Whatever it is, I Don't Like it

by Howard Jacobson

  But the more important question is not who Maureer is, but who Maureer hates. ‘You and all you stand for.’ Since these words deface a statue of William III, William III has to be prime suspect. Netherlandish by birth and temperament, and subsequently a victor in the Battle of the Boyne, William III must have made many enemies of a non-Protestant persuasion. So could Maureer be a Dutch-detesting Irish Catholic? And a homophobe to boot, since rumours have always abounded – none of them substantiated, but then hatred needs no substantiation – of William’s having indulged a taste for foot soldiers no less than for mistresses of the more conventional sort. A xenophobic anti-militaristic Catholic homophobe who loathes all lowlander Protestants and opposes adultery – is this who we’re looking for?

  Or is the sculptor Rysbrack the problem? Rysbrack beat his rival Scheemakers to the commission and this might rankle still with Scheemakers’ descendants of whom Maureer Scheemakers could easily be one. And then there are the relatives of Van Oost, the flower painter, who actually made the sculpture, though Rysbrack won all the plaudits for the design. Or failing that, Maureer’s hatred could simply be aesthetical. ‘I hate you and all you stand for.’ That’s to say classical sculpture, judicious choice of materials, pyramidal composition, and the whole lickspittle business of dressing royal personages up as Roman emperors.

  So much to hate, once you start. Queen Square itself is no monument to human goodness, having housed the slave traders who made Bristol rich. Were your ancestors shackled and sold for two-and-sixpence, Maureer? And so it is us you hate – we post-colonialists who go on obscurely enjoying the fruits of a heinous trade, accepting our culpability in one quarter only to recidivate in another? Little museums and monuments all over Bristol, commemorating slavery, adding to the total of the town’s attractions – here the river where the slavers sailed, there the mansions where the slavers lived it up, nice places to sit and have a heritage cappuccino now.

  So much to hate, once you start. And no one telling you it’s not a smart idea, not good for you, not good for your heart, let alone the peace of mind of those you hate, and everything they stand for. Not even some of what they stand for? Wouldn’t that do, Maureer?

  On an almshouse close to Queen Square, a returned seamen’s poem. ‘Freed from all storms, the tempest and the rage / Of billows, here we spend our age.’ Freed from rage. It seems a novel thought today, that we should welcome quiet, and not rage against whatever dares to rage at us. A blessed thing, quiet. Wherein to read, compose the mind, listen to Schubert, maybe recall the words of those who once advised we learn to love our enemies. But Maureer’s storms carry the day. Maybe he is a human bomb in waiting. Why not? He who is unhappy has no choice but to hate and kill – violence is ineluctable – isn’t that what we now believe?

  Blubber

  While the world was protecting its eyes last Wednesday, staring into buckets to watch the reflected sky go dark, I was weeping buckets of my own. You could say the two events were not unconnected: there is nothing like interplanetary activity, after all, for reminding you of your own insignificance. But insignificance wasn’t the reason I was blubbering. Quite the opposite. A sudden, piercing vision of human grandeur, the immensity of our appetite for sorrow – that’s what set me off. And what more cause for shedding copious tears do you need, than that you have copious tears to shed?

  Call this self-indulgence if you wish – I confess I was playing old records of Caruso and Mario Lanza at the time, both of whom I turn to when I want the tears to flow – but it was the spectacle of someone else’s sorrow that had softened me up the day before, when I happened to walk past a man in anguish in a doorway in Leicester Square.

  Why does one person’s distress speak more eloquently than another’s? If you live in London you walk past a fellow creature in anguish every five minutes. Here’s one who sits with his dog at his side by the cash machines all day, pleading for small change. Here’s another who is in bed in his cardboard box at noon, whimpering like an abandoned baby in his sleep. And there’s a third, raging the length of Shaftesbury Avenue in a filthy blanket, looking like Poor Tom from King Lear, houseless and unfed, biding the pelting of the pitiless storm. He must have a hundred silver studs in his face. ‘Don’t come near me,’ my eyes warn him. I have rehearsed what I will say to him should he ignore that warning: ‘If you’re so needy,’ I will hiss, ‘why don’t you pawn your jewellery?’

  I know, I know. But you can’t feel compassion for them all. George Eliot is the person to trust in this area. ‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life,’ she says in Middlemarch, ‘we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.’ I read Middlemarch the way others read the Bible – for enlightenment and forgiveness. ‘As it is,’ she goes on, ‘the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.’ Which I take to be her way of saying, ‘I forgive you, Howard.’

  So yes, you, go pawn your jewellery. And no, I have no small change.

  And then, quite out of the blue, you see a person sitting in silent anguish in a doorway in Leicester Square – not slumped, simply emptied of resolution – who wants nothing from you, who does not notice you are there, who does not notice anyone is there, and you hear the roar which lies on the other side of silence and your heart breaks. He isn’t a refugee from the elements. He isn’t unaccommodated man. From the cut of him you would say he has a comfortable house in Islington or even Hampstead. A publisher, maybe. He is handsome, dark, well groomed and well appointed in a houndstooth suit and expensive shoes, sleek as an otter. But he is sitting on the pavement, his back against a doorway, careless of himself, his eyes as sad as any eyes I’ve ever seen.

  There is a question I must ask myself. Is it only because his fall is temporary, because he is on the street, seeking the anonymity and succour of the street, without being a street person, that I feel for him? Am I a grief snob?

  I fear I may be, though I would prefer to put it differently. Of course it makes it easier on my pity that his grief is not his profession. And I am hardly the first to feel the poignancy of a man’s fall from high estate to low. However communistical we may be, Lear the king moves us more than Poor Tom the beggar. But there is a further consideration which explains my preference. Taking into account his apparent prosperity, and measuring the depth and fixity of his pain, I decide that what has poleaxed my man of sorrows is bad news from the front line of the heart. I think his hands are folded over a mobile phone. It would make sense, then, to suppose that his wife has just rung to say she is leaving. Or his mistress. I am not concerned for the morality of the situation. Let it be, for all I care, someone else’s wife who rang, barely a minute earlier, while he was sauntering houndstoothed up Charing Cross Road to his sun-filled offices in Bloomsbury, to announce, ‘Enough, over, it’s been wonderful, but something more wonderful has come my way. Goodbye, my darling. Pause to think of me sometimes, as I will never again pause to think of you . . .’

  I am a schmaltz merchant, you see. Not all the poverty and suffering in the third or fourth or however many worlds can touch me as the story of tormented love touches me. That’s why, when no one’s watching, I sit listening to lyric tenors singing of their exile from romance. Even as the moon briefly cast its shadow on the sun, Caruso was Pagliacci’ing it on my turntable, mocking his clown-cuckold’s reflection, his own light put out forever. Now it’s not for me to explain the emotional motivations of others, but I do suspect that all our recent planet-watching was metaphorical. Why are we moved when one orb eclipses another? Ask Caruso. Ask the man in the doorway of the Leicester Square Hippodrome.

  Giselle

  What is it about the phrase ‘Austrian legend of Slavic origin’ that makes one want to slit one’s wrists? Maybe it doesn’t make you want to slit yours, in which case I’m the one with the problem. I hope it’s not that I’m anti-Austrian or Slavophobic. I think it’s the word ‘legend’ that gets under my skin, and then the word ‘origin’. Something to do with superst
itions mouldering in rural antiquity, and my wanting them to stay there.

  But let me contextualise. My wife had proposed going to see Giselle at Covent Garden. The deal is that she’ll come with me to opera if I go with her to ballet. I’d agreed to Giselle on the safe assumption that as she didn’t have tickets on the day, she wouldn’t have them on the night. Maybe one ticket would materialise if she beat the returns queue, but not two. Whereupon I would do the noble husbandly thing, sacrifice my pleasure to hers, and let her go on her own. If that meant I had to stay home, drink a bottle of Barolo and watch Chelsea play Barcelona on television, well, such are the deprivations a man who loves his wife must occasionally accept. But blow me if she didn’t come back with a pair of tickets, centre stalls, row J – best seats in the house for people our height. I could barely, as you might imagine, contain my joy.

  Now you can go to the ballet not having a clue what’s going on and stay that way until the final curtain call when you applaud like a man who’s just been rescued by a helicopter after twenty days at sea, or you can mug up on the story. Something made me mug up on the story. Maybe if I grasped the plot, I thought, I would understand why my wife would be sitting with tears streaming down her face.

  ‘In the quaint little villages snuggling amidst the romantic forests of the Rhineland,’ I read, ‘many strange, mystic legends of ghostly visitants . . .’ And that was when I wanted to slit my wrists.

  I have mugged up on ballet stories before but I had forgotten how much more plot there is in a ballet than you’d imagine there’d be need for. Girl in acres of white tulle meets boy in what my Yiddish-speaking grandparents used to call long gatkes, falls in love, gets jilted, turns into a swan and dies. That ought to cover it but never does. Even in synopsis, Giselle is more complicated than Twin Peaks and Saved run together. Giselle falls for Loys who is actually Count Albrecht; her previous lover Hilarion does a lot of spying on her behind trees; Berthe, Giselle’s mother, warns her against Loys on grounds which I assumed would become clear in time – so far so good. But then comes the moment when you know you are lost and are going to be lost forever – ‘Wilfrid, Albrecht’s squire, secretly warns him that a hunting-party is approaching, led by the Duke of Courland and the Countess Bathilde, Albrecht’s future wife.’

  It’s that unexpected arrival of a duke leading a hunting party that dashes me every time. Not just in ballet, in opera and in drama too. It’s an invariable law of the performing arts: there’s always one duke more than your comprehension can cope with.

  Still, even to have got this far in my researches meant that I’d have some idea what was going on when I was sitting in row J. At least for the first twenty minutes. But no. No amount of preparation can prepare you for the miming if you have no instinct for it. And I am a dumb-show illiterate. Part of this is wilful. I don’t want to watch lovers fall in love in silence. For me, the better part of love is language and if lovers are not talking I can’t connect with them. How they manage to connect with each other without words is beyond me. No words, no jokes, and since when did a woman fall in love with a man who didn’t make her laugh? All right, there’s the sight of him leaping in his gatkes. And there’s the sight of her with flowers in her hair, balancing on one toe. But after the leaping and the balancing, where does the relationship go? Which might be precisely what Giselle’s mother was getting at.

  Then again it might not. This is the other problem I have with miming: I am blind to its semiotics. As in ballet, so in life – I am unable to read the signs. In my susceptible years I could not approach a woman who had not signalled her unequivocal interest in me first. The sign I was waiting for was a crooked finger, the nail painted vermilion, beckoning me to the darkest corner of the room. To be certain I was reading the signal correctly I needed the owner of the finger to be wearing a concupiscent smile. And, ideally, little else. Only an undressed, lewdly grinning woman crooking a finger at me would do it. Any gesture less definite I read as cold indifference. Will you therefore be surprised, reader, to learn that I spent my susceptible years alone?

  And now here I am trying to understand why Berthe makes a basket shape with her arms, holds it over her daughter’s head, then spills it at her feet. In the interval I venture an interpretation to my wife. Loys, aka Albrecht, is too high and mighty for Giselle, who is just a country girl, and when push comes to shove, for all his attentive leaping he won’t bring home the bacon. But this is wide of the mark. What Berthe is actually warning is that there’s an Austrian legend of Slavic origin that tells of jilted brides turning into troubled spirits known as Wilis – a fate awaiting Giselle if she goes on crooking her finger at Loys. And this my wife intuits from a woman miming a basket.

  And now guess what? I am spellbound. The Wilis materialise from their graves in a gauzy mist, their morbid ethereality, their frustrated vitality, somehow perfectly suited to the unnatural way ballet dancers move their limbs. That I am not slitting my wrists is due in part to a wonderful ballerina called Tamara Rojo, but it’s also the power of the metaphor, the exquisite madness of erotic love, the everything and the nothing of our bodies, which I suppose ballet can speak of as nothing else can. Whatever the explanation, I too have tears streaming down my cheeks when the tormented spirit of Giselle, appeased at last, vanishes forever into her silent tomb. Ah, reader, reader, these Slavic legends.

  Holiday Reading

  Will somebody please explain to me what ‘holiday reading’ is? I’m not asking for recommendations. I want to know what’s meant by it. Is it a specific genre, like the misery memoir, only presumably the very opposite to the misery memoir? Is it determined by congenial subject: a happy-ending romance cooled by summer breezes? Or by congenial place: a grown-up version – though not too much of a grown-up version – of Five Go Doolally in Dorset? Is holiday reading about holidays, or is it a promise that nothing will be demanded of the person reading it that will take his/her mind from a holiday which anyone would think, given the spirit in which lists of holiday reading are compiled, is invariably a thing of sunshine, lovingness and bliss.

  But that’s not a truth about most holidays, is it? Aren’t holidays essentially opportunities to break up with the people we thought we loved? Don’t we realise how much we hate our children on holidays or, if we’re the children, how much we hate our parents? There are photographs in my mother’s possession which attest to the living hell I made of every family holiday. In snap after snap, there are my mother and father making the best of the lousy weather and the appalling food – we’re talking the 1950s when the sun never shone and all we ate was peas – and there I am with the same long face, not wanting to be there but then again not wanting to have been left behind. That’s me bawling in Blackpool; that’s me moping in Morecambe; that one’s taken the time I sulked myself into the measles, chickenpox, whooping cough and, very nearly, had I got my way, malaria in Anglesey.

  And why? That’s easy to answer. Sex. I needed sex. I might have been no more than seven or eight with not the slightest idea of what sex comprised but I needed it. Holidays do this. They heat your blood and turn your head. I saw men strolling down the promenade hand in hand with their girlfriends and I longed for a girlfriend of my own. To be honest, what I think I longed for even more than a girlfriend was a mistress. I’d heard the word, formed a dim conception of what it meant, imagined kissing had something to do with it, and hankered for one of my own. That’s me at Middleton Towers Holiday Camp stamping my foot and shouting, ‘I want a mistress.’

  Nothing I’ve observed of other people on holiday leads me to believe they have a better time of it than I did. I used to help run a craft centre in a clapped-out water mill in Cornwall. The usual thing – a Delabole slate etcher specialising in hunchbacked blue tits, a reclusive woodturner who wouldn’t turn if anyone was watching, two tattooed jewellers of indeterminate sex who squabbled in front of the public, a glass-blower who was the subject of predictable ribaldry, about which she could hardly complain as she would get pissed
blind on hot days and take her top off regardless of the families streaming through. Awful glass she blew, but nice breasts, as I recall. Had I encountered her when I was seven or eight I’d have screamed the place down until my parents persuaded her to be my mistress for the afternoon.

  Working here, whatever its attractions, taught me how horrible holidays for the majority of families are, even if they aren’t cursed with a boy-pervert like me. Because it’s on holiday that couples get to reacquaint themselves with one another and discover how little there is left to like or talk about. Parents who have been working hard all year and have barely seen their offspring now wish they didn’t have to see them at all and can’t wait for work to begin again. Through the craft centre these poor souls would troop in their dripping wet cagoules, pushing prams, squabbling, skint, each one’s idea of a good time clashing with the other’s – not that there was a good time on offer for any of them – like the damned in Dante’s Inferno.

  You take my point. Shouldn’t that be what they’re reading when they come on holiday – Dante’s Inferno? There’s powerful stuff on cruelty to children in The Brothers Karamazov. Death in Venice is good on art and fatal sexual obsession on the Lido, and you could always skip the art and get quickly to the fatal Lido bit. Wouldn’t that make ideal beach reading, whatever beach reading is?

  Help me here. What’s a beach book? I assume it’s similar to a holiday book but with the specific requirement of being sand-proof, water-repellent, and not so heavy in physical form or emotional content as to spill you out of your deckchair the minute you open it. Explain it to me: why would you want to read on something as uncomfortable as a deckchair on something as unconducive to concentration as a beach? All those distractions, all those echoing shrieks, people jet-skiing and paragliding, babies crying, children drowning – unless it’s a lonely beach, but then you’d want to walk along it, wouldn’t you, hand in hand with your mistress with whom you might indeed want to share a book later on in your hotel room, when the moon’s up, but it wouldn’t be anything on the routine holiday reading lists: it would be Antony and Cleopatra, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Lady Chatterley’s Lover or, if you’re ready for a little intimate abstraction, L’érotisme by Georges Bataille.