Whatever it is, I Don't Like it

by Howard Jacobson

  What Things Are for

  We forget what things are for. A lifetime ago, it now seems, we woke to the first Labour government in what might as well have been a thousand years. Old rusted ideas, together with the men that bore them, were at a stroke removed. The sun shone and the very pavements gleamed like El Dorado. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. This morning I don’t care a fig who we have elected. Disillusioned.

  Shaming, that a man my age should still be subject to illusions in the first place. But I’d forgotten what things are for. Governments are for the management of public finances. Idealism, seriousness, magnanimity, civilised discourse, the intellectual wherewithal to tell a hawk from a handsaw – nothing to do with government, not any of it.

  Last week, writing in the Sunday Independent, Janet Street-Porter made a similar mistake with Gilbert and George. She forgot what they are for. The occasion for her article was Tom Stoppard’s speech to the Royal Academy in which he said most of the things we all know to be true about conceptual art but feel too weary or too uncertain – in some cases, too browbeaten and too frightened – to say ourselves. Janet Street-Porter wheeled Gilbert and George into the debate in order to discredit Stoppard. Had they ever met the playwright? she asked them. To which their joint answer – for they don’t do anything by halves – was ‘Well, years ago we did go to one of his plays, but we didn’t last long – there were too many words. So we left.’ The value of which testimony is zero, for the very reason that Gilbert and George don’t exist to say intelligent things. Gilbert and George exist to bend over and show us their ageing scrotums and whatever else they’ve got down there in order that we shouldn’t entertain too grand an idea of the meaning of life or the function of art.

  They are, of course, entitled to their position.

  Why Janet Street-Porter thinks Stoppard isn’t entitled to his – as a playwright, having views on contemporary life is exactly what he’s for – I am at a loss to understand. As a newspaper editor, aren’t words what she is for? It is one thing to argue that Stoppard is wrong – which he isn’t – it is quite another to attribute his attack to professional jealousy, in Janet Street-Porter’s words, to ‘a big fit of the sulks’. Hard to imagine what, in the way of genius or success, Tom Stoppard might have to sulk about. That apart, it is a sad state of affairs when a person cannot demur to a fad without his motives coming under suspicion. There is such a thing as intellectual disinterestedness, which is what we all are for.

  Myself, I view Stoppard’s intervention – to use an art word – as an important event. A little in advance of Stoppard’s speech, Sir Nicholas Serota had made his usual prickly defence of the latest Turner shortlist – ‘I don’t feel any pressure to make it easier for ordinary people to understand.’ Had any one of us innocently enquired what extraordinary powers were needed to understand a blob of Blu-tack, we would only have demonstrated our ignorance and proved Serota’s point. Conceptual art is not the thing you see, it is the strategic placing of a reference in the history of a philosophical idea. Not for you to bother your little uneducated head about, sonny Jim. Enter Stoppard, bristling with philosophical credentials – too many of them, anyway, for Gilbert and George to penetrate. If ever there were a man who did not need to have difficult concepts explained to him, it is Stoppard. O joy, O bliss! Things will no doubt go on as before, but the argument that we don’t like it only because we can’t understand it is much weaker than it was.

  Implied in Stoppard’s criticism is a conviction of what art is for. ‘The term artist isn’t intelligible to me,’ he said, ‘if it doesn’t entail making.’ An extremely bold assertion, given how indurated, in the visual arts, the arguments against making are, and what a ninny you are thought to be if making is your bag. Janet Street-Porter questions ‘the “craft” factor’, but in fact craft has got nothing to do with it. Nor, when we speak of making, are we thinking of William Morris and the honest labour of the hands. A work not made is a work not undergone, a process of discovery and change not submitted to, revelations not revealed. Every good writer and artist will tell you that the most productive days are those which begin in ignorance and confusion, the tunnel ahead black, and not an idea in your head. Strictly speaking, ideas are your enemy. Ideas are what you had before. Ideas are where you stand, not where you might end up. ‘Never trust the artist, trust the tale,’ D. H. Lawrence famously wrote, meaning that an achieved work is another thing entirely from anything the artist merely wanted it to be.

  The conceptual artist reverses Lawrence’s dictum, in effect saying, ‘Never trust the art, trust the artist’s intention.’

  In art we get beyond ourselves; here is part of the reason we value it. Marooned in the sterility of his will – decreeing this idea, giving orders for that – the conceptual artist fears the process of change and contradiction which is art’s justification. Hence the inertness of his work when we stand before it – no trace anywhere of what else it might have been or any argument it might be having with itself. Mere insistence. Which isn’t, as Stoppard reminded us, what art is for.

  How to Upset a Millionaire

  There is a programme on BBC2 which I watch out of the side of my face while I am doing other things – the way you observe bad behaviour in someone else’s children, disapproving and yet gripped – whose premise is that we would all like to make a lot of money, but only a few of us know how. Making money in business, that is, not making money by being a celebrity or writing columns for national newspapers. As the child of small business people who never made a penny, but never thought it dishonourable to try, I have a soft spot for business. I have sold leather goods on a market stall in Cambridge, and helped a friend in Wales manufacture crimplene dresses for little girls to wear in religious processions – a foolproof enterprise had the Welsh not been Nonconformists who don’t believe in religious processions – and managed a craft centre where none of the craftspeople wanted to demonstrate their craft, and assisted in the running of a tea garden in Cornwall, my assistance consisting of ferrying hot pasties each morning from Liskeard where they were baked to Boscastle where they were consumed, stopping on Bodmin Moor when the sun shone to admire the scenery, pat the wild ponies and consume a few myself. A few pasties, that is, not ponies. Much as I like to think of mine as a life of letters, it has been no less a life of trade. So that when all my friends became Marxists in the 1970s it fell to me to make the case for capital.

  Funny thing, though – no matter how fervently I argue for business, I only really approve of businesses that fail. The minute I meet a businessman who has made money, the milk of kindness in me curdles, my heart contracts, and I turn into a 1970s Marxist. Hence the problem I have with this programme on BBC2, in which a bunch of self-pleased millionaires decide whether or not to invest in the projects of a bunch of would-be millionaires, most of whom, it’s true, are verdant shmucks who couldn’t sell a pasty to a Cornishman, but who are, nonetheless, entitled to be treated with civility. Yes, they’re tongue-tied – but then they are meant to be tongue-tied – their no-brain business plan (except that they usually no more have a plan than they have a business) subjected to the heartless inquisition of capitalists who might own half the world’s resources between them, but between them don’t possess a pinch of politesse.

  Why can’t they just say no? No, thank you. We would like to oblige you and invest, but we cannot. We wish you every success with your scheme to manufacture kitchen appliances with broadband access built in, so that you can surf the Net while you are juicing carrots, but it’s not for us, sorry. ‘Sorry’, not ‘I’m out, you moron!’

  I know, I know. Good television. We must have good television. And what makes good television is people being objectionable. But the millionaires could always refuse to play along. Since they are already millionaires it is a question what they are doing on television, anyway. They don’t exactly need the fee. Why, while we are on the subject, did Alan Sugar waste precious business time on The Apprentice, a money-or-your-life
game show in which aspirants to his title of Least Charming Business Personality of the Millennium were encouraged to talk about themselves in clichés – ‘I am the kind of person who won’t take no for an answer’ – only to be put into situations where they had to take no for an answer? We don’t believe that it was only through a telly programme that Alan Sugar could find himself a new assistant. So why did he bother? Fame, was it? Not famous enough? Or did he feel it was of benefit to an already greedy society to demonstrate the efficacy of ruthlessness?

  The millionaires I’ve been watching through the side of my face are similarly wedded to the fancy that there is something winning about brusqueness when it’s built on cash. Come the revolution, of course, the money-braggarts will be the first to go. But there ain’t gonna be no revolution – that’s the confidence that explains their complacency. This is the system we unquestioningly live by; love us or lump it. Except – and here’s the reason I keep half watching – that they are not in fact anything like as complacent as they would wish us to believe. No, there ain’t gonna be no revolution; but the world does still contain people who weigh and judge things differently, for whom the amassing of wealth, whether they approve ethically of it or not, is a matter of supreme indifference. And just as a clove of garlic will emasculate a vampire, so does indifference upset the entire edifice of material achievement on which the amour propre of any millionaire gross enough to advertise his millions on television is perched.

  There was an interesting example of this the other week, when a man who had invented a way of economising on water when you flush the lavatory irked all the millionaires, reducing one of them to near apoplexy. Sure, he was self-engrossed – inventors are supposed to be – though nothing like as self-engrossed as those questioning him. But that wasn’t his offence. His offence was to admit he cared more about saving the planet than he cared about making his fortune. You could smell the garlic.

  Remember those self-made johnnies you would encounter when you were young, who used to tell you they could buy you with their loose change, and who, if you really got up their noses, would say they valued their shit more than they valued you? It’s possible I remember them so well because I was a stuck-up little bastard who went everywhere with a copy of Women in Love under my arm and an expression of disdain on my face, and so found them wherever I went. It was the otherwise-engagedness that did it. The assumption of interior superiority – just me and D. H. Lawrence, and you can keep your self-made millions. Such, anyway, was the effect the lavatory-cistern man had on our millionaires. How dared he look down on them! They could buy him with their loose change. Did he not know that it was they who made things possible, gave people work, and in the end, when they had eviscerated the planet (they didn’t quite say that), would save it. Who did he think he was?

  Good to know about the filthy rich, that their skin is as thin as beaten gold and money cannot buy them any thicker.

  Dying Like a Gentleman

  Took in a stirring Messiah last week, the more solemn for being in a church and not the Albert Hall, and the more affecting for being intimate – a chamber choir of about forty rather than the massed thousands which impresarios believe the Hallelujah Chorus necessitates. The church was Christ Church, Spitalfields, newly restored to its original austere handsomeness – the sort of church in which you converse with God rather than prostrate yourself before Him, but in which you converse, nonetheless, with a proper regard for what is sacred. The choir was Concordia – amateur singers under professional direction, which is just the way you want it. Nobody looking bored with having to turn out and sing it for the hundredth time this Christmas, but none of that veins-in-the-neck parochial eagerness you get with the Nether Piddleton Philharmonia either.

  It helps with an oratorio, I now realise, to sit near the front. Where you would otherwise doze off briefly, you are, if you can eyeball the soprano or the bass and be eyeballed back, not only duty-bound to stay alert, but too engaged to do otherwise, fascinated by the relation the voice bears to the person. Intimate’s the thing. Find a small church, find a small choir, sit on the front row, and see if you can match the individual note to the individual choir member. I am not saying Handel has longueurs, but no work of art was ever fashioned that doesn’t allow the mind to stray occasionally. And anyway, the singers – not to mention, in this instance, the solo trumpeter whose ‘The trumpet shall sound’ had us all clamouring to get into heaven – are the art.

  I was so taken with Concordia, so grateful to them for keeping me musically on the edge of my seat and giving me a Messiah which didn’t come alive only in the best bits, that I looked up their website when I got home, still humming ‘All we like sheep have gone astray’. Go to Concordia’s members’ information and you want to join. All those directions mixing bus times with must-have music lists, the Oxford Book of Tudor Anthems and why it’s a good idea to leave valuables at home or in the hotel safe; all those suggestions as to what, in the matter of clothing and jewellery, scarves, belts, etc., is or is not considered discreet; the surprising, not to say thrilling, exclamation mark that follows the instruction to the ladies to wear a ‘Long black skirt or trousers (or short with black tights/stockings!)’. Black stockings, exclamation mark, ah, why was I never in a choir when I was young and looking to go astray?

  Here is an injunction we might consider adding to the British Citizenship Test – join a choir! Failing which, turn up to a minimum of one performance of Handel’s Messiah every Christmas. Vehemently refuse, as a matter of respect to yourself and to your new country, any adaptation of English culture to your susceptibilities. Wherever there is a ‘more inclusive’ or ‘inoffensive’ version of anything English on offer, turn your back on it, for whoever would suppose you will not at the very least be curious to see how the English pray, sing, worship, marry or remember the dead, insults you to your soul.

  Increasingly, as the censors and maulers and butchers of our culture assume more power, it will be to art – if we can save it – that we turn in order to remember who we once were and what we once believed. I don’t know whether there’s a Messiah presently going the rounds which has been de-Messiah’d out of respect to people of ‘all faiths and none’ (as though any atheist would alter his atheism out of respect to a believer), but Concordia sang it Christian-Englishly intact. God knows, there’s matter in the libretto to offend some of us if we choose to be offended. ‘The people that walked in darkness,’ for example – who would they be, then, as though we didn’t know. True, the line originates in Isaiah, but the people that walked in darkness in this context are those who chose not to see the light of Christ. And you could fairly argue that once you’ve consigned a people to darkness you have begun a process which ends in not thinking of them as people at all.

  But there you are: one faith, like one culture, like one nation, like one neighbourhood or one banlieue even, inevitably defines itself against another. Non-believers do the same. We have to be grown up about it. We none of us think anyone else can see what we can see. All we can do by way of escaping this circle of mutual disdain and fear is to note with interest how various are the ways others find of saying that we are as blind as we say they are. But let no one in his heart believe that he is free of the prejudice.

  Art enacts the history of the culture that makes it. In the Messiah, written by a German with a taste for Italian melody, we hear something of how Christianity spiritualised the English and in turn how the English societised Christianity. A swapping of refinements without doubt, but sometimes a swapping of brutalities as well, for they too constitute a culture.

  Handel is not the equal of Bach. The St Matthew Passion sounds profounder notes than the Messiah, the suffering is more inexplicable and desolate, the relation of man to God more mystical. In Bach, however grand the composition of the orchestra and choir, you hear the individual at prayer. By comparison, Handel’s great work is ceremonial, a celebration of English fields and English public life. ‘I did think I did see all Heave
n before me, and the great God himself,’ Handel said of the writing of the Hallelujah Chorus, but the God he saw was entirely eighteenth century, well mannered, decorous and amenable to reason. The English eighteenth-century way of belief, like the English eighteenth-century way of death, was nothing if not worldly. ‘He died much like a gentleman,’ my old teacher F. R. Leavis used to recite in illustration of the spirit in which a polite Augustan prepared to meet his maker, ‘and went to heaven with a very good mien.’ Though he was not recommending a return to Augustan decorum, I always had the feeling that that was how he hoped he would die himself – though I’m told he didn’t – with a very good mien.

  We celebrate something of this, anyway, whenever we perform Handel’s Messiah, especially if we can find a Hawksmoor church to perform it in. As for the stockings exclamation mark, they too minister to that greater glory we call Englishness.

  Death of Alma

  And so Alma finally passed away, sweetly confused and listening to Perry Como. Nothing in her life became her like the leaving it. And flights of angels sing her to her rest.

  I am not, on principle – though while I’m in mourning I’m damned if I can remember what that principle is – a watcher of Coronation Street, but there are those around me who are, so I somehow know what’s happening. You can follow a good soap from another room. Like rich cooking, its ingredients stay in the air a long time, getting into curtains and penetrating walls. Out of respect to Alma, though, I sat and watched. I have always liked Alma. A fragility thing. She has the face of a woman doomed to die betimes, and thus she touches on a profound male dread. In the catalogue of women a man is bound to hurt, Alma is the one you know you will feel worst about. She seems to have no defences against all you are going to throw at her. And now she’s gone forever. Dead as earth.