Geoff Dyer's English journey

New Statesman​

a day ago

Geoff Dyer is an Englishman, though it can look as though he's spent his life pretending not to be. His literary subject matter – travel, Andrei Tarkovsky, American photography, American jazz – is full of what Philip Larkin warily called 'being abroad'. His literary output is similarly unrooted, slaloming between cultural history, literary criticism, comic fiction and general reminisces. In the 2003 work Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It (which combines all of the above) he writes that ''Home'… is the place where least has happened… peripheral and, as a consequence, more than a little blurred.' Now, though, he has produced that most conventional thing, a boyhood memoir, a book about his home, Cheltenham in the Sixties and Seventies, and about ours – a book about England.
Dyer gives us all the first fights and first fucks, and before that all the mewling and pissed-off-with-his-schooling. He does refreshingly leave out the self-abuse that dominates the 20th-century iterations of the genre, telling me when we meet in London that, while 'there was no cover-up', other male writers had exhausted the subject. But though guided by what he has called 'perpetual revelation' – often shaming self-revelation – this book represents something of a swerve for Dyer, a project equal parts social and personal.
Homework is a study of Dyer's childhood, but also of the worlds that it scampered through. There is the provincial geography of Dyer's boyhood Cheltenham, a terraced England of high streets, lanes, closes and drives. There is the motion of class in the post-war period, frozen like a great glacier for so many generations before the meltwater of the grammar school system opened new streams of social mobility, sending Dyer to Oxford University and the literary life that followed. And then there is a peculiarly English psyche, simultaneously mean and kind, of which Dyer's parents are two beautifully drawn representatives. He may or may not be one of the greats – his books are so segregated by topic that it is hard to imagine anyone beyond an unusually polymathic biographer enjoying them whole. But, handed a great novelist's confluence of theme, narrator and occasion, I think he has now written a great book.
We're far from Cheltenham when Dyer and I meet. We're in the top two floors of a Victorian house in Ladbroke Grove, to which he moved back permanently from Los Angeles last month. It's newly renovated, with high ceilings and a stylish, minimalist decor. And Dyer is certainly not a mean host: the interview only begins after smooth, home-ground coffee and almond croissants the size of small calzones, sourced from a local bakery.
In the typical back and forth of his comic style (in Homework he calls it 'ironic switchback'), Dyer first says he is delighted to be back after a decade in America. But it soon becomes clear he means London rather than Britain: 'Typically, as soon as we have to go anywhere else in England, then all my rage returns because of the fucked-up train system. And I'm instantly reminded of the thing that used to drive me more insane about England than anything… this Soviet-style resignation to inefficiency and things not working.' It's an ambivalence he summarises with a quotation from DH Lawrence: 'English in the teeth of all the world – even in the teeth of England.'
DH Lawrence is the most consistent preoccupation of a career that has been defined by curiosity and obsession. And, much like his literary output, Dyer's maisonette is a display cabinet of his periodic interests. Greeting me on his landing (at 67, he has an impressively slim frame which continues to resemble a life-size Giacometti statue), Dyer immediately gestures at a poster for the avant-garde jazz band the Necks, newly framed and mounted by the front door. Dyer tells me he had partly arranged his return to England for early May so he could make their residency at Cafe Oto, in east London, attending six of their eight sets. In the kitchen, meanwhile, there is a panoramic photograph of Nevada's Burning Man, the anarchic, alternative festival of 'self-reliance' which has served as a Dyer setting and muse on more than one occasion.
This life – the insecure, bohemian, ungrounded existence Dyer calls 'the writer's life' – is a world away from the ancestral milieu found in Homework. Dyer's father was a sheet-metal worker; his mother was a school dinner lady and then a hospital cleaner. As a trio, they led the kind of respectable lower-middle-class life that was utterly normal but which has now taken on theair of a foreign country.
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In the book, Dyer's parents never fly on a plane (on a family holiday to London they visit Heathrow, just to look at it). The front room of their two-up, two-down is never used, except at Christmas, its deliberate vacancy and dusty drinks cabinet proof of a family that had 'a toe-hold in the age of plenty… more than we needed'. When on holiday, the Dyers make their own beds to spare the maid at the B&B, 'incapable by nature, circumstances and habit, of being served in any way'. They collect the series of cards that would come free with boxes of Brooke Bond Tea. And the children play games about the Second World War, even as its living veterans, including Dyer's father, rarely mention it, leaving their little boys' campaigns of Airfix and Action Man, their imagined El Alamein, undisturbed by the truth of memory.
At times, too, it resembles a postwar sitcom. The greatest refrain of the book surrounds Dyer's father's attitude to money, cautious and miserly, what Dyer calls a 'subsistence existentialism'. It supplies the funniest set-pieces, as when his father offers to buy a company boss a drink at their Christmas do, and receives the order of a 'double scotch', such an unthinking injustice ('a double!') that Dyer's father repeats the story like 'the Ancient Mariner' for days after.
The parents are also habitual hoarders – expired Bird's custard power in the cupboard, banknotes under the mattress – while Dyer's dad steals as much stationery from work as he can manage, a squirrel-like trait that made me wheeze with recognition. (In 2018, my own family finally exhausted a stockpile of candles first established by my grandmother during the three-day week – a stockpile she too had stolen from her workplace.)
Part of Dyer's project in this book is to historicise these hang-ups. Having grown up in the Thirties, his parents were 'an inevitable product of centuries of rural life in which obligations and hardships greatly outweighed all possibilities of treats or abundance'. He has partially inherited this attitude of thrift: should he ever give up writing, he tells me, he would find it 'quite fulfilling, clipping out discount coupons in the local papers', though he admits that he has 'paid a lot of money for Japanese denim' in his time.
But he is decidedly ambivalent about this more general attitude of self-privation. 'Noble is certainly the wrong word,' he says; 'admirable is not quite the right word… My parents were so weirdly resistant to having anything made nicer in their lives… Rebecca [his wife] was always saying, 'Shouldn't we do this with your mum and dad?' And I'd say, 'Well, they won't want to'. There's no point because – I just knew there wasn't.'
The postwar instinct ofself-privation is a cousin of self-sacrifice and, in turn, self-denial.As Dyer writes in the moving final section of Homework, his mother was afflicted by a series of hairy moles across her body, one 'the size of a large casserole lid on her right hip', and the largest on her left arm. She underwent an operation after the war to remove the most visible section, but couldn't face any follow-ups. As a result she was, Dyer writes, marked 'as a kind of outcaste', fated to imperfection. 'This feeling,' Dyer writes, 'the opposite of the word we hear so often now, of entitlement… was not second nature to her: it was her first nature, part of the larger culture of deference and knowing one's place.'
Dyer writes of a world only three generations removed, but this aspect can seem almost pre-modern. 'It's that historical change,' Dyer tells me. 'If you think of people of my parents' age, then of course they're going to think like that, whereas for all sorts of reasons now we feel things can be made better. I'm really conscious of this in LA: it's got to the ludicrous extent of the perfectibility of the individual at the expense of the society. It's just incredible where we lived, the number of gyms we were surrounded by: you can get the perfect body, you can get the perfect everything, really, partly by being at the gym, partly by surgery. And as a result you can sink into total despair about something else!' Whereas postwar England prioritised the perfectibility of the society at the expense of the individual? 'Yes, indeed. To exaggerate somewhat – I talk about my dad's lack of interest in everything – he sort of almost didn't have much of a 'self', really… They had so little agency. By the end of my dad's life, his agency was reduced to just saving money, recycling teabags endlessly.'
This lack of interests, lack of culture, became a cleavage between father and son as Dyer enjoyed the social mobility that his parents willed him on to. 'My increasing sense… of part of my life being incommunicable,' he writes of his bookish teenage self, 'consolidated the habit of communicating less and less of what was important to my parents.' And this more bitter aspect of self-advancement is recalled tenderly but unsparingly by Dyer. 'We just gradually accepted this sort of silence settling between us about certain things. Such big parts of my life were incommunicable… If I'd had a brother or sister, then maybe the gap would have shrunk in a way; things would have been normalised. As it was, it just felt that we were in this kind of weird experiment.'
Dyer was taking part in an experiment: the experiment of the meritocracy. Oxford overwhelmed his parents: 'We went for lunch when they visited and it was all a bit uncomfortable because they were so… deferential, and obviously feeling well out of their routine life. We so rarely went to restaurants, even that was a bit unusual.' The life Dyer chose after university – 'living on the dole in a slum in Brixton' and thereby entering a sort of welfare-leisure class – only broadened this distance from his parents.
But it was during this Brixton period that Dyer discovered writers like Raymond Williams and EP Thompson, the cultural critic and historian whose famous lines on class epigraph and epilogue Homework. 'They're so important to me because they explain the process I had been through, and therefore they explained who I was. The crucial thing with this book, I think, is that there's nothing particularly interesting about my life, except to me. But it's interesting to tell my story precisely because it illustrates or embodies a larger social history.'
These days, in his Ladbroke Grove pomp, Dyer makes no pretension to being working class any longer (that would be 'a delusion', he says). But, like so many English people, class pride and class resentmentcloud his peripheral vision. He tells me the story of how, when his 'upper-middle-class' wife's parents once came to visit and met his downstairs neighbours, he 'invented this whole pointless errand, just so I could really affirm to them that these were Rebecca's parents. I couldn't bear them to think that was the world I came from.'
'It's daft,' he says, and he's quite right. But it's the kind of pathology – and the kind of comedy – that might only make sense in England. 'It's not even a thing to which we can ascribe any motives, because it's just my DNA, really… Class is part of your DNA here; it's almost a biological part of one's being.'
As our conversation goes on, it becomes clear that Dyer's life isn't just different from his parents'. It's the opposite. His father left England to fight in war; Dyer left it to write books. His parents had an extraordinary 'capacity for patience' and 'acceptance'; he is a 'raging inferno of impatience' with 'no capacity for acceptance'. Where they were private, self-secluded, he is warm and sociable. (At a reading I attended two days before our meeting, Dyer was greeted with a mixture of affection and professional envy.) He's had a good time.
No room of his house exists to remain unused: thoughtfully curated, symmetrically styled, it is yet another form of self-expression. This is more than a lifestyle; it's a generational creed. And as young life becomes more static and straitened, it's one that begins to look as historical as that two-up, two-down in Cheltenham.
If his life seems historical, Dyer is semi-conscious of his age: 'It sounds old, doesn't it?' he says. 'But I was conscious of this important book to be written… I really feel a great sense of relief that I've done this because I really was the only person capable, the perfect person to choose, to write this story.' This story? The story of the historical process, the peculiarities of the English, the lost promise of a postwar Jerusalem? 'No,' he says. 'Me!'
'Homework: A Memoir' is out now. Buy on bookshop.org
[See also: Britain's new-build nightmare]
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