Outside of a Dog (7 page)

Having been so moved by Whitman in his teens, Ginsberg was simply waiting for Blake to happen. In 1948, he did. In a vision that was to shape his life, the poet Blake appeared before the
twenty-six-year-old Ginsberg, who, transported, emerged from the experience clear that he had been visited by God. Much later, I was lucky enough to hear him singing, with his partner Peter
Orlovsky, from his settings of
Songs of Innocence and Experience
. I had always been sceptical about the idea of the poet as bard, or (worse) shaman. Those are easy cloaks to put on, easy to
abuse, altogether too self-aggrandizing. Yet Ginsberg was wholly convincing, his audience rapt. It was one of the most moving experiences of my life. I’d never understood or appreciated Blake
properly before, or Ginsberg, or (I supposed) myself.

It made me wish I had made more of myself. I was at the time teaching English at the University of Warwick, at which Ginsberg’s reading took place. After the reading, still deeply moved, I
found myself standing next to him as we peed at the urinals. It was my chance, my only chance, to acknowledge what I owed him. What words would be adequate?

‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘Sure,’ he said, smiling.

I felt blessed, and went home glowing to tell Barbara about the experience. She immediately sensed something dangerous in my response: she had once observed that it wouldn’t have surprised
her entirely, if one day she found a note from me saying that I was off. Not off as in off with another woman, or to a different flat, but really off. Not off somewhere, but to nowhere, to
anywhere. And that she might not then hear from me for a very long time. It was an acute reading of a fantasy of mine – not to abandon her, but in some unexamined way to find myself –
but she knew, as I knew even better, that I was far too dutiful, too conventional, finally too frightened, to do more than contemplate such a thing. I had an inner lexicon of sad and attenuated
fantasies of life on the road, which involved moving from one stereotype to another: open-topped cars on endless roads to nowhere, vast Western landscapes with critters and varmints howling in the
night, bars with drunken and available women, lonely motels . . . All the stale tropes of noir fiction. Nothing too difficult, highly charged, or genuinely imagined. Nothing exotic, nothing
foreign. It was a by-product of the genius of Allen Ginsberg that, in reanimating these clichés, he made me feel more alive.

Allen and Holden had become guides, though eventually their voices merged with whatever was developing as my own. They engendered loyalty, and that kind of naive identification where we find
ourselves unconsciously mimicking not merely our friends’ attitudes, but also their habits, likes and dislikes, voices and postures. For a time I could recognize an inner Holden and an inner
Allen Ginsberg, but eventually they got assimilated, increasingly mixed up with the myriad other voices I was to make my own, to make myself.

Philip Roth’s protagonist Nathan Zuckerman puts this perfectly, in the novel
Exit Ghost
: ‘All I can tell you with certainty is that I . . . have no self, and that I am
unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self. What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do . . .’

So Zuckerman, ironically, while disallowing the very concept of the self, also uses it, because he has to: it is built into the psycholinguistic structures we are stuck with: ‘I am
unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon my
self
the joke of a self.’ There’s no way round it – a process that Jacques Derrida calls using concepts ‘under erasure’
– at the very moment at which we disallow a concept we may be obliged to employ it.

Charles Lamb, in a much quoted phrase, claimed that he loved to ‘lose himself in other men’s minds’, and that is what I did, though not in the sense that Lamb intended. He
thinks there is something comfortable about the process, something seamlessly enhancing. But my assimilation of the Caulfield and Ginsberg voices had something spurious about it – I
didn’t simply learn from them, I appropriated a whole series of attitudes and beliefs which were neither warranted nor engendered by my own experience: I despised phonies! I wanted to be
lawless and to embrace all!

Perhaps, though, that is the point, and what poor frustrated Miss Wyeth was trying to teach us. That literature offers us foreign voices, and enables, even urges, us to assimilate them. How we
do that, of course, is up to us. You have to be careful whose company you keep, and how. Matthew Arnold recommended ‘the best that has been known and thought’ as internal models,
without remarking, too, the concomitant danger of what Jung calls psychic inflation. I suspect that he thought the process would make one humble, but identifying with and appropriating views of the
world that one might not have come to on one’s own does not necessarily lead to humility.

Therein lies the paradox: we cannot form our views of the world without exposure to ‘other men’s minds’, yet in doing so we risk something second-hand, inauthentic. Literature
becomes both our experience and our substitute for experience. There is, after all, a crucial distinction between actually being on the road, being Kerouac and Cassady, and reading about it,
identifying with them, and regarding oneself as, similarly, an outlaw. To be outside the law you must be as honest as Jack or Neal, and not like their many admirers and wannabes.

Allen Ginsberg’s valuation of spontaneity, his desire for sexual freedom and loathing of the conventions of the political process and of petit bourgeois life, moved and convinced me, and I
have never entirely freed myself of these attitudes, nor entirely wished to. But they have left me with a lifetime disposition to seem to be, to pretend to be larger, more interesting and important
than I really am. Like Philip Roth’s Zuckerman, without a self that is anything more than a vast echo chamber, with resonating voices, intertwined, from any variety of sources. Is this why we
sense, in people who are steeped in literature, a kind of intractable pomposity, as if they are swollen by voices not legitimately their own? ‘As Charles Lamb was fond of remarking,’
they say, remarking it themselves. Charles Lamb,
c’est moi
.

I cite therefore I am? There is something compellingly ridiculous about the process. Even in its most distinguished examples, compulsive quoting always suggests something second-hand to me. Take
Joan Didion’s moving account of her response to the sudden death of her adored husband, John Gregory Dunne,
The Year of Magical Thinking
. The text is littered with references to those
writers Didion most admires, and who may be able to offer insight or consolation. And, reading, I was irritated by this: can’t she grieve, even, without this plethora of literary citation?
But there is nothing second-hand about the process, not to Joan Didion: these voices, these authorities, these friends are part of what and who she is. What is this, this chamber of citations, but
the self?

Whatever self I was beginning to form in high school sought eagerly, if not for a genuine escape, at least for some radical way of marking my difference and disaffection. It would have to be
subtle, this protest, no failing, no dropping out, no confrontations beyond the normal wise-crackery, no locks flowing over the collar. At last I found an ideal gesture: every day during my senior
year I would wear a sports jacket and a tie! Unlike the other boys in their chinos, checked shirts and v-necked sweaters, I would set myself apart, formal and superior, and never indicate why I was
doing so.

It wasn’t easy. I only had the one (green and gold threaded) jacket, a couple of white button-down cotton shirts, and three thin ties, each with bright horizontal stripes. But I
persevered. My fellow students were puzzled, but my teachers thought I looked nice. They didn’t realize that I was dressing ironically, but Allen Ginsberg would have. I liked to think he
would have been proud of me.

In the summer after I graduated, I got to do a different sort of dressing up, while employed as a campus guard by Burns Detective Agency, stationed at the local C.W. Post College, at the time a
deeply undistinguished campus largely for the graduates of the local high schools. I was issued with a peaked cap, and a badge that I pinned on my khaki shirt. My role was to make sure that nobody
except the administration officers parked in the car parks outside the administration offices. This entailed standing on the broiling tarmac from 7.30 in the morning until 3.30 in the afternoon,
with half an hour for lunch at midday. It was exhausting, and the sun gave me headaches until I bought a pair of aviator sun glasses.

I have never been so bored. I would check my watch every few minutes, certain that an hour had passed. It was intolerable, and I took to bringing a novel with me, from the suggested reading list
that the University of Pennsylvania had sent prior to my matriculating in the autumn. I found I could read a book a day, and was beginning to rather enjoy it, wishing only that they had issued me
with a chair, when the President of the College approached me sternly.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Guarding the car park, sir.’

‘No, you’re not. You’re reading!’

‘Believe it or not, sir, I can do both at the same time.’

‘It doesn’t make the right impression. I want you to stop this reading immediately!’

I put my copy of
On The Road
into my pocket wearily.

‘If I might say so, sir, it seems to me I am the only person on this campus who actually reads books. Could you not regard me as setting a good example?’

He couldn’t, and wasn’t amused. I spent the rest of the summer standing at my post, broiling in the sun, guarding my little heart out, turning away the occasional student brave or
stupid enough to try to swipe one of the prohibited places.

To make some extra money to take to college I also worked in the evenings that summer, in the sporting goods department at Macy’s in the local mall. My specialty was drilling bowling
balls, and I got sufficiently good at it that customers would return to tell me that they’d bowled an especially good game. During the occasional lulls, I’d chat with my colleagues, who
measured golf clubs, or sold sneakers and tennis rackets.

It turned out that one of them was a summer school student at C.W. Post.

‘C.W. Post! Do you know the car park by the president’s office?’ I asked eagerly.

‘Oh yeah, sure, I tried to park there last week, but there was this really tough-looking cop, and I got scared away.’

It was the high point of my summer.

4

‘Let’s begin here,’ our instructor in Introduction to English said. ‘You have read
The Waste Land
for today’s assignment. Can you recite
the opening line? Not
lines
, just the one. You should be able to, it’s famous enough, almost a cliché by now.’

He was regarded by most of the class with incredulity, and by me with contempt. That was obvious, wasn’t it? What was the catch? We all knew it, and recited it almost as if it were a
nursery rhyme:
‘April is the cruellest month . . .’

‘Wrong!’ (You won’t believe this. We didn’t.) ‘Think again.’

We did, and we wouldn’t back down. What was this guy: stupid?

‘Have a look in your book.’ And sure enough the first line reads:

‘Why does it start like that?’ he asked. ‘How is that different from the line you remember? Why does he do it like that – what is the effect?’

We read the next line:

which repeats the pattern of the first line – doesn’t it? – with the active hanging verb suggesting fertility and hinting at sexuality. (Lines three, five and
six will do the same.) Why is it that ‘lilacs’ are what is bred? There is no appended note by Eliot, and our first association was with Whitman’s ‘When Lilacs Last in the
Dooryard Bloomed’, the elegy on the death of Abraham Lincoln. Thus new life in the springtime brings with it a hint of the destruction of the best and brightest? That is – is it?
– why April is cruel? Is there some later association with the ‘hyacinth girl’ – hyacinths being visually similar to lilacs, similarly strongly perfumed – and the
moment of epiphany associated with her?

I can’t remember when I first read T.S. Eliot. This may account for my feeling that he has always been with me, for Eliot, more than any other writer, has been a constant reference point:
read and reread, reconsidered, rethought, reimagined, indeed, re-sounded, for the poem can be recited in many ways and voices. For almost fifty years he has been a constant but shifting part of my
self-definition, as if what I made of Eliot, at any given period of my reading life, were essential to what I made of myself. And, equally, as my sense of myself has evolved, my responses to Eliot
have shifted.

Perhaps – (if this isn’t true nevertheless it carries the weight of truth for me) – it was my father who introduced me to Eliot? His heavily annotated copy of the poet’s
Collected Poems
was in a prominent place on his shelves, and in everyday conversation he was likely to interject a phrase or image of Eliot’s: at a party the ‘women come and go,
talking of Michelangelo’, and we could not enter spring without being reminded that April was ‘the cruellest month’, which to my mind it so obviously wasn’t. (That, dad
observed, was exactly the point.)

I like the notion that he introduced me to Eliot, because my nature and ambitions so closely mirrored his as a teenager. In 1930, the eighteen-year-old Bernie Gekoski, recently graduated from
high school, adored eldest child and the hero of his younger sister, a well-read, earnest young man and aspiring writer, entered the freshman class at the University of Pennsylvania. He had already
read some Freud, and had hopes that he might one day train as a psychoanalyst, but (aware that you needed to be a doctor or a psychology graduate to do this) contemplated instead a career as a
professor of English. And if that didn’t work out, he recognized, you could always train as a lawyer, a perfectly respectable profession for a young man with a conscience.