Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

He shrugged. ‘I can’t remember seeing her with anything but Jane Eyre in her hand,’ he told his grandmother. ‘Always a novel, anyway. This philosophy business seems to have come out of the blue.’

‘It’s not one of your books?’

‘No,’ Henry said.

‘You haven’t been told to read him at school?’

‘No. Look, this hasn’t come from me. But I have to say it sounds interesting enough.’

‘Interesting!’ Effie exploded. ‘Do you know your mother’s reading Hitler’s favourite writer?’

Henry wondered where it would have left them had Hitler’s favourite writer been Charlotte Brontë, as for all he knew it was. ‘She doesn’t believe every word of it, you know,’ he said, as much in his own defence as his mother’s. ‘I think she’s just toying with it.’

‘You don’t toy with fire,’ his grandmother reminded him.

Henry shrugged again. ‘My father does,’ he reminded her.

‘Yes, well, that’s what we are wondering,’ Effie broke in. ‘Could it be that there’s a problem between them?’

‘Do you mean is she reading Nietzsche because Dad’s away a lot? I suppose that’s possible. But then you could argue there are worse things to do when your husband’s out.’

Always supposing you can keep a husband, was the implied slight which Henry intended them to hear in that. He was annoyed with them. On his mother’s behalf largely, but also because he hated the way they would suddenly close ranks and close their minds — even Marghanita — the moment the world beyond threatened to impinge upon their privacy, and thus destabilise, as they saw it, their meticulously contrived anonymity. They read books and played music and looked at paintings, they embraced the arts of civilisation, they loved to talk, they cultivated feeling, yet at the same time they cultivated ignorance. Why does no one ever try to interest me, Henry wondered, in what is happening at this moment? Not to him, not to them, not to the family, and not even to the tribe, but out there, in the world, to the world. He didn’t mean politics, specifically. He didn’t quite know what he meant, since he was describing the absence of a presence for which he had never been given the word. That was his beef. That he hadn’t been kept informed. That he didn’t know what he was missing, only that he was missing something. The way things worked, was that it? The operations of the universe? The physics of being?

But the physics of being as recently understood. Not as decreed on a mountain top on Sinai five thousand years ago.

His father was his father. Uncle Izzi, children’s entertainer. And Henry wasn’t going to look to a children’s entertainer for enlightenment. His father lived out of time, not in the past but on some other plane where there was neither past nor future. His father’s parents had barely learned to speak a word of English though they’d been born in Manchester and lived there all their lives. Yiddish did them. Yiddish sufficed. In Yiddish they thought they were invisible to their enemies. Like the ostrich. Which certainly made them invisible to Henry, at whom they stared in deep anxiety, the few times they saw him, as though he might be about to report them to the authorities, and as though the penny they gave him, pinching his cheek, would buy him off. But his mother and the Stern Girls were different. They weren’t in hiding. They weren’t afraid. So why didn’t the times pulse audibly in their veins? Wherefore, at the last, were they bemused?

Sometimes Henry wondered whether it was all an effect of being in the north. Too cold up there, too dark, too backward, for anything but your own immediate wants to engross you. But always he would come back to believing that the fault — if fault it was — lay more particularly with his own people. They had come north in order not to know or notice; they were up here precisely because it was like being nowhere.

Was this why Marghanita pressed American literature on him? In America the Jews had taken on a version of the national identity, had made the American cause their own, had even shaped it, sometimes dangerously — tempting fate, risking a backlash — in their own image. Not in England, not in Manchester, not on the Pennines. Yes, they were dutiful citizens; they paid their taxes, fought in wars, performed charitable deeds, gave service to the community — but only for the right, at last, to be left alone to notice nothing. And not be noticed noticing it.

The catch for Henry was that he, too, found this half-absence from the world alluring. By Henry’s lights, if anything was civilised, this was — knowing nothing of event, forswearing effect, attending only to the still sad humanity of your own heart. ‘You and your ivory tower version of civilisation,’ his Gentile schoolfriends used to twit him, Geoff the geographer who understood the economic underpinnings of Henry’s street, Ned who could compute the distance of a star from how bright it was, Dick who debated capitalism versus socialism with numbers — how many privileged, how many deprived, how many slaughtered or gone missing, how many enriched — all stuff Henry knew absolutely nothing about. But that’s my point,’ was Henry’s invariable reply, ‘civilisation is an ivory tower.’

Except that it didn’t look so civilised on days like today, with the Stern Girls manning every exit, and his grandmother in the forecourt with her torch, reminding him why it was necessary, on occasions, to round up stragglers and turn the key.

‘Yes, there are worse things to do when your husband’s out, Henry,’ she said, ‘though not very many. You know we don’t go in for old world superstition or fanaticism here. We are free thinkers. But if there’s one freedom of thought we don’t need just at this very moment it’s the freedom to accuse the Jewish people of poisoning civilisation. That we can think about again a hundred years from now.’

Ah well, Henry supposed he agreed with that. Or if he didn’t, couldn’t remember why he didn’t. Jew talk embarrassed him. At school it was frowned on by Jewish and non-Jewish boys alike. It felt old hat. Wej talk was different. Back slang the fact of your being a Jew and you did something witty with it. Joking was fine. Otherwise leave it. As for Nietzsche, he was old hat too. The world he’d set alight was no longer even smouldering. The most interesting part of it all, for Henry, was seeing his mother fired with intellectual passion, reading without migraines, not merely to rub at the itch of her sensitivity — could that have been the reason for the migraines? — but seeking for truth in that penetralium of mystery, philosophy. It made him proud of her. My mother understands philosophy, what does your mother understand? But he also suspected it would pass. He was confident of the soundness of her mind. She was too sensible to be a fanatic.

And at length, of course, it did pass. One day she was talking about ‘slave ethics’, the next she wasn’t. Just like that. Possible that the Stern Girls had put the screws on her, but he doubted it. Much more likely to have been the firmness of her character. The sane are fickle. When it came to cake decorating, though, he could see that something had changed. Her natural soundness had been undermined. She couldn’t stop doing it. Couldn’t stop reading about it, couldn’t stop showing him her sugar pastes and wire flowers, couldn’t stop going on courses, couldn’t stop giving lectures and demonstrations. Once, he walked into Lewis’s in Leeds (never mind why he was in Leeds) and saw her with a semi-circle of women around her, doing something with royal icing. He was relieved he was on his own. Not because he was ashamed of her, no, if anything he was thrilled to see how smart and assured she looked, how well she held her audience, how roundly she rang her voice. Sometimes you need to observe your mother in a public place, at the centre of a world which excludes you, to grasp her separateness. At least Henry did. So that was his mother! So that was what she actually looked like! Amazing. But upsetting too. His mother become a kitchen person. His mother in an apron. She who had sat him on her knee and got him to read to her from The Awkward Age . She who had put her mind to Nietzsche and the idea that there was once, in some city of the mind, a slave revolt, not in marzipan but in morals. Demeaned. Diminished. And all because the men in her house had left her to her own devices, marooned her at home where at last she had grown homey.