Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

It was the women who finally dragged him down. Not the womenfriends or the womenrelatives or the borrowed women-wives of his best friends, but the women in his department, the bookwomen in whose name literature, as a sort of evidential documentation of persecution, or, when not that, a palimpsest of resistance, was now being universally understood. He should have been prepared. He should even have been at home. If ever a man had been brought up to be one of them, a girl among girls, it was Henry. What was so different about their way of looking at things from his own? Literature was the history and lexicon of their oppression; well, wasn’t literature also the history and lexicon of his? Jane Eyre, Mrs Dalloway, Henry Nagel — take your pick.

He could have done without a father. Left entirely to the mercies of his mother and the Stern Girls, Henry could have made his way nicely through the newly effeminated humanities. He joked about it in a rare letter to ‘Hovis’ Belkin, by then in America. ‘ Textually, or I might even mean textologically, I am entirely in my element. All I need to do is wear a frock and cut my dick off and the prize is mine ,’ he wrote, and no sooner posted it than wished he hadn’t. Tactless, tasteless, damaging to himself, to be confirming ‘Hovis’ of all people in the very view of Henry’s masculinity which ‘Hovis’ had been the first (not counting Henry’s father) to promulgate. Did Henry want ‘Hovis’ to think of him as frocked and dickless? Had he always wanted it? In a rare letter back, ‘Hovis’ skipped the dick but was surprised to hear (but then again not surprised to hear, the Pennines being the Pennines) that they were still in frocks and not yet in dungarees and overalls where Henry was. But not surprised, Henry noted, to hear that Henry was thinking of wearing one. Would anyone have been surprised? The question stirred the dormant pond of genes bequeathed to Henry by his father. Be a man, Henry. Be a man and stand up for men. His voice deepened from belated boy soprano to something closer to light baritone. His beard grew bristlier before he shaved if off altogether to manifest dark stubble. He trimmed his lashes. He adopted the mannerism of scratching behind his ear when any of his women colleagues spoke, a downward raking of his neck, as though he meant to draw his own blood, which he’d seen someone do in the movies and which he thought denoted a fine masculinist contempt. He breathed fire. Going in to empty the ashtrays after staff meetings, in those days when Henry bit back his bashfulness and went to war on behalf of the waning phallotyranny of fathers everywhere, the cleaners believed they could smell paraffin.

Nothing so pathetic as a dragon without a bite. Having set himself against the girls, Henry couldn’t come up with anything to cheer the boys. Men in books? Henry didn’t know of any men in books. Yes, there were odd male interlopers, incidental swashbucklers even, about whom the heroines might and then again might not, but the fictional strategy, not to say the underlying semiotic, was against them. Henry wasn’t convinced by all the talk about the conductibility and viscousness of women’s writing; he couldn’t feel the deep maternal blood flow, let alone go with it; he missed the goo; but in all the novels that were important to him — even those by the author of The Ivory Tower — the poetics invariably confirmed the sensibilities of women. The form was theirs. Its structure chimed with the almanac of their frustrated powers. He made a brief excursion into Tom Jones and Roderick Random and Ivanhoe and Peveril of the Peak and The Last of the Barons , but he could no more take the historiography than the facetiousness. He even canvassed a course in which anything with Henry in, would Henry teach. The Henrys of course, Henry IV (Parts 1 and 2), Henry V, Henry VI (Parts 1, 2 and 3) and Henry VIII (which Henry himself had never read), Little Dorrit (for Henry Gowan), Northanger Abbey (for Henry Tilney), Mansfield Park (for Henry Crawford), Emma (for Henry Woodhouse and Henrietta Bates), A Pair of Blue Eyes (for Henry Knight), The Fox (for Henry Grenfel), the poetry of John Berryman whose Henry set the benchmark for suicidally unhappy Henrys everywhere, and, bending his own rules, the earlier short stories of O. Henry and the later novels of Henry James. This, however, struck the department as differing in no essential from what Henry normally taught, except in so far as it came clean at last about the solipsism, which wasn’t necessarily a recommendation.

So he settled finally — was allowed to settle, that’s to say, in the spirit of its being his goose, so let him cook it — for a comparative and evaluative course of study (you had to announce if there was going to be any evaluation, you had to issue a health warning, and you had to include a sub-clause offering students the option not to) entitled Literature’s For Life, implying that it wasn’t just for Christmas while at the same time echoing life as in Lawrentian ‘life’, a religious entity with masculinist overtones, and also the last line of Washington Square, ‘for life, as it were’, which as everyone knows refers to the cold fate of a betrayed woman. That’s what he would really have liked to call it: Literature’s For Life As It Were, but he knew without asking that it would take up too much space in the Handbook. In meetings on the curriculum or when trying to interest incurious students at the beginning of a new academic year, he pronounced it North Manchesterly — Literature’s For Laff — to evoke, as well, the idea of muscular expansiveness and mirth. But when all was said and done — Life or Laff, however you cared to interpret or pronounce it — his course comprised the same texts as everyone else was teaching: Pamela, Amelia, Clarissa, Henrietta , Sophia, Cecilia, Evelina, Belinda, Emma, Shirley, Sybil, Venetia, Ruth, Eleanor , Marcella, Mary Barton, Mrs Dalloway . Only with the occasional consolatory Henry thrown in, and taught, as Henry liked to think, with more sinew.

Lit’s For Life, was how the students referred to it, whatever Henry liked to think. Lit’s For Life — like the motto on a T-shirt. Shows us your tits, show us your lits. So much for Henry James and D. H. Lawrence.

He became a spider, spinning in the dark. Five years into his appointment, and still uncertain of tenure, he was moved to the end of the corridor, and then into another wing of the humanities building altogether.

‘The students can’t find me,’ he complained to his then head of department — the previous incumbent, Jane’s husband, having moved on, taking Jane, who wouldn’t let him weigh her breasts on the moor, with him. Mona Khartoum the name of the new one. Brought up in Sussex and Baghdad. Dr Lilac and orange hair, time at the Sorbonne, author of a work on the sexual economics of prosody (assertive cadence a tax on women, an actual emotional revenue, administered and gathered in by men), and a way of pursing her lips — almost homoerotically, Henry thought, almost like offering a rectum — when kissing her colleagues. Even to Henry, whom she wanted dead — an otiose ambition in the circumstances — she presented the little puckered O of her rectum mouth.

Henry made a chivalric cherry of his lips in return. And planted it on her cheek.

Years later, still waiting for promotion, he remembered his failure to reciprocate Dr Khartoum’s obscene greeting. Not that he believed she took him to have turned her down, or had sufficient interest in him to care even if he had. No. His mistake had not been sexual but political. He hadn’t adequately abased himself. He hadn’t acknowledged gynocracy. But it was also true that promotion waited on publication, and Henry had published nothing. Virtually nothing, anyway. And academics who had published virtually nothing were in no position to be picky where they pressed their mouths.