The Dog's Last Walk

by Howard Jacobson

  If I say I hope the petition against Zoolander 2 has run out of steam, it isn’t because I am unsympathetic to the concerns of the androgyne/trans/non-binary individuals who were originally offended by it, albeit on the strength of a trailer and a publicity handout. But there’s a principle at stake: offence, however deep the cut, does not sanction silencing.

  That should be the first sentence anyone enrolling at a university hears. Good morning, students. Welcome to a liberal education where you will encounter, if we are doing our job right, much that will distress and infuriate you. The indignation you have been expressing on your first morning here, voting for the banning of all jokes and the removal from office of every lecturer with whose views you suspect you will soon be disagreeing, does you credit, but adds nothing to the sum of human reason. So you are offended by Zoolander 2. Who isn’t? Of course a satire which is directed against you hurts; that is precisely its point. Would you live in a world that has none? No ridicule because you are its object? No mockery, though mockery is the breath of life? Punch the following into your phones – giving offence is sacred. Oh, and try to remember how much you liked Benedict the day before yesterday.

  But two days are a long time in the politics of pain. And those who should be counselling against the fashion for fraught nerves are shamefully surrendering to it. Not long ago, an eccentric Nobel Prize winner with profuse nostril hair – I mention this only to highlight his carelessness as to effect – was relieved of his duties for making a joke which, inter alia, had women as its object. An element of the joke was that women cry easily, whereupon a number of them did precisely that and there was his career sunk. The world waited for the academic institution that employed him to come to its senses, but it didn’t. For universities go in fear now of the massed neuroses of their students or junior staff and, rather than risk a confrontation, capitulate to them.

  The latest sacrifice on the altar of the thin-skinned is David Starkey, also once the nation’s darling, but now banned from appearing in a Cambridge University promo because of his racist, classist and no doubt anti-androgyne/trans/non-binary views. Since Starkey chose to play the jester on television it has become more and more difficult to be certain what his views are. Only a blockhead would assume he believes what he says, since part of his comic shtick is to offend the faint of heart and bemuse the literal of mind. That doesn’t make him the nicest of company, but Cambridge University isn’t a kindergarten. We entertain a diversity of opinions, and ways of expressing them here – somebody should be saying – not all of them sympathetic. This is a place of learning, not a sanatorium. If you can’t handle contrariety, you shouldn’t be here.

  And it’s goodnight from him

  It was Simon Kelner who offered me a column on this paper. I told him I wasn’t sure I was up to the job of writing a thousand words every week. I’d done a stint reviewing television for the Correspondent, but reviewing is different – it’s not just you and the inside of your head. Simon suggested I try for a few months and see how I felt. That was eighteen years ago. When I saw him recently, he asked if I’d made my mind up. I told him I hadn’t.

  I wrote my early columns in a camper van travelling from Perth to Broome. I recall composing one while sitting on a collapsible stool by a billabong that had been a smudge of dry dirt the day before but was now home to pelicans, wading birds and a single black swan. Another, I phoned in from a rowing boat on the heartbreak-blue waters of Shark Bay, a thousand miles from anywhere. Bottlenosed dolphins tried to nudge the phone out of my hand. In Broome itself, I wrote about watching an Aboriginal musical under a broiling night sky from which a succession of shooting stars fled like sparks from the fires of hell. In the heat, the moon rolled red like a drunkard.

  Six months later I was back in London, still writing the column, but without the Australian wildlife. It changed days, changed length, changed format, and little by little I changed with it. The anecdotal mode gave way to the discursive, the ironical to the ireful, until I decided I was going in the wrong direction and changed back again.

  I hadn’t signed on to write opinion pieces about war and famine – I am a novelist and novelists aren’t meant to have opinions – but nor did I want to dance inconsequentially upon a pinhead every week. Making something out of nothing is a challenge to a writer; do it too often, though, and nothing comes of nothing.

  What’s worse, ponderousness or levity? My first responsibility, I believed, was to entertain in a spirit of high seriousness. Glide seamlessly between Rabelais and George Eliot.

  But no one entertains all of the people all of the time. Kelner stopped being entertained when I began savaging other writers on the paper. And those other writers weren’t much entertained either. But readers who didn’t share the indurated anti-Zionism I was attacking declared themselves grateful.

  In other circumstances, I might have written fewer articles on the subject. I didn’t come on to the paper a polemical Zionist. If I have sometimes sounded like one, that’s the paper’s fault. I’m not saying I cared nothing for Israel beforehand. But there was a new orthodoxy of anti-Zionism in the air and this paper inhaled its poisons freely. One doesn’t go to war in the abstract. Had quite so many anti-Zionists not been writing for the Independent, and had their hostility to Israel been less a thing of myth and rhetoric, I might not have felt the call to buckle up as often as I did. But when I did buckle up, it was as a critic of their psychology, not their politics. The deep, self-deluding irrationality of hatred will always give itself away in language first.

  We all learn on the job, and writing is no exception. It is said of novels that if you know what you’re going to say before you say it, you won’t produce a good novel. The same, to my mind, is true of writing a column. You need to snake your way to meaning, find out what’s true, or at least more true than false, in the course of saying it, allow the words to discover the passion, not the passion dictate the words. The reason ideology leads us astray is that it is the expression of made-up minds. The best novels surprise their authors and the best columns end up somewhere the columnist never expected to go.

  Online, the made-up mind characterises much that passes for comment. Wise columnists don’t read the threads that follow their words, but once in a while it is instructive to do so. It is a jungle in which the combatants are so befuddled they forget it was you they set out to attack and end up tearing at one another. Once upon a time, the ignorant, the froward and the vain vented their spleen in letters written in green ink and sealed with a little sticker showing a dove of peace. Now there’s no need for the pretence. You can revile and say so at the press of a button. This too has come to be a subject I’ve returned to reluctantly but often: the Gadarene-swine effect of the social media.

  What’s wrong with the social media can be simply stated. In the heat of violent exchange, everything but opinion gets lost. A generation has grown up that – online, at least – is deaf to tone, impervious to irony, incapable of grasping that thought can be tentative and argument exploratory. Theirs is a battleground of stated positions. One view lowers its head and charges its antlers at another. All we can hope is that in time they will all have butted themselves into unconsciousness.

  I am asked whether writing columns has interfered with writing fiction. My answer is no, because I have approached both in a similar spirit. It might sound fanciful to claim that my columns have been little novels, but that was how I saw them. Essays into rather than about, dramatic pieces in which I didn’t have to say what I believed, because I didn’t know, or didn’t want to know, or hoped that in the interactive play of images and ideas a way of looking at the world would emerge that wasn’t trite, that might surprise and energise, and would give pleasure.

  Pleasure to me too. For eighteen years of which, now I have finally made my mind up, I owe Simon Kelner thanks. And so I leave you.

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  An award-winning writer and broadcaster, Howard Jacobson was born in Manchester, brought up
in Prestwich and educated at Stand Grammar School in Whitefield and Downing College, Cambridge, where he studied under F. R. Leavis. He lectured for three years at the University of Sydney before returning to teach at Selwyn College, Cambridge. His novels include The Mighty Waltzer and Zoo Time (both winners of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize); Kalooki Nights (longlisted for the Man Booker Prize); the 2010 Man Booker Prize-winning The Finkler Question; (shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize), and most recently, Shylock is My Name. He was a weekly columnist for the Independent for eighteen years until its closure in early 2016.

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  First published in Great Britain 2017

  © Howard Jacobson 2017

  These columns were first published in the Independent, to which Author and Publisher are grateful for permission to reproduce them.

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