To say I come from Manchester is shorthand. Who has the patience to listen to me tell how I was born in a nursing home in Prestbury, lived my first years in Salford, the next few in a half Yiddish-speaking shtetl called Hightown, then moved to Prestwich, a suburb famous for its psychiatric hospital? It was, and remains, easier just to say Manchester.
But I feel a bit of a fraud calling myself a Mancunian. I don’t have the Mancunian’s passion for football. Or acid house. Or Noel Gallagher. Or going out in a short-sleeved shirt in the dead of winter. I have retained the flat vowels – making missiles of words such as “bus” and “basket” – but wish I hadn’t. I talk proudly of Manchester’s shrewd, stoic sarcasm as though I share it, while in fact I spent my first 15 years shrinking from its abrasiveness. Though that, too, is part of the fiction – the writer hankering for the alien robustness of streets that frighten him. The truth is I no longer know what the truth is. Invent your past often enough, and it becomes invention the minute you put it down on paper, and you are doomed to live in that invented past for ever.
In the end it’s others who locate me. I see them start from some northern barbarism of pronunciation or locution. Critics of a certain kind say they find my novels too noisy. Since I find many contemporary novels too quiet I can’t complain. Noisy would appear to be something I admire. Argumentative, disorderly, off-centre, Jewish – what, as they say, is not to like? For good or ill, anyway, Manchester can claim credit for that brew. The city had grown into a metropolis in the 19th century. German industrialists came, bringing music, art and philosophical societies. Italians opened restaurants and sold ice cream. So there was already a half-space for Jews when my mother’s Lithuanian and my father’s Russian grandparents arrived in the late 1890s. They assimilated in the best possible way, picking and choosing whatever took their fancy, and the city responded in the best possible way by letting them. I grew up half a Jew, and half whatever the word was for someone born in Prestbury then growing up in Salford.
But there – between my Lithuanian antecedents and my Russian – was another fissure. On the one hand reserve, on the other excitability. Introspection or bear-wrestling. It’s the bear-wrestler in me that those who think I write noisy sentences hear. Praised be the city whose mirth and curiosity enable such differences to flourish. And here, I guess, is where I do discern a writer’s debt. In embracing the city’s raucousness even as I blenched from it, I came to understand – not consciously, but as something felt in the blood – that the best of life is choric and contradictory. That conviction won’t in itself make a novelist, but you’d be hard pressed to write a novel without it.
• The Dog’s Last Walk and Other Pieces by Howard Jacobson is published in paperback by Bloomsbury.
