Howard Jacobson: ‘I’m my mother’s son, which was terrible news for my father’

  • 2/12/2022
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Iam born. It is August 1942. My father steps out of his barracks in north Wales, puts out his hand and feels no rain, looks up and sees no bombs, hopes the quiet sky augurs well for my mother who is due to give birth to me any minute, indeed might already have done so, and hops on to a train. I think he will be pleased to discover I am a boy. Many years later he buys me boxing gloves and he may already be imagining going a few rounds with me as he settles back in the compartment and goes to sleep. For an active man he sleeps a lot. I will inherit this gene from him. Alas, not the boxing gene as well. It’s a bit early to be confessing I was a disappointment to him. But I can’t introduce him without also introducing the remorse in which I clothe every memory and thought of him. “I’m sorry, Dad, I wasn’t the boy you’d have picked had you been offered an assortment.” My mother must have been pleased to see him. I’d given her a rough few hours. I see him coming into the ward carrying a bunch of flowers in one of those claw-hammer hands of his. He’d clipped his moustache and was wearing his red regimental beret at a jaunty angle. It was family mythology that the strange position I’d adopted in the womb accounted for why I could never do a backflip or a somersault; why I was always travel-sick and still cannot ride backwards in a taxi or a bus; and why I was – and remain – unable to climb a lamppost, draw a map, run a marathon. Over time I grew to favour another explanation, also to do with the womb but harder to substantiate: that I’d been born a Jew. Wear your sweater inside out in Lithuania and they say you’re “going Jew”. It isn’t hard to see what they’re getting at. The Jew is oriented differently. All thumbs, at sixes and sevens, the wrong way round. A malfunction of nature. “Rubbish!” my mother says. “Your father was very practical.” She’s right. I must be careful not to see every Jew in my image or allow “Jewish” to become a synonym for physical incompetence. “My hands are so clumsy that I cannot even write so as to read it myself,” Montaigne wrote, and he wasn’t Jewish. Nor, by his own admission, could he ever “carry a hawk and fly her, nor hunt the dogs, nor speak to a horse”. Whereas my father was variously an upholsterer, a tailor, a manufacturer of coffee tables, a magician, a taxi driver, a balloonist – by which I mean that he twisted balloons into the shapes of animals, not that he was an aeronaut – and while I doubt he fared any better talking to horses than Montaigne, he did once astonish into silence a horse bearing the weight of Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists: Mosley saw a short muscular Jew approaching in a fury, ducked low like the cowardly blackguard he was, and allowed his horse to take the blow intended for him. It’s just a thought: but could my father’s multi-competence – he fixed cars, too, rewired houses, replumbed bathrooms, tiled roofs, repaired washing machines – explain why my hands are good for nothing? Because – except for typing, and for that I use only my left forefinger – they weren’t ever needed. How much more than a forefinger does a writer need? Well, there is something more. Maladjustment. It’s my theory that only the unhappy, the uncomfortable, the gauche, the badly put together, aspire to make art. Why would you seek to reshape the world unless you were ill at ease in it? And I came out of the womb in every sense the wrong way round. Which includes being Jewish. “Oh, shut up!” My mother expostulating. It is no exaggeration to say she will never merely remark when she can expostulate. Ours is and always has been an expostulatory family. Maybe we all came out of the womb with something to complain about. Photographs of me in my pram, or rattling the bars of my cot, show a baby misfit. This is how I remember myself: a failed baby, miserable in my body, demeaned by all the appurtenances of baby-being and perambulation, not wanting to be lifted, not wanting to be put down, resenting being pushed, resisting being rocked, uncomfortable in the clothes that people who have forgotten what it’s like to be a baby choose for them. Any garment less suitable for romping in than a romper suit is hard to imagine. Not that romping was in my nature. Sedentary sullenness was in my nature. I was my mother’s first child. She was still a teenager when I was born and her younger sister was probably only just out of single figures. My grandmother, too, was young and yet to be a grandmother to anyone else. I think it fair to say that theirs was a laboratory for mothers and I the biological specimen. “Rubbish!” I can hear all three of them saying it – my trio of weaving goddesses, my Fates, my Andrews Sisters. “Rubbish!” “Rubbish!” “Rubbish!” This rubbishing betrays my maternal origins. I was well into middle age before I discovered that my mother’s grandparents on both sides came from Lithuania. “Russia” was the universal answer to all our questions about the past. Where did we come from? There, out there. Where was there? They seemed to be pointing in the direction of Sale and Altrincham. Hale Barns. Well-to-do Jewish south Manchester, and we knew damn well we hadn’t come from there. Keep on asking and they tell you somewhere in the vicinity of Russia. It didn’t matter where exactly. “Think about something else,” my parents advised. “We’re English now. Be grateful and do your homework.” But the clues were always there to see. Jew to Jew, Lithuanians are the great disparagers. When the Jewish revivalist movement known as Hasidism spread from Ukraine in the 18th century, its chief enemies were the Lithuanian Mitnagdim, or “opponents”. Jewishness for Mitnagdim was austere, rational, intellectual – a religion of the mind. “Rubbish,” they said when the Hasidim came cartwheeling out of the east, pantheistic, populist, charismatic, resembling so many Karamazovs with flying fringes. Ironically, that was exactly the part of the world my father’s family came cartwheeling out of, though no one could have been less of a Hasid than he was. To the music of religion he was tone deaf. But he had the big Russian soul thing – by which I mean he could dance the kazatsky like a Cossack, and did so at many a family simcha (a simcha being a celebration, at which your Russian father, if you are lucky enough to have one, dances the kazatsky like a Cossack) – looked capable of wrestling a bear, and rubbished nothing. Life was to be relished not denigrated. My parents felt life differently and so entertained different ambitions for me. Am I saying they unconsciously wrestled for my soul? If I answer yes, I intend no reproval. I consider myself lucky to have been tugged this way and that – now my mother’s quiet, agonisingly shy, sorrowing, studious, disapproving boy, later, as my father’s influence grew, a yay-saying entertainer and showoff in his likeness. For a writer, at least, it’s a blessing to be your parents’ battleground and eventually to be at war with yourself. My mother 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. Max and Anita. Jakey, she called him. Neetie, he called her. I saw little more of my father in the immediate aftermath of the war than I’d seen of him during it. He comes back into my life when I’m six or seven and giving trouble. He was not of a generation of men who put their mind to parenting. But he had strong views on what a son should and shouldn’t be. And what they boiled down to was that a son shouldn’t be a kunilemelly, my father’s own demeaning pronunciation of Kuni Lemel, a character in an early-20th-century Yiddish operetta. In the original operetta Kuni Lemel was a bumpkin; in the operetta of my father’s family a kunilemelly was a hypersensitive, easily wounded, forever embarrassed, ungrateful, enfeebled and unmanly boy. Me. He began to find excuses to pick on me, knock my hands away from my face, complain about the noise I made, complain about the noise I didn’t make, send me to bed early. Later on, when he was working too hard and I could hear his heart beating in his chest, he would take me to my room and punish my latest transgression with his belt. Time has taught me to be fair to him: he was not the only father doing this in Hightown and Cheetham Hill in 1950. But I raged against my father’s strappings in my soul. He grew into a lovable man and would show great tenderness to me when we both were older. It was he who drove me to Piccadilly on the morning I left to start my first term at Cambridge. He found me a seat on the train, took my luggage and put it on the rack above my head. There was no hugging. He shook my hand. “Don’t forget to write to your mother,” he said. I was surprised to find myself tearful. Ridiculous: I was only going to Cambridge, for God’s sake. Suddenly he clapped his hand over my eyes. Was this to stop me crying? It seemed an extreme measure. “Get off the train,” he ordered. “Now?” “Now.” I could see enough through his fingers to make out that the person he’d seated me opposite – a rather pale and silent railway employee who I thought would make the perfect travelling companion – was dead. Everything then happened quickly. He had me and my luggage on the platform. He emptied the compartment. He called the guard. He conferred with other passengers. He spoke to the police. He checked the time of my next train. Perhaps I only imagined that he offered to drive it. My first day as a man and my father had appropriated it. If I find it hard to conjure memories of family meals it’s because there were none. Did my father wake from his evening “kip” when food arrived? I don’t see him. What eating we did as a family – my sister, brother and I – we did at the kitchen table and my mother too was absent from it. “I’ll sit down when you’ve finished,” she’d say, replenishing our plates long before we’d finished. Eat, eat! But there had to be some deeper psychological explanation for her never joining us that was buried deep in Lithuanian, or even Judaean/Samarian traditions of mothering. Was it to demonstrate the sacrifice a mother made for her children? Self-denial was a way of denying us nothing. Or was the very idea of relaxation alien to her on account of our long history of having to get up, pack our bags, and run for it? There, in the kitchen, my mother stood, listening out for the hoof-beats of Cossacks, the rumbling of tanks, the cries of an angry mob, poised to sweep us up in her arms and carry us to safety at a moment’s notice. I’ll write about this one day, I thought. I will make it funny. But will I know how to make it serious? It’s one thing to joke about the Cossacks, but do I fully gauge the fears and strains of keeping an ever-watchful eye on a Jewish family so soon after events we find too terrible to name? My mother had been compelled to leave school by economic necessity when she was about 14, and my father had had even less schooling than that. She was not a classical reader of novels; though she enjoyed Dickens and George Eliot, her taste ran more to writers like AJ Cronin and Nevil Shute. It made an impression on me, of course, to see her engrossed in one novel after another, but it was to her love of poetry that I ascribe much of the word music I go on hearing in my head. The Forsaken Merman by Matthew Arnold, The Lady of Shalott, Wordsworth’s I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud. It wouldn’t be fanciful to say the hours of reading poetry with my mother determined the very orchestration of my interior life. I sometimes wonder if she chose the poems at random or with intent. There was great sadness in those she read to me. A fair share of sadness awaited her, but in her poetry-reading period life was as happy as it could be for a reserved and introspective person. We had no money. She was often ashamed to let people into the house because she thought it was shabby. And my father was always a worry because he worked too hard, earned little, and was improvident with what he did earn. But none of this explained the morbidity count of the poems we read together. What she wanted to save me from was disappointment. The enemy was expectation. Better not to want too much or aim too high. The sadness that my mother loved in poetry was the sadness that waited on dashed hope. A story I have told a thousand times but have to tell again because I am not comprehensible, my mother is not comprehensible, and maybe Judaism – at least the version of it handed down to me – is not comprehensible without it. It is 1960 and I am lying in bed, pretending not to be waiting to hear whether I’ve been offered a place at Cambridge. I’m on shpilkes, that’s to say I’m sitting on pins. Needless to say, my mother has been on shpilkes for me for weeks. It’s she who brings up the telegram. I open it and read it out to her. Yes, I have a place. A silence falls on us. We aren’t a whooping family. My mother extends a hand, not to pat my cheek or ruffle my hair or shake my hand, but to retrieve the envelope. She is reading the address. “Just want to be certain it’s for you,” she says. No cruelty is intended by this. She isn’t implying there might be some mistake because I’m undeserving. If there is a mistake, if the telegram has been sent to the wrong person at the wrong address, it is because the universe is spiteful, because fortune as good as this doesn’t befall us, because things more often go wrong than right. And from the disappointment attendant on any such misprision or mischance my mother will do anything to protect me. In 1951 a primary school teacher wrote my mother a letter on a small blue sheet of notepaper. It described an essay I’d written. “I have every confidence,” it concluded, “that Howard will be a great writer one day.” It was signed Esther Herman. Who can estimate the influence a good word from a teacher can have on a person’s life? It’s one thing to believe in your destiny, it’s another to have it confirmed. And it’s hardly her fault that throughout my teenage years, my 20s and most of my 30s, the bile of failed promise would force me on to a regimen of Andrews Liver Salts, Rennie, Milk of Magnesia, Mylanta, Gaviscon, Nexium, charcoal tablets – anything, in short, that tasted like chalk, and none of which worked. Can you die of not writing a novel? I thought I might. Can you die of others thinking you’re a fantasist? I thought I might. My fault, of course, for ever telling people I was working on a novel when I wasn’t. It didn’t help, either, that I was called Howard. Can you write a novel when you don’t have a novelist’s name? Howard Jacobson? I didn’t think so. Scott Fitzgerald. Virginia Woolf. Evelyn Waugh. Now, with those names you had a fighting chance. Even my father’s name had a writer’s ring. Max Jacobson – I could have been a writer of tough-guy Chicagoan prose had I been a Max. Very early in my career I was the subject of a BBC documentary. My father had a walk-on role. He was a children’s conjuror in his spare time and we had footage of him entertaining a party. There was one trick he did specifically for the programme, close up in front of the camera, producing silk scarves from a bucket. “It’s not a trick to pull a few small things out of a very big thing,” I told him afterwards. “If anything, that’s the opposite to a trick.” He shook his head. What did I know! What I knew was that I’d wanted him to be in the programme because it wasn’t every novelist who had a conjuror for a father. But what I also knew was that I was ashamed of him. First, for not being a very good conjuror. But also, for being a conjuror at all. Pride and shame are not always incompatible. “Bleh, bleh, bleh” – the equivalent of sticking his tongue out or thumbing his nose – like a child. My father loved playing the child, inventing words. “Taugetz,” he’d say if he thought what I’d said was nonsense. “Taugetzmeowgetz.” My nonsense trumps your nonsense. What the hell did that mean? Taugetzmeowgetz? What language was he speaking? It’s just possible he thought he was speaking Yiddish. Zay gesund. Take a shtum powder. Mind your own bitnut (business). Keep your big schnozz out. Zol zein. Hak mir nit in kop! Hab seichel (use your brains). The letting down began early. I was a mother’s boy. Then there was my long face. He was always apologising for me, he said. People took my expression amiss. “Cheer up, it may never happen,” they’d say. And I’d reply, “It already has.” For which, on one occasion, he slapped my face. I’ll kill you for that one day, I thought. Sons have done more than that for less. But in the end I accepted his valuation of me. I needed to lighten up. As for what he needed, it wasn’t a leaden son hanging like the albatross round his neck. He had troubles enough. His upholstery business had gone up in smoke. So these were to be my father’s Ben-Hur years, there and back in a tail-lift chariot between Manchester and London, day after day, going empty and coming back loaded with boxes of swag – the professional word for objects of neither use nor loveliness, made in Hong Kong or Romania and destined to be sold on markets in Oswestry and Worksop. At weekends or in the holidays, I would accompany him. I find it hard to remember what we talked about. It couldn’t have been The Forsaken Merman. That would have elicited a Taugetzmeowgetz from him. He was ill-paid and exhausted. Fortunately, our neighbours were expanding their operation and handed him the opportunity to take over one of their market stalls. “Cheap Johnny” – a name he inherited with the stall – was born. There were essentially two ways of being a market man, or gaff worker, if you were Jewish, as most market men were then. The first was to be a shtummer, a stay-shtum, say-nothing, purveyor of nylons or woollen gloves which you’d lay out on your stall and wait for someone to buy. The second way was to be a big mouth, a pitcher, a fairground auctioneer. The stage was the back of the van, your patter was low, your prices even lower, and the straight man who copped all the flak – the butt of every joke, the schlemiel who had to take the candlewick bedspread or non-stick pan-set away to pretend it had been sold and then bring it back hidden under his shirt, the one with the burning cheeks, the one “Cheap Johnny” called Charlie – was me. Every pitcher was shouting down every other. Some blew whistles. Some broke china. Some gave half their stock away for nothing. Is it possible I enjoyed it more than I let on? I know I revelled in the lingua franca of the markets, that fantastic mix of Yiddish and Hebrew and leshon hakmah (the covert language of the Jews) and Polari and cockney rhyming slang and costermonger insult and Maxisms – words simply made up on the spot. Many was the time, in conversation with my father, that I felt we had only just met. He must have felt the same. I imagined him lying in bed with my mother asking her who the hell I was. On one occasion he asked me how my book was going. I found the question intensely embarrassing. “All right,” I lied. “What kind of book is it?” By our standards this was more than a conversation, it was an inquisition. “It’s a novel.” I see him nodding. A novel … Hmmm … “So this novel … ?” “This novel what?” “How much longer is it going to take?” I’d been lying about my novel. I’d said I was writing one at Cambridge and I barely wrote three pages in three years. In the years after I graduated and moved to Australia, scarcely a letter from my mother went by without her asking how the novel was progressing, and I’d replied yes, slowly, but yes … “Some things are about feel, Dad. You just know. You know when you’ve mastered a magic trick. There’s no time limit.” “But with me,” my father said, “if I can’t master a trick I go to someone who can. Do you have anyone you can go to?” “Like a senior magician?” “That sort of thing.” “I couldn’t bear to show anyone what I’m writing.” “Why not?” “Because only I know what I’m trying to do, so only I know how to sort it out. The solution to a trick is in the trick, the solution to my writing is in my writing.” “And if you can’t find the solution?” “I just go on until I do.” “Then you might never finish.” “It’s possible.” “Sheesh, that will have been a lot of work for nothing.” He was proud when I did have a published novel to show him, though it would be another 13 or 14 years. I dedicated it to him and my mother. I felt they’d waited long enough for it. He kept it in his possession for several weeks before saying anything. What he finally did say was, “It’s very nice of you, Howard, to go to the trouble of getting a copy specially printed with our names on it.” Perhaps for the first time in all the years we’d been father and son I wanted to put my arms around him. But he had another surprise for me two or three weeks later. “I don’t mind telling you I’ve been struggling,” he confessed, “but I think I’m getting the hang of it. You know where it says ‘All rights reserved’?” Yes, I knew where it said that. On the same page it gave the address of the publisher and the book’s ISBN number and the date of publication. The only page I hadn’t written. I nodded. “That means no one else can say they wrote it. Am I right?” “Yes,” I said. “You’re right.” Not long before he died he presented me with a 10-page booklet entitled Uncle Max’s Magic and Puzzle Book. “You’re not the only writer in the family,” he said. Thus were we united in literature at last. This is an edited extract from Mother’s Boy by Howard Jacobson, published on 3 March by Vintage Publishing. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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