Outside of a Dog (12 page)

But the poet does not insist upon the need for transcendence. There is an inalienable conflict between flesh and spirit, youth and age, the transient and the immortal, the world of sensual
experience and the world of art. You can’t wish away this tension, nor can you solve it: all that you can hope is that the transforming powers of the imagination can use such conflicts as
sources of art – however inadequate the process may sometimes seem – and hence be of some consolation. T.S. Eliot, who regarded Yeats as the greatest poet of the century, makes this
point perfectly:

It’s not an easy process, not as I experience it, this mixing (as Eliot put it) of memory and desire.

Much of what I remember of Rachel is so intense and so vivid that it seems as if it were played by some inward video, recalling the delights of first love. All of forty-odd years later this
– might one call it emotion recollected in senility? – is so fresh, and very occasionally so stimulating, that it rather embarrasses me to admit it, though it is testimony to the
unfolding of time, to its radiant refulgence, its pathos and inevitability.

First love is only infrequently revisited, when the right catalyst occurs. It might be hearing that significant song, or talking to an old friend, or looking through those old photos. Or reading
W.B.Yeats. Perhaps I’ve had it wrong: it is not Rachel that makes me think of Yeats but the other way round. Yeats makes us all think about first love, the flushes of youth: what we never
cease to regret the loss of. This is, he came to feel, the essential task of the poet: to become that golden bird which sings forever of ‘what is past, or passing, or to come’. There is
no consolation in art, only formulation: the pain of our inevitable loss of vitality is not slowed by the intercessions of the artist, but in listening attentively we may smile, and remember for a
moment what it was to be vibrantly alive, to have been young and in love.

First love is better remembered than continued, and Rachel was right to leave it when she did. The irony – I was too young to expect it – is that pain releases energy, just as
pleasure often retards it. I indulged myself with a few months of operatic grief, in which I wrote a two hundred-page account of my travails, and then threw it away. Soon enough I was seeing other
women, had a romantic idyll in Ischia with an attractive classmate of Rachel ’s who’d decided I was just the right sort to serve as her first lover, and returned to Oxford happy and
refreshed. In my overstuffed pigeonhole at Merton, amongst the usual college notices and invitations to join various societies, was a letter from Rachel. I carried it back to my flat in my breast
pocket, and put it on my desk, where it sat for a few minutes before I was ready to open it. What might it say? What did I want it to say?

She had ended her relationship with her teacher, which had been a mistake, but a necessary one. We’d had a ‘very young’ relationship, she acknowledged, but the pause might be
good for us. Could we not try to get to know one another again, in a better way? It was the letter I had yearned for, the letter that Wandering Aengus was designed to prompt, it had a tentative
delicacy that hurt my heart, but it was too late. I thought for a few days, and composed a letter of thanks, and of regret, to say good-bye. It was florid and self-regarding – April was our
cruellest month, but I was breeding lilacs out of the dead land – which rather confirmed her sense of how immature the relationship had been.

I still was. At the time I got her letter we would have been married for three months. I presume it wouldn’t have lasted. Better the lifetime pleasure of first love, remembered. Better,
too, that sadness, that loss.

7

If it had to be Wordsworth or Arnold, then it would have to be Arnold. The Oxford BPhil in English made you choose one or the other as a special subject, and I’d had
enough of Wordsworth in my undergraduate Romantic Poetry course. I did not share his reverence for ‘nature’, and had no desire to be improved by its beggars, leech gatherers, and other
drooling rustics. To my sort of Jewish American, nature is dangerous, where you are more likely to be eaten by a bear than improved by neo-Platonic contemplation. I’m rather fond of scenery,
though, as long as you don’t step in it. You need to be protected from it by a pane of glass.

Not that I knew much about Matthew Arnold. I think I’d read ‘Dover Beach’, and was aware that Lionel Trilling’s PhD thesis and first book had been on Arnold, which was
some recommendation. Having made my choice, I threw on my rather dashing magenta-and-cream striped Merton College scarf, and headed to Blackwell’s Book Shop, on the Broad, where I had opened
an account: ‘R.A. Gekoski, Merton’ was enough – you didn’t even need to prove it – to allow you a full term’s credit. Take a book, take armfuls of books, sign:
‘R.A. Gekoski, Merton’. It was a good game. My shelves filled right up. Arnold’s
Collected Poems
and
Culture and Anarchy
on the top shelf.

My tutor for the term, Hugo Dyson, had suggested I do an essay on Arnold as a critic. I was anxious to impress him: he’d been a member of the Inklings, was a noted (if not exactly
prolific) scholar and bon viveur, and had recently had a walk-on role as a professor in the movie
Darling
, with that super Julie Christie. I worked hard on the paper, and sent it to him a
few days in advance of the tutorial. On the day, I popped on the scrappy, distinctly humiliating black rags called a Commoner’s Gown – the Scholar’s Gowns were capacious enough to
flap about like Gandalf – hoisted my umbrella, and made my way down the slippery cobbles of Merton Street for my tutorial.

The essay attempted a demolition of one of Arnold’s central critical ideals, concerning the use of touchstones, or memorized lines of poetry of such quality that mere comparison with them
would indicate the merit of any other bit of verse. I’d read his two essential essays, ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ and ‘The Study of Poetry’, and
been mystified by the combination of extreme self-confidence and methodological laxness that they seemed to display. The following was typical, and typically irritating:

What lines did he have in mind? There are eleven examples: three each from Homer, Dante and Milton, and two from Shakespeare. They are ‘lines and expressions of the great masters’,
of the utmost gravitas, and include Hamlet’s dying words to Horatio, and Milton’s lament on the death of Persephone, as well as his injunction:

which is perfectly designed to appeal to high-Victorian sensibility, as well as to scout troops, Sumo wrestlers and American Marines.

Tuck these lines away, add a few dashes of Dante, and ‘if you have tact’ they will be adequate ‘even of themselves’ to guide us to a proper understanding and evaluation
of poetry. Clearly a lot is being built into the term ‘tact’, which pretty obviously means ‘sensibility’. But if you have such sensibility, surely, you don’t need a
carrier bag of touchstones to help you on your way? You will have your own standards of quality, your own comparators, your own understanding of the nature of the poetic.

‘Poetry,’ Arnold informed me, consisted of ‘a criticism of life’, a remarkably airy notion, accompanied by no definition, as if delivered to an audience that would know
what he meant. I didn’t. When I went back to Arnold’s formulation, seeking further guidance, things only got worse: ‘a criticism of life
under the conditions fixed for such a
criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty
’. It was enough to make you squeal, and I did, for twelve closely argued polemical pages. I sent them to Dyson, expecting
approbation.

His rooms were messy and apparently unloved – I’d not yet encountered the concept of the shabby genteel – but there was a comfy chair and the inevitable glass of dry sherry, an
astringent drink about which no one had warned me, and of which I’d drunk too much during my college induction meetings. It made me feel sophisticated: Amontillado, or better yet Fino.
Not
Bristol Cream.

My essay was sitting amongst a pile of papers on the table next to the bottle of sherry. I craned my neck, but couldn’t see a mark or any comments on the front page.

‘Now, dear boy, shall we look at the Marguerite poems?’

I opened my
Collected Poems
.

‘Which one?’

‘Why don’t you read ‘To Marguerite’?

I read the poem, then reread it, and looked up.

‘There is only one line of genuine poetry in the entire poem,’ he said. He paused while I looked back through the poem anxiously. ‘Which is it?’

I peered at the text. Surely it couldn’t be the opening line – ‘enisled’ was awful! I could feel my mind closing down.

What kind of a tutorial was this anyway? I’d never been asked such a question before, and had no idea where to start. Presumably I was supposed to
classify
the lines – both
Arnold and Oxford were obsessed by class – give them a First, or an Alpha – both new categories to me, and distinctly foreign. Was this how you read poetry in Oxford?

Dyson looked at me steadily, as if willing me to find the answer – or, perhaps, to fail? My attack on Arnold had been intemperate and show-offy, and Arnold was revered in Oxford,
‘that city of dreaming spires’ as he had christened it: ‘home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties’. I drank some sherry
– I
needed
some sherry – and looked at the text again. I fidgeted, I sipped, I stalled. I was fast becoming another of Oxford’s ‘lost causes’.

‘Surely,’ he said, crisply: ‘“
The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea
.” Pure poetry, lovely.’

We spent the rest of the hour – it was intimidatingly intimate, this one-to-one tutorial format, its apparent gentility really just a stage for jousting, testing, competing, probing
– in similarly amateurish pursuit. It was a ‘tact’ test, and I was failing it. I was furious. By the time Dyson had walked me through the other poems seeking lines worthy of
touchstone status (though I didn’t see what he was up to), I couldn’t wait to collect my essay and get the hell out of there. I rose as the college bells tolled the hour, and Hugo
handed me my essay.

‘Quite interesting, thank you,’ he said mildly. I was quite pleased. I didn’t know that the English use ‘quite’ to mean ‘not particularly’, rather than
the American usage, in which it is frequently used to add approving emphasis. I had a similar linguistic embarrassment, though with a better result, in attempting to join the varsity tennis
‘club’, which had a ‘secretary’, one Tony Billington, himself a member of the team. I dropped him a note, and by return received his suggestion that I have a game with a
fresher called Ian Hewitt, who was ‘a useful player’. A few days later Ian and I had a match on grass, on which I had little experience, but rather enjoyed. I didn’t expect much
from him, given that he was only ‘useful’, and I won relatively easily. I was immediately invited to join the varsity squad, and soon learned that Ian was a junior Wimbledon player, and
played for Hampshire. ‘Useful’ meant ‘bloody good’. He eventually captained the team, and played First Singles in the Varsity Match. I played Sixth, and never took another
set off him.

Two countries divided by a common language? It wasn’t just a question of different accent, usage and vocabulary – you could pick that up – but what was more complex, and harder
to read, were the tonal differences between American English and English English. I’d never read anyone who wrote like Matthew Arnold, never encountered that curious mixture of playfulness
and gravitas that make for his particular urbanity. Though committed to ‘the best that has been known and thought’ – to ‘culture’ – Arnold rarely has the
earnestness that one finds in, say, Trilling; instead he is poised, playful, teasing, disarming potential opposition through the effortless felicity of his manner. Take the opening of Chapter 3 of
Culture and Anarchy
: