Making the Cat Laugh. Lynne Truss
early days at the hotel, where my fellow diners often drew attention to my book at meal times.
I had thought it was funny, then, the way their friendly comments would have sounded frankly presumptuous had I been seated with a bloke instead. How would a chap react, I wondered, if strangers kept leaning over him to say to me, ‘Gosh, that’s a big one,’ and ‘But I can’t say I fancy it myself’?
Oh, what a Jezebel I used to be, when it came to books. ‘Use ’em up and cast ’em aside’ was my motto, as I notched up conquests on the bedpost, and blew smoke rings at the ceiling. I made bibliophile a dirty word. ‘Use it gently, won’t you?’ people said when they lent me books, and I laughed, callously, with a succession of’ Heh!’ noises. Living dangerously, I defied P.J. O’Rourke’s prudent advice that you should always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it. Let death surprise me in flagrante with the Jeeves Omnibus, I cared not.
And now here I am, stuck in terminal monogamy with Possession, a book I shall certainly die in the middle of, because I shall never finish it.
I keep reading the same bits over and over again, you see, because the story glances off my imagination without sticking. ‘Try skim-reading,’ my friends advise me, but I am not that kind of girl. I weep, I rage, I do the kneeling and hammering thing on the carpet. But the book remains calm and implacable on the coffee table, its nice blue ribbon marking my place. I complain about Possession to my mum on the phone (‘We just don’t get on, mum’), and she says loyally: ‘Why don’t you bust up, like you did with old whatsisname, Henry James, that time?’
Sometimes, when you are unhappy in a relationship, it is good to talk about it. But it breaks your heart to think how casually it was undertaken in the first place. I mean, I only thought, ‘Better not take a funny book’ (since it sometimes disturbs people’s dinners when you suddenly bark explosively, sending bits of half-digested bread roll across the room); and ‘I won’t take any Anita Brookner, especially not the ones about lonely old maids reading in restaurants.’
Of such chance decisions are our manacles forged.
It is no good regretting it now. It is no good thinking of Dorothy Parker’s famous line, ‘This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly, it should be thrown with great force.’ I sit glumly in my living room, humming the tune to ‘A Fine Romance’ in a minor key, and guiltily running my eyes over the books pages of newspapers while pretending not to.
Possession does not satisfy me: it is as simple as that. And all I can do is pace outside Waterstone’s on wet afternoons, feverishly wondering whether I dare run in, grab a copy of Madame Bovary and take it on an illicit ride in a cab.
News Stories That Captured My Imagination
I would like you to imagine the following narrative and see what is wrong with it. A woman, in Virginia, drives at top speed away from the house where she has just severed her husband’s penis. She is by nature a long-suffering person (as evidenced by her placid acceptance of her married name – Bobbitt – with all its connotations of finger puppets), but under the strain of the relationship she has finally snapped like a dry stick, and now she hares away from the grisly scene. She tosses the offending pizzle from the car window and drives on. All this may sound implausible, but in credibility terms it is easy meat compared with the next bit. For, shortly after, the police arrive, locate the member, pack it in ice and nee-naw it to a hospital (doubtless singing encouraging songs to it, to keep its peck – I mean, er, to boost its morale), where it is successfully reattached to a grateful Mr Bobbitt.
Now my point is this. If you leave a trowel in the long grass next to the shed, you can’t find it, can you? If you drop a clothes-peg on the kitchen floor and it bounces sideways, it can disappear for weeks. Yet for some reason Mr Bobbitt’s severed member was found easily by the side of a busy road. Is this not suspicious? If I were Mr Bobbitt, what would really worry me right now is not the imminent outcome of the court case against Mrs Bobbitt, nor even the off-colour willy-jokes at my expense (‘It will never stand up in court,’ and so on). No, I would be thinking: do I have the right willy? What if those well-meaning state troopers, scouring the dusty roadside (‘There it is! We got it!’), actually located somebody else’s?
You may not remember the old German film The Hands of Orlac, but it is relevant, I promise. The plot concerned a virtuoso pianist who by a crushing misfortune loses both his hands in a railway accident, but whose career is ostensibly saved when a scientist secretly sews on some donor hands belonging to a freshly hanged murderer, whose dexterous speciality happened to be strangling and knife-throwing. Doubtless you can see where this is leading. The post-operative pianist peers at his big mitts (‘They don’t look like mine,’ he comments, but tragically lets it pass), and then tries to practise some scales, only to find that – musically speaking – his new fingers have ‘Geest’ and ‘Fyffes’ written all over them. It is peculiar. Then one day his fiancée’s newspaper is snatched by a gust of wind, and he automatically picks up a Sabatier, yells ‘Leave this to me!’, and hurls the knife with such deadly accuracy that it nails the paper to the floor. Naturally, there is a significant pause while she looks at him, and he looks at the knife, and then they both look at his sewn-on hands, with glum expressions.
Reports of Mr Bobbitt’s operation tell us it was only partially successful. In other words, it is not the willy that it used to be. Enough said, I think. Much attention Stateside has focused on the advisability of women taking the law into their own hands, and on the disturbing idea that here, in the Bobbitt emasculation, is the most terrifying of all female revenges. But of course it isn’t, not by a long measure. A proper job would involve detailed pre-planning, and in particular the planting of a look-alike willy on a main road (a stand-in!), possibly next to a large sign with ‘I think this is what you’re looking for, officer’ written in large letters upon it. In the sweetest of all possible revenges, Mr Bobbitt would therefore emerge from his anaesthetic and say, ‘Funny, doesn’t look like mine,’ but cast such doubt immediately from his thoughts, as impossibly far-fetched.
Tattooed serial numbers would seem to be the answer, if any man is worried. But I doubt Mrs Bobbitt with her kitchen knife has started a trend, or anything. Most women are rightly repulsed by the idea of mutilation; if there is a nasty cackle of joy among certain feminists at the Bobbitt news, it’s just that there is something irresistibly hilarious at the idea of standing between a man and his willy, for however brief a span. I just hope the Hollywood Bobbitt films have thought of the Orlac angle. It would be a shame not to grab it up, rush it to the studios, and stitch it on sharpish. After all, it wouldn’t even matter if it didn’t quite fit.
‘Bob Dylan has been spotted looking at property in Crouch End …’ Scene: The well-furnished drawing-room of a large house in Crouch End, north London, one afternoon in August. Birds twitter in the garden beyond; a doorbell rings; a dog barks. From the hallway, a small shriek of surprise is followed by low murmurings of welcome. The door to the drawing-room opens briefly and an estate agent is heard to say, ‘Upstairs first, I think,’ before a woman, evidently distraught, rushes in, slams the door and grabs the telephone. She dials and waits, screwing up her face and tap-dancing on the parquet in anguish and impatience. Finally her call is answered by a man with a German accent.
WOMAN: Doctor Fiegelman? Thank God you’re there. It’s happening again.
DR FIEGELMAN (on phone): Go on.
WOMAN (with strangled cry): It’s Bob Dylan, doctor. He wants to buy the house.
DR F: Mein Gott, this is serious. Are you sitting down?
WOMAN: No.
DR F: I think you should sit down.
The woman miserably slides down the wall until she is sitting on the floor.
WOMAN (whispering): Done it.
DR F: Good. Now, taking your time, what exactly is it that makes you think Bob Dylan