In the beginning was the picture. I suppose that at some point in those unregenerate days before the Beginner Books had taught three generations of children that They Must Not Hop On Pop I must have transcribed in laborious pothooks ‘The-cat-sat-on-the-mat’, but if so the experience is mercifully forgotten. My earliest recollection is of books whose illustrations were sufficiently intriguing to make me spell out the exiguous text which accompanied them. There was a series which I dimly remember as being called the Golliwog books, featuring that now socially unacceptable but perpetually endearing anthropoid and a skeletal clothes-peg figure wearing a beret and called, I think, Peg. Was there a Meg as well? In one book in the series there were icebergs too, and polar bears. From another book comes a frieze of little black boys being chased round and round a tree by a tiger until the ravening beast churned itself into butter. Or was it marmalade? A minimum of research would establish the truth about these details, but I prefer to keep such memories impressionistic and obscure. Certainly my children never experienced them, though de Brunhoff’s Babar books and the terrifying Long-Legged Scissor Man (from Struwwelpeter) successfully leapt the generation gap and survive today.
Apart from a conviction that, if no more pressing commitment arose, the proper way to spend time was with a book, I cannot pretend that these early studies affected either my prose style or my personality. Nor did the William books, nor, a little later, the adventures of the Swallows and Amazons, have much effect on me except, perhaps, to compel my reluctant admission that I lacked the boldness of the first and the resourcefulness of the second. It was the masterpieces of what, I suppose, might now be categorized as magic realism which first stirred my imagination and led me to realize that everything need not necessarily be as it seems, that the prosaic needs only to be stood upon its head to become poetic. Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring, E. Nesbit’s The Phoenix and the Carpet and, most of all, the works of Lewis Carroll, opened my eyes to the latent oddity of things. Carroll in particular taught me the incredible liberties that can be taken with language without sacrificing lucidity. Without subscribing to the Humpty Dumpty doctrine that a word should mean whatever the author chooses it to mean – ‘the question is, which is to be master – that’s all’ – I believe that rules are made to be broken and that though in Finnegans Wake Joyce defeats his own purpose by plunging too deep into the inspissated waters of his own unconscious, some passages of Ulysses are among the finest ever written in the English language.
The great wave of adventure books through which I swam between the ages of eight and fourteen gave much pleasure but left little mark. I never wanted to write like Sapper or Buchan, Rafael Sabatini or P. C. Wren. Still less did I accept or even reflect on their social and political assumptions. English schoolboys in the 1930s often indulged in a mild and unthinking anti-semitism, but this was something quite distinct from the odious thuggery of Bulldog Drummond, whose obscurantist mutterings about an international Marxist–Jewish conspiracy I either skipped or failed to notice. Nor did the subtler snobbery and prejudices of John Buchan have any noticeable effect on my social attitudes; I followed with relish the exploits of Hannay or Sandy Arbuthnot but never considered them as role models to whose thoughts, or still less deeds, I should aspire.
I can date almost to the moment the time at which I – not put away childish things, since it is only a few months since I reread Buchan’s Greenmantle with considerable pleasure – realized that there was a world elsewhere. In February 1944, when I was fourteen, I had a bad bout of flu. I was convalescent and becoming restless but, as was the custom of the times, was condemned to another three days in bed. My housemaster, a much shrewder man than he usually allowed his pupils to perceive, looked in to my room one morning and, remarking: ‘I think you might be ready for this,’ tossed a copy of Pride and Prejudice on to my bed. Seventy-two hours later, having finished the sixth of Jane Austen’s novels and realized to my outraged perplexity that there were no more to come, I got up. By the end of that year I had gulped down all the Brontë novels, much of Dickens, Vanity Fair, and Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, shortly following these with George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga and Trollope’s Barchester novels. Some time that following year I also discovered Saki; a writer who, I am still convinced, would, if he had lived, have become one of the most important novelists of the twentieth century. His masterpiece, The Unbearable Bassington, showed a compassion and understanding of human nature which far transcended the wit and ingenuity that are normally considered the hallmarks of his work. Since 1944 no year has gone by without my rereading at least two of Jane Austen’s novels and one or more by Dickens. Inexorably over the next few years the frontiers of my reading expanded, introducing new gods to take their places in my pantheon; there have been periods when it seemed to me that no novelist could hold a candle to Dostoyevsky, others when Flaubert reigned supreme; but over the decades it is to Jane Austen and Charles Dickens that I have remained most faithful.
What Jane Austen did for fiction, Macaulay did for history. Though one ancient but inspired schoolmaster had persuaded me that it was possible for history to be taught in such a way as to amuse and excite the pupil, I must have been sixteen before it occurred to me that the same pleasure was to be derived from books. Then someone made me read Macaulay’s supremely dramatic account of the Massacre at Glencoe. How closely this related to reality I did not know then and do not know now, but in its capacity to move and disturb it ranked with any of the novels I had devoured over the previous eighteen months. A few days later term ended; I raced to my father’s shelves, found Macaulay’s History of England, and had read it all within the next few days. Perverse and bigoted though I now know that it sometimes is, I still believe it to be one of the noblest flowers of historical genius to be found in the English tongue.
‘Ziegler will never make a historian,’ that same perceptive housemaster once all too correctly remarked. The serious reader of history, I would suppose, is one who is resolved to be informed and instructed without worrying too much about being entertained. Macaulay ended that possibility for me. Over the intervening forty-five years I have derived enormous pleasure from reading history, but always the style has been as important as the content. Grouped around Macaulay’s works in my father’s library were other heavily leather-bound sets of volumes. I began to explore. Prescott on the Incas and the Aztecs I relished; Kinglake on the Crimea I found rewarding but intractable; Carlyle on the French Revolution I confronted, recoiled in dismay, tried and once more emerged intoxicated but convinced that I would never broach it again except in the smallest doses. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall was my greatest defeat. I have embarked on it at least four times, once on a long sea journey, once as a soldier marooned in North Africa on the edge of one of the largest sandpits in the world, yet even in such propitious circumstances I have abandoned the effort in despair after the first hundred or so pages. I can see all Gibbon’s merits, accept his greatness, but I cannot read him.
As a biographer I should be able to identify the great works in my own field which have most inspired me, but I turned to biography only after I had failed miserably at fiction, and I view the art form through the eyes of a novelist manqué. It seems to me now that it was Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria which first convinced me that the dreary three-decker hagiographies of the nineteenth century were not the only way to write of someone’s life, yet I doubt if Strachey’s brilliant, if perverse, study was in fact the first biography that I enjoyed, and certainly I had read precious few nineteenth-century biographies when first I encountered it. By its style and elegance no biography has given me greater delight than David Cecil’s The Young Melbourne but the twentieth century is rich in practitioners who have combined meticulous scholarship with writing of the highest order.
Today my reading is largely circumscribed by the constraints of what I have to read; for reviews, in connection with the book that I am writing, or for the literary prize which I help adjudicate. I read perhaps forty new novels a year, looking forward with particular pleasure to anything by Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, William Boyd, Iris Murdoch, or further afield Bellow, Updike, Richler, Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez. This list seems dispiritingly fashionable, but on the whole it is true that the writers who best stand the test of time are those who are appreciated and applauded (if not necessarily bought extensively) by their contemporaries. I read perhaps the same number of books of biography or history, admiring particularly Holroyd, Richard Holmes, Carpenter and, among those who write the same sort of book as I do, John Grigg, Alistair Home, Ben Pimlott – but I could name a dozen others without even venturing into that remarkable new school of travel writing-cum-autobiography which includes Jonathan Raban, Colin Thubron and Paul Theroux.
I have written only about the effect that writers have had on my own writing or my reading – books upon books. Has any book changed my life or notably affected my personality? I was brought up on Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, have reread it several times and believe it to be one of the most moving and inspiring of human testaments. I would like to feel that it has influenced me. For a time Forster’s Howard’s End was my bible, but I would not dare reread it now for fear that I would find that the philosophy had worn thin and that its potency had departed. Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov I have reread and will return to constantly; I know of no book which says more about the human spirit.
I could not name ten favourite books, only identify ten books which, for a variety of reasons, are of special importance to me. The books that have given me the greatest pleasure over the longest time – both reread twenty times or more – are Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir. The most perfectly crafted of all novels is Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. The two books of the kind which I write myself and which I would most like to have written are Norman Gash’s Peel and Duff Cooper’s Talleyrand. The two books that moved me most and haunt me still are Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky. The richest and most delectable, for occasional sipping only, is Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia or Urn Burial. My desert island book, chosen for its length and density as well as other qualities, would be Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu in the original with the Scott Moncrieff/Kilmartin translation bound in on alternate pages. And finally a wild-card book, not to be categorized but irresistible, is Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. With that travelling library I could confront eternity unafraid.
As I grow older – I’m now in my early sixties – the books of my childhood seem more and more vivid, while most of those that I read ten or even five years ago are completely forgotten. Not only can I remember, half a century later, my first readings of Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe, but I can sense quite clearly my feelings at the time – all the wide-eyed excitement of a seven-year-old, and that curious vulnerability, the fear that my imagination might be overwhelmed by the richness of these invented worlds. Even now, simply thinking about Long John Silver or the waves on Crusoe’s island stirs me far more than reading the original text. I suspect that these childhood tales have long since left their pages and taken on a second life inside my head.
By contrast, I can scarcely recall what I read in my thirties and forties. Like many people of my age, my reading of the great works of Western literature was over by the time I was twenty. In the three or four years of my late teens I devoured an entire library of classic and modern fiction, from Cervantes to Kafka, Jane Austen to Camus, often at the rate of a novel a day. Trying to find my way through the grey light of postwar, austerity Britain, it was a relief to step into the rich and larger-spirited world of the great novelists. I’m sure that the ground-plan of my imagination was drawn long before I went up to Cambridge in 1949.
In this respect I differed completely from my children, who began to read (I suspect) only after they had left their universities. Like many parents who brought up teenagers in the 1970s, it worried me that my children were more interested in going to pop concerts than in reading Pride and Prejudice or The Brothers Karamazov – how naive I must have been. But it seemed to me then that they were missing something vital to the growth of their imaginations, that radical reordering of the world that only the great novelists can achieve.
I now see that I was completely wrong to worry, and that their sense of priorities was right – the heady, optimistic world of pop culture, which I had never experienced, was the important one for them to explore. Jane Austen and Dostoyevsky could wait until they had gained the maturity in their twenties and thirties to appreciate and understand these writers, far more meaningfully than I could have done at sixteen or seventeen.
In fact I now regret that so much of my reading took place during my late adolescence, long before I had any adult experience of the world, long before I had fallen in love, learned to understand my parents, earned my own living and had time to reflect on the world’s ways. It may be that my intense adolescent reading actually handicapped me in the process of growing up – in all senses my own children and their contemporaries strike me as more mature, more reflective and more open to the possibilities of their own talents than I was at their age. I seriously wonder what Kafka and Dostoyevsky, Sartre and Camus could have meant to me. That same handicap I see borne today by those people who spend their university years reading English literature – scarcely a degree subject at all and about as rigorous a discipline as music criticism – before gaining the experience to make sense of the exquisite moral dilemmas that their tutors are so devoted to teasing out.
The early childhood reading that I remember so vividly was largely shaped by the city in which I was born and brought up. Shanghai was one of the most polyglot cities in the world, a vast metropolis governed by the British and French but otherwise an American zone of influence. I remember reading children’s editions of Alice in Wonderland, Robinson Crusoe and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels at the same time as American comics and magazines. Alice, the Red Queen and Man Friday crowded a mental landscape also occupied by Superman, Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. My favourite American comic strip was Terry and the Pirates, a wonderful Oriental farrago of Chinese warlords, dragon ladies and antique pagodas that had the added excitement for me of being set in the China where I lived, an impossibly exotic realm for which I searched in vain among Shanghai’s Manhattan-style department stores and nightclubs.
I can no longer remember my nursery reading, though my mother, once a schoolteacher, fortunately had taught me to read before I entered school at the age of five. There were no cheerful posters or visual aids in those days, apart from a few threatening maps, in which the world was drenched red by the British Empire. The headmaster was a ferocious English clergyman whose preferred bible was Kennedy’s Latin Primer. From the age of six we were terrorized through two hours of Latin a day, and were only saved from his merciless regime by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (though he would have been pleased to know that, sitting the School Certificate in England after the war, I and a group of boys tried to substitute a Latin oral for the French, which we all detested).
Once home from school, reading played the roles now filled by television, radio, cinema, visits to theme parks and museums (there were none in Shanghai), the local record shop and McDonald’s. Left to myself for long periods, I read everything I could find – not only American comics, but Time, Life, Saturday Evening Post and the New Yorker. At the same time I read the childhood classics – Peter Pan, the Pooh books and the genuinely strange William series, with their Ionesco-like picture of an oddly empty middle-class England. Without being able to identify exactly what, I knew that something was missing, and in due course received a large shock when, in 1946, I discovered the invisible class who constituted three-quarters of the population but never appeared in the Chums and Boys’ Own Paper annuals.
Later, when I was seven or eight, came The Arabian Nights, Hans Andersen and the Grimm brothers, anthologies of Victorian ghost stories and tales of terror, illustrated with threatening, Beardsley-like drawings that projected an inner world as weird as the surrealists’. Looking back on my childhood reading, I’m struck by how frightening most of it was, and I’m glad that my own children were never exposed to those gruesome tales and eerie coloured plates with their airless Pre-Raphaelite gloom, unearthly complexions and haunted infants with almost autistic stares. The overbearing moralistic tone was explicit in Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies, a masterpiece in its bizarre way, but one of the most unpleasant works of fiction I have ever read before or since. The same tone could be heard through so much of children’s fiction, as if childhood itself and the child’s imagination were maladies to be repressed and punished.
The greatest exception was Treasure Island, frightening but in an exhilarating and positive way – I hope that I have been influenced by Stevenson as much as by Conrad and Graham Greene, but I suspect that The Water-Babies and all those sinister fairy tales played a far more important part in shaping my imagination. Even at the age of ten or eleven I recognized that something strangely morbid hovered over their pages, and that dispersing this chilling miasma might make more sense of the world I was living in than Stevenson’s robust yarns.
During the three years that I was interned by the Japanese my reading followed a new set of fracture lines. The 2,000 internees carried with them into the camp a substantial library that circulated from cubicle to cubicle, bunk to bunk, and was my first exposure to adult fiction – popular American bestsellers, Reader’s Digest condensed books, Somerset Maugham and Sinclair Lewis, Steinbeck and H. G. Wells. From all of them, I like to think, I learned the importance of sheer storytelling, a quality which was about to leave the serious English novel, and even now has scarcely returned.
Arriving in England in 1946, I was faced with the incomprehensible strangeness of English life, for which my childhood reading had prepared me in more ways than I realized. Fortunately, I soon discovered that the whole of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature lay waiting for me, a vast compendium of human case histories that stemmed from a similar source. In the next four or five years I stopped reading only to go to the cinema. The Hollywood films that kept hope alive – Citizen Kane, Sunset Boulevard, The Big Sleep and White Heat – seemed to form a continuum with the novels of Hemingway and Nathanael West, Kafka and Camus. At about the same time I found my way to psychoanalysis and surrealism, and this hot mix together fuelled the short stories that I was already writing and strongly influenced my decision to read medicine.
There were also false starts, and doubtful acquaintances. Ulysses overwhelmed me when I read it in the sixth form, and from then on there seemed to be no point in writing anything that didn’t follow doggedly on the heels of Joyce’s masterpiece. It was certainly the wrong model for me, and may have been partly responsible for my late start as a writer – I was twenty-six when my first short story was published, and thirty-three before I wrote my first novel. But bad company is always the best, and leaves a reserve of memories on which one can draw for ever.
For reasons that I have never understood, once my own professional career was under way I almost stopped reading altogether. For the next twenty years I was still digesting the extraordinary body of fiction and non-fiction that I had read at school and at Cambridge. From the 1950s and 1960s I remember The White Goddess by Robert Graves, Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, Durrell’s Justine and Dalí’s Secret Life, then Heller’s Catch-22 and, above all, the novels of William Burroughs – The Naked Lunch restored my faith in the novel at a time, the heyday of C. P. Snow, Anthony Powell and Kingsley Amis, when it had begun to flag.
Since then I’ve continued on my magpie way, and in the last ten years have found that I read more and more, in particular the nineteenth- and twentieth-century classics that I speed-read in my teens. Most of them are totally different from the books I remember. I have always been a voracious reader of what I call invisible literatures – scientific journals, technical manuals, pharmaceutical company brochures, think-tank internal documents, PR company position papers – part of that universe of published material to which most literate people have scarcely any access but which provides the most potent compost for the imagination. I never read my own fiction.
In compiling my list of ten favourite books I have selected not those that I think are literature’s masterpieces, but simply those that I have read most frequently in the past five years. I strongly recommend Patrick Trevor-Roper’s The World through Blunted Sight to anyone interested in the influence of the eye’s physiology on the work of poets and painters. The Black Box consists of cockpit voice-recorder transcripts (not all involving fatal crashes), and is a remarkable tribute to the courage and stoicism of professional flight crews. My copy of the Los Angeles Yellow Pages I stole from the Beverly Hilton Hotel three years ago; it has been a fund of extraordinary material, as surrealist in its way as Dalí’s autobiography.
The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West; Collected Short Stories, Ernest Hemingway; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge; The Annotated Alice, ed. Martin Gardner; The World through Blunted Sight, Patrick Trevor-Roper; The Naked Lunch, William Burroughs; The Black Box, ed. Malcolm MacPherson; Los Angeles Yellow Pages; America, Jean Baudrillard; The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, by Dalí.
The picture I can still see in my mind’s eye is of a dancing, gesticulating thing with a human face and cat’s ears, its body furred like a bear. The anomaly is that at the time, when I was about seven, the last thing I wanted was ever to see the picture again. I knew quite precisely where in the Andrew Lang Fairy Book it came, in which quarter of the book and between which pages, and I was determined never to look at it, it frightened me too much. On the other hand, so perverse are human beings, however youthful and innocent, that I was also terribly tempted to peep at it. To flick quickly through the pages in the dangerous area and catch a tiny fearful glimpse.
Now I can’t even remember which of the Fairy Books it was, Crimson, Blue, Yellow, Lilac. I read them all. They were the first books I read which others had not either read or recommended to me, and they left me with a permanent fondness for fairy stories and with something else, something that has been of practical use to me as well as perennial fascination. Andrew Lang began the process of teaching me how to frighten my readers.
Because I had a Scandinavian mother – I have to describe her thus as she was a half-Swede, half-Dane, with an Icelandic grandmother, born in Stockholm, brought up in Copenhagen – I was early on introduced to Hans Andersen. I never liked him. He was too much of a moralist for me. His stories mostly carried a message and a threat. Oddly enough, or perhaps not oddly at all, the one I hated most was the favourite of my mother, who had her stern Lutheran side. This was ‘The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf’, which is about ugsome Inger who used a loaf of bread as a stepping stone to avoid wetting her fine shoes at the ford. The result of course was that she sank down into the Bog Wife’s domain, a kind of cesspit full of creepy-crawlies, and that is only the beginning of her misfortunes.
I never really wanted to read anything my parents wanted me to read. No doubt this is normal. The exception would be Beatrix Potter, but we grow out of her early and only return to our passion after twenty or thirty years. Does anyone read The Water-Babies today? Charles Kingsley is just as improving as Andersen but in a different way. It was social rather than moral evils he pointed out. Andersen never gave a thought to Inger’s poverty and deprived childhood. The poor little chimney sweep’s boys always excited my wonder and pity. I never imagined I would one day live in a house where, inside the huge chimney, you can see the footholds the boys used to go up with their brushes. The water creatures the metamorphosed Tom encountered started me on a lifelong interest in natural history.
Two years after Tolkien’s The Hobbit was published I read it for the first time. Twenty years later I read it again and experienced just the same feeling of delight and happiness and a quite breathless pleasure. That first time, when I was nine, was also the first time I remember feeling this. It is a sensation known to all lovers of fiction and comes at about page two, when you know it’s not only going to be good, but immensely satisfying, enthralling, not to be put down without resentment, drawing inexorably to a conclusion of power and dramatic soundness.
While I was engrossed in The Hobbit I was also reading The Complete Book of British Butterflies, a fairly large tome by the great naturalist F. W. Frohawk – what a wonderful name that is, he sounds like a giant butterfly or moth himself. That copy I still have, can see it on the shelves from where I sit writing. I used to collect butterflies, kill them in a bottle containing ammonia on cottonwool and mount them on pins. The disapproval of a schoolfellow, whom I rather disliked but must have respected, put an end to that and I have killed hardly anything since, a few flies, a mosquito or two. Outside the pages of fiction, that is.
My father came upon me reading Thackeray’s Book of Snobs and told me – rightly – that I should not understand it. I was only driven to it by the lack of anything else. The reader must read even if, by default, it is The Book of Snobs or the telephone directory. If it was the school holidays and the school library therefore closed to me, if the distance from the county library made nipping out for a book impossible, my only recourse was my parents’ bookshelves. They were both teachers, both readers, but they had few books of their own. They couldn’t afford to buy them. What they had were textbooks they had used as students, newish novels given as Christmas presents and two sets of the complete works of favourite authors, in my father’s case Hardy, in my mother’s Kipling.
I can remember one horrid wet Sunday afternoon when I struggled with An Introduction to Palaeontology and something called Igneous Rocks. My father had been trained as a geologist. Rather more rewarding was Marie Stopes’s Married Love, the only volume on the shelves to have a blank slip-on cover, so therefore marked out as of ‘special interest’, as dealers in porn used to put it. However, there was no porn in Stopes and very little information. It puzzled me then and puzzles me now that this book, by a mistress of circumlocution and euphemism, is supposed to be about sex.
Oh, the dreary evenings sitting with my father while he read Hardy aloud to me. I’m sure he read very well and with a fine rendering of Wessex speech, for he was a Devon man, but to me in my early teens there was an inexpressible tedium about those rustics under their greenwood tree. Today I find Jude too painful to reread and The Return of the Native almost suicidally grim, but there was none of that then, only stratagems milling about in my head as to how escape might be effected without hurting the feelings of a dearly loved parent.
Not that Victorian fiction was unacceptable. Far from it. A lifelong fondness for Trollope was about to begin. Dr Thorne – a reissue of which by a pleasant irony I have just edited and introduced for Penguin Classics – I found on the shelves in the house of an aunt. I was discouraged from reading it. There were whispers about unsuitability. It seems incredible today (it was coming close to incredible then) that the reason for caution was that a girl in the novel has an illegitimate child and the word ‘seducer’ is used. But my family were like that. Without their reluctance to let me get my hands on it, I might never have opened the book. How many of us owe a lifelong devotion to an author because he or she once narrowly escaped banning? How many of us derive a permanent distrust of certain writers because a parent read aloud from them to us in our impressionable youth?
I was to get over my dislike of Hardy and have come to a reserved admiration for him. My mother’s transports put me off Tennyson for good – what on earth would a Swedo-Dane see in Maud? – and Kipling I don’t care for to this day. But the encyclopaedia called The Wonderland of Knowledge which my mother bought for me when I was much younger introduced me to Greek mythology, and the Odyssey remains a favourite book.
Another enduring favourite is The Way of All Flesh, the copy I still possess given me as a seventeenth birthday present by a school friend. I should like to think that I learned to avoid cant from Butler but the truth is I only learned what it is. I should like to think it taught me to eschew humbug but it only showed me how to recognize it in others. After all, at the same time as I was reading Butler I was also in love with Somerset Maugham. This was a ridiculous passion, such as a few years later the young had for pop stars. The Painted Veil on those profoundly influential parental bookshelves was responsible for starting this. Before I went off Maugham for good I had managed to rake up the money to buy each new book of his as it came out. This left me with a fine collection of Maugham first editions and a quasi-Maugham style, Frenchified, archaic, embarrassing, in which I wrote all my early short stories and one very bad novel. Small wonder they were rejected.
I used to boast that during those years of my late teens and early twenties I read every play ever published in English in the twentieth century. It can’t have been true but I think it nearly was. Even if it is only almost so, how strange that today I would not dream of writing for the stage and resist with all my strength invitations to produce television scripts.
For years The Way of All Flesh remained my favourite book and it must certainly be included in a list of my top ten. Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier superseded it a dozen years ago and remains in prime position. I reread it every year, I love it. Its characters live in my mind’s eye as if moving in some ritual dance, precise, exquisite, finely balanced. With the poor narrator I suffer afresh each time.
Jane Austen must be there and it had better be Mansfield Park – the fun-less one, the profoundest, the most didactic, but nevertheless the greatest. Here in fourth position, though I can’t undertake to place all in strict order of preference, the Odyssey must come, and the edition the relatively new Robert Fitzgerald translation.
Now for The Complete Poems of George Herbert because he is my hero, then Grace Abounding because Bunyan is too. For opening my eyes to a world of wonders, and not just dreams, drugs and drawings, I shall take as my seventh favourite Alethea Hayter’s Opium and the Romantic Imagination.
I like Proust, or I say I do and convince myself I do, but since I have only read Remembrance of Things Past once and don’t feel like reading it again, I shall give it a miss here, remembering among my own things past what Butler has to say about humbug. But Trollope must be on the list and if it is a choice between the two masterpieces, The Way We Live Now and The Last Chronicle of Barset, the latter wins, if only because the tedious comic antics at Johnny’s lodgings grate less than Sir Felix’s junketings with his working-class girlfriend.
There seems no reason not to squeeze the maximum in and have a trilogy. The one that comes first to mind is Robertson Davies’ The Deptford Trilogy, but it surfaces only to sink again. I love Henry James but I like L. P. Hartley better, he is more economical, more readable, less rarefied, so I will pick the three novels of his in one volume that appear under the title Eustace and Hilda. Number ten might be Fowler’s Modern English Usage but Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable has a tiny edge on it.
Those ten will be on my desert island or my deathbed.
My first sense of books is the feel and the smell of them, ravelled old books growing musty in a trunk, but full of secrets. Ours was not a literary household, there were prayer books, one cookery book (Mrs Beeton) and bloodstock manuals. In our village there was no public library, yet I was in love with writing before I was acquainted with it; a pre-love if you like. My mother, an artist, I do believe, in her own right, disliked books, particularly disliked fiction, believed it was redolent of sin. It was as if she herself had read Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in Ulysses in a past life and was still reeling from the bawdiness of it.
I cannot remember the first book that I read, no matter how hard I try, but I do know that at ten or eleven I read the occasional page of Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. A copy was secured in our village, no doubt by some love-lorn wife or spinster, and was loaned by the page because all were avid to read this tormenting love story and all identified with it. In my girlish dreams, star-crossed love became the pulse of life, a notion I have never quite surrendered. What a long way I had to go to find Chekhov, a fiction so imbued with truth it is to me more like a breath of nature.
The first book I ever treasured was a cloth book, a children’s book perhaps, and though I have no memory of the story I do think of it as something sacred, akin to religion, the cloth of the book reminding me in some way of the cloth of the scapulars we wore inside our vests and which contained a relic of the saints. I was more addicted to words than to pictures. Words were talismanic, transfiguring, making everything clearer, and at the same time more complex. Words were the sluice gates to the mind and to the emotions. Reading for me, then as now, is not a pleasure, but something far more visceral, a brush with terror. The mythologies of my country were of invasion, battle, betrayal, barbaric events told in a supernaturally beautiful language – there were The Red Branch Knights, The Laments of Corc and Nial, Con of the Hundred Battles, Mad Sweeney in the Woods, The Sweet Song of Diarmuid and Grainne and Morrigan the Goddess of War, glorifying in the gore:
Ravens shall pick/The necks of men/Blood shall gush/ In combat wild/Skins shall be hacked/Crazed with spoils/ Men’s sides pierced/In battle brave/To Erne woe/To Ulster woe.
By contrast, the language of prayer books verged on the sentimental – paeans to the mystic Christ, who was also a mortal man, a mortal man who bled on the cross for us. Religion and literature were inextricable, so at fourteen it was something of a relief, as well as a come-down, to get to the novelettes, the gushing stories, for instance, of Miss Annie P. Smithson; tales of blighted love, elopements, embezzlements, revenge and such heady things. ‘Lord Ullin’s Daughter’ by Thomas Campbell, ‘Lucy Grey, or Solitude’ by Wordsworth and Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’ were successive heroines with whom one identified, and of course Heathcliff and the crisp Mr Rochester were one’s heroes. Peter Abelard replaced these two gents in my teens, with, as well, a morbid fascination for Dracula. It is no accident that its author, Bram Stoker, is an Irishman transmitting his countrymen’s covert mania into the psyche of a Baltic count.
The greatest revelation in my reading life took place one afternoon when I was about seventeen in a chemist’s shop in Dublin, where I worked, or, to be more precise, where I toiled for twelve hours a day. I received an honorarium of seven-and-six a week and, hungry for books, although not as hungry as I was for food and finery, I would devote a small portion of that grand salary to buying a second-hand book each week. At George Webb’s bookstall on the quays in Dublin, I purchased for fourpence a small book called Introducing James Joyce by T. S. Eliot. There was a lull that afternoon in the chemist’s shop and as I read the first few pages from Portrait of the Artist, I was myself transported to the Dedalus house, eating the Christmas dinner, seeing the brandy flame on the plum pudding, trembling at the pitch of argument about the patriot-cum-adulterer, Charles Stewart Parnell. Oh the bliss of it. It is probably true to say that for every aspiring Irish writer Joyce remains the master, Father, Son and Holy Ghost of words, although I have to say that that other great epiphanous maverick, Mr Beckett, carries his own kit of spiritual as well as literary ammunition.
I once asked Mr Beckett who his favourite author was, and rather tetchily he replied that there was no such thing. For me there is, and it is Chekhov. His stories have passed into my bloodstream, the fates of his characters as vivid to me as the happenings in my own life. I eloped from the chemist’s shop and moved to a retreat in the country where I had leisure and the opportunity to read. Reading a story of Chekhov’s called ‘The Darling’ about a woman who loved first one husband and then another and another but eventually fastened all her longings on to a little boy called Sasha, I named my son Sasha. But love of Chekhov is something more than the sentiment of a name, it is a human and aesthetic imperative. Good writing deepens or should deepen our well of humanness. Even Joyce, the cerebral William Tell, regarded it as the first prerogative of literature and it was for its human quality that he valued the story of Odysseus above any other. As an aside: he found Dante a bit boring, said that reading Dante was like looking at the sun for too long.
The great thing about reading is not just the hour by the fire or on the train, but the accumulation in the mind from moments of books, the residual thrill, the way the characters swish about in our consciousness long after we have finished the tale. Of the several moments indented in my memory I recall the jealous count in Zola’s Nana, who, having been unfaithful all his life, suspects his wife of infidelity and stands outside a paramour’s window all night, watching for one or two shadows, then tires of his vigil and falls asleep; the primordial moment when the young Marcel Proust waits for the kiss from his mother, the kiss that he will repudiate; the lethal glee when Iago plants the first seed of doubt in Othello and predicts that no drug, ‘not even the drowsy syrup of the sweet mandragora’, will allow him to sleep again; Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair protesting her innocence as her husband surprises her with Lord Steyne in a drawing room in Curzon Street; Emma Bovary’s blue riding cape and the red jars in the apothecary’s window, tabernacles of poison to fulfil her death wish; Anna Karenina chafing her grievances, the little red handbag on her arm, gauging the distance between the front and back wheels of the train before she jumps – drastic moments all, but literature is more eerily accurate at depicting sorrow than joy. As much as I love writing, I love writers, the demented creatures who admit us into their magic, labyrinthine worlds.
I cannot conclude without quoting from a local history card which says that Emily Brontë’s death at the age of thirty was ‘possibly accelerated by the failure of Wuthering Heights and the death of her brother Branwell’ – well, as they say in Ireland, ‘She’s dead, but she won’t lie down.’
I was lucky, being born into a house with books. Not all of them were for reading. In the front room a large shiny bookcase with glass doors displayed bound sets relating to the South African war, Living Animals of the World, and other serious topics, along with the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in green cloth. These books were furniture. No one, so far as I know, ever ventured to disturb their austere calm. To have opened their glass prison would have been like entering a catacomb. Probably it was the same in many middle-class suburban homes of the 1930s and 40s, where there were some aspirations to culture, but not much time for it.
I have inherited that Encyclopaedia Britannica. It always looks a little naked on my shelves, without its glass, and it is not much good for reference, being the eleventh edition (1910–11). But it is a time-machine. Its pictures and descriptions of cities and countries show a world that two wars and modern communications have swept away. Here, preserved in photographs and tiny print, are Conrad’s Africa, and Proust’s France, and the Germany of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks.
But as a child I was immune to its appeal, and would not have been allowed to touch it anyway. The real books were upstairs – perhaps a couple of hundred of them, on some old varnished shelves, in a room rather grandly called ‘the study’. It also contained a big linen cupboard, in the top right-hand drawer of which, hidden under a pile of sheets, were a box of revolver bullets and a policeman’s truncheon. They belonged, I suppose, to my father – the bullets left over from the First World War, in which he had fought, and the truncheon, I later surmised, from his brief period as a special constable during the General Strike. But I cannot be sure, because I never discussed these magic relics with anyone, or disclosed that I knew of their whereabouts. I would just take them out, when alone, and finger them. The truncheon was new-looking and shiny, and disappointingly free of combat-marks. But some of the bullets had been used – perhaps fired at Germans? – and the survivors rolled about and thudded importantly in their tough little cardboard box with its stoutly-stapled corners.
Their spell filled the room with past time, and so did the books. For they had been collected by my grown-up brother and sister, and seemed to me like historical documents. My favourite was a Chums annual from an even earlier generation – handed down, perhaps, by some vanished great-uncle. It was a huge book, in deeply embossed red and gold covers, inside which the weekly issues of Chums were bound together. These had no colour, just columns and columns of close-packed print, and greyish pictures showing schoolboys in long knickerbockers and caps with stripes going round them. What I liked were the column-fillers – jokes, fascinating facts, arresting anecdotes, each occupying its tiny paragraph. They were quite useless, but I would soak them up for hours on end, completely released from my own world, like an archaeologist at the bottom of some deep shaft.
Almost as strong a competitor for my attention was a Hobbies Annual from a slightly more recent era – about 1931, I think, because one of its full-page illustrations was an artist’s impression of ‘The Doomed R101 at its Mooring Mast’. The accompanying article described the airship, in an unforgettable phrase, as ‘the crippled dirigible’. The main pleasure Hobbies offered, though, was not its literary style but its detailed directions about how to construct model steam yachts or electric motors or viaducts for Hornby layouts. These always carried the assurance that the necessary materials could be ‘purchased for a few pence from any ironmongers’. I loved this phrase for the opulence it evoked. By the time I read the book the Second World War was in progress, and I knew of no likely ironmongers. But anyway I had no inclination to make the models. The pleasure they yielded was that of pure make-believe. I gloated over them rather, I suppose, as housewives, stinted by rationing, studied prewar cookery books.
Most of the other stuff on the shelves seemed pretty unapproachable. There was a high proportion of John Buchan and G. A. Henty, and a quick look at these put me off. More manageable was The Boy’s Book of School Stories, edited by the intriguingly-named Gunby Hadath. One story, which for some reason impressed me indelibly, was about an unacademic schoolboy who suffers acutely from the sarcasm of his English master. One day the boy is asked to explain the lines:
Caledonia, stern and wild,
Meet nurse for a poetic child!
He is baffled. To him the lines sound ‘like a telegram from a lunatic asylum to an employment agency’ (this was the story’s best joke, and still seems funny to me). In despair he blurts out: ‘Sir, I don’t quite understand who is to meet the nurse.’ The class explodes in laughter, and the master fires off some of his choicest sarcasms.
Later, in the summer holidays, the boy and his family are climbing in the Alps, and one day, high on a rock face, they come upon another climber in difficulties. It is the English master. I remember the illustration. Stuck to the rock like a starfish, in plus-fours and long socks, he is staring downwards with the whites of his eyes enlarged, to indicate fear. The boy, leaning out coolly from the rock below him, instructs him on which ledges to put his feet, to reach safety. But he is too terrified to move, so to spur him on the boy repeats the sarcasms the master had used in class. This does the trick. I suppose the story appealed to me as a triumph over the adult world – though the literary allusion also gave it a certain chic.
Contemporary writing was not represented on the shelves, so for that I had to depend on birthday and Christmas presents, and loans from friends. My favourite modern author was Captain W. E. Johns. I must have read nearly all his Biggles books (though not the cissy Worrals of the WAAF series, of course). The Biggles adventures that most gripped me were the exotic ones. Biggles in the Orient was a marvel of deft plotting about a series of inexplicable crashes among the fighter planes operating against the Japs from a certain Burmese airfield. Inspecting the wreckage of one plane, Biggles finds a scrap of peppermint-scented silver paper. Chewing gum! All at once it dawns on him. Someone must be drugging the pilots’ confectionery, so that they pass out when flying over the jungle. Sure enough, back at base, a ‘moon-faced’ Eurasian mess steward is found injecting the squadron’s chewing gum with a hypodermic. Curtains for Moon-Face.
The scrap of pepperminty paper strikes me, even now, as a brilliant touch – like the chocolate paper William Golding’s shipwrecked Pincher Martin finds in his pocket, with one agonizingly sweet crumb of chocolate still adhering to it. Perhaps Golding was a Biggles fan too.
Biggles in the South Seas enthralled me even more. I forget the plot, but in one episode Biggles’s friend Ginger becomes romantically attached to a young female South Sea Islander, and they have an adventure with a giant octopus, involving a lung-searing underwater swim. The girl is clad – scantily, one gathers – in something called a pareu. I had no idea what this garment was, but it lingered pleasantly in my mind, eventually getting mixed up with the brief costume worn by Jean Simmons in The Blue Lagoon. Like many teenagers, I felt sure, as puberty approached, that my destiny was to be a poet, and Ginger’s girl’s pareu figured importantly among my early inspirations, combined with the world-weary tones of T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, whose ‘Love Song’ completely captivated me after a single reading. I wrote some wistful, elderly recollections of my youth in the South Seas, in free verse, and tapped out my poems one-fingered on my father’s huge old Underwood, which lurked under a sort of tarpaulin shroud in the front room. This took a long time, as I had no way of correcting typing errors, and as soon as I made one my authorial pride obliged me to start the whole page again. At last I produced perfect copies, however, and sent them off to The Listener for publication. Why I chose The Listener escapes me, but I realize now that the then literary editor was J. R. Ackerley, later famous for his love affair with his Alsatian bitch Queenie, which he wrote up in My Dog Tulip. However, my tasteful blend of Biggles and T. S. Eliot must have seemed unusual, even to someone of his wide experience.
My poems were some time coming back, as I had omitted to enclose a stamped, addressed envelope. This was pointed out (in the great Ackerley’s hand?) on the rejection slip, which was decorated with the BBC’s crest in pastel blue. I was not as pained as I had expected. Being a rejected poet seemed somehow even finer than being published.
At school, as at home, reading was oriented towards the past – for which I am grateful. It was a boys’ grammar school in south-west London, and someone had donated to the sixth-form classroom some back numbers of the London Mercury, dating from the 1920s. They were lovely objects, printed on thick, rough-edged paper with light orange and black covers. To me, this was a modern literary periodical. Only later did I learn that it was correct to sneer at its editor, J. C. Squire, and his reactionary stance. At the time I much enjoyed the poems I found in it by Walter de la Mare, W. H. Davies, and other Georgians.
For class work we had a collection called, I think, Shorter Narrative Poems, which introduced me to masterpieces like Tennyson’s ‘The Lotos-Eaters’ and Arnold’s ‘Sohrab and Rustum’. I had not realized till now, but the bits I liked best were nearly all about water. In ‘The Lotos-Eaters’ it was the waterfalls – ‘like a downward smoke’; and in Chesterton’s ‘Lepanto’ it was ‘White founts falling in the Courts of the sun’; and in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and Masefield’s ‘Dauber’ and W. W. Gibson’s ‘Flannan Isle’, the sea. Maybe water is especially attractive to adolescents, being an alternative to the land’s conventional fixed forms.
When we did Horace’s Odes for Latin A level, it was a water-poem, O fons Bandusiae, that first attracted me. This caused some embarrassment when I went up to Oxford for my scholarship interview. I faced a tableful of elderly dons, one of whom asked whether I thought Horace or Virgil the greater poet. I answered, without thinking, ‘Oh, Horace,’ at which they all laughed, and my questioner inquired the reason for my choice. I made up some stuff about Horace’s interesting use of Greek metres, which seemed to satisfy them, but actually it was because of his water. Besides, after ploughing through two books of the Aeneid, I could not see why anyone thought Virgil a poet at all. But I felt it best not to tell them this.
Explaining why favourite books are favourites is always difficult, because so many private feelings are involved. It is not at all the same as choosing the ‘best’. My top ten would include Lesley Blanch’s Round the World in Eighty Dishes and L. Russell Muirhead’s Blue Guide to North-Western France. I quite appreciate these may not be eternal monuments to the human spirit, but I have used them both so much they feel like second nature. Lesley Blanch describes various countries she has lived in and gives recipes from each. In our copy the pages on fondue and cinnamon apples (from Baalbek) are the most splashed and dog-eared. We used to take the Muirhead guide for walking holidays in Normandy, and it is interleaved with cards from little hotels we stayed in.
Also high in my favourites list would come Conan Doyle’s Collected Sherlock Holmes Short Stories, George and Weedon Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody, and Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm – because each creates its own world, as separate as someone else’s house. It is the incidentals that really count, in all three books. In the Holmes stories, for instance, the hansom cabs and the linoleum in the hallway weave the spell, rather than more sensational elements. I should certainly pick the Collected Poems of Philip Larkin, which are closer to me than any other poetry, and George Orwell’s Collected Letters and Journalism, which seem to me unmatched in English writing for intelligence and style.
As a straight novel I should choose Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, because its banter and flirtation suggest the erotic charge between two young people more subtly than any other English classic, even Dickens’s Great Expectations. There would have to be a children’s book, because reading to children is so educative for the reader, so I should probably opt for Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit – not as witty as Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, but children seem to understand it better, and enjoy its high style (the sparrows ‘implored Peter to exert himself’). And number ten? Well, it would be a toss-up between S. J. Perelman’s The Road to Miltown, probably the funniest book ever written (amazingly, it was never published in England), and D. H. Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia, which of all his books embodies most intensely the most intense personality in modern writing. So that would make ten. But luckily in real life you do not have to stop at ten.
There were three shelves of books in the house where I was born, on the dining-room wall between the fireplace and the wireless set. My parents moved into the house after their marriage and left it sixty-five years later when they died. During that time the books changed very little, though my father disposed of some of his physics books after Hiroshima.
My father taught mathematics and physics at Coatham School on the north-east coast for forty-seven years and the top bookshelf was filled with his textbooks. I never saw him open one of them. He taught from memory. My brother and I had our way with the top shelf. We both hated numbers and I am still afraid of measuring things. We made bridges of the books and hurled Dinky cars through them with furious sounds – sirens, firemen and imaginary blasts of smoke.
Shelf two was dominated by my father’s school prizes. I can’t believe that the Nelson School, Wigton was very well-endowed in 1914, for most of the boys were the sons of poor farmers of the Depression, yet the prizes are magnificent, bound in full calf, gold-tooled, with end-papers of lilac and rose marbling, bookmarks of silk, and engraved book-plates. The copperplate inscriptions are works of art in themselves. Creasy’s The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World (a second prize only) is the most handsome book I possess – more glorious even than the ten-volume Malone Shakespeare I found and bought for ten shillings in a backstreet in Carlisle when I was seventeen. (A curate lurking among the shelves helped me carry this home and my Aunt Mabel shut the door on him as we hadn’t been introduced.) Aged eight or so I liked reading Creasy on my stomach on the dining-room floor beside the sunburst-fronted radio on which we were soon to hear Churchill’s wartime speeches. The cold north-east sea-fret soaked down outside and I lay wondering what Marathon was like. Thirty years on I found myself living in the house where Creasy had written the book. His library had had its shelves ripped out by the soldiers in the Second World War and was now our breakfast room, which was a place like the cafés advertised along the motorways that serve ‘breakfast all day’, for we ate all our meals there except for parties, and it witnessed plenty of decisive and indecisive battles of our own. Judge Creasy’s ghost sat in the window between the long white shutters, his desk looking out over the place where his Victorian tennis court had been, now called ‘the hump’ because it had been turned in the war into a huge air-raid shelter. I can’t remember what battle it was of which Creasy said that the terrain was rather like Surrey, northward from the South Downs – little farmsteads, coppices, crops and fields. This is what he must have seen from his – now our – bedroom window which is now only a pretty view by night – a sea of lights to Epsom. Poor Judge Creasy left lovely Victorian Wimbledon to become Chief Justice of Ceylon and in three months he was dead.
The third bookshelf held my mother’s books, which were nearly all holy, for she was an Anglo-Catholic and convert to the Oxford Movement. The shelf was stuffed with saints, with Keble, Pusey, Newman, Bishop Gore and Archbishop Temple, and books about sin. There were my Uncle Cyril’s Winchester sermons and his mother’s (a great-great-aunt Jane) edition of The Life of St Augustine with the pages about his wicked adolescence ripped out. There were always the hymn books my mother had brought absent-mindedly home from church and there was The Book of Common Prayer. This I didn’t read very often, for it was a back-up book. I knew most of it by heart. Between the ages of five and eighteen I had to go to church twice each Sunday and the church was celebrated for ‘the length of its solemn services’. Mother did allow herself some novels: Jane Eyre, Scott’s Quentin Durward, The Flower Patch Among the Hills by Flora Klickmann, J. B. Priestley (‘such an ugly man, but he can’t help it’) and Phyllis Bentley ‘because she was Yorkshire’. Later, mysteriously, there was Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, the first satire I ever met. I was puzzled by it at first because my mother had said that it was ‘very grim’. There was another rogue in the shelf – Stephen Leacock. The same angel had slipped him in for me. There was What Katy Did and Did Next, which I adored and adore.
Of all the books I suppose The Book of Common Prayer has been the biggest influence. I don’t think I ever once wanted to go to church as a child but on the other hand I never deeply minded going, because according to the bishops on shelf two, church was good fire-insurance, and I could gaze around at the purple camels and shocking-pink palm trees of the late Pre-Raphaelite windows and feel proud of the twelve mahogany-coloured apostles behind the high altar, painted by my Aunt Mary, and the vermilion and cobalt banners that were like an army on the march. Later on I gazed yearningly through my fingers at the older choirboys. All these years The Book of Common Prayer was washing over me and entangling itself in my memory for ever.
The first book I possessed arrived before all this, when I was four. My mother was going to stay for the night with a friend in York. ‘Now be quiet,’ she said, ‘don’t fuss. I’ll be bringing you back a present.’ The present, I was told, would be a porter.
This puzzled me. I knew porters. They were my father’s enemies on our thrice-annual journeys across country to Cumberland to my grandparents’ farm. ‘Look alive, laddie,’ my father would cry to these lugubrious men (we changed trains four times). ‘By Gad, some people have easy lives. Get this lot stacked, boy – we’ve connections to catch. No wonder the country’s finished.’ But I pulled from under my pillow, the morning after my mother’s late-night return, not one of my father’s slaves but a small square book covered in thick shiny cellophane. Across the cover pranced an empty-headed-looking rabbit. Inside, there he was again. He and other rabbits of his acquaintance seemed to be living full and interesting lives. I can remember exactly where we sat in my bedroom, my mother and I, reading the Beatrix Potter books, how I smugly explained to her the famous word ‘soporific’, dazzling the world with my brilliant instant reading. All over the country hundreds of children were doing the same. A couple of times after having Beatrix Potter read to us, we were off. The few words on each page were beautifully printed and yet not in the least childish – like a missal. Those who call Beatrix Potter sickly don’t know what they are talking about. They are books written by a woman who had never messed about with ‘children’s books’. They are full of harnessed passion, the powers of darkness, malice and terror – all the things children love – as well as the sweet comforts of ordered lives, the miraculous English landscape and the enigma of the human and animal condition. They are also very funny and this makes up for the stories being rather feeble.
The landscape of Beatrix Potter I already knew – the white farmhouses scattered on watery purple mountains, the farmyard with flowery weeds in the cobbles, sleepy beehives humming and shining puddle-ducks were at the end of the journey to Cumberland with the attendant porters. My grandparents’ farm, ‘Thornby End’, was not very far from Beatrix Potter’s ‘Hill Top’ at Sawrey and we spent four months of the year there – my father was expected to go back for all his long school holidays to help on the farm – and I wept in each of the five trains when it was time for us to leave for the cold north-eastern world of church and school and sea-fret and sin.
The days at Thornby End were the best in my life and about two hours long, though goodness knows what we did in them except wander about, feed the calves, gather the eggs and lie around in the hay. There was not one book on the farm except in the dining-room, on the furred green tablecloth, a family Bible with a brass clasp, and it did not attract me. One day, however, when it was raining, I decided to crawl – I must have been ten but I was very small for my age and as retarded as Peter Rabbit – along inside the court-cupboard in the dining-room, in at one door and out at the other. A court-cupboard is a piece of furniture like a long sideboard with cupboards above and below, carved in rich black oak with flowers and leaves and squirls. Ours was carved too with the date 1667 – the house had been built round it. As I proceeded along in the dark of the ground floor of the cupboard I found on a pile of rubbishy newspapers a smelly, freckly, mean little book with its cardboard covers bent back and the nastiest, smallest print I ever saw. It was called Northanger Abbey. ‘Whatever do you want with that?’ asked my grandmother. ‘It’s something from Crummock Bank, to do with your Aunt Jessie.’ (I never discovered what this meant.) I read Northanger Abbey all over the farm, in the stack-yard and the Dutch barn and the bower of the red sandstone earth closet that looked down through the orchard and over the Rough Ground to the Scottish mountains. I can’t pretend I doted on it – or even had much idea what it was about. It was dry and difficult and the prickly clever people might have lived on the moon. Yet somehow I knew them.
This spring I had to write an article, for a book called Writers’ Houses, about Hill Top, Sawrey, and saw in Beatrix Potter’s sitting room a court-cupboard carved in 1667. I found in the National Trust’s inventory of the house that Beatrix Potter had picked it up at a farm sale in West Cumberland – at about the time Thornby End was sold up and our cupboard disappeared. Again, it was something to do with Aunt Mabel who knew about antiques – though not as much, I’d guess, as Beatrix Potter. I felt very much as Beatrix Potter did when she saw Samuel Whiskers and his wife flitting off down Sawrey village with ‘a little wheelbarrow, which looked very like mine’. But probably it’s all fancy.
I should like to pretend that after my high-flown start with the Liturgy and Jane Austen, and the animal and human condition, I continued on the same plane, but I didn’t. When I was ten a public library was started at home in Coatham which changed my life. I attended every day after school and often twice on Saturdays when I infuriated the librarians by bringing back the morning’s book for a new one in the afternoon, which was forbidden. Who chose the books for that library? I wonder. It was said that they were bought by the yard from left-overs at sales. I never even heard of some of the children’s books other children were reading at the time or the books of my mother’s generation – Yonge, Molesworth, Nesbit. I read the William books and Biggles. I worshipped Biggles and would have swooned had I known that his creator, W. E. Johns, was soon to be stationed in the RAF two miles away – unless perhaps that had been in the war before the one that was coming?
Biggles led me to books on flying aeroplanes and aeroplane identification and, when war was declared, to first aid. I wallowed in wounds and soon felt that at a pinch I could have delivered a child or done simple amputations. I instructed my friends in the Girl Guides about tourniquets from illustrations of people spouting like colanders. Of all this literature only William was frowned upon by my mother, who disliked the ‘bad grammar and spelling’, so I read him under the sheets. Later I was smug when I found out that Richmal Crompton had been a classicist: beautifully constructed, unsentimental, loving, funny stories – and still going strong. And how much better than the milk-and-water adventures of the dreary Ransome children of Swallows and Amazons in so-called Cumberland: Cumberland without the foxy-whiskered gentleman or smelly Mr Brock living in their dripping, Beowulfian hovels. And where was my old grandfather swearing behind his horses at the plough, or my Auntie Mabel returning from an antiques jaunt to be gored by one of her own cows? Long live Cold Comfort Farm. And what names they had, those Ransome children. Titty, for goodness sake! I knew all about that sort of thing, discussing it at length with the hired girl, Molly, as we did the milking.
There was one splendid thing about the public library and that was that the children’s department was not separated from the rest of it and you could slide round the end of a bookcase and in four steps be away from Arthur Ransome and The Muddle-Headed Postman and dismal Worrals of the WAAF, and be eyeball to eyeball with Thomas Hardy and Thomas Traherne (I wonder if authors were classified under Christian names?). As the years rolled on I took these across the corridor to read in the ‘Reference Library’, which was a quiet, nice room with a coal fire. It was wartime now and all the winter afternoons of the Christmas holidays in 1940 I sat gobbling books – all the Brontës and Dickens and a huge volume of Heath-Robinson drawings. Strangely, when the siren went, we were all tipped out on to the streets to walk home under the searchlights. I could not get the Heath-Robinson under my coat but I could pack Villette or Adam Bede into my navy-blue elasticated knickers as well as the two books we were legally allowed. I drank the books. They were tincture of rhubarb and tincture of myrrh on those bleak cold days. They were sparkling wine and grand cru cream soda. Soon – well, a year or so later – Hardy had emerged for me as top author. I’d never been south of York in my life and had a hazy idea of Wessex, yet like Bath in the eighteenth century with its curricles and bonnets, I somehow knew it. I’ve never deserted Hardy and he’s never loosed hold of me.
About the same time, the first bookshop opened in the town and we were sent there from school to buy one of two possible home-readers – Selections from the Iliad and the Odyssey or Selections from Don Quixote. The shop was run by a Mr Hasty (later it became our first WHSmith), who was the slowest man I ever met. At the back of his shadowy shop he propped himself against the bookshelves and laid his arms (he was a giant) along the tops of them so that he appeared to hang immobile like a giant sloth or fruit-bat. My friend and I, each holding a two-shilling piece, were overawed by the hanging shadow and so we giggled. ‘No,’ he roared, ‘no, I have NOT.’ Moving his fingers about he detached a couple of selections from Homer and tossed them on the counter. ‘I have NOT “Don QuickSOTE”. I have NOT “Don QuickSOTE”.’ We fled, but he followed us to the step. ‘DON KY-OTI,’ he cried, ‘Don KY-OTI.’ I never read Don Quixote until the university (when I found it very patchy), and I still wonder why it meant so much to Mr Hasty. I’m grateful to him though, because I’ve loved both Iliad and Odyssey ever since.
A life without books is unthinkable to me. The three dining-room shelves were maybe an unlikely start for a love-affair for life. They were so unwanted when we cleared up my parents’ house after their deaths five weeks apart that not even the church jumble sale was interested. I took nearly all of them home to live with me. God bless them – Cardinal Newman, Flora Klickmann, Practical Physics and The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World.
The Book of Common Prayer; The Tempest, William Shakespeare; Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe; The Embassy Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; Madame Bovary, Gustav Flaubert; Nicholas Nickleby, Charles Dickens; Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy; The Diary of a Nobody, George and Weedon Grossmith; One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez; The Short Stories of Raymond Carver; Oscar and Lucinda, Peter Carey; the thirteen-volume Oxford English Dictionary bought with my first royalties.
Oh, the excitement of the latest Famous Five adventure – with Biggles, Just William, Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer and Long John Silver following close behind. I have not, except for Treasure Island, reread them since childhood or adolescence and I’ve made it a condition not to reread them now in case I am embarrassed by memory. I want to prevent the pompous adult, sensitive to what others may think, from inhibiting the impressionable child. I was, by the way, a late developer and only really began reading intelligently when I was twenty.
I should explain I was born and educated in Cape Town but my mother, born in London, led me to believe from an early age that England was the Promised Land and London Jerusalem, so I was a good deal drawn to books which fed my hunger for Englishness defined by me then, and now, as an ideal of gentleness, culture, countryside and justice.
Enid Blyton, more than any other writer I remember, fulfilled much of that definition, those longings for England, but only in her Famous Five stories. (I could not abide Noddy or any of the others.) The Famous Five, as I remember, lived somewhere in the south of England – Kent, I think – and were amateur detectives who, in their summer holidays, stumbled on crimes and solved them just as it was time to go back to school. Gentle justice triumphed. But it was her ability to share her love of the English landscape which was, to me, her most enduring quality. Enid Blyton described the English rural scene so vividly that I carry to this day what I believe to be her images of tree-tunnels and green hillsides and well-kept careless gardens. I am told now it was a sugary, middle-class idyll she created (a criticism as meaningless to me now as it would have been then), romantic, idealized, nostalgic. The fascinating aspect of her power, however, is that when, many years later, I went to live in a Hampshire village and walked the footpaths and climbed the hangers, my memory was jolted by her descriptions of the England in which the capers of the Famous Five took place and seemed to me accurate. I cannot say she influenced my own writing but as a reader I owe her an enormous debt; and I remember in the 1970s, when censorship was virulent in England, how shocked I was to read of librarians removing Enid Blyton from their shelves for being too middle-class or too twee or too something. They could not have known that to one immigrant, at least, she described a magical world.
I suspect that W. E. Johns with Biggles, and Richmal Crompton (whose first name baffled me because I could not decide his or her gender) with William Brown, were also part of my yearning for England. But there was another excitement and one that has lasted to this day. I must have been ten or eleven when, having finished my first Biggles, I discovered in a kind of ecstasy that the author had written a host of other books about the same hero. I devoured them one after the other: by day hiding them behind school textbooks and by night under the bedclothes, reading until the batteries of the torch gave out and the light was no more. I remember much later discovering Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, P. G. Wodehouse, and similarly devouring their novels to the exclusion of all else.
With Mark Twain I suppose I took a step up the cultural ladder even though he wasn’t English. Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer were more alive to me than any of my real friends or acquaintances for the simple reason that I knew more about them than anyone who crossed my path. I could predict how Huck and Tom would react or what they would say in any given circumstance. They lived and breathed; the Mississippi flowed in Cape Town and Injun Jim stalked my sunlit streets. If Captain Johns was a caricaturist whose colours were stark, Mark Twain made me aware that the life of the characters and one’s ability to believe in them were the most important elements in fiction.
The turning-point, however, was Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, which I believe to be a masterpiece. In this book plot and story are perfectly woven to sustain E. M. Forster’s two essential requirements of a novel, which are a story and a plot. To the story, Forster explained, you ask the question, ‘and then?’; to the plot you ask the question, ‘why?’. (He offers this example: the King died and then the Queen died – that’s a story. But, the King died and then the Queen died of grief – that’s a plot.) Well, in Treasure Island the story is breathtaking, the invention of incident prolific, the need to know what happens next unceasing, but the plot, the why of the novel, is divine. Why all these adventures, why the black spot and Billy Bones and Blind Pew and Ben Gunn? The answer motivates every event: treasure, Jim lad, buried treasure. There is also a switch of narrator, a stunning device, for the tale is told not only by Jim Hawkins but also by Dr Smollett. Other works by Stevenson I did not find so rewarding – Kidnapped and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde were dreadful let-downs – so I read and reread and read yet again Treasure Island. Last year I sailed on the Hispaniola for the umpteenth time and my heart missed a beat, as it always does, when Israel Hands falls from the rigging.
I am beginning to understand that the books I read as a child subtly define the adult. I know, too, how influenced I was in my reading by my mother. Her love of literature, especially poetry, was profound, but she had prejudices which included an aversion to personifying animals. (She would shudder with disgust when people talked to their pets as though they were children.) There were no copies of Beatrix Potter or Kenneth Grahame on our shelves and Jock of the Bushveld, a South African classic, she dismissed as ill-written and sentimental. (Some years ago I was asked to adapt the book for the screen and found my mother’s judgement to be infallible. I wrote the screenplay. The film, thank God, was never made.) I can only conclude, therefore, that it was she who bequeathed to me an ambivalence towards Lewis Carroll. Nevertheless, he looms large in my formative years. I must have read the Alice books often because I seem to know them well and rejoice in his imagination and linguistic inventions. But I was wary of him, a little suspicious – as I was of Kipling’s Jungle Book – and I never surrendered unconditionally to his genius. I warmed to the Carpenter but not the Walrus, to the Mad Hatter but not the Dormouse. The White Rabbit left me cold. And, I now realize, I have never been a great fan of Animal Farm.
There was a private lending-library, down the road in Sea Point where I lived, run by Mrs Lipschitz. One night a week, Thursday I think, my mother and I would trot down in the early evening to choose two or three volumes for the coming week. The sections marked ‘Sports’ and ‘Westerns’ started to attract me when I was about twelve. Being a cricket fanatic and a promising boxer (until I was knocked out in the second round by a killer named Swart), I read the lives of Don Bradman (as a boy he made himself hit a golf ball with a walking-stick against a jagged wall a hundred times in succession), Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney (the Long Count – Dempsey was robbed!), Joe Louis (then still the reigning heavyweight champion of the world, the man who had taken his revenge on that arrogant German, Max Schmeling) and Jack Hobbs (a gentleman and a genius). I still place cricket above all other sport and I’ve no doubt reading about those giants encouraged my undying love for the game. I continue to read books about cricket and cricketers but the fight game is not what it was. As for Westerns, I doubt if any child now reads Zane Grey.
There were three other important strands to my early reading. The first was the Old Testament and the exquisite liturgy of the synagogue. (‘Praised be Thou O Lord Our God, ruler of the world, by whose law the shadows of evening fall and the gates of morn are opened.’) I was deeply religious. I bought the Bible stories lock, stock and tabernacle. The world was created in six days, the Children of Israel were God’s chosen people – although what we were chosen for was never absolutely clear – and Jehovah tested poor old Job’s faith by causing him to come out in boils. No work so inflamed my imagination as the Bible, and the embers still glow. Faith continues to haunt me, like an ectoplasm, there one moment, gone the next. But, of course, it is really doubt which haunts me, and is presumably why I now read a good deal of philosophy, although I am untrained and awkward in my appreciation. The more I read, the more confused I become, and conclude that certainty is an early symptom of insanity.
The second strand was encyclopaedias. We had two sets: one edited by Arthur Mee, the other by Sir John Hammerton. I spent hours with those volumes and remember especially clearly in Arthur Mee the lives of the famous composers: reading of Schubert’s death from an ‘incurable disease’; of J. S. Bach, as a child, straining his eyes because he worked too late by candlelight and as a result going blind in old age (I stopped reading by torchlight under the bedclothes immediately); and most baffling of all, learning that Beethoven was deaf – was it possible that a deaf man could write such sublime music? Exactly how much useful and useless information I gathered from those tomes I shall never know, but instinct tells me my inquisitiveness was quickened and has never died.
The final strand was the discovery of William Shakespeare and the theatre, again my mother’s great passions. But it was the cinema which really drove me into his embrace. I was thirteen when I saw Laurence Olivier’s film of Hamlet. Within a month I had seen it six times and knew the play by heart. Henry V, although made first, I saw later and was equally smitten. Thereafter, I read plays compulsively and everything else I could lay hands on about actors and the theatre. A friend, Gerald Masters, and I had a toy theatre – an elaborate structure which we christened the Royal Acropolis – and we would act out an eclectic selection of plays with me taking the leading roles while pushing up and down cardboard cut-outs of the characters. There was little professional theatre in Cape Town but in the Royal Acropolis I discovered Sheridan, Ben Travers, Chekhov, Noel Coward, J. B. Priestley, Elmer Rice, Ibsen, Eugene O’Neill, Wilde and Galsworthy. We had an obsession with Bernard Shaw but that soon wore off and, in my case, has never returned. I did not believe in his characters as real people and so he lost me for ever.
It is impossible, of course, to do justice to all the books which captivated me, but Palgrave’s Golden Treasury must enter my pantheon. My favourite was Wordsworth – yes, and Keats and Tennyson and, oh, all of them, all of them. And, in the netherworld of adolescence, being given T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Journey of the Magi’ to learn as a punishment and being dropped unwittingly into new, unexplored territory; yes, a cold coming I had of it, and I was no longer at ease in the old dispensation.
The list of my top ten favourite books: I do not really approve of lists but I shall have a go and cheat a little. In no particular order then: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, War and Peace by Tolstoy, the complete works of William Shakespeare, The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud, Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh, Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D., Stevenson’s Treasure Island, The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and the Old Testament.
I spent much of my childhood in bed, reading. I was handicapped, set apart, greatly blessed by very bad asthma. Much later when I came to read Proust, I recognized certain things in him – a contemplative acute vision, induced by keeping very still in order to be able to breathe, a sense of living most fiercely in the mind, or in books, which were a livelier life. I have tried to remember my first real reading, and failed. There seems to have been nothing between ‘Pat can sing. Sing to Mother Pat’, and a voracious indiscriminate devouring of all printed words, the Children’s Encyclopaedia, Worzel Gummidge, Little Grey Rabbit, David Copperfield, Alice, Winnie-the-Pooh, The Wind in the Willows, Sir Walter Scott. I remember not making sense of things – it didn’t occur to me that Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women were Americans so I couldn’t understand why they had to sail to England. I believed I was threatened with imminent imprisonment in the Marshalsea from reading Little Dorrit, and tried A Midsummer Night’s Dream and got annoyed by being distracted from what I supposed to be the ‘real’ story, the love of Hermia and Lysander, by fairies. I don’t remember finding anything too difficult – I just skipped and struggled to make sense of what I could.
What do I remember? What of all that fiercely explored forest of paper is still alive? I recognized, earlier than Proust, another mirror for myself in Coleridge’s remark about his own childhood reading: ‘From my early reading of Faery Tales and Genii etc etc – my mind had been habituated to the Vast – and I never regarded my senses in any way as the criteria of my belief . . .’ The roots of my thinking are a tangled maze of myths, folktales, legends, fairy stories. Robin Hood, King Arthur, Alexander of Macedon, Achilles and Odysseus, Apollo and Pan, Loki and Baldur, Sinbad and Haroun al Rashid, Rapunzel and Beauty and the Beast, Tom Bombadil and Cerberus. I have no idea now where I got all this, except for the Norse myths, which came from a turn-of-the-century book, Asgard and the Gods, bought by my mother as a crib for her Ancient Norse and Icelandic exams at Cambridge. I read the Fairy Books of Andrew Lang and several collections of ballads, and ‘How Horatius Kept the Bridge’ from Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome. The tales and myths and legends did, I am now more sure than ever I was, exactly what Coleridge said they did. They made it clear there was another world, beside the world of having to be a child in a house, an inner world and a vast outer world with large implications – good and evil, angels and demons, fate and love and terror and beauty – and the comfort of the inevitable ending, not only the happy ending against odds, but the tragic one too.
At the same time, and just as early, I remember the importance of poetry. Nursery rhymes, ballads, ‘The Jackdaw of Rheims’ from Richard Barham’s The Ingoldsby Legends and A. A. Milne’s Now We Are Six, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Slowly silently now the moon’ by Walter de la Mare. I think one of the most important writers to me ever has been de la Mare, though it is a debt hard to recognize or acknowledge. Partly for the singing strange rhythms of his poetry, partly for the strange worlds and half-worlds he gave one glimpses of, the world of a pike suspended in thick gloom under a bridge, the journeyings of the Three Mulla-Mulgars, which I read over and over. The most important poems were three colouring books we had, a page of poetry beside a picture, all three complete stories. The Pied Piper, Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’, his Morte d’Arthur. I knew them all by heart long before I thought to ask who had written them. Their rhythms haunt everything I write, especially the Tennyson. The enclosed weaving lady became my private symbol for my reading and brooding self long before I saw what she meant for him, and for nineteenth-century poetry in general. Truthfulness forces me to admit that we did not have that great anthology of magical and narrative verse, de la Mare’s Come Hither, but we were brought up on its contents by my mother, who gave us poems and more poems, as though it was unquestionable that this was the best thing she could do for us.
What about fiction, as opposed to fairy tales? What I remember most vividly is learning fear, which I think may be important to all animals – I used to love the song from Jungle Book – ‘It is fear, oh little hunter, it is fear’. And I remember Blind Pew tapping, the terrible staircase and the heather-hunting in Kidnapped, I remember Jane Eyre locked in the Red Room, and poor David Copperfield at the mercy of Mr Murdstone, the horrors of Fagin in the condemned cell (I can only have been eight or nine) and worst of all (though I still have nightmares about executions), Pip on the marshes being grabbed by Magwitch in that brilliant and terrible beginning of Great Expectations. I must have been very little. I didn’t understand any more than Pip that Magwitch’s terrible companion was fictive.
I remember my first meeting with evil, too, and it has only just recently struck me how strange that was. I worked my way along my grandmother’s shelf of school prizes – was I nine or ten? Or younger? And read Uncle Tom’s Cabin before anyone had told me that slaves had really existed outside The Arabian Nights. Tom’s sufferings and the evil of the system and the people who killed him, with cruelty or negligence, made me feel ill and appalled. I never talked to anyone about it. We sang about Christ’s suffering in church but that seemed comparatively comfortable and institutional and had after all a happy ending, whereas Tom’s story did not. And yet one is grateful for these glimpses of the dark: as long as they do not destroy, they strengthen.
I liked adventures – not Marryat and The Coral Island too much, but the wonderfully heartrending stories of Violet Needham, and Dumas and Scott; all the adventures of the Musketeers, The Talisman and Ivanhoe, Kenilworth and Redgauntlet, and most of the rest of Scott, though I had trouble with not knowing what Covenanters were in Old Mortality, and having to keep several hypotheses open in my mind. I was in love with Athos and with Loki and with the sinful Lancelot and with Ulysses – the clever and complicated and fallible, on the whole.
What I didn’t like was children, though I read a lot about them, faute de mieux, because I read too fast not to. I didn’t like being a child, and I didn’t like being with imaginary children, not even the Bastables, not even, really, Arthur Ransome’s families, though I read and reread Swallows and Amazons, I think mostly for the landscape, and for the very good fear generated by We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea. I must make an exception for that anarchic and eternal child, Richmal Crompton’s William, as much an archetype as Alice. But I hated Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and all schoolchildren in school stories and the smug kind of children in pony stories who despise children who are interested in clothes or books or anything but tomboyishness. I liked Little Women better when they were Good Wives. They were more interesting. I liked Jane Austen, and believed everything she said about the right way for men and women to behave towards each other – her heroines are young things (apart from my favourite, Anne in Persuasion) who are about to be able to be women not girls, and be happy, as in fairy stories.
I agree wholly with Tolkien and Auden, in their dispute with Alan Garner about how to write about magical and alien worlds for children. The little groups of wandering Susans and Johns and Erics in their pyjamas and school sandals ruined many good imaginary landscapes and cosmic battles for me. I am too old to have read Tolkien as a child, but the child in me read and reads him as an adult in moments of depression, as I read Dumas and Asgard and the Gods, to live in narrative. I can’t now read and couldn’t then read C. S. Lewis – there is a nasty moral in a sugary pill there, the books have palpable intentions on you and the children are horridly childish. It follows from that that I mistrust romantic theories about the wisdom, or truthful vision of children, such as were rife in the 1960s. Children are just people in the process of getting older, vulnerable people learning to be human, and wise children know that being men and women is much more interesting and complicated than the state in which they are temporarily stuck.
I knew a lot about passionate love, from the Morte d’Arthur to Jane Eyre. I began to learn about sex from E. Arnot Robertson (Four Frightened People) and Elizabeth Bowen (The House in Paris), a wonderfully double book, bought by my father by mistake for Marjorie Bowen, a tale told through the eyes of a sharp but childish child, which includes adult passion, and has a very odd effect on a reader hardly older than Henrietta herself.
What effect did all this have on my writing? I think there was always a mythic and poetic undertow in my fiction, even at its most realist. The Game, for instance, is full of echoes of ‘The Lady of Shalott’ and the Morte d’Arthur, and is essentially a novel about a battle to the death between a realist novelist and an academic with a romantic imagination, in both the medieval and the Coleridgean sense. It turns on a phrase of Dr Johnson’s about the hunger of the imagination, which preys incessantly upon life. It asks if books are life-giving or death-dealing, and if so, is it social and emotional truth-telling, or myth and legend which give the power? I have spent much of my career as a writer defending what I call ‘self-conscious realism’ against the nouveau roman or the ideas of Virginia Woolf about life as a series of impressions seen through a luminous halo. I think, although all my books have also been fighting a more or less overt battle with Dr Leavis and the Cambridge-English school of moral seriousness and social responsibility, I have also been deeply influenced by it. But recently – when, for instance, I read Angela Carter saying she wanted to write with the passion with which she read fairy stories as a child, or when I see what Salman Rushdie makes of The Arabian Nights as a way of telling truths today – I have felt that the primitive reader in me, too, has been liberated. B. S. Johnson in the 1960s invented various ‘experimental’ narrative forms based on the premise that ‘telling stories is telling lies’. Iris Murdoch said ‘All art is adventure stories.’ (Or at least the god Apollo said it, in an editorial capacity, in one of her novels.) I agree with Iris Murdoch. And therefore I find recent movements in the shape of fiction – the new mixtures of fables and myths and quests and hunts, of magic and truth, reality and artifice – very exciting.
One’s list of ten, or any other number of books, changes from day to day. I have chosen these really on the principle of whether they stood up to the test of being asked whether I could not do without them, over a period of about three days. I should point out that this is not a list of most admired authors – there are novelists in particular, Balzac, Dickens, George Eliot, Iris Murdoch, Tolstoy, whom I need and love, but in toto, and remember well enough to do without particular works. The same goes for many poets – I need Herbert and Donne and Tennyson as much as the included poets, but can do without the books with more equanimity. I have included Tolkien, as the narrative to read when ill, rather than Georgette Heyer on the same principle.
The Collected Poems of: Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson, Robert Browning; A la recherche du temps perdu, Marcel Proust; The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoyevsky; Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy; The Notebooks of S. T. Coleridge; Asgard and the Gods (adapted from the work of Dr W. Wägner by M. W. Macdowell, edited by W. S. W. Anson); The London Book of English Verse, ed. Bonamy Dobree (I fear this excellent collection is out of print, but it is still by far my favourite anthology. It was made at the time when my adult taste in poetry was formed by T. S. Eliot, and is full of ‘metaphysical’ and ‘symphonic’ poems I love, and a lot of surprises); J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (for reading when very ill or depressed: it is compelling narrative and there is no sex and no real moral problems to agitate the mind).
I learnt to read in Montreal during the war, lisping out the captions and balloon-dialogue of Captain Marvel comics, Batman, Superman, The Green Hornet, Captain Marvel Junior, Mary Marvel, and so forth. I found the very sight of the glossy covers, the feel, the smell, so exciting that to this day I still sometimes swoon at the memory – as potent as the occasional astonished return (one in 50,000 puffs) to the experience of an early cigarette. The first book I remember reading was in Hayling Island, when I was about eight, I suppose. The American servicemen based there had gone home, and my brother and I used to haunt the empty barracks, looking for loot. The prize, for me, was a tattered, red-spined but virtually coverless copy of Sherlock Holmes stories. So after that more Sherlock Holmes, and on to Father Brown, and then on to virtually any book I could get hold of – between the age of ten and sixteen I truly believed there was no better place in the world than inside a book.
Among the books I most adored being inside of in my immediate post-pubescence were those by Hank Janson – the first popular soft-porn merchant – whose covers, as shiny as any Captain Marvel, exhibited well-breasted (and partially bra-ed; I’m writing here of the late 1940s and early 1950s) young women, generally bound and gagged, skirts hiked to reveal a stocking-top and a suspender. I used to sell off school textbooks, not only my own, at the second-hand shop in Foyles to find the money (one shilling and sixpence) to keep me in my warm romantic fantasies which were even more important to me than success at cricket. Towards the end of my Hank Janson phase – not that it’s ever completely ended; I still stir at the spectacle of a maiden in distress – I was also tucking into the kind of books that chaps with intellectual pretensions at Westminster tucked into. Dostoyevsky, Camus, Sartre – anyone who received a formal education in that era will be poignantly familiar with the bibliography, which extended itself when I found myself back in Canada (Halifax, Nova Scotia, for reasons too boring to explain) to Plato, Aristotle, Kant (I have actually read the whole of The Critique of Pure Reason: this is a boast, not a confession), Heidegger, Kummelfliger, Perry Jubb and lots and lots of Raymond Chandler.
Three years later I was in Clermont-Ferrand, France, teaching English at a collège-technique, and it was there, suddenly, under the influence of a bearded Leavisite who was doing what I was doing, although at a more exalted level, that I began to read English novels at last. It was he who started me off on Leavis – he’d brought the key texts with him in his knapsack – and through Leavis I read Lawrence, of course and several times, Conrad, George Eliot, Henry James – the Downing canon. From Clermont-Ferrand I went as first a postgraduate, intending to write a thesis on Henry James, back through the ranks to undergraduate status. When I wasn’t playing poker at Cambridge, or going to the cinema, or hunting down ninth-hand copies of long-out-of-print Hank Jansons, I was reading, in a disagreeably professional manner, for the tripos. After the tripos, taken in a heavily hay-fever-ridden summer, I swore I’d never again read a book I didn’t actually want to read – a pledge I almost managed to stand by even though I eventually got a job teaching literature at London University. It meant I kept my students on a fairly sparse diet – but what the hell!
Now that I’ve resigned from lecturing my reading is either dilatory or professional – that is, I either pick up books on a whim, going by their cover, the blurb and vaguely recalled reputation, or because they’re sent to me with a view to my turning them into film scripts. I try, whenever I can, to avoid the modern novel. I expect lots of modern novels are simply terrific, and that my own experience with them has only been so unfortunate because it’s been so haphazard. The problem is, though, that I find them intensely difficult to get stuck into. One is still waiting, waiting, for the absolute immersion, the complete world-deafness of one’s childhood reading. When it comes partially it comes from what I now recognize is an entirely expected source, the thriller. After all, it’s only in the thriller that a strong story line is mandatory, though no doubt modern critical theorists, who are as anti-coherence as modern educationalists appear to be anti-education, will try to find ways of forcing unreadable fragmentations of thriller-narrative upon us. In fact I have a suspicion that I came across some French (what else?) examples of this some years back. But the truth is you know exactly where you are with a Dick Francis, especially the early ones, which seem to me infinitely superior as works of literature to the razzmatazz stylistics of the highly publicized and award-winning novels by young X, who jives egocentrically across the page, but fails to make one wish to turn it.
One highly celebrated novel of our days I’ve tried to read three times, and on each occasion, in a state of exhausted admiration, have let it drop to the floor around page fifty, with 400 pages or so still to go. Not only not a patch in narrative flow on Dick Francis, who never insults his readers by turning a phrase unless it’s appropriate (i.e. turns a narrative screw), and also not a patch on Barbara Vine (née Ruth Rendell, so to speak), whose first three thrillers achieve a genuinely classy atmosphere of excitement and dread that seems to me far beyond the range of all those chaps who write about babies and the bomb – already a decidedly anachronistic subject, though it’s true that babies and parental feelings go on and on, and back and back – although you’d think they’d only just been invented, from the surprise with which they’re being greeted by a current crop of literary daddies.
Although the above is clearly mere prejudice, feebly masquerading as taste and judgement, it is still an undeniable fact of my nature that I’m unable to follow any prose or indeed verse that doesn’t in some sense tell a story. Even polemic, or close-knit political and philosophical argument, seems to me to require a narrative – the feeling that the reader is invited to go on a journey with a terminus in mind, even if that turns out to be somewhere cold and damp, where you’d rather not be. The most perfect example of narrative prose, swift, witty, informative and dramatic, that I know of in the English language is the first chapter of Mansfield Park, although every first chapter in Jane Austen is marked by the unmistakable confidence of the writer who knows she has a story to tell, and knows she knows exactly how to tell it. The closing chapters of Mansfield Park show all the same qualities corrupted by moral intent. The wit becomes nasty, the drama becomes melodrama, and the confidence becomes simultaneously smug and punitive. I’m not sure why I go into this here, unless it’s to register the sense of betrayal, intensely personal betrayal, that books can still induce. To that extent they really are like friends and loved ones.
At one time, about a decade ago, when I was going through an unusually depressing phase, I virtually read only cricket books. Not just the obvious ones, like Neville Cardus and Robertson-Glasgow, but the autobiographies and ghosted autobiographies of players themselves. Edrich, Compton, Evans, Graveney, recently Pat Pocock. One of the most telling bits of drama I’ve come across in a book is Edrich’s account of trying to get Hutton out of bed (to which he had withdrawn in a state of shock and terror) to win the Ashes in Australia, in the great Tyson series. Without doubt, the most astute and witty book I’ve read in recent years is Mike Brearley’s on The Art of Captaincy. I thumb it about quite a lot, at all hours of the day and night. But on the whole, though still frequently depressed, I’ve given them up – there’s too much cricket to see, these days, to find the time to read about it seriously. Also, in as much as most of the best books belong to a vanished age, they would probably only add to the depression.
What I’m reduced to, really, is reading the same books again and again. I’ve read Mansfield Park twelve times, most of Jane Austen nearly as often. I’ve reread Dickens, with as much awe and joy the fifth time around as on the first. I read George Eliot now and again, T. S. Eliot again and again, and Larkin, of course, and George and Weedon Grossmith’s The Diary of a Nobody and The Papers of A. J. Wentworth. The list of great writers I intend never to read again before I die (I can’t speak for after. There may well be a Hell) is vastly longer, and includes Proust, all of Joyce except Dubliners, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Shaw, W. H. Auden (for personal reasons too embarrassing to go into), Walter Scott, naturally; and sadly – because I’m still grateful for the intoxicated and bogus sense of manhood he gave me when I was twenty-one and in France and still full of passionate sexual confusions – D. H. Lawrence.
One of my biggest regrets in life is that my own books were not around for me to enjoy when I was a child. In fact, because of the war, very few children’s books were available at all. There was a local library with a limited stock, but no bookshops. New books, like bananas, were heard of, but not seen.
My father, an occasional reader who enjoyed stories of the sea, felt embarrassed about entering a library. A working man’s fear of being shown up or made to look ignorant, I suppose. He left it to the family to choose the books for him. And it was easy:
‘I got this for you, Dad, have you read it?’
‘Yes, but it doesn’t matter, it’s good. It’s always good.’
My mother, on the other hand, loved books and was a firm believer in the potency of words to charm, to heal and to educate. It was she who would put me on to a merry-go-round of nursery rhymes and simple prayers, then take me off, dizzy with words. Though books were scarce in those early years mother made sure that I listened to a bedtime story every night. By the light of a burning factory or a crashed Messerschmitt she would read anything that came to hand: sauce bottle labels, the sides of cornflake packets. All tucked up warm and cosy, my favourite story was a tin of Ovaltine. How well I remember her voice even now: ‘Sprinkle two or three heaped teaspoonsful of . . .’
At the age of five I started school and became an infant. At Star of the Sea I learned my letters from wall-charts, so old-fashioned that Ronnie with his Red Rattle and Tired Mother, who sighed ‘Hah’ as she sat on a large ‘h’, looked more unreal than the fairies and elves who decorated the picture books.
This method of personifying the alphabet, however, worked too well and overtired my imagination to the extent that I still attribute feelings to individual letters rather than seeing them as mere hieroglyphs. (That’s what is good about a word like ‘hieroglyph’, the letters find themselves in different company, it keeps them on their toes. I digress.)
The first story I remember that touched me deeply was Greyfriars Bobby by Eleanor Atkinson, and the fact that it was true made my NHS glasses mist over time after time. To know that there would be no sequel entitled Bobby to the Rescue, in which it transpires that the old chap had not really died but had fallen off the top of Ben Nevis and lain injured until finally rescued by the plucky terrier, was a tragic realization. That truth could be crueller than fiction was one of the first lessons that reading taught me, and I didn’t want to believe it. What I wanted was Custer Rides Again, Joan of Arc II and Further Adventures of the Princes in the Tower. Fairytale fiction, of course, was often desperately dark and as scary as any nightmare, and although there were no witches or goblins in the part of Liverpool that I grew up in, I realized that what happened to Hansel and Gretel could happen to any child. The names, places and costumes may have changed but the evil was still there.
But so was goodness of course, courage, and generosity. At the age of seven or eight my heroine was Grace Darling, the lighthouse keeper’s daughter who helped rescue sailors from a ship wrecked off the Northumbrian coast. The book featured stirring illustrations of a frail beauty rowing through a storm, and I knew then that when I grew up I wanted to be rescued by someone as lovely as she. (As a matter of fact I was, but that’s another story.)
It was at the top end of junior school that I graduated to abridged versions of classics such as Treasure Island and A Christmas Carol which caused my pulse to race and my hackles tremble. Remember the feeling when turning the page was almost too much to bear? As adults grown weary on clichés and redesigned storylines, we too easily forget the initial jolt, the power, almost drug-like, of those first readings, when imagination flared up and seemed capable of consuming us.
After romping through half-remembered classics (abridged too far, perhaps?), such as Around the World in a Day-and-a-Half, A Tale of One City and The Lion, the Witch and the Tea-chest, it was the comic that became my essential reading. Not cartoons but adventure weeklies such as the Wizard, Hotspur and Rover. Here I mixed happily with the public schoolboys of Red Circle, and admired the pluck of ‘Limp-along Leslie’, the diminutive left-winger who, despite a withered leg, developed an unstoppable shot that unerringly curled into the top right-hand corner of the net two minutes before the final whistle.
Another working-class hero with whom I identified was ‘Alf Tupper the Tough of the Track’, who trained on fish and chips, ran in hobnailed boots, baggy undies and a borrowed vest and showed the world’s best milers a clean pair of heels (well, not that clean, actually). And perhaps my all-time favourite – Wilson, the metaphysical mega-athlete and mystic who lived in a cave on Dartmoor, on a diet of nuts and berries. Clad only in black woolly combinations he would emerge when his country needed him and run like the wind with its tail on fire. Scorning fame and success, he was the outsider, an eccentric loner.
The interesting thing about these comic-book characters is that they were all either deformed, deprived or cuckoo, and yet were capable of extraordinary feats of strength and endurance, thanks to intense concentration, the will to win and an abhorrence of sex.
Unlike me. (It is with some embarrassment that I admit to borrowing my sister’s copy of School Friend each week to marvel at the drawings of girls wearing tutus or hockey shorts.) National Geographic magazines, too, have a lot to answer for.
Verse speaking played an important part in fashioning my reading. As a child I used to mumble, and so when I was eleven my mother sent me to elocution lessons where I learned how to mumble louder. Poems which had been grey indecipherable lumps during Eng. Lit. periods suddenly came to life. Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’, ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna’ and Masefield’s ‘Cargoes’ were favourites to recite individually or as part of a chorus. Eventually, as I became unselfconscious about hearing my own voice, I learned to listen to the poet’s.
I can’t remember what I read from fourteen to seventeen. Set books, I suppose. Or rather, half-hearted attempts. (Thomas Hardy may be credited with having written The Mayor of Casterbridge but I wrote at least two thirds of it – the weekly punishment for failing the comprehension test was to write out the chapter in question. Week in, week out . . .)
In late adolescence I became interested in ideas rather than stories: J. D. Salinger, Kerouac and Colin Wilson (could the author of The Outsider be the same Wilson who lived in a cave on Dartmoor? Surely not). Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave, D. H. Lawrence, Sartre, Joyce and, of course, the poetry.
With an Irish Catholic working-class background it was hardly surprising that I felt ill at ease with the traditional English poet, his Protestantism, his class, his reserve. At university the blackboard was taken down, and through the window behind it the sun streamed in. I discovered the passion and colour of Jiménez and Rimbaud, the surrealism of Morgenstern, of Prévert and Apollinaire. Through Dylan Thomas and e e cummings to the American Beats and then back, years later, and with some relief, to the English tradition through Eliot and Larkin.
Today I read poetry every day as well as everybody’s favourite novelists including Burgess, Theroux, Bainbridge, Lodge, Rendell, etc, etc . . . (there are so many good ones around) Kundera, Vonnegut, etc . . . Keneally, Greene, etc, etc . . . etc.