An interview with the Booker winning author, Howard Jacobson. By Debojit Dutta and Manjiri Indurkar.
Guy Ableman, the protagonist of Howard Jacobson’s latest novel Zoo Time, is a fiction writer living in an unfortunate age. Fiction is dead, because fiction readers are dead, and those who are still reading would rather read books like The Girl who ate her own placenta. But Ableman is adamant on sticking to the traditional mould, albeit ignoring one advice of the traditionals, of maintaining a clear divide between the author and the novel.
Mind threatens to give in to the pleasure of deciphering symbolisms, and pardon us for the trend has been long established. We too would have done it, had it not been for Jacobson warning us not to confuse him with Ableman. Because while he has “won the Booker”, Ableman “has not, and will never.”
The theists believe that every character is a shadow of its creator. The line that defines the writer from the character has always been obscure. An observer can easily mix the two. Maybe that is why fiction is so beautifully confusing. The mark of a good writer is the realisation of his limitations, says Jacobson, “If you start a book as God and also end up as God then you know you have not written a very good book.” The trick lies in the loosening of grips, both of fingers and the imagination: “You start a book you create a world, and you think you are a God, but then the characters take charge and they take the world the way they want to.” Whether or not Ableman feels intruded by Jacobson is a debate that could go on forever, for who is to say where the writer ends and the character begins. Becoming God is a romantic idea, a delicious sin, desirable to all, achievable to none.
Jacobson, the writer, believes that a person becomes a writer, so that he can be one. Jacobson, the liberal Zionist, as he has come to be called, informs us that such an act is blasphemy. Creating a world parallel to the one created by the almighty is considered to be blasphemous by the followers of Judaism, and that is why “art is to be taken seriously.” Jacobson, the writer and Jacobson the Zionist are doppelgangers of sorts. Often one surfaces while communicating with the other. If Jacobson the writer is speaking, Jacobson the Zionist tiptoes in, hijacking the conversation. However, there is a world of difference. If Jacobson, the Zionist, is vocal about his opinions, understands and fights for the Jewish world; Jacobson, the writer, is a recluse, who would prefer not to exist beyond the pages of his books. “Logically, I should not be giving interviews,” says Jacobson, “I should say I have nothing to say; I am not important, my novel is.” Yet here he is, talking to us about writing, but more about the people who consider it to be sacrilegious.
The writer and the Zionist coexist in harmony, often greeting visitors with a single hand shake. So, when reviewers accuse him of writing semi-autobiographical novels, they can’t be blamed entirely. At certain levels, his characters do seem to borrow much from their creator. Ableman doesn’t know what being Jewish means; for a very long time, Jacobson too was oblivious to the Jewish ways of life. The protagonist from The Mighty Walzerwas a table tennis player, Jacobson in his youth was one of the top ten under-18 players of the game in England. In the age of technology and literature festivals, too much information about the author is available to the reader, which forces him to draw such conclusions. But the author asks us to avoid such details. “I don’t like talking about autobiographies,” he tells us, “no matter how many ideas you get from the world, the minute you start writing, it is all false. And the falseness is what is wonderful.”
Interestingly, his reviewers are not the only people guilty of making these assumptions. Jacobson, after sending the final draft of The Mighty Walzer to his publisher, got a worried call from her. She asked him to reconsider the ending of the novel, where the protagonist is disappointed with his two children (daughters) who have become orthodox Jews. She thought the ending might cause pain to the writer’s own kids. Jacobson laughingly told his editor, that he didn’t have children, just one son, who wasn’t even religious, let alone orthodox.
Mention of The Mighty Walzer brings back memories of his school days. He talks about his headmaster’s lack of respect for table tennis, refusing to call it a sport. Surprisingly, he concurs with his headmaster’s notion. Calling the game disrespectful, he equates it to art. “Table tennis is like art, it is one of the things that you do when you feel you are not quite at home. When that happens, you want to build a world for yourself.” Many artists have spoken of similar thoughts. The reason behind harbouring such a thought could be different for each. While for some it could be love and its many tragedies, for others, loneliness or pure madness. Jacobson, it seems, struggled with his own identity since a very young age.
Do not misjudge, his childhood was as colourful as mine or yours. He grew up in what he calls, a “poorish family.” His father made furniture, a business which soon went bankrupt, and so the Jacobsons started making and selling small goods. The business didn’t make much money, but kept them afloat. Howard, the oldest of the three sons, though involved, was never interested in the business. Unlike his father who never read a book, his mother was a woman of words, and it was because of her, he says, he could become a writer.
The Jacobsons weren’t religious Jews, they didn’t know anything about being Jewish and whatever they knew was hidden from the kids. “One of the things that I discovered very late in my life was where we came from,” he says, “because no one ever talked about it. So I’d ask where did we come from, and Russia would be the answer.” To be more precise, his father’s family came from Ukraine, and his mother had roots in Lithuania. Jacobson, who believes he is a product of his parent’s “battle through life”, says he has inherited intellect from his mother’s side, and the garishness from his father’s.
The oblivion that shadowed him throughout his childhood must have contributed towards the making of the man he is today. Perhaps, that is why Jacobson is so brazenly a supporter of Israel. He says that in a strange way he is still in conversation with Moses and Abraham. He is aware of the Jewish Commandments which must not be broken; all of which he broke long back. The most serious one of them all being “Thou shall not make art”, for art, as said earlier, is blasphemy.
A staunch advocate of Israel’s cause, Jacobson has written extensively about how the country has played the role of a demon in the English world. Be it writing his regular column for the Independent or other publications like the CNN’s website — where he famously opposed Alice Walker’s decision to board the freedom flotilla to Gaza — Jacobson has left no holds barred.
Recollecting the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, he informs us that the biggest mistake Israel made was that it won and kept the land to itself. Thus it became the conqueror, who deserves nobody’s sympathy. “But then,” he pauses to introspect, “what would have Israel done?” He’s aware that the problem lies in the act of choosing: “the Israelis say that the land is theirs, they are right, and when the Palestinians say that the land is theirs, they are right.”
Israel, he says, is the bad guy of the English world. The Holy Bible is nothing without the devil, and the English world is nothing without its hated people ─ the Jews. Then, would it be incorrect to say that it is the hatred that stitches the worlds together? Is it the hatred for the other people that makes Jacobson appealing to the English world? Is it the hatred that makes him loved? Is he Britain’s hated other or the loved one? Jacobson, the Jew smiles at us and says that the hated other is the necessity for the world. Jacobson the writer, in the meantime, has abandoned the conversation and retired to a world, of which, we know nothing.
