Outside of a Dog

by Rick Gekoski

  Remember what happens when you go into psychoanalysis: the lying down, the figure probing insistently behind you, the repressed material, the blockage and release, the feelings of shame. That’s more or less it, isn’t it? But it always had, for me, a shadow, or something shadowy, unsaid or unacknowledged, something absent in the Lacanian sense. This sense of the unconscious underpinning of our experience is, of course, the stuff of classical Freudianism: a child is being beaten, a primal scene enacted. Our adult lives are shadowed by the potency of unremembered childhood fantasy and desire. There is such a shadow here too, in the relationship between analyst and analysand: an underlying metaphor that Freud, curiously, never acknowledges. Because the operating analogy is not with the extraction of a tooth, but with the giving of an enema.

  Feelings are repressed, and become impacted when they cannot be released. The process is like constipation (from which Freud suffered for his entire life). The internal material festers, becomes painful, and threatens the health of the entire organism. When this happened to Viennese children in the 1890s they were regularly given an enema to re-establish regularity. One can imagine the resistance with which it was received, the discomfort, the sense of violation which may have been accompanied (as Freud observed) by pleasure.

  Germans sometimes use the term Bescherung, which means bestowal, to refer to a child’s bowel movements. The gift is frequently understood to be a form of gold – my grandmother would look in my sister’s diaper, grateful that her bowels had emptied, and murmur gelt – and the association is enshrined in German folktales in a character who actually shat gold coins. If toilet-training becomes prolonged the child may fixate at this stage, and we get the development of that obstinate, anally retentive type who withholds faeces, and in adult life finds it impossible to give emotionally, is both literally and metaphorically miserly: the association is explicitly made by Freud’s early disciple, Sandor Ferenczi: ‘Money is nothing other than odourless, dehydrated filth, that has been made to shine.’

  Money is shit, shit is money? The identification of the two leads to curious conclusions, for if our excreta is actually a gift of gold, why should it be given away? Each time the child takes to the toilet he is a loser, under the coercion of toilet-training. The parent becomes a sort of lavatorial highwayman: Sit down and deliver! is the demand, and punishment is threatened for the insufficiently generous.

  Freud acknowledged that analysis ends when the money runs out. So the demand of the analyst – keep producing! give! – recapitulates those ancient demands of the parents to the costive infant. The analyst demands: Lie down and deliver! This may sound perilous, but it is also central to psychoanalytic procedure. The analyst inherits the crucial roles in the patient’s life, and is emotionally regarded as if he were a parent: resented and loved. The possible result of this transference of feeling is that unresolved infantile dramas may be re-enacted, and resolved, in the therapeutic setting. For Freud this applied, crucially, to re-enactments of the Oedipal drama, but little attention has been given to the ways in which psychoanalysis re-enacts the battle of the chamber pot.

  I wrote my novel Bottom’s Dream in an attempt to find some dramatic form for these new ideas, unlikely as this may sound. If the plot sounds unpromising, the result was even worse, and confirmed what I had always suspected, that I am no novelist, nor was meant to be. (I don’t much mind: if something is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.) My characters lacked depth, and spoke in the same voice, the descriptions of faces, rooms, food, trees, skies, lacked texture, detail, colour, particularity. There were too many overheated conversations, everything was pitched at the same intensity, climax followed climax, as in a pornographic novel. Nothing came alive, nothing was adequately envisioned, nothing except the ideas.

  My novel was intended, I proclaimed proudly, to do for the anus what Moby Dick had done for the whale. I offered to send the draft to various literary friends: to Graham Greene, William Golding, Faber director Charles Monteith, Salman Rushdie. Funnily enough, they didn’t seem very interested, though D.M. Thomas (perhaps predictably) liked it, and was encouraging. But when I sent the text to a Professor of Freudian Studies at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, I was gratified to hear that he regarded my line of thought as both true and original, if a little peculiar, and he urged me to publish it in some form or other.

  Instead, I took the manuscript and put it in a drawer, and haven’t looked at it since. What would be the point? It had served its purpose, allowed the release of some feeling: it was cathartic, and now it’s embarrassing. Anyway, it seemed to me unlikely even then, and inconceivable now, that someone hasn’t made the same points, more carefully and thoroughly than I had, or wished to.

  No, what Bottom’s Dream did for me was to signal the end, not of my belief in psychoanalytic concepts and apparatus, but of my reflexive turning to therapy when in personal trouble. The problem is that therapy privileges feeling without testing it. Feelings are treacherous things, and we are as likely to be misguided by what we feel as creatively informed by it. Nor does therapy sufficiently assess or value how we behave, partly, of course, because your average analysand is likely to offer a deeply sympathetic account of their own behaviour, and to suppress critical reactions to it.

  But we are frequently the worst judges of how we act, what we feel, and how we need to change. If you want to learn about such things – about what you are really like – you will do better by consulting your spouse, children, colleagues and friends, in a spirit of curiosity and humility. Psychotherapy, like mumps, is something you should have when young, get over, and remain immune to for the rest of your life. A lifetime addiction to it – like some compulsive fixation on internal cleansing – is obsessional, narcissistic and counterproductive. Otherwise, psychoanalysis may become the illness from which you need to be cured.

  Ruthie and I certainly wanted to rid our lives of therapy, sitting quietly upstairs as one nut followed another for their sessions with mom. It wasn’t fair: the TV was in the downstairs den, next to the Nutcracker Suite. What were we supposed to do for three hours, homework? It was time, we agreed, to make a point. Resistance, that was what she called it, didn’t she? Now we were the Resistance. There was no sense denying our hostility. We hated being stifled like this, keeping our feelings in. It’s not healthy, it’s infantile. Better to do some acting out.

  When the last nut left, at ten o’clock, we watched the lights disappear as he drove away, and listened for mom coming out of the Suite. We turned out all the lights in the upper part of the house, which meant that she would have to come upstairs in the dark before she could locate a light switch. A door closed, she walked over to the stairs, and stopped.

  ‘Ricky? Ruthie?’

  We didn’t say anything. Ruthie hid behind the sofa, and I secreted myself behind a kitchen door – the two avenues towards the light switch.

  ‘Ricky! Ruthie! You’d better not!’

  This was how our game began, and she loved to play, especially when she wasn’t the victim. Lights out, victim terrified, hidden person jumps out and yells: ‘BOO!’ Now we had her where we wanted her, helpless, tip-toeing up the stairs in the hope that we might have gone to bed.

  Timing is everything in the BOO game. If you get it wrong your victim is not unlikely to fall back down the stairs and die, and that would be hostile even for us. You have to wait until you hear at least three steps from the top of the stairs, and then strike.

  One-two-three.

  ‘Ricky? Ruthie? I’m scared!’ But she was already starting to giggle, because BOO! – which she had, after all, invented – released something childlike and zany in her that all of us cherished. She started turning round in circles, trying to see by the pale light that came from the lamp posts through the living room window.

  ‘No, no, no, don’t! I’m scared!’ Her laughter became a shriek, as Ruthie screamed the first BOO!

  ‘NO! NO!’

  BOOS are best delivered in pairs, and I
got mine in with impeccable timing. Mom rushed past the light switch and out through the kitchen door, hysterical, on to the front lawn.

  It was dark there too. We stalked her from opposite ends of the garden, stealthily, giggling just enough to add to her terror. Lights came on in the neighbour’s kitchen, which overlooked our garden, but we were too entranced with our hunting ritual to care if we were observed. Mom was laughing helplessly now, turning round and round in circles on her tiptoes, clenching her thighs together.

  ‘I’m wetting!’ she cried, ‘I’m wetting!’

  Perfect. That meant we’d won, and we relented gracefully, ushered her back to the house, and made hot chocolate while she went upstairs to shower and change. She came back down a few minutes later, in a terry towelling robe, her hair wet, glowing.

  ‘You really got me!’ she said.

  16

  BETTER THAN LITERATURE!

  The thing I have to do, it’s so important . . . If you knew it all you’d see the point.

  Carl Hiaasen, Double Whammy

  I issued my first catalogue as a rare book dealer in the autumn of 1982, while still teaching at Warwick. In those days individual catalogues had names, to serve as shorthand for telegraphic orders. My first was called Barbara. I got a telegram after I sent it out, from a delighted potential customer (who didn’t buy anything) proclaiming ‘Barbara is Beautiful!’ a response grudgingly shared in the rare book trade. (Along with: ‘who the Hell does this guy think he is?’) The catalogue was printed on glossy paper, with illustrations, which was uncommon at the time. I thought it rather grand. But by the time it was issued, though, I’d learned that Barbara was actually a bit of a tart. When my printer handed over the first copy, he looked at it fondly if not admiringly. ‘Not bad,’ he said, ‘cheap and cheerful.’

  I wished my father, who had died two years earlier, had been there to see it. He would have been so proud. On my visits home over the last few years of his life, he’d become fascinated by my new vocation as a book scout, and would sit in his Eames chair, put his record of The Magic Flute on his new Danish teak modern hi-fi, and quiz me on points, issues and values of first editions. He was uncommonly engaged with this my incarnation, possibly because it was the first time I had deviated from the directions he’d laid down. No one in the family had ever been good at business, and my combination of literary and financial acumen fascinated him. I would come home from New York after a day scouting for rare books, with a few hundred dollars profit in my pocket, and we would both be lost in admiration. We contemplated setting up a business together: Son and Gekoski, Rare Books.

  I wished this name might have been on my new catalogue, but I liked it anyway, whatever it was. I loved it. I took that first copy home, made myself a cup of coffee, and sat at the pine table in the kitchen leafing through it happily. I was shortly joined by our neighbour, the rather strict academic wife of one of my colleagues. I should have known better, but I was so chuffed with my little green catalogue that I handed it over excitedly, saying, ‘Look: My first catalogue!’ She flipped through it in a desultory way, taking in the occasional details, mostly, as far as I could see, of the prices. She paused for a moment, and looked me squarely in the eye, as anyone fearlessly committed to the telling of truths should do.

  ‘How disgusting!’ she said. I don’t recall how I responded; I’m not sure I said anything at all. I was aware, of course, that academics are hostile to ‘trade’, as well as ignorant about it. And though happy to deploy this prejudice, she would also have known that much of the material she’d worked on as a graduate student – rare texts, letters and manuscripts – would have found its way into special collections departments of libraries through the rare book trade.

  It may be that rare book dealers, like rubbish men, are necessary, but that doesn’t make them smell good. The problem was compounded by the fact that I had gone into business in rare books. Books, to my colleagues – indeed, books to most sane people – are objects of utility, designed to convey information and give pleasure, and esteemed accordingly. To value a book not for what is in it, but (as it were) in itself suggests a fetishization of the object that many people in the academic and literary worlds find offensive. Why should a first edition of some novel be worth more than its reprints? Why does the presence of its dust wrapper – for God’s sake! – render it much more valuable? Why should the mere fact that an author has signed a book make it more desirable? Surely fetishizing the object simultaneously demeans its contents?

  From that time, colleagues would occasionally inquire, sniffily, ‘And how is business?’ My regular response to this – ‘Terrific! And how are you finding academic life?’ – generally signalled an end to the conversation, a confirmation of the distance that now separated us.

  When I gave up teaching, in 1984, I found – I don’t know why I should have found this so surprising – that the major emotion that accompanied my retreat from university life was anger. I kept banging on about my feelings obsessively, like someone with post-traumatic stress syndrome. I could recognize the symptoms, but I couldn’t stop. I bored myself, I bored everybody. I was scathing about the form of life that I had just left, sulphurous about many of my ex-colleagues, and particularly furious with myself for following such an uncongenial path. Though I was ostensibly having a terrific time in my new career as a rare book dealer, I could neither purge the regret I felt at having wasted my time and energy, nor give up the social cachet of being a university teacher. As I still taught part-time (for three years) as part of my redundancy package, I now described myself as a ‘university teacher and rare book dealer’, unwilling to give up the prestige of my old position at the same time that I professed to detest almost everything that it represented.

  In order to purge this anger, and to eradicate the hold that university teaching still had on me, I conceived a cunning plan which I hoped would rid me of the toxicity of my academic persona: the fearfulness, the hyper-scepticism, the pomposity, the anxiety not to be found out for the drudge I was. I called this new project ‘becoming less intelligent’.

  It was fun. I hardly needed to cultivate my philistinism, which was pretty much full grown already. I’ve always preferred sport to high art, and have a positive dislike for people who regard themselves as ‘cultured’. Next time you go to the opera look at the body language of most of the patrons: the stiffness of demeanour, the noses held that extra ten degrees skywards, the strangulated voices. There is little so repellent as the English in high culture mode. Nor did it take much for me to give up going to the theatre, which I have always disliked: all that spitting and declaiming, the audience’s anxiety that something might go wrong, allied to the vague hope that it might. (Holden Caulfield hated actors, whom he regarded, though without having met any, as the very incarnation of the phoney.) I abjured philosophy – that was easy enough – but also swore off ‘literature’. No more fancy reading, no more highbrow talking. Simplify, if not to refine then even to coarsen. Become less intelligent.

  For years I confined my TV watching to sports and movies, and my reading to detective fiction. I opened a standing order for twenty thrillers a month with Otto Penzler of Manhattan’s Mysterious Bookshop, to be chosen by his bright and knowledgeable staff. When the boxes arrived I would pile up my new treats, start at the top and work down, handing them over to Anna when I was finished. When asked what I had been reading – even what I was reading on the day – I could rarely remember either author or title (or, much of the time, the plot). I gorged myself, grew fat and indolent with reading. I read dozens of thriller writers, and hundreds of books. Like Kingsley Amis, who complained that he was quickly bored by a novel that did not begin with the words ‘A shot rang out’, I demanded nothing but finger-on-the-trigger entertainment.

  I am pretty sure that none of Otto’s shipments contained a novel by Carl Hiaasen. Even in my befuddled state, getting less intelligent by the minute, I would have remembered that. So when in the Hampstead branch of Waterstone’s o
ne day, I spotted a book called Double Whammy, by an author unknown to me, I hardly gave it a thought until I read the puff on the front cover: ‘Better than literature!’ P.J. O’Rourke. Perfect! Something other than literature was what I was looking for, something better than literature was a bonus. Anything that P.J. O’Rourke is that keen on is OK with me. He may be laughably right-wing, but he’s funny and sharp as a tack, and I reckoned that this Hiaasen person must be worth a look.

  He was. His novel was blackly comic, with a one-eyed protagonist called Clinton Tyree, a drop-out Governor of Florida who becomes a hermit in the Everglades under the name of Skink, living on road kill. There was a cast of characters ranging from the wacky to the totally deranged. Double Whammy is in a tradition of the grotesque Southern novel, but the enterprise was animated and informed by Hiaasen’s rage at the desecration of the landscape of South Florida by planners, developers and associated con-men intent on making a sleazy quick buck. The writing was wonderful, totally surprising in tone and content, and made me cringe, howl with laughter, and contract in righteous indignation. The novel culminated in a scene in which a psychopath who has been bitten on the arm by a rabid dog, and is unable to prise its jaws open even when it is dead, simply cuts off the body, and goes about his business with the dead dog’s head attached to his arm. (Hiaasen’s villains often end up with something peculiar attached to their arms. When asked why this was, he admitted that he’d never noticed it.)

  But there is something more than sheer mayhem going on. Skink is a great comic creation, but his story is a black parable of the Fall. He enters politics, naively, in order to do good, and is brought down by the massed forces of greed and corruption that are endemic to South Florida. Entrusted with an Edenic garden – a ‘virgin’ territory – he presides over its destruction. His withdrawal into the swamps is an act of penance: