REMINDER
MOTHER BOY
by Howard Jacobson (Cape £16.99, 288 pages)
Comic book writer Howard Jacobson (now in his 80th year) became a writer because he was always cranky and grumpy? Or was it a writer that made him moody and grumpy?
It is the conundrum he explores with wonderful verve in Mother’s Boy, where the somewhat boastful and certainly self-satisfying paradoxical conclusion seems to be that “the miserable use a wider vocabulary than the fortunate because they have more to express”.
Howard Jacobson (pictured) tells in his memoir how he grew up Jewish in Manchester and how his life experiences became comedy gold
Jacobson certainly has a lot to say, starting with his childhood days as a Jew in Manchester.
His parents’ heritage was, to date enough, Ukrainian – but the ancestry was never mentioned. “Think of something else,” young Howard was told when he broached the subject. “We are English now.”
There was an exotic relative, a cranky and drunk grandfather whose toenails were so hideous and gnarled that cutting them was a job for a tree surgeon.
Jacobson’s father, full of “Ukrainian boldness,” sounds like a case. Known as Jakey, he was always busy fixing cars, rewiring houses, fixing washing machines. “He was a great neighbor when your pipe burst.” He also worked as a tailor and upholsterer and had a stall in the market selling candlewick bedspreads, nonstick pans and spoons that bent in boiling water.
And he was also a semi-professional magician. The house was full of wands, cloaks and white rabbits.
Although Jakey was a practical man, he was not the most observant of the Jews. He once thought the Passover table was his surprise birthday party.
Neetie, Jacobson’s mother, may have been overprotective. When he went to Cambridge, she let him take a supply of emergency toilet paper with him. She always encouraged her son’s love of reading and would recite Tennyson’s poems. “She had a stirring voice full of warm vivacity.” She enjoyed ballroom dancing with off-duty police officers.
Young Jacobson himself was a holy terror. He ripped wallpaper from the walls, gouged out the eyes of stuffed animals, and scribbled everything with his crayons. He couldn’t – and still can’t – climb, draw maps, pack packages or ride backwards in a taxi or bus. At school, he could not sing, play the recorder, or use the restroom when other cubicles were occupied.
Howard (pictured) emigrated to Australia to become an academic in the English department at Sydney University after studying at Downing College, Cambridge
Nonetheless, his grammar school got him to Downing College. The first time he took the train to Cambridge, the man sitting across from him dropped dead — an omen of sorts. When Jacobson arrived, he spent a semester impressing the college porter with intellectual conversation, mistaking him for FR Leavis.
In one way or another, Jacobson was taught that “a judgment is a richer thing than an opinion, and this tone can tell us what literal statements cannot”. Fair enough – but he got a bad degree.
The only option was to emigrate to Australia to become an academic in the English department at the University of Sydney, where the staff were “sarcastic, cruel, perceptive, whimsical” – as they reliably are in all English departments.
Jacobson married in 1964 after graduating and was accompanied by his bride, Barbara Starr. Jacobson says, Down Under: “I forgot to be shy. I forgot to be depressed. I have forgotten that I am Jewish.’
Instead, he became a loudmouth drinker. Far too often, Barbara has had to “scrape me off the floor, drive me home, and manage to get me up the stairs.”
Carelessness was confused with obscenity. Jacobson admits he has engaged in “aggression, alcohol, cigarettes, late nights, infidelity, and falling in love with a student,” an offense a person today would “call off” without mercy.
However, we are told that “the heart is a rogue organ and will love and cheat at the same time if you let it.” I don’t think the organ in question is the heart here, but as the saying goes, the past is a different country and they did things differently there, especially in Australia.
Howard’s book Coming From Behind (pictured) was published in 1983 to great acclaim, resulting in the author becoming a worthy successor to Tom Sharpe
Back in the UK after three hedonistic years, Jacobson taught English to hairdressers and sold handbags at the market. Because of his Mancunian accent, people thought he was selling humbugs.
“I slept badly and woke up worse.” He separated from Barbara, although there was now a son, Conrad, named after Joseph Conrad, Jacobson’s favorite writer.
Returning to Australia alone, he taught at a technical college in Melbourne. It was here that Jacobson met Ros Sadler, a swimmer, sailor and cellist who became his second wife in 1978.
Back in England, Jacobson was employed as a lecturer at Wolverhampton. He really couldn’t get over the utter desolation of the place. . . the utter negation of natural beauty”.
Life in Wolverhampton, he says, would be called “self-injurious” today, but he stayed there for seven years.
Meanwhile, Ros, who also disliked Wolverhampton, set up a craft shop in Boscastle, Cornwall, selling novelty paperweights made in China and unisex cheesecloth pirate smocks.
MOTHER’S BOY by Howard Jacobson (Cape £16.99, 288 pages)
If Jacobson commuted between Cornwall and the West Midlands for 12 years, it’s because while he ‘hated Boscastle a little’, he ‘hated it less than Wolverhampton, which I absolutely hated’.
How much hate and restlessness is in this man that stretches into the past.
Jacobson does not forgive many of his teachers and is “angry with myself for wasting my college years.” Relationship with Ros was fraught with resentment – his sulk was matched by her “scathing sarcasm”. The marriage was only contracted so that she could obtain British citizenship. On their honeymoon in Paris, neither of them spoke.
Of course, the tide of “disappointment, humiliation, frustration, hostility, envy, futility” discussed in “Mother’s Boy” was waiting to be turned into comedy gold. Jacobson, slightly fictionalizing his experiences, sat down and wrote Coming From Behind.
Its potential was immediately spotted by Chatto editor Jeremy Lewis – my late cousin. But when feminist new broom Carmen Callil arrived at the publisher, she balked at the novel: “If you were walking down Bond Street naked, I couldn’t sell this book,” she told him.
It was published in 1983 to great acclaim and along with Peeping Tom a year later marked the new author, already in his forties, as a worthy successor to Tom Sharpe. Jacobson won the Booker in 2010.
Callil, he recalls, was a harbinger of “the fun dying of everything.” We’ll probably hear more about that in another volume, which I’m looking forward to with great excitement.
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