Whatever it is, I Don't Like it by Howard Jacobson Read Free Book Online Page B

simply to take a hand in our pleasures – to try to understand, in tranquillity, why we are like we are. In a scientific and humanistic age we throw open everything to the light; why should comedy, alone with religious fundamentalism, be exempt? Persuaded by my simple honesty, the studio audience would roar on every word I spoke, leaving the comedians to slink away like so many Goliaths felled by the sweet-tongued David. All this I anticipated, and all this, between ourselves, gentle reader, was exactly what transpired; but I still needed my prepatory morning among the memorials to the dead.
    It is a very fine cemetery, this one. Not one of your exquisitely retiring country graveyards where you yearn to be laid, when your time comes, under a sad cypress, rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, a thing of faded lettering and quiet nature yourself now, all your striving to be anything else put finally to rest. No, although it is solemnly shaded, a step or two back from the clamour of the living, Dean Cemetery is an urban, even a civic burial place, bristling with verbose Victorian tombstones, elaborate sarcophagi, neoclassical tablets set into the walls, busts, sculptures, obelisks, even pyramids. Where a country churchyard is a grateful relinquishment of the clamour of life, Dean Cemetery is a celebration of it. Here are soldiers, sailors, statesmen, surgeons, painters, zoologists, critics (I encountered no comedian) – all still active in this wordy commemoration of their worldly genius.
    But it was one stone in particular which caught my attention. It read:
    Â 
    SACRED TO THE MEMORY
    OF
    ARCHIBALD McGLASHAN
    TEACHER OF ENGLISH
    DIED 14 MARCH 1881
    AGED 36 YEARS
    â€˜A MAN GREATLY BELOVED’.
    Â 
    Had I not had comedians to put right later in the day, I believe I could have loitered by this stone until the sun went down. And what was it in particular that struck me? Everything. Every single word.
    Died aged thirty-six years, of course; died aged anything other than forty years older than whatever age you happen to be, is always enough to make you stop and think. Longevity is what you like to read about in graveyards, doughty souls who gave up the ghost at ninety-eight and then only because they couldn’t think what else to do, not people cut off before their prime. And thirty-six is particularly cruel: just when you’re getting going, just when you’ve outgrown stand-up and television, just when you are getting your first glimpse of what it all might be about.
    Except that Archibald McGlashan seemed already to know. Teacher of English. As bald as that. Not linguistician or philologist. Not lecturer in liberal and media studies, nor professor of ideological piety, nor doctor whose speciality is whichever humanities happen to be thought relevant at whatever political moment. Not even Teacher of English with no offence meant to non-English-speaking minorities. Just Teacher of English, enough said. Simple words etched into plain stone.
    Tempting, in these fractiously ambitious times, to view such a measured memorial sadly. Here lies some mute inglorious Milton, died soon and died obscure. If only Archibald McGlashan had shared in our twentieth-century advantages he might have got somewhere, become famous like Sting, had his own series on telly – Sex in the Grave – at the least made it on to Big Brother . Never mind that he’s dead; even alive, Teacher of English is too modest an achievement for us to contemplate without melancholy. The poor bastard, we think, forgetting that it wasn’t all teenage junkies with abusive parents in the 1870s. The poor bastard, forgetting that you were allowed to enthuse your pupils once, that there was an exhilaration in passing on the baton of learning and enquiry, enfranchising young minds with the best of thought and feeling, because ‘best’ wasn’t then an unacceptable and outmoded elitist concept.
    For which favour, conscientiously