The Making of Henry

by Howard Jacobson

‘Not all right with me. If I’d thought I was going to end up selling molasses, I’d have stayed, wouldn’t I? Kept my hat on. As it effing is, pardon my French, it’s all been for nothing.’

  Hmm. Time to go, harumphing Henry thinks, refusing another drink. Time to return to his own disappointments. But not before it has crossed his mind that they have something in common, Lachlan and Moira – she the pastry chef, he caramelised in history and grief. Sweeteners.

  Henry has been alive a long time; he knows how much small things count, what tiny fibres of like-mindedness bind the lonely. He himself is merely a failed teacher, arid, an amateur cake decorator’s son, with at best confectioner’s cream in his veins. Between Moira and Lachlan flows, whether or not they yet know it, molasses.

  He should let Lachlan have her. Give something back. He’s borrowed from other men all his life, now’s the time to make some recompense. Moira isn’t his to give, he knows that, but if she were he should part with her. Give someone else a chance.

  ‘Before you go, old man,’ Lachlan says at the door, not quite putting his arm round Henry’s shoulder, but nearly, disconcertingly nearly, ‘do you use whores?’

  Henry’s jaw drops. Actually slides out of his possession. He is aware that he has reddened. ‘Not exactly,’ is the best he can think of saying, ‘though I suppose there have been times when they’ve used me.’

  They laugh at that, together, if you can call the noise they make a laugh.

  Yes, Henry decides, he should definitely let Lachlan have her. Lachlan’s need being by far the greater. And by that token, his capacity to love and cherish being the greater too. It would be a kindness all round. If nothing else, that would at least leave Henry with the eminence he once enjoyed, as the most miserable person in the building.

  But he loves her. And you don’t give away what you love. That much he has learned. So there you are.

  SEVEN

  ‘I’ve cocked up my life,’ Henry told himself, early on the first day of his first term as an assistant lecturer at the Pennine Way College of Rural Technology. That was not simply a description of what had happened, it was also a statement of intent. Henry conjugated verbs differently from other men. ‘I’ve cocked up my life’, as Henry inflected it, also contained the meanings ‘I will cock up my life’, ‘I will have cocked up my life’, and ‘There was never a time when I wasn’t going to have cocked up my life’.

  A future imperative, past determinative tense, all Henry’s own, perfect, unconditional and punitive.

  So who was Henry punishing? Ah, if Henry only knew the answer to that!

  As for why he was punishing whoever he was punishing, that is much easier. Henry couldn’t forgive him/her/them for making him so frightened of life that all he could do was teach it. In the abstract Henry admired teachers and didn’t hold with the smug wisdom which said that those who could did, and those who couldn’t taught. Teaching was as much doing as most things, Henry thought, and in many cases more. Those who really could were proud to pass on the trick of it – for pedagogy was a species of philanthropy – while those who couldn’t clothed their incompetence in selfishness and went into banking or politics. The parasitic professions. That being the case, Henry should have been proud to be a teacher. But he wasn’t.

  This was partly the fault of the profession itself. Or at least the fault of the profession at the time Henry as a pupil encountered it. By believing it could effect wonders as an influence for social change, not just enlighten but liberate, teaching became the architect of its own demise. It educated boys like Henry into inordinate ambitions for themselves, created the most grandiose expectations, of which the least was staying where you were and passing on the baton of learning.

  When it came to mapping out their futures, Henry and his school friends, not excepting the stellar ‘Hovis’ Belkin, had all been unthreateningly vague, wanting to do well, hoping to make a name, meaning to be of use, expecting, at the very least, to be creative. Beyond that it was felt to be crass to declare your career path. The only people who knew what they wanted to be wanted to be train drivers. The world was all before them, that was how they felt about it; they were educated to believe they could be and do anything. Anything but teachers. That was their single specificity. Whatever other choices we may make, we will none of us choose teaching. It was almost a blood oath. An obligation to their collective idea of themselves, past and future, sacredly binding each to each. We will make the world sit up or we will not, but we will never so help us God be stuck stuttering in front of a class of boys like ‘Fister’ Frister, or go quietly to the funny farm like ‘Fat Frieda’, or break down and weep like ‘Bunny’ Hensher, in commemoration of whose congenital rabbit twitch Henry’s classmates sat a carrot on their desks at the beginning of every lesson.

  Thus by becoming the only one of them to renege on his oath, Henry had let not only himself down, but all his friends. In a queer way he even felt that by becoming a teacher he had let his teachers down.

  Complicated, the labyrinth of loyalties a boy bears to his school past. One way or another you’re always letting someone down. Henry remembered ‘Fat Frieda’ with such a toxic mixture of embarrassment, allegiance and regret, such consciousness of treachery, that what he felt for her was almost love. Something of him belonged to her, that was the only way he could understand it; something of him pertained to her, which he was duty-bound, if he were to make any progress giving his own nature the slip, flatly to deny.

  Biology, she taught. Whatever biology was. Henry never listened. Biology, physics, chemistry, maths – whatever explained the way the physical universe worked was of no interest to Henry, who preferred not to know. You look in a mirror and you see yourself, that was knowledge enough for Henry. All refraction did was explain what didn’t need explaining and give him migraines. Molecules were less obvious to the eye, but made him queasy for that very reason. Face that life was molecules, rather than words, and suicide was the only logical conclusion. In fairness to it, biology lacked the hard-edged cruelty of the other sciences. Biology was more like a ramble through the park, looking for catkins, than an actual subject. ‘Oh, and what is it we see here?’ No point asking Henry; Henry hadn’t seen anything. None of the teachers ever lasted very long either. Often Henry’s class was without a biology teacher altogether. Not that Henry minded that. Who needed biology? So desperate was the school, however, to take on anybody who could be induced to teach biology for more than a term, whether or not they knew any more about it than Henry did, that at last they flew in the face of a century of tradition, not to say wisdom, and hired a woman. Miss Hill. Spherical, owlish, low on the ground. Her bad luck that there was already a Hill on the premises, Fred Hill, also seriously foreshortened, a podgy lab assistant in a discoloured white coat which smelled of stink bombs. By the end of her first day she was ‘Fat Frieda’, echoing ‘Fat’ Fred, and assumed to be ‘Fat’ Fred in disguise, a money-saving ruse on the part of the school attested to, above all, by the fact that Fred and ‘Frieda’ Hill had identical moustaches.

  Whenever ‘Fat Frieda’ asked a question, Henry’s classmates made aerials of their arms, like the antennae of caterpillars, and shouted, ‘Sir, sir – oh sorry, Miss.’

  Then they held their noses, the way they did when ‘Fat’ Fred entered the lab.

  Henry couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t learn from experience, since she was a scientist, and give up asking questions altogether. He also couldn’t figure why the headmaster didn’t squash the ribald speculations by parading Fred and ‘Frieda’ Hill on the platform at the same time, as in the final act of The Comedy of Errors. Failing which, he wondered how long it would be before Miss Hill fell apart, leaving them without a biology teacher once again, but more importantly, leaving him without the wherewithal to control his features. Henry was only ever marginally able to police his face. If ‘Fat Frieda’ went in his seeing, he knew he’d go with her.

  Then, towards the end of one muggy Friday afternoon, that aftert
hought hour when biology was always to be found, like a drowned man lashed to the shipwreck of the week, Henry was brought back from his mental wanderings by the noise of the rest of the class jumping on to their desks, scratching their armpits, and making like monkeys. ‘Ooo, ooo, ooo!’ Poor Miss Hill. He shook his head over her. She had no instinct for self-preservation. Zoo animals, for God’s sake. With boys! Hadn’t she learned yet that the only safe subject with boys was the broad bean? But he pricked his ears, nonetheless, to something he half-heard her say, her voice quavering as ever, as though there were perforations in her voice box. The skin of apes and monkeys remains dry even in a hot environment – was that it? ‘Ooo, ooo, ooo!’ Yes, that was it. Dry even in a hot environment – like school. He was a profuse sweater himself, Henry. He was wet all day. He had been wet all week. His difference from apes and monkeys could have been explained had apes and monkeys lacked the means to sweat. But they didn’t. As he understood it – and he was listening hard now, harder than he had ever listened to anything that was not poetic fancy – they were possessed of the same two categories of sweat glands, apocrine and eccrine, as himself. Eccrine glands were absent from the majority of mammals, but not from chimpanzees and gorillas. They may have had fewer than he did, every living creature had fewer than he did, but the big thing was that they had them at all. For biologists taking the long view, this suggested that intense thermal sweating in man was an answer to some new prompting. Henry reckoned he knew what that prompting was. Shame. In that instant he formulated his own theory of the ascent of man. What impelled man forward, sophisticating his glands and separating him at last from the apes, was disgust and embarrassment with himself. The whole story of our evolution is the development of our capacity to know shame, and the cutaneous transpiration of mortification into pearls of sweat which roll glistening down our chests and backs, and not down the backs and chests of gorillas, is the visible evidence of it.

  Ergo – civilisation is shame.

  His mother was right. She should not have given birth to him.

  His eyes met ‘Fat Frieda’s’. He was the only boy not jumping up and down, scratching his armpits and bellowing. Was that a smile she found for him? Through all the fear, a glint of gentle recognition, and maybe even gratitude?

  Henry knew what he had to do. He leapt up from his chair. ‘Ooo, ooo, ooo!’ he went. ‘Ooo, ooo, ooo!’

  And was never able to look her in the eye again.

  So who could say that teaching wasn’t his punishment?

  They screwed a polished wooden board to his door with his name on it in swirls of gold lettering.

  HENRY NAGEL LECTURER

  He stood in front of it a long time, balancing grief with pride. It wasn’t quite the same as teacher, lecturer, was it? Lecturer denoted something else. Lecturer meant soon to be professor, which definitely denoted something else. Or did it? Would the distinction have cut any ice, to choose a name at random, with ‘Hovis’ Belkin?

  Knowing that the board with gold lettering would please his mother and the Stern Girls, he invited them (but not his father, who would breathe on it and burn it down) to sherry in his room.

  ‘Henry, the board!’ his grandmother cried.

  ‘Board?’ Henry wondered. ‘Is there a board?’

  They kissed him in turn, Irina, Effie, Marghanita, his mother. He’d done it for them. And for the memory of Anastasia. He had penetrated an England which, for all their culturedness, had hitherto eluded them. He was a soon-to-be professor. He had opened up the spice route to the institutions of the English mind. He wanted to weep, they had it so wrong.

  Madness, wasn’t it, listening to ‘Hovis’ Belkin, the enemy of his soul, when he could have taken the word of the women who loved him, and considered him a success? But that was the way of it, for Henry. Only those who thought badly of him counted.

  How long it was before the waters of the college closed over him, Henry can no longer remember. He fancies he was a drowning man from the day he took his first class, clicking his fingers and cracking his knuckles and pulling hairs out of his beard, an excruciated boy in a leather jacket, his voice not a voice he recognised, the preposterousness of his being a figure in authority all he could think about, he, hangdog Henry, who only the day before, it seemed, had been sitting on his mother’s knee, reading aloud to her from The Awkward Age. But the truth is he went under only gradually. Didn’t even have the balls to dive straight in, Henry.

  It was the women who finally dragged him down. Not the womenfriends or the womenrelatives or the borrowed women-wives of his best friends, but the women in his department, the bookwomen in whose name literature, as a sort of evidential documentation of persecution, or, when not that, a palimpsest of resistance, was now being universally understood. He should have been prepared. He should even have been at home. If ever a man had been brought up to be one of them, a girl among girls, it was Henry. What was so different about their way of looking at things from his own? Literature was the history and lexicon of their oppression; well, wasn’t literature also the history and lexicon of his? Jane Eyre, Mrs Dalloway, Henry Nagel – take your pick.

  He could have done without a father. Left entirely to the mercies of his mother and the Stern Girls, Henry could have made his way nicely through the newly effeminated humanities. He joked about it in a rare letter to ‘Hovis’ Belkin, by then in America. ‘Textually, or I might even mean textologically, I am entirely in my element. All I need to do is wear a frock and cut my dick off and the prize is mine,’ he wrote, and no sooner posted it than wished he hadn’t. Tactless, tasteless, damaging to himself, to be confirming ‘Hovis’ of all people in the very view of Henry’s masculinity which ‘Hovis’ had been the first (not counting Henry’s father) to promulgate. Did Henry want ‘Hovis’ to think of him as frocked and dickless? Had he always wanted it? In a rare letter back, ‘Hovis’ skipped the dick but was surprised to hear (but then again not surprised to hear, the Pennines being the Pennines) that they were still in frocks and not yet in dungarees and overalls where Henry was. But not surprised, Henry noted, to hear that Henry was thinking of wearing one. Would anyone have been surprised? The question stirred the dormant pond of genes bequeathed to Henry by his father. Be a man, Henry. Be a man and stand up for men. His voice deepened from belated boy soprano to something closer to light baritone. His beard grew bristlier before he shaved if off altogether to manifest dark stubble. He trimmed his lashes. He adopted the mannerism of scratching behind his ear when any of his women colleagues spoke, a downward raking of his neck, as though he meant to draw his own blood, which he’d seen someone do in the movies and which he thought denoted a fine masculinist contempt. He breathed fire. Going in to empty the ashtrays after staff meetings, in those days when Henry bit back his bashfulness and went to war on behalf of the waning phallotyranny of fathers everywhere, the cleaners believed they could smell paraffin.

  Nothing so pathetic as a dragon without a bite. Having set himself against the girls, Henry couldn’t come up with anything to cheer the boys. Men in books? Henry didn’t know of any men in books. Yes, there were odd male interlopers, incidental swashbucklers even, about whom the heroines might and then again might not, but the fictional strategy, not to say the underlying semiotic, was against them. Henry wasn’t convinced by all the talk about the conductibility and viscousness of women’s writing; he couldn’t feel the deep maternal blood flow, let alone go with it; he missed the goo; but in all the novels that were important to him – even those by the author of The Ivory Tower – the poetics invariably confirmed the sensibilities of women. The form was theirs. Its structure chimed with the almanac of their frustrated powers. He made a brief excursion into Tom Jones and Roderick Random and Ivanhoe and Peveril of the Peak and The Last of the Barons, but he could no more take the historiography than the facetiousness. He even canvassed a course in which anything with Henry in, would Henry teach. The Henrys of course, Henry IV (Parts 1 and 2), Henry V, Henry VI (Parts 1, 2 and 3) and Henry VI
II (which Henry himself had never read), Little Dorrit (for Henry Gowan), Northanger Abbey (for Henry Tilney), Mansfield Park (for Henry Crawford), Emma (for Henry Woodhouse and Henrietta Bates), A Pair of Blue Eyes (for Henry Knight), The Fox (for Henry Grenfel), the poetry of John Berryman whose Henry set the benchmark for suicidally unhappy Henrys everywhere, and, bending his own rules, the earlier short stories of O. Henry and the later novels of Henry James. This, however, struck the department as differing in no essential from what Henry normally taught, except in so far as it came clean at last about the solipsism, which wasn’t necessarily a recommendation.

  So he settled finally – was allowed to settle, that’s to say, in the spirit of its being his goose, so let him cook it – for a comparative and evaluative course of study (you had to announce if there was going to be any evaluation, you had to issue a health warning, and you had to include a sub-clause offering students the option not to) entitled Literature’s For Life, implying that it wasn’t just for Christmas while at the same time echoing life as in Lawrentian ‘life’, a religious entity with masculinist overtones, and also the last line of Washington Square, ‘for life, as it were’, which as everyone knows refers to the cold fate of a betrayed woman. That’s what he would really have liked to call it: Literature’s For Life As It Were, but he knew without asking that it would take up too much space in the Handbook. In meetings on the curriculum or when trying to interest incurious students at the beginning of a new academic year, he pronounced it North Manchesterly – Literature’s For Laff – to evoke, as well, the idea of muscular expansiveness and mirth. But when all was said and done – Life or Laff, however you cared to interpret or pronounce it – his course comprised the same texts as everyone else was teaching: Pamela, Amelia, Clarissa, Henrietta , Sophia, Cecilia, Evelina, Belinda, Emma, Shirley, Sybil, Venetia, Ruth, Eleanor , Marcella, Mary Barton, Mrs Dalloway. Only with the occasional consolatory Henry thrown in, and taught, as Henry liked to think, with more sinew.