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Updated: February 16, 2020 1:36:40 pm
Author Howard Jacobson at the Jaipur Literature Festival. (Express Photo by Rohit Jain Paras)
“Must you ask?” says Howard Jacobson, leaning back in his chair with a sigh. He had been talking about Beryl Dusinberry, the nonagenarian protagonist of his last novel, Live A Little (2019), who came to him “fully formed” — a delightful dowager who is losing her memory but not her wit and who finds love in the 91-year-old Jewish Shimi Carmelli. It’s a tender look at what it is to live through history and to discover affection anew, with a lifetime behind oneself and unusual in the fact that, for the first time, a woman is the pivot in a Jacobson novel.
What brought him to Beryl, I ask then, was it his own advancing years? Sitting in the lawns of Jaipur’s Rambagh Palace, in the benign January sun, the 77-year-old is quiet for a moment. “Age gets some of the rage of eroticism out of the way but as a writer, too, I have never really been curious about physical love. I am much more interested in how things shift. What does love mean when you are dealing with the humiliation of incontinence and loss of memory when you have lived through war and the Holocaust? This is a novel of age. I am interested in it because I am heading there. I was always conscious of not being young. My first novel (Coming From Behind, 1983) came out when I was 40, whereas if you are Martin Amis, your first novel comes out when you are 24. I have been permanently middle-aged. I get along with older people. I don’t go to rock concerts or football, don’t drive fast cars, I have never had a motorbike. I don’t have any of the vigour of youth. But I think (old) age has come on me quite suddenly and the funny thing is, I don’t feel old,” he says.
For nearly two decades, as a columnist for The Independent, Jacobson reflected upon contemporary politics and its impact on culture. (Express Photo by Rohit Jain Paras)
It’s the only time that the British writer appears somewhat pensive. At other times, he summons laughter with a flourish, his craggy face lighting up when a punchline hits home. In session after session at the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival, the Booker Prize winner (for The Finkler Question, Bloomsbury, 2010) holds his audience in thrall, riffing on potential ideas for future novels and regaling them with stories from his prodigious writing career, that has seen the publication of 16 novels and five volumes of best-selling non-fiction. A Jacobson novel is an immersion in the British Jewish experience, richly served by his unerring eye for satire and a delectable sense of whimsy. It has won him two Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prizes for comic writing (for The Mighty Walzer, 1999, and Zoo Time, 2013) and several Booker nominations and comparisons with the American writer Philip Roth in the way both locate themselves in their work.
Howard Jacobson on his new novel, Jaipur and his struggle to write
“The one thing I am used to, that I am absolutely certain of is that I can make people laugh. I’m not conventionally Jewish. I grew up in Manchester, and, at home we never really discussed identity. We were British and Jewish and it appeared to me to be a fine position. But the idea of the Jew as fool, told by the Jew himself, I loved doing that. Jewish jokes are a strategy. What a Jew is essentially saying is that you come at us with your weapons and all we have is our intelligence. One of the things we do with our intelligence is that we beat you at beating us. So we can be funnier about us, ruder about us, crueller about us, and we can make you laugh,” he says.
For the longest time, he’s been the funny guy in the room, probing fault lines in communities and relationships with drollery. The Finkler Question, for instance, is the story of three friends, two of them Jewish and a third obsessed with the idea of being Jewish. Kalooki Nights (2006) is a darkly comedic reflection on adolescence and what it means to be Jewish in 1950s Britain. With J (Bloomsbury, 2014), shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Jacobson moved towards a darker, more contemporary theme — the othering by a majoritarian group of a community it is uncomfortable with and a negation of horrors past. He meant the tale to be cautionary, he says, but also descriptive of something real about the times we are living in. “The recrudescence of fascism in various forms across the world, we have to face that. Specifically, anti-Semitism is a cruel one because we saw that taken to a length that few bigotries are taken to. The idea that the Jew is devilish, is a money-grabber, a passer-on of illnesses and diseases — which is what the Nazis made the German people believe — reached its apotheosis in the Holocaust. After that, you would have thought, okay, that’s all been shown, the terrorism of that, the consequences of it, hopefully, people will leave that one well alone, and to see it not being left alone made me write J. If it can’t go away after Auschwitz, nothing will,”
he says.
Jacobson had won the Booker for his novel, The Finkler Question.
For nearly two decades, as a columnist for The Independent, Jacobson reflected upon contemporary politics and its impact on culture. He’s watched with distaste the popularity of British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who has been accused of anti-Semitism. “Corbyn has cultivated an image of an ordinary guy — ‘one of the people’ as they say — and he thrives on people’s inability to not think for themselves. The case of Corbyn is very strange because you cannot see what the source of his charisma is. But in the anti-charisma of Corbyn is his charisma, in the nothingness of Corbyn, people wrote their own message. I don’t understand why anybody would even admire a better version of Corbyn but people liked and still like him. And they are now saying that there was nothing wrong with Corbyn, it was Brexit did it,” he says.
The three-year Brexit crisis, he says, has served to confirm some of his worst fears about democracy. “What I hated was the manner in which Brexit was sold by people who manifestly told lies, who had their own interests. The whole point of democracy is that it protects you against autocracies — the autocracy of the dictator, the autocracy of the wealthy — but the catch is that one of the cruellest autocracies of all is the autocracy of the people and democracy can’t save you from the people. And never have we been in more danger from the people than we are now because the people have been empowered by social media. They don’t like authority figures, and by that, I don’t mean politicians but experts who know what they are talking about. They read unauthored pieces, half of which is gossip, give in to mass hysteria, disown facts and call it fake news because they don’t want to think for themselves. It’s the death of the imagination and it’s a terrifying thing,” he says.
Live A Little is Jacobson’s latest novel.
In 2017, soon after Donald Trump was elected as President of the United States, Jacobson wrote a short Swiftian satire called Pussy. He had been horrified, he says, by Trump’s starburst and the derision for knowledge that he espoused. “Donald Trump is a halfwit, a fool of a man. But he is up for another election and might very well win it. When I wrote that book, it came from a place of utter exasperation and a lot of the book is asking the question, what is it that people do when they are in the mass, when they are led by emotions and not by reason,” he says.
It’s not a book he’d write again, he says. Instead, he’s working on rescuing himself from his novels for the memoir that he is writing. “I have always said I can’t write one because although my novels are novels, I have put myself in them a lot. But I thought the reverse might be an exciting exercise. So, it’s a memoir that feels like a novel. I have written about my father endlessly and in a funny way and I have just started to feel guilty about whether I have made him too light. It came from a place of love and love is its own respect but I wanted to grapple with the other thing, too. And I want to pay a tribute to my mother. She left school when she was 14 because they had no money but she was a reader and she read to me. She gave me the taste for literature, the rhythm of words in my mind,” he says.
It was because of her that his childhood was steeped in Jane Austen, George Eliot and others, and why, unlike Roth, he’s not looked at the other sex as an adversary. “I admire Philip Roth deeply but as is the case in many of his novels, you feel like you are in a divorce court and Roth, the novelist, is addressing the jury, ‘Look how badly I have been treated, look what she has done to me.’ I kind of like the idea of a man being no match for a woman. I have been around strong women — my mother, the women I married. When I went to Australia in 1965, I met some very sarcastic women there. Germaine Greer was one of them. She left Sydney University to come to Cambridge and I left Cambridge to go to the post she’d vacated. We met briefly in Cambridge before I went and I thought I’d never seen such an extraordinary woman. She was astonishingly beautiful, like a wild bird, rude, coarse and witty. And, of course, she took Cambridge by storm. Then I went to Australia and thought ‘My god, there are so many like her!’ ”
When he was writing Beryl, it was this insouciance that found its way into the character and he knew she was going to be special. Would he do it again? “I have always said I could be a male Jane Austen, that I need not know how to write about women. But once I had Beryl and as she began speaking to Shimi, I think my reserve broke a bit. My wife wants me to write a sequel and I say, what more can happen? She says, ‘Well, they can just go on talking’ and perhaps, they will,” he says.
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