Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

So who then? Ernesto? Why would Ernesto tell me to get a life when I had recently given him back his? Rafaele? He was in Umbria, eating Polish sausage. Who else knew I had no life? Unless the whole of Marylebone was witness to my cuckoldry — which I wouldn’t of course have minded. I could think of a few of my more clubbable fellow antiquarians who had grown lecherous over their brandies when I’d let them, offering it as their opinion that I was a lucky devil in my way to be married to a woman with a body as magnificent as her appetite to use it was unquenchable. Not what they could handle in a wife — not got the balls for it, old boy — but if I could, and I wanted it no other way, hats off to me. ‘I’m bewitched,’ I’d confessed to them, and they’d said she was a witch, all right, my wife, and in their orange eyes I’d seen the witch-yearning that lives in every man no matter what he tells you to the contrary.

But in that case it was they who needed to get a life, not me.

There was also something perplexingly incongruous about the choice of such a card for such a message. Munch in his self-portrait would get a life if he could, but life has been mislaid. It is a sympathetic, tormented study, painted sepulchrally, of a hounded, black-eyed man, barely daring to show himself to the night. Whoever chose that card could not have hated me.

Marisa?

My darling, get a life, get your life, get our life back. My dearest husband, do not end up looking as bleak and eyeless as Mr Munch.

Except that sending an anonymous card addressed in someone else’s handwriting was not Marisa’s style. Nor, when I’d last checked, was it her mood. GET A LIFE is not the same as GET A WHIPPING.

I would have gone on fretting about it had I not that same morning received an unexpected visit in the shop — unexpected by me, at least, because of some cock-up in our appointment system — from the most eminent of James Joyce’s biographers, hot from the Oxford college where he resided in intellectual splendour, receiving lesser Joyce scholars as an emperor receives principalities. Professor X, as I will have to call him — for it would be a breach of professional etiquette to give his real name — had contacted me a month or two before regarding a number of Irish fairy stories signed W. B. Yeats (another of his subjects) which had appeared in our catalogue. I’d sent him the catalogue knowing they were his cup of tea. He was in a position now to inspect them if I still had them.

Of course, I told him, apologising for the cock-up, I still had them. I’d passed over several offers in the hope that Professor X would make his bid for them before too long. Who you sell to is not immaterial in this business. Besides, there was a question I was particularly anxious to put to him — as it were on behalf of the whole family — once our business was concluded. Joyce’s wife Nora — was it true, as rumoured, that Joyce had encouraged her to. .

‘Put it about?’ the professor obliged.

I bowed, as to his mastery of the vernacular. But blenched from the implicit suggestion that I’d been vulgarly intrusive. I was addressing a biographer, was I not? Isn’t biography ipso facto vulgarly intrusive?

‘You will be asking me next,’ he went on, shaking his great woolly head at me, much like a sheep refusing to cross a ditch, ‘whether Nora ever did what Joyce told her in a letter he would like her to do — sit in an armchair with her thighs apart, point her cane towards some imaginary misdemeanour for which he wished to be held responsible, pull him towards her in a simulacrum of rage, throw him face downwards in her lap, pull off his trousers, raise her cane. .’

I waited. If I was vulgar I was vulgar.

‘Who knows,’ he said. Not a question but a statement, whereupon we both fell silent, listening to the words tumble like stones down a great, dark well.

It appeared he had nothing else to say, indeed I made to shake his hand, but quite suddenly, as though he felt he couldn’t be done with me yet, he found one last stern remonstrance. ‘You will be able to discover fetishism and anality or whatever else you want to call it in the life of any writer who is concerned, as Joyce was, to subject love to intense scrutiny, to break it down, reconstitute and crystallise it. A restless imagination will always be vulnerable to gossip.’

I couldn’t, after that, say, ‘And Nora’s putting it about?’

My curiosity struck me, in the presence of the distinguished man, not just as bad form on the personal level but as an intellectual offence also. Quite how he squared his grand sniffiness with his profession of muckraker I wasn’t sure, but it was right of him, I thought — particularly as he knew nothing of my grandfather’s shady encounter with Joyce and Nora in the Zunfthaus zur Zimmerleuten, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell him now — to tick me off for an inquisitiveness that was inaesthetic. The life is not the work, the work is not the life. Joyce the novelist is Joyce the novelist, and Bloom the exblotting paper salesman is Bloom the ex blotting paper salesman. But then Professor X didn’t have to save either of them from me. I love a man, whether he is what he is in the name of art or not, who refuses to be in a permanent war over possession with other men, who prefers absorbency to power, who abdicates the imperiousness of his will and allows his wife to do with him as she pleases.

Which begs, I accept, a fairly large question. What if the thing she does with him is less what pleases her than what pleases him? Is his will, in that case, not so much abdicated as exerted in another form?

A row of this sort, I suspected, was brewing between Marisa and me, whether or not she was the one who had sent me the postcard of Munch’s Night Wanderer, exhorting me to get a life. It is standard in the clinical literature on perversion that the masochist inscribes a tyrannical script, that wherever you find a submissive and a dominant entwined, it is the submissive who calls the shots. The bullied who does the bullying. The slave that dominates the mistress. A nice little paradox of the twisted life.

Much of this, I have to say, bores me profoundly. Anyone who has spent a moment considering the role of partners in a sadomasochistic relationship notices the topsy-turvy nature of their power exchange. But I am not interested in the person who has considered the subject for a moment; for the purposes of conversation, at least, I am interested only in the person who has studied it for a lifetime. So Professor X should have been my man. But the intense scrutiny of love he ascribed to Joyce seemed a touch abstract and yellow-bellied to me, an apology for unhusbandly behaviour when what one wanted was a celebration. Like so many biographers of the unconventional, he was too conventional adequately to do the job. Too conventional for me to jabber to, at least.

So much of what a pervert knows he cannot say because he cannot find anyone to say it to.

And yet I was the one they dared tell to get a life!

WHICH RETURNS ME, BUT AT A PERVERT’S PACE, TO THE WHIPPING.

As my father’s son I knew about such things. All the men in our family my father’s age had themselves whipped as a matter of course. Preferably on the Continent where the subtleties of temporary sexual metamorphosis were better understood. For whatever purposes he employed them, my father held British prostitutes in the highest contempt. They were a cause for national shame, he never tired of saying. He didn’t mean for being prostitutes; he meant for being prostitutes with so little joie de vivre or élan vital . That he could express what they were lacking only in the French tongue was no accident: like his father before him, he packed a light bag and took himself off to France or Germany whenever he felt the rise of urges which marriage could not satisfy. ‘You find a wife to clean your house this side of the Channel and a mistress to dirty your mind on the other,’ he told me once when he was drunk. In this again, as a deliriously happy husband, have I broken with family tradition. I haven’t needed to leave home to have my mind dirtied.