Howard Jacobson: The Making of Henry

Their right to think vulgarly if they so choose, but Henry sees what happened differently. Henry believes he isn’t teaching young persons how to think aloofly any more because young persons have finally cottoned on to the fact that he doesn’t like them. As far as Henry is concerned a conspiracy of the childish runs the world — a magic number of the world’s most influential children (‘We are the Bilderbergies, happy girls and boys’) meeting every Christmas and Easter in a secret candyfloss garden on an invisible lemon meringue island somewhere off the sugary coast of Never-Never Land. Irk them and you’ve had it. Henry engaged their baby wrath by writing one of their number a letter of recommendation without crayoning in a little house bathed in eternal sunshine. Henry forgot the golden rule and made it rain. Or maybe he didn’t forget, maybe he just wanted rain. He was getting pretty depressed, anyway, Henry, the oldest person teaching in an institution which was the mirror image of his soul — remote, unacknowledged, irrelevant, forgotten. A university they called it — the University of the Pennine Way — but before that it had been a polytechnic, and before that a college of technology, and before that a place for keeping hairdressers on day release off the streets, and before that a Spinners’ Institute, and before that Henry had no idea. A playschool for Bilderbergies? Change the name and you change how people feel about themselves, that’s the thinking. So by writing a poor student a poor reference, Henry effectively unravelled a century or more of cosmetic nomenclature, thereby adversely affecting not only the student’s self-esteem but everybody else’s not excluding his own. Especially his own. The place was Henry’s life. He had been teaching there before the vice-chancellor was born.

Put Henry into a trance and regress him and you’ll find that he’d been teaching at the Spinners’ Institute even before he was born himself.

Stuck-up, Henry?

Hardly.

Just stuck. Stuck in the Pennine mud.

And stuck in his mother. Stuck fast within her resistant womb, stuck fast between her milky breasts, stuck fast in her disapproving mind.

Open the door and let me out, Ma!

Except that Henry has always rather liked it in there.

‘Now we’re going to make you a professor,’ Henry’s mother tells him, sitting him on her knee and getting him to read the words she points to with her lovely slender-knuckled fingers. ‘First the title. .’

Little Henry, aged three and a half, over the moon, puts his arm around his mother’s neck and bites his tongue. ‘The. Awkward. Age.’

‘Bravo! Now Chapter One. “Save when it happened to rain Vanderbank always walked home, but he usually took a hansom. .” What’s a hansom, Henry?’

‘A two-wheeled cabriolet, Mummy.’

‘ Bravissimo ! Now you continue.’

‘“But he usually took a hansom when the rain was moderate and adopted the preference of the philosopher when it was heavy.”’

‘Excellent, Henry. So what do you suppose that philosophic preference would be?’

‘Staying in?’

‘Good boy. Now let’s hurry up and finish this and then we can start on The Ivory Tower . .’

. . Well, every man who is unhappy idealises his childhood. Henry can’t put a name to what he first read with his mother but he is sure it had nothing to do with those ghosts and wizards reputed to be dear to the imaginations of children. Enough that Ekaterina was married to a wizard, and that they would all be ghosts soon enough.

The literature of excruciation, that was Ekaterina Nagel’s gift to Henry. The poetry of alarms and perturbations. Strange, because on her own account Ekaterina was not a timid woman. She had grown up without too many men around, her mother and her mother’s sisters sardonically shedding or mislaying them in an early trial run of the century’s later phallophobia — nothing neurasthenic about it in their case, simply a contempt borne out by experience, what happened when you met a man from North Manchester, and you always did meet a man from North Manchester. Being a girl in these liberated circumstances, where there was money enough to help you hold your head high, men or no men, was exhilarating for Ekaterina. Tall and straight with green eyes and good diction — ‘gr-ah! — ssss’ and ‘rather’ — Ekaterina Stern was expected to pursue the logic of her mother’s and her mother’s sisters’ independent braininess, put into practice all their ambitions, and be the first of them to go to university. Professor Ekaterina Stern! It had such a ring that her mother didn’t understand why they couldn’t skip the qualifications part and just give her the job. Then Ekaterina met a communist, lost her head, maybe lost even more than that, and was sent to cool down with family in the old country just as the old country was facing facts — yes, the Nazis did mean what they said they meant: who’d have thought it? — and packing to go somewhere else. She lasted three weeks, just three weeks fewer than the old country, but long enough for the communist at home to have disappeared. Not that that mattered: on the boat back she had struck up a conversation with a dashing young man, also hot-footing it from a badly timed visit to doomed relatives, who told her his ambition was to be a fire-eater, which she, on account of his coarse North Manchester accent, had misheard as firefighter. By the time she realised her mistake they were already in love. ‘Another one!’ Irina Stern groaned, shaking her head. But destiny is destiny. Falling for men from North Manchester was what the Stern Girls did, no matter where you sent them.

War stopped Ekaterina finding out at once what being married to a fire-eater would be like. Izzi was soon away, another in the long line of absent men, leaving it to little Henry to hold the fort. By the time he was three, happy Henry was the longest-serving male family member any of the Stern Girls had ever known. Small wonder that they loved him as they did.

As for Ekaterina, the conviction which had assailed her during labour, that she was doing a wicked thing ushering a vulnerable life into a disgusting and terrifying universe, remained with her long afterwards, affecting the literature she encouraged Henry to read. At another time she could have taken the macabre route, allowing the horror of the spider which had crawled across her belly to lead her and Henry into Poe or Kafka. But no one cared for Poe or knew of Kafka and his cockroach then. Instead she went in the direction of Jane Eyre . Henry cannot remember how old he was before it dawned on him that Jane Eyre was the only book he had ever read. But it couldn’t have been all that long ago. Jane Eyre , Jane Eyre , and nothing but Jane Eyre . Even when the work of literature was called something else, it was still, in all its essentials, Jane Eyre .

Looking back, Henry is philosophical about it. In the end what other story is there? Reclusive girl suffers agonies because her skin is thin, but finally gets to fuck the hero. Moral: the thinner the skin, the better the fuck.

Wasn’t that, give or take, his shrinking story too? Without the bravado — all so much wind, Henry’s wife-borrowing talk, all hot air to blow away the evidence of how hard he found everything. And of course without the happy ending.

As for what Ekaterina intended, pushing him in the direction of girlish fragility — who knows? Did she wish Henry had been a girl, was that it? Henrietta Nagel. Alice Harriet Henrietta Nagel…Was that why Ekaterina had held him back on Christmas Day, in the hope that the waiting and the disappointment would teach him what it was like to suffer as a girl and maybe turn him into one? Another Stern Girl to add to the collection, except that not one of those girls could hold a candle to little Henry in the fragile-flower department. Home from war, Izzi gasped at what they’d done to his rosebud boy. ‘This lipstick?’ he asked, rubbing at Henry’s pouting mouth. Pampering he’d expected: ‘All my love to you, my darling, and to the spoilt one,’ he’d written from the front, or at least from Basingstoke which was as near to the front as they’d send a man who had so much of the child in him. But spoiling was not effemination. ‘Why don’t you shove him in a frilly frock,’ he asked his wife, ‘stick pink ribbons in his hair and have done?’ But all that did was to make Henry more quivery still, and to plant a confirmation in his mind for later, that the world was full of Mr Brocklehursts, brutes to those whose fine-sprung clockwork showed through their lucent skins.