The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘I do think you can say anything you like’
Novelist Howard Jacobson on publishing’s sensitivity crisis – and why Bernard Manning made him laugh
Howard Jacobson is 79, though he looks, and has always looked, 50. He has a healthy beard. He lives in a lovely Soho flat with his third wife, Jenny, surrounded by books and memories that he has decided, finally, to put to paper. He shows me a copy of the new memoir, Mother’s Boy, and tells me to look at the endorsements on the back: Simon Schama; David Baddiel; Steven Berkoff.
“Look who else is there.”
“Jimmy Carr!” The Jimmy Carr, who nearly got cancelled for a gag about the Holocaust?
“He is very clever, you know,” says Jacobson. “Well educated, a smart reader.”
And this interview, I think, could get someone in trouble.
Mother’s Boy is the story of a writer becoming a novelist, a process which took Jacobson half a lifetime: he was born in 1942; his first novel, Coming from Behind, was published in 1983. He grew up in Manchester, in a working-class Jewish family just one generation from having escaped oppression in eastern Europe. His father served in the
British Army; Howard made it to Cambridge, to pursue a passion for English literature. The Jacobsons were absolutely part of England, yet there was always a bit of the young intellectual waiting for the crowd to turn on him; for the moment he might have to “get up and go”.
Even today, he sits on the edge of his seat: “Formally dressed, rarely in casual clothes, because you’ve got to have the clothes for flight.”
He shows me his original introduction for the book, set on election day 2019, recalling how he looked out the window and tried to guess whether the rain was good or bad, if the dry weather predicted for the afternoon would cancel out “whatever good the wet might do us”. Who is us? “Jews.” He was frightened by Jeremy Corbyn and knew it would be “uncomfortable” if he won.
When the results came in at the New Statesman election night party “there were cheers”. Jacobson voted Tory. “You had to.”
He dropped the Corbyn angle from Mother’s Boy because he was persuaded that there was no point nailing his memoir “to the coat-tails of someone who might be” – he clicks his fingers – “forgotten in five minutes”. Today, he rather likes Keir Starmer, though the Labour leader “needs more oomph”, and Jacobson says he is “still making up my mind if I can bear his deputy. She’s a bit Northern for me,” by which I think he means that Angela Rayner reminds him of what he left behind.
In 1965 he sailed to Australia with his first wife, Barbara, to teach English literature. All the self-consciousness he’d felt at Cambridge, being Jewish, being proletarian, slipped away. “It didn’t bother me [any more] and it didn’t bother them. It was a country of all sorts; because it was an immigrant country, I was one more immigrant.”
The sun and fun went to his head. He had an affair. So, no, Mother’s Boy isn’t about Corbyn’s sins – it’s a confession of his own.
“I just decided that I had been a s---. I’d been a bad husband. The things you don’t do, I had done. I was out of control.”
He describes walking out on his wife and their son “when he was three or four – and that was the best thing to do for all parties, but still it’s a thing you worry about having done”. Today, he is reconciled with them both.
What most bothered him was his alienation from Wilbur Sanders, a friend with whom he had co-written his first book, on Shakespeare. After the end of Jacobson’s second marriage, another disaster, he tried to get back in touch – “and Wilbur died... He went on a walking holiday on his own and fell off a cliff... What made it terribly upsetting was I got a
letter from his wife, saying: ‘Don’t come to the funeral.’” Howard tried writing to her but got no response.
Connecting the failed marriages and the lost friendships was Jacobson’s determination to find a voice and put it to paper, and writers, in my experience, tend to exhaust situations and people and then move on to the next chapter.
The pain caused by Jacobson was, some might say, worth it, because Coming from Behind marked the beginning of a dazzling career that led, in 2010, to the Booker Prize for The Finkler Question, a novel so funny that it almost absolves the sins of anyone who can write that well.
The question is, is Britain in 2022 in a generous mood? Jacobson was warned by his publisher that Mother’s Boy might make him seem “not very likeable”.
No book he has ever written, he says, “has had so many versions... It was as if people [in publishing] were watching out for me, telling me to be careful in a way I’ve not been told to be careful about writing novels.”
He could sense with his last book, Live a Little (2019), that something was in the air. The American publisher complained that his lead character, a woman, called one of her carers “that black one”. “It’s the sort of thing this woman would say,” Jacobson protested, but “I thought: ‘I don’t care, I’ll have a quiet life,’” and cut it. When the publisher next objected to the character calling someone a “Jew boy”, he said: “Look, I am entitled to know whether or not that’s offensive. If I’ve put it in, it means it’s not offensive, so that stayed.”
Jacobson, who writes about sex and, thus, the female body from a man’s point-of-view, has been accused of misogyny. “I’ve lost the energy for the battle,” he shrugs. “It’s not a word that should be used of writers... It’s not a critical term. As anti-semitism is not a critical term... Dickens wrote novels that you could say are anti-semitic – so what have you said? And a male writer is not obliged to like women.”
A common mistake, he says, is to
confuse art for the statement of a political view, as if every character speaks for the author. For Jacobson, “the worst crime” is “bad writing, much lower down the list is whether or not you said something you’re not supposed to say at the moment”.
Which brings us back to Jimmy Carr, and his gag about the gypsies who died in the Holocaust. Jacobson is exasperated. “Jimmy Carr did not make a remark about gypsies… Jimmy Carr made a joke. You might loathe the joke... but it wasn’t a remark, it belonged to another statement. A joke is like a little novel, a joke has got characters in it, there is always a narrator and that narrator might be a false narrator… That doesn’t mean you can say anything you like, though actually I do think you can say anything you like.”
Jacobson used to travel to Manchester with a friend to watch Bernard Manning perform: Manning would welcome them into the club – “two nice Jewish boys’’ – give them a good table, then hit them with an avalanche of Jewish jokes, “and they were good jokes’’ (one should note that Manning himself was part-Jewish). He’s been to a few Roy Chubby Brown nights, too, where the audience is overwhelmingly “workingclass, mainly women on hen nights, and they find the stuff that’s meant to be rude about women astonishingly funny... because it’s a relief to be laughing at their bodies, at the way their bodies malfunction.”
He puts on a Chubby voice, deep and dirty: “‘I’m not a gynaecologist but I’ll have a fookin’ good look’... They laugh for an hour, and so did I.”
The “male gaze”, he says, “is a horrible concept... It’s anti-life and it’s anti-art” – though he is doing his best to turn it into art by writing a new novel about a boy grappling with love, with what he can look at, or think or say.
Contemporary fiction is beset by politics, clearly – but also by social media, which eliminates memory. People used to tell him that as a novelist, he would live on after death, that “you’ll be remembered. It’s hard to feel that now as a writer, that there’s any kind of permanence.” The legacy of English culture, the thing that excited him to push the boundaries of his life and talent, is itself in doubt.
“When I read that some university was offering trigger warnings to its first-year students about a Harry Potter novel they were reading,” he thought, “what’s more to be frightened of? That a Harry Potter novel needs a trigger warning or that first-year students are reading Harry Potter?”
‘Dickens wrote novels that you could say are anti-semitic. So what? It’s not a critical term’