Outside of a Dog (6 page)

I was regarded as bright, but like Mr Cooke’s hero, I was not an ‘A-student’, which allowed my teachers enthusiastically to describe me as an ‘under-achiever’. I
was nevertheless put in the top stream (called ‘XX’, as if a coded form of obscenity), which had the happy effect of giving one a bonus at the end of the year, whereby a ‘C’
would count as a ‘B’ in one’s grade-point average. Riding the back of this benefit, I finally managed an exact 3.0 average (straight B) which just allowed me to slip into the top
10 per cent of my graduating class. My transcript, if you looked at it even without this enhancement, was undistinguished. My grades in English classes were particularly disappointing.

The teaching was enthusiastic and competent, but the set texts were unstimulating. There were the thumping rhythms of Vachel Lindsay’s
The Congo: A Study of the Negro Race
:

which even I, in the ninety-nine per cent white Huntington High School, could tell was total tosh. Then there was some pappy stuff from Stephen Vincent Benét, and
lashings of homespun wisdom from Robert Frost, who liked choosing between different tracks in the woods, or building walls, and then making a fuss about it.

But XX English with Miss Wyeth, in my senior year, was a different kettle of literary fish. Relentlessly high-minded in the way bright and frustrated high school teachers can be, Miss Wyeth had
composed a year-long crash course in Western Literature and Philosophy, beginning with Homer, through Plato, Aristotle and the Greek tragedians, and ending, via a commodious vicus of recirculation,
with
Finnegans Wake
. Miss Wyeth was a moony fan of my father’s (who was president of the local Arts Council) and had decided that I should be the star of her show. She would pick me up
from the back of class, where I sat slouched over my desk doing the
New York Times
crossword, to ask the most trenchant questions.

‘And what do you think, Rick, of the quality of this translation by Dudley Fitts?’ (This to a class illiterate in Greek, having read no other translations, and based simply on a
sheet outlining a few possible alternatives for the Greek phrase in question.)

‘It seems to me admirably to exemplify the old phrase . . .’ Miss Wyeth gave me an anticipatory glare. ‘. . . if the Dudley Fitts, wear it.’

‘Out!’ she said, pointing to the door.

I knew the way to the principal’s office by then: word of mouth had led me there frequently enough. He looked up wearily as I entered.

‘What is it this time?’

‘Well, sir,’ I said, as contritely as possible, ‘I insulted Dudley Fitts in Miss Wyeth’s class.’

The principal was no classicist.

‘What did you say to him?’

‘I was teasing him about his name, sir.’

‘Well,’ he said firmly, ‘I want you to go back to class immediately and apologize to Dudley. You know our Honour Code requires courtesy between students!’

‘I’ll be extremely happy to do that, sir.’

Retelling the story over dinner, I thought my dad would rather admire my wit, though he was getting tired of coming to school to apologize for my behaviour, which I was generally unwilling to do
on my own behalf.

‘She had it coming,’ I would say steadfastly, though I felt a little guilty. Miss Wyeth wasn’t a moron or a phoney, like many of the other teachers. This unpleasant dismissive
language I had learned from my contemporary, a seventeen-year-old named Holden Caulfield, who was one of my closest confidants. You will remember him as the hero and narrator of J.D.
Salinger’s
The Catcher in the Rye
, which was much my favourite book at the time.

Holden is a drop-out from a series of posh prep schools, but unlike me was no smart-aleck. Unfailingly polite, and inclined in public to take the blame for his many academic shortcomings –
he too only liked English – Holden is internally scathingly dismissive of almost everyone who has taught him. He is a veritable walking crap detector, unfailingly sensitive to every
cliché, insincerity, and bit of educational jargon. Counselled by yet another of his disappointed English teachers ‘to learn how to play the game’, Holden isn’t buying:
‘Game, my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it’s a game all right – I’ll admit that, but if you get on the
other
side, where
there aren’t any hot-shots, then what’s a game about it? Nothing. No game.’

I, too, was on the other side, wherever that was. Holden and I, we were in opposition, unreceptive to second-hand wisdom, unwilling to take counsel from self-appointed betters. I took
Holden’s example literally, mistook intensity for fairness of feeling. Teenagers do this, though it is a sign of retarded development in adults.

But there were two things I failed to learn from him. First, was how to keep my mouth shut, though that didn’t matter much. But second, and significantly, was how to fail. Holden will not
do what he doesn’t believe in, study what doesn’t interest him, take advice where it doesn’t resonate with what he needs. If this means that he drops out of one school after
another, he feels no shame. His father, kid sister Phoebe says, will ‘kill’ him for his latest failure, but he fails nonetheless. There is some integrity in this: the more good-willed
educators praise the value of what he is being offered, the more he rejects it. In his inchoate way he knows that it is a characteristic of narcissistic forms of life that they generate lashings of
self-praise. Phoneys, this is what Holden means by phoniness. But what is
not
phoney? He doesn’t know yet, save for the clear knowledge that
he
isn’t. And his
unwillingness to play the proffered game confirms something intransigent and authentic in him.

The psychotherapist Alice Miller observes that for children who are being pressured by ambitious parents, failure may be the only way to assert independence: ‘it may come about that
something inside refuses to produce good grades. They are unwilling to take part in a cover-up of a lack of love, and they use their bad grades to protest hypocrisy and to defend the
truth.’

Holden chooses to fail, and it provokes no anxiety in him, though he has some (admittedly mild) regret at the distress it causes others. He doesn’t fear failure, he does it, chooses it.
Failure is a confirmation of his integrity.

But Holden Caulfield was in a situation radically different from my own. We may both have been surly high school kids, but Holden had adequate reason for his disaffection, what Eliot calls an
‘objective correlative’. He is profoundly and admittedly depressed, his only attachments being to his younger sister Phoebe, and to the memory of Allie, his adored kid brother who died
when Holden was thirteen. The day that Allie died, Holden broke his hand smashing windows in the garage. Three years later his hand still hurts, and he is still angry, but the anger has twisted and
turned inward. At the end of the book Holden is an in-patient in a psychiatric institution, and has written this account of himself as a kind of therapeutic self-explanation.

He is grieving, still. What had I experienced that I should have found his situation so sympathetic? If I had a sense of loss it was only obscurely: a product of a child-centred environment, I
had fallen from an egocentric state of innocence into a world that expected
me
to centre on
it
. Yet if my reasons for grief, if you can call it that, bore little comparison to those
of Holden Caulfield, they certainly produced similar symptoms.

Catcher
is a protracted moan, but what Holden really needs to do is to howl. His sense of loss – so unlike my own – is sympathetic, conscious and overwhelming. He is filled
with numb rage and unshed tears. No one seems to have helped him properly: in the course of the narrative not one of his many well-wishing adults, no teacher, no parent, no friend, sees fit to
mention Allie’s death. (Only Phoebe does that.) Holden needed better, wiser, more psychologically and culturally radical counsel.

Perhaps he needed Allen Ginsberg? Holden couldn’t have read
Howl
(which was published five years after
Catcher in the Rye
) but I was lucky enough, in 1960, to read both
books, and in the right order.
Howl
begins where
Catcher
ends: in a mental hospital, where a tormented and intensely bright inmate is trying and failing to make peace in and with the
world. Though it is often referred to as
Howl
, Ginsberg’s book was originally titled
Howl for Carl Solomon
. A lament for his mad friend, it begins:

and continues:

Who was this stylistic hooligan? I’d never read anything like this before, words stomping about the page without discernible rhythms, much less rhymes, lawless and free. It was strident,
repetitious, shockingly outspoken. (It was also bombastic and not entirely accurate: Carl Solomon later claimed to be mystified by the whole business: ‘Why he wrote the poem, I don’t
understand. I was seeking only a rest and attempting to give up smoking. I don’t understand all this grand opera.’)

Whatever this was, it certainly wasn’t poetry. It was better than poetry. Poetry was the clanking Mr Lindsay (student of the Negro Race) and the homespun Mr Frost. Poetry was as fluent and
as memorable as that contemporary hit by the Shirelles: ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?’ But no one could feel cosy with this Mr Ginsberg, or quote more than a couple of lines without
starting to hem and haw, eventually grinding to a mid-line halt.

If Ginsberg’s verse calls Holden Caulfield to mind – leaving school, drunk in a seedy New York hotel room, angry and desperate, dreaming of an escape to the lonely outreaches of the
West – they also transcend him entirely. You could relate to Holden, internalize him as a friend. Even his creator did that. According to his girlfriend at the time, when Salinger was writing
the novel he used to quote Holden Caulfield enthusiastically and extensively. I did too. ‘What would Holden have thought about this bullshit?’ I would think, as I sat, superior, in
judgement on the inadequacy of my teachers. And my friend Holden would tell me, at length.

But Allen Ginsberg? No, he was neither a friend, nor someone inwardly to consult, and his voice wasn’t so easily introjected. If Holden was a comfortable companion, Ginsberg made me both
excited and anxious. It was his aim to provoke, and what he provoked in me was a fierce desire for escape, and a reflexive rejection of that impulse so quick that I could hardly remember having
felt it. Talk about having a vigilant system of defences. He made me feel both trapped and pathetic, yet the net effect was curiously exhilarating.

Ginsberg and his beat friends –
Howl
is dedicated to Kerouac, Burroughs and Cassady – were, of course, in a long American tradition, exploring the wilderness within and
without. We remember Huck Finn, fleeing the forces of convention in the form of his Aunt Sally (who wants ‘to adopt me and sivilize me’), getting ready to light out for the territory.
It is clear to Huck that there is something preferable and unconstrained in this metaphorical, pre-lapsarian terrain. It was clear to Allen Ginsberg as well, though the nature of the freedoms he
envisaged might have surprised even the liberal-minded Huck. They surprised the hell out of me. Ginsberg was omnivorously, rapaciously sexy, hetero- and what we called, with anxious fastidiousness,
‘homo’: happy it seemed to be on the giving or receiving end of whatever was coming or going. William Carlos Williams, speaking of
Howl
, put this perfectly: ‘He avoids
nothing but experiences it to the hilt. He contains it. Claims it as his own – and, we believe, laughs at it and has the time and effrontery to love a fellow of his choice and record that
love in a well-made poem.’

The major antecedents of
Howl
, which seems a quintessentially modern poem, lie in the nineteenth century: in James Fenimore Cooper and
Huckleberry Finn
, and particularly in Walt
Whitman’s
Song of Myself
, which Ginsberg had read while at high school in New Jersey. Walt’s dictum: ‘I am huge I contain multitudes,’ became the young
Ginsberg’s mantra. The panoptically loving
Howl
embraces (
takes in
) the outlawed and outcast, the rejected, the poor, the black, the downtrodden. More than accepts but embraces
(
celebrates)
that which tests boundaries, attacks prejudices, transgresses. In those great words of Whitman’s:

I wasn’t sure, contemplating this lofty sentiment at the age of seventeen, quite what insulting one’s ‘soul’ might consist of, as compared to, say, insulting one’s
self. I had certainly heard of souls, but was unsure whether I had, or indeed, whether I wanted one. They sounded pesky things, these souls, a bit like puppies: endlessly importuning, hungry for
sustenance, altogether too demanding.

Soul or no soul, the arrival of Allen signalled the end of my identification with Holden. He and I had not yet got past a negative version of ‘dismissing’, were ruthlessly without
charity. Ginsberg pointed the way to something larger, more generous and more dangerous. That’s what happens when you wish to say
YES
, unconditionally, to the world,
which is what Ginsberg recommended and exemplified.