Within weeks I went from being a simile-spotting Leavisite to a textually suspicious materialist, from someone who could identify a half-rhyme at five hundred paces to someone ‘deeply suspicious of the whole notion of canonical value’. I had a handful of phrases that saw me through, phrases which, if said without blinking, could imply a position arrived at via months (rather than minutes) of critical reflection.
Whereas I once thought that Beckett wrote about the tragi-comic void of our common humanity, I soon found myself saying things like: ‘his work is gendered in really interesting ways’. If I had once warmed to myself as a literary critic, I now swaggered along the fifth floor of the Arts Department as something much sexier, even scary. I was a literary theorist. Barthes’ ‘literature is what gets taught’ could get me out of any scrape, so long as no one asked me where it was from (where is it from?).
Yet the fifth floor of the Arts Department was not a place to inflect your reading with any ideology, Marxist or otherwise. Theory had arrived at Warwick, but it had arrived via the philosophers and the sociologists, rogue historians and refugee linguists. It came seeping in from the Birmingham Centre for Culture Studies just up the road. It was in the bars (all five of them) and it was in the athletics union, which weirdly had a drinks licence for opening in the afternoon. It was in the music press, which was running articles that wove together music reviews with the far outposts of poststructuralist theory. It was the currency of the postgrads, who all seemed to be researching things like desire, excess and abjection. Where it wasn’t was in the fifth floor of the Arts Department.
Take a stroll along the English corridor and chances are you would hear Dr Bill Whitehead warmly reminiscing about his time at Oxford and how Chaucer, like a literary version of Hovis, is as relevant to us today as it’s always been. When, in my second or third week, I went to see my tutor for European Epic and told him that I was struggling to get to grips with the Iliad, he seemed slightly baffled and says: ‘It’s like when you go to the opera. Listen for the arias.’ I would try to remember that. The next time I went to the opera.
‘Culture is ordinary.’ With these three words did the critic Raymond Williams open up my world. For if culture is ordinary, then the ordinary is cultural. Something more than my sensitive sensibility would be needed here.
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‘Don’t call me scarface.’
The Specials, ‘Gangsters’
I often thought of Tom Winnifrith’s opening interview joke, about how Warwick had nothing to do with Warwick, or anywhere else really. There was something nowhere-ish about the university campus, something barren. The students used to joke that it was modelled on a Latvian prison or an out-of-season holiday camp. There was a bar called the ‘Airport Lounge’ and the whole place shared that sense of anxious in-between-ness.
We were no more than three miles from Coventry, and the place was effectively run by people who lived in Coventry – cleaners, bar staff, shop and canteen workers, security. And yet no one seemed to mention the fact, let alone celebrate it. People talked about Stratford as though it was on the doorstep which, at twenty miles and with a regular supply of cheap theatre tickets, made it a much sought after neighbour. Coventry, on the other hand, was the rowdy lot the next street over. Don’t tell them we’re having a bash, they might want to come.
The Students’ Union was closed to non-students, which meant that our free Saturday night gigs (Divine, The Men They Couldn’t Hang, Pete Shelley, Jonathan Richman) weren’t open to the locals. It was invisible class apartheid: we had subsidized beer, grant-funded educations that were going to get us better jobs, an Arts Centre that catered to our every creative whim. In Coventry unemployment ran at 20 per cent.
The Union’s Housing Officer regularly warned members about the dangers of student-bashing, yet seemed to make no connection with these dangers and a policy that excluded non-students. The Specials had recorded ‘Ghost Town’ a year or two before (‘Bands don’t play no more / Too much fighting on the dance floor’), a song that was a regular fixture for the Alt Music Soc.
When a recently elected Thatcher arrived to open a new Business Park (what else?), she was met not only by the usual mob of jeering Trots, but by a group of Young Conservatives clutching placards demanding ‘More Cuts’. I’d never met a Tory. I don’t mean someone who voted Conservative because their tabloid had told them to, but a real card-carrying, flesh-and-blood Tory. I’d always imagined them as claret-swilling jowly idiots, replete with three-piece suits and pocket watches, slightly bewildered by their discovery that they seem to run the country.
These Tories weren’t that. These were Young Conservatives, a new breed of class warrior for whom the free market was as much an ideological commitment as state ownership had been for the left. They joined the Students’ Union in an attempt to disband it. They had a vision of a Privatized Utopia, unfettered commercial freedoms whose only responsibility would be to the laws of supply and demand and a thing called individual choice. They would call each other ‘comrade’ and taunt the left by referring to Mandela as a terrorist. A few of them wore T-shirts calling for him to be hanged.
They had chosen their target well, for if you wanted to upset the left in the mid-1980s, you had only to mention that you were unsure of where you stood on apartheid. Any student found not wearing an ANC badge in the lapel of their second-hand jacket was shot and their corpse propped up as a picket outside the campus branch of Barclays. It was compulsory to name every bar after imprisoned South African activists (as though what would really comfort the Mandelas in their time of struggle would be the thought of students drinking cheap lager and throwing up in each other’s underwear).
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‘And class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs.’
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
Inadvertently, incidentally, inevitably, Warwick University teaches me the ways in which I’m working class.
Jack and Kath didn’t teach me the meaning of my class. They’d taught me ways to compensate for it, to rise above it, to feel its shame and convert it into something that could pass for pride. In the language of Marx, they taught me ‘class in itself’.
The SWP hadn’t taught me about class either. They may have been in search of class consciousness, for Marx’s ‘class for itself’, but that was a goal, an ideal; not a description of its soul.
It was the middle class who taught me fully the meaning of what it was to be working class, who gave me my class self-consciousness.
At Warwick I came to understand that I had ‘a background’, and that this was something different from ‘an upbringing’. There was something robust, wholesome, about an upbringing: it suggested an ongoing, cyclical consensus, like cultivating a garden, or Morris dancing. A background, on the other hand, was something out of which one stepped, something murky and disreputable that would be best left to fade away.
I hadn’t realized the importance of the first person pronoun, that there was something unseemly and overly possessive about prefacing ‘dad’ or ‘mum’ with ‘my’; or that saying ‘my holidays’ was provincial (‘holiday’ was quite sufficient).
I hadn’t realized that you passed the potatoes before helping yourself, or that being on time was bourgeois, or that supper was tea and dinner lunch, or that it was boring to worry about money. I hadn’t realized that having a bath and not a shower was unhygienic or that we could always get a taxi. I didn’t know that parents were in a line of work rather than having a job, and I certainly didn’t know that you could call them by their first names. I didn’t know that ‘lovely’ wasn’t necessarily ‘lovely’ or that charming probably wasn’t charming or that dull was the worst thing you could be. I didn’t know, couldn’t even have guessed, that everything was OK, amazing actually. And w
ould just carry on being amazing; because why wouldn’t it? And what I definitely didn’t know, but would be reminded of daily, was that I had a funny/charming/strange/strong/distinctive/sweet/delightful way of talking. People felt free, compelled even, to do imitations of my accent within the first thirty seconds of meeting me. Bad imitations. Imitations that moved across the Pennines and up the coast and swerved back round via Newcastle and Carlisle. The imitation would invariably involve ‘whippets’ and saying the words ‘mother’, ‘ey up’ and ‘by gum’ in various combinations. Failure to greet being mocked to your face with anything less than full-blown hilarity would result in the charge of chips on shoulder and the need to get over them.
What strikes me now is just how annoyed people were by my being working class, as though I was doing it on purpose, just to provoke them. There was a need to challenge me, prove me wrong, catch me out. I remember one housemate saying that I didn’t need to keep ‘reminding us how working class you are’ (as though his own behaviour and values were classless); or another saying that now that I was at university I was middle class too (although in the holidays I was going home to work at Asda dairies: she was going to Venice).
And so you learn to shut up. You learn to hide your class ‘tells’ beneath an apologetic smile and constant self-screening. You soften your vowels and become your own Professor Higgins, correcting and cajoling your inner Eliza Doolittle.
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‘Love will get you like a dose of anthrax’
Gang of Four, ‘Anthrax’
She kisses me. And I kiss her.
I’d seen too many episodes of the TV series The Young Ones to think of myself as a feminist (they thought it meant getting to do Felicity Kendal’s laundry). Yet I’d been around too many lefties to think of myself as anything else.
Lips, neck.
It seems common sense – shitty wages, shitty men, too much childcare. She tells me that ‘common sense’ was a way for oppression to disguise itself, of making itself seem natural. So maybe it wasn’t.
And so on.
There are two books doing the rounds, compulsory reading: Our Bodies, Ourselves, and Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden. I spend a lot of time with both of them. Especially the Nancy Friday. And especially a girl called Bobby in the Nancy Friday.
I say, It’s OK. I don’t mind. I like it.
I think that the having-been-fucked-thing should mean that I’m their ally, one of them even, an honorary woman. I’m annoyed that it doesn’t.
It may be the wrong time to be thinking of William Carlos Williams, but it is William Carlos Williams that goes through my head: ‘They taste good to her / They taste good / to her. They taste / Good to her.’
Her name is Lisa and she is perfect. I know that thinking she is perfect has all sorts of problems, not least the problem of her imperfections.
My nose? Chin also?
I don’t recognize any of the male privileges that I’m supposed to benefit from, but then again I wouldn’t, would I? Their invisibility is part of the privilege.
It’s not really a moan; not quite a gasp. Somewhere in between.
She has scarily impeccable credentials: Greenham Common visits, university women’s group, spiky black and blonde hair with the tips dyed a red that reminds me of snooker balls. She wears monkey boots with multi-coloured laces.
Soles of her feet. On my back. Like soft sandpaper.
She pulls me up. She has the dirty smile, where she bites her bottom lip as if she’s still undecided where she wants this to go. I know where I want this to go. I want this to go where she wants this to go. I think something like, This is who I am, even though my sense of who I am seems to lie somewhere else, with her maybe, or in the space between us, which has a definite shape and texture. She pushes me onto my back and climbs on top of me, her knees on either side of my hips. The record has come to the end of its side, some reggae that I didn’t know I liked but plan to start liking. I’ve sat in this room every night for the last ten nights. I’ve drunk cold coffee until two, three, four in the morning and walked the three miles back to campus. We’ve agreed – or rather she’s said – that the boyfriend–girlfriend deal is bollocks, patriarchal nonsense, and I’ve agreed. I’ve agreed because I want the boyfriend–girlfriend deal, and it seems the best way to get it is to pretend that I don’t want it. She’s told me to stop putting her on a pedestal, that she sweats and burps just like anybody else, and I’ve said yes I know, that’s why I’ve put you on a pedestal, and she laughed and told me that I’m a pervert.
We’ve agreed that men are wrapped up in power and power is wrapped up in patriarchy and that patriarchy is like capitalism, it’s everywhere. She’s agreed when I’ve said that it’s more complicated than that, that men get screwed over too and, anyway what about class? She says, I’ll trade you, you can have class and I get gender: deal? Deal. She lends me books published by Virago. I give her a copy of Kafka short stories and worry that she might not like them.
We’d been on a date that we didn’t call a date to see a film called The Big Chill. She hated it. She hated the smug bunch of wankers all fretting about their cosy fucking lives and being so pleased with their liberal fucking credentials and preening about their successful fucking marriages and their successful fucking jobs. Like I said: she’s perfect.
And so I’m here on top of her bed in a terraced house in Earlsden, Coventry. She puts one hand over my face, feeling the contours, as though she is blind. The other roams over my body, my nipples and stomach. Further down.
Why has she just tasered my cock? There, she’s done it again. Tasered it, and now I’m somewhere on the ceiling watching not her but an abstract composite of Lisa-shaped flesh. And watching a boy who looks like me. I’m absolutely calm, clinically calm. I’m like Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, leaving her body in the middle of making love to Woody, picking up her drawing pad: ‘Now that’s what I call detached.’ And again. Taser, flinch. Flinch without moving; flinch in the stomach. The cock that isn’t my cock but which seems to be attached to my pelvis is erect. It’s a phantom limb. I watch it do its thing. Whoever is projecting the film has used the wrong filter, or over-exposed it. I know I’m in Lisa’s room, but it’s a hologram of Lisa’s room, or one of those flimsy cardboard film sets that they use in cheap productions that wobble when the actors slam a door. And cut.
The story is inescapable. It may have minor amendments, footnotes or variations. It is played out in a million movies, it’s the gag (sometimes the only gag) in thousands of stand-up routines and scores of sitcoms. It’s the stuff of folklore and ancient myth, genetic speculation and cultural theory. It’s a story in which we find motivation, tragedy and hubris. It’s a story whose pitfalls we already know, but which we embrace anyway, embrace its pitfalls as essential to its abiding truth.
The story is this: men need sex.
They need it like they need to empty their bowels. They need it beyond, despite of or instead of emotion. They pester women for it, they marry women for it, they pay women for it. They may not particularly like it, are probably not very good at it (whatever that might mean), but they need it. Like air, like food. It is, we are told, hard-wired into our DNA. Our need for sex, so the story goes, is who we are, what we are.
Unsurprisingly, women have had a lot to say about this (as have some men). They have rightly challenged its status as ‘the dominant discourse’, its crudely reductive biological determinism, its potential for excusing a whole range of behaviours from infidelity to rape. They have opposed the way the story is used (sometimes literally) as a Get Out of Jail Free card, as an all too convenient abdication of agency and responsibility. And yet . . .
And yet, it’s a story that we were born into; it’s our inheritance. It is reinforced daily; we are surrounded and produced by it. It lives inside our pores: men need sex.
I hate the story. I hate it now, and I hated it when I used to tell myself it from the other side of the room in a bedroom in Blackburn whilst my body was
being used by a man who needed sex but whose religious vocation prevented him from having it. I hate it politically, and the way in which it swaggers its way out of the mouths of groups of men who, when gathered together, are so frightened of boredom that they fall back on the story to keep their other desires at bay. I hate it aesthetically, and the infantilizing representations of Men Behaving Badly or New Men behaving disingenuously or Papa bloody Hemingway’s Men Without Women.
But I hated it the most when I felt its presence between me and Lisa in a bedroom on the outskirts of Coventry.
I don’t tell her about Kevin. I don’t tell her about Kevin because I haven’t told myself about Kevin. Or rather, I’ve come to Warwick to stop telling myself about Kevin. I want to be ex-Kevin; non-Kevined. And so I tell her bullshit. I tell her that I have problems with the whole blah blah of penetrative sex, that the blah of phallocentric blah is to perpetuate a whole notion of blah. And I thought as a feminist she’d be pleased? (And had she read those Kafka short stories I gave her?)
It’s a long walk home that night, longer than it has been the previous ten nights. I wander round the green bit in Earlsdon that’s more waste ground than park and one of the townies who I never call townies shouts at me, ‘Whaddya spend yer grant on?’ And I tell him to fuck off and he seems surprised that I haven’t got a posh accent, and we face off and then both walk away because we’re both men and it seems that we need to save face as much as we need sex, and maybe needing sex is a way of saving face and I think it’d be easier if I was gay even though I know it wouldn’t be and I feel guilty for thinking it. And I start to laugh, laugh a lot, because I think how in a way this is exactly like one of those films where the boy walks round a waste ground late at night because of his problems with a girl, even though it’s exactly not like that, because my problems with a girl are the opposite of the problems that boys usually have with girls, whatever they are.
The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness Page 21