Favourite Things – Howard Jacobson
Each week Reaction Weekend brings you Favourite Things – interviews with interesting people about the skills, hobbies, pleasures and past times that make them who they are.
Howard Jacobson is a novelist, broadcaster and university lecturer. He has written over twenty works of fiction and non-fiction and wrote a column for the Independent for nearly twenty years. In 2010 his novel The Finkler Question won the Man Booker Prize. Several of his works have also been shortlisted for the prize.
These are a few of Howard Jacobson’s favourite things.
Memorial Benches
Whether it is overlooking the sea or in a park, I love memorial benches. They have to have a message on because I’m a word freak, but I will read every message on every bench. I am so touched by the messages; memorial benches keep the person more alive than a gravestone. I like that the bench memorialises someone for not very much. These are not benches for someone who killed a lot of people in the French civil war, but simply for someone who loved it here. I always imagine them, whoever was here, sitting and looking, being in this spot on this bench where I am sitting now, a beloved person. I get the bench, I get some words, I get some intended or unintended poetry and I get the emotion of a person being remembered by somebody who loved them.
When my book Live A Little came out last year my wife, knowing my love of benches, erected a bench for me. So, you don’t have to be dead to have one. It’s in the little park at the bottom of St John’s Wood high street. The sad part about the lockdown is that I have not been able to see it for several months, but I’m hoping it’s still there.
Secondhand Bookshops
I have been amassing books since I was about 10 and a bookish little boy. All I ever wanted to do was be a writer, so I thought, in the meantime, I will collect books. I used to go to the secondhand bookstalls in Shudehill market in Manchester. It was so exciting to spend hours there rooting around because you could find some quite unusual things and even put sets together. I would bring them home in a little box and creep into my house because my parents started to worry that I was overloading my bedroom. They kept talking about dirty books. It wasn’t pornography – the books were not very physically clean because they had come from God knows where and were thrown into the store. But for me, that was part of it. The mustiness and the fact that some of the pages stuck together.
My dad used to say, why are you buying more books? Have you read all the other ones? And I would say, that’s not how books work. You don’t read one and get rid of it and then buy another one, you accrue them and have them for research. Some of these books I won’t read this year or next, but I will one day.
Street Eating
One of my favourite things is eating out. By eating out, I mean out. Not out of the house, but out on the street. When I was about 13, I left Manchester properly for the first time and went on a school trip to Paris. I had never seen people eating in the streets before or pavement cafes with their awnings; I thought it was so fantastic and the life I wanted. It was entirely my idea of sophistication. It became my dream for when I was older. I would be a revered writer or thinker and people would find me at my favourite street eating out and would come over to talk about the meaning of the world. Whenever I see people eating out, I still get excited by it. To try and boost trade again in Soho, they have pedestrianised some areas. It is lovely because they are not just eating out on the pavement but eating out on the road! For someone who saw eating out on the pavement as exciting, eating out on the road… wow.
Opera
Opera sounds a bit fancy and I’m not an opera buff, I just love the music and go to the opera house when I can. I don’t listen to anything as much as I should due to my writing. I’ve written a lot since I became a writer and other things become an intrusion, even the beauty of music. So, I carry stuff in my head. I hear Schubert piano music, not every minute, but lots of the time. I have always wanted music to make me cry. I don’t want to be seen to be crying and it has taken a long time to admit it. My parents thought I was a very odd child with my dirty books, crying over classical music.
Opera is the kind of theatre I like most. I don’t go to plays or comedy clubs, I can’t bear being part of an audience in which we are all laughing knowingly at the same thing. But there is something about all being moved by something sublime in music when every person’s heart is breaking. I enjoy that it isn’t ideological, their hearts are not breaking because Jeremy Corbyn has lost the election, or because Trump’s going to be with us for another few years. At that moment, you know that human beings share something important. I go to the opera to get that feeling. And then I come home and think I would like to eat out on the street.
Pelicans
I was brought up in the middle of Manchester where we had yards instead of gardens. I knew nothing of the natural world. Then I went to Australia and for the first time, I saw these birds. Often in remote parts of the coast, you come across a little bit of gravel beach miles from anywhere and there’s a very quiet pelican. I like the clumsy serenity of a pelican. You see lots of pelicans in European churches because the Pelican became a kind of metaphor for Christ. It was mistakenly believed that pelicans killed their young, pricked their chest with its beak to make itself bleed, and then fed the blood to its young ones to revive them. You could see how that could get caught up in Christian theology. It fascinated me to discover that the bird was once thought of as destructive and then later as a saviour to its young.
Once a pelican was sort of a saviour to me. I was travelling in Australia in the outback somewhere and I had done my back in. I could drive but I couldn’t get out of the car, and I needed to get out of the car. I pulled the car onto a grassy verge and had to do a very ungracious roll out of the car onto the verge. Then I couldn’t get back up. In the middle of the indignity there was suddenly a pelican standing over me and looking at me benignly. This is where I’d like to say that the Pelican helped me up and gave me a little ride on its back, but I can’t go that far. But there was something in that kindly force of nature that empowered me to get up.
