, has poked its way into the sweet satin folds of the romance, and ‘Be my Valentine’ is no longer a wistful request.
Isn’t February depressing enough, without this? Channel 4 sent me a little bottle of massage oil in celebration of the ‘Love Weekend’ and I have been thinking seriously about drinking it. But leaving aside all the arguments on behalf of lonely stay-at-homes (and romantics) dismayed and alienated by frank, endless sex-talk on the telly, isn’t it just spit-awful to find yet another date in the calendar turned irrevocably into an imperative national event, demanding special film seasons on the box? I mean, where will it end? It was actually a surprise, on Monday, to see the world return to normal, with the banks open, and people going off to work. ‘No holiday, then?’ I breathed in relief, thankful for the small mercy.
Personally, I am now dreading next week’s Pancake Day, for fear that the TV channels will be given over to a ‘Night of Batter’. I hardly dare open my Radio Times:
BBC2, 7.50pm: a short, irreverent history of the Jif lemon.
8pm: an in-depth profile of modern artists whose chosen medium is pancake-and-gouache.
Midnight until 4am: an acclaimed, sobering French movie about the unremembered crêperie wars that shook Paris during the Occupation.
Channel 4, meanwhile, could fill a studio with talentless ugly nude people with frying-pans on their heads, extracting endless nervous hilarity from the word ‘toss’. It could all happen; I sincerely believe it. Something for everyone, that’s the principle of these theme nights; only unfortunately it usually comes out curiously awry, as everything for someone.
I said I would leave aside the special-pleading arguments about lonely stay-at-homes struck downhearted and dismal by the excesses of this past weekend, but the pancake analogy somehow invites them back to the forefront again. Because – well, it’s obvious. While for single people (and people not happily in love, which is a different category that includes nearly everyone) the whole dark, heaving Valentine event is so dispiriting it makes the depression of Christmas seem like a hayride to a clambake, Pancake Day requires no special personal circumstances for its enjoyment, and is therefore, actually, a better cause for celebration. Hm, I may be on to something. I mean, you don’t have to be ‘lurved’ as a prerequisite for Pancake Day, just handy with a whisk. I have never thought of it this way before, but the pancake is obviously a great leveller. Old and young, ugly and beautiful, we can all roll them up and squirt them with lemons – and if we choose not to, it’s not because there is anything wrong with us.
It is sad to think how St Valentine’s is going – but on the other hand, the hell with it. You’ve got Shrove Tuesday to look forward to. Moreover, there is still time to record a short sequence on video describing your first pancake, your ideal pancake, your lost pancake, or the final pancake that left you feeling a bit sick and sorry for yourself. And the funny thing is, that compared with many of the dreary sexual relationships displayed and analysed on the ‘Love Weekend’, your pancakes will probably appear to have colour, individuality, interest – and above all, depth.
When Raoul Fitzgerald Hernandez O’Flaherty, the hot-blooded Irish-Argentinian international polo ace, called me up on Friday from his helicopter, begging me to join him on a weekend trip to Palm Beach, I admit I was slightly taken aback. This is a bit irregular, I thought. I had planned a nice weekend rearranging my dried fruit collection and mending my string bag, and now here was Randy Raoul hovering spectacularly over my front garden, showering emerald trinkets into my bird-bath, and demanding by loud-hailer that I go and inspect some new ponies.
Of course I became an expert on horse-flesh years ago, when I avidly consumed books such as Jill Enjoys Her Ponies. Also, I spent many childhood Sunday afternoons ‘treading in’ (stamping on divots) between chukkas at a nearby polo club. Yet I had a strange feeling that it was my body, not my equine expertise, that Raoul was really after. The O’Flaherty triplets are all notorious womanizers, but Raoul is the best lover of the three, ranked number eight in the world! Raoul clearly wanted to pluck me from my flat, lavish all sorts of sexual attention on me, drive me wild with jewels and frocks, and drop hilarious innuendoes about the thrill of goal-scoring. What on earth was a girl to do?
Well, the string bag is much better now, you will be relieved to hear. The currants are tucked in neatly behind the prunes. But I am seriously wondering what to do with this copy of Jilly Cooper’s Polo, which seems to be the source of the trouble. What do other women do in these circumstances? As a mere novice to the so-called bonk-buster novel (obliged to read Polo for purely professional reasons) I had no idea it would fill my world with rich, good-looking blokes with stron
g brown arms akimbo. I poke through my jewellery and can’t believe my eyes. What, no perfect emeralds, gift of an infatuated millionaire? No diamonds? How can it be true that my only ring is the one I bought for a fiver in a place called Mousehole? Thank goodness the Freudian heyday is a thing of the past.
Of course I am not the ideal reader for a bonk-buster novel, because I am not married. I am free to get excited in the polo tournament bits (‘Come on, you brave little ponies!’) and to salivate openly during the sex scenes, whereas the target reader will be a married woman on a beach somewhere, obliged to disguise her reactions for the benefit of the husband (not rich, not handsome, and can’t tell a divot from a hole in the ground). While reading, she controls her breathing, tries not to perspire too visibly, and occasionally breaks off during a particularly juicy bit to say offhandedly ‘Not very good, this, actually’, before plunging back again and memorizing the page number for later on.
For me personally, on the other hand, Polo recalled all those Jill and Her Ponies books I used to read when I was ten. Who will win the silver cup? Will the pony rescued from cruelty turn into the best little pony in the world? This jolly gymkhana stuff made me feel quite young again, but it also made me wonder whether the Jill in question grew up to become Jilly in later life. It is not impossible. After all, the fictional Jill’s mother was a writer – but an unsuccessful one who clearly overlooked the bankable nature of her own daughter’s pony-mad activities. Poor Jill was obliged to wear second-hand jodhpurs to the Pony Club Gymkhana, which is just the sort of indignity (in bonk-busters, anyway) that makes an ambitious girl grow up aching for a shot at some serious dosh.
I am not sure, in retrospect, that we were supposed to despise Jill’s mum for being a hopeless breadwinner. In fact, I used to think it was sweet that when the pig-tailed Jill came home on summer afternoons – all dusty from a hack on Black Boy, all worried about where the next curry-comb was coming from – there would be Mother, leaning out of the window of their little cottage, excitedly waving a small piece of paper. ‘A cheque!’ she would yell. ‘I’ve sold a story in London!’ And my heart would leap. ‘Saddle up Black Boy again, Jill,’ Mother would say. ‘Today we’ll have buns for tea!’
Such innocence. It makes you feel all old and jaded and peculiar. True, I always shout ‘Buns for tea!’ when a cheque arrives in the post, but it is heavily ironic, since I know perfectly well that the money will only service the overdraft, or go half-way towards some car insurance (buns doesn’t come into it). But I prefer the world of ‘Buns for tea!’ to the casual purchase of Renoirs and Ferraris to be found in Polo. Cream puffs evidently mean nothing on the international polo circuit; teacakes make them laugh.
I think this is why, in the end, I turned down Raoul’s tempting offer of the Palm Beach trip. So what, if these polo people are good at jewels and orgasms, if they are blind to the value of an honest barm cake? Of course, memory may be playing tricks here: perhaps Jill and her mum sang ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ in the evenings, while flipping through glossy magazines for pictures of rich people. Perhaps they would have killed for a chance to fly off to the world of Cartier and great sex, leaving the second-hand jodhpurs in a heap on the ground. In which case, when Raoul O’Flaherty came to call, perhaps I made a rather large mistake.
A few years ago, I met a dynamic woman journalist who told me she was keen to launch a new daily paper aimed at a female readership. Unfortunately for the ensuing discourse, our meeting took place at the wrong end of a highly boozy book-award dinner, at that delirious point in the evening when you start to pass out in your chair, and think hey, that’s nice, everyone’s a bunny rabbit. So when this charismatic woman mentioned the newspaper idea, I couldn’t think how to react, except with boundless enthusiasm. ‘Great,’ I shouted, so loudly that other people looked round. ‘Brilliant, I mean, brilliant,’ I added, in a whisper, and knocked back another glass of port as if to show how brilliant I thought it really was. ‘Er, how would it be different exactly? What would you put in?’ ‘Well, the main thing is this,’ she said. ‘It’s what you take out.’ I smiled in a vague what’s-she-talking-about kind of way and concentrated for a couple of minutes on trying to rest my chin on my hand, without success. ‘All right, what do you take out?’ I slurred at last, leaning forward. ‘You take out the sport,’ she said.
I never saw this woman again, but I often think of her. Until I met her, I would never have dared to assert that sport was uninteresting to all (or most) women; I just thought I had a blind spot. But now, when I open my Times in the morning, flipping the second section adroitly into the bin (only to rescue it later with a stifled scream and a flurry of soggy tea-bags when I remember the arts pages), I know I am not alone. Similarly, when the Today programme reaches twenty-five past the hour (‘Now, time for sport’) and I rush about for precisely five minutes doing the noisy jobs such as bath-running and kettle-boiling, I am confident that countless other people are doing the same. And finally, when a programme such as Sports Review of the Year soaks up two hours of BBC1 peak-time on a Sunday night, I happily regard it as a gap in the schedule, and read a book. Fran Lebowitz spoke for me and for millions, I quite believe, when she said the only thing she had in common with sports fanatics was the right to trial by jury.
I mention all this because on Sunday I eschewed the usual literary treat and forced myself to watch Sports Review instead. I had heard about the time-honoured award for BBC Sports Personality of the Year, and envisaged it as a bit of a laugh, with household-name sports heroes lined up in swimsuits and sashes (‘Mister Cricket’, ‘Mister 100 Metres’ and so on) trying to impress Desmond Lynam with their breadth of hobbies and love of travel, and nervously pushing back their tiaras as they paraded at the end. Of course, it turned out to be much less interesting than that, with lots of unidentifiable sports people got up like funeral directors, but it did conclude quite as oddly, when Nigel Mansell (the winner, a racing driver) addressed the viewer at home and said that he would like to thank us all for supporting him.
For a moment he was so convincing that I almost didn’t notice. ‘Any time, Nige. Don’t mention it, old son,’ I said, wiping a tear. But then I remembered that I never watch racing driving (can’t stand the nyow-nyow; can’t stomach the commentators; can’t follow who’s winning; hate the bit when they squirt champagne). And it suddenly occurred to me: These people don’t know. They really don’t know that sport is a minority interest. When they say ‘England’ and assume you will understand a team of footballers, they forget completely that the word has another (if only a secondary) meaning. Far be it from me to argue that other people should not enjoy sport. It is merely childish to argue against something on the grounds that you don’t know what they see in it. I just wish to point out, for those who didn’t know, that in a large number of households the television news gets switched off automatically when the announcer says, ‘Cricket, and at Edgbaston …’ And also that sometimes, when drunk and in the pleasant company of the cast of Watership Down, one can believe for a bright shining moment that the collective indifference is so very marked, it might even be marketable.
How heartening to know that the prime minister buys books he doesn’t have time to read. No piece of news has ever, metaphorically speaking, drawn him closer to my bosom. I doubt it was meant to, however. The thought of him excitedly shuffling his book tokens at Waterstone’s check-out has already elicited sneers – intellectual snobs being always alert for vulgarians proudly displaying their embossed Shakespeare with the disclaimer, ‘Of course, it’s not something you can actually read’. But personally, I take great comfort in the news; it gives him a whole new human side. He has faith in the future. At the same time, he sensibly realizes that busy jobs don’t last for ever. He likes books for their own sake. And when people look at his shelves and say, ‘Have you read all these?’, he replies without embarrassment, ‘No, but I live in hope.’
My own sensitivity on this issue I can trace to my days as a guilty,
hard-pressed literary editor in an office waist-deep with neglected review copies. ‘Have you read all these?’ people would enquire, innocuously enough, and then draw back in alarm as I scrambled to the window ledge and threatened to jump. They learnt not to ask. At home, I own literally hundreds of books I have bought, but not yet read; but if I say I regard them as a squirrel regards his nuts, I hope you will pardon the expression and catch my drift. I mean, what is the point of owning only books you have read? Where is the challenge or excitement in that? It would be like having a fridge full of food you have already eaten, cupboards of booze that’s already been drunk. Imagine browsing for a meal in the evenings – ‘Mm, this moussaka was pretty good last time, and I reckon Mister Retsina could stand another paddle down the old alimentary canal.’
Of course, I have made mistakes, bought books I couldn’t get on with. By rights, I should donate them to passing students, but instead I hoard them, like ill-fitting shoes, in hope that one day I will make the effort to break them in. Henry James is no good at all, God knows I’ve tried, but from the very first sentence I always find myself sinking, disappearing, drowning in dark mud, it’s horrible, horrible, and finally I cry out in Thurberesque despair, ‘Why doesn’t somebody take this damn thing away from me?’ Yet if I retain my copy of The Golden Bowl, it’s not because I am dishonestly feigning an abiding love of Henry James, it’s just because I like to be prepared for all contingencies. Who knows, but one day I may positively yearn for intellectual suffocation in mud? Similarly, who knows, but I might break a leg and catch up on all my Gary Larson ‘Far Side’ books as well.