by Rick Gekoski
Such self-knowledge is by no means a wholly positive thing. If philosophy has the capacity to make you humble, it can also supply you with the tools to mask your shortcomings with extraordinary aggression. I did further courses in symbolic logic, ethics and aesthetics, metaphysics, and the philosophy of science. I read widely in both the primary and secondary literature. I honed my analytic skills. Honing is a dangerous metaphor here, for in general we are rightly anxious about immature people with knives. You can sharpen a scalpel or a butcher’s knife, and achieve marvels of accurate surgery upon the living or the dead. But offer a knife – even worse a badly honed one – to someone without the skills or the sense to know how to use it, and a lot of misdirected slashing is likely to result.
I became even more pedantic and argumentative, scorned sloppy reasoning and crass induction, demanded that my interlocutors define their terms. Your average person, I was fond of remarking, is quite incapable of distinguishing an argument from an assertion. And since it must be the case, empirically and philosophically, that some people are right more often than others, I happily assimilated myself to this first category, and waged a kind of tacit war on those in the latter. (My ex-wife and children will testify to the effects of this, and the kind of everyday bullying that it can engender.)
In short, I was quickly becoming the sort of person who wants to be a university teacher. But not a teacher of philosophy. Though urged to major in the subject by my new friend Mr Varnedoe, and enlivened by my readings in it, I was clear from the start that philosophy was not the field for me. I wasn’t clever enough to do original work and, in any case, there struck me as something arid and inconsequential in much philosophical discourse. Albert Einstein remarked that ‘when I study philosophical works I feel I am swallowing something which I don’t have in my mouth.’ I could not imagine feeling this way about the reading of literature, and it was eventually an easy decision to major in English rather than philosophy.
If one could imagine a mindset antithetical to Allen Ginsberg’s inclusiveness and generosity, academic philosophy was it. I could see, already, that there was something of a conflict between the two disciplines, between scepticism and imagination, which I had initially experienced as the Holden voice versus the Allen voice. Yet the fields had more in common than the easy academic distinctions between them might lead one to believe. Philosophers as well as imaginative writers have to find just the right language to convince their readers, both attempt to locate and uncover the nature of what is most important, be it goodness, truth or beauty.
I did my English Honours thesis under the joint guidance of members of the English and philosophy departments, which was, at the time, an unusual arrangement designed to accommodate the fact that I had interdisciplinary interests. As my subject I tried to unravel what it was that Keats’s Grecian urn meant when it said that:
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’, – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
The poet obviously believes something important is at stake here – the urn is ‘a friend to man’ – but what exactly that friend is claiming is not entirely clear.
I read through the available critical literature on the subject, and began by dividing it into categories. There were two major questions to be asked: was the utterance true? And did it matter, in the sense of having consequences? (After all, what is true for Grecian urns – for immortal art – may not be true for mortal humans.) Thus there were four possible positions: true and with consequences, true but without, false but with, false but without. I found critics who occupied each of the four points of view, and tried to mediate between them.
If there is something clunky about this, my aesthetics tutor nevertheless found the resulting analysis palatable, but when it was handed over to the English Department the Honours Committee hated it, rightly feeling it lacking in literary analysis. This meant that I was to graduate with neither honour nor Honours in my chosen subject, which was presumably intended as a signal that I had no future in the field. I certainly took it to be one. Given that I had spent my final year applying to do post-graduate work in English, this came as something of a shock.
I imprecated, I supplicated, I appealed, I pointed out my many virtues. I demanded a reread. The department treated me with a courtesy that my aggression hardly deserved, got reports from each of the readers of the thesis, commissioned a new one, and confirmed its original judgement: this philosophical Gekoski was not of sufficient standard to be awarded Honours in English. Which left me in the odd – indeed, I think it was unique – position of graduating summa cum laude, at the very top of my class, but without Honours.
I pointed out to the chairman of my department that as various universities and foundations had offered me PhD places and scholarships, perhaps it was the Penn English Department that was out of line here, and not me? He (a kindly man) assured me that he had every confidence that I would do well, perhaps even better if I confined myself to proper English studies.
I didn’t tell him, in listing my achievements and prospects, that I had been turned down to do a PhD by Yale, for reasons that would have confirmed his doubts about me. The Yale application form demanded both that one send in a sustained essay on a literary topic – I submitted one of my better course papers – and write a further essay of ‘up to a thousand words’ assessing one’s prospects as a graduate student at Yale.
This seemed to me an idiotic requirement. They already had my transcript of grades and courses taken, three recommendations from tutors, and the course essay. Was one supposed to be honest in writing such self-description, citing one’s strengths and weaknesses like a penitent on a pilgrimage? No thanks. My eventual submission (of up to a thousand words) read as follows: ‘My prospects as a graduate student at Yale University are uniformly excellent.’ Given a choice between affirming the sensibleness of their requirements, and accepting this renegade candidate, the Yale Graduate Admissions Department chose the former, and rejected the latter. I never much wanted to go there anyway – too preppy – and went to Oxford instead, to ‘read’ the newly fashionable BPhil degree in English.
I loved that word ‘read’, which came from the Delegacy of English’s handbook, and was reiterated in the literature from Merton College, which also advised that ‘gentlemen are responsible for bringing their own tea crockery.’ My mother adored the phrase, and used it repeatedly over the months before I left for Oxford.
‘He’s responsible for bringing his own tea crockery, you know,’ she told her friends.
‘What’s tea crockery?’
‘I don’t know,’ she admitted, ‘but I bought him a mug.’
I took it with me to Oxford, and it came in handy when my next door neighbour in the college graduate house at 21 Merton Street, Vijaya Samaraweera, arrived from Ceylon with an entire chest full of (who would have supposed it?) tea. I showed him my mug. We became instant friends.
Going to Oxford was the right decision: great Philosophy Department, and reasonable enough in English. I bought a Harris tweed jacket, a Merton scarf and tie, and had a three-piece pin-striped suit made by Hall Brothers in the High. I had tea and apple crumble with custard at George’s in the covered market, used ‘jolly’ as an adjective, took afternoon tea in the Middle Common Room, learned to call my tutor by his first name, went to evensong in the chapel, and joined the varsity tennis club (during the fixtures you stopped for tea between matches). My fiancée Rachel, who still had a year to finish at college, would join me in Oxford the next year, after our forthcoming marriage in June of 1967. What a great plan. You could count on love, whatever those sceptical Shirelles and that Mr Hume suggested.
6
YOUNG AND OLD WITH W.B. YEATS
And I though never of Ledaean kind
Had pretty plumage once – enough of that,
Better to smile on all that smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.
W.B. Yeats, ‘Among School Children
’
When I remember my first love, my mind often turns to W.B.Yeats. She would probably be mystified to hear this, all these years later, and I’m a little puzzled by it myself. I suppose it must be because my copy of Yeats’s poems is all that I have left of her. It is a blue cloth volume stamped in gilt, as many of the early editions of the poet’s works were, though it lacks the elegance of their original design. I purchased this unprepossessing book in 1963, in my second year at the University of Pennsylvania, and subsequently used it at Oxford, and later while teaching at Warwick. It has been constantly in my possession, then, for some forty-six years, save the one during which I lent it to Rachel, who was reading Yeats in one of her college courses.
My memory of her – what she looked like, how she moved, what her voice sounded like – has largely faded, and I threw out all her letters when she left me, forlorn in Oxford, for her college English teacher in April of 1967. Her Yeats teacher. Her Yeats teacher with whom she used my book. There seemed to me something bibliographically perfidious in this treachery, some unaccountable wickedness. Surely if you are going to have an affair with your English teacher you don’t use your fiancé’s book as the medium? It would be like using his bed, only worse: this left permanent stains. Because, on many pages of the Collected Poems there were annotations in her hand that, had I been granted an early glimpse at them, might have enabled me to foresee what was coming.
In themselves her notes are slight and fundamentally uninteresting. I had annotated the book copiously as well, and my notes, too, are hardly enough now to divert one’s emotional or intellectual attention. They were, I suspect, largely transcriptions from a teacher’s voice on to the page. But viewed suspiciously, hers gave implicit testimony, if not to the forthcoming infidelity, at least of some overheating of her imagination in the presence of her ardent teacher.
Her note to ‘Leda and the Swan’, that tale of the overcoming of innocence by male lust, seemed in retrospect positively prescient: ‘Zeus – passionate. Leda – helpless and terrified.’ So my loved one was overcome by a God-like teacher (the animal!), but it wasn’t her fault. That was some consolation, though her notes stressing the purification that comes from the flames of passion in the margin to ‘Byzantium’ seemed to indicate that much good could, and had, come out of it for them both, if not for me.
Risible nonsense, of course: merely a nice example of how badly we read if our feelings obtrude unduly. But in comparison my own annotations seem sexless, impersonal, and banal: ‘Wit!’ I say here, ‘Symbolism!’ there, make references to Shelley, Keats and Arnold, paraphrase this or that, add a reference to gyres, or to Fergus and Cuchulain, those supremely uninteresting figures from Celtic mythology. What a boring little pedant I was, how bloodless in contrast to my winsome, passionate lost love.
We met in 1961, during my senior year at Huntington High School (her junior year), and were welded together until I left for Oxford in 1966. I thought her quite the most beautiful girl ever, dimpled, wavy-haired, easy-smiling. When I said so to my father, who liked to be accurate, he agreed that she was ‘rather pretty’. I was so furious that I hardly talked to him for days.
This unformed, infinitely agreeable girl – I hardly recall an angry word between us, and I am the sort of man who makes women cross on a regular basis – may have seemed to him an unprepossessing object to occasion such an intense attachment. I was drunk with the intensity of my desire for her, though the opposite possibility (of hers for me?) never seemed plausible. In that period young women didn’t have sexual desires, they responded to them. If you were lucky. Love needed to be involved: kisses, troths, going steady, having ‘our song’, rings, charm bracelets and anklets, professions of fidelity, plans for the future. But when the regulations had been negotiated and obeyed, the erotic possibilities were surprisingly varied and exciting.
My pre-pubescent reading in my father’s library had led me to the exhausting supposition that sexual love consisted of a geometrically expanding series of activities. Having done this, might it not be exciting to do this, and that, and that? The sexual mores of the time were obsessed with drawing lines and establishing boundaries, but it began to seem as if the purpose of all these prohibitions – kissing but no tongues, above the waist but not below the waist, below the waist but no penetration – was to multiply the possibilities of daring, guilty transgression, and satisfaction. Lines were drawn and breathlessly crossed, redrawn, recrossed. The months passed in a haze of yearning and erotic exploration.
Not that there was a lot else to do on Long Island in 1961. We watched Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show and hardly knew whether to laugh or cry. We were too square for any of that, all that shimmying and shaking. I couldn’t and wouldn’t do the jitterbug, and was utterly humiliated trying to do the twist in front of my bedroom mirror. (I still cringe at the memory of my mother grinding away desperately to my Chubby Checker record: ‘That’s it, isn’t it!’ she’d cry. ‘I think I’ve got it now!’) Our other tastes and pleasures were equally suburban: we had rounds of miniature golf, ate at that quirky new eatery McDonald’s (you couldn’t even eat a dollar’s worth!), played family tennis at the racquet club, hung out at the beach, begged the car to go to a drive-in movie in the evening. ‘What did you see?’ my mother would ask, disapproving yet slyly animated by the thought of what we might have been doing in the back seat of the car. We made it a point to remember a scene, or at least the title. Sometimes someone would give a party, after long negotiations with parents, and we would try to wangle some beer, making regular trips to the car to consume a can, before returning to swoon to Johnny Mathis and Pat Boone. Later, when we were more than making-out, when we were actually doing it in our own college rooms and apartments, in came a new wave of music, as if in confirmation of our sense that the times were indeed a changin’: Dylan, the Beatles, the Stones. Sometimes, smugly, I felt as if we’d fucked the new decade into life, ignited it. A lot of people felt like that then, and they were pretty much right.
It was intoxicating. I spent years drugged by sex, by the memory and anticipation of sex, indifferent to the creeping certainty that it would be right for both of us to move on. The physical fervour was not accompanied by an equal emotional intensity and curiosity – I had encountered no equivalent to Hirschfeld regarding the inward life. We were both stuck, and bored, without recognizing it, enacting the same old postures and rituals, both physical and emotional. Fortunately she saw this before I did, and had the courage to break our engagement just before we were due to get married in the summer of 1967.
I soon discovered (though I can’t remember how) that Rachel’s teacher had courted her by sending her a copy of Yeats’s early poem, ‘Brown Penny’, which opens like this:
I whispered ‘I am too young,’
And then ‘I am old enough’;
Wherefore I threw a penny
To find out if I might love.
‘Go and love, go and love, young man,
If the lady be young and fair.’
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
I am looped in the loops of her hair.
I was horrified by this bit of pretentious loopiness, so typical of the worst of Yeats, with a characteristic build-up to a pseudo-climax where sound overwhelms sense. It seemed to me breathtakingly banal, the final repetition serving only to suggest that the would-be lover (read: her teacher) was the sort of fanciful dope who would seek, and follow, such advice. It was obvious that Rachel was in trouble, and should tell her undiscriminating suitor to get lost. He must, I concluded, be both an emotional and a literary retard.
Unlike me. Outraged that my loved one should be courted so ineptly, I responded by sending her another, and palpably better, Yeats poem, ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, which ends with an exalted crescendo of feeling:
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her han
ds;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
That would do it! When I regained my lost one – and how could I not, sending her such a wonderful poem? – then we would enjoy the fruits of those countless nights and days. We’d be reunited, and I would have freed her from the momentary blindness that had caused her to choose (and to read) so clumsily.
Actually it was me who was reading badly. At least ‘Brown Penny’ is in the voice of a young man, full of desire, while ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ is that of an old man full of regret for what has been lost. We do not believe, reading it, that Wandering Aengus will reunite with his love, only that it is characteristic of age to yearn for lost vitality. Why would I have sent Rachel such a poem? Was I unconsciously acknowledging and accepting her decision? And in so doing, acknowledging, too, that she was right?
Months went by as I waited despondently for her answer. Surely, someone as sensitive as me had to be preferable to this surrogate, this seducer foolishly chosen while I was away at Oxford. Surely no woman could prefer the prosaic twerp who sent her ‘Brown Penny’ to a man with the passionate intensity to choose ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’? And if my dear one – here was a startling and terrible thought – could make such a choice, perhaps she wasn’t the girl for me after all? I was in a vulnerable state, sleepless and emotionally wrought, and informed my Oxford supervisor not to expect any essays ‘for at least a term’, owing to my broken heart.
It was just as well. Literary criticism was hardly my strong point at the time. In any case, I’ve always had my reservations about Yeats, who is the most irritating poet since Blake, whom he revered, and whom he edited (with Edwin Ellis) in 1893. Blake invents a cosmology and cast of characters for his prophetic books which are allegorical – there is, loosely, a one-to-one correspondence between a named ‘character’ and the force(s) that are represented. This seems oddly at variance with his insistence on the goodness of ‘minute particulars’, and his credo ‘to generalize is to be an Idiot’, which is my favourite generalization. You can see why Yeats was drawn to this, though there seems something oddly unimaginative in the project, which is why, I suspect, people who claim to admire Blake are really only delighted – as I am – by the Songs of Innocence and Experience, and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The later works are deeply obscure, and read largely by nerds, or Blakeans, as they call themselves.