destructive — or angry — enough to write a
‘violent, sexually deranged’ essay for Cam-
bridge’s leading pacifist intellectual, and
graduated with a 2:2; the neurotic’s degree.
‘Cambridge played into some of my own
peculiar paranoia,’ he says now. ‘Something
happens. Like Rip Van Winkle, I fall asleep,
and then when I wake up everything has
changed and I have got to catch up again. I
always have that sense. If I go into any room
and everybody knows one another and I
don’t know them and they don’t know me.’In his twenties he lived with wife, his
baby, and his parents-in-law; he taught in a
secondary school; he sold leather goods in
Cambridge market. ‘I felt I had gone back-
wards,’ he says. So he left: ‘I took my little
boy to school one morning and said, “Daddy
won’t see you for a little while”, and flew to
Australia to be with my friends.’
He was, he says, ‘very selfish and unhappy
and an unhappy man is very dangerous’. He
returned to a job at Wolverhampton Poly-
technic, and despair. ‘My dad used to tease
me, people would jeer at me because I called
myself a novelist. I just did not know what
to do, I couldn’t find it, I couldn’t find avoice.’ In the opening of Kalooki Nights —
‘the best thing I have ever written’ — he
writes an equation about Jewishness. J÷J=j.
But he can’t solve the equation. He can’t
minimise the J and, in his heart, he doesn’t
want to. So he wrote Coming from Behind,
the story of Sefton Goldberg, a Jewish lec-
turer who sounds like Howard Jacobson, at
a polytechnic that sounds like Wolverhamp-
ton Polytechnic.
‘The voice needed to have Jew in it,’ he
says. ‘That’s the only way to explain your life
so far: why you felt out of place, why you felt
that the culture that you belong to doesn’t
think you belong to it.’ He knew this now.
‘Finally, finally, a novel,’ he pauses, ‘with my
name on it.’ He was 41.
Writing, he says, was ‘a liberation from
what I was — the limitations of who I was
—and the life I was living. I could retell me.
I could retell the story of the world — that
is to say, my world. I could make me again.’
He is very emphatic. ‘That was the way to
somehow get out. There was some truth that
needed to be told, and only I could tell it and
I had to tell it my way. Until I did it, every-
thing else was incomplete.’
And that is why he wrote Pussy, in a
frenzy of bewilderment and disgust. It is
a defence of everything he has loved; and
everything that has saved him. He cannot
understand why everyone does not like his
novels: ‘So who is not going to like it?’ And
he cannot understand how someone can be
as stupid — so happily, proudly stupid — as
Donald Trump.
‘How do you put your shoes on in the
morning? How do you exist and be so
dumb?’ He read The Art of the Deal. He
ordered it from Amazon. ‘I could write it
in about a minute,’ he rants. ‘The dog could
write it. It is the emptiest mind there’s ever
been!’ So he imagined a hinterland for the
infant Donald and it is the emptiest place
you could imagine.
He doesn’t care about the politics, but
‘the wordlessness of Trump, the wordless-
ness of the man, and that wordlessness is
attractive. That I cannot conceive. When I
was a little boy, words,’ and he pauses, to
repeat it, ‘words, words were everything’.
He hates ‘the social media’ and its con-
tempt for words. ‘It will be where every-
thing that the Enlightenment has been for,
everything that we have tried to aspire to
as human beings, out of the primeval soup,
grunting for words, finding expression, find-
ing the ways in which we can understand one
another through language: gone.’ He says
this very low, and adds: ‘Dead.’
He writes to defend his calling, then; he
writes to find order. If he writes too much
in one day, he says, he will, ‘go to bed early
and get up early feeling I have to get rid of
it. Because I might die and there is evidence
in the world of my having gabbled’.
He thinks about death a lot, particularly
when he is happy. But that is the J again.H
oward Jacobson awoke to the news
of Trump’s victory in November. He
had no newspaper column so, what
could he do? Write a novel, said his wife, and
he did, in six weeks. It is called Pussy, and it
is a short and horrifying hypothetical biogra-
phy of Donald Trump, now an infant prince
called Fracassus, born into a noble family of
property developers. Fracassus hates words.
He hates women. He tweets. Jacobson throws
every weapon — every word — he has into
Pussy. He is the voice of the metropolitan
liberal elite emitting a death rattle, and that
is a grave calling.
I have loved Jacobson since he wrote
this, in 2011, about the ‘new’ anti- Semitism:
‘Thus are Jews doubly damned: to the Hol-
ocaust itself and to the moral wasteland of
having found no humanising redemption in
its horrors.’ If I love his journalism, I cannot
finish his novels because — and this is a very
Jewish criticism — they are too evocative.
Reading The Finkler Question — for which
he won the Booker Prize in 2010 — made
me want to hit my father with a spade.
In person, Jacobson isn’t noisy. His nov-
els, which he ‘stole from his own life’ take
it all, and leave him courteous and calm
— except when he is talking about Trump,
‘the’ social media and Brexit. He is 75, but
he looks younger. He speaks in a low Man-
cunian growl.
Jacobson is a child of two warring Jew-
ish worlds, which make, by my count, three
civilisations to be torn between, and the
potential for three separate alienations.
He has mined them all. ‘We are all our par-
ents’ battlegrounds,’ he says. ‘Mine was very
stark because my dad was unlettered, extra-
verted, vivacious.’ His father’s family were
Ukrainian Jews: ‘The rabbis who did som-
ersaults, the charismatics.’ He was a mar-
ket trader, and a children’s magician: ‘Not
a very good magician. The kids could see.’
His mother’s family were Lithuanian Jews:
‘Scientists, philosophers, students. They were
shy, easily hurt, [and] withdrew into them-
selves. At family dos, the hokey cokey would
come around and my father’s sisters would
be screaming and my mother and her sister
were shrunken in a corner.’ In 1961, he left
grammar school for Downing College, Cam-
bridge, to study under F.R. Leavis.
He was terribly shy: ‘I didn’t know how to
make anything work for myself.’ He was self-Tr u m p, t h e e m p t i e s t m i n d
Howard Jacobson talks about his new novel,
a hypothetical exploration of the US President’s childhoodTANYA GOLD