Thecultured wanderer
DavidHerman celebrates the work of writer and critic Gabriel Josipovici, who will be 80 next week. AnneGarvey samples some literary poison
They kept asking me what English novelist I most admired and I kept saying, ‘Dostoyevsky’.” Gabriel Josipovici was talking about his Oxford University interview. “And they kept saying, ‘ English novelist, Mr Josipovici’, and I kept saying, ‘Dostoyevsky’, vaguely aware that something was profoundly wrong but unable, in the heat of the moment, to put my finger on it.”
The story perfectly captures the sense of Josipovici as an outsider, who has never quite belonged in England, where he has lived for more than 60 years.
“I was born on the last day on which my parents could have escaped from war-torn Europe,” Josipovici says, referring to his birthday — October 8, 1940. He spent his early childhood in hiding in wartime France. Then, in 1945, he and his mother, Sacha Rabinovitch, returned to her native Egypt. In 1956, they moved again, this time to England, arriving a few weeks before the Suez crisis.
Despite all this uprooting, he once wrote, “I do not feel myself an exile, for an exile has a country to which he longs to return (but then neither did Abraham consider himself an exile). My home is not France, where I was born, nor Egypt, where I spent my childhood, nor England, where I have lived for three-quarters of my life.”
This might explain why he is drawn, both in his fiction and criticism, to outsiders and people without roots or a home. The reference to Abraham is telling. Josipovici started to learn biblical Hebrew in the 1970s and, ever since, the Jewish Bible has been an increasingly important part of his work, especially, it seems, since his The Book of God (1988).
“The Jewishness I cherish,” he once said, “is the one that stresses wandering as the human condition…”
Perhaps the nearest he came to a home was Sussex, where he still lives, having taught at Sussex University for 35 years from 1963 to 1998.
The English department was full of kindred spirits. “They were wonderful years,” he recalls. “I was extraordinarily lucky.”
Gabriel Josipovici’s first book of criticism, The World and the Book (1971), ranged from Chaucer and Rabelais to Proust and Nabokov.
Early on, he was associated with the
great figures of Modernism: Picasso, Stockhausen and, above all, his beloved Kafka and Proust. But Josipovici’s writing was more personal than this might imply.
His criticism has always been centrally preoccupied with one image — that, whatever it is, which happens when the individual artist sits down to produce a work.
“Modernism,” he wrote in The Lessons of Modernism (1977) “is not only something that happened in Paris or Vienna in 1900; it is there, with its problems and possibilities, whenever and wherever an artist sits down to work.”
His later critical writing has been more wide-ranging. “I love the narratives of the Hebrew Bible and the narratives of the Border Ballads and of the Grimm tales,” he has said.
His brilliant, recent collections of essays — The Singer on the Shore and The Teller and the Tale — have ranged from old favourites like Borges, Kafka and Aharon Appelfeld to the Bible and the Hebrew Poetry of modern Spain. His fiction is just as prolific, and deeply original. He has written almost 20 novels and five books of short stories. Some, including the acclaimed novel, Contre-Jour (republished last year) and stories like Mobius the Stripper, The Bird Cage and a deeply moving story about Malvolio from Twelfth Night are, in my view, among the best fiction written since the war. The prose is clear, spare and simple. The novels are always short, the narrative voice distinctive. There is little description or psychologising; plots matter less than a voice.
In a lecture that Gabriel Josipovici gave 20 years ago, he said that, as a young writer, he “felt crushed by the weight of the European tradition — all those massive novels like War and Peace and Middlemarch, standing there like mountains, utterly self-confident, without a chink in their armour.”
And then he discovered a very different tradition — T S Eliot, Proust and Kafka — and that changed the way he thought about literature and writing.
This also explains his remarkable originality as a writer, a starry and loyal name on the list of his publisher through the years, Carcanet, and one of the outstanding writers and critics of our time.
Some of his fiction ranks among the best written since the war