Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

Thus by becoming the only one of them to renege on his oath, Henry had let not only himself down, but all his friends. In a queer way he even felt that by becoming a teacher he had let his teachers down.

Complicated, the labyrinth of loyalties a boy bears to his school past. One way or another you’re always letting someone down. Henry remembered ‘Fat Frieda’ with such a toxic mixture of embarrassment, allegiance and regret, such consciousness of treachery, that what he felt for her was almost love. Something of him belonged to her, that was the only way he could understand it; something of him pertained to her, which he was duty-bound, if he were to make any progress giving his own nature the slip, flatly to deny.

Biology, she taught. Whatever biology was. Henry never listened. Biology, physics, chemistry, maths — whatever explained the way the physical universe worked was of no interest to Henry, who preferred not to know. You look in a mirror and you see yourself, that was knowledge enough for Henry. All refraction did was explain what didn’t need explaining and give him migraines. Molecules were less obvious to the eye, but made him queasy for that very reason. Face that life was molecules, rather than words, and suicide was the only logical conclusion. In fairness to it, biology lacked the hard-edged cruelty of the other sciences. Biology was more like a ramble through the park, looking for catkins, than an actual subject. ‘Oh, and what is it we see here?’ No point asking Henry; Henry hadn’t seen anything. None of the teachers ever lasted very long either. Often Henry’s class was without a biology teacher altogether. Not that Henry minded that. Who needed biology? So desperate was the school, however, to take on anybody who could be induced to teach biology for more than a term, whether or not they knew any more about it than Henry did, that at last they flew in the face of a century of tradition, not to say wisdom, and hired a woman. Miss Hill. Spherical, owlish, low on the ground. Her bad luck that there was already a Hill on the premises, Fred Hill, also seriously foreshortened, a podgy lab assistant in a discoloured white coat which smelled of stink bombs. By the end of her first day she was ‘Fat Frieda’, echoing ‘Fat’ Fred, and assumed to be ‘Fat’ Fred in disguise, a money-saving ruse on the part of the school attested to, above all, by the fact that Fred and ‘Frieda’ Hill had identical moustaches.

Whenever ‘Fat Frieda’ asked a question, Henry’s classmates made aerials of their arms, like the antennae of caterpillars, and shouted, ‘Sir, sir — oh sorry, Miss.’

Then they held their noses, the way they did when ‘Fat’ Fred entered the lab.

Henry couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t learn from experience, since she was a scientist, and give up asking questions altogether. He also couldn’t figure why the headmaster didn’t squash the ribald speculations by parading Fred and ‘Frieda’ Hill on the platform at the same time, as in the final act of The Comedy of Errors . Failing which, he wondered how long it would be before Miss Hill fell apart, leaving them without a biology teacher once again, but more importantly, leaving him without the wherewithal to control his features. Henry was only ever marginally able to police his face. If ‘Fat Frieda’ went in his seeing, he knew he’d go with her.

Then, towards the end of one muggy Friday afternoon, that afterthought hour when biology was always to be found, like a drowned man lashed to the shipwreck of the week, Henry was brought back from his mental wanderings by the noise of the rest of the class jumping on to their desks, scratching their armpits, and making like monkeys. ‘Ooo, ooo, ooo!’ Poor Miss Hill. He shook his head over her. She had no instinct for self-preservation. Zoo animals, for God’s sake. With boys! Hadn’t she learned yet that the only safe subject with boys was the broad bean? But he pricked his ears, nonetheless, to something he half-heard her say, her voice quavering as ever, as though there were perforations in her voice box. The skin of apes and monkeys remains dry even in a hot environment — was that it? ‘Ooo, ooo, ooo!’ Yes, that was it. Dry even in a hot environment — like school. He was a profuse sweater himself, Henry. He was wet all day. He had been wet all week. His difference from apes and monkeys could have been explained had apes and monkeys lacked the means to sweat. But they didn’t. As he understood it — and he was listening hard now, harder than he had ever listened to anything that was not poetic fancy — they were possessed of the same two categories of sweat glands, apocrine and eccrine, as himself. Eccrine glands were absent from the majority of mammals, but not from chimpanzees and gorillas. They may have had fewer than he did, every living creature had fewer than he did, but the big thing was that they had them at all. For biologists taking the long view, this suggested that intense thermal sweating in man was an answer to some new prompting. Henry reckoned he knew what that prompting was. Shame. In that instant he formulated his own theory of the ascent of man. What impelled man forward, sophisticating his glands and separating him at last from the apes, was disgust and embarrassment with himself. The whole story of our evolution is the development of our capacity to know shame, and the cutaneous transpiration of mortification into pearls of sweat which roll glistening down our chests and backs, and not down the backs and chests of gorillas, is the visible evidence of it.

Ergo — civilisation is shame.

His mother was right. She should not have given birth to him.

His eyes met ‘Fat Frieda’s’. He was the only boy not jumping up and down, scratching his armpits and bellowing. Was that a smile she found for him? Through all the fear, a glint of gentle recognition, and maybe even gratitude?

Henry knew what he had to do. He leapt up from his chair. ‘Ooo, ooo, ooo!’ he went. ‘Ooo, ooo, ooo!’

And was never able to look her in the eye again.

So who could say that teaching wasn’t his punishment?

They screwed a polished wooden board to his door with his name on it in swirls of gold lettering.

HENRY NAGEL LECTURER

He stood in front of it a long time, balancing grief with pride. It wasn’t quite the same as teacher, lecturer, was it? Lecturer denoted something else. Lecturer meant soon to be professor, which definitely denoted something else. Or did it? Would the distinction have cut any ice, to choose a name at random, with ‘Hovis’ Belkin?

Knowing that the board with gold lettering would please his mother and the Stern Girls, he invited them (but not his father, who would breathe on it and burn it down) to sherry in his room.

‘Henry, the board!’ his grandmother cried.

‘Board?’ Henry wondered. ‘Is there a board?’

They kissed him in turn, Irina, Effie, Marghanita, his mother. He’d done it for them. And for the memory of Anastasia. He had penetrated an England which, for all their culturedness, had hitherto eluded them. He was a soon-to-be professor. He had opened up the spice route to the institutions of the English mind. He wanted to weep, they had it so wrong.

Madness, wasn’t it, listening to ‘Hovis’ Belkin, the enemy of his soul, when he could have taken the word of the women who loved him, and considered him a success? But that was the way of it, for Henry. Only those who thought badly of him counted.

How long it was before the waters of the college closed over him, Henry can no longer remember. He fancies he was a drowning man from the day he took his first class, clicking his fingers and cracking his knuckles and pulling hairs out of his beard, an excruciated boy in a leather jacket, his voice not a voice he recognised, the preposterousness of his being a figure in authority all he could think about, he, hangdog Henry, who only the day before, it seemed, had been sitting on his mother’s knee, reading aloud to her from The Awkward Age . But the truth is he went under only gradually. Didn’t even have the balls to dive straight in, Henry.