Look with a Capital L
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Homework, Geoff Dyer, Canongate, 2025, pp. 288, Hardback, £20.00
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Geoff Dyer is a real looker. In the course of more than twenty books published over nearly forty years, he has maintained a close attention to the look of things. ‘Naturally, I have no method,’ he relates at the outset of 2021’s See/Saw, his second book on photography: ‘I just look, and think about what I’m looking at, and then try to articulate what I’ve seen and thought – which encourages me to write things I hadn’t previously noticed, to have thoughts I hadn’t had before writing began.’ This guileless method translates neatly in that book from the ghostly urban images of Eugène Atget to the languid portraits of Dayanita Singh, but it has served him with other forms, too. In But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz (1991), he writes about Thelonious Monk: ‘His body fills in all the gaps in the music; without seeing him it always sounds like something’s missing but when you see him even piano solos acquire a sound as full as a quartet’s. The eye hears what the ear misses.’
In his latest book, Homework, a memoir of his early childhood in Cheltenham, Dyer writes about the past in visual terms: ‘Life took some camera-less pictures of my mum and me playing two-against-one badminton with my dad.’ Dyer was (is) an only child, and much of his childhood was spent looking at the objects and images that saturated postwar suburban life: Airfix kits, Action Men, the futuristic puppet show Stingray (1964-1965) and the James Bond film Thunderball (1965), to name just a few. Culturally, England at mid-century was still dominated by representations of war, from the adventure series The Rat Patrol (1966-1968) and the bombastic Where Eagles Dare (1968) – about which Dyer wrote a jolly scene-by-scene commentary, 2018’s Broadsword Calling Danny Boy – to schoolkids playing with plastic Tommy guns in the lane behind 1 Fairfield Walk, the first house in Cheltenham where Dyer lived with his parents, Phyllis ‘Mary’, a school dinner lady, and Arthur ‘John’, a sheet metal worker and ‘passionate creosoter’.
England at this time was a place obsessed with appearances and keeping appearances; or, in other words, with the difference between what things look like and what they really are. This is evident, not least, in the prevalence of nicknames or pseudonyms: almost everybody in Homework has a different name, creating a family with ‘a touch of the nineteenth-century Russian novel’. ‘Auntie Lean’s actual name was Mabel, Dink’s was Edna May and Joan’s was Lavinia. Their real names were never used.’ 1 Fairfield Walk has an unused cocktail cabinet in the ‘trophy or show’ front room, which is opened just once a year, at Christmas. When the mother of one of Dyer’s friends suffers a schizophrenic breakdown, her paranoia arrives in the form of looking, and being looked at. In the garden of 3 Fairfield Walk, she berates a neighbour who is hanging out her sheets on the line: ‘You think you’re looking at me, well I can look too, yes, I can bloody look.’ Such a breakdown, Dyer muses, ‘seemed inevitable’ thanks to the ‘constant prompting by adverts on TV to achieve a whiter and whiter wash with products whose names – Breeze, Tide, Surf – promised a life of oceanic freedom so at odds with the routine drudgery of using them’.
The fear of being looked at goes on to underpin the most poignant moment in the book, when Dyer speaks to a paramedic after Mary, now eighty-four, has collapsed: ‘My mum has a very large birthmark on her arm,’ he tries to explain through his tears. ‘It’s been the most important thing in her life. … Can you please do everything you can to make sure that she is covered up in the hospital, that no one sees it?’ This short scene is moving not only for the emotional inversion of Dyer’s phrasing (‘the most important thing’ in one’s life usually refers to something happy or enjoyable) but because Mary’s birthmark had already been removed years before: ‘The birthmark did not just sap my mum’s confidence,’ Dyer writes, ‘it marked her, from birth, as a kind of outcast. By the time the birthmark – or part of it – was removed, the physical mark was less important than its internalised and unseen psychological effect.’
Dyer writes Homework with a kind of double exposure: the childhood event being related is overlaid with the mature reflections of the sixty five-year-old man doing the relating.
Aside from a short coda that skips forward to the last years of Mary and John, Homework is mostly concerned with Dyer’s early childhood and teenage years, including underage drinking, ‘a distinguished career in retail’ and doing well enough at Cheltenham Grammar School to win a place at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Dyer ‘looks back’ on this time, but he also looks at it: he refers variously to photographs and printed ephemera to order his reflections. In doing so he keeps in mind a quotation from historian Martha Sandweiss that appeared as an epigraph to his 2005 book The Ongoing Moment: ‘The capacity of photographs to evoke rather than tell, to suggest rather than explain, makes them alluring material for the historian or anthropologist or art historian who would pluck a single picture from a large collection and use it to narrate his or her own stories.’ The most important photograph referred to in Homework, reproduced on the front cover, shows a very young Dyer in a cowboy hat with his mother, father and an unidentified inflatable animal stood in front of the family Vauxhall Victory in a rural carpark. For Dyer, ‘the photograph is memory. If I remember the weather of my childhood as perpetually sunny that is because photographs… were only taken on days when the light was deemed sufficient’. Dyer uses this photograph to modify a famous idea from Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida (1980). Looking at a photograph of his recently deceased mother as a young girl – the now-famous ‘winter garden photograph’ – Barthes wrote that there exists a ‘rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead.’ In Homework, Dyer responds:
There’s nothing terrible about it, and the dead, in photographs, do the only thing they can do: they stay dead. The little cowboy doesn’t know that yet – how could he when he’s not seen this picture? – but he will. Maybe he seems sad because to gaze into the camera is to look into the future. He knows – often, these days, finds himself thinking: I could be dead soon.
Dyer writes Homework with a kind of double exposure: the childhood event being related is overlaid with the mature reflections of the sixty five-year-old man doing the relating. This provides the opportunity for countless funny comparisons. When the children in Dyer’s class queue up to have their pencils sharpened, the teacher, Mr Grinnell, tells Dyer to turn around and go to the back of the queue, giving no reason (Dyer learns later that he had presented his pencil to the teacher the wrong way up). To be turned away like this ‘was mystifying, inexplicable, in the same way that people would later be turned away arbitrarily by the bouncers at Berghain. The only difference here was that you got another chance.’ This double exposure also rescues Dyer from the occupational hazard of the early-childhood memoir: tedium. The otherwise boring moment when Dyer is too late for the ice cream van is salvaged by comparing the feeling to John Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’: ‘Even, now, sixty years later, Keats’ line, “Fled is that music,” makes me think not of a nightingale but a gaggle of kids standing, waiting, listening.’
Dyer uses these anachronistic comparisons to construct intricate extended metaphors, some of which go on for several pages. The schoolyard game of conkers is made into an elite sport, where pickling a conker in vinegar is ‘the equivalent of doping except that while frowned upon (by kids who did not yet know that expression), the practice was not outlawed’. Swapping bubblegum cards is elevated to the level of currency trading, where ‘through the multiple transactions and negotiations at work in the course of the day an overall exchange rate emerged whereby a given card acquired a more or less standardised value.’ The growing popularity of the Action Man doll – at one point there were four dolls for every three boys in England – is likened to international conflict escalation: ‘just as war generates its own momentum, we kept forking out for munitions and uniforms’. As well as being funny, these anachronisms capture the specific consciousness of the young child, who is so egocentric that the experience of trading a bubblegum card or choosing a new costume for an Action Man takes on a world-historical significance.
The first words of Homework are a longer quotation from the Welsh cultural theorist Raymond Williams’ 1973 work The Country and the City, which ends: ‘Great confusion is caused if the real childhood memory is projected, unqualified, as history.’ The personal experience is, to an extent, just that: personal. Dyer is alive to this, and he is honourably candid about the central fact of his life. Passing the 11-plus was, Dyer writes, ‘the most momentous event of my life, not simply up to that point but for its duration. Everything else that has happened couldn’t have happened were it not for that.’ Rather than believing the idea that he was a particularly clever eleven-year-old, Dyer acknowledges the arbitrariness (and unfairness) of the grammar-school system: ‘the purpose of the 11-plus was not to send a few clever kids – kids, more exactly, who’d passed the 11-plus – to grammar school’. This apparent meritocracy was no more than ‘a side-effect or corollary of the larger aim and intention: to ensure a steady flow of workers who would not go to grammar school’. Dyer is conscious here of ‘the ladder version of society’ as described by Williams in his earlier book, Culture and Society (1958): ‘the ladder is a perfect symbol of the bourgeois idea of society, because, while undoubtedly it offers the opportunity to climb, it is a device which can only be used individually: you go up the ladder alone’. Dyer, like Williams, looks beyond his personal experience.
Dyer quips towards the end of the book that portraying himself ‘in a consistently poor light has been more than a source of pleasure over the last thirty years.’ For him, it is ‘a point of principle that no one emerges from any page by me looking worse than the person writing it.’ How, then, does Dyer look? Charming and funny, warm and inquisitive, the reflecting Dyer provides a page-turner that entertains you just long enough to forget the sad fact of it all, that even camera-less pictures warp and fade.
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© 2015 Larry D. Moore. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Joe Williams is reviews editor at Critical Quarterly.
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