Outside of a Dog (27 page)

In 1984 the AIDS virus was first diagnosed, and within two years even the Thatcher government was aware of the catastrophic potential of the new disease. Newspaper and television commercials
reminded us all to practise safe sex, use condoms, and warned more or less obliquely of the particular dangers associated with anal intercourse, which was assumed to be an exclusively gay activity.
An embarrassed heterosexual population turned its head discreetly aside, only to be forced back to full attention by an apparently correlative pandemic of child abuse.

The first cases – loads of them, an astonishing number – were ‘diagnosed’ in Middlesbrough, where two local GPs convinced the local hospital that they needed to be
allowed to examine large numbers of children, even babies, for signs of sexual abuse. Their diagnostic procedure consisted of an ‘anal dilation test’, in which the poor, humiliated
children had their buttocks spread by the doctor. If the anus remained open this was taken to be unimpeachable ‘evidence’ of sexual abuse. Hundreds of screaming children were taken away
from their protesting, horrified, and helpless parents – eighteen over one weekend – and placed in care. Frequently their siblings were removed as well, ‘for their own
protection’. The media carried daily reports of cults of ‘satanic abuse’ of children who, when recovered from their devilish tormentors, frequently could not pass their dilation
tests. England had, of a sudden, become a country of unrestrained paedophile buggers, whose apparently unchecked activities were threatening the health of the nation, and fascinating its public. I
don’t know if the Chinese have such a thing, but surely 1986 was the Year of the Anus.

It was wicked, stupid, unfounded and unfathomable, this medical and social hysteria, and there was scant empirical evidence for the test on which the doctors placed such confidence. It called to
mind a similar decade of hysteria, in the 1890s, when Breuer and Freud reported widespread sexual abuse of children based on their ‘seduction theory’, which relied on the accounts many
adults gave, while in therapy, of their sexual abuse at the hands of fathers, uncles, doctors, nursemaids. But Freud, when required to posit an unlikely number of incestuous attacks on children,
was less gullible than the doctors some hundred years later. It simply couldn’t be; what he was observing in his patients, he decided, was not the memory of an abuse, but a wish that such
abuse might have taken place. It was, if anything, an even more shocking line of thought.

One thing leads to another, thoughts coalesce in unexpected ways, and these thoughts and images were percolating away in my unconscious. It became clear to me, of a sudden, that only writing a
novel could calm me inwardly, purging my unhappiness on to the page. Purgation, catharsis. It’s peculiar, isn’t it, how the processes have their twin meanings? My dictionary allows the
following for
catharsis
:

Remember what happens when you go into psychoanalysis: the lying down, the figure probing insistently behind you, the repressed material, the blockage and release, the feelings of shame.
That’s more or less it, isn’t it? But it always had, for me, a shadow, or something shadowy, unsaid or unacknowledged, something
absent
in the Lacanian sense. This sense of the
unconscious underpinning of our experience is, of course, the stuff of classical Freudianism: a child is being beaten, a primal scene enacted. Our adult lives are shadowed by the potency of
unremembered childhood fantasy and desire. There is such a shadow here too, in the relationship between analyst and analysand: an underlying metaphor that Freud, curiously, never acknowledges.
Because the operating analogy is not with the extraction of a tooth, but with the giving of an enema.

Feelings are repressed, and become impacted when they cannot be released. The process is like constipation (from which Freud suffered for his entire life). The internal material festers, becomes
painful, and threatens the health of the entire organism. When this happened to Viennese children in the 1890s they were regularly given an enema to re-establish regularity. One can imagine the
resistance with which it was received, the discomfort, the sense of violation which may have been accompanied (as Freud observed) by pleasure.

Germans sometimes use the term
Bescherung
, which means bestowal, to refer to a child’s bowel movements. The gift is frequently understood to be a form of gold – my grandmother
would look in my sister’s diaper, grateful that her bowels had emptied, and murmur
gelt –
and the association is enshrined in German folktales in a character who actually shat
gold coins. If toilet-training becomes prolonged the child may fixate at this stage, and we get the development of that obstinate, anally retentive type who withholds faeces, and in adult life
finds it impossible to give emotionally, is both literally and metaphorically miserly: the association is explicitly made by Freud’s early disciple, Sandor Ferenczi: ‘Money is nothing
other than odourless, dehydrated filth, that has been made to shine.’

Money is shit, shit is money? The identification of the two leads to curious conclusions, for if our excreta is actually a gift of gold, why should it be given away? Each time the child takes to
the toilet he is a loser, under the coercion of toilet-training. The parent becomes a sort of lavatorial highwayman:
Sit down and deliver!
is the demand, and punishment is threatened for the
insufficiently generous.

Freud acknowledged that analysis ends when the money runs out. So the demand of the analyst – keep producing! give! – recapitulates those ancient demands of the parents to the
costive infant. The analyst demands:
Lie down and deliver!
This may sound perilous, but it is also central to psychoanalytic procedure. The analyst inherits the crucial roles in the
patient’s life, and is emotionally regarded as if he were a parent: resented and loved. The possible result of this transference of feeling is that unresolved infantile dramas may be
re-enacted, and resolved, in the therapeutic setting. For Freud this applied, crucially, to re-enactments of the Oedipal drama, but little attention has been given to the ways in which
psychoanalysis re-enacts the battle of the chamber pot.

I wrote my novel
Bottom’s Dream
in an attempt to find some dramatic form for these new ideas, unlikely as this may sound. If the plot sounds unpromising, the result was even worse,
and confirmed what I had always suspected, that I am no novelist, nor was meant to be. (I don’t much mind: if something is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.) My characters lacked depth,
and spoke in the same voice, the descriptions of faces, rooms, food, trees, skies, lacked texture, detail, colour, particularity. There were too many overheated conversations, everything was
pitched at the same intensity, climax followed climax, as in a pornographic novel. Nothing came alive, nothing was adequately envisioned, nothing except the ideas.

My novel was intended, I proclaimed proudly, to do for the anus what
Moby Dick
had done for the whale. I offered to send the draft to various literary friends: to Graham Greene, William
Golding, Faber director Charles Monteith, Salman Rushdie. Funnily enough, they didn’t seem very interested, though D.M. Thomas (perhaps predictably) liked it, and was encouraging. But when I
sent the text to a Professor of Freudian Studies at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, I was gratified to hear that he regarded my line of thought as both true and original, if a
little peculiar, and he urged me to publish it in some form or other.

Instead, I took the manuscript and put it in a drawer, and haven’t looked at it since. What would be the point? It had served its purpose, allowed the release of some feeling: it was
cathartic, and now it’s embarrassing. Anyway, it seemed to me unlikely even then, and inconceivable now, that someone hasn’t made the same points, more carefully and thoroughly than I
had, or wished to.

No, what
Bottom’s Dream
did for me was to signal the end, not of my belief in psychoanalytic concepts and apparatus, but of my reflexive turning to therapy when in personal trouble.
The problem is that therapy privileges feeling without testing it. Feelings are treacherous things, and we are as likely to be misguided by what we feel as creatively informed by it. Nor does
therapy sufficiently assess or value how we behave, partly, of course, because your average analysand is likely to offer a deeply sympathetic account of their own behaviour, and to suppress
critical reactions to it.

But we are frequently the worst judges of how we act, what we feel, and how we need to change. If you want to learn about such things – about what you are
really
like – you
will do better by consulting your spouse, children, colleagues and friends, in a spirit of curiosity and humility. Psychotherapy, like mumps, is something you should have when young, get over, and
remain immune to for the rest of your life. A lifetime addiction to it – like some compulsive fixation on internal cleansing – is obsessional, narcissistic and counterproductive.
Otherwise, psychoanalysis may become the illness from which you need to be cured.

Ruthie and I certainly wanted to rid our lives of therapy, sitting quietly upstairs as one nut followed another for their sessions with mom. It wasn’t fair: the TV was in the downstairs
den, next to the Nutcracker Suite. What were we supposed to do for three hours, homework? It was time, we agreed, to make a point. Resistance, that was what she called it, didn’t she? Now we
were
the Resistance. There was no sense denying our hostility. We hated being stifled like this, keeping our feelings in. It’s not healthy, it’s infantile. Better to do some
acting out.

When the last nut left, at ten o’clock, we watched the lights disappear as he drove away, and listened for mom coming out of the Suite. We turned out all the lights in the upper part of
the house, which meant that she would have to come upstairs in the dark before she could locate a light switch. A door closed, she walked over to the stairs, and stopped.

‘Ricky? Ruthie?’

We didn’t say anything. Ruthie hid behind the sofa, and I secreted myself behind a kitchen door – the two avenues towards the light switch.

‘Ricky! Ruthie! You’d better not!’

This was how our game began, and she loved to play, especially when she wasn’t the victim. Lights out, victim terrified, hidden person jumps out and yells: ‘BOO!’ Now we had
her where we wanted her, helpless, tip-toeing up the stairs in the hope that we might have gone to bed.

Timing is everything in the BOO game. If you get it wrong your victim is not unlikely to fall back down the stairs and die, and that would be hostile even for us. You have to wait until you hear
at least three steps from the top of the stairs, and then strike.

One-two-three.

‘Ricky? Ruthie? I’m scared!’ But she was already starting to giggle, because BOO! – which she had, after all, invented – released something childlike and zany in
her that all of us cherished. She started turning round in circles, trying to see by the pale light that came from the lamp posts through the living room window.

‘No, no, no, don’t! I’m scared!’ Her laughter became a shriek, as Ruthie screamed the first BOO!

‘NO! NO!’

BOOS are best delivered in pairs, and I got mine in with impeccable timing. Mom rushed past the light switch and out through the kitchen door, hysterical, on to the front lawn.

It was dark there too. We stalked her from opposite ends of the garden, stealthily, giggling just enough to add to her terror. Lights came on in the neighbour’s kitchen, which overlooked
our garden, but we were too entranced with our hunting ritual to care if we were observed. Mom was laughing helplessly now, turning round and round in circles on her tiptoes, clenching her thighs
together.

‘I’m wetting!’ she cried, ‘I’m wetting!’

Perfect. That meant we’d won, and we relented gracefully, ushered her back to the house, and made hot chocolate while she went upstairs to shower and change. She came back down a few
minutes later, in a terry towelling robe, her hair wet, glowing.

‘You really got me!’ she said.

16

I issued my first catalogue as a rare book dealer in the autumn of 1982, while still teaching at Warwick. In those days individual catalogues had names, to serve as shorthand
for telegraphic orders. My first was called
Barbara
. I got a telegram after I sent it out, from a delighted potential customer (who didn’t buy anything) proclaiming ‘Barbara is
Beautiful!’ a response grudgingly shared in the rare book trade. (Along with: ‘who the Hell does this guy think he is?’) The catalogue was printed on glossy paper, with
illustrations, which was uncommon at the time. I thought it rather grand. But by the time it was issued, though, I’d learned that
Barbara
was actually a bit of a tart. When my printer
handed over the first copy, he looked at it fondly if not admiringly. ‘Not bad,’ he said, ‘cheap and cheerful.’

I wished my father, who had died two years earlier, had been there to see it. He would have been so proud. On my visits home over the last few years of his life, he’d become fascinated by
my new vocation as a book scout, and would sit in his Eames chair, put his record of
The Magic Flute
on his new Danish teak modern hi-fi, and quiz me on points, issues and values of first
editions. He was uncommonly engaged with this my incarnation, possibly because it was the first time I had deviated from the directions he’d laid down. No one in the family had ever been good
at business, and my combination of literary and financial acumen fascinated him. I would come home from New York after a day scouting for rare books, with a few hundred dollars profit in my pocket,
and we would both be lost in admiration. We contemplated setting up a business together: Son and Gekoski, Rare Books.