Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (127 page)

After getting a top degree in English at Witwatersrand and suffering a few awkward months at a kibbutz in Israel, Jacobson spent a year in London. He worked there in a Jewish boys’ school, pigged it in lodgings, and was very lonely. A ‘demialien’, he began, in his solitude, to write a novel:
The Wonder-Worker
(1973) recalls this period of London loneliness. It was, none the less, a happy time. He loved the way the English so expertly ‘imitated’ being English and it was on this trip, aged twenty-one, that he became committed to the place – though he would not settle there yet. He was dismissed from his teaching post for thoughtlessly informing his boys that the universe was (contra Genesis) millions of years old. He returned, wanderingly, to South Africa, and did a number of desk jobs. More importantly, he was already publishing short fiction in American magazines such as
Commentary
and the
New Yorker
. In 1954 Jacobson married a Rhodesian teacher, Margaret Pye, and moved with her to London. He was by now highly regarded as a coming author in the US and in 1956 he spent a year as writer-in-residence at Stanford. The 1950s was a period when South Africa – and its Afrikaaner resistance to the winds of change – was front-page news across the world.

This phase of Jacobson’s writing career climaxed with
The Beginners
in 1966. It was his
Buddenbrooks
and tells the story of a dynasty of Lithuanian Jews, the Glickmans, ‘beginning’ over again in South Africa. But it is their destiny to wander not settle: the Boers are settlers, the English are colonisers, the Jews are transients. The core issue in
The Beginners
is the same as in Mann’s novel. What does the third generation – no longer faced with struggle or bound in by the disciplines of ideology – do? The question is resolved in the stories of Joel and David: one an ‘engaged’ man of action and Zionist, the other a student, observing life from its edge. The novel’s ethical problems are articulated in a parable-like prelude in which Avrom, the patriarch of the Glickmans (a lovable man given to impulsive and foolish acts), returns to Lithuania with money, saved up by his hard-working sons, to bring the rest of the family to the safety of South Africa. On the way, at Bremen railway station, he sees a woman weeping, with three children around her. She is clearly Jewish. ‘Is there anything a Jew can do?’ asks Avrom. She has been robbed. He gives her the fifty sovereigns, intended for his own family – who must now wait years for their rescue. Has he done the right thing?

The Beginners
was a valediction to South Africa. After a longish interval, Jacobson produced the biblical fantasia
The Rape of Tamar
(1970). As narrated in Leviticus and Samuel, there is an extraordinary – and spectacularly novelistic – episode. So much so that one wonders what it is doing in that particular book. Amnon, heir apparent to David, conceives an overwhelming desire for his half-sister, Tamar. Aided by his cousin, Jonadab, he feigns illness, lures her to her quarters and rapes her. Why?
The Rape of Tamar
is Jacobson’s favourite novel. It would, he later surmised, have been in the running for the newly established Booker, except that glowing reviews were lost in the strife that was crippling Fleet Street at the time.

Karl Miller, who had materially furthered Jacobson’s career as editor of
The Listener
, chided him for the shift away from South African subjects (a territory he would only return to, as a cold-eyed tourist, in his late-life travel writing). But Kafka, not Thomas Mann, was now the star Jacobson followed. Had he stayed in the groove of his first five novels he would have ended up, he felt, a superior Wilbur Smith.
The Confessions of Josef Baisz
(1977), a fable set in an imaginary country, is the most successfully experimental novel in this second phase of his career.

Cash prizes, Arts Council bursaries, royalties and journalism kept Jacobson going through the 1960s, but the life of a writer, with a growing family (there would be four children) was a tightrope walk. On his appointment to the Northcliffe chair at University College London, Karl Miller brought Jacobson into his entourage as a lecturer. It was a happy change of direction. There was an inner pedagogue in Jacobson, only too glad to be released. At UCL he was for some years a colleague of
A. S. Byatt. As she recalls, the two of them would discuss whether the academic life was good for their fiction. She eventually decided not, and left. He stayed until retirement in 1994. His later fiction was carefully wrought and continued the lines of narrative exploration he had opened in the 1970s. UCL, the godless place in Gower Street, which had been set up in large part as a home for the spiritually uncomfortable, fitted Jacobson like a glove. Its open-mindedness encouraged monographs such as
The Story of the Stories: The Chosen People and Its God
(1982) – the Bible was, he always thought, the best novel ever written. In his travel writing and memoirs, he settled his personal account with the country in which he was born (whose accent his speech never lost) and with Nazi-occupied Europe. ‘They would have killed us, if they could have got to South Africa’ he mused, contemplating the exterminations in Vilnius and Heshel’s fortuitous death.

An image that recurs in Jacobson’s writing is the pit, or abyss – sometimes materialising into the vast black holes left by the Kimberley diamond excavations of his childhood. At other more metaphorical moments, it takes shape as Conrad’s heart of darkness. ‘The pit of the future’, he once wrote, ‘is quite as deep as the pit of the past. Through it, too, all things fall endlessly.’

The Western World must realise that Africa is made up of human beings.

Achebe is Nigeria’s – or, more accurately, given the fissile nature of that country, the Igbo nation’s – first great author: a title which, in later years, he contested with Wole Soyinka, the (Hausa nation) novelist who got the Nobel Prize Achebe didn’t. By way of consolation, Achebe can claim authorship of the novel routinely described as ‘the most read novel to have come out of Africa’:
Things Fall Apart
(1958). Achebe was born in an ‘impressive zinc house’ and raised middle-class in a small town, Ogidi, in the east of Nigeria. His religious background was second-generation Protestant. He describes his father, Isaiah Okafor, as a ‘missionary’, a ‘catechist’ and an ‘evangelist’. He was named after the Queen’s consort, ‘Albert’, a colonial label he later shed.
‘Albert Achebe’ no longer exists – although he once did. Achebe’s detachment from ‘Victorian’ (i.e. British nineteenth-century) hegemony has been lifelong, fraught, and as painful as removing a slaver’s brand. ‘Chinua’, his chosen first name, is the abbreviation of an Igbo prayer.

The opening paragraph of his most famous novel, set in the period when the colonising missionaries arrived in Igbo territory, strikes a defiantly unBritish note, bleaching English of all its Englishness to do so:

Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His fame rested on solid personal achievements. As a young man of eighteen he had brought honour to his village by throwing Amalinze the Cat. Amalinze was the great wrestler who for seven years was unbeaten. He was called the Cat because his back would never touch the earth. It was this man that Okonkwo threw in a fight which the old men agreed was one of the fiercest since the founder of their town engaged a spirit of the wild for seven days and seven nights.

The syntax has the percussiveness of an African drum. Okonkwo is proudly heathen: his gods are Idemili, Ogwugwu, Agbala. But, one notes, the title of the novel comes from Yeats’s chiliastic poem about ‘The Second Coming’. The colonists’ biblical book pursues Achebe like Francis Thompson’s ‘Hound of Heaven’.

In early reading of writers such as Rider Haggard, Achebe ‘took sides with the whitemen against the “savages”’. He was brought up jointly steeped in Anglican theology (he recalls
The Pilgrim’s Progress
as being the first novel he read) and the still vital folklore, and oral narratives, of his people. At the boarding schools he attended Achebe effortlessly passed exams and won scholarships. English was his daily, if never quite his mother, tongue. At the University of Ibadan (then an outpost of London University) he initially enrolled to study medicine, before switching to Humanities and Theology. Those subjects were taught exclusively by white academics. One course of lectures on Thomas Hardy made a particular impression on the young Achebe. The ‘reality’ of the sage of Wessex’s world, he felt, ‘was very close to mine.’ He was already writing for publication and had adopted an increasingly articulate protest against the mind-forged shackles of colonialism – focused, specifically, on the Uncle-Tomist, paternalistic (‘benign’) racism of Joyce Cary’s
Mister Johnson
(1939), and such observations as Hugh Trevor-Roper’s that ‘Africa has no history’. Achebe would mobilise a powerful counter-narrative.

But extra-curricular studies distracted him and he was awarded only a second-class degree. After a few months’ back-country teaching, he took a job in the newly established Nigerian Broadcasting Service in Lagos, with a special responsibility for ‘talks’. In 1956 he was seconded to London for a BBC course. Over this period he was writing
Things Fall Apart
. It is the story of a yam farmer, Okonkwo, who – like
Michael Henchard in Hardy’s
Mayor of Casterbridge
– is a ‘man of character’ (a ‘man of
strong
character’, Achebe calls him), doomed by history. The harbingers of his downfall are the arriving missionaries to his village, Umuofia. The date of the action is, by Western reckoning, the early 1890s. Okonkwo is driven to justified murder and altruistic suicide, to spare his village punitive measures. The District Commissioner (later to reappear, named, as George Allen in
Arrow of God
) muses, apropos of a book he is thinking of writing on the colony:

The story of this man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought:
The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger
.

The novel was propelled into prominence by Macmillan’s ‘winds of change’ – Nigeria was ‘given’ its independence in 1960.
Things Fall Apart
was first published in London by Heinemann, pioneers in making post-colonial literature known to Western readers. Released in a cautious run of 2,000 copies in June 1958, the novel got strong, if somewhat condescending, reviews and was on its way – via prescription in educational syllabuses – to sales of many millions over the succeeding years. Where the novel did not do well, paradoxically, was Nigeria. Localism (the patriotism of the village) was seen as divisive in the dubiously homogeneous new country. Achebe was out of step.

Meanwhile, he was rising to senior professional levels at the NBS. He married a colleague, Christie Okoli, in 1961, at a Christian ceremony at the (now independent) University of Ibadan. There would be four children – and, for the parents, continual problems as how indigenous/international their education should be. Fellowships, and his growing reputation, meant travel and public speaking. Achebe’s second novel,
No Longer at Ease
(1960), was set in the modern period. Its hero, Obi (Okonkwo’s grandson), is a civil servant in Lagos, caught up in the city’s endemic corruption. By now Achebe’s was no longer a voice in the wilderness. Other writers similarly published and pushed by Heinemann had appeared on the scene, notably Wole Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Post-colonial (earlier called ‘Commonwealth’) literature was a booming specialism in British and American universities and Achebe was a figurehead in the emergent field.

In what would become a famous proclamation, on his first visit to England in 1964, Achebe asserted that his fiction aimed not at protest, but at his nation recovering ‘a belief in itself’. His third novel,
Arrow of God
, was published in 1964 (the
year of civil rights riots across America). The action returns to the fraught collision of Europe and Nigeria at the start of the twentieth century and the imposition of colonial authority via obedient ‘warrant chiefs’. A central role is assigned to the DC, George Allen, who had figured in the last paragraphs of
Things Fall Apart
. The ancient priest Ezeulu, worshipper of the god Ulu, is finally destroyed by the internal contradictions of colonised tribalism and dies ‘like the lizard in the fable who ruined his mother’s funeral by his own hand’. Christianity triumphs.

The tone of Achebe’s fiction was now manifestly angrier. Anger intensified to razor sharpness in
A Man of the People
(1966), where it is principally directed against post-independence corruption. This phase of his career was, however, wholly overshadowed by the secession of the Igbo region of Nigeria and its declaration of independence as Biafra. A two-year civil war ensued, in which the UK staunchly backed Nigeria against the breakaway insurgents. Achebe, who narrowly escaped death before fleeing east, was denounced by Lagos. He threw in his lot with the new republic and served in the Ministry of Information under the Igbo leader, Emeka Ojukwu, in Enugu. He refused offers of safety abroad in the face of what he saw as genocide (engineered by the British). After Biafra was harshly subdued, Achebe retreated into academic life, taking up a succession of visiting posts in the US. Honorary fellowships and doctorates were showered on him, but he was anything but pacified by them. In a lecture at Amherst College, on 18 February 1975, Achebe delivered his canon-busting lecture, ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
’, in which he denounced Conrad as ‘a bloody racist’. Why, he asked, should his people, his continent, the plight of hundreds of millions of Africans be cast as the mere, anonymous, depersonalised ‘backdrop’ to one European’s ‘nervous breakdown’. His lecture was hugely influential in reassessing texts, such as Conrad’s, complacently viewed in the West as being on the side of the angels and flattering to the white liberal conscience.