Zoo Time by Howard Jacobson Read Free Book Online Page A

same, whichever Lawrence she was quoting. The initialled reviewer had traduced the tale, the fragile thing of words spun only incidentally by me, as the farmer only incidentally grows the wheat. (And stolen from Vanessa, anyway.) That was why she trod on his spectacles: so that he would know how it felt to be the word, the wounded logos, kicked when it was down.
    Things dying can have a voluptuous beauty. Only think of the dying of the day or the dying of the summer. So it was with the word. The sicker it grew, the more livid it turned, the more people of an over-refined and morbid disposition fell in love with its putrefaction.
    Would I be around to see it finally pass away? I wasn’t sure, but I could imagine the scene, like the burning of a Viking hero at sea – the sky, as bloody as a reviewer’s nose, painted by J. M. W. Turner; the last of the verbalising men looking into the self-combusting sun, hoarsely mouthing their goodbyes; the women tearing their hair and wailing. Foremost among them, atremble in lacy weeds such as those she’d worn to see off poor Merton, my Vanessa.
    Magnificent in mourning.

6
    Party’s Over
    Mourning. We were all doing it. The trick was not to let it get you down.
    After Merton died I thought it would be a good idea to see my agent to talk about what next. A living writer needs a living publisher.
    Over the phone, Francis wondered what the hurry was. I could hear the alarm in his voice.
    Like Merton, he dreaded the prospect of a new book. Knowing writers were coming to see them, some agents had taken to locking themselves in lavatories rather than have a manuscript handed to them personally like a subpoena. That was how far the situation had deteriorated. A good day now was one in which no one gave them anything they had to find a publisher to sell to.
    But at least I had an agent. ‘So who’s representing you now?’ other writers would ask me when we met at literary parties. We called them parties but they were more like wakes. Except that at a wake there’d have been more to drink, and fuller sandwiches. Maybe even sausage rolls. I evaded the question. Give another writer the name of your agent and he stroke she would try to steal him stroke her off you.
    Sometimes I’d lie. ‘I’m going it alone now,’ I’d say.
    ‘Can that work?’ Damien Clery wanted to know.
    He was the author of slightly camp, light-hearted social comedies set in cathedral towns – Trollope in a tutu, one reviewer had called him – but was better known for having jumped his agent from the other side of the desk and broken his nose. Since then, no agency would touch him. No publisher either. For the last four years he had been living off a charity administered by the Scrivener . I found him frightening, not by virtue of his violence of temper but the very opposite. He was the sweetest, mildest-mannered novelist in London. He had golden curls, lovely lilac-coloured eyes, and spoke melodiously. But you never knew when he would turn feral – a word I begrudged him because Mishnah Grunewald had used it of me, though I had never touched an agent’s nose.
    ‘It works fine, Damien,’ I confided, ‘but it means you have to do a lot of legwork. You have to deposit the manuscript on a publisher’s desk by hand. No point posting it. They won’t read it. You need to make personal contact.’
    ‘They won’t let me near. There are photographs of me in the reception area of every publishing house in the country. Security has me out before I can even ring the bell.’
    ‘Ah,’ I said, backing away.
    ‘I suppose I could get somebody else to deliver for me.’
    ‘That might work,’ I said. ‘Though they’d still know it was you from the name on the typescript.’
    ‘Not if I changed it.’ He gulped down a full glass of wine at terrifying speed and then had another idea. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘you wouldn’t be prepared to drop off some manuscripts for me?’
    I backed away further. ‘Would have done so