Seven years after its original publication, the first French translation
of Me, Cheeta has just been released by Le Nouvel Attila, whose founder
has been exploring all kinds of genre literature for the past twenty
years. I first heard about it on the French radio programme Mauvais
Genres. Little is known about the author, said Francois Angelier,
programme creator and presenter. James Lever doesn’t do interviews and
his previous works went by rather unnoticed. Actually, Angelier added,
rumour has it that James Lever might just be a pseudonym, that the
actual author of Me, Cheeta might be Will Self.
This got my
attention. Not that I particularly like Will Self, mind you. There is a
difference between being witty and having a point and I sometimes find
that Will Self doesn’t understand it. But I was intrigued: what do you
get by applying his undeniable talent to a topic like Tarzan? So I
bought the book.
A lot of the readers I know research a book and
its author before reading it. I don’t. I am under the illusion that this
provides me with a more unblemished reading experience. Plus, I cannot
resist the challenge: how much can I figure out about a writer based on
his or her prose? Here is my guess work about James Lever upon finishing
his novel, minutes before googling his name:
“Finished Me,
Cheeta. I doubt it is from Will Self. The writing sounds very American,
especially the way the metaphors are developed (that passage p.271 where
Cheeta refers to pain as “the blue button” (the blue button being
Tarzan’s absence) which he carries on pressing: “I was like a chimp
working in university failing the cognition test with the electric bolt
over and over, just not getting it that the blue button meant pain” and,
further down the page: “Because, to be absolutely honest, I didn’t want
to move on. I liked the blue button. Even if I could, I’d never stop
pressing it”) to the way the core ideas keep popping up at regular
intervals, for a reassessment (Maureen / Jane saying “The hurt will die
down eventually” and, towards the end, p.301, this conclusion from
Cheeta: “Jane’s law? It doesn’t work. The hurt doesn’t die down. It
doesn’t have to.” – this is particularly reminiscent of John Irving),
the division in 3 parts: the beginning in the jungle, the glory days in
Hollywood, then the end years, the ageing and death approaching, that
perfectly drawn arc, the world changing, the remarkable balance between
action and comments, all these structural elements point to an American
school of writing. The tone is however quite personal, constantly funny –
with this also very American way of slipping comedy crumbs in the most
tragic scenes, keeping the deep sadness but cutting the bitterness – and
satirical as only the best satirists like Voltaire can do. For this
reason, if I had to guess an author’s name behind James Lever, I would
go for James Morrow [...]. In particular, the consistency in which Lever
has kept Cheeta’s voice – the voice of a chimp who can think but thinks
like a chimp, misinterpreting whole slabs of human society – is a tour
de force [...]”
How wrong was I? Let’s run a quick check on the
web. Here you go. An interview from August 1st, 2009 for the Guardian by
Zoe Williams reveals that not only does James Lever exist but also that
she knows him from University, that he is British, lives in Kensal
Rise, is – or was – broke and 37 at the time and had been unsuccessfully
writing for the past 20 years. Me Cheeta was, however, a command from
his publisher, who tied Lever to extremely strict deadlines. Most of his
work effort was put in the research. The writing was done in one go and
hardly corrected. This makes the result all the more impressive. It can
also explain the school book quality of the structure(1).
Steward
Homes’s The Nine Lives of Ray The Cat Jones was my novel of the year
2014. So far, Me, Cheeta is my book of the year 2015. Both have this
marvellous combination of a flawless style (precise, fast paced, fun,
clever, well documented but never pedantic), a historical and cultural
background to which I can relate. In both, the narrative point of view
is, to say the least, unusual.
The Nine Lives of Ray The Cat
Jones is an punk-anarchist, first-person account of the life of a thief
who had his hours of fame in the late 20th century. Ray Jones, the
narrator, is the opposite of a self-interested criminal. Stealing, he
said, is completely acceptable provided that what is taken is taken from
people who will not miss it. This, you might say, is nothing but the
old Robin Hood tale all over again. However, the novel illustrates it
from the insider point of view, giving it an angle that only stories can
find.
Enabled with similar qualities, Me, Cheeta challenges
what we usually see as an intellectual standpoint, more than a moral
one: disbelief in humanity(2). The supposed simian author keeps
hammering his love for the human race. “You want to make death disappear
from the world!” Cheeta the chimp says to us. “You find shelter for us
all, away from the risks and perils of the jungle”. This starts as a
satiric joke. It ends up running throughout the whole novel. Always, new
situations are interpreted with the same blissfully stupid adoring
glance at human beings.
However, as the theme finds its pattern,
it twists. At the start of the novel, in the capture scene, Cheeta is
running away from a scene of carnage. His whole tribe has been decimated
by what he calls “the hostiles” – bar this name, we will know nothing
more of them. His mother and his favourite sister have just been killed.
Cheeta drags in his wake his brother Cary and his other brother slash
archenemy Stroheim. Stroheim catches up with him. Cheeta loses the
ensuing fight. Just as he is about to die, the fight is interrupted by
(this is Cheeta the chimp, writer of the autobiography, talking) “an
ape, white-faced, complexly coated, smiling: […] Tony Gentry (3) [...]” .
The same Gentry immediately turns to his assistant and shouts: “‘Got
three! [...] Three of them playing together!’”. Sighing,
Cheeta-the-author adds: “Thank God for humanity”.
Cheeta takes
his raptor for an ape. Gentry takes a fight to death for a game. Two
short and funny sentences is all it takes to Lever to tell us this: the
misunderstanding between chimp and human is total and mutual. Humans
love animals. Animals love humans. Neither of them has the smallest clue
about what is going on in the other’s life. Me, Cheeta could have been
called Love and Misreading. It could have been a Jane Austin novel or a
Hernandez comic.
From there onwards, the theme of the
misinterpretation is recurrent: hundreds of animals are captured and
shipped back to the US aboard the cargo named Forest Lawn? This is part
of a herculean task to rescue the whole animal kingdom from mutual
murder. Animals are kept in closed cages? This is part of a
rehabilitation programme where, with food and shelter provided, animals
are allowed to laze around as long as it takes to bring down their
stress level (an awful lot of masturbation is involved at this stage).
The seas are overfished? This is in order to make them safer. Through
this distorted lens, the human world is reinvented as a Disney-esque
theatre. At the centre of its stage, Johnny Weissmuller and Cheeta live
the perfect love on a paradisiac set – which Cheeta calls The Dream and
which we know as the setting of the early Tarzan movies.
Walking
us through all the dirty stories of Hollywood Golden Age, James Lever
uses and develops this angle. As he does so, the way Cheeta has to lie
to himself to preserve his fiction of a perfect world gets more obvious
and the satire more subtle. With Jane entering the scene, things start
getting ugly. Soon, we come to realise that Cheeta is no fool. As the
chimpanzee stops believing in his own lies, we stop believing in his
naivety. What was satire becomes irony. This slow reversal takes us all
the way to the final pages. When the extent of Cheeta’s credulity is
finally revealed, it is with Lever’s characteristic sobriety, in one
anecdotic piece of sentence, between brackets, like a rock dismissively
flipped at our face. However, this falling of the mask does not alter
Cheeta’s feelings towards humans. “[…] no other species would even have
come close to what you’ve done! You’re amazing”. There might still be
double meaning in these words. But there is no ambiguity in the
declaration that follows: “I love humans […] I’m the one that’s on your
side. I’m the one up here trying to be the best damned friend you ever
had”.
Does this sound like American blind-bliss optimistic
self-patting auto-satisfaction to you? This is one way of seeing it.
Another way is to do what I did after reading about James Lever and
recognise this as an expression of what British people quintessentially
are: paradox lovers, contradiction seekers, and goddamn animal huggers
(4).
(1)The interview also goes to show that I am not
the only one not doing my homework. Francois Angelier, usually so well
documented, should have known better.
(2)And is there anything more British than this form of self-deprecation?
(3)Tony Gentry was a once famous “animal trainer” (Wikipedia’s politically correct version of “animal hunter”) for Hollywood.
(4)I
am by no way being dismissive to my dear wife’s fellow countrymen. I
love you British people! I’m the one up here trying to be the best
damned friend you ever had!
