Lichtich's review of Ma Bao – the late Howard Jacobson

Mother’s Boy: A Writer’s Beginnings, by Howard Jacobson, Jonathan Cape, March 2022, 288pp

Howard Jacobson was nearly forty years old when he published his first novel, and has struggled to catch up ever since. On his eightieth birthday, he published his memoir Mother's Boy: A Writer's Beginnings, his twenty-third book. Entering this century, he published an average of one novel every two years for twenty years, from the age of sixty to eighty. When "The Finkler Problem" won the Booker Prize in 2010, his lifelong ambitions were fulfilled, and Jacobson received the stamp of authoritative recognition he had always desired, but he did not lie in the book of credit.

Since then, he has dabbled in metafiction (2012's Zoo Time), dystopianism (2014's J), Shakespeare (2016's "My Name is Sherlock"), political satire (2017's Pussy), and a charming twilight romance (2019's Living Out Of Myself). While this belated prolific output is inevitably uneven (2006's Carockie's Night is so great, and Trump's is superfluous), this series of works cements his reputation as a prominent British Jewish writer of his generation and, of course, the outstanding creator of British Jewish fiction. The series also testifies to his perseverance, which has allowed him to survive the first two decades of adulthood—no way to publish, no name, nowhere to find himself everywhere—but also to find himself still longing, still believing that writing is the path to freedom.

"Ma Bao" is a story about this perseverance, which is not so much stoicism as it is necessary to exist. As Jacobson said to Costy Young on "Lonely Island Records" shortly after winning the Booker Prize: "I can't imagine what life would be like if I didn't become a writer." Or to put it another way, as Jacobson said in Zoo Time, borrowing Guy Abelman as his other self- character: "The urge to write is an impulse to rewrite your childhood situation." In Jacobson's fiction and nonfiction, in newspaper columns and interviews, he draws extensively on his own experiences in childhood and youth, and in a sense Ma Bao is a collection of his life's work and a narrative about how he got started: a logical conclusion and a story of origins.

Jacobson's fans are already familiar with much of the book's material: his upbringing in north Manchester in the 1940s and 1950s, the feelings of outsiders, his ambivalent relationship with Jewishness, his escape from table tennis, his studies at Cambridge university under F. R. Levi's years, traveling to Sydney to lecture on the transformation of English literature, and then returning to England in displeasure to find another teaching position at Wolverhampton Polytechnic – the backdrop to his bitterly intertwined debut novel, Later on (1983). But jacobson's commanding heights are different today's, and his persona seems to be more open-minded and less self-critical and hurtful—and just as interesting— than his previous incarnations.

We start with his mother – is there any other possibility? In the preface we learn that Jacobson's mother died at the age of ninety-seven while he was writing this memoir. The last connection to the old world was severed, although those connections could be repaired or rewritten through writing. "Since I started while she was still alive... Writing these memories, I will make it seem as if she is still alive throughout the book. Anyway, when you recall the past, tense doesn't matter. ”

We'll read humorous accounts of Jacobson's relatives, his great-grandmother speaking Yiddish (her "foreign look frightens me"), his unruly grandmother and grumpy grandfather (those "phlegm spit out loud and disrespectful behaviors"), and the Eastern European background steeped in horror. "The word 'Russian' alone is enough to conjure up images of a superstitious, anti-Semitic, stenchy village inhabited by pig farmers." As with his past work, Jacobson takes that history of persecution extremely seriously, but questions the kind of worship that is directed at the victims—a tension that runs through all of his work. His parents said to him, "We are British now, be grateful and do your homework." The author recalls how he and his friends "freely ridiculed each other, in response to the excessive sensitivity of our parents and ourselves to anti-Semitism, and invented the whole myth of Jews and hatred of Jews to explain every illness and frustration." He felt that Manchester in the 1950s was "an era that made it easier for Jews to grow up than it is now". Many will disagree with him, though his reasons carry his typical bold wit. "I don't remember anyone accusing us of being slave traders."

Jacobson was a shy, clumsy, non-athletic boy who was prone to motion sickness and liked to hoard books. His father Max was pragmatic and imposing (he used to punch Oswald Mosley) and a performer: this was evident in his market stalls, peddling "goods from unknown sources" and later becoming a magician. Jacobson brilliantly portrays his fictional image in The Mighty Waltzer (1999), in which we learn more about the humiliation experienced by the newcomer writer at the time, such as selling candle wick bedspreads or other classified groceries to his family at the markets of Oswestley and Gaston. The author says of Max's ghost: "Your style is low, your asking price is lower, and the upright man who bears all the criticism ... It's me. Only now did he realize that he was not the only victim. The ghost asked, "Don't you think I didn't hate it half the time?" ”

Jacobson may have been "ashamed" of Max, but he also grew fond of the idea of giving a famous novelist a trickster father ("Pride and shame are not always incompatible"). He writes emotionally about Max's good sense of humor when he is used as a "material" for creation, and attributes the happy chowder of His father's mouth to his former love of word games ("He speaks many languages—just in his own way"). But it was Jacobson's mother—a frustrated self-learner—who introduced the boy to the world of poetry.

College has proven to be both an inspiration and a disappointment. F. R. Levi's revelation was behind the times, and Jacobson's shyness, though gradually washed away in his late teenage years, is now roaring and making a comeback. "I had no joy or joy, and I finished Cambridge." He had poor grades when he was in school. After graduation, he married his girlfriend from Manchester, the hairstylist Barbara, and struggled to find an academic position. "I entered Cambridge as a persecuted Jew. I left Cambridge as a persecuted Levisian. "It was Australia that beckoned to him at this point.

From here, the "Ma Bao" narrative picks up the pace. Jacobson found himself gifted with lecturing and making carefree friends ("I forgot to be a Jew"). He drank, partyed, and forged friendships that had lasted for years. He doesn't behave well with his wife ("I forgot to be a good husband"). There have been a number of affairs, including with his undergraduate students. The author wisely stepped out of that self twenty years ago, when he claimed (in the Sunday Times) that "when we sleep together, we can become better teachers and students." Now the book expresses more regret: "Barbara, I am so sorry. ”

The couple will return to The UK to take it a step further and live in Manchester, London and Cambridge. "In all three places, the worst times have been met." Jacobson is now full of thoughts about becoming a novelist ("I'm thinking of fiction, breathing in fiction" but apparently hasn't made much effort to achieve it ("The novel itself is an insignificant text"), thus falling into despair, and he also has to sell handbags in the market to subsidize his income from part-time teaching in Cambridge (there is a wonderful conversation in the book, people are misled by his Manchester accent, thinking that he is selling "liar" humbug instead of handbags). They had a son, but the future novelist had little ability to be a father. The marriage collapsed. One day, Jacobson returned to Australia after sending his child to kindergarten.

If the first two-thirds of "Ma Bao" is about the cultivation of a writer, the second third is more focused on his failures. In Melbourne, "I almost wrote a novel"; after returning to England again, he found a teaching position in Wolverhampton and moved into a dilapidated apartment and began working. "I rented a cell and atoned for my sins, the most excessive of which was my own tendency, and everywhere I lived would become a cell of atonement." Although these days are full of sins, there are no works that have taken shape. Jacobson's tumultuous second marriage caused him to run between Wolverhampton and Bocastle in Cornwall, where his wife Rose opened a shop selling art. The distance from the university gives Jacobson space to satirize it. His epiphany was the realization to write "a campus novel without a campus." A book took shape. Rose loved the last two pages of it. The rest had to be abandoned. Then a second epiphany appeared, with which he had been staring ever since: he was going to write the protagonist as a Jew. A novelist was born.

Shortly before Jacobson's mother died, he had told her, "If it was Jewish identity that got me in the way, it was Jewish identity that got me going." For Jacobson," "as a Jew" (a recurring joke in "Later on Top") meant a lot of things. For this time, it seems akin to some sort of self-acceptance — albeit imbued with rich ambiguity. Closely related to this is its self-projection side, which is another key to Jacobson's Jewishness. As David Brauner commented in his literary-sharp monograph Howard Jacobson (2020), Jacobson's writing "always has an element of performance." It's all part of the tragicomedy. True, true, false. While this approach allows us to keep a certain distance from the memoirist—I hope to read more about Howard as an absent father, a jealous brother, and even a depressed person who touches the soul—that's what makes Ma Po so easy to read.

(The original English version of this article was published in the Times Literary Supplement on March 18, 2022, with the author's permission to translate and publish)