Wednesday 13 January 2010

A Self-Made Fish Out of Water

Yet another night with little sleep. I went to bed just before midnight, and woke at 3am, and have been unable to sleep since. It's a quarter to eight in the morning, and my cumulative lack of sleep is making me hallucinate, something I haven't experienced since my late mother had her devastating first heart attack, and I was awake for three whole days and began mistaking dustbins for children. I'm now mistaking the leaves of high weeds blowing in the wind for a helicopter.

I've spent the tired yet wired early hours reading Nick Hornby's "the complete Polysyllabic Spree", which details the books he bought and the books he read (not the same things) between 2003 and 2006.

I've never taken to Hornby or his novels, I don't like his blokishness, I think he has lousy taste in popular music, which seems to be the only music he likes - he rates highly the Clash and Bruce Springsteen, which two I've long classed as posturing mediocrities whose only talent was to sellotape together rock clichés, and I've always classed him as one of those middle class men with an affected interest in football, so affected that even he's forgotten it was affected. Sports fannery is a blind spot of mine, I do not get it at all.

His cultural interests on the evidence of "Polysyllabic Spree" are limited to mainstream fiction and literary biography, rock music, and football. He doesn't so much dismiss science - for instance - as use that common trick of "hmm, very clever, far too clever for me, but it's not important, is it, except to nerds?".

Around the middle of the book Hornby mentions he's read a biography of the dead writer B.S. Johnson by Jonathan Coe. Hornby finishes his comments by saying that B.S. Johnson had an attitude about himself and others that could be simplified as "don't you know who I am?"
"which in Johnson's case was an even more unfortunate question than it normally is. Nobody knew then, and nobody knows now."

I knew and know who B.S. Johnson was. I read his "House Mother Normal" and "Christie Malry's Own Double Entry" in my late teens 33 years ago. I can't say I ever re-read them, but I can remember them clearly. They made a strong enough impression on me, the first book a depiction of the same non-events in an old peoples' home as seen through the consciousnesses of patients with different depths of senility, the second a depiction of a young clerical worker applying the principles of book-keeping to an escalatingly violent working out of his grudges. I didn't decide toread these because I had read reviews of them in the literary pages of newspapers , I found "House Mother Normal" in a Remainder Bin in my local Woolworths, and borrowed "Christie Malry's Own Double Entry" from my local library because I'd been impressed by the first book.

My friend Heather once called me "a Self-made Fish out of Water" and "an Isolated Intellectual". While I don't think I'm an intellectual and don't want to be, I wonder whether there's a basic truth in what she said; that I am by background very poor uneducated working class and I have suffered the disadvantages of that background, but I am very intelligent, received a middlingly good education, and continued to educate myself. Consequently, still trapped among people of my own background, I have spent 30 years of my adult life having little in common with them except where we come from: few common subjects of interest, few similar goals, few tastes.

I seem to have been interested and attuned to things that people of a similar age and similar intelligence weren't. I very often hear and read cultural commentators in the media failing to understanding references that I understand; these are people who by profession and education should pick up those references.

It sounds a snobbish and arrogant thing to say, but I wonder how many of my troubles come from having been born in the lowest social class with talents and intelligence that suited me for the professional middle class, but few opportunities to make use of them. I needed that insight twenty or thirty years ago, so that I'd have understood the desperate importance of climbing out of my class by any means.

I have only met two people like me in my entire life.

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