I’m an admirer of Howard Jacobson’s articles in The Independent, so I’ve been trying his novels. I’ve just completed The Act of Love, which was published last year and which is reminiscent of a novel by Daphne Du Maurier. Although it is written with far more sophistication, The Act of Love has the same melodrama, the same air of menace and doom, and the same theme of abject thraldom to a love object.
Like a thriller it begins at a funeral, where Felix the narrator spots his nemesis Marius:-
“How can you tell on so brief an appraisal (and most of it from behind) that a man is an absentee libertine, that he lights fires and doesn’t stop to see them blaze, that at the last he’d sooner withhold a sexual favour than confer one, I can’t explain. Perhaps that sort of sadism shows in the curvature of the spine. Perhaps I’m just good at seeing what I want to see.”
Well, HOW can you, as Kingsley Amis would say. But I’m ready to drop realism and be taken along by Felix as the teller of a tale made out of guesses and hints and his ricocheting imagination because that’s what love and jealousy do – they make you imagine, fiercely and painfully. Felix says, “I viewed Marius pornographically. Whatever the reality of him, he played the archetypal role in that book-fed theatre of riot and melodrama that was my sexual imagination.”
Felix sees himself in literary context as the mari complaisant and the masochist first described by Leopold von Sachre-Masoch, who wrote Venus in Furs. Felix is jealousy’s Don Quixote who has read too many books about love and adultery for the good of his sanity. He is a conspiracy theorist about his own life. No gesture is random, no word without a charged meeting, no dot can be left unconnected to another dot.
“No husband is ever happy – truly, genitally happy, happy at the very heart of himself as a husband – until he has proof positive that another man is fucking her.”
Like Lolita The Act of Love is the story of an unnatural love told by a highly cultivated man. Scenes occur in art galleries, at classical concerts, and after performances of Shakespeare.
The main plot is a love triangle, with lines of connection drawn to former spouses and lovers. Felix engineers that his wife Marisa and the demon Marius have an affair, so he can hear and brood over the details of it. Whereas Marius is the all-conquering male figure, Marisa is the enigmatic woman. She’s a trustafarian with a degree in art history who wears perfect clothes and conducts love affairs, not out of anything as mundane as lasciviousness but more from a refined curiosity. But in spite of her physicality being insisted upon and her habits being endlessly described she is merely a well dressed object of desire. She doesn’t come to the life that Du Maurier can give to her inspirers of obsessive love.
Still, characterisation is not all and there is plenty in this novel to enjoy, conveyed through the elegant prose. The action takes place in Marylebone, around the corner from the Wallace Collection, and we are taken on a tour around the gallery, because one of the themes of the book, expressly stated, is how high art and literature are the embroidery and drapes over naked desire. They clothe lust in grandeur. The novel is erotic through a suggestiveness and a dressed up quality, the silky shirts, the handsome surroundings, the secretiveness, the glamour. Whereas– and Howard Jacobson would know this, you can see the critic at work along with the novelist – a closely described orgy of fetishists is graphically described and a sexual downer.
Felix recounts his visit to a brothel where he experiences the toolkit of masochism:-
“But I didn’t enjoy anything we tried. Not the crop, not the cat-o’-nine-tails, not the bullwhip, not the wheel, not the cage, not the manacles, not the ball lock, not the bit gag, not the cock ring, not the butt plug, not the separator, not the speculum, not the fisting sling, not the nipple clamps, not the bollock stocks, not the kneeling bench, not the hogtie bars, not the spanking horse, not the queening chair, and in the end not even her [the prostitute guide’s] company.”
Dark comedy mixes with the exquisite perversity. It adds up to an atmosphere of rarefied decadence as in Huysman’s A Rebours, though upper middle class rather than aristocratic. Huysman’s hero had a knowledge of obscure Latin authors. Howard Jacobson’s allusions are to English literature, and after returning from a production of Othello ( a motif in this novel about marital jealousy) his characters converse thus:-
Marisa said. . . “Doesn’t Othello say he’d have been happy for the camp to taste Desdemona’s body provided he knew nothing about it.”
“Desdemona’s sweet body,” I corrected her, since we were swapping emphases.
“But knowing nothing about it.”
“That’s what he says, yes.”
Marisa appeared to reflect on this. “You would, I suppose, argue that he does not wallow in the idea of Desdemona’s defilement any the less for imagining himself ignorant of it.”
I nodded.
“I think I’d go further,” she said, her eyes suddenly become hooded. [Shouldn’t that be “becoming” rather than become?] “I think the not knowing turns the screws of jealousy even more exquisitely.”
“As long as you know you don’t know – is that what you’re saying?”
“As long as you don’t know whether there is anything to know.”
These eighth-tone changes of emphasis are like those in the conversations in Henry James’s novels – and of course Howard Jacobson would know that too.
‘“That was in another country,” he’d say, leaving her to complete the quotation.’ And some of us can – from Eliot’s quoting those lines from the Jew of Malta – “and now the wench is dead.” Flattering indeed. Less so when the allusions switched to Robbe-Grillet, whom I haven’t read.
In Marius’s past is Elspeth, who had run off with him to her ultimate misery.
“To her friends – those who remained – she referred to him as the Dark Lord of Morgroth. . . like Morgroth, Marius had fallen from airy grace into evil darkness, yet still she loved him. That she continued to call him Morgroth, however, knowing how much he despised her for confusing Tolkien with literature, suggests her anger towards him was real. . . . Elspeth believed that things were all right with them again, and would be until their ship at last reached the shores of the Uttermost West, dwelling place of the lords and queens of the Valar.”
Morgroth is a more potent figure than Lucifer, Valar than Arcadia or paradise. Never mind how bad Tolkien’s books are. From them have come figures, landscapes and moods – archetypes in fact. Howard Jacobson needed those Tolkien archetypes, however apologetically he introduces them.
Well, a novel by a literary bloke about a literary bloke for literary readers. I’ve got literary tastes and enjoyed it, as someone who was interested in naval history would enjoy Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander series. I admired the beautifully judged prose. But I did scratch my head over the odd sexual behaviour of the protagonists. That part of The Act of Love me feel like a sturdy New Zealand peasant, who used to push the cowshit out of the yard into the slurry pit. So that’s what those haut bourgeois London folk get up to?
