Howard Jacobson - No More Mr. Nice Guy

‘This is Father Lawrence,’ Brother Cyprian said. ‘He’ll talk to you. He is the wisest man in our community.’

‘Oh, I don’t know about wise,’ said Father Lawrence, lowering his eyes, recalling to Frank’s mind Benedict’s seventh step of humility — ‘that a man not only admits with his tongue but is also convinced in his heart that he is inferior to all and of less value, humbling himself and saying with the Prophet, “I am truly a worm, not a man.” ‘

Frank hoped not. He could do the worm stuff himself. Wisdom was what he was after.

It was a struggle to get the old man to accept the more comfortable seat. Frank wished now that he had something to give him. If not wine or biscuits, a container of Summer County at the least. He looked ill at ease and a touch cold, his hood down, a Viyella shirt under his prickly cassock, his feet in sandals and heavy white socks of the sort Frank remembered otherwise naked boys wearing in those gay porno magazines he dutifully leafed through the time he was dreaming about sucking off Kurt. He sat looking at Frank incuriously, sometimes rubbing his head, passing his fingers lightly over a tumor the size of an egg, the single disfigurement to his smooth baldness. The egg of wisdom, Frank hoped. The cyst of spirituality.

‘This isn’t easy for me,’ Frank confessed, sitting forward on the kitchen chair he normally used as a support for his portable television. ‘I’ve never sought counsel before. And of course I’m not a Christian. But then I’ve never appealed to a rabbi either. Quite what I want from you I don’t know. Quite what the trouble is I don’t know. Too much mind perhaps.’

The ex-abbot pointed to his chest. ‘There must be love,’ he said. ‘But then the mind can be a good thing too.’

You don’t say, Frank thought.

It struck him that Father Lawrence was ready to go now. But Frank hadn’t even started yet. ‘I am,’ he conceded, ‘a disputatious man. I earn my living disputatiously. Criticism is everything to me. It is perhaps the only activity in which I am truly happy. It is certainly the only activity I unreservedly value. For myself, you understand. I grasp what Benedict means when he advises against grumbling and speaking ill of others. But given the opportunity to unsay any of the cruel or dismissive things I have said over the years I doubt if I would withdraw more than half a dozen of them. They have not been gratuitous. I hope I am not a gratuitous man. I hope that a disinterested play of mind is what has governed me in all my asseverations. I hope so. But I cannot deny that to be in possession of a relentlessly critical mind is to be frequently wearied. It begins to affect the heart. When I listen to my heart sometimes I hear it begging to be let off Deposit something kind in my vicinity, I hear it saying. Do warmth for a bit. Do forgivingness. I’ve heard it said that a bad heart can be as much a moral as a physiological condition. It would seem that you can literally cruel your own heart. I feel that I have cruelled mine. But in a cause in which I wholeheartedly — ha, wholeheartedly — believe. There’s the catch. Where, without also damaging myself spiritually and intellectually, am I supposed to find the forgivingness my heart seems to want? It’s as if my several parts, my heart and my mind — my spirit and my intellect, if you like — are at war with one another. How to heal their feud? I am interested in that term you Christian philosophers employ: hesychia. Perhaps I’m pronouncing it wrong. Hesychia? Hesychia? I’m not at all sure I understand it fully either. Tranquility, I think it means. Is that right? A sort of still, seated harmony among the parts. But how to achieve hesychia — there’s the question …’

So he spoke.

He paused, not because he’d finished — oh no, he’d nothing like finished — but because he assumed it was spiritual good manners, during counselling, to allow the counsellor the time to counsel.

He waited.

Father Lawrence massaged the tumor on his head. He seemed taken aback by the expression of expectancy on Frank’s face.

At last he said, ‘I had a wonderful holiday in Israel last year. I went for about six weeks. In a group. All Benedictines, of course. I’d never been before, though it had always been my ambition to go. Everyone was very nice to us. And surprisingly knowledgeable. Our driver particularly. He was an Israeli. Yet he knew all the holy sites. And their meaning for us. He even knew the Franciscan Fathers on the Mount of Beatitudes and was able to arrange for us to have an outdoor Mass there. It was very moving.’

Was this wisdom of the very highest order, Frank wondered. Was this wisdom and then some?

The eleventh step of humility is that a monk speaks gently and without laughter, seriously and with becoming modesty, briefly and reasonably and without raising his voice …

Did the ex-Father Abbot’s seriousness and reasonableness, his economic spiritual maturity, reside in this: that he knew how to counsel without apparently counselling at all? That he only appeared to be talking about his hols; that he was in fact presenting Frank with a working model of the very calm he sought?

But in that case, why didn’t Frank feel calm?

‘Let me put it another way,’ Frank said. ‘The problem for me seems to be one of ascendancy — that’s to say, how do I get it. When you are used to mental turbulence, and even come to love the noise it makes, come to recognise it as a sign that you are intellectually alive, how do you go about silencing it without feeling that you have immured or even damaged your best self Your own St Benedict says that the wise man is known by the fewness of his words. But words are my profession

He looked across at the old man whose hands were folded now, as though deliberately, as an act of refusal, in his lap. Was Frank pleading? Maybe not pleading, but asking certainly. Seeking. Shut the fuck up and get the fuck out, Mel had ordered. He was halfway there. He’d got the fuck out. But how to shut the fuck up?

Seek and ye shall find.

Well, Father? Well?

‘Next year,’ Father Lawrence said, but this time without recourse to his cyst, ‘I’m hoping I will be well enough to make it to Italy. I haven’t been to Rome for twenty years, could be more. And there have been many changes

He has no appetite for it, Frank thought. He has no gift for abstraction and no flair for solace. He has the face of a philosopher but the imagination of a commuter. But he felt he owed it to Brother Cyprian at least to give it one last go. ‘So how do you quieten the roar of your passions?’ he asked. Keeping it simple now, keeping it short. ‘What do you do when jealousy or anger smites your heart?’

‘Oh, you have to see how silly that is, and try to think of something else.’

Frank waited. Was that it? Silly! Had they been sitting there discussing silliness for an hour?

Yes, that was it. The old man turned his face to the window, looked out into the vegetable garden where Gordon, all tears, was pulling down an unwanted woodshed. Then he consulted the alarm clock by Frank’s bed. Time to be going.

Frank rose and thanked him. ‘It’s most kind of you,’ he said. ‘I’m most grateful to you. I’ll think about what you have said to me.’

But he knew what he was going to think. He was going to think that he had more spirituality in his dick …

… and he didn’t want to be thinking about his dick.

It’s enough to make him miss Mel. He can’t find anybody to be serious with.

‘Day by day remind yourself,’ Benedict advised, ‘that you are going to die.’ No sign that the monks have taken any heed of that. They laugh uproariously and eat like pigs. And the wisest and oldest one among them is planning his next overseas trip. Only Frank has death daily in his eyes.