Kevin Jackson obituary

“Who’s going to be our phone-a-friend now?” tweeted the film producer Kevin Loader, on hearing of the death of the writer, essayist and broadcaster Kevin Jackson, of heart failure, at the age of 66. It was not just a lament for a man with a special talent for friendship but also an acknowledgment that, for pretty much everyone who met him, Jackson was the person most likely to know the answer to the question that was nagging at you.

His intellect was extraordinarily capacious – it was easy, at times, to believe that he had read everything – but also entirely free of airs and graces. If you needed to know about the late films of Andrei Tarkovsky, say, or the artistic possibilities of the epigraph, Jackson could usually extemporise on the subject from a cold start. If, on the other hand, you were after the complete lyrics for The Flintstones theme tune, he could sing them to you, fortissimo, and would encourage you to join in on the chorus.

In all his work – from cultural histories such as Constellation of Genius (2012), a masterful “biography” of the year modernism was born, through collections of essays such as Carnal (2014) and Invisible Forms (1999), to Bloke’s Progress (2018), a graphic-novel introduction to John Ruskin’s ideas, which he created with the cartoonist Hunt Emerson – there was the sense that knowledge should never be divorced from fun.

Although stubbornly resistant to some conveniences of the modern world (he confessed once to owning a mobile phone, but steadfastly refused to carry it with him), he enthusiastically embraced the social possibilities of the internet, transforming his own Facebook page into a kind of virtual salon – a rolling symposium of jokes, recommendations, cultural debates and intellectual cross-pollination. To raise even the ghost of an idea or a project with him was to guarantee a string of suggestions of people you had to enlist and ways of proceeding that might prove useful … as well as an offer of practical help to nudge things forward.

He was born in London, the son of Alma (nee Rolfe) and Lt Col Alec Jackson, an officer in the Life Guards and riding master of the Household Cavalry from whom Kevin inherited a fine seat on a horse and a distinctly military bearing. He was educated at Emanuel school in Battersea, from where he went on to study English at Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1974.

He could certainly have had an academic career – after graduation, in 1980, he took up a teaching fellowship in the US, at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, under the aegis of the poet and critic Donald Davie, and he was a visiting professor in English at University College London between 2009 and 2011. However, salaried career paths never appealed to him as much as the independence of a full-time writer.

Returning to London permanently in 1984, he worked both in journalism and broadcasting, initially on the Radio 4 arts programme Kaleidoscope and BBC2’s Saturday Review, before joining the arts pages of the Independent shortly after the paper’s 1986 launch. Although part of the editorial team there, his ability to plug last-minute gaps in the pages with copy that was usually better than that which had been originally commissioned meant that he appeared in the paper with increasing frequency.

Eventually, in the early 1990s, he committed himself fully to the life of a freelance – a decision which ushered in nearly three decades of uncertain income but startling productivity. He was married in 2004, to his long-term partner, Claire Preston, a professor of English and expert in Sir Thomas Browne, with whom he made a home in Linton, near Cambridge.

Like one of his cultural heroes – the critic and lexicographer Samuel Johnson – he took some pride in his status as a man of letters free of institutional commitments, and thus free to pursue his inspirations where they took him. Although he published serious studies of his major passions – Humphrey Jennings, Ruskin and TE Lawrence, among others – he also produced a children’s story in verse, Greta and the Labrador (2019), an English version of the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz’s Crimean Sonnets (2015), and a gleefully irreverent cartoon strip for the Fortean Times on the lives of the great occultists.

Nor did he restrict his creativity to books: discovering, in 2009, that a small publicity budget was available for his book Bite, a “vampire handbook”, he commandeered the cash and persuaded a mixed team of professionals and amateurs to help him produce short promotional films, which he wrote and directed.

Those films were credited to Alces Productions, a Linnean nod to the name by which many of his friends knew him, Moose; a sobriquet from his Nashville days which he embraced with enthusiasm. In 2008, he even published a small monograph on the animal, an essay that typically ranged in its references from scientific literature and Caesar’s History of the Gallic Wars to the politics of Teddy Roosevelt and the poetry of Ted Hughes.

And it is possible that his affection for what he saw as his own spirit animal can be detected in a characteristic passage from another book – his funny, perceptive BFI monograph on Withnail and I (2004). Jackson begins, boldly, by laying out the case against the film, before declaring that he intends to champion its cause without reservation. And then he makes a promise to the reader: “I will want to make some fairly large and high-toned claims for it, but I will try never to lose sight of the fact that it is a shaggy, smelly, disreputable beast, and that it always, unfailingly, makes me laugh like a loon.” The life of the mind, in other words, had to acknowledge life in full, or it had missed the point entirely.

Jackson is survived by his wife.

Kevin Jackson, writer and broadcaster, born 3 January 1955; died 10 May 2021

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJqfpLi0e5FpaWpnnZbGcH6TaKKerpmjequtwqSqqKZdpK%2BqwNSaqbI%3D