Brother of the More Famous Jack

For Stan, Elaine and Susan

Introduction

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Thirty-Seven

Thirty-Eight

Thirty-Nine

Forty

Forty-One

Forty-Two

Forty-Three

Forty-Four

Forty-Five

Forty-Six

Forty-Seven

Forty-Eight

Forty-Nine

Fifty

A Note on the Author

By the Same Author

Praise for Brother of the More Famous Jack

Rachel Cusk

I read
Brother of the More Famous Jack
as an undergraduate student at university. It introduced me to the possibilities of the contemporary female narrative voice. And that unmistakable voice has stayed clear in my ear over the two intervening decades, so that I can still repeat numerous passages or observations from the novel now, entirely from memory. There are many, many books I admire to which I could not pay anything like that sort of compliment.

The reason, I suppose, is that
Brother of the More Famous Jack
spoke to
me.
The story of an idiosyncratic young girl with literary tastes and a sense of humour, making her way through the world of men and finding that somehow, in her grasping of the nettle of romance, she has stung and stung herself into utter sorrow and submission, was of such personal interest to me that the novel in its entirety seemed a mere extension of this heroine's interests, and my own. It was life itself as a literary enterprise: it was the personal as picaresque.

We first meet Katherine standing in the foothills of experience, fresh from the suburbs and possessing not much more than a talent for self-adornment and a university place to study philosophy: we leave her years later at its peak, happiness. I wondered whether Katherine herself gave her life this readable form. Or do
novels merely mirror the shape of fate, its twists and turns obscuring but never vitiating the hope of arrival? In Katherine's rocky progress I saw evidence of both. In her world of thwarted love and feeling I found readings and rereadings of the novelistic concept of determinism. And the title itself, with its resounding literary reference cheek-by-jowl with its consolation for the hapless, the hopeless, the perennially – in matters of the heart – mistaken: at nineteen or twenty, I felt that in Barbara Trapido I had found a new and extremely sympathetic friend.

But it is not unusual to see the art of writing and the art of living intertwined in an author's first work. What is known as the ‘coming-of-age' novel is often the tentative debut of both the writer and her heroine, who jointly attain different forms of competence in the sphere of human affairs before the reader's eyes.
Brother of the More Famous Jack
is such a meditated example of this genre that it could almost be said to be a commentary on it: indeed, its clever interpolations of the subject of reading and writing, and of culture generally, make this ambition clear. From the first lines it is evident that we are to be given an account of inexperience that is the very opposite of tentative, that is as seasoned as its own rich repository of reference, and it is here that the novel makes its chief claim to originality. Few writers as talented as Barbara Trapido can wait very long before cracking open their store of material and hearing their authorial voice begin, however clumsily, to speak; and consequently, there are few modern tales of first love and its disillusions that are as thoroughly realised, as brilliantly lewd, and as hilariously satisfying to men and women of all ages as this one.

Among other things, the story of Katherine, only child of a prim Hendon widow, and her dealings with the Goldman family, an eight-strong, lavishly obscene, bohemian tribe captained by a kindly Jewish intellectual, is a portrait of a particular England: the middle-class England of unsung diversity and moral confusion, whose denizens are forever struggling to establish definitions of right and wrong in everything from art to sexual politics. This
is an England where Marxist ideology meets suburban net-curtain values, where feminism meets housewifery, where a great deal of soul-searching goes on as new generations grapple with established social and familial roles and responsibilities. It is also an England whose comic literary possibilities have been inexplicably neglected over the years. This is part of what makes
Brother of the More Famous Jack
such a very funny novel. It is the humour of the newcomer, the outsider – as its author, transplanted from South Africa, once was – and she revives the English gift for social comedy with a newcomer's relish.

But
Brother of the More Famous Jack
is first and foremost a book about destiny. It follows Katherine into womanhood, marriage, exile, motherhood, and indeed tragedy, and it implacably brings her back again to where she began. What seemed like a journey is in fact a slow process of recognition. It is one of the characteristics of youth – and particularly of early adulthood – that experience is formative; that events have a significance that feels in some sense fixed or preordained, as though in the first exposure of our fantasies and illusions to the world's reality, a kind of hardening or permanence is conferred on them. This is perhaps our first – and sometimes only – experience of the notion of ‘plot', of a course of events that are not random but meaningful, tutelary, even moral. Later, we learn that we gave these events their meaning, but at the time it feels the other way around.
Brother of the More Famous Jack
captures precisely the mixture of the carefree and the indelible that forms the atmosphere of this transaction. It is in our innocence, or in the loss of it, that we are formed in ways that can be reexamined but not undone. This novel teaches us to reread our lives, to look again, and to understand what escaped us the first time.

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.

‘Me too,' Jacob 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.