Read Online The Making of Henry by Howard Jacobson - Free Book Online Page B

depressed, anyway, Henry, the oldest person teaching in an institution which was the mirror image of his soul – remote, unacknowledged, irrelevant, forgotten. A university they called it – the University of the Pennine Way – but before that it had been a polytechnic, and before that a college of technology, and before that a place for keeping hairdressers on day release off the streets, and before that a Spinners’ Institute, and before that Henry had no idea. A playschool for Bilderbergies? Change the name and you change how people feel about themselves, that’s the thinking. So by writing a poor student a poor reference, Henry effectively unravelled a century or more of cosmetic nomenclature, thereby adversely affecting not only the student’s self-esteem but everybody else’s not excluding his own. Especially his own. The place was Henry’s life. He had been teaching there before the vice-chancellor was born.
    Put Henry into a trance and regress him and you’ll find that he’d been teaching at the Spinners’ Institute even before he was born himself.
    Stuck-up, Henry?
    Hardly.
    Just stuck. Stuck in the Pennine mud.
    And stuck in his mother. Stuck fast within her resistant womb, stuck fast between her milky breasts, stuck fast in her disapproving mind.
    Open the door and let me out, Ma!
    Except that Henry has always rather liked it in there.
    â€˜Now we’re going to make you a professor,’ Henry’s mother tells him, sitting him on her knee and getting him to read the words she points to with her lovely slender-knuckled fingers. ‘First the title . . .’
    Little Henry, aged three and a half, over the moon, puts his arm around his mother’s neck and bites his tongue. ‘The. Awkward. Age.’
    â€˜Bravo! Now Chapter One. “Save when it happened to rain Vanderbank always walked home, but he usually took a hansom . . .” What’s a hansom, Henry?’
    â€˜A two-wheeled cabriolet, Mummy.’
    â€˜
Bravissimo
! Now you continue.’
    â€˜â€œBut he usually took a hansom when the rain was moderate and adopted the preference of the philosopher when it was heavy.”’
    â€˜Excellent, Henry. So what do you suppose that philosophic preference would be?’
    â€˜Staying in?’
    â€˜Good boy. Now let’s hurry up and finish this and then we can start on
The Ivory Tower
. . .’
    . . . Well, every man who is unhappy idealises his childhood. Henry can’t put a name to what he first read with his mother but he is sure it had nothing to do with those ghosts and wizards reputed to be dear to the imaginations of children. Enough that Ekaterina was married to a wizard, and that they would all be ghosts soon enough.
    The literature of excruciation, that was Ekaterina Nagel’s gift to Henry. The poetry of alarms and perturbations. Strange, because on her own account Ekaterina was not a timid woman. She had grown up without too many men around, her mother and her mother’s sisters sardonically shedding or mislaying them in an early trial run of the century’s later phallophobia – nothing neurasthenic about it in their case, simply a contempt borne out by experience, what happened when you met a man from North Manchester, and you always
did
meet a man from North Manchester. Being a girl in these liberated circumstances, where there was money enough to help you hold your head high, men or no men, was exhilarating for Ekaterina. Tall and straight with green eyes and good diction – ‘gr-ah!-ssss’ and ‘rather’ – Ekaterina Stern was expected to pursue the logic of her mother’s and her mother’s sisters’ independent braininess, put into practice all their ambitions, and be the first of them to go to university. Professor Ekaterina Stern! It had such a ring that her mother didn’t understand why they couldn’t skip the qualifications part and just give her