Whatever it is, I Don't Like it

by Howard Jacobson

  Holiday reading, beach reading, summer reading – what next? Winter equinox reading, midweek reading, Sunday reading, middle-aged reading, deathbed reading? Books to read when you’re wearing a frock as opposed to books to read when you’re wearing jeans. Books that go with your trainers. Books to read on clifftops, books to read while you’re snowboarding, books to read while you’re fighting in Afghanistan.

  According to his wife, the critic F. R. Leavis took Othello and that other great work of sexual jealousy, The Kreutzer Sonata, away on their honeymoon. We laughed, we students of Leavis, when we heard that. But we laughed with a sneaking regard. It was an example to us all. Stay serious. Serious is more fun than not serious. And if you want a holiday from serious, try being more serious still. The dichotomy between great works of literature and the books we ‘secretly’ enjoy is a false one. Trashy novels are less enjoyable to read than good ones. The greater the book the more pleasure it gives. Holidays are hideous enough already: why make them even worse with dross?

  Pity the Poor Porkers and Damn the Swine that Gave them Fever

  Nothing illustrates the sadness of mute creation more poignantly than the life and tragic death of sow number 847Y, on whom the recent outbreak of swine fever has been blamed. Even before the story unfolds, it is bleak. We know that pigs are intelligent. There are allusions in Shakespeare to a pig at whom the Elizabethans marvelled on account of its numeracy, easy social graces and low opinion of the plays of Christopher Marlowe. Is it not a cruelty, then, that a sentient being with more skills and better taste than most graduates from our universities should be deprived of the dignity of a name and sent to meet its maker known only as 847Y?

  Then there is the village where 847Y was raised and perished. Quidenham, in Norfolk. I am not aware that I have ever been to Quidenham, so what I am about to say is not personal. Like everybody else, I love place names that have a Q in them. The Quantocks, in Somerset. Qingcheng, in China. Quetzaltenango, in Guatemala. Qs are cute. And exotic. Exotique! But is there not something Latinately and legalistically indeterminate about Quidenham? It sounds as though it means ‘that which a thing just happens to be’. It seems to imply blind chance, mere nameless accidentality, moral no less than geographic arbitrariness. In the village of That Which a Thing Just Happens to Be lived a pig called 847Y . . . Heartbreaking.

  But it gets worse. 847Y was a free-range pig. That should have been an advantage. No doubt, to 756K and 934Z, confined to the stinking battery sty down the road, in the village of That’s Just the Way It Is, 847Y was living in pig heaven.

  But beside the farm on which she roamed ran a little footpath. And you know what footpaths bring. Behold, then, striding our way, a sticked and knitted-hatted quidnunc in walking boots and thick red socks, a rambling map, sealed against the elements, around his neck, and a sufficiency of lunch kept fresh inside a ball of silver foil kept fresher still inside a plastic box kept fresher yet inside a backpack. Hey ho, let’s stop and eat.

  It may be lunchtime, or it may be the power of suggestion, for the lunch that the quidnunc carries wrapped like a Russian doll upon his back is a ham sandwich and a pork pie, and your thoughts are bound to turn to ham and pork when you espy 847Y grunting on the other side of the hedgerow. Pig, pig, snap!

  I said this tale was sad, and there is more sadness yet to come. What would make a man feed a ham sandwich or a pork pie to a pig? What brutality, what horrible perversity of humour, what distortion of kindness (to take the charitable view) would lead you a) to think of such a thing and b) to go ahead and do it? Here, piggy, piggy, come and eat your own.

  The prohibition against cannibalism acknowledges a principle of kinship that extends beyond humankind. You don’t eat family. You don’t encourage family to feed on family. You don’t throw one cat to another. Soon we will breed cats who don’t feel pain. At which point the earth will open and swallow us down. In the meantime, we try to act as though we understand the difference between good and evil. Which means we know better than to offer pork pies to a pig.

  Yes, 847Y should have refused. It’s no excuse that she didn’t have the Book of Leviticus to help her to make the right decision. Uncleanness is uncleanness. You sense when you are transgressing dietary laws, because they are the laws of your nature. Besides, the smell tells you. Nonetheless, it remains true that, in the case of livestock, we are our brothers’ keepers. The whole point of our stewardship being that we set a good example. And in this instance we did not.

  One month later 847Y and all her piglets were dead. Some life! The cause – pork or ham imported from a country less nice about swine fever than we are. The rest is history; 60,000 pigs so far slaughtered, and plenty more to go.

  That somebody knows the person who started all this goes without saying. The usual telltale signs. Depression. Nightmares. A compulsion to burn hiking gear. Plastic lunch boxes going missing. And a sudden and uncharacteristic aversion to pork pies. If that description fits your husband, hand him over. You owe that to the farmers and the pigs. Look on the bright side – since he wears thick red socks and carries his lunch in rucksacks, you’ll have been wanting to get rid of him for a long time anyway.

  But I’m more interested in the fate of sow number 847Y – the Typhoid Mary of the swine world – than that of just one more human clown. It’s strange to me, and I cannot pretend I understand all it means, but I am noticing a growing fellow feeling with animals (if that’s not a contradiction in terms), the more I age. I used to think it pathological of Gulliver to prefer the company of horses to humans on his return from the Houyhnhnms. Now, hunting for meaning and desperate to escape vanity, I’m not so sure. I haven’t yet reached the stage of forbidding my wife and children to touch my bread or share my cup, but my pigs understand me tolerably well, I converse with them four hours every day, and they live in great amity with me and friendship to each other.

  Death of Dudley

  Alas, poor Dudley. If his death pricks our tears more keenly than did Peter Cook’s that is only because he was the cuddly one, and his dying was the more cruelly protracted. Now it is as though Peter Cook has died again. A double sorrow. Or maybe it amounts to more sorrows than that even. For I think we watched Peter Cook die several times in the course of his separation from Dudley Moore. And we certainly watched Dudley as good as give up the ghost when he succumbed to Hollywood, playing the jackass for Americans who can only take their Englishmen that way.

  We don’t as a rule do obsequies for the famous in this column. We are uncomfortable showing too much feeling for those we never knew personally. Maybe that’s wrong of us. Maybe it is a sign of our humanity that we can accept celebrities – those walking shadows – into our hearts and miss them as our own. I remember watching a lady schoolteacher break down in front of the class when the news came through that George VI had died. I couldn’t understand it. What’s she to Hecuba? I wondered. Or words to that effect. When I went home I asked my mother if she thought Miss Venvell could have been related to the royal family. My mother explained that King George VI had been an important symbol to us throughout the war. And besides, she added, he was a lovely man.

  How did my mother know that? I asked myself. For I was a sceptic early. I also doubted whether anyone with a public image could be lovely. I still have a streak of that puritanism in me. Succeed and you must have sold your soul to the devil, I think, fame being a harlot, money being the root of all evil, and a moving image being a contradiction of God’s wishes and intentions.

  Dudley, though, was an exception to all this. He was intelligent, for a start, in the Oxbridge way, and I make allowances for Oxbridge intelligence. One of the reasons I failed to get on with the alternative comedians of the eighties was that they came from red-brick universities. I don’t doubt you can be funny if you have a degree from Manchester or Leeds, but you can’t be philosophically funny, you can’t make the heart itself laugh. You can do knockabout and you can do polemic but you can’t do heart. Don’t ask me why that is. Somethin
g in the water. Something sad about these university towns. Some excruciating anticlimax from which you never recover. Whatever the cause, Dudley Moore touched the heart effortlessly before he went to America – which is sad in another way – both as a musician and a comedian. Though no sooner do I say comedian than I feel I must retract the word. What he was best at was not raising mirth but being the cause that mirth was in others.

  I know what it is that has long upset me about the break-up of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, and I will resist saying that they are together again, now, in comedic Elysium, at last. Like all the best double acts, theirs was a love affair. Did you see that film footage of Jerry Lewis breaking down in a limousine, remembering his days with Dean Martin? Did you see Ernie Wise on television after the death of Eric Morecambe? Widows, both of them. Their grief unbearable to behold. But Peter Cook and Dudley Moore seemed to be entwined even tighter still. And that was because Dudley Moore appreciated Peter Cook’s genius to the depth of his soul, got him as no one would ever get him again. And the sign of that appreciation was his laughter, his failure, no matter how hard he struggled, to keep his face straight, his divine incapacity, once his partner was in full flight, to hold himself together.

  There, I think, you have the story of Peter Cook’s life. He had the fortune (maybe the misfortune) to meet someone who broke up more spectacularly, more profoundly – I will even risk saying more erotically, for there is undeniably a sexual component to such disarrangement – than any other person on the planet. Thereafter, what else was there to live for but to go on cracking Dudley up, splitting him asunder, dissolving him, tearing his very heart out with laughter. You can hear it on that sublimely filthy record, Derek and Clive (Live) – Peter Cook scaling wilder and wilder heights of scatological absurdity and invention, in order to test what condition of hysteria he could reduce Dudley to next. Sex? Yes, but even better than sex.

  And there was the tragedy of it – because finally Dudley left. Finally, no doubt, Dudley had to leave. Put yourself in his place. He wasn’t the stooge. His role was always more active than that. But he was the convulsed sea to Peter Cook’s controlling moon. There comes a time when you want to exert your own magnetic force.

  For a while – and Peter Cook malevolently encouraged this view himself – it looked as though envy was the engine house of their estrangement. The contrast in their fortunes was too great: Dudley getting off with beautiful women twice his height in Hollywood, and Peter Cook getting pissed at Private Eye lunches in Soho, no disrespect meant to the latter. But I know in my bones it wasn’t primarily envy, though envy will insist its way into everything. It was heartbreak. You can’t enjoy such complete and cultivated admiration, then have it stolen from you. Not in the matter of your jokes, you can’t. Alas, poor Peter.

  Cherie Baby and the Bombers

  As a bald statement of consequences, free of all history and context, it is so unexceptionable and self-proving as to be without meaning. ‘As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up, you are never going to make progress.’ Step forward whoever believes that as long as young people have got no hope but to blow themselves up, we are making excellent progress.

  Myself, I’d go further than Cherie Blair. Why stop at young people? Surely as long as any people – the middle-aged, the elderly, the geriatric – have got no hope but to blow themselves up, we are not making progress. Unless you would argue that in the case of the geriatric we are making progress, since their blowing themselves up in large numbers would be some sort of solution to the problem of an ageing population. That is as long as they are only blowing themselves up, and not indiscriminately blowing up other people along with them. It begs a question, you see, this phrase ‘blowing themselves up’. Indeed, it doesn’t only beg a question, it buries it.

  Try the sentence again, then, paying more attention to the specifics. ‘As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow up as many other people as they can, you are never going to make progress.’ Put like that, progress becomes a rather pale word for what we are not making.

  Now share the emotional adjective ‘young’ between the people who are doing the blowing and those who are being blown. If it is tragic for one young person to be without hope, surely it is still more tragic for another young person to be without life, especially as the decision to be without life is not one he has reached in the extremity of his own hopelessness, but is thrust upon him.

  The English language is subtle enough to make all the necessary distinctions. A suicide kills himself. A murderer kills other people. A murderer who chooses to kill himself in the process is no less a murderer. Even-handedness of sympathy is not the issue here. We do not need to be told later, by way of redress, that Cherie Blair is a staunch supporter of the State of Israel. You fix the problem in the text itself – the text being an indicator of the mind, and the mind an indicator of the sympathies – by not omitting to mention that it was first and foremost murder to which the latest Palestinian depressive was driven.

  Terrible to be so driven, terrible indeed, but let us properly name the deed he was driven to.

  Which brings us to the assumption – almost an idée fixe now, in some quarters – that between hopelessness and murder there is no moral or behavioural transition worth talking about. ‘As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up’ etc., etc. No hope but to – how trippingly off the tongue that comes. How trippingly off the tongue it has been coming since September 11, when the world woke to many surprises, not the least of them being a whole new system of measuring longevity of suffering and patience. People were fed up. People had had enough. What do you expect? Of course they flew planes into the World Trade Center, what else were they meant to do? Not nice, of course not nice, but . . . The new ‘but’, hacking away at our every compunction. No hope but to.

  What collusion in grievance, and what an elision of responsibility and culpability the idea of ‘no hope but to’ masks! Once upon a time we thought it unacceptable to deduce from our hopelessness the right to kill ourselves. (Had not God fixed his canon ’gainst self-slaughter?) Now it makes perfect sense to be hopeless and go kill someone else. How did we manage before? People have been hopeless for centuries without stuffing their pockets with explosives. Pushed from pillar to post, crushed, enslaved, demeaned. For how many millions of people over how many thousands of years has hopelessness been the fixed, unquestionable condition of life? There are even those, though I am not one, who would argue that it has been good for us to know such oppression, that religion and philosophy have grown out of it, that we are the better for our sorrows. Give mankind everything to hope for and it hopes to be on Big Brother. Well, Big Brother is a risk worth running, I say. Let everyone have hope, however they choose to squander it. But it is fanaticism of sympathy to grant the power of life and death to those who are dissatisfied, as though unhappiness were a sort of absolution that wiped out every other human obligation.

  As for just how lacking in hope, in this instance, the actual bomber was, we have his own words to go on. Tricky, I know, to determine truth from bravado here. Of the mysteries of despair and elation, none of us can speak with certainty. A man who is down one day may well be up the next, especially if he has slaughter on his mind. But Mohammed al-Ghoul’s murder note does not evince any of that lassitude of vocabulary or defeatedness of cadence we normally associate with having nothing much to hope for. ‘How beautiful it is to make my bomb shrapnel kill the enemy,’ he writes. ‘How beautiful it is to kill and be killed . . .’

  The politics of active hate, not inexpectancy, speak here. And not to know the difference is to be a fool.

  The best one can say for Cherie Blair is that her folly, maybe like the bomber’s, is not to have thought for herself. She opens her mouth and out pops one of the unthinking commonplaces of her time and milieu. To wit: it must follow, where people are unhappy, that they resort to murder. That there will be countries where this is
taken to be an endorsement of murder, I do not doubt. Because semantically – ‘no hope but’ – that’s exactly what it is.

  Human Values

  I note that The Truth About Vince has just won a special prize at the Rose d’Or television festival in Montreux for displaying the strongest ‘human values’. Interesting that you have to invent a category for that. If ‘human values’ mean anything, wouldn’t you expect every programme ever made, with the exception, say, of Skippy and Rolf Harris’s Animal Hospital, to display them? What other values do we have?

  You can half see what the golden-rose cultivators of Montreux are getting at. With wall-to-wall tits on the box and the reinvention of the freak show by Jerry Springer et al. – turning emotional impoverishment into a spectator sport – it’s no surprise that your average grossed-out viewer hankers every now and then for something with a touch more moral elevation and uplift. But is ‘human values’ really the right phrase for what we’re groping for here? Doesn’t Getting ’Em Off In Ibiza also display ‘human values’? How much more human can we be, when all is said and done, than pissed and butt naked under a Spanish street sign at five o’clock in the morning after a night trying to make babies?