Howard Jacobson's Blog, page 13

Leave out Hurricane Irene – which was not quite destructive enough to merit blanket television coverage – and the major atmospheric tumult afflicting the east coast of America in recent times has coincided with my being there. Some three years ago, as I reported in this column at the time, I flew into “Snowmageddon” Washington on the last plane out of London. “The last plane out.” Fainter hearted men might have stayed home, but I resolved to boldly go.

And so the Jimmy Savile scandal rumbles on, with every woman who's ever been felt up in or near the BBC, no matter how long ago, no matter at what age, and no matter whether on air or off it, piling in to add her experience of molestation to the charge sheet.

So, is philanthropy the last refuge of the scoundrel?

Ed Miliband did something extraordinary this week. I’m not referring to his speaking for over an hour without notes, though that was extraordinary enough. Nor to his delivering that speech with the fluency and timing of a seasoned stand-up comedian, though that was more extraordinary still. No, what was truly astounding was his assumption that right this minute the British people would rather put their trust in a Jew than a toff.

Much as writers complain about the amount of spirit and shoe leather they expend doing the literary festival circuit, the majority also find it exhilarating: the crowds, the flattery, the prawn sandwiches, all those hidden-away libraries and theatres they wouldn’t otherwise get to see, let alone perform in.

In a famous passage in Persuasion, Anne Elliot tells a sentimental sailor to mend his reading habits, hoping he does not read only poetry – a form “seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely” – and recommending such prose works of the best moralists as were “calculated to rouse and fortify the mind”.

Two cruel examples, this week, of the inevitability of disappointment. I don’t just mean the Wordsworthian sinking of spirits, dropping from delight to dejection for no other reason than that we are framed that way, hourglasses whose vital energies run out like sand the minute we are full and have to be turned over. I am thinking more of the way the facts of our nature return to mock us – whether in Hillsborough or Benghazi – every time we believe we’ve glimpsed a brand new dawn.

Vanessa hated it when I started a new book. She saw it as me getting one over her who hadn't started a new book because she hadn't finished, or indeed started, the old one. But she also hated it when I hadn't started a new book, because not starting a new book made me querulous and sexually unreliable. At least when I was writing a new book she knew where I was. The downside of that being that as soon as she knew where I was she wished I were somewhere else.

Every two years for the past 12, I have published a novel. Not a strategy, just the way it's fallen out. I was a late starter, but I don't think I've been trying, consciously anyway, to catch up; though it could be that what you don't do in your twenties you will need to do later on. Certainly I began to fear, with every passing birthday, that I wasn't after all going to make it as a novelist, unless you could be a novelist without actually writing a novel. I kept a mental list of how great writers of the past were doing at the same age. Lawrence published his first novel when he was 26, so he didn't help when I got to 27. Henry James's Watch and Ward was serialised when he was 28 and Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby at 29, so they too were dispiriting once I passed 30.

Remember Norman Hackforth, accompanist to Noël Coward and the "mystery voice" of Twenty Questions, the BBC radio quiz which kept the likes of me entertained from about the age of five until... well, I would say until the age of now if only the programme were still being broadcast.