Howard Jacobson has chosen an Indian restaurant for our meeting: Zaika, in Kensington High Street, a place of pomp and quiet ceremony, with wood-panelled walls that make it look like a college where everyone is neglecting their studies in favour of eating curry. The waiters wear gold waistcoats and Jacobson tells me – we sit down at a window overlooking Kensington Gardens – the place used to be a bank. He has not been here before but the key thing was to choose somewhere Indian. The choice is unexpected. Jacobson is known for his obstreperously brilliant novels with Jewishness defining the narrative. The first hit was the campus novel Coming from Behind (1983) and then, almost 30 years and nine novels later, he won the Booker with The Finkler Question which chair of the judges Andrew Motion praised as a novel about “love, loss and male friendship”. His most recent, J, is his least comic (an effort of will: “I try hard not to be funny”) and was shortlisted for the 2014 Booker. It describes a dystopia in which oblivion is the norm and ignorance anything but bliss. Indian restaurants don’t get a look in.
Jacobson is the most invigorating person to lunch with: hilarious and hangdog at the same time. He is smartly turned out, bearded, with a glint in his eye. I used to know him a little years ago and am delighted to find him unchanged. At 72, there is still something vigorously laddish about him. He is eloquent, opinionated and makes you laugh while keeping a resignedly straight face himself. I should have guessed he would be able to turn his life into a story in which everything was reshuffled with just one constant: the Indian restaurant.
He is “sentimental” about food and sentimental generally (of which more anon). He grew up in Prestwich, Manchester where his father, a market trader and magician, introduced him to Indian restaurants early: “Father got very excited by Indian food – and ate gluttonously.” Later, Indian restaurants were convenient for courting: “If you met a girl late at night, you could go for a curry.” He says: “I attach friendship and being in love with food.” Resolved not to be sentimental as a young man, he scoffed at men who cried in films. But his own throat was “permanently sore” from “gulping back grief”. And he was inveterately love-struck: “I fell in love Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday…” He was, above all, “sentimental about myself”. He would fret about extinguishing new flames: “How do I tell her? I thought she’d not be able to bear it. How do I break the news to this girl I have known for 24 hours that she will never see me again?”
He went to Stand grammar school and to Cambridge to read English under FR Leavis. When he arrived, he identified the college porter as the famous don and was puzzled when he did not respond to remarks about the relative merits of Dryden and Pope. As a working-class Jew from up north, he felt a misfit: “I had a rubbish time but it wasn’t Cambridge’s fault. It was all in my head: I am different from the rest. I was a bad student.” He would become an accomplished public speaker but while at Cambridge, “I’d flush and startle like an 11-year-old girl. It was horrible. It was agonising. I didn’t feel entitled…” But what he and his best friend, John McClafferty, did feel entitled to was curry. They would dine in college but that was never enough. So they would pop over to the Indian restaurant opposite with old-fashioned flock wallpaper and pictures of the Taj Mahal. “It took us away from Cambridge’s preciousness.”
The next restaurant to feature was in Australia where, at 22, he was taken on as a lecturer at Sydney University – “the most fantastic job”. By this stage, he had proposed to “the girl next door” – the first of three wives. The restaurant in Sydney was run by “Ralph from Leeds” and Jacobson always chose rogan josh which is what, in a statelier version, he is eating today (nihari gosht, slow-cooked lamb shanks with braised onion and spices). People are often mysteriously loyal to their choices at Indian restaurants.
A lonelier restaurant came next. On his return from Australia, he got a job lecturing at Wolverhampton Polytechnic: “I was on my own and by then divorced. My colleagues lived in Shropshire. I lived in Indian restaurants.” He has always felt an “outsider’ – Indian restaurants appear in his narrative as retreats. But claiming outsider status must be a stretch nowadays since winning the Booker and being embraced by the literary establishment? “Is there an establishment? We don’t know if there is. If there is, it’s probably in Norwich. And if there is, it didn’t put its arm around me or – if it did – I didn’t notice.” But winning the Booker, he admits, has been sweet: “I had been inclined to be rancid.”
J opens with the moral: “Always leave a little on your plate.” Would he apply this to his life – and/or this meal? “It does not apply to the way I eat. I’ve been greedy in my pleasures. I’ve left nothing on my plate or anyone else’s. I’ve been a marauder. I’m an avid eater of other people’s leftovers.” I can confirm this. He enjoyed my lunch (in as far as I was prepared to allow) as much, possibly more than, his own.
One of the most attractive things about him is that he is emphatically doubtful. Is there anything about which he is certain? “Absolutely nothing.” He pauses. I wait. “I’m certain of my feelings to the person to whom I am married. I’m certain of my steadfastness. It’s taken me a long time.”
He is married to documentary-maker Jenny De Yong. They met when his 1987 travel book, The Land of Os, was being made into a film for Channel Four. They live in Soho which he loves although he says there are “far too many chocolate shops – you could spend an inheritance on chocolate”. Jenny is, as we munch, reading his new novel based on The Merchant of Venice, part of a series commissioned by Hogarth Press for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. I’m wondering how well he takes criticism and whether she dares risk giving it? “It is tense when she is reading. The house goes quiet for a few days. She doesn’t want me to ask how it is going from page two. She does not laugh aloud – no huge guffaws.” And she did once have to deliver a bombshell: “‘I don’t know if this is going to be the end of the marriage: but this doesn’t work.’” (The book, ironically, was The Act of Love). Not what he wanted to hear but he heard, rewrote and stayed married.
What has he learnt about marriage? “I’ve got better at it. I was too young to get married. My father was happy with my mother but warned me not to marry as young as he had. When you are too young, it makes you cruel. I was a cruel husband, impossible to live with, not nice – it takes a long time to become worth loving. The big lesson is that you are very much who you are with.”
His second wife was “a great companion and courageous, much tougher than me”. And he reminisces (it sounds like a sitcom but must have been hair-tearingly stressful at the time) about helping her run a restaurant in an old mill in Boscastle, Cornwall while commuting from his Wolverhampton job. He sometimes cooked moussakas (one of three dishes in his repertoire – spag bol and treacle tart the others) in Wolverhampton and drove them to Boscastle.
Would he agree men in his novels tend to be more high-maintenance than women? He looks wary. Well, is he high-maintenance himself? His present wife’s mother, after meeting him, told her daughter he would take “a lot of looking after”. He admits: “I do. I need devotion. I’m incapable of surviving on my own. I become wretched, don’t do anything.”
He has a son from his first marriage and a granddaughter who live in Manchester – life coming full circle. We have barely talked about Jewishness, I say, although his novels explore what his perfunctorily Jewish childhood overlooked. He had a barmitzvah, he explains, but that was it. He knew his mother’s family were from Lithuania and “Dad’s lot were from Ukraine’. He puts on a voice: “We are from Russia – stop asking.” He would not describe himself as an atheist today but is mistrustful of what happens in religion’s name: “It is murderous when people think they know what God wants them to do…” But this is another conversation. He looks across at my idle fork (my methi murgh is excellent but filling): “Can I have a little more of that?” OFM
Howard Jacobson will be at Jewish Book Week, Kings Place, London N1 on 1 March; jewishbookweek.com
