Howard Jacobson's Blog, page 11

Our subject today is Dr Johnson’s hypothetical highwayman. For readers who have forgotten him, here’s a reminder.

Well, whad’ya know – fewer writers used the word “theretofore” in the 1960s than used it in the 19th century; more employed the word “groovy”; the Second World War generated sadder words than the peace that followed it; American writers are more garrulous than we are, and no female character in any novel written by the Brontë sisters says “Whad’ya know”.

We lack, it seems to me, the language of disgrace. And where there is no language of disgrace – no deep damnation – there is no language of compassion either – no pity like a naked newborn babe, no tears that drown the wind. I’ve no desire to trawl through the rights and wrongs of the Huhne case now that they’ve been packed off, and you could say that their shame resides precisely in the pettiness of their offence, for which small words will do as well as great, but do you not feel, reader, that in the absence of prophets among our commentators and tragedians among our judiciary, without a grand cosmology of sin and expiation to shape our thoughts, we haven’t really risen to the drama of their fall?

I got clobbered in the street recently. In a hurry to make a doctor’s appointment, I found myself on a narrow pavement behind two enchantingly voluble middle-aged, middle-class women, one pushing a couple of twin babies, presumably her grandchildren, whom she addressed as though they were just home from university, the other gesticulating with wild expressiveness, as though to draw the attention of pilots preparing to land at Heathrow.

What do George Galloway, Martin Heidegger, the London Review of Books, and the Third Reich have in common, other than that they all give me the creeps? Well, maybe nothing, but let's have a look-see. Concatenations are dangerous, but sometimes they make themselves, as when Boyd Tonkin’s profile of Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of Books (home to Hilary Mantel’s piece on Kate Middleton), appeared in the same edition of The Independent as John Gray’s review of Yvonne Sherratt’s Hitler’s Philosophers.

It’s a curious fact about medical check-ups that you always leave shorter and heavier than when you arrived. “If I go on losing inches this fast,” I told the doctor the last time he measured me, “I will soon have disappeared altogether.” “That’s unlikely to happen,” he said, “so long as you go on gaining pounds at the same rate.”

You can’t blame Richard Dawkins for getting in early with his tweet. See it from his point of view: if you are of the conviction that organised religion encourages a dangerous delusion and that Pope Benedict XVI’s “first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal”, then the announcement of his retirement is an opportunity too good to miss. “I feel sorry for the Pope and all old Catholic priests,” he tweeted. “Imagine having a wasted life to look back on and no sex.”

Much enjoying Jonathan Miller refusing to bear his faculties meekly and go quietly into the good night of artistic eminence, but thundering Timon-like against – well, against just about everything. Such withering anger, it seems to me, becomes a man who has directed Shakespeare and Verdi, who could have given his life to science, mimicry, satire, polemics, sculpture, and who never seems to believe he is doing what he should be doing or that people have adequately valued what he has done.

Heard the one about the four Jewish writers sitting on a stage in a royal palace at the Jaipur Literary Festival discussing the condition of the Jewish novel? The Jewish novel in Jaipur? Circumcision, shiksehs, Yiddish gags? Yes, hard to credit. As one of the writers, I found it hard to credit even as it was happening. But here’s the punchline: there wasn’t a single Jewish joke or reference the 500 attentively listening Indians didn’t get! I’ve encountered more bemusement at a reading in St John’s Wood.

You want to know how to get through the rest of the winter norovirus free? Don’t handle anything. This advice, I accept, will be harder for some to follow than others. To me – because I grew up to be a universal non-handler, not touching other people, alien food, animals or myself – it’s second nature. That I was a precociously fastidious boy I ascribe primarily to a confused understanding of Jewish hygiene laws: if it was sinful to go near some things, but impossible to remember in the heat of living which, the most sensible plan of action was to go near nothing. Otherwise I put it down to my family’s revulsion, probably acquired over centuries of being treated like dirt in Eastern European shtetls, from refuse.