Mixing memory with desire

Rick Gekoski is an expatriate American, long established as one of the leading antiquarian book-dealers in Britain. As one might expect, books have been his passion for as long as he can remember, his reading as integral a part of his development as anything experienced in the world outside. ‘Every reading experience vibrates subtly across the jelly of being,’ he writes. ‘We are made and continually transformed by what, and how, we read.’ This autobiography, Outside of a Dog, described as a ‘bibliomemoir’, is extravagantly enjoyable, lively, candid, and wonderfully well-written.

Gekoski’s first literary love affair was with Horton Hatches the Egg by Dr Seuss (‘Then they cheered and they cheered and they CHEERED more and more/ They’d never seen anything like it before!’), read aloud to him by his parents when he was a small boy living on the outskirts of Washington. From this moment young Rick is hooked and nothing can stop him. ‘In adolescence, caught up in a hot-blooded cycle of lust and teenage alienation, he drools over Krafft-Ebbing and recognises in Holden Caulfield his alter-ego. ‘Soon Salinger’s anti-hero is usurped by Allen Ginsberg and the poets of the Beat generation, ‘[who] pointed the way to something larger, more generous and more dangerous … I didn’t know it at the time … but the Sixties started here.’

As a student at the University of Pennsylvania, Gekoski is hit hard by T. S. Eliot, who is to become a constant reference point, the close companion of a lifetime. To the keen members of the English class at Penn, their instructor’s challenge to recite the famous first line of The Waste Land appears frankly pathetic.

What was this guy: stupid? … We all knew it, and recited it almost as if it were a nursery rhyme: ‘April is the cruellest month…’ ‘Wrong! … Think again.’