Howl is Jacobson’s attempt to do just that. To get a handle not on the pogrom itself, which in its sheer horror and cruelty defies all but the grotesque imaginations of those who conceived and perpetrated it, but on its aftermath. In what, writing a prophetic 2009 article on the resurgence from the left of British antisemitism, he described as “cosy old lazy old easy-come easy-go England”. A place that deluded itself it was immune to Jew-hate of the violent and virulent kind, and to which Howl will, by the end, serve as a kind of elegy.
It couldn’t happen here. But it could, and it has, and it does, and the fact he long since saw it coming has made it no easier to deal with it.
It would land beyond the far reaches of facile to say of Howl that at least some good has come of it all – doubtless Jacobson would prefer to have no pogrom and no novel – but one can say that Howl is, paradoxically, a joy of a book. All the broad comic exuberance and pinpoint observational brilliance, the effervescence, the virtuoso phrase-making and joke-telling, that at the gloomiest moments of our interview one might fear events had knocked out of the man – just as, at times, events have knocked the stuffing out of all of us – flourish in his writing as vividly they have ever done. It is both a marvellous counterblast to the narratives ranged against Jews, and more importantly still, a magnificent work of literature. Even the best polemic, after all, is merely a polemic. But literature has a lasting power agitprop will never know.
The author with his wife, Jenny De Yong[Missing Credit]
“It wasn’t really a novel at the beginning,” says Jacobson. “It was just a rant. As it all unfolded, Jenny said, ‘You have to write something.’ My first thought was a non-fiction book.” He replays his own reactions to the aftershocks of October 7. “‘Lie.’ ‘No, that’s not true.’ ‘Lies, lies, lies, lies.’” He conceived a book called A History of the Jewish People in 100 Lies. He imagined a comic. His agent pictured a small volume placed by the till – a dark, droll conceit. It is both the refuge and the curse of the writer to meet tragedy or catastrophe with professional calculation. “Finally, I thought, ‘No, I’ve got to write a novel. It has to be, because only a novel can deal with [this].’
“What I’m planning to say as I go out into the world to talk about the book, is, ‘Look, before we go any further, this is a novel. It’s not a march. It’s the antithesis to a march.’ But it wasn’t the antithesis to a march at the beginning. It was a march. It was its own march. It was a better march, I can tell you.” He chuckles. “It had better lines. And it had righteousness on its… well, it had God on its side.” His tone is at once self-mocking and deadly serious, acknowledging the portentous weight of such an assertion. “But it wasn’t long before I showed it to my wife. She just reeled back.
“She said, ‘This is like a howl.’ That’s where the word came from. I had a completely different title. And it was a howl. Now it’s a howl with its many different meanings.”
The most immediate of which is the evocation of Allen Ginsberg’s poem with the same title, whose famous opening line provides the novel’s epigraph: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” This itself acquires a double meaning: the antizionist derangement of minds which, if not always the best, are often the best-educated, in turn drives mad the targets of their righteous lunacy: which is to say, us.
Howl captures better than anything else I have read how maddening it all is – as in, both sanity-sapping, and enraging – and how exhausting.
Joseph Heller’s 1961 classic Catch-22 dealt with the question of how to stay sane in a world gone mad.
Howl asks how you can possibly stay sane in a world gone mad specifically at you.
“Oh, that’s interesting,” says Jacobson. “I like that. The first thing one always says is, ‘The world’s gone mad.’ It’s a trite thing to say. I was playing at the beginning with carnival – the whole topsy-turvy idea, the world upside-down. Because people were admiring things that had nothing to admire about them. They were calling obviously wicked things good things. And whatever your politics – I keep wanting to stay away from those – whatever right you have on your side, you are not permitted to feel those things about murder and rape or any of it.” As he later notes, he deems the foregrounding of the death of Palestinian children in every BBC report on the Israel-Hamas war a modern variation on the old blood libel – “because Jews have got previous” – yet he feels nothing but grief at the casualties themselves.
“I wept like other people at the sight of the kids.”
Observational brilliance: Howard Jacobson[Missing Credit]
Into this post-pogrom bedlam he has hurled Ferdinand Draxler, the good-natured and moderate headmaster of a London primary school.
Jacobson’s protagonists are often taken as avatars of the author, and to a degree this remains so – Ferdinand’s ideas, mannerisms and humour certainly resemble his own – but more than this, Ferdinand is an Everyjew, a character upon whom everything that has happened to us collectively in recent years is visited personally.
“He’s sweeter than most of us,” says Jacobson, and I guffaw involuntarily. “But, yes, that’s a nice way of putting it. And not just in the last few years. He’s also got the Holocaust piled on top of him” – this in the form of his mother, a survivor of Belsen comprising equal parts self-mythology and iron unsentimentality – “so he’s the victim of everything, absolutely everything.”
If it were simply a story of Mr Nice Jew versus the Nasty World, Howl would be at best a diverting parable, and at worst an act of special pleading. But Jacobson would never be so pedestrian. Part of what makes the book so funny, and a great deal of what makes it complex and profound, is that Ferdinand’s struggles are just as much with other Jews, and especially with his family: with his formidable, quixotic and in every sense (including the Freudian) impenetrable mother; with his long-absent brother, reappearing just when his talents as an agent of chaos are least wanted; and with his daughter Zoe, captured by the academic parareligion of antizionism, which presses every psychological button on her console. As Ferdinand forlornly observes, “She’s had sorrow educated out of her. She knows only allegiance and hate.” Zoe numbers among those Jews “unable,” as Jacobson has it, “to resist marching with people who want them dead”. Perhaps youth and naivety are mitigating factors for the likes of Zoe The Antizio. But there are many Asajews much older and no wiser, represented by Ferdinand’s colleague, Gillian Wallenstein, who thinks that other Jews – to whom she is, of course, superior in her enlightenment – dwell, as a matter of preference rather than duress, in “the ghettos of the mind”. I ask Jacobson if he shares my sense that we are – speaking metaphorically, at least for now – being forced back into the ghetto.
People were admiring things that had nothing to admire about them. They were calling obviously wicked things good things
He ponders, briefly, sadly. “I guess we are. It is bigger and more comfortable, but, intellectually, yes, I guess we are. Yes,” he says, “and I don’t know how it could be otherwise.”
But then, Howl – in all its bursting, hilarious, heartbroken vivacity and generosity – shows what the best of us can produce even in those narrowed confines. Put us in a cage, harass us, banish us from the Community of the Good, and we’ll still make richer, finer, funnier art than our jailers, assailants or excommunicators ever could. Perhaps that might help explain the eternal conundrum of why they hate us so much. Or perhaps, as I suggest to Jacobson, it’s simpler than that. Perhaps it is, and always has been, because we’re there.
“That won’t quite do it, though,” he says. “It’s because we’re still there. I think that’s a good answer to the question. Yes, we’re still there.”
Howl is one more piece of evidence, of the life-affirming kind, that we will not go quietly.
Howl (Jonathan Cape) is out now
