AutoBioPhilosophy: An intimate story of what it means to be human

The lack of money was a background drone and a drain. The previous summer, at the end of my first year in 1985, I had decided to stay on in Oxford for the long vacation or ‘vac’. In that era, it was still possible for students to sign on out of term time. The phrase was ‘going on the dole’. But my application was refused. I remonstrated with a benefits officer behind a glass screen in the prefab Department of Social Security building on the outskirts of town. To no avail. This was where the government employees received us privileged ‘gownies’ – as opposed to ‘townies’ – with the contempt that we probably deserved. It matched perfectly what Kafka describes in his fiction, The Trial: faceless administration, baffling paperwork, impenetrable processes. I felt like the Minotaur trapped in the labyrinth.

So for the ten weeks of that long summer, in the year before I met Simone, while I was still with Astrid, I lived on a food budget of a pound a day. I made a few extra quid offering guided tours of Oxford, but not enough to make a difference. One pound equated to a single portion of boiled rice from a Chinese takeaway called Dear Friends – known to us student wits as ‘Dead Friends’ – and a couple of Snickers bars. That was it. I lost weight. Meanwhile, the credit card bills came through with inexorable regularity, and with interest charged on top like some monstrous dehiscence.

Why didn’t I just go home that first Oxford summer and live off my parents, like a normal student, getting my laundry done and having my meals cooked? This was the period after my father had lost his job, when his father, my grandfather, had scraped him like a barnacle off the hull of the ship of the family business, leaving him to bob hopelessly in the waves. To shore up their losses, my parents had moved from the rambling detached house where I had done most of my growing up, into a semi-detached cottage back in south Croydon. The flash cars were sold. My bedroom was a box partitioned out of the master bedroom where my parents slept, with a wall so thin that I could hear them breathe at night. It wasn’t home for any of us. On the day we moved in, my mother sat down on the stairs and wept.

Haunting

That wasn’t the main reason why I stayed up in Oxford that first summer. Though I too struggled with the comedown in our family fortunes. The loss of social status became all the more acute on going up to Oxford. I could see up close the real-life toffs at Christ Church and Worcester and Magdalen. These were the gilded youth who hailed from old money, had houses in the country, and all knew each other – my peers included David Cameron and Boris Johnson. Before going up, I had assumed that Oxford would be about the scaling of intellectual summits. I soon realised that social altitude mattered more. Being middle class and intellectual was somewhat suspect. Better to be a bit less bright and a bit more posh. I’d been a keen actor at school and a member of the National Youth Theatre, and Oxford would be a chance for me to take some interesting new roles … but the roles were always taken by these chums with skiing holiday tans, liberal allowances and bow ties that needed to be tied.

A short note on cars

The Chrysler in the photo was one of several owned by my grandfather with an ‘Oak’ licence plate. The registration number refers to ‘Ye Olde Oak’, the brand name of the tinned ham produced by Rowland Smith & Son Ltd. In the mid 1970s, this vehicle was sold to none other than David Bowie, who was then in his ‘plastic soul’ phase, and wanted an American car to drive in England. A Chrysler features in his 1975 song ‘Young Americans’. Perhaps it was this one. When my father had to give up driving, it represented another break with the Oak dynasty, and a loss of male energy. My own dreams often feature cars. The kind of car I’m driving and the journey I’m on seem to indicate my state of mind at the time.

Admittedly, I had been to a private school myself – the same Dulwich College that my mother aspired to on her son’s behalf. But Dulwich was a school for new-money boys from Beckenham or Bromley or, like me, Croydon. By contrast, those bright young things had carved out an elite within the elite, an inner sanctum of privilege cordoned off with a red rope and guarded by a PR team with a list of names from which mine was absent. I wasn’t sure if I hated them or wished I was one of them. Probably both.

Ultimately, staying away that summer was a means of avoiding living under the same roof as my father in his castrated state. A state like that of King Lear turfed out of his castle, confined to the outbuildings with the animals. It would have meant seeing his reality first hand. I use the word ‘castrated’ deliberately. Though the MS would sure enough disable his sexual functioning along with everything else, it was more that the symbolic male energy that should have flowed from father to son, from him to me, had been interrupted. The oil pipeline, the artery of resources, had been blown up by terrorists. Just as I was making my transition from adolescence to the big wide world, and needing male fuel to boost me on, the engine cut out.

More usually the reverse applies: paternal potency induces filial feebleness. There are billionaire fathers with wastrel sons, and celebrity fathers whose male progeny live in their shadow. In those cases, it is an excess rather than an insufficiency of fatherly strength that causes the son to weaken. For me, it was the other way round. And it was as much about timing as anything else. At the point of leaving home I needed a full tank. I had expected my father to fill it up as a parting gift. I got only a few miles down the road before the engine sputtered and died. Why had my father stopped earning money to support me? Why couldn’t he have an influential job for me to boast about? Why did he have to crumple into his own despair rather than steer me with gubernatorial ease towards a sure destiny? I felt angry with him, disappointed, cheated.

To tell the awkward truth, I felt it would have been better if he had died. To me he was like a bloodied bull staggering around the bullring, dazed and confused, the picos sticking out from his neck to make a grotesque ruff. A part of me was praying for the matador to put him out of his misery. At least then I would have the opportunity to mourn. In the terms of Sigmund Freud, I would have been able to ‘incorporate’ him properly. Instead, he was cast into a limbo between life and death. That made it impossible for me as his son to abstract the remaining heat from his corpse, like an electricity thief, and plug it into my own circuit of veins. For Freud, this is one of the chief causes of depression, or what he calls ‘melancholia’. Instead of being able to grieve fully for somebody by incorporating them into our memories, we are impeded. They remain only half taken in, and that induces a terrible sadness.

But Freud is talking about people who actually die. He is describing a failure of mourning on the part of those who survive them. My dad did not actually die. Rather, he lived a half life, as if he’d been exposed to radiation. He would stir only to do sums on blotting paper, working out how to eke out his savings, now that no more income was coming in. This half life, half death on his part was the cause of my half mourning. I’ve effectively remained in this state of half mourning ever since that rupturing of the masculine tract. I think it lies behind the dejection I experienced at Oxford. Freud refers to primitive societies in which the dead king is literally eaten, ingested, as a way of tapping his energy. Not eating leaves you weak. We grow in strength when we consume dead meat. We need the body of the past to sustain us for the future.

The implication is that when you fully incorporate the dead, you won’t be haunted by them. They will be satisfactorily swallowed, and you can get on with your business, just as if you’d had a restorative meal. Haunting is less a spectral visitation, in other words, than a failure of mourning. It’s not that the dead return, but that the living haven’t digested them properly. The living thus keep burping up the dead like a gas which takes human shape, its hologram shimmering before their eyes. And because, with the onset of his two irreversible conditions, MS and unemployment, my father entered a zone that was also neither dead nor alive, it turned him into a kind of ghost that haunted me. It was his ghostly half-presence that spooked me, and I couldn’t face living in the little house with it for a whole summer.

But nor could I fight with him. Young adult sons need not only to draw from the male strength of the father, but also to do battle with it. There has to be some alpha wrangle that lets the son believe he has thrown the father over. It’s an Oedipal crisis that tightens the relationship between father and son like a screw until the wood splits, and the parts can become individual again. With a damaged father, one mother, two sisters and no brother, I lacked a male adversary to define myself against. My father had become a ghostly gas (the two words are related), and I could punch right through it.

The word ‘Oedipal’, of course, refers to the Oedipus complex as elaborated by Freud. The original version by Sophocles sees Oedipus unwittingly kill his father and marry his mother. Freud recasts the Greek original in psychological terms in order to reveal a general tendency among boys to attack their fathers while idealising their mothers. He says that it is an important phase for a boy to go through. As in, go through and come out the other side. In my attempt here at a Freudian self-analysis, I’m saying that I never quite went through it, or that I might still be stuck in an unresolved version thereof. I couldn’t attack my father because he couldn’t fight back.

And if I couldn’t elbow my way beyond that aggressive phase with my father, does it imply that I remained in a state whereby I idealised my mother in Oedipal fashion? As I pointed out in the Foreword, this book contains disproportionately more material about my father than about my mother. I would answer that writing less about my mother does indeed contain a residual motive to idealise, but in the following sense. Just as my teenage self was squaring up to fight him, I saw that my father was already on the canvas, knocked out by life. With one parent down, and still down to this day – as I write Colin lies in his hospital bed ten miles away – how could I possibly risk damaging the other parent too? Would analysing my mother in the way that I have analysed my father undermine the consolation that I derive from having at least one parent not sitting on death row? Even if any illusions that I hold about my mother serve merely to compensate for the disillusion with my father, that is fine by me. My silence about my mother keeps those illusions about her alive. Those illusions, if they exist, serve a purpose.

Whether or not my self-analysis is valid, it was because of that father–son dynamic that I didn’t go home that first Oxford summer. The following year, 1986, I took up the summer job at the call centre and met Simone. Having dropped out of college, I started wondering what I would do with my life.

Sex: more recreation than reproduction

When Freud writes about incorporating those who have passed away, it fits, perhaps surprisingly, with his earlier theory of sexuality. Whether mourning the dead or reaching out to the living, we are bringing the other towards us, overcoming distance, making relationship. Underlying both is an instinct in us to bond with others and get close to them. It is this instinct which for Freud is ‘erotic’, though in the very broadest sense. He’s not talking about sex narrowly defined, but about the wider need in us to discharge our energy. Given that the energy has to go somewhere, our erotic instincts provide a positive channel.

Not that sex is absent from the picture. Our erotic instincts do also take the form of wanting sex with others, that is bringing them into physical intimacy with us. These erotic instincts have an interest not just in the short-term pleasure of the moment, however, but also in the long-term furthering of the species. Sex goes together with life.

Maybe that is a statement of the blindingly obvious. Yet the obvious is recalled more seldom than it might be. Thanks both to the availability of contraception and to a growing acceptance of homosexuality, we make the connection between sex and life less automatically than once we did. Whatever the morals of it, there just is an awful lot of sex that doesn’t result in babies being born. That makes sex overall more about recreation than reproduction, as shown in the following diagram. (In the diagram, the size of the circles is a crude indicator of the amount of different kinds of sex that we have.) And whilst the dominance of recreational sex can dull our appreciation of the link between sex and life, our appreciating it less doesn’t stop that link from holding.

So how much of the life force is present when we hold erotic feelings for another person? How far is our sexual desire controlled by an unconscious instinct to reproduce? Of course, the question doesn’t seem to apply to same sex relationships, where reproduction isn’t an option. But does that make the question a bad one? After all, you can still want what’s not available. To put it philosophically, impossibility is no constraint on desire. So, oddly enough, we can’t be 100 per cent certain that the instinct to reproduce plays no part in homosexual desire, especially if instincts are unconscious, which in Freud they are. That isn’t supposed to be an underhand way of averring that gay people are closet heterosexuals. It is just that an unconscious instinct for life might conceivably roam in the background of all erotic feelings.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to prove. What we can say is that without reproduction humans would die out, meaning that as a species we need to have sex for our own survival. So although, when we want sex, we might never get any felt sense of the larger imperative, such an imperative could well be there. Maybe that implies that we are rewarded with sexual pleasure by the species as a sop, to ensure its own continuity. But so what? The species isn’t different from us, its members. If we are being manipulated, it’s we who are doing the manipulating. We win both ways.

Self-sabotage

That summer of 1986, when Simone and I met, turned into autumn. She left to take up her teaching position in Perpignan. I, having checked out of Oxford at the end of my second year, stayed behind in Croydon, in the box room at my parents’ house. What was I thinking? I was horrified, revulsed and scared by my father’s condition. I had lingered in Oxford during the previous vacation specifically to avoid it. Yet here I was, moving back home. As against the default option, the path of least resistance, which was to complete my final year and claim my degree, I was actively putting the momentum of my life into reverse.

Part of the reason was the fear of sinking further into debt. That fear came with the shame I felt at the prospect of confessing to my financial woes. At home I could live for free, earn some money and covertly get back into the black. And yet the debt really wasn’t so large, maybe a grand. Besides, I had a place at Oxford. Imagining a better station in life was difficult. Yet here I was, throwing it away. What was pushing me towards this act of self-sabotage?

I think I felt guilty about driving ahead with my own life when my father had so conspicuously broken down. It would have been like ignoring the fire on the side of the motorway. The point being that it’s not how much success you want, it’s how much your conscience can tolerate. I didn’t formulate it in such terms at the time because I was still saturated with my disappointment in him. All too often that disappointment would come out as hostility. The first time I ever directed the F-word at him was during this period. I remember trembling afterwards, with a mixture of triumph and horror at my crime.

But outer hostility had an inner kernel of love. Or at least a filial concern to tie my fortunes to his, for better or for worse. Even if I longed for him to be different, I was his son, and he my only father. My sabotaging my own prospects was a simple case of a boy wanting to emulate his dad. What made the case unusual was that what was being emulated was catastrophe. When I saw that his car had crashed, I crashed my own.

None of this was conscious. Often, what motivates us at a given point in time is a mystery that becomes clear only with hindsight. I could conceivably come up with a yet truer interpretation of that summer of ’86 another thirty years hence, if I’m still around. Big events in life are like dreams in this respect. They spill their secrets slowly, and only after we have forgotten about them for a spell do their meanings achieve transparency. It’s not in thinking things through but in leaving them be that the pattern can form which we later discern. Thinking can be a block to understanding. For where thinking wants to make meaning, understanding is about receiving it.

And so, with the quotient of hindsight available to me today, I’d argue that, in a way that was obscure to me then, I was seeking to match my fate to my father’s. Needless to say, the tragedy points that I scored by dropping out of uni were far lower than those accrued by him. He was suffering from MS, had been ejected from the family business and, still in his forties, had been put out to pasture. Any ‘matching’ on my part fell far short. In their naïvety, my actions were probably closer to comedy than to tragedy. Nevertheless, I believe the unconscious intention to imitate his story was real.

The conundrum is why I bore that intention at all. What good would it do? The best answer I can give is that I was curbing my own success so as to make Colin’s having been deprived of it seem less egregious. Part of me couldn’t bear to succeed in case it exposed how far he had been left behind. I suspect such hidden motives might explain many cases where people fail to realise their potential. A secret loyalty is holding them back. I, at least, was nipping in the bud my own prospects for success. It was an intervention designed to exact some parity for Colin, after he had been so outplayed by life and was so many goals down. By breaking my own, I was showing him that a broken life like his was normal. I could thus spare him any sense that he had been singled out for misfortune. I could comfort him that he wasn’t alone, and serve as his partner in failure.

Insofar as that intervention involved a sacrifice on my part, however, it was pointless. Maybe copying his downfall helped to absorb the shock it had caused me. Trauma is trauma by virtue of the fact that we repeat it, rather than get over it. But my thriving less could never make him thrive more. Two wrongs don’t make a right. If anything, my dropping out would have added to his woes. Indeed, when I first announced that I wasn’t going back to sit my finals, he reacted with pure consternation. So pleased was he to have a son at Oxford that he would tell anyone who’d listen. Our local newsagent once reported to me that my father had been in again, buying his paper and talking about his clever charge. ‘So proud!’ said the newsagent. By quitting Oxford, I was actually taking away one of the few reasons Colin had to be cheerful about the future. His son, so full of promise, was putting his life chances in jeopardy.

I was also allowing my fate to become mixed up with his, like one swimmer helping another swimmer in distress, and causing both to drown. It can be hard for us to accept that fate separates people from each other, especially within a family. Fate undoes the knots that we so readily create as we become entangled with one another. In French, the word for fate is le sort, which alludes precisely to this notion of disentanglement, of sorting people onto different tracks. And so, despite my best efforts to subvert myself, to bring my onwards journey to a halt and wait with my father on the hard shoulder, fate had other ideas. A different engine had fired up.

Pomegranate in a shoebox

By the end of that year, 1986, I had tried two further temping jobs. The first was in the accounts department of a computer company located next to the old Croydon Airport. I might have got into Oxford and been a dab hand at English literature, but when it came to numeracy, I was at sixes and sevens. God knows what the auditors made of the books for the period that I was there. The second involved stacking shelves in the food hall at Marks and Spencer, organising the items according to sell-by date. If I was underqualified for the accounting job, I was overqualified for this. With no plan B, I quit on day two.

Meanwhile, Simone in Perpignan and I in Croydon had been writing regularly. We would send each other gifts. In return for a pair of ski pants that I bought her, Simone dispatched a fresh pomegranate. On account of its many seeds, the pomegranate is an ancient symbol of fertility.

The fruit would demonstrate its prophetic power in due course, though as a gift it was already suggestive. Simone had wrapped the burnished gourd in newspaper and packed it into a shoebox. With it she had enclosed Baudelaire’s poem, ‘L’invitation au voyage’, which she had written out long-hand in French:

Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté,

Luxe, calme et volupté.

‘There is nothing here that is not order and beauty, / Luxurious, calm and voluptuary’. I lingered over this refrain. Given my context – living with my parents, temping in Croydon – it was beguilingly exotic. Like a siren singing to a sailor all at sea, Simone was calling me to join her.

Again, I would realise it only later, but that wasn’t the first time in my family history that such an invitation had been issued. It echoed my father inviting my mother on the transatlantic voyage from England to Canada in 1959 which resulted in their wedding. Perhaps that was another reason why I was so amenable to Simone’s unwitting reinterpretation of it. My parents’ elopement having entered the family folklore, it must have formed a template in my psyche for how romantic events were meant to unfold. The template ran as follows:

Out of love, one follows the other across the sea.

We often play out our lives according to these semi-mythical frameworks implanted in childhood. They work like a foreshadowing, or the unwitting tracking of ley lines. In both cases, however, accepting the invitation was as foolish as it was romantic. By eloping, my parents had been playing fast and loose with their family ties. I was damaging my career prospects still further, for in those days, before the opening up of the European labour market, I had no right to work on the continent. Perhaps it was romantic because it was foolish.

A staircase without stairs

Fortunately, Simone had a steady income from her job as lectrice at Perpignan’s university, which eased the immediate pressure on me to earn money. Perpignan sits in south-west France near the Spanish border. One had only to make the short drive through the slopes of the eastern Pyrenees to see in silhouette against the hills the effigies of bulls that were so talismanic of Spain. The border country also maps onto Catalonia. On Perpignan’s labyrinthine streets one would hear Catalan spoken both by old ladies wearing black and old men in flat caps.

A true melting pot of cultures, Perpignan was north African too. Simone had rented digs on the Rue Dugommier in the city’s shabby Arab quarter. Our downstairs neighbours were Moroccans. On the one day that it snowed, they congregated in woollen beanies, looking out from the hallway in bemusement. The apartment was on the first floor, above a horse butcher’s straightforwardly called A Cheval, with sawdust on the floor to soak up the blood. A few doors down was a bistro, Chez Nicole et Marcel, where they served mussels in piles as high as a wedding cake.

Having a place of our own at that age was wonderful. We had terracotta tiles and red shutters. Not that it was perfect. One day we came back to find that several of the stairs between the first and second floors had crumbled away, leaving a ravine spanned only by the iron of the banister. Whenever the people on the two storeys above us wanted to get into their flat, they had to approach the ascent like mountaineers.

I was to give English lessons. Without a work visa or leave to remain in the country for more than ninety days, however, I’d have to do so on the sly and for cash only. That meant I was nervous of getting caught. It wasn’t just paranoia. One night, towards dawn, we were woken by a commotion in the hallway. Doors were banging, people were shouting. ‘Ouvrez! Ouvrez! Police des étrangers! Ouvrez!’ The immigration police were conducting a raid. Our Moroccan neighbours in the ground-floor flat were wrenched from their beds. More of them than we ever imagined could live in it were bundled out of the door in their nightwear.

Being on the first floor, Simone and I were next. She was legit, but my number was up. I saw myself thrust into a police cell, questioned and roundly deported. ‘Vos papiers!’ barked the gendarme at our door. I fetched my passport from the drawer and proffered it to him as if I were a lamb to the slaughter. No sooner did the officer see the British insignia than he bowed, apologised and moved on. I was as illegal as any of the Moroccans, but the good old racism of the French South had come to my rescue.

In addition to the grande dame who hired me to occupy her daughter with English verbs while she had adulterous sex with her lover, one student stood out. For our first lesson, he insisted that we meet at a public venue. I arrived at the Café de la Paix at the appointed hour to be greeted by a Sicilian man called Andrea. He was in his late thirties, stocky, with a broken nose, yellow-tinted sunglasses, a gold chain and greased-back black hair. He said that he was looking for an English-speaking partner in his shoe business. Why he thought a student dropout would fit the bill wasn’t clear, but the Oxford connection seemed endorsement enough. I explained that he’d got the wrong end of the stick. I wasn’t looking for a business venture, just to earn some francs teaching English.