The Dog's Last Walk

by Howard Jacobson

  I sat next to a Cohen lookalike at the O2 Arena. Not as aged or as switchblade lean, but wearing his hat identically and given to ironic, deep-throated mumblings. He knew every song by heart, and appeared, at times, as though he had passed over into another reality. Cohen sang what was in my neighbour’s soul. I won’t say everybody at the concert was transported to this degree, but most were. It was like being at a very sedate, elderly orgy. ‘Dance me to the end of love,’ Cohen sang, and that was precisely where he took us – to love’s very extremities. Cohen’s peculiar genius is to have made masochism melodic, and by that means to have turned it into macho. Song after song celebrates erotic surrender. Fine by the man next to me. He yielded up his being. Fine by all the other 20,000 fetishists in the stadium. Sexually speaking, probably the sweetest, least aggressive people on the planet. But the question has to be asked whether art is best served by submitting yourself to it so completely. Can it even be said to be art that you’re enjoying when what you are is seduced?

  The hat gives the game away. Love me under my fedora, Cohen asks. Ignore me, says Lowry under his shapeless trilby – for I am unlovable – and look instead at what I make. Very Manchester, this unwillingness to whisper sweet nothings. We are plain-speaking, sarcastic, self-denigrating, difficult buggers up there. We’ll meet anyone halfway, provided they are plain-speaking, difficult buggers too. For years, it seems to me, it was Lowry’s refusal to talk up his work, to give his paintings other than bog-standard titles, to aggrandise, to woo, to seduce us with the charm of paint or the allure of sentiment, that kept him out of the mainstream.

  Paradoxically, this reluctance to be idolised should have recommended Lowry to the sternest of contemporary critics – those aestheticians who, after Adorno and Laura Mulvey, cautioned against ‘libidinous engagement with the art object’. ‘Passionate detachment’ was what they preached instead. Precious chance of that when the artist tips his fedora at you. Lowry’s charmless titfer, on the other hand, keeps us strictly in our place.

  The unhappy wanderer

  It’s a curious fact about medical check-ups that you always leave shorter and heavier than when you arrived. ‘If I go on losing inches this fast,’ I told the doctor the last time he measured me, ‘I will soon have disappeared altogether.’ ‘That’s unlikely to happen,’ he said, ‘so long as you go on gaining pounds at the same rate.’

  The vanishing inches I ascribe to faulty equipment, but the accumulated pounds I acknowledge, though what’s making them accumulate I have no idea. I understand dieting and occasionally practise it. I get the science of nutrition. Yes, I eat bread and drink wine, but I have cut down on cheese, can take or leave champagne, only eat biscuits on trains, only eat cake at birthdays and no more like chocolates than I like carrots, consumption of which I have also reduced. ‘It could be,’ the doctor told me, ‘that you’re happy.’

  That was such an astonishing suggestion that I forgot to ask him to explain what the one had to do with the other. Happy? Me! I have been miserable – and have prided myself on being miserable – for as long as I can remember. I was a prodigy of misery when I was small. Strangers commented on it. ‘Why the long face?’ ‘Cheer up, sunshine, it may never happen.’ ‘Smiles are free, you know, you sour-faced little bastard.’

  That last remark was my father’s. He hated having a surly son. I think my mother persuaded him it was early-onset adolescence. ‘What, in his pram?’ But he left me to it and hoped my temperament would lighten by itself. Which it partly did once real adolescence came and went. But I still remained more sullen than sunny, didn’t like the feel of my face from the inside, or indeed the look of my face from the outside, when I smiled, and found an echo of my feelings only in sardonic literature and heartbreaking music.

  And now, suddenly, according to my doctor, I’m happy. He’s right, as it happens, though I’m embarrassed that it shows. I seem to have reversed the normal order of things which is to gurgle away cheerfully when you’re an infant and decline into despondency as you start hitting the big numbers. Here is not the place to discuss how this reversal has come about. More interesting is my doctor’s contention that happiness puts on weight.

  Having pondered it for a while, I think this has a physiological rather than a psychological explanation. When you’re happy, you dispense with exercise. I have not spent a great deal of time in gyms or health clubs. Having loathed PE as a boy, it makes no sense to me to embrace it as a man. But whenever I’ve been in a gym I’ve been struck by the angry sadness of everyone I see there. The received wisdom has it that running on a treadmill or pressing weights releases endorphins that make us happy, but that’s only relative to how unhappy we were to start with. A man with a loving bed-warmed wife to stay wrapped around does not leave the house at seven in the morning to sweat in the company of other men. Unless … But that’s something else again. Ditto a man with a job he cannot be torn away from. The gym is a place we go to find a simulacrum of happiness, not to compound the happiness we already feel. We are not fools. We can distinguish endorphin-induced bliss from the real thing. No genuinely happy man ever saw the need to exercise.

  And walking the same. I have walked a lot in my life. Aged eight, I left home with a Dick Whittington bundle on my shoulder and walked to my grandmother’s a mile away. Unhappiness was the cause. My parents had refused to go on paying the fines on my library books. I’d taken out Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther and André Maurois’s Call No Man Happy months before and hadn’t wanted to return them. I hoped my grandmother would pay the fines for me, though, as I trudged along, I knew in my heart she wouldn’t. And once I very nearly walked from Manchester to Cambridge having failed to hitch a single ride. Drivers don’t like picking up hikers with sour faces. Since then, I have found it helps to walk off a bout of depression, a severe disappointment, a sudden loss of self-belief, or simply a marriage. More than once, and by more than one wife, I have been accused of ‘flouncing’ out, but it wasn’t a flounce, it was just an irresistible compulsion to walk away from the anguish of conflict, and suffer it on my own. There are Walter Sickert paintings and Thomas Hardy poems that evoke the walled-in suffocation of couples no longer in love; in every case, all parties would have benefited from a walk. I don’t say they would have been happier, but walking suits and even explains unhappiness, and so makes for a sort of private harmony of wretchedness.

  Some will no doubt maintain that a bracing walk can express high spirits but the fact that they’ve slipped in the word ‘bracing’ proves that a walk for them is not a walk for me. There was a popular German song we all made fun of in the 1950s called ‘The Happy Wanderer’, or ‘Der Fröhliche Wanderer’. ‘I love to go a wandering,’ it began, and then we’d all join in with ‘Val-deri, Val-dera, Val-deri, Val-dera-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha’, the false Germanic ha-has giving the lie to the idea that shlepping a knapsack through the Tyrol made you happy.

  In fact, all the great wanderers – Cain, Werther, the rejected lover in Schubert’s Winterreise – were miserable as sin. Walking is motion to feel bad to. Stumble on felicity and you’ll never walk again. And that’s why the happy put on weight. Why they also lose inches is a question I’m working on.

  At least the old aren’t young

  It’s a sure sign I’m getting old, according to a study the newspapers are carrying, that I fall asleep in front of the TV. I say ‘study’, but it’s no more than simple answers to simple questions collated by the insurance company Engage Mutual. So what am I doing reading stuff like this at my age? I’m waiting to see my doctor, that’s what. And when you’re waiting to see your doctor, you read whatever’s lying about. I can also tell you, for example, the cost of a six-bedroom, 25-acre property in Chipping Norton, and what Katie Price – or is it Katy Perry, or is it Katie Holmes? – has for breakfast. Nothing. That’s what she has for breakfast, not the value of the six-bedroom property in Chipping Norton. Shaming to know such things. Why do we fritter away the hours we spend waiting to see a doctor – hours
that could be our last on Earth – on flim-flam? Answer me that, Engage Mutual.

  I’m angered by their ice-cream study. Angry with myself for bothering to go through the fifty things that prove I’m past it. Angry with the quietist assumptions that always underpin lists of this sort, as for example that being angry is a sign you’re getting old, not that there’s something to be angry about. Why is dissatisfaction taken to be a mark of failing powers and patience, when it might just as easily be understood as a proper judgement on a foolish world? Since we know that to be young is to be in a permanent, albeit conformist quarrel with everything and everybody, why is the anger of the aged judged differently? Why is an old man’s anger invariably reduced to the status of querulousness?

  Take No. 15 on the list: ‘Finding you have no idea what young people are talking about’ – far from being evidence of decrepitude, might this not be a) good manners, as in minding one’s own business; b) seasoned indifference to opinions still at the foetal stage; c) absorption in ideas of one’s own, as when William Blake’s wife told visitors her husband couldn’t receive them because he was in paradise? Absent-mindedness can often be another word for having better things to think about.

  Ditto falling asleep in front of the television. I, for one, don’t do it because I’m old. I do it because I’ve lost interest. I never fell asleep during Borgen or The Sopranos. And when I did start to fall asleep during Curb Your Enthusiasm, it was because it had started to be unfunny. In fact, I have always fallen asleep watching television when it’s humdrum, which is much of the time. So why don’t I do something else? Because the sleep you get in front of TV is of a particularly high order in that it combines active criticism with rest. We speak of the sleep of the just; we should speak also of the sleep of the discerning.

  No. 22 of Engage Mutual’s fifty symptoms of senescence is ‘complaining about the rubbish on television these days’. Thus they have you either way. You’re an old fart if you let the pap send you to sleep, and you’re an old fart if you make an active stand against it. Which leaves the young where? Either too dumb to notice how dull most television is, or too pusillanimous to complain.

  Although the signs of ageing we are told to look out for are of the pipe-and-slippers sort – hating noisy pubs, liking cups of tea, driving slowly, falling asleep after a single glass of wine (messy if you’re already asleep watching television), forgetting the names of bands, dressing according to the weather, not knowing any songs in the Top 10 – in fact, there is an implicit rebelliousness here against everything the young, in all their earnest conventionality, never dream of questioning. It isn’t retirement that bugs the authors of this study; it’s intransigence. The old simply refuse to play along.

  Of the accusations devised by capitalism to make the no-longer obedient feel bad about themselves, this is the most heinous: that not agreeing, not accepting, not buying into the manufactured trends of musicolatry – not being good little consumers, in short – mark you out as grumpy old men and women. I don’t mean to turn this into a war between the generations. It’s miserable enough for the young already without old men like me pointing out their shortcomings, but it does them no favours to treat their slavishness to fads, received opinions, mass delusion, and every other species of regimentation, as manifestations of vigour. Only in body does youth triumph over age. And the old must never begrudge the young abusing those bodies as we enjoyed abusing ours. Thereafter, though, we must teach them to look forward to physical ruination for the consolations it brings: wearing clothes that fit, not being pissed every hour the devil sends, forgetting what you can’t be bothered remembering, falling asleep in front of the TV.

  But youth and age are only superficially adversaries. In some we call old, youth remains vividly present, just as in some we call young, the fossil is there for all to see. It’s naivety, which is no respecter of age, we need to watch. To pass the time in the surgery I began composing a rival list of fifty things that show you are naive. 1: Watching The Apprentice. 2: Expressing shock that countries spy on one another. 3: Thinking there’d be no more terrorists if we addressed the causes of terrorism. 4: Having a favourite band. 5: Riding a bicycle in cities. 6: Assuming England are going to win the Ashes hands down …

  The doctor called me in before I could finish. I mentioned I’d been reading a survey about old age. He got me to try touching my toes. ‘Now that’s what I call old,’ he said.

  There’s always another Dark Lady

  Lovers of Shakespeare’s sonnets – and who that reads this paper isn’t? – will be relieved to learn that the identity of the Dark Lady, supposed addressee of the final twenty-four, has been uncovered. No, not Aemilia Bassano, poetess and lover of Lord Hunsdon, who was a patron of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, for whom Shakespeare wrote and whose mistress, therefore, by the febrile logic of biographical scholarship, he would not have been able to keep his hands off. Nor was she Lucy Negro, the Clerkenwell whore, sometimes called Black Luce but always referred to as ‘notorious’ – a prime candidate, by the same scholastic logic, for the reason that Shakespeare was often in Clerkenwell.

  In the minds of literary biographers, a poet has only to have strolled down a street in early evening for the likelihood to arise of his having sired a family of eight there. Let him have come within half a mile of another man’s mistress, whether strumpet, versifier or both, and the chances of his not having had carnal relations with her are minimal. Grant but a tenth of the suppositions made about his sex life and you can see why in Sonnet 110 Shakespeare berated himself for having gone ‘here and there’ and made himself ‘a motley to the view’.

  But don’t forget that Sonnet 110 predates the Dark Lady sequence and must have been addressed either to the Earl of Pembroke or the Earl of Southampton, though why it couldn’t equally have been addressed to Hunsdon, preparatory to Shakespeare’s nabbing his concubine, or even John Greene, who kept a disorderly house in Cow Lane, Clerkenwell, which Shakespeare was bound to have passed on his way to meeting Black Luce, I don’t know, but the preference of literary biographers for earls probably accounts for it.

  The Dark Lady, anyway, according to Dr Aubrey Burl, fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, turns out to have been Aline Florio, wife of John Florio, the translator of Montaigne. This will not come as a surprise to the distinguished Shakespearean Jonathan Bate who, in his book The Genius of Shakespeare, published fifteen years ago, cautions against ‘reducing the sonnets to their origin’ but then reduces them for the hell of it. ‘My Dark Lady,’ he whispers in the trembling reader’s ear, ‘is John Florio’s wife.’ Scholars being nothing if not magnanimous, Professor Bate will be happy to have Dr Burl’s belated corroboration.

  We won’t elaborate here on the reasons adduced by both men for their choice – Aline Florio was someone Shakespeare would have met (and we know where that always led); her husband was old (and we know where that always led); Shakespeare had a thing for witty women and Aline Florio (Bate has to invoke genetics to get this to run) was the sister of a witty man; and she was born of low degree in Somerset, which would explain the darkness of her complexion if not the inconstancy of her nature. Enough. Let the Dark Lady be whoever the Dark Lady was. It is not our affair personally, given that Shakespeare chose it not to be, and it is not our affair aesthetically in that, as Stephen Greenblatt reminds us: ‘It would be folly to take [the sonnets] as a kind of confidential diary, a straightforward record of what actually went on.’

  Of the misconceptions that continue to bedevil literature, this is among the most obdurate: that it is a record, straightforward or otherwise, of something that actually happened. Even the most sophisticated readers will forget all they know of the difference between literature and life when biography perchance shows its slip. I recall not only a publisher but an agent conscientiously worrying that the end of one of my novels would cause great pain to my two devout but estranged daughters. In fact, I have no daughters, just a son from whom I am not estranged and who is not devout.
I take the error as a compliment; my writing, it seemed, was so vivid, that what was imagined could pass as real.

  But you would think the case no longer needed to be made, that what is wrought by the imagination vies with actuality, transforming beyond recognition any ‘truth’ that might have been lurking in its lees. I am not the I of my novels. I am not even the I of these columns. It doesn’t matter that there are resemblances. No matter how like the I of reality the I in whose name I write is, he is still a construct. Forgive the apparent self-concern, but in fact it isn’t me I’m talking about, any more than we should suppose that the Will in Sonnets 135 and 136, which play ingeniously, if sometimes tiresomely, upon the poet’s name – ‘Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will, / And Will to boot, and Will in over-plus’ – is Shakespeare stripped of art and artifice and coming clean about himself. There is no coming clean in art.

  Before he breaks his own rule, Jonathan Bate says we should ‘allow the sonnets to rest in a middle space between experience and imagination’. I like the phrase but think he still gives too much to ‘experience’, which is beyond our reach and business. It’s possible that had there been no Dark Lady, had Shakespeare never wandered into Clerkenwell or stolen reechy kisses from the wife of a scholar too busy translating Montaigne to notice, these sonnets about loathing what you love, about believing what you know to be untrue, about the falsity at the very heart of sexual desire, would not have spoken to us with such disquieting force. But there’s always another Dark Lady. Isn’t that what these poems proclaim: that erotic love is full of pain and contradiction, an eternal search for an anguish one cannot bear and cannot bear to be without? We diminish them by making them the story of an actual affair. We diminish thought, we diminish imagination, and we diminish art.