Outside of a Dog

by Rick Gekoski

  I’d sit in the evenings with her manuscript and her blessing, correcting, editing, redrafting, inserting phrases and questions, crossing things out, connecting one bit to another, and I’d think, ‘She’s on the fucking slide again, and this is me diving and trying to catch her when she is in danger. It’s all I can do for her now: I can edit.’

  When Lucy’s dismembered body was found, in 1994, there was cord and tape wound around her head, and many bones were absent. Horrifyingly, it seems that she may have been kept alive in the cellar for up to a week.

  No, I thought, as I made my notes: ‘Show, don’t tell. Be specific: how and why “wound around her head”? Which bones were absent? Is there any need for “Horrifyingly”? Let the facts speak for themselves!’ I eventually crossed the comments out, and left the passage as it stands. Who wants or needs such details? Tell, don’t show!

  Lucy Partington, a twenty-one-year-old student at Exeter University, niece of Kingsley and cousin of Martin Amis, in the wrong place at the wrong time. An Anna Gekoski, making a bad decision, accepting a lift from strangers on a rainy Gloucester night. As soon as I began to think about it, about what happened to poor Lucy Partington, my mind capsized with images, and began to founder. Why should I have to think such thoughts: about her, or about her double, my daughter? Why did Anna wish to?

  It was a mystery, curiously analogous to the mystery with which her book ended: why is it that a very few children grow up to be serial killers, and the rest don’t? Anna is circumspect in her answer to this question, citing Wittgenstein’s arguments against essence, denying some ‘factor X’ of the sort posited by Colin Wilson, instead sensibly laying down conditions, neither necessary nor sufficient, which may turn a child into a murderer. But there was a clear pattern: serial killers had abusive fathers and over-protective mothers, were introverted and often bullied at school, they withdrew into a toxic inner state as their rage transformed into sadistic fantasy.

  As for why she should have developed such grisly interests, when most children don’t, she was similarly careful, and tentative. In an article that she published in Vogue after Murder By Numbers came out, all she would offer by way of explanation was that she had been ‘entranced’ by The Silence of The Lambs:

  The combination of intellect, sex-appeal, and violence was irresistible … I was, in1990, a shy and tentative 16-year-old, still unformed and somewhat alarmed at the intensity of my interest in the book. Clarice Starling became my heroine and alter-ego. I wanted to be her because she was so unlike me. She was a powerful, fearless, gun-carrying hunter of the ‘monsters’ that preyed on the innocent. It was pure fantasy of course, and one which I shared with many other young women who read the book. But for most of these women the fantasy was transitory. Mine was not.

  How did this happen? Most readers got over The Silence of the Lambs, but Anna was captivated and transformed by it. Some unexpected inner seed germinated, and there seemed little she, or her parents, could do to control the process. If it hadn’t been Clarice Starling it would have been someone else. Or, and this was a radical and disarming thought, could it be that the furious little girl that she had been, feeling abandoned, abused and enraged, had identified neither with the FBI heroine nor with the victims, but with the murderer himself? Could it have been that the unconscious role model was not Clarice Starling but Hannibal Lecter?

  When she’d finished writing she took to her bed for two months, utterly depleted. And when she rallied – denying all the time that she was suffering the psychic effects of her long journey into the underworld – she shook herself off, and got back to work: began a career as a News of the World reporter specializing in crime (‘It’s the job my alter ego has always wanted.’), and ghosted a book for Sara Payne, the mother of the eight-year-old girl murdered by a paedophile.

  But she was restless and unfulfilled, and the incessant ugliness of the News of the World drained her. For a time the demands of the job had strengthened her sinews, made her more confident, but it couldn’t last. Soon she didn’t want just to write about criminals, but to study them eyeball to eyeball. She enrolled for an MSc in forensic psychology with a view to working as a psychologist in a prison or secure hospital. She wanted to hear the confessions of the Yorkshire Ripper, to analyse the motivations of Ian Brady, to recommend a course of action for treating Rose West.

  Thank God it didn’t work out, as following the fantasy began to lead closer and closer to the reality. She soon decided that she no longer wanted to work with rapists and killers, to spend days confronting people who had done terrible things to others, and who probably wanted to do them to her. So instead of applying for jobs as a trainee forensic psychologist, she chose a related but altogether gentler course of action, doing doctoral research into how victims of crime may be re-victimized by their experiences with criminal justice agencies such as the police and courts.

  It’s good work, and I suppose somebody has to do it, and teach it, which she seems to enjoy more than I – or she – would have guessed. But she confesses that she dreams of doing something or other with shoes: ‘fabulous, high-heeled, brightly coloured, happy-making shoes’.

  Shoes? Why not? ‘Sherlock Holmes became a bee-keeper didn’t he? And that detective in The Moonstone, Sergeant Cuff, is addicted to rose-growing. So perhaps my shoe fantasies aren’t so odd: roses, bees, shoes – they’re all a way of seeing the nicer, brighter side of life.’

  You don’t have to be Alice Miller to understand the symbolism.

  19

  STAYING UP WITH BERTIE

  ‘I am trained, as an academic, in habits of analysis, in trying to figure out how things work – whether those things are novels, or even football clubs. And I’m a supporter of the club, so I don’t think there is anything to fear.’ I was starting to babble …

  Rick Gekoski, Staying Up

  Gerald Crich’s mother, in Lawrence’s Women in Love, is an odd old bird, fierce and dissatisfied as a hawk sulking in a cage, given to embarrassing behaviour, and gnomic utterance. In an early chapter of the novel she is talking to Rupert Birkin, during a family party, surrounded by people she doesn’t recognize:

  ‘I don’t know people whom I find in the house. The children introduce them to me – “Mother, this is Mr So-and-so.”I am no further. What has Mr So-and-so to do with his own name?’

  That is terribly funny and provocative: ‘What does Mr So-and-so have to do with his own name?’ Not because he is called ‘Soand-so’. The newcomer is called Señor Fitzpoodle, or the Duke of Earl, or Dr R.A. Gekoski. Obviously something can be learned from such nomenclature, but nothing – to Mrs Crich – that is at all essential. Why have a name, in that case? Whatever can be learned from it?

  The answer, Mrs Crich, is: a lot, if you are sufficiently interested. (She isn’t.) I’ve had several in my time, and when I segue from one to the other it indicates that some major changes have occurred in my life. Since childhood, except for a short and unremembered period in which I was apparently called Richie, I became Ricky, and within the family have stayed that way since. In ordinary life I have always been Rick, a name that strikes me as lacking gravitas compared to Richard, which is my given name. But I have never felt like a Richard, always a Rick. Rick Gekoski, then. (I don’t much like Gekoski either.)

  But once I went to college, all of a sudden I had two names: one personal, and one academic, as if one were bifurcated by the very process of higher education. At Penn, we used the American format: formal first name, initial, second name: my essays were all written by Richard A. Gekoski, and I rather liked the dignity that seemed to confer upon them. They were marked by Professors William H. Marshall and Peter B. Murray. At Oxford I immediately changed my studying name to R.A. Gekoski, in deference to local usage, not having learned, yet, that when you change your language – especially when you change your name – you change your life. A few years later this person morphed into Dr R.A. Gekoski, a name I still use when making airline reservations.

  The life
changes that accompanied these alterations of name were imperceptible, to me at least. But what happened over the next years was that my voice changed. I do not mean that I acquired my characteristic mid-Atlantic accent, which often happens to Americans who emigrate to England. In fact, most of my English friends claim that I still sound American after forty years in the UK, though I am frequently mistaken for English when I visit America.

  ‘Ah, you’se over from da old country?’ said New York’s Carnegie Delicatessen waitress when I ordered my pastrami sandwich.

  ‘Excuse me?’ Presumably I must have sounded Polish to her ears?

  ‘Jolly old England,’ she said, affecting an English accent which made her sound like Joyce Grenfell drowning in the bath.

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Can I have extra pickles? English people like pickles.’ ‘You have a good day,’ she said.

  Not that voice. The critical change was not in how I sounded, but in what I said, and how I said it. There was nothing conscious about this process, and it was understandable enough. When we go somewhere new we pick up not merely accents, but different ways of seeing and expressing ourselves. Over the next decade I found myself attempting to express myself more complexly, delicately, and ironically: to think and talk, that is, as if I were English. Or, more accurately, to take my relatively ill-informed notion of Englishness, and apply it to my own voice. The best way to illustrate this is to quote to you part of the second paragraph of a book by one R.A. Gekoski, entitled Joseph Conrad: The Moral World of the Novelist, which was published in 1978, and based on my DPhil thesis. He is talking about Conrad’s portrayal of women:

  His women attain to particularity only in the absence of those fulfilments that sentiment would ascribe to them. Like so many of Conrad’s male heroes, they are all defined and particularised with reference to the test which they undergo, rather than by a challenge that they generate themselves … Conrad’s heroes seem not to have depths discretely their own; their inner lives consist, in the most dramatic form, of a reflection or enactment of the universe in which they live.

  My sister Ruthie, having read this far – we’re still on page 1 – abandoned the book. It was, she said, ‘too intelligent’ for her. But it was, in fact, quite the reverse, her judgement a symptom of her loveably unflagging belief in my intellectual superiority, and lack of confidence in her own considerable critical abilities.

  What the hell does ‘attain to particularity’ mean? It must be important because the term ‘particular’ is used again, almost immediately. (I suspect simple sloppiness here.) What is the ‘most dramatic form’ that ‘an inner life’ can have? How does that inner life ‘enact’ the universe? I could go on. The prose is immature and crunchingly academic, and its badness is multi-determined. If language could elicit psychotherapy this might be a good candidate. The obvious problem is the strain: nothing flows, there is no sense, none whatsoever, of a speaking voice. Its author is trying to appear more intelligent than he is, anxiously injecting a needlessly complex vocabulary to make relatively simple points. Desperate to impress, himself most of all.

  Oh well, perhaps many brightish aspiring academics are like that, writing dissertations, and worrying. The strained tone, though, is characteristic of academics generally, and you can hear it in more mature (and better) writers than my immature self. It is the tone of people constantly anxious that their colleagues may be smarter than they are.

  The second problem with my little paragraph is that it is an ill-conceived, thoroughly inadequate piece of ventriloquism. Ever hear an American – even a good actor – trying to do an English accent? Embarrassing. That is what is happening in my sentences, and I’m not even a good actor. This is a poor miming of English sensibility, and it rings false.

  I am sorry to be so hard on my former self, it feels unpleasant of me: I wouldn’t judge someone else who wrote like that quite so harshly. But it saddens me, and makes me cross, to have wasted so much energy on so little output. I didn’t write another book for twenty years, because I couldn’t. I started several, particularly the one on D.H. Lawrence that stuttered on for years. I tried desperately to make headway with it when on sabbatical in 1975 at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, soon after Anna’s birth and my mother’s death. Exhausted, thoroughly depleted, I went to the library every morning to write, leaving Barbara with a new baby and little in the way of infrastructure, friends or support. I came home every night guiltily pretending to have done an honest day’s work.

  I hardly wrote a single word, and it was unrelenting agony, trying, and failing, and trying again. Norman Mailer describes writer’s block as ‘simply a failure of ego’, which is right in many ways that I couldn’t recognize at the time. What caused this failure was unknown to me, and I attributed it to some internal force that didn’t want me to succeed, to make a name for myself. The career of one R.A. Gekoski, DPhil and university lecturer, seemed to be going nowhere. I worried if I would ever get promoted, though I did, in 1981, when I became a senior lecturer. Then I worried that the promotion had been premature and unwarranted. I was certain I would never become a professor. Not that I liked professors very much, most of them were even more pompous and defensive – and competitive – than I was. Presumably you grow into the job.

  It took me another ten years to realize – I am a slow developer – that my academic inability to write, this ‘writer’s block’ as I described it, was in fact a creative method in which my unconscious was desperately trying to tell me something. The message was simple: I do not like or recognize this ‘R.A. Gekoski’: he is not pursuing ends that are good for him, he is inauthentic and his efforts are those of an unhappy person manifesting his unhappiness. His tones are strangulated, pompous and unreal, a pretend voice and not a real one. I won’t let him write like this, not without a fight. Every word he tries to write I will resist every letter of the way. And that is how it felt. I didn’t have writer’s block, I had identity block.

  Now read this, published twenty years later, by one Rick Gekoski in a book titled Staying Up: A Fan Behind the Scenes in the Premiership.

  I had decided to go wherever I wanted until someone told me not to, a policy that proved remarkably successful as I accompanied the team onto the pitch for the pre-match warm-up. Airily announcing to two amiable Torquay stewards, ‘I’m with the Coventry lads,’ I ambled through the barrier and onto the pitch with Dion Dublin, only to hear one of the stewards say ‘Who’s he, the chairman?’ The other considered: ‘Nah, probably the owner.’ I was exultant. Life was different on the other side of the barrier.’

  The difference between this and my Conrad paragraph is not attributable to the fact that the first is academic, and the second popular: this is not an example of a high-minded person slumming it ‘on the other side of the barrier’. The new prose is, if you will, the result of my former projects of writing more freely, and becoming less intelligent. Its author is clearly having fun, expressing himself simply, and if showing off, he is not doing so by trying to be cleverer than he is, just more important. It sounds, I have been told, as if I were simply talking, and the reader listening. That was the idea anyway.

  I had talked the chairman of my beloved Coventry City Football Club, Bryan Richardson, into letting me write a behind-the-scenes book about the 1997–8 Premier League football season. I had no idea what to expect, but the idea of hanging out with manager Gordon Strachan and his team was thrillingly beguiling. I was given open access to the chairman, the team’s administrative officers, and all of those on the management and playing side. It was my brief to write an account of what a football season is really like, not to talk about myself. Most sports books are written as ‘fly on the wall’ accounts, and make little reference to the writer’s own experience, much less to his feelings. What readers are interested in, after all, is what the chairman does and Gordon Strachan has to say, what centre forward Dion Dublin is like once you get to know him.

  This assumes a modest narrative presence: the fly must be
invisible on the wall, which is appropriate, because that is how sports people treat not merely journalists but almost everyone else as well. I found this more than a little disconcerting. Players turned their backs on me, Strachan ‘forgot’ appointments, I was kept waiting for hours in offices, dugouts, practice grounds and stadia. Nobody gave a damn if it bothered me. I not only had no rights, I had no self.

  ‘That’s how we treat newcomers,’ centre back Gary Breen confided to me, ‘even when a new player joins the team it takes us a long time to let him in. We go all shy, like a herd of animals.’

  I was not used to this, as an experienced journalist would be, and found it impossible to put aside my feelings of hurt, thwarted friendliness and anger. Talking and being talked to is how I make my living, it’s what I like and need, and all of a sudden my normal resources failed. My curiosity met with indifference, attempts to charm were shrugged or laughed off, the merest request for simple attention was ignored. It was no fun at all, and the only solace was that I could, at least, write about the process. Staying Up thus became a kind of travel book, about a visit to a remote foreign land. The traveller doesn’t know the customs or the language, he looks different, and is regarded with suspicion. He learns to speak slowly and quietly, if at all, and to move about unobtrusively. The natives warily keep him at a distance, and only slowly accommodate themselves to his ways, as he to theirs. It’s a difficult process, and takes patience. It reminded me of my first days at Oxford.

  And so I became, if not the hero certainly the protagonist. When you write you are inevitably describing yourself as well as your object (even in academic writing, as my Conrad paragraph demonstrates). Staying Up had to be in my personal voice because it was about trying to find and to employ that voice in a familiar but suddenly alien setting: the voice that could be heard on the terraces, and in my conversations about football, not about literature.