Extract 1
Vanessa Feltz: You once wrote of your father's business endeavours,
'Any old person can succeed in business. It takes flair to fail.'
Howard Jacobson: Yes, he was no good. He was absolutely no good
at all. He built hatches. Like I say, he built hatches well and he was
a good upholsterer. He was one of those Jewish businessmen who kept being
betrayed by his best friends. You know those? 'The brother-in-law, I'll
never speak to him again!' And as soon as he went into business with someone,
they burned the factory down or they cooked the books. It was one of those
classic things.
Then, when the upholstery business went, he went on the markets and became
a market man. My mother had to write his patter out for him. I can still
see my mother writing out the lines. 'I'm not going to say 19 shillings.
I'm not going to say 17 shillings. I'm not going to say 15 shillings.
Yours, five bob the lot!' And he learned that off by heart from my mother's
thing. It was extraordinary. And in the end he became very good at it.
But he always had those notes in his pocket. And we never now actually
know how many spivs we see out there doing all this stuff are actually
reading it! You don't know whether I'm reading lines, written by my partner,
or my mother!
I remember we all loved making speeches when I grew up in Prestwich and
we all got married. We got engaged, had as many barmitzvahs as we could,
got married, to make speeches. Because it was a terrific way to make a
speech. Because with all the weddings in Manchester, all the simchas,
you never had less than 400 people if you wanted a big audience like this.
Now I can come to Jewish Book Week, but then you had to get married. I
must say this is less pressure on the nerves! And I gave the most brilliant
speech and I heard someone saying afterwards to my mother, 'Did you write
that for him?' So she wrote for my father.
Vanessa Feltz: But you were all involved in the family business,
particularly when it came to packing goods to be sold on the market stalls,
weren't you?
Howard Jacobson: Yes. We did everything at home. My job was, this
has cropped up in several novels, I can't stop writing about it. There's
something about being brought up in a house like that, that's a great
gift, if you're a novelist. I mean it's wonderful. It's so much better
than being the son of a teacher or an academic or a lawyer or something,
if you've got all that. And I can't stop writing about it.
But I remember particularly, with great fondness, one of my jobs was
to clean chocolates. Chocolates used to arrive in a bag, a great big sack
of chocolates. And these were chocolates which had been 'about' a bit.
And my job was, I mean I didn't have a job description, but my job was
to polish the mould off the chocolates.
Vanessa Feltz: Ugh!
Howard Jacobson: It's not that bad. A little bit of mould! What's that?
And I had to make very, very subtle distinctions between chocolates whose
mould would never come off. I don't know how you know on a certain kind
of chocolate, well, if you've not done this before you wouldn't know!
Listen to me when I tell you! Sometimes when you take the mould off, the
mould comes back and you have to calculate whether the mould will come
back or not. If the mould was going to come back, those you ate!
Vanessa Feltz: Ugh!
Howard Jacobson: But I want you to know that we did not treat
the punters any worse than we treated ourselves. In fact, we treated the
punters better, because the really mouldy ones I ate and the not-so-mouldy
ones we sold. And then we folded those up in a little bag, and I still
get a shudder of pleasure when I look at my stapler in my desk because
I stapled these together with a little thing saying 'Max's Chocolates'.
His name was Max and these were 'Max's Chocolates'. We thought hard and
long about what to call these gifts. And then he went like Mr Capp and
'Oy! I've come up with the voyrd! Max's Chocolates!'
The other one we did was poppet beads, which was just bags and bags and
bags of them. I don't know whether you remember: there was a time when
women wore plastic poppets, and they came separate and you had to put
them into a chain. I developed then my own business sense, because 30
poppets, 30 beads make a necklace. And I thought that if I put 29 in,
I could then every 30 necklaces, I could then have another necklace. But
since he wasn't buying them off me, I didn't achieve anything either.
But I learned to be the canny person I am now from that.
Vanessa Feltz: But don't your thumbs still bear the stigmata of
those poppets?
Howard Jacobson: They did for a long time, yes, they did for a
long time. You had a little indentation in your thumb. And this was a
secret thing because it meant that the boys whose parents did honest things,
like work on the markets, would show one another their thumbs, and boys
who had no marks on their thumbs were merely the children of professionals.
Vanessa Feltz: But your father had another incarnation as well
because he was also a magician.
Howard Jacobson: 'Uncle Max.' It was the saddest thing, really,
because everybody loved my father's tricks, which were hopeless. He was
a Tommy Cooper figure, only whereas Tommy Cooper could make the tricks
work sometimes, my father could not. I'm not making this up, it's true.
And everybody loved my father for this, except that I couldn't. My brother
and sister couldn't. We just couldn't. We'd seen him do it since we were
kids and we couldn't stand it. What he just did was that, as a consequence
of this, he just made a very ruthless calculation, which was to sort of
get rid of us and get new children who did like his tricks!
So I'd come back from university and find somebody in my bed! I tell
no lies. This person in my bed and my father would introduce me to him,
'This is Johnny,' or 'This is Richard.' 'What's he doing here?' 'He's
a friend. He's a friend.'
And then, as the evening wore on, my father would do one of his absolutely
pathetic tricks and this Johnny would kill himself with laughter and say,
'Max, that's fantastic!' And we'd all be thinking that it wasn't fantastic.
I've got some keys here, I'll show you what he did. See these keys? Then
he'd palm them. He'd go like that. Ok? Gone! And this Richard, or this
Johnny would go, 'Max, that is the most fantastic trick!' And you'd think,
well, were they doing this just to get a bed, just to get a free bed?
And what's the high humanity in the end?
And in fact the truth is, I told this story on a television series I
made once, and I've just written about it somewhere else, but it is absolutely
true. My father died about ten years ago and as he lay dying - he was
very responsive to nurses if they looked nice, my father, he did like
women, and he liked nurses - a very, very good-looking nurse was kind
of propping him up one morning. And what was meant to be, I kid you not,
the last day or two of his life, it really was, and something about her
made him want to show off, and he had in his bedside cabinet, you know,
when people are dying then in their bedside cabinet they've got the Bible,
they've got the Torah, they've got maybe a piece of fruit, they've got
photographs of their family; my father had coins, wands, silk handkerchiefs,
a dead rabbit. There was always a dead rabbit. I don't know how many rabbits
he killed. Had the Animal Liberation people got on to my father, this
is all so true! He would suddenly remember, some days he'd suddenly go
'Oy! Abroch!' and he'd run to his wardrobe. Too late: dead. A dead bird
or a dead rabbit.
Anyway, there was one by his bedside table when he was dying. And he
did this trick and it was a trick he'd never done in his life. He'd never
made it work before. It was all about getting a ring to come out. You
take the ring off a woman and you put the ring in a hankie. You throw
it up in the air, you've got to follow it in the air, you go, 'Yes, Max.
There it goes. There it goes. Fantastic, Max. Jink!' And it went: 'That's
it. The ring's now gone!' And he did this with the nurse, and for the
first time I've ever seen anything like it, it worked. And the nurse kissed
him, and all the old men came up, all the other men who were walking up
and down, you know? With those 'egg boxes' to try and pee in. And you
walk up and down with an 'egg box'. They're all going: Oi, oi, oi. All
staring at one another's 'egg boxes'. Any good? Nein, nothing. They all
got so excited, they all had a pee. The ward emptied. My father lived
another five or six weeks. They actually let him out of hospital. I'd
like to say it was a renaissance, a rebirth. It was a kind of miracle,
through magic, so you don't mock it.
Extract 2
Vanessa Feltz: You went up to Cambridge and found it in every
way a disappointment. You had envisaged toasting crumpets with well-bred
gentile girls?
Howard Jacobson: Yeah. I though I was going to meet an aristocratic
woman who was going to just take me away from it all and make me feel
comfortable in bathrooms. I'd sit on a bathroom in Castle Howard or somewhere
like that and watch that happen. And you prepare for it on your first
day. I don't know, it's probably changed now. But I still remember my
first day in Cambridge. I don't know who communicated to me what you do,
but what you do is you go to Woolworths and you buy a kettle, two cups
and two saucers, and a fork, a big long fork with which you toast the
crumpets on your gas fire. You have a little gas fire which is useful,
because if you never ever get a girl to come along to have crumpets with
you, well you can then use the gas fire to gas yourself with. Which a
lot of people did in my time. It was either that or you jumped out of
the window. The Jewish boys gassed themselves. The gentiles, as always,
have got to be athletic and jump out of the window.
And I had these things. And I remember too thinking, I bought the crumpets
as well, not from Woolworths, from another shop. I had those crumpets
for two years in Cambridge, the same packet of crumpets. And then finally
a girl came along and I gave her the crumpets, and she doesn't like the
crumpets.
That's right. You buy all that, and then you have your little writing
paper, your writing paper with your college crest, Downing College crest,
and on those you're going to say: Howard Jacobson invites Lady Mary Wortley-Montague
to crumpets with him at his. And the paper never gets used, I gave it
to my mother in the end. She used it to write notes for my father to do
his market.
Vanessa Feltz: But you became very quickly a confirmed Leavisite?
Howard Jacobson: Yes. I don't know whether we want to talk about
Leavis and all that. He's gone now. Leavis was the great critic in those
days. He was the last serious literary critic we've had. Literary criticism
stopped after Leavis and it just became theory, really. In fact the study
of literature stopped after Leavis and people then studied the sociology
of the study of literature. But the actual reading of books, well it was
wonderful reading literature in my day. If you liked the book, yeh, great,
next. There was none of that, well, the reason you like it is because
there was no Marxism or any of that. I mean it just didn't exist. There
was no theory. It was good and clean.
I actually went to Downing College in Cambridge to study with him, because
we'd had a Leavisite teacher at school. But what I really liked about
it was that it was very Jewish. I mean he sounds Jewish, Leavis, but he's
not. He had a Jewish wife. As it happens, he was a Huguenot. But the whole
thing of this 'rigorous', it was all about rigorous standards and reading.
And people would go, 'Oh, you're a Leavisite. You read the text very closely'.
I've just never understood that to this day. What else are you supposed
to do? You read a book, you read the text closely. And it seemed, I didn't
realise it at the time because I'd never gone to yeshivah and never been
a real talmid or anything, but I've now realised, now realise looking
back, it was an entirely Jewish thing to do … Wolf Mankowitz, for
example, was a Leavisite and there have been lots of Jewish men who'd
gone there and really loved that business of close textual analysis, rigorous
textual analysis. Which was a Jewish thing to do.
I mean, I've said that already, that most things worth talking about
are Jewish. But literary criticism is entirely Jewish. For a while, it
really was in America. Every literary critic you could think of really,
from Trilling down, was a Jew. Here it was slightly different. I was the
only person I knew, I was the only person in England studying and teaching
English literature for a while. There are a few more kicking around now.
But in my day I was the only one. Certainly no one in our school ever
thought of doing that. Whereas in America it was the natural thing to
do, become a literary critic. So I was, yes, I was a very, very serious-minded
literary critic. And as a literary critic, as a consequence of that, had
no friends, because people don't like you if you're like that.
I had other Leavisite friends. Well, it was like in a joke. I had an
Irishman, a Welshman and a Scots friend. And people would go: There's
the Irishman, the Welshman, the Scotsman and the Jew. And they thought
that was funny. But we were Leavisites, so we didn't think anything. We
didn't think anything was funny. So we would just meet in one another's
rooms and we would slag off everybody else and we would do a little bit
of close textual analysis. We'd read a Blake poem, or something or other.
And then you'd go home at night and look at your packet of crumpets mouldering
away, and that's it. And the next thing, three years of Cambridge had
just gone, gone. Nothing happened. Terrible.
Vanessa Feltz: But wearing the badge of being a Leavisite took
you out to Australia and an altogether different life. You were greeted
like a rock star. You had 900 eager students at your first lecture on
Tess of the D'Urbervilles. And they thought you were a Bohemian above
all else.
Howard Jacobson: Yeh. Funny that, isn't it? Yes. Well, it's not
for me to say I haven't changed much, but my general sense of, I'm not
very inventive about how you kind of, I'm not like Beckham, or something,
you know. One day, I know who I am, I'll have a hairdo. No, I won't have
any hair. Then, well, that was just stupid. This is how I was born. I
looked like this at four! This was one of the reasons people kvell. This
was one of the reasons the word kvell was invented. Look at all the hair
on him! Look at the moustache! And I looked like this and I've always
assumed that's the way a man is supposed to be and I went to Australia
looking like that, and they'd never seen anything like it in their lives.
As a Leavisite, I got with a Leavisite department which Sydney University
was then, which was a stroke of luck. And Australia then was this very
strange place which was about to become what it is now, an entirely gay
country. But it didn't know it yet. So all the men would just talk about
gays all the time. As soon as you met them, they'd go: Are you gay? Well,
they didn't say 'gay': Are you a pooftah? Gay wasn't in then. And I'd
go, No, I'm not a pooftah.
And I was endlessly in fights with people. And I hadn't been brought
up to fight. But I had to fight back because everybody thought that, because
I looked like this. I don't look like a pooftah, but they thought.., but
what it was really about was that they were all pooftahs. And when I went
back ten years later, there they all were, all those people who'd said:
Are you a pooftah? They'd go, Good ony'a. You're a pooftah? I'm a pooftah
now and we're all…
I mean all of them! I mean, all of them! Every single man in Australia
entirely forgets. And one of the things that this does, when you go there
as a man from another place, is that you have the most fantastic time
with women. Because women are just delighted that there is someone who
is not a pooftah. As we all know, once men come out and become pooftahs,
then they become, we all know the clichés, very, very good company
for women because you can…
But if they've not come out to be pooftahs yet, then they're no good.
Because you can't go shopping with them, and you can't show them your
frock, because they're in denial. So there's this country of 8 million
men, all of them in denial! And I turned up, and I thought it was absolutely
fantastic! And my life cheered up no end after that, you know. All the
Leavisite stuff got….
Except when it came to the actual teaching. Because although I looked,
as you said, Bohemian and they thought I was Ringo Starr and all that
and I remember I wore a leather tie and a leather jacket, and I thought
that was cool then and manly, and compared to them it certainly was manly.
They all wore shorts and cardigans! God, they were awful to look at!
The women were staggering! The women in Australia were staggeringly beautiful
and the men were appalling. I mean, I would wander around the streets
and think, this country doesn't add up. How is there a birth rate? And
of course there wasn't a birth rate. They had to import Italians and Greeks
and Vietnamese for the country to grow. But as a teacher I simply taught,
I was a straight, although I looked a Bohemian, I was very prim and my
speciality was 'shy girls from 19th century novels', Little Dorritt, Fanny
Price, lots of girls called Fanny, Belinda, all those, and they're called
Camilla. And they couldn't believe it. They expected me to do tough guy
literature: Hemingway and things like that. But I didn't do it.
Vanessa Feltz: I want to bring you back with a big thump to Wolverhampton
Polytechnic.
Howard Jacobson: You're merciless, I've decided. It's not like
this on the radio. The parabola of my academic career was to start very
high and then I went down, like that. Because I enjoyed myself at Sydney
so much that I published nothing and I did no other degree. I never had
a PhD or anything like that. And when I came back from it, I discovered
that all my friends who'd not gone to Sydney and had gone to really boring
places, had nonetheless got themselves PhDs and things. And they were
the only ones who could get jobs. And also, theory had happened and there'd
been no theory while I was still happily doing my, I mean I'd torn books
up in my lectures at Sydney. This is Tess of the D'Urbervilles. This is
what I think of Tess of the D'Urbervilles. I'd tear the book up. They'd
go: That's great!
That was my idea of literary criticism. It still is my idea of literary
criticism. And that passed away and that had gone and I couldn't hack
theory. So I ended up not being able to get a job and, for a while, I
taught at Cambridge which sounded grand, but it was only because someone
gave me a helping hand. But in the end I was at Wolverhampton Polytechnic,
which was the worst institution I have ever…
Actually there was nothing wrong with the institution. It was the town
that was appalling. I thought what I'd do is that I'd go. I was between
marriages. I was 'resting'. I thought I'd get a little flat in the middle
of town, Wolverhampton, it would be all sharp and all the academics would
be in town. But they weren't. All my fellow teachers, because Wolverhampton,
although it is vile, is actually near lovely country, and they all went
out to the gentile swathe of England called Shropshire. Wenlock. They
all had a little elfin cottage in Wenlock. They all lived in Wenlock Edge
and they all read Houseman to one another.
And I didn't want to live in Wenlock Edge. I was on my own. So I continued
to live in Wolverhampton in this flat, entirely on my own, and was there
for several years actually, and spent every single night, there are people
there who will remember me, mainly Indians, sitting in Indian restaurants.
I would go into an Indian restaurant, because I was lonely, and I'd take
a book, I'd take some Coleridge or some Dickens, and sit in an Indian
restaurant, the Kohinoor or the Taj Mahal, on my own, because nobody goes
into Indian restaurants, particularly in the Midlands, until about midnight.
You go to the pub and you get very, very drunk or you go to the pictures.
I don't think anybody ever went to the pictures in Wolverhampton, they
wouldn't have understood a picture. They just went to the pub. They got
drunk. They went to the Indian restaurant. And as soon as they came in,
I left. But it meant I was this sad, actually heartbreaking figure. I
wept over the sight of myself often. Just haunting these Indian restaurants.
But still, they say these things are the making of you, so we'll have
to see.
Vanessa Feltz: But this was though, wasn't it? Because finally
your first novel is hoving into view and to some extent we have to thank
Wolverhampton Wanderers for that?
Howard Jacobson: Yes. Well I mean it was. People thought I made
it up when I wrote my first novel, Coming From Behind, about it. But the
final insult in Wolverhampton, the unusual thing about the English Department
in Wolverhampton is that they were very good. We were all Oxford and Cambridge
and we were all rather, you know, austere. The students didn't have the
slightest interest in any of it. But we were austere, and so when they
said to us as a Department: We're moving you from where you are now. We've
just done a deal. The finances of Wolverhampton are complex and Wolverhampton
football ground in Molyneux is rebuilding and we've done a deal with them
and we've got rooms in the football ground for the English Department,
we said: We don't want to go. We don't like football. Does anybody like
football? No, we don't like football. And we definitely don't like football
as played by Wolves, and we don't want to go in the football ground.
And they said: We'll give you rooms. You'll each have a room with a window,
so that while you're teaching you can see Wolves playing.
And we thought. Well, no. No. We didn't want that either.
So I thought: Well, there could be at last a novel in this. Because,
as I told you, I'd been brilliant at four and started well, and then there
was a slowdown. Well, you can start too soon. I'd started much too soon,
and then, for thirty years, things went very quiet. And then I saw this
as an opportunity really to write a comic novel, and all the reviews went
'Well, we really like this novel, but all that stuff about the football
ground is a bit fantastical!' It's the only true thing I've ever written!
