The escape from working-class life has good narrative pedigree, a classic form—beginning with the idea of escape itself. It’s something like a sharpened bildungsroman. The child is nudged forward by an ambitious parent, by an influential teacher, or simply by a curiosity that, like water, insists on finding its way in and out. There’s the Cortés-like discovery of world-disclosing books; the opening up at school or university; perhaps a gradual estrangement from those same ambitious parents, who discover, too late, that they’ve been underwriting the family’s own unravelling. And then there’s the journey away from the old home, toward actual new worlds.
“Homework” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a new memoir by the English writer Geoff Dyer, traces several such journeys. Dyer could hardly be unself-conscious about what might be called his writes of passage. A coolly funny stylist—the author of the brilliant “Out of Sheer Rage,” among many other books—he knows a thing or two about narratives of, and out of, working-class life. Dyer was born in Cheltenham in 1958, the same year that the Marxist cultural theorist Raymond Williams, who would become an important influence on Dyer’s work, published the pioneering study “Culture and Society.” In a sense, Dyer grew up alongside British cultural materialism. Intellectually, the era was one of radical ferment, but radicalism worked on the canonical: D. H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy remained royalty in schools and universities, thanks to the king-making attentions of Williams and F. R. Leavis. It’s no surprise to find Lawrence and Hardy invoked in “Homework,” or to learn that one of the secondhand books Dyer’s mother brought home was a battered orange Penguin of Williams’s “Border Country.” You could say that Dyer has done his homework.
But it’s not just homework; it’s also the work that home does on you. The reason Lawrence, Hardy, and Williams shadow “Homework” is not simply that Dyer is a shrewd reader who propelled himself from a bookless, working-class home to Cheltenham Grammar, and then to Oxford. Others have made that climb, too. What makes those writers crucial here is that Dyer’s own journey is viscerally connected to theirs. Hardy, the son of a Dorset stonemason and a mother who oversaw his schooling, wrote “Jude the Obscure,” the great novel of frustrated ambition, about a stonemason’s attempt to access a lightly fictionalized Oxford. (Dyer admits that he once filched a copy from a Cheltenham bookshop.) Lawrence was the son of a Nottinghamshire miner who could barely read and an ambitious mother who’d taught school. Williams, the son of a Welsh railway worker, was, like Dyer, lifted by grammar school and a scholarship to an august university—Cambridge, in his case.
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And Geoff Dyer is the only child of a Gloucestershire sheet-metal worker and a school lunch lady. Home was more or less bookless. His mother may have bought books for him, but, as he notes, she “never became a reader.” In fact, she was only a generation removed from illiteracy: her own father, a farm laborer from Shropshire, couldn’t read at all. She’d say that, like some twentieth-century Tess Durbeyfield, she was “raised to milk cows.” She longed to be a seamstress but somehow lacked the confidence, or the self-esteem, to pursue even that modest ambition.
Dyer is provoked to a kind of bitter bewilderment by the “culture of deference” that fixed his parents’ lives in place. He grew up in a family ruled by fatalism, and by the dictum of “accepting one’s lot.” His parents benefitted, to some extent, from postwar prosperity, but remained in the grip of older anxieties. He speculates that they’d only ever really known a “subsistence-level relation to the world”—mere survival, leaving little for the surplus of culture or even of leisure. Pleasure was difficult, almost a burden. His parents were the products of “centuries of rural life in which obligations and hardships greatly outweighed all possibilities of treats or abundance.” So the past was always close at hand: the young Dyer could almost touch those long centuries of rural life—the same world that connected him to the writers he was reading (and, sometimes, shoplifting). One wonders if the Oxford dons who marked his essays on Lawrence and Hardy ever understood that, for Dyer, these authors could never be just “authors.”
Dyer’s memoir is a funny and often painful book that both follows and departs from the traditional working-class bildungsroman. It offers, perhaps, a stranger account than even Dyer quite allows: at times, a wounded narrative pretending not to be. Many of the classic elements are here—the murky atrocity of school food; the ecstatic discovery of literature (for Dyer, especially Shakespeare) and music (gallons of dubious prog rock); a spurt or two of rebellion; sexual fumblings in cars; the anxious opening of exam results in “buff-coloured” envelopes, those official passports to the wider world.
All this is delivered in Dyer’s familiar mode of extended riffing, comic loitering, and dry exaggeration. At one point, he pauses to analyze a family snapshot, reading both the sociology and the aesthetics of a nineteen-sixties photograph, in a bit of Englished Roland Barthes. Then he turns to his parents. Perhaps it seems odd, he writes, that his dad’s sweater is tucked into his trousers, “but since he tucked his shirt into his underpants an internally layered logic is at work.” Where Barthes hunted for the punctum, the accidental detail that pierces the heart, Dyer larkily pretends to puncture the punctum. The pretense is the thing. His style, as carefully layered as his father’s clothing, is one of punctilious paradox—the paradox being that Dyer is always performing not performing. The result is an almost weary vanity, in which the author plays himself as if under duress, simultaneously flourishing and folding up the self.
That Dyer burlesque—of self-ravelling and unravelling—stretched across a memoir (though the narrative essentially ends at twenty-one) quickly takes on a quality of mock-heroic completism. Like it or not, Dyer is going to tell us, in great detail, about the boyish intricacies of Airfix model airplanes, the TV programs that his family watched, his bicycles, his favorite sweets, the painstaking assembly of a Brooke Bond tea-card library, or the day that Jeremy Hartwell thought he was getting first prize at the school raffle, only to learn he had won third (a large Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut bar).
This reader did like it. Perhaps because my own nineteen-seventies childhood in the North of England was atmospherically similar to Dyer’s, or more likely because Dyer can be involvingly funny about anything, I found myself laughing with scandalized delight at my little shocks of recognition. Yes, the school showers, being in unpleasant proximity to the school toilets, gave one the sense, as Dyer puts it, that “one was cleaning oneself in very hot piss.” Why, indeed, were the dead “front rooms” in people’s tiny houses so rarely used, instead kept as morbidly pristine as an undertaker’s parlor? (Dyer spent the first eleven years of his life in what is known in Britain as a two-up-two-down—two bedrooms upstairs, two rooms and a kitchen downstairs.) Yes, childhood was a time of variously disgusting smells, starting but by no means ending with those of school food. Dyer gives us the perfect phrase: “a thick smell of inbred gravy.” Inbred! As if it were the product less of a recipe than of an accursed inheritance.
My own upbringing was more middle class than Dyer’s, and I was born seven years later, but I remember well the stringent thrift of that postwar era—a slightly traumatized austerity that lasted into Mrs. Thatcher’s avaricious, wide-boy eighties. Everything could be patched, darned, or tinkered with. (Some cars existed only to be tinkered with.) Failing that, you could always hit the thing—slapping the TV usually did the trick. Dyer is especially funny about the purity of his family’s recycling: once his father had used up his razors, they were handed to his mother to shave her legs; once she’d finished with them, they still weren’t thrown out. “Their functional life was ended but they had some as yet undiscovered potential use even if they were so blunt as to have rendered suicide almost impossible,” Dyer writes. Cue the droll puncturing of the punctum: “Given sufficient determination you could have attempted to saw away at your wrists but the effort and time involved would have reawakened a sense of purpose synonymous with the will to live.”
In that modest world, to assert one’s own needs or aversions was to court moral disapproval. Dyer rarely liked the food that he was served, including his mother’s cooking. “Well, you’re hard to please” was the quintessentially English response. In context, Dyer notes, it was “a terrible rebuke.” Being “hard to please,” he adds, “was anathema to the culture of gratitude that pervaded the 1960s.”
Is it any wonder that, as a writer, Dyer has so brilliantly cultivated a style of ironic self-escape, a kind of negative egotism? The prose points both ways: I am, and am not, hard to please. The mock-heroic plenitude—a page, say, on Waddington’s jigsaw map of the British Isles, or four pages on schoolyard fights, including a close study of the resident bully—is a way of insisting on one’s importance and denying it at the same time. Movingly, this self-insistence can be read as a type of amateur cultural materialism: here, for the record, are the smallest specificities of a working-class English childhood in the sixties and seventies. Down among the Cadbury Fruit & Nut, the Vesta beef curry, and the Huntley & Palmers Breakfast Biscuits is a reality rarely touched by theorists, who are too busy theorizing. Here, too, in the Airfix models and the vainglorious LP collection is the solitary self-curation of the only child—the kid who can’t dash from his bedroom to a sibling’s, model or record in hand. These things are precious.
Yet something is also being denied, or avoided. As “Homework” unfolds, the reader starts to see Dyer’s mock heroics as a species of louche misdirection. Surely he knows what he’s doing. To open a section with “One year there was a raffle at school,” or “When I was fifteen we went to Bournemouth for a summer holiday,” or even “To my surprise I quite enjoyed rugby, up to a point,” is to offer a kind of defensive pre-ironizing—the writing setting itself up for its own sardonic disavowal. If everything is important, then nothing quite is. But what, exactly, is being disavowed?
Take Dyer’s running joke about the awfulness of childhood food. He hated fish fingers. He hated milk, because it tasted like “something out of a cow.” At fairs, he hated “the revolting toffee apples.” All school food was repellent: “During one meal I tried to swallow a piece of meat—more like two blobs of meat connected, like weights on a bar, by a length of gristle.” The smell of the food “was disgusting and this smell, congealed and lingering, contaminated the school, from the time it was being prepared in the morning to the afternoons when the remains of one day’s slop were being disposed of and the kitchens cleaned prior to the preparation of the next day’s slop.”
But Dyer is on comfy terrain here. Everyone hates school food; everyone, it seems, has hated English food. Around the time Dyer was born, Natalia Ginzburg wrote an essay about the misery of English cooking: “A dull sadness weighs on every place where food is served or sold.” Dyer, too, can riff endlessly in this mode, frothing and fretting like some avuncular combination of Thomas Bernhard and Martin Amis. The exaggeration becomes its own joke, pulling the sting from itself. It isn’t even really hostile; it overwhelms its targets with a kind of sweet venom, a disgusted love. It’s the performance of revulsion—a trick he pulled off so sparklingly in “Out of Sheer Rage.” This is the argumentative attitude that Dyer claims as his stylistic inheritance: “I felt most at home in the idiom of the ironic switchback, an educationally enhanced version of something that still came under the broad conversational church-pub known as banter.”
But what can’t be turned into banter is the fact that Dyer’s mother was responsible for cooking much of that food—at the very school young Geoff attended before grammar school. Sometimes she served him at home with leftovers from the junior-school kitchen: “slop that would otherwise have been thrown away, given to pigs who would probably have turned their snouts up at it. However hard mum tried to disguise the fact that it was from the canteen I always caught her out.” The prose is still spinning its exaggerations, but no longer comically. Whatever this is, it isn’t quite banter. Is it genuine anger? Genuine repulsion?
Gradually, it becomes apparent that, running alongside the book’s comic freestyling, there’s a painful shadow text. Perhaps “shadow text” isn’t quite right—the words are out in the open. In fact, they often compose sentences of acute, lancing pain, pain too great to linger over or even to fully acknowledge. There is banter and there is not-banter, but no gristle connecting them. Take the two pages where Dyer writes about his father’s extreme reticence about his own past. His dad, he says, “had no interest in his past precisely because it was past.” So far, so familiar—my own father, a product of the war years and rationing, never spoke of his childhood, either. It was characteristic of that postwar generation to look forward, not back. But then Dyer adds, “I say this but I wonder if it might be simpler and more accurate to say that he had almost no interests at all.” Even the things his father seemed to enjoy—making wine, gardening—were tinged with duty. A list of things he was indifferent to, Dyer notes, would constitute for most people the stuff of an ordinarily rich life. So what did interest him? “He was interested in me, obviously, with all the love and pride that a father brings to an only child, but that was programmed into the biological fact of our blood relationship.” Obviously: that word is doing heavy lifting. Is it so obvious? Then why must we be told? This particular pain is never returned to—not in these terms. And with good reason, one suspects.
Consider Dyer’s mother. Later in the book, he describes how he was always nagging her to stop smoking. Her coughing, he writes, was one of a number of “persistent sources of tension” between them. But his mother insists that the cough has nothing to do with cigarettes—it’s a nervous cough, she says. Nervous? “You make me nervous,” she replies. Dyer’s assessment—“Maybe I did, but the idea that this could produce a cough was so ridiculous that a cough-punctuated quarrel was soon in progress”—shows a writer who misses little and yet, at a crucial moment, veers back into banter, even bluster, rather than pausing to absorb the scene’s pathos. Each, mother and son, is fixated on the cough, but what about her words? For a parent to tell her almost grown child that his presence makes her nervous is an extraordinary admission. The mother who brought home books for her bright, independent-minded son, yet “never became a reader” herself, registers the distance between her own world and that of a child who will soon be at unimaginable Oxford. Incommunicability hovers between them. Dyer surely knows this, but he cannot quite say it all.
Although Dyer’s parents are central to his book, they remain rather slender presences, apparently because they had so little dramatic personality, as if personality itself were a rationed pleasure. Dyer writes that his father’s nature expressed itself mostly in caution, diligence, a kind of austerity. On car journeys, much of the time was spent searching for gasoline, because his father insisted on only ever filling half the tank. They never overtook other cars—his father was a chronically modest driver—but were always being overtaken, prompting a characteristically English rebuke from his mother: “He’s in a hurry.” It’s as if, only half fuelled and wary of rushing, these two parents are only half in the memoir, dragging their feet behind their fast, stylishly performing only child. They seem to linger at the edges of Dyer’s life, shy about asserting themselves, just as they are shy about their son asserting himself. “Nothing shamed them more than when my behaviour drew attention to them,” Dyer writes. On the one hand, this is simply the essence of middle England: rueful, reduced, shabby, and funny-sad in a Larkinesque way. But, on the other, how remarkable for a child to write this about his parents, and to set it down in a memoir, which must be, by definition, about one’s own behavior.
In this way, a seemingly canonical tale of triumphant escape from working-class life turns out not to be so canonical after all. The classic bildungsroman usually hinges on at least one parent’s ambition for the child—so that, say, entry to Oxford becomes the triumphant culmination of their vicarious hopes. Lawrence opens “The Rainbow” with a portrait of English workingmen sunk in their labors, while the women peer out, restless, toward the horizon, where the vicar and the schoolteacher speak their magic languages. The women aspire. The mother who brought home Raymond Williams’s novel must have nurtured something like this for young Geoff. Dyer hints at it—his father, perhaps, was “content,” his mother more restless. Yet his parents couldn’t quite imagine or speak of ambition, not even vicariously, for that would mean wanting something for themselves, and failing to accept their lot. So grammar school and Oxford are undoubted triumphs, but they seem almost accidental. Dyer’s rise is solitary, freakish, and shadowed always by the chance that it might never have happened. As he movingly confesses, his parents were proud when he got to Oxford, but could hardly express it: “We were living through something we didn’t understand, of which no one had any experience.”
So this painful and pained book proceeds—the searing, isolate sentences tearing repeated holes in the screen of banter. The punctum keeps returning, no matter how hard Dyer tries to puncture it. And how. “Never put anything in writing” is one of the few pieces of advice that Dyer, the author of more than twenty books, remembers his father giving. Think about that. ♦
