Outside of a Dog (33 page)

The life changes that accompanied these alterations of name were imperceptible, to me at least. But what happened over the next years was that my voice changed. I do not mean that I acquired my
characteristic mid-Atlantic accent, which often happens to Americans who emigrate to England. In fact, most of my English friends claim that I still sound American after forty years in the UK,
though I am frequently mistaken for English when I visit America.

‘Ah, you’se over from da old country?’ said New York’s Carnegie Delicatessen waitress when I ordered my pastrami sandwich.

‘Excuse me?’ Presumably I must have sounded Polish to her ears?

‘Jolly old England,’ she said, affecting an English accent which made her sound like Joyce Grenfell drowning in the bath.

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Can I have extra pickles? English people like pickles.’ ‘You have a good day,’ she said.

Not
that
voice. The critical change was not in how I sounded, but in what I said, and how I said it. There was nothing conscious about this process, and it was understandable enough. When
we go somewhere new we pick up not merely accents, but different ways of seeing and expressing ourselves. Over the next decade I found myself attempting to express myself more complexly,
delicately, and ironically: to think and talk, that is, as if I were English. Or, more accurately, to take my relatively ill-informed notion of Englishness, and apply it to my own voice. The best
way to illustrate this is to quote to you part of the second paragraph of a book by one R.A. Gekoski, entitled
Joseph Conrad: The Moral World of the Novelist
, which was published in 1978,
and based on my DPhil thesis. He is talking about Conrad’s portrayal of women:

My sister Ruthie, having read this far – we’re still on page 1 – abandoned the book. It was, she said, ‘too intelligent’ for her. But it was, in fact, quite the
reverse, her judgement a symptom of her loveably unflagging belief in my intellectual superiority, and lack of confidence in her own considerable critical abilities.

What the hell does ‘attain to particularity’ mean? It must be important because the term ‘particular’ is used again, almost immediately. (I suspect simple sloppiness
here.) What is the ‘most dramatic form’ that ‘an inner life’ can have? How does that inner life ‘enact’ the universe? I could go on. The prose is immature and
crunchingly academic, and its badness is multi-determined. If language could elicit psychotherapy this might be a good candidate. The obvious problem is the strain: nothing flows, there is no
sense, none whatsoever, of a speaking voice. Its author is trying to appear more intelligent than he is, anxiously injecting a needlessly complex vocabulary to make relatively simple points.
Desperate to impress, himself most of all.

Oh well, perhaps many brightish aspiring academics are like that, writing dissertations, and worrying. The strained tone, though, is characteristic of academics generally, and you can hear it in
more mature (and better) writers than my immature self. It is the tone of people constantly anxious that their colleagues may be smarter than they are.

The second problem with my little paragraph is that it is an ill-conceived, thoroughly inadequate piece of ventriloquism. Ever hear an American – even a good actor – trying to do an
English accent? Embarrassing. That is what is happening in my sentences, and I’m not even a good actor. This is a poor miming of English sensibility, and it rings false.

I am sorry to be so hard on my former self, it feels unpleasant of me: I wouldn’t judge someone else who wrote like that quite so harshly. But it saddens me, and makes me cross, to have
wasted so much energy on so little output. I didn’t write another book for twenty years, because I couldn’t. I started several, particularly the one on D.H. Lawrence that stuttered on
for years. I tried desperately to make headway with it when on sabbatical in 1975 at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, soon after Anna’s birth and my mother’s death. Exhausted,
thoroughly depleted, I went to the library every morning to write, leaving Barbara with a new baby and little in the way of infrastructure, friends or support. I came home every night guiltily
pretending to have done an honest day’s work.

I hardly wrote a single word, and it was unrelenting agony, trying, and failing, and trying again. Norman Mailer describes writer’s block as ‘simply a failure of ego’, which is
right in many ways that I couldn’t recognize at the time. What caused this failure was unknown to me, and I attributed it to some internal force that didn’t want me to succeed,
to
make a name for myself
. The career of one R.A. Gekoski, DPhil and university lecturer, seemed to be going nowhere. I worried if I would ever get promoted, though I did, in 1981, when I became a
senior lecturer. Then I worried that the promotion had been premature and unwarranted. I was certain I would never become a professor. Not that I liked professors very much, most of them were even
more pompous and defensive – and competitive – than I was. Presumably you grow into the job.

It took me another ten years to realize – I am a slow developer – that my academic inability to write, this ‘writer’s block’ as I described it, was in fact a
creative method in which my unconscious was desperately trying to tell me something. The message was simple
: I do not like or recognize this ‘R.A. Gekoski’: he is not pursuing ends
that are good for him, he is inauthentic and his efforts are those of an unhappy person manifesting his unhap
piness. His tones are strangulated, pompous and unreal, a pretend voice and not a
real one. I won’t let him write like this, not without a fight. Every word he tries to write I will resist every letter of the way
. And that is how it felt. I didn’t have
writer’s block, I had identity block.

Now read this, published twenty years later, by one Rick Gekoski in a book titled
Staying Up: A Fan Behind the Scenes in the Premiership
.

The difference between this and my Conrad paragraph is not attributable to the fact that the first is academic, and the second popular: this is not an example of a high-minded person slumming it
‘on the other side of the barrier’. The new prose is, if you will, the result of my former projects of writing more freely, and becoming less intelligent. Its author is clearly having
fun, expressing himself simply, and if showing off, he is not doing so by trying to be cleverer than he is, just more important. It sounds, I have been told, as if I were simply talking, and the
reader listening. That was the idea anyway.

I had talked the chairman of my beloved Coventry City Football Club, Bryan Richardson, into letting me write a behind-the-scenes book about the 1997–8 Premier League football season. I had
no idea what to expect, but the idea of hanging out with manager Gordon Strachan and his team was thrillingly beguiling. I was given open access to the chairman, the team’s administrative
officers, and all of those on the management and playing side. It was my brief to write an account of what a football season is
really
like, not to talk about myself. Most sports books are
written as ‘fly on the wall’ accounts, and make little reference to the writer’s own experience, much less to his feelings. What readers are interested in, after all, is what the
chairman does and Gordon Strachan has to say, what centre forward Dion Dublin is like once you get to know him.

This assumes a modest narrative presence: the fly must be invisible on the wall, which is appropriate, because that is how sports people treat not merely journalists but almost everyone else as
well. I found this more than a little disconcerting. Players turned their backs on me, Strachan ‘forgot’ appointments, I was kept waiting for hours in offices, dugouts, practice grounds
and stadia. Nobody gave a damn if it bothered me. I not only had no rights, I had no self.

‘That’s how we treat newcomers,’ centre back Gary Breen confided to me, ‘even when a new player joins the team it takes us a long time to let him in. We go all shy, like
a herd of animals.’

I was not used to this, as an experienced journalist would be, and found it impossible to put aside my feelings of hurt, thwarted friendliness and anger. Talking and being talked to is how I
make my living, it’s what I like and need, and all of a sudden my normal resources failed. My curiosity met with indifference, attempts to charm were shrugged or laughed off, the merest
request for simple attention was ignored. It was no fun at all, and the only solace was that I could, at least, write about the process.
Staying Up
thus became a kind of travel book, about a
visit to a remote foreign land. The traveller doesn’t know the customs or the language, he looks different, and is regarded with suspicion. He learns to speak slowly and quietly, if at all,
and to move about unobtrusively. The natives warily keep him at a distance, and only slowly accommodate themselves to his ways, as he to theirs. It’s a difficult process, and takes patience.
It reminded me of my first days at Oxford.

And so I became, if not the hero certainly the protagonist. When you write you are inevitably describing yourself as well as your object (even in academic writing, as my Conrad paragraph
demonstrates).
Staying Up
had to be in my
personal
voice because it was about trying to find and to employ that voice in a familiar but suddenly alien setting: the voice that could be
heard on the terraces, and in my conversations about football, not about literature.

Most of these talks were with Bertie, then aged seventeen, who was my fellow traveller during the season, and frequently my guide. He had developed from the self-proclaimed ‘simple
boy’ of seven into a remarkably genial, intelligent and artistic, highly rational young man. The only member of our family who could keep his head in a crisis, he tried to avoid disputes, but
once in them had a remarkable knack for finding a resolution. In the continuing discord that was frequently our family life, I often tried to react as I thought he might, and often failed.

He took the opposite course to his sister’s: if she was fated to plumb the abysmal waters, he was determinedly staying up on the surface of things. His choice of career – he was to
read advertising and marketing at university, and later founded his own modelling agency – was inevitable and appropriate for someone who wanted to fill his head with positive images. Anna,
he felt, looked into things too deeply and suffered for it, though he rather envied her, while she admired his capacity to protect himself from the darkness. If her fantasy was to skim happily
across the surface of things in her magical shoes, he admits to a desire to become an underwater videographer.

His level-headed amusement at my floundering about became one of the book’s topics, and supplied a measured response to my own amalgam of frustration and over-excitement. He was allowed
much of the freedom of access that was offered to me, but had it in better perspective. He quite enjoyed standing next to the pitch while the players warmed up before a game – I
loved
it – but quickly (and rightly) got bored.

‘Why are we here, dad?’ he asked. ‘What good is it doing us?’

I was shocked.

‘Look around you!’ I said. ‘See all the people in the stands? Any of them down here? We’re here because we’re allowed to be here, and they’re not.’

He shook his head in mock pity, and headed back to the stands to read his programme, disregarding my shout that he had no soul.

I had better conversations with other City fans, more envious than Bertie of my new status, and anxious to be told what was going on. If I’d cravenly lost my confidence in the presence of
Strachan and the players, I found myself treating the other supporters as if I were one of the elect converting the heathens. The only consolation I could offer myself for this shameful bit of
psychic inflation was that what had happened to me was both interesting and right. It would happen to any fan allowed so extensively behind the scenes. The best part is not being there, but talking
about it to people who wish they were.

I thus became a representative figure, living out the universal fantasy of sports fans. My desire to know was theirs, my privileged access to the inside story an instance of what they all
yearned for. On the train up to one of the games, a Coventry City supporter had enjoined me, earnestly: ‘Be careful! You’re living this experience for all of us, and you’re
writing for us all!’ He was identifying himself, then, as the ideal reader that every writer has in mind, however subliminally, as he writes. To whom is the story directed? Whose praise would
mean the most?

After
Staying Up
was published, two responses stood out, and gave me the most satisfaction. The first was from the redoubtable poet and critic Ian Hamilton (himself the author of
Gazza
Agonistes
, and a Spurs supporter) reviewing the book in the
Sunday Telegraph
.
Staying Up
, he wrote, actually told us things about football we hadn’t known, ‘was richly
comic’, and ‘the year’s best soccer book by far’.