Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

Our subject was the book, not the sociology of the study of the book. Babies that we were.

I should have seen the writing on the wall when my own Ph.D. thesis — The Wound Re-Opened: A Comparative Study of Shyness and Other Social Excruciations in the Novels of Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf — was knocked back comprehensively not only by the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press but by every academic publisher in Britain and America. A methodological problem. I was too old fashioned. I was no good on words as signs. Arkansas University Press liked my prose style and wondered if I had anything more up to the minute in the pipeline. Hence my ping-pong manual. But by the time they got that out into the shops in a language which Americans could understand it too was obsolete.

Now I hang on by my fingertips. Independently funded colleges, shonky private universities, non-Italian language speaking institutions with the occasional extra-mural this and that for visiting foreigners — I take what I can get. I am yesterday’s man.

It’s amazing how long you can go on being yesterday’s man and still draw breath. It helps, of course, if you have a little something from Gershom and Dora Finkel to ease the pain. It means you can rent a very small room not quite overlooking the Grand or even one of the Not So Grand Canals, but looking over something every bit as smelly, and afford a sufficiency of pasta and cheap Venetian wine and free light. And it means you can believe you’ve attained the clear uncluttered blue.

For the Brontës as understood by a man there is now little or no call, but people do want to know what Byron and Ruskin and Henry James did when they were here, to say nothing of Casanova. And I can give them that, not exactly from the woman’s point of view, but as it impinged on women, so to speak.

It’s not impossible you’ve seen me on your summer holidays, or in the course of one of those lightning weekend breaks designed to relieve you of your air miles, holding aloft a black umbrella, leading my Asian and American charges from one culture-drenched palazzo to the next, on and off those magnificently unfillable and not at all vaporous pontoons, the vaporetti, halting on this bridge or on that to tell them of murders and seductions and other art-associated gossip. Most of it invented by me.

The Moody-Merchant of Venice.

But at least it’s not the Irwell.

And at least it’s not swag.

Correction: at least it’s not Walzer swag.

And the death thing doesn’t worry me? The coffined gondolas, the sudden closures of vista, the menacing shadows, the floods, the fires, the sinking stucco, the feeling you have that the malaria has never really gone away?

It’s someone else’s death — that always helps. I see or hear one drop almost every week. Sometimes it’s just the sound of one going into the canal you hear. Not a splash, more a thud. Like someone falling on to a sheet of Copestake’s foam. Ooch plock! But you can also get the whole melodrama, such as when I had to lead a group of my charges away from an outdoor restaurant in San Stefano recently, where a gentleman no older than me was springing blood from both nostrils, a pair of crimson jets flooding his basket of bread, his plate of coda di ròspo , stealing over the starched white tablecloth as though from underneath, as though the table itself had been wounded and meant to bleed for ever. It’s a deeper red when it’s more than just a nose bleed. And a heavier downpour. When the brain is bleeding you don’t even try to save the fish.

But of course for a moment it looked beautiful, like another proof of the ancient Venetian gift for decoration. A bold aesthetic coup — red on white, liquid on cloth, flesh on stone.

I suppose I ought not to have walked my party in the other direction. Isn’t death in Venice what they have come to see? For certainly no one does it better.

So no, except in so far as everything worries me now, the death part of Venice doesn’t worry me unduly. There’s been more of it in Manchester. Too much death in Manchester for me ever to go back willingly to the place. The city itself had the heart ripped out of it long before the IRA did its bit. Torn apart to make room for tsatske precincts for the post-industrial poor. Tickle the poor into town with tsatskes and they take over the town. Mate, multiply, bebop, stick needles into themselves, put pistols to your head. Try Manchester after midnight today and you’ll think you’ve walked into the Book of Revelation. I’d say wall it up and forget it exists if there weren’t some of my own still in there. Not many. Not as many as there used to be. The heart has been ripped out of the Walzers and the Saffrons as well. And that’s the only reason I ever return: to bury another of us.

Fay was the first. Suddenly and in her sleep. Of fright.

Routine check-up, routine recommendation that she come back in for a second opinion. Just in case what they’d found was a tumour. They named it, you see. They spoke the word. Only just in case , but the word was out and once the word’s out there’s no taking it back.

She died dreading.

The old Saffron fear of sphericality — whatever was round and incalculable.

And the old Saffron horror of our own insides.

Poor Fay. I know how she must have felt. If only we’d been born hollow. With our giblets in a removable plastic bag.

I flew back from a conference for her funeral. It was November, as it always is when we bury our northern dead. The ground cold but not yet hard. We die soggy in the North. We come apart like cardboard.

My mother was scarcely alive herself. She had wept for thirty-six hours. No sleep, no food, just tears and telephone calls.

‘I feel as if I’ll cry for ever,’ she told me. ‘Poor Fay. She was just a kid. She was barely older than my own children. She hadn’t started to live yet. I won’t ever get over it.’

Too cruel when it’s the youngest who goes first. But there was an over-and-above cruelty which no one could bear to put into words. No, she hadn’t lived, but she was just starting to. She died, as though to satisfy some spite at the very core of things, just as she was putting a life together. She was in love, skippingly in love with her nuisance caller and engaged to marry him. For years she’d rejected every suggestion of a face to face encounter, content to go on talking over the blower, afraid of what he would be like in the flesh, afraid of what she would be like in the flesh. Then finally they did it, met for tea and cucumber sandwiches at the Midland Hotel, pink carnations in their buttonholes, a palm court orchestra playing, and my father hiding behind the palms in case of trouble. There was no trouble. How could there be? They were already good friends, knew everything there was to know about each other — favourite book, favourite walk, favourite short piece of music, favourite long piece of music, favourite colour, favourite smell, favourite fear — and had learnt to understand the meaning of every hesitation and intake of breath. The telephone teaches you to listen if nothing else. And they’d been on the telephone a long time.

Had she lived, she would have changed her name to Fenwick, moved into a house with verandahs on Alderley Edge, woken to the sound of birdsong, and become a stepmother, maybe a mother in her own right. It was all just beginning for her. She wasn’t even forty yet.

We had to tear my grandfather away from the television for the funeral. Put a suit on him, empty his pockets of sweet wrappers, brush his hair and shove him into the hearse. For a brief moment all sides of our family thought as one: it should have been him we were removing from our sight.

That we were changed by Fay’s death goes without saying. But what changed us most was the depth of Duncan Fenwick’s grief. He was inconsolable. He hung on to my mother when the coffin was carried out of the house, and then joined the remaining Saffron women when the time came for them to throw themselves upon it. He called her name over and over — ‘Fay, Fay, oh Fay!’ — a bloodcurdling lament which made her unrecognizable to us, not ours at all in death, because at the last she had not been ours but someone else’s in life. We made room for him, even Fay’s sisters parted, so that the last kiss on the coffin could be his.