Jubb

JUBB

KEITH WATERHOUSE

With a new introduction by

ALICE FERREBE

VALANCOURT BOOKS

Jubb by Keith Waterhouse

First published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph in 1963

First U.S. edition published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1964

First Valancourt Books edition 2015

Copyright © 1963 by Keith Waterhouse, renewed 1991

Introduction © 2015 by Alice Ferrebe

Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

http://www.valancourtbooks.com

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the copying, scanning, uploading, and/or electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.

Cover by Bill Belcher

INTRODUCTION

In the spring of 1964, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Vladimir Nabokov was interviewed by a young Harvard undergraduate who asked what he was reading at the time. Keith Waterhouse’s Jubb, he replied, and he liked it.1 The novel had just come out in the United States, a year after its British publication. The reviewer for the New York Times, schooled, we might assume, by Lolita, was able to discern high culture in the base behaviour of protagonist Cyril Leonard Jubb: ‘The nymphomaniac to whom he cries from the depths will emerge in our minds with Rilke’s angels. Jubb will gradually disclose himself as a strangely transformed, though not unrecognizable, incarnation of the courtly lover’.2 Yet the very first sentence of Jubb indicates that, try as he might, the narrator does not share Humbert Humbert’s elevated aesthetic tastes nor his delicate turn of phrase: ‘Man found dead in plastic wardrobe. That’s the way you’ll finish up if you’re not careful, I tell myself’. It signals too that we have moved a long way from Keith Waterhouse’s previous novel Billy Liar (1959), the tale of a feckless but lovable Yorkshire lad that is cherished as a British comic classic.

In Jubb, we’re not in Yorkshire anymore. The novel is set in Chapel Langtry, a fictional example of one of the New Towns built over and around rural settlements within the London commuter belt after the Second World War. Peripheral Roads divide neighbourhoods with faux pastoral names like Buttermilk Glade, and these swathes of uniformly various houses surround a Civic Centre stocked with ‘amenities’; college, Fire Station and ‘proposed Theatre’. All are conveniently located near to the gigantic earthworks that will, one day, become the new London to Cambridge motorway; a road which currently ends ‘like a snipped ribbon’ in the mud. Jubb is thirty-six-years old, and is fortunate enough to live, with his wife, in a ‘Standard A’ house in Cherry Croft. His job as rent collector has secured him one of the largest of the housing stock, despite the couple’s lack of children (and, latterly, the absence of his wife). Night and day, Jubb paces this postwar landscape with a professional seriousness, policing ‘Sunset Homes’, the caravan site that shelters people with jobs in Chapel Langtry but no accommodation, as they wait for more houses to go up. He has nothing but disgust for the residual Romany people, whose site it was before Sunset Homes took over: ‘Legislation is in hand to have them moved on as they are an anomaly’.

Jubb is equally uncompromising in his duty to the ‘Good Neighbours Club’, where as Youth Leader he strives to bring the suburban kids from the surrounding Fields, Glades and Crofts together in healthy pursuits. He is a collector of long out-of-print boys’ comics like The Magnet and Schoolboy’s Own Library, and for all his pedantic spiel about the ‘psychology of modern adolescence’, Jubb’s understanding of youth is deeply rooted in old-fashioned codes of imperial decency and class privilege, and ‘a world of stentorian cries echoing through hallowed cloisters’. At their leisure, the Chapel Langtry boys want to shout racist abuse gleaned from a media furore about immigration. Jubb tries to get them decorously to debate racial equality, wondering pompously at the failure of painfully shy Victor Rosenberg to speak against the casual anti-semitism of the mob. Enter Mr Ngmbryu, who is writing a ‘series of articles on the British Way of Life for the Ashanti Evening Tribune’. Keith Waterhouse was himself a prolific journalist who began his career aged 21 at the Yorkshire Evening Post, and went on to work at the Daily Mirror and then the Daily Mail whilst authoring over sixty books. In the late 1950s, in response to civic unrest in Nottingham and London, he produced a series of crusading pieces on the assumption that ‘People are human beings even though they come in different colours. The main reason for the race riots is plain IGNORANCE of this simple truth’.3 Waterhouse’s humour, always present in his writing, is also always purposeful, and the comic game he plays with the novel’s black characters and the ignorance with which they are treated can be an uneasy one for our contemporary sensibilities. So too can the way in which Waterhouse demonstrates the conviction of shared humanity that so animated his series in the Mirror. He makes Mr Ngmbryu obsessive-compulsive, equally as ill-at-ease in the world as Jubb, and has him write home to Ghana with a salacious piece on Chapel Langtry’s incipient ‘immorality’ that is on a par with the worst of the period’s gutter polemic. As such, it speaks directly to Jubb, and his most titillating obsession.

According to Jubb’s colleague Duggie, Mrs Potter of No. 41 Orchard Glade ‘undresses at her open window every night and stands there stark naked for minutes at a time’. Duggie, Jubb observes mournfully, is ‘a Lion’: he is ‘clean and mobile, gregarious’. Each day at the Estate Agents, Auctioneers and Valuers, Duggie boasts of his gargantuan sexual exploits of the night before. If Duggie is to be believed, Chapel Langtry is a hotbed of seething lust and blatantly exhibitionist activity, yet Jubb’s nocturnal wanderings never seem to lead him to the right place at the right time. Mrs Potter’s window remains in darkness, and the Glades and Crofts are devoid of nymphs. In the Textbook of Psychosexual Disorders, published the same year as Waterhouse’s novel, Clifford Allen saw fit to state sternly that ‘Since writers […] have become fascinated with the concept of nymphomania […] it might be as well here to state that it is clinically very rare’.4 Jubb’s hotly sought nymphomaniacs only appear in books, or one in particular – his favourite, Freud: The Columbus of Sex. As Jubb pores periodically over streaker Bertha L., and a woman who dreams she is walking down Fifth Avenue in her Maidenform bra, Waterhouse gradually reveals him as a complex case study, orphaned in suspicious circumstances, bereaved of a brother in socially shameful ones, haunted by a childhood love, and guilty of peeping at Aunt Dolly (the nickname shared with Lolita is surely not coincidental) who brought him up in ‘tolerance without laxity’ until forced to throw him out in disgust.

Wrote Humbert, ‘I want my learned readers to participate in the scene I am about to replay; I want them to examine its every detail and see for themselves how careful, how chaste, the whole wine-sweet event is if viewed with what my lawyer has called, in a private talk we have had, impartial sympathy.’5 Jubb allows himself no such exquisite self-delusion, presenting himself as increasingly fetid, with a ‘coating of white filth on my lips, an obscene smell around my mouth, festering gums and a heavy sweat that rots through the armpits of my jacket’. Yet the New York Times still commended Waterhouse’s novel for its ‘unerring, tonally flawless delivery,6 and the most disturbing element of this tone is its mundane reasonableness. Jubb is convinced that his reader is just like him, and, as testament to his author’s skill, this conviction can be powerfully persuasive.

Jubb’s past is revealed as uniquely horrible, but, like all effective case studies, his experience is both singular and recognisable. Duggie is one of the ‘Lions’, but Jubb is a ‘Herbert’, a hunched observer of other people’s lives, wheedling to start a photographic club. Of course, Jubb is simply not clubbable: the acquisitive religious sect ‘Follow Your Thoughts’ rejects him, and ‘The True Nationals’ do not consider Jubb’s admiration for Mussolini (who routinely ‘followed his thoughts’, according to one of Jubb’s treasured pamphlets) an adequate qualification to join their morally squalid group. Yet is Jubb really such a spiritual and social anomaly? The mass media, he claims on behalf of all Herberts, ‘give us bright and pretty colours but they will not give us anything for ourselves, they will not give us any pure undoctored light’. ‘How do you walk as if the world belonged to you?’ he demands of his reader. If we knew, would we really be spending our time reading a novel like this one?

As revelations about Jubb’s relationship with his wife Mary accrue, our empathy for him is tested to its limit. Yet, despite the odds against him, he remains both pathetic and comic – a foundational combination of British humour. In the Times Literary Supplement, Mrs Marigold Johnson concluded her review: ‘Mr Waterhouse’s criticism of our society is no less angry for being very funny, and he has achieved the remarkable feat of writing in the character of a man not only psychopathic, but also a repulsive bore, who nevertheless emerges as profoundly sane and even, in his own odd way, quite jolly’.7 Hear, hear.

Alice Ferrebe

Liverpool John Moores University

March 2015

Alice Ferrebe is Subject Leader in English at Liverpool John Moores University. She is the author of Masculinity in Male-Authored Fiction 1950-2000 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and Literature of the 1950s: Good, Brave Causes (Edinburgh University Press, 2012).

1 Brian Boyd, interview with Peter Lubin, May 1983, quoted in Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 1993), 483.

2 R.V. Cassill, ‘A Herbert Who Wished to Be a Lion ’, New York Times, April 5, 1964, BR46.

3 ‘The Boys from Jamaica’, Daily Mirror, 8 September 1958, 13.

4 C. Allen, Textbook of Psychosexual Disorders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 306.

5 Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (London: Penguin Books, 1995), 57.

6 Cassill, BR46.

7 ‘Heading for a Fall’, Times Literary Supplement, 27 September 1963, 730.

Saturday

Man found dead in plastic wardrobe. That’s the way you’ll finish up if you’re not careful, I tell myself, AAAAA Male (36) unusual interests, seeks pen-pals. I am getting worried. I have started following girls home, and that’s a bad sign: off the train and along the high-fenced station approaches that lead away into those lost suburban streets, AAAAA Ruth, please write. Think­ing of you.

Sometimes I spend the whole day going up and down the Piccadilly Line, looking at girls. It’s a very good line for them: typists? – they can’t be, they’re flocking about at all hours, all crossed knees and tight wiry skirts. I see where a man was arrested the other day, going up and down the escalators at Bond Street station, looking at women’s legs. Well, you don’t carry on like that. Abnormal, completely; he was there thirty-five minutes. Some­body must have complained. Fined two pounds. Married. Silly b., I wonder what he told his wife. There are things wives can be told – rape and murder, yes, they’re easy subjects to dis­cuss; but other things are more difficult to explain. ‘Did anything happen at the office, dear?’ – ‘Yes, a policeman came and charged me with looking up women’s legs in the tube station.’ Silly man. Get in the train, get in the train, that’s the plan. The Piccadilly Line is the best place or failing that the District: never the Central or the Metropolitan. It must be something to do with the class of girl that lives in these places. I sit there sometimes from Ruislip to Cockfosters and back again. I ogle them, that’s the word, ogle them across the carriage, keeping my eye steadfastly upon their knees. Be bold. If they get up and move to another seat or tug their skirts down or get out of the carriage altogether, that is good enough for me. Leave them alone, you don’t want any trouble. But I tell you this, I have known women adjust their skirts so that I could see more of those knees of theirs. That’s it. Pretend to be reading a book or paper and you will see them stealthily cross their legs so that you can see four or five inches up their skirts. Erotic. Perhaps it’s imagination, but that’s what it’s always seemed to me that they were doing. And then I have stuck with them, changed trains with them, followed them through the tunnels and out into fresh daylight in streets I have never seen before, until one or other of us became frightened and ran away. AAAAA Ladies and gentlemen interested in joining select social circle are invited to write fully to Box 123.

Oh, I can see it coming. Youth club leader’s strange death, it’s always happening. Coroner’s Polythene Bag Warning. ‘He was very fond of experiments. He had seen something like it on tele­vision, and this may have led him to try it for himself.’ Oh, yes. Subconsciously these people are trying to get back to the womb. I don’t blame them.

I’ve been trying to find Ruth again. I took the train to Cam­bridge, pursuing a feeling, just a kink that’s all, an impulse, that she might be there, wandering about somewhere, somewhere in the town centre. I followed my thoughts. And if I drew a blank, well, it is not always a wasted day, for there are some beau­tiful girls in Cambridge. Students, mainly. They ride about on bicycles, definitely giving you the eye, some of them. Is that the place where there are more women than men? I was reading a book entitled Washington Confidential the other day, in which one learns of a certain café which is the rendezvous for girls who are employed by the United States Government. Secretaries, filing clerks. Apparently all you have to do is to sit in this café, alone, during the cocktail hour, and sooner or later one of these girls at an adjoining table will ask you to join her in a cocktail. Apparently there are 100,000 more women than men in Washington. Next to Hamburg, for which I pine, that is where I would like to go. But Cambridge is a good place, especially in the bookshops and around the market-place. There are some beautiful girls there, so pretty in their black gowns, poring over those thick expensive American paperbacks. But what can you do, what can you say? You cannot walk up to a girl and say, ‘Excuse me, I think you are delightful.’ She would call the police. Although I believe in Italy it is quite the custom. ‘Pardon me, but had I seen you at a party or at a dance I would have asked somebody to introduce us. Alas, however, we are on the street and so I may not speak to you. Is that not ridiculous?’ An Italian could get away with that, even here. But not an Englishman. Not I. Follow them home, watch them in the trains and in the bookshops, that’s my amusement.

Although I will say this: in Cambridge there was a chance or glimmer of something of an experience. I was in one of the book­shops, one of the bigger ones where the students go. The place was full of them. They stand about there, poring over the Ever­green Review and the expensive paperbacks. The Myth Makers; The Drug Takers; The Image Breakers, things like that: The Expan­sionists. The Equalisers. The Evaporators – Problems of Waste in an Affluent Society. Do they really read these books? – well, yes, they must, to get degrees, but what is their reason? A famous writer once said that he wrote primarily to impress women. I believe that. I believe that sex is one of the greatest sources of industry in the world today. Some psychologists hold that many activities are a form of sublimation, that we choose to pursue them as a substitute for sexual activity. I disagree with that. I believe that many of our great men have been spurred on and influenced in their decisions by the need to impress women.

It was an older woman who caught my attention; she was quite out of place among all the young people. I have always had a regard for the older woman. Someone of 45 to 50; they don’t expect much, that’s the point, they don’t expect attention and they’re flattered when they get it. Don’s wife probably, or probably not: you tend to identify everyone with university life in these places. In all probability she was an ordinary suburban housewife. About 47 I would say, 47 or 48, not all that many years my senior. She carried a net plastic shopping bag full of little things from Boots and Timothy White’s and Taylor’s – I wondered at first if she might not be a kleptomaniac. Change of life. She wore flat shoes and a very plain navy blue serge suit. She was indeed very plain herself although there was nothing dumpy about her – she wore for example those seamless nylon stockings, flesh-­coloured, such as a pretty girl might wear, and she had good legs: there are few women without some beauty about them, somewhere. But the whole point is that she was definitely hanging about that shop. Definitely hanging about. She was at the drama counter, by the collected plays. I was at the psychology counter next to it. I stared at her quite deliberately across a pyramid of books, making a thing of it, making no pretence of reading. It’s a delight to me, how women acknowledge a frank look from a man. She looked down, as they do, picked up a book at random, moved a couple of steps away from the counter but not out of my range of vision – I’ve seen it, often. Looked up again, catching my glance; and now it was my turn to look away, my part of the dance; and when I made a show of turning my back on her, examined some book titles, casually picked up a volume and then – very suddenly – wheeled round and faced her, naturally she was looking at me, and she blushed. She waited as long as she dared in that shop, waited for me to speak or make some excuse, or for something to happen. She expected a smile but she did not get one: what is the point of man hiding his desires behind the eunuch’s boyish, open grin? I gave her a straight hard carnal look and then pretended to dismiss her. I picked up a copy of The Dissociation of Personality and fingered through the pages until she left the premises. It must have been flattering for her to have the attention of a younger man.

That is really all that happened. The streets are very crowded on a Saturday and having lost her long before I reached the market place I turned my eye upon something younger. It was only by chance that I saw her again. There is a café I sometimes fre­quent when in Cambridge, not up to Washington standards by any means but they do have a tea dance there occasionally, al­though not today as it transpired, and you do get a certain number of young students congregating. I went in, my second time that afternoon, pure coincidence, and she was sitting by her­self at a wickerwork table, pouring a cup of tea. I sat at the next table, who wouldn’t? I ordered, but did not touch my food; made a great thing of reading a book, show yourself to be worth some­thing – a copy of Freud: The Columbus of Sex I had picked up. American. She finished her tea and toast and seemed, so far as I could judge without staring directly at her, to be looking at me.

And that was the end of the afternoon. She began picking her nose – discreetly, just with the nail of her little finger, scratching the inside of her nostril. I was disgusted. One thing you cannot pretend is that a woman who picks her nose in front of you is in the slightest degree interested in you. Why delude yourself? She got up to pay her bill at the cash desk and the waitress ran after her, brandishing the black gloves she had left behind. ‘Your gloves, Mrs Prince!’ A regular. Forgotten gloves – could be Freud­ian symbol. But why pretend? One knows her name but what of that? – a wasted day. I drank my tea and walked down to the station. Futile day, completely. On the train home a girl got into my compartment, that’s true enough, but there was an elderly woman already sitting opposite me, so nothing to report there. The girl had something in her eye, a piece of grit, and she asked the woman to take it out for her. This is the first time in my life that I have actually seen that happen. I should have been sitting next to her. We should have been alone in the carriage. I must have slipped up. But she got out at Bishop’s Stortford and so naturally I got out with her, and there’s a great hulking brute of a fellow, enormous chap, waiting for her with a Buick. So no luck there. I was stuck in the b. High Street with an hour and a quarter to wait before the next train. Completely wasted day. I slipped into a newsagent’s shop and bought an adult magazine full of naked women covered with netting, AAAAA Intimate Posing. Low angle photos, full frontal, side and rear positions. Uncon­ven­tional Collectors wanting these sexciting photos should write for 5/- sample or £1 set. Are they prostitutes, I wonder, or do they do it for pleasure? Women are notorious exhibitionists, sub­con­sciously. ‘I dreamt I was walking down Fifth Avenue in my Maidenform bra.’ Look at what the doctors say.

But I don’t know what to do with the magazine now I’ve got it. You hear of men showing them to their wives. They must have funny wives. If I’m not careful I’ll be showing it to some of the lads at the club and then you’re on the slippery slope. Youth club leader on serious charge. Oh, yes, it’s on the cards all right.

Sunday

Name of Jubb. I am thirty six years of age, old enough to know better. I am not ugly, although I lack those positive, clearly-defined – chiselled, is it? – features that women seem to find at­trac­tive. Although actually they