Whatever it is, I Don't Like it

by Howard Jacobson

  In fact, it’s never just my name. I am temperamentally incapable of writing just my name. I don’t do legible and I don’t do brief. While we were at Hay my partner got John Updike’s signature. ‘To Jenny, with best wishes and cheers.’ Imagine being able to do that! ‘Best wishes and cheers.’ You might ask why ‘Best wishes’ and ‘cheers’, but still and all, such pithiness! I’ve never managed anything so economical in my entire career. Even the ‘To’ I can’t pull off. I always think it should be ‘For’, implying that the book was written with this very reader in mind, or that I am making a gift of it, which of course I’m not. But most times I no sooner write ‘For’ than I realise it is inappropriately personal and might conceivably cause the reader problems, especially if she’s a woman and her husband sees it, so I cross it out and write ‘To’ instead. Add the crossing-out to the blobs of ink and strips of tissue and that’s not a pretty page they’re left with.

  After which I can’t just toss off a ‘Best wishes’, can I? I’ve got a first-edition Kingsley Amis that says ‘Hi!’ Such a disappointment. You hand over your book to a master of the language and he writes ‘Hi!’ Call me foolish but I feel I owe my readers more than that – more in the way of words and, quite frankly, more in the way of feeling. As the book, so the inscription, surely. If your subject is the horror of the human condition you must convey a flavour of that in your message. Line up to get your Brothers Karamazov signed and you’re not going to be satisfied with ‘Have a good one! – Fyodor Dostoevsky’.

  And yet the last time I wrote ‘Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery – Kind regards, Hay, 2004’ I got the distinct impression that the recipient was unhappy. Seeing what had happened, the next person in the queue was very firm in her directions. ‘Make it to Ann,’ she said, ‘without an e.’ Simple, you’d think. ‘To Ann.’ But no. ‘To Ann without an E,’ some demon made me write. ‘With love, with an E, from the author’ – and then what was I going to say? – ‘with an A.’ For which blather I had next, still writing in her book, to apologise. ‘Forgive this nonsense – with two Es,’ I went on, before it dawned on both of us that this would end only when I had defaced every page.

  I got the shop to give the poor woman her money back at the finish. I gave them all their money back. That’s another of the reasons I dread publication. I end up thousands of pounds out of pocket.

  Rigoletto

  Just blown the best part of two hundred smackers staring into the back of someone’s bald head. This is called going to the opera. More precisely going to the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. I visit Covent Garden infrequently for this very reason: if I’m going to spend my children’s inheritance on a seat, I believe I should at least be able to see something from it.

  I can just about reconcile myself to the cost. Seats for a coming Madonna concert at the O2 Arena are said to be changing hands on eBay for £700, which makes an upside-down bucket with your back to the stage of the Royal Opera House cheap at half a million. In fact, I’m lying when I say I can reconcile myself to the cost. I am of the generation that believes paying £100 for anything is irresponsible. I grew up in a house that cost half that. For £100 my parents were able to feed and clothe three children from the moment of our birth to our leaving home eighteen years later. And have enough left for a celebration party when we’d gone. Like everyone else I eat at expensive restaurants – what choice do I have? – but I still find any bill over £20 for two (three courses, champagne, Shiraz, but no dessert wine) criminally exorbitant, whereas people under forty we dine with consider anything under ten times that amount a snip.

  But all right, opera’s different. You’re paying for more than a night out. You’re paying to be reconnected to civilisation and, if laziness and too many dinners have stopped you listening to the music you loved when you were young, you’re paying to be reminded of who you once were, what you once felt, the melodious idealism which once made your heart flutter like a caged bird. And the building is exhilarating. And the bar is good. And people make more of an effort with their appearance than when they go to any old theatre, though still not a sufficient effort in my view. Grand opera requires that the audience too be grand. Dinner jackets should be mandatory. Would you want to be Rigoletto howling for his daughter in a sack while looking out at an audience in jeans and cardigans?

  All the more reason, then, when you’ve gone to the trouble and shelled out more than a banker earns in thirty seconds, to expect a view of something other than the bald head of the person in front of you. I know there are seats in the Royal Opera House from which you can see the singers, but these, like a place at Eton, have to be bought for you before you’re born. I exaggerate only slightly. Turn up at the box office a month before a production expecting a seat you can see from and they look at you as though you’re insane. So how is a man with a life to lead supposed to know where he is going to be a month from now? Opera itself teaches that our lives change from happy to sad, from purposeful to pointless, in the course of half an aria. But the decent seats at Covent Garden are bagged years in advance by people prepared to bank a) on their continued existence, b) on their precise whereabouts, and c) on the music they’re going to be in the mood to listen to.

  Couldn’t they reserve a few good seats for opera’s natural audience – the existential chancers and cultural vagabonds of our dull society? And couldn’t they, at the same time, insist that anyone over six foot three – actually, five foot three is where I’d draw the line – sits in row Z?

  The bald man in front of me is, I would guess, six feet dead. I know I should thank my lucky stars he is bald. At the opera you get many a shock-headed person trying to look like Simon Rattle – half the time, for all I know, it is Simon Rattle – which means you can see neither over him nor past him. But as it happens there are two shock-headed people in front of the bald man, so although I can twist in my seat to see either side of him, all I get to see is them, twisting in their seats to see round the Simon Rattles in front of them.

  I tell myself I’m here for the singing not the acting. I spend a quarter of any opera I like with my eyes closed anyway, so what the hell – just spend it all like that. But this is a notoriously raunchy production that’s been kicking round the repertoire for years – a Rigoletto that’s all humping (the pun is not mine) – and I want to see if it’s as naff as it’s been made out. The sexing up of opera rates as one of the great absurdities of our time. See an opera in Germany and it’s invariably set in a fetish club and sung in shiny leather sado-shorts. Even Mozart’s Requiem. But this is London where we are meant to have a keener sense of the ridiculous. Only not on this occasion. Naff it decidedly is – fellatio and cunnilingus to music, or at least I think what they’re doing is fellatio and cunnilingus, but given how far back from the stage I am and how many impediments to seeing anything there are, it might just be a more than usually excitable bridge evening at an old persons’ home in Pinner.

  And now, of course, it becomes positively unseemly, my bouncing about in my seat, craning my neck, lifting myself up by the roots of my hair, to ascertain whether those really are bare breasts on the serving wenches, or just flesh-coloured bodices. Do I care? Does it matter if that’s a nipple or a brooch? Thwarted, whether it matters or not, I fall to counting the hairs on the bald man’s head, all 117 of them. Three warts. Four liver spots. And a bruise, sustained, I imagine, the last time he ruined an orgy at the Opera House for someone less sweet-tempered than me.

  And yet in the end, somehow, somehow, the music works its magic. By the time we reach the magnificent quartet, mixing mellifluousness with cynicism, answering hope with desolation, tempering rage with love, I have forgotten where I am and it is worth it after all. Art doing what it’s supposed to do – making life supportable. But must there always be these obstacles to refined emotion? Does sublimity have to be quite so bloody expensive, uncomfortable and fatuously staged?

  Pie Pellicane

  A pelican cro
ssed my path on Boxing Day. Not in flight, on foot. And not in Queensland or in Florida but in London. You feel there should be superstitions associated with such an event. When a pelican crosses your path on Boxing Day it means you’re going to go on a long journey, or inherit a fortune, or lose your heart to a beautiful feathery white woman with a big mouth and an inordinate appetite for fish. Unless pelicans materialise vengefully on Boxing Day in a spirit of bird solidarity with the turkey you stuffed and ate the day before. When a pelican crosses your path on foot on Boxing Day you know that the next time you gorge on flightless fowl you’ll choke on it.

  Whatever the auguries, I was out strolling in St James’s Park with my wife, enjoying the wintry sunshine, relieved to be walking off the previous day’s excesses, when a pelican cut across us. We were approaching the Blue Bridge in a westerly direction, and he was approaching it in a easterly direction, on foot, as though he’d just come from the Palace. Since he wasn’t going to pause, we did, allowing him to get on to the bridge without obstruction. It is a strange experience meeting a pelican, pedestrian to pedestrian, and it must have been even stranger for those already on the bridge observing him coming towards them. You don’t expect to meet a pelican on a bridge.

  In fact, I know this pelican. He’s the sociable one who sometimes joins you on a bench in St James’s Park and tries to eat your mobile phone while you’re filming him with it – though I’m sure he does that only because he knows it makes a better photograph. Even by pelican standards he has a piercing eye and a wonderfully Italianate beak, all distressed umbers and citric yellows and patina’d verdigris. He also has more pink in his feathers than you expect of a white pelican – as though a flamingo long ago sneaked in between one of his forebears’ sheets. Some consciousness of his individually fine deportment, despite the inherited absurd appearance of his species, must explain his conviviality. Food has nothing to do with it. He perambulates more like a human than a bird, in order to be seen and admired.

  It is, in general, a wonderful thing to run into any of the large birds as long as they don’t mean ill by you. You wouldn’t want to find yourself alone on a bridge with a cassowary, for example, on account of his penchant for ripping out your stomach with his big toe. And even the most flirtatiously feather-boa’d emu always looks as though she will turn on you if you read her signals wrong. But there is something benign about a pelican. On his own territory, fishing on a lonely beach or sitting folded and uncomfortable, as though buggered, on a pole, he will cast an idle but protective eye your way. They say a dolphin will save a swimmer who gets into trouble in the water, but a pelican offers more existential assistance. He teaches the virtue of imperturbability and absurdism. On our territory, however, that something benign about him is increased a hundredfold. Have a pelican amble towards you in St James’s Park and you believe a kindly hand is ordering the universe after all.

  There wasn’t anyone on that bridge, no matter what language they spoke, no matter what kind of Christmas Day they’d had, who didn’t laugh to see him. Though he is a show-off and even a bit of a bully when it comes to right of way, he inspires, in humans at least, an unconditional joy.

  So why is that? Because he is out of place, partly. Because we don’t expect to see a pelican strolling through the park on Boxing Day as though he too needs to walk off a heavy dinner from the day before. And because, though he chooses our company, he comes from a world we can’t begin to understand. But most of all, I think, because he isn’t beautiful. He is grand but it is the grandeur, as it were, of adversity overcome. Fancy managing to look good when you have all that extraneous bulk and a floppy throat pouch to carry around. A flamingo approaching us on the bridge would also have had us reaching for our cameras. But she would not have inspired the affection the pelican did. Too graceful. Too naturally the thing she is.

  It’s for the same reason that the fast bowler Darren Gough won this year’s Christmas Day Strictly Come Dancing champion of champions dance-off, easily beating the beauteous Alesha Dixon who had triumphed in the competition proper only the week before. When Darren Gough dances he defies probability. Dancing is not a skill we feel can be, or should be, locked away inside a man of such lumbering machismo. And when he releases lightness from his giant frame it is as though he is refusing the limits placed on flesh itself. For a moment, anything is possible for anyone. This, after all, is why we surrender to the programme despite all that nice to see you to see you nice drivel – not to applaud someone born airy like Alesha merely being herself, but to watch great albatrosses of men and women find elegance in their earthbound ungainliness.

  There was a way in which this was true of Alesha also. She did not, of course, have physical bulk or an inappropriately comic personality to transcend, but she did have a clumsy assumption about herself to overcome: the assumption that as a thoroughly modern girl – a pop singer with a round red mouth and a lean hot body – she would do best when her dresses were brief and she was free to jive or salsa. In fact, she most moved the judges and the voting public when she waltzed. Bounce we knew she had; the surprise was to discover she could do old-fashioned grace.

  There is a fancy abroad that we are all in pursuit of ourselves. It is a commonplace of the self-improvement business that once we learn to act in accord with who we really are we will be happy. In X Factor dross-speak, we have a dream we must make true. Bad advice, all of it. It’s who we are that keeps us miserable. Rather than find ourselves we need to find someone who isn’t us at all. Release the person you didn’t know was there, I say. Learn from the pelican. Be who you’re not. Don’t fly when flying is expected of you – walk. Don’t be beautiful, be strange.

  Best Gig in Edinburgh

  Just back from trundling my wares in Edinburgh, where, among other trials, I had consented to be thrown, as sacrificial pompous pundit, to a bunch of carnivorous comedians. A radio thing, which was why I couldn’t say no. Now that television is wall-to-wall children’s programming with the word sex (or the promise of the word sex) thrown in – Dating in the Kindergarten, Sex and the Hobbit, A History of Sex and Homework – you can’t ever say no to radio. But I was more than usually tense on the morning of the event, to take my mind off which I spent many hours in a cemetery close to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. As a rule I prefer graveyards to gigs at festivals: at least there they know they’re dead.

  Next to God and my country I revere comedians and in the main get on with them. But ever since I wrote Seriously Funny: An Argument for Comedy they have been inclined to treat me as a sort of composite Rosencrantz and Guildenstern figure, a false friend who has dared to pluck the heart out of comedy’s mystery. So I knew in my bones what was going to happen. The comedians would make gags about academic jargon and other Start the Weekery and I would accuse them of philistinism. Stirred by the unevenness of the contest – for laughter always has the beating of learning in a crowded place – I would liken their reluctance to discuss what they do, or have others discuss what they do, to a doctor’s refusing to examine hearts on the grounds that he would thereby interfere with the mystery of vitality. I would argue that to think about joking was not to usurp the joke itself and install pedantry in its place, but simply to take a hand in our pleasures – to try to understand, in tranquillity, why we are like we are. In a scientific and humanistic age we throw open everything to the light; why should comedy, alone with religious fundamentalism, be exempt? Persuaded by my simple honesty, the studio audience would roar on every word I spoke, leaving the comedians to slink away like so many Goliaths felled by the sweet-tongued David. All this I anticipated, and all this, between ourselves, gentle reader, was exactly what transpired; but I still needed my prepatory morning among the memorials to the dead.

  It is a very fine cemetery, this one. Not one of your exquisitely retiring country graveyards where you yearn to be laid, when your time comes, under a sad cypress, rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, a thing of faded lettering and quiet nature yourself now, a
ll your striving to be anything else put finally to rest. No, although it is solemnly shaded, a step or two back from the clamour of the living, Dean Cemetery is an urban, even a civic burial place, bristling with verbose Victorian tombstones, elaborate sarcophagi, neoclassical tablets set into the walls, busts, sculptures, obelisks, even pyramids. Where a country churchyard is a grateful relinquishment of the clamour of life, Dean Cemetery is a celebration of it. Here are soldiers, sailors, statesmen, surgeons, painters, zoologists, critics (I encountered no comedian) – all still active in this wordy commemoration of their worldly genius.

  But it was one stone in particular which caught my attention. It read:

  SACRED TO THE MEMORY

  OF

  ARCHIBALD McGLASHAN

  TEACHER OF ENGLISH

  DIED 14 MARCH 1881

  AGED 36 YEARS

  ‘A MAN GREATLY BELOVED’.

  Had I not had comedians to put right later in the day, I believe I could have loitered by this stone until the sun went down. And what was it in particular that struck me? Everything. Every single word.

  Died aged thirty-six years, of course; died aged anything other than forty years older than whatever age you happen to be, is always enough to make you stop and think. Longevity is what you like to read about in graveyards, doughty souls who gave up the ghost at ninety-eight and then only because they couldn’t think what else to do, not people cut off before their prime. And thirty-six is particularly cruel: just when you’re getting going, just when you’ve outgrown stand-up and television, just when you are getting your first glimpse of what it all might be about.

  Except that Archibald McGlashan seemed already to know. Teacher of English. As bald as that. Not linguistician or philologist. Not lecturer in liberal and media studies, nor professor of ideological piety, nor doctor whose speciality is whichever humanities happen to be thought relevant at whatever political moment. Not even Teacher of English with no offence meant to non-English-speaking minorities. Just Teacher of English, enough said. Simple words etched into plain stone.