Outside of a Dog

A Bibliomemoir

CONSTABLE • LONDON

Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com

This edition published by Constable,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2009

Copyright © Rick Gekoski, 2009

The right of Rick Gekoski to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any
form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication
Data is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-84529-883-8

Printed and bound in the EU

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For Vera, Chuck and Dave

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First thanks are due to my literary agent Peter Straus, for finding the right home for this book, and to Andreas Campomar of Constable & Robinson for supplying it. Both of
these friends have been constant sources of encouragement and critical attention.

Sandy Neubauer’s enthusiasm meant more than he would know in those early difficult days; Warwick Gould helped me to avoid errors of fact and judgement with regard to W.B. Yeats; Ron
Schuchard kindly supplied an obscure Eliot reference; Martin Warner was so generous that he made me want to take back every criticism I have made about academic life, all of the virtues of which
come together in him; Tom Rosenthal cast his shrewd but friendly eye on successive drafts, and is absolved from ever having to read this again; Natalie Galustian read with acute sympathy, and kept
me going when things got tough; I couldn’t find either the time or the energy to write without the staunch support of Peter Grogan, who keeps our business going when my eye is turned in a
different direction. I am also indebted to Michael Silverman, Ann Rosenthal, Tim Gilbertson, James Stourton, Mez Packer, Geordie Williamson, Maggie Body, Mary Montgomery, Gina Rozner, Ali
Blackburn, Bob Demaria and Mark Everett for helpful advice.

Particular thanks are due to Sam Varnedoe who improves everything that he touches, and whose lovingly assiduous enthusiasm has sustained me throughout.

For Anna, Steve, Bertie and the eagle-eyed Ruthie, so full of love and support. And for Belinda, as ever, and always.

Vera, Chuck and Dave are, of course, the imagined prospective grandchildren in the Beatles’ ‘When I’m 64’.

RG

INTRODUCTION

‘Lot 147 then. Lovely item!’

The auctioneer’s eyes flicked towards the left-hand wall.

A ferrety porter in a green apron pointed out the object.

‘Showing here, sir!’

‘Who’ll start me at £100 then?’

I stood along the left side of the room, my catalogue clutched damply in my hand, trying to look nonchalant. An audience of about fifty people wandered in and out, settled on
their chairs, drank coffee from plastic cups. A middle-aged woman in a hat with a red feather bid excitedly on many of the items, waving her catalogue in the air. In the back row a silver-haired
man was reading quietly to a toddler.

Our local auction house had weekly sales of sub-antique household furniture, which were great fun for picking up the odd coal scuttle, rocking chair, or threadbare Oriental rug. Occasionally I
might spend a tenner on a job lot of books with one or two first editions in it. The pickings were not bad: prosperous towns with large houses often disgorge interesting bric-a-brac. While
Leamington Spa’s treasures weren’t as rich as those of, say, Bath or Cheltenham, there were bargains to be had.

But this was not one of the weekly sales, but the monthly Fine Art Sale, which was not for the likes of me. In 1974 I only made £1,800 a year, and I had never spent more than £16 on
an item for the house. I was very nervous, scanning the room for possible competition. A local dealer? Perhaps one of my university colleagues?

‘One hundred pounds? £100? Who’ll start me at £50 then?’ His eyes moved towards the back of the room, where a clutch of dealers were smoking and chatting noisily,
apparently paying no attention.

‘I have £50.’

He moved upwards slowly in increments of £5. I bided my time, prowling like a nervous lion, ready to pounce. The bidding reached £85 and the pace slowed. I raised my programme in the
air, but wasn’t noticed. I raised my whole arm.
Me, sir, pick me!

‘New place. £90. Thank you, sir.’

The dealer at the back nodded once more, and I increased my bid to £100. There was a pause as the auctioneer peered round the room. The dealer shrugged and went back to his conversation.
The laws of nature were suspended. Time stood still. The gavel poised in the air.

‘All done then? Last chance. Do I hear £110? . . . I’ll take £105 if you like.’

A final leisurely look, and the gavel hit the podium with a satisfying crack. I lowered my arm, which had stayed suspended in the air as if I were acknowledging applause after scoring a
goal.

I was exultant. The very same item had been offered in a previous Fine Art Sale, at an estimate of £300–£500, and I had watched as it failed to sell. No way could I afford that
much for a bookcase, however grand. I had a theory though – I had
lots
of theories in those days – which was that large bookcases were white elephants: if a person had a lot of
books he was unlikely to have a big house, whereas people with large houses weren’t likely accumulators of books. So big bookcases need to find just the right buyer.

That would be me, and this one was a beauty. Made of Victorian mahogany, it divided into six sections, the three top ones fitting on to the slightly protruding bottom sections, making a unit
twelve feet long by ten feet high, with fifteen adjustable shelves that would hold, I reckoned, about a thousand books. My then-wife Barbara and I had recently refurbished a gracious Regency
terraced house in the middle of Leamington Spa. It had four double bedrooms, a large sitting room with a balcony overlooking the garden and original wide-planked reddish Canadian pine floorboards,
and an undistinguished marble fireplace, which we thought rather posh.

In the process of furnishing the house, the recurrent problem was where to find room for all my books. I was not a book collector, but I acquired them avidly, and for any variety of reasons. I
bought books to read immediately, books to read some time in the future, books that were useful for research, books that looked good to me or might look good to others. Many I bought for no reason
at all, on one whim or another. And after a time there was nowhere to put them. The alcoves were all shelved, occasional bookcases bedecked the walls of the hallways, bedrooms, kitchen and study.
Piles of books grew like spores, and prospered. The house was infested with them.

And now, with the mere raising and eventual lowering of a hand, the problem was solved. I paid £20 to have our new bookcase delivered, assembled it on the left-hand wall of the sitting
room, opposite the fireplace, and spent a sweaty weekend organizing and shelving, constructing an exhibition of my life as a reader. There were books from my high school and undergraduate years,
like the tatty but heavily annotated
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
. From my time at Oxford, working copies of all of Matthew Arnold, my annotated Lewis Carroll, long runs of
Lawrence, Joyce and Eliot. And, most significantly, there were my Conrads: all of his books, many in first editions, as well as most of the available critical books on him, which I had used doing
my DPhil. Then there were all of the books, with their heavy apparatus of notes, annotations, marginalia and insertions, that I had used while teaching at the University of Warwick: hundreds of
volumes of philosophy, psychology and literature, the tools of my trade, each volume weighted with the memory of courses, syllabuses and seminars taught. There were books that charted my various
enthusiasms: tomes on Chinese porcelain, a series of books on Oriental painting, shelves full of art books and exhibition catalogues, plus a mass of books about various sports: John Feinstein on
golf and basketball, Mike Brearley on cricket captaincy, Hunter Davies on football, George Will on baseball, Nick Faldo on himself.

When, some twenty-five years later, Barbara and I divorced, we came to the neat agreement that she would keep the house and its contents, and I would have our smaller London flat and its
contents. The only exception to this admirably simple plan was that I would be allowed to retrieve my books whenever I was able to house them. But a divorce is seldom a simple or amicable thing:
people don’t do it because they trust each other and know how to negotiate their differences. A year later, when I moved to a larger flat with my new girlfriend Belinda, I rang Barbara to ask
when I could pick up the books. Never, she said. She was entitled to the contents of the house, as we had agreed, and if she had once, she acknowledged, allowed me to think of them as mine, she had
changed her mind and was keeping them. Given that I had refused to return a Roger Hilton painting that I had given her as a gift, but which was still in London, why should she return my books?

I was stunned. She was quite right about the painting, and I had behaved badly, but I had never expected anything as forensically undermining as the kidnapping of my books. I’d been
outsmarted, mugged and denuded of a great treasure. I howled, I hooted, I imprecated. I cursed Barbara and I cursed God. These weren’t books, things of paste and ink and paper. They were as
close as I came to a
soul
, they contained my history, my inner voices and connections to the transcendent, and she had excised it, as in Philip Pullman’s
Northern Lights
, where
children’s daemons are surgically removed, and they waste away and die. Ex-wives know where your soft spots are, and this foray was wonderfully exact, as if beamed by micro-surgery into the
secret places of my heart.