by Antonia Fraser
‘WELL, what books has anyone brought?’ Thus my father, at the beginning of the Second World War, on a journey to the Isle of Wight for an Officers’ Training Course; intending to break the ice in the most conventional manner possible. There was complete silence. Finally one of his companions said in a voice of complete amazement: ‘Books? But we’ll find a book when we get there, won’t we . . .?’ This story has always seemed to me to sum up the deep division that exists in the human race, regardless of any other more obvious distinction, between those for whom books are an obsession, and those who are prepared, good-humouredly enough, to tolerate their existence.
Belonging to the former category, I too have always been fascinated by other people’s reading. I am that irritating person who reads your book over your shoulder in the train or tube; somehow, you feel, purloining its secret. I have to admit that for a while I was baffled by Kindles (although very happy with one myself, as an essential weapon of travel). Then one day, swimming frustratedly in a hotel pool surrounded by Kindle-readers, I decided to move with the times. I rose up out of the water like an inquisitive mermaid and questioned each reader in turn. All answered politely and nearly all answered: ‘John Grisham.’ (I began to think it was some kind of code.)
What do other people read? In profiles of public figures I always home in on their reading matter – if any – and make judgements accordingly. But of course the reading of other writers is the most fascinating of all; a truth is here revealed, as when looking at the houses in which famous architects actually live.
In this way, I came to suggest a collection of pieces by writers about their own reading for WHSmith, who wanted an appropriate volume to celebrate its bicentenary in 1992. This new version is being published twenty-three years later, with equal appropriateness, in aid of the charity Give a Book. Its detailed aims are related by Victoria Gray in her Preface: but its motto could be summed up by the title of this book: the pleasure of reading.
Originally it was decided to invite well-known writers (using the English language) of all ages and from backgrounds as diverse as possible. Very few refused – and generally for the good writerly reason of needing to get on with their own work. The brief was simple. Writers were asked to describe their early reading, what did (or did not) influence them, and what they enjoy reading today. They were also asked ‘if possible’ for a list of their ten favourite books. Some did not find this possible – there were groans of ‘I hate lists’ – but however odious to compile, other people’s lists do make intriguing reading. Who could resist learning that J. G. Ballard rated the Los Angeles Yellow Pages among his favourite reading, or that for Paul Sayer it was the Timeform Black Book No 19, 26 February 1978/9?
For this new version, five additional writers were invited, born in the 1970s and 80s, and respectively a novelist, a travel writer, a biographer, a poet and a playwright: Kamila Shamsie, Rory Stewart, Katie Waldegrave, Emily Berry and Tom Wells. Fittingly, Tom Wells, the youngest contributor, calls attention to the phenomenon of the J. K. Rowling books. ‘Everything is different when you’re in love. And I absolutely loved Harry Potter.’ That was something I encountered for myself when I watched my granddaughter Atalanta reading the first book of the series at breakfast. Her eyes were glued to the precious page held in front of her nose: in order not to stop reading for a moment she attempted to spread marmalade on toast with her other hand without looking (with disastrous results).
So here are forty-three writers whose dates of birth range over seventy-six years. The countries in which they were brought up include Canada and China, Ireland and India, New Zealand and Nigeria, Syria and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), even Germany during the 1930s – followed by a flight from Hitler for Judith Kerr, for whom Dr Dolittle’s pushmi-pullyu still remains its German version of a Stossmichziehdich. In Kamila Shamsie’s childhood memory for example, the Neverland of J. M. Barrie was ‘just off the coast of Karachi . . . So although Peter might fly into rooms in London he ended up just off the coast on which I lived; a comforting thought.’
Backgrounds are as varied as Stephen Spender’s ‘family of journalists: I was brought up among people who read and wrote much’ to Roger McGough’s Irish Catholic working-class world and his father’s ‘working man’s fear’ of entering a library. Sometimes reading emerges as prophetic of a future career – Philip Ziegler, biographer of Lord Mountbatten, read Macaulay and Hume, and loved Lord David Cecil’s life of Lord Melbourne – and sometimes wildly at variance – Dr Robert Burchfield, the distinguished lexicographer, coming from ‘a working-class environment in New Zealand without books’.
Yet for all these differences, certain common themes do emerge: and strongest of these is of reading as a childhood or youthful passion, amounting to an addiction. Melvyn Bragg actually uses the word: alone in his parents’ ‘overdressed’ front parlour, with its ‘shapely womanly paraffin lamp’, he found in books first a refuge, then an addiction. Jane Gardam was promised ‘a porter’ (contrary to expectation it turned out to be a book – a Beatrix Potter) and after that there was no stopping her. Here is John Fowles: ‘it was impossible to think of life without reading’ or Emma Tennant, in a remote Victorian Gothic ‘monstrosity’ of a castle in Scotland: ‘I read up and down house.’ Brian Moore: ‘at a very early age I became an avid reader’. For Sue Townsend ‘reading became a secret obsession’.
A. S. Byatt boldly describes herself as ‘greatly blessed by very bad asthma’ which meant that she spent most of her childhood in bed reading. Katie Waldegrave writes of ‘a wicker basket (still beside her bed) full of children’s books . . . it is the first possesion I would rescue in a fire.’ Emily Berry’s conclusion was specially evocative: ‘I suppose for me, the “pleasure of reading” is in feeling safe . . . when you read something that speaks to you, it’s a reminder that everything, even and especially the hardest things, has a precedent. So you’re not alone, not “lost in a forest” after all.’ While it is Rory Stewart who points to the awesome power of the reader: ‘Once you have taken possession of a book, you can inspect a writer’s mind, in all its shades and dimensions. You can establish a relationship, which would be intolerable to a living individual: you can wake the writer at three in the morning, switch her off in mid-sentence, insist she continues for six hours unbroken, skip, go back, repeat the same paragraph again and again, impertinently second-guessing her vocabulary and metaphors, scrutinising her structure and tricks.’
Carol Ann Duffy, finding escape through reading in a ‘virtually bookless house’, was, however, among the many contributors whose prolonged immersion was somehow felt to be unhealthy or even subversive. ‘Get your head out of that book!’ was a command frequently issued – without being obeyed. Prohibition led Jeanette Winterson to the memorable discovery that seventy-seven paperback books is the maximum number you can hide under an average single-bed mattress without the level rising dangerously.
Of course there are interesting exceptions to prove this rule. Tom Stoppard declared himself as ‘quite shifty’ on the subject of other people’s precocious early reading since he did not share it, Michael Foot was ‘a late developer’ and Alan Hollinghurst sitting surrounded by books in his father’s library preferred ‘the abstraction of music’. Patrick Leigh Fermor, however, stood for the great majority, when he described how learning to read at the age of six turned him from ‘an unlettered brute into a book-ridden lunatic’.
An addict myself, who learnt to read extremely early (taught by my mother who had time to spare since I was her first child), I certainly shared this preoccupation. There is a letter from Evelyn Waugh to Lady Diana Cooper describing a visit to my parents, then Frank and Elizabeth Pakenham, in September 1932, when I would have been a few weeks old. ‘So I saw F. Pakenham’s baby and gave it a book, but it can’t read yet.’ My first reaction when it was pointed out to me in 2014, by Robert Gottlieb, was not amusement but indignation: I learnt pretty soon, I wanted to cry! I also had the advantage – as it seemed then – of reading extremely fast, so much so, that my mother and I have speculated whether she did not by mistake teach me speed-reading. At any rate my speedy reading used to earn me a useful income, trapping the grown-ups to unwise bets on the subject of my prowess. The grown-up would select the book (to avoid cheating) and I then retired to whizz through it. There followed a searing examination of the contents. For some reason grown-ups tended to choose the lesser-known works of Sir Walter Scott; in this way I acquired good cash profits from Kenilworth, Peveril of the Peak and The Talisman – as well as a grateful love of Scott himself. Alas, speedy reading, so useful in youth for passing examinations, is a double-edged weapon in an age of security: I used to have to travel on holiday with luggage that aroused instant suspicion at airports: ‘Are you suggesting these are all books?’ – hence the aforesaid convenience of Kindle.
The second theme which emerged from this collection is an encouraging one to those parents who fear that their children read nothing but ‘rubbish’. It seems that what children read is less important than the fact that they do the reading in the first place. The stirring of the imagination is the important thing. Doris Lessing learnt to read off a cigarette packet at the age of seven and Simon Gray from comic-strip cartoons in wartime Canada where he was an evacuee. Enid Blyton was forbidden by Hermione Lee’s ‘high-brow middle-class’ parents: and also, incidentally, by my own. (I passed on the ban to my own children, only to find – naturally – a wardrobe bulging with the forbidden volumes, imported from a friend with a more tolerant mother.) Yet the frequent mentions of Enid Blyton in this volume give another side to the picture. For Ronald Harwood, as a child in Cape Town, too young to see her deficiencies, her work represented the ‘magic world’ of England.
Similarly, the popularity of the Just William books is a marked feature of these contributions: in the original list of most-often mentioned books, Just William ranks fourth, just after Treasure Island, with only Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Jane Eyre and Winnie-the-Pooh ahead. Evidently devouring what are now perceived as less good books does not preclude devouring good books too: as Sally Beauman, an avid reader, put it: ‘I loved them all.’ Jan Morris was probably right in suggesting that most of what we read is thrown into ‘a mental waste-paper basket’, leaving stored on ‘some indestructible disk of the sensibility only the works destined permanently to influence us’.
A third theme also relates to the question of the imagination. There seems to be a kind of creative fear which children – those who grow up to be writers, at least – actually enjoy feeling. J. G. Ballard was among many who loved Treasure Island, finding it ‘frightening but in an exhilarating and positive way’, just as John Mortimer, reading it under the bedclothes with a torch, felt ‘reassuringly afraid’. John Mortimer also pointed out that Dickens is our greatest novelist, not only for his mastery of comedy but also because of the way ‘he alarms his readers’.
Creative fear can be experienced from sources which are at first sight surprising. Margaret Atwood referred to Beatrix Potter’s ‘Dark Period (the ones with knives, cannibalistic foxes and stolen babies in them)’. Ruth Rendell remembered an Andrew Lang Fairy Book with a shudder: ‘The picture I can still see in my mind’s eye,’ she wrote, ‘is of a dancing gesticulating thing with a human face and cat’s ears, its body furred like a bear.’ She knew exactly where the picture was, knew that she must avoid it, and yet ‘so perverse are human beings, however youthful and omniscient’ that she was also terribly tempted to peep ‘and catch a tiny fearful glimpse’. One of my own favourite books was The Enchanted Castle by E. Nesbit. On the one hand, the terror of the moment when the Uglie-Wuglies (created as an ‘audience’ for the children’s play out of overcoats, gloves and walking-sticks) come to life and start to clap their gloved ‘hands’ with a horrid muffled sound, still haunts me sufficiently to make me give racks of old coats hanging in back corridors a wide berth. On the other hand, it was probably creatively buried in my mystery-writer’s unconscious.
The appearance of books, as opposed to their contents, turned out to be very important to contributors. The first book Edna O’Brien ever treasured was made of cloth ‘reminding me in some way of the cloth of the scapulars we wore inside our vests and which contained a relic of the saints’. In her Irish childhood, she continued to love ‘the feel and smell of them, ravelled old books, growing musty, in a trunk but full of secrets’. John Carey loved the red and gold look of a Chums annual, inherited from previous generations of his family. Germaine Greer spiritedly denounced The Water-Babies (another of my own favourite books – oh, Ellie’s white bedroom! – but one which arouses very mixed reactions here). However she did at least commend the red morocco feel of the edition she read. One cannot help wondering if this visual and tactile advantage is something which books might still retain for young children over videos, iPads and, of course, television.
Reading aloud gets a good press here. Some contributors of course, like Buchi Emecheta, brought up in Nigeria, come from cultures where stories were naturally read and told. Rana Kabbani, with one grandmother who could read and one who could not, described the ‘harem world’ of her youth in Damascus, where women were constantly telling stories. Then there were British parents who believed in reading aloud as a matter of principle (like my own mother, who by skipping a great deal of description in The Last Days of Pompeii gave me the erroneous impression that Lord Lytton was an action-packed author to be compared only to Baroness Orczy). Of such parents, Candia McWilliam wrote: ‘My first reading was of course not mine’, as she painted a picture of her father chain-smoking Senior Service as he read, so taken up with the wickedness of Samuel Whiskers that he might burn his fingers or her nightdress.
One of the unexpected delights of editing this collection was being reminded of forgotten favourites – Harrison Ainsworth’s historical epics for example (hated by some but adored by me – Old St Paul’s! Oh Amabel – betrayed by her seducer!), or Geoffrey Williams and Ronald Searle’s Molesworth in Down with skool! who, as Wendy Cope recalled to me, defined poets as ‘weedy people [who] say la and fie and swoon when they see a bunch of daffodils’; Timberlake Wertenbaker reading The Three Musketeers ‘twenty or thirty times’, a subject on which I too could once have passed an examination.
The other gratification came from completely the opposite direction: finding windows opened onto a very different view from the academic world of my childhood when my father was a don at Oxford. Gita Mehta in India heard about the pleasures of reading, even before she could read herself, from booksellers working from carpets spread out by the roadside, or jumping on the steps of moving trains in their enthusiasm: ‘Anna Karenina, sahib, Madame Bovary. Hot books only this very minute arrived. Believe it or not, sahib. Tomorrow no copies remaining!’ (In a continent where illiteracy was so widespread, the ability to read was greeted with ‘awe’.) Readers will undoubtedly share both experiences: the shock of recognition and the shock of the new.
Lastly, I am indeed grateful to Bloomsbury for making it possible for this book to live again, in order to benefit such an excellent cause as Give a Book. As for the contributors, both old and new, I thank them for enabling us to peer into the various magic worlds of the past which made them what they are – writers.
Antonia Fraser
London, 8 January 2015