Dan Jacobson: Writer and academic with a funny, melancholic air
1929-2014
PROLIFIC novelist, essayist, short-story writer and literary critic Dan Jacobson, who has died in England at the age of 85, was born, raised and educated in South Africa.
The son of a Lithuanian mother and a Latvian father, both of whom had fled persecution in their homelands and, he never forgot, certain death at the hands of the Nazis if they had stayed on, he was born in Johannesburg on March 7 1929, but brought up in Kimberley, where his father had a butter factory.
Although he enjoyed a privileged childhood, he remembered Kimberley as a rather dull town with a big black hole, which reap- peared in various metaphorical guises in some of the 25 books he wrote and may or may not have influenced his generally melancholic outlook on life.
“The pit of the future is quite as deep as the pit of the past,” he wrote. “Through it, too, all things fall endlessly.”
He attended Kimberley Boys’ High School. After graduating with a degree in English from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1949, he spent a few months on a kibbutz in Israel and a year in London, where he taught at a Jewish boys’ school, lived in lodgings and felt very lonely.
But this drove him to start writing novels. Readers of his fiction were given a taste of this period in his 1973 novel, The Wonder Work- er. He was fired from his teaching post after informing his charges that, contrary to what the Bible might have told them, the universe was billions of years old.
Not that he had anything against the Bible; he thought it the best novel that had ever been written. In 1970, he wrote a fable based on it, The Rape of Tamar, which he thought might have won the newly established Booker prize if a favourable review of the book had not gone missing during a printers’ strike.
After a year in London, he returned to South Africa and did a number of desk jobs while writing short fiction, some of it published in the New Yorker magazine.
In 1954, he married Margaret Pye, a teacher from what was then Rhodesia, and returned with her to London where his first novel, The Trap, was published in 1955.
The following year he was offered a writer’s residency at Stanford university in the US.
Although hardly a year went by without him publishing another book, he needed cash prizes, bursaries, royalties and journalism to keep him solvent for 15 years or so until being invited in the mid1970s to become a lecturer at University College London, where he came down hard on jargon and bad writing.
A regular topic of conversation with his colleague, writer AS Byatt, was whether academic life did their fiction any good. She decided not, and left. He stayed on, becoming professor in 1986 and retiring as professor emeritus in 1994.
Jacobson always had a slightly deceptive air of melancholy about him. His colleagues found him quite cheerful and regarded him as the best raconteur and joketeller in the department.
He is survived by his wife, Margaret, and three children. — Chris Barron