Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

And she was right. How could she be otherwise? Who knows women better than a mother? And who better knows her son? First chance he gets, Henry is fist-deep in his mother’s innards, scalpelling out her ventricles and whatever else they fancy while he’s in there. Aorta, anyone? Small intestine? Pancreas? And then he’s off, running, running, dispensing maternal organs like a second Mother Teresa let loose among the bloodsuckers. Whereupon he stumbles, whereupon the heart falls from his slippy grasp, whereupon, of course, of course, the heart cries, ‘Are you hurt, my son?’

Christ! These mothers!

And what does Henry, in the dirt, do then?

Attacks the pulp of pumping muscle, that’s what, throttles it, berates it, cries ‘Will you shut the fuck up, Ma!’, then remembers himself, his task, his sacred duty, and resumes running to the woman, the women, just as his mother said he would.

The women who don’t give a shit how hurt Henry is.

Was that another reason, yet another among hundreds, she held him back from the world, kept him inside her as long as she decently could, and then bound him in ribbons to her side, reading to him of callous men and girls with skin as fine as angels’ wings — because she knew he would have no choice but to knife her once she let him go?

It would help if he knew more men. He could ask them. Is this what you did too, is this what we all do? Is this what we essentially are ?

But he’s got rid of all the men he knew. Friends. What do you do with friends? Hang on to your friends, someone should have told him — maybe the wife or girlfriend of one of the friends in question — hang on tight to your friends, Henry, you’ll need them when you’re old. But then he’d have fallen for her, wouldn’t he, loved her for her foresight and intelligence, worshipped her for her wisdom and acuity, and asked her to have dinner with him — and bang would have gone another chum.

His father’s no use. His father was a brute, crashed like a herd of elephants through the fine web of undergrowth which bound Henry to his mother and then, when he was finally called upon to feel his way gently, felt too much — felt too much too suddenly — and let his own heart give out. What sort of example was that?

Henry’s heart could give out, too, remembering the desertion of his mother. It’s cake talk that does it. Confectioner’s cream. He sees it as a measure of her loneliness, the extent to which he and his father had abandoned her, that she should have been reduced to that. She could talk of nothing else the weekend he nipped across from the Pennines to see her and found her in the kitchen — a room in the house she had once upon a time claimed she needed a guide dog to help her to locate — up to her ears in piping nozzles and spatulas. ‘What are you doing?’ he had asked, afraid her sensitivity had finally tipped her over the edge. ‘I’m scrolling, Henry,’ she told him. ‘Look — it’s like decorating a church. It’s like sculpting. I love doing it. You’ve no idea. It’s like a whole new world. I just love it.’ She seemed possessed, inordinate. ‘Did you actually bake that thing?’ Henry asked, seriously frightened for her now. ‘Don’t be ridiculous! When did I ever bake a cake?’ ‘When did you ever scroll, Ma?’ She kissed him, pulled him to her so he could smell the marzipan in her hair. ‘The cakes, I buy,’ she said. ‘Dead plain. Nothing on them. The rest I do. See this? It’s called a crimping knife. Guess what I do with it.’ ‘You crimp?’ ‘Exactly. I crimp, Henry! I flute, I pipe, I letter, I emboss. Aren’t you proud of me?’ What could he say? That he would have been had there been less hysteria in the enthusiasm? That it had always been understood between them that they were too civilised ever to embrace a craze, that they were professional sufferers and bleeders, nothing else, and that they had only to look at her husband, his father, if they needed to be reminded what a hobby did to you?

It was the undividedness of her zealotry that betrayed her. The wild bacchante look in her eyes, the almost proselytising fervour. How long, he wondered, before she’d be buying him a little set of icing scrollers and extruders of his own? This was not his mother. This was not how she operated when she was herself. Yes, her vocabulary had always been extreme, but when she was truly engaged she was vaguer, less upfront, more ambiguous. Henry recalls the time she discovered Nietzsche. He had gone to Paris on a school trip and returned to find her sitting up in bed in a nightgown and wearing reading glasses he had never seen before, with The Genealogy of Morals held out before her as though in some soft-porn parody of a sex-starved teacher enticing her students with German philosophy. He stood at the foot of her bed, waiting for her to ask him about his holiday. She peered at him over her lenses. ‘Have you read this?’ she asked. He shook his head. ‘Probably best you don’t,’ she said. ‘Not yet. But then again, maybe you’re old enough. I don’t know. He’s a profound thinker. Rabid, someone called him, morally contagious, maybe too contagious for someone your age. But no Jew should go through life without reading him sometime. With a pinch of salt, I grant you. But with an open mind as well. Anyway, how was Paris?’

It was the idea of there having been a slave revolt in morals which interested her. According to Nietzsche this was a Jewish revolt, the Jews, a priestly people, having hacked away at the aristocratic edifice of those manly virtues of war and chase and gaiety, and ushered in an era, in which we still live impoverished today, of equality and democracy. Those whom the gods had loved for their daring were henceforth damned; only the unfit were blessed. In the place of power, beauty and nobility, were now enthroned poverty, ugliness, intellection and suffering. A change in our entire system of valuation effected by the terrible potency of envy.

Henry, tired with travel, wondered whether his mother was thinking of what her husband had done to her, the vulgar demos of North Manchester pulling down the aristocratic gaiety of the South. But that interpretation failed when he tried imagining his father as a priest.

Or as potent in his envy.

‘Is that why we all wear glasses?’ he speculated instead.

She looked at him strangely. ‘We don’t all wear glasses,’ she said. ‘You don’t, your father doesn’t, and I have only just started wearing these to read philosophy.’

‘No, but you know. . I might not wear glasses but I wear a scarf. We all wear glasses or scarves.’

‘Henry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘We put something between ourselves and the world. Is that what Nietzsche means, that we have removed ourselves from nature?’

Ekaterina took off her glasses and called her son to her. ‘ We don’t do anything,’ she said, patting his hand. ‘There is no we. And if there were it wouldn’t include us. Now I’d like you to forget everything I’ve told you. I warned you it was contagious. I won’t mention the subject again.’

The trouble was she had mentioned it far and wide already, not least to her mother and her mother’s sisters. Over Friday dinner at their place — tinned chicken soup, tinned chicken, tinned syrup sponge — the Stern Girls, by then depleted by one, and only to that degree less indomitable, quizzed him about it.

‘How long has your mother been reading this person?’ his grandmother wanted to know.

‘Nietzsche,’ Marghanita corrected her, with a quick, precise stare at Henry.

How did she do that, Henry wanted to know, how was she able to make even a dead German philosopher sound like an adventure between them? OK, Nietzsche’s name had a buried z in it, but she could embroil him no less successfully in secrets with Hawthorne or Melville, or Emerson even. Was it her? Or was it him, simply what happened to him when he heard the names of writers?