YouSaid · the spoken record

Howard Jacobson

lines on the record: 50
first: 2011-02-06
most recent: 2011-02-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Oh God, that's tough. It would be between Janet Baker and Alboli. And the Janet Baker, which is how to resign oneself beautifully to death probably would be too morbid for me in the end. So Alboli for love and for life and for the future.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I actually want is shirts I love shirts, I am a shirt person. I want to be I don't I couldn't do beach bump thing on this I want to look I want to have pleated trousers and I want to have shirts which are kind of somehow or other miraculously ironed for me so that when the rescue party comes which I hope will be very very quickly I'll be looking smart”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“the Oxford Book of English Verse I have to have some poetry there, and since I can't have a volume of Don and a volume of Keats and a volume of Wordsworth, so that way I will get a little bit of all the ones that I like.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll bowly you're a sweetheart, this is to my wife M Jenny, and it was a we got married five and a half years ago and we had a band playing at our wedding that had to play to make sure before we had the band that they knew this and could play this in the right spirit. You'll hear why.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I play music. When I was choosing the music for this and I played them and yes, I sobbed over half of them. And sometimes if I'm caught, I'm embarrassed, my wife caught me. She thought I'd just heard some terrible news. Bad news of the death of. I'm not very good with death. I don't know if anybody is good with death, but I'm worried about it and have worried about my own and can't find any way of consoling myself in the face of it. And when somebody I love dies, I just, you know, there's nothing I can say not only to, you know, to his or her family, but to myself that makes me feel all right. I just feel as though something's been scooped out. There's a great hole in life. For all my misery, I must love the world a lot because I so dread leaving it.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll be writing in my head and listening to this music and sobbing, sobbing a lot. I'll be doing a lot of sobbing, but no, I will make an extremely bad job of this. I won't know how to eat, I won't know how to shelter myself. I very much doubt I'll survive to tell you the truth. I doubt I'll survive to get to hear these eight”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Schubert, I adore Schubert, this is piano trio in B flat Major, it's a very important piece of music to me, eh because it's exquisite, and B because it was a piece of music I listened to with a very dear Australian friend, Terry Colletts, who died last year, and he was one of three friends who died when I was finishing the Finkeler question, to whom the Finkeler question is dedicated. It's hard being this age if you're a man, you know. You worry about your health, and the men are not making a very good job of living as long as women are. But Terry Collett's was a desperately close friend, and this was music that we listened to together in Australia.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, he told me he was coming, but nonetheless, I like that idea that knock, knock, knock, and I heard the knock and my son has come. And we talked and we've been very good friends, very, very good friends ever since.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we had one of those, you know, one of those wonderful conversations that you read about. I never lost contact with him. We saw each other, but his mother married again and so someone else brought him up with great affection, actually, and love. And then, you know, he came and knocked on my door and we had the conversation. What was all that about? He literally turned the door.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I get on very well with my son and his wife, and he's had a child recently. Ziva, I am a grandfather. I never thought I'd be able to cope with being a grandfather. I really never did. And I think this goes back to that early period. I put everything back to that early period. I feel I was, you know, ripped on timely from the state of being a child. I've gone on being a child longer than I ought to have gone on being a child. And if you're going on being a child, it's very hard for you to be a father, let alone a husband. And so you are.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I suppose it is. I feel a lot less angry now. You know, sometimes you worry if you are happy I am happy, I am, you know, domestically happy, I am a happily married Jewish man. If you want to get yourself a good husband, get a 60 year old Jewish man. A sixty-year-old Jewish man is perfect. He just wants to sit around a bit. He wants company. He loves the woman he is with. He's grateful. He's got a woman to be with him. I said there was a period of my life in which I wasn't worth knowing. I'm not going to say I am now worth knowing, but I am a lot more worth knowing.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some Mozart Don Giovanni Lachi Darem Lamana here is this exquisite, exquisite love song in which you feel your hearing people singing from their hearts and as you've noticed most of my music is a love song of one sort or another hello or a goodbye.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“propelled you into what you should have been doing. It absolutely was. That was a novel written in desperation. I was moving through my thirties. I was almost 40 when that novel was published. And what would have happened to me had I not written it and B had it not been published? I don't know. I don't know. I can't bear to think. I can't imagine what life I would have had that would have been at all tolerable had I not done that.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And by that time I'd ended up in Wolverhampton and was feeling even more miserable than ever teaching at a polytechnic which in my unpleasant, snobbish way I thought was beneath me truly, truly a mess and such a mess that I thought I finally see the novel I have to write. I have to write a splinetic comic novel about what a mess I am.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Time of playing. Yes, yes, huge turmoil. I had a wonderful period immediately after Cambridge when I went to Australia and fell in love with lecturing at Sydney University English Department. I adored it. All my shyness went away. I lectured in front of 700 people. I loved it. I read lots of books and I had a whole Australian life really. That bit was good, but when I came back from Sydney as I did after about three years feeling I have to be in England really England is my life. And then I didn't get a good job for many, many in fact. I never really got a good job thereafter. And I was very bitter about it. I see photographs of myself at that period and I can barely bear to look at them. Very unhappy, no good as a husband, bad as a father. I wasn't fit to be, I truly was not fit to be a husband or a father. I was too unfulfilled. I wasn't nice to my friends. I wasn't nice to my parents. I wasn't nice to my son. I wasn't nice to my then wife.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“but still somewhere at the very bottom of it all I have this residual anxiety that maybe we have to take precautions that nobody else has to take.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes because I wondered A, it surprised me to discover I was going to write about anything Jewish at all as I never thought I would insofar as I had a kind of breakthrough as a writer which simply meant I finally began to write. It finally needed me to write that sentence being Jewish as if that was being Jewish comma was the clue to it all, the clue to why it hadn't, the clue to who I was being Jewish in England where being Jewish was this strange, slightly fearful thing. If I've accused myself of being antisemitic I suppose I mean that. Why am I so fearful of and why if I see a well known Jewish person on television or anything smoking a cigar or talking about money do I feel you mustn't do that? You mustn't do that and you know my wife will say that's a terrible thing to say, that's an anti-Semitic thing to say why shouldn't a Jew behave like anybody else? And I know that is the answer. Why shouldn't an English Jew behave like anybody else?”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm aware that I was brought up to lie low. I remember my dad had an expression stum don't draw too much attention to yourself. I did grow up with the feeling that maybe I shouldn't talk about being Jewish. That's what it is really. Is it a good idea to be talking about being Jewish? And”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Putting my mind to where all you were sweet enough to call Schmaltz, and I was talking about heartbreak comes from, it occurs to me there are a lot of this actually grows out of Jewish cantorial music. I say I didn't go to the synagogue much, but when I did go to the synagogue where I felt lost and frightened, I would also feel if we had a good cantle when the cantle began that with all that Jewish heartbreak in which the Jews apologized for all their sins and God shows compassion to them. And it just occurs to me that perhaps I fell in love with that kind of music first hearing cantors and this is Rosenblack one of the great Jewish cantors singing about God's compassion and it might remind you of Mario Lanza a bit.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trying to get that to yourself. No, no, no, they're fine. Writing has done the trick. At least now I'm able to make fun of myself in writing at least.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's my aunt to my mother. Yes, sorry. There isn't some story I've been concealing from. Yeah, I mean, suddenly there was my dad wanted his supper and he had jokes to make too, and he had tricks to do, so they had to clap him. And then there were new babies to be attended to, and I wasn't the centre of attention. And so I think I did spend the first quarter of my life trying to get the attention back that I had lost from women.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Terrible terrible what I was looking for in Cambridge when I got there was a little girlfriend. I'd been looking for a little girlfriend to sing Mario Lanza songs too, to smooch to from a very early age. I think probably from the moment when all my girlfriends were taken from me by my dad coming back and siblings, and ever since probably four I'd been searching for new little girlfriends to replace all those big girlfriends that I'd had.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My hair was long, I had a little beard, which was scantier than it is now because I pulled it out. I was like a parrot. Yes, you know how for parrot's been in a cage too long they pluck their hair out. I behaved a little bit like a parrot in a cage really like that. It didn't suit me to be a young man. I didn't know how to handle it at all.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've had a good think about it, and what I remember is that all of us were shy, while elsewhere, in other parts of Cambridge they were having made balls and dancing and getting up to pranks and”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Crippled by shyness, yes, and it went on until I was about fourteen or fifteen. I needed to do this smooching to get me out of it because I'd hated being, hated being shy. And members of the family would use horrible expressions like, you know, isn't your boy out of his shell yet? And I thought, oh God, I'm a thing in a shell, I'm a mollusk, I'm a turtle, I'm something disgusting. So I was really horrified by being shy, as well as being shy. And then I got rid of it and I thought, this is great. And then I went to Cambridge and it all came back. And I spent three years at Cambridge Scarlet”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong I came across an LP of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong when I was a teenager, and it was music to smooch to. And it was at the age when I was desperate to smooch, I wanted girlfriends. This was the music I imagined smooching to. Probably two years afterwards I did find someone to smooch to. One of my friends house was vacant. His parents were away in Blackpool. And we met a couple of girls at the Magambo coffee bar, finally got to seriously smooch, and when it was all over and the girls had gone, I discovered that she'd stolen my wallet.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we saw it on television. You asked me about our Jewishness. Our Jewishness was not located in belief or the synagogue, but it was a keen sense of any kind of antisemitism, you know, we were out there fighting it, and he was a strong man, very short, but very wide man, as wide as he was high, my father. And he didn't come home when we thought he would come home when we got very, very anxious about him, and then we watched the news, and pretty well certain that we saw my dad lean forward and aim a punch. Whether it landed on Oswalmos, I'd like to think he'd knocked Oswald Mosley clean out. I think it may have missed. But anyway, he was arrested and then we had to go and collect him from the police station, and he was very pleased with himself for having been tough, a tough Jew.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wish I could say yes. I mean, I could see those guys who spin those things. I was not one of those. No, it was only later that I was able to see how the vitality of that word. My dad didn't really know how to do it. My mother had to write the spiel for him. So, you know, lady over here, a lady over here, I'm not going to charge you 19 and 6. I'm not going to charge you 15. My mum wrote it. And he kind of learnt that script. And then he became very good.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“tartan cardboard, with the locks already rusting, and if it rained on them, they're just dissolved. We fell in love with the swell. We would look at the swag and think, how would anybody buy this?”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did he ever run a market store? The markets were our life for years and years and years. He sold swag, I've written about this with great zest. For a writer I am so blessed to have had a mother who read books, who introduced me to poetry and was a reader, and a father who read nothing, couldn't read at all, but had immense vitality and life and wanted to entertain people. And he ran this market stall. The markets in those days were, you know, he was what was called a pitcher. Lady over here, lady over there, mock auction, and I was used, I was the age ten and very shy and stock up, I was the person at the front who, you know, the front of the van who had to go out and take the stuff into the crowd and hated doing it and things. And we sold fancy goods which we called swag, which was this wonderful, awful stuff. I went to Cambridge with a set of suitcases, swag suitcases. From my father's stool, we sold them as a nest. Why does anybody want a nest of cases? We sold a nest of cases which were made of copper.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, my father got upset because my brother was marrying a non Jewish girl, very happy marriage, they're still happily married this is ages ago. My father was a children's magician. My brother was very upset that my dad had said, I can't go to the wedding. My sister had said, why don't you ask him to do some tricks at your wedding? Of course he couldn't say no to that. I mean, that's how deep. That's how deep the faith went. And I really love that. I loved it then and I like it now that, you know, we had those principles, but, you know, doing a trick came first.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a terrific time, I think. Certainly my mother and father were very keen that I go to an English university, that I do English things. On the other hand, they wanted us to, you know, be aware of our Jewishness. There were certain things you didn't do. You didn't eat a bacon sandwich in the house. You didn't do that. But, you know, we were poor. We had to work on Saturdays, so that one went by the board. We were embarrassed when we went into the synagogue, but nonetheless, I had a barmitz for.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mention my brother, and this is a record that my brother made. My brother belonged to a group called the Willwinds. It disbanded, the weather groups do, and some of them went on to become Tennessee. Some very, very good musicians. My brother went off to become a painter. They would play in our house. I told them they'd have a chance. They all had ambitions. I said, you don't have a chance, forget it. Wrong again. This is a record that the whirlwinds made.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had a paradise all four years. It could be that I love all this music about heartbreak, because maybe my heart broke. I had a paradise of four years, my father was in the army, I had my mother, I had her sister, I had my mother's mother looking after me. Trapping when I danced and sang, thinking I was the most brilliant thing that ever there was showering me with attention for four years. Then my dad came back. I have no complaints about that. He was a loving babe, but he came back, that was another, then a brother was born, then a sister was born, and the world which had been mine alone was no longer mine alone. They took it from me.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know what it's like I think I have memories of that, and my mother assures me that there were, you know, that she could hear them going off in far away Manchester as I was being born. I was like another explosion.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think it's absolutely important and I think if you don't, I think certainly if a writer doesn't make you laugh, a writer is not doing all that a writer can do, and I've always wanted to do that as a writer. The balance between laughter and tragedy for me is really what I'm about, taking laughter as close as I can to what's sad, and then taking what's sorrowful as far as I can. But to keep them in balance is for me the great challenge of writing.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm not going to sing it now, but I used to sing it as a young mum, my voice was stronger as a young man at parties I did Mario Lanza imitations. I mean, I can't tell you how mad I was. I mean, completely mad on Mario Lanza, and although it's easy to say schmaltzy, never let it be forgotten that both Pavarotti and Domingo said they owed their singing careers to Mario Lanza. He had a great voice. He wasted it, but he had a great voice.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mario Lanza, who was my hero when I was a boy. I can't remember a time when I did not listen to Mario Lanza. I adored Mario Lanza. And I particularly liked him singing Neapolitan songs. And this again is for me heartbreak.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Else's books and enjoying them. Well, that's a joke. I mean, I've always said that a woman laughing at a man's jokes is quite a sexual thing. If you could make a woman laugh and throw her head back and show you her throat, it's a sex. On women you love doing that with other people's jokes, or indeed with other people's books, but no, I mean, no, no, I'm a tolerant husband. My wife is allowed to read and laugh at what she likes. She can have a Philip Roth novel on the girl. I don't like if she laughs too hard because then I will measure it against her laughter that I get. So if she's laughing louder at Philip Roth than she's laughing at one of my novels, that's hard for me. It's pretty hard for her too.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If there's someone you trust thinks there's a problem, you listen. I mean, you want the work to be right, and if you've got someone you trust, you absolutely have to trust them.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My novels I don't show her until I can't bear anybody to see what I'm writing until I think it's finished. I hand her the manuscript and the house goes quiet for three days and I listen in at her room to hear if she's crying where she should be crying, if she's laughing where she should be laughing. And if I don't hear anything, I get very, very anxious. And then what I hope that is after three days she will come running to me with her arms out and go, darling, it's another masterpiece. It isn't always like that. Once or twice it's been I don't know how to tell you this, and then I know, you know, it's serious.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I need the company, obviously, I need the support. I think I need to be looked at with love to be certain I'm there. Maybe I need to see myself in a beloved's eyes, to see a nicer version of myself than is either actually the case or than I fear might be the case.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd be crying for company. I'd be crying because I'd be missing my friends, said My son, my grandchild, my mother, my brother, my sister, my wife, of course, my wife Soho Restaurants wine all the things I love. I'm not a person that copes well in isolation I go to pieces in isolation, I lose all sense of who I am.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're going to hear Dame Janet Baker singing Schlumet Iron from Ishabaganug. It is one of the most exquisite pieces of music sung exquisitely. Crying is very important to me, ground music. I used to cry a lot and I cry a lot now when I hear. Music and I use music for crying the minute this begins I am I am gone and I think on a desert island I would be crying a lot anyway and I'd like to feel that there is good reason other than self-pity for me to be crying and this really art it's really art I'm crying about”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel I've arrived whether I've arrived into the establishment, I don't know, I can't quite believe I'll ever be part of the establishment because my sense of myself and certainly my sense of myself as a writer has always been being on the outside. On the outside looking in, on the outside as a Jew looking into Gentile England, but also, you know, on the outside of Jewishness too. I've always felt myself to be on the outside of everything.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was. No, but I'd also like them to have been reading that. People said to me, don't you think the mighty waltzer should have won the book a prize? Don't you think Kaluki Knight should have won the book a prize? To which I always answer, yes, indeed, I should have won the book a prize three times, but I'll settle for how it's happened.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's huge because it's good for how you feel about yourself. For a writer my age it of necessity casts a light back on the other work even though your other work's got nothing to do with it. So your other work comes alive again and I somehow were able to decide it's a kind of reward for that too. It does matter for a writer to be read and in our times it's quite hard to be read and been getting harder to be read if you're a serious writer.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She did watch on television, though she did say she wasn't going to watch on television. She wasn't going to watch on television because I wasn't going to win. And when I rang her to say I'd won, she said, no, I know I've been watching television. But one thing she said, they interrupted your speech. The chillian miners had just come out And she said they interrupted your speech for the Chilean miners. She said the Chilean miners had been down there for six months, or ten more minutes made so much difference.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She said it was too Jewish, but she's also always been telling me I am the long shot because she wants to save me from disappointment. She's always been a very protective mother in this way. She wants me to feel that not to hope for too much.”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if I was the favourite is the first I've heard of it. I thought I was the long shot. But anyway, I'd certainly decided I was a long shot, and my mother had told me I was a long shot because I”
2011-02-06 · Desert Island Discs · Howard Jacobson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source