Outside of a Dog

by Rick Gekoski

  ‘You’re not pooing, you’re reading!’ he said.

  ‘They go together. Now go away.’

  He went downstairs to report this to the waiting crowd.

  A few minutes later – page 87 – there was a further knock on the door.

  ‘Dad,’ said Anna in her strictest voice, ‘I know what you are doing! You’ve got Matilda in there! I looked on the presents pile and it’s gone! And it’s mine and Bert’s and I want to read it right now.’

  ‘I am reading it right now,’ I said. ‘Possession is nine-tenths of the law. You get it next. Bad luck. You’ll just have to wait.’

  And she did, on the carpet right outside the loo. After a few minutes – page ninety-nine – she was joined by her brother.

  ‘Dad!’ they’d expostulate together, knocking ferociously on the door. ‘Mum says you’re to come out right now!’

  ‘Bugger off!’

  ‘It’s our book!’ they’d shout, knocking recurrently.

  And it was, and they got it, but not until I had skimmed my way to the end some half an hour later, deposited it in their greedy little hands, and made my way to the kitchen. The old folks were asleep in front of the TV, and Barbara was furious.

  ‘I hope you’re thoroughly satisfied,’ she said icily.

  And I was. It was a wonderful book. ‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘Anna and Bertie must read it as soon as possible.’

  A ‘tiny girl, with dark hair and a round serious face’, loveable, independent and preternaturally precocious – illustrated with heartrending sympathy by Quentin Blake – Matilda has been catastrophically born into the wrong family. Her father is a flagrantly dishonest second-hand car dealer, her mother a bingo addict, her brother a cowed daddy’s boy. Thoroughly ignored when she isn’t being derided, Matilda quietly teaches herself to read, and before she is five has read virtually the entire stock of the local library. Books have ‘transported’ her into new worlds; if only, she wished, her parents would read rather than watch the telly, for literature could give ‘a view of life that they had never seen’. She reads most of the classics of adult fiction, though, she admits, she doesn’t entirely understand Hemingway’s stuff about men and women. (Neither do I.)

  Books are soon banned from the house, and Matilda’s cleverness – she can also do huge mathematical calculations in her head – is mocked, when it is noticed at all. Her response to this abuse, fortunately, is not withdrawal, but anger. She counter-attacks: puts superglue on her father’s porkpie hat, stuffs a parrot up the chimney so that it seems there is a ghost in the sitting room, pours peroxide in her father’s hair tonic: ‘her safety valve, the thing that prevented her from going round the bend, was the fun of devising and dishing out these splendid punishments.’ The phrase ‘going round the bend’, while lightly stated is nevertheless fully considered. It is only Matilda’s remarkable capacity to marshal anger that can save her, as she is to find when she begins a primary school experience that consists not of neglect and belittlement, but of outright sadistic abuse. The headmistress of Crunchem Hall primary school, Miss Agatha Trunchbull, loathes children, particularly the littlest ones. (She denies having been one herself.) An Amazonian ex-athlete, now much given to the throwing of children instead of hammers, she is universally feared and detested.

  It is only the presence of the young teacher Miss Honey that makes Matilda’s ordeal tolerable. Astonished by the child’s brilliance and maturity, she takes the little girl to her heart, but (being herself under the control of the headmistress, who turns out to be her aunt) she cannot offer much protection. But a child of Matilda’s resourcefulness, having found such a mentor, is more able to cope for herself. She has, she soon finds, remarkable telekinetic powers: she can make objects move just by concentrating hard on them. She topples a glass of water (with a newt in it) right on to Miss Trunchbull’s lap.

  The parallels with Harry Potter’s uncongenial family situation and gradual discovery of his true nature have been remarked. Like the boy wizard, Matilda’s magical powers are most useful when she is angry, as a means of self-protection. The results are astonishing and gratifying. When she performs the ‘miracle’ of the tipping of the glass, Matilda is freed from fear, and the experience is little short of transcendent: her ‘whole face was transfigured . . . quite beautiful in a blaze of silence’. When she recovers, her face registers a ‘seraphic’ calm: ‘I was flying,’ she reports, ‘past the stars on silver wings.’ She has become an angel, but not a soppy one. She is an angel of vengeance.

  Soon enough Miss Trunchbull is defeated and banished, and Matilda’s parents embark for Australia in a great hurry, abandoning her to the loving care of Miss Honey, now reinstated in the family home that had been usurped by her wicked aunt. Matilda’s magical powers, no longer necessary, have faded, though her emotional and intellectual ones are now free to flower. We end, as fairy tales should, with a happy child, loved and loving, free to be herself, as all children ought to be, and so often are not.

  One can easily imagine a real life Matilda, lacking only the spunk, precocity and anger, who instead withdrew into herself, festered and shrank, ending up not in a Miss Honey’s happy home, reclaimed by love, but on a therapist’s couch. I love Roald Dahl’s works about children because he is entirely on their side, remarkably able to understand their point of view. To do so, he once said, you need to get down on your hands and knees to observe the adults towering above, issuing demands. Thus we have his first description of the kindly Miss Honey, who ‘possessed that rare gift . . . to understand totally the bewilderment and fear that so often overwhelm young children who for the first time in their lives are herded into a classroom and told to obey orders’.

  The language reminds me of Alice Miller, the Swiss psychotherapist, known for her advocacy of what she called ‘the inner child’, who has written at length of the ‘fear, despair, and utter loneliness’ of her own early childhood and schooling. It was Miller’s experience – a common one in her view – that the pressure of expectation imposed on her caused her to shut down emotionally and creatively, withdraw into herself, and develop a persona that suppressed all memory of the ‘psychic terror’ of childhood. And as an exemplar of that psychic terror there can be no bettering Agatha Trunchbull, the incarnation of everything uncontrollable, arbitrary and overpowering about adults, seen from a child’s point of view.

  If there appears something farfetched in this leap from Roald Dahl to Alice Miller, it seems natural enough to me, but then again I was (at the time I gave Matilda to Anna and Bertie) in therapy with a Hampstead therapist trained in the Alice Miller school. And, funnily enough, I never made any connection between my love of Matilda, and my admiration for Alice. Sometimes I can’t see what is in front of my face, but in any case it has been a recurrent fact about my adult personality that I have continued to love children’s books and films.

  Not in some nostalgic way, as elderly men often go gooey when they read Winnie the Pooh to their grandchildren. No, I have read all of the classics of children’s literature, but I keep up with a lot of the new things too: have queued at midnight with Anna to get each new Harry Potter, and finished all of them within a week; read all of Philip Pullman with surpassing admiration, including the insufficiently admired Sally Lockhart mysteries; loved The Wind on Fire trilogy of William Nicholson. And films like The Jungle Book, Short Circuit, Back to the Future, and especially E.T. are more likely to give me pleasure, on re-viewing, than are the films of Jean Renoir or Ingmar Bergman.

  So going into therapy to get into closer connection with some inner and largely forgotten ‘little Rick’ should have been easier for me than many people. I am, in most respects, thoroughly childish (or, as I prefer, child-like). I’m fidgety, noisy and attention-seeking, love watching cartoons and reading comics, am greedy, over-anxious to please and easily hurt, competitive and self-referring, have a short attention span and hate doing chores, am likely to blurt out inappropriate things about myself or others, and am guided almost en
tirely by the pleasure principle. If I have problems with my inner child, it is in keeping him in, rather than letting him out. He doesn’t need an advocate, he needs a keeper. What I need to discover is my inner adult. I said this repeatedly to my therapist, but he wasn’t having any of it. Continuing to act out little Rick’s anxieties, he observed, was hardly the same thing as going back, re-experiencing them, and allowing their resolution through new understanding and empathy.

  It’s generally a bad idea, when in therapy, to read the relevant texts. It is regarded as intellectualization, and hence some form of defence: one ought to concentrate on feeling, not on obtaining some mastery of the theory on which the analysis is based. But you can’t pretend to be someone you’re not, so I consulted the relevant Alice Miller books anyway, finding pretty quickly that I didn’t actually need to read them. I flicked through The Body Never Lies, For Your Own Good, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware, Banished Knowledge, and Breaking Down the Wall of Silence. The titles are remarkably similar, in that they all point to the same phenomenon. As a theorist, Alice Miller is a one trick pony. But it’s a good trick, and it takes some learning, which is presumably why she keeps repeating herself, like some evangelist intent on saving souls.

  She is particularly good on the ways in which childhood unhappiness manifests itself in adult illness and somatic symptoms, some of them serious, many apparently trivial. You don’t have to develop asthma or cancer to pay the price of an unhappy childhood: cigarette smoking, nail-biting, and obsessive dieting (to pick just those symptoms that fit me) are all apparently adult signals of childhood abuse: ‘all these illnesses or addictions are screams of the body that want to be heard.’ In an interview in 1987, Miller put her core insight perfectly:

  We do not need books about psychology in order to learn to respect our children. What we need is a total revision of the methods of child rearing and our traditional view about it. The way we were treated as small children is the way we treat ourselves the rest of our lives: with cruelty or with tenderness and protection. We often impose our most agonizing suffering upon ourselves and, later, on our children.

  Surely this is an insight worth repeating. But quite how it would help me with the problems that had driven me back into a therapist’s arms was unclear. I was, still, in an unhappy and uncreative marriage. I could not, still, write with any freedom or pleasure. How could these blockages diminish by reference to some putative inner child?

  Alice Miller seemed unable to offer anything more satisfying than an explanation, which isn’t much use. But she was unexpectedly helpful with regard to the problem of writer’s block. The least known of her books, probably, is Pictures of a Childhood, and gives an account of her life as a painter, together with colour plates of a number of her pictures. Small in scale, semi-abstract and highly coloured, like a mixture of Klee and Miro, they have a numinous quality, with tiny, haunting figures seeming to peer out of the grounds as if crying for attention.

  The pictures depict something of the artist’s unconscious, and give unmediated access to that unhappy, ‘inner’ little girl with whom Miller (despite two full analyses) had never quite been able to recall or to sympathize. She had painted as a child, and been ‘encouraged’ (by which she means bullied) by her mother into excelling at her work. The young Alice’s response to this putative ‘support’ was to dry up entirely: ‘. . . it is clear to me in retrospect that my strong resistance to formal training, to thought and planning in the area of my painting, was highly significant, perhaps even saved my life.’

  Only in adult life did she resume painting, and found that she could only paint if she did so ‘spontaneously’, for unless she did ‘the child in me rebelled and immediately became defiant’. But if she simply played with the paint, and allowed whatever wanted to be expressed to come out in its own manner, then she took immense satisfaction in the process, and the pictures flowed, as if naturally. They gave her access, she found, to the child within, and gave that long suppressed little girl, at last, a language of her own.

  Whether the pictures were any good (they are) was not the point. They were free, unmediated, and responded to no pressures except those from within, demanding release. The implication was clear to me. Though it is easier to see how the process would work with painting rather than writing, nevertheless there was something to be learned. Might it be possible for me to write like that? Spontaneously, without premeditation, playfully? ‘First thought, best thought,’ as Allen Ginsberg put it. It was an unlikely proposition: after all, my academic training had taught me exactly the opposite process. Writing is the highly meditated, careful and considered outcome of mature consideration. Avoid error! There is nothing playful or spontaneous about it, it’s a thoroughly conscious, largely defensive process.

  I thought about this for a time, talked about it with my therapist, wondered how to take the first step.

  ‘Trust your unconscious,’ he said. ‘It’ll tell you what to do if you don’t fuss about it.’

  I listened intently, but all I heard was a voice saying, ‘Just do it for God’s sake!’ A week later I started a novel. It was finished in six weeks. It was harder not to write than to write. If I put it down for a moment my head teemed with thoughts, scenes, images and conversations, and I had to get back to the typewriter. I banged away at it, surprisingly happy.

  Entitled Bottom’s Dream, it was predictably enough about me (in the guise of a psychotherapist with doubts), unhappily married to a difficult painter, trying to find a comfortable way to live in the world, and failing. (The poor old protagonist commits suicide.) The novel was personally and sexually explicit to a ridiculous degree, but it was really only a symptom of my angry and demoralized psychological state, and I didn’t show it to any publisher. My therapist thought it ‘remarkable’, but I’ll bet he said that to all the girls. I got a more disinterested opinion from the novelist Peter Ackroyd. When I told him I was writing an autobiographical novel he wrinkled his nose: ‘Darling,’ he said, ‘why don’t you write about something interesting?’ I haven’t reread Bottom’s Dream since, and would not wish to, though I am curiously resistant to throwing it away. If there is anything worth returning to, it is in the nature of the doubts about Freud and psychoanalysis that it adumbrates, about which more later.

  What was thrilling was that the writing came as if naturally, and was a cause of pleasure. All you had to do was believe in yourself, let it go spontaneously, allow whatever is in you to find its own voice, and fill up the page. The author of the book was called ‘Rick Gekoski’. He had never written anything before, ‘R.A. Gekoski’ having been responsible for my previous works. I liked this new fellow better; if he was sometimes desperate, at least he wrote in a voice that I recognized as my own. I had Alice Miller to thank for this. And it wasn’t just my inner child who came to my aid, but my inner Matilda as well. All you need to do to banish your Miss Trunchbull, after all, is to concentrate entirely, direct your eyes, and let the energy flow, and you will end up, victorious, feeling like an angel. (Whether you write a good novel is quite another issue.)

  The key to such triumphs lies, I think, in the kind of stories that you listen to, read, and make up for and about yourself. That’s how Matilda, aged four, releases herself into an imaginative world, to deal with and to supplant the realities of an inadequate real one. In effect, she makes herself through reading, and in so doing offers a model, and a hope. And yet – this is too easily missed – she is also a sad example of a child who has had to become, prematurely, an adult: Matilda forfeits her girlhood because of the abuse she has suffered. She has been ‘robbed’, as A.S. Neill put it, of ‘her right to play’. I suspect that Roald Dahl would have regarded Crunchem School as a representative, if exaggerated, example of what happens to most children in their early education. It didn’t happen at Summerhill.

  Anna and Bertie adored Matilda, and he went on to read all of Roald Dahl’s books with passionate delight. When he had finished the last one, he asked what other writers he’d l
ike? I didn’t know what to say – there aren’t any, quite, in the same league – and he’s been disappointed ever since. (Just like me as a child, wanting more writers like Dr Seuss.) Bertie thinks nobody is as good to read as Roald Dahl, and I rather agree. Perhaps he should have won the Nobel Prize?

  14

  AYER AND ANGELS

  We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express – that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as being true, or reject it as being false.

  A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic

  Sixty-eight per cent of all Americans, I am told, believe in the existence of angels. This fact is frequently cited – I have done so myself – as an instance of the gullible religiosity of the American people. I can be quite rude on the subject. I have recently, though, begun to wonder if it is fair of me, quite, to be so dismissive. My unease is not philosophical: I know that the concept ‘angel’ is unclear, and that it is equally uncertain what ‘believing’ in such an entity might entail. Nor is it because I don’t believe in angels myself, under any construction of those terms, but because I wish I did.

  Not in that self-serving way in which I want to believe in an afterlife, the thought of which would be consoling while alive and (I presume) agreeable when dead. There is nothing self-interested in my search for my lost angels. By which I don’t mean those banal beings who loiter listlessly on clouds, playing harps, translucent and bored: that’s what happens when you can’t eat, smoke, play poker or kiss girls. No, God forgive me, I never want to be one of them; give me a short sharp shock of damnation any time, something bracing and sexy.

  What I want to believe in is not the bloodless seraphim of popular Christian iconography, but the angels of the poets: in Donne’s angel with ‘wings of aire’, Blake’s perky friend the angel in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Byron’s angels hoarse with singing out of tune, Yeats’s ‘great angels’ who visit us in our hours of need, Eliot’s ‘dark angel’. One could go on and on, citing angels: dear Matilda, enraptured, like an angel, or Emily Dickinson’s, with ‘even feet – and uniforms of snow’. When we peruse the imaginative world of writers, it appears that without their angels they are as nothing. I wish that I could have some, even one, to rescue me from the mundane linearity of my mind, its relentless proseyness.