Mother’s Boy: A Writer’s Beginnings

Howard Jacobson

Jonathan Cape, £18.99

By Rosemary Goring

IT was the Florentine sculptor, silversmith, thief and bar-room brawler Benvenuto Cellini who laid down the gauntlet to would-be memoirists. “All men, whatever be their condition, who have done anything of merit, or which verily has a semblance of merit, if so be they are men of truth and good repute, should write the tale of their life with their own hand.” This should not, Cellini added, be attempted until the authors had passed their fortieth year. He was then fifty-eight and determined to go “on his way rejoicing”.

These days memoirs pour from the presses like oil from stricken tankers, many preceded by the word ‘misery’. Howard Jacobson, a novelist of good repute, has waited until he is nearly eighty to add to the flow though he has previously (In the Land of Oz, Roots Schmoots, etc) offered insights into his past.

Mother’s Boy, however, is quite different. Of misery there is plenty but it is leavened with Jacobson’s rapacious humour. Like Woody Allen, he is steeped in the idea of the futility of life and deflects from such nihilism by resorting to jokes and anecdotes of which he is invariably the hapless butt. “‘Howard,’ I kept hearing myself say, ‘give yourself a break, mate, cut yourself some slack. How bad can things be? Not the least of your achievements is that you have outlived many of your enemies and most of your friends. OK, you may not – yet! – have won a Nobel but you have won the Booker, not to mention the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. You’ve got a lot to be thankful for. Chin up!’”

I fear, however, such advice would fall on deaf ears. From the book’s opening sentence – “My mother died today.” – we know that what we are about to receive will not always be garnished with laughter. Jacobson’s parents were working-class Jewish immigrants who settled in Manchester. Asked where they came from they said “out there” and pointed “in the direction of Sale and Altrincham.” Pressed, they admitted to coming from somewhere in the vicinity of Russia. Only in middle-age did Jacobson discover that they had fled Lithuania.

Their desire was to be assimilated, to be accepted as English, and this yearning permeates Jacobson’s pages. It is something he finds elusive. His wardrobe holds only hair shirts. Being Jewish, he is condemned to wander the planet in search of a self who is uncomfortable in his skin yet cannot deny he is a member of tribe defined by the horror of the Holocaust.

As such, he is sensitive to an almost Proustian degree. Even as a baby he was a failure though how he can be sure is unclear. His mother must accept some of the blame, as must his father. “My mother,” he recalls, “was nothing if not critical and inevitably made a critic of me. My father, without ever reading a novel, made me a novelist because he was himself a novel.”

When he was nine Jacobson was told by a teacher that he would become a great novelist, which is one of the few pluses he awards himself. Year after year, friends, family, colleagues, rivals, inquired after his debut novel’s progress. If only there was some. He finally broke his duck with Coming From Behind, a terrible double-entendre, in 1983, when he was an aged forty-one.

How he passed that milestone is described with panache in Mother’s Boy. He got into Cambridge where – you’ve guessed! – he had a miserable time and fell under the spell of FR Leavis, the Savonarola of English literature. What Leavis did, Jacobson writes, was “make us see what a rare thing creative genius was, and how it needed to be distinguished from creative mediocrity.” He also told his acolytes that to learn to write you first needed to learn to read. Let’s drink to that. For an aspiring novelist, however, Leavis left Jacobson with the feeling of inferiority. How could he ever compete on a playing field populated by superstars like Dickens, Eliot, James and Conrad? The bar was set too high. Thus Jacobson did what so many do when faced with no alternative; he taught.

By his own testimony, he was a lousy teacher, By now he was in a relationship and bound for Australia, with which fell instantly in love. What he was less enamoured of was “The department” in Sydney University of which he was a part. “Once,” he relates, without offering details, “I was punched for looking like Jesus Christ.” After some toing and froing he returned permanently to Blighty and got married in Wolverhampton where he found employment in a polytechnic. There, he bemoaned the death of Shakespeare’s England. The unremitting ugliness of the town where Enoch Powell gave his “rivers of blood” speech inspires a diatribe to rival Betjeman’s ‘Slough’: “What did people do here? My guess was process applications for dog licences.”

The road to Booker triumph was replete with emotional pot holes and pile ups. His second marriage, to an antipodean called Ros, was a car crash. The couple should have called it quits after the honeymoon in Paris. But she was a good reader, and brutally, cruelly honest. He gave her his novel-in-progress, comprising 190 pages, which she said came alive on its penultimate page. “So what changes on page one hundred and eighty-nine?” he asked. “You’re the writer,” she replied. “You work it out.”

When eventually the novel was published it was to little fanfare. Carmen Callil, the new ruler of the roost at his publisher, said, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with you, Mr Jacobson. If you ran down Bond Street naked I couldn’t sell this book.” She was wrong. If not like hotcakes, Coming From Behind sold like kebabs after last orders. Asked her opinion of it his mother said, “It’s too Jewish.” Jacobson was pleased because that’s what he thought too. It was noisy, garrulous, hyperbolic, funny, and featured a main character with a mock-heroic persecution complex. All of which is true of Mother’s Boy.

ENDS