Contents

Contents

Cover

About the Book

About the Author

Also by Howard Jacobson

Dedication

Title Page

Prologue

Part One

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Part Two

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Copyright

About the Book

About the Book

Barney Fugleman has two major preoccupations in life: sex and literature. He is obsessed by the life and work of a man hailed by many as a genius of the nineteenth century – and by Barney as a ‘prurient little Victorian ratbag’.

This curious propulsion drives him out of Finchley, and out of the life he shares with Sharon and her ‘rampant marvellings’, to Cornwall. There he offends serious ramblers with his slip-on snakeskin shoes, fur coat and antagonism to all things green and growing as he stomps the wild Atlantic cliffs on long, morbid walks, tampering with the truth, tangling with the imperious Camilla – and telling a riotous tale.

About the Author

About the Author

Howard Jacobson is the author of eleven novels and four works of non-fiction. He won the Everyman Wodehouse Award for comic writing in 1999 for The Mighty Walzer. His latest novel, The Finkler Question, won the 2010 Man Booker Prize.

Also by Howard Jacobson

Also by Howard Jacobson

Fiction

Coming from Behind

Redback

The Very Model of a Man

No More Mister Nice Guy

The Mighty Walzer

Who’s Sorry Now?

The Making of Henry

Kalooki Nights

The Act of Love

The Finkler Question

Non-Fiction

Shakespeare’s Magnanimity (with Wilbur Sanders)

In the Land of Oz

Roots Schmoots

Seriously Funny: An Argument for Comedy

Dedication

FOR ROSALIN – WHO INSTIGATED, HATCHED AND REARED THIS, AND LOOKED TO ME TO LEGITIMIZE IT MERELY.

Title Page

Prologue

PROLOGUE

Remember to keep faith with those three great sources of your strength: Earth, Sea and Air. Walk barefoot on the Earth whenever you can. Learn to swim, and return to the Sea from which all life originally came. And always wear as few clothes as possible. It is important to allow the Air to circulate freely around those parts of the body which are not usually exposed to it.

And don’t forget: it is no good working on your body if your mind is drugged with cigarettes and television.

Lance Tourney, Lad of Destiny: A Boy’s

Guide to Health and Confidence

Signs are, even to my drugged eye, that the village is finally coming out of winter. I am not witnessing a return to robustness and sanity exactly – that’s too much to expect down here, so far from the soundness of cities, so deep into the obsessional neurosis of Nature – but there is an atmosphere of fragile convalescence abroad, as if the patients have been allowed their first unaccompanied turn around the walled gardens of the institution.

The wind has dropped. The water in the harbour rocks itself, brooding on its delusions. The squinting sea birds look as if they believe they might just eat again. Those hoteliers who changed wives or husbands at the start of the off-season – hoteliers are always the most romantic and expectant inhabitants of any remote place – have changed back again and are freshening up their Vacancy notices. Autographed copies of this year’s print run of Lionel Turnbull’s pamphlet (Lance Tourney is, of course, a pen-name) have started to appear in the post office and the village stores, and Lionel himself has begun those naked ritualistic swims which will continue every morning now until the Atlantic freezes over again. And already the first serious walkers of the season have arrived in their fetishistic boots and with their Ordnance Survey maps in protective plastic packets tied around their necks like bibs.

I meet them in the early morning during my penitential walks along the harbour walls or out on the cliff paths, and although they all nod me a bracing greeting or wave their blackthorn sticks, I can see that I am an extraneity and a blemish for them. In my long sleek-piled fur coat (resembling ocelot and bought on an Austin Reed charge account) and my Bally slip-on snakeskin shoes decorated, rather tastefully I’ve always thought, with a delicate gold chain and having the added advantage of slightly built-up heels, I am not what they have taken a week off work and kissed goodbye to their children and strapped methane stoves to their backs to find. At a stroke I domesticate the cliffs for them. Many of them, I fancy, will spend the rest of the day in a pet, not even noticing the wild sea below; fearing that at the next precipitous turn of the path, beneath the overhanging crags, above the foaming waterfall, they will come upon more like me, wearing jewels and stoles, contradicting one another in broken accents, and picnicking on smoked salmon sandwiches from the boot of a white Daimler. That’s the extent to which I have blotted their landscape.

But if my being here is a disagreeable shock to them, imagine what it is to me!

I have just been sitting on the rocks watching a group of schoolgirls watching Lionel Turnbull preparing for a swim. Whether Lionel saw the schoolgirls or whether the schoolgirls saw me it is impossible to say. We were all, in our own ways, separately engrossed. With the exception of a neat square rug of hair on his chest and back Lionel is a smooth man. Bobbing about in the water he is indistinguishable from the brown seals he has befriended. Anyone familiar with rustic persiflage will be able to imagine the sorts of jokes that circulate about Lionel and his relations with those seals. For all the influx of summer tourists this is still essentially a farming community – there isn’t anything that farmers find improbable.

Once he had peeled off his posing pouch which he wears under his exercise briefs which he wears under his swimming trunks which he wears under his perambulating shorts, Lionel stood for a while with his legs apart and his arms raised, for the purpose, I guessed, of letting the air circulate around those parts which had been stored away all winter. Then, with slow rhythmic movements, he began the sort of examination of himself that is recommended to women for the location of unfamiliar lumps in the breasts; except that he didn’t confine himself to one area, but examined his neck and his armpits also, and the region of his lumbar ganglion and his prostate, his rib cage, his kidneys, his liver, and, with lingering deliberation, his testicles. This was too much for the schoolgirls who, being visitors to the village, had never before seen an adult male standing on argillaceous rock and rolling his balls minutely around the outstretched palm of his hand.

It puzzled me also, I must confess, although I didn’t almost fall into the sea with laughter, because if those were cancer lumps Lionel Turnbull was searching for then he must have let himself go quite badly over the winter. Chapter V of Lad of Destiny states categorically that cancer is merely a consequence of lifestyle, being ascribable entirely to smoking, television, and bad bodily habits. From the confident manner in which he plunged finally into the water I deduced that he had found nothing in his body that shouldn’t have been there, but it has not gone without my noticing it that he thought he might.

There is something about this part of the world – it might be the light or the towering cliffs or the perpendicular fields and meadows – all offering incomparable opportunities for high profile – that attracts exhibitionists. A year and a half ago a whole family of them took a winter let on a small holiday cottage in the harbour. Grandmother, mother, two sons, and a daughter-in-law. That’s only approximate – domestic confusion as to who is related to whom and how is not uncommon in this neck of the woods. The rule of thumb seems to be that if a person sharing your house looks twice your age then there is a good chance it is your parent and oughtn’t, therefore, to make a habit of sharing your bed – at least not until you’re married; otherwise it’s fairly open slather. Anyway, in the case of the family of exhibitionists, I can say for sure that there were three women and two men, and that the National Trust didn’t take at all kindly to the manner in which they disported themselves both within the cottage and without it. Just in case that sounds unreasonable, let me make it clear that the cottage stood inside the area designated as the harbour, and that the harbour is the property of the National Trust. Gossip had it that they received an official typed complaint on Trust notepaper, in response to which the grandmother (if that was who she was) sent back a signed group photograph of them all lined up against the harbour wall in a state of Nature, the women concealing their ultimate immodesty behind their National Trust membership cards and the two men more flagrant in their National Trust ties. Was it the colour of their skins, she sent a covering note to enquire, that the Trust found out of keeping? This was a sly allusion to an argument which was occupying the attention of the village at the time, on the issue of the colour of the motor cars the Trust preferred the villagers to own. For that jibe alone their emmet foreignness and impudicity might have been forgiven, but the youngest son, the ostensibly unmarried one, went and blew it.

As long as he merely roamed the cliffs, in his earrings and his bright orange wig, with his ornithologist’s binoculars strapped around his neck and his cock hanging out of his trousers, nobody gave him any trouble. If you came upon him unexpectedly he would immediately put his glasses to his eye. Whether this was exquisite tact or complete confusion as to his role – an inability to make up his mind whether he was a shower-off or a looker-on – who could say? For my part I was never very interested in him. But Camilla – there! I’ve named her at last, my beloved and much-missed Camilla, whose spirit fills and frets this place for me – Camilla was, in that perverse way of hers, entirely sympathetic to him. Unforgiving of just about everybody, enraged by the smallest omissions of her friends, she was massively tolerant of aberrations. And according to her, this was an aberration every bit as massive as her tolerance. He had shown it to her in a queue at the post office once, and she had understood immediately how tragically limited were his options. ‘You’ve no idea what an enormous size it is,’ she tried to explain to me. ‘I can see why he has to show it, the poor bugger. There’s absolutely nothing else he could possibly do with it.’

Well, she was wrong there. One thing he could do with it was to trundle it up the hill to the village school, poke it through the protective railings, and get the children – girls or boys, he didn’t much care which – to measure it. And that was how, one afternoon, the village parents found him: standing on the old slate wall, one arm hooked around a cast iron railing, his binoculars pointing out to sea, his trousers open, and all their pretty ones gathered round him with their tiny rulers and protractors.

Camilla was a Parish Councillor again that year, but although she liked to make matters of public morality her own there was nothing she could do, even in her official capacity, to soothe parental wrath. This was not the sort of subject, either, that she was likely to be at her most understanding about. She didn’t throb parentally herself. She didn’t much care for children. And she certainly didn’t believe they were in possession of any innocence worth troubling oneself to protect.

‘The only thing you’ve got to worry about,’ she told the near murderous mother of one little girl, ‘is what this has done to her expectations. I myself don’t see how men can be anything but one big disappointment to her after this.’

‘I very much doubt that the experience will turn Colin into a homosexual,’ she assured the harbour master’s wife. ‘But if it does, look on the bright side – one more homosexual in the world means one less compliant wife and mother.’

It took the police though, not Camilla’s reassurances, to forestall the terrible vengeance demanded by outraged decency and to escort the five frightened flashers safely from the village.

It seems to be doing me some good, forcing myself to remember actual words that Camilla spoke. Her presence has been getting unhealthily generalized and diffused of late, particularly when I’m not walking the cliffs or following the course of rambles that we used to take together deep into the Valency Valley. There has been a touch of Heathcliff about me recently, I fear, that is if someone who is called Barney Fugleman and what’s more looks as if he is called Barney Fugleman can approximate to such a gentile, such a Christian, such an English, such an essentially Cornish spinster’s fantasy. But then why not? Might it not be possible to show, without going so far as to claim Jewish parentage for her Liverpudlian gypsy foundling, that it was precisely someone such as me, swarthy and saturnine and inhospitable and liable to vent my spleen on other people’s pets, that the poor girl dreamed about, my fur coat and Bally shoes notwithstanding, in the back room of that draughty rectory? It’s not out of the question. I’ve stirred the imagination of more than one lonely bookish vicar’s daughter in my time. Either way, it’s a surprise to me how morbid I’ve become. I listen to voices in the wind for God’s sake! I trudge moors. I haunt country graveyards. Dogs I have always wanted to kick and I might myself, at any time, have hung up Isabella Linton’s – the more the worms writhe, and all that – but now, I swear, and this is absolutely uncharacteristic of me, if I knew what an ash tree looked like or where one was to be found I could very easily fall to dashing my head against it.

To convey the extremity of my condition let me tell you that I toyed, for longer than I care to admit, with the notion of having all Camilla’s words printed in a different type-face – in something thin and spectral and wraith-like, in tribute to her rarity and other-worldliness and ventriloquial genius. The only thing that changed my mind was the realization that Camilla herself would have hated it. She didn’t see herself as a wraith. And she loathed every kind of tricksiness. Her preference, in all things, was always for simplicity and directness. As indeed, when I am myself, is mine. This was one of the many fastidiousnesses that united us. Together we were very choosy in our ideas of what constituted good art. We couldn’t stand, in just about equal measure, novels that took an interminable time telling you who was telling the story and how he came by it, both of us being perfectly at home with the convention of invisible omniscient narrators, no matter what people said about the breakdown of social certainty and the consequent necessary fictiveness of fabulists. We had no patience for films that could in any way be described as experimental, enigmatic, or surreal; and we could not abide plays that were about tramps, lunatics, savages without language, the terminally infirm, or the problem of writing plays. When I think of the number of theatres we stormed out of together and the quantity of paperbacks we tossed into the fire to keep us warm in winter, or into the sea to keep us young in spring, my heart aches.

Stuck out here, so far from the civilizing amenities, all efforts to keep in touch with written or spoken English were labours of love. We had to drive for an hour to find an even moderately well-stocked bookshop. If we wanted to see a play in the West End we had to set out early in the morning, leaving food for the cats, messages for the milkman, and the telephone number of the hotel we were staying at in case anyone important to us died while we were away. And yet before ten minutes of the first scene had elapsed we were up out of our seats – often on the front row, sometimes in a box – and into the nearest bar. We weren’t particularly interested in drinking; we just wanted somewhere quiet to sit where we could talk over the insult that had just been delivered to our intelligence. We didn’t just sneer; we discussed and analysed conscientiously. Our conversations on these occasions were almost certainly the best things on anywhere in London.

In the second of our summers together (the really good one) I think we must have seen as many as twenty-five plays without getting to the final act of any of them. One – I suppose it must have been a Pinter – we walked out of before a single character had even said anything. On top of that we consigned to the flames or the waves one Gunter Grass, two John Fowles, a Nabokov, a John Berger, three Doris Lessings, a Gore Vidal, two John Barths, and the whole of Jorge Luis Borges. I remember that I even tossed in a Norman Mailer but Camilla dived in – she was a stupendous diver – and rescued him. I think she detected my unclean unliterary motive. I knew that she had a soft spot for Norman Mailer and that for him she might leave me. We were very much in love that summer. We had a ball.

I didn’t worry too much about Norman Mailer. There didn’t seem any realistic danger of his turning up here with a rucksack, so far from the jazz and the booze and the hot bitches and the hellish stench of home. It was already stretching probability that I should be here, and I was not, more’s the pity, Norman Mailer, I did not have his rival distractions, and I had come for a purpose.

Of course the village has had its share of literary celebrity. Even leaving aside Lance Tourney, Camilla and myself, and the dozens who are at this very moment scribbling down their dreams in low-rent fishermen’s cottages all around the harbour, this spot is consecrated by one who came and courted here, and roamed and wrote awhile, and returned famously, full of remorse and rhyme. Many of those who visit today, whose mornings I interrupt and spoil up on the cliffs, are on a sort of pilgrimage and have come to inspect the church and walk the valley, to see the stiff escarpments, to stride the purple strand, to lose themselves in the flounce flinging mists. Don’t think that you detect any irony; you won’t hear a word against such pilgrims from me. After all, Camilla made her living out of them. And I welcome tourists for the very reason that the National Trust fears them: there is a good chance they will eventually wear away the countryside.

The Story Continues on BooksBarbecue!

Enjoyed this preview? ❤️ Do not stop here!

Read the complete book free online → 🔗

Continue reading now on BooksBarbecue and discover every page!

Love reading? Bookmark BooksBarbecue.com for more amazing books!

Happy Reading!