'No thought explodes as softly as a feather bomb'

HOW I CAME TO WRITE THE NICOTINE CAT 

‘Then seek no more out of thyself to find
The thing that thou hast sought so long before,
For thou shalt find it sitting in the mind.’
From Thomas Wyatt’s Second Satire 

Writing is solitaire played by a lone diner. Throw down your cards. Call it a poem when it sings. Prose when it speaks for itself. But both these hands come with an exclamation mark. It’s the give away. The loner has doubts about himself, and orders a lump of sugar with his cognac. It’s called a canard as you duck it.  Impressing French waiters is the last refuge of the insecure. 

Scribble a phrase like ‘the cat is on the mat’. It gives every appearance of solid sense. But you only have to look into the cat’s eyes to realise the mat is just a surface illusion. The world behind it darts around. The cat is getting ready to leap. And before you can say ‘boo’, it’s out of the bag. All the letters up in the air.  ‘Since words are beyond us, let us pretend to be their organisers’, says Jean Cocteau.  

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has a hundred thousand words, Samuel Johnson’s forty one thousand. Shakespeare had fourteen thousand on the go, Racine and the average adult have three thousand, and three year olds, twelve hundred. Marianne, our family French doll, had two words, bon jour. Or is it one? Moi, I say to myself. There’s a lot to be said for a quiet word.

I didn’t say much as a child, but I learned to talk with my hands. I was fingered to become the animator of a magic lantern show, a musician or a dentist. But when my father died an interest in numbers took over. As an incipient scientist in the nineteen seventies I only communicated with them. I handed the numbers over to my boss, Malcombe, and he put them into words. My hero was a biologist in Dundee whose life achievement was to get a layer of the skin removed from the textbooks. Clynoblasts. I was dedicated to diminishing returns. Malcombe called me The Incredible Shrinking Research Assistant (1957), drawing from a film that ends with the young man disappearing with the words, ‘God has no zero – so I still exist’. 

Things changed in the nineteen eighties when I discovered Virchow’s Law, ‘Medicine is a social science, and politics nothing else but medicine on a large scale’. The world outside entered my work (or was it the other way round?). It seemed right to give it some attention. I wanted to be a social reformer, in a small way. I had an idea or two that could be put into practice. I translated my numbers into words before showing them to Malcombe. I was no longer the lone diner playing solitaire. 

My ideas were small ones. All the better to be taken up, I thought. Malcombe showed me the way. Fog’s Readability Index. It was used in advertising to promote information for popular consumption. Fog’s Index measured the number of syllables in words, the word-count between full stops, and their common currency. The index estimated at what reading age a form of words could be understood. Malcombe told me the target for those who held the purse strings was thirteen years of age, and seven for the general public. 

Fog was like playing jigsaw puzzles. Sentences were the pieces and words had to fit into them. This one-dimensional flattening of language conflicted with my rage for expression. I did not subscribe to the young Brecht’s notion, ‘Unlike underwear we do not change our vocabulary. It belongs to nobody and everybody and so it never gets washed. Words in the end are the dead bodies of things’ (Journals, 1920). I inclined my ear to an expanding universe in which every word, new and old, is given its chance. As they come to you, weigh and consider their value, and recycle them as the fancy takes. 

I revolted against the incredibly shrinking Fog, and though I never used the word ‘numinous’ when applying for money, or promoting the ideas in leaflets and press releases, I allowed metaphors, and once a covert quotation from Montaigne (‘There is merit in exchanging a bad situation for an uncertain one’). The civil servants took it to be the latest jargon cascading down.  Moreover, I made the odd joke for the general public, who didn’t seem to mind. Malcombe calculated the reading age of my communications was at least forty-six (my age at the time), and even though the bids were no less successful, or not, than before, he was relieved when in the late nineteen nineties a command came from above - all official reports or leaflets related to public health were to be standardised using a grid. 

When the Fog of officialdom descended, and the politics of work became Virchow impossible, I took myself off with a sigh of regret, tempered by the feeling that it was about time. I escaped to a port town on the border between France and Spain where I didn’t know either language. I had enough of words and numbers. But gradually, through the language of human kindness, I began to notice other people behind the vines and cactuses, and their cats. It brought me back to my childhood, for a second time. I was learning again to speak, listen and live a little. Above all I was listening to the voices in my head. Who was talking to me? I jotted down what I heard as though taking dictation, and in no time I had several notebooks on the go. I called them chronicles. What I thought I knew about sport, God, trivia, philosophy etc I weaved into a tapestry and gave them a story.
   
And so emerged The Nicotine Cat and Other People. The cat is out of the bag. I’ve had feedback from two characters that are in it. Welsh, my drinking companion, said, ‘You’ve put the fun back into the fundamental’. Joab Comfort, who hadn’t yet finished it, said, ‘It’s a leisurely read’. Augustus himself should be allowed the last word.   

‘I’m sitting on the bench in my jardin sauvage, a reconverted parking space, reading the stardust column of the morning newspaper, when I hear the sound of kissing. It is coming from the building across the road, the third floor. I thought it might be a turtledove. But no. A plump woman is leaning over the balcony in a flouncy peignoir, moumou-ing me shamelessly. Three little kisses followed by a prolonged loud one. I can see she’s of a certain age. As I am, I suppose, but I’m taken aback when she starts the kissing cycle again, until I notice that the beige feral cat that everybody thinks is cute has settled under my seat. He is unmoved.’