Out of Sheer Rage / True Stories Book Club
Getting to know Geoff Dyer’s classic memoir
A couple of places have become free at my very special residential retreat in July - you can find more information here • We held our first ‘silent sit’, a companionable hour’s silence for full members, earlier this week. It was lovely - people read, wrote, crafted, doodled (me) and sometimes just sat with their thoughts. I felt deep peace afterwards. The next one will be on Sunday 18th May, 5pm - 6pm UK.
Hello,
So it begins. The Clearing, meet Geoff Dyer, the unashamedly louche public intellectual with well-documented penchants for John Berger, Roger Federer, the jazz greats and Burning Man. And, of course, D H Lawrence, whose life is explored (albeit glancingly) in Out of Sheer Rage.
In this section, we find Geoff wondering where he ought to live for the next season in his life while he finishes his biography of D H Lawrence. He’s tired of Paris, and thinks that perhaps he might be more productive in Rome. It turns out that Rome is too hot. Then an offer of some time on a Greek island comes along, and that sounds too idyllic to miss. And yet this, too, fails to draw out the muse; “We always have this ideal image of being on an island but actually being on an island always turns out to be hellish,” he writes. Soon, after endlessly driving around the island out of sheer boredom, he ends up crashing his moped into a cliff, injuring himself and his girlfriend Laura. After a period of painful convalescence, the pair return to Rome, where he believes he might just begin to write his book. Except that there is life to live, and views to watch, and naps to take. Life drifts onward.
I’ve been known to make the occasional snide comment about male authors, and What They Are Allowed To Write About. No shade intended to the authors themselves, but it always seems to me that they get a little more licence to write on topics that fall outside the immediate mainstream. I feel certain that, should I offer to write a blow-by-blow account of a Tarkovsky film - as Dyer has - the ‘no thanks’ from publishers would be resounding. But Dyer has been permitted to meander through all the topics that interest him for more than three decades, and the result is illuminating. Not all of it is compelling, but in aggregate, it’s a fascinating body of work. In many ways, he’s been allowed to have an old-fashioned writing career, kept in print through the twists and turns of his interest, and judged on the sum total. May we all be given such grace.
I um-ed and aah-ed slightly over choosing this book for our next group read. My heart said,YES, this is exactly the light relief we need right now. My head said, Is it though? Is this truly the moment to focus on one writer’s procrastination and occasional debauchery while he fails to write a literary biography?
What got me in the end was this: Out of Sheer Rage tells a kind of truth about existence that few other books ever capture. It’s easy to get frustrated with Dyer for the same reason that we get frustrated with ourselves: namely that we rarely do what we intend to do, we endlessly veer towards temptation rather than seriousness, and we are capable of astonishing acts of self-indulgence and petulance that do not befit sensible adults. Dyer captures all of this, and in the process gives us something timeless. Here is the human condition; even when we are not exactly in the gutter, we are still distracted by the stars.
A huge question underlying this book is relevant to most of the readers of this newsletter: what does it mean to live a creative life? It seems to me that the internet age has increasingly led us toward a consensus that we should approach creative work with routine, efficiency, persistence and discipline. Dyer, writing in 1997, was unburned with this orthodoxy. He shows a different side of creativity: diversionary, not especially productive, and fun. And although as contemporary readers, we may itch to yell words at him like “Privilege!” I think we have to admit that it might just be a better way of going about things. On this evidence, it produces strikingly original, highly entertaining, and slightly naughty work. Reading Geoff Dyer makes me wonder how we can return to this kind of playfulness.
Perhaps this insight is best left in the hands of D H Lawrence himself: “Already I am wavering,” he wrote, “in my absolute determination to shut myself up daily, wherever I am and in whatever external circumstances, for so-and-so-many hours for my works’ sake.”
So tell me: What are your first impressions of Out of Sheer Rage? Do you find Geoff an appealing narrator - and do you recognise any of yourself in him? Would we all be a little more inspired in the great cities of the world, or is that just an illusion? Personally, I’d say a few weeks on a wild coastline would do me no harm…
Reading schedule:
N.B. Out of Sheer Rage has no chapters, and it appears that the page numbers are not universal… below are the page numbers for two different editions, but I’m afraid we’ll all have to find our own route through!
14th - 20th April: pages 46 - 88, section ending ‘And over all of this, a sky of Camus blue…’
21st - 27th April: pages 88 - 122, section ending ‘Nietzsche, the Goncourt brothers, Barthes, Fernando Pessoa, Ryszatd Kapuscinski, Thomas Bernhard…’
28th April - 4th May: catchup break
5th May - 11th May: pages 122 - 162, section ending ‘I read other letters in the same spirit, obsessively, eager to see what will set him off next.’
12th May - 18th May: pages 162 - 208, section ending ‘then you can despair.’
19th May - 25th May, pages 208 - end.
Thanks to Vi for providing these alternative page numbers for the Canadian Canongate edition:
14th - 20th April: pages 47 - 89, section ending ‘And over all of this, a sky of Camus blue…’
21st - 27th April: pages 89 - 124, section ending ‘Nietzsche, the Goncourt brothers, Barthes, Fernando Pessoa, Ryszatd Kapuscinski, Thomas Bernhard…’
28th April - 4th May: catchup break
5th May - 11th May: pages 124 - 166, section ending ‘I read other letters in the same spirit, obsessively, eager to see what will set him off next.’
12th May - 18th May: pages 166 - 212, section ending ‘then you can despair.’
19th May - 25th May, pages 212 - end.
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I love the line, “although I love the idea of speaking foreign languages I hate doing anything in life that requires an effort.” What a confession!
I had never heard of Dyer, or this book. I would never have chosen it - dare I say that I rarely read anything written by old, white men these days -I’ve heard quite enough from most of them! However, this had me sitting in bed, belly laughing until I cried, so spot on is his depiction of procrastination and indecision, so paralysing and familiar to me. Great, left-field choice, I would never have made on my own, so thank you Katherine.