 Whatever you did, if it wasn't good enough, you needed to try and do better and keep at it. Actually, village life produces the philosophical ideas that are germane to democratic thought and practice. I mean, just losing four of your bandmates, soulmates is bad enough. But the worst thing is out of those four families, two of the families blame to me. But the progress from 1991 to 2017, I think only took India to a better place. It was really through the transition into politics that I had the good luck of becoming a writer. India is beautiful and you're so beautiful. Thank you, Mrs. Pencil. And you're a lucky man, son. I made you some coffee and I have a surprise for you. Your favourite? Samosas. Good afternoon. Lovely to see you all back in person after two years of not being here enjoying the lovely, you know, discussions, the sessions. We're delighted to welcome you all to the ninth JLF London at the British Library, supported by Haldiram's. It's our pleasure today to present Mother's Boy, a writer's beginnings. Howard Jacobson in conversation with Alexandra Pringle. Booker prize-winning writer Howard Jacobson illuminates the course of his life, the beginnings, as well as the twists and turns that led to his becoming a writer in the candid and poignant memoir, Mother's Boy, a writer's beginnings. In an exploration of the idea of belonging, being both English and Jewish through the growing pains of childhood, bittersweet memories and experiences as an adult, Jacobson allows a precious window into the mind, motivations and craft of a writer. Jacobson discusses the journey of understanding oneself and becoming the writer you were meant to be with British publishing legend Alexandra Pringle. This conversation will be followed by a Q&A session and what I would like to share with you is that there will be book signing, Howard will be signing books at the book shop outside, so please after the session is over, do find your way there. And while you're at the session, I want to remind you that you can get on to our social media handles. Please tweet and tag using at JLF Litfest and use the hashtag, hashtag JLF London 2022 and hashtag JLF London at British Library. Ladies and gentlemen, Mother's Boy, a writer's beginnings. Howard Jacobson in conversation with Alexandra Pringle. Hello everybody and welcome. So the last time I saw Howard was in January 2020 and we were sitting at Jaipur Airport on our way home from the Jaipur Festival and he turned to me and he said, there's a plague coming. And I said, no, Howard. And I thought, what a doom monger. And I said to him, yeah, I've heard something, but it's not as bad as SARS. And he said, oh no, it is much, much, much worse. And of course, Howard was right. So it's lovely to see him again after this break and we've been through all of this. So Howard, as you know, is one of Britain's major writers and one of our cleverest and funniest writers. He's written 16 novels and five works of nonfiction. And I was incredibly lucky to be at his table when he had the absolute incredible joy of winning the Booker Prize for the Finkler question. And now he's written a memoir and I think it is a classic. But it's not just me that thinks that. Melvin Bragg and William Boyd also think that and they should know, being very educated and distinguished men, unlike me. It is of course very, very funny and it has many layers to it. It's immensely touching, thoughtful and interesting about many things including what it is to be a Jew and what it is to be a writer. I thought we'd begin with Howard reading the very opening of the book. This working? Yes. My mother died today. It is the third of May 2020. She is 97 years old. I have had premonitions of her dying for the last 70 of those years on occasions hearing her calling my name in the night. But last night she was silent and today she crept under the radar of my forebodings. Many are succumbing to COVID-19 but my mother hasn't died of any virus. Two days ago she complained of a bad pain in her head and fell almost immediately into unconsciousness. Quietly and unobtrusively she drifts out of this world altogether. This was always her chosen way of going without fuss or notice. I am upset that the pain of which she complained was in her head. She feared for her head. I too, when I was small, feared for her head. As a young woman she suffered migraines so badly that when she went to bed with her hands over her eyes I was afraid she would not survive the night. Ours was a mental relationship. It was our heads that joined us. I dread dying with a pain in mine. We'd spoken on the phone a few days before she died and but for my having to repeat everything I said twice, three times if it was a joke, we'd had a good conversation. At the beginning of the year when the virus was first mentioned she'd expressed surprise. I was taking any precautions. Oh how would you want worrying about that are you? As though she hadn't schooled me to prepare for the most apocalyptic eventualities. The day I left home to go to university she'd reminded me to take enough toilet paper. What for three years? Until you settle in. I think Cambridge will have toilet paper I said but I took a role just in case. Yet now that we really did have to contend with the calamity equal to her anxieties she had turned perversely carefree. Oh how would. By the time of our final conversation Howard, by the time of our final conversation Howard, every time I see a word that begins with H-O-W I think it's my name. But by the time of our final conversation however she had rethought and was back to her old apocalyptic self. It's going to kill us all she said. After which she moved on seamlessly to cheese. I'd been sending her gifts of mature cheddar cheese because we all love mature cheddar cheese in our family. Grilled on toast ideally and because she can't eat chocolates and doesn't like flowers. This cheddar cheese grills especially well. But I don't want you to spend a fortune on me she said. Must be costing you everything you earn. I told her I could just about afford it. Her reasoning wasn't always easy to follow but I thought I could see what led her to ask next how my book was going. It's okay. What is it again? It's a memoir. What's it about? Me, Ma, what do you think? She sounded concerned. Is that a good idea? Probably not. What about you? About how I became a writer. You were always a writer. I know but I was 40 before I actually wrote anything. So what was stopping you? That's one of the questions I'm asking in my memoir but the short answer is being Jewish. Oh no not being Jewish you aren't going to be horrible about Jews are you? I hope not I said. Or if it was being Jewish that held me back it was being Jewish that got me going. I have said her reasoning took unexpected turns but what she said next soared into the realms of the fantastical. She told me she loved me. I'm ashamed to say I roared with laughter. Ma I said that's not the kind of thing we say to each other and it wasn't love talk was not us. Well I do love you she said. I should have known then that she was dying. I'd laughed but I was overwhelmed by feelings I didn't recognise. I'm glad I said. And then I plunged into the deep dark chambers of the hitherto unexpressed because I love you. There said it. She nearly a hundred. I in my 70s and we'd finally said that we loved each other. It astonishes me. What that we'd said it or that it had taken so long. Both. There's a lot of love in your book particularly love for women I think and there are three women that brought you up your mother your grandmother and your aunt Joyce. Do you talk a little bit about the three of them? There were my mother was very young when she had me. I think she was 19 when I was born. The family was young. She was an uneducated woman but she read books. She left school at 14 but she read books and loved libraries and loved going to the theatre. She'd educated herself as had her sister who was even younger than her who'd educated herself and their mother my grandma who was also a young grandma. Three relatively young women. I was their gift. I was my mother's first child and as far as I'm concerned I should have remained her only child. And for four years I had these three women to myself. They adored me whatever I was like they adored me. They thought I was brilliant. They said these such a brilliant child. And I played up to them. I made up dances and I made up rhymes and I sang songs. And they were my companions really. They were like they were short. All my family's short apart from me. And they were like my little girlfriends. I had this family of little girlfriends who loved me and I loved them and it was paradise. We were in the Garden of Eden together but then a snake came into my garden four years later and that was my brother. So that's another story. You say somewhere that you wanted to have a girlfriend and couldn't understand why you didn't from the age of six which is quite young. Do you think that's connected to this? I think I exaggerated. I think it was from the age of four. I always I can't remember any time. It was to do with these women wasn't it? It must be to do with... I say they were like little girlfriends and that was what I wanted. Presumably when my brother came along and the sad thing about when my brother came along was that the language of appreciation changed. Where with me that always... the words that I'd always heard were brilliant, clever, smart, quick, funny. A new vocabulary that I'd never heard turned up. Beautiful, sweet, gorgeous, lovely. Isn't he lovely I heard? From the other room I'd hear the sounds of women. Does a Yiddish word knitching? Knitching is when you do that and you can hear when you've got little baby chicks they make a squeaking sound. My brother squeaked more than it was right that a child should squeak. So there they were, knitching and squeaking my brother and saying isn't he lovely. I'd never heard that. I'd heard isn't he smart, isn't he brilliant. So I was kind of... I felt excluded. So it might be that from that age, the age of four, I needed to find an alternative to these three women and probably spend the rest of my life until at last I found one, finding the ideal girlfriend to replace them. And I really did want a girlfriend and I would look at other people when we went on holiday. I ruined my parents' holidays because I was miserable all the time because I didn't like being on my own. I don't know what age I was when I would have said I wanted a mistress. I wouldn't have wanted a mistress at four but by about seven or eight I was thinking a mistress might have been a good idea. It was the hand in hand thing and I used to look at the way men put their arms on women's shoulders or women put their arms around men's shoulders and I thought that's for me and for years and years of course I had no such companion. I didn't have one. I think it's an interesting thing that nobody talks about how romantic it is as a woman to have a son, to have a baby son. People talk about girl children and boy children as if they're the same but I think that there is an incredible romance and it's not talked about much. Romance that the mother feels? Yes, I think the mother feels and I hope the boy feels back. I say this as a mother of a son. What if the romance my mother had was with my brother and not me? Well, you know, you can have more than one romance in your life, can't you? But still means if she'd been felt romantic about me and that my brother came along and she felt romantic about him it still means she was unfaithful to me, doesn't it? Well, Howard, you do talk later in your book about being in love with two women at once. So my mother can be in love with two sons at once? Yes, yes. Well, I see it but in my heart I can't feel it. No, because you can't forgive it, can you? No, I can't forgive it, no, no. You started to write this book while your mother was still alive. Do you think that if she were alive now it would be a different book? I think it may have been... Well, remember I'd written half of it before she died but then there was a lot of rewrites. It may have been a less nostalgic book though I am a very nostalgic person. I memorise, I memorialise everything. Absolutely everything. I drive my wife, my beloved wife. I finally found the girlfriend that I was looking for aged four. It took me a long time. But I say to her, do you remember that wonderful day that we had and the sun was shining and we sat looking at the sea and then we ordered crab sandwiches? Do you remember what a wonderful day that was? She said, yes, I do. It was yesterday. And I just memorialised things that have just happened. So it might be that I was feeling, the minute my mother died, another kind of... It was already going to be a sentimental book, I think, another kind of sentimentality crept in. It might be that I felt freer. I was worried about what she'd think about things. She'd not really been reading me for a few. She died when she was 97. So it's understandable if in the last 10 years she hadn't read me much. I think she hadn't read me much in the last 30 years. She was frightened what she was going to find. And she would often say to me when I brought in the new book and I'd show her the new book and she'd look at the cover and she'd look at it and she'd hold it up like that and her eyes were bad and she'd lift up her spectacles, look at this book and she said, you know what, darling, I like your first book. She always liked me and I couldn't tell her how deeply insulting that was. I should have been glad that she liked my first book. I think the answer is yes. I think it might have been a touch more hard-edged. Had she... And also, of course, I didn't get some of the things which finally make it into the book, which are her diaries, which are fantastic and which gave me a wonderful end to the book, I think, which gave the book a shape, I think, yes. And tell us a bit about the diaries. Well, when she died, my sister unearthed some diaries which she thought I would like and she sent them to me. And they are fantastic. I mean, there's one year in which I follow her in the diary for her 17... She was 17, utterly mature, not at school, wandering around Manchester, working for a million, I think, and collecting for charity. The bombs are falling in Manchester. She's worried about the war. She's going to the theatre. She says at one point that she loved reference libraries. I just love reference libraries. She's going to serious theatre. She's going to the opera. No education whatsoever. She didn't come from an educated family. She'd left school at 14, and yet she taught herself all this. She read books. She read poetry to me when I was a little boy growing up. But the wonderful thing that I didn't... The very touching thing that I didn't know, there's a passage in these diaries in which she suddenly says, ambition. Big letters on the top of this tiny little diary. Suddenly, ambition. I must have an ambition. And then she said, and I know what my ambition is. My ambition is to be a writer. I never knew she wanted to be a writer. My ambition is to be a writer. This is something for me to find after I've just finished... after I'm just finishing a memoir about always having wanted to be a writer. It made me feel was I living my life or was I living my mother's life? And with the disappointments I felt in myself. Because if you believe you're a writer from an early age and you get to the age of 40 before your first novel comes out, you're pretty disappointed in yourself. So had I was I disappointing her as much as me, that I don't know. But when she describes the writer she wanted to be, it's just fantastic. She's living in a country house. What? She's thinking about pausing from her writing to go out into the fields and ride a horse. Ride a horse? My mother never... We don't ride bikes in our family. Never mind a horse. So it was... and she describes the kind she'd like to write essays and lectures. She isn't sure what. Terrifically touching. In fact, my mother died during the pandemic and like many families we weren't able to have a proper funeral. But last year we were and the whole family, not a funeral, but the whole family were able to go to the graveside and put stones on her grave as Jews do. And I read from these diaries. And it was really quite wonderful because the whole family was there and the thought of my mother horse riding just amused them so much that we all stood around the grave and laughed. But it wasn't... as you know, it wasn't contemptuous or derisive laughter. It was just a real appreciation of her. She was a laughter. She loved to laugh. It was my job to make her laugh. I was appointed to make her. My father appointed me to make her laugh. He could make everybody laugh except my mother for some reason. I think living with him was just too vexatious for laughter. But I made her laugh and my father loved watching me make her laugh. So I wasn't only my mother in one sense, I was my father in another sense. Which is the story of the book, my being alternately, each of them. Yes. So you were very young when you knew you wanted to be a writer. So you were four when you knew you wanted to have a girlfriend. Six when you knew you wanted a mistress. How old were you when you knew you wanted to be a writer? Five and a half. I was a child of words. I think because I had these three women who talk to me all the time, I became accustomed to words. I liked words. I liked interesting them. I liked engaging them. But above all, I liked making them laugh. Making people laugh but also particularly making women laugh was a pleasure that I acquired then. It's quite a personal thing to do to make somebody laugh. I wrote a book about this, actually a book about comedy, talked a lot about making somebody laugh. And I learned to... I learned... What was your question? It was really sort of how old you were. How old was I? Yes, I think about then. It was to do with words. It was to do with laughter. And then another thing crept in when I was a little older. And that was feeling I was foolish and feeling ashamed. I felt ashamed of myself a lot. This probably had to do with my... At the age of five, stopping grown women in the park and asking them if they'd like to be my mistress. The expression on the faces of some were benign. Some took me home. Some slapped me. Some just thought they'd never heard anything so preposterous in their lives. And I knew how preposterous I was. And the only way I could overcome my shame was to write little tales about them. Tell stories to myself or to anybody that maybe even my mother, if not my dad, he wouldn't eat them in his sleep. But my mother, I would tell stories about it. And I would write little stories about my shame. And I discovered that if you wrote about feeling ashamed, you could overcome your shame. You could as it... You could surmount it. You could be better than it. And because with shame, shame as I remember it anyway was partly about imagining lots of people laughing at you. All around. In the environs of your world, there were people laughing at you. And if I could tell this... If I could laugh at myself sooner than they could or if I could laugh at myself more heartily or with more cleverness or with more... If I could be rude to myself, crueler to myself, I'd prevented them. I'd anticipated them. And in a sense too, I'd beaten them. So very quickly, I thought, telling stories is a way... Writing would be a way of overcoming all the shames that it would appear to be one's human lot to suffer. And not much has changed. But it's at your bar mitzvah that you discover that you like public speaking. And I think you say that if you decided if you didn't make it as a novelist, you'd like to be a comedian or a lyric tenor? Yeah, well, I was very... I was a very sentimental boy. So of course, I very quickly got on to the kind of music that moved me, which was Light Operetta, some opera, but I was like the tenor parts. So all the famous stuff that we loved, Pavarotti singing, it wasn't Pavarotti. In those days it was, I've even forgotten the names, but the most popular was Mario Lanza. Mario Lanza was kind of... Mario Lanza was not quite opera. Mario Lanza was a very interesting... His whole story has interested me, Mario Lanza, because he could have been a great opera singer. But Hollywood got him, because he was handsomish. And that was the end of him as an opera singer. And the whole opera world scorned Mario Lanza. But Pavarotti didn't. And Placido Domingo didn't. And they all said they learned a lot from Mario Lanza. Well, there I was almost before them, if you like, in love with Mario Lanza. So I used to play Mario Lanza on my LPs of Mario Lanza in my room. And I thought, I'd love to be able to do that. And for a little while I thought I could do that, because I don't know whether you ever practice singing powerful operatic singing in the shower. There's something about the water and the shower and the blissfulness of it and the steam that convinces you you sound fantastic. I was absolutely convinced, if I'd have gone on stage, that nobody would have known it wasn't Mario Lanza. And it was only when I went to parties and decided to give people a sample of my Mario Lanza. And I saw the look on people's faces that I realized how far short of Mario Lanza I was. But I dreamed of being somebody like that. I liked the whole Mario Lanza story. I saw me as being like that. He could have been a great opera singer, but he went to Hollywood and gave it all away for money and fame and women. And that would be my story, and I kind of quite fancied that. But there was also a more serious part in that I did love and still do love the music that makes me cry. It doesn't have to be a super Italian opera. It can be Bach will do it and Schubert will do it. And that was what I liked listening to as a boy. And this was when I'm 12 or 13 by now. And the family do start to worry a bit that I'm locked away in my room. And instead of hearing pop music, instead of hearing Bill Haley coming out of my room, they hear all this mournful stuff. And when they come into my room to see what's going on, they see on my walls photographs of George Eliot, Jane Austen, D.H. Lawrence and Henry James, and no pictures of footballers. They really did feel they had a problematic child on their hands. Well, I can see that. But it seems to me that it's also very connected to your Jewish heart. You do a lot of crying, don't you? Yeah, Jews do cry a lot. And that's the music. We moved off my bar mitzvah very quickly. I must have got lost in something or other. I mean, Hasidic music, the wailing and the crying and that sense that you are intrinsic to Judaism really, certainly modern Judaism, is the idea that you are calling to a God who doesn't answer. Because there's no one, there's nobody there. We have no image. This is partly what's fantastic about Judaism, I think. It's an idea. There is no picture. We have no Jesus. We have no profit. We only have this idea of a God. And we want him to answer our prayers and we want the Messiah to come. And although some would say the Messiah did come, but that's not what Jews say, that's what the Jews who became Christians say. So you're always longing for somebody to come who doesn't. So it's heartbreak, really. There is at the center of Judaism, we'll put it this way. Judaism is shot through with the melancholy of yearning. There was a Jewish, a very Schmoutsy Jewish tenor called Leo Fould, who people listened to in the 50s. And he sang these very Schmoutsy Jewish songs about, where do I go? I could almost break out. Every road is close to me. Tell me, where can I go to the east, to the west? There's nowhere I could go. And I love that. I was the wandering Jew aged, whatever that was, 13. And there was nowhere I could go. And you had to go to school, and you hated school. You went to grammar school, and you then went to Cambridge University. In fact, you said, you say in your book, I don't want to talk about school or university. I didn't enjoy either. That's an understatement. I was utterly miserable at the first and hated the second. Why were you miserable at school? I was just a miserable kid. I mean, you think what I'm describing. I've been waiting for a mistress for eight years. She hasn't come. I'm waiting for a god to answer my prayers. He doesn't. I'm listening to Schmoutsy music on my record player at home at night. I am a pretty miserable kid. I'm ashamed of myself all the time. I got to be very shy, which isn't surprising after this lot. I felt very out of place. I was caught up in this strange battle between my parents, in that my father was a very confident, outward going, powerful man with a lot of personality and people loved my father. He was out in the world and people loved him. My mother was much shyer, much quieter. The 17-year-old in her diary vanished. I've often wondered about that. I think the minute she became a mother, she became much more quiet and abashed and introverted herself. And I'd become, in this battle between them, I'd somehow drifted to my mother's side and I was my mother. So I was shy all the time. I was always red and flushing and blushing and not liking things and people always said, I've got a long, why the long face? Why the long face? My father hit me. I never remember. Never forget coming away from some family do and as we reached our house, my father went like that, bang. I said, what's that for? He said, you showed me up. I said, how did I show you? You're doing your long face. People kept coming up and saying, why's he got such a long face? And I could have said, that's because you keep hitting me, father. If I'd had a lesson at long face, he might have missed. But that's what it was, really. It was a mixture of all these things. And sometimes maybe there's no explanation in the end for why someone is just a miserable little stinker, really. I was a miserable, I was a miserable little kid. No fun. I was no fun for anyone to be near. And I knew I disappointed my father who wasn't that he wanted me to be a sportsman and I was no sportsman. So I hated sports at school. This was something else about school. And my mother, God bless her, gave me a note to excuse me from all games. And I had a note in my back pocket for the whole time I was at school. And every year or two, I used to get her to refresh it to put it on a new piece of... And it was bilious. Howard's got very sorry. Howard has a bilious attack and cannot do games today. And the teacher would jost me and say, how many bilious attacks can you have? And I said, I have one every week, sir. And he'd say, but how come it always coincides with games? And I'd say perfectly reasonable, it's because fear of games makes me bilious, sir. And they had no answer. They had no answer to that. So I was just miserable all the time. I did one thing that could have saved it. I played table tennis. I became actually a very good, a seriously good table tennis player. Wrote a novel about it once called The Mighty Walser. And I had dreams that table tennis would make my fortune. Table tennis would be... I'd become a world champion. I was very good. I'd never have become a world champion. But I was a junior player. And I played for Lancashire and for Manchester. And I was ranked about number nine in England. I never made it for England, June. But I was good. The school never mentioned me. The school refused to take table tennis seriously. It's not a sport, they said. I'd go to the gym teacher and say, every morning you'll mention people at school assembly who've done, somebody from a fifth football team has just almost scored a goal and you mention it. And I'm winning cups. I've got cups. I've got pictures of me with cups. And you won't mention it. He said it's not a real sport. So I was furious about it. It was a real sport. I had a track suit. I trained like a boxer. I skipped. And I dreamed that maybe table tennis would be the saving of me. That I'd become a great table tennis player, make a fortune, and beautiful women would throw themselves at me. Why I thought beautiful women would throw themselves at a table tennis player, I don't know. But if I were to ask you here to name, name your favourite 10 table tennis players. Name the table tennis player you most long to be with. When you go home at night and you turn the lights out and you're lying there on your own in bed, who is the table tennis player you'd like to have in your arms? You see the mistake I'd made? But I got a good novel out of it. Well, that's pretty good. I think we should talk a little bit about your father because he was a man of so many parts. So this is the list of all the things he did. He was an upholsterer, a tailor, a manufacturer of coffee tables, a magician, a taxi driver, and a balloonist. Not a balloonist that goes up with a balloon, but somebody who twists balloons around and makes animals out of them. Tell us about your relationship with your father. I was aware from the start that I was a disappointment to my father. I could tell the way he looked at me. Just something about the way he looked at me. There was not quite what he had in mind. I was not, I don't know, I was not masculinist enough. I wasn't enough of a good sport. That was what he wanted. He wanted a good sport. The most horrible things would happen when we went on holiday because we would go on holiday to terrible holiday camps and things. And at holiday camps they have competitions like, you know, the toughest boy, the naughtiest boy, and he would enter me into naughty boy competitions and I had to look like a ruffian. I couldn't look like a ruffian. So my father would rough me up. He'd put some coal dust on my face and mess up my hair and put a cap on and twist my cap and he'd go, put your fists out. I've got photographs of me like, saddest things. He wanted me not to be a sportsman but to be a sport. He wanted me to join in everything. When we went to a pantomime and somebody on the stage would say, okay, all the kids come up on stage now. The father would go, go on, up you go. No, I don't want to go. So I was consistently in flight from what my father wanted. He was a very social man. He loved company. Where my mother shrank from company, my father loved it. He was very short man, very broad man. He was broader than he was tall actually. He was Ukrainian. He used to do those Ukrainian dances, the Kazatsky and things like that. He was a magician, you mentioned that. He did things like tearing telephone directories in half. And a Manchester telephone directory was like that thick. My father could, and he could tear them in half. He bent nails. He liked, if he were here now, he'd come up on the stage quietly while no one was noticing. Get on his hands and knees by one leg, with me in it, with one hand. He was very strong and he loved doing things like that. And he was a very popular man. He was a market man for a while who was a kind of auctioneer and stood on the back of his lorry and sold things, making jokes to a public. He just was, then he was a taxi driver. When he was a taxi driver, he was known as the Godfather. The Godfather of Manchester was my father and that was because you didn't start. If anything needed sorting out, my father sorted it out. And he had me for a son. Yes, but you did a bit of trading yourself. You ran market stalls. Yeah, but nothing. I was what was called a schtummer, meaning I just stood by the stall and just waited for someone to come by. My father stood on the back of his lorry, built up a stall every morning when he went to work on the markets, built a stall on the back of the lorry and then stand there and auction things off. It was a whole pattern. It was a whole theatrical routine talking about the goods, talking about what he sold, getting a huge audience, big audiences who just listened to him talk. And I was the stooge. I stood down below and I had to take all the jokes. So he'd make jokes about me. I was called Charlie. He was called Chief Johnny. And I was called Charlie. I didn't take the jokes in good part. Why didn't it join in? But I didn't. I just shrunk. And I'm so ashamed of myself when I think of it. And he was disappointed in me. He would have liked somebody a little bit more robust. He did find somebody more robust in the end. That was my sister. My sister, who was six years younger than me, did the job. Finally, he had somebody who could, if anybody, if anybody, my father fixed cars and did all that. But if anybody needed to fix a car and my father wasn't there, it was my sister who did it. My sister was the first or the second female taxi driver in Manchester. I'm not saying she was masculine. She isn't at all masculine. But she could just do it. She was competent. And my father loved her competence. Whereas I was totally incompetent. And in terms of not joining in, of course, you go to Cambridge and you list all the things that you didn't do at Cambridge, like wearing a college scarf, toasting crumpets, dancing at a May ball. But you did have FR Levis. And that was clearly a massive thing in your life. Yeah, I was taught by FR Levis, which is a name which will mean something to the more literary of you and the older of you and to others, maybe not. But he was the literary critic of the time when I went. And I went to study with him. He had encouraged me to go and study with him. It was called The Great Tradition. And it began aggressively and ironically with some line like the five great English novelists are. And I loved that. Yes, discrimination. People hated him for it. You can't say he never said there were only five. He just said these are the five great ones. And it was clearly partly a tease. It was a provocation. He was austerely provocative. I thought I can learn from this. He's intolerant. I was intolerant. He was dismissive. I was dismissive. He was contemptuous. I was contemptuous. He was not at home in Cambridge. Although he was the Cambridge star. I was not at home anywhere. So when I went to him, people thought you're so lucky Howard to have come from Manchester and to have gone to Cambridge. And now you're out in the world. What they didn't know was I had gone to somebody to be taught by somebody who was less in the world even than I was. He was noble. The whole business of being shy and awkward. Because he was shy and awkward at Cambridge too. But he was a brilliant teacher. He talked about poetry with wonderful vividness and conviction. And I swore by him then. And although he's entirely out of fashion now, because you're not meant to be judgmental, I say you are meant to be judgmental. The more judgmental, the better. Some novelists are better than others. And you should say so. And I revere him to this day. But that was the reason I went to Cambridge. And as far as that was concerned, Cambridge worked for me. But where the place that really brought you to life was Australia. You described that you were like a flower that opened. Yes, I was. I've never known the name of flowers so I can't tell you what flower I was like. But I couldn't believe it. I was offered a job. God knows why I was offered a job, but I was offered a job aged 22 to lecture at Sydney University. How could I say no to that? So I hopped on a boat, as they say, and sailed to Sydney. And sailing to Sydney was the most magic. I could not believe my eyes when I sailed into Sydney Harbour. And there was this big golden thing in the sky which I later learned was called the Sun. I'd never seen the Sun in Manchester or Cambridge. What's that? That's the Sun. It was hot. There were people on the Harbour in little boats waving the great big P&O liner in. For one moment I thought they were welcoming me welcoming me to Sydney. And for three years, I just loved it there. I thought people were handsome. I thought the women were ravishing. People got jokes. We could be rude. People with tough skin. People from Sydney were a little bit like the people from Manchester I'd grown up with. They were sardonic and clever, but they were more outdoors. And I got to Sydney and within a week I'd bought shorts. The only time I'd owned shorts before was for table tennis. These were walking shorts. I owned walking shorts. I had short sleeved shirts. My hair was going golden in the sun. I had a tan. I was giving lectures. And the most wonderful thing happened. The minute I gave my first lecture I switched like that in a moment from my mother to my father. I just became my father. Bang! That was that. My mother vanished. And I was my father. For a moment I was terrified. That was my first lecture. My first lecture was on Thomas Hardy, Tessa the Derbavills I thought I'd go into a room and there'd be a nice healthy audience like you. There were 800 people there. And I looked out and I thought, can I deal with this? The first thought was if only I had a Manchester telephone directory here I could rip it off. But I was my father. I actually did tear a page out of Tessa the Derbavills. I said this is rubbish here. Through the page away. Awfully showy. But I became my dad on his market stalls. And in a way that changed my life. I was then forever really a bit more my dad than my mother. We're nearly at the point of getting questions. But before that we must get on to you writing the first novel. It took a long time. It took until you were 40. Which of course nowadays 40 seems very young, doesn't it? But then it must have felt like... Nowadays 60 seems very young. No. But it's taken us 40 minutes to get on to you writing a novel. I think there's a perfect... There is. Perhaps you'd like to just read the lovely bit on starting page 246 where you are actually finally writing it. And then we'll have some questions. Is it page 246? Let me see. I'm using my... Can I use yours? I've never read this in public before so forgive me if I stumble. And the campus novel without a campus was what I ended up writing. Over a period of more years than I willingly remember I wrote just a minute. Over a period of more years than I willingly remember I wrote 190 pages. Take what follows as an approximation. 90 of them in my Wolverhampton flat. 30 of them on Bodminmoor. 5 of them in the member services on the M4. 10 of them in a garden in a pub in Bishop's Lidiard in Somerset. 5 of them in my head while trapped inside the old mill waterwheel and however many that leaves on side roads and bridal paths in the course of my searching out Cornish pasties in Devon and Cornwall. I'm living at this point partly in Cornwall with my second wife who was an Australian. I grabbed myself an Australian while I was there. These I handed to Roz my Australian wife to read during a rare peaceful weekend in Wolverhampton together. I put three bottles of Australian Shiraz on the table for her. You think three will do it? She said, I told her I could always nip out and get more. I didn't want to be there while she was reading anyway. When a friend of mine showed me something he'd written and he wanted to see what I think I told him not to be stupid. Just get on and read it, I said. Just get on and write it. Don't show people what you read. Don't show people what you write. Just get on and write. Well then, now here I am doing the same thing. So how to explain my 190 pages to my wife. This is... I've not really set this up well. I finally got round to writing 190 pages and I'm showing it to my Australian wife who's a very, very severe, sarcastic critic of everything that I do. Our marriage was one long sometimes interesting battle. Desperation is the best explanation I can think of. I was getting too old to disappear down the rabbit hole of delusion. I needed my long bottled up words to be looked at and if they were no good I needed to be told they were no good. And then this bit... Let me say it because I think it's too hard to set it up. Sorry. So I gave her 199 pages of the novel to read. I'd written it while not talking to her. I'd written it after we'd been on we got married for a reason I can't now remember. She was Australian her passport had expired for her to stay in the country and she wasn't sure she wanted to stay in the country and I wasn't sure I wanted her to stay in the country but we decided maybe she should stay in the country so we got married so her passport would be alright. We then went on a honeymoon which was the worst honeymoon any couple had ever had. We had a honeymoon in Paris and couldn't find anywhere to eat. On our final night we walked 17 miles through Paris and ended up in a restaurant that one spoke no English, that one had the wrong food. We fought outside every restaurant we finally got to a clip joint in Montmartre where a violinist came up and said do you have any favourite music and my Australian wife said yes do you know the Dead March and that was our honeymoon. We came back, we didn't speak I decided this is now nothing left for me, I'll never be a happy man all I can do now is write the novel so in secret hiding in a corner of our bedroom I wrote 190 pages and then these I showed to them and she sat and read them quietly don't watch me read, she said just stay in another room I listened from another room to try and hear her laughing there was no sign of laughter I stopped her in the middle and said why aren't you laughing she said it's not funny in fact she was Australian so she said it was not effing funny I said go on reading anyway just go on reading it she went on reading it, I kept feeding her bottles of wine she finally got to the end of the novel I could stand it no more and I said well she said come here I did what I was told, I came there she pointed to the last page but one of the novel and she said it starts there I said why is it what makes it start there she said you're the novelist, you decide got up, walked out strangely enough while this could have been the end of the marriage and I suppose it was the beginning of the end of the marriage though this was one of those marriages that ended the day it began, it had an end built into it but this really was finally the end of the marriage though we did stay about another four years together, she did see this novel be published and a couple more but she was actually right she had spotted something to this day I don't know what she spotted on that last page of the manuscript but I trusted her as a critic I threw those 189 pages or however away and started again from that last page and I got a novel so I have a lot to thank her for wherever you are she's an Australian now wherever you are, thank you very much are there any questions is there a microphone, yes there's a microphone there so stick your hand up there's one here you want me to stand up I am a stand up comic hello my name is Anushree and I have a question when you talk about yourself a writer's journey a lot of the times is how they think about themselves and how they see the world you talk about yourself in the past how you saw yourself as a kid how you saw the world how do you see yourself now well it's funny you should say that because I said to my wife I did an event a couple of nights ago and they sent photographs of it and I said to my wife do I really look like that? because I'm sort of shocked at how old I look and I'm only saying that because this is not me trying to get you to say oh you don't look so old Howard so you can say that if you want to say that but it's because I don't recognise what I look like and not recognising what you look like means you don't properly recognise what you've come I am sort of in a state of I'm stunned to be the age I am I don't know how it's happened I don't know how I've got where I am I don't know why I look the way I look I don't recognise whatever you see when you look at me that's not who I am so you're actually not talking to me who it is you are talking to I don't know it's a mysterious business well it's a mysterious business being a human being but being a human being being an ageing human being is very very peculiar I find it weird it upsets me and it means I cast I cast back over the books I've written and I'm starting to do that terrible thing which my wife is not letting me do but I'm in danger of doing it which is that thing that a disappointed person does and I'm now starting to think that could have been better that could have been better these are supposed to be the years when you sit back and go fat and happy and contented in your armchair sitting in the dying sun looking at the sky and saying what's that where you're supposed to sit there and enjoy yourself and I can't so it looks like the critical me that always dissatisfied me that's the only part of me that still is I am unrecognisable to myself apart from my dissatisfactions well you did ask next question can't hear you my name is Aftab Jafferjee I have two questions one is a writer you owe debt of gratitude to your miserable years and secondly can we go back to the Balmetsver please this is how the Balmetsver goes Rabbi Wolwick Rabbi Saperstein Rabbi Goldberg my dear great grandmother my dear grandmother my dear grandfather my dear parents friends, relatives, machatonim my cup of happiness is overflowing to be with you tonight that was what my mother got me to say my mother wrote those words for me the last words I ever allowed her to write afterwards I went home and said mother how could you talk about me having a cup of happiness everybody there in the thing roared with laughter when I said my cup of happiness overflowing your son has got a cup of happiness that's overflowing and because I knew at the time I then as it were took the reins over and started to do a kind of an impromptu speech I suddenly found I say that when I got to Sydney I became my father but at that moment at the Balmetsver I half became my father not that he could make a speech he was no good my mother wrote his speeches for him but I found a confidence and again it was the same thing as when I got to Sydney something about a room full of people excites me something about an audience excites me you excite me just your being here excites me if you were to see me walking home in half an hour you'd see a very a much more downhearted, introverted quiet person that you might not recognize an audience calls something out of me so that's the Balmetsver speech that's what happened but do I owe something to my miserable yes absolutely and in fact the only reason I wrote that Mother's Boy is the story of writing a first novel and the only reason I wrote that first novel finally was that I was more disappointed and more miserable and more ashamed of myself than I had ever been before and the reason for that was not on top of all my other failures I was teaching at an institution I probably very unfairly decided was just the pits I was teaching in a town called Wolverhampton which is the pits you've got to have the nerve to say sometimes some towns are not very nice the West Midlands of this country are not very nice and Wolverhampton was the least nice part of the West Midlands and I was teaching in a polytechnic and because I am a snob and had studied English literature at Cambridge under F. R. Leavis I thought I should have been teaching either at Cambridge or at Oxford or at Harvard nowhere else and here I was teaching at Wolverhampton Polytechnic and it was worse than that because the polytechnic didn't respect our department which was made up of people just like me who wanted to be teaching at Oxford, Cambridge or Harvard we were all a very snobbish bunch the poor students didn't know what we were talking about we taught them highfalutin poetry in language that was not available to them and the polytechnic was so disgusted with us that they gave us rooms in the Wolverhampton Wanderers football ground there was a football ground there mulling you and they said we'll give you rooms there and we said we don't want to go there we don't like football we've got nothing to do with football and they said we will give you rooms where you will be able to look at the ground and when you're teaching on a Saturday afternoon you'll be able to see the match while you're giving lectures when finally I woke up one morning after this terrible honeymoon that I told you about at the end of not a happy marriage and the second thing I would the first thing I woke up to see was an the first thing I woke up to see was an unhappy wife the second thing I woke up to see was the dreary dark of Wolverhampton and the third thing I woke to see was my diary in which my classes were listed at Wolverhampton Polytechnic football ground and I thought in every regard my life is not just miserable it's shameful it's humiliating it's pathetic and I thought there's nothing else I can do now but write a novel about it so I wrote a not a campus novel it didn't even have a campus Wolverhampton it was a campus novel without a campus it was I'm amazed really I never thought anybody would publish it or like it or anything but it seemed that when it came out you need a bit of luck it seemed that when it came out in 1983 the public wanted the most miserable humiliated novel that had ever been written and I was the lucky one you see luck will come to you in the end I was the one that gave a miserable country what it wanted and your publisher was my first boss Carmen Khalil do we want to talk about this well we could this is the elephant in the room should we talk about the elephant in the room let's talk about the elephant in the room I sold the manuscript of this novel to two lovely men one was called neither of whom Alas is alive now one is called Jeremy Lewis a well-known publisher and the other was the poet DJ Enright they were running this publishing firm Chateau & Winders they liked the manuscript of this novel and they bought it six months into there having bought it not published yet in comes to Chateau & Winders to take it over a very very famous publisher your mate Carmen Khalil who started Virago did you start Virago? she started Virago I was the fourth person to join I was what was known as the shit worker there and I ended up as editorial director well you survived I'm the only person that ever survived Carmen so Carmen comes in and Carmen publishers never like authors that they've inherited a publisher that moves to a new publishing house likes to bring in their own but Carmen had inherited me and she took one look at the manuscript which was full of it wasn't a sexy I'm not capable of sexism as you've heard I love women all I ever wanted was a woman to be my mistress it's not possible but there were references to there were references to women there were references to parts of women's bodies I talked about this one having beautiful arms I talked about that one having lovely fingers one woman I described as having beautiful ankles Carmen didn't like that stuff so she took the manuscript and she took a blue pencil and she put a pencil through every every reference to a woman's every reference so I went to Jeremy Lewis the person who bought the book and said what do I do about it she does this through everything by a man she just doesn't like men and she doesn't like books by men she never looked again to see whether I'd taken any notice I took no notice but she did ring me up once when I was at this point living still well obviously I was because the novel had not finished living with my Australian wife in Cornwall and Carmen rang me up in the house in Cornwall and said Howard I don't know what I'm going to do about you I said in what sense she said nobody knows who you are in London nobody knows you I said I know well that's because I'm living in teaching in Wolverhampton half the year and living in Cornwall the other half of the year she said you've got to come to London and have an affair with somebody famous she spoke so loud that my wife could hear it my wife was sitting at the other end of the room and she said she means her and I didn't come to London and have an affair with Carmen I never propositioned Carmen nor did she proposition me and in fact the only reference to anything suggestive between us was made by her when at a party that she gave for the publication of my novel and the publication of seven other novels we stood in a line and she went along as all like a sergeant major inspecting us and you went you're a wonderful now you're such a wonderful writer you're Howard Jacobson what am I going to do with you and I said well publish me she said yes well that's not going to be easy do you know Howard if you run naked down Bond Street I wouldn't be able to sell one of these novels and I didn't run naked down Bond Street and true to her word she was not able to sell one of my novels in fact this particular novel would have died completely had it not been that for a paperback publisher so if you are a writer things have probably changed a lot but if you are a writer my advice would be don't despair when your hardback publisher doesn't sell a single copy because a paperback publisher might rescue you and I was rescued from and this is your friend my ex-boss I used to wake up crying in the morning and I was so frightened of her we should have been together because I went to bed crying at night sadly I think we're out of time but you can all see what a completely ravishing book this is so go and buy a copy get Howard to sign it and you can cherish it thank you so much Howard that was wonderful