by Rick Gekoski
Most of these talks were with Bertie, then aged seventeen, who was my fellow traveller during the season, and frequently my guide. He had developed from the self-proclaimed ‘simple boy’ of seven into a remarkably genial, intelligent and artistic, highly rational young man. The only member of our family who could keep his head in a crisis, he tried to avoid disputes, but once in them had a remarkable knack for finding a resolution. In the continuing discord that was frequently our family life, I often tried to react as I thought he might, and often failed.
He took the opposite course to his sister’s: if she was fated to plumb the abysmal waters, he was determinedly staying up on the surface of things. His choice of career – he was to read advertising and marketing at university, and later founded his own modelling agency – was inevitable and appropriate for someone who wanted to fill his head with positive images. Anna, he felt, looked into things too deeply and suffered for it, though he rather envied her, while she admired his capacity to protect himself from the darkness. If her fantasy was to skim happily across the surface of things in her magical shoes, he admits to a desire to become an underwater videographer.
His level-headed amusement at my floundering about became one of the book’s topics, and supplied a measured response to my own amalgam of frustration and over-excitement. He was allowed much of the freedom of access that was offered to me, but had it in better perspective. He quite enjoyed standing next to the pitch while the players warmed up before a game – I loved it – but quickly (and rightly) got bored.
‘Why are we here, dad?’ he asked. ‘What good is it doing us?’
I was shocked.
‘Look around you!’ I said. ‘See all the people in the stands? Any of them down here? We’re here because we’re allowed to be here, and they’re not.’
He shook his head in mock pity, and headed back to the stands to read his programme, disregarding my shout that he had no soul.
I had better conversations with other City fans, more envious than Bertie of my new status, and anxious to be told what was going on. If I’d cravenly lost my confidence in the presence of Strachan and the players, I found myself treating the other supporters as if I were one of the elect converting the heathens. The only consolation I could offer myself for this shameful bit of psychic inflation was that what had happened to me was both interesting and right. It would happen to any fan allowed so extensively behind the scenes. The best part is not being there, but talking about it to people who wish they were.
I thus became a representative figure, living out the universal fantasy of sports fans. My desire to know was theirs, my privileged access to the inside story an instance of what they all yearned for. On the train up to one of the games, a Coventry City supporter had enjoined me, earnestly: ‘Be careful! You’re living this experience for all of us, and you’re writing for us all!’ He was identifying himself, then, as the ideal reader that every writer has in mind, however subliminally, as he writes. To whom is the story directed? Whose praise would mean the most?
After Staying Up was published, two responses stood out, and gave me the most satisfaction. The first was from the redoubtable poet and critic Ian Hamilton (himself the author of Gazza Agonistes, and a Spurs supporter) reviewing the book in the Sunday Telegraph. Staying Up, he wrote, actually told us things about football we hadn’t known, ‘was richly comic’, and ‘the year’s best soccer book by far’.
I could hardly have imagined a more satisfactory response, but I got one, and it came, modestly enough, in a reader’s report on amazon.com. The writer didn’t give his name (he called himself ‘A Customer’) and was clearly at the other end of the literary spectrum from Ian Hamilton. He was obviously a passionate City supporter, though. He was one of us:
Fantastic reading best book I have read. I bought this book the very first day it came out on sale and it took me 3 days to read. I thought the way the book was written and no holds barred with some of the stories which mentioning no names got offended by if it was about me I would have been honoured.
I had simultaneously satisfied, then, the old R.A. readership, and the new Rick one.
Benjamin Disraeli, asked if he had read Daniel Deronda, remarked, ‘If I want to read a novel, I write one.’ This is wry, and has some nice hidden truths, but I’ll bet he had read Daniel Deronda. I like the notion that authors don’t merely write their own books, they read them too – and that the processes are separable. As I sat and read the final draft of Staying Up, I recognized it was one of the most important reading experiences of my lifetime. The writing struck me, at last, as having the relaxed ease, and good humoured intelligence, that I had never found as a writer. My ideal reader, finally, was me.
The final chapters of Staying Up reflected just this process: during the early stages of my travels in football-land I had tried to adapt to customs that were alien to me, and lost confidence in my own voice, just as I had in academic life and in assimilating to Englishness. At the end of the experience there was an odd mixture of triumph and despair. Travelling to the final match of the season, I experienced a shy sense of loss and anticlimax, and again it was Bertie who helped supply perspective.
‘I’ve seen you talking with the fans, and with our friends all year. I’ve heard every one of your opinions a hundred times. It’s been “As Gordon was saying the other day”, and “actually Bryan doesn’t think that, the true story is …”’
‘OK,’ I said, recognizing the ring of truth when I heard it. ‘You’re right. So why do I feel so low?’
‘Because you wanted it to be easy, and fun, and some of it was hard work. And because you’re sad that it’s over.’
He smiled, as much to himself as to me, adding: ‘But I know you, and you’ve loved it.’
I had, and I was grateful to him once again.
A friend, reading Staying Up, remarked that although she had no interest in football, the book was really about how much I love Bertie. Going to the football games, like the golf that we played every week, was part of a normal process of bonding between father and son, but I have always had an additional tie to him, because he both recalls and replaces my father. Not merely in his sweet reasonableness, but because his birth was followed so quickly by my father’s death – as Anna’s had been by my mother’s. Genetic replacement is ruthless in our family, and Bertie’s charmed babyhood was linked to my father’s last days.
Dad died of pancreatic cancer in 1981, at the age of sixty-eight. As he lay peacefully awaiting the end – he was as inspiring an example of how to die as my mother was a sad one – he confided, ‘I never had much energy,’ as if that explained it. Though he outlived my mother by eleven years, and she had bags of energy, most of it misdirected, my father wasn’t built to last, and seemed not to regret it. I did, terribly. His virtues were Chaucerian: largeness of vision, freedom from cant, shrewdness, benignity. He treated everyone he met with the same quiet respect, lived an exemplary inner life, and would have died reconciled to his God if he’d had one. His example and legacy became part of my psychological and moral cellular structure and his death, like his life, formed and enabled me, and through me, Bertie, the star of Staying Up, who enjoyed the finished book but not as much, I think, as he had liked Matilda, which showed good judgement.
My diminished spirits on finishing the football season were further restored when Bertie and I were invited to dinner with the Coventry City directors, before the final game at Everton. Suddenly I found myself, surprisingly, at ease: ‘The tone was familiar and cordial, and as I sat laughing, telling them all about the progress of the book, and the difficulties of the early months, I had the sudden, sharp realisation that I was speaking in my own voice.’
It had been a great lesson, and a coming into consciousness. Writing as Rick banished R.A. – I won’t write under that name again – and reinstated myself to myself. Yet this Rick Gekoski, as author, incorporated what I had been, rather than simply obliterating it. The campaign to become less intelligent had served i
ts purpose, and been misconceived. The better idea was to become differently intelligent. And so Rick Gekoski doesn’t overwrite R.A., he ingests him and transforms his voice. One person, one voice.
I had managed to make reading and writing into work, and now they weren’t. I began to rescue those worthy tomes – that ‘literature’ – that had made me feel alternately frightened and bored, and to take real pleasure in them once again: to reread Henry James, to ask myself how much of The Waste Land I could still recite, to cut down on my allowance of thrillers (except Carl Hiaasen) and replace it with more demanding fiction. Surely there was some significant gain in this reclamation of things past? I’d never had all that much learning anyway, which made it easier to wear it lightly.
It was a year in which a number of burdens eased. Though Barbara had been generous while I was writing Staying Up, allowing me to spend two nights a week at the house while I hung out with the City players, it had been some time since we had lived together. This new estrangement felt different from the old ones, had less fire and more resignation in it. We were simply worn out with each other, the children had left home, there was nothing substantial holding us together except the emotional scenarios that we seemed doomed to repeat without resolution, like players trapped in a script.
My understanding of my marriage is limited and incomplete, and my attempts to generalize about it leave me feeling foolish, unperceptive and vaguely fraudulent. Things happened, one after another, patterns seemed to suggest themselves and then recede, needs and feelings emerged imperiously and waned unexpectedly, the sheer immediacy of the moments overwhelmed either the desire or the capacity to link one inextricably to the next. So when I asked after thirty years of marriage and an impending divorce – what went wrong? – the answer was not, quite, that I didn’t know, but that I could hardly imagine what would count as a satisfactory answer. Any that I might have given would have felt facile and incomplete. We’d met while on the rebound? We came from such different backgrounds that a computer would have spat us out as a bad match?
But lots of couples are animated by their differences, and many meet while on the bounce. These may have been factors, but they’re not explanations. I can’t do better than this: something didn’t happen, that appears to happen in better and more durable marriages than ours. I hardly knew what it was, having little experience of it. My parents didn’t discover it, nor did Barbara’s. But dear Ruthie and Roy, in spite of the maelstrom of his ill health, were never engulfed, never ceased to love one another. I observed this with envious incomprehension.
It has something to do with trust, doesn’t it? A reflexive cleaving together when the impulse is to fly apart, some reliable emotional disinterestedness. I hope this doesn’t aspire to a definition. There isn’t one, surely? It would be dreadful if there were.
Love resists its name, but it was simple, after all. I needed to feel loved, and I didn’t, and hadn’t. I suppose Barbara felt the same. We had settled for that for much too long, tried being together, and apart, and mixtures of the two. This protracted ambivalence was foolish and damaging, but it also produced a reservoir of cherished moments, images and memories. I don’t regret any of it. It was what I chose.
The best, and least expected, result of the publication of Staying Up was that it introduced me to Belinda Kitchin, whom I was to marry in 2004. I’d gone to an opening at the Grosvenor Gallery – reluctantly, and only on the promise of an Italian meal with white truffles afterwards from my friend Michael Estorick – to view the work of some Irish artist or other. The pictures weren’t very arresting, I didn’t know anyone, and was thoroughly bored when, of a sudden, someone trod on my foot. An extremely attractive, immediately amused and friendly woman turned round, and without much embarrassment said, ‘Sorry!’
‘It’s nothing,’ I said, ‘you must do it again.’
‘I was just going outside for a cigarette,’ she said.
‘I think I’ll join you,’ I said, and we introduced ourselves.
We were standing outside companionably, puffing away, animatedly asking and answering the usual questions, when Michael came out and glared at me.
‘I thought you’d stopped smoking!’
‘I have,’ I said, ‘but you know how meeting a good-looking woman makes me anxious.’
She didn’t though. She was instantly approachable, bright, curious, laughed with the easy openness of antipodeans (she is a New Zealander, though raised largely in Malawi), and made me feel that I just had to get to know her. I liked her immediately, more than liked her, recognized something in her.
Michael invited her to join us for dinner, and was soon apologizing for not having read Staying Up, which had just been published. ‘What’s that?’ asked Belinda.
I explained that it was a book about football. She made a face. Like many of her generation of New Zealand women she has a disdain for big-time sport, is untouched, and a little bemused, by the adulation of the All Blacks, and had participated in the protests against the South African Springboks tour to New Zealand in 1981. Not an ideal reader for a book about my compulsive interest in Coventry City.
I could virtually see her estimation of me collapsing. ‘It’s not so bad, really,’ I hastened to say, not exactly apologizing for the book, but attempting to interest her just a little. ‘It’s really a sort of travel book, with balls.’
She raised her eyelids.
‘You know, stranger goes to a strange land, the natives and he don’t understand each other, various funny things happen …’
‘Maybe I should read it,’ she said. I would have had a bet that she’d never read a book about sport before.
‘I hope you’ll like it, I’ll send you a copy. What’s your address?’
‘I am,’ she said firmly, ‘perfectly capable of purchasing a book by myself.’
‘I don’t doubt that,’ I said, immediately clear that she was perfectly capable of doing and saying anything she wanted. ‘But I would be so delighted if you’d accept one as a present.’
She wouldn’t. A week later we rang each other at exactly the same moment to make a date. I invited her to the opening of an exhibition at the British Library. Fancy party, wine and canapés, pretty impressive venue for a first date.
When we got there the building was dark, the gates locked. I wandered about shouting for somebody to let us in.
‘Are you sure this is the right night?’ Belinda asked, peering into the gloom.
‘Of course it’s the right bloody night!’
It wasn’t. I’d arrived a week early. Chastened by this sad example of bibliophilic premature ejaculation, I took her for champagne and oysters at Odette’s Restaurant in Primrose Hill, round the corner from my flat in Chalcot Square.
She was remarkably forgiving, and we talked and talked, and slurped and drank. When we got to the flat I opened a half-bottle of 1983 Chateau Climens, a wonderful Barsac, and a token of my increasing esteem. She took one taste and seemed, of a sudden, to regard me with further interest and respect.
She’d liked Staying Up, and she came to love Rick Gekoski: author, voice, person. As I came to love her. She is a totally supportive but not unchallenging companion, with a remarkable emotional accuracy and integrity. I trust her entirely.
Good thing I didn’t give Belinda my Conrad book, that would have been the last I’d have seen of her. She later tried to read it, but gave it up after a few pages, with a baffled look.
‘How could you have written this sort of stuff?’ she asked.
‘It’s a long story,’ I said.
EPILOGUE
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory with desire …
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
I
From a man without a philosophy no one can expect philosophical completeness; clearness is the one merit which a plain, unsystematic writer, without a philosophy, can hope to have. The words are in fact Matthew Arnold’s, bu
t they are so apposite that I want to make them my own. I wish that this investigation of myself and of my reading amounted to something, something more than it has: wish I had a theory, a wider perspective, something general with which to conclude, and from which someone could learn something. Something big, something Hortonish. But I have no theory of selfhood, nor of reading, nor of psychological development, or more properly I have them in bits, which added together come to nothing more than an unreliable set of dispositions, opinions and prejudices. I am sceptical about theory, do not believe in essence, adore particularity, like to keep my eyes on the text not the idea. This has its benefits, though my incapacity to generalize rather saddens me, and makes me feel as if I had started a job and had neither the wit, the energy, nor the penetration to finish it.
II
I do know some things. My books have made me, and through them I know myself, and through myself I know them. And nobody can take them away.
III
I still wish I believed in angels. De Quincey says that ‘in an angelic understanding, all things would appear to be related to all’. What, then, would be the opposite of an angel: a practical critic? Who sees one thing at a time, observes his world closely but never whole, looks down because he is frightened to look up? As I once looked at the stars from the roof of the bungalow, was overwhelmed, and took up a book instead.
IV
I no longer know what I have read and what I haven’t. Have I read Tristram Shandy? I know about it, I can talk about it. I think I haven’t read it, though I am more familiar with it than, say, those thousands of thrillers I have read and forgotten. Tristram Shandy, oddly, is part of my reading.