Listen

Big deal.

Am I vexed? Am I perplexed?

You think this beard hasn’t seen some action? You think this beard hasn’t lived?

O.K.

I keep it close trimmed to avoid interference with voles, also to pose no hindrance to children and small birds. He liked opera, my father; bellowing tenors had that radio tuned whenever possible to short burly men opening mouths of such power as to move the ground from under your feet, a short burly man himself, the dad, the physique, in part, passed on to me, likewise his lack of musical tone, couldn’t sing a song to save the soul, me neither, and yet, and yet, notwithstanding that we also are not what we hear, this portrait would be lacking if the charcoal failed to flick in Diz and Bird and Bud and Miles and Monk and all the rest of them, the love oh my bebop ears.

My mother bought us piano lessons, my sister and me. Also the instrument, a secondhand German upright with a wooden frame. Which could also describe Dr Genzel the teacher, who sat beside me on the stool snoring fitfully while I thumped through The Jolly Farmer, ten weeks of. torture until finally my mother snapped and asked would l rather do ballet instead.

A good woman, the old lady. Best mother I ever had.

I am cleaner than my father, frankly a grub, whose clothes had to be wrested from him at week’s end and sped to the copper for a boil, he was uncomfortable with cleanliness. fidgety under starch, a disgrace really, a horror in hygiene, practically a plague, the entire week’s menu on open show across his ward­robe, shirt-front, trousers, jumper, tie, his jacket lapels, all the obvious places, but his shoes too, God knows how he managed it, even his socks, and of course I am not like that, nothing like that, a tyrannical grandfather and an obsessed mother mercifully intercepted the bloodlines in that regard, but I have escaped not entirely unscathed. For look, see me walking towards you, do I have about me that certain aspect of having dressed in the dark in frantic seconds in an hotel on furious fire? Oh clean, yes, certainly clean, sure, of course. well, more or less clean, anyway a palpable improvement on dear dubious dad, but is there not something of my father’s gorgeous slovenliness, his grand mismatching of parts? The shirt screams against the jumper, the tie is outrageous, the trousers a positively suicidal clash.

Wonderful, wonderful!

Dig that style!

But to literary matters.

He was a reader, my father, of westerns, only of westerns. loved those westerns, a fresh two every Saturday afternoon grabbed from the lending library round the corner, the covers ablaze with heroic men in flapping chaps blasting their six-shooters at one another or into the air over stampeding herds, my own tastes culturally not all that far removed, Nabokov, Beckett, Bellow, bookshelves crammed with all the right trash, Borges, Barthelme, Edmund Wilson (the whisky drinker), Hemingway (the shooter), a genius and a poet each and every one, as of course every writer is, whether galloping after a stagecoach hurtling to the cliff with a crinolined woman wailing inside or dipping his sponge finger into his cocoa to summon up the gentle past, my father’s reading different from my own only in that he did his in the bath – how he used to grab at my books to take them to the tub! – while I prefer my literature basically dry.

I smoked Camels for twenty years and then quit cold and went nuts – a vital part of the portrait – and now it’s Ramon Allones and Partagas and Bolivar and Romeo y Julieta and Dunhill and Monte Cristo, box after box in their various hand-rolled sizes from full corona on down, and in between times sometimes a pipe, though often more chewed than actually a full smoulder, this inherited not from my father, who tried a cigarette once a year but could never master the difference between blow and suck – I can still see the lovely purple he made of his cheeks – no, the grandfather is the responsible party here, that stylish way he sat reading his newspapers always with a ciga­rette in a long black holder, an absolute prince of smoking, a king-maker of clouds.

So.

Some details.

I’m not all that mad for dancing. Nor for scuba-diving, for that honest matter.

Hang-gliding you can exclude from my life portrait entirely.

I hold that good legs on a woman can excuse her for a good deal, but they’re not the whole story.

I hold the converse to be similarly true.

As for schooling, credentials, where born and how, prizes won arid honours bought, life’s many travels and travails, well, yes, there should of course be a listing, not perhaps so many as to glaze the eyes of the beholder; but no mere insignificant few either, the odd translation, say, of this into Gaelic, the odd inclusion of that; for instance, into an anthology for the maimed, that kind of thing, ballast, bulk, to be added or subtracted, as required. My dad had a brother who wrote and sent us his books, little red books they were, each year another one, the line growing like mercury in a thermometer along the shelf in the bookcase in the passage at home, and we used to stand there and look at them, dad and me, and my dad didn’t read them because they weren’t westerns full of stagecoaches and guns and I didn’t read them because they were in Hebrew which I couldn’t and still can’t read, but I want that in the portrait too, standing there in the passage looking at all that unknown erudition, me and my dad.