Ed Vulliamy remembers his friend, the travel writer and historian
Last Saturday, the world lost one of its most contagious and mischievous smiles, and twinkliest but keen-sighted pair of eyes: those of the traveller, travel writer and art historian Michael Jacobs, who died of cancer, which was diagnosed last September.
Public reactions in Britain to Michael's death came mainly from travel writers. But across the Spanish and Latin American literary world – where he had been serially honoured and bestowed with awards – he was hailed and mourned as one of its own. Figures of the stature of Hector Abad paid tribute to "a great writer, a great friend and great journalist"; the leading Colombian columnist Juan Esteban Constain, writing in El Tiempo of Bogota, called him "one of the world's last exponents of a venerable aesthetic and moral tradition: the great writers of travel books". The Spanish and Americas wing of the Hay literary festival is to launch a special bursary in Michael's memory to fund travel writing in Latin America.
It was my honour to spend the penultimate afternoon of Michael's life in his company and that of our mutual friend, Jon Lee Anderson of the New Yorker. We were discussing our shared sense of deracination and belonging to what he called "a country by the name of nowhere in particular – not bad roots at all". I remarked how this applied to him: Anglo-Irish-Jewish-Italian, born in London. Michael, although moving in and out of consciousness, flashed an immediate smile of corrective reproach: "I was born in Genoa," he said sharply.
Which he was, in 1952: to an Italian actor, Mariagrazia Paltrineri, and Captain David Jacobs, a British soldier she had met during the liberation of Sicily in 1943.
Michael studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art under Sir Anthony Blunt, whose most illustrious student he was and to whom he remained fiercely loyal after the keeper of the Queen's pictures was revealed as the "fourth man" spying for the KGB in 1979.
Such displays of fidelity in Britain's McCarthyite period could cost even such a talented student his career in academic art history, so Michael threw himself into his love for Spain and Hispanicism, writing travel and art history books (including a fine work on the nude).
He wandered Ceausescu's Romania and became an expert on Prague, but it was to the land of the olive grove that he was irrevocably drawn, and there he settled in the Andalucian town of Frailes.
Although he is probably best known and loved in Spain for his travelogue Between Hopes and Memories: A Spanish Journey, his Iberian masterpiece is The Factory of Light, a book set entirely within the spiritual, social, political and gastronomic life of the village that came to adore him and claimed "Migueleeeto" as its own – a lambent work with a sense of place worthy of a Seamus Heaney poem.
Michael had been drawn to Failes by a local mystical belief: in a santo custodio, and though he reserved judgment on its veracity, magic is everywhere in his work, as it was in his imagination. The Factory of Light's hero was a character called Manuel Ruiz Lopez, known as El Sereno, who died last year; Michael, then in fine health, took his demise as a bad omen.
Michael's sense of adventure was boundless, but not as purposeful as that of, say, the great Ryszard Kapuscinski, with whom he once shared a journey to Timbuktu. Michael wandered more than he dashed; his description of being apprehended and held by Farc guerrillas in the Colombian jungle was written up with an almost casual humour. Michael would not write until he had a full story to tell, and was convinced that its truth was stranger than any fiction. Another of Michael's great books was an epic history entitled, simply, Andes. His last, and probably finest book, TheRobber of Memories, related a journey to the source of the Magdalena river in Colombia.
He charted his slow progress with wit and poetry, but the real theme was a relationship across time and space with his elderly mother in London and her Alzheimer's. Worried that he would hear of her death via a phone call, Michael had over recent weeks to face the savage irony: that she would outlive him.
He was working towards what may have been his definitive work when he died: an autobiographical account of his life with Spanish art – Velázquez, in particular, and his opaque masterpiece, Las Meninas, specifically – including recollections of Blunt. As his illness worsened, we had hoped to finish it through dictation, but even this plan was overtaken by the cancer. In conversation, Michael referred to the irony of the figure who leaves Velazquez's painting up a stairwell, "as though to the other side". His publishers are considering how what is hitherto written might best see daylight in print.
Michael was widely and deeply loved, surrounded by friends in good health and in bad. His own conviviality won him loyalty among others, in whom his jovial modesty brought out the best. He loved a social occasion and crowded room, book festival or exhibition party; strangers were endlessly interesting to him and his warmth of heart brought many of them to subsequently arrive on his doorstep, unannounced. Michael and I met in London but bonded in Mexico during an all-night bar crawl through a city controlled by the Zetas drug cartel into which we had been warned not to venture.
Michael invariably drank wine with lunch and, much as he loved a good dinner, hated to digest it without a port, grappa, rum or vodka – depending on which culture he was navigating – and strong coffee. Nowhere, however, did he treasure more than his home in Frailes, and there was no company he preferred to that of his wife, Jackie – and dog, Chumberry – who survive him. Michael died at Barts hospital, but with the image of the santo custodio of Frailes firmly in his wallet.