← A Point of View
A Point of View
Our Revels Now Are Ended
00:10:26
Howard Jacobson presents the final edition of A Point of View.
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Howard Jacobson
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.
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Howard Jacobson
did when I was invited to contribute to A Point of View was crack open a good bottle of wine. A Point of View was a slot I'd coveted since listening to Clive James range over the entirety of human experience without ever once committing the sin of taking himself too serious. The second thing I did was buy a notebook. I already had more notebooks than I would ever fill, but they were the sort that came in the canvas goody bag. Literary festivals give their writers, along with a pen, a small bar of chocolate made by an obscure chocolate maker, and a copy of a novel by a fellow contributor. The chocolate I'd eat, the novel I'd present to Oxfam, who never wanted it. The canvas bag itself I'd fold into a neat square and and store in another canvas bag. And the notebook I'd give away at Christmas to people who'd give it back to me the following year. It was too bulky to serve as a notebook for A Point of view. For that I wanted something svelte enough, its pages smelling of the pine forest where they'd originated, to fit in my top pocket, where I could find it the moment I had an idea for a point of view. Not the whole essay, just the germ for one essay. We'll come to that, but suffice to say, we didn't have the word podcast yet. What I didn't know when choosing my notebook was how quickly I'd fill it with ideas that didn't work. I'd written a weekly column for the independent for nearly 20 years, and you don't get second chances with a weekly column. Find yourself with an idea that's on its last legs, and you either give it the kiss of life or leave the country. The high wire part of column writing, getting to the morning of the day you have to file without a clue what you're going to say was what made it exhilarating. Not knowing what I was going to say even became something of a fetish. Look at me, everybody. No hands. Remember Ms. Peecher, the schoolmistress in Dickens? Our mutual friend who could, and I quote, write a little essay on any subject exactly a slate long, beginning at the left hand, top of one side and ending at the right hand, bottom of the other. And the essay should be strictly according to rule. I bet that wasn't how Montaigne or Dr. Johnson used to do it. And I knew I couldn't even had I wanted to. I lacked the organizational skills. I became a novelist because I had an untidy mind and couldn't keep a tidy desk. And while an essay, even when it was called a column, was meant to give an illusion of compact order, I still wanted it to be a sort of sister form to the kind of novel I write. Ironic, without an axe to grind, a great bold leap into the unknown. The advantage of that method for an essayist being that you have less far to if that didn't work as well when I was writing A Point of View, it was because a point of view was more than words on paper. A point of view was a voice, and a voice will give away what words can keep hidden. But more than this, a point of view was broadcast. It went out into the world. It asked for attention. It's one thing to help pad out a newspaper with the story of you're almost being hit by an e scooter powered by a grown man wearing kiddies ankle socks and a MAGA baseball hat. It's another to expect the country to give a damn what dangers you face when you cross the road, not looking because you're writing sneery observations in your notebook. Perhaps because I am of the generation that grew up in the immediate aftermath of World War II. I take the very word broadcast seriously. I was in my pram when Churchill was broadcasting to the nation, warning of dire hardship and calling for exceptional courage. But I must have heard him. How could that same verb to broadcast apply both to those great war speeches and my asking say why so many operas are staged as bacchanals? And why so many chubby baritones sport multiple body piercings and come on stage wearing leather thongs? Funny, maybe in a Saturday paper but to a country worrying where the next meal's coming from and wondering what its children are doing on the streets not. And so my svelte and elegant notebook filled up with rejected ideas, as did all the succeeding ones. So how many bad ideas did it take to make a good one? That's a cruel question. Some weeks, four or five. Some weeks the right piece wrote itself. My piece about not being much of a hugger at the best of times came fully formed into the world early in the first touch me not days of lockdown. The disgrace of Brett Kavanaugh's election to the American Supreme Court landed on my desk as though gifted by the gods. An elegy to my mother, whose funeral Covid stopped me attending, was a soulful piece I'd been practicing writing as long as I'd known her. She enjoyed a joke against herself even in her 90s, and wept tears of true merriment whenever I told the story of her surreptitiously loading my suitcase with toilet rolls the day left home for university. I think Cambridge will have toilet rolls, Ma, I said as I removed them one by one. But the joke was on me. My college bathroom had a bar of soap the size of a cockroach and a few torn sheets of the Times Educational Supplement. That might not be true, I don't remember, but my mother loved exaggeration, and I felt I owed her memory that. No one says an essay has to be a literal account of what happened. Its only debt is to the frolicsome spirit of truth. This was another of the ways in which I felt that the essays I wrote for a Point of view were more little novels than there were arguments or opinions on matters of fact, politics, economics, issues of state. In one of his essays, D.H. lawrence called the novel the one bright book of life. Novels, he said, go the whole hog. For me. It's precisely because essays can't or won't go the whole hog because they refuse the false idea of unanimity conferred by a cast of thousands relying on the virtuosity of a single rebel voice finding argument in solitary reflection that they matter almost as much. The great Austrian novelist, essayist Robert Musil, or author of the Man Without Qualities, one of the best and most difficult to finish novels of the 20th century. But don't let that put you off, employed the term essayism to define a sort of writing that challenged the all encompassing ambitions of the novel by keeping every question unanswered. Essayism is the practice of a vital uncertainty, a principled directionlessness, a refusal of grandiosity. Sunday psychobabblers talk of closure as though a matter closed is a problem solved. Closure holds no temptation for muzzle the essayist, or indeed for the novel's hero and his sister, who are made up of fragments, all passionate, piecemeal. Critics with a neatness fetish call the man without qualities a mess. I have said I keep a disorderly desk, so you would not expect me to agree with them. If an essay is a fragment of a novel, what the novel might have been had the novelist not let his characters distract him so much more. Scintillating the essay One way to shore ourselves up against the deranged certainties of the Internet and its associated media is to rejoice in in the idea that life is passionate, piecemeal. We are fragmentary beings. If we measured ourselves against the idea of wholeness less often we might make fewer visits to the doctor and sign up to fewer causes, offering imbecilic cures for our brokenness. Brokenness is good. Brokenness is the proof that we need neither religion nor ideology to prosper at a time when we no longer have the concentration to read entire books. And what we do read leads us into the arms of madmen. We should love the shards of skepticism with which the best essays dazzle us. I am no Prospero and a point of view is no bewitched island, though it has often enough bewitched me, but it still with tears that I abjure
- [10:22]
BBC Radio 4 Announcer
my rough Magic from BBC Radio 4.
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Howard Jacobson
They remind me of the beauty of the everyday.
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BBC Radio 4 Announcer
Illuminated is the home for creative, one of a kind documentaries that shed light on hidden worlds. You could hear the plants photosynthesizing, a place of audio beauty and joy with emotion and human experience at its very heart.
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Howard Jacobson
You can see the people walking bewildered, absolutely bewildered.
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BBC Radio 4 Announcer
Nobody really knew what to think. The programs you'll find here explore the reality of contemporary Britain and the world. It's a chance to meet voices that are not normally heard.
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BBC Radio 4 Announcer
Illuminated from BBC Radio 4 All Human Life is here, just waiting to be discovered. Listen on BBC Sounds.
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