The Gatekeeper by Terry Eagleton

Author:Terry Eagleton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

5

Losers

At breakfast one morning as a child, I began idly to dig a hole with my spoon in the thick rim of my porridge. My mother noticed what I was doing, and I waited for her to tell me to stop. It was not a household in which one did anything without a point, unless prayer is to be included in that category. We would no more have done something without a definite function than we would have knocked nails into each other’s skulls just for the sake of it. To my surprise, however, my mother encouraged me to make the hole wider and deeper. Then she took the milk jug and poured milk into it. The hole was just a convenient way of pouring milk on my porridge. The playful turned out to be pragmatic after all. There had been no Proustian epiphany. My porridge was not my madeleine.

Poverty is not the best school for learning to savour things in themselves. It is in this sense that it is anti-aesthetic, not just because it is unpleasant. Our life at home was as bare as a gerbil’s, without friends, trips, entertainment, social skills. As Flann O’Brien observed, we had to keep the wolf from the door to stop it getting out. Trips, entertainment and the like were either things we could not afford, or were offensive to the spirit of grim utility which being poor tends to foster. Not for everyone, however. We were miserably hard up, but also miserable, which does not necessarily follow. Lots of families around us were on their beam-ends yet seemed to have fun. And though the impoverished Carmelites down the road did not exactly have fun, they were not slaves to utility either. There was nothing particularly useful about never having a square meal. We did not enjoy ourselves partly because we had aspirations, which made being impecunious a lot worse. The notion of enjoying life for its own sake was as much a mystery to us as sado-masochism or hermeneutics.

We led a cowed, daunted existence, socially sophisticated enough to be conscious of our social inferiority. Our aim in life was to have the words ‘We Were No Trouble’ inscribed on our tombstones. A knock at the front door would send us scrambling in terror like the thump of an SS rifle-butt, so unaccustomed were we to visitors. The sparsely furnished house was like a Beckettian stage-set in which nothing ever happened, since we lacked the resources for eventfulness to occur. The present is made up largely of what failed to happen in the past; my present, anyway. Today I have fewer books than almost any academic I know, perhaps out of some childhood sense that possessions are superfluous clutter. The house was rented from an absentee landlord, one of those shadowy Dickensian ogres who never put in a physical appearance, but to whom my father would occasionally write requesting some minor repair. It was the only writing he ever did. After an insultingly long time, the landlord would reply without addressing my father as ‘Dear’.

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