Everything Known: On Geoff Dyer’s “Homework”

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The only time I have been to England was for a barely-overnight layover near Gatwick Airport, where I asked the cabbie about “the Knowledge,” that deep awareness of London street systems he must surely have, according to that one New Yorker article, or maybe it was a Radiolab episode, I don’t know. He shrugged off the question and dropped me at the Premier Inn, where I slept for four hours, then headed back to the airport. ’Twas my England!

Indeed, many Americans’ Knowledge of this country is both deep and embarrassingly partial. I remember, in high school, a pair of boys who called themselves “Anglophiles” and once invited me to play croquet and eat scones, which they pronounced in that particular way. My Knowledge does not feel so very far-off from their version of worship. Its map is comprised of feelings and tidbits from Robert Macfarlane’s walks and Roger Deakin’s swims and J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine. For a certain set of 90s kids, there was also, of course, Brian Jacques’s Redwall, with its vermin kingdoms feasting on hotroot soup and acorn cakes bedecked with meadowcream, all so clearly mapped onto British countrysides and British streams. More recently, for me, the show Great Canal Journeys, in which aging stage actors Prunella Scales and Timothy West traverse the capillaries of the country in a half-stultifying spectacle whose climaxes involve quickly manipulating canal locks with an alacrity they realize they can no longer really handle. (Once, while half-watching, I realized abruptly that I recognized their son, guesting for an episode, from his acting in Slow Horses, a show which shows the other side of the televised UK: gray, grimy, crimey. This is the other half of my Knowledge: ten full years of watching dramas about horrific crimes unraveled by detectives/spies with depressing personal lives.) And then, of course, there is The Great British Bake-Off, which repeatedly asks its American viewers to believe it is simply a thing at run of the mill parties in the UK to expect ornate custards, “puds,” and Battenberg cakes. 

But maybe this is England. After all: “sugar, lovely sugar!” exclaims Geoff Dyer in his latest book, Homework: A Memoir. It is a strange book. Earnest. One in which he purely delights in the substance as “a source of pleasure, nutrition, energy and happiness.” Sugar so suffuses Dyer’s childhood, we learn, that it was impossible for anything to be “too sweet—how could it be?” “It wasn’t that I had a sweet tooth; I had a normal tooth, a tooth that craved sugar,” he continues. The writing here is notably hyper, it is, in a classic Dyerian mode, also a buoyant rant of sorts, against, maybe, some of the grim pronouncements of RFK Jr. types intoning about longevity, obesity, diabetes. Sugar did Dyer no harm, he writes, other than, of course, the tooth thing, but whatever: tooth problems were normal to everyone there, at that time.

There, at that time: place and temporality form the two axes of Dyer’s examination. Homework is a story, we are to understand, not just of Dyer’s childhood, but of England in the 60s, and a particular strata of England at that: let’s say lower-middle class. He is imparting his Knowledge to us, through detail—sugar, and teeth, but also trading cards, knick-knacks, and verrucas bloomed in the locker room, and the distant-but-not-too-distant memory of two world wars, which bleed into everything. We learn, overtly, via a not very Dyerian, disclaimer-y sounding statement, that he did not grow up in poverty. Rather, Dyer and his family lived under the abiding mandate to always “go without.” Extraordinarily, painfully conscious of money, of their class position, and of a “primitive” past separated only by a generation from the present, the Dyer parents work constantly, grow their own vegetables at their allotment, and do not “want” for more than they have. Because “any increase in pleasure,” Dyer writes, “came with a corresponding or disproportionate escalation of responsibility or obligation that had the potential to turn the object of pleasure into a source of drudgery.” So this is where, and when, Geoff comes from.

‘Twas his England. The book is about England, about an era that formed him, and parents that did too. From my mattress of clotted cream and crime, I expected to be annoyed by this book, in the way that I always think I am annoyed by Dyer. And then I always remember that, actually, I’m not: I admire him, and that is what annoys me. A large part of Dyer’s work is his self-abasement: as he writes in Homework, “presenting myself in a consistently poor light has been more than a source of pleasure over the last thirty years. It’s been a point of principle that no one emerges from any page by me looking worse than the person writing it.” He wants you to roll your eyes along at him, at his tendencies, and his insufficiencies, and his pomposities. I used to try to write this way, and be this way; at a certain point, as a woman (as a woman!) it became a personal and professional liability to be self-deprecating beyond a certain degree. 

Along the way, Dyer’s project has been reflexive (by the way, at a certain point, people started saying “self-reflexive,” but I wonder: wouldn’t “reflexive” suffice? To be self-reflexive adds an extra layer of reflexivity that I think cancels out the original reflexivity; also, I think people might just be thinking of the term “self-reflective,” which is a little less neurotic, maybe, than reflexivity). His probably most famous book, Out of Sheer Rage, is one of the most reflexive and also self-reflective projects he’s done. I lent my copy of this book to a student recently in an independent study, and am now paging through it, reading her marginalia, noting the unsurprising revelation that I am not the only one half-annoyed, half-admiring:

I giggled [“I wanted to slaughter them all—at least it would have been something to do”]

Yes! Something happened lol [the scene where Dyer and his girlfriend get in a moped accident]

Lazy [“my favorite foods are all variants of bread”]

Transitory spaces seem to make up a longer part of this book than I thought [When Dyer lambasts himself for renting an apartment in Oxford]

rolled my eyes. STFU. [“For the writer, the artist’s studio is, essentially, a place where women undress.”]

In Out of Sheer Rage, we have Dyer-the-character impaling himself for his procrastinatory tendencies, and making fun of himself, and exploring the various stripes of his internally-held pain and difficulty. In Homework, it is Dyer-the-writer whose self-consciousness underscores the project. Often, this takes the form of reminding us that he is in the process of writing and re-writing a book that we are in the process of reading. Twice, for instance, Dyer offers alternative titles for the book we hold in our hands (“A Happening” and “This Was Not Entirely My Fault”). At another point, he mentions that he “had just finished a version of this section” (the one about sugar) when he read a similarly-themed passage in another memoirist’s draft. Describing his grandmother, who is dying of TB, he corrects himself: he was “going to say” that she smoked like a chimney, “but that’s not right: she was a human chimney…coughing, in fact, was her way of breathing.” 

Elsewhere, this self-consciousness about the act of writing the book takes an almost schlocky standup-like quality: “Even at the risk of this book suddenly reading like the autobiography of someone who went on to become a minor British painter best known for seascapes, I want it on record that my first attempts at creating art involved the underwater world,” Dyer writes. Or “Since I have high hopes of this book being turned into a Hollywood blockbuster…”  And occasionally, his self-consciousness becomes so intense, and so tangled, that his sentences startle, and their meaning deepens after they’ve forced you to ensure you understand what, exactly, he’s saying. Remembering the act of buying an expensive pair of pants, Dyer thinks of his father’s parsimoniousness. “When the price was quoted, I responded with shocked ‘how much?’ This was a tribute to my dad and, since I bought them, an indulgence (the expression, I mean, not the purchase).”

What is the purpose of all this self-consciousness? And also, what effect does it have? I was never exactly tempted to write STFU on any page of Homework, but the book startled me for its overt awareness of its constructions, an awareness which became something like a tic the longer it went on. This tendency of Dyer’s became oddly talky at times, like Groucho Marx providing a running commentary on the action, except that it didn’t point away from what he was saying. It did point towards the vulnerability of it—of one writer’s deepest, oldest memories, delivered carefully to a legion of reader-fans after a lifetime of writing about other topics: D.H. Lawrence and tennis and World War I and ships and Annie Dillard and music and television and film and photography. 

Rather touchingly, it turns out that nearly all of these interests of older-Dyer are in this book—many of them as seeds that sprout during younger-Dyer’s adolescence, a la the lettuce in his father’s allotment. They are precious in some foundational sense. For his is the rare example of writing which is not, in our current age of relentless self-branding, narrowing into one or two hobbyhorses hammered into a brand. He is instead defined by his expansive interest in pretty much everything. Dyer’s “brand,” to speak crassly, is his voice—another way to put this might be that it is him, and his sensibilities, that run as a consistent thread through everything he has written. And here we see not just the foundations of his interests, but the foundations of him, his tendencies towards self-abasement, his reflexivity.

Inescapably, he is a product of time and place—it is just that he has now left this time and place, and is finally looking back at it, with a perspective he could never have had before. It would be easy, with such a project, for the writer to enter reverie; nearly ten pages about young-Dyer’s favorite toy soldiers can attest to the strength of that pull. It was the only part of the book I skimmed. Into the rest, I sank with a kind of agreeable, warm bafflement at what felt like a new frontier for Dyer, a kind of tenderness occasionally flicked at by his self-conscious jokes and slightly arduous confessions of intent. “England, my England,” he writes, “that line is like a watermark printed invisibly on every page of this book, invisibly in the sense of visibly.” Invisibly in the sense of visibly? I mean, watermarks are both invisible and visible: I get it. And yet I feel that surge of half-envy again: for how his editor did not “correct” Dyer, did not write a paralyzing “?” next to this and other such lines. 

What Dyer is doing, in Homework, is creating a collage that tempts a reader to write, in the margins, some version of “?”. Or maybe, that two-word phrase every writer worries about receiving, so crushing a reminder that just because we care about something, that doesn’t mean our reader does. So what? Hence, I guess, the self-consciousness. This book is a map of himself, from memory, comprised of “unsorted jumble of pieces in the bag,” as Dyer describes a jigsaw puzzle he finds in his parents’ attic as an adult, after his mother’s death. A collection of things that simultaneously matter and do not matter. They simply formed the stacking strata of his childhood, and any earthquakes that rumble through are fairly minimal, and mostly emanating from the distant past, in which his rural forebears wash their hair with rainwater, and do not always know who their fathers were. This is not to say that nothing dramatic, painful, or notable happens in Dyer’s younger life. Quite the opposite: he has sex, he gets suddenly raged at once by his father in a somewhat disquieting scene involving plum pits, and, later, his grandfather apparently commits suicide by walking off a balcony.  

But notable, and crushing, is that Dyer shows relatively little emotion about any of these large events. There is not much feeling here, in this place, at this time. There is very little self-consciousness in younger-Dyer, or, at least, it is not able to really be voiced. Perhaps it is as he writes: “How readily children accept the life they are born into. There are no abnormalities in family life.” Perhaps it is, also, England: what we Know of it and its stiflings, class boundaries, attachments to the Past. Most of all, though, perhaps it is as Dyer says: that for him, growing up where and when he did, “the idea of contentment was closely related to that of acceptance… From an early age I was home-schooled in notions of acceptance that I later found entirely unacceptable.” 

And so this book is an examination of that, it turns out. For you cannot accept everything. Certain things come out, sometimes in weird ways. Particularly moving here are Dyer’s descriptions of what seems like some kind of eating disorder, though he would never term it that, exactly. He makes a linkage between dog food and human food early on and cannot seem to shake it; neither can he stomach milk; he marvels with no small degree of horror at the food served for school lunches, driven to impressionistic listing (“sausages—made entirely of fat—served in batter. Grey lamb—nothing but fat and gristle—with mashed potatoes that were both watery and lumpy. Pale, wilted chips… Stink-fish on Fridays”). It is no wonder he turns to sugar sandwiches, and a flask full of canned vegetable soup, and a regionally-specific kind of cake known as a “dripper.” This is how he quite literally survives.

Reading from an extended moment of trauma-focused memoir, we await, maybe, the Bad Thing, or, failing that, the Big Thing. What we get are two education-related events, both gigantic, but presented without too much fanfare, because fanfare simply isn’t a part of young-Dyer’s life. The first event, Dyer tells us, remains “the most momentous event of my life”: passing the 11-plus exam, as it is called, and going to grammar school, a mark of passage into a new world marked by social customs and class networks not inherent to his old one. The second, a few years later, is Dyer’s admittance to Oxford. Time slows down in this scene; his absorption of the fundamentally life-changing news has nowhere to go. We do not get a sense of his internal feeling, at all, except through the windows, and his parents. 

I called the college office and was told that I had got a place. This was at about four in the afternoon. Then minutes later my mum came home from the canteen, pushing her bike along the narrow path outside the kitchen window. She looked up to see me strutting back and forth in the kitchen, brightly lit, pumping my arms up and down.

In the early evening, after my dad got home from work, I borrowed the car and went for a victory drive, breaking a wing-mirror as I squeezed past a parked car on Thirlestaine Road. There was no disguising the damage: the mirror was dangling from the side of the car like a more complex version of the Tommy gun I’d broken as a kid. My dad had glued the broken gun back together; now, when I got back home and parked the car in the drive, he said he wouldn’t spoil my big day by making a fuss about the unfixable mirror.

I’d only gone for a drive because I didn’t know what else to do. Nor did my parents. Passing the 11-plus was a goal shared by all the parents they knew; going to the grammar school was an achievement they could fully appreciate, bask in. Now something unknowable was beckoning.

I wonder what a reader might take of the resemblance in this book between the blinders of childhood—that lack of “perspective”—and the larger social constructions around “accepting one’s lot in life” that Dyer explores. In this book, both Dyer’s childhood and his family’s social class contain a certain passivity. That passivity is normal, to some degree, in the early years of one’s life. But a tricky parallel emerges, in these pages, between childhood and class, a parallel which Dyer both approaches and seeks to avoid. Via becoming an adult and going to Oxford, he leaves both. His parents only transcend the former. 

Yet the ending of this book works almost as a legend on a map. The final chapter is a stunner focused on his mother’s death and a large birthmark she once attempted, in her youth, to have removed. This was her attempt, in vain, to not accept her lot, to change things for herself. It is a painful procedure in more ways than one for Dyer’s mother; the retrieval of this information, too, is painful for Dyer himself. Because she never finished it. She never got it removed. And he has spent his entire life avoiding writing about it: what it meant for her, this large mark she eventually accepted, with shame. The chapter slides as a key, opening everything that comes before. His mother could have changed things for herself; it was simply too hard, too painful, too much to transcend. Not so for him. And so a partial affinity emerges: of the boundedness into which both were born. To some, like Dyer’s mother, it might be too painful to leave everything that is known behind. But to leave, then return—different now, and self-conscious of a gap—brings pain too.