Lost amid leek leaves

Press, 24 September 1983, Page 18

Lost amid leek leaves

Coming From Behind. By Howard Jacobson. Chatto and Windus/ Hogarth Press, 1983. 202 pp. $23.50. In Sefton Goldberg’s world, where reputation and human passion are transient, only a book is stable and permanent. “Even to be remaindered was to be remembered,” reflects Goldberg, unhappy lecturer in a Midlands Polytech whose department of Eng. Lit. has progressed to being a Department of Twentieth Century Studies. But an author Sefton Goldberg is not, even though he lectures on the longer English novels, tears up paperback copies of set books in front of his students, and plans a “history and vindication of the will to failure in art.” Sefton has his own ideas about educating the children of Nottingham mine workers. Degrees? “We give too many. It’s time we started taking some back.” He has to deal with an administration that greets anything resembling a complaint with reminders of “redeployment, retirement, resignation, and redundancy.” His best school friend has become a wildly successful critic and interviewer who has set off for a desert commune in a search for “the silence on the other side of language, and the language on the other side of silence.” No wonder Sefton’s chief activity is filling in applications for academic jobs in the comfortable south of England. But what if he should apply for a fellowship at Cambridge; fill his application with such gems as, “Let others revel in the trappings of office and the ticker-tape of qualification. I stand before you like Lear on the heathbareheaded”; and find himself on a shortlist? Any joy is stifled when the competition turns out to come from his own former students. Sefton’s Jewishness revels in failure and persecution. “Sefton was only

human; there were limits to how much happiness he wanted for his friends.” His lady friend, a librarian, spends her days “lending large-print books to childmolesters in the public library,” and Sefton never knows when her niceness is going to strike next. “Coming From Behind” is a delight, a kind of “Lucky Jim,” thirty years on, in a world where natural living allows someone to sport mocassins “woven out of bean pods and leek leaves.” Where students at creative writing classes have the “nervous exhausted look which comes from the excessive practice of candour.” No wonder Sefton wonders if this is really a proper place for a Jewish boy to be. Jacobson will give a good many academic readers a surfeit of delicious chuckles, and a few uncomfortable moments, as they see themselves reflected back from his pages.—Naylor Hillary.