Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

‘Oh, come on!’ said Flops and Rowlie in a rare show of marital unanimity. They come together when they feel threatened, the wives and husbands of Middle England.

Whereupon conversation turned to other matters.

But later, as we were preparing for bed, Marisa said, ‘You cheated a bit there, as I recall. Doesn’t Othello say he ’d have been happy for the camp to taste Desdemona’s body provided he knew nothing about it?’

‘Desdemona’s sweet body,’ I corrected her, since we were swapping emphases.

‘But knowing nothing about it.’ ‘That’s what he says, yes.’

Marisa appeared to reflect on this. ‘You would, I suppose, argue that he does not wallow in the idea of Desdemona’s defilement any the less for imagining himself ignorant of it.’

I nodded.

‘I think I’d go further,’ she said, her eyes suddenly become hooded. ‘I think the not knowing turns the screws of jealousy even more exquisitely.’

‘As long as you know you don’t know — is that what you’re saying?’

‘As long as you don’t know whether there is anything to know.’ Pleading tiredness, I wished her good night, wanting to take her words with me into sleep. Though of course I did not sleep.

LOOKING UP FROM HIS FISH SOUP LUNCH AT THE ZUNFTHAUS ZUR ZIMMER- leuten, a favourite Zurich restaurant on the right bank of the Limmat, Felix Quinn — not me but a young man bearing a remarkable resemblance to me (same soft mouth, same shy, hooded eyes) and after whom, like my father before me, I am named — finds himself meeting the bold stare of a comely, not unfashionable, but indefinably common woman (ours, as I have not attempted to conceal, is a family of unapologetic snobs) who could at a guess be twice his age, sitting with a pigeon-chested, halfblind man who at a guess could be her husband. Felix has seen the pair before, once at a performance of Troilus and Cressida at the Pfauen Theatre, once while walking by the lake. On those occasions, too, he had stared and been stared at. The idea that they will think he has been following them humiliates him. The alternative idea — that they have been following him — embarrasses him in a different way.

The year is 1919 and Felix Quinn, who happens to be my grandfather, is in Zurich on family business, inspecting the library of an industrialist who would like to sell up and move to Paris now that Europe is safe again, but does not want to take his library with him. Felix blushes to the roots of his hair, as I would have done in his place, when he realises that the excessive interest he’s been taking in the woman at the table opposite — it is her air of indolent accessibility, and yet not, that he finds fascinating — is being observed by the man he assumes to be her husband.

He lowers his head and tries to concentrate on his fish soup. But it is impossible for him not to raise his eyes every once in a while, and whenever he does so he finds the woman and her birdlike companion staring at him with expressions he does not have the language to describe.

At last, to his relief — that was how he always told it, anyway, relief — the woman leaves the table. Felix hears, but does not see her go. A moment later the man is on his feet before him, civil but highly agitated, wondering if there is any objection to his sitting down and discussing how things stand between them, as they seem to be seeing a lot of one another but have not yet exchanged words.

‘Please,’ my grandfather says with a gesture of the hand.

‘I would like,’ replies the gentleman, his cigarette describing a circle of gallantry in the air, ‘to extend the same invitation to you.’ Whereupon he sits, coughs a number of times, and fastens Felix with a stare of such inordinate intention that he fears he will burn up beneath it.

When Felix had seen this man in the park, swathed in a grey coat, he had taken him for a revolutionary. In the theatre, in his patent pumps, he resembled a dancing master. Today he looks like someone from the music halls. In fact he is an Irish exile, a language teacher in Zurich and a writer of some growing renown but of whom Felix is ashamed to admit he has not heard. ‘I have been here less than a week,’ he explains.

Felix loves plays and novels and they talk literature awhile — Ibsen, Flaubert, George Bernard Shaw. Once the husband picks up that Felix, like all the Felixes in our family, is classically educated, he begins to pepper his conversation with a Latin which my grandfather finds alternately Jesuitical and of the schoolyard. He does not understand everything that is said to him but grasps that the husband has begun to deliver intimate, not to say obscene confidences about his wife. Because he lacks the assurance to object, to demand that the husband recall himself to propriety, to plead his own fastidiousness or plain bashfulness, he can only go on smiling feebly as the absent woman’s living flesh is appraised and parted for him in a dead tongue.

‘You will sleep with her, then?’ the husband asks at last, as though their whole conversation so far has been heading to this point and this point only. Felix does not know what to say. He cannot, after what he has so far allowed, offer to take offence. He cannot, without giving offence himself, refuse the wife. And to wonder whether she has been consulted on the matter, as would be only proper, is tantamount to agreeing to sleep with her if she has. In the end there is only one thing he can say, and that is, ‘I’ll think about it, yes, of course I will, I am honoured to be the recipient of such a magnanimous request.’

‘Muchibus thankibus,’ says the writer, lighting a cigarette. ‘It will be of inestimable value to me in my researches.’

The following day, after deciding without seeing it that the industrialist’s library is not suitable for us, my grandfather packs his bags and returns to London.

And that, if he was telling the truth about any of it, was as close as any member of our family ever got to granting the inventor of Leopold Bloom his earnest wish to have another man cohabit with his wife.

Whether that meant Joyce had to try again with someone else, or simply had to make it up, is one of those literary mysteries that no amount of reading and rereading Ulysses will solve.

There is no saying, had my grandfather only held his nerve and hung on in Switzerland a little longer, that he ’d have made it into literature, but he might at least have got to see a performance of Joyce’s Exiles , a play in which Joyce investigates the ‘baffled lust’ that makes a husband the agent of his own dishonour.

Who knows — Joyce might have sat him next to Nora in the stalls. Marisa and I saw a production in Dublin which we were visiting for an

Antiquarian Booksellers Association dinner, not long, coincidentally, after our Othello evening — coincidentally, because Othello stimulated Joyce and was plainly a work to which he felt indebted.

Taking my wife to see one play about willingly jealous husbands after another was not, I must say, part of any campaign I was waging to make her aware of where I stood. The apparent continuity of theme is simple to explain: this is what literature is about. And more than that, this is what drives the making of literature. Not all literature perhaps, but I think the best literature. Or at least the best literature written by men. Employing a suspense identical to the suspense of the husband who waits to be betrayed, the writer (in Henry James’s words a person ‘on whom nothing is lost’, and therefore upon whom, if he is any good, everything is visited) puts himself in a position to observe, as God the immortal cuckold has been observing from the moment He divided light from darkness, the ever recurring disloyalties of his creations. Knowing what He must have known would be our natures, not least our propensity to go whoring after lesser gods, Jehovah’s great creative founding act was of the essence masochistic. The writer’s creativity is no different, engraving, in loving detail, the infidelities of characters dear to his heart. Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Molly Bloom — what do they have in common? Simply this: that each yields to minutely observed seduction at the hands of unworthy men, and in the process subjects her creator, who loves her better than any other man ever could, to the torments of the damned.