Outside of a Dog
Page 27
V
Memory is reconstructive, and the assumption or hope that one can photographically recapitulate and reanimate the past is wrong. Even photographs don’t do that. The past is what we make in the present, as the present is made by the past. We take the strands and feelings of our past lives as we experience them now, not then, and make them into narratives, themes, incidents. Such constructions are more or less reliable depending not on how strictly accurate they are to the past, but how authentic they feel, how fairly they make the case, how interesting they become. When Clive James calls his memoirs ‘unreliable’ he means that you might well produce contemporary witnesses to say that ‘no, it didn’t happen quite like that, it happened like this’ and that, within a range of accountability, it doesn’t matter. You are allowed to sex them up, not as an act of falsification, but because that is how memory works. There is nothing wrong with this sort of forgetting, forgetting is part of who we are and of how we describe ourselves. Forgetting enables us to make better stories.
VI
Is there something arbitrary about my choice of books? They were culled from a much longer list of possibilities, but my final list, once I had settled upon it, had an aura of inevitability that was both satisfying and puzzling. These were the right books. Freud tells us that things happen for a reason, there must be a reason. The answer only became clear to me after I had finished writing. What did these apparently disparate books have in common? They have formed the basis of some sort of intellectual and personal memoir. But the recurring motif, it surprised me to see, has been the search for an understanding of the nature of love.
No, that’s not it, quite. That sounds intellectual and secondhand, in the wrong voice. It seems, baldly, that love is what I am interested in. I don’t quite know what to make of this, it feels slightly embarrassing. It’s surprising, reading yourself.
VII
I have re-read all of the books about which I have written here, though you don’t have to reread a book in order to revisit it. I can remember the text of Women in Love, reread it, remember reading it at various times in my life, remember what I made of it at those times, take an attitude to those reading experiences, take an attitude to having taken that attitude … And so it goes on. Rereading we encounter the familiar strangers of our past selves, reading. It is a surprisingly complex process, and in tracing the lineaments of our reading experience we are most assuredly reading and rereading ourselves. It is too much for me, trying abstractly to unravel these processes, and I am certainly not going to make the attempt. Has anyone written about this? Perhaps on the phenomenology of reading? Or a book modelled on R.D. Laing’s Knots? If so, I don’t want to know about it.
VIII
We read together in anxious, attentive satisfaction, our fingers moving slowly, word by word across the lines. We have started with the opening of The Waste Land. It is the late afternoon, my favourite time to teach, and in my memory there is a wintery penumbral light as the sun sets, and a wood fire is burning in the fireplace. Often my students come by our house, which I greatly prefer as a teaching space: warmer, more personal, comfier. I have served coffee or tea at the start of the seminar, as I always do, accompanied by biscuits. We drink from our cups, nibble and consult, read with an increasing excitement and sense of incipient understanding, putting the images together, getting some sense of an emerging pattern. I love this activity, the slow, creative excitement of reading word-by-word, sharing the experience, understanding how the words relate, one to the other.
It is an advantage of having the seminar late in the day that we can exceed the stipulated time if we are still excited by the reading, go on until we are ready to stop, tired. And then I put on the LP of Eliot himself reading the poem, and we listen quietly, drifting in and out of the poem sleepily, as his cracked, rasping voice makes its way through the poem with a wry desperation. It is impossible not to close one’s eyes, listening.
I didn’t recognize it then – the process was entirely unconscious – but I see it now. I had done this before. It echoes that primal scene: the parent reading to the child, fingers on the page, the slow understanding, the delight. My class and I are learning to read, again, together. It is night-time, with an exciting, almost sensual drowsiness, cuddling up in soft chairs and sofas with our tea and cookies. Touching the text with fingers, being touched by it. In reading with this degree and kind of attentiveness, we reanimate the earliest memories, books and practices that have touched us. We are touched by how and who we read, and by what we read, and by those who transmit it to us, and to whom we transmit it. The excitement of reading widens and refines throughout our lives, but there is always the echo of the first times that we began to understand the power and mystery of words. ‘In all things we learn only from those we love.’ Reading is how we learn to attach ourselves to ourselves, and to others, and to the world: reading inhabits us with the tendrils of love. We are made and continually transformed by what, and how, we read: from Dr Seuss to T.S. Eliot, we are made by it.
IX
This process of self-making, of reading and re-reading both my books and my former selves is ongoing; why suppose that the formative ends at some moment, when we are made, perfected? It doesn’t happen. Every reading experience vibrates subtly across the jelly of being, makes adjustments minute or transforming, recalls other reading and foreshadows reading still to come.
Now I’m sixty-four, I most look forward to that time when Anna and Bertie will have children of their own, and I can have a little Vera, Chuck or Dave on my knee, and introduce them to the admirable Horton and that little angel Matilda. And I shall recall little Rick snuggled up and listening raptly: connected once again to my parents, as through my children and my children’s children the reading will go on.
And we will read until the light fails and the night draws in, and I can read no more.
REFERENCES
The author and publishers gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint the following extracts:
A.J. Ayer: an extract from Language, Truth and Logic (Pelican, 1971); Roald Dahl: an extract from Matilda (Jonathan Cape, 1988), reprinted by permission of David Higham Associates Ltd; T.S. Eliot: extracts from ‘The Waste Land’ from Collected Poems 1909-1962 (Faber & Faber, 1974), reprinted by permission of the publisher; Sigmund Freud: an extract from The Interpretation of Dreams, edited by J. Crick (Oxford University Press, 2008), reprinted by permission of the publisher; Gerry Goffin and Carol King: song lyrics from ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?’ by The Shirelles from the album Tonight’s the Night (Scepter label, 1960); Allen Ginsberg: extracts from ‘Howl’ from Selected Poems 1947-1995 (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics, 1997); Germaine Greer: extracts from The Female Eunuch (Paladin, 1976), reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd; Thomas Harris: an extract from The Silence of the Lambs (William Heinemann, 1989), reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd; Carl Hiaasen: an extract from Double Whammy (Pan Books, 1999); R.D. Laing: extracts from The Divided Self (Pelican, 1965); A.S. Neill: extracts from Summerhill (Pelican, 1970), reprinted by permission of the Estate of A.S. Neill; Dr Seuss: extracts from Horton Hatches the Egg (HarperCollins Children’s Books, 2004); Ludwig Wittgenstein: an extract from Philosophical Investigations(Blackwell, 1953); Tom Wolfe: extracts from The Electrik Kool-Aid Acid Test (Black Swan, 1989); W.B. Yeats: extracts from ‘Among School Children’ , ‘Brown Penny’, ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ and ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ from Collected Poems (Picador, 1990), reprinted by permission of A.P. Watt Ltd on behalf of Gráinne Yeats.
Every effort has been made to trace or contact copyright holders prior to publication. If contacted, the publisher will be pleased to rectify any omissions or errors at the earliest opportunity.
his book with friends