Whatever it is, I Don't Like it

by Howard Jacobson

  Pinter, anyway, approached me in what I took to be a pugilistic manner and told me who he was. I told him I knew who he was. He told me he knew what I’d been writing about him. I told him I was surprised but honoured. He told me that what he was thinking did not honour me. I told him I was honoured to be dishonoured by him. He looked me up and down as though calculating how many blows it would take to floor me. One is the answer but I didn’t tell him that. And so it would have gone on had Simon Gray not interrupted us. ‘You two met each other then?’ he asked.

  Looking back I wonder whether Pinter really was being menacing to me. Could he just have been making merry? You don’t always know in his plays whether one character wants to kill another or just have fun with him. That’s Pinter’s subject – the borderline, the uncertainty, the hair-trigger moments when joking turns to violence and vice versa. We are powder kegs and clowns, and it’s hard to know which makes us more dangerous.

  I wasn’t a great fan of his plays. Surreal minimalism leaves me dissatisfied. I like amplitude and excess. Of course he could do hyperbole, but it was the hyperbole of less, and I’m a more man. Maybe his work rattled me. What if I was wrong? What if less was more and more was less? The other reason he rattled me was that his screenplays were so good – The Servant and the The Go-Between I loved – and he spoke so compellingly about his work in interviews, that I could see he had a genius I couldn’t find in his stage plays. At the edges of my professional life he nagged away at me. I was always thinking about him. Then came a decisive incident. I was chairing a Late Show Booker Prize panel, being rude as I was hired to be, when a courier on a motorbike delivered a handwritten missive (I almost said missile) from Harold Pinter – believe me when I tell you it was still blazing hot from his hand – saying he hoped never to see me discussing literature on television again. It felt like a threat to the entire edifice that was the BBC, never mind to me.

  Thereafter, when we found ourselves in the same room, we took up positions in opposite corners. Or at least I took up positions in opposite corners. When he became a more overtly political figure, railing against America, I poured scorn on him. What a waste of a linguistic gift to expend it on so banal a cause, saying exactly what men with no gift for thought or language whatsoever were saying. How could a masterly writer of ambiguities sink to the same level of crude one-note commonplace as Ken Livingstone and George Galloway? How could he bear to share the air with them let alone a platform?

  Perversely, that made me think again about his plays. Such subtlety there, such crassness on the soapbox. Then a second decisive event. Quite out of the blue he approached me, again at a party, and extended a hand. ‘There has been a certain froideur between us of late,’ he said. I didn’t reply, ‘Froideur! Harold, it’s been glacial.’ I simply took his hand and melted. He could do that when he bent his gaze on you, he could turn you to jelly.

  I am unable to account for this sudden gesture of goodwill. Perhaps it was Simon Gray’s influence. Or perhaps Harold’s wife had said something. He was becoming ill, maybe she thought he ought to be settling accounts, or needed a nice Jewish boy for a friend. It’s my belief that what’s unspoken in Pinter’s plays – the great mysterious lacuna at their heart, the object of all those apparently motiveless interrogations – is his Jewishness. Maybe Lady Antonia thought that too and wanted him to fill the space, at least in life.

  Not that we talked Jews. Or, thank God, America. What we talked on the single occasion we lunched together was literature and sex. He had invited me out to discuss my new novel which he had read in proof and was generous enough – more generous than I had ever been to him – to say he liked. The novel is about jealousy, husbands and lovers, the elusive transference of erotic power – Pinter territory in fact. Without realising it, I’d written a Pinteresque novel, Pinteresque in subject, I mean, not in form. Less I still won’t do. Or can’t do.

  He knew screeds of James Joyce by heart, which I listened to in wondering rapture. An observer would have picked us for master and acolyte, hero and heroiser. And so it felt. Ill and angry, he was still a great talker and, to my guilty surprise, a great listener too. His deep beautiful brown eyes swallowed me whole. I was in love. No other word for it. Bewitched. I skipped home like a boy. We’d agreed we would do it again. Then Simon Gray died and the time for conviviality passed. And now Harold. So there was and will be no second lunch and I am desperately sad about it. I would have liked more of him, not less.

  Washington I

  Here’s a line I never thought I’d hear myself employ: I caught the last plane out. In fact – if only prosaic fact will satisfy you – it was just the last plane out of Heathrow to Dulles International, all later flights to Washington having been cancelled because of the snow forecast to ‘bury’ the city.

  There was even some question of whether we’d be able to land at all before the snow began to fall in earnest. But we made it. There’s another line I never thought I’d hear myself employ: We made it.

  By a whisker. We weren’t only the last plane out, we were the last plane in. It was like landing in some hellish Eastern-bloc state before the Communists decamped. Not another plane in sight, nothing moving, all the runways vacant, no understanding where the snow was falling from because there was no sky. In such places snow would fall as a kind of ironic commentary on the political system: behold the spiritual nothingness to which ideology has reduced you. But this was Washington – bright, pushy, free-enterprise, illuminated Washington! Snow belongs as though by its intrinsic nature to Communism. Capitalism, one feels, should by now have found a way of dispensing with it. But it was about to close Dulles International Airport.

  So how long, I wondered, before the American middle right, the Tea Party folk, would blame the most violent blizzard to hit the capital in living memory on Obama’s socialist agenda?

  Expect more of this political savvy over the next few weeks. I am in Washington being a visiting professor. Seemed like a nice gig when I was offered it, but that was before the snow fell. Let’s not be churlish: it still is a nice gig, or it will be if George Washington University ever reopens. The minute we landed, the city’s institutions began to close their doors. You’ve never seen so much snow. Lock yourself in your room and don’t come out is the advice on radio and television. Which is all very well if you’re in your own home and have a freezer stuffed with pizzas, but an apartment hotel with a complimentary sachet of coffee, two tea bags and a packet of chocolate chip cookies – the difference between civilisation and barbarism is the difference between an English biscuit and an American cookie – is no place to be holed up in for a month.

  Rather than unpack my summery shirts – the weather had been unseasonably mild in Washington in January; I’ve even brought shorts in expectation of paddling in the Potomac – I head straight out into the blizzard and make for Trader Joe’s, a grocery store which the woolly-hatted porter tells me is just across the street, that’s if I can get across the street. Trader Joe’s, he adds, is organic. Like I care – to speak the way the locals speak – whether Trader Joe’s is organic. I am about to be immured in the worst snowstorm in Washington’s history and I am supposed to be pleased that I can get unsalted sunflower seeds and reduced-guilt (I kid you not) tortilla strips grown with consideration to Mother Earth. In weather like this it’s impossible to show love to nature, and I know the argument that says it’s lack of love for nature that’s got us into this mess. Without going so far as climate-change denial, I don’t hold with quid pro quo explanations of natural events. This blizzard is an act of motiveless malignancy and there’s an end of it.

  As luck would have it, Trader Joe’s turns out to be the best grocery store with principles I have ever shopped in, and that isn’t just desperation talking. Yes, you can get your slivered seeds if you want them, but you can also get salamis soaked in red wine, puttanesca sauce made with red wine, excellent red-wine vinegars, red-wine mustard and, best of all, red wine itself, organised not only by country but
by grape. Suddenly I don’t want the siege to end; God willing I won’t have to do an hour’s teaching and can sample every Pinot Noir the state of Oregon can produce before I fly back home again, assuming a thaw, in March.

  But this isn’t all that’s raised my spirits. Reader, they are panic buying here. All the bread has gone. All the eggs have gone. Bottled water’s running low. (Don’t ask me why they’re just not buying wine.) And the queues stretch out into the street. And why does this please me? Because it shows it’s not just us who go to pieces in extremity. I passed more and bigger snowploughs between Washington airport and the city than the whole of our impecunious country can rustle up from Land’s End to Gretna Green. I drove by mountains of grit as high as Snowdon. This is the way to do it, I thought. This puts us to shame. But the roads remain unploughed and ungritted and they’re panic buying in the shops.

  What is more, when I turn on the television weather hysteria is all I can find. Channel outdoing channel with ‘wall-to-wall coverage of the bad stuff’ – ‘Snowmageddon’, Obama is calling it; ‘snowpocalypse’ is another popular coinage – hour upon hour of footage of deserted roads, stranded vehicles, scenes of people fighting one another over the last snow shovel in Wal-Mart. And we Brits are the ones who are said to fall apart when winter strikes. True, it only takes a snowflake to bring our railways to a stop, and here, so far, thirty inches have fallen, but still and all, snow’s just snow.

  Having seen an item about panic buying in Washington on the BBC News, my mother calls. ‘I hear they’re running out of toilet rolls,’ she says. When I was a child my mother never let me leave the house without a hundred yards of toilet roll tightly folded in the back pocket of my trousers, ‘just in case’. Now she isn’t here to look after me the catastrophe she always dreaded has arrived. ‘I might still have a wad,’ I tell her, trying my back pocket.

  At school the other boys laughed at my wad of folded toilet paper. Who’s laughing now, sucker?

  In fact, before you start sending parcels, I have plenty of everything I need, especially self-satisfaction. Last plane out, last plane in, a storm to end storms ravaging a strange city, egg riots at the organic grocery store – and I am unfazed. My wife runs me a bath. After a long soak I crack open a Sonoma County Zinfandel and watch television report more closures. Schools, museums, churches, and now the federal government. Wimps.

  Washington II

  A small American in a small art lover’s beard – a small art lover’s beard on an even smaller art-loving American would be a better description – greets us at the door to the permanent collection and asks us to leave our coats in the cloakroom.

  I let him know we would rather not; our time is limited and we don’t want to spend it queuing for cloakrooms when we could be looking at the Rothkos and the Bonnards for which the Phillips Collection is renowned. May we keep them on? He shakes his head politely. Washington is a polite town. ‘They look pretty heavy anyway,’ he says, as though he’s insisting on this only for our convenience.

  I don’t say that the weight of my coat is my business, that no one tells me how many clothes I may wear at Tate Britain, and that this is pretty rich all round given the fuss America is making at the moment about state intrusion into what Brits call civil liberty and Americans free enterprise. If free enterprise means anything doesn’t it mean I may look at Rothko in a coat if I so choose?

  In fact, if he’d had his way, Rothko would have determined not only how many clothes people looking at his work should wear, but of what colour and what weave. There’s a small Rothko room at the Phillips Collection, chapel-like according to the painter’s stipulations, an environment in which, in his words, the walls are to be ‘defeated’ so that the space can be ‘saturated with the feeling of the work’. Myself, I think the artist should leave feelings of saturation to the person looking. Which is what Bonnard does. Look if you like, Bonnard says. My colours will work on you or they won’t. Very French. But not Rothko, who is very American. With Rothko you don’t look at the work, you submit to it.

  Call this art as tyranny. First the gallery dictates your wardrobe, then the artist commandeers your mind. So is this an American paradox or another instance of American schizophrenia? Free the individual and then tell him what to do with his freedom; entangle him in red tape and then raise the roof if anyone mentions socialism.

  The shock jocks of American television are defining socialism as the government invading your home with a shotgun and stealing your furniture. The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, whose patrons include Sarah ‘Read My Hands’ Palin – otherwise described by the comedian Bill Maher as ‘the Nudnik from Alaska’ – is making inroads into popular opinion with a mix of perfectly explicable loathing of the banks and perfectly inexplicable anxiety regarding health-care reforms which they are convinced will lead to the elderly and the sick being left to bleed to death in the corridors and waiting rooms of filthy hospitals, as they are in England, rather than on the roads as they are, if they happen to be uninsured, in the USA. (Don’t bother to correct me on either score. I am infected by the new adversariality of American politics. Someone attacks you with unreason, you strike back with more unreason still.)

  You would think that what has happened in Washington this last week would have finally disclosed to Americans the overwhelming truth about free enterprise: namely, that it doesn’t work. It’s the snow I’m talking about. Not who was responsible for making it fall, but who is responsible for clearing it away. Questioned by snowed-in citizens on the matter of uncleared sidewalks, the Mayor of Washington, Adrian Fenty – a man with an unnervingly over-polished bald pate – explained that responsibility for clearing a path outside a house or shop falls to the individual whose house or shop it is, and not the city. Interrogated further as to why he hadn’t used his powers to compel people to fulfil these responsibilities, Mayor Fenty raised a hand and did to his glistening head what he will not do the city sidewalks. ‘I prefer the carrot to the stick approach,’ he said.

  Meaning, we don’t hold with telling people what to do in these parts, unless they’re wearing too many clothes to look at art in.

  So the situation is this: some stretches of sidewalk appear passable, because owners of property have been out with their shovels, but these you can access only by leaping the hummocks of filthy snow, or fording the roaring rivulets of freezing sludge, left by owners of property who don’t give a shit. The consequence of which is that the cleared sidewalks are of use to you only if someone helicopters you in.

  Now wouldn’t you think that if you were clearing your own two feet of pavement you would clear the two feet on either side of you while the spade was in your hand, no matter that the persons charged with that responsibility can’t or won’t? If not as an act of common courtesy, then in order to make your own coming and going that little bit easier? In socialist England where the government steals our furniture and leaves us to die where we fall, we shovel away snow and ask who the snow belongs to later. But in free-enterprise Washington this apparently is not possible. What’s mine is mine, what’s yours is yours. So go break your neck. But it’s said politely.

  I could have the sidewalks cleared in minutes. I’d invite government intervention. That’s what governments are for. To make us do in a body what we are cussedly incapable of doing as individuals. Individualism is a fine ideal; it’s only a shame individuals suck.

  Bill Maher, to whom I’ve already referred, made the same point in an interview with Larry King the other day. ‘The people stink,’ he said, alluding to the illogicality of the popular disillusionment with Obama for not doing what would, were he to do it, disillusion them still more.

  There, in a nutshell, is the case against empowering the people. They stink. But how can you not love a country where someone will say that on television? We Brits might shovel one another’s snow but we haven’t the courage to insult the Demos. Love is what our politicians and comedians crave. They want the people to adore them. Cry a little over them. Feel thei
r pain. Not even Paxman will tell the British public they stink.

  So, thanks to Bill Maher, I approach the great democratic experiment which is America from an upside-down position. It doesn’t work because the people stink. But in a country where you can say the people stink, the people can’t stink. So it does work.

  It’s convoluted, but you can get there. Which is more than you can say about the sidewalks.

  Elitism for Everybody

  Here’s a little test for you. Who said of Samuel Beckett, ‘His appeal lies in his directness – the sparse, unembellished prose that can make his meticulous stage directions unexpected’?

  No, not Terry Eagleton. Guess again.

  I’ll put you out of your misery. Nick Clegg.

  Let’s not get carried away. I wouldn’t have given that an A+ had it turned up in an essay at Wolverhampton Polytechnic. He who would avoid cliché must not put ‘sparse’ and ‘unembellished’ together. And ‘directness’ is not a noun that quite winkles out what’s distinctive or, as Clegg has it, ‘disturbing’ – another cliché – in Samuel Beckett. Mrs Thatcher had ‘directness’, as did John Prescott, if you remember him. The quality makes neither of them Beckett. But never mind. The wonder of it is, that asked to choose his hero, Clegg chose Beckett.

  Whether Cameron will come round to any of Clegg’s tastes in the long nights of slinky rapprochement ahead remains to be seen. His own stated preferences have always been strategically populist. As, of course, were Blair’s and, latterly, Brown’s. In Blair’s case I believed them. Blair was superficial to his skin. In Brown’s I didn’t. We will never know now whether Brown would have fared better had he been allowed to speak in his own native sparse, unembellished prose, but it would have been worth a try. The lesson should not be lost on Cameron. The British might despise elitism but they quickly see through cultural sycophancy.