Howard Jacobson superbly captures the terrible cost of becoming a writer

Howard Jacobson, who turns 80 this year, published his first novel aged 40. Since then he has produced roughly a book every two years, including The Finkler Question, which won the Man Booker in 2010. Given that he was put on Earth to write, why the wait? This is the subject of Mother’s Boy, a tale of self-persecution in the form of a monologue which includes interjections from the ghosts of his parents and one chapter, recording a period in his twenties that he drifted through in a dream state, printed in a font resembling handwriting.

‘How’s the novel coming along?’ his father would routinely ask after Jacobson graduated from Cambridge with a ‘poor degree’ in English. He was taught by F.R. Leavis, whose claim in the opening line of The Great Tradition that ‘The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad’ would impress Jacobson enough for him to call his son Conrad. Perhaps his own name was the problem? How could you write a novel as great as Pride and Prejudice or Middlemarch or The Golden Bowl ‘when you don’t have a novelist’s name? Howard Jacobson? I didn’t think so.’

Leavis trained his disciples to preach his doctrine rather than add to the English canon, but Jacobson rejects the suggestion that his tutor might have stemmed the flow of his students’ creative genius:

What he did was make us see what a rare thing creative genius was, and how it needed to be distinguished from creative mediocrity. He was not to be blamed if many of us came also to see, under his tuition, wherein we were deficient.