There’s a recurring phrase in Howard Jacobson’s first novel, Coming from Behind, which describes the protagonist Sefton Goldberg, an English lecturer at Wrottesley Polytechnic in the West Midlands. “Being Jewish,” it goes. As in, “being Jewish, he didn’t know that…”; or, “being Jewish, he couldn’t understand how…” Each repetition underscores Sefton’s absurdist failures—failures so absurdist they could almost be empowering.
Though rooted in autobiography—he was at the time teaching English at Wolverhampton Polytechnic—Jacobson’s own literary career has proven to be altogether more illustrious than his alter-ego’s. When it was published in 1983, Coming from Behind was likened to Evelyn Waugh’s works and prizes and plaudits have come Jacobson’s way ever since, including the Booker in 2010 for The Finkler Question. Yet the same two words that preface Goldberg’s apparent inadequacies—“being Jewish…”—have come to define his creator, too. In a career spanning almost four decades, he has become the UK’s most widely recognised Jewish writer, roaming further afield as a broadcaster, but as an author staying close to his working-class, Manchester Jewish roots. He’s hilarious, acute, poignant, serious—but above all Jewish. As, indeed, are his protagonists—or, in the case of Julian Treslove, the radio producer at the centre of The Finkler Question, ardently wish they were.
Strange to think, then, that Jacobson’s earliest novelistic imaginings centred on a character with the unmistakeably goyish moniker Hugh St John Vereker. Jacobson shares this revelation in his new memoir Mother’s Boy, an instantly engaging and sublimely intelligent volume whose approachability might mislead the uninitiated. For this, like his best work, is a book of enlightening complication that’s positively Talmudic in its discursiveness. Take Hugh St John Vereker. Jacobson, though he was a precocious boy scribbler, didn’t actually write him into being as a 14-year-old. Instead, the squib in which Vereker debuts was composed later in life as a pastiche of his own juvenile literary ambitions.
Jacobson’s journey to becoming a published author is vitally bound up with his journey to understanding his Jewish inheritance. His was not an observant home. Yes, there was a bar mitzvah which revealed to a shy, long-faced boy that he liked public speaking and enjoyed making people laugh. There were bagels smeared with smetana and kes from the legendary Titanics deli in Manchester. And there were vestiges—“motes” of piety or “floaters of faith”—in the air at his grandparents’ home. But when he saw his aunts run into the street after the hearse bearing his grandmother, their un-English outpourings appalled him. “The Jew-thing had me by the throat,” he writes.
Despite casual prejudice at his grammar school and a father who once fought Oswald Mosley in the street—or at least his horse, a typically Jacobsonian twist—1950s Manchester was a relatively benign time and place to be Jewish. (Intriguingly, he dates “the slow beginning of a backlash” to Lord Russell’s 1954 work, The Scourge of the Swastika, which brought the horrors of the Holocaust to a wide audience.) Nevertheless, there was a deeply assimilationist thrust to Anglo-Jewry at the time—and it propelled Jacobson through grammar school all the way to Downing College, Cambridge. There he was made to feel out of place—one tutor forever called him by generic surnames. But he also became—and remains—an ardent acolyte of FR Leavis, the renowned literary critic who taught at the college. As Jacobson writes of the famous and now unfashionably definitive opening sentence of Leavis’s The Great Tradition—“The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad”—“there was nothing insular about the idea of ‘English’ if you came from a shtetl in Lithuania.”
There was only one problem: “the further from being a Jew I was, the further I was, too, from being a writer,” he notes. And he was to get further away still. Married too young, he left for an academic job in Australia, where he discovered another self: flamboyant, drunk, faithless. Back in England, teaching at Cambridge and already a father, he started a handbag stall to make ends meet before leaving his wife and returning to Oz. Eventually, he was dividing his time between his Wolverhampton teaching gig and Boscastle in Cornwall, where wife number two ran an Australian-themed café. “Can you die of not writing a novel? I thought I might,” he recalls of those years. Long years, because Coming from Behind wasn’t published until he was in his early forties.
While Jacobson may be “feeble of foot and rheumatic of shoulder,” he’s still dazzlingly fleet of thought
One of the joys of this memoir is his boxer-like inquisitiveness into the stories he finds himself telling again and again—and the spin he puts on them. Often the spin is comedic. As a child, noticing that his mother never sat down to eat with the family, he remembers thinking he’ll write about it one day. “I will make it funny. But will I know how to make it serious?”
The farcical tone is set by an early anecdote, in which he accosts a man in Cambridge he presumes to be Leavis, straining to impress him with his current reading (appropriately enough it’s the mock-heroic The Dunciad). Except that the blank-looking chap would turn out to be Tony, the college porter. Despite Jacobson’s crippling feelings of social exclusion, his time at the university wasn’t, he later concedes, all so dismal. So why does he tell it that way? “It can only be that writing has been no sort of therapy for me,” he decides. “In my own eyes I am still a wretch waiting to be saved. But whether that’s self-punishing or self-delighting, I am back saying I don’t know.” Self-punishing or self-delighting—it’s a fine, sometimes indistinguishable, line. But Jacobson’s acute self-awareness lifts this memoir above the unfiltered outpourings of what he calls our “mawkish” era.
He reaches his late thirties and still no novel has come. Not for Jacobson the fabled drawers stuffed with unsold short stories: for the first two decades of his adult life, he seems to have written little more than some academic works, lectures and a pamphlet on Leavis. And yet, he “thought novel, breathed novel, saw and heard the world, as I saw and heard myself, as novel.”
Literature is how he makes sense of life. Tolstoy’s character Oblonsky helps him understand his surly but “promiscuously sociable” grandfather. When, as a young academic in Sydney, he has an affair with a student, he names her Anna Sergeyevna, after Chekhov’s story “The Lady with the Dog.” A line from Austen’s Persuasion explains his second marriage: “He had nothing to do, and she had hardly anybody to love.”
If there isn’t a real literary reference to be found, he makes one up. “The novel my mother was forever writing in her head, and mine, was Beware of Hope” (in homage to Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity). He goes on to relate an anecdote about receiving the telegram informing him he’d got into Cambridge. His mother takes the envelope to examine the address. “Just want to be certain it’s for you.”
Anita more than deserves her place in the book’s title. His father, a market trader and amateur magician, “thought with his hands”—and occasionally used them to discipline his young son. But his mother’s love of 19th-century poetry filled Jacobson’s head with “word music” he hears to this day. “It wouldn’t be fanciful—and no matter if it were—to say these hours of reading with my mother determined the very orchestration of my interior life.”
That “no matter if it were” is typical of Jacobson. “Am I to be trusted in this?” he wonders elsewhere. As is the way with writers, he’s extensively mined his boyhood in his fiction to the extent that he finds it hard to parse fact from fable. Yet still the raw material shimmers on these pages. He discovers silk blouses in an elderly relative’s cupboard, boxed and tissue-wrapped. (“There are wasted lives and there are waiting lives. The waiting life is crueller,” he notes.) And he thanks his grandmother for every Yiddishism that leaps unbidden to his mind, gifting him with the means of expressing “an exuberance or a fatalism, a sense of the terrors or superabundance of life.”
Among the themes running through the book is the oldest hatred: antisemitism. (He’s searingly astute when it comes to the discomfort that he—and more of us besides—feel for the word: “to this day I feel a country-cousin when I say it. Antisemitism—its utterance turns me into the very Jew antisemites deride.”) Another is “the oldest story,” sexism, and the unrealised potential of so many women in his family, including his mother. She wasn’t just “a natural and vivacious writer,” as he learned from the diaries he inherited after her death, but she also dreamed of owning a large writing bureau positioned by a window. “I could weep for her,” he says.
When Jacobson finally sat down to write it was not at a bureau by a window, but a card table shoved up against a wall. After amassing 190 pages, he handed them to his wife. “It starts here,” she told him, pointing to page 189. Why there? That was the moment the novel found its soul or, in Yiddish, neshome. He was, he suddenly realised, writing a Jewish novel. “And it was only because it was a Jewish novel that I was writing it at all,” he asserts. “No Jew—no novel.”
Why had he resisted for so long? As he notes, it never crossed his mind until then to look to Jewish writers as well as non-Jewish ones. “The quickest answer is that when it came to words, sentences, paragraphs, I didn’t feel different. Or, more accurately, didn’t know I felt different. How about: didn’t want to feel different?”
Jacobson has always been a wise writer and this memoir, written as he nears 80, is filled with the yearnings and regrets that literature names but only life can teach. While he may be “feeble of foot and rheumatic of shoulder,” he’s still dazzlingly fleet of thought. Even now, he’s ready to think again. “If the words ‘Being Jewish’ got me writing, writing them got me being Jewish,” he says. His journey has even led him to the Talmud, in which he finds much to admire. “I loved the labyrinthine reasoning… the idea of an inexhaustible text; the sense that conversation could never be concluded or controversy resolved.” Mother’s Boy feels like one long conversation—Jacobson with Jacobson with Jacobson. He barely pauses to draw breath—except perhaps to laugh or dab an eye.
By the end, he’s become the epitome of an elderly Jewish zayde, kvelling over his granddaughter. He even includes a portrait of him she sketched when she was six. She captures him perfectly, he notes. “Sigmund Freud watching Benny Hill.” It’s hard to disagree.
