Read Whatever it is, I Don't Like it Online
Authors: Howard Jacobson
Whatever it is, I Don't Like it
Whatever It Is,
I Don't Like It
Howard Jacobson
Contents
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The Part of Me That Is Forever Cosa Nostra
âKeep Smiling' â Franz Kafka
Pity the Poor Porkers and Damn the Swine That Gave Them Fever
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
The Greatness of Philip Guston
O the Opal and the Sapphire of That Wandering Western Sea
The Grave Question of the Bicycle
You Cannot Have a Margin Unless You Have a Centre
Thou Shalt Not Know What One Is Talking About
Alida Valli and the Eroticism of the Raincoat
It Don't Mean a Thing if It Ain't Got That Swing
If It's âReadable' Don't Read it
âA Gentle Vacancy of Spirit'
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For Ziva
Groucho Marx: I've got something here you're bound to like. You'll be crazy about it.
Chico Marx: No, I don't like it.
Groucho Marx: You don't like what?
Chico Marx: Whatever it is, I don't like it.
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A Night at the Opera
What follows is a selection of the columns I have been writing for the
Independent
since 1998. The title,
Whatever It Is, I Don't Like It
, might be asking for trouble, as it suggests a querulousness which I don't in all honesty lay claim to. There is a great deal that I do like. But it isn't in my nature to be non-confrontational, and these columns have, I hope, been amicably provocative from the start â picking a fight with those who make the world more sanctimonious, more foolish and, in every sense, more impoverished than it needs to be, while at the same time expecting to be read in a spirit of good-hearted amusement. It matters to me to be entertaining. Some would say it matters too much. But I don't have any story to break or any information to convey; I am a stranger to the current affairs agenda; and I don't see myself as an opinion former.
Novelists are not here to have opinions; our job is to submit opinion to the comic drama of ambiguity and contradiction, and I have all along conceived these pieces as more like little novels than articles â flights of fancy, tales of misadventure, character sketches, pauses for reflection, eulogies to those I admire and farewells to those I have loved. Some read like conversations, assuming a commonality of seriousness and exasperation between the reader and the writer that underlies whatever laughter we share.
I have been guided in my choice of which columns to reprint by no principle other than pleasure â the pleasure I recall taking in the writing of them and the pleasure I was assured they gave to those who read them. It is for this reason that I have not dated them or â except in the case of a small number that were written when I was travelling in Australia â grouped them according to subject or chronology. Each stands or falls on its own merits, self-revelatory, requiring neither context nor explanation.
Though some of the pieces are intimate â I do not conceal, for example, my passion for mafiosi shirts â this is not a memoir in another form. But a lot happens to a man in thirteen years. Thus the wife whose father's ashes I helped scatter into the West Australian sea he loved is not the wife who, in a more recent piece, I feared was about to leave me for Richard Wagner. And some of the friends I wrote about in 1998 are no longer here in 2011.
To emphasise that these are celebratory no less than angry or satiric pieces, the collection begins with an account of a mechanical elephant taking over the streets of London: an event which I witnessed and recorded with nothing short of rapture.
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Howard Jacobson
2011
We are entranced. We have not stopped smiling or looking dreamy for days. If you didn't know us better you'd say we were in love, except that we are not suffering any of love's unease. Not a condition we admit to very often in this column. As a rule we come to bury wonder not to praise it. In a childish world someone has to do the dirty business of growing up. But this week we have rediscovered the child in our self (that's if you can rediscover what you never were) and are aquiver with enchantment. The Sultan's Elephant is the cause. The mechanical contrivance, some fifty feet in height, complete with tusks and trunk and elephantine sadness, which roamed the streets of London for a weekend and stills roams the imaginations of those who saw it.
You will appreciate how beside our normal self we are when I say that we very nearly, for the duration of the elephant's stay, got the point of Ken Livingstone. Loose of tongue, slack of jaw, lumbering of attitude and posture, careless of whoever gets in his way, and dangerous to lose one's footing in the vicinity of â this is Livingstone I'm talking about, not the elephant â he nonetheless had the foresight to close central London to traffic for as long as it took the elephant to enjoy the city and the city to enjoy him, and for this, when he is consigned for all eternity to hell, I hope they give him the occasional cooling weekend off. Well, not weekend exactly; maybe half-hour. And not
too
cooling. A man whose brain boils with the impetuosity of prejudice does not deserve in the next life the temperateness he declined in this. But then again, he did let us have the elephant.
Central London without traffic is a marvellous place. Elephant or no elephant, it would be good, now we have seen how well it works, to close London to traffic one day a week. The motor car is a neurosis not a necessity. Millions of people still found a way of getting in. Shops stayed busy, cafes still spilled their customers on to the streets, but the difference this time was that you could stroll the city rather than have to dodge it, and it's only when you stroll a city that you truly enjoy its dimensions â the breadth of its boulevards, the plenty of its amenities, its rooftops, its vistas, and the easy companionableness, if you will only give them opportunity to express it, of its citizens.
If there was trouble on the weekend the Sultan's Elephant came to London I didn't see it. No one was competing with anybody: that helped. There was no trophy at stake. No tribe squared up to tribe. And no one plied us with liquor. But of course it was the elephant, ultimately â its pure, purposeless presence among us; street theatre without street theatre's usual agitating agenda â that soothed the savage breast. All those other considerations helped, but what made humanity benign for an hour was the grandest toy any of us had ever seen.
There is something about an elephant that brings out the best in people, ivory collectors apart. It's the size partly. As with whales and dinosaurs, the thought that life can fill up such a big space, that we share hearts and lungs with creatures built on such a scale, somehow aggrandises us. We want there to be life on Mars because we want Creation to be limitless. Looking at elephants or whales might not make believers of us, but we glimpse the grandeur of a creative impulse in them. What immortal hand or eye, and all that.
But an elephant isn't only majestic by virtue of its scale, it is also tragic because of it. Or at least it seems so to us. It looks hard to be an elephant. We know how difficult it is to drag around our own tenements of flesh and we accept existence on the understanding it will not get easier. Elephants look old in body from the moment they are born. Their every step is weary. Hence, I suppose, the fantasies we weave about their inner life: each elephant a Proust in his own right, recalling his life history before he goes to sleep, retracing in his imagination his peregrinations from waterhole to waterhole, unable to bear the sight of ancestral bones when by chance he comes upon them, and reburying them with all due ceremonials and formalities, including, for all we know, elephant eulogies and hymns. Elephants break our hearts.
