The Goldberg Variations

The Goldberg Variations

MARK GLANVILLE

COPYRIGHT

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by Flamingo 2004

Previously published in Great Britain in hardback by Flamingo 2003

Copyright © Mark Glanville 2003

Mark Glanville asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780007118427

Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2013 ISBN 9780007383306

Version: 2016-03-17

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PRAISE

‘Like C4’s ‘Faking It’ makeovers, The Goldberg Variations opposes two purposes seemingly too different for one person to undertake successfully. Glanville’s ongoing battle between football and music fascinates. One facilitates the other – his first trip to OldTrafford was a reward for passing Grade 5 clarinet. One impinges on the other – concerned about protecting his opera voice, Glanville lowers it an octave on the terraces. The emerging dialectic evolves alongside traditional rites-of-passage (first solo trip abroad, first love, etc) and against a backdrop of troubled sexuality – teenage frustrations kindled by his sisters and an inability to climax with girlfriends. Glanville’s openness is seductive and his memoir is disarming.’

Time Out

‘A richly enjoyable and moving memoir.’

Tribune

‘A chilling account of life on the terraces and of the loyalty it engenders. It is also a fascinating description of the long process of having your voice professionally trained for the opera stage.’

Irish Examiner

‘A readable, funny and intelligent story of a man’s struggle to find himself among a confusion of different lives.’

Cork Evening Echo

DEDICATION

For Joshua and Arabella

Were the wind to blow even slightly against them My eyes would refuse to close HITTAAN BIN AL-MU’ALLAA

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

ARIA

VARIATION ONE: The Football Hooligan

VARIATION TWO: The Oxford Classicist

VARIATION THREE: The Opera Singer

VARIATION FOUR: The Jew

ARIA DA CAPO: The Vedl

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

I must own that I could have assured any questioner that Combray did include other scenes and did exist at other hours than these. But since the facts which I should then have recalled would have been prompted by voluntary memory, the memory of the intellect, and since the pictures which that kind of memory shows us preserve nothing of the past itself, I should never have had any wish to ponder over this residue of Combray.

Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust

ARIA

What makes me myself rather than anyone else is the very fact that I am poised between two countries, two or three languages and several cultural traditions. It is preciscly this that defines my identity.

Les Identites Meurtrieres, Amin Maalouf

Happy the man who can celebrate his diversity. I wonder how long, if at all, it took the author of the above to reconcile the disparate elements of his own personality, to recognise that they could live in harmony, and that his identity was a compound of them. For a large part of my own life the contradictory elements of my identity have been at war, and have fragmented rather than fused me. Despairing of any reconciliation, I’ve often wished or plotted for the destruction of all but one of them (which depended on my changing mood), so that I and it might live in peace thereafter. What follows is an account of that campaign.

‘So Abey goes into a mensvear shop …’

Sometimes we’d go into ourselves, his captive audience perpetually on hand to applaud a nightly stand-up that ran until we’d all left home.

‘I vont to buy a suit!’

With a shift of the jaw his face would fall comfortably into a parody of a ghetto Jew’s cheek-straining smile.

‘I think I can help you, sir,’ the shop assistant would reply with the bright, clipped elocution of the forties public-school-boy Dad had been.

There were certain jokes that bore umpteen retellings. Mum was usually the first to laugh, with a hearty whoop to convince you she’d never heard it before, then we’d come in, each a different note on the xylophone counterpointing the melody of his speech.

‘Here we are. If you don’t mind … slipping it on … that’s right …’

By now he’d be treading the amtico tiles that formed his stage, miming the appropriate movements of his dramatis personae.

‘But look! It’s coming up here,’ he’d cry as the Jew, hunching his right shoulder in a gesture ludicrous enough to silence the percussion of our dining.

‘Er, do excuse me, sir, but if you don’t mind my saying, that’s because you’re not standing properly. Now if you were to … that’s it. Splendid!’

‘But now it’s coming out here!’

The sight of Dad’s head between his shoulders, jacket hunched, a Jewish tortoise, snapped our last resistance and earned him the laughter he yearned for. At such times we were a team, playing catch with smiles round the table, listening for each other’s laughter with an unspoken sense of belonging engendered by the joke and its teller.

‘Sir, you’re still not standing properly. Now if you … That’s it … Excellent!’

‘Vunderful! A perfect fit!’

Bending his doppelgänger double, he’d exit his imaginary shop as a Yiddisher Quasimodo.

‘So he’s walking down the street like this, when he bumps into his old friend Morrie.

“‘Keneine hora! Abey, vot happened to you?”’

We didn’t know what the Yiddish meant, but it was a meal in itself. You could bite into the boiled chicken and smell the pickled cucumber.

“‘I’ve just been to see my tailor.”’

By now he’d be really milking it, Abey growing ever more grotesque as Dad hobbled up and down the kitchen.

“To see your tailor. I should go to see your tailor. Vot a vunderful tailor he must be! Vy, if he can fit a cripple like you he can fit anyvun!’”

And as Abey, Morrie, the tailor and the narrator left the stage, five suns formed a spotlight he could bask in, Dad’s ‘Thank you, thank you,’ reflecting our joy back at us with a nod and a bow.

Family life was played out around a circular kitchen table. The court of King Brian and his fair queen Pamela was a boisterous one at which each bite of food gained was a soundbite lost. We’d peck away incessantly at meat and conversation, all fighting to be heard and fed, picking up the debris left behind in the wake of Dad’s voracious appetite and machine-gun verbal barrage. He had a favourite image of someone eating as if Cossacks were about to swoop down and steal all his food; and speaking as if they were going to cut out the tongue that ate it, he might have added. We children developed habits of our own to survive, one of which was speed-eating. Liz, twin to Toby, extended this to speech, cramming extraordinary quantities of words into the millisecond gaps that occurred when Dad caught his breath or swallowed a chicken thigh, while I’d try speaking louder in the hope of engaging at least one other person in conversation, but woe betide any dialogue that threatened to drown the monologue.

‘Keep it down to a dull roar could you! Heard a good one the other day. Why do they have dustbins at Polish weddings? To keep the flies off the bride.’

‘Your Dad’s being very naughty.’

‘Fucking Poles!’

‘Brian!’

‘Sorry, mutteler, those damned Poles,’ he’d correct himself in pre-war officer tones before returning to those of the public school that he always joked had cost his parents a fortune.

‘Worse than the Germans. They couldn’t wait to get at us.’

‘Brian, can we stop this?’

‘Three million killed in Poland alone,’ he’d sigh, energy draining from his face. ‘And they let so many of them over here along with those bloody Ukros.’

It was ironic that, wracked daily with the torments of the Holocaust, we should be living two doors away from the Ukrainian Cultural Institute of Great Britain, which was founded and frequented by men who were reputed to be former members of the Waffen SS.

‘Brian, you’re so filled with hatred. You have to learn to forgive. At least you didn’t lose anyone. Never a week goes by when I don’t think of poor Theo. One has to carry on. I don’t understand why you’re like this.’

He’d cast me an ally’s wink. This was a scene that played at least once a month.

Jokes blessed us. They bottled an essence of something that belonged to children denied the ordinary trappings of identity portrayed on the labels of religion and suits. After all, we didn’t even own our name. Around 1880 my Lithuanian great-grandfather, a quack dentist, arrived in Ireland. B the turn of the century his sons were all qualified and practising in Dublin. After moving to London and marrying an East End Jewish girl, my grandfather opened a telephone directory at random and out popped the Anglo-house of Glanville whose scions would doubtless have had e time for him and his kind as they passed through the Rhineland en route for Jerusalem. Thus poor Goldberg, having survived a thousand years of persecution, assumed the name of one of his tormentors. After Dad was sent to where he could acquire the mannerisms to complement the new name, the deception became complete.

Mum hadn’t heard such jokes before she met Dad. Her father had been brought up in Prussian Breslau, now Polish Wroclaw, one of those middle-European cities of uncertain identity where Jews flourished, in which people weaned on wienerschnitzel and sauerkraut would have winced at the odour of lokshen soup, even if they might have eaten the carrot on the head of the gefilte fish. Deluded German Jews, Yekkes, revelling in the fruits of an emancipation not enjoyed by their kindred to the east, began calling their children Siegfried, after the hero of Wagner’s myth of Teutonic superiority, oblivious to the fact that it was his enemy Alberich, the ugly, covetous dwarf whom the composer envisaged as the prototype Jew. Meanwhile in their synagogues the plangent wail of the cantor was drowned beneath the organ-accompanied congregational wash flowing in from the church across the road.

There was nothing obviously Jewish about Mum. Her delicate, Reform nose captured the more refined scents that wafted past Dad’s Orthodox schnoz, and she laughed in hearty major keys. Another Morrie, who worked in another menswear shop, this one up the road from us in Notting Hill Gate, once described her to a colleague as ‘the tall woman with the jovial manner’, and it was a description Dad never let her forget. It was how she often seemed, but though she laughed in jolly, perfect intervals, it was really in response to the vibrations of a plaintive instrument, one she and Dad both owned, and which we, their children, had inherited. It was hard to imagine her as anything other than English, and impossible to believe that she, who always sounded so aristocratic, should have arrived in England barely able to speak the language. Despite her tolerant, forgiving approach to the Holocaust in which members of her family had been murdered, and the little attention she paid her Jewishness, it was she rather than Dad who never felt comfortable or at home in England. Dad’s Jewishness was far more belligerent, but, born and bred here, he’d assimilated, while Mum was a true foreigner, as German as she was Jewish. Like so many Yekkes she maintained a pride in German culture that overrode the ghastliness the country of its origin had visited on her people. My own feelings of alienation had more in common with Mum’s sense of non-belonging than with Dad’s soapbox stances.

After the fashion of ‘better’ Germans, Mum’s father had been sent to be educated in England. There he met his gentile wife, ‘the Ethiopian in the fuel supply’ as Dad called her, quoting WC Fields; according to Orthodox Jewish laws of matrilineal descent, she, our only non-Jewish grandparent, was the only one whose status mattered when it came to determining which side of the gentile/Jewish divide we fell. After waiting for him while he was interned on the Isle of Man during the First World War as an enemy alien, my grandmother followed him to Holland, the place of his repatriation, giving birth to my mother in Amsterdam whence they returned to Berlin. They remained there until 1933 when he was granted a visa allowing him to emigrate to England, his reward for the indignity of having to train up a young Nazi journalist on the Berliner Tageblatt. By the time she was twelve, Mum had already worn more suits than Dad would have to wear in his entire life.

While we washed up and dried the dishes, Dad would sing. Like an old-time music-hall performer, he could do a bit of everything.

‘Brian, are you just going to sit there all evening singing songs, or can we have some help?’

‘Sit here, just here all evening singing songs …’

There wasn’t a word, a phrase, a situation that didn’t remind him of some ghastly old number he’d immediately begin to croon.

‘Oh Brian, shut up!’

‘Shut up, that’s how I am without you. Shut up, alone and blue …’

Pavlov’s dog had learned many commands, but his howl was melodious.

‘Where on earth do you get all those dreadful old songs?’

‘I’m a philistinc, mutteler, but a lovable one.’

In the contrast between Mum’s polite, old-fashioned soprano and Dad’s earthy baritone, one heard the difference between the environments that had nurtured them. Snatches of lieder, the German songs Mum had heard as a girl, came to her intermittently, like her reminiscences of 1920s Berlin. Dad’s world was as clear as a photograph, but Mum’s was more like a jigsaw whose pieces she sometimes threw us but which we were never able to complete. There were parts of it we weren’t allowed to see, so the lieder became important, capturing something of the essence of Mum’s background, as songs and jokes did Dad’s. It was practically the only time we heard her use German, a language she claimed, somewhat strangely, she no longer spoke. Mum’s rendition of Schubert’s ‘Heidenroslein’ was my first acquaintance with a composer whose music was always able to take over for me at the point where words could no longer describe feelings. Schubert’s setting matches Goethe’s simple moral tale of a boy who sees, plucks, and is pricked by a beautiful rose, with an even simpler accompaniment, but the painful thorns which so often accompany beauty, wound a vocal line the cheerful accompaniment can never quite heal. It captured the essence of my mother.

For her the kitchen in the basement was less a domain than a prison where three meals had to be prepared each day and served on a table at which the places were always neatly laid – once the washing-up was finished it was usually time to start cooking again. She was never quite alone down there, even when we’d all gone to bed and Dad was off at a football match or upstairs watching Kojak. Something was incarcerated with her that would sometimes vent its frustration by hurling things around and occasionally make an unwelcome appearance; a small child she sometimes mistook for one of us, that only she had ever seen. In time Mum’s poltergeist became Dad’s scapegoat when no one else could be blamed for the not infrequent disappearance of his personal possessions, as if he subconsciously perceived it as the agent of her ill will.

‘There’s no other explanation. It’s been polted,’ he’d complain, though it struck me that the confusion of competing files, bags and newspapers in his study, where items as large as footballs could remain hidden for weeks, was a far more likely explanation. The poltergeist’s unhappy presence somehow reflected her own predicament, tied below stairs. It frightened a couple of au-pairs; one ran up the stairs screaming after a mirror was lifted off its hook and thrown to the floor with a crash. But though we were told it drew on our childish energy, we only saw the effects of its actions once, when a loaf of bread mysteriously rose from the work surface and hovered in mid-air before falling to the floor. Even Dad was upstaged that evening.

I was envious of Mum’s relationship with the poltergeist. It meant she was capable of inhabiting worlds denied the rest of us. I knew Mum had special gifts. She understood the healing qualities of music, when our imaginations had been over-stimulated by tales of entities such as the poltergeist in the basement. Once or twice it appeared in the hall, though that was as far as it went. Something was tying it down, preventing release into the realms she and it would have preferred to inhabit. I guess it came to remind her of that fact, as much as to sympathise with her sense of captivity. Confronted with such a reflection of her own dilemma, no wonder she felt afraid.

VARIATION ONE – The Football Hooligan

There’s no need to be afraid in the hall. You just have to pretend to be the ghost who might meet you there

(from The Ego and its Mechanisms of Defence by Anna Freud)

‘The main trouble is that he has never really accepted the arrival of the twin brother and sister, who were born when he was two years old. Their birth threw him into turmoil which manifested itself in many obvious and wretched ways. He became and has remained heavily dependent on and involved with me. There is a predilection for sadomasochistic situations and the beginnings of a pleasure in the idea of whipping. Also he shows a potential for pervert tendencies such as a compulsion to look at and to feel girls’ pants. While he tends to be bullying and aggressive at home he is on the whole placatory and nervous at school, and not very popular. In his actual work he is doing well, showing a special interest in History and English.’

Pamela Glanville to Dr Winnicott, letter, 1967.

Early history is the bastard child of personal recollection and other people’s anecdotes. Its objects, like the ghosts and monsters that flit in and out of view in old penny arcade machines, are glimpsed fleetingly. Some, including my own family, employ psychotherapists to bust these machines and compel their images to stay in view long enough to be assessed and analysed. I was sent off to track mine down at eight, when Mum wrote her letter to Dr Winnicott, but I can’t say I came away with a more focused picture of childhood than those who never had the benefits of therapy. To me childhood is still a lost play of which scant tangible evidence remains; fragments quoted by others, discovered on papyrus, inscribed on stone.

An early talkie is probably the oldest piece in my archive. Stripey-uniformed nanny Jeanette buckles my harness abruptly with jolts and bumps and hauls me behind her as she pushes a pram containing my new twin brother and sister towards Kensington Gardens.

‘You’re not walking properly!’

Whack! Her hand comes down across the side of my face like a whip: it stings. My check goes warm, almost comfortingly so. I still can’t keep up.

‘You’re not walking properly!’

Whack! This one catches me across the side of my head and makes me think about what I’m doing with my feet. Although I try to correct them, I find myself stumbling and tripping. Again and again her hand comes down. Much fainter is the reel of her shoving me against a stone step and smashing my tooth. The incident where she hurled me across the kitchen with such force that I hit the wall, landing half-conscious on the floor is someone else’s first-hand testimony. The cleaning lady witnessed it, but she didn’t want to cause any bother so she didn’t tell Mum. When I told Mum about the regular beatings, nanny Jeanette denied it vehemently and she believed her.

Five years later Mum felt compelled to write a letter that should have led to me being watched by Special Branch for the rest of my useful life.

… a compulsion to look at and to feel girls’ pants – another ghost 1 can freeze-frame. The moment the girls lined up to have their arithmetic books marked was always the highlight of an otherwise dull day. When they were all in position I’d crawl forward on my hands and knees, looking up their skirts for the statutory grey knickers. Or else, I’d deliberately misbehave and have myself thrown out of Scripture, partly because I wasn’t very good at drawing sheaths of corn, but chiefly because I knew the older girls would be doing gym then. I’d roam the corridors of the school, until I reached the hall through whose windows I could enjoy visions of pretty girls vaulting over horses and running about in their underwear.

After five, the images linger long enough for me to examine them without the crutch of hearsay. We had a succession of au pairs: Sylvia, Maria, Gerda, Brigitte, Ulrike. I remember Mum crying in the kitchen and holding her in the familiar squidgy embrace, feeling her tears roll down my cheeks and the shock of emotional reversal.

‘Your father’s always been the same, I was even warned about him, dancing off with other girls at parties.’

She’d tell me of the time she caught him ‘smooching with some silly girl’, and how she put on a Highland fling, grabbed a man at random and reeled past, bumping into him as hard as she could. She laughed at the memory and I guessed he’d seen the funny side too.

‘Always the same type. He won’t change. Once a womaniser …’

A word that acquired heroic status in my mind. Other boys could be engine-drivers or firemen, I wanted to be a womaniser.

I worshipped Dad. He was always around, as he worked at home. Page upon page emerged like the product of a twenty-six legged centipede dipped in ink. So long as I was quiet he’d allow me to sit with him, overlooked by a John Bratby painting in chunky, thumb-nail deep oil that years of indoor football eventually chipped away. Around the time I was able to translate its abstract shapes into men playing billiards, there’s enough primary evidence and eyewitness testimony for my history proper to begin.

Now that I’m six I’m as clever as clever And I wish I could be six now for ever and ever

sang Christopher Robin, and I believed him. All year I’d been reciting those lines as a mantra that promised to see off the ills of infancy. I’d crossed the first threshold and I could see rewards beyond it. Good things happened in autumn. Boots and hats and coats and gloves and scarves smothered me against the foggy foggy dew Dad often sang of. The trees painted their multi-coloured pictures and every footstep was an adventure in which you might crackle, crunch or slide. Each week Mum and I walked to the Kensington children’s library. Our jaunts recalled the golden days when I had no sisters, no brother Toby, a time before I was wrenched from Mum’s lap and hurled into the world of the nanny beyond. Our twenty-minute walk was the magic of the annual journey to Santa’s grotto repeated every week, and the books Mum and I chose, tales of witches, ghosts and other creatures living in fantastic realms, comforted me until the next visit. At night I kept my world alive even when the lights went out, continuing my reading with a torch under the sheets.