Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions (24 page)

It gave me the energy to do something as weird as write a fairy story in the middle of a nightmare. There's no more absolute thing than a promise to your child. You can't break it.'

The new book can and will be read as a fantastical commentary on the author's situation. Such a reading is no doubt naive, but purity of literary response is another privilege that Rushdie must resign himself to losing — for now.
All
his books suddenly seem to predict and explore his present situation, and parts of
The Satanic Verses
are almost vulgarly prescient ('Your blasphemy, Salman, can't be forgiven . . . To set your words against the Words of God . . .'). In any case
Haroun
is a minor classic of passionate invention. The change in genre is after all quite seamless: what is 'magical realism' but the wishful laxity of a child's imagination? Here are the stories that Rushdie wanted to tell his child. More than that, though, you also see the child in Rushdie - his delight, his mischief, his innocence, his eager heart.

Asked if he has a plan for the future, Rushdie says, 'A
plan.
Well, "plan" would be a rather glorified word for it.' His survival, like his capacity for hope, will continue to be a matter of daily improvisation. From time to time one hears a statement from Tehran along the following lines: that if Rushdie (a) admits he was wrong (b) renounces the paperback (c) recalls and pulps the hardback (d) makes extensive reparations and (e) becomes a devout muslim, it
still
won't be enough. What will be enough? The tone of the challenge makes one think of the lovelorn, the wounded adolescent. It could almost be a less benign and forgiving Haroun. Fill the ocean with your tears. Cry me a river.

Once Rushdie got going on his fairy story all the difficulties fell away. He wrote the first draft in two and a half months; he wrote the second in two weeks — 'at enormous speed. A chapter a day.' The breakthrough was unrelated to any change in circumstance. It had to do with the framing of the first sentence, 'which seemed to contain a lot of energy. It was like a tuning-fork.' And Rushdie quotes it:

There was once, in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name.

But the reader is already sad, already moved and haunted, by the book's dedication (an acrostic) which refers to enforced distance, to a sense of thwarted homing, and to a lost time that no Happy Ending can redress:

Z embla, Zenda, Xanadu:

A 11 our dream-worlds may come true.

F airy lands are fearsome too.

A s I wander far from view, R ead, and bring me home to you.

Vanity Fair, 1990

POKER NIGHT

GQ
magazine asked me and four other writers (A. Alvarez, John Graham, Anthony Holden and David Mamet) to spend an evening playing poker and then report on the experience for its pages. The fee was paid in advance and in the form of poker chips:
£500.
The game was to be Texas Hold 'em: two cards each, face down (bet); three shared cards, face up, known as 'the flop' (bet); a fourth shared card, face up, known as 'Fourth Street' (bet); a fifth shared card, face up, known as 'Fifth Street' (bet).

A man can find out a lot about himself, playing poker. Is he brave? Is he cool? Does he have any money left? I am obliged to say that I felt pretty hip and well-hung for much of the evening, in that little paradise of the private room, with its pro dealer, its full bar, its pleasant company, its complimentary poker chips — and the oncoming cards, from which hope unceasingly springs. By the end of the evening, I confess, I was feeling much less formidable: much less butch, and much less rich. But what an enthralling process. When can I go through it again?

From the start I sensed that I was the
rabbit
(the easy mark). This suspicion, along with all the free money, had a liberating effect on me, Unlike the scarred sharpers I faced, I wasn't bringing any rep to the table. I hadn't
sat down
for a decade, and had never played hold 'em. Originally, the fashionable poker variant was draw; then stud; then, during my brief heyday (in my late teens I played every night for three years), it was seven-card high-low. Now it's hold 'em, the purists' game, with its austere and subtle variations on the theme of the shared five cards.

When you sit down, you confront the force fields of opposed personalities. You shouldn't do this (it's a callow distraction), but you do. You look around for someone to bully, someone to be scared of. I found John Graham, the noted bridge player, to be easily the most emotional presence at the table: his operatic profile, tranced pauses, flustered raises. He is all joker, all wild card: he seems regularly astonished by his own unpredictability. As it happened, he lost; and was soon eagerly into a thousand pounds of his own money. But on another night you could imagine him cleaning you out with a jack high.

Al Alvarez I took to be an expert percentage man, interspersing his play with the occasional and prohibitive bluffs that his accuracy earns him. Al's style is as metronomic as the wheezing of his pipe. He won't come in often; when he does, you can't wait to get out of the way. But it was Anthony Holden who appeared to me to possess the most dangerous mixture of froth and flair. Tony is toney; he has his Vegas mannerisms: the exaggerated slouch, the languidly scornful flickaway of the dead cards. When the pot gets high, the hour late, and you need to see what he has in the hole, then the lounge lizard melds into a loanshark. Like his mentor Al Alvarez, Holden writes whole books about hold 'em. He is the Imam of hold 'em. He is practically
called
Holdem.

David Mamet was the only stranger. The others were familiar presences (I have known Tony for twenty years, Al for thirty) but Mamet I had only glimpsed electronically — on the small screen. There, he struck me as someone who had been put together by an Atlantic City biochemist; a human construction called
POKER 1
. The opacity, the staring stillness, the transcendental inscrutablity. In addition, Mamet is American, and what's more he wrote
House of Games,
that tour de force of manic hazardry and compound deceit. On top of all this he was only drinking
tea.
Son of a bitch . . . Men with a sheen of silence easily intimidate their fellows (these helpless prattlers); we imbue that silence with an unblinking censoriousness — or with our own self-doubt. Anyway, it's perfect for poker. Humanly, David Mamet opened up over the course of the evening. But his style remained impeccably closed. I felt very potent and twinkly when I called an early bluff of his, and was then reduced to a pale onlooker as he slowly bled me white.

Oh, we all talk tough at the table ('it's not about reality', 'it's all ifs and buts', 'you gotta speculate to accumulate') and then go home and sob in our wives' arms: tears of loss, tears of gorgeous relief. As you play, unfamiliar chemicals flood the body — money chemicals. In the colour-coded diagram, you could portray them as poker chips, helixed and value-stamped. Money is the language of poker. A defeat at chess leaves you flattened, chastened, but not visibly poorer. In poker, defeat means a submission to a more worldly power. It's tough out there. And it's tough in here. The winner's silence says to you:
That's
why I'm rock-hard.
That's
why I'm ice-cold. If I weren't, do you think I could get through this either?

1990

Postscript:
Anthony Holden was the big winner (well over a thousand pounds); David Mamet doubled his money; Al Alvarez lost, and John Graham lost heavily, as they say; I came out with £200 of the magazine's money. But then I had to write the piece, Holden, in effect, was paid £2 a word for his contribution; I was paid 25p.

JOHN LENNON

In my teens I had a friend called Barry who resembled John Lennon to a disconcerting degree: the fluted nose, the beaked mouth, the eyelids thin and insolent. Barry's method of accumulating girlfriends was laborious but original. All day he studied the Ten Pals' section of
Beatles Monthly.
He selected the girls who lived preferably no more than a few hundred yards from where he lived, and wrote to them, enclosing a photograph of himself (complete with peaked Lennon cap; later with rimless spectacles), and the signature 'Barry Lennon' - or 'Buddy Lennon', depending on his mood.

In crew-necked Beatles jacket and chelsea boots with cuban heels, I often made up the foursomes that Barry would subsequently arrange. He would present himself now as Lennon's kid brother, now as his cousin, now as some more exotic relation (co-foundling, for instance) — sometimes, I think, as Lennon himself.

We were well up on Beatle lore. We knew that John was five feet eleven (as were Paul and George: mascot Ringo, of course, was five feet eight), that his taste in clothes encompassed 'anything casual', the sort of jellybabies he liked, the characteristics of his wife and his child - who was Barry's little nephew, after all. Considering his other plentiful demerits, Barry's success with his pen pals was very consistent. As I went along with it all, as Barry Lennon's sidekick and gofer, I sensed that the girls - though unquenchably gullible

— really saw through Barry's imposture. But they didn't want to break the illusion of proximity, and neither did I.

John Lennon was born in 1940. Barry and I were born in 1949, and so were well placed to have our teenage years utterly dominated by the Beatles and their music. As a thirteen-year-old I witnessed their first-ever TV appearance

—  on some innocuous news-and-views show that I usually watched on my return from school. They sang 'Love Me Do'. I knew at once that they would become a part of my life. Shortly afterwards I made a five-shilling bet with my father, who claimed that the Beatles would be more or less forgotten within a year. When the time came for him to pay up, he confessed to a liking for one or two of their songs. My mother was a devoted fan. Everyone was.

Initially regarded as wanton and subversive figures -after all, they reinvented long hair — the Beatles quickly established their family appeal, an appeal nurtured by their manager Brian Epstein. The lovable moptops, the Fab Four, turned out to be nice lads really - to nationwide sighs of parental relief . . . But John Lennon remained a wayward and unpredictable element, thwarting the homogenisation that Epstein clearly had in mind. Musically and personally, Lennon gave the Beatles their edge.

He mugged to camera and taunted comperes. He coined or at any rate popularised the phrase 'Little girls should be obscene and not heard.' In interviews he could be very funny or, alternatively, very unfunny. He published two books of prattling word-play,
In His Own Write
and
A Spaniard in the Works.
He got drunk and caused scuffles in restaurants and clubs.

As song-writers and lead singers, Lennon and McCartney captured and divided the fans, while George and Ringo were mere innocent bystanders. There was something over-cute and chirpy about Paul; he wanted to be loved not only by your mother but by your grandmother too. Preferring Paul to John was like preferring Cliff Richard to Elvis Presley, or Donovan to Dylan. John was the leader; he was his own man. After their musical summit in the late Sixties, with
Rubber Soul, Sergeant Pepper
and
The White Album,
it became clear to me and a million other anxious readers of the rock press that the Beatles' days were numbered. And we all knew that it was John who was breaking away.

In the old days, Barry reminded me of Lennon. Later on, Lennon reminded me of Barry — trend-crazed Barry, a fantasist, a chameleon. Barry was now having a terrible time trying to stay abreast of Lennon's startling changes in appearance and philosophy. Having created the Swinging Sixties, Lennon became a hold-all for the thronging credulities of the next decade, a decade whose demise coincided with his own.

Lennon's career in the early Seventies reads like a telex of banal headlines and captions. Lennon returns his MBE; meets with Pierre Trudeau; John and Yoko take out advertisements praising peace; they consort with the Maharishi, Timothy Leary, assorted minor gurus; LSD, cocaine, heroine; beard, shades, crew-cut, scalplock; bed-ins, bag-ins, be-ins, in-ins . . . Then Lennon 'got tired of waking up in the papers'. He succumbed to depression and hermitism. He became a 'househusband', rearing his son and baking bread at home while Yoko went out acquiring real estate. Their dream was to buy up the whole of the Dakota, the
Rosemary's Baby
mansion block on Central Park West. When questioned about this, Yoko once said, 'The thing is, John never had a house of his own.'

Separated from the melodic balance of the Beatles, Lennon's music became harsh and spikey, occasionally memorable and moving but more often strident and sloganising. He died just as his lyric talent seemed to be resurfacing. What took him to America was a desire not just for (comparative) anonymity but also for the teeming classlessness of New York. His murder was very typical of the city — flukey and meaningless. Deaths of this kind are what happens when the Warhol catchphrase - Everyone a Star - teams up with psychopathology. In New York that night, Lennon met up with the wrong kind of Barry.

Like countless others I played the Beatles' records into the turntable. They measured out my teens. Any Beatles track instantly transfers me to a specific segment of my past. When I heard of Lennon's death I felt a sense of shock well beyond what I felt at the deaths of the Kennedys and Luther King. I suffered this shock as it were helplessly. I thought of Barry - dreaming Barry, who bought two copies of 'Strawberry Fields' in case he broke one on the way home. I can only guess at his present sufferings. For both of us the past will never be the same again.

Observer, 1980