Gabriel Josipovici at Eighty-Five

Gabriel Josipovici is one of the leading writers and critics of his generation. He has been astonishingly prolific. Over more than fifty years he has written two dozen novels and books of short stories, as well as written and edited almost twenty books of criticism, from The World and the Book (1971) to A Winter in Zürau (2024).

Perhaps most striking of all has been his range of interests. In an interview he gave in 2015 he said,

I love the narratives of the Hebrew Bible and the narratives of the Border Ballads and of the Grimm tales, but most so-called classical novels turn me off – I don’t want to be filled with Stendahl’s or George Eliot’s inventions, or even Tolstoy’s, all those descriptions of clothes and rooms and the rest – I want books that leave a space for me to discover myself, like Proust’s or Kafka’s, or that get my body dancing, like those of Queneau and Muriel Spark. Lots happens in Balzac and Dickens, but I’d rather read Chandler or Wodehouse, writers who know that what they are doing is neither ‘significant’ nor ‘real’.

Take his first book, The World and the Book (1971), which ranges from Chaucer and Rabelais to Proust and American writers like Hawthorne and Bellow. Then in The Lessons of Modernism, a book of essays written during the early 1970s, he moved on to Kafka, Pessoa, Walter Benjamin and Bellow and composers like Peter Maxwell Davies and Stockhausen. Later, there are books on the Hebrew Bible and Hamlet, on touch and forgetting.

In October, Josipovici will celebrate his eighty-fifth birthday. He was born in Nice on 8 October 1940, the son of Jean Josipovici and Sacha (née Rabinovitch). His mother was born in Cairo in 1910. ‘My father’s family,’ he wrote in one of his best books of essays, The Singer on the Shore, ‘had settled in Egypt in the 19th century and left their roots behind.’ ‘My father’s grandfather left the Romanian town of Iasi to seek his fortune, first in Constantinople, where he married, then in Egypt. My mother’s great-grandfather must have left his native Ferrara as a young doctor a little earlier in the 19th century and ... sailed across the sea, also to Egypt. My mother’s father, after studying medicine in Berlin, and having been wounded in the Russo-Japanese war, left his native Odessa and settled in Egypt...’

When Gabriel’s mother was five, her father went mad and died in Paris in 1915. Sacha’s mother died of typhoid when her daughter was just ten. In 1934 Sacha met Jean Josipovici and they moved to France. The last possible passage back to Egypt was due to set sail on 8 October 1940, the day Gabriel was born.

He and his mother spent the war in France and then returned to Egypt in October 1945. Gabriel was educated at Victoria College in Cairo. Other students included Omar Sharif and Edward Said. In his memoir, Out of Place, Said described Victoria College as ‘a school designed to be the Eton of the Middle East. Except for the teachers of Arabic and French, the faculty was entirely English, though … not a single English student was enrolled.’ The Englishness of the school was summed up by Said, ‘I was a member of Kitchener House; other houses were Cromer, Frobisher, and Drake’.

In September 1956, Gabriel Josipovici and his mother arrived in Britain, a few weeks before the Suez crisis. It was the third country they had lived in and he was still a teenager. ‘I do not feel myself an exile,’ he wrote in The Singer on the Shore,

for an exile has a country to which he longs to return (but then neither did Abraham consider himself an exile). My home is not France, where I was born, nor Egypt, where I spent my childhood, nor England, where I have lived for three quarters of my life. ... There is no land or language of which I feel I have been deprived by historical circumstances, nowhere to which I dream of one day returning.

Almost fifteen years ago, he wrote to me that he was

not a refugee because ‘we left before Suez, wishing to settle in England – I was to do my A levels here in the hope of obtaining a grant (ah, those days) to go to university, since we couldn’t have afforded it without that. And uneducated, even though I went to Edward Said’s school – I wonder if he felt uneducated... I feel looking back that we were very badly taught and I got little out of it, except I suppose a way of studying or something. But all the intellectual stimulus came from home – my mother and aunt. So, yes, badly educated – compared to Stephen [Medcalf] with his classics and thorough grounding in English Literature – and a Jewish immi- grant – both true. I think I obscurely felt it from the start, but then I also felt a stranger in Egypt, having arrived there at the age of 5 and never really mastering the native language...’

Josipovici’s life has moved between Englishness and being an outsider ever since. I interviewed him a few years ago not far from where he has lived in Sussex for many years. It could hardly have been a more English scene, lunch in a country pub close to the Downs. He told me about his Oxford interview: ‘They kept asking me what English novelist I most admired and I kept saying Dostoevsky and they kept saying English novelist, Mr Josipovici, and I kept saying Dostoevsky, vaguely aware that something was profoundly wrong but unable, in the heat of the moment, to put my finger on it.’

This is where his book, What Ever Happened to Modernism? began, sitting in a lecture hall in Oxford. He came away with a list of names: Anthony Powell, Angus Wilson and Iris Murdoch. ‘However, when I borrowed their work from the library I was disappointed to find that they seemed to have nothing whatsoever in common with the writers I had been reading.’ There was this puzzling gap between the writers he had devoured before coming up to Oxford, ‘Mann, Kafka and, finally, Proust’, and these genteel 1950s English novelists.

He wrote later, in The Mirror of Criticism, ‘I first came across the name of Borges in Maurice Blanchot’s Le Livre a venir. That was in 1959, in the narrow corridor that linked the main shop to the foreign books department in the old Parker’s, across the road from Blackwell’s, in Oxford... In Paris later that year I picked up a copy of the French translation of Ficciones in the ugly yellow cover in which the NRF condemn their South American translations to face the world, and read it through in one afternoon.’

Borges and Blanchot have remained part of his pantheon ever since. He has written about Borges in three of his best books and in 1982 he edited a book of essays by Blanchot called The Siren’s Song.

Im 1965 Josipovici found the perfect home for someone with his range of interests: Sussex University. In 2020 he wrote to me about coming to Sussex, ‘when I got to the place it was all I’d hoped for – Europe orientated, wonderful colleagues, and above all no hierarchy and the freedom to admit, in faculty seminars, that you didn’t understand, didn’t know, weren’t sure, etc. The best kind of freedom.’ Sussex was ideal for an outsider like him and he stayed there for thirty-five years.

From the late 1960s and 1970s Josipovici combined an extraordinary academic career with his new life as a writer and playwright. He published his first novel, The Inventory, in 1968, his first book of criticism, The World and the Book, in 1971 and his first play in 1972, followed by two outstanding books of short stories, Mobius the Stripper: Stories and Short Plays (1974) and Four Stories (1977).

These were hugely productive years for him. Between 1968 and 1988 he published eight novels, five books of criticism (as well as two critical works which he edited), nine plays and seven radio plays and three books of stories and plays.

It wasn’t just that he wrote criticism and fiction at the same time. There were other ways in which the two overlapped. First, there was the powerful influence of contemporary French fiction and criticism. It helped that he was fluent in French. But more important, writers like Roland Barthes, Jean Ricardou, Marguerite Duras, Raymond Queneau and Maurice Blanchot, in particular, were a major formative influence. In an interview many years later, he spoke about Queneau,

A writer I had not really thought about much, Raymond Queneau, became a great source of strength… Recalling his ability to maintain wild flights of fancy and yet hold on to ‘the real world’ of the France he knew, particularly in Zazie dans le métro, gave me the confidence to let go in ways I had never been able to do in my short fiction. It was frightening but exhilarating, a roller-coaster ride with no assurance that I would land on my feet at the other end. But, somehow, I did (I learned that if you let go you often do).

Above all, of course, there was Proust, a huge presence in Josipovici’s work from the opening chapter of The World and the Book (1971). It’s perhaps interesting to compare Josipovici with Susan Sontag’s essays in Against Interpretation. Her brief time in Paris and her early essays on contemporary French cinema and writing helped establish her reputation in the 1960s, but she jettisoned these figures quickly. Josipovici didn’t. Although Central European writers and thinkers like Kafka and Benjamin became more and more important to him, he never lost his passion for that generation of French writers.

Secondly, of course, there was Modernism. Few British critics have been so passionate about the great Modernists. In The Singer and the Shore, he wrote,

When I started writing seriously in my late teens, I felt crushed by the weight of the European tradition – all those massive novels like War and Peace and Middlemarch, standing there like mountains, utterly self-confident, without a chink in their armour. How could one begin to emulate them? How, indeed, could one begin?... However, then I read Eliot and Proust and was overwhelmed by their acknowledgement, within their works, of inevitable failure... Reading this I suddenly felt released – it was possible, I realised, to start with failure, with words which refused to line up, plots which refused to develop.

These thoughts are echoed in an interview he gave in 2015:

I had read Proust and Mann and Kafka, and Mann had made me understand that our modern situation is different from anything that has gone before, and fraught with difficulty; Kafka had made me understand that I was not alone in my sense of not belonging anywhere or having any tradition to call on; and Proust had given me the confidence to fail, had driven home to me the lesson that if you come up against a brick wall perhaps the way forward is to incorporate the wall and your effort to scale it into the work.

Words like ‘failure’, ‘difficulty’, ‘not belonging anywhere’ and ‘the confidence to fail’, echo through his best criticism and inspire his fiction. What is most striking is how personal his engagement with Modernism has always been.

A third decisive encounter was his Jewish turn: Kafka and Benjamin, of course, but also the Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld (Josipovici was an early champion) and, crucially, the Hebrew Bible. In the mid-1970s he started to learn Hebrew. Years later, he told an interviewer,

[W]hen as an adolescent I had my religious crisis it was a Christian religious crisis. After all, I had been reading Dostoyevsky and Kierkegaard, not Buber and Rosenzweig. Did I believe in Jesus Christ? Could I commit my life to such a set of beliefs? Like most adolescent religious crises, this one passed. I went on teaching Donne and Herbert, Dante and Dostoyevsky, but in my thirties I began to think again about my Jewish roots. It was really a cultural thing. At Oxford and then at Sussex I had felt that the friends I made shared a European outlook with me, but at some point it became clear to me that there was a part of me, the part that had its roots in my family and in Egypt, which was not catered for by the idea of Europe… I had begun to teach a course on The Bible and English Literature with a remarkable Anglican colleague and friend, Stephen Medcalf. At Oxford we had often been told: ‘You can’t understand English literature before the twentieth century if you don’t know your Bible’, but no-one did anything about it. It seemed to us that Sussex, always open to new courses, would be the ideal place to try to fill that gap. It was a fascinating course, both in itself and for the variety of students it attracted – from those whose parents, reacting to their own parents, had brought them up in ignorance of the Bible and who now felt the need to find out about it as we at Oxford had felt the need to find out about Kafka or Kierkegaard, to those steeped in this or that version of a Bible-based religion and found it difficult to treat the text as the narrative it after all primarily is.

But I soon realised that to teach the course I really had to learn biblical Hebrew. So Stephen and I and several of our colleagues sat at the feet of a new recruit to Religious Studies, an Anglican priest called Michael Wadsworth, who was also a semiticist and had just completed a thesis under Geza Vermes at Oxford, and learned the rudiments of biblical Hebrew. We also found ourselves gathering informally to discuss books such as Frank Kermode’s The Genesis of Secrecy, which had just been published, and which excitingly married biblical criticism with modern theory, and to revisit the first chapter of Erich Auerbach’s extraordinary Mimesis, written in Istanbul during the war and one of the founding texts of the School of European Studies. And gradually I found myself lecturing and writing on the Bible and on why (as it seemed to us) both the theological and the archaeological approaches to it, the two predominant scholarly approaches, left so much, perhaps even the essence of that strange great book untouched. And we found ourselves part of a movement that took in America, Britain and Israel, a movement with roots in the writings of Buber and of Jewish scholars like Umberto Cassuto, as well as Auerbach, but which had taken wing with the publication of Robert Alter’s Aspects of Biblical Narrative. We were a tiny minority in the sea of biblical scholarship, but nevertheless, a vocal and significant one. It is the only time I have understood what it means to feel part of an international scholarly community, and it was a very nice feeling.’

In the same interview he says,

Until well into my thirties I knew I was Jewish, knew my mother and I had survived in France during the war more by luck than anything else, yet I had no connection with things Jewish. My first books were written by someone without any contact with organised religion or with any religious tradition. So I was intrigued when, years later, a German colleague at Sussex, who was working on the way in which the Nazis took over the flats of Jews in Vienna after the Anschluss, told me she felt The Inventory was a very Jewish work: ‘It’s a book about the fragile remains of one person’, she said, ‘and the memory of that person in the objects he leaves behind and in the lives of those who survive. Surely you were obliquely writing about the war?’ I assured her that that was not the case, but of course accepted that sometimes we write more than we know.

Then… at the time of writing Migrations I was starting to read the Hebrew Bible intensively. And what I found in the narratives there was a kind of writing that I had only come across in the work of Marguerite Duras: narratives denuded of description or psychologising, narratives which draw their power from the way dialogue and the stark description of ‘what happens’ hint at depths which evade even the speakers themselves. It was very exciting. And at the time too I became friends with a number of wonderfully thoughtful and interesting religious Jews, mainly Reform, Francis Landy, Geoff Newman, Jonathan Magonet. I found they shared one of the central attitudes I had been delighted to find at Sussex when I joined the University, a belief that one need not always have the answers, that sometimes genuine puzzlement is more fruitful than clear solutions. I admire and respect their devotion but because I never had any religious education or went to synagogue as a child I feel a little bit outside it all, but they – and they are still good friends – seem to accept me as I am… The Jewishness I cherish is the one that stresses wandering as the human condition, not any sort of possession of a promised land. So I would say that the feeling that I am Jewish is now more informed than it was, but it remains, like my awareness of Proust and Kafka, a support and a comfort rather than anything else.

Returning to Josipovici’s range of interests, of course, there is the literary eclecticism: from the Bible and the Brothers Grimm to Tristram Shandy and Proust. But there’s another dimension which includes music and art. Already in the 1970s, he was writing on Schoenberg and Stravinsky, Peter Maxwell Davies and Stockhausen. In 1984 he wrote a novel, Contre-Jour, ‘loosely based’ on the life and work of Bonnard, and a decade later he was writing on Rembrandt’s self-portraits. Of an early novel, The Air We Breathe (1981), he said that behind it ‘lies the figure of Claude Monet’, and that it ‘was sparked off by my looking at a book of photographs of the aged Monet and his wife – sitting on the beach in Dieppe, pottering about the garden in Giverny’.

Then in 2010 he told an interviewer,

A key moment in What Ever Happened to Modernism?, to my mind, though no-one has mentioned it, is the confrontation I set up between Duchamp and Bacon. Both of them want nothing to do with mere description, nor do they want to go down the road of abstraction, but where Duchamp views every artistic gesture with suspicion, Bacon is prepared to trust the moment, to trust his painterly gesture. Duchamp has all the philosophical answers, but Bacon is a bit like Dr. Johnson confronting Bishop Berkeley: he kicks the stone. Duchamp will never be accused of self-indulgence or losing the plot, but my heart is with Bacon. And more than my heart. I believe that if we realise that a child lives the toy, lives with the toy, while never for a moment thinking it is anything other than a toy, then we perhaps have a better model of our relationship to art than the conceptual one. I at any rate dream of making a work that is like some complicated toy you can dismantle and put together again and that is always not just more than the sum of its parts but in a different dimension. So I love works like Perec’s La vie mode d’emploi or Birtwistle’s Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum and Steve Reich’s percussion pieces – but of course I also love works which are not like that at all, such as those of Kafka and Beckett and Stockhausen and Kurtág.

In part this interest in art was influenced by his longtime friendship with the artist Timothy Hyman, about whom Gabriel spoke so movingly at his memorial service at the Royal Academy last year, just as his Jewish turn was influenced by his friendships with Rabbi Jeffrey Newman, Jonathan Magonet and others. Friendships are often at the heart of his interests, just as writers, artists and composers constantly feed into his writing and criticism.

Josipovici has never been a conventional critic. But his writing is more personal than this sounds. His criticism has always been centrally preoccupied with that image: what happens when the individual artist sits down to produce a work. ‘Modernism,’ he wrote in The Lessons of Modernism (1977), ‘is not only something which happened in Paris or Vienna in 1900; it is there, with its problems and possibilities, whenever and wherever an artist sits down to work.’

For Josipovici this is what Modernism is about. At a certain moment, writers, artists and composers started to ask themselves questions about what they were doing, whether they had the authority to make claims for their work, whether or not they belonged to a tradition, and how they could confront worries about uncertainty and failure.

In his Northcliffe Lectures, published as Writing and the Body (1982), he writes of Kafka’s doubts: ‘“Why should I do it this way if I might just as well do it that way?” is not just a preliminary question. It is the first question and the last one too.’ It is primarily the writer as a solitary individual that fascinates Josipovici. Some of the central examples are Beckett, Kafka and Proust, who recur through his work from The World and the Book (1971) to What Ever Happened to Modernism? (2010), almost forty years later.

First, Proust: ‘We watch Marcel,’ he writes, ‘coming alive in those last pages of the novel, until he reaches the point where, understanding fully what his task is, he is ready to write the book we have been reading.’

Or Beckett. ‘For Beckett did not stop at the end of Molloy and look round for another novel to write. There seemed to be no way forward, yet he found he could go on moving.’

Or Kafka, alone in his room in a sanatorium: ‘We are now perhaps a little nearer to understanding the profound irony of Kafka’s last illness. He who had always mistrusted writing, he who had always longed for a writing that would be more than mere words on paper, is now, in those last moments, reduced to communicating only by means of words on paper.’

‘All artists are solitary beings,’ wrote Josipovici, ‘All artists have to find their own way.’ Proust in his cork-lined room, Kafka in his sanatorium, Beckett at the end of Molloy. All ‘solitary beings’.

His fiction is just as original. Some of his stories and novels are among the best fiction written since the war. Everyone will have their own favourites but mine would include his acclaimed novel Contre-Jour and stories such as ‘Mobius the Stripper’, ‘The Bird Cage’ and a deeply moving tale about Malvolio from Twelfth Night. The prose is clear, spare and simple. The novels are always short. The narrative voice distinctive. There is little description or psychologising, plots matter less than a voice – another recurring word in his writing.

One of the most moving images in his critical writing is an essay in his Northcliffe Lectures, Writing and the Body (1982), on the end of Kafka’s life, when, unable to speak, he was ‘reduced to communicating only by means of words on paper’. ‘Kafka,’ he writes, ‘who had always been so suspicious of writing, is, we have seen, forced in the end to rely upon it. And he is prepared to do so because he knows that someone will read what he has written: Dora Dymant, Robert Klopstock. What these fragments finally convey is the centrality of trust; they are an icon of trust.’ Perhaps this is why, again and again, Josipovici returns to Kafka. Not just because of his Jewishness or because he was a Modernist, but because of something much more human and that has always been at the heart of Gabriel Josipovici’s writing.