Read Online Kalooki Nights by Howard Jacobson - Free Book Online

vision that for a while all my heroes had two yellow cones of light pouring from their eyes, I little by little rebelled from the extravagantly optimistic fantasy of it all. English culture called. If not the English comic book, then the English cartoon. Moralistic. Suspicious. Dour. Savage. Reductively ribald. Everything that I was not.
    That I became a cartoonist rather than that more verdant creature, a comic-book illustrator, let alone an accountant or a dentist, only goes to show that you don’t always follow your own best impulses, or even know what your impulses are. I recall my mother telling me with horror about a friend of hers who had suddenly fallen victim to a sort of science-fiction sickness known to doctors – in so far as it was known to them at all – as Anarchic (otherwise Alien) Hand syndrome. The poor woman had had a stroke, as a consequence of which the right part of her brain had become disconnected electrically from the left, leaving her right hand in a state of enmity with the rest of her. Sometimes the wayward hand merely wanted to grab on to something which she didn’t – a door, a handle, an object in a supermarket – but at others it sought postively to hinder and embarrass her, and once she woke up choking in the night, on the point of being strangled by it. We are psychologically at war with ourselves, that’s what it comes to. One half of us would destroy the other half if it could, and only the impartial intercession of the body, when it’s well ordered, saves us from self-murder. Let the body become unstrung, however, and we are once again at the mercy of our feuding psyches. So it was with my illustrator’s hand. Although it hasn’t yet attempted to throttle me or put my eyes out – and there is no saying it still won’t – it did, by wanting to draw satirically at all, act independently of me, in mischievous defiance of my nature, which was always melancholy and withdrawn, resistant to laughter and exaggeration, and not at all given to the crude and often cruel hilarity of caricature. To say that one part of me drew cartoons in order to spite the other half which abominated them, might be going too far; but I don’t doubt there wassubversion in it, as though my drawing was impelled by hobgoblins or other spritely things of darkness I did not want to acknowledge mine.
    ‘All boys read comics,’ my mother said.
    But I was right and she was wrong. Manny Washinsky had never read a comic in his life. But he, too, wanted someone to play with. So for a dozen Beanos and one Tarzan he swapped me The Scourge of the Swastika . ‘Only I’ll be wanting it back,’ he told me.
    ‘Then I’ll be wanting my Beanos back.’
    ‘You can have them back now. I won’t look at them anyway. I’m not allowed.’
    ‘So why are you giving me this?’
    ‘I’m not. I’m just lending it you.’
    ‘What’s it about?’ I asked.
    ‘The Final Solution.’
    ‘Is it any good?’ It looked good, if the cover was anything to go by. Blood-red lettering on a cowardy cowardy custard-yellow background. A figure in jackboots, seen from behind and below, as a trodden worm might see him; in his belt a revolver, the jackboots themselves astride the globe, like the very portals of the earth. And between his legs, viewed from a distance, cowering and hopeless, with nowhere to hide, the trodden-worm masses of the Jewish people.
    More than that, it appeared well thumbed.
    ‘There are supposed to be photographs in it,’ Manny told me, ‘but my parents ripped them out.’
    I wondered why that was.
    Manny pulled a face. ‘They said I could see them when I was older.’
    The book itself, though I can recite half of it to this day, I have no memory of actually sitting down and reading. So I must have imbibed its contents some other way. And eventually, courtesy ofErrol Tobias who had his own copy – the street, it turned out, was awash with The Scourge of the Swastika – I got to see the missing photographs as