Outside of a Dog (24 page)

She is particularly good on the ways in which childhood unhappiness manifests itself in adult illness and somatic symptoms, some of them serious, many apparently trivial. You don’t have to
develop asthma or cancer to pay the price of an unhappy childhood: cigarette smoking, nail-biting, and obsessive dieting (to pick just those symptoms that fit me) are all apparently adult signals
of childhood abuse: ‘all these illnesses or addictions are screams of the body that want to be heard.’ In an interview in 1987, Miller put her core insight perfectly:

Surely this is an insight worth repeating. But quite how it would help me with the problems that had driven me back into a therapist’s arms was unclear. I was, still, in an unhappy and
uncreative marriage. I could not, still, write with any freedom or pleasure. How could these blockages diminish by reference to some putative inner child?

Alice Miller seemed unable to offer anything more satisfying than an explanation, which isn’t much use. But she was unexpectedly helpful with regard to the problem of writer’s block.
The least known of her books, probably, is
Pictures of a Childhood
, and gives an account of her life as a painter, together with colour plates of a number of her pictures. Small in scale,
semi-abstract and highly coloured, like a mixture of Klee and Miro, they have a numinous quality, with tiny, haunting figures seeming to peer out of the grounds as if crying for attention.

The pictures depict something of the artist’s unconscious, and give unmediated access to that unhappy, ‘inner’ little girl with whom Miller (despite two full analyses) had
never quite been able to recall or to sympathize. She had painted as a child, and been ‘encouraged’ (by which she means bullied) by her mother into excelling at her work. The young
Alice’s response to this putative ‘support’ was to dry up entirely: ‘. . . it is clear to me in retrospect that my strong resistance to formal training, to thought and
planning in the area of my painting, was highly significant, perhaps even saved my life.’

Only in adult life did she resume painting, and found that she could only paint if she did so ‘spontaneously’, for unless she did ‘the child in me rebelled and immediately
became defiant’. But if she simply played with the paint, and allowed whatever wanted to be expressed to come out in its own manner, then she took immense satisfaction in the process, and the
pictures flowed, as if naturally. They gave her access, she found, to the child within, and gave that long suppressed little girl, at last, a language of her own.

Whether the pictures were any good (they are) was not the point. They were free, unmediated, and responded to no pressures except those from within, demanding release. The implication was clear
to me. Though it is easier to see how the process would work with painting rather than writing, nevertheless there was something to be learned. Might it be possible for me to write like that?
Spontaneously, without premeditation, playfully? ‘First thought, best thought,’ as Allen Ginsberg put it. It was an unlikely proposition: after all, my academic training had taught me
exactly the opposite process. Writing is the highly meditated, careful and considered outcome of mature consideration.
Avoid error!
There is nothing playful or spontaneous about it,
it’s a thoroughly conscious, largely defensive process.

I thought about this for a time, talked about it with my therapist, wondered how to take the first step.

‘Trust your unconscious,’ he said. ‘It’ll tell you what to do if you don’t fuss about it.’

I listened intently, but all I heard was a voice saying, ‘Just do it for God’s sake!’ A week later I started a novel. It was finished in six weeks. It was harder
not
to
write than to write. If I put it down for a moment my head teemed with thoughts, scenes, images and conversations, and I had to get back to the typewriter. I banged away at it, surprisingly
happy.

Entitled
Bottom’s Dream
, it was predictably enough about me (in the guise of a psychotherapist with doubts), unhappily married to a difficult painter, trying to find a comfortable
way to live in the world, and failing. (The poor old protagonist commits suicide.) The novel was personally and sexually explicit to a ridiculous degree, but it was really only a symptom of my
angry and demoralized psychological state, and I didn’t show it to any publisher. My therapist thought it ‘remarkable’, but I’ll bet he said that to all the girls. I got a
more disinterested opinion from the novelist Peter Ackroyd. When I told him I was writing an autobiographical novel he wrinkled his nose: ‘Darling,’ he said, ‘why don’t you
write about something
interesting
?’ I haven’t reread
Bottom’s Dream
since, and would not wish to, though I am curiously resistant to throwing it away. If there is
anything worth returning to, it is in the nature of the doubts about Freud and psychoanalysis that it adumbrates, about which more later.

What was thrilling was that the writing came as if naturally, and was a cause of pleasure. All you had to do was believe in yourself, let it go spontaneously, allow whatever is in you to find
its own voice, and fill up the page. The author of the book was called ‘Rick Gekoski’. He had never written anything before, ‘R.A. Gekoski’ having been responsible for my
previous works. I liked this new fellow better; if he was sometimes desperate, at least he wrote in a voice that I recognized as my own. I had Alice Miller to thank for this. And it wasn’t
just my inner child who came to my aid, but my inner Matilda as well. All you need to do to banish your Miss Trunchbull, after all, is to concentrate entirely, direct your eyes, and let the energy
flow, and you will end up, victorious, feeling like an angel. (Whether you write a good novel is quite another issue.)

The key to such triumphs lies, I think, in the kind of stories that you listen to, read, and make up for and about yourself. That’s how Matilda, aged four, releases herself into an
imaginative world, to deal with and to supplant the realities of an inadequate real one. In effect, she makes herself through reading, and in so doing offers a model, and a hope. And yet –
this is too easily missed – she is also a sad example of a child who has had to become, prematurely, an adult: Matilda forfeits her girlhood because of the abuse she has suffered. She has
been ‘robbed’, as A.S. Neill put it, of ‘her right to play’. I suspect that Roald Dahl would have regarded Crunchem School as a representative, if exaggerated, example of
what happens to most children in their early education. It didn’t happen at Summerhill.

Anna and Bertie adored
Matilda
, and he went on to read all of Roald Dahl’s books with passionate delight. When he had finished the last one, he asked what other writers he’d
like? I didn’t know what to say – there aren’t any, quite, in the same league – and he’s been disappointed ever since. (Just like me as a child, wanting more writers
like Dr Seuss.) Bertie thinks nobody is as good to read as Roald Dahl, and I rather agree. Perhaps he should have won the Nobel Prize?

14

Sixty-eight per cent of all Americans, I am told, believe in the existence of angels. This fact is frequently cited – I have done so myself – as an instance of the
gullible religiosity of the American people. I can be quite rude on the subject. I have recently, though, begun to wonder if it is fair of me, quite, to be so dismissive. My unease is not
philosophical: I know that the concept ‘angel’ is unclear, and that it is equally uncertain what ‘believing’ in such an entity might entail. Nor is it because I don’t
believe in angels myself, under
any
construction of those terms, but because I wish I did.

Not in that self-serving way in which I want to believe in an afterlife, the thought of which would be consoling while alive and (I presume) agreeable when dead. There is nothing self-interested
in my search for my lost angels. By which I don’t mean those banal beings who loiter listlessly on clouds, playing harps, translucent and bored: that’s what happens when you can’t
eat, smoke, play poker or kiss girls. No, God forgive me, I never want to be one of them; give me a short sharp shock of damnation any time, something bracing and sexy.

What I want to believe in is not the bloodless seraphim of popular Christian iconography, but the angels of the poets: in Donne’s angel with ‘wings of aire’, Blake’s
perky friend the angel in
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
, Byron’s angels hoarse with singing out of tune, Yeats’s ‘great angels’ who visit us in our hours of need,
Eliot’s ‘dark angel’. One could go on and on, citing angels: dear Matilda, enraptured, like an angel, or Emily Dickinson’s, with ‘even feet – and uniforms of
snow’. When we peruse the imaginative world of writers, it appears that without their angels they are as nothing. I wish that I could have some, even one, to rescue me from the mundane
linearity of my mind, its relentless proseyness.

Not that we Jews get a lot of angels, they’re largely the province of the Goyim. I went, reluctantly, to Temple until my Bar Mitzvah provided the desired presents and freed me from further
theological obligation, and I cannot recall any talk of angels or devils, though the Old Testament is stuffed with them. But we didn’t care. It is one of the many charms of my religion, weak
though my practice of it may be, that it focuses so entirely on this life, and on the moral obligations attendant on being a person in a community. All of that Christian insistence on doing good in
order to be rewarded –
why not?
asks Pascal,
what do you have to lose?
– strikes me as the very worst reason to live a moral life.

So when a Jew comes up with angels, they’re likely to be peculiar ones, like Allen Ginsberg’s panoply of angels, Mohammedan, Indian, blonde and naked, mad but sane – hardly
angelic at all really, more like Allen in fact, who no doubt thought himself one of them. Such an angel is an emblem of translucent otherness, of the ideal towards which the imagination strives,
yet which is only just imaginable. Ginsberg wants the company of angels, in order to escape from the confines of the mundanely rational.

Keats, after all, had exactly the same concern and he wasn’t even Jewish. Consider the lines from
Lamia
:

If I had to choose the one philosophical text that most clearly and powerfully exemplifies the hostility of philosophy to poetry, it might well be A.J. Ayer’s
Language, Truth and
Logic
. Though published in 1936, Ayer’s text maintains the capacity to shock. I first read it at Penn, and admired its lucidity and bravado, regarding logical positivism (as it was
called) as the
ne plus ultra
of Humean scepticism. Indeed, one of my reasons for wishing to go to Oxford was that I would have a chance to hear Ayer lecture, for he was one of the luminaries
of an excellent school of philosophy. Freddy (as he was known, later Sir Freddy) and his foxy motorcyclist wife, the American journalist Dee Wells, were central figures in both the Oxford universe,
and that of North London’s intellectual classes. Ayer was media-hungry, anxious to make philosophy widely available. He appealed to the kind of people who read the broadsheets, and listened
to the Third Programme, the BBC’s highbrow radio broadcast that began in 1946, and which was sometimes derided as merely ‘two dons talking’ – one of whom was frequently
Ayer. Because his philosophical position was radical, surprising, even shocking, to persons of all persuasions – virtually all you needed, to be offended by Ayer, was to
have
a
persuasion – he was much in demand. He was a controversialist, loved to argue, and was a formidable opponent.

What he opposed were those metaphysical concepts and statements that he labelled ‘nonsense’, and those further propositions – like those of ethics or aesthetics – which
he regarded as simply ‘emotive’, and consequently impossible to verify (in effect, further forms of nonsense). The use of ‘nonsense’ as the category into which the
non-verifiable was tossed, willy-nilly, was intentionally provocative. God is good? Turner is a wonderful painter? It is better to do good than evil? Steak and kidney pie is delicious? One finds
contentment in nature? Any football team is to be preferred to Manchester United? Shakespeare is the best writer? These are not truths, all are nonsense of one sort or the other. It made it
impossible to be English without embarrassing oneself philosophically.

Of course Ayer, a genial and literate man burdened with the normal baggage of belief, who passionately supported both the Labour Party and Tottenham Hotspur, was having some fun with his key
concept. He was, after all, in his early twenties when he wrote
Language, Truth and Logic
, and anxious to make his name. (Isaiah Berlin described him at the time as ‘an irresistible
missile’.) He later renounced his major arguments, but it didn’t matter: the book has sold over a million copies, and never gone out of print.

I was persuaded by Ayer for a time, at much the same age at which he had written and published his book. He seemed so daring, so assured, and so difficult to follow, that he must have been
right. But rereading it after many years, the book feels facile and dated, and it’s easy to see how it engendered the parodies in both
Beyond the Fringe
and
Monty Python
.