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How a love of armchairs came to define novelist Howard Jacobson's career By HOWARD JACOBSON FOR YOU MAGAZINE Published: 08:00, 15 March 2025 | Updated: 08:00, 15 March 2025 e-mail View comments There are walkers and joggers, sitters and standers, sleepers and sloggers. It all comes down, in the end, to which we more comfortably inhabit: our bodies or our heads. I am so dedicated a sitter that it can surprise me to discover I even have a body.
Whether I began with a shape ideally suited to sitting or acquired chair-friendly contours over years of writing at a desk I don’t know. Did writing make me a chair person or did I choose to write because I wanted to spend the better part of my life sitting down? Whatever the answer, my preferences showed themselves at an early age. I wrote stories almost before I could crawl and I cried when my mother put me in a baby walking harness.
Didn’t I want to go walkies and feed the ducks? I had nothing against ducks except that the nearest duck pond was a mile away. Although this was years before we counted our steps on smart watches, I still knew when I’d walked a mile because I was exhausted. To this day, when someone says something is just a mile away I know I will never get there unless I book a taxi.
My father started a one-man upholstery business when he came back from the war, specialising in sofas and armchairs too big to fit into any house smaller than Buckingham Palace. He couldn’t help himself – he thought big, built big and in the end failed big. Understanding nothing of any of this, I loved being in his workshop watching him stretching webbing across wooden frames and talking with tacks in his mouth.
I was fascinated by furniture-making, not just the tools but the entangled intricacies of springs, the canvas bags stuffed with horsehair and – long before sniffing it became a national pastime – the smell of the glue pots. He built me a chair that looked leather but was in fact covered with Rexine, a Manchester-produced leather-look cloth that was popular in those days of rationing and making-do. Not only was it a fabulously luxurious chair, it was a talkative one.
The Rexine squeaked the minute I sat on it, the flock-filled cushions sighed, the casters, which were the size of motorbike wheels, screeched whenever I shifted position. And it had a matching footstool, which my legs weren’t long enough to reach. That it was far too big for me goes without saying, but I liked getting lost in the upholstery so that when my mother came looking for me, shouting, ‘Time to feed the ducks,’ I was nowhere to be found.
The idea of getting lost in a big armchair when you are small is not fantastical. Half the games we play as children are about going missing and being rescued, which is not surprising given the mystery of our appearing in the world from god knows where and our fear of vanishing from it just as suddenly. Lucky the little boy who has a father able to make him an armchair that is at once a barricade, a hidey-hole and a sanatorium.
In my case, hiding was more than play. I was a reserved child for whom the world was vast and frightening. I kept myself to myself, far from uncles who told me to cheer up, it would never happen.
‘It just has,’ I longed to say. A well-upholstered armchair was a place in which I could shrink from notice. Though they couldn’t offer anything like the same protection, the office chairs I bought when I was older performed a similar psychological function.
They didn’t fortify me against physical danger, but I could, as a writer of fiction, sit in them and create worlds over which I had at least a degree of control. Many writers have been great walkers. Dickens claimed to walk 30 miles before breakfast – the impressiveness of which feat can only be determined if we know what time his breakfast was.
Enthusiasts of walking will tell you that rhythmic movement and bracing air combine to boost creativity, allowing memories to return and reshape themselves, new ideas to form and flow freely, inspiration to grow wings – and while I recognise the truth of this, it is only a partial truth. Yes, the imagination likes to be taken on a walk. Yes, a sort of half-writing can happen as you stride the hills or hike through bracken.
But the images and sentences that flood into your brain can flood out again just as quickly unless you can find a chair in which to sit and process their randomness, give them shape and meaning in the act of writing them down. Given what I have said about my preference for chairs that enfolded and comforted me, it won’t come as a surprise to anyone to learn that I never got on with such icons of modernist discomfort as the Eames Lounge Chair or the Wassily B3 Chair or Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona MR 90 chair. Please understand that I didn’t dismiss these out of hand.
I knew I couldn’t cart my father’s Gargantua of a chair around the world with me for ever. I had to embrace the modern. But I soon learned that, elegant as these marvels of design looked in the right minimalist setting, you had to be minimalist in appearance and stature yourself to sit comfortably in any of them for more than five minutes.
Arne Jacobsen’s Egg Chair spun me round and threw me out of it while I was trying it for size in Heal’s. The shocking-pink Mogg oyster-shaped rocker similarly dumped me on the floor after a single rock. And Frank Gehry’s corrugated-cardboard Wiggle Side Chair wouldn’t even let me get that far.
I tried sidling on to it from the left – surreptitiously, as though to conceal the fact that I was preparing to mount – only to slide immediately off it on the right. The shop assistant – she wore a badge describing her position as ‘furnishings consultant’ – helped me to my feet. ‘These chairs aren’t for everybody,’ she said.
I asked if she had a chair that was. She escorted me to a corner of the shop that was designed to look like the tropics and showed me a colonial-style planter’s chair woven from rattan on a polished-teak frame. It came with a mosquito net and a set of silver cigar cutters.
Discovering it did not, however, have its own punka wallah, I said I’d leave it. The ‘furnishings consultant’ guffawed, as if she knew what discomfort awaited me. I didn’t arrive back full circle to the realisation that only the sumptuous Rexine-covered chair my father had made me would suffice until the infirmities of age made all alternatives impossible.
I am now 82 and must have a support for my back. So that’s a no to any version of the pouffe, hammock, beanbag or bar stool, and while the now-ubiquitous restaurant banquette solves the problem of my back, it doesn’t solve the problem of my arms. Who can eat without an armrest to lean on? I need legroom too – not because my legs have grown longer than they were when I struggled to reach my first footstool, but because cramp is liable to force me out of a sitting position at any time.
This consideration makes a theatre seat a trial, though not such a trial, I confess, as it would be if I liked the theatre. I have searched for a replica of my father’s chair, and even bought a couple of near-lookalikes in the past five years or so. A Fiori soft chenille armchair sat in my lounge briefly.
It had the bulk I was looking for – the deep cushions, the firm back and the rolled arms – but it lacked the expansiveness of the chairs my father made, and didn’t repel food as efficiently as the Rexine of old – one wipe and it was clean. Rexine, however, went out of production in 2005, so it was leather or nothing. And what’s wrong with leather? Well, a leather armchair looks a touch grandfatherly in 2025, like those globes of the world you see on birthday cards for the elderly, and the leather will discolour and go baggy if you live in it for as long as I do.
Recently, with the help of my physiotherapist, I bought a skeleton-considerate Scandinavian swivel chair that tilts so far back a dentist could fit me with a new set of teeth. Thus, as we age, do we sacrifice style to wellbeing. Here I recline anyway, nostalgically imagining myself back in a grandly sprung, Rexine and horsehair throne that coddled me, concealed me and loved me.
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