Howard Jacobson's Blog, page 12

Weary after a hard day hearing cases of juvenile delinquency, I guess, a middle-aged man takes his seat beside me, puts his briefcase between his legs, and before the play starts falls soundly asleep.

Lovers of Shakespeare’s sonnets – and who that reads this paper isn’t? – will be relieved to learn that the identity of the Dark Lady, supposed addressee of the final 24, has been uncovered.

The older guy won.

Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, 20 miles of the sea. Not true, I was 12 before I saw a river and 20 before I saw a marsh, but if I confuse myself with Philip Pirrip, the blacksmith’s boy, that’s because I seem to have done little else this year but watch adaptations of Great Expectations, Dickens’s great novel about the deranged fastidiousness we call romantic love. Not that you’d guess that’s what it’s about from the prim and starchy versions I’ve been watching.

Let’s play Plebgate. You’re the police and I’m the government chief whip. “I thought you lot were fucking meant to help us,” I say when you refuse to open the main gates from Downing Street to Whitehall – gates you routinely open on other days – forcing me to trundle my bike a further 15 feet. I think of Bradley Wiggins and all he has done to sacralise the cyclist. Isn’t this an insult to him, too? “Fucking plebs!” I say.

A child walks into a local supermarket and is caught in the cross-fire of rival gangs.

Let’s begin with a big question. “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” Should the relevance of this not be immediately apparent, please substitute “freedom of the press” for “whole world”. “For what is a man profited if he shall secure the freedom of the press, and lose his own soul?”

So the future Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, is Jewish. I can’t say it comes as any surprise to me. Who isn’t Jewish? I stopped watching Who Do You Think You Are? once it became apparent that every episode was going to end with some scion of an ancient Roman Catholic dynasty weeping buckets outside Auschwitz over the fate of his great-aunt Yetta. Funny, this hankering for a rogue gene. I’m the same. I’d love it if a researcher found me a Cossack for a grandad.

What do we mean when we talk about an artist’s dark side? And why are we so surprised when we discover he has one? You think we’d know what to expect by now. Larkin a racist. Percy Grainger into S&M. Eric Gill a domestic pornographer. Dickens a louse to his wife. Tut, tut! And that’s before we talk about the art.

Let us speak, then, of remembrance. After reading what Maurice Saatchi told Bryan Appleyard last week about the grief he still suffers a year after the death of his wife Josephine Hart, whose book Life Saving: Why We Need Poetry has just been published, I’ve found it hard to think about anything, not even the American presidential elections, except love, its ravages, the price we pay for it, and the terrible, sacramental obligations it imposes on memory.