Friday Faves: Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer
…in which I invite someone bookish to share one of their all-time favourite works of fiction and what it means to them. This week’s Friday Fave comes from writer Lee Kofman:
     Call me obsessive, but for a long time now I’ve been keeping a journal where I record a description of every book I read – what I liked about it, what I didn’t, and most importantly - what I learned from it as a writer and a human being. Moreover, every year I choose my top book for that year. My favourite book in 2010 - one of my most prolific years reading-wise - was Out of Sheer Rage, a creative nonfiction book by Geoff Dyer, possibly the quirkiest writer in the UK (a country with a reputation as a breeding ground for quirky writers). Dyer is a renowned author of fiction and creative nonfiction, and his books have been translated into many languages and won many awards. New York Magazine once described him as ‘one of our greatest living critics, not of the arts but of life itself, and one of our most original writers’. I find Dyer’s creative nonfiction particularly interesting and it is these books from his oeuvre that are often described as genre-defying. However, as good as Dyer’s other books are, none of those I have read can compete with Out of Sheer Rage - particularly on the account of its sheer urgency (forgive me the pun). Most writers produce one book in their lifetime into which they pour their whole heart, and I suspect this is that book for Dyer.
                Out of Sheer Rage is a book about how Dyer didn’t manage to write a book about D.H. Lawrence, who is perhaps the greatest influence on Dyer’s writing. Yes, the book’s premise is just how it sounds. Dyer, who harboured a years-long ambition to write a study of Lawrence’s work, wrote a book about not writing this book. You have to be an author of Dyer’s calibre to pull off such a feat.
Even though Dyer was already an acclaimed writer when he began working (or not working) on his study of Lawrence, he felt this was going to be his most important artistic task. At least in part due to the weightiness of his mission, he excelled in reading avoiding it. The narrative of Out of Sheer Rage traces the years when, instead of re-reading Lawrence’s novels as he intended, Dyer reads his – and even Rilke’s – letters, and instead of writing the book he traverses the globe both to create a home for himself to write undisturbed, and also to trace Lawrence’s own haunts. Thus we follow Dyer and his girlfriend throughout the book to many exotic locations, including Italy, Greece and Mexico, where they spend an awful lot of time feeling hot, making love and planning to move somewhere else.
While the book’s predominant themes are writer’s block and procrastination, and what it takes not to write a book, such a summary doesn’t do justice to the wonderful chaos that lives on its pages. Dyer is the king of the digression. Alongside the memoiristic narrative, Out of Sheer Rage is rich in essayistic passages about anything Dyer feels passionate about. Whatever subject Dyer tackles, his lack of political correctness is refreshing. I love, for example, the audacity with which he complains about Italians:
We were in one of those touchy ‘respect’ cultures where the smallest action can cause enormous offence, where people are relaxed to the point of torpor and, at the same time, ferociously uptight. They slumber and slumber and then, suddenly, they erupt.
Among the many things he is unhappy about, Dyer also discusses a topic close to my heart - the downfall of the modern novel:
Nowadays most novels are copies of other novels... Increasingly, the process of novelisation goes hand in hand with a straight-jacketing of the material’s expressive potential. Of course, good, even great, novels continue to be written but… the moment of the form’s historical urgency has passed...
But the digressions are more than a litany of (always amusing) complaints. They include stories from Dyer’s life (a bad drug trip, growing up working class in England, deciding whether to have children), amusing travel sketches and meditations on literature. Yet much larger than the particulars of the themes looms Dyer’s voice. Its singular honesty, hilarity and originality are truly distinctive in the epidemic of niceness that plagues contemporary literature.
Dyer’s is a divisive voice. It is inaccurate to say that his personality is on the page; rather, his personality takes over the page. And it is an impossible personality, built almost entirely upon contradictions. Dyer’s indecisiveness, misanthropy and restlessness drive the narrative, and also drive even his most adoring readers nuts. Forget his inability to settle in one geographical location, the man cannot even decide what books to pack on his travels. There is a Woody Allen-esque quality to Dyer’s voice – you either love it or hate it, and even if you love it you hate it a little too. Out of Sheer Rage was the only book that dramatically divided my husband’s usually agreeable book club. Yet even Dyer’s most controversial lines likely to get sympathy with many readers, since they strike a sincere note, expressing the kind of things many of us think but never say. Take the: ‘I hate children and I hate parents of children...’ for example. Besides, whether you agree with them or not, many of Dyer’s statements will make you laugh out loud. His relentless neurosis is somehow deeply relatable, although I suspect the persona of himself Dyer creates on the page is amplified for entertainment’s sake. Sometimes reading this book I got the feeling as if, to write it, Dyer dived into the depths of the collective subconscious and came up with a net full of colourful, odd, spooky creatures that live in all of us, but which we seldom glimpse. As a writer, I felt nourished after reading Out of Sheer Rage. It was a great reminder not to take myself too seriously on the page and not to tame my voice to appear ‘normal’.
Despite the ambitious range of topics this book takes on, it is held together by a unifying vision. Firstly, this book about not writing a study of Lawrence of course ends up being a study of Lawrence. Yet, rather than being another conventional work of literary criticism, Out of Sheer Rage is a deeply personal study of the great man’s anxieties and obsessions - the inner demons that underpinned his world view and, consequently, his literary vision that is in turn Dyer’s vision too. As the book progresses, more and more parallels between the author and his subject emerge. They share poor, uneducated origins; both suffer from an inability to live in one place for more than five minutes; and both are grumps. Most importantly, though, for both Lawrence and Dyer literature is not a vocation but their raison d’etre, and one of the main themes of the book is the importance of artistic integrity. Dyer is blocked because he is trying to write the kind of a book he feels he ought to, rather than must, write. His struggle reminds us of that of Lawrence, who was a literary pioneer in many ways and was therefore plagued with uncertainty and self-doubt. Thus Out of Sheer Rage explores what it takes for a writer to find their subject, which is possibly one of the most difficult tasks artists face – having the courage not to succumb to fashions or vanity or the desire to please but rather to tackle the genuinely urgent themes, which are usually uncomfortable ones.Â
Out of Sheer Rage does what the best books do, it helps us to think about how to live our lives. For Dyer, the following quote from Lawrence is the essence of his philosophy: ‘How can we most deeply live? And the answer is different in every case’. Dyer also writes ‘What Lawrence's life demonstrates so powerfully is that it actually takes a daily effort to be free…’ Accordingly, Out of Sheer Rage doesn’t offer easy solutions to the difficult questions it engages with. Dyer, and Lawrence, suggest that a good life is lived with an open mind, self-awareness and integrity. Moreover, Dyer favours confusion over clarity, and seems to think that living with neurosis while not the most comfortable, can be a rather authentic (and at times exhilarating) way of living. Sanity and contentment, Lawrence and Dyer point out in unison, are kinda boring.
Lee Kofman is an Israeli-Australian author of three fiction books (in Hebrew). Her short works in English have been widely published in Australia, the UK, Scotland, Canada and the US. Her first book in English, the memoir ‘The Dangerous Bride’ is due to appear in October 2014 through MUP. Find out more at her website leekofman.com.au or connect with her on Twitter.
You can read her post about beating procrastination for Writers Victoria here.
Your Turn: Don't you just love the idea of writing a book about a different book you failed to write? Do you, like Lee, keep a record of every book you read?
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