by Rick Gekoski
This is neither a sympathetic position nor a defensible one, but it has some truth in it. Did Freud not admit that women were lions to him, that he could not understand, after years of observation, what it was that they wanted? There is some general truth lurking here. If lions, women and blacks cannot be understood from outside the group, why is it not also true of men, or whites? After all, what woman could fully comprehend the gloopy mixture of aggression, competitiveness, insecurity and lust that drives most men?
The implications are clear: how do I understand you? Or you, me? We all roam our internal savannahs, bask in our own sun, hunt our own zebra. Even in our most intimate relationships we are frequently struck by the sheer distance that separates one mind – one person – from another. In those days we would say, exasperatedly, ‘you don’t know where I’m coming from,’ as if by an effort of will our partner or friend might be able to bridge the chasm between one mind and another. If a person could talk, we could not understand them?
Unless, perhaps, we were reading a novel. What is so addictive about fiction is that it is the one reliable place in which we can apprehend and participate in – fully understand – the inward world of another person. To get the connection between the form of life they are placed in, and the language that they speak. In this sense – a limited one, but satisfying – I know Leopold Bloom better than I know my wife. There is nothing unknown about him, his motives are revealed to the extent that he has them, everything that he feels is displayed. This is satisfying, but it’s not enough. That is of course why one prefers life to literature: because knowing is less exciting and less satisfying than not knowing.
The implication is ironic and amusing. Wolfe invents his electric prose to deal with the extremities of a form of life – the acid experience – that is so foreign that we can’t seem to apprehend it. Yet in so doing, he stumbles across a general truth. Acid heads are alien to us, and seem to operate from a lion-like distance from ordinary life, but there is no ordinary life. We are all irremediably foreign and separate. And so you can write like that, you need to write like that, not merely about Pranksters, but about anyone and everybody. Wolfe’s later books use similar prose to describe much less outrageous characters, to describe ‘ordinary’ people who, once you start to get them, are almost as zappy, as other, as those Pranksters were.
So vivid was the experience of reading Tom Wolfe, that his readers wanted to become Pranksters: to be on the bus. To hop on to what the Beatles were to call, in their derivative and commercially watered-down version, the ‘Magical Mystery Tour’. Great writing does that to and for you. It was a terrific fantasy, to use one of Kesey’s favourite words. To be that free, to push all boundaries, demand the ecstatic rather than the everyday, to do one’s own thing entirely, pass that acid test.
The Acid Tests were one of those outrages, one of those scandals, that create a new style or a new world view. Everyone clucks, fumes, grinds their teeth over the bad taste, the bad morals, the insolence, the vulgarity, the childishness, the lunacy, the cruelty, the irresponsibility, the fraudulence and, in fact, gets worked up into such a state of excitement, such a slaver, they can’t turn it loose. It becomes a perfect obsession.
But all these reasons for disapproving were, finally, persuasive, though I indulged my fascination. I knew my inner Prankster was purely a fantasy figure, not something to live by, but something to contemplate, and perhaps to learn from. Learn about what I could and could not do, who I was, and wasn’t.
No, what I really wished, wished fervently but without hope of success (as one would wish to play golf like Tiger Woods) was to write like Tom Wolfe. To give myself fully to experience, and to learn from it. To empathize without losing separateness of judgement: if there is plenty of the enthusiasm of Allen Ginsberg in his project, Holden Caulfield is there as well, as evidenced by the occasional fastidious use of the term phoney. Though I realized perfectly clearly that I would never be able to write like that, even so there was plenty to learn from Tom Wolfe: participate – give yourself to – what you see and write about. Be both in and out of it. Find the right language, the inevitable language, to capture the form of life you are observing and participating in. Take some risks. Listen to the lions. And above all: Make it fun.
It was a great lesson, and I forgot it almost immediately. Indeed, I have had to continually remind myself of it for the rest of my life, for the pressure to regard reading and writing as forms of work – which is endemic to the form of life, and its associated language, that academics have chosen – is inexorable. I went back to Oxford at the end of the summer of 1968, grew my beard, and began work on a DPhil on Joseph Conrad’s moral vision. There’s nothing obviously playful about such a project. If there was fun to be had in it – and there might well be, to someone more free-spirited than I was then – I never found it, never established any synergy between being serious and having fun. You had to choose. Oxford is the setting, after all, for the mournful poetry of Matthew Arnold, not the electric effusiveness of Tom Wolfe.
9
A DIVIDED SELF IN OXFORD
The range of what we think and do
Is limited by what we fail to notice.
And because we fail to notice
That we fail to notice
There is little we can do
To change
Until we notice
How failing to notice
Shapes our thoughts and deeds.
R.D. Laing, Knots
The Abysmal (Water). It was apparently an uncommon reading, and potentially a disastrous one. Barbara and I had thrown the I Ching sticks, seeking guidance as to whether we should get married. We couldn’t decide, perhaps the ancient wisdom of the Orient might point us in the right direction? The text seemed to issue a clear warning to us, and particularly to me:
Danger comes because one is too ambitious . . . A man when in danger has only to proceed along the line of least resistance; thus he reaches the goal. A man who in the extremity of danger has lost the right way and is irremediably entangled in his sins has no prospect of escape.
That sounded terrible, but the remedy was obvious. There must have been some inscrutable oriental mistake. We threw the sticks again:The Abysmal (Water). The odds against this reading coming up twice in a row are huge. But surely the text was open to interpretation? What does ‘abysmal water’ suggest? Our first associations, as if we were interpreting a dream, were dank, polluted, stagnant, filthy, dangerous to life. Or perhaps a torrent was envisaged, like a tsunami that would drown all those in its path? What could we salvage from that?
We were both fully aware that the archetype of the journey into the underworld, the descent into the murky symbolism – the abysmal waters – of the unconscious, presented one with trials and dangers. That didn’t mean it wasn’t worth the effort. Surely if we could plumb or navigate those waters we would be strengthened by the process? The I Ching was offering us a challenge, and an opportunity:
if one is sincere when confronted with difficulties, the heart can penetrate the meaning of the situation. And once we have gained inner mastery of a problem, it will come about naturally that the action we take will succeed.
We were married in the Oxford Registry Office on 11 October 1969. It had been a tumultuous courtship, was going to become an even more unsettling marriage, and it wasn’t an unambiguously happy moment. Barbara looked both stunned and stunning in a flowing, dreamy silk dress in reds and blacks bought at a shop near Harrods, and subsequently worn by her Auntie Nancy on cruises. My three-piece pinstriped blue business suit made me look like a trainee lawyer in need of a decent haircut.
Her parents welcomed me into the family gracefully and with, I suspect, some relief. She was twenty-six by then – and if she didn’t marry me, her father said anxiously to her mother, she would be ‘damaged goods’. Catherine characteristically repeated the comment to Bar, who chortled, and remarked that she’d been damaged goods before she met me. The first time I visited the parents,
in their semi on a modest little road in Kenilworth, a bastion of Tory petit bourgeois life, I arrived in the Morgan convertible dressed in a red Arab djelaba, with a long bushy beard, and an overstuffed meerschaum pipe filled with some noxious tobacco that made me into a walking bush fire. (Some time later, teaching a seminar at Warwick – students kept asking if I could please open the window – my beard caught fire from a stray ember. It didn’t smell all that different from the reeking Latakia tobacco, and I burbled on regardless, until the flames became visible beneath my nose. I snuffed it out one-handed, barely missing a phrase. Nobody laughed, but there was a general sense in the room that it served me right.)
We were cloistered together in the hothouse of a tiny flat in Stanley Road: she emerging only to go to her newly located analyst. Her anxieties, while severe and debilitating, struck me as somehow not personal, more a function of her life situation. She was a changeling, placed in the wrong family and environment, too curious, finely tuned and thoughtful to feel comfortable in the provincial life she had, inappropriately, been given. She’d educated herself as an adolescent, reading her way through the Kenilworth Library stock of books on the history of art, and through a selection of writers including Sartre and Camus, many of the English poets, and a run of contemporary novelists, while studying shorthand and other secretarial skills. She yearned for something larger and freer, left home for London at the age of sixteen, later moved to Oxford, tried to make relationships that were challenging and sustaining. The price she paid for entering the world she should have been given in the first place was too high and too cruel.
Getting her back, well and functioning, became our joint project, more important than anything else. We ceased to go out, lost touch with our best friends, engulfed by the psychoanalytic miasma, claustrophobic and ingrown. The rituals of everyday life became an essential point of stability, but even these were delicately poised. We would wander off companionably in the mornings to do the shopping, perhaps have a coffee at the local café. But this progress was retarded by the intercession of the neighbour’s dog, an Alsatian of malign disposition, like the Hound of the Baskervilles on steroids, who would hide behind a tree until passers-by got to the garden gate, and then come charging towards them, barking ferociously, jumping upon the gate in an attempt to scale it and eat the terrified pedestrians. The first time it happened I almost fainted from fright. Then I got furious.
‘I know,’ I said to Barbara, plotting revenge that evening. ‘I’ll buy a huge rump steak and put rat poison all over it, and chuck it in their garden.’
‘You can’t do that!’ said Bar, genuinely disapproving. (She liked dogs enough, even, not to want to kill this one.)
‘I guess you’re right. How about lashings of Tabasco sauce?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I can think of something much worse. When the dog is inside one evening’ (we’d noticed he was often in the house for a couple of hours at night – perhaps they fed him one of their many cats) ‘we can sneak into the garden and snip their daffs!’
‘Snip their daffs?’
‘That’d do it!’ she said.
We never visited our neighbour with this quintessentially English form of retribution, alas, nor my archetypal American one, and learned to walk down the other side of Stanley Road instead. The dog still tried to get us, but it was less frightening at a distance.
In the flat, we read together the essential works of Freud, Jung and A.S. Neill, and for a period we were both entranced by R.D. Laing, who all of a sudden had become a cult figure. His first book, The Divided Self, had been published in 1960, way before all the sixties shenanigans began. It was not so much ahead of its time; in part, at least, it caused it. It became an extraordinarily influential book. Laing argued that even the most extreme cases of schizophrenia – psychoanalytically regarded as untreatable – were capable of being both understood and treated therapeutically. Schizophrenics were not mad, insane, or deranged – categories that merely demonstrated the observer’s incomprehension – rather, the individual schizophrenic was to be understood as someone who had creatively tried to accommodate sets of radically conflicting demands. Using Gregory Bateson’s double-bind theory, Laing and his early colleagues were working towards an understanding of the reasonableness of the schizophrenic world, however apparently incomprehensible the symptoms manifested by any given schizophrenic might seem.
To this set of ideas was aligned a bias towards phenomenology which claimed that no response or set of responses to the world, if sincere and accurately reported, could be given privilege over any other. The schizophrenic’s inner voices and inward experience were real to him or her. That’s what real is: reality is what is generated by an act of perception.
You might wonder why the emerging hip generation of the sixties should have cared about schizophrenia, and how it should or should not be regarded and treated. And we didn’t, really; the reason The Divided Self had such an impact was that it posited radical alternatives to received wisdom, that it was so stringently anti-establishment. It allowed people their own voices, however deviant: it seemed to extend a remarkably generous form of fellowship.
It sounded great to us. Authentic self-realization seemed an admirable goal; after all, I regarded myself as a student of the results of inspiration, a romantic not a classicist. Barbara was determinedly trying to find a way to escape the various mixed messages and double binds of her upbringing. Laing, without denying the stresses of the internal life, made it sound exciting. Listen to your inner voices! Be inhabited by spirits! Hadn’t Blake told us that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom? Though my reading at the time was dominated by Freud, and my life by the Freudian, Laing seemed to take more risks than Freud, and to point in less conventional directions. Barbara, coming home from a session with her Freudian analyst one afternoon, quoted him as saying that she should be more like his wife, who was ‘a good, sensible woman’. I’d seen the frumpy figure thus alluded too, and was certain I would prefer Barbara as she was.
But therapy helped her. After a lot of time, and a brave internal effort, the boundaries of life began to expand: we went out more, and more people came round. We were friends with a number of people ranging from the eccentric to the downright dangerous. John lived off vegetables discarded in the bins at the Oxford market, and never washed his hair, ever; Reg, a brilliant but schizoid potter, had served time at Broadmoor Hospital for a murder committed in a pub, and became a founding member of the Oxford Arts Lab; John Preston, a frustrated painter, woodcarver, husband and spirit, ran a contemporary ceramics gallery on North Parade. He was the sort of person that North Oxford sub-culture was made for: talented, but not talented enough, unhappy, something of a fantasist.
From the moment Barbara first came into his shop, beautiful, enthusiastic, approachable, he fell in love with her. She hardly had the income to indulge her excellent taste, but bought things anyway, even if it meant eating less: a beautiful yellow Lucie Rie bowl, a larger brown one by Gwen Hanson. Sometimes John would offer a lovingly cooked dinner, a bottle of wine, and a lot of talk about himself. He carved a wooden figure of her in a piece of gnarly fruit wood, about four inches high mounted on a plinth, that was an unsettlingly accurate image of her in the nude. He frequently came round to our flat to visit her, and to complain about the constraints of his marriage, and how much his children sided with their mother against him.
One weekend John came round after closing his shop. He was in a lot of pain with headaches, which had increased in severity over the last month, and which he described – and we agreed – as a symptom of the unhappiness that his marriage caused him.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘sometimes I don’t think I can stand it any more. I feel like I’m going mad.’
We listened sympathetically. Mad didn’t scare us.
‘Sometimes I have these thoughts, I keep having them, that one day I’ll just get a gun and kill us all . . .’ He held his head in his hands. I went to make tea while Barbara comforte
d him.
‘I know,’ she said, ‘people often have fantasies like that, I’m glad you can talk about it. You’re not mad. You mustn’t feel guilty.’
He shook his head. ‘I can actually see myself doing it. I go upstairs and get the shotgun...’
‘Don’t!’ Barbara said. ‘Don’t dwell on it. It isn’t good for you.’
He cheered up a little after dinner, stayed the night, and headed back to his house in the country in the morning.
Later that week, I found Barbara waiting for me tearfully, clutching a copy of the Guardian, outside St Clare’s College, where I had been teaching a course on modern English Literature to a group of American junior year abroad students. On the front page was the story. John had, indeed, shot his wife and children, then himself after setting the house on fire.
‘We should have taken him more seriously,’ she said, ‘we should have helped him.’ Although the autopsy revealed a brain tumour, which was held by the coroner to be an explanation for the tragedy, we couldn’t help but feel responsible. Our problem hadn’t been lack of seriousness, we’d been serious in the wrong way. The obvious and appropriate response – are you sure you’re getting the right medical advice about these headaches? – was disabled by the times. Doctors were not to be trusted: purveyors of mother’s little helpers like valium, barbaric imposers of ECT, doctors treated symptoms rather than causes, believed in suppression rather than expression.