Howard Jacobson - The Making of Henry

It had been different when he was twenty-five, or thirty, but now that he had begun his headlong decline into the second half of his life he was no longer attracted to the young of any species, least of all his own. He never had been much, now he wasn’t at all. He didn’t like their wet mouths, their casualness, their trainers, the pride they took in everything they didn’t know, their assumption that the old were interested in, or envious of them, the way they glottal-stopped, the way they said ‘gid’ for good, their failure to understand that education was an escape from popular culture not a platform for it, the tuneless head-banging songs they hummed — Hit me with your rhythm stick, hit me, hit me , no Charlie Parker riffs of the sort favoured by his pals at school, doodleoodleooodleoo , no Gigli either, no Fischer-Dieskau, no Schubert, and whoever lives without Schubert does not live at all — and most of all he didn’t like their slack sexualism, born of the pill, a loss of shame, the decline of Christianity, and an insufficiency of that bodily fastidiousness without which sex isn’t worth performing. Sooner than reach out to touch or tap a student, sooner than put his arm around a student, whether as a gesture of encouragement or consolation, Henry would have snuck into a nest of vipers. Indeed, he did from time to time wonder whether his bodily revulsion from those whose intelligences he was paid to sharpen wasn’t itself a more serious breach of the new codes of conduct than intimacy of trespass. Staff are not expected physically to loathe their students, nor to start from them as from a leper, so don’t throw up on their essays or otherwise manifest nausea without a third party being present — there’d have been more sense in Catherine getting him to take on board that injunction, than worrying him, had-it Henry, with warnings of inviolable space which he had not the slightest urge to violate.

But though he was spatially impeccable, judgementally he wasn’t. He went where he should not have gone. He judged.

Ask Henry for a reference or a letter of recommendation and you took your life into your hands. Every student knew this. Henry warned them in advance. I don’t like writing references, he explained, and the only way I am able to reconcile myself to the chore is by treating them as art. My model is the character sketch of the seventeenth century. Clarendon, Halifax, Sir Philip Warwick, none of them writers of whom you’ll have heard. Judicious, dramatic, unflattering, starting from the centre and working out. If you do not choose to trust your character to my pen, then don’t ask me for a reference. Otherwise, take your chance, hope that I have seen what value lies within your nature, that I have truly measured your accomplishments, and all might yet be well. Someone might be persuaded to employ you. Then again someone might not. My only obligation is to the truth.

For a while it was possible to get away with this. A reference was a reference. A considered verdict delivered by an expert. Even if the expert happened to be a pompous prick like Henry. But little by little the times they changed around him. First, the authority of the teacher was called into question. Who was Henry, who were any of them, to suppose their opinion was qualitatively better or truer than anyone else’s? Then came human rights, the expectation enjoyed by every student to be well-spoken-of, to be free of anyone’s opinion of him or her should that opinion happen to be unwelcome, the right never to be the object of comment that could be construed as negative. And following hard upon the heels of both, news from the United States of America that students at the sharp end of a bad reference, regardless of its justice, were successfully suing the institutions on whose notepaper the reference had been written.

‘Here are the new Guidelines for Writing References,’ Catherine said, dropping them on Henry’s desk. ‘I particularly draw your attention to page 9, paragraph 14 — “Please ensure that you provide only factual information as opposed to personal opinion.”’

‘I don’t know the difference between factual information and personal opinion,’ Henry complained. ‘They write an essay, everything they say in it is shit. Is that a fact or my opinion? I say it’s both. My opinion has to count as fact. That’s why I am trusted to teach.’

‘I didn’t write these,’ Catherine reminded him. ‘And by the way, how are you?’

Seeing Catherine’s concerned expression, Henry went into immediate decline.

As for references, the only safe course now was to give up writing them altogether. Or failing that, to get students to sign a waiver in advance, indemnifying the referee from prosecution.

A third, unspoken option, the anodyne option, in which you unearthed something complimentary to say of every student — how kind to animals they were, how punctually they handed in the shit they wrote, how innovatively they tied their shoelaces — was closed to Henry who found it hard enough to speak well of someone who deserved to be spoken well of.

Page 10, paragraph 6, settled it for Henry. ‘If you aren’t certain, DON’T WRITE THE LETTER.’

Music to his ears: fair enough: he wouldn’t.

So what on earth suddenly made him let his guard down and ignore the guidelines, not only denying a student the words of enthusiastic commendation to which she’d been born entitled, but offering it as his judgement that she had a poor mind and an even poorer attitude — slovenly was the word he used, a slovenly intelligence — thereby abusing her human rights, defaming her character, exposing himself to the charge of negligent misrepresentation and the University of the Pennine Way to the possibility of a damaging lawsuit, and thus bringing his illustrious career to an ignominious end?

How come, Henry?

Explain yourself.

Who was she? What had she done to deafen you to that exquisite music — DON’T WRITE THE LETTER — and make you depart from your usual precautions? And what would have led her to believe, if you had so low an opinion of her, that she could count on you to speak up on her behalf? Was she someone to whom you owed an obligation of some sort? Was she otherwise known to you? And if so, should you not, in common decency, have advised her to look elsewhere for the recommendation she sought?

He isn’t sure he can go ahead with this line of self-interrogation. He turns on to his side, being careful not to wake Moira. Her snoring soothes him. If you can make a sound when you are not awake, then there is life beyond the pains of consciousness. That’s where Henry would like to be: somewhere else, somewhere he can fall into ignorance of himself without ceasing to be altogether. A halfway house. Not quite death, not quite life.

Sleep does it for some people. But sleep isn’t quite what Henry means. The state Henry craves hasn’t yet been discovered.

Besides, Henry can’t sleep tonight. Too many people in his head tonight who do not think as they ought on serious subjects.

So he lies there, straining his ears for the sound of traffic, the outside welcome tonight, more welcome than the inside at least. The disgrace of it, he thinks. The disgrace of it! Nothing specific. Just the disgrace of life before and — whether he falls into blessed ignorance of himself or not — the disgrace of life hereafter.

‘Guess what?’ Lachlan says, looking from one to the other. ‘She kept diaries.’

‘Really,’ Henry says.

Moira kicks him under the table. ‘What?’ his eyes ask. ‘What have I done?’ But he knows what he’s done. He hasn’t shown sufficient interest. He’s off and away, somewhere else. ‘Sorry,’ he says, bringing himself back, attending to Lachlan properly this time. ‘Who kept diaries?’