Stop What You’re Doing and Read This! (3 page)

The poems in the
Birthday Letters
are intensely personal. ‘Remember how we picked the daffodils?’ one poem begins. ‘Nobody else remembers, but I remember.’ The memory is his alone. But by recording it as he does, in moving detail, he lets the rest of us in on it, and deepens our understanding of love, hope, grief and loss.

Poetry is associated with profundity – with the uttering of thoughts that lie too deep for tears. Perhaps that’s why some readers feel scared by poetry: they worry they’ll be out of their depth. But not all poets set out to be deep. Some work skittishly, for a laugh. And others offer the pleasure of formal accomplishment, rewarding us with complex metres and cunning rhymes. Poetry is a serious business, but it isn’t solemn or funereal. All it insists on is that we read carefully, with concentration. The shortening of lines is a signal to slacken our pace:

Caution all prose hogs!

The poem is a speed bump.

It’s there to make you slow down.

Two years ago, buying a birthday present for my wife in a jeweller’s near Chancery Lane, I was mugged. The police thought the muggers had taken me for a diamond merchant, which I found surprising, even insulting. Whatever the case, they must have been disappointed when they opened my backpack: all it contained was a shirt, a pair of socks, a washbag, copies of three of my books (I’d given a reading the night before) and Francis Spufford’s
The Child That Books Built
, which I’d only just started. There was no replacing the marked copies of my books, which was annoying, but I reordered Francis Spufford’s online – consolation and restitution of a kind.

Browsing through it the other day, I found the passage I’d been reading before I was mugged:

when I read obsessively as a child I was striking a kind of deal that allowed me to turn away. Sometime in childhood I made a bargain that limited, so I thought, the
power
over me that real experience had … Twenty-five years have gone by since then. My life has changed, and so has the content of my reading. But the bargain holds. Still, when I reach for a book, I am reaching for an equilibrium. I am reading to banish pity and brittle bones. I am reading to evade guilt, and avoid consequences, and to limit time’s hold on me …

Francis Spufford’s wasn’t an unhappy childhood, but his little sister had a life-threatening illness and his mother developed osteoporosis at thirty-two. Losing himself in a book – ‘reading catatonically’ as he puts it – became his way of coping with these travails. To read so as to limit the power that the real world has over us: is there a better reason?

Eva Hoffman’s
Lost in Translation
recounts the difficulties she has in adjusting to life in North America after moving there from Poland. She feels an outsider, a misfit, a stranger in a strange land. But when she starts reading American fiction, her sense of isolation disappears:

People are often lonely in American novels, and can’t easily talk to each other; they flub human contacts horribly, and tend to find themselves in seedy rooms, alone, or out on the frontier, grimly questing. As for men and women, they either speak to each other with great sentimentality, as in
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, or find each other truly disgusting, as in
Miss Lonelyhearts
.

Being an alien myself in the midst of all this alienation turns out to be no disadvantage.

You might want to quibble with Hoffman’s definition of the American novel. But she touches on something profound here: how literature creates a sense of companionship. In solitude under the reading lamp, we meet characters who are themselves solitary types. And as a result, we feel less lonely.

For myself, I like quiet when I’m reading, with no one else around. ‘Go Away: I’m Reading’ is the slogan on a mug I’m fond of, and on my office door, at Goldsmiths College, is an image of Johannes Gutenberg, brow furrowed, hunched over a book – my hope is that any student who sees it will imagine I’m similarly occupied behind
the
door and won’t knock unless their errand is vitally important. But there are also times when I leave the door open, or when I wish my mug carried a second slogan on its reverse side: ‘Join Me: Let’s Read Together.’

When you’re deep into a book, it’s for yourself alone. But once you’ve finished, if it’s any good, you want to share it with others – rehearse the story, assess the characters, discuss what makes the book special. Children do this instinctively, and the growth of book clubs, reading groups and blogs reflects a continuing and perhaps increasing need for adults to share books in this way.

There’s no contradiction. First engage, in private; then exchange, in public. Both ways of interacting with a book are valid and pleasurable. As is being read to or reading aloud.

Some of us grow up in homes where reading is notionally approved of, because ‘educational’, but in reality gently discouraged. My father made me feel guilty if I had a book in my hands, because it meant I’d no hand free to play tennis with him or help wash his car; the problem with reading, as he saw it, was that it didn’t involve physical
exercise
or the performance of useful practical tasks. Lorna Sage’s mother was similarly oppositional, dusting the books of her vicar-father but never opening them, since she associated them with his errant ways. Lorna did open them, and felt her grandpa coming back to life ‘whenever I communed with the dandyish and despairing characters in his leftover library’. She also opened the books owned by her Uncle Bill, ‘enchanted by their news of forbidden love, civil wars, corsetry through the ages, incest and necrophilia’.

‘Forbidden’ is the key word. Just as some of the most powerful books ever written have been
samizdat
(works banned by the government of the day, and produced in conditions of secrecy or exile), so the experience of reading is often most intense when it’s surreptitious – when we feel we shouldn’t be doing it, either because the book in question is in some way illicit or because reading itself, for whatever reason, has been outlawed. Andrea Ashworth recalls naughtily reading
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
by the light of her pencil torch while working as a cinema usherette (‘I read on, obsessed by the idea that I was tainted, like Tess’). And for Seamus Deane, in his novel-cum-memoir
Reading in the Dark
, books are likewise a shadowy pursuit. Ordered to stop reading at night, he would ‘switch
off
the light, get back in bed, and lie there, the book still open, re-imagining all I had read, the various ways the plot might unravel, the novel opening into endless possibilities in the dark’.

If reading is most charged when the pleasure we take in it is illicit, where does that leave the canon? Don’t people get turned off books when they’re set texts? Aren’t lists of improving literature self-defeating? Isn’t the best way to encourage reading counter-intuitive, by proscribing books rather than prescribing them?

Well, up to a point. In an engaging new book,
The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
, Alan Jacobs has some gentle fun at the expense of American literature professors who publish self-improvement manuals with titles such as
How to Read a Book, The New Lifetime Reading Plan
and
How to Read Literature Like a Professor
. Jacobs compares their methods to those of Charles Atlas, with his body-building programmes. ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t turn reading into the intellectual equivalent of eating organic greens,’ he pleads, and urges people to read at whim, not be intimidated by experts.

Still, in the end Jacobs admits that a whimsical or random approach to reading won’t quite do. Some books are simply better than others. Or last the course longer. Or grow richer the more they are reread. If we see the canon not as a social-conditioning or moral fitness programme, imposed from above, but as a collective of writers’ and readers’ enthusiasms, then there’s no reason to resist. We might prefer to go off-piste. But there are times when a list of recommendations can be useful. And since the canon is, or ought to be, ever-changing, we can contribute to its formation by suggesting books that deserve to be better known.

Sometimes places prompt the same sensation that books do: we feel at home there, as if they were created specially for us. If these are places off the beaten track, we’re usually keen for them to remain well-kept secrets, fearing they’ll be ruined if too many other people discover them. Books aren’t like that. We’ve no investment in keeping them to ourselves. Let the whole world have them. The world will be the better for it. And the words will remain the same.

LIKE MOST PEOPLE
born in a wealthy country, in practical matters I had a most fortunate childhood. My vast family live in Melbourne, Australia, and our branch of it very near the beach coast on the bay that opens out to glance at Tasmania, then goes on to face the Antarctic. We had hot, hot summers – very long ones – and short, arctic winters. This is the kind of weather that most encourages reading: it is weather to disappear from, with a book. A great deal of my reading was done in front of our Kosi wood-burning stove or the open fire, or sitting in the sea to keep cool, with a book in my hands.

My father was a barrister. He was a lecturer in French at Melbourne University, spoke Arabic and was familiar with a number of other languages. He was also a gambler – dogs, horses, cards, backgammon. In a sense he was a book gambler
too
, because as an avid collector, he often bought books in auctions. Amidst the pile of books, sold in lots, there would be the one he wanted. But all the books came home to us.

My father died of Hodgkin’s disease, lymphoma, when he was forty-eight and I was nine. It takes some time to die of Hodgkin’s disease; he was ill for some years and so I hardly remember him, and before he died I was sent to the convent. Each of his four children reacted to his death in different ways. In my case I retired to the vast collection of books he had left behind. Most of them were on shelves all around our sitting room, on either side of the fire one needed so much in the winter. The surplus was to be found in piles in a shed in the garden, where my mother also put up a ping-pong table for my brothers and me to humiliate each other in endless competition. There were more in the outhouse next to the laundry, together with gigantic piles of the
Saturday Evening Post
, which taught me about Tugboat Annie, Norman Rockwell and baseball – all, except for the paintings of Rockwell, so inferior to the Australian traditions my ancestors gifted me.
Reader’s Digest
was another source of information. From that I learned about Spoonerisms, the marvellous disarray of words that constituted the speech of the
Reverend
William Archibald Spooner: ‘Mardon me padam, but you are occupewing my pie’ and ‘Spring is here and chirds are birping.’ The latter became a family phrase to describe any good day.

Travelling from left to right, in the mind’s eye of my nine-year-old self, I can see again the books on the library shelves. On the left of the window that looked onto the verandah were the French books. So different from English books, marked by the simple covers, the red or black lettering, the absolutely assured appearance of the publications of Gallimard or Flammarion, Plon or Grasset. These were on the left of his desk, at which I sit now to write about his books. To the right of that was a mysterious section, remembered now for two items: an
Encyclopaedia of the Body and its Works
kept high on a top shelf, out of reach of us children, and discovered only at that time when a young body does
not
want to see diagrams of instruction as to where to place the penis or position the vagina (but would prefer to learn by practice).

Also there was C. M. Doughty’s
Travels in Arabia Deserta
, a beautiful edition, which I opened constantly and failed to comprehend for many years. But as the volumes were so beautiful – heavy, covers encrusted – this did not matter to me. Doughty was surrounded by books about
strange
places and tomes in Arabic, which one could make neither head nor tail of.

Then came the fireplace, and to the right of that, stretching around to the doors opening onto the hall, was my favourite section. These shelves were full of novels, books of philosophy and nonsense, biographies, plays and poetry. Prominent were Shaw, Meredith, Wells, Dickens, Chesterton, Belloc, Baring. There were hundreds more, and considerable miscellanea which fascinated me, in particular the works of George Borrow, a formidably eccentric Bible-basher, traveller and recorder of the Gypsies and hoi polloi of nineteenth-century England. Despite the dreamlike nature of his adventures, Borrow is always forthright. He was my close comfort after the death of my father. My copies of
Lavengro, The Romany Rye
and
The Bible in Spain
are annotated first by my father, and then by me:

When a man dies, he is cast into the earth, and his wife and child sorrow over him. If he has neither wife nor child, then his father and mother, I suppose; and if he is quite alone in the world, why, then, he is cast into the earth, and there is an end of the matter.

(
Lavengro
)

There were strange editions of the
Prophecies
of Nostradamus, naughty paintings of bosomy ladies by Norman Lindsay, and a book that set my mind in solid plaster:
Some Lies and Errors of History
by the Reverend Reuben Parsons, DD (1893). This is a collection of essays written from a Catholic point of view, essays of the ilk of ‘The Truth about the Inquisition’, attacking ‘the misstatements of all modern enemies of the Church concerning this tribunal … Whenever humanity carries out a great design, it becomes prodigal of blood’, and ‘The Last word on the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day’ (‘the number of the victims has been greatly exaggerated’). Another delight was
The Oyster: Where, How and When to Find, Breed, Cook and Eat it
(1861). (‘There is something poetical and pretty in the idea, which once prevailed, that the oyster was a lover of music …’ and ‘Arrived in port, the oyster first truly becomes sensible of the miseries of slavery …’)

Books of peculiarity and wonder sat on these shelves. It was these odd books with which I spent most of my time, and they extended to the shelves to the right of the doors to the room. And there were collected many of the bits and pieces acquired in the auction job-lots. Key among them, for me,
was
the autobiography of F. C. Burnand,
Records and Reminiscences, Personal and General
(1904). Who on earth was he? In finding out, I introduced myself to Gilbert and Sullivan (not difficult to do anyway, because their operas and songs generally were much loved in the Australia of my childhood). F. C. Burnand was a comic fixture at
Punch
and editor of it from the 1880s, and wrote the libretto of
Cox and Box
for Arthur Sullivan.
Punch
cartoons, Gilbert and Sullivan, the novels of George Meredith and the travel writings of George Borrow hardly prepared me for the reading environment I was to enter next: the convent.

It was the sort of Catholic convent that should have been in deepest Ireland, but was in fact in one of the more elegant Melbourne suburbs. I was sent there when I was eight, and from it I was disgorged at sixteen. The Loreto nuns who educated me were semi-enclosed, which meant no speech from dusk to dawn, Mass every morning at 6.20 a.m., a tomato for supper on Sunday nights and much Irish brown bread the rest of the time. Rules, censorship and silence, and above all a sense of disapproval waiting to pounce on those rare times when you felt most entirely yourself. And an obsession with sin. What sort of sin? Answers came there none.

In the convent it was more a matter of what we could not read, rather than what we could. Our reading matter has been chronicled so many times by so many other fellow sufferers it hardly bears repeating. My worst memory is the stories of the Catholic martyrs read out to us at breakfast. The most ghastly story, which calcified my heart, was that of Roman soldiers putting to death a particular saint who was whipped to death by the
uncus
, a rope to which were attached sharp iron hooks. The hooks buried themselves in her skin and the soldiers then pulled away her flesh. Such things turned me into a morbid child.

However, I was saved by my mother. Left a young widow with the four of us, she managed as best she could. She had to be a stay-at-home, or wanted to be, so reading was a most important part of her life. She had the library of course, but she strayed further than that in her reading. We had all the basic literature of every Australian child: the poems and novels of bush and city, stories of bushrangers, explorers, bunyips and kookaburras, drought and the sea. To these were added Biggles and William, a most perfect combination of childhood reading. In the winter months she read out to us as we
sat
around the stove. These were the years of Dickens:
Great Expectations, David Copperfield, The Pickwick Papers
.

My mother had an excellent and thoroughly English sense of humour. She was very attached to the witty parson Sydney Smith and to Hesketh Pearson’s biography of him
The Smith of Smiths
(1934). Among Smith’s many aperçus was ‘Live always in the best company when you read.’ This my mother and I did: we read for company, but decided for ourselves what was good or not. To this day I do not move outside the house without a book; inside my house they are my paintings, my decorations, my fellow travellers and my comfort.

Another maternal favourite was the father of the Sitwells, Sir George Reresby Sitwell (1860– 1943), an aristocrat who abused his children and everyone else who came within his bailiwick. She was particularly fascinated by his reactionary opinions and methods of topiary. My mother died when she was ninety-one, and she read till her eyes gave out. We corresponded about books; I have thousands and thousands of letters from her, and also, surrounding me – in addition to my father’s desk – many of his books, which she packed up and sent over to me when she finally
came
to accept that I had settled in London. Her eye for the out-of-the-way and her sharp sayings have stood me in good stead too.

I had arrived in London by 1960 and five years later, with good and bad luck, I had begun to work in book publishing. I was a ‘publicity girl’, then one of the few jobs available to women who did not want to be secretaries. It was the Sixties, those most reviled years, but to me nothing but a decade of nonchalance, friendships and discovery. Work was my drug of choice and, in those days, it felt as though anybody could do anything. Life in London in the 1960s, a most excellent time to be young, added to my childhood fodder. We were libertarians, and the feminism that raised its head in those years was part of it.

How often I remember sitting at dinner tables in the 1960s, the men talking to each other about serious matters, the women sitting quietly like decorated lumps of sugar. I remember one such occasion when I raised my fist, banged the table and shouted: ‘I have views on Bangladesh too!’ George Borrow would have done exactly that. One day, when having a drink in a pub in Goodge Street, the idea for my publishing company came to me like the switching on of a light bulb.

I would publish books that needed to be
published
, books forgotten or neglected, books I would ferret out and make available, perfectly certain that there were thousands like me who would buy and read them. So in 1972 I founded Virago, to break a silence, to make women’s voices heard, to tell my mother’s stories, women’s stories: my stories and theirs. Women’s history, not only histories of men at war; books that celebrated women and women’s lives. Modest ambitions. I always believed that books change lives, that writers change lives. I also believed – still do – that injustice corrupts those who indulge in it, and I wanted change for our brothers, husbands, uncles, fathers too.

The first Virago books were published in 1975: history, memoirs, a wide range of non-fiction. Then in 1977 the writer Michael Holroyd insisted I read Antonia White’s
Frost in May
. This novel, about a nine-year-old girl closeted in an English convent, is funny, beautifully written, its heroine a young Everywoman up against an authoritarian and frightening body of adults who insist on subduing her spirit in the name of God. Rosamond Lehmann used to tell me how often the readers of her novels wrote to her exclaiming, ‘This is my story.’
Frost in May
was mine. I had to republish it.

How could I publish
Frost in May
? The answer came quite easily: here were the celebration and fun I was looking for, here was a way of illuminating women’s history in a way that would reach out to a much wider audience of both women and men. I would publish a multitude of novels, I would publish them in a series, I would market them as a brand, just like Penguin. If one novel could tell the story of my life, there were scores more, and thousands of readers who would feel as I did.
Frost in May
became the first Virago Modern Classic, a library of treasures now more than 500 novels strong.

My inspiration was always literary. It was books and writers and writing I loved. Childhood beliefs and instructions from those in power above disappear as children grow to adulthood, but the comfort of books and reading is stalwart. Only particular books or writers can disappoint, but the gift of information and entertainment is always there, night and day.

The writer who perfectly conveys this is Philip Pullman in his trilogy,
His Dark Materials
. His heroine is a young girl, Lyra Belacqua, who lives in a world both like our own, yet entirely different. As adventure stories, fantasies, the three novels are masterpieces of storytelling. But
they
encompass radical ideas, the most remarkable of which is Pullman’s concept of daemons. Daemons could perhaps be seen as a modern interpretation of guardian angels, but in Pullman’s novels they take the form of animal companions, who represent the very soul, the true personality of each human being. If separated, both human and animal daemon die.

Books are the true daemons: not the imaginary animals of Pullman’s brilliant imagination, but solid blocks of paper and print pottering along with you every moment of the day. There for you. Books are shields against a terror of boredom, that curse of most childhoods. What they offer does not change, and if the human race was separated from words and thoughts and stories, it would die. I took that legacy from my childhood, but more: a habit of comfort and enquiry. If something happened to me, if I felt something, I would go to books to read about others’ experiences, others’ thoughts, to find out what to do and what to think. Books tell you jokes, make you laugh, laugh with you.