‘Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.’ Groucho Marx

Book review: Outside of a Dog. A Bibliomemoir, by Rick Gekoski

There are many components of contemporary culture that people rate highly, but whose qualities continue to elude me. Bafflingly, there are some in this world who don’t like TV, or massages, or who love Bon Jovi, and while they are pretty mysterious creatures to me, if I try hard and perform the cognitive equivalent of squinting through fog I can sort of see where all these people live. But something I find impossible to understand is people who do not read. People that not only do not read but who are PROUD of the fact that they have never started or finished a book. I have heard some of them boast about the absence of literature in their lives as though they were declaring that they have never had a sexually transmitted disease.

That said, I think no less of those who don’t read. There is no snobbery intended in this opinion, though no doubt my inability to accept non-readers could be construed as imperious. Rather, I find it oddly distressing to think that these people are missing out on arguably one of life’s great pleasures. I am acquainted with many non-readers (there are more of them than I had expected) and I have found that they are mostly neither dull nor unintelligent, but quite excellent and fun people to be around. But, I suppose if I were on a date with a guy who over dinner smugly announced that he had never read a book, sex would almost certainly be off the menu. I simply wouldn’t know how to be with them, or who they really were.

Rick Gekoski is a man viscerally driven by literature, and his latest work Outside of a Dog, A Bibliomemoir I believe is the first of its kind. Unlike other highly entertaining autobiographical works like John Baxter’s A Pound of Paper, or indeed Rick’s last book Tolkien’s Gown that tell of somewhat obsessive and fanatical escapades, chasing rare books and soaking up authors, Outside of a Dog is a self-portrait refracted through the prism of a lifetime’s reading.

is there anything sadder???I

 

 It begins with a cataclysm – the loss of his beloved book collection during his painful divorce from a woman who had also once been much beloved. Endings are almost always messy, with both parties stooping to tit for tat tactics and silly games. Rick admits that he withheld a treasured painting of Barbara’s, almost certainly out of spite. And with equal enmity she hit him where it really hurt and seized the books. At first, the loss of something Rick describes “as close as I came to a soul” is devastating, and leaves him like a bewildered child, full of self-doubt, asking the questions, “Was I still me? Who am I, with no books?”

But, amid the ruins a kind of alchemical process begins, and it is not long before Gekoski feels liberated by the absence of the clutter of books and instead explores them anew, how they sculpted him from within, and mapping how he continues to evolve with them.This literary odyssey begins with childhood, and the remembrance of Rick’s father reading Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hatches The Egg to him when he was very small. The fledgling Rick identifies Horton and his father as simpatico – nurturing, patient, large, cuddly – a true parent, and recognises the wilful Maizie in his own always-just-out-of-reach mother.Even at this tender, pre-school age he is making sense of the world through his experience of reading and being read to. His pleas to his father of “Again! Read it again!” echo the experiment that is Outside of a Dog – that revisiting a book is a natural, essential process of learning. Gekoski understands that  ‘Reading is how we learn to attach ourselves to ourselves, and to others, and to the world: reading inhabits us with the tendrils of love. We are made and continually transformed by what, and how, we read: from Dr. Seuss to T. S. Eliot, we are made by it.’ 

 

Ever the excitable child, only Rick could make the quantum leap from Dr. Seuss to masturbatory episodes in the space of just a few lines. The chapter ‘Spritzing over the Books’ is a hugely entertaining exploration of consciousness and awakening through reading his father’s rather technical and deeply unerotic books on sexual congress, and which advances beautifully into more cerebral coming of age experiences as he immerses himself in the work of Allen Ginsberg and J. D Salinger in ‘Catching and Howling’. The heavy weights start to roll up.  T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is assimilated like an emotional crossword puzzle, and it’s through Eliot that his ability to read really begins to mature.  Psychoanalytical works and analysts are discovered, crystallizing most significantly in an intriguing psychological ménage a trois between Rick, his wife and the noted and notorious psychiatrist R. D. Laing. And he sets sail with W. B. Yeats on the tempestuous raft of first love.

But it’s the chapters that centre on his children, Anna and Bertie, which frame this memoir so movingly. Holding their hands while they learned to read, much like his Horton-like father had done with him, sparks profound, tectonic shifts in Rick’s emotional planes, and he returns to being a child once more, even stealing the Christmas present he’d just given to them – a copy of Roald Dahl’s Matilda – and locking himself in the loo with it for the afternoon, ignoring the incessant banging of tiny, irate fists on the toilet door. Strikingly intelligent and darkly curious, Anna, had the course of her life mapped out through a specific reading experience. For her it was Thomas Harris’s Silence of the Lambs, the character of Clarice Starling being something of an inspiration for her to study criminology as a postgraduate at Cambridge and become an expert writer in her field. Bertie, having perhaps very wisely decided quite early on that no other writer could entertain him better than Roald Dahl, is more often found not with his nose in a book, but in a scuba mask, exploring and embracing the natural world with a refreshing, childlike wonder. I doubt one would ever find Rick sitting at the bottom of the ocean in his flippers. He already knows that there are no delis down there. And no books.

 

mein kampf

My favourite criticism from my university tutor of my final thesis on modern literature was that it ‘struggled to unify its voluminous material’. This is something I have been accused of throughout my life, and anyone who has ever seen me in the flesh will understand that this comment is not necessarily best applied to my written work. Despite the breadth of literature covered in Gekoski’s memoirs, there are no broad strokes here, and never does he struggle to articulate himself. Gekoski has an artful, effortless style that does not betray just how difficult I imagine it was to write this book. Writing a history of the self as seen through one’s reading of other people’s words must be really fucking hard, and I’m glad that Rick has done it so that I don’t have to.

Paper, despite its palpable fragility, is marvellously enduring. If we are fortunate enough, we can still see and even touch a leaf of the Gutenberg Bible, or the first page of the manuscript of Byron’s Don Juan, but we haven’t got a hope in hell of accessing data trapped in 1970s computer discs at NASA, as all the machinery used to read them is obsolete.  If they become the literary equivalents of the iPod, the Kindle and its competitors could make the experience of reading almost unrecognisable from the one portrayed in Outside of a Dog. No more frantically scribbled notes in the margins, dog-eared spines and edges, no more being able to retrace what you’ve eaten that whole week through the little splats on the pages, and no more libraries to be separated from. Steve Jobs says the Amazon Kindle will fail because “people don’t read anymore”.  I am not sure about that.  But I hope those who do still read will always crave the tactile, intimate experience of reading words on paper. It’s hard to imagine Rick having the same set of transforming experiences on his Sony Reader. He’s a bookman, through and through.

Outside Of A Dog by Rick Gekoski is published by Constable & Robinson, priced £14.99, and available at all good bookstores.