Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

Explain that. Henry will go to his grave not understanding. There she was, a woman with the music of the capitals of Europe in her soul, wise with the wisdom of the Volga, yet blind to the overwhelming provinciality of Henry’s professional life, a barely tenured teacher in a barely illuminated institution in a barely breathing Pennine valley. Wonderful, what he was doing, she thought. Wonderful for himself: a privilege to have your soul filled with literature all the long day. And wonderful for others: those who came to listen to her great-nephew, and learn. There is a variety of views on everything, one man’s meat etc.; but can there be divergence of opinion in the matter of what is life and what is death? Henry was the corpse. Ask him. He was the one lacking in any of the usual presumptions of animation. Yet to Marghanita he was not merely living, he was a creative force, the reason that life is in others. If it turns out that she’d been right all along, that he’d led a privileged, energising life, what does that say about Henry? Wouldn’t that make him doubly a dead man?

‘“Crist, if my love were in my arms. .”’ Henry read to his class. With feeling. His arms out, cradling air.

Which was when they raised the question — What about the woman?

There is no woman, Henry told them. Marghanita sad, smiling from the back.

There is no woman in this poem. The poignancy of her resides precisely in her absence.

Dangerous word, absence. Henry’s students had written essays about the absent woman in world history. What is absence, Mr Nagel, they asked him, if not presence in its most eloquently telling form — the woman objectified in her removal, possessed and reified in abstracto , assumed without question to be the man’s property, the object of his desires, to be enfolded in his arms, in his bed? Passively waiting for him while he gallivants about the globe, no doubt colonising it.

What if the woman didn’t want the man, had Henry thought about that?

He had, and could recommend any number of works on the subject. Just not this.

What if the small rain down did rain and he came home to find her with another man, or better still another woman, he, she, they, in her arms, not she in his, hers, theirs. What then? What then, Mr Western Wind?

Then we’d be reading a different poem, Henry explained.

Then let’s, they told him.

So he read them Berryman –

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart

só heavy, if he had a hundred years

& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time,

Henry could not make good.

But they weren’t satisfied that the woman’s point of view was adequately attended to in that either.

You are the collective thing that sat down once on my heart, Henry wanted to tell them. You are the thing I will never, not if I have a hundred years and more of weeping, make good.

Not true, of course. The thing that sat on Henry’s heart predated student feminism.

‘Where do they get this stuff from?’ she laughed afterwards, Henry’s great-aunt Marghanita, still lovely enough at God knows what age to melt Henry’s só heavy bones. Laughing.

Laugh, Moira! Laugh like Marghanita!

Lying with Marghanita in his arms, however, had such a thing been — been allowable, or, being allowable, happened — he would have fretted (because fretting was what he did) that her laughter was maybe the tiniest bit too loyal. Too much in agreement. Not sufficiently dialectic or dialogic, if those are the words he’s after. For he is fastidious, Henry, in the matter of loyalty, and believes there can be too much as well as too little. Precise in the matter, also, noting that while too little can frustrate a man and, who knows, build up a tumour in his brain, too much directly invades his nervous system, and makes him feel that spiders are crawling across his flesh. All this is supposition. He never did lie with Marghanita in his bed. The one person who did, for whom she had held herself in chaste reserve, waiting and waiting for the Western wind to blow him to her — Crist, that she were in his arms — allowed himself, if only temporarily, to forget her, for which offence Marghanita refused, if only permanently, to forgive him. It was the story of her life. The Deceiving of Marghanita . An evergreen melodrama which described herself to herself, not one single line of which suffered diminution of black sardonic pain in all the years of its playing. It went everywhere with her, like her handbag, or like a writer’s first manuscript, The Deceiving of Marghanita. Sometimes Henry saw her lips moving to the famous soliloquies, saw her lovely cheekbones moisten, and on occasions — who knows, perhaps anniversaries — tears spring like geysers from her eyes. So she, if anyone, might have embraced the woman’s point of view. Hang on, Henry, let’s just think about this. You’re right, of course you’re right, and funny, of course you’re funny, and they are preposterous, of course they are preposterous, but the woman waiting, Henry, the woman waiting. . After which correction to his prejudices, dealt fairly and understandingly with, but not indulged, it has to be assumed that Henry would have been content to lie with his arms about her — all else being equal — and not ache with melancholy for those other ones in the corridor of mirrors, those of the past, and those who were yet to come, those who overlaughed and those who under-laughed and those who didn’t laugh at all. For that must follow, Henry, must it not? That you were only ever waiting for everything you liked, the right amount of this and the right amount of that, to come together? Your bed, then, and only then, the perfect paradise.

Crist!

Henry sat with Marghanita as she lay wet cheekboned on her own bed of perfect peace, and discovered he was weeping for his mother. How hard it is to be discrete. How hard, in the end, to be certain you can tell one person from another. Death the great leveller, but what about life? In Henry’s experience, life too eventually rolls out all undulations. Unnecessary for King Lear to have called upon the all-shaking thunder to smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world. It was always going to happen anyway.

But Henry doesn’t want, today, tonight, to think about Marghanita smote flat, unprotrusive on her bed.

‘The second thing I found out about you that I didn’t know. .’ Moira says, slithery like tofu in his arms, but he won’t let her finish.

‘I’d rather find out about you,’ he says. ‘Tell me what you hated most at school.’

She doesn’t hesitate. ‘Hockey.’

‘What didn’t you like?’

‘The cold. I was always on the fucking wing.’

‘I didn’t realise it was colder on the wing.’

‘Well, it didn’t have to be. But no one passed to me. So I just stood around with my feet getting more and more numb.’

‘You could have run about anyway.’

‘I was too cold to run about.’

Her kisses her hair. Smells school playing field in it. ‘Fancy you being a winger.’

‘Why, don’t I look like a winger?’

‘I don’t know. Just fancy you being anything. Just fancy you having been a girl.’

He was delighted. He loved hearing about the girlhood of girls. Infinitely touching, in the woman, the evidence of girl. Especially before sleep. Better than counting sheep for Henry, the traces of girl in a borrowed woman.

‘And remind me again,’ he says, after a moment of reflection, ‘this was school in Prague?’

She aims an imaginary blow at him. ‘Hemel Hempstead,’ she says, ‘as you know full well.’

But Henry doesn’t know anything full well. ‘I am in charge of the whereabouts of your childhood,’ he says.