Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

‘Have you considered the possibility that your students might not want to find you?’ she asked him.

‘No, I haven’t,’ Henry said. ‘Do you think I should?’

‘No. No. But there are very few things we do that we do not mean to do.’

‘Like getting cancer and being run over?’

She put her head to one side, as colourful as a parrot, a single lilac braid looping from her hair. ‘Those too,’ she said.

Then mean to do both, Henry thought. But what he said was, ‘I’d settle for a wooden finger by the main departmental notice-boards, pointing them my way.’

She thought about it. ‘But then wouldn’t everybody want a finger?’ she wondered.

To which lily-livered Henry was not prepared to chance an answer.

He was like the mad wife in the attic, only he was in the cellar. When inspectors or external examiners came to the college, they were not shown Henry. He was their terrible secret, the last man teaching literature, or at least the last man teaching it the old male way, as though language were achievement rather than trace.

They appended a Mr on his name board –

MR HENRY NAGEL LECTURER

— in order to hammer home that he would never be a professor, that he was an amateur, a mere unlettered dabbler, but just as importantly to dissociate the department from his gender. No one else was Mr. Either they were Dr or they were nothing. But Henry needed defining. The views expressed in this room are not necessarily the views of the department — that was what they were telling students and whoever else stumbled, in the blackness, upon Henry’s room. In here language is considered an achievement not a trace — be warned!

‘Why don’t you rename your course Literature and Invasiveness?’ Drs Grynszpan (Cerisse) and Delahunty (Rhona) asked him, pissed, at an end-of-term party. He was the only man they had to talk to, else they wouldn’t have bothered.

Henry fiddled with the sharp points of his tie. Never without a suit and tie, Henry, whatever the occasion. The suit caused consternation, he could tell, by virtue of its symbolic refusal of flux and chaos, and the tie — well, a tie’s a tie. He smiled his sweetest. ‘Because I don’t know anything about it,’ he told them. ‘Cup and mitre, I’m the cup.’

Dr Grynszpan stood on one leg, like a stork. She was wearing a parody short skirt, slightly starched like a ballet dancer’s, over opaque black Hamlet tights. Short skirts on Drs flummoxed Henry. He never knew where to look that did justice to the doctorate. ‘You’ve gone immediately into defensive mode,’ she said, turning her grey eyes on him.

Henry looked into those. ‘Centuries of repression,’ he explained.

‘So now you’re getting your own back?’ Dr Delahunty wondered.

She was easier for Henry, visually, a Dr who dressed in what Henry thought of as rehearsal clothes, like a mime artist’s, with a violent splash of red lipstick, almost as electric as Henry’s tie. Logocentric Henry hated mime, but at least Dr Delahunty concealed her body.

‘No, surprisingly I don’t feel vengeful,’ Henry said. ‘And certainly don’t teach vengeance. Rather I see myself in a demystifying role. Like you, I understand that as a teacher of the syntax of oppression, it is my job to fracture it. There’s where we find ourselves, we of the margins — now in the fissure, now in the fracture. We fracture away down there in my little room.’

‘It must be a sight.’

‘It is. You are welcome to observe it. You’ll need to being your potholing gear, though.’

‘But you are still talking to your students about genius, I hear,’ Grynszpan said. She had a way of swirling around him, like a little girl showing Daddy her new frock. What there was of it.

‘They’ve reported me, have they?’

‘No. But the word crops up in their essays. They have to have got it from somewhere. We figured it was you.’

‘We?’

Delahunty nodded. ‘ We .’

‘Then you both figured right,’ Henry said. ‘I’m a genius freak. Especially I get freaky when the genius in question is female. It’s how I was brought up. I am constitutionally impressed by the intelligence of women. I am by yours.’

‘Well, we do both have PhDs,’ Grynszpan reminded him.

‘I am at all times mindful of those,’ Henry said, holding up the hand of peace. ‘I can’t begin to imagine the disadvantages you must both have had to overcome to get where you have got. When one thinks of how it was for those poor governesses in Charlotte Brontë. . ’

‘It has, however, nothing to do with genius, which, along with plaisir du texte , is a masculine concept,’ Delahunty told him. ‘And ascribing it to women doesn’t undo its violence, just like that. You perpetuate an injustice to those women writers you teach if you miss the subtlety of their subversion. It was never their intention simply to become proxy men.’

‘You’re not a proxy man just because you write well.’

She arched her mimist’s eyebrow. ‘You are,’ she said, ‘if all you understand by writing well is the smooth didactic surface of the patriarchal logos.’

Taugetz , Henry thought. A great wave of nostalgia for home passed over him. What you give up when you go to a university or wherever, what you forfeit doubly when you go to teach at one — the seasoned scepticism of people not deranged by the politics of their specialisms. Taugetz, taugetz, taugetz, taugetz . .

But all he chose to say was ‘Look, I just teach the kids to read what’s there. OK?’

‘Ha!’ they said together. ‘ There! ’

He looked into his drink. ‘You seem to have forgotten this is a party,’ he said, excusing himself.

But they hadn’t done with him. ‘Still there , is it, Henry?’ they would enquire, laughing, wherever they ran into him, slumped over his Pennine shepherd’s pie in the refectory, wandering the library stacks in search of a novel with a man in it, stumbling in the direction of the lecture theatre, emerging blinking from his spider’s hole beside the print room, coming out of the single male lavatory the department provided for men, particularly then , the lavatory — ‘Still there , is it, Henry?’

He was no match for them. They wore him down. He couldn’t keep it up. Whereas they could go on for ever. Was that the power of gibberish over language proper, the female semiotic, as they called it, over the male symbolic, the flux over the mastery — that there was no stemming its flow once it started? ‘Ooo, ooo, ooo!’ Unless it wasn’t gibberish. Unless it wasn’t all gibberish. Henry’s big mistake, he now realises, is that he left them to it. He thought they would go away. He thought it would go away. Thought it was a fad. What goes around comes around. I’ll continue as before, he decided, enjoying the thing that’s written rather than the thing that isn’t, and all will be well. One day he’d wake up from the nightmare of their horrible unintelligibility — all right, their gracelessness, then, their vile verbal discordances — and they’d be gone, and in their place once more nice people like his mother and her aunties, book lovers and Henry-appreciators of the old sort. So he never kept up, never read them or their womby sources, never sought to understand them, never even tried, intellectually, to meet them halfway. Grew lazy instead, knowing what he knew.

No better than his paternal grandparents, he now realises, who stuck with Yiddish though they’d been born in an English-speaking country, because in Yiddish they felt at home. I too, Henry thinks, though born in a gibberish-speaking country, took the coward’s way out and spoke only English because in English I felt at home. Would it have killed me to have picked up one or two words of the other along the way? Since gibberish was the currency of communication, didn’t it behove me at the least to buy a phrase book?