Gilbert: The book, to me, seems less an indictment of Fracassus, or Trump, than of the culture that produced him.
Jacobson: This book, whatever it is—this satire, this fable, this parable—it’s all sorts of things really. I decided I was never going to make up my mind what it was and I was just going to do it. And maybe that’s a sin against the aesthetics of satire but I didn’t mind at the time. I wrote it like a diary, day by day, as things dawned on me about the significance of what had happened. People keep saying you can’t satirize Trump because he’s beyond satire, but it’s not difficult to just let him out and let him walk upon the stage and say his own words. But that wasn’t my first interest. The thing that interested me much more than Trump himself was, how does this come about?
The night of the election, I went to bed having thought, I’m not staying up to watch, it’s not necessary. And I woke up in the middle of the night with the sensation of a goblin sitting on my chest. Something malevolent, something malign, was sitting on me, stopping me from breathing. My wife and I looked at each other, and we said, either someone in the family has died or something terrible has happened. And we turned on the radio. I started writing within four hours of it being announced that he’d won the election.
Gilbert: Why a fairy tale? I read that you first wrote a fairy tale at university.
Jacobson: You’re probably too young to remember, but [in 1959] there was a famous academic argument between the critic F.R. Leavis, who was my teacher, and the sage and novelist C.P. Snow. I don’t heroize people but I heroized F.R. Leavis, whom I’d gone to Cambridge to be taught by. When the whole world attacked Leavis for attacking Snow, I thought, I have to defend him. I put out this pamphlet with some friends called “The Ogre of Downing College.” There wasn’t time to do a serious study. But I was studying, at the time, Swift, and Dryden, and Dr. Johnson, who remains one of my favorite writers, and I loved Rasselas, which wasn’t quite a satire, but it was a moral fable. I quite fancied inhabiting that moral vein in which you can high-mindedly make large declarations about the meaning of life, and half laugh at yourself for being so high-minded, which is what Dr. Johnson is very good at. And so I did that at the time, laughing at myself for being so high-minded about F.R. Leavis but at the same time wanting to defend him for what seemed to me absolutely unfair attacks on him. And with Pussy, that just seemed to be, again without really thinking about it, the mode that I fell into.
One thing I knew I was not going to write, because I don’t know enough, was something that Philip Roth might have written, or Gore Vidal, or Norman Mailer. No doubt these books are being written now all across America, these grand novels that investigate what’s brought American politics, the Republican party, to this pass. I knew I couldn’t do that, and the reason for making this a fable was that I didn’t want it to be set in America, and I don’t feel I’ve written a book about America. I call it Urbs-Ludus. It’s a trivial place that—it seems to me, as an incorrigible moralist—we all inhabit, in which we overvalue money and high buildings and casinos and vulgarity and triviality and celebrity and all the rest of it. Those are my targets, really.