Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts

15 Aug 2025

And Hate Shall Set You Free

And Hate Shall Set You Free 
SA von Hell after William Blake (2025) [a]
 
  
I. 
 
"We hate old friends: we hate old books: we hate old opinions; and at last we come to hate ourselves." [b] 
 
That's a great line from Hazlitt: far more philosophically profound and liberating than the Christian idea of learning to love one's enemies and the Californian injunction to love the self.   
 
Love binds: but it's hate that shall set you free; free from the expectation of those who think they know you best and oblige you to remain the person you've always been; free from ideas and viewpoints that have become fixed and congeal into forms of doxa or harden still further into dogma; free from a model of self born of internalised cruelty that some think of as an essential soul and others discuss in terms of subjective identity.  
 
 
II. 
 
Of course, it's difficult breaking from old friends and family members (unless they die or conveniently move far away). Nevertheless, it can be liberating to both parties to encounter one another once more as strangers (an acquaintance of mine once told me that he never loved his wife more than after their estrangement and subsequent divorce).    
 
The fact is, times change and we change and whilst some old friendships can last a lifetime, other friendships become "cold, comfortless, and distasteful" [131] like a plate of cold meat served up over and over again and even if we would like to revive old feelings that's impossible: "The stomach turns against them." [131]  
 
 
III. 
 
Perhaps it's even more difficult breaking from the authors one has loved; even when fully aware that one rewards great teachers not with loyalty but infidelity and by reading them against themselves; giving them over, as Hazlitt says, to the dissecting-knife or opening them up to ridicule [c].  
 
And great books must also be laid aside at some point and allowed to gather dust [d] - even become a little worm-eaten and mouldy. For as Nietzsche writes somewhere or other, it says nothing against the greatness of a spirit - or, in this case, a book - that it contains a few worms; corruption is a sign of maturity or ripeness and doesn't diminish overall value [e].  

 
IV. 
 
"As to my old opinions, I am heartily sick of them. I have reason, for they have deceived me sadly." [135] 
 
Again, I know exactly what Hazlitt means: old ideas and old beliefs that I once subscribed to in all sincerity at the very least embarrass today; words I once used to identify myself - punk and pagan, for example - "are become to my ears a mockery and a dream" [135].  
 
A true philosopher, says Nietzsche, cannot belong to any church or party that requires members to have moral convictions or political principles; for a philosopher is someone who burrows their way into a body, through it, and out the other side and never holds on to even their own ideas for too long, for this would imply that one could know oneself well enough to trust one's own thoughts and that simply isn't the case:
 
"We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers [...] We remain strange to ourselves out of necessity, we do not understand ourselves, we must confusedly mistake who we are [...]" [f] 
 
Hazlitt appears to find this lack of self-knowledge good cause for self-contempt; "mistaken as I have been in my public and private hopes [...] always disappointed where I placed most reliance [...] have I not reason to hate and to despise myself?" [136]
 
But then he adds an amusing final twist:  "Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough." [136]
 
 
Notes
 
[a] The phrase hate shall set you free is obviously playing on the well-known biblical line: 'And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free' (John 8:32 KJV). 
      Ever quick to point out the bleeding obvious and display it's moral colours, the Google AI assistant was keen to inform me that the phrase 'hate shall set you free' is neither a universally recognised nor an accepted statement and that the original saying is emphasising the liberating power of truth, not hate: 
      "While some may interpret it to mean that rejecting societal norms or expectations (through hate or defiance) can lead to liberation, it's crucial to understand that this interpretation is not a standard or positive one." 
      If I were Tracey Emin, I may have been tempted to write the phrase 'hate shall set you free' in the form of a neon sign, but - as I'm not Tracey Emin - I've simply added it the text to William Blake's 'Albion Rose', which can be found in A Large Book of Designs (1793-96). 
      I'm sure he wouldn't object; for Blake acknowledges the vital importance of hate as well as love within human existence by arguing that: "Without contraries there is no progression." See the Argument that opens The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93).       
 
[b] William Hazlitt, 'On the Pleasure of Hating', essay in The Plain Speaker: Opinions on Books, Men, and Things, originally published anonymously in two volumes, in 1826. 
      I am quoting from the text as it appears in Volume 7 of The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, ed. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover (J. M. Dent and Co., 1903), p. 130, which was published as an eBook by Project Gutenberg in 2018: click here. Future page references to Hazlitt's essay will be given directly in the text.
 
[c] Hazlitt is right to say that we are aided and abetted in this by the fact that sometimes our favourite writers suddenly become fashionable and subject to an outpouring of academic analysis: 
      "The popularity of the most successful writers operates to wean us from them, by the cant and fuss that is made about them, by hearing their names everlastingly repeated, and by the number of ignorant and indiscriminate admirers they draw after them." [133]
     
[d] Even Hazlitt has some reservations about this; surely, he says, "there are some works, that, like nature, can never grow old and that must always touch the imagination and passions alike!" 
      Or, at the very least, there are books that contain passages "that seem as if we might brood over them all our lives, and not exhaust the sentiments of love and admiration they excite" [133]. 
      Having said that, however, Hazlitt confesses that, for him at least, any passage - even the most beautiful or stirring - soon becomes vapid if we read or recite it too often (see p. 134).
 
[e] See Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1986), Vol. 2, Part 1, Section 353, p. 292.
 
[f] Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 3.  
 
 
For a couple of other recent posts inspired by Hazlitt's essay 'On the Pleasure of Hating' - discussing topics including spiders, ghosts, and witches - please click here and/or here.  
 
 

28 Jul 2025

Marking Geoff Dyer's Homework (Part Two: XIII-XXII)

 Geoff Dyer as a young teen in his bedroom
Photo from geoffdyer.com 
 
 
Part One of this post (sections I-XII) can be accessed by clicking here
All page references are to Homework: A Memoir, by Geoff Dyer, (Canongate, 2025). 
 
 
XIII.
 
More random words and phrases, brand names and TV shows, employed (effectively) by Dyer to trigger memories of an English childhood in the 1960s/70s: 
 
The Man from U.N.C.L.E ... Sekiden guns ... toy racquets ... flying ants ... dad having a wash and shave in the kitchen ... Babycham ... Lucozade ... Brasso ... Boxing Day leftovers ... Peach Melba ... Corgi cars ... Milk Tray ... Airfix models ... Humbrol paints ... superhero comics ... coal fires ... fireworks ... Panorama transfer sets ... day trips ... free school milk ... Imperial Leather soap ... paternal reticence ...   
 
 
XIV. 
 
That last thing feeds into something else that Dyer identifies as a defining characteristic of working class men of a certain generation - men like his dad and mine - namely, not just a reluctance to speak about themselves, but an impressive (almost stoical) indifference to the world. 
 
Dyer writes: 
 
"My dad had no interest in his past precisely because it was past [...] but I wonder if it might be simpler and more accurate to say that he had almost no interests at all. [...] Even  activities that might be termed hobbies [...] were not things that interested him; they were just tasks to be undertaken. He liked watching rugby and cricket on telly but he didn't follow either sport with the passion and dedication of a fan. If he had been denied any of the things that he took pleasure in he would not have felt particularly put out. A list of the thing he was indifferet to would constitute a mirror image of what, for many people, might constitute a rich and enjoyable life: books, beer, films, cars, music." [89-90] 
 
Dyer concludes (rightly I think): 
 
"I suspect it was not so unusual for someone of his class, his generation, to be like that. At the risk of putting it overdramatically, his interests were so tightly bound up with a kind of subsistence-level relation to the world [...] that there was nothing left over for the extraneous realm of culture or even leisure pursuits (drinking, holidays)." [90] 
 
Dyer's father was born in 1919; mine seven years earlier. What he writes here I could echo word for word. Although whether this paternal contentment is tied to the idea of accepting one's lot in life, I'm not so sure. As I say above, I think this indifference is quasi-stoical; not a sign of resigned passivity or fatalism. 
 
And I'm pleased to say it's a trait I've inherited from my father: I don't particularly want anything, because I don't feel I lack anything. And if this makes me a kind of Japanese soldier holding on to an older way of life in a world shaped by an economy of desire, I don't care.        
  
 
XV. 
 
Like Dyer's, my childhood was saturated in sugar and I too loved sweets: fruit sweets, mint sweets, cough candy, kola cubes, sweet peanuts, pear drops, humbugs, chews, toffees, gobstoppers, sherbert dips, liquorice allsorts, jelly beans, love hearts, black jacks "and all the other variously flavoured and manifested forms of sugar" [112].  
 
In fact, apart from those pink foam shrimps, I can't think of any sweets I didn't like. Of course, it was much easier to find an NHS dentist in those days and silver fillings (mostly made from mercury) were a small price to pay for the great joy afforded by sugar:
 
"Sugar, lovely sugar! Not the cause of obesity and harbinger of diabetes as we now think of it, but a source of pleasure, nutrition, energy and happiness." [113] [a]      
 
 
XVI. 
 
By the time I went to senior school, in 1974, it had become a comprehensive; the old secondary modern school - Broxhill, known locally as Boothill - having merged with the grammar school across the road and renamed Bedfords Park. So no eleven-plus exam for me; "the central event in the life of any state-school child in the 1960s" [122]
 
For Geoff Dyer, however, passing the eleven-plus was the most momentous event of his life; "not simply up to that point but for its duration" [123]
 
He explains: "Everything else that has happened couldn't have happened were it not for that" [123], continuing:
 
"On my head, invisibly, is the black cap with silver badge of Cheltenham Gramar School. I am a pure product of grammar school, a grammar-school boy through and through, to the core of my being." [124]
 
And that, of course, is where we radically differ: for whilst I wouldn't identify myself in such essentialist terms - don't think I possess a core being - if obliged to play this game I would say the defining moment came for me in 1977, when I was fourteen, and had nothing to do with my schooling:
 
On my lapel, invisibly, is a silver safety pin: I am an impure product of punk, a Sex Pistol man oh yeah! [b]  
 
 
XVII. 
 
Somehow, I knew that I wasn't going to enjoy the second part of Dyer's book as much as the first. 
 
Stories of a grammar school teen living in a three-bedroom house with bay windows and a conservatory simply don't interest me as much as those of a working-class child at Naunton Park Primary School, living in a two-up, two-down at Fairfield Walk [c].    
 
Perhaps this proves Dyer's contention that passing the eleven-plus is "the big divider" [125] ... Whatever the reason, from page 131 onwards, the possibility that Geoff and I might have been friends - had I been born four or five years earlier in Cheltenham - becomes increasingly difficult to imagine. 
 
Still, let's press on ...  
 
 
XVIII. 
 
I do like Dyer's recounting of his first kisses on the grass with a blonde American girl, a couple of years younger than himself, called Shane. These lines in particular made me smile:
 
 "After we had finished kissing we kept kissing for a while longer because we didn't know what else to do. We stood up like a fully clothed Adam and Eve after eating a sensationally normal apple, bewildered, not even dishevelled: unseen, uncaught and unpunished." [159]
 
Later, in the following weeks, he got to "feel her nascent tits" [159] and even to "slide a finger awkwardly inside her" [160], whilst at the pictures. 
 
Unfortunately for young Geoff, however, soon after this she and her family returned to the States (and perhaps, as he says, she only let him do this as a going away treat) [d].   
 
 
XIX.  
 
As indicated above (XVI), I was born of punk (and conceived to the sounds of glam) [e], so the fact that Dyer was a prog rock devotee is something I can neither overlook, accept, nor forgive. 
 
I find it incomprehensible that someone would actually think Creedence Clearwater Revival the most important rock band of all time. Groups such as Family, Hawkwind and Van der Graaf Generator are anathema to me. But then my musical tastes were never advanced, as Dyer claims his were; I was never a loyal viewer of The Old Grey Whistle Test and had no desire to wear hippie fashion [f]
 
When he was fifteen, Dyer went to a store called Driftin' on Cheltenham High Street, which sold "not just prog LPs and underground magazines but the loons, scoop necks and cheescloth shirts worn while listening to or reading them" [183]. In contrast, when I was fifteen, in 1978, I paid my one and only visit to Seditionaries at 430 King's Road.
 
Like Dyer in his hippie mecca, however, I couldn't really afford to buy anything and felt a little intimidated at punk central by the staff and other customers, who were older and way cooler and it was something of a relief to leave the shop and head back home with my only purchase bought on the day - not at Seditionaries, obviously - a large Public Image Limited poster (that I still have) [g].    
 
      
XX. 
 
Even more crucial than Dyer's discovery of sex and alcohol, was his encounter with English literature. Books were to become the decisive factor in his life; not birds and beer (though that's not to downplay his love of these things [h]).     
 
Again, it's a familiar story: though I don't think I was ever as taken with reading plays and poetry and works of fiction as Dyer; certainly not as a teenager (even if I studied English Lit. at A-level). My love of books only really began much later, when I discovered Barthes, Foucault, Baudrillard, etc. It was French theory - not English literature - that made a reader of me (at the age of 28). 
 
And I certainly didn't instigate a cultural revolution in my parent's home by bringing home lots of books and demanding display space for them in the front room. Dyer writes:
 
"Looking back I see this as the first incursion into our home [...] of a feature of middle-class life: the book as something not only to be used as tools to pass exams, to get an education, but as something to be displayed, to furnish a room." [223] [i]   
 
To this day, I don't like to have lots of books around me and dislike book cases (most of the books I have are - inconveniently - packed in boxes). 
 
 
XXI. 
 
I recently published a post here on Torpedo the Ark about a pair of brass candlesticks belonging to my parents: click here. And so I was delighted to discover that Dyer's parents also loved their brass ornaments, even if cleaning them with Brasso was more of a chore than a pleasure:
 
"On days when the brass was to be cleaned, all of it came out, from every nook and cupboard of the house, was cleaned on spread sheets of the Daily Mirror, and then put back in its place. Everything existed in order to be cleaned even though it was never really dirty." [223]   
 
Dyer's remarking that the "red, white and blue can of Brasso" was more pleasing to his eye, even then, "than any of the objects it was used to clean" [223], also makes smile. 
 
 
XXII. 
 
There is a third part to Dyer's memoir, which briefly touches on the nine month period between passing his A-levels and taking up his place at Oxford (Chorpus Christi College) and also paints a deeply moving portrait of his mother in the last two years of her life (2009-11) [j], when, in her mid-80s, she is diagnosed with lung cancer:  
 
"She was not so much dying as diminishing until there was so little left of her that there was not enough to summon up the effort required to die." [264].  
 
Again, I know exactly what Dyer means here and finish Homework with tears in my eyes, rather than a smile on my face.  
 
 
Notes
 
[a] As Dyer goes on to add: "We are talking exclusively of white sugar. Even brown sugar was too sophisticated; an acquired taste with suggestions of a health fad ..." [113]. Similarly, bread was something white and sliced - though I can't recall ever going so far as young Geoff and making a sugar sandwich! 
      As for tooth decay ... "Yes, the gnashers paid a price, but that was almost irrelevant since one's teeth were assumed to be in the process of corroding anyway; after a relatively brief honeymoon of painless and effective chewing, that's what teeth did." [113]  
 
[b] Surprisingly, Dyer makes only one mention of punk in the entire book; see p. 240. It's surprising because he has many of the background experiences and personal qualities that might have made him an excellent punk. He doesn't even express hostility to it; just dismisses it as something happening in London and thus far away from his life in Cheltenham as a pub-loving, badminton-playing, book-reading grammar school boy studying hard in the hope of gaining admission to Oxford. 
 
[c] This is not to say that Dyer's tales of romantic fumblings, schoolyard scuffles, and gig-going are not, in themselves, interesting - and it's certainly not to suggest they are any the less beautifully documented - but, for me, the fun has dissipated and I can no longer see myself so frequently reflected in the book. 
      Further, as Dyer himself admits: "The nice little boy in the blue sweater" seen in the photograph used for the book's front cover, "was well on the way to becoming ... a less than nice adolescent" [168] and who wants to spend time with a snotty and stroppy teen?  
 
[d] Those readers interested in Dyer's early sex life are encouraged to skip to p. 205 and his encounter with Mandy on the beach at Bourenmouth and, later, in her room at a local B&B while her parents are out. This initial interaction is followed by a couple of visits made by Mandy to Dyer's parental home, where, apparently, she and Geoff engaged in oral sex; see p. 206. See also pp. 220-221 and the story of Janice. 
      I have to confess, Dyer's erotic writing is my least favourite aspect of his work; not just here, but in his fiction too. I'm not expecting D. H. Lawrence, but Dyer's laid-back, rather droll style seems lacking not only in romantic embellishment, but even warmness of heart.  
 
[e] See the post of 24 July 2018: 'Notes on a Glam-Punk Childhood' - click here
 
[f] Dyer notes how by 1973 "a version of hippy style had percolated down to the third and fourth form of Cheltenham Grammar" and claims that on his Christmas wish list for that year he requested a pair of purple-coloured bell bottom loons [182]. He would later even persuade a girlfriend, Janice, "to change the way she dressed, from secondary-modern style to something more grammar-school hippy" [221].  
 
[g] Dyer was also a fan of the wall poster - but then, as he points out, posters of every kind "were all the rage back then" [186].  
 
[h] For Dyer's first taste of a pint of beer poured in a pub, see pp. 213-214. Unlike Dyer, I have never been a beer drinker; cider, yes; spirits, yes; wine, yes; but never beer. I can't say I'm as much of a pub lover as he is either (preferring the anonymity of hotel bars to the cosiness of a pub).    
 
[i] Dyer goes on to say: 
      "After a couple of weeks I took the books back upstairs to [...] my bedroom [...] I can't remember why [...] but mainly because it just didn't feel right. And so the separation of books from shared space was reinstated [...]" [224] 
 
[j] Dyer does speak of his father's death, also in 2011, but, somehow, the death of a father doesn't mean the same or as much - for a son at least - as the death of a mother. I don't know why that is, but one thinks again of the proverb of uncertain origin made famous by Hitchcock in Psycho (1960) : A boy's best friend is his mother
      I was pleased, however, that Dyer mentioned the "jars full of screws and nails" [275] kept by his father, reminding me of the tobacco tins in which my dad kept such things; see the post entitled 'Notes on the Material Remains of My Father' (6 June 2016): click here.   
 
 

13 Sept 2019

On D. H. Lawrence's Objection to Pirated Books and Counterfeit Emotions



I. 

As Michael Squires reminds us, A Propos of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" originally consisted of a brief expository essay in which Lawrence takes on the pirates who had moved quickly to produce various counterfeit editions of his controversial novel, which had been published privately, in July 1928.   

Later, Lawrence radically expanded the essay in order to defend the work from critics and censors - whom he despised more than the pirates - and offer a "final, eloquent statement of his belief" [1] in an authentic model of sexuality and the importance of what he termed phallic marriage.

I'll comment on these ideas shortly, but I'd like to begin by discussing Lawrence's skirmish with Jolly Roger ... 


II. 

Towards the end of 1928, Lawrence became aware that Lady C. had been pirated, as unauthorised versions of the work began appearing in New York, London, and Paris, much to his irritation. 

He decided the best thing to do as a countermeasure would be to bring out a new, inexpensive paperbound edition of his own. This French edition, which came with the original short introduction mentioned above ('My Skirmish with Jolly Roger') - appeared in May 1929 and quickly sold out. 

But what, we might ask - apart from the loss of royalties (and Lawrence wasn't indifferent to this issue) - was his problem with the pirate books? 
 
In A Propos, he objects at first purely on aesthetic grounds; they are either cheap and inferior or gloomy and depressing looking. But that's rather unconvincing coming from someone who, just five years earlier, had written of his contempt for the "actual corpus and substance" of the book as an actual object; i.e., as a published volume that is marketed and put on sale:

"Books to me are incorporate things [...] What do I care for first or last editions? I have never read one of my own published works. To me, no book has a date, no book has a binding.
      What do I care if 'e' is somewhere upside down, or 'g' comes from the wrong fount? I really don't." [2]  

So there's obviously something else going on ... And that something else is to do with the question of authenticity: In brief, Lawrence hates the pirate books because they're forgeries and facsimiles. In other words, they're not the real deal as authorised (and signed) by him; they're counterfeit copies, or replicas as he calls them. 

And that's what troubles him: just as, later in A Propos, it becomes clear what troubles him most of all about modern expressions of sexuality and human emotion is that they are, in his view, fake and fraudulent. Lawrence contrasts emotions as (false) mental representations with real feelings that belong to the body: 

"Today, many people live and die without having had any real feelings - though they have had a 'rich emotional life' apparently, having showed strong mental feeling. But it is all counterfeit." [3]

Above all else, it's love that is a counterfeit feeling today and reduced to a stereotyped set of behaviours. Which means, says Lawrence, that there is no real sex - it's been killed, or, at the very least, perverted into a thing that is cold and bloodless. And that's a catastrophe because, for Lawrence, sex is an impersonal, cosmic principle that not only keeps men and women in balance, but holds the very heavens in place.    


III.

What, as readers in 2019, are we to make of this?

Personally, I can only echo Michel Foucault who ends the first volume of his History of Sexuality with a quotation from Lawrence's A Propos calling for the "full conscious realisation of sex" (i.e. sex thought completely, honestly and cleanly). [3]

Foucault responds to this passage, in which Lawrence would have us believe our ontological future is at stake, with amused irony:

"Perhaps one day people will wonder at this. They will not be able to understand how a civilization [...] found the time and the infinite patience to inquire so anxiously concerning the actual state of sex; people will smile perhaps when they recall that here were men - meaning ourselves - who believed that therein resided a truth every bit as precious as the one they had already demanded from the earth, the stars, and the pure forms of their thought ..." [4]


Notes

[1] Michael Squires, Introduction to A Propos of "Lady Chatterley's Lover", in Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press,1993), p. lv.

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Bad Side of Books', Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 75-6.

[3] D. H. Lawrence, A Propos of "Lady Chatterley's Lover", in Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 311 and 308.

[4] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, (Pantheon Books, 1978), pp. 157-58. 

Readers interested in this topic might like to read an earlier post on Lady Chatterley's postmodern lover: click here.

See also: Chris Forster, 'Skirmishing with Jolly Roger: D. H. Lawrence, Obscenity, and Book Piracy', Ch. 3 of Filthy Material: Modernism and the Media of Obscenity, (Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 61-88. Forster cleverly - and, in my view, rightly - argues that Lawrence "frames his critique of piracy as one more expression of the corrupt state of [inauthentic] modernity" [71]

Musical bonus: Adam and the Ants, 'Jolly Roger', from the album Kings of the Wild Frontier (CBS, 1980): click here.