Howard Jacobson: Shylock Is My Name

Barney laughed a shepherd’s laugh. “I don’t recall any such fair and I have never owned such a suit,” he said.

“You wore an off-white linen shirt under it,” D’Anton went on. “It had a button missing.”

“Never owned one of those either.”

“And you were carrying a straw panama.”

“Not me guv’nor.”

“So what’s your version?” Plurabelle asked him, aroused by the mention of the missing button.

He shook his head. “D’Anton was just somehow always there or thereabouts,” he said. “You might as well ask me when I first saw the sky.”

D’Anton’s expression brought to Plurabelle’s mind another painting by William Holman Hunt. The Light of the World . Jesus with the moon behind him like a halo, knocking on a door with no expectation of its being opened, his lips pursed almost pettishly, his eyes downcast, a lonely, self-pitying man—“Behold I stand at the door and knock; if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me”—all the while knowing that the door will remain unanswered.

There seems to be something about all this being rejected that D’Anton quite likes, Plurabelle thought. Could it be that he hopes Barney won’t give him whatever it is he wants?

Or was it she who was hoping Barney wouldn’t give him whatever it was he wanted?

“I have to take this,” Strulovitch said, reaching for his phone.

“It’s your daughter, of course you do,” Shylock told him.

“How do you know it’s my daughter?”

“I recognise the ring,” Shylock said.

The two men were strolling with a forced companionability out of the cemetery towards the car park. Strulovitch had invited Shylock home — get out of the cold, have a bath, drink Scotch, stay the night — and Shylock had accepted with a rough alacrity that surprised and flattered Strulovitch. Despite his wealth and influence, Strulovitch was a man of modest origins and expected his invitations to be turned down. People surely had better things to do with their time than spend it with him. “Good, good, very good,” he’d said, with something too like a bow. And Shylock — a man vexed in the matter of giving and receiving hospitality himself — had patted his shoulder. It was as though — without strong instincts for such a thing on either side — they felt they needed to accelerate the process of friendship.

Quite why, Strulovitch would have been unable to say. He was not a man who made friends easily with other men. A mother, a wife, a daughter — these were the loadstones of his life. Possibly, then, he missed what he had never had. As for Shylock — Strulovitch would not have dared ask what he missed.

He liked it that Shylock took his arm, even though the grip was fierce. The gesture made him feel European. He hoped an observer would have taken them for professors of fine art at the University of Bologna, discussing how to improve the architecture of Jewish cemeteries.

“It’s evident you spoil her,” Shylock said, when Strulovitch rang off.

Strulovitch detected emotion in the other man’s voice. How could it be otherwise? But which emotion — sorrow, envy, bitterness?

Did each of them envy the other?

Or was it just his own fatherly pride and sentimentality he was listening to?

“Her mother is too sick a woman to care for her as a mother should,” he said. “The responsibility for her falls to me. It’s not something for which I’m suited.”

“Is any man?” Shylock interposed.

“Without a wife — probably not. So yes, I spoil her — spoil and deprive her in equal measure.”

“That too I understand.”

“I praise her and then I castigate her. What I give with my left hand I take with my right. It’s all indulgence followed by exasperation followed by remorse. I feel as though I’m confined in a small space with her — impeding her movements one minute, too intimately aware of her presence the next. And then I punish her for feeling what I feel. I can’t find any equilibrium in my love for her.”

Shylock tightened his grip on Strulovitch’s arm. Through the taut fingers Strulovitch could feel memory vibrating.

“Your words are daggers,” Shylock said. “But so they would be to any father. It’s an invariable law that fathers love their daughters immoderately.”

He made it sound like a terrible duty enjoined by a God who’d done no better bringing up his own children. An exaction of affection more than a bestowal of it. To be loved by Shylock, Strulovitch saw, would be an arduous experience. But his words consoled as well as frightened him. So he wasn’t the only one. The universe decreed that fathers should love their daughters not wisely but too well. And that daughters should hate them for it.

“I want to let her alone but I can’t,” he said. “I fear for her. I wish she would go to sleep and wake up ten years older. A daughter studying at college is a living torture. She comes home addled.”

Shylock could barely wait for him to finish. “You think it would be any different if she never left the house? A daughter doesn’t have to have an education to be taught how to hate her father. She can learn rebellion through an open window. It’s in the nature of a daughter.”

“It’s in the nature of an open window.”

“It’s in the nature of nature.”

“Then I am not for nature.”

Shylock made a noise in the back of his throat that sounded like a laugh dying. “I wish you luck with that,” he said, slowing their pace and looking beyond Strulovitch as though to be sure nature wasn’t following them. “We’ve been battling nature a long time. How many jungle Jews do you know?”

Offhand, Strulovitch could only think of Johnny Weissmuller.

Shylock slapped the air, as if he meant to swat away a fly. “Him I can’t comment on, but Tarzan, let me tell you, wasn’t one of us. We don’t hang out with apes. It’s the gibbering of primates or it’s the law. We chose the law. You read Stefan Zweig? Of course you do. There’s a story that when he was a young man he used to expose himself to women by the monkey house in the Schönbrunn Zoo in Vienna. So why did he choose the monkey house? To deride the sexual imperative to which he was enslaved. I am no better than a monkey, he was saying. He grew out of it. That’s the whole story of the Jews. We grew out of it. You have to draw a line under where you’ve been. Christians like to think they’ve drawn a line under us.”

“We aren’t monkeys.”

“In their eyes we are. Apes, curs, wolves.”

“That’s nothing more than invective. Their real argument with us is that we drew the line too strictly under nature.”

“Their argument with us is whatever will serve their purpose at any given moment. They don’t know what it is they can’t abide, only that they can’t. I am more precise when it comes to what I can’t abide about them. We lack charity, they say, but when I ran out on to the streets calling for Jessica children jeered at my distress. No charitable Christian parent dragged them home and admonished them for their cruelty.”

Christ, Strulovitch thought admiringly, he doesn’t lack outrage or intransigence, or come to that celerity, my new friend.

Then again, though he didn’t mean to be critical so early in their acquaintance, wasn’t it reported that Shylock ran out on to those very streets calling at the same time for his ducats? Strulovitch knew never to trust what was reported, but what if, in this instance, it were true?

He wanted to be fair. It was, after all, as an object of material worth that Shylock’s daughter had been stolen. But you can’t — can you? — put everything down to the prevailing mercantilism of your society. Strulovitch lived in a wealth-crazed world himself; he hoped, however, that he knew the difference between his daughter and his bank account. Yet this, too, he understood — that in the outrage of loss, objects and people lose their delineation. The robbed commonly speak of violation, feeling the theft of things as keenly as an attack on their person. He couldn’t say he would feel the same, neither could he say he wouldn’t. But he wondered if he cut a similar figure as a father. Obsessed. Wolf-like. Enraged into possessive befuddlement. Was it just as arduous to be loved by him? Was he just as laughable a father in the cruel eyes of Christians?