Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

You were meant to back blindly in, bang into a sherry, inveigle a book off the shelf or better still a faded cyclostyled sheet with extracts of books on it, keep your head down, and not address a soul. The silence of the grave — that was the other distinguishing feature of a Yorath and Rubella party, though I didn’t know that at the time either.

But I am ashamed to say I took to it as a whelk takes to brine. There must have been twenty Collins Classics men in Yorath’s room when I turned up, all absorbed into paper, all with their eyes occluded. Dido and Aeneas was on the turntable. But very low. ‘When I am lai-aid, lai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-d in earth …’ Woman’s grief. Isolde next. An instinct for staidness, no less than embarrassment to the bone, told me not to break into the solemnities by introducing myself. Nobody was curious anyway. Besides, we were bound each to each at a level below the mere naming of names. We were a species unto ourselves. The Unmanned.

I picked my way through the strewn cyclostyled sheets — practical criticism exercises designed to demonstrate the ways in which Oliphant Mrs had the writerly wood on Hemingway Ernest, or Behn Aphra the intellectual, emotional and every other sort of beating of Pinter Harold — and found myself a corner. Unless a hand came through the bookcases, no one could get me here.

Every now and then someone would laugh, the demented laugh of the solitary, the laughter of the hermit bookman occasioned not by happy accident but a perceived inferiority in a male writer of no merit. Not surprise, but confirmation. The laugh rippled through us like a cold breeze, invigorating our brave marginality, binding us in our contempt for those whose heads did not grow below their shoulders. Conjoining us in chill. For those we laughed at most were the hot. Not hot as in shell-bound, not hot with the celerity of one’s introversion, but hot as in rash, nimble, impetuous.

And this was my chosen world for however many years?

Still is. Open me up and you will find that my blood runs Collins Classics green.

It shouldn’t be that much of a surprise that I joined the Unmanned. The shy, too, must have their day. And ours was an Elect of the Shy. Just because our eyes were lowered and the laughter froze like hailstones in our throats, it didn’t mean that we too didn’t find it passing brave to be a king and ride in triumph through Persepolis. It’s possible we were the cruellest conquerors of them all. Certainly we were the most supercilious. The lowest in the saddle but the most high and mighty in our hearts.

But the die was not cast yet. It was still only Day One, hard as that was to believe, and before midnight struck I could yet go over to the hearties.

No, I had not given up entirely on the Quaffers’ bash. Try everything, wasn’t that my father’s motto? Try nothing spoke every bit as persuasively from my mother’s side, but I was already trying nothing, wasn’t I?

The Yorath and Rubella party broke up just after nine. How could I tell? Because that was when Yorath and Rubella arrived. Yorath in a rage, curled around and around himself like a small unexploded firework, a rip-rap, smelling of saltpetre and powdered milk and Milton and uncut pages of forgotten novels; Rubella a step or two behind, a slothful Yakipak with voluptuous charcoal eyelids and the curly carmine lips of a led-astray cherub. I expected some secret nod of Laps’ or KD acknowledgement from Rubella, unserer to unserer even though the Bug and the Guadalquivir were a continent apart. But I got nothing. And never did, not in three long years as an undergraduate and another five, ten — God knows how long I was there — as a research student. Just once, towards the end of a tutorial excruciating even by Rubella standards, he stuttered out something about my judgement being impaired by the ethic of first-past-the-post commercial individualism into which I’d been born, and our eyes met over that right enough. But it was hardly a meeting of the sympathetic. Later I learned that the two-faced trumbenik was able to indulge his lifestyle of superior last-past-the-post unpublishedness on the back of a family of wholesale haberdashers. From the North! His embroideries, his hand-woven rugs, his exquisite one-off Judith and Holofernes curtains, his Angelica Kaufmann wallpaper, his little wilting Gwen John self-portraits — all paid for by my aunties in yards of spiritless elastic!

He stood on the stairs as we squeezed past him. We careful not to touch, he careful not to be touched. ‘Cho’,’ he said to each of us in turn. It was the best approximation to Cheerio he could manage. Too shy to essay so many syllables with a single breath. And too fucking fastidious ever to be caught forming a word that had Cheer in it.

Yorath didn’t even bother with Cho’. He hopped from leg to leg with the key to his door in his hand, desperate for us to leave, his narrow body vibrating with the myriad cares of a principled marriage. Hold Yorath to your ear and you would hear the roar of his wife’s bleeding. But you wouldn’t want to hold Yorath to your ear.

While he used his college room for seminars — hence the practical criticism sheets — Iaoin Yorath conducted all his one-to-one teaching, the only sort that really mattered in Golem College, in the parlour of a cramped worker’s cottage off Parker’s Piece where he was otherwise dragging up his sprawling family. Thanks be to God for the kindly necrosis of memory. I cannot now remember the architecture of the room in which I spent so many miserable and ungenerous hours, arguing for comedy though we never found anything funny, stressing the importance of narrative though in our conversation we frowned on anything approaching an anecdote, invoking life as the final arbiter of art, life, though we leapt from the living as from the leprous. But it falls to no man to be so fortunate as to forget everything. I still see the angel of the house, Yorath Mrs Herself, aflutter at the door in her slip in the cold Cambridge morning, big with yet one more, so white she was yellow, her large wet exhausted eyes, imploring you to be gone although you’d only just arrived. And I still see that other angel, the angel of domestic desperation, pass over Her Husband when the babies began to cry — not a normal cry, a harrowing unending wail, as though a bear had crossed Parker’s Piece and got into their house and was dismembering them a joint at a time — at the very moment that he, the doctor not the bear, was coiled to explode like a rip-rap, enraged that you had gone out on a limb and found interest in something that wasn’t available as a Collins Classic.

He screamed at me once. ‘I don’t have time, I don’t have time, Walzer, to go combing the back streets of Cambridge for some lurid continental paperback romance that you’ve taken it into your head to write about.’

‘You can borrow mine,’ I suggested.

‘I don’t want to borrow yours. I don’t want to read it. Do you understand that? Nothing you’ve said makes me want to read a word of it. You’ve failed to engage me. You’ve failed to persuade me that there’s anything behind your interest except fashionable prurience. If you must read something foreign read Adolphe.’

I took a note. ‘Is that by Benjamin Constant?’

‘By? By? Who is a novel ever by ? Without Madame de Staël Adolphe would not have existed. Without her desolation — but read it, read it, Mr Walzer, and don’t bother with who it’s by.’

And then the bear got in and the babies started. All of them at once. And a bottle exploded in the kitchen. And the phone rang. And soot fell down the chimney, blackening my essay. And the gas meter ran out of shillings. And the next student rang at the door. And Mrs Yorath went into labour.