Howard Jacobson Meet the Author

jumped by more than 40%,

on its stock market debut.

Now it's time for Meet the Author.

Howard Jacobson is a master of the art of serious fiction

that is also hilarious.

He has won the Man Booker Prize and the Everyman PG Woodhouse Prize

for Comic Fiction twice.

No-one else has done that.

The Dog's Last Walk and Other Pieces is a collection of his newspaper

columns for the Independent.

They sparkle with wit, plenty of erudition edition

and the wisdom of a writer who seems to get even more curious

about life and about all of us as the years go by.

Welcome.

Let's do the sensible thing and begin and the beginning.

The first story in this collection of columns is called

The Dog's Last Walk and you have chosen to give that title

to the collection as a whole.

Now, why?

I've had the good fortune to have read it and I think I know why.

But what is it about this story that touches you so much?

It touched other people too, people stopped me in the street and said,

you just made me cry.

So I thought, "Ah!", I'm not used to making people cry.

I didn't used to have the confidence to make people cry.

I thought my job was to make people laugh.

I never had the confidence to admit that I cried.

I mean, I've been a blubberer all my life and I've denied it.

You cry at the movies?

I cry everywhere and I pretend not to.

Don't want to admit that I cry.

Just now, and this grand old age, I'm prepared to admit that I cry

and I'm prepared to write to make people cry.

Not that I did that deliberately, I just saw a scene that upset me

a great deal and I wanted to write about it.

Well it's a terribly touching story.

You were with your wife sitting on a park bench

and what did you see?

I saw an elegantly dressed lady leading a big, very

tired black labrador.

Labradors have wonderful, wonderful heads.

Dogs altogether seem to have a gravity that human

beings rarely manage.

But labradors particularly.

This was beyond the usual sadness of a big dog.

This looked to me, and I said this to my wife, this

is his last day on earth, you can feel it.

And the way his owner was walking him around,

being very patient with him when he had to stop, bending down

to him and stroking his head, told me that this was the last day

of his life.

Whether she would take him to be shot or what, whether he would just

expire at the end of the day, but you could just feel it,

between them, in their relationship, you could feel this was the last day

they would spend together and it was unbearably

upsetting to see it.

I thought, will he even die in front of me?

And I just wanted to describe his slow progress around the park.

It's also a wonderful illustration of how a piece

of writing and reflection, of newspaper column length

in this case, can come from one little observation,

one moment, you know, a flash on your eye of something

and then everything begins to weave itself around that one sight.

Absolutely.

That's always been my way of doing it, the only way I can do it.

I couldn't come as a columnist, if there had been a war

while I was writing, although there were some,

I didn't know how to deal with them.

I want to make something little big rather than, you know,

leap on the back of something that is big.

That's the challenge for me, start with nothing and let the words

do it, let one's observation do it, let the words do it,

see where they take you.

It's a wonderful skill to be able to fashion

a column that is touching, funny, may be profound

if you're lucky.

But also has a kind of wordplay that gives it a simple aesthetic pleasure

as a piece of writing, it has a beginning, middle and end,

beautifully turned sentences.

And that's what you really love, isn't it?

The rhythm is everything, get the rhythm of a joke wrong,

comedians know that.

A joke, the timing and rhythm is everything and so it is in

the writing something like a column.

I can just start with very little and I the words do it.

I am, if you like, a servant of the words.

They are my words, but sometimes they don't feel like my words.

Where do they come from?

A mysterious feeling.

Of course you feel that the world is a mystery, that's quite

a good start, isn't it?

It's much more fun than knowing everything.

If you're going on an exploration, saying, how did that come about,

why do we feel like that, why do people behave like that?

And more important I think than ever at the moment

because post the social media, and I can't stop banging on about it

because I feel it will be the death of humanity in the end.

Mark my words, if we're around 100 years, I said it,

it will be death of us.

But social media thrives on assertion.

I know this or even worse than that, I think this, I feel this,

this is my opinion.

I don't really have opinions.

It may look like I have an opinion but first

and foremost I'm a novelist.

I am ironical, elusive, equivocal, you can't find me,

I don't want to be found because I'm not there.

Me, me, is not there.

You're sometimes very irritated as well, particularly with social

media in all its manifestations.

There is a wonderful column in which you talk

about being invited to join one of these networks and of course

you don't want to take part in it and you imagine the person whose

name has popped up saying you are invited to join

the network waiting.

"Has he not responded yet?"

This whole idea of a world of emotion that is out

there but completely beyond you.

Beyond me and expressive of views I can't bear,

and certainties that I can't.

There is this or there is that.

You and I know that everything interesting is not a thumbs up

or thumbs down, it's everything in between that.

All the great writing that you love is writing about that middle ground,

the lack of certainty, the difference between good and evil

that is often not as big a difference as you think.

You know, the ambiguities that are in every human being.

Absolutely, and the other thing that's started to crop up quite

recently I think is this idea of the importance of sincerity.

We've had it with several of our recently elected leaders.

At least he tells what he believes.

No virtue in saying what you believe if what you believe is trash.

Writers aren't sincere, they are never simply only

themselves, they have to find other ways of being all the time.

Well, that brings us conveniently to another project

which is near fruition, a novel, a story coming out

in April, inspired, provoked, whatever the appropriate word is,

by the election of Donald Trump, an event that clearly moved

you to do something.

What did you want to do in this story, which is called Pussy?

The day that Trump won the election, that astonishing night,

I went to sleep thinking he'd lost, as I've done on several other

occasions that year.

I woke up in the middle of the night with a goblin sitting on my chest,

unable to breathe and I realised what had happened.

The following morning I just began a fairy story.

You can only tell it as a fairy story.

To my mind, you can't do this as real.

A traditional fairy story?

A kind of Grimm's fairy story, a ferocious fairy story about this

character called Fracassus and about his birth

and how he is destined to run the free world.

What is fascinating about him is that he has no words,

this is a person with no words.

That's the phenomena that we're seeing over there at the moment.

How can a person thrive, how can a person be listened to,

believe he has the right to govern, but worst of all, how can he be

elected when he has no language?

Language is what we know, we who read and write,

language is the way you think, the way you think yourself out

of prejudice, the way you think yourself to enlightenment.

Without language, you're locked in.

Did you feel better when you finished it?

I felt a lot better, partly because I was excited that

I'd written something at this speed.

The columns had helped me, all those years writing columns

had helped me to write.

Normally I'd take two years to write a novel.

Here was a novel written, it isn't a full-length novel,

it's a novella, but it's 50,000 words, written in a few weeks.

The columns helped me to do that.

Well, people can read Pussy next month and for the moment they can

enjoy your columns under the heading of that melancholy little story that

opens the collection of columns, writing, The Dog's Last Walk.

Howard Jacobson, thanks very much.