Reading for me is tied inextricably to place. The Victorian Gothic house – a ‘monstrosity’ to some, a ‘folly’ to others, to all a decidedly odd place for a person to spend their formative years – cast its long shadow over the pages of the books I read. For years no book I read came from anywhere but the bowels and lungs – and in some cases the twisted attics – of the Big House that crouched at the end of a valley still then clad with the last shreds of the Ettrick Forest. I read up and down the house, and I knew fairly early on that I would never begin to be able to get through all of it – even with the help of the terrifying Demonologie, property of James VI of Scotland, with its turning paper wheels to aid with the casting of spells.
To begin with that ragged line of Ettrick silver birches outside my bedroom window. This was the Fethan Wood, where James Hogg set fairy tales and metamorphoses: it was dangerous to walk there, to go up to the ring of bright grass and look down at the house through the silver-grey trees. People came out transformed into animals – or didn’t come out at all, to be discovered years later as three-legged stools. I read the Hogg stories – or they were read to me – and years before I was able to go on to his great masterpiece, The Confessions of a Justified Sinner, the account of a man driven insane by Calvinism, by the dictates of the devil who sends him out to kill as one of the Elect – I could feel the power of Hogg’s imagination in the hills and woods and streams that enclosed the house.
The house could be said to be like an archaeological dig, with the basement providing material contemporaneous with the discoveries of archaeologists Arthur Evans or Heinrich Schliemann, and just as startling for a child to discover as it must have been for the archaeologists to unearth the foundations of Knossos or Clytemnestra’s tomb. Here were Henty and Ballantyne – and, most important of all, Rider Haggard’s She – all in low rooms hard to find in a labyrinth of tiled passages, cold and with a strong smell of rot. Here the strong and brave of the Empire fought their battles and had their impossible adventures; and here I lingered, in disused dairies and stillrooms, reading in a world which was a dusty monument to that vanished and glorious past.
From the crepuscular vaults of the house there were two ways up. The back stairs led to the schoolrooms, where tubercular daughters had coughed over books of such spectacular dullness that I remember none of them – except for the fact that some more recent incumbents had left a stash of historical romances by Margaret Irwin and Violet Needham. Here, in the abandoned schoolroom, I was drawn into a past (there were a couple of Georgette Heyers too) of phaetons and darkly scowling aristocrats and games of faro and the like, and for a while I stopped there, until the discovery of Alexandre Dumas’s The Black Tulip drew me down the stairs again and out into the garden. For the magnetic quality of that extraordinary book led me to search the grassy paths and flower borders for the elusive tulip – and once I thought I saw it between two yew trees, at the entrance to the garden: a rich, gleaming black flower that would guide me somehow down the paths my own imagination was just beginning to try.
If I had left the basement by the front stairs I would have found myself in the library. Here was the Witches Book that the last King of Scotland and the first King of England had used to sentence the women burned to death just a mile or so away at Traquair; and here were the French books, some of great beauty and delicacy, from the library of Madame de Pompadour and other noble families, snapped up by my great-grandfather at the time of the building of the house. All these were unreadable but lovely to touch, with their gold coats of arms and leather binding faded to strawberry pink. Huge atlases were at least of some use, in this room that no one ever sat in; and I would drag them out sometimes. But the temptation to go right up to the top of the house usually proved too strong to resist, and gigantic plates of Africa and Asia lay unstudied on the floor as I ran up the stairs again, this time to the foolish, crenellated summit of the place.
The attics had books in trunks that had split open with age – books no one wanted when they went off to war, or went off to get married, or had no room for anyway. Bees had once swarmed in the attic, and it’s to the smell of wax that I remember finding the early Penguins: the Aldous Huxleys, a book called A Month of Sundays which I have never since been able to trace – and the odd Agatha Christie, which kept me up there until dark, amongst children’s wicker saddles, pictures of aunts that no one could ever want to look at, and a floor covering of dead bees.
When I was older I would take books from the sitting room, lined with dark green bound volumes of the Brontës, Peacock and Stevenson. But by then the Gothic atmosphere of the place may already have permeated me more than I knew. On coming down for the first time to London and going to school I was obsessed with one poem above all others: Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Bells’. I would shout the words, ‘The tintinnabulation of the bells, bells, bells . . .’ And my younger brother rolled on the floor with laughter at me.
Street of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz; The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov; Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel García Márquez; Ariel, Sylvia Plath; The Confessions of a Justified Sinner, James Hogg; Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, R. L. Stevenson; The White Goddess, Robert Graves; Two Serious Ladies, Jane Bowles; The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles.
I was never a precocious reader. In his Unreliable Memoirs Clive James remembers, or thinks he does, how certain of his schoolmates, on being asked what they had been reading in the holidays, would come up with James Joyce while Clive himself would confess to Biggles in the South Seas. This was pretty much my own experience except that as far as I know none of us had read James Joyce.
There was a library on the troopship which brought us from India when I was eight. From the way I tried to divine the contents of the books purely from their physical appearances, with no sense of authors or titles, I would guess that I had read little or nothing before then. My mother qualifies this with her own memory of the two of us planning to have a bookshop together, but in that regard all I can recall is buying the Dandy and Beano in the shop near the Capital Cinema in Darjeeling.
The first real book I read was Peter Duck by Arthur Ransome. By ‘real book’ I mean a book which looked like a proper grown-up book, 300 or more pages of solid text. I was quite surprised to discover that such an intimidating object could turn out to be gripping stuff. This was a few weeks after I arrived in England. I didn’t ‘know about books’. I noticed from the flyleaf of Peter Duck that the author had written other books, and my method of searching for these books had a sort of dim pathos about it; I simply went around picking up any book I saw lying about to see if it was called Swallows and Amazons. But it never was.
However, Peter Duck broke the dam and when I arrived at my English prep school I started reading books in sets – the collected Arthur Ransome, Richmal Crompton, Captain W. E. Johns, and the usual classics – The Wind in the Willows, Treasure Island, The Coral Island, Stalky And Co., Three Men in a Boat. I would say that my reading was utterly conventional except in its voracity. I was the apocryphal child who read the sauce bottle and the cornflakes packet if there was nothing else to hand, and for years afterwards I simply wouldn’t contemplate getting on a bus without something to read, to the point, once when I was in my late teens, of spending my bus fare on a second-hand book (I still have it: Walter Winchell by St Clair McKelway), preferring the devil of hitchhiking to the deep blue sea of enduring half an hour bookless.
The collected works of Dornford Yates bridged me between schools, and my tastes remained thoroughly unintellectual until I left school, at which time my passion was Damon Runyon. I wrote several Damon Runyon stories.
I’m a very unreliable witness to my own experience but I can recall two significant and very similar incidents at school. In each case I noticed a boy reading a book with such obvious relish and absorption that I wanted to know what the book was. It turned out that one was Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh, and the other was England Their England by A. G. Macdonell. I read the wrong one. Most of my ‘light pieces’ for the newspaper I joined when I was seventeen – and I wrote hundreds – owed something to Macdonell. It is a book I still have great affection for, but it had a bad effect on me. I would strain for Macdonell’s tone when it wasn’t appropriate, and end up sounding merely facetious. I was well into my twenties before I caught up with Waugh, who became and remained a literary god.
But where were the great authors, the famous dead? Where were Dickens, Tolstoy, Flaubert? Where was Shakespeare? I become quite shifty when I hear about other people’s early reading (this very book is going to cause serious shiftiness, I know). Leaving aside set books (David Copperfield, The Merchant of Venice, etc, which I found hard going), I never read any ‘great literature’ till I began to weary of the excitements and pleasures of provincial journalism. I mean no irony here. I loved being a reporter, I loved writing news stories, interviews and my endless series of ‘light’ pieces.
I must have read a lot of books during this time but I can remember very few of them. Those few, however, went very deep. My Runyon stories were followed by one or two modelled on Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, and, a few weeks later, on Miss Lonelyhearts. A fellow reporter who was considered something of a literary chap (he wore a bow tie, and in fact went on to write thrillers) told me about a book called The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, so next I wrote fake-Catcher stories. In other words, as a (potential) writer I had no personality of my own; and as a reader I seemed to be a displaced American. During my twenties I was on an American binge: Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Saroyan, Miller, Crane, Cummings, Dos Passos, Thurber, O’Hara, Lardner, Mailer, Salinger, and, notably, the first two anthologies of New Yorker Short Stories. I bought a long run of New World Writing (I think it was called) and I remember one exceptional story which was introduced as coming from a novel-in-progress to be called Catch-18 (it was changed to 22 because Leon Uris had bagged Heller’s number for Mila 18).
But above all, there was Hemingway. I read everything, more or less in the order in which it was written, and I was knocked sideways. I remained at this angle for years, as is perfectly clear from Faber’s Introduction 2: Stories by New Writers (1963), and I’m not quite perpendicular yet. Ten years ago I owned Edmund Wilson’s copy of In Our Time sent to him by the author fresh off the press. You can read the letter which accompanied it in Hemingway’s Collected Letters. I sold it in order to buy a statue, a decision so weird that I cannot now bear to think of it, not least because Wilson is another of my heroes. In the late 1950s I took Classics and Commercials, Axel’s Castle and To the Finland Station on holiday to Spain and spent so much time in different hotel rooms reading Wilson that I might as well have stayed in Bristol. To the Finland Station was a seminal book for me, the first book which made me interested in history and politics with the same emotional involvement exerted by Peter Duck fourteen years before. Wilson instantly defined my taste in critical writing, and I still ignore all criticism which isn’t descriptive, plain-spoken, concrete.
However, there was a backlash from Wilson. I was impressed by his having learned whatever languages he needed to know for the better understanding of what he was reading (he learned Hebrew when he got interested in the Dead Sea scrolls, and was taking Hungarian lessons when he died), so I decided not to read the great Russians until I could read them in the original. Although I finally gave up in the case of Dostoyevsky, Chekhov stories, Turgenev, Pushkin and Pasternak, I am only now acknowledging to myself that I will never pick up the Russian lessons which I began thirty years ago, so I have not yet read War and Peace.
This reading, however, had to compete with my fascination with journalism. I was interested in journalism on every level – its history, its practice, its heroes, and this lasted beyond the time when I stopped writing regularly for newspapers and magazines, in 1962. In 1956 I saw no point in being John Osborne if one could be Noel Barber or Sefton Delmer, who were reporting from Budapest at more or less the same moment that the Royal Court Theatre was becoming the big story on the theatre page.
And of course during this period there were books which one read because ‘everyone’ read them. Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet and Nabokov’s Lolita were notable examples. But generally I felt out of step. In the late 1950s an English version of the nouveau roman had a hot flush; I couldn’t pretend not to be bored. And then, of course, there were the American Beats and their English imitators. With those I pretended more successfully, but my true sympathies were with Capote’s remark, ‘It’s just kind of typing, isn’t it?’ I used the 1960s to do some of the reading which people assumed one had already done, and James Joyce finally joined Captain W. E. Johns in the history of my reading pleasures.
Because I write slowly and because I like to shut out everything which isn’t relevant to what I am writing, I read fewer books with each succeeding year. And with each succeeding year, it seems, there are more and more books which one ought to read. I buy them all and read very few of them. How do other people do it? While I have been reading the first half of Ackroyd’s Charles Dickens at least twenty more ‘necessary’ books have come out (including, of course, Claire Tomalin’s biography of Nelly Ternan). On the whole I tend to put aside these books for my children (who don’t read) and spend my time with the books I need for the work I am doing. Almost all the philosophy I have read occupied me, very happily, at the time when I was writing Jumpers. This year I must have read a million words about India, because I needed a tiny fraction of that reading for a radio play which I have just finished. Meanwhile, Julian Barnes’s The History of the World in 10½ Chapters, Martin Amis’s London Fields, Ian McEwan’s The Innocent, A. S. Byatt’s Possession and dozens of others wait hopelessly in a queue for which time, in the end, will run out. But I read every Piers Paul Read as it comes out.
P.S. I have now read the Barnes and the Byatt, so for ‘hopelessly’ read ‘hopefully’.
As for ‘ten favourite books’ I could spend days trying to arrive at a list which told some kind of truth, but the more definitive one tries to be the more ‘favourite’ cries out to be defined. Perhaps there is equal truth in naming off the top of my head ten books which, once read, were not put aside:
Winnie-the-Pooh, A. A. Milne; New Yorker Short Stories; The First Forty-Nine Stories, Ernest Hemingway; At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O’Brien; Collected Poems, T. S. Eliot; A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh; Ulysses, James Joyce; Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov; Essays, Thomas Macaulay; The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn.
I learned to read before I started school. My mother claims I taught myself because she refused to read comics to me. Probably my older brother helped: he was writing comic books himself, and may have needed an audience.
In any case, the first books I can remember were a scribbled-over copy of Mother Goose and several Beatrix Potters, from her Dark Period (the ones with knives, cannibalistic foxes, and stolen babies in them). Then came the complete, unexpurgated Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which my parents ordered by mail, unaware that it would contain so many red-hot shoes, barrels full of nails, and mangled bodies. This was in the 1940s, just after the war. It was becoming the fashion, then, to rewrite fairy tales, removing anything too bloodthirsty and prettying up the endings, and my parents were worried that all the skeletons and gouged-out eyes in Grimm’s would warp my mind. Perhaps they did, although Bruno Bettelheim has since claimed that this sort of thing was good for me. In any case I devoured these stories, and a number of them have been with me ever since.
Shortly after this I began to read everything I could get my hands on. At that time my family was spending a lot of time in the northern Canadian bush, where there were no movie theatres and where even radio was unreliable: reading was it. The school readers, the notorious milk-and-water Dick and Jane series, did not have much to offer me after Grimm’s. See Jane Run, indeed. Instead I read comic books and the backs of cereal boxes. I tried ‘girls’ books’ – The Bobbsey Twins by Laura Lee Hope, The Curlytops series by Howard Garis, Cherry Ames, Junior Nurse – but they weren’t much competition for Batman or for red-hot iron shoes. (Anne of Green Gables was an exception; that one I loved.) I made my way through the standard children’s classics, some of which I’d already heard, read out loud by my mother – The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, the Alice books, Treasure Island. Gulliver’s Travels is not really a children’s book, but was considered one because of the giants, so I read that too.
I read Canadian animal stories – those by Sir Charles G. D. Roberts and Ernest Thompson Seton, for instance – in which the animals always ended up dead. Such books appeared regularly at Christmas – adults seemed to think that any book about animals was a children’s book – and I would snivel my way through the trapped, shot and gnawed corpses of the various rabbits, grouse, foxes and wolves that littered their pages, overdosing on chocolates. I read Orwell’s Animal Farm, thinking that it too was a story about animals, and was seriously upset by the death of the horse.
By this time I was about ten or eleven, and I’d begun dipping into the adult shelves. I can recall with great clarity the Dell pocket-book mysteries, the ones with the map of the crime scene on the back and the eye in a keyhole on the front, along with the lurid picture of the strangled blonde in the red strapless gown. One mystery in particular stands out: the murder was done by tying the victim to a tree, naked, during mosquito season. (Living where I did, I found this highly plausible.) I read a junky science-fiction magazine left behind by a guest, and vividly remember a story in which the beautiful women of Planet X hunt men down, paralyse them with a bite on the neck, and lay eggs on them like spiders. I used to drag the really dubious books off into corners, like dogs with bones, where no one would see me reading them. I resorted to flashlights under the covers. I knew good trash when I saw it. I don’t think these books influenced my writing, but they certainly influenced my reading.
Around this time too I read the collected works of Edgar Allan Poe, which some fool had put in the school library on the assumption that anything without sex in it was suitable for young minds. This experience disturbed me in a way that Grimm’s Fairy Tales had not, possibly because Poe is obsessive about detail and sets out to horrify. I had nightmares about decaying or being buried alive, but this did not stop me from reading on.
Attracted by the beautiful woodcuts of whales in our edition, I read Melville’s Moby-Dick, again expecting animals. I skipped the parts about people; I identified with the whale, and was not at all sad when it wrecked the whaler and drowned most of the crew and got away at the end. After all those trapped wolves and poisoned foxes, it was about time for an animal to come out on top.
When I hit high school, I read Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights, and developed what was, in those days before rock stars, a standard passion for Mr Darcy and Heathcliff. (Luckily I did not at that time know any bad-tempered, impolite and darkly brooding young men; otherwise I might have run off with them.) These reading choices were approved of by adults, who liked anything called a classic. Other reading choices were not. In grade nine, for instance, I joined a paperback book club which was in the business of parting teenagers from their allowances, and received a satisfying helping of verbal trash through the mail every month. Donovan’s Brain stands out: it was about an overgrown and demented brain which was being kept alive in a glass jar by scientists – a brain which was trying to take over the world. In addition to colouring my view of politicians, this prepared me for the reading of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, later on.
I discovered the cellar. (By this time we were living in Toronto, and had one.) My parents had two vices which I have inherited – they bought a lot of books, and they found it difficult to throw any of them out. The cellar was lined with bookshelves, and I used to go down there and browse among the books, while eating snacks filched from the kitchen – crackers thickly spread with peanut butter and honey, dates prised off the block of them used for baking, handfuls of raisins, and – one of my favourites – lime jelly powder. The whole experience felt like a delicious escape, and my eclectic eating habits complemented what I was reading, which ranged from scientific textbooks on ants and spiders – my father was an entomologist – to H. G. Wells’s history of almost everything, to the romances of Walter Scott, to old copies of National Geographic, to the theatrical murders of Ngaio Marsh. This is where I came across Churchill’s history of the Second World War, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Arthur Koestler’s Darkness At Noon – books which did, much later, actually have an influence on something I wrote myself, as The Handmaid’s Tale emerged from the same fascination with history and the structure of totalitarian regimes.
All of this took place quite apart from school. At school I was practical, and saw myself as someone who would eventually have a serious job of some kind. The drawback to this was that there were only five careers listed for women in the Guidance textbook: home economist, nurse, teacher, airline stewardess, and secretary. Home economists got paid the most, but I was not good at zippers. This was depressing. I read more.
In English, we were studying a Shakespeare play a year, a good deal of Thomas Hardy and some George Eliot, and a lot of poetry, most of it by the romantics and the Victorians. Writing – unlike reading – appeared to be something that had been done some time ago, and very far away. In those days the Canadian high school curriculum had not yet discovered either modern poetry or Canada itself; ‘Canadian writer’ seemed to be a contradiction in terms; and when I realized at the age of sixteen that writing was what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, nobody was more surprised than I was.
What do I enjoy reading today? It’s hard to say; it varies from day to day. From where I’m writing at this desk I can see, deposited around the floor of the room, eighteen separate piles or nests of books. They aren’t all there for purposes of enjoyment – some of them are for work – but, starting from left to right, the things on the tops of the piles are: Virago’s catalogue of new books; Márquez’s The General in His Labyrinth; a newsletter about health; a book on the origins of humanity; a Canadian literary magazine called Paragraph; Ethel Wilson’s Hetty Dorval; a dictionary of French synonyms; two paperback murder mysteries, one by P. D. James, one by Robert Barnard; Writing the Circle, an anthology of Native (Indian, Inuit or Eskimo) women writers; Kurt Vonnegut’s new novel, Hocus Pocus; a book on wind energy in Denmark – well, you get the idea. Every once in a while I root through the piles, picking out something in them I haven’t yet read, shuffling them around, trying to figure out where to file the books in the various already overcrowded bookcases. Or I add to the piles, or growl over them, protecting them from being tidied up, or haul something off to another location. I read in bed – what a luxury! – or on aeroplanes, where the phone can never ring; or in the bathtub, or in the kitchen. It’s still a random process, and I still love it.
I dislike lists of top ten favourite books, because they don’t give you enough room. Novels? Poetry? Non-fiction? Do collected works count? Does the Bible? Does The Joy of Cooking?
But here are five novels I’ve read recently and enjoyed a lot. They have not all been written recently; it’s just that I did not get around to them at the time: Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet; Louise Erdrich, The Beet Queen; Toni Morrison, Beloved; Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart; Nawar El Sadawi, The Fall of the Imam.
And here are five Canadian novels I’ve read and reread over the years: Anne Hébert, Kamouraska; Alice Munro, The Lives of Girls and Women; Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel; Robertson Davies, Fifth Business; Timothy Findley, The Wars.
When I was little I read everything that had letters on it, just for the pleasure of decoding them. ‘What does it say?’ I would ask, peering over the edge of the breakfast table at the Weeties packet. When no one answered I set about finding out. When I had had my fill of reading about riboflavin and niacin, I set about deciphering the bit of my father’s newspaper that drooped over the marmalade pot, so that I can still read upside-down almost as fast as right-way-up.
Reading was my first solitary vice (and led to all the others). I read while I ate, I read in the loo, I read in the bath. When I was supposed to be sleeping, I was reading. So the light would not show under the door I read under the sheets but not by the light of a battery torch, which I had no money to buy. I pinched candle ends from the parish church and burned them in bed, a recollection that makes me shudder. My front hair still stands up in a crinkly quiff from being regularly singed.
While I was doing my household tasks my mother would intone from wherever she was in the house: ‘You’re reading. Stop reading.’ She was trying in vain to prevent my burning a hole in the collar of my school blouse with the iron or from crashing into the skirtings with the vacuum cleaner. If she came into the room where I was supposed to be polishing the silver she was bound to find me reading the sheet of newspaper put down to protect the table. I didn’t like having my ears boxed, but I couldn’t help myself. If there was a patch of print anywhere within my field of vision, I would read it. Even now I find myself being glared at because, having exhausted my own, I am lost in someone else’s newspaper, reading it upside-down or over a shoulder on the Tube.
I don’t remember learning to read. I do remember mispronouncing the word ‘put’ in the first grade because I wanted someone to explain why it wasn’t pronounced ‘putt’ but of course nobody could. After that I stopped pretending I had difficulties and, when my turn came to read aloud, rattled away as fast and shrill as I could until Sister stopped me and slowed us all back down to a crawl. Having read my primer from cover to cover by the second day of school, I was then obliged to listen for a whole year to the other kids boggling for minutes at a time over the simplest words and ignoring the sense altogether; driven beyond my five-year-old endurance I would yell out the right words and so earned an enduring reputation as a know-all creep.
The texts we studied did not repay repeated scrutiny. The second book of the Victorian Readers, which was reissued in facsimile in 1989, is as fatuous a collection of fake-childish junk as ever was assembled. It began with something the editors acknowledged only as ‘Old Song’:
Do you wonder where the fairies are
That folks declare have vanished?
They’re very near, yet very far:
But neither dead nor banished, (etc)
Facing it was a foggy reproduction of Reynolds’s The Age of Innocence. I do not remember having been impressed or otherwise by stories about fairies making rainbows out of ribbons of sunshine and elves using toadstools as umbrellas, but the story of Little Half-Chick, who became a weathercock, and the little foxes, who were scalded to death because the hen in their father’s sack replaced herself with a stone, and the dingo who ate up the Hobyahs, who came run-running on the tips of their toes, filled me with angst. The myths that Child Education thought appropriate to the age of innocence were redder in tooth and claw than nature herself. The fullest statement of the dog-eat-dog theme was the tale of the old woman who could not get her pig to walk home from market. The old woman’s entreaties to the other creatures were fulfilled only when she found milk for the cat.
Then the cat began to kill the rat; the rat began to gnaw the rope; the rope began to hang the butcher; the butcher began to kill the ox; the ox began to drink the water; the water began to quench the fire; the fire began to burn the stick; the stick began to beat the dog; the dog began to bite the pig; and the pig jumped over the stile; and the old woman got home that night after all.
At home I was reading grown-up books which, though quite unsuitable, were far less depraving. Before I was eight I had attempted the entire contents of my parents’ small bird’s-eye maple bookcase which included The Way of a Transgressor by Negley Farson, O’Flaherty’s Famine, Alan Moorehead’s The End in Africa, Through the Forbidden Land by Gustav Krist and The Countess of Rudolstadt by George Sand (which is where my mother got my name from). I discovered voluptuousness by reading an English translation of Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin. Once a year I tried to fathom our red-bound Shakespeare with the semi-pornographic steel engravings. Long before I realized that neither of the creatures in the title was a reptile, I knew ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ by heart.
By this time I had grown a deep perpetual furrow of incomprehension in my brow, which prompted the grown-ups to try to find suitable books that would not be exhausted in a day and thrown aside. When I was going on seven my grandmother gave me Alice in Wonderland and The Water-Babies in the Collins Library of Classics edition. The last time I was in my mother’s house I sniffed them out, drawn by the luxurious scent of the red morocco in which they were bound. The feel of the book was the only thing I liked about The Water-Babies; which ends with a moral:
And now, my dear little man, what should we learn from this parable [no question mark].
We should learn thirty-seven or thirty-nine things, I am not exactly sure which: but one thing, at least, we may learn, and that is this – when we see efts in the ponds, never to throw stones at them, or catch them with crooked pins, or put them into vivariums with sticklebacks, that the sticklebacks may prick them in their poor little stomachs, and make them jump out of the glass into somebody’s workbox and so come to a bad end. For these efts are nothing else but the waterbabies who are stupid and dirty and will not learn their lessons and keep themselves clean . . .
What was somebody to make of this faux naïf twaddle who was not only not a dear little man, but a girl tall for her age, who had never seen an eft, a vivarium or a stickleback? When I found a dictionary that had the word ‘eft’ in it I discovered that the Professor of Modern History from the University of Cambridge was an unprincipled liar. The distrust of fiction engendered by this early experience has endured to this very day.
Alice in Wonderland was a different matter. Carroll’s prose is elegant and exact where Kingsley’s is misshapen, dreary and false. Alice was the first thing I read where I didn’t care two hoots what happened next because I was so enchanted by how the thing happened that was happening as I read. I wanted to think and speak the way the writing did. I would adopt a word and use it for a whole day until I had got the feel of it, ‘fetch’ or ‘directly’ or ‘capital’ or ‘coaxing’ or ‘melancholy’. Though Lewis Carroll would have scorned to point his moral, Alice was a way of being sensible, courteous and interested. You could not read her (for her sensibility is the book) without becoming a little more sensible, courteous and interested yourself.
Most of what I had to read – Six O’Clock Saints, and Joyce Lankester Brisley’s Milly-Molly-Mandy, the Brothers Grimm and Hans Andersen – was nowhere near as intelligent or as intelligible as Alice. I didn’t read Enid Blyton, or Beatrix Potter. The books I liked best were books that were fat and fact-filled. From our matching dictionary and encyclopaedia, a special offer by the newspaper my father worked for, I learnt the meanings of hundreds of words I had never heard anybody say. I thought the person who casts spells was a ‘magican’, that a small book was a ‘phamphlet’ and orphans had to go to an ‘aisylum’. The use of words you have seen but not heard is a characteristic of clever Australian children; my godchild at twenty-seven is still saying ‘unwieldly’ and ‘integral’.
It would be wrong to think that because I read books, any books, some over and over, I enjoyed them. I did not read for pleasure; I was an addict. I read for greed. I jammed books into my brain like a compulsive eater glutting herself gobbling up one book so that I could gobble up another. My reading was mostly displacement activity; when other children were playing, or getting exercise, training in some sport or hanging out with their mates, I was reading. The only alternative was a boredom so heavy and slow that it squashed my soul flat. Conversation with my father did not happen, while conversation with my mother was a torture of calculated illogicality. My brother and sister were each much younger than I. My book, any book, was my fantasy interlocutor, my friend.
For Christmas 1949 my mother gave me a handsome edition of David Copperfield with the original illustrations by ‘Phiz’. David Copperfield struck me as a weed but, like him, I fell horribly in love with Steerforth, David’s Bad Angel, with ‘his nice voice, and his fine face, and his easy manner’. This was largely the fault of the illustration of Steerforth confronting Mr Mell. The mixture of feelings that welled in my nearly eleven-year-old bosom when Steerforth seduced Emily while Byronically hating himself for it, to end drowned on the sand at Yarmouth, ‘lying with his head on his arm as [David] had often seen him lie at school’, was my introduction to grown-up passion. That innocent Oxford edition, bound in brown cloth and lettered in silver on the spine, set me off on a lifetime search for Mr Wrong, including two years’ postgraduate work on Byron and a longer infatuation with Rochester.
It was not the writing of Steerforth but the idea of him that seduced me. I had yet to discover the real pleasure of reading, which requires a unique combination of educated susceptibility in the reader and greatness in the book. I read on indiscriminately, gorging on print, reading rubbish with the same appetite that I read the best. Because I read so much and so fast I borrowed books from the school library by weight, which was how I came to lug home a vast, badly foxed copy of Bleak House. I opened it with some misgiving and read:
Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimneypots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foothold at street corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since day broke . . .
By the time I finished that first paragraph I was reading in a different way, letting the phrases swing me along, bouncing through arcs of history, spinning as a hawk’s eye to a point of view at once lofty and minute. The rhythm of the writing imposed itself on the rush of my compulsion. I knew that this was an appetite that would not sicken. I would be reading this book for the rest of my life. Dickens had rescued me from both the aversion therapy of the schoolroom and my own perverse nature. I knew real pleasure at last.
Oxford English Dictionary; Complete Opera Book, Gustav Kobbé; Hobson-Jobson Dictionary of Anglo-Indian Usage; Trees and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles, Bean; Golden Legend, Jacobus de Voragine; English Poets, Chalmer; Letters, Lord Byron (ed. Prothero); Diaries, Pepys (ed. Latham and Matthews); Larousse Illustré; Times Atlas of the World.
It was called the sitting room or the front parlour depending how confident you felt in the claim. You can see it today in the D. H. Lawrence museum or in several of the terraced houses reclaimed so affectionately at Beamish. It is overdressed; the horsehair chaise-longue, samplers on the wall, a table decently draped in green velvet tasselled suggestively around the fringe, tiled fireplace with the irons drawn up at attention to one side, shapely womanly paraffin lamp, a piano, cold as frost in winter, in summer a soporific compound of polishes and trapped air. This was where the bodies were laid out in the coffins. This was where the piano was tormented. This was where I could read in peace.
I left that place when I was eight, but I remember reading there, there and in school; in bed, younger, I had been read to. There must have been other private locations but until a full excavation of the past is undertaken they seem beyond reach. So reading was associated with formality and a special place; but the formal, communal place was subverted by its use for something as selfish as reading.
There are many books I remember reading in that parlour. Sunday afternoon, after Sunday School and before evensong, was the best bet for an uninterrupted stretch. Robin Hood was an addiction for one season. Whoever put that particular version on paper – I lost it long ago – had great skill in unlocking the imagination of a child. I can still see the print on the page – when Robin met John Little – ‘I shall call thee Little John’ – after a fierce battle with quarterstaffs on a narrow bridge, a fight which Robin lost – a fine touch of realism there. Will O’Scarlet dropped the ‘O’. Friar Tuck ‘rubbed his bald pate’. Into the Greenwood they went and I with them. Even today there is no forest on earth which smells or sounds or moves like Sherwood Forest, even though I fear it may well be two stumpy oaks propped up by steel pins, and a motorway cutting through a built-up area. There was grace and goodness in Robin Hood’s Greenwood, high cunning for high purposes and the freedom of the forest, a life which would never be circumscribed by a family, Sunday School, sudden mysterious imperatives, and a cold cluttered parlour.
Another of many keen memories is Kidnapped – to which the name R. L. Stevenson did not attach itself until years later. What I recall now is how sick I felt when David was isolated on what he mistook for an island and tried to live on the shellfish. I don’t suppose I’d ever put a tooth to a shellfish but the scene was felt to be desolate. Perhaps the cold helped.
As a contrast to the solitary books were the comics which seemed to be a common purchase. The Dandy and the Beano – almost my exact contemporaries – and later the Wizard, Hotspur, Rover and Adventure. They were gobbled up anywhere. Once a week a woman’s magazine, or ‘book’ as it was called, came in and its romantic short stories were no doubt gulped down like oysters. The daily paper was the News Chronicle – used by me at that time for sport and nothing else – the Sunday was the News of the World (or the Empire News?). Whatever it was the lurid naughty bits were seductive and disturbing. No explanations were asked for, nor were they offered, but the squelch of the stomach on some tale of 1940s vice was a part of the growing habit of reading.
Until eight, then, there are remembered books, quite a few, and acres of sensation illustrated by large block cartoon drawings and disseminated through eye-squinting print. It was either a solitary escape within the respectable protection of hard covers or a gallop among friends through print that stuck to your thumb. The library was visited at least once a week like a dutiful volume which ought to be read.
But perhaps the most intensive reading done at that time was in the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer including the psalms and Hymns Ancient and Modern. The lessons and the collects of the day were there to be read along as they were read aloud and from the age of six I sat in the choir, part of whose purpose was to be seen to be following the order of service. The psalms were practised several times on Thursday evenings, the words fitted precisely to the demands of the chanting music, and hymns too were bashed out, more perfunctorily, to be replayed on the Sabbath. In many ways this was the most focused and, I scarcely doubt, the most influential reading I did.
At eight I moved house and was also found to have very poor eyesight and presented with specs, goggles, four-eyes, which changed my childhood. Reading became first a refuge and then even more of an addiction.
The gulping of cheap fiction went on. From that fiction have lingered characters whose life in my mind has outlasted many hundreds from serious and worthy contemporary and even ancient literature. Not an enormous number compared with the comic-book characters such as Wilson, Alf Tupper, Limp Along Leslie, Baldy Hogan, Cannonball Kid, Sergeant Braddock – each one clearly defined by a few notes and able to play variations on simple themes for ever and a day, it appeared. But as the teens crashed in, the diet of hardbacks swelled to a glut and the habit which had plugged gaps of time and taped over boredom, which had been a substitute for play and an excuse for isolation, became a compulsion. In the sporting and games-obsessed culture in which I grew up there was a need to be secretive and so the specs were always whipped off for any scratch ball game going, but I began to look forward to early nights with a book and, if possible, snacks to nibble away the tension.
If we take this up to thirteen or fourteen and call that the end of early reading, then that first clutch takes me from Biggles to D. H. Lawrence, from the Fifth Form at St Dominic’s through Psmith to ‘grown-up’ Wodehouse (if that distinction is permitted), from Blyton’s Famous Five to John Steinbeck, from Priestley’s The Good Companions to Dickens, to Sinclair Lewis, with Tolstoy around or about to arrive and change everything. At school we read the set books and were expected to answer detailed questions on them and read around them. The library was where I lassoed books for the weekend reading rampage.
As for the influences of this earlier reading, I would like to spend some long time working that through. Certainly I can see, or rather hear, the influence of the steady pressure of religious texts – and see their concerns in my work still. I wish sometimes I could capture the fast action of the comics with their Keystone Cops version of Dickens’s cliff-hangers. Of the earliest subject matter – adventure, thrillers, epic events – I see little trace. My slightly later (when I was about ten) obsession with school yarns – inevitably public school yarns – could have something to do with a continuing return to a small, enclosed, almost hermetic community. Once I breasted the teens, this relationship with my subject matter – the small town (Steinbeck) tension of intense cohabitation (Lawrence) – became more noticeable. But in the game of influences we all like to claim someone like Tolstoy as a father. What if Woman’s Own were a truer begetter? Dare one say it? Who knows what percolates through to fertilize the few images and words that matter? All of us want to be in a Great Tradition even if it is an alternative tradition. Indeed the latter is having a strong innings at present. But what if the merest, not the greatest, the most banal and not the most magnificent sets us off? Just as likely – perhaps it could be argued more likely, in that all but the maddest egotists would be so intimidated by greatness that they would flinch from it and would say ‘I could do that’ of a more humble offering.
Influences, I suspect, are more to do with rhythm than subject, with sound rather than sense, especially at the start, which is when influences most matter. Hearing your tone. Listening to what you hope will be yourself. Excitedly, sometimes desperately spinning through the channels hoping to chance on your own voice. It is there that the singing in the choir, the chanting of the creed, the collective hushed utterance of certain prayers may well have been a more formative influence than anything I’ve read. Form and subject matter come in any conscious or articulate way later.
There is a stage, much later, when you begin to write and constantly seek not so much influences as models. The boast of the Jesuits, the philosophy of Wordsworth, the discoveries of Freud knead into us the notion that all our deepest experiences occur before we are capable of tabulating them. So to look for influences which would seem to be those which shaped and guided you almost unconsciously is all but a contradiction. Influences look for you. But is even that wholly true? Is the seeking for models which, like many another young writer, caused me to mow down others’ first chapters in bookshops and libraries throughout apprentice years, is that wholly different from receiving influences? I hope not. I hope that what one consciously, or especially self-consciously, attaches oneself to might be more than a touchstone, more even than a pole star.
There is a larger issue. Are those most powerful influences on writers the most literary? We are in some way into a phase in our particular literary episode – of a superior knowingness about books, their surfaces, their significations, their interrelatedness. The pleasures of critical recognition are in the ascendant. The begetting of books by bookmen from books can appear the essential matter. But what about the extra-literary influences – the lives led, experiences undergone, emotions enjoyed or endured? Perhaps the nudge or the urge to write could come out of a different source, while the author only turned to books for a way of saying. The influence on a writer of writing cannot be underestimated. It can however be over-estimated.
The next move in this essay on given questions is to list the books one enjoys reading today. The first thing to say is that one of the very greatest pleasures at my age is rereading. To come upon Jane Austen or E. M. Forster, Pushkin, Mann, Svevo, Hawthorne, Joyce and scores of others after some years of neglect proves to be one of the guaranteed pleasures of middle life. I read them more slowly, I read them with more understanding, I hope; I read them with even greater admiration, although perhaps the love one felt so keenly has lost its possessive power.
There are so many dead writers to read again that one welcomes commissions which encourage or, even better, demand that pleasure. And then one is beset by the living – Bellow, Updike, Márquez, Heaney, Hughes, the Amises – the list could fill out the page with easy copy. As could new writers tasted so far only through one book. There is not the time and that is part of the difficulty; there’s not the time there was to read. The libraries and the paperback shelves and the second-hand bookshops are too full. Nor is there the time to relish as once there was. Writing itself absorbs much of that time. It will most likely get worse and soon one will be back to late childhood, coping with plans and schedules in order to encompass all the reading one wants to do.
And as for my ten favourite books – that is impossible, except in the interests of sportsmanship. I assume that the Bible and Shakespeare are out of this particular lark. There would have to be something from Tolstoy – Anna Karenina or The Cossacks; the short stories of Chekhov and D. H. Lawrence; Wordsworth’s Prelude and Twain’s Huckleberry Finn; Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dickens’s Bleak House; a twelve-pack of Wodehouse and William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished; Byron’s Don Juan and, finally, whatever contemporary work catches my eye on the pouting rows of paperbacks massed in the new high street book boutiques.
A completely different list could be just as pleasurable. Perhaps there are half a dozen such lists. One sure thing that writing teaches you to do better is to read, and the pleasure in store in revisiting the list in the above paragraph makes me itch for the silent emptiness of the cold parlour.
‘Sahib. Latest from Plato. The Republic. Also, James Hadley Chase and P. G. Wodehouse. You want Catcher in the Rye, sahib? MAD magazine? But sahib, just now unpacked. At least sample Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens.’
To me, that is what it meant to learn to read in India. Having the pleasures of reading shouted at you by pavement booksellers before you even knew how to read. Envying the animation on the face of the grown-up bent over the volumes displayed on a threadbare carpet by the roadside while the bookseller slapped another two books together to loosen the dust kicked up by passing pedestrians, before whispering: ‘Anna Karenina, sahib, Madame Bovary. Hot books only this very minute arrived. Believe it or not, sahib. Tomorrow no copies remaining!’
Surely there was no other country in the world where booksellers jumped onto the steps of moving trains, clinging with one hand to the iron bars of the window, with the other pushing forward a basket of books – cajoling, exhorting, begging you to read. Or where the ability to read was thought to be synonymous with the desire to read.
Because illiteracy is so widespread in India, the capacity to read is treated with a respect bordering on awe, and maidservants who could neither read nor write made sure we steered our way past the alphabet into those boring reading primers of English schoolchildren at play. The tedium of the text was only broken by their glee in our achievement, a glee which increased as we were able to repay the stories we had learned at their laps, of gods and kings and ascetics who had cheated their way into immortality, with other tales of sleeping beauties and the extraordinary adventures of Tom Thumb. Because of them the world of the imagination became as tangible to us as the corporeal world, as tangible as the next book read by torchlight when we were sent to bed. And reading became a pleasure so intense it was practically a vice. Indeed, they often treated it as a vice when we could not be drawn from our books to perform our other duties such as eating or sleeping. But however contradictory adults were about our reading habits, they were adamant in demanding respect for the book itself. To deface a book or, worse, to put your feet on a book, were considered acts of such grossness they provoked the contempt of the entire household.
Reading was for us a significant part of the comfort of childhood and a necessary comfort when we were sent off as infants to boarding schools. In darkened dormitories with the monsoon rain beating so heavily on the tin roof it almost drowned our sobs of homesickness we could be tricked out of loneliness by a teacher reading aloud stories of Harry the Horse and his fellow citizens playing games of chance; or the fortunes of Mrs Bennett’s daughters; or Mehitabel signing off to her cockroach with the inspiring sentiment: ‘Toujours gai, Archy. Toujours gai.’
When we got home from school there were always more books waiting as gifts. Bought for us, like schoolbooks they carried an aura of duty. Fortunately, relatives paying morning calls on our parents would circle our heads with money to remove the evil eye, then press the money into our hands. Now we were in a position to buy our own books and the purchase of two books enabled you to read a hundred, thanks to the lending library.
But these were not the lending libraries of the First World. These were secret shifting Indian lending libraries which fit into garishly painted tin trunks small enough to be strapped on the back of the librarian’s bicycle, only learned about by word of mouth. A favourite library took up three rungs on the fire escape behind O. N. Mukherji’s Emporium in Calcutta. It contained, my aficionado elder brother assured me, the finest collection of westerns in the world. By investing a fraction of a rupee and including your own book in the corpus of the library, you could read as many Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey novels as you could stomach. Or two-in-ones, with a picture of an Apache on one cover and, when you turned the book around and upside down, the picture of a mounted cowboy with drawn six-guns on the other. Sometimes, thanks to the vagaries of the librarian’s definition of a western, you found a Jack London or a Stephen Crane and were drawn into the worlds of other men of action – Joseph Conrad, Alexandre Dumas, Leo Tolstoy. Or there would appear with miraculous suddenness opposite the Chinese shoemaker’s the library which only circulated books by Denis Wheatley, Edgar Allan Poe and the Brontë sisters. Then there was the librarian who specialized in Russian classics – heavily subsidized for the Indian market by the Soviet Union – and murder mysteries, so that reading Agatha Christie, Georges Simenon, Rex Stout, was for us a natural corollary to reading Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Gorky.
If this meant our tastes were formed by those books which the librarians – often clerks moonlighting from government offices – could buy in second-hand bookstores or trade with other customers, it also meant we were uninhibited by literary snobbisms, holding an unshakeable belief that any book we borrowed was a potential source of delight, that there did not exist the book too difficult to read.
The only obstacle to our reading appetites was the tragic absence of a lending library for comics. The steely-eyed owners of comics shops insisted on full payment, cash down. Such hard-heartedness enabled them to have permanent establishments – wooden shacks where they sat smirking on floors covered with white sheets, surrounded by unattainable treasure. Leaving our shoes on the roadside we climbed barefoot up the two steps leading into the shack and disappeared into a brave new world peopled by Superman, Scrooge McDuck, Archie and Veronica, Captain Marvel, Nyoka the Jungle Girl. And Classics Illustrated Comics, which enabled us in later years to get degrees in literature from places like Cambridge University because the plots and characters of the great novels were tattooed on our brains.
As we grew older we did of course go to proper bookstores: the cathedral-like Oxford University Press bookshop on Calcutta’s Park Street, with its glass-fronted mahogany bookshelves and the hushed voices of the assistants barely audible over the hum of air-conditioning; Ramakrishna and Sons hiding behind stucco Lutyens columns in New Delhi, with its tottering pillars of books piled to the height of the ceiling in a system of cataloguing so mysterious that only the elderly proprietor could locate a book; Faqir Chand’s, where the hunchback owner never let you leave without a monogrammed pen or letter opener even if you hadn’t bought anything; the Strand Book Stall behind Bombay University, full of advertising executives buying their copies of Catch-22.
In these bookstores we struck intellectual attitudes, anxiously awaiting the four new Penguin titles which arrived in India every month while studying on earlier Penguins the portraits of Katherine Anne Porter, Nabokov, Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh. Sometimes we abandoned our orange-covered Penguins, leaving the shop ostentatiously lost between the yellow Faber and Faber covers of Saroyan’s The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze. Or clutching the blue-covered Methuen editions of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. Or the brightly coloured American paperbacks of Gertrude Stein, Nathanael West, Kerouac, Capote, J. D. Salinger, which could so effectively be colour co-ordinated with one’s clothes.
But our passion for reading was not born in such establishments to visible self-improvement. It was awakened by those pavement bookstalls and lending libraries which so tenaciously offered themselves as a necessary adjunct to every pleasure. If you were taken to a restaurant you had to spend long minutes examining the books spread on the kerb outside. As you did after you had watched a movie. Or been to a cricket match. Or illegally bought a packet of cigarettes. The persistence of such book vendors made us gluttons for books.
The same gluttony characterizes my reading today. And I am as indiscriminate now as I was then. Give me a history or a biography and it will trigger off hours of happy rumination on human behaviour. A contemporary novel, to keep in touch with the Zeitgeist. A golden oldie – Vanity Fair, War and Peace, Candide, or any of a hundred others – because each rereading confirms one’s original passion for the book. A volume of poetry for that kidney punch: what Emily Dickinson called ‘that turning to ice of the limbs’ so essential for the enslaved reader. A book on science or philosophy, since who can tell when one might grasp the theory of chaos or Kierkegaard. And give me always a couple of mystery novels in case they cancel my flight.
But then I am an addict, addicted to reading by those magicians sitting cross-legged on the pavements endlessly arranging and rearranging their stock, who lured us away from the little world of the self into whole galaxies of the imagination. How they would have scorned the French observation that ‘after every other pleasure proves illusory there remains only the pleasure of the stomach’ as they shouted to us like circus barkers, corrupting us with their seductive litany of titles.
When I was a child, reading was never a major activity in my part of Nigeria. Storytelling was. From the time you are in your mother’s belly, you have your own song, your own story. Some Ibo midwives actually sing you praises as you glide from your mother’s womb. I belong to this culture.
Going to school and learning to read was not a life planned for me. It happened by accident. My younger brother started school before I did. I used to take him to school and then stand by the school gate watching children from rich homes in their smart uniforms marching to songs played by the band boys. They played songs like ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’, ‘John Brown’s Body’ and war songs like ‘Oh my home’. I used to stand at the gate and march up and down and sing to my heart’s content.
Around this time, some Americans (I think they were Baptists) came to our road in Akinwunmi Street and set up a Sunday school. I won the prize for good attendance and was given a beautifully illustrated Gospel according to St Matthew. My father used that to teach me how to read. I recognized big words like ‘generation’ and phrases like ‘fourteen generations’ and ‘in this wise’. Curiously enough, almost forty years after, I still write my sentences ‘in this wise’.
Our life was strangely very Victorian. Children were expected to be quiet, and girls in particular did a great deal of housework. But because there was no television, and the few radios that existed were intended for adults only, there was still plenty of time to play. I was not good at fighting and hated being beaten up, so I became shy and introspective.
Because I ran away to a Methodist school at the age of eight, my parents consented and promised to keep me in school for two years at least. Some organizations from abroad sent some books of fairy tales to West African schools. Our headmaster said we could borrow them to read. The first story I ever read all by myself was ‘Hansel and Gretel’. How I cried and cried for those poor children lying hand in hand in their bed of roses. Snow White and those seven miserable dwarfs made me cry too. But I did not like Goldilocks who had to steal from the bears, and as for that terrible wolf that kept eating up an innocent grandmother, I just did not understand his wickedness. In our families, grandmothers helped a great deal in making life harmonious; they settled cases between young people, they told us stories with songs in the moonlight. So I did not see why the wolf would choose to eat her up. After a while, I knew the words of most of the stories by heart. And I used to start by telling the wolf: ‘Now you be a good wolf today and don’t eat the grandmother up. She’s done nothing to you.’
At the age of ten, I secretly took an entrance exam to a grammar school without telling anybody. I won a scholarship, including my boarding. I refused to stop going to school. My mother said I was bad and selfish, but I loved school and did not ‘pay her any mind’. She eventually changed her mind and told me to ‘Walk good’. My world changed.
At the Methodist Girls High School, the world of books became open to me. For the first three months we read ‘Pinocchio’. I found it silly because I did not understand how a wooden doll’s nose could get longer whenever he told a little lie. But by the second term we were in the world of Charles Dickens. With his David Copperfield, I cut my first literary tooth. I could identify with David. Those early Methodist missionaries (whom I later discovered to be highly qualified young women from prestigious universities like Oxford and Cambridge) taught us literature in a beautiful, beautiful way. If we were doing Dickens’s Great Expectations, say, we’d be encouraged to know as much as possible about his world. We were encouraged to use the encyclopaedias and other reference works that threw light on his life. And then we could go on and read as many of his books as we could lay our hands on. Strangely, even when reading for pleasure today, I use the same method. I feel that a single title read from an author is just a glimpse. I like to read more by the author of my choice. Like any other schoolgirl of that period in England, I read all Agatha Christie’s books, Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard, Marie Corelli, Joe Clemens and many many others. The difference was that I was in Lagos, Nigeria.
In my fourth year, we studied the Brontë sisters in detail. Jane Eyre was the first book written by a woman I studied with my classmates. We could never forget Helen Burns and Mr Rochester.
As for Jane Austen, I came under her spell. This was because I studied for my A level in English literature by myself. I married as soon as I left school at sixteen, and when carrying my first baby I was reading for A levels in English literature, history, geography and Latin. I found Pride and Prejudice an all-time masterpiece. I still marvel sometimes how she mastered such delicate irony, humour and yet deep characterization.
The books that influenced my thoughts at the time? All of them did. At school and as a young bride in a boring marriage, I read anything and everything I could lay my hands on. I loved reading so much that I became a library assistant in the American Embassy Library in Lagos.
The third paper for my A level history was on the social history of Britain. I simply chose the period when Jane Austen lived, and for my answers I virtually poured out pages of Pride and Prejudice, Emma and Northanger Abbey. For the classical background to this paper, I read Oliver Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield and was always quoting from his Deserted Village when describing the great movement from rural areas to the city centres. Another author I liked quoting for a slice of rural England was Thomas Hardy, especially Far from the Madding Crowd.
Because we did not have the intrusion of television, the average African child in a good school in the late 1950s and early 1960s could read her heart out. I am afraid it is no longer like that now. Now we have a School of Creative Writing whose main aim is to shorten those long years of apprenticeship we had by sheer reading.
The irony in my literary life was that it was in England that I first came across a book written by a black person. How excited I was that day. I was then a library assistant at the Chalk Farm Library in north London. I did not get the essence of what he was saying in The Fire Next Time, but to see Jimmy Baldwin’s picture on the cover gave me so much hope.
At the British Museum I saw Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe. I read it during my lunch breaks. His book was like listening to a moonlit story of my youth. I could understand every turn of phrase and visualize most of the episodes. Such books gave me another twist of understanding. Books like Efuru by Flora Nwapa and The Man Died by Wole Soyinka were, to me, landscape in words, the more so because I did not need to stretch my imagination too far. I recognized my youth, my part of Africa in those landscapes and characters created in words. Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died is an account of the author’s time in prison. I had a secret joy when I saw that writing the English language the way it comes from your heart can paint a much more vivid picture. It did not necessarily have to be grammatical, yet the haunting pictures remained.
Choosing my best ten books is difficult, because my taste in reading is quite catholic.
Maybe because I started reading with tragedies, I always read Shakespeare’s tragedies over and over again. My all-time favourite is Hamlet. I’ll try to put my best books list in this order.
Hamlet, William Shakespeare; Great Expectations, Charles Dickens; Their Eyes Were Watching God, Noele Thurston; A Short Walk, Alice Childress; The Invitation, Catherine Cookson; The Coup, John Updike; Mila 18, Leon Uris; Exodus, Leon Uris; Mama Day, Gloria Naylor; The Color Purple, Alice Walker.
Reading is a habit. Once it is formed in childhood, it can be very advantageous later in life. For most writers the habit is invaluable, especially writers like myself who have to use our non-emotional language as the tool of our profession.
My style to date is still very biblical and Dickensian with a great deal of translation from my emotional native language. Equally, most of the protagonists in my works are tragic figures giving my works a kind of sardonic overtone, and they always start in childhood, not unlike the first books that impressed me as a child, for example David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, Little Dorrit and Jane Eyre. And very much like their lives, there is usually an unexpected light at the end of the tunnel.
Until I was asked to do this piece, I did not realize how much I owe to those early classics.
I can remember the day I learned to read; I can remember the room in which I did so. It was in Bristol, at the top of a tall house overlooking a park; I was with my mother, and the book was Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses – I have it still. Perhaps this memory, clear as it is, cheats a little, for I loved these poems so much and they had been read to me so often that I almost knew them by heart. Maybe, then, I was only half-reading, half-reciting; nevertheless, some process of decipherment was involved, I am sure. I know that afternoon was momentous.
One of those poems is about a lamplighter, and (this will make me seem very old) there was a lamplighter then in our street, some two years after the end of the war. On winter afternoons we would watch him, my mother and I, as he passed down the hill from gas-lamp to gas-lamp. It seemed a wondrous connection – the sounds that sprang up from the page; the actual man on the hill. I was three years old, and something happened then. In all the years since, I cannot remember a single day that passed without reading.
I liked comedy best, in those days, and for a long time – long after my mother considered I should have outgrown them – I liked A. A. Milne’s books, and still do, for that matter. I liked, and still like, the way his fictional characters balance perfectly on that razor edge between clarity and mystery. My favourites were Tigger, because he bounced and boasted, and Eeyore, because he was melancholy. My father, a very tall, very thin man, who could compose his features at will into an expression of heartrending lugubriousness, was an accomplished Eeyore. But why exactly was Eeyore so sad? Could it be simply that he mourned the flattening of his special thistle bed by a bouncing Tigger? My father and I had long and earnest conversations on the subject. No, we agreed, for Eeyore’s melancholy pre-dated that incident. My father’s view – a comforting one – was that such vagaries could not always be explained: ‘Maybe he just is,’ he said. He sighed. ‘People often just are, darling. In my experience, anyway.’
I was not sure then if he was right or wrong – and I still am not. Either way, certain tastes were fixed: I liked books which made you laugh and cry; I liked books in which character propelled the plot; the books I liked best of all were those which moved beyond safe fictional territory, over the horizon and into a hinterland, where anything was possible and for every question the answers stretched to infinity.
That said, I could never claim that my reading was very selective. I read anything and everything. I was an only child; my parents did not acquire a television set (and then only after much ethical anguishing) until I was fourteen years old. There was a wireless set and there was conversation (everyone in my family loved arguing), but much as I enjoyed both of these, I preferred reading. My parents encouraged this; reading by torchlight in bed was sanctioned, though a firm line was taken against reading at mealtimes. They found it a little eccentric (my mother felt girls ought not to be bookworms), but since both were unliterary and liberal they let me read what I liked, neither censoring nor guiding.
The bookshelves at home were a hotchpotch: they were filled with relics to past fashions, past tastes, chance gifts, with the occasional nod towards literary immortality. At boarding school my father had enjoyed Bulldog Drummond and adventures by Buchan, so these were represented, as was a slightly later taste for Somerset Maugham and Dornford Yates. There was a row of leatherbound Dickens (I suspect largely unread), and fat padded volumes of Victorian poetry which had belonged to my grandmother. My father ignored all these; by the time of my childhood his reading was confined to newspapers, and dense analyses of military history he claimed were a sure recipe for sleep.
My mother had more pronounced tastes, and went for a racier read. She liked detective stories, relished murders, but would make do, when pressed, with historical romance. Every week she and I made the lengthy trip to the public library (two buses; a long walk). There she would inform the librarian, with some hauteur, that what she required was something neither too heavy, nor too light. The result of this (treasures like the latest Agatha Christie or Ngaio Marsh were rare; there was always a long waiting list) were books which were very light indeed. My mother read them with zest. Most, as far as I can remember now, dealt with the wives and daughters of Henry VIII; many were by Jean Plaidy, and most – despite energetic love-interest – ended bloodily: my mother liked this.
So, aged seven or eight, did I. It had not occurred to me then to be critical of any book. I devoured them all: the Buchan, the detective stories, the romances, the Just William stories, which had belonged to an uncle, Peter Pan, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows, The Arabian Nights, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales, Sherlock Holmes, the Katy books, Kipling, Enid Blyton, Arthur Ransome . . . I loved them all, and reread them all, again and again. I read with a blithe lack of discrimination: School Friends’ Annual was as delightful to me as Somerset Maugham; Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill and Blyton’s Malory Towers were equally magical.
I might like to think now that I could differentiate between the imaginative power, the prose style, of Carroll, Blyton or Conan Doyle, or to kid myself that I found the adventures of Alice more resonant than William Brown’s run-ins with the housemaid or the perils experienced by those intrepid adventurers Philip, Jack, Dinah and Lucy-Anne (from Blyton’s Adventure books) – but it would not be the truth. The truth is I was a little heathen and – true god or simulacrum – I loved them all.
Later, this changed. I know exactly when it changed. I can see the room, which smelled of wax polish, and the stern figure who effected the change: Miss Fleur, geography, also in charge of the school library, a whiskery and tweedy woman, possessed of cold blue eyes. I was twelve, new to the school, which was somewhat stern too, and firmly dedicated to the intellectual training of female minds. Miss Fleur informed me, with froideur, that Arthur Ransome wrote ‘vulgar prose’. She directed me to august, towering, sober shelves: Eliot, Austen, Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope . . .
What? I had never read Austen? Contempt, disbelief, outrage eddied around the room: Pride and Prejudice was thrust into my hands – and that was fine, but the next week it was Barchester Towers, which was not fine at all. It took me six miserable weeks to finish it, put me off Trollope for the next twenty years (I did not risk him again until I was in my thirties; now I love him) and left me with a residual suspicion of Great World Novels that lasted two years. I could not altogether avoid them, those giants of the past, but I looked at them askance with a mutinous teenage hostility. There was a whiff of cant in the way they were presented; I knew they were supposed to improve my mind – and that set me dead against them. At thirteen and fourteen I preferred my mind unimproved. I knew about ‘improving’ novels; I’d been given one a few years before by a well-meaning aunt. Louisa M. Alcott’s Little Women: it was the one book of my childhood that I resolutely despised and detested.
Well, well, I was very obstinate and very stupid. The result was that for two years I read almost no novels. I gave them up; I went cold turkey. But I was fortunate: I met Mrs Culverwell, then aged almost eighty, and with her I rediscovered an old joy – poetry.
It sounds incredibly old-fashioned now (it was the 1950s) but Mrs Culverwell – extra-curricular, on a par with ballet – taught Drama and Poetry Appreciation two afternoons a week, after school, in her drawing room. She was tiny, white-haired, hunch-backed, imperious. Her house, a huge and cavernous place, still lit by gaslight and warmed by coal fires, was a mausoleum to a theatrical youth, when her spine had been straight and her parents had been intimates of Irving. Signed photographs of actors with noble profiles and sorrowful mascara stood ranked upon the piano. Their names meant nothing to me, but their noses were impressive.
Occasionally, looking at these photographs, Mrs Culverwell would go off into a reverie. My recitation of ‘The Lady of Shalott’, my earnestly rehearsed renditions of ‘I know a bank’ from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech from Romeo and Juliet, would falter then halt. ‘Ah, Ivor,’ Mrs Culverwell would sigh towards one of the profiles. Or ‘Ah, Sir Frank. Such a very splendid Richard in his day. Then latterly, so sad – you know, his memory . . .’ Minutes would tick by, then she would rouse herself with a waft of her hand. ‘Continue, child,’ she would say. ‘A little less fire. Continue . . .’
Over the next few years we read a great deal of poetry. Mrs Culverwell’s taste was firm: verse must be rhythmic, romantic, if possible soulful. We read a great many odes, and came to a halt with Tennyson. We also read our way through Shakespeare, Mrs Culverwell, ex-actress that she was, bagging all the best female parts and leaving me to wrestle with Romeo, Antony, Benedick, Macbeth. I never minded: at night, when I went home to the privacy of my room I played all the parts anyway.
At fifteen, never having seen a Shakespeare play in the theatre, I knew several of them almost by heart, my favourite being Macbeth, which I enacted at least once a week, unprompted and alone, giving a no doubt very bad performance not just of the Macbeths themselves but everyone else from the messenger to the porter. Somewhere about this time, meanwhile, when I was fourteen or fifteen, I rediscovered the pleasure of novels. The book which effected the change was The Catcher in the Rye, which I read, spellbound, in a single sitting, and which led – for several years afterwards – to a fixation with Salinger. After that, the floodgates opened; the joys came thick and fast – the Brontës, Flaubert, Scott, Tolstoy, Balzac, Camus, Conrad, Stevenson, Austen . . . I cannot remember, now, the order in which I read them, nor the identities of all the other authors with whom they were interspersed. Old habits die hard, and I’m afraid I read as I had always done, voraciously and unsystematically – even the Literature Tripos at Cambridge would not cure me of that.
Later, I did learn to read in a different, less impetuous way: I discovered the pleasures to be found in stripping down the engine of a novel, and – in the process – attempting to decodify the story. That process altered my tastes somewhat: I like Camus and Salinger much less now; I am more suspicious of the constrictions of Austen and the moral piety of George Eliot than I used to be. The novels I love best, and which I reread constantly, have certain qualities in common: their structure is cunning and supple; they can break the heart; there is – always – a whiff of danger. One other common factor, alas: they are all nineteenth-century.
I regret this, for I read modern fiction all the time, some three or four new novels a week; I admire, hugely, the work of such writers as Updike, Bellow, Amis (fils – definitely not père), Barnes and Chatwin; I look forward to a new detective novel by P. D. James or Ruth Rendell as much as I ever did a Christie – but for the greatest pleasure, the continual capacity to astonish, I would always return to the expansiveness, complexity, and technical audacity of the nineteenth-century novel.
The following list reflects that taste, and also the impossibility of the stern task set. Only ten favourite books? I should find it very hard to limit the choice to fifty. However, I abide by the rules of the game. I have included only books reread many times, and I have selected them upon the principles of Desert Island Discs: a slight cheat, of course, since that means that, although not listed, I get to hang on to both the Bible and Shakespeare . . .
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights; Flaubert, Madame Bovary; Dickens, Bleak House and Little Dorrit; Mann, Buddenbrooks; Chekhov, Collected Plays; John Donne, Complete Verse & Selected Prose; Virginia Woolf, The Complete Diaries; Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time.
The first book I read to myself was Enid Blyton’s The Buttercup Farm Family. I can’t recall anything about the plot or the characters but I do remember gazing for a long time at the word ‘put’ before swallowing my pride and asking Nanna to tell me what it said.
Though my parents both left school at fourteen, we were a moderately bookish household, and the grown-ups did all the right things to help me learn to read. Since my grandmother lived with us, there were three of them. It was Nanna who had the most time available to read me stories and to teach me the letter-names and sounds. Once I could read on my own, I wouldn’t allow anyone to read to me. This may have been a loss for Nanna. Thinking about it now, I feel very sad.
An inactive and rather depressed child, I began to turn to books for comfort and escape, and much preferred reading to any other pastime. My parents regarded this as a mixed blessing. When they told me off for being unsociable, I thought unsociable sounded like a good thing to be.
Though I was beginning to have some idea of myself as an egghead, I still mostly read Enid Blyton. The Secret Seven, The Famous Five, the Malory Towers stories, and anything else I could get hold of. Except Noddy. By the time Noddy reached our house, I was too old and sophisticated for such things, and left him to my younger sister. I don’t know if Enid Blyton did me any harm. I keep meaning to reread some and find out what’s wrong with it.
Then there were horse stories. My mother read me Black Beauty before I could read to myself. Not long afterwards I began to have some riding lessons, recommended as a cure for knock knees. Naturally, this gave rise to a desire to have a pony (‘Why can’t we keep a pony in the back garden?’) and to read about gymkhanas. But I was discriminating. At the age of nine or ten I abandoned a book after a few chapters because the heroine got keen on a boy and let him kiss her. Boring. Horse stories with romantic interest were unacceptable. Horse stories – or any other kind of stories – with a Christian message were even worse. Since my mother is of the evangelical persuasion, I was sometimes given these. They infuriated me. Religious instruction disguised as a pony book was a cheat and I wasn’t having any of it.
Fortunately my mother also directed me towards some children’s classics. Little Women, What Katy Did, Johanna Spyri’s Heidi and their respective sequels punctuated my addiction to Enid. I remember enjoying The Jungle Book more than anything I’d ever read. I loved the characters so much that I dreaded coming to the end and having to leave them behind. This feeling of bereavement on finishing a good novel is something I still experience.
Another vivid memory is the first time I had to put a book down for a few moments because I was afraid that I was going to choke to death with laughter. I was seven and the book was Winnie-the-Pooh. This had been read to me when I was too little to see the funny side. Picking it up again was a revelation. I have been rereading the Pooh books at intervals ever since and haven’t tired of them yet. In fact, they get better as one grows older and understands more about the foibles of human nature. In this respect they resemble the novels of Jane Austen. I particularly admire the way the final chapter of The House at Pooh Corner makes the reader laugh (at Eeyore the poet) and then cry within the space of a few pages. I don’t think I’d want to be close to anyone who could read this chapter without crying. Or without laughing, for that matter.
Molesworth is another touchstone. Nobody who fails to respond to his wit and wisdom can really be on my wavelength. I first came across Down with Skool when I was eleven.
‘It looks like a boys’ book,’ said my mother. ‘Are you sure you want it?’ I was sure. Though it was Ronald Searle’s illustrations that caught my eye in the bookshop, the text, by the late Geoffrey Willans, proved just as wonderful. Nowadays I like the literary theory best: ‘Peotry is sissy stuff that rhymes. Weedy people say la and fie and swoon when they see a bunch of daffodils.’
Peotry. As a child, I wasn’t much keener than Molesworth. The poems we did at junior school were mostly about nature and fairies. ‘Who has seen the wind?’ nearly put me off Christina Rossetti for life. Every year, or so it seemed, we had to write a story explaining what was going on in Walter de la Mare’s ‘The Listeners’: ‘“Is there anybody there?” said the traveller.’ I neither kno nor care, as Molesworth might say, if there is anebode there or not.
At home I was subjected to different poetry – recitations by my father of the favourites he knew by heart. We didn’t encourage him to give us Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ or excerpts from the Rubaiyat over lunch but, if the mood took him, we got it anyway. The poems he made us listen to are now among my favourites too. It’s odd how it can go either way. Junior school put me off all sorts of things, including, I am sad to say, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Bored to distraction by my early experience of church, I have grown up to love The Book of Common Prayer and the hymns we sang.
At school, poetry improved when we began working on the O level English Literature syllabus. I was surprised to find how much I liked certain poems by Yeats, Hardy and James Elroy Flecker. In the sixth form (where I was well taught) I was bowled over by Keats.
But I didn’t read poetry in my spare time. At ten or eleven I had discovered detective stories and these were my staple reading during my early teens. Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, John Dickson Carr, Carter Dickson. And war stories – the name Paul Brickhill comes to mind. From the age of thirteen I also read anything that might have some sex in it. In a girls’ boarding school such books were not easy to come by. Some shelves outside the main school library housed the ‘fiction library’, a collection of historical novels and family sagas considered suitable for young ladies. Some of them were known to contain mildly erotic passages and these were always in demand. The books we brought to school had to be passed by the authorities but a certain amount of smuggling went on. After the Chatterley trial, someone brought in a copy of D. H. Lawrence’s novel, which was passed around the sixth form. I went through it looking for the sex and skipping the rest. Five years ago I read it properly and thought it very good.
In English lessons we were introduced to Jane Austen and the Brontës. My pleasure in their novels was modified by the pernicious business of reading round the class. To enjoy the book at one’s own pace, instead of following while others stumbled through the text, was bad behaviour. These lessons didn’t achieve their apparent aim – some of us stubbornly continued to like the books.
University (where I read history) and the years immediately afterwards were a bad time. One of the symptoms was that I more or less lost the reading habit. It did sometimes come back. One vacation, severely depressed, no longer believing in God, and unable to make sense of anything, I managed to get into The Brothers Karamazov. I think it saved my sanity. Occasionally I would open a book of poems – it might be T. S. Eliot, or it might be one of J. M. Cohen’s anthologies of Comic and Curious Verse, which I acquired in the early 1960s.
At the age of twenty-seven I went into psychoanalysis and within six months was reading and writing in every spare moment. I read psychology books – especially the work of R. D. Laing and his associates – and poetry. The New Oxford Book of English Verse, edited by Helen Gardner, had just been published and it became my guide to the poetry of past centuries. I began reading contemporary poetry as well – Larkin, Hughes, Sylvia Plath. In the public library I found the PEN anthologies of new poetry that Hutchinson used to publish. But there isn’t much poetry in public libraries and there was a limit to the number of books I could buy on a teacher’s salary. Eventually, and with tremendous gratitude, I discovered the Arts Council Poetry Library, now housed in the Royal Festival Hall.
One or two poets of my acquaintance say they never read novels. Nowadays there are phases when I do, and phases when I don’t. What holds me back is fear of the child who wants to do nothing but sit and read fiction all day. If I give in to her, I’ll be a penniless hermit. But I am learning to enjoy novels in moderation. This morning there’s a copy of Jude the Obscure on the living-room table, with page 93/94 turned down. It’s going to stay there until after lunch.
This is the first time I’ve read Jude. Some people would give a lot to come across a Hardy novel they hadn’t read before, and I’m glad I didn’t get round to all the great classics when I was young. Where new fiction is concerned, I welcome press coverage of the paperback editions. It isn’t just that hardbacks are expensive – they’re difficult to carry around. Authors whose paperbacks I snap up include Anita Brookner, David Lodge, Julian Barnes, both Amises, P. D. James, Len Deighton and Alison Lurie. Reading Lurie’s The Nowhere City, I found myself hurrying through the heroine’s love-life to get to the next bit about her sinus trouble. One’s preoccupations change with the years.
I haven’t opened a history book since I left university but have recently begun to read the occasional biography. Nancy Mitford by Selina Hastings got me through an otherwise terrible weekend. Though travel books rarely tempt me, I whiled away some happy hours with Redmond O’Hanlon’s two volumes.
When it came to making my list of ten favourites, I asked myself which books come down from the shelves most often. I wouldn’t try to argue that Michael Frayn’s Towards the End of the Morning is better than War and Peace, but I haven’t read the latter three times. Frayn, whom I first discovered in The Observer in about 1960, has frequently made me laugh until I could hardly breathe.
In some cases it seemed a good idea to mention a particular edition of a poet’s work. I’ve chosen the Ricks edition of Housman, despite his peculiar introduction, because it includes the Housman who makes me laugh (in his light verse and letters), as well as the Housman who makes me cry. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson comprises 1,775 untitled items – it’s hard to find the same poem twice, so the ones I know best are all in Ted Hughes’s selection. Since my German is elementary, I’m a bit embarrassed about listing the Heine, but it really is a favourite. My copy (a gift, which has great sentimental value) is the Penguin Classics edition, with prose translations at the bottom of each page. As I weep over Heine’s lyrics, and memorize some of them, I like to think my knowledge of the language is improving. Next time I’m in a German-speaking country, I’ll be well-equipped to express love or grief but still won’t know how to ask which tram goes to the shopping centre.
A. E. Housman: Collected Poems and Selected Prose, ed. Christopher Ricks; The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, trs. Edward Fitzgerald; A Choice of Emily Dickinson’s Verse, ed. Ted Hughes; Sonnets, William Shakespeare; Heinrich Heine: Selected Verse, ed. and trans. Peter Branscombe; Persuasion, Jane Austen; Towards the End of the Morning, Michael Frayn; The House at Pooh Corner, A. A. Milne; The Compleet Molesworth, Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle; Songs of Praise (with tunes), ed. Dearmer, Vaughan Williams, Shaw.
I was eight before I could read. My teacher was a nasty drunken woman who looked like a dyspeptic badger. I’m forty-six now and she is long dead, but my heart almost stops if I see anyone resembling her stomping along the pavement towards me.
I learnt to read during the three weeks I was away from school with a spectacular case of mumps. (Mumps were mumps in the 1950s.) My mother went to a rummage sale and came back with a pile of William books written by Richmal Crompton, a person I assumed to be a man. I looked at the illustrations and laughed, then I tried to read the captions underneath these delightful scratchy drawings. My mother helped me out and slowly and mysteriously the black squiggles turned into words which turned into sentences, which turned into stories. I could read.
There should have been a hundred-gun salute. The Red Arrows should have flown overhead. The night sky should have blazed with fireworks.
I joined the library thirsting after more William books. I read one a day and then two a day, then I ran out and fumbled along the library shelves pulling out books at random. Nothing was ever as good as William, but the die was cast, I was addicted to print.
Christmas came, and with it a stack of books in the Woolworth’s classics series. They had serious red covers, and gilt lettering: Treasure Island and Kidnapped, R. D. Blackmore’s Lorna Doone, Heidi, Little Women, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In the front of each book there was a coloured illustration, and when I had read the last page I would turn back to the beginning and study this picture as closely as a Sotheby’s expert; trying to extract more meaning and more pleasure. I’ve always felt a great sadness on finishing a book I’ve enjoyed. And a strong reluctance to actually close the book and put it on a shelf. I delay the moment of parting as other people might put off finishing a love affair.
During the junior school holidays I would often read three books a day. The local librarian used to interrogate me on the contents, convinced that I was showing off, though there was nobody to impress in my immediate circle. Most adults took my passion for books as a sign of derangement. ‘Your brain will burst,’ was a common warning, one that I took seriously. When reading I half expected my head to explode and hit the ceiling. It didn’t put me off. Reading became the most important thing in my life. My favourite place to read was on my bed, lying on a pink cotton counterpane, and if I had a bag of sweets next to me, I was in heaven.
The first book I lost a night’s sleep over was Jane Eyre. It was winter and our house wasn’t heated – apart from a coal fire in the living room. I read in bed. My fingers and arms froze, my nails went blue. Frost formed on the inside of the window panes, but I could not put Jane Eyre down. I loved Jane. Snow fell, a few birds began to sing, my eyes drooped but I had to read on. Who had started the fire? Who was the mad creature in the attic? I ate my porridge reading. I walked to school reading. I read in each lesson until the morning milk break. I finished the last page in the school cloakroom, surrounded by wet gabardine mackintoshes. I felt very lonely. I wanted to talk about Jane Eyre. There were so many references I didn’t understand, but I made no attempt to talk about that or any other book.
Reading became a secret obsession; I would drop a book guiltily if anyone came into a room. I went nowhere without a book – the lavatory, a bus journey, walking to school.
I began to buy second-hand paperbacks from Leicester market. I soon realized that the orange-covered Penguins were an indication of quality. If I found a writer I liked, I would collect and read everything of theirs I could. The first Orwell I read was Inside the Whale and Other Essays. If I am tempted to show off and use an esoteric word, I think of Orwell, who hated esotericism (he would not have approved of the last sentence). I read my tattered copies of P. G. Wodehouse and laughed like a drain in the the middle of the night; more evidence of my derangement, according to my family.
The first erotic book I read was about a Spanish bullfighter. I don’t recall the title or the author but I certainly remember the delicious anticipation it aroused in me. I couldn’t wait to grow up and have a sexual experience. Though Spanish bullfighters were thin on the ground in Leicester.
I left school one week before my fifteenth birthday and I remember what I was reading on my last day at school. The˙Plays of Oscar Wilde. I took a biography of Ernest Hemingway with me to my first job. It was too large to fit in my narrow office drawer so I hid it inside a brown paper bag and shoved it under the desk. I didn’t read it during the day, but its presence was a comfort.
I was an emotional reader, I laughed and cried over Dickens and Arnold Bennett, and Nevil Shute made me yearn for a faithful, plodding, Shute-type of man. I imagined us trekking across the Australian outback, finding a rundown hamlet, and then transforming it – together – until death or flood parted us.
When I was sixteen I found a book that did truly change my life – The Gambler by Dostoyevsky. Not his best book, but good enough for me at the time. I didn’t know that Dostoyevsky was a genius, I knew nothing about Russia, but I found something in The Gambler that comforted and satisfied me. I was irritated by the Russian names and baffled by the references to historical events, but I liked the notion of duality; that good and evil coexist inside every human being. I looked on the market stalls for more Dostoyevsky but found nothing. I couldn’t borrow more Dostoyevskys from the library because I owed a fortune in library fines (I could never bear to take the books back). I realized that I would have to buy a book. Bookshops were intimidating places to me then. They were staffed by wizened old men who knew their stuff and my big problem was that I didn’t know how to pronounce ‘Dostoyevsky’.
One day I was in a café and saw a man with a beard who was wearing a black polo-neck sweater. He was reading a book and smoking a French cigarette. I had The Gambler with me and I daringly crossed to this intellectual-looking stranger, showed him the book and asked him how to pronounce the author’s name. He pronounced the name ‘Dostoyevsky’ carefully and we became friends. His name was Bob and he invited me back to his squalid cottage in the country where mice gambolled in the living room. Over the next few years Bob introduced me to Henry Miller, Kafka, Donleavy and Sean O’Casey.
I would trek out to ‘Mouse House’ as I called it at any hour of the day or night: Bob was always genial and welcoming, but was also, to my great sorrow, homosexual.
I married at eighteen and in that year I discovered Graham Greene, John Steinbeck, George Eliot and the book review pages of the Manchester Guardian. I remember the first new hardback book I ever bought: it was Brendan Behan’s Hold Your Hour and Have Another.
At nineteen I had my first baby (I took Osbert Sitwell’s Laughter in the Next Room with me in the labour ward). My son was born prematurely and I was forced to leave him in hospital in an incubator while he gained weight. I found Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop on the hospital trolley – a delightful compensation. Being a very nosy person I have always enjoyed reading diaries, letters and journals, especially Waugh’s, Noel Coward’s, Pepys’s and Virginia Woolf’s. Sylvia Plath’s letters to and from her mother prove to me that she was programmed from an early age to take her own life. The standards she set herself were so impossibly high.
My favourite contemporary writers are Kingsley Amis, Paul Theroux, John Updike, Martin Amis, Iris Murdoch . . . but I can’t go on, there are so many. I seemed to have spent my whole life reading. God knows how I found the time to rear four children (or conceive them).
What am I reading now? As I write I have a pile of books on my bedside table. The new ones are: Rabbit at Rest by John Updike, Doctor De Marr by Paul Theroux, An Immaculate Mistake by Paul Bailey, The Body Won’t Break by John McGrath, and six back copies of Modern Painting, all but one edited by the late Peter Fuller. I am also rereading, for the fourth time, V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival.
The books I have most enjoyed are: The House of the Dead, Fyodor Dostoyevsky; Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis; Erewhon, Samuel Butler; Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë; Scoop, Evelyn Waugh; Resurrection, Leo Tolstoy; the four Rabbit books, John Updike; Inside the Whale and Other Essays, George Orwell; Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert; Dostoyevsky, John Jones.
When God rested on the seventh day I’m sure he sat down, kicked off his shoes and opened a book.