Outside of a Dog
Page 1
OUTSIDE OF A DOG
OUTSIDE
OF A DOG
A Bibliomemoir
Rick Gekoski
CONSTABLE • LONDON
Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com
This edition published by Constable,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2009
Copyright © Rick Gekoski, 2009
The right of Rick Gekoski to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication
Data is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-84529-883-8
Printed and bound in the EU
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend.
Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read
Groucho Marx
For Vera, Chuck and Dave
CONTENTS
Introduction: The Battle of the Books
1
Horton and Mayzie – Dr Seuss,
Horton Hatches the Egg
2
Spritzing Over the Books – Magnus Hirschfeld, Sexual Anomalies and Perversions
3
Catching and Howling – J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye and Allen Ginsberg, Howl
4
Learning to Read – T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
5
Descartes, Hume and the Miracle of Love – René Descartes, Meditations and David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
6
Young and Old with W.B. Yeats – W.B. Yeats, The Collected Poems
7
Sweet and Sour – Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and F.R. Leavis, The Common Pursuit
8
Forms of Language and Forms of Life – Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
9
A Divided Self in Oxford – R.D. Laing, The Divided Self
10
What Will You Do? – Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch
11
Highly Orchestrated – D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love
12
All You Need Is Love? – A.S. Neill, Summerhill
13
Matilda, Alice and Little Rick – Roald Dahl, Matilda and Alice Miller, Pictures of a Childhood
14
Ayer and Angels – A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic
15
The Royal Road – Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
16
Better than Literature! – Carl Hiaasen, Double Whammy
17
Spycatcher and the Lost Archive of Kim Philby – Peter Wright, Spycatcher
18
Birds of a Feather – Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs and Anna Gekoski, Murder By Numbers
19
Staying Up with Bertie – Rick Gekoski, Staying Up
Epilogue
References
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First thanks are due to my literary agent Peter Straus, for finding the right home for this book, and to Andreas Campomar of Constable & Robinson for supplying it. Both of these friends have been constant sources of encouragement and critical attention.
Sandy Neubauer’s enthusiasm meant more than he would know in those early difficult days; Warwick Gould helped me to avoid errors of fact and judgement with regard to W.B. Yeats; Ron Schuchard kindly supplied an obscure Eliot reference; Martin Warner was so generous that he made me want to take back every criticism I have made about academic life, all of the virtues of which come together in him; Tom Rosenthal cast his shrewd but friendly eye on successive drafts, and is absolved from ever having to read this again; Natalie Galustian read with acute sympathy, and kept me going when things got tough; I couldn’t find either the time or the energy to write without the staunch support of Peter Grogan, who keeps our business going when my eye is turned in a different direction. I am also indebted to Michael Silverman, Ann Rosenthal, Tim Gilbertson, James Stourton, Mez Packer, Geordie Williamson, Maggie Body, Mary Montgomery, Gina Rozner, Ali Blackburn, Bob Demaria and Mark Everett for helpful advice.
Particular thanks are due to Sam Varnedoe who improves everything that he touches, and whose lovingly assiduous enthusiasm has sustained me throughout.
For Anna, Steve, Bertie and the eagle-eyed Ruthie, so full of love and support. And for Belinda, as ever, and always.
Vera, Chuck and Dave are, of course, the imagined prospective grandchildren in the Beatles’ ‘When I’m 64’.
RG
INTRODUCTION
THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
‘Lot 147 then. Lovely item!’
The auctioneer’s eyes flicked towards the left-hand wall.
A ferrety porter in a green apron pointed out the object.
‘Showing here, sir!’
‘Who’ll start me at £100 then?’
I stood along the left side of the room, my catalogue clutched damply in my hand, trying to look nonchalant. An audience of about fifty people wandered in and out, settled on their chairs, drank coffee from plastic cups. A middle-aged woman in a hat with a red feather bid excitedly on many of the items, waving her catalogue in the air. In the back row a silver-haired man was reading quietly to a toddler.
Our local auction house had weekly sales of sub-antique household furniture, which were great fun for picking up the odd coal scuttle, rocking chair, or threadbare Oriental rug. Occasionally I might spend a tenner on a job lot of books with one or two first editions in it. The pickings were not bad: prosperous towns with large houses often disgorge interesting bric-a-brac. While Leamington Spa’s treasures weren’t as rich as those of, say, Bath or Cheltenham, there were bargains to be had.
But this was not one of the weekly sales, but the monthly Fine Art Sale, which was not for the likes of me. In 1974 I only made £1,800 a year, and I had never spent more than £16 on an item for the house. I was very nervous, scanning the room for possible competition. A local dealer? Perhaps one of my university colleagues?
‘One hundred pounds? £100? Who’ll start me at £50 then?’ His eyes moved towards the back of the room, where a clutch of dealers were smoking and chatting noisily, apparently paying no attention.
‘I have £50.’
He moved upwards slowly in increments of £5. I bided my time, prowling like a nervous lion, ready to pounce. The bidding reached £85 and the pace slowed. I raised my programme in the air, but wasn’t noticed. I raised my whole arm. Me, sir, pick me!
‘New place. £90. Thank you, sir.’
The dealer at the back nodded once more, and I increased my bid to £100. There was a pause as the auctioneer peered round the room. The dealer shrugged and went back to his conversation. The laws of nature were suspended. Time stood still. The gavel poised in the air.
‘All done then? Last chance. Do I hear £110? . . . I’ll take £105 if you like.’
A final leisurely look, and the gavel hit the podium with a satisfying crack. I lowered my arm, which had stayed suspended in the air as if I were acknowledging applause after scoring a goal.<
br />
I was exultant. The very same item had been offered in a previous Fine Art Sale, at an estimate of £300–£500, and I had watched as it failed to sell. No way could I afford that much for a bookcase, however grand. I had a theory though – I had lots of theories in those days – which was that large bookcases were white elephants: if a person had a lot of books he was unlikely to have a big house, whereas people with large houses weren’t likely accumulators of books. So big bookcases need to find just the right buyer.
That would be me, and this one was a beauty. Made of Victorian mahogany, it divided into six sections, the three top ones fitting on to the slightly protruding bottom sections, making a unit twelve feet long by ten feet high, with fifteen adjustable shelves that would hold, I reckoned, about a thousand books. My then-wife Barbara and I had recently refurbished a gracious Regency terraced house in the middle of Leamington Spa. It had four double bedrooms, a large sitting room with a balcony overlooking the garden and original wide-planked reddish Canadian pine floorboards, and an undistinguished marble fireplace, which we thought rather posh.
In the process of furnishing the house, the recurrent problem was where to find room for all my books. I was not a book collector, but I acquired them avidly, and for any variety of reasons. I bought books to read immediately, books to read some time in the future, books that were useful for research, books that looked good to me or might look good to others. Many I bought for no reason at all, on one whim or another. And after a time there was nowhere to put them. The alcoves were all shelved, occasional bookcases bedecked the walls of the hallways, bedrooms, kitchen and study. Piles of books grew like spores, and prospered. The house was infested with them.
And now, with the mere raising and eventual lowering of a hand, the problem was solved. I paid £20 to have our new bookcase delivered, assembled it on the left-hand wall of the sitting room, opposite the fireplace, and spent a sweaty weekend organizing and shelving, constructing an exhibition of my life as a reader. There were books from my high school and undergraduate years, like the tatty but heavily annotated A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. From my time at Oxford, working copies of all of Matthew Arnold, my annotated Lewis Carroll, long runs of Lawrence, Joyce and Eliot. And, most significantly, there were my Conrads: all of his books, many in first editions, as well as most of the available critical books on him, which I had used doing my DPhil. Then there were all of the books, with their heavy apparatus of notes, annotations, marginalia and insertions, that I had used while teaching at the University of Warwick: hundreds of volumes of philosophy, psychology and literature, the tools of my trade, each volume weighted with the memory of courses, syllabuses and seminars taught. There were books that charted my various enthusiasms: tomes on Chinese porcelain, a series of books on Oriental painting, shelves full of art books and exhibition catalogues, plus a mass of books about various sports: John Feinstein on golf and basketball, Mike Brearley on cricket captaincy, Hunter Davies on football, George Will on baseball, Nick Faldo on himself.
When, some twenty-five years later, Barbara and I divorced, we came to the neat agreement that she would keep the house and its contents, and I would have our smaller London flat and its contents. The only exception to this admirably simple plan was that I would be allowed to retrieve my books whenever I was able to house them. But a divorce is seldom a simple or amicable thing: people don’t do it because they trust each other and know how to negotiate their differences. A year later, when I moved to a larger flat with my new girlfriend Belinda, I rang Barbara to ask when I could pick up the books. Never, she said. She was entitled to the contents of the house, as we had agreed, and if she had once, she acknowledged, allowed me to think of them as mine, she had changed her mind and was keeping them. Given that I had refused to return a Roger Hilton painting that I had given her as a gift, but which was still in London, why should she return my books?
I was stunned. She was quite right about the painting, and I had behaved badly, but I had never expected anything as forensically undermining as the kidnapping of my books. I’d been outsmarted, mugged and denuded of a great treasure. I howled, I hooted, I imprecated. I cursed Barbara and I cursed God. These weren’t books, things of paste and ink and paper. They were as close as I came to a soul, they contained my history, my inner voices and connections to the transcendent, and she had excised it, as in Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights, where children’s daemons are surgically removed, and they waste away and die. Ex-wives know where your soft spots are, and this foray was wonderfully exact, as if beamed by micro-surgery into the secret places of my heart.
The books were not of any interest to her. They were mine, they were archaeologically mine. If you dug through and into them, layers of my life were progressively uncovered. What hurt the worst was the loss of my Graham Greenes, which had been Bertie’s bottle books. Though Barbara had breast-fed our first child, Anna, by the time baby Bertie was born, some six years later, she had decided that anyone who goes through childbirth deserves a rest. I rather agreed, and was happy to give him his middle-of-the-night feed with a bottle. He would beam up at me, his silver-gold hair radiant as spun moonlight, and slurp away happily. I developed rather a neat posture in which I could tuck him into the crook of my left arm, place the bottle delicately in his mouth, and keep open a paperback Graham Greene in my right hand. I read fifteen of them before Bertie started to sleep through the night.
I later bought, from Greene himself, a set of his Collected Works, each of the twenty volumes signed by him, which he’d formerly kept in his flat in Paris. I associated them, naturally enough, with Bertie. They were gone as well.
My books were gone. The effect was tremendous, unexpected, physically distressing. I felt dizzy and nauseous, I kept having to sit down to regain my equilibrium. My books were gone. It prompted the questions, at once psychological and metaphysical: Was I still me? Who am I, with no books?
You may think this was an overreaction. It was. Nobody died, yet what I experienced was a form of grief. After the initial pain and disbelief there was an aching sense of loss. If there was something clownishly self-indulgent about this response, the intensity of my reaction was fuelled from other sources, from the accumulated frustration, anger and hurt that the loss of love entails.
But as time passed – we’re only talking six months here – what I increasingly and surprisingly felt was no longer a sense of loss, but one of release. All those books, all that dust, all those metres of shelf space crammed higgledy-piggledy with paperbacks with their spines coming off, assorted hardbacks with torn or missing dust wrappers, maps and guidebooks stuffed into corners, bits of stuff and guff and fluff. For a rare book dealer I treat my personal books with shocking disregard. I cram them into shelves, dog-ear pages as I read, remove dust wrappers and then lose them. I suppose I still regard most books, as academics do, as mere objects of utility.
Though there may be comfort in large numbers of books, there’s very little beauty. The art dealer Anthony d’Offay, who began his career as a rare book dealer, once told me that of all the serious art collectors he knew ‘only two’ have large numbers of books anywhere in the house. His point was not that big-hitting art collectors are semi-literate, but that almost all of them regard large assemblages of books as ugly. Viewed in this way (you have to skew your head to the side and look carefully) what you see when you look at a lot of books is paper in various stages of decay. Over time it progressively becomes yellowed with age, musty, acidic, bowed or brittle, ready for decomposition. It takes longer for paper than for humans, but the process is the same, and the results similar.
I like to think that when Philip Larkin memorably said ‘books are a load of crap’, he was not trying simply to shock. Perhaps he was also observing something about books as physical objects, and about the properties – the genesis and eventual decline – of paper? Paper begins when trees are reduced to vatfuls of yucky mulch; the books that are one of the results of this process can fertilize and no
urish, to be sure, but there is something ineluctably physical, something that suggests decay and death, something disgusting about them.
And the curious feeling that was gradually unfolding in me, I recognized, was relief. Books, if not exactly crap, were certainly a burden. It felt free to live in a space that wasn’t shelved on all sides, surrounded and defined by books. Large numbers of books seem to consume the very air. There’s something insistently aggressive about them, something clamorous: ‘Look at me! Read me! Remember me! Refer to me! Cite me! Dust me! Rearrange me!’ Perhaps this is why working in libraries has always made me feel anxious. Academic friends reminisce with delight about hours spent in Duke Humfrey’s Reading Room at Bodley, the Beinecke at Yale, the Ransom Center at Texas, the old Reading Room at the British Library. I’ve spent my time in each of them, anxiously plotting an escape.
Too much unread, too much unknown, too poignant the sense of the futility of writing books. The British Library has millions of the damn things. Looking at the stacks I am often struck, not by the range and determination of man’s quest for knowledge, but by the utter fatuousness of it all, the vanity.
Samuel Johnson – himself heavily represented in libraries – makes the point with characteristic zest:
Of many writers who fill their age with wonder, and whose names we find celebrated in the books of their contemporaries, the works are now no longer to be seen, or are seen only among the lumber of libraries which are seldom visited, where they lie only to shew the deceitfulness of hope, and the uncertainty of honour.