Making the Cat Laugh (25 page)

It is only when one watches several weeks of ‘Crime and Punishment’ television that one realizes how little real-life contact one has with the police. It is rather odd. As a viewer, I feel I am so well acquainted with police procedure I could confidently head a murder enquiry; but at the same time, in real life, I have only twice been inside a police station. Talking recently to the producer of a ‘Cops on the Box’ documentary, I was relieved to find he shared this wildly discrepant experience. In making his
programme, he said, he hired two actors in uniform to sit in an old white Zephyr (in homage to
Z
Cars) and walk shoulder-to-shoulder down whitewashed corridors. At one point, he momentarily forgot where he was, turned round to see these two coppers bearing down on him, and jumped aloft with shock.

Perhaps this explains why it has stuck in my mind, the time long ago when a real-life local CID bloke, taking a statement from me about a bag-snatching, conformed to his image as portrayed by left-wing television playwrights and thereby delivered a bit of a jolt. He had asked what my job was, to which I truthfully replied I was a literary editor on a magazine (
The Listener).
He looked interested, so I elaborated. Publishers sent me their new books, I said, and I commissioned reviews; then I edited them, wrote headlines, laid out pages and corrected proofs. ‘It’s a dog’s life,’ I added cheerfully, in case he thought I was showing off. He thought about it, as if he were going to volunteer for a spot of reviewing (people often did), and then pronounced the words that have niggled me ever since: ‘I expect there’s room for corruption in that.’ I remember how my mind went blank. I said how d’you mean, corruption? You’ve got something people want, he said; it stands to reason they’ll pay for it.

Well naturally I went back to the office next day and shook all the books to see if any fivers fell out, but with no success. I rang up Chatto & Windus and asked for the bribe department, but they denied all knowledge. My detective was evidently wrong in his suspicions. But what alarmed me, obviously, was that this friendly backhander insinuation was the first conversational angle he thought of. While normal people might have said, ‘Do you read all the books?’, ‘What’s Stephen Fry like?’ or ‘So that’s why you smell of book dust and Xerox toner!’, this policeman evidently saw the world as one huge greasy palm, and assumed that everyone else did, too. In retrospect I wish I
had countered more effectively. ‘Detective sergeant, are you?’ I might have said, ‘Gosh, I expect there’s room for reading a novel with a pencil in your hand in that.’

So it took me aback, this encounter, the way corruption came up in the first five minutes I ever spent with a policeman. Especially when, merely out of politeness, I turned the conversation round to him (‘But I expect there’s room for corruption in
your
job?’) and he fobbed me off with a ludicrous story involving a motorist and a ten-bob note. ‘You seem to have left this money in your driving-licence, sir; we must be more careful,’ he had said, apparently, handing it back confused.

In my more paranoid moments I still wonder, though, whether I missed out on something. Whether other literary editors were taking delivery of string bags stuffed with notes in the gents at Waterloo while I was miserably sticking galleys on to layout sheets and getting cow-gum in my eyebrows. The idea of the lit. ed. as wide-boy certainly has its attractions; any gathering of the downtrodden, stoop-gaited chaps (it’s mostly chaps) tells you at a glance that sniffing the bindings is the nearest they get to an illicit activity. So what we obviously require is a culture in which literary editing, not police work, is the theme of tough, uncompromising television shows. ‘I told you,’ the hard-boiled lit. ed. snarls down the phone, while admiring his manicured nails, ‘I want a pony for the Brookner, or the deal’s off.’ The viewing nation would be held in thrall. He’s tough; he’s mean; he edits book reviews. And then, whenever the public chanced to meet a real literary editor in the flesh, they would get the same frisson of second-hand recognition that we currently reserve for the cops.

At the end of last year, when the terrific Radio 4 dramatization of
Little Women
was underway on Thursday mornings (tough
luck for people with jobs), a man wrote to
Woman’s Hour
with an interesting point. Listeners had been challenged to vote on which of Louisa May Alcott’s four March sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, they identified with – which possibly doesn’t sound very interesting, but actually was. For example, some women curiously opted for Meg (sweet, placid, forgettable), and a few even fancied themselves as the vain affected Amy or the timid moribund Beth. However, the majority opted for the splendid heroine Jo – tomboy, literary genius, portrait of the author as a stormy petrel – perhaps because she seems quite modern, but more likely because identification with Jo is what the author so clearly intends. Like a fool, I hadn’t realized this before. I thought I was the only reader who secretly admired Jo March. But it turns out that the adult female world is crammed with undercover Jo fans, all wishing we could scribble up a storm, scorch our frocks, and exclaim ‘Christopher Columbus!’ despite its not being ladylike.

If these names and characters mean nothing to you, I can only say you must blame your classical education. These are female archetypes, mate. How can you possibly understand feminism if you don’t personally recollect the quietly touching scene in which good, wise Mrs March (known as ‘Marmee’) advises her justly furious daughter ‘Never let the sun go down on your anger’? Generations of young female readers have felt so exasperated at this point that they immediately chained themselves to railings or resolved to set fire to something. It all goes very deep. ‘Moral pap for the young’ was how Louisa May Alcott once startlingly described her own books, and the suggestion of a soft, absorbent foodstuff shovelled into girl infants is alarmingly close to the truth as one recalls it. Radio 4’s decision to present
Little Women
and then its sequel
Good Wives
(which finished last week, amid sobs in my house, with Jo’s marriage to the penniless Professor Bhaer) was a brilliant one, if only as a kind of catharsis therapy. All those forgotten,
repressed episodes somehow fundamental to one’s own childhood were dug up publicly and found not to be so ghastly after all.

But what did this chap write in his letter to
Woman’s Hour,
you want to know. Well, he said that having read
Little Women
at an early age, not only had he found it useful in understanding women, but he had honestly needed to enquire no further. As far as female taxonomy went, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy covered the lot. If an occasional hybrid crossed his path (a Meg-Beth, an Amy-Jo-Marmee), it was the work of an instant to sort it into its constituent parts. He spoke as someone who had known multitudes of women – but each of them for a shortish period, presumably, the acquaintance always mysteriously ceasing at the precise moment when she discovered his heavily annotated copy of
Little Women
wedged behind the lavatory-cistern, sussed his creepy game at once and scarpered via the back gate into the sunshine. No woman should stick around with a man who thinks she’s Beth, it’s obvious. When I was twelve years old and chronically ill, my older sister cheerfully said that she saw me as a little Beth, and in my innocence I thought she was being nice. But I realize now the sad, sad truth of the matter, that actually she wanted me to croak.

Four seems to be the standard number for female types: four sisters in
What Katy Did
; four Marys in the famous
Bunty
comic strip; four Golden Girls. When a pilot for a British version of
The Golden Girls
was broadcast recently, the makers obviously couldn’t think of any new female comic humours to depict, so they adhered to the American originals – vain, dim, sardonic, outrageous – so endorsing the unfortunate impression that this is the full range available. Perhaps the number four gives the illusion of all-round choice; I mean, it always worked for Opal Fruits. For the moment, however, I am far too worried about this long-buried identification with Jo March to give it much thought. Good grief, it may even
explain why I am disastrously attracted to old foreign blokes with no money.

If I were Barbie, I would be rather hurt by the general reception given to my new dance work-out video. Amid all the hoots of derision, nobody bothers to see its significance from Barbie’s own point of view – her amazing courage, after those years in a creative desert, to ‘pick up the pieces’ and ‘go out on a limb’. It’s not easy being Barbie, you know. For one thing, how would
you
like it if your boy-friend (Ken) slept in a shoe-box, and melted on contact with radiators? You would feel pretty humiliated, obviously. But remember the publishing disaster of
Fear
of
Bending,
Barbie’s teensy-weensy, reveal-all autobiography? Remember her public miniature fury when Claire Bloom snatched the lead in
A Doll’s House
? Those drunken pavement cat-fights with Tressy outside a small-scale model of the Limelight Club? Those whispers about the itsy-bitsy Betty Ford Clinic? Ah yes, it all comes back to you now, when it’s too late, the damage done.

So why shouldn’t she issue a dance work-out video? One thing to be said for Barbie is that she always kept her figure. Obviously there is a slight danger that if you adhered to Barbie’s rigorous hamstring exercises you might end up with your feet (like hers) permanently pointed in a tip-toe – which means that unless you wear the right high heels, you forever topple forwards and bang your bonce. But otherwise Barbie possesses precisely the same qualities as the other supermodels, whose exercise videos are bestsellers. She is plastic, perfect, self-absorbed, and her hair comes ready-lacquered. However, she is also very, very small; so you can derive a certain comfort from the thought that Richard Gere wouldn’t glance at her twice (unless he crunched her underfoot by mistake).

Whether I shall buy
Dance Work-Out With Barbie
depends on my next fortnightly visit to the ‘Body Sculpt’ class, led by ‘Geri’ at the local gym. A young woman whose abductor muscles are strung so tightly that they are visibly teetering on the edge of a breakdown, Geri is beginning to annoy me. She is Australian, white-blonde, long-legged and deep-tanned, with a face like Rosanna Arquette. She wears skimpy Lycra ensembles in purple and lime green with large interesting peep-holes cut from the sides, just to show that in places where the rest of us have grey-white crêpey stuff (which cries aloud for elasticated containment, ‘Pants! Give us pants!’), she has taut brown skin, and that’s all. I am beginning to hate the body sculpt class. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of myself in the wall-to-wall mirror, lumbering out of step, and I think, ‘I don’t have to do this,
Woodrow Wyatt doesn’t do this.
’ Which shows to what levels of mental desiccation an envy of somebody’s lime-green peep-holes can plunge you.

Barbie’s work-out is for five-year-olds, of course. But so, in a way, is the body sculpt class. In fact, few experiences in adult life so readily evoke the wretched emotions of the infants’ playground as to be led in a mindless game of mimicry by a tyrannical bimbo shouting above the music, ‘Do this! Now do that! Back to this, again! Four of these! Two and two! Left leg, right leg, right leg, left leg! Left leg, right leg, right leg, left leg!’ Noticeably, there is no camaraderie among Geri’s brutalized troupe – just as there is none when you are five years old – so you can’t heckle ‘Make your mind up, woman!’ and expect to get a laugh and a breather. Under Geri’s tutelage, the goody-goodies get all the steps right, the others do their earnest best, while I, the only no-hoper, clap my hands at the wrong moments and pray privately that the bell will soon ring for Two-Times Tables or Finger-Painting.

I wish Barbie success with her video. Children don’t need it, obviously, but it will be good for the rest of us to face facts.
See this dolly? This is what you want to look like. This is what Geri looks like. But in any other context she’d look very, very stupid. Apparently, in the video, Barbie doesn’t do much of the actual dancing; someone called Kim takes over. Meanwhile Barbie presumably has a lie-down, phones her analyst, and then smokes a minuscule cigarette from a tiny box. Honestly, if this is a role-model for today’s children, I think we have little to fear.