Howard Jacobson

David Brauner, Daniel Lea

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781526101495
• eBook ISBN: 9781526101518
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

This is a comprehensive and definitive study of the Man Booker Prize-winning novelist, Howard Jacobson. It offers lucid, detailed and nuanced readings of each of Jacobson's novels, and makes a powerful case for the importance of his work in the landscape of contemporary fiction. Focusing on the themes of comedy, masculinity and Jewishness, the book emphasises the richness and diversity of Jacobson's work. Often described by others as 'the English Philip Roth' and by himself as 'the Jewish Jane Austen', Jacobson emerges here as a complex and often contradictory figure: a fearless novelist; a combative public intellectual; a polemical journalist; an unapologetic elitist and an irreverent outsider; an exuberant iconoclast and a sombre satirist. Never afraid of controversy, Jacobson tends to polarise readers; but love him or hate him, he is difficult to ignore. This book gives him the thorough consideration and the balanced evaluation that he deserves.

1

‘Being funny’: comedy, the anti-pastoral and literary politics

That one might be a serious novelist while also ‘being funny’ was the great epiphany that launched Jacobson’s career as a novelist. Jacobson demonstrated precocious literary talent as a boy – he likes to tell the story of how a primary schoolteacher wrote a letter to his mother, which she framed, declaring that Jacobson was destined ‘to become an important writer’ (Wintle 2013: 9), and he told James O’Brien that he ‘wrote a little play when I was nine’ (O’Brien 2019) – but in spite of these auspicious beginnings, he felt constrained by his background: ‘being a working-class Manchester boy the omens [for becoming a writer] didn’t feel right’ (O’Brien 2019). As an adolescent Jacobson became, in his own self-satirical account, ‘a stuck-up little bastard who went everywhere with a copy of Women in Love under my arm and an expression of disdain on my face’ (Jacobson 2012a: 200) and after graduating from Cambridge Jacobson wrote his first book, a study of four Shakespeare tragedies co-authored with Wilbur Sanders, but, as he told O’Brien, ‘I never really believed that that was the real thing’ (O’Brien 2019). His early attempts at writing fiction were inauthentic pastiches of his literary heroes: ‘I wanted to be Henry James or Jane Austen and write elegantly of country houses’, as he told Angela Wintle (Wintle 2013: 9). It was only once he realised that these weren’t ‘the real thing’ either – ‘Face it, I’m not living a Jamesian . . . life, I’m in fucking Wolverhampton’, he told himself (Boylan 2011) – that he began to consider material closer to home. Home at this stage of Jacobson’s career was Wolverhampton, and it was in the ignominy of being a lecturer in a provincial polytechnic – ‘I’m ashamed to say that I was ashamed of it’, he told O’Brien – that Jacobson found a subject, and a genre: ‘I found myself writing a campus novel and suddenly, instead of reading Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, I was reading people like Kingsley Amis and Malcom Bradbury and David Lodge’ (O’Brien 2019).

Early reviewers tended to situate Jacobson firmly in this tradition of the English campus novel: Humphrey Carpenter saw him as part of what he called ‘the [Kingsley]Amis-Bradbury-Lodge world’, even straying into ‘Tom Sharpe territory’ (1984: 23), while Peter Craven dismissed his first three novels as ‘jocose fiction of the Bradbury-Lodge variety’ (Craven 1988: 223). Jacobson himself implicitly acknowledged his debt to this tradition and at the same time indicated his sense of alienation from it in Coming From Behind, whose protagonist ‘had an idea that somewhere in Hampstead stood a house (to which he fancifully gave the name Bradbury Lodge) where all the famous literary and academic figures of the English-speaking world came together to discuss eros and thanatos and have a good laugh at his expense’ (Jacobson 1984: 34). Yet for Jacobson the comic novel, far from being a niche interest confined to this tradition, is something of a tautology: ‘Every novel worth the name is at odds with itself. Which is another way of saying that every novel worth the name is comic . . .’ (Jacobson 1999d: 30). Jacobson has been a vocal advocate for what he calls the ‘the primacy of comedy’ throughout his career (Jacobson 2012a: 270).1 Although his first book was a study of Shakespearean tragedy, it begins with a comic prelude and insists throughout that, far from being antithetical to tragedy, ‘comedy is the friend of the serious and seeks to protect it from the preposterous’ (Sanders and Jacobson 1978: 18) and that ‘[a]ll good writing is comic’ (16). In a review in The London Review of Books of the comedian Frank Muir’s 1990 volume The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose Jacobson complains that Muir fails entirely to understand that ‘no dichotomy exists between comic and serious unless we would operate with a diminished definition of each mode’ (Jacobson 1990: 60) and twenty years later he made much the same point in a piece in the Guardian entitled ‘Taking comic novels seriously’, lamenting ‘the false division between laughter and thought, between comedy and seriousness, between the exhilaration that the great novels offer when they are their funniest, and whatever else it is we now think we want from literature’ (Jacobson 2010h). Jacobson’s exasperation with the ‘diminished definition’ of comedy that underpins Muir’s conservative selection of texts and his cliché-ridden introduction to the anthology was of course exacerbated by the fact that he has skin in this particular game, just as the timing and tenor of ‘Taking comic novels seriously’ was strategic: published just prior to the awarding of the Man Booker Prize to The Finkler Question, the complaint that comedy has been ghettoised in contemporary culture was arguably a form of covert lobbying. This is not to say that Jacobson’s arguments are purely self-interested, but rather that, as with all statements by artists about the nature of the field they work in, they are not entirely disinterested either, and need to be read in the context of their own poetics.

The fullest statement of these poetics – and Jacobson’s most sustained consideration of comedy – is to be found in Seriously Funny: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime (1997), a book that combines history, anthropology, travelogue and literary criticism. Like so much of Jacobson’s fiction, Seriously Funny revels in paradoxes. It claims that ‘[f]ew things matter more than comedy’ but also that it celebrates ‘forgetfulness’ and ‘irresponsibility’ (Jacobson 1997: 44); it argues that ‘through comic obscenity . . . we triumph over the body’s mortality’ while at the same time insisting that comedy offers no possibility of transcendence, instead reminding us ‘we are . . . only flesh that falls away’; and it insists that ‘[w]e are able to be rude only where we feel reverence, and we cannot revere without being rude’ (Jacobson 1997: 1, 38, 242, 132). Finally, Jacobson argues, ‘[i]t is of the essence of comedy to kaleidoscope extremes, to jam together opposites so that they are simultaneously true (240). For Jacobson, ‘[t]he sign of a great comic writer is not that he necessarily makes us laugh . . . but that contrariety is able to have its way with him’ (240–41) and the great virtue of the novel as a form is that it promotes ‘contrarieties [that] enhance’ its readers intellectually and morally: ‘we grow mentally the more apparently antithetical views we hold’ (Jacobson 2015d). This Leavisite note of social utility – what Jacobson describes as the conviction that ‘[c]omedy affirm[s] the vigorous and unpredictable livability of life’ (Jacobson 2010h) – seems to me to be at odds with the claim that Jacobson makes elsewhere that comedy embodies ‘the vigorous expression of our scepticism, our refusal to believe that everything is harmoniously conceived, or that a benevolent agency . . . shapes our ends’ (2017b: 6–7), but then again perhaps this should be read simply as further evidence of Jacobson allowing contrariety to have its way with him.

In spite of its enthusiastic embrace of the open-endedness of comedy, Seriously Funny celebrates a very specific kind of comic writing: the grotesque, scatological, phallocentric, Rabelaisian tradition that the Russian critic Bakhtin defined as ‘carnivalesque’; a comedy characterised by excess and, as Jacobson put it elsewhere, ‘relishing hyperbole, repetition, the swell of language’ (Jacobson 1993b: 32). Jacobson’s own comedy is more various than this might suggest. Although there are carnivalesque elements to his fiction, particularly in the early novels, in which ‘[o]bscenity goes with the terrain’ (Jacobson 1999d: 30), they are more reliant on what has been called the ‘incongruity’ theory of comedy.2 Moreover, Jacobson’s comedy becomes darker as his career progresses. As he himself puts it: ‘[o]nce upon a time I just wrote the satyr play, leaving the preceding tragedies to others. Now I try to create the whole cycle, but always going for that final invigoration of comedy’ (2012a: 270). The comic novels that I will look at in the rest of this chapter run the gamut from light-hearted sexual farce to acerbic political satire, but they do share what Jacobson calls, in another paradoxical formulation, ‘the high indignity of comic narrative’ (Jacobson 2016c: 48), an anti-pastoral sensibility and a preoccupation with literary politics.

Coming From Behind (1983)

The 1984 Black Swan paperback edition of Jacobson’s first novel gives the distinct impression that it is a roman-à-clef. The front cover design features a caricature of the author in the foreground, walking briskly, head down, hands in pockets, emerging from a frame in which football hooligans, academics, students and assorted misfits, delinquents and punks mill about. The biographical note on the first page of the front matter informs us, laconically: ‘He has, of course, taught English at a polytechnic’ (Jacobson 1984: n.p.). The title of the novel itself, while containing a sexual pun, also slyly alludes to the belatedness of Jacobson’s debut: he was forty-one when it appeared.

Coming From Behind might have been a long time in coming, but Jacobson announces his arrival as a novelist with a bang, literally and metaphorically. His first novel begins with a brilliant comic set-piece, depicting its protagonist engaging in intercourse with a mature student:

Sefton Goldberg, on all fours above her, his knees and elbows glued with the perspiration of effort and anxiety to the polytechnic linoleum, as naked as Noah but for the academic gown and hood which Mrs Shorthall insists he wears, it being degree day, hopes to God he has remembered to lock his door. While Lynne Shorthall wrinkles up her nose and bites the air and gargles Black Country familiarities, Sefton Goldberg can think of nothing but the position of the little metal nipple on his Yale lock. Is it up or is it down? He thinks he can recall depressing it, but what if some fault in the mechanism, a loose fitting or some over-zealous spring is at this very moment urging and encouraging it up again? . . . What he would like is to get up and check, but such alarmism is inconsistent with his idea of manliness; and he is not well placed even to take the rudimentary precaution of stealing a glance. (7)

Sexually explicit though it is, there is nothing titillating about this scene. Far from revelling in Sefton Goldberg’s sexual prowess or celebrating his sexual conquest, its keynotes are ignominy and embarrassment. The comedy here derives from a series of incongruities: between the dignity implicitly conferred on Goldberg by the invocation of the old testament patriarch, Noah (albeit the allusion is to the episode in which he is made drunk and seduced by his daughters) and the indignities of his position, sexually (awkwardly ‘on all fours’, his knees and elbows sticky and aching) and socially (he is employed by a polytechnic, which at the time had the reputation of being a second-rate university); between the vulgarity of the situation and the fastidious niceties of the prose in which it is described; and between the uninhibited enthusiasm of Lynne and the paralysing paranoia of Sefton. The delight here is in the details: the complex layers of irony that Jacobson interweaves. The potential eroticism of the scenario is immediately undermined by the emphasis on Goldberg’s physical discomfort and psychological unease (‘the perspiration of effort and anxiety’), but what definitively drains this encounter of any sense of pleasure are the references to the linoleum to which his knees and elbows are ‘glued’ and to the grimaces and unappealing noises of his lover. The verb ‘to gargle’ in particular is an inspired touch, suggesting both a guttural noise and – by virtue of its near-homonym ‘garbling’ – a mangling of language which corresponds to the distortion of her features. If Mrs Shorthall is represented somewhat grotesquely, it is Goldberg himself who is the main butt of Jacobson’s comedy. His humiliation is compounded by the fact that he is sporting an academic gown and hood, not, the narrator drily insists, because of any kinkiness on Shorthall’s part, but, on the contrary, out of a sense of academic propriety, this ‘being degree day’, when tradition dictates that graduating students process in front of their families and academics attired in formal robes. And his anxiety is amplified by his fear that he may be discovered in flagrante delicto, since he is uncertain whether or not he has locked his office door. Again, the comedy of the situation is heightened by the specific terms in which this anxiety is described, specifically the way in which inanimate objects in the passage are imbued with sexual associations, so that the ‘nipple’ of the lock recalls erogenous zones, while the ‘over-zealous spring’ he imagines ‘urging . . . it up’ and his desire to ‘get up’ to check on its status alludes to his state of sexual tumescence, while at the same time threatening to deflate it, as he hopes to have ‘depressed’ the lock itself. Finally, the phrase deployed to explain his inability to reassure himself of their privacy – ‘he is not well placed even to take the rudimentary precaution of stealing a glance’ – is comically incongruous in its decorous diction (‘well placed’, ‘rudimentary’) and formal syntax (‘even to take’), while at the same time slyly hinting at the indecorousness of his situation (‘not well placed’ refers obliquely to the sexual position of the lovers and ‘stealing a glance’ connotes the furtiveness which constrains Goldberg’s desire to confirm that the lock is in place).

In the larger context of Jacobson’s oeuvre, the most telling detail of all is the suggestion, in passing, that the other factor, apart from the inconvenient disposition of the lovers, which prevents Goldberg from checking whether he has locked the door is that to do so would be ‘inconsistent with his idea of manliness’. For Jacobson’s representations of sexual relationships throughout his career are inflected by the tension between his protagonists’ ideas of manliness and the emasculating scenarios in which they invariably find themselves. In fact, ‘find themselves’ is perhaps not the best phrase to use in this context, since these scenarios are, more often than not, ones which they have either consciously contrived or unconsciously connived at. In later novels, this masochistic impulse takes a darker, psychological turn, but in Coming From Behind Sefton Goldberg’s self-abasement and self-inflicted pratfalls are played very much for laughs, and in the service of a satirical critique of the Leavisite great tradition of English literature.

Jacobson was himself taught by Leavis as an undergraduate at Cambridge, an experience he has written about repeatedly and ambivalently in both...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 ‘Being funny’: comedy, the anti-pastoral and literary politics
• 2 ‘Being men’: masculinity, mortality and sexual politics
• 3 ‘Being Jewish’: Philip Roth, antisemitism and the Holocaust
• Afterword
• Select bibliography
• Index