Geoff Dyer is one of those authors who never writes the same book twice. He’s produced around twenty of them so far, on a kaleidoscopic range of subjects, including the history of photography, India, Soviet film, the First World War, jazz heroes, Roger Federer and war movies. My favourite is Out of sheer rage: wrestling with D.H. Lawrence, about trying and failing to write a book about D.H. Lawrence. As that title suggests, a constant in his writing is humour, combined with self-deprecation and a penetrating, analytic way of talking about abstruse or apparently small themes. As a rule, he approaches them at a tangent, and develops them in unconventional ways.
In his most recent book, though, Dyer breaks with habit and writes a conventional story, told in a straightforward way. Homework: a memoir is just what it says, a chronological reconstruction of his childhood and youth, up the point of his leaving secondary school. Coming-of-age auto-narratives have been commonplace for decades (one that came to mind when I was reading this was Blake Morrison’s And when did you last see your father?) What marks out Homework is that its ordinariness – nothing startling or tragic happens to Dyer junior throughout – viewed with a distanced, amused but affectionate eye.
There’s a periodic commentary running through the story about how memory transmutes rather than transcribes events of the past. An epigraph from Raymond Williams introduces this theme: ‘what was once close, absorbing, accepted, familiar, internally experienced [about remembering childhood] becomes separate, critical, changing, externally observed.’ This accounts for the gentle but persistent irony that marks the telling of the tale.
Geoff Dyer was brought up in Cheltenham. For most people Cheltenham is an impeccably proper and middle-class town, with an alter ego as a circle of spies. But it has its working-class side, and that’s where Dyer and his parents belonged. His father was a sheet-metal worker and his mother a dinner lady. They belonged to a very different age from the world their only son was growing up in. It had been formed by the poverty of the thirties and the austerity and dangers of wartime. His dad remained a staunch socialist, republican and puritan, who felt nothing but contempt for the throwaway consumer society that was gathering pace in the 1960s. That included overseas holiday travel, even though he’d seen war service in India. Some of this asceticism rubbed off on his son: ‘at a shop in Los Angeles I recently tried on a pair of Japanese jeans. When the price was quoted, I responded with a shocked ‘How much?’
Anyone brought up around the same time will recognise the details, so odd from today’s perspective, of how things were in the 1960s and 1970s: the front-room kept unused as ‘best’, conker fights, collecting tea cards, assembling Airfix kits, learning to swim in cold Victorian baths, Sunday drives in a Vauxhall Victor. The key event of Geoff’s early life was passing the 11-plus exam, which allowed him to enter Cheltenham Grammar School, an achievement marked by the gift from his parents of a new Dawes Red Feather bike. At secondary school he mixed with a new set of friends, including some with a reputation for naughtiness and worse. He discovered beer, rock music and girls. Dyer describes his sexual fumblings with the latter in a deadpan, matter-of-fact way. At the same time, always (unlike his parents) a bookish lad, he was developing an interest in literature, guided by an inspirational teacher, and managed to pull himself together to pass his A-levels and be accepted to go to university.
All of the story so far Dyer narrates in meticulous detail (how did he recollect all of that?), and almost every page will induce a chuckle of recognition from anyone over the age of 65. But then, in the book’s final section, ‘Jerusalem’, the tone changes. It concerns mainly Dyer’s mother, her final illness and death. So far, we’ve read a lot about his father and his eccentricities, much less about Mary, his mother. Now irony lapses, and deeper feelings come to the surface.
His mother had a creative gift and was superb with her hands. Dyer remembers her saying that she wished she’s become a professional seamstress. In her final days he comes to understand the reason why the wish was a regret rather than an ambition: a large birthmark down the whole length of her arm.
Nothing has ever been more painful for me to write about than my mother’s birthmark. Presenting myself in a consistently poor light has been more than a source of pleasure over the last thirty years. It’s been a point of principle that no one emerges from any page by me looking worse that the person writing it. No one, I think, has ever felt misrepresented by anything I’ve written, let alone betrayed. Even mentioning my mother’s birthmark is a betrayal.
An operation, three years before Dyer’s birth, improved part of the skin, but Mary refused to undergo a second, and the experience destroyed her self-confidence. The birthmark’s psychological scar was even worse than its physical one, robbing her of her dreams and ambitions, and driving her, together with her husband, into a private and self-denying way of life.
Mary’s dying is painful and miserable. Dyer gives us the details, as usual, but now without inviting the reader to recognise them and smile. His father also dies. At his funeral there are ‘a few bright flowers and ‘Jerusalem’ because we were an English family and without Blake there is no England’. The son goes on to Oxford and a ‘glittering career’ as a writer. His debts to his parents are evident throughout Homework, but for all the book’s lightness and comedy you leave it feeling that his parents, trapped by their class background and the times they lived through, were prevented from realising their talents in the same way as he succeeded in doing.
Leave a Reply to Kate Hardy Cancel reply