The Dog's Last Walk

by Howard Jacobson

  Lesson No. 3: Camilla Long isn’t the worst columnist who has ever been because her heart doesn’t break into the same number of pieces as yours does when an entertainer dies. Here’s a handy rule to follow before calling someone the worst columnist there has ever been: be sure you’ve read the others. Unless you are only speaking immoderately for the fun of getting up someone’s nose. But in that case, ask yourself whether the columnist you can’t abide is only speaking immoderately to get up yours.

  Lesson No. 4: Don’t marvel that publications give space to the particular worst living writer you have your sights fixed on today. It sounds like sour grapes. Of course it is sour grapes, but you should try to conceal it. The last thing a person whose only outlet is an online forum should draw attention to is the envy consuming him from the fingers down.

  Lesson No. 5: Failing to see the point is not a virtue. The more articles you don’t see the point of, the more questions are going to be asked about your perspicacity. You are right that some things are a waste of space; in all likelihood your tweet is one of them.

  Lesson No. 6: Don’t complain that the media won’t stop hounding whoever it is you admire – say, Corbyn, to pluck a name at random. Most public figures, not excepting Corbyn, get a fair crack of the whip somewhere. What you’re really complaining about is that you don’t get a fair crack of the whip anywhere. But that won’t be bias. It will just mean you’re a knob.

  Lesson No. 7: Remembering what I said about irony, think twice before buckling up for war. You might be walking into a trap for the literal-minded. As a rule of thumb I’d say that if you don’t have a sense of humour you are missing the tone of most of what you read. So why advertise the fact? If you have nothing to do, and are looking for an activity that doesn’t require a sense of humour, try colouring in.

  Lesson No. 8: A writer who has more words than you have isn’t ipso facto a show-off. Ditto a writer who has read a couple of books and is otherwise cultivé. By bleating about his or her erudition you are merely allowing your own ignorance to embarrass you. It should.

  Lesson No. 9: Don’t imagine that a word you say is going to make a blind bit of difference. You wouldn’t be tweeting poison if you were otherwise able to solicit interest. But if you must fight a losing battle try at least to be sophisticated. Telling a writer you despise that he has his head up his arse will only make him feel good about himself. Better his arse, after all, than yours.

  Lesson No. 10: Remember Sidney. Being a horse when you’re meant to be a flower isn’t funny, it’s silly.

  The glorious madness of Wisden

  What a wonderful thing is Wisden, that lovely, lozengy, yellow-jacketed, Bible-shaped and Bible-weighted cricketers’ almanack, 1,500 pages deep, in which the averages of batsmen and bowlers and wicketkeepers, English and not-English, male and female, living and dead, are collated with a mystic punctiliousness that proves beyond argument the existence of God. You want to see the Divine Watchmaker at work on the mathematics of life? Then read Wisden.

  If it falls marginally short of retelling the whole story of human existence in statistics, that is only because it records achievements at the cost of failures: number of runs scored but not number of balls missed, number of catches taken but not number of catches dropped, outstanding seasons in schools’ cricket but not suicidally dismal ones.

  To this degree Wisden is essentially a commemoration of success, unlike great novels, which are commemorations of failure. But I would still be inclined to put Wisden on my fiction shelves, so fantastical, like a tale from Kafka or Borges, is its illusory narrative of order.

  I was guest speaker this week at a dinner to celebrate the 149th edition of Wisden, held in the Long Room at Lord’s. Though not the sort of memorabilia freak likely to be stirred by candle snuffers and inkwells in the form of W. G. Grace, I am a sucker for rooms with history, for walls hung with portraits of whatever the plural is of genius loci, for the company of eminent practitioners, and for a good dinner. So when I was asked to give the speech, I couldn’t say no. How else was I ever going to get into the Long Room at Lord’s?

  Readers unsurprised that I accepted might wonder nonetheless why I was invited. All I can say is that I am known to have a passion for cricket, albeit more of the passive than the active sort. As far as the active side is concerned, I have only once played what could be called a match, and then was out first ball, being simultaneously bowled and adjudged to have fallen on my wicket. This was before the days of the instant replay, which would have shown that I was also out LBW, caught behind and stumped. Whether I illegally handled the ball as well, only I knew for sure. Let’s just say I wanted to be out before I was in, fearing what damage the ball could do to a frame as unused to bruising as mine.

  What’s charming about the fraternity of cricket is that it has a keen sense of the ridiculous and excludes no one. There’s probably a page for the likes of me buried somewhere in Wisden – batsmen out to the only ball they were ever called upon to play. There I sat, anyway, in the nervous hour before I gave my speech, discussing Cambridge in the early 1960s with Mike Brearley, a man I had long heroised for thinking the Ashes out of Australia’s grasp, but never imagined I would one day be exchanging thoughts about F. R. Leavis with. Here, you see, is what’s irresistible about cricket, whether you’re out first ball or not: it’s a game of the mind pretending to be a game of the body.

  As I explained when I rose to speak, my more passive lifelong participation in cricket – i.e. listening to it at all hours of the day and night on radio – had, over the years, slipped into a mild form of insanity akin to that described by Dr Johnson in Rasselas, when he has an astronomer believe he can control the elements. ‘Flood!’ he orders the Nile, and the Nile floods. And no argument on the side of pure coincidence can shake him.

  Similarly, lying there in my bed in the early hours of the morning, listening to the commentary coming in from Melbourne or Sydney, I would exhort Fred Trueman or Bob Willis to take a wicket and, provided I was concentrating adequately, a wicket was exactly what they took.

  Of the forms of superstition that rob the human mind of reason, sporting superstition is at once the most innocent and the least susceptible to cure, so easy is it to persuade yourself that even if you are not controlling the game from your bed entirely, you are still controlling a major part of it. Geoff Boycott didn’t always hit a century when I slept with the light on and the dog out, but Ian Chappell was invariably dismissed for a low score when I went to bed without pyjama bottoms.

  Believe me, reader, when I tell you that the famous partnership of close to 200 put together by Mike Denness and Keith Fletcher during the 1974–75 tour of Australia was achieved only because I switched from my left side to my right side with every alternate ball Dennis Lillee bowled. In the end it was Max Walker who broke the partnership, and that only happened because I had to go to the toilet.

  Whether my pleas to be included in Wisden as the unseen force guiding English cricket will be heeded, I won’t know until next year’s 150th edition. I suspect not. But I think I was able to persuade the majority of people there that you don’t have to play the game to be infected by those magnificent numerical obsessions that Wisden celebrates. We also serve who turn over in our beds only during Test Match Special, now once to the right, now twice to the left …

  You’re going the wrong way, mate

  The great god Pan is dead! I was weeping soppily in celebration of another Olympic gold for Team GB when I learned of the death of that formidable intellectual force, the art critic Robert Hughes, and remembered what tears are really for. I can’t claim him as a personal friend, though we met occasionally when he came along to editorial meetings of that once fine journal Modern Painters, breathing fire, heaping scorn, laughing like Jove, and reminding us by his very presence that there are few higher callings than talking well about art. Some men of stature shrink those they come in contact with; Hughes made everyone around him feel like a god. Olympic sport is all very we
ll, but when Robert Hughes addressed you as ‘mate’, it was as a welcome to Mount Olympus itself.

  He came to Europe in the 1960s on that fabulous boat of my invention which also carried Clive James, Barry Humphries, Germaine Greer, the film director Bruce Beresford, the painter Brett Whiteley and countless more Australians of prodigious gifts. I was on the water at the same time, going the other way. We passed on the equator. That’s how I like to tell it anyway.

  In fact, they staggered their arrival, as though each was preparing us for the next. What made Australia of the late 1950s such an intellectual hothouse is a subject for another time, as is the reason so many of that generation felt they had to leave it. But, briefly, distance was the cause of both.

  In the days before cheap air travel, physical alienation from European culture made Australians determined they would not be alienated from it intellectually, and so they read and looked and listened as no one born in London or Paris felt they had to – if you want to know the location of any art treasure in Italy, you ask an Australian, not an Italian; if you want to know who sings the best Rigoletto, similarly – but that same distance created a forlornness (I say nothing of Sir Les Patterson) from which, for many, it was necessary to escape.

  Do we yet know how lucky we were to have them on this side of the world? We had our own irreverently clever, establishment-bashing boys at that time, but the Australian contingent brought a combination of wit, rumbustiousness, intellectual scruple and deep seriousness (no matter that it dressed itself as mirth) that the English couldn’t match. Their ear for cant and commonplace was sharper than ours, their nose for self-righteousness and hypocrisy keener. They weren’t just thinkers – they were pugilists of thought.

  Outside the art world, Hughes first became widely known in 1980 with his television series The Shock of the New. Has anyone ever looked out of a television screen with more critical menace? It was a series in which the viewer was made ashamed of being stupid. That’s to say it was the opposite of most art programmes now. The words flowed, the passion burnt up the screen. He made it manly to look at art, not Sir Kenneth Clark refined and in-the-know, or John Berger ideological, but manly in the democratic sense, engaging our humanity. He hated theory and the linguistic pallor of those who used jargon to shut the uninitiated out of art.

  As a critic who talked so well about ‘shock’, he was expected to love everything the etiolated curatorial class considered ‘new’, but he fumed against its triviality and cynicism. In a period marked by ignominious intellectual capitulation to dross, he performed Pope’s function of excoriating the dunces, but at the same time went on reminding us of what true art looked like, sometimes in the voice of the larrikin, sometimes of the connoisseur, but always wittier than any other art critic, better read, and possessed of infinitely more subtle judgement.

  Do I heroise him? Yes, I do. I am unable to heroise Usain Bolt however fast he travels and however beautiful he looks in motion. The macho gurning and showboating for the cameras reduce him. Give me the modest triathlete or wordless pommel horseman any time. But I heroise the man who thinks deep, and looks hard, still more.

  Not that Hughes placed himself above the physical life. He was a man’s man, a fisherman who drank with gusto. You felt his bulk when he entered a room. The last time I saw him was at a restaurant in London. He had suffered terrible injuries in a road accident in feral north Western Australia and was walking on crutches. I was sitting at a table of writers who’d been speaking earlier that week at feral Hay-on-Wye. Norman Mailer was among them. He, too, had entered the restaurant with the help of a stick.

  I don’t know which of them saw the other first. Maybe it wasn’t a question of visual recognition. Maybe they just sniffed each other’s presence, like big cats. How well they were acquainted I have no idea. But they were bound to have met and sparred over the years. And whatever the mutual admiration there was bound, too, to have been the rivalry of alpha males who dealt in grand ideas and spoke like oracles. Mailer rose from the table, anyway, and without the use of his stick made his way to Hughes. Hughes discarded his crutches. Like old soldiers refusing to make anything of their wounds, however grave, they crashed into each other’s arms.

  It’s impossible to heroise without being sentimental. Mailer sentimentalised Muhammad Ali just a little. Maybe for being the Mailer Mailer had never been. In his wonderful book about the colonisation of Australia, The Fatal Shore, Hughes, for the same reason, sentimentalised the first wild Irish–Australians who gave the country its character. Thus do high-born aristocrats long to play the low-born rebel. I wouldn’t say, though, that he ever sentimentalised Rembrandt or Picasso. You can overdo your admiration for athletes or bushmen, but not for great painters. Or great critics.

  Let’s introduce ourselves: what’s your username?

  At a time when there is much to fear, few to trust, and not a damn thing to believe in, may I hold out a flickering torch of hope? I have struck a symbolic blow. I have said no. En oh – NO! Enough is enough. Enough usernames, enough PINs, but above all enough passwords. Now I expect other victims of the relentless march of online passwords to join me in my campaign. Let’s all say NO TO PASSWORDS.

  I have been chafing against the imposition of the password for some time, but the last straw was an invitation to speak at a literary festival on a date and at an hour I could only discover if I ‘accessed’ my ‘profile’ saved under the ‘mailings icon’ on their ‘authors’ website’. Don’t let the correct use of the apostrophe fool you. Everything else about this invitation is fatuous. ‘Access’ as a verb is a hateful coinage, invented by computer folk to make the process of looking something up sound busy and scientific. In fact, most of what we can be said to ‘access’ is either trivial or filthy. When we do call on the Internet to provide a worthwhile service – to find a poem we don’t have in any of our anthologies, for example – we don’t say we are ‘accessing it’. We don’t ‘access’ Thomas Sackville, Earl of Dorset. We look for him, and when we’ve found him we read him. If anyone should know that, the organisers of a literary festival should.

  And what’s this about a ‘profile’? Do they mean my name? Do they mean the information I require, such as the date and time they would like me to speak? If so, why don’t they save us all the bother and just tell me? Friday at 4 p.m., Mr Jacobson, see you there. Anything further – my age, my shoe size, the state of my teeth – I don’t need to ‘access my profile’ to discover because I already know it.

  The assumption is, however, that I have nothing better to do than arse around (indeed that I can’t wait to arse around) locating the ‘mailing icon’ (‘icon’ being another instance of computerese coined to make a childish activity – the equivalent of colouring in – sound like an adult one) in order to gain entry to a place I have not the slightest desire to visit, let alone ‘access’, namely the ‘authors’ website’. But even that isn’t enough. I have to drop whatever else I’m doing, the novel I’m writing, the Thomas Sackville, Earl of Dorset poem I’m reading, the alms I’m distributing to the needy, and go there ‘as soon as possible’.

  Is there no end to their impertinence? Reader, no, there isn’t. Having chivvied me to go post-haste where no grown man or woman could possibly want to go, they then tell me I cannot go there without a username and password. Given that my username turns out to be my actual name I am compelled to wonder why we need the term username at all. Or is ‘username’ set to replace Christian and surname? ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume.’ ‘That, sir, is my username, yes.’

  Which brings us to the password. And with the request for the password comes that sentence from online hell, ‘If you have forgotten your password, you can reset it by following the link on the log-in page.’ Ah, reader, how many and how long are the hours we have spent following links to reset a password we see no reason to possess by logging into a log-in page impossible to log into without a password. You want to know why there is so much rage on our streets and unhappiness in our homes? L
ook no further than the bitter frustration of the passwordless, forever chasing their own tails in pursuit of a key that can only be accessed by the key they’re trying to access.

  It’s possible there are people who love having passwords because passwords remind them of the games they played in primary school, not letting the girls into the boys’ toilets until they gave the secret watchword, which might have been schopenhauer17 or weewee2, I can’t remember. Or they might love them, as some love putting figures in columns, because they are clerkly by nature. Such people will no doubt have books to keep their passwords in – a little red book for their smartphone passwords, a little blue book for their banking passwords, a little yellow one for adult content and literary festival passwords – and what is more will protect these books from being accessed by the inquisitive by assigning them each a password.

  I have a book in which I write usernames, PINs and passwords but never know where I’ve put it. Since I’m not such a fool as to bank online I don’t have any precious secrets in this book and so don’t care who reads it. There is nothing I don’t want anyone else to read in the aforementioned ‘profile’ of me either, in which case why do I need a password? In order that no one should have a better idea of the time and day I’m speaking than I do? As for my shoe size, it’s a 10, G fitting.

  I voiced my objection to all this, anyway. ‘Life’s too damned short for passwords,’ I emailed the person who’d invited me, no matter that she’d asked me to communicate any problems via, of course, their authors’ website. She emailed back, explaining how I could get a new password, and telling me the festival was too busy to deal with individual authors except online, though she would be pleased to ‘resolve the issue on the phone’. So that would have been two emails and a phone call to tell me what she could have told me in the first place in a single line had she not been too busy to do so.