‘BEWARE OF wishing for anything in youth, because you will get it in middle age.’ Goethe said that and it’s not worth both parts of Faust. Last year I became music critic of one journal and theatre critic of another. I think, if I’d tried hard enough, I could also have been appointed gastronomic critic for one of the glossy man-about-town fripperies. What a dream for a young man – free entrée to all the theatres, concert halls and restaurants of London. But the fulfilment has to come when the appetite is blunted, the stomach queasy and the ear or brain quickly bored.
Ignorance and poverty are the best condiments for the great feast of the world, but the inexperienced and poor are never invited to it. Books are part of the feast, and when I was young I slavered for them. I can get books now but, inevitably, I don’t want them anymore, I seem to have finished with reading.
That’s not strictly true, since after the long day’s writing, I can’t get to sleep without the drug of print. But the prescription has varied little in 10 years. I read miniature scores of orchestral works I know well, Boswell, espionage, Joyce, and what has been called the drowsy, mellifluous twaddle of the worst Elizabethan prose. Sometimes, for real soporific, I reread something of my own. And, whatever I read, I experience the guilt of knowing I should be reading something else – something to improve my mind, fill in old gaps, render me up-to-date.
The up-to-date part worries me least, because, if anybody at a party asks me if I’ve read So-and-so, I can always counter with: No, but I’ve read Such-and-such; have you? Such-and-such is somebody I make up on the spot, plot and characters and all. It is sometimes less wearisome to fabricate imaginary contemporaries than to read real ones.
But the guilt about the gap-filling and mind-improving cannot be shrugged off. And it cannot be palliated with the knowledge that I’ve read certain books that other people haven’t. I’ve read Don Quixote right through in English and I know by heart the opening sentence in the original: ‘En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme…’ I’ve read the Papus treatise on the Tarot cards, which T.S. Eliot never did, at least before he wrote The Waste Land. I’ve read most of Ben Jonson and the first volume of The Anatomy of Melancholy. I’ve read Hemingway’s Fiesta in German. I’ve read three Sherlock Holmes stories in the Indonesian language. I’ve read (with a crib and with difficulty) the Persian verses of Omar Khayyam. But I’ve not read Jane Austen.
I wish I had read Jane Austen. I wish I’d done the job in my youth (as I did the job of reading Virgil) and thus got it over. My wife is a Janeite, like William Burroughs, and perhaps I feel that, man and wife being one flesh, there is no point in duplication. But that won’t really do since marriage is supposed to be a business of shared pleasures. Sometimes my wife quizzes me on the names of Jane Austen’s characters, and I can get a lot of them right now (the Bennet sisters are Elizabeth, Jane, Mary, Lydia and Kitty). I have also seen the film of Pride and Prejudice, with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier, scripted by Aldous Huxley, and I have a very clear idea of what Mr Collins looks like. But I know only the surface of Jane Austen, the vital statistics my wife has drilled me in, the odd-remembered line from a radio adaptation, a general impression of high-waisted dresses and genteel parsonage flirtation. This is shameful and hopeless, and I can do nothing about it. There is a very good edition of the novels in our house-library, but the time for my opening any of them is gone.
Why? Is it not ‘never too late’? Yes, it is. There was a period in my life when I could well have had my sensibility modified by what I understand to be the gentle elegance, sometimes gently barbed, of Jane Austen. But now, having formed my sensibility a different way, I recognise that I can gain no pleasure from serious reading (I would evidently have to take Jane Austen seriously) that lacks a strong male thrust, an almost pedantic allusiveness, and a brutal intellectual content.
I think I would take it further and doubt whether I could ever approach any woman writer – a woman writer, that is, who exploited her femininity – with any real hope of joyful enlightenment. The Chinese Taoists posit (if Comrade Mao still permits) a universe in which the yin (a female principle) battles endlessly with the yang (or male principle). There is even a Chinese disease, sometimes fatal, in which the male sufferer believes that he is being set upon by the yin, so that the emblems of his sex shrink fearfully into his belly. I think I suffer from this disease. I’m frightened of submitting to a woman author (all reading is an act of submission). Where I can record exceptions I can adduce plausible enough explanations. Harriet Beecher Stowe? Outraged motherhood, protective rather than devouring. Ivy Compton-Burnett? A big sexless nemesis force. George Eliot? The male impersonation is wholly successful.
But (how cussed can one get?) I find in my reading gaps a fair number of writers who are very notably yang. In other words, the fear of having my head shorn is only half the story. I have not read Sir Walter Scott, the man who opposed the big bow-wow to the Austen delicacy. It is possible that his yang is so thoroughgoing that it becomes a parody of itself, something made by a yin personality. All that chivalry, treachery, romantic contrivance reminds one of the day-dream stuff of the Japanese Tale of Genji, which was written by a woman. I could not tackle any Scott now, though for my sins, about seven years ago, I had to teach an abridged edition of Ivanhoe to a mixed class of Malays, Chinese, Tamils and reformed headhunters. I also saw the film of Ivanhoe, with Ava Gardner, and thought that it must be superior to the novel.
But as with Jane Austen, I wish I had romped through Scott in my youth, as I romped through H.G. Wells’s sociological novels (never again) and that ghastly Forsyte Saga. One ought to have had the experience of childish absorption in a teller of rattling good yarns (Fenimore Cooper, John Buchan, Henty) before maturity set in like rigor mortis. And, to go right back to the nursery stage, one ought to have had bloody Christopher Robin and that Pooh thing and The Wind in the Willows. I bought the latter book quite recently and was in fact disturbed by a rat and a mole sharing a picnic-basket full of chicken and ham. And I was worried about a toad riding in an automobile. I also couldn’t cope with illustrations that cut nothing down to size, so that a real horse was being pulled by a couple of real rodents. Middle-age is not the period for suspending the particular kind of disbelief that has no part in primal innocence.
I feel certain conclusions coming on and, before I have really concluded, I had better voice them. First, the adult relation to books is one of absorbing rather than being absorbed. In youth, a book is a door: you enter, you surrender everything, you are gladly lost. In middle-age, you want to hold on to your own identity, to consume, to use, to carve a book like a joint and ingest it to feed that identity. But, by the usual human paradox, that identity couldn’t have come into existence at all unless it had been moulded, early in life, by others. So youth is the time for submission to books that can’t be enjoyed except by submission. And yet, by the usual human irony, youth believes that certain reading tasks can be put off till later in life: ‘Some day I shall read Josephus, the whole of Gibbon, all Freud.’ That, anyway, is the undergraduate’s vow.
But the time for surrender to a big author always comes when the will to surrender is gone. To start reading Dickens or Shakespeare for the first time in middle-age would be like Gauguin discovering he had to be a painter or Saul that he had to be Paul. To turn into a saint (whom I take to be one who surrenders his own personality to a greater) should be a transformation reserved to youth, before marriage, children, a house, furniture, set ways come along and the only foreseeable change is a sea-change.
Second, it is very common only to wish to read a book when you don’t possess it. For years I wanted to read The Cloud of Unknowing, but I never came across a copy. Yet I eagerly read a good deal about that mystical work and took in, obliquely, much of its content. In Kota Bharu, north-eastern Malaya, I went into a Chinese mahjong den, saw a book-case in the corner, examined it, and found that it contained two books only, one of which was The Cloud of Unknowing. A mystery never to be solved. I stole that book and took it back to England. Needless to say, I have never opened it. And I know I never shall. The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
When I had to get my William Faulkner out of the public library, I read him avidly. Now I have a set of him on my shelves, and the desire to reread him grows weaker all the time. If I didn’t have Edmund Spenser’s works I’d cry with frustration at not having read The Fairie Queene. Well the Fairie Queene is waiting there for me and, for all I care, she can go on waiting. Only with a real woman is possession an act of enjoyment; with books it’s Confederate money, Czarist rubles – a ghost of wealth.
During the war an army sergeant spoke to me earnestly of the value of education. He told me of the time he had been in prison and of how he had beguiled the long stretch by reading the works of Sir Francis Bacon. ‘And,’ he said, ‘If I ever go to prison again I’ll get down to reading Thomas Hobbes. Reading’s a wonderful thing.’ So it is when you’ve already done it, or when you propose to do it. It’s the doing of it that’s painful. Reading is rather like writing.
New York Times, 4 December 1966