‘I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.’
Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
I go to Oxford to stay with Dave Hesy; he’s working at a cinema (Penultimate Picture Palace?) and takes me to see Chinatown. When Nicholson tells the ‘fuck like a Chinaman’ joke, unaware that Faye Dunaway is behind him, Dave shuffles in his seat, and, for a second, I think he might be bored. Then I sense that he can barely contain his delight. At that moment he’s my favourite person. We go to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Eraserhead the night after. He carries a Faber copy of Robert Lowell in his jacket pocket and he cooks me spaghetti. We take drugs and talk about how difficult it is to talk about fancying women without sounding like a wanker, and he tells me a story about his ex-girlfriend and then says he’s just realized that that makes him sound like a wanker, and I tell him it doesn’t and he says thanks for saying that Graham, and I think how not that many people use my name. I tell him about Warwick and Tom Winnifrith and he tells me about meeting James Fenton and we agree that our lives are going to be interesting.
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‘I hope to God you’re not as dumb as you make out . . .’
Orange Juice, ‘Rip It Up’
Even though they call the results ‘your’ results they don’t send the results to you. You are still property of the school, your accomplishments are theirs (although you know that your failures will be your own). And the school is still the property of the Church, even though it is now a sixth form and there are no more blazered boys skidding down the corridors. What there is is a group of unblazered boys (collective name: a slouch) and pencil-skirted girls (a pout of) loitering nervously outside the headmaster’s office. They are telling each other that they don’t care, that they already know they’ve done crap, messed up, fucked up, screwed up, didn’t do any work, can always do re-sits, got a job anyway so it don’t really matter. Except it does matter. To me it matters more than anything has ever mattered. It means no more:
no more office and the being called to and the sitting there in a lower chair with the sun in my eyes and being told what I’ve done wrong and remembering the That that I can’t acknowledge even though I don’t want it acknowledged even though it’s everywhere in the office in the space between the chairs
The boys emerge from his office one by one.
no more WMC and the look at what he’s wearing and he’s probably one of them punk rockers and get us half a bitter and two fat ladies and Frankie Grant looking at me like a butcher eyeing up a carcass and a big King Street welcome for whoever’s love is in the air and you’ll have this glass when I’ve bloody well drunk it
There’s shrugs, stoic smiles, tears angrily brushed aside.
no more clinging to the Railway like a life-raft hoping that the revolution arrives whilst I’ve still got the time to enjoy it and doesn’t ‘merciless criticism of all things existing’ mean appraisal and not just finding fault with everything all the time?
It’s a sixth-former’s waltz, each person egging on the other to go before them: After you, no, after you, no really, after you. After me? Surely after you? It’s like a Marx Brothers routine.
Just. Fucking. Go. In.
I go in. He’s perched on the edge of his desk, wearing a black priest suit and white dog collar. I know this film, I’ve seen it dozens of times. Like Kathleen says, I can play this bloody part myself. I click the camera on behind my eyes. It’s connected to the switch in my chest, which is the reason I find it hard to breathe sometimes. The projector is running smoothly, its whirrrrring like a lullaby. He’s Leonard Rossiter as Mr Shadrack in Billy Liar, carpeting Billy about the petty cash. He’s Donald Wolfit as Mr Brown giving Joe Lampton the third degree in Room at the Top. He’s Captain Bligh and Miss MacKay, Colonel Kurtz and Baby Jane. There’s a slow-mo shot of him handing me an envelope, cut to a close-up of his face, inscrutable. I’m Steve McQueen in The Cincinatti Kid, Paul Newman in The Hustler. I’m a bratty Ann Blyth and De Niro’s Johnny Boy and a silky Cary Grant.
I open up the already opened-up envelope.
Inside the envelope is the best book I’d ever read: it said, You can be rid of the person stood before you and meet people who know nothing about you. It said, All knowledge comes with a price but some books will pay you back. It said, You can turn your back on this man’s needy greedy soul and his joyless seedy cock. It said AAB.
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‘It is after all a little difficult to catch the reflexion in your own armour.’
Patrick White, The Living and the Dead
Jack and Kath didn’t tell the entire earth’s population that their son was going to, had been accepted at, been offered a place with. They spread the news even more widely. They descended on relatives I never knew I had, cousins by marriage, a woman who lived in Bacup who had been ‘like an aunty to my dad when he was younger’ (what?), the bloke in the cake shop whose daughter had once babysat and who ‘still asked about me’. My aunt Mary was the one with the phone, which meant increased visits and ‘while you’re there, ask her if you can give Gladys Arkwright / Mrs Pickles / Pat from work / Vera from bingo / Ida from church / Elsie from the hairdressers a quick ring and tell ’em your news’.
So I rang and told them my news. Apparently I didn’t tell enough of ’em, as Kath was forced to go to the Lancashire Evening Telegraph and the Accrington Observer, holding in her hand a piece of paper, like Chamberlain just back from Munich.
I wasn’t sure if Sartre’s mum had rung up a local Parisian newspaper to tell them that ‘our Jean-Paul has just been accepted to the École Normale Supérieure (and make sure you spell his name right)’, but I was pretty certain that his dad hadn’t told the steward of his local working men’s club, and that the steward hadn’t then told whichever garçon called out the bingo numbers, and that there was therefore no announcement for Jean-Paul (in between the announcements for the arrival of pies, rolls and, presumably, croissants) that we’d like to give a big Le Roi Rue congratulations to a young man, you all know him, who has served this club faithfully for the past couple of years and who will be leaving us to go to university and that there was no big ‘Oooooo’ sound, a sound that would echo in J-P’s head every time he sat down to write Being and fucking Nothingness.
It is in King Street that I spend my last night in Accrington. I’m told I can go early. (It’s a long way to Coventry. Should have been sent there a long time ago. Etc.) Tommy slips me an envelope with a card addressed to The Professor. It contains ten pounds plus my wages and is signed by all the bar staff. I sit in the lounge with Jack and Kath. I can feel a conversation brewing. If there’s one thing I don’t want, one thing I can’t have, on the night before I leave home, then that’s a conversation about leaving home.
Jack says, This time tomorrow you’ll’ve left home . . .
Kath says, But you can always come back home, if you don’t like it down there. We won’t pressure you. This will always be your home.
And then she cries.
Whilst my mum is crying do I really think: You should have protected me but couldn’t protect me and so I won’t miss you even though I will miss you because you loved me and are decent and that the pride you have in me is misplaced but no I won’t be coming back, ever? Probably not.
By my reckoning, Kath and Jack were born, worked and died within a four-mile radius. The distance from the house in which my dad grew up to the house in which my mum grew up is about one hundred and fifty yards. Because they were both Catholics, they both attended the Sacred Heart school, the school that took its name from the local church in which they (along with both my aunties) were married. I would also attend this school, be baptized and confirmed in this church and serve on its altar.
With the notable exceptions of . . .
One trip to London in the early sixties in which they saw Oliver! on a West End stage and Kath thinks she saw Kenn
eth Williams sitting on a bench in Hyde Park.
And
One pre-me holiday in Spain which they hated due to hotness of weather and lateness of food. (Ten o’clock! For your tea!)
And
Annual trips to either Blackpool, Fleetwood or Morecambe (trips, as I’ve said, that were really extensions of home).
. . . They had never left Accrington.
Which means what? It means that they were, in the parlance of the social psychologists, ‘outside in’. It means that their sense of identity, their core beliefs, the ways in which they validated themselves had been produced, reflected and reinforced by the world in which they grew up. At its best it meant that a community had nourished and nurtured them, had (in soc psych speak) allowed them to develop meaningful connections amongst their peers, form supportive networks and lifelong-lasting friendships. It meant pragmatism and resilience and a sense of communal well-being. It meant that Accrington had seen them right.
Yet it also meant fear: fear of the world outside that community, or of people from the outside coming into it. Fear that you weren’t somehow good enough or clever enough or that people would think you’d been born yesterday. It meant letting pride shade into bitter exclusivity, pragmatism into a lack of imagination. It meant letting humour become a cover story for prejudice, and straight-talking becoming a shortcut to cruelty. It meant letting ‘the community’ become ‘looking after our own’ (and sod the rest) and looking out for each other a smokescreen for parochialism and back-biting and gossip.
Would that those oppositions could be neatly divided, but they collapsed themselves daily, sometimes within the same sentence. My heroic working class were also the petty proles, their common decency a tabloid headline away from moralistic outrage.
And so I sit with Jack and Kath in the lounge of King Street WMC and I sip my drink and I watch my mum cry and I try to summon up a sadness at leaving a place with attachments I no longer feel attached to.
Tomorrow I would be at university where I would find out that I was a recognizable type, that my story was part of a bigger story. I would learn about social mobility and the precarious advantages bestowed upon the working class by Butler’s Education Act of 1944. I would hear about education being a form of enlightened false consciousness and how boys from my background had to straddle two worlds and yet would belong to neither: the worlds of the confident and self-assured middle class and the deep-seated uncertainties of the exam-passing working class. I would read books like Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, which would describe my intellectual trajectory to its boldly crossed T and I would blush in recognition at the description of: ‘He (who) has moved away from his “lower” origins, and may move farther. If so, he is likely to be nagged underneath by a sense of how far he has come, by the fear and shame of a possible falling-back.’
But I would also know that this was not it, this was not it at all. The story of precarious working-class ‘self-improvement’ was one that I held on to in the absence of anything else, all the while raging at its inadequacy. My parents were outside in but I was inside out. I was inside out in ways that went further, cut deeper, than knowing about wine or meeting people who went skiing. The outside that had nurtured my parents had ruptured me. The world would no longer be allowed in, or would only be allowed in through the frozen watchfulness of a trauma that didn’t recognize itself as such.
‘Brains are the currency by which he has bought his way, and increasingly brains seem to be the currency that tells,’ writes Hoggart: ‘He tends to make his masters over-important, since they are the cashiers in the new world of brain-currency. In his home-world his father is still his father; in the other world of school his father can have little place: he tends to make a father-figure of his form-master.’ His characterization of the nervously uprooted scholarship boy had little to say about the impact that fucking him may have on his sense of dislocation. Safe to say, it doesn’t help. And when the ‘father-figure’ is also a reverend Father, what then?
I sit beneath the strobe lights in the lounge of a working men’s club and I drink another pint of a beer that I still don’t really like with parents who I love but will be glad to leave and I try to separate: parents from teachers; teachers from headmasters; headmasters and teachers from priests; priests from Catholics; Catholics from parents; parents from the working men’s club in which we’re sat on a Friday night in September 1983.
It’s not working. It’s like trying to separate H2 from O to make more sense of water.
So I will leave it all behind instead. I will go to a new place, and meet new people, and do new things.
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‘“What you say is true,” the professor said, staring through his study window at the sky, “but not so very interesting.”’
Renata Adler, Speedboat
This much I knew:
I knew that there were politics and that there were Politics, and that the lower-case kind were the stuff of people’s lives, and their ideas about their lives. I knew that strikes and racism and nuclear weapons and CND were the only politics that mattered, or at least the only politics that I could relate to. I also knew that Politics could be the enemy of politics, a way to stop non-political people from being politicized.
I knew that there was literature and that, like my hero Kafka: ‘I am made of literature. I cannot be anything else.’
And I knew that there were literary figures who were political, and that literature was capable of playing a role in the kind of politics about which I cared. I had read Paul Foot’s book on Shelley, seen a production of Brecht (thank you, Father K) and listened to my best mate recite Neruda’s ‘Come and see the blood in the streets’ whilst drinking cans of cider in the local park (thank you, Dave Hes).
I assumed therefore that politics would mean, that its end point would be, the emancipation of the working class in order that they may better read Literature. It couldn’t mean anything else.
The literature that I had been lucky enough to read (abusive priests or not) was the only literature that mattered. I believed in Penguin. I trusted in Pelican. I used to amuse myself by imagining that socialism would mean me and Jack and Kath arguing over translations of Kafka.
The first lesson I learn at Warwick is that my assumptions about Literature are themselves political, that there is a Literature and a literature, and that the pleasure I found in my reading had as much to do with a thing called ‘ideology’ as it does with me being just a naturally sensitive little sod.
Perhaps it wasn’t a question of giving the working class access to Great Books, or High Culture, or Literary Taste. It wasn’t about connoisseurship but of understanding that the very definition of Culture itself is a matter of class (amongst other things). Maybe, maybe even in my teenage socialist utopia, Jack and Kath wouldn’t want to read Kafka; or if they did, they may do so with a mindset that is not searching for the eternal truths that I’d gone looking for.
I’d heard of F. R. Leavis, but had certainly never read him. This, I soon discovered, hadn’t stopped me from being one of his most devout disciples. It turned out that I was committed to ‘a particular version’ of literary criticism, one that was all the more ‘problematic’ for refusing to acknowledge itself as such. (I liked the idea that I was problematic.)
It’s a version that is predicated on ‘humanism’ (lift an eye-brow), ‘universalism’ (tilt the head) and ‘trans-historicism’ (breathe in sharply). It assumes that the job of the literary critic is to unpick the various ways in which the literary canon (make quote marks with the index finger of each hand) reveals eternal truths (ditto) about the human condition (shrug shoulders and moan).
Furthermore, I think of these great works as part of a Tradition, one that I have inherited, ready-made and validated through time. And yet I fail to see that this story is itself part of an ideological construct, one that privileges certain authors (and I should think about the word ‘authority’) over other, more marginalized voices (women, col
onized subjects, immigrants, gay and lesbian writers).
It’s true: I do do that. I thought that that is what we were supposed to. And I was good at it. I thought that reading English and American Literature at Warwick would be like doing A-level English but with a few more – a lot more – books. And without getting fucked.
I thought that I would plough through wonderful books written by wonderful men (and a few wonderful women) and discuss the ways in which they were wonderful. I had my three Practical Criticism questions written down in my sixth-form Prac. Crit. notebook, and I expected that for the next three years I would be applying these same three questions to the entire history of Western Literature.
They were:
a: What is the author’s intention?
b: How does he (sic) go about expressing this intention?
and
c: Is he successful in doing so?
There. I could do that.
The intention of this Larkin poem was to express his ambiguous response towards a wedding / tomb / church / his parents. He did this by internal rhythm (cite relevant example), assonance, enjambment, litotes/bathos (I was never sure of the difference), metaphor, alliteration and onomatopoeia. He was successful because I now also feel ambiguous about these things. And what is more (and this is the really clever bit), Larkin wasn’t alone in thinking that weddings, tombs, churches and parents were ambiguous. Other writers had thought that too (name one before for influence on Larkin, and one after for Larkin’s influence). Can I have an A?
I suspected that getting a First Class honours degree might be a bit trickier than that, but not much. I knew that there would be a lot more reading (it was the reason I was there), but it had never occurred to me that I would have to question the whole notion of reading itself, to question what I soon learned to call my ‘subject position’. Or that the books would be called ‘texts’ and treated with a certain disdain; as though they were secondary to the real ‘critical project’, which was to upset binary oppositions, or locate them within ‘the materiality of history’, or ‘embarrass the mechanics of their own production’.
The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness Page 20