Nick Bartlett: Knowing One's Place

Homework: A Memoir, by Geoff Dyer. Canongate Books, 2025, 288pp, £20.00. 

Geoff Dyer’s memoir Homework deals extensively with details of childhood. So the title is a fitting one, though not in the way you might expect. In writing this book, Dyer’s project seems occasioned by an intimate obligation to his parents rather than from a well-established tendency to literary play. For the devoted reader, then, so used to his free-wheeling prose, devoid of sentimentality, and replete with self-satire and irony, the act of reading his memoir may feel a little like, well, homework. Before he landed on the title you see on the cover, Dyer was considering an alternative one. A Happening, as it was originally entitled, is a reference to the process of class formation as articulated by historian E.P. Thompson in his study The Making of the English Working Class. What is most striking about the memoir is its painstaking reconstruction of the social forces which first shaped the psychology of his parents and later facilitated his gradual departure from their milieu into a very different way of life.

Dyer’s life can be convincingly divided against the date of the 11-plus examinations. This isn’t to say that the memoir is split in two halves; in fact, it is structured around three parts which roughly correspond to three separate periods in his life. What I mean to say, and what Dyer himself says, is that passing the examinations, which used to take place on the eve of secondary school in England and largely determined one’s professional trajectory post-school, was ‘the most important event in [his] life.’ Of course, part one of the book is not exclusively about the 11-plus. We also learn about life in Cheltenham in the 60s; the war-games in the back-alley; the weight of the real-war in childhood consciousness; his mate’s schizophrenic mother; the tune of the ice-cream truck; the foot diseases (verrucae) picked up at swimming lessons; the colour of tennis balls (grey, not yellow); and the efficiency of the NHS (unimaginable). In short, what we get is the texture and colour of childhood memory. Here, we find Dyer at his characteristically most playful. Take the description of the mysterious emptiness of the front room in his childhood home as an example:

The armchairs and sofa comprising the brown three-piece suite had no real purpose in life; sitting there, waiting to be sat in, they had the effect of making the room seem crowded with emptiness.

The second part of the book unfolds almost entirely within the spatial and temporal confines of Dyer’s experience of the selective Cheltenham Grammar School. By this stage, aged fourteen or fifteen, Dyer is already six feet. But it is another form of development, ‘the feeling of something happening to [his] mind,’ that is most interesting. By sixth form, Dyer has become conscious of an extra responsiveness to the world around him, as if this level of awareness is far ahead of his lived experience. This happening, as we might understand it, is almost entirely down to ‘all the novels’ he was reading. If passing the 11-plus was the most important event in his life, Bob Beale, Cheltenham’s Head of English, ‘was the most important influence.’ Alongside the usual prescriptions – Shakespeare, Dickens, Conrad, Hardy, Lawrence, Beale introduces Dyer and his classmates to the more contemporary stuff: A Farewell to Arms, Catch-22, On the Road. What we are witnessing here is the evolution of Dyer’s taste; by upper-sixth form, Dyer tells us, his life was really just ‘rock and literature.’ The former: mainly prog. Hawkwind, Wishbone Ash, Deep Purple, Bowie, Hendrix, The Who, Led Zep.

It's clear that towards the end of high school ‘a world was beckoning.’ That world is the one of the writer and Oxford University is the next stop. But it is a very different world to the one inhabited by his parents and instead of turning to university life in the third and final part of the book, Dyer explores the next iteration of this happening: how, in other words, his intellectual and cultural formation impacted his capacity to relate to his parents. Increasingly, there are parts of his life that cannot be expressed to them. In one particular episode, Dyer tries to share a short story he has written with his dad, only to snatch the notepad back immediately, much to the relief of both father and son. He refuses to linger on the emotional impulse behind the desire to show his writing, other than to concede, with rather flippant irony, ‘well, he was my dad, as Martin might have said of Kingsley.’ It isn’t so much an explanation as a statement of fact, but one that betrays an intimate, albeit impossible, desire to share an aspect of self with his parents which he knows they can never properly access. Dyer’s clumsy attempt to share his writing with his dad, this burgeoning sense of distance, of incommunicability, consolidates the ‘habit of communicating less and less of what was important to [his] parents.’

Nothing in this book is quite so un-Dyer, so earnest and honest, so striking in its unexpectedness, than his subsequent disclosure of his mum’s birthmark. Indeed, ‘nothing has ever been more painful for [him] to write about.’ While the details of his mum’s skin disfigurement are less important, what is important is the way Dyer articulates the ‘internalised and unseen psychological effect’ that it had on her life: it prevented her from reaching her professional and personal dream, of what she was more than capable of achieving, to be a seamstress. The anecdote is both revealing and reinforcing of his parents’ position in the world – their inexorable view of most things as lying beyond their grasp and self-worth – and Dyer’s increasing socio-cultural estrangement from them. The birthmark, Dyer says, in a nod to Annie Ernaux’s La Place, represents the ‘larger culture of deference and knowing one’s place,’ which defined the lives of his parents. Dyer’s career, as a writer mostly of entirely public self-satires in the form of narrative non-fiction, melts into a different texture when read against the exposed privacy of his parents. In exposing his parents, in this act of ‘betrayal,’ as he calls it, Dyer makes himself more vulnerable than in any other moment in his work.

Nick Bartlett has worked as a journalist in Dakar and London, most recently as a reporter at Bloomberg. He did his BA in History and French at the University of Cambridge where he was also editor-in-chief of the literary magazine, The Mays. He is currently undertaking an MA in History and Literature funded by Columbia University in Paris.