Outside of a Dog (10 page)

These arguments seemed sensible if unexceptional; what interested me more, though, was the manner in which they were presented. Unlike, say, Locke, whose prose is lumpy, utilitarian and
consistently unremarkable, Hume is sprightly, accessible, and always anxious to please. There is something almost boyish about his eagerness to enter into direct contact with his readers. He
enlists the evidence of our natural responses, and solicits agreement through the commonality of human experience. He begins the essay ‘Of Miracles’ by citing Dr Tillotson’s
argument against ‘real presence’, before going on to add: ‘I flatter myself, that I have discovered an argument of a like nature, which, if just, will, with the wise and learned,
be an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion, and consequently will be useful as long as the world endures.’

The slow accumulation of clauses beckons the reader into agreement, inviting him to share the exploration, not merely to concur with its conclusions, so much as coming to them himself, with Hume
as his guide.

But, however engaging the tone and satisfying the arguments, there was something odd about the essay, which (given that it is published as part of
An Enquiry
) seemed curiously to miss the
point.

I raised my hand.

‘I don’t quite understand this,’ I said.

‘What’s the problem?’

‘I can’t figure out why Hume needs all of these ancillary arguments, when it is obvious from his epistemological position that there can be no such thing as a miracle...’

Mr Evans looked puzzled.

‘Although he refers to a miracle as a break in “the laws of nature”, all that a law of nature can be, if you follow his reasoning, is a long and unbroken series of spatial and
temporal connections between two events. After sustained experience, we assume that seas do not part, nor will the sun cease to rise. But if one day either were to happen, this might only mean that
we had had insufficient experience to see it coming, as an astronomically unsophisticated audience might regard a solar eclipse as miraculous. There can thus be no miracles, because the miraculous
would seem to involve a break in the connection between things, and no such connection can be shown to be necessary.’

I exhaled mightily.

‘I think you are right,’ he said after a moment. ‘That is a really interesting line of thought.’ (He was wrong, as I was, for Hume is neither so lax nor so foolish as to
have no answer to my objection.)

When, some weeks later, the final exam came round, I was very confident. I’d loved the course, done the reading obsessionally, revised the probable exam topics. But I was rather surprised
to see, as question six (you had to do three of nine):
‘Describe why Hume’s arguments about miracles are unnecessary in the light of his epistemology.’
I could do at least
seven of the questions perfectly well, but, having been offered this treat, I chose to take it. I reaffirmed and added to my original classroom arguments, did two other questions, and was rewarded
with an ‘A’ in the course. What a dope. It would have been more stylish to have ignored the bone proffered to the good little doggy. I would have been proud to take such an attitude,
had it occurred to me, but sadly it did not. I gobbled up my freebie, unaware of something unseemly in the process. It still rather embarrasses me.

I think I fell for this generously offered titbit because I was already recognizing that philosophy was too hard for me. Once I had read the major philosophers it was clear that they were a
lot
smarter than me, and that I could hardly even follow some of their thinking. (Test case: Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason.
) Philosophy, like maths or physics, tests and
defines the limits of our understanding and intelligence. You know what you can’t do when you study philosophy.

Such self-knowledge is by no means a wholly positive thing. If philosophy has the capacity to make you humble, it can also supply you with the tools to mask your shortcomings with extraordinary
aggression. I did further courses in symbolic logic, ethics and aesthetics, metaphysics, and the philosophy of science. I read widely in both the primary and secondary literature. I honed my
analytic skills. Honing is a dangerous metaphor here, for in general we are rightly anxious about immature people with knives. You can sharpen a scalpel or a butcher’s knife, and achieve
marvels of accurate surgery upon the living or the dead. But offer a knife – even worse a badly honed one – to someone without the skills or the sense to know how to use it, and a lot
of misdirected slashing is likely to result.

I became even more pedantic and argumentative, scorned sloppy reasoning and crass induction, demanded that my interlocutors define their terms. Your average person, I was fond of remarking, is
quite incapable of distinguishing an argument from an assertion. And since it must be the case, empirically and philosophically, that some people are right more often than others, I happily
assimilated myself to this first category, and waged a kind of tacit war on those in the latter. (My ex-wife and children will testify to the effects of this, and the kind of everyday bullying that
it can engender.)

In short, I was quickly becoming the sort of person who wants to be a university teacher. But not a teacher of philosophy. Though urged to major in the subject by my new friend Mr Varnedoe, and
enlivened by my readings in it, I was clear from the start that philosophy was not the field for me. I wasn’t clever enough to do original work and, in any case, there struck me as something
arid and inconsequential in much philosophical discourse. Albert Einstein remarked that ‘when I study philosophical works I feel I am swallowing something which I don’t have in my
mouth.’ I could not imagine feeling this way about the reading of literature, and it was eventually an easy decision to major in English rather than philosophy.

If one could imagine a mindset antithetical to Allen Ginsberg’s inclusiveness and generosity, academic philosophy was it. I could see, already, that there was something of a conflict
between the two disciplines, between scepticism and imagination, which I had initially experienced as the Holden voice versus the Allen voice. Yet the fields had more in common than the easy
academic distinctions between them might lead one to believe. Philosophers as well as imaginative writers have to find just the right language to convince their readers, both attempt to locate and
uncover the nature of what is most important, be it goodness, truth or beauty.

I did my English Honours thesis under the joint guidance of members of the English and philosophy departments, which was, at the time, an unusual arrangement designed to accommodate the fact
that I had interdisciplinary interests. As my subject I tried to unravel what it was that Keats’s Grecian urn
meant
when it said that:

The poet obviously believes something important is at stake here – the urn is ‘a friend to man’ – but what exactly that friend is claiming is not entirely clear.

I read through the available critical literature on the subject, and began by dividing it into categories. There were two major questions to be asked: was the utterance true? And did it matter,
in the sense of having consequences? (After all, what is true for Grecian urns – for immortal art – may not be true for mortal humans.) Thus there were four possible positions: true and
with consequences, true but without, false but with, false but without. I found critics who occupied each of the four points of view, and tried to mediate between them.

If there is something clunky about this, my aesthetics tutor nevertheless found the resulting analysis palatable, but when it was handed over to the English Department the Honours Committee
hated it, rightly feeling it lacking in literary analysis. This meant that I was to graduate with neither honour nor Honours in my chosen subject, which was presumably intended as a signal that I
had no future in the field. I certainly took it to be one. Given that I had spent my final year applying to do post-graduate work in English, this came as something of a shock.

I imprecated, I supplicated, I appealed, I pointed out my many virtues. I demanded a reread. The department treated me with a courtesy that my aggression hardly deserved, got reports from each
of the readers of the thesis, commissioned a new one, and confirmed its original judgement: this philosophical Gekoski was not of sufficient standard to be awarded Honours in English. Which left me
in the odd – indeed, I think it was unique – position of graduating
summa cum laude
, at the very top of my class, but without Honours.

I pointed out to the chairman of my department that as various universities and foundations had offered me PhD places and scholarships, perhaps it was the Penn English Department that was out of
line here, and not me? He (a kindly man) assured me that he had every confidence that I would do well, perhaps even better if I confined myself to proper English studies.

I didn’t tell him, in listing my achievements and prospects, that I had been turned down to do a PhD by Yale, for reasons that would have confirmed his doubts about me. The Yale
application form demanded both that one send in a sustained essay on a literary topic – I submitted one of my better course papers – and write a further essay of ‘up to a thousand
words’ assessing one’s prospects as a graduate student at Yale.

This seemed to me an idiotic requirement. They already had my transcript of grades and courses taken, three recommendations from tutors, and the course essay. Was one supposed to be honest in
writing such self-description, citing one’s strengths and weaknesses like a penitent on a pilgrimage? No thanks. My eventual submission (of up to a thousand words) read as follows: ‘My
prospects as a graduate student at Yale University are uniformly excellent.’ Given a choice between affirming the sensibleness of their requirements, and accepting this renegade candidate,
the Yale Graduate Admissions Department chose the former, and rejected the latter. I never much wanted to go there anyway – too preppy – and went to Oxford instead, to
‘read’ the newly fashionable BPhil degree in English.

I loved that word ‘read’, which came from the Delegacy of English’s handbook, and was reiterated in the literature from Merton College, which also advised that ‘gentlemen
are responsible for bringing their own tea crockery.’ My mother adored the phrase, and used it repeatedly over the months before I left for Oxford.

‘He’s responsible for bringing his own tea crockery, you know,’ she told her friends.

‘What’s tea crockery?’

‘I don’t know,’ she admitted, ‘but I bought him a mug.’

I took it with me to Oxford, and it came in handy when my next door neighbour in the college graduate house at 21 Merton Street, Vijaya Samaraweera, arrived from Ceylon with an entire chest full
of (who would have supposed it?) tea. I showed him my mug. We became instant friends.

Going to Oxford was the right decision: great Philosophy Department, and reasonable enough in English. I bought a Harris tweed jacket, a Merton scarf and tie, and had a three-piece pin-striped
suit made by Hall Brothers in the High. I had tea and apple crumble with custard at George’s in the covered market, used ‘jolly’ as an adjective, took afternoon tea in the Middle
Common Room, learned to call my tutor by his first name, went to evensong in the chapel, and joined the varsity tennis club (during the fixtures you stopped for tea between matches). My
fiancée Rachel, who still had a year to finish at college, would join me in Oxford the next year, after our forthcoming marriage in June of 1967. What a great plan. You could count on love,
whatever those sceptical Shirelles and that Mr Hume suggested.

6

When I remember my first love, my mind often turns to W.B.Yeats. She would probably be mystified to hear this, all these years later, and I’m a little puzzled by it
myself. I suppose it must be because my copy of Yeats’s poems is all that I have left of her. It is a blue cloth volume stamped in gilt, as many of the early editions of the poet’s
works were, though it lacks the elegance of their original design. I purchased this unprepossessing book in 1963, in my second year at the University of Pennsylvania, and subsequently used it at
Oxford, and later while teaching at Warwick. It has been constantly in my possession, then, for some forty-six years, save the one during which I lent it to Rachel, who was reading Yeats in one of
her college courses.

My memory of her – what she looked like, how she moved, what her voice sounded like – has largely faded, and I threw out all her letters when she left me, forlorn in Oxford, for her
college English teacher in April of 1967. Her
Yeats
teacher. Her Yeats teacher with whom she used
my
book. There seemed to me something bibliographically perfidious in this treachery,
some unaccountable wickedness. Surely if you are going to have an affair with your English teacher you don’t use your fiancé’s book as the medium? It would be like using his bed,
only worse: this left permanent stains. Because, on many pages of the
Collected Poems
there were annotations in her hand that, had I been granted an early glimpse at them, might have enabled
me to foresee what was coming.

In themselves her notes are slight and fundamentally uninteresting. I had annotated the book copiously as well, and my notes, too, are hardly enough now to divert one’s emotional or
intellectual attention. They were, I suspect, largely transcriptions from a teacher’s voice on to the page. But viewed suspiciously, hers gave implicit testimony, if not to the forthcoming
infidelity, at least of some overheating of her imagination in the presence of her ardent teacher.