The Making of Henry

by Howard Jacobson

  And this is just the piss part. No sooner are they out of the high street into rural St John’s Wood Terrace – for he is sick of the shops now, Angus, and wants a residential street to defile – than they encounter what Henry at first takes to be an albino dwarf, but is in fact a miniature bull terrier with a blind face, sitting as proud as an heraldic lion on a wall, sheathing and unsheathing his penis. Henry pulls at Angus, hoping to get him to cross the road. But Angus is riveted. The bull terrier squints, unsheathing his penis, a cigar coming out of its wrapper. To Henry it is a windless early evening, still as the grave, but the albino dog can smell breeze. He tilts his head, blindly nosing the air for it, calling it to him; then when he finds it, relaxes his shoulders, spreading his limbs, allowing it to fan his cigar alight. Angus stares. There is none of that mutual embarrassment of which Thomas Mann speaks, nothing of the constraint which he believed obtains when dogs meet for the first time. Take me as you find me, the bull terrier appears to be saying. And Angus is mulling it over. Henry can hear him pondering. That’s good. So he is not entirely beyond reflection. To dogs, too, has the Almighty granted free will. With what there is of his, Angus reaches the decision to sit and unsheathe his own penis. It’s like a beauty pageant. First it was the bull terrier’s turn, now it’s Angus’s. What next – evening gowns? Already Angus is upping the stakes: not content with showing the judges his penis, he must show how well he licks it. Nothing elaborate or fanciful. Nothing you could even call sexual. More like Henry’s father cleaning his teeth. Now this side, now that, now in and around a bit, the tongue conscientious and searching, but the mind elsewhere. A hygiene thing, Henry takes it to be, putting the best gloss on it, an act of dog-to-dog consideration, given where they both know they’ve been. Whatever it is, the bull terrier looks unmoved in his impure whiteness. Finished with himself, Angus gets begrudingly to his feet, his age showing, and approaches the bull terrier’s penis with the sole intention – what else can it be? – of licking that. Rather than allow which abomination, Hebraic Henry hits the roof.

  Are you allowed to strike another man’s dog? You shouldn’t strike anything aged over seventy, but then over seventy should act over seventy. Henry has picked up the wisdom from somewhere that you punish a malfeasant dog by rubbing his nose in his malfeasance, but given that Angus’s malfeasance is the bull terrier, that wouldn’t be much of a punishment. Removal, that’s the thing. Violent removal from the scene. Grabbing him by the collar, Henry pulls him away from St John’s Terrace like a dog on wheels, down Charlbert Street whimpering, along Allitsen whipped, then back on to the High Street, like a sled. Home, that’s where Angus is headed, home for three Hail Marys, a shower and a thrashing. He knows he’s done wrong. He can’t help nosing out more piss as they go, his love of the smell of other dogs’ piss as ineradicable as Henry’s love of the smell of other men’s women, but at least, Henry allows, he has the decency to hang his head. Periodically, he slows, looks up at Henry with pain in his eyes, and shrinks into himself, as though he wishes the earth would open up and swallow him. Which to Henry is a clear sign that he is capable of remorse.

  Against Angus’s wishes, Henry slows at a hole in the wall of a bank. A couple of Americans, presumably from the American University around the corner, are discussing world politics while waiting for their money.

  ‘Rule one, always plan your exit,’ the older of the two explains.

  ‘Yeah, but exit to where?’ the other asks.

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Just be ready. That’s why I never pass one of these without making a withdrawal.’

  Good thinking, Henry thinks, fishing for his card. In these dangerous times you cannot have too much money about your person.

  Angus pulls at the lead and whimpers.

  ‘Yes, yes, just wait,’ Henry tells him. ‘I have to plan my exit.’

  Outside Bar One, the man of Mediterranean appearance is still on his mobile phone. Angus recognises him and stops. Again, he looks pleadingly at Henry. Does he want him to say something to the man? Apologise? Twit him a second time? ‘No, Angus,’ Henry says. ‘We’ve done here.’

  But Angus hasn’t. Unable to contain himself any longer, he squats on the pavement and defecates.

  It is only when he hears the man shouting, ‘Now that you will do something about, you filthy pig!’ that Henry finally realises how good a joke on him his life has been.

  NINE

  ‘I’ve looked you up,’ Moira tells him, ‘on the Internet.’

  ‘In which case,’ Henry says, ‘you don’t have enough to do with yourself.’

  ‘That’s a laugh,’ she says, putting her flattied feet up on his knees. ‘I’ve been running all day.’

  They are in his apartment, at home, as he likes to think of it, lolling. Henry has never lolled, but Moira is teaching him. ‘You want to lighten up,’ she has been telling him. ‘You’re coiled as if waiting for something to happen. Look at your shoulders. And why are you always in a jacket? What are you expecting?’

  ‘Nothing,’ had been his answer. Which was a lie. Like Mr Micawber, Henry is always expecting something. The difference being that Henry is expecting a blow, not a windfall.

  ‘Then relax,’ she’d said, helping him out of his jacket, undoing his tie, and putting her feet up on him.

  So he’s trying. But he’d rather not be reminded that there is an index of achievement called an Internet out there which contains not a mention of him.

  ‘Oh but it does,’ she informs him. ‘“Western wind, when will thou blow?”’

  ‘That’s not by me.’

  ‘I didn’t say it was by you. It’s a favourite poem of yours, though. I know that much.’

  ‘It says that on the Internet? You look up my name and it tells you my favourite poetry? Just like that?’

  ‘No, not just like that. I looked up your name and that took me to the site of the University of the Pennine Way, and that gives the name of academic staff and their specialities.’

  ‘I’m not a member of their academic staff any more.’

  ‘It’ll be out of date. Everything on the Internet is out of date. I’m down as offering courses every Monday and Thursday. I haven’t done a Thursday for three years. But why haven’t you read me “Western wind, when will thou blow” if it’s your favourite poem?’

  ‘It isn’t. It’s just the shortest.’

  ‘Recite it to me, then.’

  ‘You’ve already recited it.’

  ‘Is that all there is?’

  ‘No. There’s a bit more.’

  ‘So . . . ’

  So, not to be a niggard, Henry recites it.

  Western wind, when will thou blow,

  The small rain down can rain?

  Crist, if my love were in my arms,

  And I in my bed again!

  ‘That’s beautiful.’

  ‘Yes. And short. Poems should be short.’

  ‘It’s more nautical than I’d have expected of you. He is a sailor, isn’t he?’

  ‘Or a soldier. A traveller, at least. To be honest with you I’ve never worried about that aspect of it – I just always associated the wind and the rain with the Pennines. “Western wind, when will thou stop,” was how I read it.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that change the meaning?’

  ‘Not at all. It was still about being somewhere you didn’t want to be. And wishing you were home.’

  ‘So where was home? Where was the bed you wanted to be back in?’

  Henry looks up at dimmed lights of the chandelier. ‘Ah,’ he says, ‘you have me there.’

  ‘And who was “the love”?’

  ‘And there,’ he says, ‘you have me again.’

  She wriggles her feet on him. ‘Come on, tell me. Who were you missing when you made it your favourite poem?’

  ‘If you really want to know, I was missing men.’

  ‘“Crist, if my love were in my arms” – a man!’

  ‘No. I was missing men to whom I could talk about how much I
was missing women.’

  ‘Why couldn’t you just tell the women?’

  ‘They were the wrong sort of women. Maybe all women are the wrong sort. You need men to discuss longing with. That was why I put it in on my Literature’s For Life course. A subsidiary module on longing – Angst and the Man. Hoping it would attract the boys. But it didn’t. It just attracted more of the girls, on whom, of course, it was wasted.’

  She throws him one of her twisted looks. ‘My sex does not understand longing?’

  ‘Well, it didn’t understand this version of it. They kept wanting to talk about it from the woman’s point of view. How she felt.’

  ‘And you weren’t interested in that?’

  Henry is very tired suddenly. Some battles he no longer has the stomach for. He has just made a joke. Or maybe it was life that made the joke. It doesn’t matter. But in relation to four brief lines of unbearably exquisite male yearning, the idea of a woman’s point of view is lunatic. How she felt. Laugh, Moira!

  He shouldn’t have been inveigled into reciting it to her. It is a deceptively treacherous piece of verse. Read it with your arms around a woman you love, and you cannot avoid remembering wrapping your arms around another woman you loved. It is a corridor of mirrors, infinitely receding, each enactment of the thing you longed for issuing in remembrance, and each remembrance leaving you longing for the longing before.

  Or it could be that it isn’t the poem which is deceptively treacherous, only Henry.

  Laugh, Moira!

  Henry, full of grief for what was and what was not, remembers Marghanita. Crist, if my love were in my arms. She never was, though, and that’s the truth of it. Never was and never should have been. But does that make the subjunctive memory the less or the more painful? Crist, if only she had been!

  And now it’s clear to him why he is thinking of Marghanita. Laugh, Moira. Laugh, as Marghanita had laughed, at the very idea, with the Western wind not blowing and the small rain down not raining, of seeing it from the woman’s point of view. She had visited him at the institute, as it must still have been called then. Henry is not master of the chronology, but he is fairly sure she had stopped calling on him by the time it was a polytechnic, and was dead before it became a university. So does Henry measure out his sorrows. Not her first visit, the one he is thinking of, nor her last, but vivid to him perhaps because of the poem. She had sat in on one of his classes. She liked doing that. His students would not have known what to make of this elegant elderly lady with the tragic expression, whom Henry passed off on them as an inspector, as though any inspector would have turned up in the Pennines, however freezing, with a fox around her throat.

  She sat at the back, smiling her elegiac White Russian smile, her head not as high as it had been, just a touch shaky now, but that perhaps only visible to Henry who scrutinised mercilessly those he loved. Better not to be loved by Henry, that’s the lesson. And many had learned it. But Marghanita was family, flesh and blood, so there was no question of not being loved by him, or of not loving him in return – Henry, the marvellous boy, in whom so many of her ambitions, and the ambitions of her waning sisters, were realised.

  Explain that. Henry will go to his grave not understanding. There she was, a woman with the music of the capitals of Europe in her soul, wise with the wisdom of the Volga, yet blind to the overwhelming provinciality of Henry’s professional life, a barely tenured teacher in a barely illuminated institution in a barely breathing Pennine valley. Wonderful, what he was doing, she thought. Wonderful for himself: a privilege to have your soul filled with literature all the long day. And wonderful for others: those who came to listen to her great-nephew, and learn. There is a variety of views on everything, one man’s meat etc.; but can there be divergence of opinion in the matter of what is life and what is death? Henry was the corpse. Ask him. He was the one lacking in any of the usual presumptions of animation. Yet to Marghanita he was not merely living, he was a creative force, the reason that life is in others. If it turns out that she’d been right all along, that he’d led a privileged, energising life, what does that say about Henry? Wouldn’t that make him doubly a dead man?

  ‘“Crist, if my love were in my arms . . .”’ Henry read to his class. With feeling. His arms out, cradling air.

  Which was when they raised the question – What about the woman?

  There is no woman, Henry told them. Marghanita sad, smiling from the back.

  There is no woman in this poem. The poignancy of her resides precisely in her absence.

  Dangerous word, absence. Henry’s students had written essays about the absent woman in world history. What is absence, Mr Nagel, they asked him, if not presence in its most eloquently telling form – the woman objectified in her removal, possessed and reified in abstracto, assumed without question to be the man’s property, the object of his desires, to be enfolded in his arms, in his bed? Passively waiting for him while he gallivants about the globe, no doubt colonising it.

  What if the woman didn’t want the man, had Henry thought about that?

  He had, and could recommend any number of works on the subject. Just not this.

  What if the small rain down did rain and he came home to find her with another man, or better still another woman, he, she, they, in her arms, not she in his, hers, theirs. What then? What then, Mr Western Wind?

  Then we’d be reading a different poem, Henry explained.

  Then let’s, they told him.

  So he read them Berryman –

  There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart

  só heavy, if he had a hundred years

  & more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time,

  Henry could not make good.

  But they weren’t satisfied that the woman’s point of view was adequately attended to in that either.

  You are the collective thing that sat down once on my heart, Henry wanted to tell them. You are the thing I will never, not if I have a hundred years and more of weeping, make good.

  Not true, of course. The thing that sat on Henry’s heart predated student feminism.

  ‘Where do they get this stuff from?’ she laughed afterwards, Henry’s great-aunt Marghanita, still lovely enough at God knows what age to melt Henry’s só heavy bones. Laughing.

  Laugh, Moira! Laugh like Marghanita!

  Lying with Marghanita in his arms, however, had such a thing been – been allowable, or, being allowable, happened – he would have fretted (because fretting was what he did) that her laughter was maybe the tiniest bit too loyal. Too much in agreement. Not sufficiently dialectic or dialogic, if those are the words he’s after. For he is fastidious, Henry, in the matter of loyalty, and believes there can be too much as well as too little. Precise in the matter, also, noting that while too little can frustrate a man and, who knows, build up a tumour in his brain, too much directly invades his nervous system, and makes him feel that spiders are crawling across his flesh. All this is supposition. He never did lie with Marghanita in his bed. The one person who did, for whom she had held herself in chaste reserve, waiting and waiting for the Western wind to blow him to her – Crist, that she were in his arms – allowed himself, if only temporarily, to forget her, for which offence Marghanita refused, if only permanently, to forgive him. It was the story of her life. The Deceiving of Marghanita. An evergreen melodrama which described herself to herself, not one single line of which suffered diminution of black sardonic pain in all the years of its playing. It went everywhere with her, like her handbag, or like a writer’s first manuscript, The Deceiving of Marghanita. Sometimes Henry saw her lips moving to the famous soliloquies, saw her lovely cheekbones moisten, and on occasions – who knows, perhaps anniversaries – tears spring like geysers from her eyes. So she, if anyone, might have embraced the woman’s point of view. Hang on, Henry, let’s just think about this. You’re right, of course you’re right, and funny, of course you’re funny, and they are preposterous, of course they are preposterous, but the woman waiting, He
nry, the woman waiting . . . After which correction to his prejudices, dealt fairly and understandingly with, but not indulged, it has to be assumed that Henry would have been content to lie with his arms about her – all else being equal – and not ache with melancholy for those other ones in the corridor of mirrors, those of the past, and those who were yet to come, those who overlaughed and those who under-laughed and those who didn’t laugh at all. For that must follow, Henry, must it not? That you were only ever waiting for everything you liked, the right amount of this and the right amount of that, to come together? Your bed, then, and only then, the perfect paradise.

  Crist!

  Henry sat with Marghanita as she lay wet cheekboned on her own bed of perfect peace, and discovered he was weeping for his mother. How hard it is to be discrete. How hard, in the end, to be certain you can tell one person from another. Death the great leveller, but what about life? In Henry’s experience, life too eventually rolls out all undulations. Unnecessary for King Lear to have called upon the all-shaking thunder to smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world. It was always going to happen anyway.