Outside of a Dog (28 page)

I wished this name might have been on my new catalogue, but I liked it anyway, whatever it was. I loved it. I took that first copy home, made myself a cup of coffee, and sat at the pine table in
the kitchen leafing through it happily. I was shortly joined by our neighbour, the rather strict academic wife of one of my colleagues. I should have known better, but I was so chuffed with my
little green catalogue that I handed it over excitedly, saying, ‘Look: My first catalogue!’ She flipped through it in a desultory way, taking in the occasional details, mostly, as far
as I could see, of the prices. She paused for a moment, and looked me squarely in the eye, as anyone fearlessly committed to the telling of truths should do.

‘How disgusting!’ she said. I don’t recall how I responded; I’m not sure I said anything at all. I was aware, of course, that academics are hostile to
‘trade’, as well as ignorant about it. And though happy to deploy this prejudice, she would also have known that much of the material she’d worked on as a graduate student –
rare texts, letters and manuscripts – would have found its way into special collections departments of libraries through the rare book trade.

It may be that rare book dealers, like rubbish men, are necessary, but that doesn’t make them smell good. The problem was compounded by the fact that I had gone into business in rare
books
. Books, to my colleagues – indeed, books to most sane people – are objects of utility, designed to convey information and give pleasure, and esteemed accordingly. To value
a book not for what is in it, but (as it were) in itself suggests a fetishization of the object that many people in the academic and literary worlds find offensive. Why should a first edition of
some novel be worth more than its reprints? Why does the presence of its dust wrapper – for God’s sake! – render it much more valuable? Why should the mere fact that an author has
signed a book make it more desirable? Surely fetishizing the object simultaneously demeans its contents?

From that time, colleagues would occasionally inquire, sniffily, ‘And how is
business
?’ My regular response to this – ‘Terrific! And how are you finding
academic life
?’ – generally signalled an end to the conversation, a confirmation of the distance that now separated us.

When I gave up teaching, in 1984, I found – I don’t know why I should have found this so surprising – that the major emotion that accompanied my retreat from university life
was anger. I kept banging on about my feelings obsessively, like someone with post-traumatic stress syndrome. I could recognize the symptoms, but I couldn’t stop. I bored myself, I bored
everybody. I was scathing about the form of life that I had just left, sulphurous about many of my ex-colleagues, and particularly furious with myself for following such an uncongenial path. Though
I was ostensibly having a terrific time in my new career as a rare book dealer, I could neither purge the regret I felt at having wasted my time and energy, nor give up the social cachet of being a
university teacher. As I still taught part-time (for three years) as part of my redundancy package, I now described myself as a ‘university teacher and rare book dealer’, unwilling to
give up the prestige of my old position at the same time that I professed to detest almost everything that it represented.

In order to purge this anger, and to eradicate the hold that university teaching still had on me, I conceived a cunning plan which I hoped would rid me of the toxicity of my academic persona:
the fearfulness, the hyper-scepticism, the pomposity, the anxiety not to be found out for the drudge I was. I called this new project ‘becoming less intelligent’.

It was fun. I hardly needed to cultivate my philistinism, which was pretty much full grown already. I’ve always preferred sport to high art, and have a positive dislike for people who
regard themselves as ‘cultured’. Next time you go to the opera look at the body language of most of the patrons: the stiffness of demeanour, the noses held that extra ten degrees
skywards, the strangulated voices. There is little so repellent as the English in high culture mode. Nor did it take much for me to give up going to the theatre, which I have always disliked: all
that spitting and declaiming, the audience’s anxiety that something might go wrong, allied to the vague hope that it might. (Holden Caulfield hated actors, whom he regarded, though without
having met any, as the very incarnation of the phoney.) I abjured philosophy – that was easy enough – but also swore off ‘literature’. No more fancy reading, no more
highbrow talking. Simplify, if not to refine then even to coarsen. Become less intelligent.

For years I confined my TV watching to sports and movies, and my reading to detective fiction. I opened a standing order for twenty thrillers a month with Otto Penzler of Manhattan’s
Mysterious Bookshop, to be chosen by his bright and knowledgeable staff. When the boxes arrived I would pile up my new treats, start at the top and work down, handing them over to Anna when I was
finished. When asked what I had been reading – even what I was reading on the day – I could rarely remember either author or title (or, much of the time, the plot). I gorged myself,
grew fat and indolent with reading. I read dozens of thriller writers, and hundreds of books. Like Kingsley Amis, who complained that he was quickly bored by a novel that did not begin with the
words ‘A shot rang out’, I demanded nothing but finger-on-the-trigger entertainment.

I am pretty sure that none of Otto’s shipments contained a novel by Carl Hiaasen. Even in my befuddled state, getting less intelligent by the minute, I would have remembered that. So when
in the Hampstead branch of Waterstone’s one day, I spotted a book called
Double Whammy
, by an author unknown to me, I hardly gave it a thought until I read the puff on the front cover:
‘Better than literature!’
P.J. O’Rourke. Perfect! Something other than literature was what I was looking for, something
better
than literature was a bonus. Anything
that P.J. O’Rourke is that keen on is OK with me. He may be laughably right-wing, but he’s funny and sharp as a tack, and I reckoned that this Hiaasen person must be worth a look.

He was. His novel was blackly comic, with a one-eyed protagonist called Clinton Tyree, a drop-out Governor of Florida who becomes a hermit in the Everglades under the name of Skink, living on
road kill. There was a cast of characters ranging from the wacky to the totally deranged.
Double Whammy
is in a tradition of the grotesque Southern novel, but the enterprise was animated and
informed by Hiaasen’s rage at the desecration of the landscape of South Florida by planners, developers and associated con-men intent on making a sleazy quick buck. The writing was wonderful,
totally surprising in tone and content, and made me cringe, howl with laughter, and contract in righteous indignation. The novel culminated in a scene in which a psychopath who has been bitten on
the arm by a rabid dog, and is unable to prise its jaws open even when it is dead, simply cuts off the body, and goes about his business with the dead dog’s head attached to his arm.
(Hiaasen’s villains often end up with something peculiar attached to their arms. When asked why this was, he admitted that he’d never noticed it.)

But there is something more than sheer mayhem going on. Skink is a great comic creation, but his story is a black parable of the Fall. He enters politics, naively, in order to do good, and is
brought down by the massed forces of greed and corruption that are endemic to South Florida. Entrusted with an Edenic garden – a ‘virgin’ territory – he presides over its
destruction. His withdrawal into the swamps is an act of penance:

An investigative journalist by training, Hiaasen has worked since 1985 for
The Miami Herald
, and writes a regular column which, he acknowledges jauntily, ‘at one time or another has
pissed off just about everybody in South Florida’, including his own bosses. His indignation at the institutionalized desecration of the prelapsarian South Florida landscape is the animating
impulse of both his columns and the string of delicious novels that began, in 1986, with
Tourist Season
. His only regret, he says, is that the books haven’t put tourists off visiting
his homeland. He hates tourists as much as he loves South Florida.

The
Irish Times
review of
Double Whammy
called it ‘seriously funny’, which ought to have meant both serious
and
funny – an admirable goal – though it
probably didn’t. I enjoyed it so much that I did something I’ve never done before, or since. I went to the excellent Primrose Hill Bookshop and ordered ten copies to give away. My kids
each got one, the guys in my office, various friends. I gave Salman Rushdie one, and in exchange for the tip he insisted I read Stephen King.

Stephen King! What an odd notion.

‘He’s terrific!’ Salman said.

The publisher Tom Rosenthal turned down my offer of a copy.

‘Of course I’ve read him,’ he said, ‘he’s a genius. I tried to sign him for Deutsch but my co-publishers let me down, and we lost the deal.’

Hiaasen was clearly serious, but he wasn’t high serious. He was low serious. I preferred that, and it set a sort of example. He seemed to be having fun writing, and all of a sudden I was
having fun reading. It had all the freshness of a new experience. Was there something frivolous about the way he wrote, and the way I read him? Absolutely, though by no means entirely. That’s
what I yearned for, and what I had been missing, in making reading into my profession. And, yes, I am aware that people don’t have fun in their professions. Do accountants adore all that
yummy adding up? Do lawyers love all that obsessive prevaricating? No, most of the ones I know come to dislike it, as I came to dislike the profession of letters. Literature, as taught at
universities, has become an institution: syllabus-bound, examination-driven. You get marks for how well you understand Dickens. I gave them. I’d become institutionalized too.

How did all of this happen? I don’t mean: to me. I mean: to us. How did the reading of imaginative literature get hijacked by the pedants? English Literature as a secondary and tertiary
subject is now so popular, and seems so natural to us, that we seldom pause to inquire where it came from, and why. We make the assumption that it is as obvious a university subject as history, or
classics, much less law, medicine, or engineering. In fact, though, ‘English’ is pretty much a Johnny-come-lately of academic subjects. Curiously little has been written about this,
most of it in obscure academic journals that are hard to find, and embarrassing to be seen reading.

The story, once you begin to piece it together, is surprising and revealing. In eighteenth-century England a gentleman studied the classics of Greek and Roman literature, in the original
languages. The classics didn’t confer gentility, they confirmed it. If he went to university at all, it was most frequently to become a cleric. It was only in the 1820s that the first
university courses in English appeared, at the newly founded University College and King’s College in London. These institutions differed substantially, the former being egalitarian and
utilitarian, while King’s was informed by a romantic, neo-Platonic aesthetic, in which the study of English encouraged its students to rise ‘above what is apparent and transitory to
what is real and permanent’.

These new educational courses and practices – both utilitarian and transcendental – were soon appropriated by government, and sent to the colonies. If English literature was good for
us, surely it would be even better for our overseas subjects, for whom some such civilizing influence was so palpably necessary. Talking to the House of Commons in 1833, Thomas Babington Macaulay
recommended the conscious propagation and study of ‘that literature before the light of which impious and cruel superstitions are fast taking flight on the banks of the Ganges . . . And
wherever British literature spreads may it be attended by British virtue and British freedom!’ The study of literature, nauseatingly, was both useful and good. It was, of course, particularly
good for those who needed to be improved, whether they be on the banks of the Ganges or amongst England’s emerging mercantile classes.

One can feel this spirit pervading the introduction to Vicesimus Knox’s
Elegant Extracts
, published at the same time as the London colleges were being founded, and one of the first
anthologies of literature for use at schools. The emerging middle classes, Knox maintained, should use their leisure to peruse ‘polite literature’: ‘Nothing perhaps contributes
more to liberalize their minds, and prevent that narrowness which is too often the consequence of a life attached, from the earliest age, to the pursuits of lucre.’ The mere study of
‘English’ thus confirmed its students, either indigenous or foreign, as inferior educational citizens. But it still might confer, if not the class of the classics, at least the saving
grace of the vernacular.

English universities were based to a large extent on Germanic models. Disciplines were strictly divided from each other, methods of examination and conferment of degrees were controlled
centrally, teachers achieved ranks culminating in professorships, students divided into undergraduate and postgraduate. But if the study of English was the coming thing, there was no clear
agreement on how it was to be taught within the structures available. The transition from the reading of books as a polite drawing room activity suitable for young ladies, to an examinable
discipline of higher education was a complex and hotly disputed subject during the nineteenth century.

Oxford and Cambridge, typically, had been slow to react to these changes, and only entered the arena once English had established itself, but had yet to find an agreed academic form. Oxbridge
didn’t lead the way in this process, but entered at the point at which guidance was sorely needed. The first Oxford Chair of English Literature was established in 1904, though the original
Oxford syllabus in English was severely philological and historicist. At Cambridge, though it had been possible to read English as part of the Tripos since 1891, it was impossible to do a single
Honours degree in English until 1926, exactly a hundred years after the formation of UCL. The Cambridge degree included an element of practical criticism as well as a paper on ‘Life,
Literature and Thought’, and provides the basis of English Studies in the Anglophone world.