Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

No one said, ‘Some child, Henry, your old man!’

What Henry would like to know from his father, who has had a long time to think about it, is whether he believes he was cheated of a grown-up existence, denied the chance to find out what not being a child was like. .

You mean like you, Henry? A little old man from the moment you were born.

. . or whether, if his father will allow him to finish, he believes he had the best of it, never growing up to know bitterness and defeat.

Because I was too busy, Henry, keeping consciousness of bitterness and defeat from you .

You can see why Henry doesn’t want to go home some days, however much he doesn’t want to be out. But you can’t take over someone else’s past and hope to escape a colloquium with ghosts.

So why isn’t Henry speaking to his lamented mother? He is, but she understands him too well. When Henry speaks, the sockets of her dry eyes fill with sadness. It’s the seduction it always was. If he allows her, she will pull him down with her into the blackness, where she can shield him from all harm. Keep the clanging world away from him. And have him in an early grave.

Was that what they fought over, Ekaterina and Izzi Nagel, was that really the trouble between them — the saving of Henry? Was she rehearsing her version of the truth when the coach crashed? Your son. . And then bang!

Was he answering her, the fire-eater, when his heart gave out? My son? My son, you call him! And then oy gevalt !

To save Henry from the world, Ekaterina Nagel came as close as was within her power — short of jumping him from the summit of the pyramid of Cheops — to stop him being born at all. He should have been the Baby Jesus. As far as the nursing home was concerned he already was the Baby Jesus, that honour going to the first child to show its nose on Christmas Day, and little Henry being more than halfway there. Seeing as Henry’s nearest rivals were of Singaporean academic and Nigerian diplomatic parentage respectively, and in the Nigerian case were thought highly likely to come out twins, there was undoubtedly some faute de mieux favouritism in this. Whatever else there was to say on the subject, at least in Henry the Baby Jesus would be single, white and with a fifty-fifty chance of being male.

So why did Ekaterina hold back? Bombs and spiders. Given the situation vis-à-vis the aerial war with Germany, Irina Stern had insisted that South Manchester was the only place for her daughter’s confinement and to that end had found a nursing home not very many miles from Alderley Edge. Izzi was a young soldier stationed outside Basingstoke, waiting to be sent overseas to entertain other young soldiers with his sleights of hand, and he had no views on the matter other than that he wanted his wife to be safe and his son — though he had a feeling it went against the grain faithwise — to be the Baby Jesus. What no one had counted on was the inaccuracy, not to say the irreligious-ness, of German pilots, dropping bombs in the vicinity of Alderley Edge on Christmas Eve while aiming for Ellesmere Port. As soon as Ekaterina heard the explosions she reversed her labour, ignoring all exhortations to push for Christ’s sake. In the early hours of Christmas Day, with the prize still there for the taking and the sky clear, Ekaterina did begin to push, but went into reverse again on account of a spider with long sticky legs crawling across her belly. Talking about it later, with a shudder, Ekaterina multiplied the spiders which had taken advantage of her helplessness, increasing not only their number but their size. She wasn’t superstitious and didn’t hold with omens, she simply refused to bring a child of hers into a world which had such horrors in it. By mid-afternoon her fears had been almost stilled: this was rural England, the countryside, and in the country even the cleanest nursing home could not be one hundred per cent insectproof. As for the offending insect itself, it was just a daddy-long-legs left over from the summer, looking for somewhere warm to hide. ‘On my stomach!’ Ekaterina cried. ‘Shush,’ they told her. ‘Across my baby’s brain!’ ‘Shush,’ they told her. ‘Shush and push.’ And thus, at four o’clock on a dark December afternoon, the Saviour’s birthday, Henry Nagel was delivered, with a brief scream and a cough of blood, into an existence marred by bombs and spiders. But by that time he was too late to make it as the Baby Jesus. The honour of being the Redeemer for the day had fallen to Taiwo and Kehinde Mabogunje, sleeping soundly in a crib decorated with crêpe paper, silver cut-out moons and shepherds.

A family joke for years afterwards, beloved of his father. ‘How do you like that? A Yiddeler, two Schwartzes and a Chink. Some choice, eh?’

They brought it out the way you bring out old photographs. Henry remembers the tears of laughter, and maybe of sadness too — regret, horror, who can say? — streaming down his mother’s cheeks. Now the family would go to prison just for smiling inwardly at the comedy of colour.

Henry’s view is that there was more racial harmony when no one was trying to promote it. But then who of any importance cares what Henry’s views are, Henry no longer being in any position to influence events, even in the Pennines.

Take that ‘no longer’ with a pinch of salt, Henry feeling sorry for his present self — the truth is Henry never was in any position to influence events.

Ask what did for Henry professionally and you have to go a long way back. All the way to his not being the Baby Jesus, probably. Takes away from a boy’s outgoingness, that sort of thing. Accustoms him, as a matter of aesthetical necessity no less than manners, to holding back.

There are those who would say it was reclusiveness that did for Henry from the off: social reclusiveness in the sense of not wishing to appear too forward, or simply not wishing to appear at all, and political reclusiveness — a sort of intellectual absenteeism — in the sense of not liking the ideas which were being exchanged around him, and therefore not attending to them. A man out of sympathy with his age, eh, Henry? Like Lucretius in Matthew Arnold’s understanding of him, who, ‘overstrained, gloom-weighted, morbid’, turned from the varied and abundant spectacle of Roman life, and ‘with stern effort, with gloomy despair’, riveted his eyes on the ‘naked framework of the world’, looking for essences where other men sought appearances, and as a consequence retreating further and further into ‘disenchantment and annihilation’. Might sound tosh as applied to Henry, turning from the varied and abundant spectacle of life on the Pennine Way, and toshier still considering that the essences in which Henry sought consolation were the wives and girlfriends of other men, but we can only report on life as it feels to us, and that was how life felt to Henry. The world was a blank to him; he approved and noticed nothing unless he was in love with a woman. Then he approved and noticed nothing but her. It meant you got a good deal if you were the woman. It meant you got a lot of Henry. But of course that was only a good deal if a lot of Henry was what you wanted. And if by a lot you understood intensity rather than duration.

Not so much a little touch of Harry in the night: more a healthy dollop of Henry over the fortnight.

A refined and disenchanted reclusiveness, a principled absenteeism, what you might call a dandified old-fashionedness — modern but not adequate to modernity, was Arnold’s summation of Lucretius — and a subtly-fibred sympathy, breathed in from his mother, for women to whom life had been cruel: those were the qualities, anyway, for which Henry, not least as a teacher and exemplar to the young, wanted to be admired. In fact, his fellow teachers thought he was hoity-toity, ludicrous and ill-educated; up himself and as often as not up someone he had no business being up. If you wanted the authoritative account (without the Lucretius) of Henry’s academic fall from nowhere to somewhere even lower, then that was it: a pathetic figure without provenance or curiosity, who hoity-toitied and hanky-pankeyed himself out of professional contention, hoity-toitied and hanky-pankeyed himself out of promotion, and finally hoity-toitied and hanky-pankeyed himself out of a job.