The Dog's Last Walk

by Howard Jacobson

  I wish I’d known Anne and that she’d lived a little longer so we could have discussed the outpouring of celebrity Twitter grief for Peaches Geldof. The vanity, the banality, the trivialising. Nothing betrays an inert heart like an inert commiseration. ‘Our thoughts are with X or Y,’ the famous for nothing very much in particular proclaimed like automata, proving that their thoughts, if indeed they had any, were somewhere else entirely. And then – speaking of the mundanity of the modern – there was Lord Sugar’s immortal contribution to the vocabulary of feeling: ‘Peaches Geldof dies aged 25. What happen there??? That’s a shock.’

  How to confront the august mystery of death – ‘What happen there???’

  Now tell me that Anne was wrong.

  The world turned upside down

  ‘Earlier this week, NASUWT general secretary Chris Keates told delegates …’ It doesn’t trip off the tongue, does it? ‘Delegates’ is one of those words you can’t hear without immediately seeing the face of Arthur Scargill, and the name Chris Keates suffers from an intrinsic bathos, like Kevin Coleridge or Sydney Shakespeare, but it’s the acronym that’s the real problem. NASUWT – it doesn’t look or sound like anything you want to belong to.

  I wish they’d give themselves their full title – National Association of Schoolmasters Forward Slash Union of Women Teachers. The pedantry is appropriate, and the word ‘schoolmaster’ in particular is rich in associations if you’re old enough to remember when that was what a teacher was – a forbidding personage who assumed responsibility for your education, a master in that he’d mastered his subject, and a master in that he mastered you. Schoolmistress the same, though there are other associations to contend with once you invoke ‘mistress’.

  The business of mastering came up at last week’s NASUWT conference. Just who is mastering whom these days? The teacher who’d been interviewed for a job by pupils and rejected because she reminded one of them of Humpty-Dumpty made the headlines, of course. One’s first response was to take it for an April Fool joke. ‘Schoolkids given say in the one thing they know bugger all about: their education – April Fool!’ And certainly many of the other horror stories have an apocryphal feel to them. Pupils on an interviewing panel asking a teacher to sing Michael Jackson’s ‘Bad’; another hopeful being asked what he would do to impress the judges of Britain’s Got Talent; pupils marking teachers for the way they dress, their friendliness, their willingness to exchange emails. Impossible, surely? But then again not.

  Whatever the accuracy of specific complaints, there is no reason to dispute the general point that teaching has been turned upside down, that those who are there to learn are deciding the futures of those they are there to learn from, that youth is sitting in judgement on age, that ignorance has become the arbiter of knowledge. The Christian world used to permit this topsy-turvy-dom once a year at Carnival, when the beggar would be king and restraint would bend the knee to licence. Then we’d return the next day to the way the society functions best. We have forgotten the back to normality part; when it comes to education, at least, we want it to be Carnival all the time.

  Blame the twentieth century. It was then that learning lost its crown. There is nothing to know, libertarian philosophers of education insisted. Knowledge did not exist. Knowledge was illusory at worst, relative at best, and either way the tool of those who would colonise the minds of the young and the subservient. It was the friend of hierarchy, the ally of hegemony, the tool of patriarchy, and therefore to be resisted as we resist all other tyrannies, never mind that belief in the relativity of knowledge is the greatest tyranny of them all.

  Though it appears stringent in its scepticism, relativism is sentimental at heart, favouring the simple over the complex, the savage over the man of social accomplishment, and the child over the adult. But like all sentimentalities, it ends up depriving those it pretends to serve. Was any savage yet made happy by the patronage of the sophisticated? Was any child empowered by being indulged for all it didn’t know?

  NASUWT is right to be enraged, though it could, it seems to me, be angrier still. Quite simply it should refuse as a union to allow any of its members to be subjected under any circumstances to the uninformed judgement of a child. The baby does not interview prospective mothers. It does not get to select the breast that suits it. Let me give NASUWT a new motto and a new acronym to remember it by. SASU – Suck and Shut Up.

  That any other ordering must humiliate the teacher hardly needs to be argued. Teaching is already a demeaned profession. Why it matters to us to denigrate teachers is a question for the social psychologist, but it is without doubt a further expression of our superstitious fear of knowledge. Once upon a time we called those possessed of knowledge necromancers and witches, and burned them at the stake; now we employ our children to bring them low.

  But it is our children we are punishing. Insist that learning must be fun and the child loses out on the invaluable experience of learning not being fun. Indulge them in their desire to have teachers who remind them of Cheryl Cole and call them ‘pet’ and they might skip home with smiles on their little faces, but they won’t have begun to scale that high and arduous hill on which wisdom resides.

  Are we afraid they will encounter teachers they don’t like? We should pray for teachers they don’t like. An alien presence at the blackboard helps break down the hateful fallacy that you read and think primarily to find out who you are and wave hello to your own reflection. As though an education is nothing but the primrose path to you. In fact the opposite is the truth – we learn in order to be liberated from ourselves.

  The classroom is neither a collective nor a focus group. We fail entirely of our educational responsibility to children every time we pretend we are partners in the learning business. There is no such equality when it comes to knowledge. If this means that the child is sometimes bored and sometimes afraid, no matter. Boredom and fear are mulch to the imagination. And a child’s perception of its own experience changes anyway. The teacher who seemed inaccessible suddenly makes sense; the teacher who wanted to be your friend now looks a clown.

  And then, years later, it will all look different again – those teachers from whom you said you got nothing resurface in your thoughts, you recall something they said, maybe no more than a scrap of information, maybe a whole way of thinking. They are not just characters in the drama of your life, changing and unfolding long after your last physical contact with them, they are the shifting determinants of your intelligence. This is the privilege of an education over which, in your best interests, you were not permitted any say.

  What is it we fear? Brainwashing? Indoctrination? Reader, no one was ever brainwashed by exposure to a good teacher so long as there are other good teachers down the corridor. Where children are subjected to unremitting mediocrity, the last thing they need are teachers chosen in mediocrity’s image.

  Down and out in Covent Garden

  You know you are grown sentimental when you start counting the cygnets on the duck pond in the park to be sure none has perished since you counted last. None has, you will be pleased to hear. Eight last week, and eight this. Each the colour of egg yolk dipped in pale ale. I can’t describe their softness because neither of the swans guarding them will let me get close enough to take a cygnet in my hand and stroke it.

  They bite the air fiercely when nosy coots or marauding mallards swim into their space, and they arch their necks at me and hiss if I show more than a passing interest in their families. In an age in which parents force-feed their babies hamburgers and blow cigarette smoke into their faces, there are things to learn from the jealous parenting of swans.

  But that could just be me being sentimental again. For all I know, swans do terrible things to their cygnets when I’m not watching. A pet rabbit, for which my father made a capacious hutch, and over whom I made much fuss when I was eight or nine, took it into her head to eat a couple of her babies one night. I didn’t witness the crime. I simply found them gone in the morning, the on
ly evidence they had ever existed a bit of mangled gristle, a flurry of bunny hair, and mummy rabbit twitching her nose prettily, as though butter wouldn’t melt. Sentimentality works by our seeing only what we want to see.

  This was brought home to me forcibly twice recently when leaving the Royal Opera House wet-eyed – first for Mimi and then for Violetta, victims of operatic tuberculosis both – only to have to pick my way between the homeless camped out in their cardboard boxes in Covent Garden. It’s a rude shock. Inconsiderate of them to disturb the deep emotionalism of my evenings this way. Couldn’t they at least wait until we opera-goers have left the area before they turn in for the night?

  If you want an image for a cruelly divided society, you won’t find a better one. But what is one to do? I don’t mean politically. Politically it’s easy to salve one’s conscience, no matter that salving it rarely makes the problem go away. You join the Labour Party, write articles attacking the privileged, give the money you spend on opera tickets to homeless charities, and vow never to go to anything that can be considered elitist again. What isn’t for everybody shouldn’t be for anybody: the world’s opera houses are the reasons we have cardboard cities. Weep. Occupy. Destroy. Fine, if these resolutions make you feel better, but they aren’t answers to my question. What do you do? What do you do at the very moment of stepping from deeply affecting music and pretend suffering into misery which no great composer has laboured over and no singer rendered exquisite?

  There are, I accept, questions to be asked of me. Inequity apart, what am I doing hopping from La Bohème to La Traviata in such quick succession that I am barely over the death of one consumptive woman before I am grieving for the next? Is there not enough real suffering out there that I must go in search of the make-believe variety? Just what kind of itch am I rubbing?

  Philosophers have put their minds for centuries to the reasons-why of art. In our time, the argument that we come out of the fires of art more finely tempered, more civilised, the better humanly for where we’ve been, gets short shrift. We’ve always known about the wealthy who weep over depictions of the poor while treating those in their employ like dogs. For as long as there have been theatres, people have sobbed their hearts out watching scenes of domestic suffering, the like of which they will be the cause the minute they get home. But more recent accounts of Rudolf Hess crying at operas put on by Jewish prisoners he wouldn’t scruple to send to the gas chambers an hour later have focused our minds, not only on the disconnect between life and art, but on the contribution sentimentality makes to the sensibilities of monsters. How can we defend art when art lovers stoked the ovens? You can see why some said that after Auschwitz poetry had better hold its tongue.

  Yet poetry is still being read and written, and we do, despite everything that’s happened, continue going to the opera even if we can no longer pretend we will be better people for it. But do we have to be? Isn’t it enough that for the brief time we are in our seats we are not our commonplace selves, we submit to unfamiliar emotions, glimpse what we might have been, if not what we actually are or ever will be?

  Much depends, of course, on what we’re watching. If I am honest, I go to that schmaltzfest La Bohème more to indulge the sentimental self I discovered at about the time my rabbit ate its family than to escape it. La Traviata is a different kettle of fish: people sing because there is no other way of expressing what they feel; the orchestra swells now with sympathy, now with contrary emotions, and in the choruses we hear a deep communal lamentation.

  It helps if you have the great Sonya Yoncheva interpreting Violetta’s rage and sorrow but, whoever’s singing, you have to be made of stone not to be engulfed by grief watching her short, tumultuous life ebb away. All right, so you’re breaking the heart of a real-life Violetta even as you’re applauding a pretend one – that only goes to show how brazenly versatile a species we are, how infinite in faculty, in apprehension like a god, in action the very devil.

  But all’s not lost: just because I’ll be eating braised cygnets tonight doesn’t mean I wasn’t genuinely anxious for their safety when I counted them on the duck pond this morning.

  The star is fallen

  There was something of Zelig – Woody Allen’s nobody who turns up at every event in recent history – about the deaf sign-language interpreter at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service, who, in the view of experts and amateurs alike, talked ‘gibberish’ with his hands. I didn’t watch the service on television, having had enough of all the easily bought, hushed-tone reverence – which is not the same as having had enough of Mandela – but it was plain enough on YouTube, from his frozen eyes and inexpressive jazz hands, that he wasn’t doing the business. He has since blamed it on schizophrenia. Which could have been Zelig’s defence as well.

  Leaving aside the insult to the deaf, you have to admire him. Though he has apparently performed this function for the ANC before – could it be that there is something they don’t want the deaf to know? – it still takes courage to appear before the world quite so ill-equipped for what you are employed to do. Yes, I know Cameron was there as well, but that’s somehow different.

  I’d be surprised, anyway, if a film starring Tom Hanks as a sign-language interpreter who doesn’t know how to hand-sign isn’t already in production. If I were not otherwise engaged I’d be working on the novel. It’s an irresistible metaphor for our times: you and I unable to communicate except through a mediator who, out of whatever motive, passes gobbledegook between us. Another word for this is television.

  But there’s something else about this fiasco that strikes me. It pertains to the event. I don’t say the occasion was fatally marred by the farcical, for all that the crowd booed Jacob Zuma, the audio systems failed (so it wasn’t only the deaf who missed out), and the attention of the world’s press was distracted by the Danish prime minister’s ‘selfie’ – a marvellous act of solipsistic bathos in the midst of this celebration of selflessness, the fact of Helle Thorning-Schmidt being married to Neil Kinnock’s son somehow compounding the absurdity. And I certainly don’t mean that a memorial service for Nelson Mandela in particular was bound to breed indignities. But the moment we forget our innate buffoonery and elevate men to the status of gods, we invite the gods to slap us down. If we want to make ourselves laughing stocks we have only to overreach.

  This isn’t a piece about Mandela. The world doesn’t need another one of those. But view him how you like, he was a flesh-and-blood man, not a deity. Believers will have to forgive me when I say the same about Jesus. It does neither a disservice to keep the supernatural out of their achievements. Goodness is harder for men than it is for gods. It’s the admixture of the ordinary and the exceptional, reminding us of how much there always is to overcome, that makes us respect them. The sight of Mandela laughing with the Spice Girls is one I would expunge from my memory if I could, but whether he posed with them in hard-nosed compliance to the realpolitik of the trashy world we live in, or because he had the bad taste actually to like the Spice Girls, such worldliness throws his real virtues into relief. Were he alive today, Jesus would surely pose with Tulisa on his way to chasing the money-changers from the City.

  We deify at our peril. ‘There was no one like Lawrence before or since,’ wrote the art patron Mabel Dodge Luhan of D. H. Lawrence. ‘His genius lay in his capacity for being …’ Let’s stop it there. I yield to no one in my admiration for Lawrence’s work, but when I hear of his, or anyone else’s, ‘capacity for being’ I’m with the gods of mischief on Parnassus. Quietly they wait, and then when death strikes those we aggrandise, so do they. And if not at the moment of death itself, then at a memorial service or an exhumation.

  Lawrence’s remains were exhumed in 1935, five years after his death. What happened to them is uncertain, but there’s no dignity however the tale’s told. One version has them incinerated in Marseille, and the ashes handed over to Captain Angelo Ravagli, the one-time lover of Lawrence’s wife. Whether you believe that Ravagli transported them to Taos
in New Mexico, where devotees were waiting to receive them, or dumped them outside Marseille to avoid transportation costs, finally posting over some other ashes altogether, depends on how demeaning you want this story to be.

  Some ashes turn up in New Mexico, anyway, where, according to one account, they fall into the hands of the poet Witter Bynner who drinks them in his cocktails in the hope of imbibing Lawrence’s ‘capacity for being’. Otherwise they get finally to Taos and become objects of fierce contention between Mabel Dodge Luhan and Lawrence’s widow, Frieda, the latter finally carting them off in a wheelbarrow of wet cement, into which she drops ash from her own cigarette, saying something along the lines of ‘let’s see the bastards try to nick them now’. And this to the remains of a man whose personal symbol was the phoenix.

  The great Roman soldier and lover Antony – a man forever writing his own epitaph – fares little better at Shakespeare’s hands. Imagining how he will be disgraced by Caesar if he’s captured, he begs those who think him godlike to finish him off in the grand manner, but they are unobliging. ‘The star is fall’n.’ ‘And time is at his period,’ proclaim a couple of poetically minded soldiers, contemplating the mess Antony has made of killing himself. Having delivered the eulogy, they scarper. Denied a heroic finish, Antony is carted wounded around the stage before being heaved up for a final kiss from Cleopatra. It lacks only a sign-language interpreter to explain it all in ‘gibberish’.

  Advice to a young artist: Don’t be yourself