Whatever it is, I Don't Like it

by Howard Jacobson

  Simon Gray got me through the holiday from which I’ve just returned, or least he got me through the beach part of it. I’d been saving The Last Cigarette, the third volume of his Smoking Diaries, to take away with me, knowing that his masterfully comic dyspepsia would be just the tonic in the heat. But I hadn’t realised that he too would be on holiday in it some of the time, so that I would be able to lie there, so to speak, and let him fulminate for both of us.

  ‘Listen to this,’ I say to my wife, who is lying next to me. Though she has a back injury, and no more wants to be exposed to the sun we’ve just paid thousands of pounds to lie in than I do, she still manages to find a graceful way of curling up and reading. Women, of course, have more adaptable bodies than men. Something, presumably, to do with childbirth. Come the hour, they have to be able to bend themselves into positions impossible for a man. Not that we’re here to have a baby. We’re just here to escape the sun. And read. Which sometimes means reading to each other.

  ‘Listen to this,’ I say, interrupting her and Philip Roth. I am not entirely happy, I have to confess, about her lying there with Philip Roth. The one consolation is that he doesn’t find life funny any more, so at least I don’t have to listen to her laughing. It’s not quite a rule between us but it’s understood that I would rather she didn’t laugh at another man’s prose – laughter in a woman denoting erotic appreciation – particularly when she’s in the prone or semi-prone position. For some reason we make an exception of Simon Gray. This is not because I don’t find him masculinely threatening – he is, actually – but because he is not a marriage-breaking writer, as Roth most definitely is. I can only explain that by saying that Simon Gray doesn’t raise the ire of either sex against the other. On the stage sometimes, maybe, in earlier days, but in his diaries, no.

  The passage I want to read aloud to my wife, who has already read The Last Cigarette but doesn’t mind hearing it again, describes the diarist lying on a plastic bed on a cement beach in Greece, surrounded by bodies he doesn’t find attractive (‘little strips of material between their legs’), listening to voices he loathes (‘voices you could grate cheese on’), a cigarette jammed into his mouth, ‘the sun pouring through my straw hat like a molten headache’.

  A wonderful image, a molten headache, partly because it enacts the condition of becoming molten which is continuous – the sun continuing to pour, the hat continuing to provide no adequate protection, the head continuing to melt. So you can go on reading and rereading the sentence, the ache getting worse with every read. Indeed, when my wife wonders why I haven’t interrupted her with another favourite phrase or paragraph for at least fifteen minutes I have to tell her that I’m still on the molten headache which is beginning to pour like liquefying gold out of my own skull now.

  That is partly the actual sun’s fault as well as Simon Gray’s. It has crept under the umbrella while I’ve been busy laughing but I can’t work out which side it’s coming in from. There are diamond-shaped patches of intense light on my arms and chest, caused partly by gaps in the material of the umbrella. I could climb off my bed to fix them, and at the same time work out where the sun is, but it’s so hot out there that if I quit the shade for more than ten seconds I will grow a melanoma. There is also, to be considered, the difficulty of rising from a sunbed at all at my age. How to get the leverage? Apply too much force to the bed and it sinks into the sand, grab hold of the umbrella pole with your weight and you’ll topple it – and that’s a melanoma each in the time it takes you to put it up again – which leaves only your wife’s shoulder to reach out and press down on, and she won’t appreciate that given her injury and the intense absorption of her concentration on Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost, which has patently reached a crisis, that’s if there’s anything in late Philip Roth that isn’t crisis.

  It’s crisis time for Simon Gray, too. Best friends dead and dying, his own tobacco health no great shakes, the body reluctant and unwieldy – for which, as I try covering up the triangles of killer light, first with what’s left of a sandwich I’ve been eating, then with The Last Cigarette itself (a manoeuvre that involves balancing it on my ankles and bending double to read the words), I have considerable fellow feeling. ‘Not exactly serenity, more a gentle vacancy of spirit,’ Gray writes, describing that ‘suspended mood when you know there’s much to worry about but you can’t remember what it is’. All we have to look forward to now – a gentle vacancy of spirit, which is a great thought because it admits its impossibility, or at least its fleetingness, in the utterance.

  But no, there is something gentler about this volume of Gray’s diaries. No dilution of the rage, no minimising of despair, and certainly no false comfort – but a great suffusion of warmth, especially in the man-to-man, eyeball-to-eyeball descriptions of his friends Alan Bates, Ian MacKillop, Harold Pinter. Astute portraits these, but infinitely touching, too, in their acknowledgement of love. You have to be of an age to write like this. It’s not only the wit but the time-dyed tenderness a younger man could never manage. I console myself with that thought as I lie dying in the sun.

  What Are They Saying?

  Made a Polish waitress cry last week. I must stop doing that. This time the ostensible cause was teapots. My tea arrived as a perforated bag floating corpse-like on its back in a cup of brown soupy-looking liquid, which is not how I like it, and when I asked what had happened to the teapot she told me there’d been an incident. ‘Incident or accident?’ I asked. I suppose I didn’t need to know, since knowing wasn’t going to get me a teapot, but if you’re having a conversation, you’re having a conversation. It is a species of impoliteness to go on speaking to a person when you aren’t certain what they’re saying.

  Her eyes filled like my teacup. I didn’t see what I had said or done to occasion that. I hadn’t been aggressive. I had even essayed a smile. It is comic, after all, in a serious restaurant, to be served tea which you would no more think of drinking than you would an open sewer. ‘All usualised teaposies incriminated in unaccountable Nietzschean engineering catastrophe,’ she said, before scurrying away with her apron to her face. Now I know she couldn’t possibly have said that, but it was what I heard. So whose fault is that?

  Suddenly I can’t understand what anyone’s saying. I don’t mean intellectually, I mean I can’t distinguish the words people are using. Can’t harmonise the sounds with any I already know. I’ve had my ears tested. They’re not perfect – I’ve been using them too long for them to be perfect – but taking one thing with a bugger, the ear specialist told me, they’re not too bag.

  It’s not only in restaurants that I have this problem. Shops the same, telephones, television, movies. Especially movies. I’ve been going to a lot of movies recently in company with a person who’s close to me and happens to be a member of BAFTA. At this time of the year she has to see every movie made since the BAFTAs of the year before. I make no attempt to influence her judgement. I just go along when I’m allowed and try my best to hear what’s being said.

  Usually I’m lost within the first ten minutes of the movie starting. The Bourne Ultimatum had me floundering in five and with American Gangster I didn’t make it past the credits. No Country for Old Men (overrated, in my opinion: violence stylised for intellectuals) had a mumbly beginning and got more mumbly from there, whereas There Will Be Blood was unintelligible initially before clearing itself up in line with Daniel Day-Lewis’s marvellously mad theatricality – and there is that to be said for the theatre: you can hear it. Even Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead had me baffled for long stretches, which doesn’t alter the fact that its failure to pick up a nomination is a scandal. Too Shakespearean, I can only suppose, in the playing out of its ineluctable morality. Too hot. Coen Brothers cold is the temperature of the hour. We like our existentialism ironic just now, perhaps as a relief from the childish ardour of our politics.

  I have no doubt that subject matter has a lot to do with what I can and cannot hear. The majority of this year’s
most successful films are about killers, hitmen, gangland members and other assorted scumbags, and I have never penetrated what gangland members say to one another in the movies. It’s a matter of the conspiratorial pitch of their voices, partly. But also of what in my polytechnic days we used to call their aims and objectives. Not everyone is interested in the whys and wherefores of rubbing people out; and if the vocabulary of skulduggery doesn’t grab you, you don’t listen. Let Marianne Dashwood lose her heart to Mr Willoughby and I follow every syllable of every palpitation. For love and its trials I am all ears. But the minute there’s a criminal plot in the hatching I go to sleep. Even The Sopranos, to which I am a late and obsessive convert, is far more engrossing when Tony commits adultery or buys his wife a bracelet (the two are usually connected) than when he beats someone to a pulp.

  And I suspect I am not alone in feeling this. Certainly every time I whisper to my companion to get her to explain what’s happening everyone in the cinema turns around to tell me to shut up, which I take to be the proof that they’re having trouble following as well. So I must assume that the fault is not in me but in the movie-makers, who want us not to comprehend because incomprehensibility is now the measure of cinematic authenticity.

  This can’t be the case in actuality, of course, because if criminals had as much trouble understanding one another as I have understanding them no crime would ever be committed. But then crime for cinema buffs is not crime as it is for criminals. Why we are so keen on watching killings from the comfort of our cinema seats at the moment is a subject for another day, but there can be no question that there’s some nostalgie de la boue in the wind, a hankering for the brutalities which, for most members of BAFTA, daily life does not provide. And concealed in this hankering for brutality is a further hankering for a time before language. It is as though we have entered an anti-evolutionary period in which we wish to roll back civilisation and with it the words that mark us out as civilised.

  However you explain what’s going on in America, I date the demise of verbal communication in this country to our rejection of received pronunciation. Rather than be spoken to by a snob we understood, we chose the Babel Tower of warring regional accents – a trade-off of intelligibility for equality. Now we live in an anti-elitist dialect-democracy where no one knows what the hell anyone else is talking about. A godsend for the capitalists who can with good conscience locate their call centres in places where nobody can assist you or otherwise purposefully take your call because you can’t understand them and they can’t understand you. Recently a person from the deep north-east of England attempted to sort out inconsistencies in my mobile phone account. ‘Aylike Baader–Meinhof mullhi mead ya doont you cal coolate Gloria Steinem, anything else I can help you with?’ he said.

  ‘Forget it,’ I told him. ‘I might as well be talking to a Dutchman.’

  ‘You calling me a douche bag? I won’t be spooken to like that,’ he said.

  I’d have had him rubbed out, had I only known how to communicate with criminals.

  Leonard Cohen in Concert

  These have been a serious few weeks, our country locked in profound moral debate about aesthetic judgement versus popular appreciation, the boundaries of good taste, the rights and wrongs of telling radio audiences whose granddaughter you’ve been knocking off, the case for universal suffrage when it comes to deciding who should win The X Factor or remain on Strictly Come Dancing. Anyone just landed from Mars watching John Sergeant’s farewell dance to a standing ovation of solemn tears and eulogy would have supposed we were saying goodbye to a leader who had led us through war, famine and the plague. Certainly Sergeant spoke to the nation as though he’d done that and more. Those whom the television gods would destroy they first make vain.

  What Sergeant forgot was that he’d entertained us because of what he couldn’t do, not because of what he could. Incompetence is a great virtue to the English, but only so long as it’s wedded to modesty. Imperfection with no delusions is what we like.

  ‘Ring the bells that still can ring’ is my motto. ‘Forget your perfect offering – there’s a crack, a crack in everything.’ I have, of course, stolen those words from Leonard Cohen. Why not? In complex moral times we need whatever guidance is on offer.

  Leonard Cohen isn’t somebody I’d put my mind to much until the other week when I went to see him at the O2 arena in Greenwich. I and fifty thousand other people, not doddery exactly, but not of an age to pull a knife whenever someone disrespected us by breathing in our direction. Not the same audience, in other words, as attended the Urban Music Awards the night after. Trouble waiting to happen, if you ask me, the minute you call someting Urban Music. What’s in a name? Everything. Urban is a moral anagram of armed. But who’s going to come jingling weaponry to an evening entitled Leonard Cohen? You would as soon take a gun to a bar mitzvah. We, anyway, were just there for the words, the music and a dollop of nostalgia. Is that why the urban young are so jumpy – they don’t have enough to remember? Certainly there’s less room for knives if you’re loaded down with recollection. And of course you move more slowly.

  I read Leonard Cohen with passing interest, in the sixties. I liked a number of his poems whose names now escape me and was aroused by his novel Beautiful Losers, described by someone as the ‘most revolting novel written in Canada’, a compliment it’s hard to gauge until you know what other revolting novels have been written in Canada. I could suggest a few but this isn’t a provocative column. After Leonard Cohen I’m in beautiful loser spirits – ‘Dance me to the end of love’ spirits, decadently moony, feeling it’s all over but still hoping for another chance, ‘For flesh is warm and sweet.’

  Sound a bit 1960s? Well, there you have him. And there you have me too. After the sixties, when he started to put his poems to music, I fell out of interest with him. Singing, singing, singing – why had everyone suddenly burst out singing? Thereafter, since I wasn’t a buyer of albums, I lost track of his career, didn’t know if he was dead or alive, couldn’t remember a line, even of the most revolting novel written in Canada, and never expected to think about him again. Now here I am in his audience, and now here he is, a devilishly attractive man in his middle seventies.

  Some men do old age better than they do youth. Especially melancholy-sensual men who can’t decide whether they’re happy or not. The not knowing, like the not eating, keeps them lean. He is fascinatingly attenuated, as laconic as a snake on grass, with a face lined by a lifetime’s amused and desperate indulgence of the appetites, by which I don’t just mean wine, women, infidelity and betrayal, but also rhapsodic spirituality alternating with ecstatic doubt. A meanings man. It’s corny in its way, as well as beautiful. All existentialism when it’s life style is corny. But there’s a crack, a crack in everything. And you won’t be popular unless you’re corny.

  I like it that he doesn’t jig about. Such a change to see someone on a stage, immobile – as still as thought. We have the attention span of children. A thing will interest us only if it sparkles and moves. Madonna, Michael Jackson – people come back from their concerts raving about how well they move as though moving is a virtue in itself. I don’t get it. If you want moving ring Pickfords. Leonard Cohen barely stirs, limiting himself to crouching over his microphone into which he whispers with hoarse suggestiveness. When he does essay a ghost of a dance he gets an affectionately ironic cheer for it.

  I would have wished the audience to follow his example. It’s all a bit cultic for my taste, fans whooping and waving like born-again Christians at a hymn-singing hoedown whenever he starts a song they recognise. I’m thinking about this, wondering if they’d be whooping if he hadn’t put his poetry to music, wondering why the words alone won’t do, when I hear those great lines from the song ‘Anthem’. Ring the bells etc. Forget your perfect offering. There’s a crack – a crack in everything.

  It’s like a reprimand to people of my temperament – life’s complainants, eroticists of disappointment, lovers only of what’s fla
wless and overwrought. Could he be singing this to me? You expect too much, mister. You are too unforgiving. Not everything works out, not everything is great, and not everyone must like what you like.

  I’ve been taught this lesson before. I remember reading an essay by the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa in which he argues for the necessity of vulgarity in serious literature. Thomas Hardy said a writer needed to be imperfectly grammatical some of the time. Mailer told an audience that not everybody wanted to ride in a Lamborghini. And now here’s Leonard Cohen saying the same thing. Forget your perfect offering. There’s a crack . . .

  And then comes another, still more wonderful, clinching line – ‘That’s how the light gets in.’

  Savour that! At a stroke, weakness becomes strength and fault becomes virtue. I feel as though original sin has just been re-explained to me. There was no fall. We were born flawed. Flawed is how we were designed to be. Which means we don’t need redeeming after all. Light? Why go searching for light? The light already shines from us. It got in through our failings.

  Had I known how to whoop I’d have whooped.

  Noe-Beaver

  Omitted mention, in last week’s panegyric to San Francisco, of a lovely little park, the size of an apron, situated in the gay suburb of Castro at the junction of Noe and Beaver Streets. You heard me – Noe and Beaver Streets! What chance of finding – in the heart of this predominantly male homosexual Shangri-La – a well-tended, spiky-shrubbed community garden (with locked gates) called Noe-Beaver? – beaver being, as I don’t have to remind my raffish readers, American slang for the female pudenda.