Outside of a Dog (26 page)

I had become, by these new standards, increasingly fusty – even I could see that – and if my chosen domain was indeed an English university, it had been taken over by these Gallified
intruders. I couldn’t even have a coffee (instant) and a cigarette (Benson and Hedges) in the common room without overhearing conversations which I could hardly understand, and which made me
recoil with dislike. It wasn’t very long before I regarded the entire project of ‘reading’ English ‘literature’ as itself under erasure, and before long the major
absence
was me.

I resigned from the Department of English in 1984. It would be inaccurate to claim that I had been pushed aside by the alien hordes; in fact, I’d wanted to leave almost from the very
moment I got there. By the early eighties it had become clear to me, as I rose every morning, that it was becoming increasingly easy to distinguish work from pleasure. Though I still enjoyed a lot
of what I was doing, my next attempt to escape had to be successful, or I would desiccate like a split coconut lying in the sun.

There was nothing there to compel me. Finish my book on Lawrence? It had gone dead some years before. Write another essay on the relations between Philosophy and Literature? I had nothing much
further to say, and had ceased to care. I was only thirty-seven and I would say I’d burned out, if that didn’t imply that there was once a flame. I never had that kind of passion, more
a sort of fizz, and now I’d gone flat.

It was wrong for me. Becoming a university teacher was a bad choice based on insufficient self-knowledge. The life I was choosing wasn’t zappy enough, nor was it ever likely to accommodate
the rackety nervous energy that has always characterized me, nor the subversiveness, nor the need to play. I’d been seduced into going on with my studies by the mere fact that I was good at
them. It is characteristic of the prevailing narcissism of academic life that teachers encourage their brightest students to emulate them, and the students are flattered and wish to follow. Perhaps
this is true in most fields. Don’t patients in therapy want to become analysts?

But the proof of the academic pudding is in the writing. I generally liked teaching, of that certain sort that kept its critical eye strictly on the text. But you can’t go on doing that
forever. The activity that defines the true academic – and that included only a small percentage of my colleagues – is the ongoing passion to do literary research, to write that new
account of Dryden, or to investigate the link between the English and French romantics. You have to do more than want to pursue such topics, you have to need to. And that never made sense to me.
Need
to write a book on D.H. Lawrence? No, I
had
to, because the institution required it.

William James observes that, for a serious thinker, there are two possible imperatives:
Seek Truth!
or
Avoid Error!
As a younger man I had been greatly influenced by truth seekers
– by Blake, Whitman and Ginsburg, say – but I had insufficient self-confidence to write with such freedom. No angels. To be a truth-seeker, the imperative implicitly is
Be Like
Nietzsche!
– in which case you have actually to
be
like him: to have something to say, something new, and urgent. I didn’t, and I don’t. That’s a good lesson to
learn young, it saves you looking a considerable fool.

Avoiding error was the safer trail for me. I remained a sceptic, though not a radical one. I wasn’t a radical anything: you can shed your Ayer without finding your angels. So you play it
safe. Most academics do that: the work they produce is generally worthy, well-researched, competently presented. It makes certain that you, the reader, are aware of the context in which the debate
takes place, and what other people have said about the topic. If most such work is fundamentally uninteresting – even those of my colleagues in the same field as me didn’t read my work,
nor I theirs – it is, at least, not
wrong
.

I suppose there is something likeable and modest in this: ‘
not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.’
So we academic Prufrocks were growing old together, mildly disappointed,
listening to the mermaids singing in the distance, observing and commentating from below, as a crustacean feeds on the droppings of the freer and larger forms of life swimming above, and the angels
wheel in the heavens unobserved.

When I announced my early retirement, a kindly colleague slipped in to my office, closed the door carefully, and whispered, ‘I just want to say I think it is very brave of you, what you
are doing.’

I knew what he meant: I had two young children, and my income as a part-time book dealer was just over £5,000 a year, or roughly a third of my salary as a senior lecturer. I was giving up
the security of a tenured position. It was a risk, leaving. So what? At least it would get me out of an environment in which I felt increasingly crimped, where I had never found my own voice, and
had long ago ceased to be any fun.

‘I must say,’ I replied, ‘that when I think of another thirty years in this department I think it is very brave of you to stay.’

15

On Wednesday nights the nuts came. After dinner, Ruthie and I had to promise to keep out of the way and to lower our voices. No clomping up and down the stairs – it was a
noisy, open-plan ‘split-level’ house, ill-designed and badly built – and it was essential, mom said, that her clients felt comfortable coming to their sessions. She had set up her
therapy room (which Ruthie called the Nutcracker Suite) on the ground floor, and left the garage door open so that there was private, if insalubrious, access at that level. We were fascinated, and
would peer through a cunningly constructed gap in the venetian blinds in the living room above, to see which ‘nut’ was arriving. I’m sure they must have seen us, but mom never
knew. She would have regarded our behaviour as an example of ‘hostility’, which was one of her favourite terms. Apparently there was a lot of it about, like teenage drunkenness.

We didn’t realize it, of course, but Ruthie and I grew up in a Freudian household. We’d been bottle-fed and toilet-trained according to the precepts of Dr Spock, began our education
at a progressive school, and constantly encountered in our daily lives the vocabulary and conceptual apparatus of the committed Freudian. When we didn’t want to do what we were told, Mom
called it ‘resistance’, and if we argued that was called ‘denial’. If you denied denial, now that was ‘hostile’, and required both an apology and an
interpretation. But to get fully interpreted you had to be ‘open’, and we remained resolutely closed. That was ‘infantile’ of us, even if we were children.

We were frequently told what we
really
wanted and
really
meant. What we thought we felt was often interpreted as projection or displacement, and was either felt by, or towards,
someone else. Our mistakes and forgetfulness were greeted with raised eyebrows, and our slips of the tongue revealed, apparently, repressed truths and wishes. When I was thirteen, my mother
accompanied me on my yearly check-up at the optician. He explained the mechanics of my growing short-sightedness, which had led to the recent humiliation of having to wear glasses. I made up for my
disability by demonstrating my knowledge of the physiology of the eye.

‘Does this myopia indicate,’ I asked, ‘some malfunction of the rectum?’

There was a long pause.

‘Do you mean the retina?’ asked the bemused doctor.

My mother peered at me intently, and avoided the optician’s glance. I was lucky she didn’t make me an appointment with a therapist, or a proctologist. We hurried home in the car,
silently, both of us embarrassed by whatever it was I had revealed about myself, after which she disappeared upstairs for a time, presumably to consult her psychoanalytic library. I’d skimmed
through much of it myself, but Freud’s books – of which there were many – were a relatively poor source of stimulating material. He was, obviously enough, obsessed by sex, but not
in a way that generated a reciprocal excitement. I looked, particularly, at
The Interpretation of Dreams
– having had some pretty hot ones myself – but didn’t learn a lot
from it.

Though
The Interpretation of Dreams
was to become one of the defining books not merely of my own life, but of all of our lives, I am not sure I have ever read it, as in read it through
from cover to cover. There is a lot in it that is pedestrian, repetitive and boring. I have consulted it, quoted it, referred to it, admired it. My experience is not, I suspect, uncommon. Kant and
Hegel are misunderstood only after a proper reading of their works, whereas Freud has penetrated the common realm so comprehensively that it might be regarded as a sign of pedantry to have to read
him. His terminology penetrates our common discourse, his central concepts – neurosis, the unconscious, id, ego and superego, the processes of repression, displacement and projection, the
Oedipus complex, penis envy and castration anxiety – are confidently, if inaccurately, deployed by a public who can instantly interpret the ‘Freudian’ implications of anything
from one banana to two peaches. And if it is now common to deplore the results of Freud’s speculations – the narcissism, permissiveness and promiscuity that are alleged to be his legacy
– it is impossible not to see the world through Freudian lenses: seamlessly relating childhood to adulthood, motivation to behaviour, the intended or manifest to the symbolic or latent.

Freud’s work provides the model for introspection in the twentieth century, in which the implications of the child being father to the man have been the focus of the inward journey. Freud
was a remarkable observer of infantile experience, and recaptures the child’s experience of the world, from the first relations to the breast, through the growing awareness of selfhood and of
the body, the struggle for bowel control and growing sensual awareness, to the rise of Oedipal feeling, and subsequent sexual awakening: the maelstrom of feeling that every child experiences, and
which is our common heritage.
The Interpretation of Dreams
is the first stage of Freud’s personal exploration of these themes, and of himself. The book is not, as claimed, a scientific
treatise, nor is it a handbook to dream interpretation. It is Freud’s autobiography, and it provides a template for one’s own.

Self-analysis convinced Freud of the importance of dreams as the ‘royal road’ to the unconscious: it was through the interpretation of his own dreams that he recovered in himself
that distressing matrix of hostility and desire towards his father and mother that was later to be termed the Oedipus complex. Audaciously, he decided that this apparently idiosyncratic disposition
must represent a universal human tendency, that what he found in himself must be found in others: an intellectual procedure equally characteristic of brilliant people and of very stupid ones.

My formal immersion in Freud’s work, while initiated at school by Miss Wyeth, accelerated, under the pressure of necessity, at Oxford. Barbara had nabbed Oxford’s only Freudian
therapist as her daily companion, confessor (he was, nicely, an ex-cleric) and consolation. It was relentless, this systematic and all-encompassing reflection, and it was no time before I wanted
‘to get help’ in my mom’s phrase, of my own.

I think I was lucky in finding a Jungian, not because I was much interested in Jung, but because he was not a Freudian. Jung was obsessed by archetypes – the various manifestations of
anima and animus, or the wise old man – in which I was uninterested, and none of which I managed to locate in myself. But I still preferred his view of the world, with its insistence on the
creative
powers of the unconscious, the use of active imagination, and the individuation process, to the grinding specificity and obsession with sex of the Freudian. Which is odd, given how
obsessed I was by sex, and how fond I was of talking about it. But I would have found psychoanalysis too slow, too invasive, and thoroughly embarrassing.

The Freudian process goes like this: you lie down on a couch, while the therapist sits behind you and out of sight. He initiates a process designed to allow expression of repressed material.
This is difficult, and the patient frequently feels blocked. The therapist subtly probes, encouraging the material to emerge. Freud likened the patient’s resistance to this process to fears
of an extraction at the dentist. So too a psychoanalytic patient may ‘put up a struggle’ against the invasive insistence of the analyst. But though the ongoing process is embarrassing
and shaming, it is also accompanied by feelings of release, which led Freud’s close associate Josef Breuer to call it the ‘cathartic method’.

Barbara did this every day, while I went and individuated once a week. The rest of the time we read and talked, informing ourselves of the theory behind the practice. We shared the contents of
our sessions, interpreted each other’s dreams and fantasies – which therapists
really
don’t encourage – and lived in an overheated attempt at making the unconscious
conscious that dwarfed our other activities entirely. We didn’t see any of this, any more than the orchids see the hothouse in which they are growing. And there were benefits. We were not so
much exploring as creating new worlds in ourselves and for each other, redescribing what we had been, what we were, and what we might hope to become. We’d tuck ourselves up on the sofa and
the beige donkey-cord scoop chair that Freddie and Catherine had given us for our wedding, put on the Incredible String Band LP, drink copious quantities of Earl Grey tea or brew a Cona coffee, and
read and talk far into the night, pausing only to dream and then to talk some more.

It would be quite wrong to describe the following decade as lost, but at the very least it was defined by the routines of teaching, parenting, negotiating the complexities of marriage, and
trying to do the sort of academic research for which I had modest ability and less taste. But following my decision to take (very) early retirement, a number of wholly unexpected factors combined
to re-ignite my interest in Freud. In the preceding few years my major commitment to his works was in trying to acquire them. In those pre-internet days, you actually had to go round the
second-hand bookshops, asking, ‘What Freud (or Jung) do you have in stock?’ It was great fun, and I gradually acquired a full set of the Hogarth Press
Collected Edition
of Freud,
and most of the volumes of the Bollingen
Collected Works of C.G. Jung
.