Like losing your virginity, if you’re that old, or hearing of the assassination of President Kennedy, if you’re that old, there are some first readings you can always remember. Open the book again, and the place and time of the first impression come back at you, like a sharp smell or a strong flavour. Elizabeth Bowen calls it ‘an echotrack of sensation’. The books that retain it are the ones that changed you, however slightly: made you shift your sense of what the world was like, what it was possible to know and to feel.
So Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, with its devastatingly low-keyed revelations about treachery and stupidity in love, is forever associated with a late 1960s rainy day in a messy student flat in the Cowley Road, Oxford; Conrad’s Nostromo with a horrible holiday in the south of France, where the Republic of Costaguana provided a dramatic and absorbing escape from a dismal love affair; Scott Moncrieff’s Proust with a cold room in Toxteth where, in my first year of teaching at Liverpool University, I came home every day, for weeks on end, to Marcel, with the same kind of excitement as if I was going to a secret assignation.
I date the beginning of these kinds of addictive pleasures to when I was nine or ten, in a hotel room in Bordeaux. I had run out of holiday reading, and my mother gave me the book she’d just finished. It was Far from the Madding Crowd, in the Macmillan red and cream paperback. Up until then, from the point when she taught me to read at the age of four (I can remember the pleasure of success on making out my first word, which was ‘hide-and-seek’), she had been bringing me up on a rich, classical diet of middle-class children’s books: Alice and Pooh, E. Nesbit, the Narnia books and Tolkien, Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden, Alison Uttley’s A Traveller in Time, Elizabeth Goudge’s The Little White Horse, The Borrowers, Rosemary Sutcliff, Patricia Lynch, Beverly Nichols, Barbara Leonie Picard, Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Heroes of Asgard, Tales of King Arthur, Kipling (I had a peculiar passion for Stalky & Co.), Rider Haggard (She, not King Solomon’s Mines), Hugh Walpole (the Jeremy Books – why this weakness for boys’ public school stories? – followed by the irresistibly second-rate Herries saga), George MacDonald (At the Back of the North Wind rather than the Curdie stories), the Grimm brothers, Just William . . . everything a literary child could want except Arthur Ransome. (Like other highbrow literary parents of the 1950s, my mother banned Enid Blyton.) But in Bordeaux I felt I was reading my first adult book. I skipped the descriptions, got bored by the rustics, and fell passionately in love with Farmer Boldwood. The pattern was set for adolescence.
Between the ages of ten and seventeen, it seems to me that I spent most of my time reading. This can’t be true, of course. I went to school (which had more to do with talking, showing off and fighting than reading), I was given a privileged cosmopolitan musical and theatrical education (my father played string quartets every weekend, we went to the opera, I had music lessons, we took well-planned French holidays and visited art galleries and the Old Vic and walked in London parks). I had hobbies, but they were all solemnly, piously literary, like making enormous family trees of the Greek gods, or indexing my collection of postcards of Renaissance nativities (though my half-Jewish, half-Calvinist background was fiercely sceptical, I was obsessed, like many young girls, with images of the Virgin and child).
But what I mostly did was read, and what I mostly read was novels. I had the run of my mother’s bookshelves, which were extensive, even though she has never ceased lamenting the loss of half her books in the Blitz. There was not much parental censorship – they assumed I would give up the books I didn’t understand. Some pleasures to come simply weren’t to my taste at that time – a copy of David Copperfield gathered dust by my bed for about six years, and I put down What Maisie Knew by Henry James in a hurry, having thought it would be a book for children, like What Katy Did. Some dislikes were settled, at first sight, for ever: I’ve always thought life was too short for Sir Walter Scott.
I liked large complicated books about relationships. A good deal of this diet – Jane Austen and George Eliot and Dostoyevsky and Forster – was intellectually challenging and – I suppose – character-forming, though at the time it all just felt like pleasure. But a great swathe of my adolescent reading, the part I most enjoyed, was – I now recognize – insidiously corrupting. Middle-class literary girls in the 1950s and 1960s were given to read by their mothers the up-market romances which have since brilliantly been given a second life by Virago, safely distanced as historical specimens. We inherited from these wonderful and misleading novels an older generation of women’s attitudes to parents and lovers and heroinism. Margaret Kennedy’s The Constant Nymph, Mary Webb’s Precious Bane, Antonia White’s Frost in May, Olivia by ‘Olivia’ (Dorothy Bussy’s intense account of her schoolgirl passion for her French teacher), Dodie Smith’s delicious I Capture the Castle, Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows: these seductive, enchanting, pernicious books sent us into adulthood with highly unrealistic beliefs in the value of intense emotions, powerfully romanticized versions of the male sex, and snobbish commitments to the worlds of art and music and writing where all the really tragic – and therefore true – feelings existed. I suspect that a large number of white British feminists who began their adult life and work in the late 1960s and early 1970s had to do battle – like Virginia Woolf doing battle with the Angel in the House, personified in Coventry Patmore’s poem of that name – with the alluring ghosts of these inherited heroines, who all thought the world well lost for love.
Two books, by writers I still dearly love, sum up these powerful influences: Elizabeth Bowen’s To the North and Rosamond Lehmann’s The Weather in the Streets. I first read To the North when I was about thirteen. It’s an edgy, mournful, sexually charged story of two sisters-in-law living together in London, whose controlled lives are disrupted by the predatory Markie, one of Bowen’s 1930s cads. It’s not her best book (see my list of best books), but I was overwhelmed by its catastrophic ending, with the betrayed, ethereal Emmeline driving Markie at reckless speed on night roads to their death: ‘She saw: “TO THE NORTH” written black on white, with a long black immovably flying arrow. Something gave way. An immense idea of departure . . . possessed her spirit, now launched like the long arrow.’ I didn’t worry at the time at the trap that the Bowen heroine always falls into, of hurling herself unprotected into ‘a world of love’ and being punished for it – though I see now that was the allure of the book. What I responded to was something extreme, the thrill of reckless speed and letting go, bursting out of the controlled good manners of the writing. Bowen recognized this adolescent desire for extremes. In The House in Paris she says: ‘Young girls like the excess of any quality . . . they like to have loud chords struck on them.’ These books were my loud chords.
The women in Rosamond Lehmann’s novels – romantic ingénues, suppressed wives, fragile, long-suffering adulterous heroines – are all victims of a trap, too. They don’t want to be déclassée and bohemian, but they don’t want to be dull middle-aged, middle-class wives either. So they have catastrophic affairs, and end up lonely and ostracized. Lehmann knows all about the fatal attraction, to these sorts of women, of men with powerful, authoritative public personae and soft centres. As soon as Rollo Spencer comes into the dining car of the train in The Weather in the Streets, ‘a tall prosperous-looking male figure in a tweed overcoat, carrying a dog under his arm’, orders ‘sausages, scrambled eggs, coffee, toast and marmalade’, and opens The Times, you know that Olivia, the victim-heroine, is doomed. What Lehmann does best is the inner voice of women talking to themselves about their hopeless love affairs, seeing their ends already in their beginnings. I remember being overcome with painful romantic bliss, reading her at fifteen, when the heroine of The Echoing Grove gives William Blake to her lover: ‘And throughout all Eternity/I forgive you, you forgive me.’ It was wonderfully high-minded and lacerating, and you could be sure that there was going to be a great deal to forgive. Now I feel that I have to forgive these novels for leading me up the garden path.
When I went to Oxford at seventeen that kind of addictive, enchanted reading began to turn into something different, possibly less pleasant but more complicated and various. There were odd gratifications to be had from the peculiar archaic Oxford English syllabus, still in place in the 1960s, which made you start your first week at university with Milton’s Lycidas and Anglo-Saxon. I relearnt English as a foreign language. I discovered long poems, the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the romantics. Later, after a year in America, I came to all the magnificent writers who would have been part of my adolescent reading if I had been an American child – Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, Hawthorne – and whom I’ve been reading and teaching ever since. Discreditably much later, I began to read translations of Eastern European writers, modern American fiction, biography. In the last ten years, I’ve found other reading pleasures. Making the anthologies of women’s short stories for the two volumes of The Secret Self led me to some marvellous new discoveries (Alice Munro is at the top of that list). Interviewing a large number of writers for Channel Four’s Book Four, between 1982 and 1986, gave me the chance to read in areas I’d been ignorant of, such as South African literature (Gordimer, Fugard, Breytenbach, Christopher Hope). And judging the WHSmith prize is a good way of ‘keeping up’. But, pleasurable though all these kinds of reading are, they are also jobs of work. It’s important to keep time for rogue reading, reading in idleness, casually, accidentally, without a pen in hand. I still miss, and still remember, that phase of passionate early reading: it never quite returns.
I had those privileged years of reading because my mother was a self-educated, dedicated book-lover, my father was a hard-working general practitioner, and both cherished liberal beliefs in the virtues of culture. For many young readers the possibilities of leisured, rich, rewarding reading depend on prolific and uncensored supplies of books in schools and universities, free and well-stocked public libraries, teachers who have time to foster individual or eccentric interests, equal educational opportunities, examination syllabuses which are flexible, imaginative, and not centrally dictated, publishing houses and bookshops willing and able to cater to minority interests, and value ascribed to uneconomical and non-vocational pursuits such as reading and thinking: all things which the Conservative government of the last decade has been busily eradicating.
In memory of my own luxurious years of passionate, leisurely reading, I decided to limit ‘my top ten favourite books’ to novels. (So Keats’s Letters, my desert island book, had to go.) To make the game easier for myself, I threw out everything in translation (so no Anna Karenina, no Turgenev (First Love), no Proust) and everything by contemporaries I have met or know. (Out went a splendid top ten which began with Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, Graham Swift’s Waterland, Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, The Counterlife by Philip Roth, Anita Brookner’s Look at Me, and The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer.) Like quarrelling Booker judges, I ruthlessly excluded my second eleven (The Good Soldier, Greene’s The End of the Affair, Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper, Kipling’s Kim among them.) After that I chose ten books which I have reread at least three times and know that I will read again. They are, in my opinion, ten of the best novels in the language:
Jane Austen, Persuasion; Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit; George Eliot, Middlemarch; Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady; Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse; Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart; Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Willa Cather, The Professor’s House; James Joyce, Ulysses.
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. Even now I have to say it is my favourite book, the one I don’t need to take to a desert island because I know it by heart. I read it at least twenty, thirty times, first in a shortened form at the age of six or so and then again and again until I was sixteen and forced myself to read Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment instead.
D’Artagnan was from Gascony, which is close enough to the Basque country for me to have thought we came from the same area. The fishing village of my childhood had a mystery and beauty I recognized later, but I was already restless. I wanted to gallop across France and join the musketeers, I wanted adventure and the friendship of such world-weary men as Athos. I also wanted to wear those beautiful hats and outface the intrigues of authority with panache. The book gave me, or rather exacerbated, a thirst for adventure, which I probably transferred later to some of my women characters.
D’Artagnan’s rashness. D’Artagnan’s loyalty. I wanted to be him. I’ve often wondered about the gender of identification. At some point, I must have realized that I was a girl reading, instead of some neutral thing that could become d’Artagnan, because I embarked on Les Petites Filles modèles by La Comtesse de Ségur. Most of my friends identified with the rebellious Sophie, but I found her rebellion, which consisted mostly of not serving tea with grace, tedious and I identified instead with the most boring and perfect of the little girls. If you can’t be a musketeer then you might as well be a perfect female. Moving from the Musketeers to Les Petites Filles was as painful as the scene in Strindberg’s Dance of Death when Alice tells her stepdaughter Judith to let down her dress and put up her hair and start taking smaller steps. Alice is not just demanding a physical change, but a confinement of the mind. I had the same sense of restricted space with another of those books one is supposed to like as a girl, Little Women. I hated it.
I moved instead to Dostoyevsky, perfect adolescent reading, as far as I was concerned. All those cockroaches. The struggle between good and evil, so strong in adolescence, the Idiot knocking over a precious vase, a common experience, the rage against the father in The Brothers Karamazov as well as the longing for forgiveness, for peace, for the kindness of a Father Zossima, based on the wonderful Saint Seraphim of Sarov. There are books that never close, and I think The Possessed is such a book. A world crumbling into chaos, the tormented cruelty of Stavrogin, the appearance of little devils proving the existence of God in a world deciding on atheism, scenes from that book still haunt me. I find Dostoyevsky was one of the best novelists of redemption. Redemption is an extraordinary concept, particularly at the end of the twentieth century, when the word could just disappear, along with the word humane.
Although I spent most of my childhood and adolescence reading in French, I had actually learned to read in English, around four, I think, and I remember a jumble of wonderful fantasies. Does anyone remember a book about a cat in a Chinese city? Another about someone who dives into a well and finds a country underneath – I can still touch its landscape. And then, the Hans Christian Andersen stories, in a big red and gold book, with grim illustrations. I grieved for the little mermaid and wanted to stop her from cutting out her tongue for the sake of a boring prince who didn’t even notice her. I wonder sometimes if it disturbed me so much it eventually drove me to write The Love of the Nightingale about a woman whose tongue is cut out. How can one trace those influences? The power of images is like birthmarks on the memory. The little boy with a splinter of ice in his heart. Who hasn’t felt, at times, that splinter of ice? Certainly the fervour of those imagined worlds and complex feelings seemed more real to me and much more interesting than the tedious round of chores and school. In fact, I think the minute I began to read I realized the best way to spend time was to develop one of those convenient childhood diseases and stay in bed and imagine.
At thirteen I discovered the Odyssey by mistake in the Lycée Français library. It was new, the pages hadn’t yet been cut, and the librarian congratulated me on being serious instead of reading Simone de Beauvoir, gobbled up by my classmates. I had no idea what she meant – the story was wonderful, those travels again, enchanted lands. The Greek was on the opposite page, an indecipherable geography of its own. I wish now I had read the Simone de Beauvoir, as it would have explained or warned me against much of what was to come.
At fifteen, under the influence of my older brother, I switched languages again and started reading and writing in English. He wanted to be the next Hemingway, I decided to be the next Fitzgerald. The new world of American literature: spare writing, subtext (the French are too interested in text to allow much subtext), romantic love often destroyed from within, as opposed to adulterous passion honed by Catholicism. I read voraciously, but too fast, and at second hand. I felt ill at ease in America with its brave, male, woodsman prose and didn’t feel at home again until I discovered Women in Love, in Italy. I don’t know what happened to the children I was supposed to be looking after. I remember lying on my bed, reading, loving the book so much I wanted to eat it. I was never happy with other books by D. H. Lawrence, but that book stayed with me for years. It was the first time I discovered such strong women in a novel; its sexuality enveloped me in that hot summer in which my own body was reeling from discoveries of desire and luxuriance. I remember also being intrigued by the muffled love of the two men for each other. I always have been. Men are often better at loving other men than at loving women because there is no fear, and fear destroys tenderness.
When you really like something I believe you wish to have written it yourself. I felt that way about Agamemnon by Aeschylus, which I discovered at university. I was supposed to write an essay on it, I kept trying to rewrite it – no, to write it. Particularly the middle play, The Libation Bearers, with its dark and vengeful Electra, the great image of the dispossessed woman, dispossessed even in her tragedy because one never knows what happens to her. The Furies don’t pursue her, she is not judged, and therefore never integrated in the state. This still bothers me.
Now that I am writing myself, I read less, which is sad. I’ve always been a chaotic reader, sniffing my way to books, but that only works if one is reading a lot. I like scientific books I don’t understand but with which I can collide imaginatively. I had a good time with Althusser and Gramsci in the 1970s, with Stephen Jay Gould’s wonderful essays on animals and evolution and recently with Danah Zohar’s The Quantum Self, because it makes quantum physics almost comprehensible, and poses important moral questions. And I like writers who cast a clear eye on troubled subjects: Foucault, Germaine Greer, Marina Warner.
I read as much contemporary fiction as I can, which is not much, both grateful to and resentful of the Booker shortlist. The book I read with the greatest pleasure in the last few years must be Graham Swift’s Waterland. Every time I drive through the fens on my way to Norfolk, I think of his book, which taught me to look at the landscape. I like watery books anyway: Conrad, possibly my favourite novelist, Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda, Heathcote Williams’s Whale Nation, Jean Rhys, Margaret Drabble, Angela Carter, Balzac, the poems of Cavafy, of Baudelaire. Too much modern fiction and theatre is dry. I’m for those watery regions of the imagination which you’re so close to as a child. The saddest thing about growing up is the threat of desiccation of the imaginative skin, of the mind. It is those memories of those first books that refresh you, like a warm bath after a tedious day of phone calls and shopping. Those knights and mermaids of childhood, sirens calling you back into the sea. The temptation to jump. Of course, you can’t, you have to go on, you have to work, but who would want to live without those calls?
I was an only child, and spent the long afternoons of childhood in rooms full of my father’s books. Like many only children I have a certain immunity to loneliness and am content with my own company almost to the point of smugness. Perhaps that is why I squandered the opportunity my singleness gave me to lose myself in reading. The titles of those books – K2, Nanga Parbat, Bhowani Junction, A Dragon Apparent – spoke for the adventurousness of a sedentary man’s imagination, just as others reflected his need for literature itself: Defoe’s Colonel Jack, Scott’s Guy Mannering, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard by Anatole France. I looked at those that had pictures, but I never read them. I never, in Dickens’s phrase, read for life. I learnt soon after, when I had heard the overture to Wagner’s Tannhäuser, to listen for life, and what followed were holidays planned around the schedules of Radio Three. It was the abstraction of music, and the visionary drama it projected into an inner vacancy of my own, that exercised such a hold on me, and maintained it, too: though I still listen to music every day, I have always been a reluctant reader. I’m not stupid, but I tend to miss the point of certain kinds of book: I read for the feel of an invented world, its colour and shadow. I am quite capable of leaving unfinished a novel I greatly admire. I’ve never read a thriller, or anything closer to a crime novel than Patricia Highsmith, whose strength I take to be the subversion of formal expectations in favour of the exploration of states of mind. I acknowledge the primacy of story at the same time as being somewhat resistant to it. From my early teens on, what I mainly read was poetry. From my earlier browsings, at six or seven, I bring back most clearly the cartoons in Pick of Punch volumes of the immediate post-war years. I loved them not for their humour, which was dim and inaccessible to me, but for the gloomy hatching of jokes about power-cuts, the spidery eccentricity of Emett, the oddly haunting stylish emptiness of Fougasse. All this seemed to deepen the mystery that attaches to the time just before one is born, giving it an air of spectral mobility and impenetrable logic.
I enjoyed classic children’s books by A. A. Milne and Kenneth Grahame very much, but I have never made a cult of them. The mood I recall most keenly from my earliest exposure to books was one of alienation. I had no understanding of the rituals enacted in them, or of their alarming and complacent heartiness. Brer Rabbit I remember finding especially remote, and the word Brer itself embodied all the rough presumption of an alien vocabulary. Later I became more adept at the play of exclusive and particular lingos, most obviously in poetry, but also in disciplines which have their own necessary refinements. From childhood journeys, when I shouted out the styles of successive buildings from the back of the car, I came to take pleasure in the beautiful dry dense language of architectural history and description, and I still derive a keener pleasure from a good architectural essay – James Ackerman on Palladio, say, or Andrew Saint on Norman Shaw, or John Summerson on Soane – than from most good novels. I can lose myself in the plan of a monster Victorian country house the way other people lose themselves in Victorian novels. This was the first language barrier I remember passing, and I was conversant with squints and squinches, strapwork and Flemish bond, could draw you a Herne vault or a four-centred arch or expound the principles of entasis long before the day I still remember when I picked up one of my parents’ novels and discovered that grown-up books were somehow or other continuous with children’s ones, and felt even a slight disappointment at understanding every word, even if not all that lay behind them.
I am only beginning to see now how deep were the effects of what little voluntary and entirely commonplace reading I did as a prep-school boy. The dominant authors were Tolkien and P. G. Wodehouse. The Wooster stories were on the television at the time, and I brought to what seemed to me close to perfection an imitation of Denis Price’s Jeeves; my voice had broken early, and encouraged by the success of my act I assumed a manner of punctilious superiority at all times – a performance oddly akin, it strikes me now, to the sarcastic suavity of our headmaster. I consumed all the Wodehouse I could – Blandings and Psmith as well as Jeeves – and so complete was my identification with them that I was requested to read the stories aloud to the other boys after prep (rather as, informally, I would sing through the entire score of My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music to the rest of my dorm after lights out). As far as Wodehouse was concerned, I merely thought he was very funny, and didn’t understand at the time how enabling he was to me, and how Jeeves in particular had given me a shield of pedantic irony which, like any camp assumption, had become before long an unconscious part of me.
Tolkien, of course, was a laboriously unamusing and I now think bad writer; but he was my obsession between the ages of twelve and fourteen. I took a poor view of The Hobbit but read The Lord of the Rings six times in succession. Pressure was on me to tackle Trollope, and I did attempt Barchester Towers between Tolkien cycles; the repugnance he filled me with has remained irrationally keen to this day. Normally in these intervals I would sulk with a manly Hammond Innes until, at the end of a week or so, the addiction of the Old Forest, the Barrow Downs and Lothlorien could no longer be resisted, and I returned to Bilbo Baggins’s eleventy-first birthday party with a happy shudder of familiarity. I went off the book with the abruptness that is an addict’s only chance of freedom, but I remain aware of deep feelings it nurtured in me – feelings about place in particular. All its most potent and plausible geography is English, and it conspired with the places where I had grown up – the Berkshire Downs, the Cotswolds, the seclusion and wildness of Dorset, night exercises among tors and standing stones of Dartmoor – to charge all those landscapes with a heroic, elegiac air. Doubtless I could have got this from other writers too; but as it happened I got it from the derivative fustian of Tolkien, and I feel it keenly still.
It may be partly because I am a very slow reader that I have the recurrent sensation of being if not exactly trapped in a book then at least retained there, subject to a worrying delay. It was a further strength of poetry that, besides its ability to make one weep and shiver, it could, up to a point, be mastered and memorized and didn’t go on for too long. Something of a Fotherington-Thomas in my early teens, I would roam the school grounds with Fifteen Poets, an anthology that ran, as I recall, from Chaucer to Arnold, and I soon had Keats’s Odes, Wordsworth’s ‘Westminster Bridge’, ‘Morte d’Arthur’ and Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ by heart, for anyone (as a rule only boys very much at a loose end) who wanted to hear them. I didn’t read serious novels until I went to Oxford, and even there was practical enough to realize that exam success depended, once one had got beyond absolute ignorance, on containing and even reducing what one knew rather than, as some people madly did, cramming as many books into their heads as they possibly could. Some people were always reading.
It’s too soon for me to have worked out the place of reading in my life, or the nature of its pleasure, but writing out these earlier memories for the first time makes me see how ambivalent my relations with books have remained. By day I am on the staff of one of the world’s most respected literary papers, and I remember how when I joined I imagined that I would be continuing more or less in the practices I had become accustomed to as a teacher of literature, worrying, without any very lively hope of success, at scholarly questions in Milton or Browning or Pound. Yet as a server or facilitator of such discussions I find myself handling their concerns at a curious remove. The work of a literary editor has a discipline of its own, uncontaminated, unenriched by the materials in which it deals. Only on occasion, as I read extracts in an essay from some dear and great poem like Wordsworth’s Prelude or Yeats’s ‘Coole Park, 1929’ or Wallace Stevens’s ‘Sunday Morning’, do I feel the vertiginous gap between my business and the primary world of literature itself. And this has to do with writing too, since such moments of recognition make one ache to do as well oneself – or at least to rejoin the abandoned pursuit.
The most innocent and pointless way in which I retain access to the world of donnish reading that I briefly inhabited is through the literary quiz Nemo’s Almanac, which I used to compete in and have edited for the past four years. This is an annual quotations competition requiring serendipity and an ear for style in both the setter and the solver. Like being a literary editor, it requires a kind of conning pretence of savoir, and gives one equally the illusion of having read the voluminous literature one has merely processed or deployed. Its pleasures are, strictly speaking, bookish rather than literary, yet it too at times brings one – not one, me – to a halt before the greatness of great writing, the hiding-places of my power seem open; I approach, and then they close.
I cannot recall either of my parents reading for pleasure. The house I grew up in – rented from my father’s employers – was virtually bookless. A Pears’ Cyclopaedia, a mother-of-pearl prayer book, a Brief History of Glasgow, are all that I can squeeze from my memory; until I began to read myself. And once I started to read, I stayed reading. Before me now I have my first ‘real’ book, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, inscribed to me by my paternal grandfather in August 1962. As one who has regularly lost other presents – rings, watches, and so on – it is significant to me that I still possess it. I loved Alice. It is the first book that I remember reading all the way through alone – as heady an experience as one’s first cigarette – and it changed me. Here was a world to live in, simply through words. Given my strict and undoubtedly clichéd working-class, Catholic background, here was escape. Mad Hatters and pools of tears. Language.
But the ending of Alice disappointed me. So it was all a dream. Only a dream. Although I immediately reread it, this prompted me to write something myself for the first time; a little story called ‘The Further Adventures of Alice’. (Nobody told me about Through the Looking-Glass.) I wrote stories and the odd rhyme from then on. Around this time, the whole family joined the local library. Again, I have no memory of either my mother or father using their blue tickets; but I haunted the place with my pink ones, and my four brothers were less frequent visitors. At home one rainy Sunday, having read the latest Enid Blyton far too quickly, as usual (she must have written them in the bath), I picked up one of my brother Frank’s library books. Thus began a lifelong love for William, which, to this day, has me combing Oxfam shops for early editions. Henceforward (we had no pets) I was accompanied everywhere by an imaginary dog closely modelled on William’s Jumble. (Black Beauty had a correspondingly equine effect.) Unlike Enid Blyton, Crompton is an author who does not patronize the young reader, and her sophisticated vocabulary gave me the habit of consulting the dictionary. Hubert Lane and Violet-Elizabeth Bott made me top in English. Frank Richards, too, was a favourite writer; and the elegant, violent world of Greyfriars became more vivid than St Austin’s R. C. Primary School. I wrote slavishly in imitation of everything I read and vaguely recollect my father taking one story, ‘Jo Must Swim’, about the triumph of a legless athlete in the swimming-pool, to the local newspaper. I think this embarrassed me.
My birthday falls two days before Christmas and my early addiction to reading (‘Get your head out of that book and outside for some fresh air this minute!’) solved the present problem. The obligatory doll lay unloved on the floor as I opened my books, often four or five of them at half-a-crown each. Which do I remember now? Little Women and Good Wives, What Katy Did, Kidnapped, and Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Jo, Meg, Beth and Amy, in Alcott’s first book, enthralled me. I was, of course, Jo – she wrote stories too – but her marriage to the kindly, dull Professor Bhaer removed some of her glamour as an early role model.
Later birthdays and Christmases yielded Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol, and Dickens is an author whom I have read and reread annually, usually over the Christmas holidays or when ill in bed, although I have never dared to read his unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood. I would point to Dickens’s genius with common speech as an influence on my own writing. But maybe not so’s you’d notice. Another hero, worshipped early, is P. G. Wodehouse. Champagne to Dickens’s red wine. When I meet my friend, the poet Kit Wright, we gleefully swop Wodehouse gems. ‘Jeeves was there, swinging a dashed efficient shoe.’ ‘It makes me feel as if I had been chasing rainbows and one of them had turned and bitten me in the leg.’ And I still would not be without Grimm’s Fairy Tales or The Arabian Nights, turned to again and again, along with the stories of Robert Louis Stevenson and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.
At secondary school, a convent, the brilliant, enthusiastic Miss Scriven introduced us to Shakespeare, naturally, and to poetry, her particular interest. Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and, later, John Donne’s ‘The Flea’ and Yeats’s ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ inspired my first, imitative poems. All ‘thou’ and ‘dost’, but I was lost for ever to prose, for which service Miss Scriven should be thanked. In true adolescent style, I wrote at least one poem a day, and when I discovered Dylan Thomas, the resultant word-diarrhoea was awesome to behold. ‘Fleshweathercock’ was a pamphlet I published with Outposts while still at school. The title says it all. Still, part of me thought that poets were really dead men and that I would eventually marry Professor Bhaer.
Other books from childhood? Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring. Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales. The Narnia books. (I didn’t read Winnie-the-Pooh till I was thirty and my lover insisted.) Pamela Brown’s The Swish of the Curtain prompted a few of us at school to write a small play – or rather, I wrote it, and they were in it. It was called Egg Flip and about a magic drink, but I remember little about it. I have written a few since, for radio and theatre. George Eliot’s Silas Marner was a set book which I devoured in one evening at home, thus leaving me bored stiff (or writing surreptitious poems) in that lesson for the rest of the term. But really, around the age of fourteen and fifteen, I read mostly poetry. Penguin, at that time, published very cheap editions of modern British and European poets, and I used some of my earnings from my Saturday job in a hairdresser’s to buy them. Dylan Thomas was replaced by Rilke, Prévert, Pablo Neruda, Stevie Smith, the Liverpool poets and so on, in a random, haphazard method of reading born of enthusiasm alone. I wish I could recapture now the thrill of going home on the bus with a new poetry paperback. My own poems became gradually less archaic, though totally undistinguished.
Forced to choose a ‘favourite poet’ now, almost an impossibility, I would select T. S. Eliot for his combinations of risk and control, voices and images. ‘I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas’ (from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’) were the first modern lines of verse that truly gave me the shock of André Breton’s ‘cold wind brushing the temples’. Behind Eliot, of course, stands Ezra Pound.
There was some fuss when I ‘borrowed’ my parents’ blue library tickets to withdraw adult books from the library, The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall among them. This was confiscated on discovery by my father. I was very moved by this book at the time, around 1969, but trying to reread it a couple of years ago, I found it hilarious. All forms of censorship were discontinued when my grandmother accused me of reading ‘a dirty book’. It was John Betjeman’s First and Last Loves, and dealt with architecture. (This must have been around my Betjeman period.)
For me, the pleasures of reading as an adult seem subtly less intense than reading as a child. This may be to do with time, which does not exist for the child, or the loss of that simplicity which allows one to enter the moment, the fantasy, the book, wholly. One is also more critical, and even the humblest writer is nudged, or provoked, or led by the hand by everything he or she reads – a poem by Ted Hughes, a passage from Ulysses. It was via James Joyce that I first came to read Samuel Beckett, the only writer automatically purchased in hardback in our household. Robert Nye once wrote that Beckett was near to becoming the patron saint of writers, and this is certainly true for me. Beckett’s writing is, as he himself said of Joyce’s work, the thing itself. He is inimitable, yet leads by the most rigorous example. Fail again. Fail better. I remember my lover and I were in Venice when he died and we sent a mournful postcard to a friend – ‘On Brink of Shrieks on Bridge of Sighs’.
Sometimes there is a rare day when one is able to disconnect the telephone, open a bottle of wine, and read for sheer self-indulgence. In my case, the book in question on such a day will either be a biography – high-class goss – or the latest Flashman by George MacDonald Fraser. The next-best thing to rereading Wodehouse is reading a new Flashman. Not having a television, this for me is pure entertainment, total relaxation and much laughter.
Richard Ellmann’s biographies of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde have been unequalled, in my opinion, by any other biographer on any subject; though, as I write, I look forward to reading Holroyd on Shaw and, despite the mixed reviews, Ackroyd on Dickens. Richard Holmes’s Coleridge was also memorable. For the rest, a look at the pile of books on my bedside table gives a fairly typical example of what I read today. There is The Government of the Tongue by Seamus Heaney, Ellmann’s a long the riverrun, The Mating Season by Wodehouse, Richmal Crompton’s William Again, London Fields by Martin Amis, Self-Portrait with a Slide – poems by Hugo Williams (for review) and The Quincunx by Charles Palliser. The latter is keeping me awake until two in the morning.
There are probably many books I have forgotten to mention – certainly there are too many poets – and doubtless many books yet to be read that will become favourites. One of the bonuses of friendship is the way in which friends share books and writers from their own past with each other. As with friends and lovers, so it is with books – I have been influenced by all of them.
Just William, Richmal Crompton; Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll; Grimm’s Fairy Tales; A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens; The Jeeves Omnibus, P. G. Wodehouse; Molloy/Malone Dies/The Unnamable (trilogy), Samuel Beckett; Oscar Wilde, Richard Ellmann; Collected Poems, T. S. Eliot; Collected Works, William Shakespeare; Flashman and the Redskins, George MacDonald Fraser.
Children make the best readers. As adults, most of them will lose their willingness to be entertained or informed by books of any kind. Might we see this as a regrettable state of affairs, or should we view it coldly as a reflection of the times, which seem to extol the inhibition of artistic curiosity? Either way, there seems no hiding from the fact that a great many supposedly grown-up people do not seem to see reading as a particularly essential pastime. Or do they? Someone must be buying the 50,000 titles reputedly published each year. Has the age of high-technology entertainment really brought about The Death of the Book? Or is there a new hunger for literature, for art, for that lost childlike appetite for the intimate disclosures of the written word?
My own voluntary reading habits probably started at the age of six when the knockabout antics of Dennis the Menace, the Bash Street Kids, Desperate Dan and the other principals of kids’ comics were required fare among Jamboree Lucky Bags, home-made catapults, days at the seaside and all the other requisites of one’s out-of-school life. Decades later these characters remain impressively durable, having undergone only the most minor physical transformations, and they are still capable of amusing children of all ages with their insatiable pursuits of ‘grub’ and mischief. ‘Roll up! Roll up! More fun on the back page, pals!’ exhorts Dennis on the cover of my own son’s latest copy of The Beano. ‘Gnash! Gnash!’ goes the Menace’s dog Gnasher, rounding up yet another bunch of softies for a bit of teasing.
For many children growing up in the 1960s more formal reading matter often took the form of the ubiquitous novels of Enid Blyton. Looking back one cannot remember having sensed anything objectionable about the perfect organization of the worlds of the Secret Seven and the Famous Five – here were secret rituals, intriguing mysteries, satisfying denouements – though now one must wonder about the white male authority suffused in the tales, the idyllically secure middle-class lives, the moral certainties as dated now as Bakelite and ration books. Perhaps it did all seem a little too perfect for someone growing up on a West Riding council estate, and maybe secretly one felt a little sympathy for the villains who spoke out of the sides of their mouths, living in mortal terror of the police and in utter deference to the English property-owning classes. Good stories, though.
At the time, our parents were doing rather better, with the age of northern realism reaching its peak through novels such as Stan Barstow’s A Kind of Loving, John Braine’s Room at the Top, and from the Midlands Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Here were the voices of young, obdurate, working-class men who were not going to take the values of the old generation lying down. They were the angry ones who wanted what was on offer for their more socially advantaged counterparts. And, outrageously, they were going to get it.
Someone else who was not going to accept the life mapped out for him was Billy Casper, the estate-scampering hero of Barry Hines’s 1968 novel, A Kestrel for a Knave (Kes). At odds with a hard and unforgiving social landscape, Billy knew one thing for sure – that he was not going to work ‘down t’pit’ under any circumstances. To this day, I have yet to discover a more trenchant literary evocation of the time and place of my youth than that offered by Hines’s memorable book.
I was to discover all these novels a few years after my parents, both indefatigable readers, had enrolled me at a new library which had been built at Sherburn-in-Elmet, a village just a mile or so from where we lived. There I found all the classics, Treasure Island, Black Beauty, Robinson Crusoe, virtually all of Dickens, and I went on to develop a precocious interest in Greek and Norse mythology. James Thurber was another great favourite. And I could get two books a week, four if my sister lent me her ticket.
In later years though, I was to fall foul of the Eng. Lit. school of learning, avoiding O level failure with the lowest possible grade. A seasoned window-watcher, I yawned over the deconstruction of Browning and was alienated, for life it seems, from Shakespeare. However, the fiction put before us did inspire some interest: Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie, and Golding’s powerful allegories Lord of the Flies and The Spire. My private interest in reading continued to flourish with Somerset Maugham – The Moon and Sixpence and The Summing Up being remembered as particularly gratifying – and the writings of D. H. Lawrence and H. E. Bates, both of whom seemed to appeal to the sensibilities of adolescence.
The fag-end of the 1960s cultural movement led me to Timothy Leary’s The Politics of Ecstasy and Richard Neville’s Play Power and some extraordinary messages were being received in the council house garret: ‘What to Do When the Vietcong Drop LSD in Our Water Supply.’ ‘Drop Out. Turn On. Tune In.’ ‘Man’s right to work is the right to be bored for most of his natural life.’ ‘Fuck the system.’ And one really did try to understand the noisy anarchy that both these writers were advocating, though ultimately all I could hear were the voices of spoilt kids railing with a scarcely believable anger against their parents’ material and forgivable moral achievements. In my own warm and good-humoured community all of this had a rather hollow ring. I read the books, discarded their ideas, quit school and found a job.
At the age of eighteen I spent my days selling furniture for Habitat and my nights reading Sartre, Mann, Kafka and contemporaries such as Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange – reread seven times), Edna O’Brien (The Love Object, A Scandalous Woman) and Roger McGough (Watchwords, In the Glassroom, et al.). The Leary book had also prompted an interest in Hermann Hesse, though I made the mistake that this author always warned against by being too young to appreciate the nature of Harry Haller’s alienation in Steppenwolf, and I came to discount any relevance Hesse’s work might have in my own life. Kafka’s glacial prose however, especially that of The Trial, looks likely to haunt me for the rest of my days. Timeless and inimitable, the nightmare visions of Metamorphosis, The Castle and, well, all that he wrote, simply refuse to go away, abiding ever in the margins of one’s conscious perceptions, as deep and as troubling as the beast that threatens the sanctuary of The Burrow.
By the same token, Samuel Beckett’s trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable contains voices which howl against silence; darkly, paroxysmally, in floods of words, contemplating yet never quite explaining the insult of mortality. In Waiting for Godot, the two tramps are suspended for eternity. ‘Well? Shall we go?’ asks Vladimir at the end. ‘Yes, let’s go,’ says Estragon. They do not move.
Those who embark on the madcap adventure of trying to create new literature would probably do well to forget the seminal achievements of Beckett and Kafka – nothing can be more intimidating than turning from, say, the second half of Molloy, or In the Penal Settlement, to a blank page of one’s own. That I tried, unsuccessfully, to capture something of both Kafka and Beckett’s power in my own first novel The Comforts of Madness is testimony more to my own naivety than to my literary convictions. Others who have worked more saliently under these influences include Patrick Süskind – The Pigeon and The Double Bass – and, closer to home, James Kelman. This latter author seems to have performed one of the most remarkable feats in modern writing by imbuing a specific landscape, Glasgow, with Beckett’s universal perspectives. Through such novels as A Chancer and A Disaffection, and with some brilliant linguistic cameos in the collections of short stories Not Not While the Giro and Greyhound for Breakfast, Kelman rages and inspires, glancing thunderbolts against Thatcher’s Britain, laying bare the blandness and injustices of the 1980s. All of Kelman’s work possesses the hallmark of great writing in that it stands up to being read again and again.
I had thought for a long time that the aforementioned age of northern realism had passed, though Pat Barker, with her novels Union Street and Blow Your House Down, was to prove me wrong. Stylish and uncompromising, this underrated novelist chronicles the lot of working-class women in the north-east and it is to her credit that she does so without a trace of sentiment or moral judgement.
Both Kelman and Barker are recent discoveries. On my way to them I had read a long list of contemporary novels which includes Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Shame, J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, Anita Brookner’s first five elegant offerings, and from earlier times, Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Cancer Ward, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (a book which reaffirmed for life my abhorrence of capital punishment – proof, if any were needed, of the political power of the written word) and probably a thousand others. Some were bad, but hardly any failed to nourish the imagination in one way or another.
They say that when you look back on your life you only remember the good times. Reviewing one’s reading history you recall the moments of revelation, of the sublime first paragraph of Hemingway’s short story ‘In Another Country’, of the ‘fatal consequence’ of Humbert Humbert’s first sight of his nymphet in Lolita, of the dreamworld of Anna Kavan in Sleep Has His House, and of the waking from a psychotic odyssey described by Barbara O’Brien in her lamentably forgotten book Operators and Things. And in modern times one must consider the almost unbearably precise prose of Ian McEwan who, with the novels The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers, The Child in Time and The Innocent, in addition to his two collections of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, and In Between the Sheets (I make no apology for listing them all), has proven himself one of those rare jewels: a storyteller who can rise above mere subject matter to produce chillingly durable works of art.
Alongside these cornerstones of modern literature one will, of course, also find ephemera, and students of the untrustworthy science of horse-racing form will doubtless be aware of the allure of the publications of the Timeform organization. Their weekly Black Books, with their plain covers suggesting ruggedly concealed ‘inside’ information about every horse in training, might have a near-mystical appeal for the impecunious and the foolhardy. Here are fairy tales, mysteries, tragedies – the stuff of dreams and seduction. One alights on these books with boundless optimism, all too willing to be charmed by their suggestions, to abandon what common sense one might possess in the pursuit of adventure and profit. The peruser of this and, for that matter, any kind of book is looking for something amongst the words on the page, ready to be informed and entertained. As readers, they become innocent again. And it has been one of the happiest discoveries of my closeted writing life to find that they, readers of all ages, are out there in their millions.
(In alphabetical order): Blow Your House Down, Pat Barker; The Beckett Trilogy, Samuel Beckett; Waiting for the Barbarians, J. M. Coetzee; A Kestrel for a Knave, Barry Hines; The Trial, Franz Kafka; Not Not While the Giro, James Kelman; The Executioner’s Song, Norman Mailer; The Cement Garden, Ian McEwan; Operators and Things, Barbara O’Brien; Timeform Black Book No 19, 26 Feb 1978/79.
My first reading was of course not mine. My father is the first person I remember reading to me. Often he smoked at the same time, Senior Service, and he would sometimes be so taken up with the wickedness of Samuel Whiskers or the venal charm of the cat, Simpkin, in Beatrix Potter’s The Tailor of Gloucester that he burnt his fingers, or, if I was on his knee, my nightdress. These were always slow-burning; my mother bought them at a junk-shop called Mrs Virtue’s, famous in Edinburgh in those days. My mother told stories rather than reading them; she could draw illustrations as she went along, using those blocks of paper which are glued together on all four sides and have to be separated with a knife.
When wishing me not to understand what they said, my parents spoke Italian, partly because of attachment to the country and partly because they sent me to the Institut Français when I was very small, so perhaps they thought I might understand if they used French for pas devant chat. My French books included the radiant lithographic Père Castor books about animals behaving as animals do, and a nice one about a seal called Jonathan who shoplifted a seabass. My parents’ feeling for Italy also influenced the picture books they gave me. I remember two large flat ones published by OUP and written and drawn, I think, by Bettina Ehrlich, called Carmello and Pantaloni, whose washy yet spot-on illustrations whetted my appetite for Italy – full of amphorae and baskets of fish and pots of flowers.
The This Is . . . books by M. Sasek were my introductions, with their wedgy, witty drawings, to the architecture of Paris, New York, Rome and Venice. These idiosyncratic books are not whimsical or patronizing. To a grown-up, I find on returning to them, they are as helpful as to a child. At this time, perhaps my favourite book was a red cloth-bound book by Ana Berry, published in the war. It was called Art for Children. It reproduced some well-known and some more obscure paintings, many in black and white, with captions which encouraged prolonged looking. Such books now are tentative, attempting to predigest for small readers. As Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, which I later read and disliked, show, this is not a good idea. I learnt more about human nature from the Golliwog books by Bertha Upton. I couldn’t stick Little Grey Rabbit. Roll on Big Red Myxomatosis.
I had each parent’s childhood books from the age I left my cot for a bed you could get out of without climbing. These ranged from cigarette-card albums of the kings and queens of England, through the usuals like The Water-Babies, Edward Lear, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (in my Edinburgh childhood I thought London a lot more exotic than Never-Never Land), Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books, and Kidnapped. These books – perhaps sixty of them – smelt of cupboards in other houses. Sometimes they yielded shocking booty, a flower pressed by my mother, a bit of writing by my father before he had handwriting. A favourite was Holiday House, by an Edinburgh author, Catherine Sinclair, about the rewards of naughtiness. It had a brother and sister, and I was intrigued by those.
The two most indefatigable readers aloud were my paternal grandmother, who read me Villette when I was in bed with mumps, and, throughout my childhood, the professor of fine art and Bellini scholar Giles Robertson, who would read to his five children and me the works of Juliana Horatia Ewing. My favourite, for the satisfyingly frequent deaths, was A Flat Iron for a Farthing. He read incredibly fast. His children laughed in the right places, but I had to go and read the books for myself. The other great triple-decker, Frances Hodgson Burnett, I encountered first in a double bill, Sara Crewe (or: What Happened at Miss Minchin’s, or: A Little Princess) and Editha’s Burglar. The illustrations were as wonderful to a little girl as Helleus are to a woman – idealized, elegant, just a bit meretricious.
When I was six, my mother began to read E. V. Rieu’s translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, in the brown and white Penguin. She was useless to talk to at this time. I thought that Homer, the Odyssey was some sort of creature (Caspar the Friendly Ghost, Puff the Magic Dragon) and picked it up. For years after that I was obsessed. I have always talked in my sleep. For those years I would shout ‘Odysseus’ from time to time. The Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne kept me topped up with the stories of Philemon and Baucis, The Dragon’s Teeth, Pandora, the Argonauts and so on. I was besotted, making charts of gods and heroes and their habits, forcing my friends to play a long invented game called ‘Siesta Time on Mount Olympus’ which involved wrapping up in bedspreads and behaving in character, with much calling for stuffed owls and Hesperidean apples from any parents unlucky enough to be about.
School helped to jostle some of this only-childishness out of me, although my greatest friend, from a large family, had a similar cult on Asgard and we evolved a RomanoGraecoNordic combination of Asgard and Olympus. Her favourite reading was the books of Alan Garner, George Macdonald and E. Nesbit (her family were prolific academic socialists). Later when she took to Tolkien, I could stand it no more, and sheered off towards all sorts of romance, from Jane Eyre and Rebecca to Jackie, a comic whose draughtsmanship arrested my own for ever after countless evenings mimicking its lemur-faced girls and chiselled romantic leads. Muriel Spark arrived in my stocking one Christmas and never departed. I got an itch, predictably, for Huxley, which I wiped out with Waugh. Angus Wilson’s short stories bewitched me, good on glitter and on drabness. I kept trying the Bible from start to finish but I skipped.
Before that adolescent separation in taste, though, my friend Harriet had introduced me to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books and to The Cricket in Times Square by George Selden, and I got a sense of America’s other language, apart from the one we shared. A timid, untravelled Scots child, I had much imagination and little sense of adventure, for I was not physically competent or brave. A fit of reading Arthur Ransome followed by John Buchan and – suddenly, by mistake – P. G. Wodehouse at once made my reading a little less overwhelmingly feminine and attuned my ear to an accent I was not conscious of having heard before, and which I found funny – the accent of the English upper middle class. I became intrigued by voices and began to see the virtue in differences.
Around the age of nine I took up death and poetry. Once or twice a year I would receive a book-token for a pound. This meant eight paperbacks or a lot more books from the second-hand bookshops where I used to hang about at weekends, if I could trade it with my father for cash. I also went through a patch of entering calligraphy competitions and religious essay contests, whose prize – always a book – one might choose. Having decided, defying my innumeracy, that I was going to be a doctor, I requested such tomes as The Discovery of Nature, a history of the life sciences, richly published by Thames and Hudson. But I was compelled at this morbid age by Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, on whose – American paperback – cover a pair of burning eyes stared from a sort of rose and khaki chador. Perhaps to redress the balance, my father gave me the buffo masterpiece of Harrison Ainsworth, Old St Paul’s, which combines overwriting, melodrama, history, villainy and unwitting jokes with things you cannot forget. It prints on the mind the burning of the first St Paul’s as its second burning must be fixed in the memories of those who were in the Blitz.
Poetry was a natural consequence of liking words very young. I picked them up and rolled them about. We had two enormous broken morocco books called Animated Nature. From the age of three these were my treat. Detailed, scenic, unconsciously humorous engravings showed innumerable beasts in imaginative versions of their habitat. The bewitching Latin names curled beneath these and the more diagrammatic figs, of dissections. I remember jumping over my skipping rope hundreds of times chanting the formal names of improbable animals, cities, flowers, bones (the ‘olecranon process’ was my favourite aged five, because I broke it). After nursery rhymes, it was Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses and Walter de la Mare, but eventually the Dragon Book pushed me into reading individual poets. The first I picked on were the usual strong flavours, Kipling, Drinkwater, Hopkins, Blake. I wrote poems out again and again and learned them off by heart. I have forgotten most, but Tennyson, Dorothy Parker and Helen Waddell’s translations from the silver Latin stick, hardly helpfully. From the age of ten, I lived in the public library. It was next to a huge laundry, so one could return smelling quite respectably of chlorine, as though one had been to the swimming baths.
My favourite comic strip was The Broons, about a family of ten living in a tenement. Their name, for English readers, was Brown. It still appears in The Sunday Post. My first illicit reading was the pretty, illustrated Fanny Hill by John Cleland, which I cannot remember being kept from me. The absence of censorship at home could have fall-out. The first day at kindergarten, my mother, who was tall and arresting, brought along a wee book she thought my teacher might enjoy. It was Lady Loverly’s Chatter, a satire in photographs of Lady Chatterley. This was 1959. For all her headscarf and her cigarettes, she was an innocent.
Buying books for my children now, I see visual plenty and some publishing heroes, but a curious gap for voracious readers who will apparently be thrown straight on to the classics or on to mildly souped-up stories about problems with the other sex. I am disconcerted to find this already happening to my six-year-old daughter, but all my children enjoy the picture books I’ve mentioned, the very same ones. They are, as I was, both pleased and embarrassed to find in them traces that their mother was once a child.
Antony and Cleopatra, William Shakespeare; Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy; Middlemarch, George Eliot; The Golden Bowl, Henry James; Stendhal on Love; The Lives of the Poets, Samuel Johnson; Don Juan, Lord Byron; Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert; The Dunciad, Alexander Pope; The Stones of Venice, John Ruskin; Bleak House, Charles Dickens; Religio Medici, Sir Thomas Browne; Epistles, Horace.
When I think of books, I am plunged back into my Damascus childhood and into a world of people who had never been taught how to read. The mountain girl who brought me up, who rolled out the dough for paper-thin börek, who dipped a comb in water the better to plait my hair, had never been anywhere near a classroom. In the hungry village she came from, only a handful of boys were lettered, and these had to trek the daily three miles to reach the nearest school.
I can still see our neighbour from the floor above, clattering down the stone staircase in her high-heeled slippers, clutching an airmail letter from a cousin who had long ago made the desperate journey to Brazil. Written in an old-fashioned hand in rose-syrup style, it was read for her by my grandmother.
Of my two grandmothers, only one could read, and it was with her that we lived. This accomplishment marked her out as a lady of wisdom and people sought her advice on all sorts of matters, believing that her access to books gave her powers denied less fortunate souls. She had had an Ottoman education, and her framed Baccalauréat from Istanbul was given pride of place on the sitting-room wall. She read in Arabic, but enjoyed Turkish as well, until that sad day in 1929 when her favourite newspapers arrived in the new Latin script ordained by Kemal Atatürk – which she could not read. She, who had taken such pride in her knowledge of Turkish, now found that this window had closed. The Ottoman era was no more.
My other, illiterate, grandmother would beam with pride when we spread out our homework on her kitchen table, and formed the curvy lines of the Arabic script that would remain mysterious to her. When phones were installed, she found herself unable to work the talking machine unless one of her children was there to dial the number for her.
The world I was raised in was a female one which retained the harem spirit. Three generations of women lived in the house. Together with their relatives, neighbours and friends, they created an intricate society very much preoccupied with ‘at home’ days and formal visiting. In an age before ready-made foods and electric machines, a great deal of time was spent on domestic chores. Jam was made in huge quantities, enough to last the year. Meat was pickled, as were vegetables, garlic braided, okra threaded into long necklaces which were then put out to dry. Each house made its daily yoghurt and its cheese. The women were forever unstitching mattresses, washing the fleece, combing it out and letting it dry in the sun. Whites had to be boiled in lye and starched by hand. There was no time to read, even if one could! And maybe the need wasn’t there, for the women were constantly telling each other stories, and their lives were so strange as to make fiction pale. Banished from rooms where the family sat, our books were kept in a long, narrow corridor, because books gathered dust and dust was a domestic calamity.
As a child, I was so marked by the powerful women I loved that, when I came to read books, I was attracted by those that spoke in female tones. I don’t claim to have made the division then, but I was instinctively aware that there was a cruelty in the male voice that repelled me – authoritative, depressive, focused on degradation and punishment. Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Richardson left me cold. I was drawn, I remember, to the literature of the American south which was written by women, perhaps because I saw in the ante-bellum world a mirror image of my own. Carson McCullers was a favourite writer for years. I felt that she too had been offered pistachio nougat from the Grace Kelly handbags of the men-hungry elderly cousins who flitted in and out of our rooms.
As I began reading, life seemed to separate into the life in books and that of the street where the daily sight was of people’s hardship: the man who did invisible mending in his hole in the wall, the carpenter’s son who had mangled his fingers in a newfangled factory machine, the seamstress whose husband had left her when her children were small. Books provided a means of escape from such pain. In a society where privacy was unheard of and where people retired to their rooms only if they felt very ill, reading was a perfect pretext for solitude. Books seemed to raise one above the mundane, above the chit-chat of the nightly gatherings, or so one little prig liked to think.
In a house where three languages were spoken – Turkish, Arabic and French – English, which no one around me spoke, became my private tongue. It gained me entry into other scenes of domestic life, but also into places untamed by domesticity of any kind. So taken was I by English that I rebelled against reading for pleasure in either Arabic or French, the languages of the classroom. I fled from Chateaubriand exulting the Crusades, and from Victor Hugo lamenting in alexandrines, to explore the heath and the moors.
What made me love English literature so much was the fact that I read as I pleased, bound by no syllabus, and certainly not one designed to instil in natives unbounded respect for Shakespeare’s ‘scepter’d isle’. I read good books and all sorts of other ones, including a four years’ hoard of the Reader’s Digest stored in our attic next to the jars of olives in brine. Jane Eyre was the first English book I read. I was nine, and the experience affected me so much that I was ill with a fever for days, only recovering when my mother took the book out of the room and hid it, breaking its spell over me.
In the heat of our sitting room during the siesta hour, I read about wintry Yorkshire, which for me was as exotic as Araby had been to any English dreamer. Its every detail intrigued me; I would gladly have exchanged my lunch of chicken pilaff for Lowood’s thinnest gruel. When I came to England twelve years later, it was as if I had made the journey before.
Books fired in me other expectations, this time of an emotional nature. In the Damascus of my adolescence, it was unusual, even something of a scandal, for a girl to marry for love. This wasn’t because parents imposed their own choices, but because the girls themselves preferred Count Paris to Romeo, found it natural to opt for security and respectability rather than the shifting sands of passion. Every other day in my classroom, a girl would arrive with the photographs of her engagement party which everyone, including the teacher, would admire. On that day the lucky bride-to-be would be allowed to come to school with varnished nails, the better to show off the ring, and her hair in a chignon, rather than the usual plait. ‘But do you love him?’ I would be the only one to ask, to be met with a horrified look, and the retort: ‘He’s a mechanical engineer!’ My emotional expectations were clearly at odds with those of most of my classmates.
My problem was that, at a very early age, I started reading books which described passionate or tragic relationships between men and women, and these turbulent narratives inevitably created a storm inside me. The men I was attracted to were a heady combination of Heathcliff, Baudelaire and Cyrano de Bergerac, crossed with Malcolm X. In retrospect and somewhat ruefully, I recognize that books shaped the sort of love I craved, and determined the marriages I made. I hold the Brontë sisters wholly responsible! Two other girls of my year were, rather like me, unable to make conventional marriages because their emotions had been perverted by novels.
The male–female tug-of-war that books embroiled me in is still being played out. The crude feminism of my early womanhood has not mellowed much; there are few male writers I enjoy unreservedly: Sainte-Beuve is one of them, Márquez is another. The writers I still cannot stomach are the two Lawrences, D. H. and Tee Hee. They belong in the Sea of Offal in which swim the Bully-Boys, the Misogynists, the Pornographers, the Structuralists, the Frauds and the Uncle Toms. I still am determined to think that some writing is perfidious and dangerous, even if it is, at any one time, the writing which is most highly lauded, most fêted, and most popular. Ultimately, it belongs in what a Nicaraguan poet recently called the ‘latrines of history’.
When I’m feeling low, tired or ill, I find that the best remedy is to curl up with a well-written cookbook, preferably one which dwells on the history of cooking, or with a book of old photographs recalling my grandmother’s era. But, at the end of the day, the books I value most are those that speak with compassion, encouraging one to believe that the human condition is surmountable, despite all the evidence.
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights; Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café; The Letters of Emily Dickinson; Colette, La Vagabonde; James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room; Kobo Abé, The Woman in the Dunes; Nikos Kazantzakis, The Rock Garden; Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language; Arthur Miller, After the Fall.
My mother taught me to read from the Book of Deuteronomy because it is full of animals (mostly unclean). Whenever we read ‘Thou shall not eat any beast that does not chew the cud or part the hoof’ she drew the creature. Horses, bunnies and little ducks were vague fabulous things but I knew all about pelicans, rock badgers, sloths and bats. This tendency towards the exotic has brought me many problems, just as it did for William Blake. My mother drew winged insects and the birds of the air, but my favourite ones were the seabed ones, the molluscs. I had a fine collection from the beach at Blackpool. She had a blue pen for the waves and brown ink for the scaly-backed crab. Lobsters were red biro. She never drew shrimps though, because she liked to eat them in a muffin. I think it had troubled her for a long time. Finally, after much prayer and some consultation with a great Man of the Lord in Shrewsbury, she agreed with St Paul that what God had cleansed we must not call common. After that we went to Molly’s Seafoods every Saturday. Deuteronomy had its drawback; it is full of Abominations and Unmentionables. Whenever we read about a bastard or someone with crushed testicles, my mother turned over the page and said ‘Leave that to the Lord’. When she’d gone I’d sneak a look. I was glad I didn’t have testicles. They sounded like intestines, only on the outside, and the men in the Bible were always having them cut off and not being able to go to church. Horrid.
Oranges are not the only Fruit
I grew up not knowing that language was for everyday purposes. I grew up with the Word and the Word was God. Now, many years after a most secular reformation, I still see language as something holy.
My parents owned six books between them. Two of these were Bibles, the third was Cruden’s Complete Concordance to the Old and New Testaments, the fourth, The House at Pooh Corner, the fifth, The Chatterbox Annual 1923, and the sixth, Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. I was allowed free run of their library when I had learned my first important lesson: Not To Tear. This was achieved by sitting me in my pram with a mail order thermal underwear catalogue. Every time I ripped up a woolly vest or ladies’ one-piece, the catalogue was taken away. I could of course have grown up to be a pervert and not a writer. The sad thing is that my parents have never worked out the difference.
I cannot over-emphasize the importance of an outside toilet when there is no room of one’s own. It was on the lavatory that I first read Freud and D. H. Lawrence and perhaps, after all, it was the right place. We kept a rubber torch hung on the cistern and I had to juggle my Saturday job money between buying forbidden books and new batteries. It was fairly easy to smuggle books in and out of the house; what was difficult was finding somewhere to keep them. I opted for under the mattress, and anyone with a single bed, standard size, and paperbacks, standard size, will discover that seventy-seven can be comfortably accommodated. But as my collection grew, I began to worry that my mother might notice that her daughter’s bed was rising visibly. One day she did. She burned everything.
Not everything. I had already started to shift my hoard to a friend’s house and so I still have some of those books, carefully covered in plastic, none of their spines broken.
I discovered a new ruse. I was given a job at the public library which my mother approved of because a) she reckoned that I couldn’t read and work at the same time, and b) it meant that she could have unlimited numbers of large-print mysteries. I think too that she hoped that simply being around books would cure me of my obsession for them, rather in the way that retired astronauts are advised to lie and look at the stars. In practice, I went to the library even when I wasn’t working, and sat uninterrupted in the reading room under a stained-glass window bearing the legend ‘Industry and Prudence Conquer’. I should say too that weekly sackfuls of Ellery Queen seemed to have a sedative effect on my mother. My father continued with the Beano. At the library, dutifully stamping out wave upon wave of sea stories, and the battered blossoms of Mills and Boon, I recognized what I had known dimly: that plot was meaningless to me. This was a difficult admission for one whose body was tattooed with Bible stories, but it was necessary for me to accept that my love affair was with language, not with what it said. Art communicates, that is certain. What it communicates, if it’s genuine, is something ineffable. Something about ourselves, about the human condition, that is not summed up by the oil painting, or the piece of music, or the poem, but, rather, moves through it. What you say, what you paint, what you can hear is the means not the end of art; there are so many rooms behind.
Freed, then, from the gross weight of how to get from A to B, I came across Gertrude Stein in the humour section. I still don’t know why she had been branded with a purple giggle-strip and heaped unalphabetically alongside the usual pile of boys’ bad jokes, but I took her away and found a different kind of coherence. At the level of theory rather than practice, she more than any other writer has taught me to think about how language is constructed. Whatever anyone feels about her style and her fiction, she has, in her essays and investigations, left us with an invaluable toolkit. I dismantled a lot of my assumptions about both reading and writing because of her, and most of them weren’t worth putting back together again.
I returned Gertrude Stein, to her rightful place under S in the literature section, and was about to embark on two years of undisturbed poetry, when I was disturbed, by my mother, in the public library reading room. She had found me out and come to have a showdown by the photocopier. ‘The trouble with books,’ she said, ‘is that you don’t know what’s in them until it’s too late.’ I confronted her with her own taste in murder mysteries and received the reply that if you know there’s a body coming, it isn’t a shock. So much for plot. However, this didn’t help my position: my mother knew that books would lead me astray, and she was right. A short time later I left home and never went back. I didn’t take anything with me; the things I loved had already gone.
For some, perhaps for many, books are spare time. For me, the rest of life is spare time: I wake and sleep language. It has always been so. When I was supporting myself by working evenings and weekends, so that I could stay at school, I fought off loneliness and fear by reciting. I had been brought up to memorize very long Bible passages and so memorizing anything is not difficult for me. This was my two years alone with the poets. In the funeral parlour I whispered Donne to the embalming fluids, and later, when I had stopped making up corpses and was working in a mental hospital, I found that Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’ was very comforting to the disturbed. Among the disturbed I numbered myself at that time.
I have never been able to give up what I love in return for a quiet life. I didn’t notice any hardship in those early years, and although I was exhausted most of the time, I felt, too, the exuberance of a lover when I came back to my tiny borrowed room and there were my books. It seems to me that the limitless world of the imagination is just as crucial as the walled world of the everyday. Inside books there is perfect space and it is that space which allows the reader to deal with the normal problems of gravity. When I talk about books in this way, I’m not talking about the second-rate or the fake. There are plenty of those and bothering with them at all is like eating your meals at McDonald’s. If you are surviving on books you soon learn what is and isn’t nourishing. I didn’t fight to read in order to be slowly poisoned. There is still no room in my life for whatever does not enhance it. I would rather concentrate on the highest, however difficult or challenging, than waste time with the mediocre. I would rather sit quietly and think than pick up a book that reveals nothing.
In 1978 I packed all of my wordly goods into the back of my Morris Minor post office van and drove to Oxford. For the first few weeks I could not rid myself of the suspicion that I had been dropped into the middle of a practical joke. Not only did everyone want to read books, they were expected to do so. They were paid to do so. Did I really not have to prepare for my tutorial in the toilet? If I put my books out on the shelves would they still be there the next day? Whenever someone knocked on my door, I leapt up and stuffed my novel under the pillow. Ridiculous? Yes, but even now I don’t keep books in the bathroom because I adore the luxury of just being able to pee.
These days I read in blocks. I choose a writer and read everything over a period of weeks or months. And then, over a further period of weeks or months, I don’t read anything. This space allows me to be properly affected by the work and it ensures that I know what I think. I always memorize passages, partly so that I can use them as a measure of experience, but probably because I shall never be altogether convinced that the books will always be on the shelves for me to read. Who knows where the world will take us? If I could only take one thing away with me, or if I was on that ubiquitous desert island, I would choose T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. I read that poem over and over again during the autumn and there is always more to be gleaned from it. It is riches and beauty; there is nothing that it does not say.
I don’t have a great many books because there aren’t a great many books worth having. I suppose my own library tends to stabilize at around a thousand volumes. Publishers are always sending me jiffy bags full of dross, but fortunately I live near a charity shop. I’m always on the lookout for new things, but I’m usually disappointed. It doesn’t matter; whatever’s genuine can be read over and over again and the odd thing is that it’s not the same book. Art seems to multiply within itself.
My mother and father still have their Bibles, but I have inherited their other four volumes and a music stand with a clamp welded to the bottom so that my mother could fix it on her ironing board and still read the Word of the Lord.
There was a seventh book but I don’t know whose it was. It lived in the tallboy under a pile of towels and was further concealed by occupying the cardboard false bottom of a set of bathsalts. It was a 1950s sex manual called How to Please Your Husband. I read it and decided that I’d have a lot more fun in the library.
My favourite books (at the moment)
Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot; Jacob’s Room, Virginia Woolf; The Prelude, William Wordsworth; Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë; Look at me now/Here I am, Gertrude Stein; The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius; Collected Poems, Robert Graves; Poems, Elizabeth Bishop; Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino; Collected Poems, Adrienne Rich.
I don’t like lists. They lie.
It started with a bear, and a boy in search of his shadow. Winnie-the-Pooh and Peter Pan were the twin companions of my earliest memories (an animal and a child – this has a certain symmetry; in my un-reading life, the primary companions of those days were an Alsatian called Dusty, and my sister). Of the two, it was Peter who lodged himself most deeply in my heart, making me dream of adventurers who would dart in through the open window at night and fly me away to Neverland. In the world of J. M. Barrie parents are understandably wary of Peter and his home ‘second to the right and straight on to morning’ but in my world it was my mother who pointed out to me that Neverland was just off the coast of Karachi, located on a series of small islets, known as Oyster Rocks by the unknowing; that two of the islets looked like granite sentinels made her claim seem all the more plausible. So although Peter might fly into rooms in London he ended up just off the coast on which I lived; a comforting thought. The only problem with the world of Peter was that girls – or rather, the one girl – was relegated to darning socks and playing mother, but I was happy for my imagination to extend beyond Barrie’s and find possibilities for myself other than those of Wendy (who was clearly ‘a girly girl’ and therefore deserved nothing better than unravelling socks).
It was a few years later that I ran into the most damned of the girly girls, within the world of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian Susan is companion and foil to her younger sister, her role more essential to the family dynamic than that of the oldest brother Peter, but in the last novel of the series, The Last Battle, we learn that she is exiled for ever from the world of Narnia because of her interest in lipstick (I may be paraphrasing slightly, but that’s the gist). At the age of thirty or so, I confessed to the novelist Michel Faber that when I was eleven and my sister thirteen I called her ‘Susan’ for daring to grow into an adolescence that I had yet to reach or understand. Did you ever apologize? Michel asked. No, I said, having given it little thought over the years. But you must, he said; it’s a terrible thing to have said. It was more in a spirit of amusement at his insistence than from any belief that my sister needed to hear an apology from me two decades later that I offered up my regrets for having Susanned her. It turned out Michel was right. It’s the worst thing you’ve ever said to me, my sister said, and thanked me for the apology.
At eight or nine, I didn’t yet see anything problematic about Susan’s lipstick exile, though I did have enough sense of how far I was from C. S. Lewis’s view of the world to be discomfited by that other Narnia book, The Horse and His Boy, in which the villains are dark-skinned people with beards and turbans. But I was far more put out on discovering that the entire Narnia series was an allegory for Christianity and Aslan wasn’t a lion, but Christ. My objection, I should say, was not to Christ himself, who I held in high regard, but to the un-lioning of Aslan. I remember very clearly the moment of this discovery – standing in the school library, having pulled a book out of the shelf because it had C. S. Lewis’s name in the title. And then, the horror, the horror. I had two choices at that moment. I could decide that the novels I loved so much that my best friend and I liked nothing better than to play imaginative games set in Narnia were not what I thought they were at all; or I could decide that if other people wanted to see Aslan as Christ they were very welcome to do so, but that was no reason for me to disrupt my relationship with the great lion. It really wasn’t any kind of choice at all.
When I’ve had cause to discuss these early books of my childhood, I too often dwell on the lipstick, the turbaned villain, the allegories of Christ in order to talk about the distance between my life in Karachi and those books. This dwelling is always precursor to discussing the enormous sense of exhilaration with which I entered the world of adult reading in adolescence and encountered Midnight’s Children, in which the English-language novel and the world around me came together in a great starburst of imagination and humour, and made it possible to imagine a space for myself as writer within the changing world of Anglophone fiction. Prior to that, I simply hadn’t known that Karachi could be a location for a novel in English.
But in the process of paying rightful homage to Midnight’s Children I betrayed my earliest loves. Peter and Aslan and all the characters around them taught me to dream and to imagine. The lipstick and the darned socks were minor notes of discordance, hardly worth my attention amidst the wardrobes that open into a world of eternal winter or the boy whose shadow runs away from him. In the Karachi of my childhood, where we had one state-run television channel and a sheltered life which rarely extended beyond the school yard and private homes, I walked through that wardrobe, flew to Neverland with the boy and his shadow. And in doing so I learnt that novels reach further than their own writers’ imagination. Who do you write for? I am often asked, the question framed in terms of nation or ethnicity. My own childhood reading makes me impatient of such questions. C. S. Lewis is unlikely to have ‘written for’ a girl in Karachi, but that doesn’t mean any boy in London grew up with a greater claim on Aslan than I did. There were things I didn’t understand, of course – What was Turkish delight to begin with? Why did all the children drink tea, which was clearly a boring beverage for grown-ups? – but I was happy to read around what I didn’t understand, sometimes accepting other rules of living, other times inventing my own explanations. Finding ways of contending with the mystification was as much a part of the joy of reading as was entering fictional worlds and changing their rules (I refer you back to girls and the darning of socks). It is a great gift to a writer, this early knowledge that there will always be people who don’t know the world you’re writing about, will miss allegories and allusions, and yet will love your books.
Now my reading life covers much wider ground than it did in childhood when writers such as C. S. Lewis and J. M. Barrie simultaneously opened up the universe and circumscribed it – from Tolstoy and Toni Morrison to Ali Smith and Juan Gabriel Vásquez the world sits on my bookshelf. But although I recognize the richness and breadth of my adult library, I miss the deep pleasures of childhood reading, the intensity which sent me back to books – and not just the most loved ones – over and over again. And yet, of all those childhood books the one that is arguably the most important to my life is one I only read once.
I remember clearly the day I found it: I was in my grandfather’s study, looking through his intimidating bookshelves in which anything I might have wanted to read (The Iliad, The Odyssey) was in Greek. I had never yet found anything of interest in those bookshelves, but that didn’t stop me returning to them time and again. Gibbon, Pliny, Marx, boring boring boring (in my defence, I was not quite eleven) . . . and then, there, where I must have looked before, in blue binding a book with a title All Dogs Go to Heaven. I pulled it out of the shelf with the same sense of wonder with which Lucy might have walked through a wardrobe that led into a world of snow. My grandfather said he had never seen the book before and I was welcome to it. I should say here that the only tragedies of my life that had occurred so far had concerned dogs – first Dusty, the German Shepherd, my earliest companion; and more recently, Topsy, the Russian Samoyed, whose death I was still grieving when some force of benevolence placed a book about dog heaven between Gibbon and Pliny just when I needed to read it.
If I ever howled with tears through a novel prior to All Dogs Go to Heaven I don’t recall it. In my memory, it was only hours after I finished reading it that my best friend, Asad, came over. Asad and I shared all our books, and to further bind us together he, too, was also deep in mourning for his pet dog. You have to read this; it’s a book set in dog heaven, I said. He replied: Why don’t we write a book? And so we did. We called it A Dog’s Life, and After. I was eleven years old; I haven’t stopped writing fiction since.
But there is nothing I can tell you about All Dogs Go to Heaven, except that it had a blue cover and was set in dog heaven. I thought Asad borrowed it from me that day we sat down to write our novel together; months later when I asked him if I could have it back he said I never gave it to him. We never lied to each other about books – if one went missing we would say so – and so the disappearance of that novel is as mysterious as its appearance.
A few years ago, while writing something about All Dogs Go to Heaven I realized that I could go online and find a copy of it. How strange that the thought had never occurred to me before. It took some searching to uncover it – the unrelated Disney movie of the same name kept leaping into view instead – but I did finally track down a used copy of the novel, which was mine to buy at the click of a button. Reader, I did not buy it. I did not even attempt to remember the author’s name. It had come into my life when I needed it, made me into a writer, and disappeared again – life-changing and fleeting, like Aslan, like Peter Pan. I was and am content to leave it as such.
Ten Favourites, at this precise moment in time: Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino; Jazz, Toni Morrison; In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje; Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie; To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf; War and Peace, Tolstoy; Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson; Great Expectations, Charles Dickens; Meatless Days, Sara Suleri.
Recently, I came across a book by the British monk Gildas. It caught my eye, on a shelf, when I should have been doing something else. I opened it, and was suddenly in the presence of a man from the sixth century. He was speaking, directly to me, in the exact words that he had chosen more than a millennium ago, about the state of Britain after the collapse of the Roman Empire. Here it is, in translation:
I shall not follow the writings and records of my own country, which (if there were any of them) have been consumed by the fires of the enemy, or have accompanied my exiled countrymen into distant lands, but be guided by the relations of foreign writers, which being broken and interrupted in many places are therefore by no means clear.
He wrote as someone living at the very edge of the known world, one of the last literate men on a distant frontier, conscious of his limitations, and blindness, in a world that had slipped its moorings. He spoke in bewilderment, in distress. He seemed to be writing his sermon-history, as though putting it into a glass bottle, to be thrown from his sinking ship, unsure if anyone would ever read it. And then – fourteen hundred years later – I could.
Later, I found, on a shelf about my local area, an Anglo-Saxon poem about the collapse of a Roman city (‘The ruins fell, perished/shattered into mounds of stone, where formerly many a warrior/joyous and bright with gold, with splendour adorned/proud and flushed with wine, in war trappings shone’). Next, I discovered a Cumbrian lullaby, written in the seventh century, about hunting in the Lake District. Then, I came across Egil’s Saga, in which the tenth-century Norse hero, aged seven, kills a ten-year-old friend with an axe, because of a disagreement at a ball game. I was hearing voices still entirely fresh despite the gap of centuries – apparently undiluted by time, or by a fastidious editor, trying to mask the brutality of the age. They were originally written in four separate languages. And they revealed a period when each valley in the Lake District – near my home – had once been almost a separate nation: when Britain had contained more ethnic, linguistic and religious divisions than Yugoslavia. And yet, without ‘reading’ these rare texts (Gildas was the first British text, and the last for two hundred years), all such cultures would be almost irretrievable.
I began to understand why reading mattered, in part, because for twenty-one months I was functionally illiterate. Walking, twenty miles or so a day from Turkey to Bangladesh, I rarely carried a book, and when I learned Farsi, Urdu or Nepali, I did not learn the scripts, so I could not read. Neon advertisements in towns, calligraphy on ancient tiles, and police documents were equally mute to me. The majority of villagers with whom I stayed were also illiterate. In Afghanistan being besawad – illiterate – was an insult, used often by city-dwellers against rural people, and it implied stupidity; but in fact I found these illiterate people to be courteous, shrewd, and eloquent. I sensed why, in the late Roman period, people whose ancestors had been able to read and write ceased to do so. Reading, it seemed, wasn’t necessary for virtue, for effectiveness, or even, in Charlemagne’s case, for running the Holy Roman Empire. But I realized that I, the Afghan villagers and Charlemagne – being illiterate – could not engage in the same way with the languages and voices of the dead. An oral tradition, even relying on bards with astonishing memories, cannot replicate a shelf of books. Only reading can fully resurrect the minds of others.
Once you have taken possession of a book, you can inspect a writer’s mind, in all its shades and dimensions. You can establish a relationship, which would be intolerable to a living individual: you can wake the writer at three in the morning, switch her off in mid-sentence, insist she continues for six hours unbroken, skip, go back, repeat the same paragraph again and again, impertinently second-guessing her vocabulary, and metaphors, scrutinizing her structure and tricks.
But a book is not a genie bottle, and the writer is not a slave-mind under your command. The writer remains always autonomous, never quite obedient to your expectation or understanding. At first, you might flatter yourself that you have developed an indecorous intimacy. I have even fancied I had caught a reference which no one else had caught – as though George Eliot had shared a private joke, with me and only me, over a distance of a century. But when I tried to keep up with her, follow her into her most inaccessible passages, press my mind into hers, burrow into the ions and synapses of her sub-cervical cortex, I could never quite possess her.
The writer has from the start the advantage over the reader. Their minds are more perfected, and clarified over five hundred pages, than could ever be possible in a real encounter. If I were to meet Turgenev, I might be frustrated by his conversation – aware that he is not focused in that moment on the things that seem most interesting, is perhaps repeating an anecdote, rather than thinking. But reading, I can spend three days, with the most perfected version of his mind, where every sentence is an exact, considered, choice.
Sometimes, I have to change to understand a writer. (Thus, when I was fourteen, I decided that the most inspiring figure in the world was Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, and that Bazarov was the hero of Fathers and Sons – now I can’t even guess why I thought those things.) Sometimes, the writer is simply difficult. Why, for example, instead of ‘Kate Croy waited’, does Henry James begin The Wings of the Dove: ‘She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. It was at this point, however, that she remained . . .’? The prose is rebarbative but it is this very resistance that makes it enthralling.
Sometimes I sense that the writer is capable of things beyond anything I could imagine or attempt. Take Oblonsky waking up at the beginning of Anna Karenina. Tolstoy can seem essentially a kooky bearded refusenik, in a smock and home-made boots, earnestly imposing his peasant utopia on everyone that surrounded him. And yet he imagines Oblonsky as a sleek, pomaded and grinning society favourite, waking from a dream in which the decanters in a restaurant in America have become dancing-girls singing ‘I mio tesoro’. Oblonsky, we learn, had assumed his wife knew of his affair, and connived in it, and is horrified to discover that she was unaware and is now heart-broken. He is so good-humoured that everyone in the household takes his side, against his much better half. He cries, and is shaved, dispatches with competence and common sense his work at the office, shows compassion and understanding towards an awkward visitor, is guilty, troubled, rueful, and buoyant. How is Tolstoy – who would seem, from everything we know of him, to despise Oblonsky – able to make us love him?
Or to take a less canonical example: Peter Brown’s new preface to his biography of St Augustine. You can follow the author, as he moves from a memory of a swimming pool in California, to a swimming pool in Cairo, somehow reminded of late Roman Christianity in both locations. You can observe his systematic criticism of his own work, his confession of how much he simplified or misunderstood as a young writer, and his push for a more testing idea of what he might still achieve. And you realize you are in the presence of a mind which makes tough choices on when not to be erudite, whose imagination is poignant: a mind which is resilient, generous to other scholars, and intelligently liberal. And then, there are the moments of fellow-feeling. Just as I conclude Brown is capable of things beyond anything I could imagine or attempt, he settles on a phrase of Foucault, which is also my favourite phrase, and we can recite it for a moment in unison: ‘After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowingness and not, in one way or another, and to the extent possible, in the knower’s straying afield of himself?’
I am, I think, jealous of people who find pleasure in reading, and find this pleasure easy to describe. I am uncomfortable thinking of reading as a pleasure. (I read many thrillers very quickly, but they feel always a bit like fast food, never ultimately satisfying.) And I read so much, that I sometimes worry I am reading when I should be living.
Reading for me is about a relationship with a writer who might be elusive, even intimidating. Reading can make me become a better version of myself, in contact with a finer mind. It is an unstable relationship in which sometimes I, as the reader, can play the tyrant – even fling the book across the room, or close it for ever – but the writer is always more splendid and more autonomous than I. Reading is the love and resurrection of better minds.
Peter Brown, St Augustine; V. S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness; King Lear; Egil’s Saga; Erich Auerbach, Mimesis; T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets; Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy; Philip Roth, American Pastoral; G. K. Chesterton, Father Brown; Leo Tolstoy, Haji Murat.
Beside my bed is a wicker basket full of raggedy children’s books which I inherited from my grandmother. It is the first possession I would rescue in a fire. Granny had suffered from childhood polio, she broke her back as a teenager and had the first of her seven children when she was nineteen, so by the time I knew her she was fairly immobile. When she was not careering about in her little blue Mini (wicker basket on the passenger seat), she was mostly settled in the high-backed sofa of her Somerset house. She faced the fire and a long coffee table filled with all the things she would need during the day. Her wooden sticks were used for hooking more than for walking. Next to the fire, under her shelf of photo albums, was the wicker basket.
I have no idea how many hours I spent cocooned in that sofa, leaning against her shoulder, turning pages when she nodded. From time to time today, I lift each book carefully out of the basket and leaf through pages which smell just the same as they always did. Les Malheurs de Sophie with its cracked spine: I remember Granny translating as she read while I looked at line drawings of Sophie and her wax doll and wondered which of my aunts had coloured in the pictures so badly. Le Bon Toto et le méchant Tom: I think we both preferred Tom, for all that he was so méchant. Ameliaranne Stiggins, Uncle Remus, Mr Buffin, Babar the Elephant, Edward Ardizzone, Shirley Hughes. Granny and I spent many happy hours with Alfie and Brer Rabbit and the rest and in so many of those early books the illustrations are what I remember now. It cut both ways, as my grandmother knew. We read Struwwelpeter, but the most frightening of the pictures she had carefully cut out with nail scissors. And then there are the books still in my parents’ house. I remember Mum, perched on the side of my bed, reading me Ernest and Celestine and Little Bear and Where the Wild Things Are. As far as I recall none of those had many words at all, but books became and have remained vital. Being without a book on a tube or bus induces a feeling of panic.
At home, my father used to read to me in the drawing room, the one room we were not normally allowed in. Looking back on it, I cannot imagine how he or Mum found so much time. We read E. Nesbit’s Psammead series, Our Island Story, The Sword in the Stone. He would read long past my bedtime, while I tried hard not to look at the gold clock on the mantelpiece in case it drew his attention to the fact. When he chose The Hobbit I tended to skip ahead to the end of the recto page and then daydream. My heart did sink slightly when he produced the Lord of the Rings, which was even longer. It would never have occurred to me to tell him I found the story dull – and in any case I so loved being curled up with him, he could have read the phone book and I’d have been content. In retrospect, I suppose Tolkien taught me a valuable lesson about beginning to develop and notice my own literary taste.
So being read to was one kind of pleasure, but soon came the great freedom of being able to read at one’s own pace. I remember the endless panics my sister Liza and I had rushing to turn off the light whenever we heard a creaking floorboard. Arthur Ransome’s We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea was the first book I stayed up all night to finish before going blurry-eyed to school. Like so many children I adored series. My brother’s generous godfather, Davo, gave him the entire series of Tintin for his birthday and I read and reread them endlessly. Between the ages of about eight and eleven all my pocket money went on buying all the Just William books which I still think are the greatest comic writing in the English language. They are the first books I pick up when I am ill or unhappy. Despite Ransome’s Peggy and Nancy, it was soon clear that being a girl was going to be a disadvantage in life. I had no desire to be of the same sex as Titty and Susan, or Pollyanna, or any of the Little Women – even Jo. I was endlessly given What Katy Did as a present – every birthday from about seven to twelve and, ungrateful child that I was, I quickly decided that I didn’t care at all what she did, or what she did next. (Although I didn’t mind the first one until she falls off a swing and is paralysed, after which she becomes an interminable saintly bore.)
Making up stories for my younger siblings, or reading ‘real’ stories, became a source of great pleasure for me, if not them. Like most children we most enjoyed the books in which all the parents had disappeared: The Children Who Lived in a Barn, Ballet Shoes, Northern Lights. Rudyard Kipling was the first to make me think about voice. Granny and Dad had both read me the Just So Stories, and I’d assumed they were ad-libbing all the ‘best beloved’ parts. It was only when I came to read them to my younger siblings and we all fell about giggling at me calling them beloved, that I realized my mistake. For the first time I was aware of the author, another presence in all this. Until then I had vaguely assumed that Granny had in fact secretly written the Noel Streatfeild books. How could anyone else have been involved in our private adventures at The House in Cornwall? How else could she have known what I’d like to read? I went through an Agatha Christie phase about this time. There is one, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, in which (spoiler alert) the narrator is the killer. I found this oddly spine-tingling. Not for the story, so much as for the sense that Christie had disobeyed the rules; there is a contract with the reader which she had broken. In the correct hands – Ian McEwan’s for example – tricksiness can still exhilarate.
There were many books which made me want to write. My best friend Tanya and I spent hours filling exercise books with our own versions of the Swallows and Amazons tales. Like Carroll’s Alice we believed in lots of illustrations and conversations. Also as many chapters as possible, each one starting on a new page and neatly underlined in red. I don’t remember what we wrote, but I do remember the satisfaction of filling the paper. Then there were the books which made me want to be a writer. I never liked Anne of Green Gables, but L. M. Montgomery’s Emily of New Moon with its aspiring writer heroine was the first to make me want to be anyone other than William Brown or Tintin.
I think that is one of the wonders of reading as a child. You inhabit the books. In the course of a week I followed a yeti in Tibet, discovered a secret garden in Yorkshire, lived with my miniature family in the skirting boards, watched Aslan die and wreaked havoc with Pippi Longstocking. Michelle Magorian’s Good Night, Mr Tom was the first book I read which I finished (in tears) and then turned back to the first page to start again. I had to wait for Anna Karenina to have that experience again. Now I find however absorbed in a book I am, it’s often on the outside. If forced to select favourite books I choose the exceptions to this rule by George Eliot, Jane Austen or Tolstoy.
The Wind in the Willows was the subject of my first literary disagreement. Mrs Marani, a fiercely brilliant teacher at my primary school, taught me about owning an opinion. She argued with us, aged ten, as though we were adults. When I told her I liked The Wind in the Willows she had a rant about anthropomorphism. ‘Look it up,’ she shouted crossly. I did, and considered. It had never particularly occurred to me to discriminate. I just read, anything and everything. Except Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl whom my parents forbade (so with hideous literary snobbishness, I looked down on those of my friends reading Mallory Towers and The Twits without having a clue why). I knew that Dad loved The Wind in the Willows. He thought (and thinks) the Piper at the Gates of Dawn chapter a work of genius. Who to pick? I suggested to Mrs Marani that it wasn’t a fair criticism: you could not like or dislike all books about animals. I explained why I liked The Wind in the Willows but not Watership Down. She disagreed vehemently and then told me I’d made a good argument. It began to make me into a more discriminating reader, but I suppose it was also the beginning of the end of perfect pleasure.
About the age of eleven or twelve those who are lucky make the transition into reading adult books. I had some wonderful schoolteachers who, in various unorthodox ways, helped me make that jump. An English teacher, Mr Fletcher, spent all the lessons for an entire year reading aloud first Cider with Rosie and then Saki short stories. I reread Laurie Lee’s memoir recently and was disappointed but at the time I adored it. Another teacher gave us copies of Heaney and Hughes’s The Rattlebag and one lesson a week was devoted to copying poems out of it, as neatly as we could, and illustrating them. Now as a teacher, I recognize this was not particularly sound, pedagogically speaking, for twelve-year-olds, but it opened up the world of poetry to me. Eliza Coutts, who taught us history, had a technique I stole when I became a history teacher. During the course of a lesson about the First World War she told us to read Birdsong. Minutes later she took it back with much panic-stricken hand flapping. ‘Goodness no, it’s full of sex. You mustn’t tell your parents.’ Needless to say we all went straight to the library. Sex of course was a great incentive for reading as a teenager. The Chamomile Lawn, which probably I read too young, alerted me to the fact that I could be reading about astonishing new topics like incest while adults looked on with benign approval.
Several years ago I founded a charity, First Story, with the author William Fiennes. I was a teacher in what is euphemistically known as a challenging secondary school. My students were talented, smart, funny kids but they did not read much – or at least not for pleasure. I don’t think that this was necessarily because they were, economically speaking, from deprived backgrounds. I think a lot of teenagers lose the habit of reading. But these teenagers felt detached from the world of reading and writing in a way that depressed me. From the way they spoke and talked it was clear that they did not feel books belonged to them. I remember we asked Gautam Malkani to come and read from his novel Londonstani which starts with a fight written in the vernacular. At the end I remember one of my students, Satwinder, saying: ‘But miss, I didn’t know you were allowed to write like that!’ Over time Satwinder, like all the students we’ve worked with since, began to find his own voice, and in doing so his place in the world.
Having worked with teenagers for the past twelve years I have come to believe that pleasures of reading and writing are closely bound to one another. As a small child I knew that each book I read had been produced for me. Richmal Crompton (who was certainly not a woman) had me in mind when writing about William Brown. One of the interesting things about First Story is how writing each week encourages students to read more. They begin with reading each other’s work and (with the help of Give a Book) they move out from there. They get closer to the joyful sense I had so often as a child and that I have still with Middlemarch or Persuasion: how extraordinary – but this book was written for me!
Favourite books are as much an inheritance track as an act of literary discrimination. From my mother: Persuasion by way of Emil and the Detectives and Antonia White. From my father: The Leopard and Tristram Shandy by way of Puck of Pook’s Hill. From both the assumption that reading is essential, like breathing. Beyond this, my approach to an impossible task was to select books which I’ve read many times before and which I expect to read many more times. Apart from Just William, and perhaps Wodehouse, they are books which seem to change as I grow older. William I hope will stay the same for ever.
Middlemarch, George Eliot; Galahad at Blandings, P. G. Wodehouse; Can You Forgive Her?, Anthony Trollope; Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen; William the Pirate, Richmal Crompton; Collected Short Stories, Anton Chekhov; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Alice Munro; Antony and Cleopatra, William Shakespeare; The Prelude, William Wordsworth; Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy.
Some of my childhood books are still in my possession. Many of them have strict injunctions penned in the flyleaves to ‘Please Be Cafle With This Book’ and ‘PLEASE DO NOT TEAR’, which gives a sense of the importance I attached to them. Even so a few are, regrettably, a little torn.
My childhood can be dangerous territory. It is not a complete circuit but has a break in it, the place where, aged seven, I suddenly lost my mother. Maybe this is why I was so concerned that things should be handled with care. When I think about the books I read and what they gave me, I think about this loss and the work a book can do, at the right moment, to transport you away from something unbearable or, at a different moment – when you’re ready to bear it – take you back to it.
Not that I thought about any of this then. Maybe the point of reading is not to have to think or, rather, to think in a way that is so guided and concentrated it becomes a kind of meditation. I’ve always done a lot of reading. Recently the mother of a friend I’ve known since I was small recalled that when we were nine or ten our class were asked how many books we’d read over the summer holidays, and I said I had read twenty-eight!
First there were the talking animals: Squirrel Nutkin, Mrs Tiggy-Winkle (thank goodness for the internet, for a moment I thought she was called Mrs Tiddlywinks); Winnie-the-Pooh . . . There was a great book about a family of pandas or maybe they were koalas (Google tells me this was Bread and Jam for Frances by Russell Hoban, and that ‘bread and jam for frances what kind of animal is frances’ is a popular search. Badger, in fact). There was no such ambiguity in Frog and Toad Tales, in which the gloomy and misanthropic Toad is always having to be cheered up by his more upbeat friend Frog – this was probably a familiar dynamic to me even then. ‘“Toad, Toad!” shouted Frog. “Wake up, it is spring!” “Blah,” said a voice from inside the house.’ My much-sellotaped copy seems to have been given to me by a family friend who inscribed it: ‘Child, Stand no nonsense!’ (I was the kind of child who was often being called ‘Child!’ because I was an only one surrounded by intellectuals who thought this would be an amusing thing to do. I guess it was.)
Children are often given very grown-up tasks in children’s books. They go off on important missions and their parents are frequently absent or dead. If this is so that children from intact families can safely play out frightening scenarios, I don’t know what it means for the ones who have already experienced those scenarios in real life. Some books that kept me entertained then would terrify me now; like The Secret Garden, which opens with a ten-year-old girl in India waking up to discover that her parents and all their servants have died of cholera. Or Maurice Sendak’s Outside Over There. ‘Ida’s father was away at sea . . .’ it begins (scary enough); meanwhile Sendak’s beautiful but nightmarish illustrations show us Ida’s little sister being stolen by goblins and replaced with a replica baby made of ice. This is the kind of reading that Kafka was probably thinking of when he said: ‘The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune . . . that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation.’ I don’t think those are the kinds of books I need.
Somewhere beyond or among the talking animals, the stolen babies and dead parents, I found out that what I really wanted was to be growing up in America; and my long-standing commitment to American literature began. Someone gave me a copy of Eloise by Kay Thompson and Hilary Knight, a wry illustrated book about a little girl who lives in the Plaza Hotel in New York with her nanny, her dog Weenie and turtle Skipperdee. Eloise is that thing that characters in children’s books often are: ‘irrepressible’. ‘We have a buzzer on our front door / I always lean on it / That’s how Nanny knows it’s me / ELOISE.’ (For some reason the text is laid out as if it’s poetry. Which it is, in a way.)
Around the same time I was reading Little Women and What Katy Did, books I was a big fan of but whose moral stance I was already finding hard to gulp down; in Little Women everyone’s favourite tomboy Jo March is eventually tamed into a ‘good wife’ by the paternally mansplainy Professor Bhaer (Jo’s refusal of Laurie’s advances remains one of the greatest romantic tragedies of my life), while in What Katy Did Katy Carr, queen of ‘scrapes’, is delivered of her waywardness and unto saintliness once she loses the use of her legs in an accident. Because I was myself a very well-behaved little girl, I wanted to read about girls who were not. Maybe I wanted to be reassured that it was possible to break the rules and be all right.
Then I discovered Anastasia Krupnik. Anastasia is not really a rulebreaker, but she’s the bolder, more outspoken self any shy, bookish child might dream of becoming. The journal-writing daughter of a poet–academic and an artist, Anastasia is proud to have a wart on her thumb (‘it’s the loveliest colour I’ve ever seen in a wart!’ says her mother) and a goldfish called Frank. When she is asked to come up with a name for her imminent little brother, she secretly writes down ‘the most terrible name she could think of’, which turns out to be ‘One-Ball Reilly’. Anastasia’s creator, Lois Lowry, has said that the inspiration for Anastasia came from the daughter of President Jimmy Carter, Amy: ‘There was this one time when this very solemn interviewer asked 10-year-old Amy, “Do you have one message to give to the children of the world?” and she said, “No!”’
Another favourite from this era of my life is From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (maybe one of the best titles ever conceived) by E. L. Konigsburg. The heroine is eleven-year-old Claudia Kincaid, who decides to run away from home and plans her mission meticulously over several weeks, saving up her pocket money by skipping hot fudge sundaes. It’s the kind of running away a nervous, organized little girl could get on board with; for a start, there’s a destination – ‘a large place, a comfortable place [Claudia doesn’t like discomfort], an indoor place, and preferably a beautiful place’: the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Once they get there, Claudia and her little brother Jamie (selected as her companion because of his own ability to save money) develop an elaborate routine to elude detection, spending their days attaching themselves to school groups wandering around the museum and their nights sleeping in the collection’s sixteenth-century beds. If you want to know how the amazing Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler comes into it, you’ll have to read the book.
As an adult I still like coming-of-age stories in all their iterations (isn’t ‘coming of age’ a permanent condition, really?): Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore; A Boy’s Own Story by Edmund White; The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides; Alice Walker’s The Color Purple; Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina; Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls; Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia; and the classics of the genre, obviously, The Catcher in the Rye and The Bell Jar.
Certain books I read during adolescence are lodged in me somewhere deep down and are not always easy to access, so that trying to summon them up initiates a kind of queasiness. I was obsessed with the frankly sleazy books of Virginia Andrews, who wrote popular gothic romances heavy on the incest – in the most famous, Flowers in the Attic, the blonde, blue-eyed Dollanganger children are hidden away in an ‘airless attic’ by their grandmother who is slowly poisoning them with arsenic sprinkled on doughnuts. Here’s a summary of one of Andrews’s novels, My Sweet Audrina (which by the way, Wikipedia says, was ‘the only standalone book without incest published during Andrews’ lifetime’): ‘The story features diverse real-world subjects such as brittle bone disease, rape, post-traumatic stress disorder, diabetes and autism in the haunting setting of a Victorian era mansion near the fictitious River Lyle.’ I must have been a lot braver back then; I’ve attempted a few times, out of curiosity, to reread Flowers in the Attic as an adult, but I always end up shutting the cover very decisively after scanning the first few lines and wedging it back on the bookshelf. But the aura of Virginia must have stayed with me because I’ve found it hovering over some of my poems. I have one called ‘Sweet Arlene’ about a group of sisters being oppressively ‘cared for’ by a demonic older woman – which all sounds a bit familiar, I realise now.
As a child I was more interested in stories than in poems, until I realized that poems could also be stories. When I was nine or ten I was given by my godmother an elegant edition of the classic anthology Other Men’s Flowers. It was a grown-up gift that required grown-up treatment. Unfortunately I wrote something on the flyleaf that I later deemed to be embarrassingly juvenile and tore out. Many of the poems in it were over my head, but I discovered the calming practice of incantation and there were some I read aloud many times. I liked the dark ones best – Poe’s ‘Annabel Lee’ (‘That the wind came out of a cloud one night, / Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee’), Wilde’s ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ and Keats’s creepiest poem, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. So that was the kind of child I was, earnestly reciting poems about imprisoned and tormented people in my dusty attic bedroom . . . alone and palely loitering.
Don’t worry, I had a sense of humour too.
What I remember reading is what it suits me to remember. Nowadays I read slightly fewer novels, a lot more poetry and the occasional memoir or biography. I like reading biographies of writers because it reassures me to find out how mad everyone is. Then I think, oh, maybe I’ll be okay then.
While I don’t personally want books to act on me ‘like a misfortune’, I’ve retained my interest in the darker side of literature and in gothic, troubled characters. I recently discovered Carson McCullers, who immediately became one of my favourite writers because everything she writes – often about the intense romantic infatuations of lonely outsiders – gets to that place where something painful becomes something beautiful.
Otherwise, I struggle with choosing ‘favourites’ because I feel like you need to be at least ten years beyond something to know whether it’s stuck; but I will mention a few other books/writers that have meant something to me at various points: Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin; Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel; John Berryman’s Dream Songs; Anne Carson; Lydia Davis; Joan Didion; Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan; That They May Face the Rising Sun by John McGahern; Toni Morrison; Frank O’Hara; Ariel by Sylvia Plath; ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ by Herman Melville; David Foster Wallace; the anthologies Emergency Kit: Poems for Strange Times and The Horse Has Six Legs (Charles Simic’s translations of Serbian poetry).
I suppose for me the ‘pleasure of reading’ is in feeling safe. Safe because the act of reading can be containing (and I always feel safest in a bookshop or a library) but also because when you read something that speaks to you, it’s a reminder that everything, even and especially the hardest things, has a precedent. So you’re not alone, not ‘lost in a forest’ after all.
The thing about books: you get a bit carried away. One minute you’re four years old, you’ve snuck into your Nan’s bed first thing and she’s teaching you a poem about yellow bananas while the Teasmaid starts up. Next thing you know, you’re fourteen, doing your best to cram a cardboard cut-out of a hippogriff into the back of your mum’s Corsa. That feels like a good place to start.
It was the last week of the summer holidays, my mum was dragging me into Hull, to British Home Stores, to get some new grey trousers ready for starting back at school. I wasn’t keen. Probably I was huffing quite a lot. On the way up Jameson Street though we passed Waterstones and my heart skipped a beat. They were dismantling their Harry Potter window display. I couldn’t believe my luck.
All summer, they’d had an amazing cardboard cut-out of Harry and Hermione flying off into the moonlight on Buckbeak’s back. Buckbeak was a hippogriff, a winged horse with the head and body of an eagle. He played a very important part in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which I’d read at least seven times since June. The cardboard cut-out of him looked immense, properly noble – you could see each individually painted feather and feel magical courage coming off him in big, empowering wafts. But they’d taken him down. I begged my mum to go in and ask if they’d still got him, if they were chucking him out, if we could have him. I fibbed a bit, said it was just a very small, very easy-to-carry, very roll-uppable poster. My poor mum wasn’t fussed about hippogriffs, she just wanted to get me some school trousers, quickly, before we got a parking ticket, but in she went, heroically, and struggled back out again a couple of minutes later with Buckbeak. His wings were massive – five foot across, at least – they got caught in the security barrier, then the double door, then he was free, free at last and mine to keep. My fourteen-year-old life was complete. Mum was a bit less thrilled. If I wanted him, she said, I’d have to lug him round Hull all afternoon. I did. On just about every street corner he caught a gust of wind and sent me flying. At one point I got trapped behind him, totally lodged in the changing room of BHS, and had to shout for help. I was only in my pants. Still though, I wasn’t fussed. Everything’s different when you’re in love. And I absolutely loved Harry Potter.
That’s not true, actually – I didn’t love Harry. I loved Hagrid, Professor Sprout, the Weasleys, especially Mrs, and Albus Dumbledore. Harry was always a bit preoccupied with the plot, and I’ve never really got the hang of plots. A good character though – funny and sad and trying their best – feels like making a proper friend. Paddington, the BFG, the entire population of the Hundred Acre Wood – I knew as I was reading them we were in it for the long haul. I loved Dickon and Martha in The Secret Garden, Laura in The Wreck of the Zanzibar and Andy in The Suitcase Kid. My absolute favourite though was Mildred Hubble, officially The Worst Witch. I was (still am) quite a hopeless farmer’s son – the only job I ever managed not to mess up was standing in a gap, stopping the cows escaping, like a sort of lanky bollard. Even that was hit-and-miss. Reading about Mildred Hubble gave me hope. She had messy plaits and trailing shoelaces, she fell off her broomstick and couldn’t do potions but her heart was in the right place and somehow, in the end, she’d be all right, cheerfully eating crumpets with an elderly wizard she’d rescued from the school pond. Jill Murphy’s writing was full of heart and mischief. I absolutely loved it.
As I got a bit older, I got more into Penguin Classics. Partly because they took a bit of reading, partly because I was quite earnest, and partly because they cost a pound – even less if they turned up at jumble sales, which they did. My heroes were Jo March – awkward and spirited, making massive clangers, wearing a dodgy hat to write in when everyone was asleep – and Lizzie Bennett – people-watching with a twinkle in her eye, and loving a good dance. I especially liked how, just by being themselves, they both got their hunks in the end. That felt quite important at the time. I really wanted a hunk.
I grew up in a tiny village called Kilnsea, in East Yorkshire. It is quite beautiful in a windswept, falling- in-the-sea sort of a way, but very isolated. As a joke, my dad’s friends would address his birthday cards to ‘The Edge of Hell’. They always arrived. Still though: lovely sunsets. Living so far off the beaten track meant that I didn’t really know or see anybody who was gay, apart from me, and it wasn’t the easiest thing to talk about. As with most things in my life, Hull Central Library came to the rescue. After school I’d stay in town late – I’d got a bus pass and a library card, anything could happen. Mostly I just borrowed books though. I’d try most things – libraries are very low-risk – which is how I ended up reading (and rereading, hundreds of times) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, J. D. Salinger’s short stories and I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. Stunning. One day there was a display for LGBT history month. I hovered nearby, pretending to be looking at Popular Psychology, waited till no one was about then grabbed Two Weeks with the Queen by Morris Gleitzman. I’m really, really glad I did. It was a genuinely funny, open-hearted and properly moving story about a lad called Colin trying to find a doctor who can help his brother to recover from leukaemia. Colin ends up befriending a gay couple, Ted and Griff, who are struggling too. It’s a sad story, but full of hope and jokes, and in Ted and Griff’s love for each other and Colin’s uncomplicated acceptance of them, my worried, fifteen-year-old self took a lot of heart. I started it on the bus home, stayed up as late as I could manage that night once I’d done my geography coursework – limestone pavements, I know – then finished it on the bus next morning. I could’ve kissed that book. Ten years later, I wandered down Marchmont Street into Gay’s The Word bookshop, my absolute favourite place in London, got a cheery welcome and saw shelf after shelf of brilliant books – Quentin Crisp, Jackie Kay, David Sedaris, A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr and Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader. It felt like coming home. I’m very grateful to Hull Central Library for setting me off on the way.
My family all relied on the library. My dad liked reading all sorts – Dick Francis, Angela’s Ashes, Annie Proulx. One summer he read Round Ireland with a Fridge then we bundled into his Sierra and headed for the ferry at Holyhead. We didn’t take a fridge. Mum was mostly into Mills and Boons. She read the end first, to check it was happy, then read the rest to check it wasn’t too rude to pass on to my Nan. Ruth, my sister, loved Marian Keyes. It was the mixture of romance and baking. She also lent me Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging by Louise Rennison on a gloomy teenage day, accidentally giving me the funniest book I have ever read (I kept it – she didn’t mind). I got to read some stunning books at uni too – To the Lighthouse, The Canterbury Tales, John Donne’s Songs and Sonnets, Keats, the Ranters’ pamphlets and everything by Shakespeare that involved a fool, a fairy or Falstaff. The degree bit felt like three years of missing the point, but getting all those voices off my bookshelf and into my head did me the world of good. Which, in fairness, was probably the point. I trudged my way through finals – ‘for what the world thinks of that ejaculation – I would not give a groat,’ Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy – and headed back to Kilnsea, to wash up in my mum’s café for a bit. It ended up being four years – my mum’s very patient.
One day there was an ad in the Yorkshire Post for the West Yorkshire Playhouse’s new writing course. You didn’t have to have written a play before, which was ideal – I’d written quite a sad poem about the Humber estuary, a haiku about hummus, and nothing else – and it was free. My mum said I should go for it. She knew how much I wanted to be a writer – I’d spent the past few months sitting in the corner reading books by Dan Rhodes and Barbara Pym (Gold and Excellent Women were my favourites) and sighing. I applied for the course last-minute, and – thank goodness – got on.
Everyone there was thoughtful and full of stories. It was lush. On the train back from Leeds that night I wrote my first joke, about a Mini Milk, and realized this was the exact thing I wanted to be doing for as long as I possibly could. I borrowed some plays – thank you again, Hull Library – read Talent by Victoria Wood, Wit by Margaret Edson, A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney, Comedians by Trevor Griffiths, Waiting for the Telegram by Alan Bennett, Bed by Jim Cartwright – all soulful and scruffy and brimming with life. I sent a script to a theatre company in London called Paines Plough, where I got to work with brilliant directors, met real-life actual playwrights, saw some properly good theatre – If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet by Nick Payne, You Can See the Hills by Matthew Dunster, The Aliens by Annie Baker – and started to find my feet a bit. I watched The Muppets, Gavin & Stacey and The Royle Family, looked at Quentin Blake’s illustrations, Beryl Cook’s paintings and Jeremy Deller’s tea stall, listened to the lyrics of Pulp and Belle and Sebastian and Dolly Parton and The Smiths, and started seeking out photography books – The Caravan Gallery’s Is Britain Great? series, Martin Parr’s The Non-Conformists, A Day Off by Tony Ray-Jones and Sefton Samuels’s Northerners. I wrote down things people said and things people didn’t say, stuff I’d just spotted or remembered. In Mike Bradwell’s The Reluctant Escapologist I learned about the sort of theatre I wanted to make, and Joan Littlewood’s autobiography Joan’s Book was like a radiator, a suit of armour and a proper adventure, all at once. It is the longest book I’ve ever read. I loved it all.
A Taste of Honey, Shelagh Delaney; Joan’s Book, Joan Littlewood; The Worst Witch, Jill Murphy; Excellent Women, Barbara Pym; Gold, Dan Rhodes; Talent, Victoria Wood; Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging, Louise Rennison; The House at Pooh Corner, A. A. Milne; The Santaland Diaries, David Sedaris; I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith.