by Will Self
You mustn’t misunderstand me, in a manner of speaking Janner and I were best friends. Actually, that is a little strong, it was rather that it was us against the rest – Janner and I versus the entire faculty and the entire student body combined.
I suppose I now realise that my feelings are not Janner’s responsibility and they never were. He just had the misfortune to come along at that point in my life where I was open to the idea of mystery. Janner took the part of Prospero; I gnashed and yowled – and somewhere on the island lurked the beautiful, the tantalising, the Ur-Bororo.
Not everyone has the opportunity to experience a real mystery in their lives. I at least did, even if the disillusionment that has followed the resolution of my mystery sometimes seems worse than the shuttered ignorance I might otherwise have enjoyed. This then is the story of a rite of passage. A coming of age that took ten years to arrive. And although it was my maturity that was at issue, it is Janner who is the central character of this story.
I can believe that in a more stimulating environment, somewhere where intellectual qualities are admired and social peculiarities sought after, Janner would have been a tremendous success. He was an excellent conversationalist, witty and informed. And if there was something rather repulsive about the way catarrh gurgled and huffled up and down his windpipe when he was speaking, it was more than compensated for by his animation, his excitement, and his capacity for getting completely involved with ideas.
Janner and I weren’t appreciated by the rest of the student body at Reigate. We thought them immature and pathetic, with their passé, hippy hair and consuming passion for incredibly long guitar solos. I dare say they thought nothing of us at all. We were peripheral.
You guessed it; I was jealous. I didn’t want to be sectioned off with waxy Janner. I wanted to be mingling my honeyed locks with similar honeyed locks to the sound of those stringed bagpipes. I wanted to provide an ideal arterial road for crabs, but I wasn’t allowed to play. It was the students in the arts faculties who were at the centre of most of the cliques. If, like me, you were reading geography and physical education, you were ruled out of court – especially if you didn’t look right, or talk right. Without these essential qualifications I was marginalised. At school my ability to do the four hundred metres hurdles comfortably under fifty seconds had made me a hero; at Reigate it was derided.
Ostracised by the cliques that mattered I found Janner, and I’ve lived to regret it. If only I’d poached my brain with psychotropics! Today I could be living a peaceful life, haggling with a recalcitrant DHSS official in rural Wales, or beating a damp strip of carpet hung over a sagging clothesline outside some inner-city squat. Janner cheated me out of this, his extreme example bred my moderation. At nineteen I could have gone either way.
I cemented my friendship with Janner during long walks in what passed for countryside around Reigate. Even at that time this part of Surrey was just the odds and ends that had been forgotten in the clashes between adjacent municipalities. The irregular strips of grey and brown farmland, the purposeless concrete aprons stippled with weeds and the low, humped downs covered with sooty, stained scrub. We traversed them all and as we walked he talked.
Janner was an anthropology student. Now, of course, he is The Anthropologist, but in those days he was simply one student among several, five to be precise. Quite why Reigate had a department of anthropology was a mystery to most of the faculty and certainly to the students. Hardly anyone knew about the Lurie Foundation, who had endowed it, and – even I didn’t know until years later – why.
During the time Janner and I were at Reigate (you could hardly say ‘up’ at Reigate) the department was run by Dr Marston. He was a striking-looking man. To say he had a prognathous jaw would have been a gross understatement. His jaw shot out in a dead flat line from his neck and went on travelling for quite a while. Looking at the rest of his face the most obvious explanation was that his chin was desperately trying to escape his formidably beetling brows. These rolled down over his eyes like great lowering storm clouds. Add to this two steady black eyes, tiny little teeth, a keel for a nose, and a mouth trying to hide behind a fringe of savagely cut black beard, and you had someone whose skull looked as if it had been assembled in an attempt to perpetrate a nineteenth-century hoax.
To see Dr Marston and Janner talking to one another was to feel that one was witnessing the meeting between two different species that had just discovered a mutual language. Not that I saw them together that often; Dr Marston had no time for me, and Janner, after his first year, was excused from regular attendance at the college and allowed to get on with his own research.
I think it would be fair to say (and please remember that this is a turn of phrase resolved solely for the use of the extremely opinionated and the hopelessly diffident) that during that year I received a fairly comprehensive anthropological education at second hand. Janner had very little interest in what I was studying. At best he used my scant geographical knowledge as a sort of card index, and when he was discoursing on the habits and customs of this or that isolated people he would consult my internal map of the world. For most of the time we were together I listened and Janner talked.
Janner talked of the pioneers in his field. He was in awe of the colossal stature of the first men and women who had aspired to objectivity in relation to the study of humankind. He talked to me of their theories and hypotheses, their intrigues and battles, their collections of objects and artefacts, and came back again and again, as we strode round and round the brown hills, to their fieldwork.
For Janner all life was a prelude to fieldwork. Reigate was only an antechamber to the real world. A world in which Janner wanted to submerge himself completely – in order to become a pure observer. He was unmoved by the relativistic, structuralist and post-structuralist theories of anthropology with their painful concern with the effect of the observer on the observed. Janner had no doubts; as soon as he got into the field he would effectively disappear, becoming like a battery of sensitive recording devices hidden in a tree. His whole life was leading up to this pure period of observation. Janner wanted to be the ultimate voyeur. He wanted to sit on a kitchen chair in the corner of the world and watch while societies played with themselves.
When Janner wasn’t telling me about infibulation among the Tuareg or Shan propitiation ceremonies, he was sharing with me the fruits of his concerted observation of Reigate society. Janner was intrigued by Reigate. He saw it as a unique society at a crucial point in its development.
Walking with him, up by the county hospital, or down in the network of lanes that formed the old town, I would squirm with embarrassment as Janner stopped passersby; milkmen, clerks and housewives. Janner encouraged them to talk about themselves, their lives, and what they were doing, just like that; impromptu, with no explanation. Needless to say they invariably obliged, and usually fulsomely.
As we passed cinema queues or discos on our interminable walks, or stopped off at cafés to eat bacon sandwiches, Janner would shape and form what he observed into a delicate tableau of practice, ritual and belief. Reigate was for him a ‘society’ and as such was as worthy of respect as any other society. It was not for him to judge the relative values of killing a bandicoot versus taking a girl on the back of your Yamaha 250 up the A23 at a hundred miles an hour; both were equally valid rites of passage.
After his first year at Reigate Janner moved out of his digs at Mrs Beasley’s on Station Road, and into a shed on the edge of the North Downs. It was his intention to get started as soon as possible on the business of living authentically – in harmony with his chosen object of field study – for by now Janner had fallen under the spell of the Ur-Bororo.
If it was unusual to study anthropology at Reigate, rather than some other branch of the humanities, it was even more unusual for an undergraduate student to nurse dreams of going to another continent for postgraduate field study. Dr Marston was well used to packing his charges off to Prestatyn to study the decli
ne of Methodist Valley communities, or to Yorkshire to study the decline of moorland Unitarian communities, or to the Orkneys to study the decline of offshore gull-eating communities. Reigate was, if not exactly famous, at least moderately well known for its tradition of doing work on stagnating sub-societal groups. Dr Marston’s own doctorate had been entitled ‘Ritual Tiffin and Teatime Taboo: Declining Practices Among Retired Indian Army Colonels in Cheltenham’.
But that being said, Dr Marston himself had had a brief period of field study abroad. This was among the Ur-Bororo of the Paquatyl region of the Amazon. It was Marston who first fired Janner with enthusiasm for this hitherto undistinguished tribe of Indians. I have no idea what he told Janner, certainly it must have contained an element of truth, but Janner told me a severely restricted version. If one listened to Janner on the subject one soon found out that his information about the Ur-Bororo consisted almost entirely of negative statements. What was known was hearsay and very little was known; what little hearsay was known was hopelessly out of date – and so forth. I didn’t trouble to challenge Janner over this, by now he was beyond my reach. He had retired to his hut on the Downs, was seldom seen at the college, and dissuaded me, politely but firmly, from calling on him.
I did go a couple of times to see him. In a way I suppose I wanted to plead with him not to abandon me. For Janner, with his pipe-stem torso sheathed in the stringy tube of a sleeveless, Fair Isle sweater, and with his eyes wetly gleaming behind round lenses, was more than a friend as far as I was concerned. I couldn’t admit it to myself but I was a little bit in love with him. He told me that his hut was a faithful reconstruction of an Ur-Bororo traditional dwelling. I didn’t believe him for a second; anyone looking at the hut could see that it had been ordered out of the back of Exchange & Mart. Its creosoted clapboard sides, its macadamised roofing, its one little leaded window, the way the floor wasn’t level with the ground. All of these facts betrayed its prefabricated nature. Inside the hut we drank tea out of crude clay vessels. Once again Janner assured me that these were of traditional Ur-Bororo manufacture, but I couldn’t really see the point of the statement. By now I could see just by looking at him that he was lost to me. He no longer needed me as a passive intermediary between his mind and the world he studied. He had found his destiny.
I left the hut without pleading at all and cycled back to Reigate. I had accepted that from now on I would be alone. But it’s difficult to get that Wertherish in Reigate, certainly not when you’re lodging in a clipped crescent of double-glazed, dormered windows. My depression soon ate itself. Without Janner to talk to I was forced back among my fellow students. I made some other friends; I even had a girlfriend. It wasn’t that I forgot about Janner, that would have been impossible, it was just that I tried to construct a life for myself to which he wouldn’t be relevant. I succeeded in this, but it had its own consequences.
During the next ten years very little happened to me. Sure, I left Reigate and went to teach at a school in Sanderstead. I met, fell in love with, and speedily married the geography and PE teacher at a neighbouring school. We became owner-occupiers and a child arrived, who was small, well made and finished; and dreamy and introverted to the point of imbecility. We had friends and opinions, both in moderation. It was a full life, seemingly without severe problems. I had grown through my modest and unturbulent adolescence into a modest and unturbulent adult. I even gained a certain celebrity for my phlegm at the school where I taught, because I could face down aggressive pupils with indifference. Some of my colleagues became convinced that within me lurked quite violent impulses. This, I’m afraid, was far from the truth. The reality was that I felt padded, as if all the gaps in my view of the world had been neatly filled with some kind of cavity life insulation. I felt ludicrously contained and static. I saw events unroll around me. I felt, I emoted, but the volume control was always on. Somewhere along the line someone had clapped a mute on my head and I hadn’t any idea who, or why.
During this whole period I heard nothing of Janner. I knew he had graduated from Reigate with unprecedented first-class honours and, with Dr Marston’s blessing and a none too generous grant from the SSRC, had gone abroad to visit his precious tribe. But beyond that, nothing. The only evidence I had of Janner’s existence during that ten-year period was finding by chance, while looking absent-mindedly through a stack of World Music records, an album Janner had acted as ‘consultant producer’ for. It was entitled Some Chants from Failed Cultures. I bought it immediately and rushed home.
If I had hoped for some kind of enlightenment, or to recapture the rapture of our scrubland walks together, I was to be disappointed. The album was gloomy and perverse. The producers had visited diverse groups of indigenes around the world, remarkable only for their persistence in chanting to no avail. Here were the Ketchem of Belize with their muttering eructation ‘Fall Out of the Water – Fish’. The I-Arana of Guinea, disillusioned cargo cultists who moaned gently, ‘Get Me Room Service’, and many others too tedious and depressing to mention.
The gist of all these failed chants I gathered from the sleeve notes, written by Janner. The chants themselves were badly recorded and incomprehensible. After two or three plays the needle on our record player started to score twists of vinyl out of the bottom of the grooves – and that was the end of that. Janner’s sleeve notes, as far as I was concerned, were unilluminating and discursive. They told me nothing concrete about his involvement with the project and gave me no clue as to where he might be now. When I tried to find out more through the record company I drew another blank. Ha-Cha-Cha Records had gone into receivership.
I may not have found the friend of my adolescence, but the record had gravely unsettled me. I had assumed that Janner was by now safely ensconced in some provincial university’s anthropology department, his tremendous enthusiasm and drive winding down through the dreary cycle of teaching. But the record and its sleeve notes presented an alternative picture, a picture of a different Janner and a more unsettled career. The evening that I brought the record home I sat in the living-room for hours, using the time while my wife was at her class, to try and fathom Janner’s fate, with only the flimsy record sleeve to go on.
My son James didn’t help. He’d picked up a couple of the failed chants and as I put him to bed that night he said, in passable Uraic, ‘Lo! The crops are withering.’ Somehow, even among the cartoon stickers and the bright bendy limbs of bendy toys, this didn’t sound as incongruous as it perhaps should have.
Then, nothing. For another two years no word or sign of Janner. I didn’t pursue him, but I did go to the trouble of finding out about the Lurie Foundation, the body which I knew had part-funded Janner’s research into the Ur-Bororo. The secretary of the foundation was unforthcoming. He wrote me a letter stating the aims of the foundation in the barest outline: ‘To contribute to the understanding of the Ur-Bororo, a bursary will be provided for one postgraduate student every twenty years. Following his field-work the student will be required to lodge a paper of not less than 30,000 words with the Lurie Archive at the British Library.’ The letter was signed by Dr Marston. I spoke to a librarian at the British Library, but she told me that all the documents relating to the Lurie Foundation were held in a closed stack. I had reached a dead end.
Janner had represented for me a set of possibilities that were unfulfilled. Even after twelve years these wider horizons continued to advance beyond my measured tread. Occasionally, sitting in the staff-room during a vacant period, I would suddenly find myself crying. I felt the tears, damp on my cheek, and into my stomach came a bubble of sweet sentimentality. But my hands gripped the edges of the Education Supplement too tightly, held it too stiffly in front of my face. All around me the talk was of interest rates. From time to time a corduroy trouser leg loomed into view.
Then one day in late summer, just after the school sports day, I was walking down the hill towards Purley when something caught my eye in the window of a launderette. An etiolated, waxy-looking ind
ividual was having an altercation with a rotund, middle-aged woman. Voices were raised and it was clear that they were on the verge of coming to blows. I heard the woman say quite distinctly, ‘Coming in here and sitting staring at other people’s laundry, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Haven’t you got any laundry of your own to look at, you filthy pervert?’ She raised her hand to strike the man. As he turned to ward off the blow I saw his profile. It was Janner.
I stepped inside the launderette. Janner had evaded the first blow and was backing off to avoid a second. I touched him on the shoulder and said in my best disciplinary manner, ‘Would you step outside for a minute please, sir?’ The Protectress of Gussets was immediately convinced that here were the Proper Authorities. She surrendered her temporary deputy’s badge with good grace. Janner stepped outside.
And continued a conversation with me as if it had been subject only to an hour’s, rather than a decade’s interruption.
‘I’m living down here in Purley [a gurgle of catarrh] in a funny sort of a place. I’ve only been back from abroad for a couple of months. I was just observing this business of observing laundry. I’m convinced that the spinning circle of laundry has some of the properties of the mandala.’
We were by now heading down the hill at a brisk trot. Janner went on and on and on at length, trying to fit Purley laundering practices into a complex and highly unconvincing portrait of South London suburban society. He had lost none of his vigour. Any attempts I made to break into his monologue he interpreted as a desire to know still more. We fetched up by the station. Janner was still talking, still gesticulating.
‘You see, Wingate Crescent represents a kind of epicentre; in order to reach the High Street you have to describe a circle. The positioning of the four launderettes – Washmatic, Blue Ribbon, Purley Way and Allnite – is also circular.’ He stopped as if he had reached some kind of self-evident conclusion. I broke in.
