The Making of Henry

by Howard Jacobson

  Lit’s For Life, was how the students referred to it, whatever Henry liked to think. Lit’s For Life – like the motto on a T-shirt. Shows us your tits, show us your lits. So much for Henry James and D. H. Lawrence.

  He became a spider, spinning in the dark. Five years into his appointment, and still uncertain of tenure, he was moved to the end of the corridor, and then into another wing of the humanities building altogether.

  ‘The students can’t find me,’ he complained to his then head of department – the previous incumbent, Jane’s husband, having moved on, taking Jane, who wouldn’t let him weigh her breasts on the moor, with him. Mona Khartoum the name of the new one. Brought up in Sussex and Baghdad. Dr Lilac and orange hair, time at the Sorbonne, author of a work on the sexual economics of prosody (assertive cadence a tax on women, an actual emotional revenue, administered and gathered in by men), and a way of pursing her lips – almost homoerotically, Henry thought, almost like offering a rectum – when kissing her colleagues. Even to Henry, whom she wanted dead – an otiose ambition in the circumstances – she presented the little puckered O of her rectum mouth.

  Henry made a chivalric cherry of his lips in return. And planted it on her cheek.

  Years later, still waiting for promotion, he remembered his failure to reciprocate Dr Khartoum’s obscene greeting. Not that he believed she took him to have turned her down, or had sufficient interest in him to care even if he had. No. His mistake had not been sexual but political. He hadn’t adequately abased himself. He hadn’t acknowledged gynocracy. But it was also true that promotion waited on publication, and Henry had published nothing. Virtually nothing, anyway. And academics who had published virtually nothing were in no position to be picky where they pressed their mouths.

  ‘Have you considered the possibility that your students might not want to find you?’ she asked him.

  ‘No, I haven’t,’ Henry said. ‘Do you think I should?’

  ‘No. No. But there are very few things we do that we do not mean to do.’

  ‘Like getting cancer and being run over?’

  She put her head to one side, as colourful as a parrot, a single lilac braid looping from her hair. ‘Those too,’ she said.

  Then mean to do both, Henry thought. But what he said was, ‘I’d settle for a wooden finger by the main departmental notice-boards, pointing them my way.’

  She thought about it. ‘But then wouldn’t everybody want a finger?’ she wondered.

  To which lily-livered Henry was not prepared to chance an answer.

  He was like the mad wife in the attic, only he was in the cellar. When inspectors or external examiners came to the college, they were not shown Henry. He was their terrible secret, the last man teaching literature, or at least the last man teaching it the old male way, as though language were achievement rather than trace.

  They appended a Mr on his name board –

  MR HENRY NAGEL LECTURER

  – in order to hammer home that he would never be a professor, that he was an amateur, a mere unlettered dabbler, but just as importantly to dissociate the department from his gender. No one else was Mr. Either they were Dr or they were nothing. But Henry needed defining. The views expressed in this room are not necessarily the views of the department – that was what they were telling students and whoever else stumbled, in the blackness, upon Henry’s room. In here language is considered an achievement not a trace – be warned!

  ‘Why don’t you rename your course Literature and Invasiveness?’ Drs Grynszpan (Cerisse) and Delahunty (Rhona) asked him, pissed, at an end-of-term party. He was the only man they had to talk to, else they wouldn’t have bothered.

  Henry fiddled with the sharp points of his tie. Never without a suit and tie, Henry, whatever the occasion. The suit caused consternation, he could tell, by virtue of its symbolic refusal of flux and chaos, and the tie – well, a tie’s a tie. He smiled his sweetest. ‘Because I don’t know anything about it,’ he told them. ‘Cup and mitre, I’m the cup.’

  Dr Grynszpan stood on one leg, like a stork. She was wearing a parody short skirt, slightly starched like a ballet dancer’s, over opaque black Hamlet tights. Short skirts on Drs flummoxed Henry. He never knew where to look that did justice to the doctorate. ‘You’ve gone immediately into defensive mode,’ she said, turning her grey eyes on him.

  Henry looked into those. ‘Centuries of repression,’ he explained.

  ‘So now you’re getting your own back?’ Dr Delahunty wondered.

  She was easier for Henry, visually, a Dr who dressed in what Henry thought of as rehearsal clothes, like a mime artist’s, with a violent splash of red lipstick, almost as electric as Henry’s tie. Logocentric Henry hated mime, but at least Dr Delahunty concealed her body.

  ‘No, surprisingly I don’t feel vengeful,’ Henry said. ‘And certainly don’t teach vengeance. Rather I see myself in a demystifying role. Like you, I understand that as a teacher of the syntax of oppression, it is my job to fracture it. There’s where we find ourselves, we of the margins – now in the fissure, now in the fracture. We fracture away down there in my little room.’

  ‘It must be a sight.’

  ‘It is. You are welcome to observe it. You’ll need to being your potholing gear, though.’

  ‘But you are still talking to your students about genius, I hear,’ Grynszpan said. She had a way of swirling around him, like a little girl showing Daddy her new frock. What there was of it.

  ‘They’ve reported me, have they?’

  ‘No. But the word crops up in their essays. They have to have got it from somewhere. We figured it was you.’

  ‘We?’

  Delahunty nodded. ‘We.’

  ‘Then you both figured right,’ Henry said. ‘I’m a genius freak. Especially I get freaky when the genius in question is female. It’s how I was brought up. I am constitutionally impressed by the intelligence of women. I am by yours.’

  ‘Well, we do both have PhDs,’ Grynszpan reminded him.

  ‘I am at all times mindful of those,’ Henry said, holding up the hand of peace. ‘I can’t begin to imagine the disadvantages you must both have had to overcome to get where you have got. When one thinks of how it was for those poor governesses in Charlotte Brontë . . . ’

  ‘It has, however, nothing to do with genius, which, along with plaisir du texte, is a masculine concept,’ Delahunty told him. ‘And ascribing it to women doesn’t undo its violence, just like that. You perpetuate an injustice to those women writers you teach if you miss the subtlety of their subversion. It was never their intention simply to become proxy men.’

  ‘You’re not a proxy man just because you write well.’

  She arched her mimist’s eyebrow. ‘You are,’ she said, ‘if all you understand by writing well is the smooth didactic surface of the patriarchal logos.’

  Taugetz, Henry thought. A great wave of nostalgia for home passed over him. What you give up when you go to a university or wherever, what you forfeit doubly when you go to teach at one – the seasoned scepticism of people not deranged by the politics of their specialisms. Taugetz, taugetz, taugetz, taugetz . . .

  But all he chose to say was ‘Look, I just teach the kids to read what’s there. OK?’

  ‘Ha!’ they said together. ‘There!’

  He looked into his drink. ‘You seem to have forgotten this is a party,’ he said, excusing himself.

  But they hadn’t done with him. ‘Still there, is it, Henry?’ they would enquire, laughing, wherever they ran into him, slumped over his Pennine shepherd’s pie in the refectory, wandering the library stacks in search of a novel with a man in it, stumbling in the direction of the lecture theatre, emerging blinking from his spider’s hole beside the print room, coming out of the single male lavatory the department provided for men, particularly then, the lavatory – ‘Still there, is it, Henry?’

  He was no match for them. They wore him down. He couldn’t keep it up. Whereas they could go on for ever. Was that the power of g
ibberish over language proper, the female semiotic, as they called it, over the male symbolic, the flux over the mastery – that there was no stemming its flow once it started? ‘Ooo, ooo, ooo!’ Unless it wasn’t gibberish. Unless it wasn’t all gibberish. Henry’s big mistake, he now realises, is that he left them to it. He thought they would go away. He thought it would go away. Thought it was a fad. What goes around comes around. I’ll continue as before, he decided, enjoying the thing that’s written rather than the thing that isn’t, and all will be well. One day he’d wake up from the nightmare of their horrible unintelligibility – all right, their gracelessness, then, their vile verbal discordances – and they’d be gone, and in their place once more nice people like his mother and her aunties, book lovers and Henry-appreciators of the old sort. So he never kept up, never read them or their womby sources, never sought to understand them, never even tried, intellectually, to meet them halfway. Grew lazy instead, knowing what he knew.

  No better than his paternal grandparents, he now realises, who stuck with Yiddish though they’d been born in an English-speaking country, because in Yiddish they felt at home. I too, Henry thinks, though born in a gibberish-speaking country, took the coward’s way out and spoke only English because in English I felt at home. Would it have killed me to have picked up one or two words of the other along the way? Since gibberish was the currency of communication, didn’t it behove me at the least to buy a phrase book?

  Couldn’t do it. Not in the genes to contend with those who spoke a foreign language. Safest to hide and not let them embroil him in conversation he didn’t understand.

  And meanwhile history rolled with them, burying Henry with his love of the thing that’s written rather than the thing that’s not, until he was just a squeak in the darkness.

  Taugetz!

  His father turned up once, Henry can’t even work out when that would have been – twenty years ago, twenty-five? – turned up unannounced, rapping on Henry’s door when Henry was in the middle of a seminar, proud, embarrassed, shit-eating grin on his face, ha, who’d have thought it, Henry the mother’s boy, who would rather run away from home than ask for his threepence back, heartfelt Henry a big man all of the sudden, with a roomful of girls bending their pretty giraffe ears to everything he said.

  No boys, Henry? Did you never teach a boy?

  There were no boys, Dad. Not in my subject.

  I blame your mother for that.

  She wasn’t in charge of the intake, Dad.

  She was in charge of you. You could have done something else .

  Why does it matter? Why needed there be boys?

  To keep your mind off the girls.

  Then if that’s all, you don’t blame Mum. Chip off the old block, Dad.

  I should leave him alone, Henry thinks. Honour thy father and thy mother. I should remember him as I wish to be remembered, justly, which is to say variously. I should remember how sweetly he smiled on me that day, holding up his hand to show that he didn’t mean to interrupt, hadn’t realised, mouthing roundly in a booming sibilant stage whisper, ‘I’ll wait outside,’ which he did, pacing the corridor for half an hour, for there were no chairs where they’d put Henry, just grey-green linoleum on the wind-tunnel floor and something institutional like asbestos, almost certainly asbestos, newly fitted – choke the bastard out – on the near-lightless ceiling. So upsetting, Henry thinks, and thought at the time, the sight of your father waiting for you, waiting for YOU, killing time, at the mercy of your busy schedule. Such a reversal of the proper order of things. Your father a petitioner, and petitioning makes a vassal of anyone.

  If there were a dead man out there, Henry thought, dismissing his class – same time next week, same book, same judgement-aversion – would it be me shielding my father’s eyes now, or would we both revert in an instant? And which way would I want it?

  No one ever upset Henry the way his father did. Rivers, Henry wept and weeps for his mother and her clan, those marvellously punctuated women who left him one by one, going down almost it seemed as it suited them, without a word of explanation, except for Marghanita who had her tragedy to explain to Henry before she too quit the scene. But for his father, even while he was alive, Henry felt a piercing grief. People had choice. People were responsible for what became of them. You owed it to people to believe that, at least, unless their circumstances were exceptional. Henry’s father’s circumstances were not exceptional, not until his wife’s accident they weren’t, anyway, yet Henry packed him round with enough extenuating circumstances to empty Hell. What happens to you, Henry thought, should not happen to a dog; but he could not have begun to explain what he meant by that, what exactly it was that befell his father that was so terrible. Carting Rivka Yoffey off to the Midland? Did that befall his father? A second home in St John’s Wood, as he now knows, with mermaid’s breasts to lean against whenever he retired to the quiet of the lavatory? Did that befall his father? It made no difference. None of it made a difference. His father broke his heart, whatever reason there was to be critical of him. Something to do with the way he floated just above the surface of things, folding his paper napkins and breathing his fire, as though the errand he was on had never been explained to him. Am I like him, then? Henry wondered. Was it him I was being when I couldn’t retrieve my threepence from the Yoffeys? Was that why he wouldn’t leave me alone about it – not because I was diffident like her but because I was baffled like him?

  He took him to the students’ cafeteria with a view beyond to a field of sheep, baby sheep, mummy sheep, daddy sheep. Introduced him on the way in to Grynzspan (Dr), who did a little twirl for him and shook his hand. ‘Ah, the patriarch! So you’re the cause of Henry?’ she laughed.

  Henry’s father was beguiled. ‘I hope you’re not saying that because he’s the cause of trouble.’

  She gave him her grey eyes. Drown yourself in these. ‘Henry? No. Not half the trouble you’d be, I bet.’

  Henry watched his father wish he’d brought his torches with him. She’d have adored that, Grynzspan; she’d have clapped her deadly little hands, egged him on and lit his wicks, the way ‘Hovis’ Belkin had. They loved Henry’s Dad, Henry’s enemies.

  ‘Nice woman,’ he said, after Henry had dragged him away and sat him down.

  ‘You think?’

  ‘Yeah, I think.’ She’d gone now, but he was still looking in her direction, as though seeing the twirling umbra she’d left behind her, like a candle’s. ‘You and she . . . ?’

  ‘You must be joking! We’d both rather have rats gnawing at our innards.’

  ‘She knocked you back, did she?’

  ‘For God’s sake, Dad, keep your voice down. And try to remember that pique is not the only motive that drives the universe.’

  Taugetz, Henry could see him thinking.

  ‘These are radical feminists,’ Henry went on. ‘They don’t behave, up here, the way they do at home. They don’t toddle off to the Midland with you just because you ask them.’

  Henry saw the light die from his father’s face. That again. The old refrain. Why do I do it? Henry wondered. Why can’t I leave him alone?

  His father dunked a biscuit in his tea, his hands too big for so delicate an operation. Henry had forgotten how hard his father found it to hold a cup, the handles always too small for his fingers. In order to get a cup to his lips, Izzi Nagel had either to become a feeding bird, dropping his head after checking that no one was watching, or to make a sort of mechanical grabber of his hands, downing the tea in a single gulp. Hence the dunking: that way he could at least leave the cup where it was and suck the tea out of the biscuit. Except that biscuits fell apart in Henry’s father’s fingers faster than they did in any other man’s. Faster and further afield.

  After which the toothpicking. A family joke, Izzi Nagel’s toothpicking. Or at least a Stern Girl joke. ‘I have never seen anyone make such a song and dance of being discreet,’ Henry remembered his grandmother Irina saying, luring Henry into laughter which he
feared was treacherous, one side of the family against the other, the girls against the boys. ‘Someone must have told him it’s good form to shield your mouth, but they omitted to mention that you aren’t meant to go on exacavating for the duration of the meal. What do you think he’s doing behind that hand – taking out his dentures and cleaning them one at a time?’

  The action reminded Henry more of someone undressing in a public place, a showgirl slipping noisily out of her undies behind a screen. Marilyn. Mae West. Come up and see me some time.

  His poor father. Everything such a performance. Picking his teeth, knocking up a settee, burning down the garden, visiting his son – same difference.

  Finished with his mouth, he looked around the room, taking in but not taking in his son’s world. The clatter of student trays, the pinball machines, the sheep in the fields beyond. Why had he come?

  Why did you come, Dad?

  ‘So what’s a radical feminist?’ he asked at last, not interested.

  And equally not interested, Henry told him. Though the description was unlikely to have been one any radical feminist would have recognised.

  ‘You should be at home here, then,’ his father said.

  Henry took it. Tit for tat. ‘You’d think, wouldn’t you.’

  So why have you come, Dad?

  They made small talk, driving themselves deeper and deeper into the unbearable inconsequence of family. He breaks my heart, but I can’t think of anything to say to him, Henry thought.

  Who knows what his father thought.

  Just before he left, he told Henry that he had hoped to have a conversation with him about his mother, but another time maybe.

  ‘Nothing’s wrong, is there?’

  ‘No, no, nothing.’

  ‘Her health’s OK?’

  ‘Absolutely. There’s nothing to worry about, I promise you.’

  ‘She still decorating her cakes?’

  ‘Well, you know that, you saw her last week.’

  What Henry wanted to say was that though he was bound to his mother, migraine to migraine, with filaments of steel, and would have known had anything been the matter with her, because it would immediately have been the matter with him, talking about her to his father made her seem a million miles away.