The Mighty Walzer

by Howard Jacobson

  But he walked away while I was telling him.

  An improbably tall person, neither man nor boy, surveyed me through what, from that distance, looked like an airman’s helmet, but was in fact nothing other than a pair of very square spectacles on a very square face. ‘You’re not a bloody hearty, are you?’ he demanded.

  I wasn’t confident I could get words to carry to his height. So I lobbed him up a Bug and Dniester shrug. Meaning, if you look at it this way, but then again if you look at it that way …

  ‘Well are you or aren’t you?’

  It was actually a reprimand. If I stayed talking to him any longer he’d be telling me to make my bloody mind up. And he was no less of a freshman than I was. I’d seen him in the line, inclining extravagantly to the Master who himself was no short-arse. So I put into practice the one lesson in Cambridge etiquette I’d already learnt and left him to his ire. But it embarrassed me to do it. It wasn’t how I’d been brought up to behave. It contravened the convention of tcheppehing.

  ‘Can’t say I blame you,’ someone whispered in my ear.

  I turned around in surprise. And found myself looking into an open face, clear blue eyes, a broad smile, a slightly dizzy quiff of blond hair, relaxed stance, easy demeanour — someone like myself, at last!

  ‘Oliver Walzer,’ I said, holding out my hand.

  ‘Robin Clarke,’ he said pleasantly, holding out his.

  ‘Bit of a brute for someone who offers not to approve of hearties, isn’t he?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, isn’t he. Name’s Marcus Whiting, I’m told. Classics scholar. They say very brilliant.’

  I pooh-poohed that. ‘We’re all very brilliant,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, I’m not. I’m not brilliant at all.’

  ‘You wouldn’t be here, else,’ I said. Already I liked him. Maybe he wasn’t very brilliant but I liked him. The goyishe friend — could this one be the goyishe friend? Whose sister I would marry in a little country church in Gloucestershire? Where we would raise horses and soft-voiced goyishe children called Christopher and Amelia? And only ever have cheese after dinner?

  He laughed. ‘Trust me I’m not,’ he said. ‘I’m not even clever. But I can see you are.’

  ‘Brilliant or clever?’

  ‘Brilliant.’

  I smiled and shook my head.

  ‘Yes, you are,’ he said. ‘All Jews are brilliant.’

  I swallowed hard. I could have walked away but I foresaw an element of farce in that. Ricocheting from one to the other like a steel ball on a bagatelle board.

  ‘Not all Jews,’ I said. ‘Just as not all gentiles.’

  He was still shining his countenance upon me. ‘I’m glad you said gentiles and not Christians,’ he said. ‘It’s a common mistake. As a Christian myself I feel that there is a great deal of the Jew in me. Where would we Christians be without the Jews after all?’

  ‘Where indeed,’ I said.

  ‘Which is why it’s so important to Christians like myself to try to win Jews back to their original faith …’

  I held up a hand. ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t even know what you’re saying no to yet.’

  ‘I do,’ I said. ‘I’m saying no to everything.’

  ‘Couldn’t we meet over a beer, to talk about it.’

  ‘Jews don’t drink beer,’ I said. ‘It interferes with their brain cells.’

  He fell quiet for a moment or two. Then he said, ‘I see that I’ve hurt your feelings. I’m sorry. I didn’t want to do that. I love all Jews.’

  ‘Well that’s more than I do,’ I said.

  Now that he’d said he’d hurt my feelings I needed to escape him. As long as he’d only hurt my feelings I was no more than annoyed by him. But once he’d said he’d hurt my feelings, he’d hurt my feelings.

  So stuff his sister.

  ‘I have another party to go to,’ I said.

  ‘Quaffers? I’m off to that. I’m a bit of a hearty myself, I have to confess. Hockey. You’re ping-pong, I gather. I’ll walk over with you.’

  ‘No need,’ I said. ‘I’m going to Yorath and Rubella’s.’

  On such pin heads do major life decisions turn.

  Although I didn’t of course know this at the time, the distinguishing feature of a Yorath and Rubella party was that neither Yorath nor Rubella was ever at it. At least not until it was over. Too shy. In Yorath’s case too shy and too angry and too domestically indicated. In Rubella’s case, just too shy.

  You were meant to back blindly in, bang into a sherry, inveigle a book off the shelf or better still a faded cyclostyled sheet with extracts of books on it, keep your head down, and not address a soul. The silence of the grave — that was the other distinguishing feature of a Yorath and Rubella party, though I didn’t know that at the time either.

  But I am ashamed to say I took to it as a whelk takes to brine. There must have been twenty Collins Classics men in Yorath’s room when I turned up, all absorbed into paper, all with their eyes occluded. Dido and Aeneas was on the turntable. But very low. ‘When I am lai-aid, lai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-d in earth …’ Woman’s grief. Isolde next. An instinct for staidness, no less than embarrassment to the bone, told me not to break into the solemnities by introducing myself. Nobody was curious anyway. Besides, we were bound each to each at a level below the mere naming of names. We were a species unto ourselves. The Unmanned.

  I picked my way through the strewn cyclostyled sheets — practical criticism exercises designed to demonstrate the ways in which Oliphant Mrs had the writerly wood on Hemingway Ernest, or Behn Aphra the intellectual, emotional and every other sort of beating of Pinter Harold — and found myself a corner. Unless a hand came through the bookcases, no one could get me here.

  Every now and then someone would laugh, the demented laugh of the solitary, the laughter of the hermit bookman occasioned not by happy accident but a perceived inferiority in a male writer of no merit. Not surprise, but confirmation. The laugh rippled through us like a cold breeze, invigorating our brave marginality, binding us in our contempt for those whose heads did not grow below their shoulders. Conjoining us in chill. For those we laughed at most were the hot. Not hot as in shell-bound, not hot with the celerity of one’s introversion, but hot as in rash, nimble, impetuous.

  And this was my chosen world for however many years?

  Still is. Open me up and you will find that my blood runs Collins Classics green.

  It shouldn’t be that much of a surprise that I joined the Unmanned. The shy, too, must have their day. And ours was an Elect of the Shy. Just because our eyes were lowered and the laughter froze like hailstones in our throats, it didn’t mean that we too didn’t find it passing brave to be a king and ride in triumph through Persepolis. It’s possible we were the cruellest conquerors of them all. Certainly we were the most supercilious. The lowest in the saddle but the most high and mighty in our hearts.

  But the die was not cast yet. It was still only Day One, hard as that was to believe, and before midnight struck I could yet go over to the hearties.

  No, I had not given up entirely on the Quaffers’ bash. Try everything, wasn’t that my father’s motto? Try nothing spoke every bit as persuasively from my mother’s side, but I was already trying nothing, wasn’t I?

  The Yorath and Rubella party broke up just after nine. How could I tell? Because that was when Yorath and Rubella arrived. Yorath in a rage, curled around and around himself like a small unexploded firework, a rip-rap, smelling of saltpetre and powdered milk and Milton and uncut pages of forgotten novels; Rubella a step or two behind, a slothful Yakipak with voluptuous charcoal eyelids and the curly carmine lips of a led-astray cherub. I expected some secret nod of Laps’ or KD acknowledgement from Rubella, unserer to unserer even though the Bug and the Guadalquivir were a continent apart. But I got nothing. And never did, not in three long years as an undergraduate and another five, ten — God knows how long I was there — as a research student. Just once, towards the end of a tutorial e
xcruciating even by Rubella standards, he stuttered out something about my judgement being impaired by the ethic of first-past-the-post commercial individualism into which I’d been born, and our eyes met over that right enough. But it was hardly a meeting of the sympathetic. Later I learned that the two-faced trumbenik was able to indulge his lifestyle of superior last-past-the-post unpublishedness on the back of a family of wholesale haberdashers. From the North! His embroideries, his hand-woven rugs, his exquisite one-off Judith and Holofernes curtains, his Angelica Kaufmann wallpaper, his little wilting Gwen John self-portraits — all paid for by my aunties in yards of spiritless elastic!

  He stood on the stairs as we squeezed past him. We careful not to touch, he careful not to be touched. ‘Cho’,’ he said to each of us in turn. It was the best approximation to Cheerio he could manage. Too shy to essay so many syllables with a single breath. And too fucking fastidious ever to be caught forming a word that had Cheer in it.

  Yorath didn’t even bother with Cho’. He hopped from leg to leg with the key to his door in his hand, desperate for us to leave, his narrow body vibrating with the myriad cares of a principled marriage. Hold Yorath to your ear and you would hear the roar of his wife’s bleeding. But you wouldn’t want to hold Yorath to your ear.

  While he used his college room for seminars — hence the practical criticism sheets — Iaoin Yorath conducted all his one-to-one teaching, the only sort that really mattered in Golem College, in the parlour of a cramped worker’s cottage off Parker’s Piece where he was otherwise dragging up his sprawling family. Thanks be to God for the kindly necrosis of memory. I cannot now remember the architecture of the room in which I spent so many miserable and ungenerous hours, arguing for comedy though we never found anything funny, stressing the importance of narrative though in our conversation we frowned on anything approaching an anecdote, invoking life as the final arbiter of art, life, though we leapt from the living as from the leprous. But it falls to no man to be so fortunate as to forget everything. I still see the angel of the house, Yorath Mrs Herself, aflutter at the door in her slip in the cold Cambridge morning, big with yet one more, so white she was yellow, her large wet exhausted eyes, imploring you to be gone although you’d only just arrived. And I still see that other angel, the angel of domestic desperation, pass over Her Husband when the babies began to cry — not a normal cry, a harrowing unending wail, as though a bear had crossed Parker’s Piece and got into their house and was dismembering them a joint at a time — at the very moment that he, the doctor not the bear, was coiled to explode like a rip-rap, enraged that you had gone out on a limb and found interest in something that wasn’t available as a Collins Classic.

  He screamed at me once. ‘I don’t have time, I don’t have time, Walzer, to go combing the back streets of Cambridge for some lurid continental paperback romance that you’ve taken it into your head to write about.’

  ‘You can borrow mine,’ I suggested.

  ‘I don’t want to borrow yours. I don’t want to read it. Do you understand that? Nothing you’ve said makes me want to read a word of it. You’ve failed to engage me. You’ve failed to persuade me that there’s anything behind your interest except fashionable prurience. If you must read something foreign read Adolphe.’

  I took a note. ‘Is that by Benjamin Constant?’

  ‘By? By? Who is a novel ever by? Without Madame de Staël Adolphe would not have existed. Without her desolation — but read it, read it, Mr Walzer, and don’t bother with who it’s by.’

  And then the bear got in and the babies started. All of them at once. And a bottle exploded in the kitchen. And the phone rang. And soot fell down the chimney, blackening my essay. And the gas meter ran out of shillings. And the next student rang at the door. And Mrs Yorath went into labour.

  The lurid continental fashionably prurient paperback romance, by the way, was The Castle by Franz Kafka. A Man.

  Unless it was by Milena Jesenská Pollak.

  * * *

  I couldn’t have been given more clues. Rubella was unable to put his fallen cherub’s lips around any word that had a Cheer in it, and the hearties were unable to get their mouths around anything else.

  ‘Cheers, Oliver.’

  ‘Cheers, Oliver.’

  ‘Cheers, Oliver.’

  Friends!

  Friends who weren’t silent, or lofty, or doomed, or bashful as a matter of intellectual and moral principle, or who didn’t walk off in the middle of a conversation.

  Cheerful friends!

  ‘Cheers, Ollie! Cheers, cheers, cheers, cheers …’

  But they were the wrong sort of friends.

  They were already rampaging when I caught up with them, leaving the college by the rear gate and heading for the Market Tavern. Singing songs. Rugby songs. Rowing songs. What did I know what songs?

  Someone recognized me. ‘Here’s Ollie Walzer!’

  A few of them looked around. A name to conjure with in sporting circles, Ollie Walzer.

  ‘Ping-pongers Walzer?’

  ‘None other,’ I said.

  And I let myself be swept up by them.

  ‘What about a ping-pongers song, Ollie?’

  ‘There aren’t any,’ I said.

  And then suddenly, I had no idea how, but without doubt emboldened by sherry, I thought of one. Or rather I saw my way to one, since first of all I had to write it. Adapt it, at any rate. ‘Ilkley Moor Bah’t ‘At’, I gave them, changing the refrain to ‘Ilkley Moor Bah’t Bat’, which struck them as demonstrating so much inventiveness and cunning, so astounded and bedazzled them each time the refrain came around, that had it not been for the presence of bulldogs in their bowler hats on the opposite side of the street I might well have been chaired into the Market Tavern as a hero.

  The dimness of recollection that makes a waste of the ensuing years begins about now. That we drank a lot in the Market Tavern, my new hearty friends and I, drank a lot and drank it noisily and quickly, I have no doubt. That they asked for further proof of my lyric genius and that I obliged them, I also have no reason to disbelieve. A bastard version of ‘The Good Ship Venus’, to wit ‘The Good Ship Golem’, lingers with me still, though I retain no more than the opening lines, which in all conscience write themselves —

  ’Twas on the good ship Golem

  That all our balls got swollen;

  We cooled ‘em down

  In Newcastle Brown

  And still no one would hold ‘em —

  and a couplet from a later stanza —

  The Master Neville-Hacket,

  A devil with a racket

  which had the merit not only of naming names — a strategy which never fails with hearties — but also of bringing us full circle back to sport.

  Otherwise I remember only that we spilled beerily out into the market at closing time, shouting Olly! Olly! which is Cambridge rowing hearty for ‘Come on, the next five, the next four’ — a chant modified, once someone saw the possibility, to ‘Olly, Olly, Ollie!’; joked ungraciously about totty and I fear abused one or two; frolicked around the fountain; fell in; pissed against a college wall (not ours); ran back pursued by proctors; and returned by the gate we’d left by, only this time up it rather than through it.

  At thirty seconds past twelve I was back in my room. Day One — the last day of verdant boyhood — was finally over.

  * * *

  When I woke sadder but no wiser on day two I was still in my clothes and still wet from the fountain. I had ruined a good Kardomah suit. I had ripped my gown climbing in. I had a thumping headache. And my throat was sore.

  Why would my throat be sore? Ah, yes. Olly! Olly! Oh, God! I’d been showing off, hadn’t I, bawling plebeian roundelays for the behoof of public school Yahoos, composing ditties which lacked even the merit of rude invention, proving I could piss higher up the walls of Peterhouse than any soft sod from the South.

  I’d never pissed up a wall in my life. What gave me the idea that I might be good at it?

>   Olly, Olly, Ollie!

  I had been tsatskying again, hadn’t I?

  I had hit the town footling.

  And what’s more I had run the risk of being picked up and arrested by the University Police. On Day One! Some way of saying thank you to my family that would have been. He goes to Cambridge and he’s arrested! For five thousand years we had managed to stay out of trouble. Five thousand years in five hundred countries and not a single violation of the civil code. Not even a parking ticket. And now this one goes to Cambridge and ends up behind bars!

  Yes, I had hit the town footling. Footling with intent.

  In a fit of self-disgust I opted for Yorath and Rubella.

  THREE

  ‘Do you think because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?’

  Jane Eyre, Brontë Charlotte

  ‘Yes.’

  Walzer, Oliver

  NOTICE ANYTHING, NOTICE anyone, missing from the preceding?

  Totty.

  We had the word. We loved the word. We wrapped our tongues around the word. ‘Nice piece of totty, that, what!’ We even had their words. Shelves upon shelves of them. For what were Austen Jane and Eliot George if not totty?

  What was Dido? What was Isolde?

  But the flesh and blood thing, that which the word denotes — not to be seen.

  Yes, there were colleges for totty. Totty-only colleges. But somehow it was never really totty that you got there. It was something else. Not everybody felt as I did. There were some, among the hearties and even among the Unmanned, who had no complaints whatsoever about the contents of these totty-only colleges. They wooed them, fell in love with them, married them, betrayed them, just as if they were perfectly normal totty. But they didn’t look like perfectly normal totty to me. I was spoilt, I’ll admit that: I’d slept on a bed of sugar bags with my arms around Lorna Peachley, I’d habituated the KD, I’d eyed off the best there was; but all KD comparisons apart, who they most reminded me of were my aunties.