The Dog's Last Walk

by Howard Jacobson

  I haven’t made the call. There is no ‘issue’ to ‘resolve’. I don’t want a password to speak at a literary festival, that’s all. And I don’t want to see a literary festival in snivelling thrall to the techno-inanities of nerdspeak. It’s time to stand up and be counted. Let’s all access the NO icon.

  How very dare you

  There was something ‘how very dare you’ about Jeremy Corbyn’s recent temper tantrum in rebuttal of the charge that the company he kept reflected badly on him. ‘The idea that I’m some kind of racist or anti-Semitic person is beyond appalling, disgusting and deeply offensive,’ he said.

  Alarm bells ring when a politician stands haughty upon his honour. This isn’t to say we detect outright dishonesty in the deflection. But it is evasive to answer questions about your judgement with protestations of your probity. How very dare we? Well, since you are putting yourself up for election we have every right to dare you. And if our point is that you don’t see racism when it’s staring you in the face, then your assurances that you aren’t yourself a racist are worthless.

  It is avouched on all sides that Jeremy Corbyn is no anti-Semite. How it is possible to guarantee the complexion of another’s soul when our own are such mysteries to us, I don’t know. But very well – he isn’t. Speaking generally, it is easier these days, anyway, to hate Israel rather than Jews, since you get the same frisson with none of the guilt. Besides, anti-Semitism need not be the worst of crimes. Depends on the variety you espouse. Not every anti-Semite is Joseph Goebbels. You can not like Jews much and be no great harm to them.

  More serious in a politician riding the wave of a credulous revivalism to high office is a dogma-driven mind, a serene conviction of rectitude, and yes, bad judgement in the matter of the company he keeps. This latter charge, levelled at Corbyn on account of the bigots, deniers and exterminationists he hasn’t scrupled to appear with on platforms and at rallies, is often repudiated as guilt by association, as though it is self-evident that a person is never to be held responsible for those he just happens to go on finding himself standing next to, or perchance agreeing with.

  But association with a certain order of person, when it is habitual, can be its own offence. ‘I am not a criminal but I seem to find myself frequently in criminal company’ is a statement that evades more questions than it answers. Corbyn’s explanation for denying all knowledge of meeting a notorious advocate of terror and then recalling it when his advisers remembered the occasion for him – a leftist politician, he argued, couldn’t be expected to recall every radical with a murderous agenda he encountered – was a careless, not to say comical admission of the habituation I’m talking about. Mix less often with bombers and fanatics, Mr Corbyn, in places where bombers and fanatics are bound to congregate, and the ones you do meet might linger longer in your mind.

  His justification for calling Hamas or the IRA his friends is that it’s only by talking that peace is achieved. This would be laudable were it not disingenuous. For much depends on what the ‘talking’ comprises. Doubtless the British government talked secretly to the IRA, but it wasn’t being chummy, or expressing sympathy with their aims, that brought them to the table. And if sweet-talking Hamas is to be forgiven for the results it might yield, then by the same logic Corbyn should be cosying up to Benjamin Netanyahu. In fact, the Stop the War Coalition, which Corbyn chairs, is pressing for Netanyahu to be arrested for war crimes when he visits Britain and, at the time of writing, Corbyn is listed to be among those demonstrating against the presence of the Israeli soccer team in Cardiff. To terrorists we speak, to footballers we don’t.

  Abhorrence for a person’s views should not stop conversation, Corbyn insists, unless, it would appear, the person happens to be Israeli. If Corbynites see no moral or intellectual contradiction in that – insisting that Israel is uniquely wicked among nations – it isn’t only honesty they are lost to but reason itself. For a phobia is a species of madness.

  Still I will not call it anti-Semitism. The truism that criticism of Israel does not equate to anti-Semitism is repeated ad nauseam. Nor, necessarily, does it. But those who leave out the ‘necessarily’ ask for a universal immunity. Refuse it and they trammel you in the ‘How very dare you’ trap. They are, they say, being blackmailed into silence. The opposite is the truth. It is they who are the blackmailers, intimidating anyone who dares criticise their criticism.

  Alone of prejudices, anti-Zionism is sacrosanct. How very dare we distinguish the motivation of one sort from another? Or question, in any instance, an anti-Zionist’s good faith? In fact, what determines whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic is the nature of it. Question Israel’s conduct of recent wars and you won’t find many Jews, in Israel or outside it, who disagree with you. Join Hamas in calling for the destruction of the Jewish state, as the prime instigator of all evil, and you’re on shakier ground.

  In an apparent softening of party tone, Corbyn’s warm-up man, the journalist Owen Jones, recently reprimanded the left for its ingrained anti-Semitism. Welcome words, but they will remain only words so long as the Corbynite left – and indeed the not-so-Corbynite left – refuses to acknowledge the degree to which anti-Semitism is snarled up in the before and after of Israelophobia. The Stop the War Coalition is a sort of home to Jew-haters because its hate music about Israel is so catchy. It simplifies a complex and heartbreaking conflict, it elides causes and effects, it perpetuates a fable that flatters one side and demonises another, it ignores all instances of intransigence and cruelty but one, inflaming hatred and enabling the very racism it declares itself opposed to.

  Let’s forget whether or not anti-Semitism is the root of this. It is sufficient that it is the consequence. Face that, Corbyn, or the offence you take at any imputation of prejudice is the hollow hypocrite’s offence, and your protestations of loving peace and justice, no matter who believes them, are as ash.

  You can’t enjoy Proust or aloo gobi standing up

  Here’s the bad news – we are sitting down too much. It would seem that if we want to get to a hundred in any state to enjoy it, we have to do so standing up. Since I earn my living sitting down, this is especially unwelcome news. I happened to be standing up when my wife broke it to me. ‘You’d better sit down for this,’ she said.

  The good news, that curries are lifesavers, thus becomes cruelly ironic. Because who wants to eat a curry standing up? And if you happen to be arthritic – a condition to which curries are thought to offer relief – are you able to eat a curry standing up?

  Others to whom curries are said to give relief include sufferers from dementia, strokes and bowel cancer. All this before we include the myriad consolations curries have long been known to bring to men who find themselves alone at midnight with nowhere but the Taj Mahal to go to. I speak as one of the consoled.

  In the days when I found it easier to stand up, I was living in a place where for ten long years I found myself alone at midnight. It isn’t necessary to be geographically specific. Let’s just say it was somewhere in the West Midlands, a little to the south of Stafford and a little to the north of Birmingham. Providentially, there was a Taj Mahal on every corner. If you happened to be a visitor to Wolverhampton in the 1970s – blast, I’ve gone and given it away! – there is a good chance you would have seen me talking to myself in the corner of one or other of those Taj Mahals, just visible against the flock wallpaper whose colour and texture I had grown to resemble.

  I had grown to resemble the Taj Mahal intestinally as well. ‘You don’t appear to have any blood,’ the doctor I finally went to see about chronic stomach pains, told me. ‘Your veins run with vindaloo.’

  In those days there was less of a consensus about the benefits of curry. So his advice was to find somewhere else to eat. ‘At midnight?’ He took my point. But what about the hot-dog and hamburger stall in the middle of town? I’m glad now, in the absence of any medical evidence to suggest that meat trimmings, saturated fats, sodium nitrate, molten cheese and onions refried in machine oil a
re good for us, that I stuck with curries. That I survived only goes to show I must have been eating something in the Taj Mahal that agreed with me, whatever the contents of my veins. And we now know what that is. Diferuloylmethane, otherwise known as curcumin, the chemical that makes turmeric the colour of the sun. Diferuloylmethane, the chemical that stops lonely men in a Midlands town from taking their lives.

  But I don’t suppose you can just nip into your nearest Taj Mahal – which won’t be called the Taj Mahal any longer anyway – and ask for extra diferuloylmethane. Who’s to say the waiter will even know what it is? And by the time you’ve talked to him about turmeric, what makes it yellow and the latest medical findings in its favour, you will have annoyed the other diners who’ve just come out for a curry. My advice is to carry a drum of turmeric everywhere you go, in the way that some people carry artificial sweeteners. There are parts of the world where it is used to stop bleeding, to disinfect wounds, to heal sores, to cure eczema and scabies. So even if you’re not a curry eater, there’s good reason always to have turmeric about your person.

  But if we are healthier standing up, does this mean that turmeric loses its efficacy if we take it sitting down? I am an incorrigible sitter-down to meals, myself. Even in those lonely years when I could have joined the army of midnight peregrinators, crossing and recrossing the ring road eating hot dogs and hamburgers, with scalding onion running down their wrists, I chose to sit in a chair, no matter that a man alone in a chair at midnight waiting for a curry is the saddest of sights.

  For of all cuisines, Indian is surely the most intrinsically ceremonial. Only think of the Indian banquets you’ve enjoyed: starting with tandoori-grilled paneer and spinach cake, with a taste of someone else’s chicken tikka pie as the sun begins to set, progressing with no hurry to pan-roasted Kashmiri-chilli halibut, Nepalese bamboo shoot and black-eyed peas, kadai gosht, a side of aloo gobi, every kind of naan and roti, plus a small share of the communal biryani, and finishing off, as the moon comes up, with blood-orange sorbet. Now try telling me you can enjoy such a meal standing up.

  Reader, aside from walking, is there really anything we do that isn’t more pleasurable sitting down? Reading? Listening to music? Drinking wine? Sleeping? I’d add writing to the list were there not a fad at the moment for writing standing up. Philip Roth does it. Virginia Woolf and Nabokov did it. And Nietzsche lambasted Flaubert for telling Maupassant he wrote better from a chair.

  There’s an austerity about the idea of writing standing up I don’t much care for, as though writing ought to be a penance. The self-flagellating writer can now buy a treadmill desk, enabling him to write running. Why? To add leanness and sinew to his prose? I see how the argument works the other way: you can tell from the flaccidity of style into which Proust sometimes fell, and from his assumption that readers had as much time to kill as he had, that he wrote in bed. But his marvellous, leisurely, unbroken flights of lucidity were also written prone.

  In the end it’s the idea of writing as though at a pulpit that troubles me. The writer as priest. I prefer him down and dirty. Companionable, comfortable and unfit, a man you’d like to share a vindaloo with. And if that means the diferuloylmethane doesn’t kick in and he won’t get to a hundred, hard cheese.

  Nice porn

  Pornography again. When we last discussed pornography, we noted how having nothing better to do explains, in part, the hours expended on it. ‘The devil finds work for idle hands’ – never were wiser words spoken. If it’s true that past the age of fervent procreation we rub the itch of sex as much out of tedium as desire, then how much more is pornography – in particular, Internet pornography – the servant of ennui. One bored click of the mouse while we’re waiting for our emails and we’re in hell.

  Once upon a time, when low-quality porn was to be found only in the Venus Bookshop, as like as not situated opposite the cathedral, and high-quality porn was kept under lock and key in the school library, procuring it required not only effort but courage. We had to brave our teachers who would subsequently ask us, in the hearing of the whole class, how we were finding The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom. Or we had to sneak down to the Venus Bookshop in a capacious coat, no matter what the weather, and risk the manifest contempt of the proprietor who never failed to draw attention to our purchase, either by commenting loudly on its contents or by wrapping it slowly and ostentatiously in a brown paper bag – the bag being even more a badge of ignominy than the magazine.

  Thus were we forced into physical exercise, compelled to negotiate a complex of social relations, and taught shame. And thus, even before settling down to weigh the chances of going blind, did we learn about the consequences of choice. But even leaving aside the ethical advantages of having to forage for our filth, these prolegomena to pornography were advantageous: they gave savour to what we were about; they ratcheted up the excitement; they threw a cloak of secrecy and daring on what has now become mere automatic drudgery.

  The child of Internet porn is therefore a loser on every count – introduced to ugliness before he has had time to dream of beauty, denied those preliminaries wherein we weigh our actions, and led to suppose there is no sorrow that cannot be soothed, no blankness that cannot be filled, by watching others perform soixante-neuf.

  I am pleased to read that that indefatigably optimistic philosopher Alain de Botton is in agreement with me on this. In a press release last week, he noted that Internet pornography reduces our capacity to tolerate anxiety and boredom, exerting its ‘maddening pull’ in those very moments ‘when we feel an irresistible desire to escape from ourselves’. I like the phrase ‘maddening pull’. It humanises the impulse, removing blame and reminding us of the universal urgency of the before and the inevitable melancholy of the after. It’s only when he promises a different kind of porn, porn that would be ‘harnessed to what is noblest in us … in which sexual desire would be invited to support, rather than permitted to undermine, our higher values’, that I find myself not in agreement with him. Porn that’s good to us, nice to us, nice about us, enhancing rather than degrading, life-affirming rather than life-threatening, by definition ceases to be porn. One might as soon ask for tragedy that has a happy ending or alcohol that doesn’t make us drunk.

  I don’t say we shouldn’t rethink the way sex is routinely depicted in our society – in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence tried nobly if unsuccessfully to clean up the very language of sexual relations – but you cannot clean up pornography because its province is defilement. However and whenever we go there, and no matter whether it’s literary pornography or the perfunctory ins and outs of YouPorn we visit, we go on the understanding that we will witness abasement and – for this is the transaction we all make with pornography – enter into sensations of debased arousal ourselves. In the end, pornography is an act of collusion between the material and the user of it. It is the collusion that is debased, hence our being able to find the images themselves innocuous and even laughable when we aren’t in a collusive mood. And it’s this collusion that erodes the distinction between classy porn and trashy porn. Pornography is a state of mind: it is nothing less than the willing and necessitous suspension of the very higher values Alain de Botton thinks pornography can be persuaded to make peace with.

  In a famous essay on the pornographic imagination, Susan Sontag made the case for some pornographic books counting as literature because they plumb ‘extreme forms of human consciousness’. But wherein would lie that extremity if they merely confirmed and flattered our ‘higher values’? As a matter of deliberate intention in the pornography we call art, and as a by-product of our collusion in that pornography which does not aspire to art at all, the best and sweetest ideas we have of ourselves, as rational creatures capable of tenderness and love, are trashed.

  But the case for pornography is not simply that it derides the decencies. It has, paradoxically, a more energising effect. There’s an exhilaration in erotic extremity that arises from its danger. Ordinarily, we harness se
x to marriage, family and employment; we accept that we can no more incorporate the fearfulness of sex into domestic life than we can wake every day to the knowledge we take, say, from a Sophoclean tragedy. But ‘the temerity of penetration’ we find in tragedy – the look into the ‘horror of nature’, to employ Nietzschean terms – is what we find in pornography, too. We are contrary beings or we are nothing; in the midst of our abundant life, indeed as one of the most powerful expressions of that abundance, pornography revels in wastefulness and destruction.

  That being the case, how can it be harnessed to all that’s good and noble? Answer: it can’t.

  The shame that outlives us

  Of the reasons there are to dread death – and no stoic or holy man has yet convinced me there are reasons not to – the most compelling is the shame of it. I don’t just mean the shame of illness and bodily deterioration, helplessness, loneliness, reliance on the care and kindness of others, the end of you as a self-determining agent, I mean the simple shame of being mortal, the disgrace of not being able to do a little better than that.

  Life is full of humiliations to all but the most insensate, but life petering out like every other, life just giving in to the brute fact of non-life, is the keenest humiliation of all. Small wonder that some cultures have seen a nobility in suicide. Whatever else there is to consider, this way, at least, the time and manner of dying is of your choosing. It is you saying no to life, and not the other way around. You are your own executioner. It’s not quite a victory, but it’s half a one.

  That said, the method of self-slaughter which some settle for appears to steal even that half-victory from them. Before Robin Williams’s decision to end his life, we can only bow our heads in respect. It isn’t for us to judge. But it’s impossible not to wonder why he chose to do it the way he did. Of all the means available, especially to a rich man living in LA, why hanging?