Outside of a Dog

by Rick Gekoski

  We discussed this, gingerly, in seminars, prompting a hearty woman mature student to expostulate, ‘Can’t they just be satisfied with a jolly good shag?’ Not everyone is. When the course ended an attractive young woman student invited me out for dinner, ostensibly to say thank you for ‘teaching her such a lot’. She chose a local bistro, made sure I drank too much, and put her hand on my thigh.

  ‘The problem with you,’ she said caressively, ‘is that you never do anything you disapprove of. It would be so good for you, it would free you from all that rectitude and conscientiousness. You’re so stiff.’

  By now that was certainly true, and the overt appeal to my inner Allen Ginsberg was intuitively perfect. I wanted to be free, less rule-bound, licentious. When I drove her home she kissed me passionately, and begged to be taken back to my flat, promising anything I liked by way of the unspeakable. I demurred: she was my student, she was married, she was that little bit unstable. I might have settled for any two out of three, but together they hardened my resolve. I’ve always regretted it. She was right.

  I carried on, not with her, but with a book on Lawrence, which had been commissioned by Methuen two years before. I wasn’t much good at that either. I had begun a chronological novel-by novel account, but there was something dead about the whole enterprise. I started again, informing Methuen that the book would now be entirely about Women in Love. Curiously, they seemed happy enough about this, probably because they had despaired of ever seeing a final script from me.

  A year later I wrote again to tell them that I was now writing a novel about a university lecturer, unhappy in life and love, who is writing a critical book about D.H. Lawrence. This novel would correlate Lawrentian experiences and ideas with events in the lecturer’s life. After some time, this book was published, not once but twice. The first version, by Bernard Malamud, was entitled Dubin’s Lives, which came out in 1979, when mine should have been published, and wasn’t. The second, in 1997, was Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence, a great title, and a good book. So mine was a viable idea after all, only I was the wrong person to have it. I never wrote a single word.

  Rereading Women in Love after some thirty years, it is hard to escape the question: how is it that I was so taken in by all of this overheated nonsense? How pleasurable it now is to quote Lawrence’s excesses, and to conclude: now I know better, how callow is youth, how easily fooled. How agreeable it is to age, and to mature, and to come finally to sound judgement.

  This is fine, as far as it goes, but it leaves something out. There is a memory trace running through Women in Love not of the passages and sentences that I remember from last reading it thirty years ago, but of me – could I call him a literary ‘little Rick’ – who was struck by those passages so deeply as to remember them almost verbatim on rereading: of the drowning of Diana Crich, the smashing of the lapis lazuli paperweight on to Birkin’s head, the wrestling scene, those obscure moments of ‘Excurse’, multiple individual lines and sentiments, all come back virtually intact. And what returns, too, is a ghostly version of my former reading self, captured by the lines, reading them attentively and with respect, aware that, if the rhetoric is sometimes strained, the repetitions insistent, nevertheless there is a powerful presence in the words, a project worth taking seriously, and personally. Rereading Lawrence I re-encounter my previous self, and recover for a moment something fresh and young, eager to believe, open-minded and open-hearted in ways that I had almost forgotten were possible.

  Is ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ wrong? This is a country for old men, worth revisiting and remembering, imprinted with a fading intensity which is recoverable, but can’t be re-experienced: like visiting a house one has lived in as a child, filled with wisps of partial memories which emerge not as feeling, but as something like feeling, which recalls feeling – of truncated narrative, partial glimpses half-perceived, visual traces of persons like ghosts, wispy and insubstantial, echoing with half-remembered conversations and lullabies.

  Listening intently to this distant music, after rereading Women in Love, brings me back to John Bayley and the memory of that tutorial. Let me return to the passage with which the novel ends, in a conversation between Birkin and Ursula, after Gerald’s death in the Alps. Birkin, happy now in his love of her, yet laments his lack of a similar intimacy with a man.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. ‘It’s an obstinacy, a theory, a perversity.’

  ‘Well –’ he said.

  ‘You can’t have two kinds of love. Why should you!’

  ‘It seems as if I can’t,’ he said. ‘Yet I wanted it.’

  ‘You can’t have it, because it’s false, impossible,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t believe that,’ he answered.

  After thirty-five years of reflection I still don’t get it, not entirely. Highly orchestrated? The ending, which reaches delicately outside the confines of the novel into some future in which the striving goes on, is highly considered. There is nothing gratuitous about it, the mastery is complete. But highly orchestrated? Perhaps Bayley was thinking of chamber music, and I (misunderstanding him) of Wagner?

  For many years this example of sensibility – like those of John Newton at Warwick, or of Dr Leavis – haunted me, and made me acutely aware of my own shortcomings. Earnest, intelligent in some prosaic, linear fashion, lacking fineness of discrimination, tactless. So when I encounter this recurring English strain of high sensibility, I often feel patronized, as if the message were I am more delicately aware than you, I’ll bet you couldn’t have put this quite so acutely. Though this is not, I suppose, the intent, it is certainly the result.

  Surely it is possible to read English literature without aping this peculiar, parochial form of sensitivity? Wallace Stevens observes that ‘Americans are not British in sensibility’, and it is a danger of expatriation that the voices, procedures and tonalities that are sanctioned by English culture are, for an American visitor, tempting roads to self-betrayal. During my previous year at Oxford, my tutor Steven Wall had criticized one of my essays for ‘lacking its own voice’. (Auden, more interestingly, accused Americans of all having the same face.) What Wall meant, almost sneeringly, was that I had not the advantage of Englishness, and lacked sensibility.

  But I had a voice, and it was American, and I lost confidence in it. Ceased to be, even, Richard A. Gekoski, and became R.A. Gekoski. I began to acquire something of an Oxford persona, and to mime its tones and inflections. Yet what I had really needed to learn, however admiringly, from John Bayley was how not to be. He was, as he would happily admit, a terrible model. For many years I lost track of myself, and foundered in a miasma of mock-Englishness, of writer’s block and incomprehension. The book on Lawrence, unsurprisingly, was never finished: the only time I have failed to meet a deadline, and one of the best things that has ever happened to me.

  12

  ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE?

  All prize-giving and marks and exams sidetrack proper personality development. Only pedants claim learning from books is education. It robs youth of its right to play and play and play; it puts old heads on young shoulders.

  A.S. Neill, Summerhill

  After voting for my girlfriend to be the Prom Queen in high school, I never again voted in an election. My reasons for this shocking abnegation of responsibility may be characterized as psychological and aesthetic. The mere fact that a person puts himself forward for high office is frequently a sign of a personality defect so profound that it ought to disqualify him. And having been raised in America, I am disgusted by the sheer ugliness of political life: the dispiriting level of most of the candidates, the fortunes wasted on the interminable campaigning, the balloons, the pompoms, the polyester, the flag-waving, the sabre-rattling, the yawning abyss between what is promised and what delivered. God Bless America! I loathe all of that phoniness, the false smiles and strained body language. Are these real people, or androids? How could any right-thinking person tolerate such company? Matthew A
rnold makes the point neatly:

  Now for my part I do not wish to see men of culture asking to be entrusted with power; and, indeed, I have freely said, that in my opinion the speech most proper, at present, for a man of culture to make to a body of his fellow-countrymen who get him into a committee-room, is Socrates’s: Know thyself! and this is not a speech to be made by men wanting to be entrusted with power.

  And so when faced with a choice, even between the bumbling but mildly estimable John Kerry and the loathsome George W. Bush, I could not force myself to push the button, or whatever it is you do. Not voting is a kind of vote: an abstention. If more of us did it – and almost half already do – maybe we could be offered something more serious and palatable. More real.

  But there is something disingenuous about this. I am interested in politics and follow elections attentively. I have favourites amongst politicians, and amongst policies. I espouse a murky but not entirely inarticulate liberalism, and believe in letting the other man live in his own way, as long as he will agree to leave me to do the same. I like differences, and I cannot abide being bossed about. I detest Ken Livingstone, the former Mayor of London, for getting rid of the Routemaster bus, the iconic walk-on walk-off double decker that has characterized London since the 1950s. And I will never forgive Tony Blair (the buck stops there) for one single act of crass stupidity. For it was under the Blair government in 1999, that the Department of Education tried to close A.S. Neill’s Summerhill School.

  Founded in Germany in 1921, and soon relocated to Leiston in Suffolk, Summerhill is a tiny, progressive boarding school for students aged between five and sixteen. Its aim is to raise children in freedom, and to generate what an admiring school inspector once called ‘the atmosphere of a permanent holiday camp’. The founding premises, based largely on Freud and Homer Lane’s Little Commonwealth, were radical but simple.

  Self-government for the pupils and staff, freedom to go to lessons or stay away, freedom to play for days or weeks or years if necessary, freedom from any indoctrination whether religious or moral or political, freedom from character moulding.

  Underlying this, of course, is the necessary belief in the innate ‘goodness of human nature’. How children develop is the direct result of how they are raised. It is the task of parent and teacher alike not to get in the way: to facilitate rather than to impose, to trust that the unimpeded growth of a loved child must result in the creation of a loving adult. A child doesn’t want to learn to read, can’t be bothered to dress properly, prefers playing guitar to going to class? Leave him alone. He’ll read when he finds that it is necessary and useful. No one ever left Summerhill illiterate. Personal happiness is the criterion and the goal, which sounds cloistered and selfish, and is in Neill’s view just the opposite. Only happy people can make a happy world, as Neill concludes in the final sentences of his preface to his book, Summerhill:

  If Summerhill has any message at all it is: Thou shalt not opt out. Fight world sickness, not with drugs like moral teachings and punishments but with natural means – approval, tenderness, tolerance . . . I hesitate to use the word love, for it has almost become a dirty word like so many honest and clean Anglo-Saxon four letter words.

  Yet soon enough, like Rupert Birkin, he has need of the forbidden word. The closing lines of the chapter ‘The Future of Summerhill’ are unequivocal:

  the future of Summerhill is of the greatest importance to humanity. New generations must be given the chance to grow in freedom. The bestowal of freedom is the bestowal of love. And only love can save the world.

  Neill’s words were sufficiently radical in their educational context, but reading them in 1971 it was hard not to feel that they encapsulated the spirit of the time. It had taken fifty years, but the world had finally caught up with A.S. Neill. ‘All you need is love.’ How could I sit in Oxford pursuing my dusty doctoral ends? I’d never wanted to be a university teacher, not really. Until my final year as an undergraduate, I still wanted to be a lawyer, and had been offered a place at Harvard Law. Granted a brief moment of lucidity that loosened my unconscious emulation of my father, I decided instead to do graduate work in English (which, anyway, was what he’d really wanted). But working towards my DPhil I would study and write sporadically, teeth gritted, without belief or pleasure, and in between I would read what really interested me, particularly the works of A.S. Neill. I was most intrigued by his four early autobiographical books, in which he traced his development as a schoolmaster, a dominee. How did a relatively ordinary Scottish boy, born in the late nineteenth century, with his fair leavening of Calvinism, become the century’s most famous progressive educationist? For if he could transform himself in such a thoroughgoing manner, surely even I could, just a little?

  Freedom was in the air: progressive education, or de-schooling, was hip. In that time at Oxford I read George Dennison, John Holt, Ivan Illich, and remembered fondly my time at Burgundy Farm Country Day School. Barbara, herself a victim of dreadful schooling, concurred with the new lines of thought, and suggested that we needed to pay a visit to Summerhill, to see what Neill’s ideas looked like in action.

  It was, thank goodness, much as we had expected. Many of the kids looked as if they’d been shipped in from a California commune, brightly and eccentrically dressed, long-haired, cheerfully androgynous. The main house looked equally shabby, if less colourful, surrounded by a series of randomly located outbuildings, the children sloping about with varying degrees of purpose, ‘Sergeant Pepper’ playing from the dormitory. Visitors were greeted by the school secretary, and herded into the main hall, where Neill gave a ten-minute talk. He was eighty-seven, the very incarnation of Jung’s wise old man, erect of carriage and bright of eye, smoking his pipe, shambling, radiant and benign. He gave a brief summary of what his visitors (there were about twenty of us) already knew about the school, and then left us to our own devices. I wanted to talk to him, perhaps introduce myself and ask about a job, but he didn’t encourage contact. It was clearly drudgery for him to go on welcoming strangers every week, but it was also an opportunity to find the occasional parents who might send their children to the school. Always financially uncertain, Summerhill could not afford to neglect such public relations.

  The main treat was the kids. They didn’t look like school children at all, rather like a flock of talking free range chickens, pecking about here and there. A few, not many, were playing with a football, two boys were weeding the garden in a desultory manner, in a studio pots and paintings were being made, groups lounged about chatting and laughing. Doing their own thing. Summerhill, all of a sudden, wasn’t alternative, peculiar, isolated: Summerhill was cool. We didn’t encounter any of the aggressive tribalism that I associate with children in school playgrounds, nor witness any of the teasing, bullying and bitchiness, the cruel exclusions that children inflict on each other with such frequency that one would swear it was part of their nature.

  The Summerhill children were exactly as Neill had characterized them: fresh-faced, friendly and open, relaxed in body and mind. Several came over to us to say hello, ask who we were and if they could show us around. They were all the advertisement the school needed. What was remarkable was that many of these children were there because they had failed to settle elsewhere, and come to Neill with that mournful disaffection so characteristic of unhappy children. If they got there young enough (‘before the age of twelve’) Neill could help. He gave ‘PLs’ – short therapy sessions, or ‘private lessons’ – to the most disaffected, which seemed to help some of the children, but no more, Neill acknowledged, than got better simply by being at the school. Being in a free community was all the therapy they needed.

  We returned to Oxford confirmed in our beliefs, and I composed a letter applying for a job. I outlined my qualifications gingerly, and added a gushy good deal about my love of children, playing and telling stories. I got a letter by return informing me that there were no vacancies, which though I expected it, was nevertheless disappointing. I kept it fo
r some time, treasuring Neill’s signature, if only on a letter of rejection.

  When I later arrived at Warwick to take up my lectureship, still full of Summerhillian yearning, I astonished our founding professor, a Scot but no A.S. Neill, by asking earnestly if I was required to examine our students, because I didn’t believe in examinations. Professor Hunter looked at me intently, as if trying to figure out how I got there, and why he had colluded in the process. He firmly believed that ‘when you teach literature, you also teach your own way of life’, but he would have had no doubt that his was preferable to mine.

  ‘Read your contract,’ he said tartly. ‘That is what we do.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ I said. ‘I think the more you are examined the less you are likely to learn.’

  ‘Education,’ he said, ‘is about achievement. Examinations are how we determine the level of achievement that has been attained.’

  ‘Do you still believe that? We must talk at length about this one day.’

  He didn’t respond, and neither of us broached the subject again. I was glad, really, for my position on the matter wouldn’t have stood up to interrogation. I was there because I was good at examinations, and proud of it. If you had taken away my academic qualifications I would have felt naked and bereft. I knew this, yet still felt that my progressive attitudes were tenable.