Since I have no other, I use as preface Jacob’s preface which I read, sneakily, fifteen years ago, when it lay on the Goldmans’ breakfast table, amid the cornflakes:
‘I cannot in good conscience give the statutory thanks to my wife,’ it says, ‘for helpful comments on the manuscript, patient reading of drafts or corrections to proofs, because Jane did none of these things. She seldom reads and when she does it is never a thing of mine. Going by the lavish thanks to wives which I find in the prefaces to other men’s books, I deem myself uniquely injudicious in having married a woman who refuses to double as a high-grade editorial assistant. Since custom requires me to thank her for something, I thank her instead for the agreeable fact of her continuing presence which in twenty years I have never presumed to expect.’
It was a marriage characterised among other things by the fact that Jacob was alternately infuriated and enchanted by Jane’s resolutely playing the country wife. There is no doubt that it influenced the paths that I chose to tread.
I met Jacob Goldman when he interviewed me for a university place in London, during my final year in the genteel north London day school to which my mother had sent me. My mother, the widow of a modestly comfortable local green-grocer, had done so at some sacrifice to herself in the hope that I would acquire the right accent and be fit to mix in the right circles. As parents are destined to be disappointed, I believe she was disappointed that her decision ensured instead that I acquired a collection of creditable A levels and became one of Jacob’s pupils. Jacob – an impressive and powerful left-wing philosopher up from the East End – talked to us with a marvellous and winning fluency about the transcendental dialectic, in a huge cockney voice full of glottal stops, like a plumber’s mate. He was the Professor of Philosophy in that labyrinthine Victorian edifice and quickly became my father figure and cultural hero. I had read Lord David Cecil’s references to his ‘rooms’ at Oxford, but Jacob interviewed me in nothing one could dignify with such a word. He interviewed me in what appeared to be an aerated cupboard.
‘I’ll be frank with you,’ he said. ‘I had you up here because your Head’s report on you is so unfavourable, it leads me to suspect that you may be somewhat brighter than the Head. You may of course be no more than an opinionated trouble-maker. Which do you think you are?’ He fixed me under his black horsehair eyebrows with what I took to be smouldering animosity. It was, of course, well before the day I saw him ask into his kitchen a collection of rain-soaked Jehovah’s Witnesses and offer them cups of tea, for he was the kindest of people. He had hair to match his eyebrows sprouting, intimidatingly, like sofa stuffing from the neck of his open shirt. I must have shrugged in an unprepossessing manner. How could I put across to him how it was with me? How much I was driven timorously by a desire to please and yet found myself stubbornly unable to do so by obedience to any values but my own? Since my values were not shared by those around me, I couldn’t possibly win. The lack of recognition, I think, made me show off in an attempt to force it from those in authority over me.
‘Sometimes I show off,’ I said.
I was, in a minor way, a trouble-maker at school, always polite, guilty of little more than reading James Joyce under the desk in religious education classes, truanting from all sporting occasions and disregarding the finer points of the school uniform: balking, in short, at those aspects of school which seemed to me peripheral to the educational process. Education, as I had always hoped for it, is what I got from Jacob. Jacob clearly identified to a degree with trouble-makers, having, I discovered much later, come before a kindly Tory magistrate once in the course of a troubled youth. The magistrate’s Toryism had taught Jacob, I think – with Toryism and other forms of villainy – to hate the sin and not the sinner. A thing he was very good at.
‘Tell me what you like to read,’ he said. He smoked his disgusting proletarian cigarettes which he lit from a large box of household matches and gave me the floor. Somewhat to my retrospective embarrassment, I remember telling him, among other things, that I thought Wordsworth had ‘possibilities,’ that I thought Jesus Christ had been a Utopian Socialist and that I didn’t like the sex in D.H. Lawrence. It is a tendency I have, now kept in check, to compensate for my natural timidity with odd flashes of bravado.
‘The wife doesn’t care for it either,’ he said, which surprised me not a little. ‘She considers it not so much sex as indecent exposure. But is there not – forgive me, since this isn’t my cabbage patch – is there not an element of zealous pioneering about it? Is it not a little ungrateful to climb on the shoulders of the past and sneer?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I don’t much like having to be grateful for things.’ Jacob took this with an encouraging suppressed smile.
‘To be sure, I’ve never been hit with the Chinese jade,’ he said. ‘I’ve had the Heinz tinned oxtail thrown at my head and miss, but it doesn’t have anything like the same symbolic power.’ I went on then to make heavy weather of the only philosophy book I had ever read – a small Home University Library publication of Bertrand Russell’s which I had bought in the Camden Town market, I suspect to annoy my mother, who believed that I was becoming a blue-stocking and frightening away nice young men. It was I who was frightened of men, of course, but it worked two ways. As Robert Frost says, ‘There’s nothing I’m afraid of like scared people.’ I told Jacob then that Emma was my favourite novel. He allowed himself to remark at my expense that there was, at least, no sex in it. Sex, had I but known it, was one of Jacob’s favourite subjects. I blushed and said hotly to cover myself, ‘Of course there’s sex in Emma. Mrs Weston has a baby. It grows out of its caps, remember? You don’t get babies without sex, do you?’ Jacob produced a wonderful Rabelaisian laugh and volunteered some coffee which we acquired down the corridor from a dispensing machine.
‘Listen, Flower,’ he said when I took my leave, ‘people who come here do so on the back of the British Taxpayer. I expect my people to work. If they don’t I do my best to have them thrown out.’
During the summer vacation I received notification – Jacob’s ultimate compliment to me – that the department would have me on three Es.