Outside of a Dog (3 page)

In addition to her regular mood swings, she suffered severe pre-menstrual tension, and could fill the house – indeed, fill the entire neighbourhood – with a bleak and dangerous
friability. (To this day I am convinced that I caused it and, indeed, that I am still the cause of
all
pre-menstrual tension.) The lesson was learned painfully early, and continued to inform
my sense of women thereafter: when they are more than usually difficult, it is prudent to hide in an upstairs closet. There was nothing more delightful than connection to such a woman, and nothing
more dangerous.

One day she disappeared. She’d become rather large, and there was apparently a baby in her tummy, though that seemed preposterous to me. Just like a woman, just like a Mayzie, to fly off
and leave you on some obscure mission, and then come back with an adored stranger in her arms. When the week-old Ruthie arrived home, a gigantic vase of orange gladioli appeared on the table in the
hall, which is one of my earliest visual memories. I was apparently supposed to be excited by this gratuitous addition to the family, but spent my time in my room twisting coat hangers (I
couldn’t find any way to attach screws or nails to them) making a ‘baby swatter’. My father came up to examine it: ‘Quite a good baby swatter. Shall we put it away?
I’ll read to you, if you want.’

Connection to a man that you could count on one hundred per cent. If Hortons are – let us admit it squarely – perhaps a little unexciting in their placidity and steadfastness, they
aren’t just out for a good time, they can be counted on. Not in some paltry way, as you might rely on your accountant: Hortons are mature, reasonable and great suppliers of love and
reading.

But, sadly, you couldn’t just be read to for the rest of your life.
Would you like to learn how to read yourself?
I wasn’t so sure. Being read to was better, surely? Faster,
more comfortable. I could drift off to sleep lapped by language, hardly aware of the last sentences, though my lips still moved with them. And then, right away, it would be morning. Could anything
be better than that?

There was certainly something worse. When you learned to read two unpleasant and frustrating things came together. First of all you didn’t get any more
stories
: no Babar and Queen
Celeste, no little nuns, no Hansel or Gretel, no Dr Dolittle and his gang of animals. Having inhabited this enchanted realm, I was conscious of some going backwards, a regression, a fall. No
stories, no sentences, not even any words. Only the acute sensation of beginning again, puzzling out, the frustration of, say, a native speaker confronted with a foreign tongue.

I began singing and sounding my ABCs, well before they might be assigned the utilitarian task of being made up from sound to word. The first pleasure was simply in mastering the connections, the
sounds, the sequences. As if I were learning to count, because B follows A as surely and satisfyingly as two follows one. I would follow my mother around the apartment for hours, counting to a
hundred, doing it again, then singing my ABCs, incessantly. It drove her crazy.

But when I got my first reading books, a process was initiated which was rather frightening, consisting of repeated experiences of puzzlement, frustration, and resolution.

Three sounds, in a slow order, then a faster one, as they are elided. What do they mean? Reading begins in anxiety. It is up to me to decipher and decide.
Can I do
this?

A dawning recognition, a smile, a great sense of incipient achievement and relief.
I get it! CAT!

And on to the next word, and to the yet more creative and complex process of assembling those words into sentences. I am in my pyjamas, sitting on the edge of the bed. It’s night-time, the
lamp is on, and the milk and Oreo cookies are on my bedside table. I sit on a lap, cuddle and squirm into some mutual organic rhythm, reach out and tentatively touch each letter, secure in the
warmth and visceral encouragement of being held. My father smells better than my mother: a cigarette, closets and stuffed teddy smell; mom smells sharper, sometimes she almost stings my nose, with
a smell mixed up of metal, marigolds and the wolf enclosure at the zoo.

We’d sound out the words together. The reiterated moments of triumph as one overcomes those spurts of anxiety and learns to read is forever associated, I suspect, with warmth, proximity
and physical comfort. People like me, who are compulsive lifetime readers, are unconsciously prompted as we turn the page by memories of this Edenic collaboration, in which the book ultimately
replaces the breast or bottle. (Goethe says, ‘in all things we learn only from those we love.’)

It was particularly hard when, at the same time, often in the same session, my own halting reading of some banal book or other might be interrupted and replaced, before going to sleep, with a
chapter from, say,
Dr Dolittle
. Dr Dolittle! That was terrific, even with its paucity of elephants. And
Jack and Jill
? Junk. The lesson of this was obvious, and – learned early
– has been a tenet for most of my adult life: never do for yourself what others can do better for you.

It was the same with writing, for learning to read is also learning to write: why bother? Other people were much better at it than me. Let them write and me listen or, if I had to, read. For my
earliest efforts at writing were even less interesting than the
Jack and Jill
books on which I painstakingly learned to read. I wrote my first book at the age of six. It consisted of a few
sheets of scrappy paper, cut clumsily with scissors into pieces, chunks really, about two inches square, and stapled together. It bore its title in crayon on the front page:
A Friend for
Mickey
. The text followed on the next four pages, also inscribed in crayon. It read: ‘Once upon a time a boy went wakking down the street to see his friend his friend was a good
friend.’

It was probably the product of a task set on a difficult day, buying my mother a few moments’ respite from my relentless counting and general fidgetiness. There is something rushed and
uncommitted about my fulfilment of the assignment, characteristics that are an abiding part of my nature. But my mother, nonetheless, was sufficiently proud of my little book that it became the
foundation document of her Old Age Box. It rather surprised me, rediscovering
Mickey
after she died in 1974, to find myself embarrassed by this palpable reminder of my early lack of anything
approaching high intelligence or, at the very least, some small creative spark.

Neither of the above. There was nothing
promising
in
A Friend for Mickey
. If it vaguely echoes – as I later imagined – the opening paragraph about Baby Tuckoo and his
friend the moocow of Joyce’s
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
, it can only be at the most fundamental archetypal level: an isolated child, the voyage down the road, the search
for a boon companion. No, if books were to be a part of my life it was likely that somebody else was going to have to write them.

But once I had read, indeed memorized, the available Dr Seuss books, it wasn’t entirely clear what to read next.
Nothing
was as good as them. My parents cast about for tempting
material, but their frustration reflected something about the culture in which they found themselves: the choices were limited. There were the Babar books, but he (King of the Elephants!), his
Queen Celeste and their children Pom, Flora and Alexander were rather inferior elephants compared to Horton. They didn’t hatch a single egg between them. A series of deliciously illustrated
books about Madeline and some nuns interested me for a time, but the texts were dull compared to Dr Seuss, and Madeline was too small and inexplicably fond of lining up in rows. No, children were
better catered for by the comics (the years 1949/1950 alone saw the first strips of
Peanuts, Beetle Bailey, Pogo
and
Dennis the Menace
), and shortly by that captivating new medium,
television, than by the written word.

By the middle of the 1950s the effect of television on reading was becoming evident. We loved
The Howdy Doody Show
, a captivatingly inane programme hosted by a toothy, freckled,
red-haired puppet who had absolutely nothing to say for himself. He didn’t need to. He was
there
. At the age of four Ruthie, a beautiful and silent child who loitered on the edge of
things, partaking rather than participating, was asked, as dessert was being served by our neighbours in the upstairs apartment, if she liked jelly roll?

‘I love him!’ she replied. ‘What channel is he on?’

Within a year we got a TV too, and we spent our time either in front of it, or begging to be in front of it, though there was almost nothing worth watching. But it sure was better than
reading.

In 1955, Rudolf Flesch’s bestselling book
Why Johnny Can’t Read: And What You Can Do About It
caused such national consternation that even
Life
magazine, hardly a
bastion of high literary culture, took up the cause. Its answer? We needed more Seuss books! In 1957, the obliging doctor responded with
The Cat in the Hat
and, sure enough, it sold huge
quantities. Kids know quality when they see it: to this day 25 per cent of American children read a Dr Seuss title as their first book. But Rudolf Flesch missed the real point, because he thought
that American child illiteracy resulted from bad teaching, whereas it is clear in retrospect that the very activity of reading was being superseded. Within a couple of generations, not merely many
children, but their parents too, would admit without shame that they have never read a book.

Even one by Dr Seuss. What a deprivation! His characters are so loveably free and wild, perfect embodiments of the lawlessness and egotism of childhood. His world is always in danger of falling
apart: he is children’s laureate of entropy. Think of the crazy energy of
The Cat in the Hat
, or the infantile omnipotence of
Yertle the Turtle
. It is no surprise to hear that
Dr Seuss (like my mom) didn’t actually like kids, because both knew you couldn’t trust them. Mrs Seuss once admitted that her husband was frightened of children, because he was so
worried what they might do or ask next.

That doesn’t bother me at all. Many of the greatest writers for or about children didn’t like kids much, partly because they understood and respected them so thoroughly, and
anxiously knew what they were capable of: not only Dr Seuss, but Beatrix Potter, Charles M. Schulz, and Lewis Carroll (unless they were half-naked little girls). But from such child-phobic writers
we get many of the abiding images and ideas that shape our sense of ourselves.

I never thought of myself as one of Dr Seuss’s child figures. Though I flew to Horton like that new-born chick, it was the estimable elephant with whom I most identified. His heroism made
me swoon with admiration:
‘he sat and he sat!’
From which, I rather believe, I derive both a lifetime preference for sitting rather than doing, and a tendency to present myself
as bigger and more important than I actually am. Yet I am grateful for my inner Horton, who has otherwise guided me truly and well. Though if I regret anything from our lifetime association it lies
in my apparent need, in unconscious acknowledgement of his internal presence, to emulate his waistline. I try to lose weight – in my time I have lost a Horton-amount of weight – but I
just don’t feel comfortable at an everyday size. It’s better to be big.

2

At the time of writing
A Friend for Mickey
I was, according to Freud, supposed to be entering that phase of psychosexual development that he called the latency period. I
had already failed my Oedipal tests by attaching myself to my father rather than my mother, not to mention identifying with an androgynous elephant-bird, and I didn’t do much better at this
later stage. Latency is supposed to involve the sublimation of the heightened (oral, anal and phallic) sexual awareness of the infant into other interests and activities, until that reawakening
that occurs at puberty.

But it was just the opposite for me. All the polymorphous sexual pleasure and curiosity of the infant continued, thoroughly unsublimated, throughout my later childhood years, in which I could
most frequently be found pants down behind a bush with any available child companion, peering and giggling. At least my parents never had to worry where I was. They’d lure me out, covered
with leaves rather than embarrassment, and suggest I came in to have something to eat, and maybe read a book.

My mother, Ruthie and I spent the summer holidays in Huntington, Long Island, in her parents’ bungalow in Harbor Heights Park, a community of modest dwellings that served as summer
retreats for New Yorkers. The bungalow was a ten-minute walk – you could pick blackberries on the way – from Brown’s Beach, with its unreliable seaweed-stuffed tides, the oily
surface of the water reflecting the sun in brilliant colours. The sand was mucky and unappealing, but there was a small snack bar where you could buy cream soda or root beer, and hotdogs with yummy
green relish gone crusty in the heat. I wasn’t allowed in the water for an hour after my lunch, or I would get cramps and drown. But lots of other kids were allowed in the water right away, I
observed to Granny Pearl, and they didn’t drown. She sniffed – her usual form of disapprobation or rebuttal – looked at her watch, and said, ‘
One hour
!’

The bungalow was entirely without soundproofing, and it was easy to overhear conversations, the everyday intimacies of belching and arguing. There were only two bedrooms. Mom slept on the porch
on a sofa-bed, in which dad would join her when he finally arrived to spend a couple of weeks, while Ruthie and I shared a room and bed next to the kitchen. Its great advantage was that the wall
that separated it from the kitchen terminated – for no obvious reason – some eighteen inches short of the ceiling. If I stood on the bedstead I could just peer over, and see what was
going on. Ruthie was too short, so I sent back reports.