I have not walked for a few days. Bitter cold, strong wind. Dubious health benefit of fresh air offset by damage from inhaling icy air. But it’s warmer today so off I set. And my thoughts are dominated, as they have been for some days, by the book which I have nearly finished reading.
I have read voraciously since I was five. The scope of new children’s books being published when I set off on this lifelong journey was limited. I was five on Christmas Eve 1946 so those few books to which I had access at first had been published before the Second World War. Still in my memory are a collection of Hans Christian Anderson stories in a blue bound volume with an embossed cover, my favourite being The Tinder Box, although I was terrified by the thought of the cat with eyes as big as dinner plates. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, good for the soul but not a lot of fun for a young boy, although I still remember Doubting Castle, Vanity Fair, the Slough of Despond. I never did reread it! But soon the Famous Five, the Uncle Remus stories, that I loved, now very politically incorrect, Just William, great fun. And eventually my first real book, Treasure Island. I read it several times. The thought of Blind Pugh, tapping his walking stick along the street, Israel Hands climbing the mast towards Jim Hawkins, terrified me but I loved the overall story.
I joined the library at which I was allowed two tickets but I also prevailed on my mother to allow me to use one of her tickets and arranged two in my father’s name, he not being a reader. I literally devoured print. When I was approaching the exams that would determine my future education my parents bought me a multi part encyclopaedia and, from this and other sources I cannot identify, I began to learn about the Western Canon of Literature. I was still too young to embark on most it but as[1] I progressed through the early years at Grammar School I attempted first Dickens, who I attempted at too early an age. Jane Austen, ditto. Then, in my fifteenth year, I accompanied my mother to the cinema to see a film called ‘Giant’. It was a so-so film with a stunningly beautiful Elizabeth Taylor but I was captivated by a young actor, who I was soon to learn, was already dead in a car accident, called James Dean. I became a little obsessed with him, or rather his image, and found that he had appeared in only three films, one of which was called ‘East of Eden’. The film was already out of general circulation (no DVDs then!) and I was not to see it for a couple of years. But I bought a paperback of the book, by John Steinbeck.
Now this is what I call writing, I thought. This is not to suggest JS was a greater writer, but this was the first adult book that contained flesh and blood characters that thought, at least in part, and spoke, at least in part, as I did. Using cash earned on my paper rounds, I bought more and more Steinbeck and, of course, found The Grapes of Wrath.
There is great satisfaction to be found on completing the reading of a book. I subscribe to the whole conceit of sharing other lives, going on journeys I could never conceive, seeing wonders, good times, bad times. But this was the first time, when I had finished , that I became aware that this book, these people, would never leave me. I had just read a great book.
Then it was ‘Crime and Punishment’, what I could understand of it. Raskolnikov! Sonya! Don’t think that these were books prescribed by school. I neglected those in pursuit of the ones I saw as more important. Then, in first year sixth form, aged seventeen, I struck up a conversation with a young trainee teacher at school and mentioned Steinbeck. Fine writer, he said. But try Faulkner. And another period of obsession, reading all I could from the library and Penguin paperbacks. Three more occasions when I closed a book and felt bereft that my journey with these people was over. For now. As I Lay Dying remains one of my comfort reads. What a book! Nearly matched by Absalom, Absalom and Light in August. Over the years I have read almost all of Faulkner and he remains very high in my estimation.
Then, one evening in 1961 I watched a play on BBC tv that greatly influenced the rest of my life. It was Waiting for Godot, and pursuit of any further works by Sam proved initially difficult/futile until I found a US paperback of Murphy and a lovely small Olympia Press, Paris, hardback of Watt. But thus commenced a lifelong acquaintance with every word he wrote. Reread in some cases many times. For me, he’s up there with WS and the other giants of world literature.
In the many years that have passed I have read all of Dickens’ novels, ditto Thomas Hardy, Ulysses, of course, once cover to cover in an edition flooded with footnotes that guided me through a great many of the obscurities, since when I read my favourite chapters when the spirit moves me. Proust, twice. Yes, the whole thing. It is wonderful. The first time I read it, I paused with forty pages to go, very loath to lose contact with people I had spent five months with. Finally, for the first (and last) time in my life, I read the end in the bath. Two years later I did it again. Read it, I mean. Not the bath thing! All the major works of Tolstoi (Anna Karenina is my second favourite novel. I think!). Dostoyevsky whom I consider in the last analysis the greatest of them all and The Idiot my personal favourite. Turgenev. The Brontes (Anne wrote the best - Wildfell Hall.) The great French works, Balzac, Zola, Hugo, Francois Mauriac (If you haven’t read Therese, try to find it. Wonderful.) Sartre and Camus, who, along with Dostoyevsky, defined my feelings and beliefs as existentialism.
A period of science fiction was in there somewhere and I still recall and recommend Alfred Bester, Arthur C Clarke, Stanislaw Lem and a writer whose style was execrable but whose imagination was staggering, A E Van Vogt. I bought Billion Year Spree by Brian Aldis which was a history of sci-fi and highlighted about thirty landmark books and I scoured secondhand book shops to find most of them. An additional less highbrow period saw me seek out and buy about thirty five of the fifty five 87th precinct books by Ed McBain. No more than 140 pages each, if you read the first paragraph, you read the first chapter. If you read that, you read the book. Oh, to be able to write like that.
But I always liked to take on the big challenges. The Magic Mountain. Gravity’s Rainbow. Infinite Jest. The Man Without Qualities. All the ‘Rabbit’ novels of John Updike. Philip Roth, above all Sabbath’s Theatre. Nabokov, especially Lolita and Ada. All of Cormac McCarthy. Oblomov. My comfort read Under the Volcano. Kafka! God! I almost forgot Moby Dick! One of the really great novels.
Which takes me back to the beginning of this snapshot. In all this reading, there have been many occasions when I have closed up the covers after the final page and known that I have just shared something beyond the normal, beyond the myriad of able, dedicated, immersing novels bruited by critics, and sometimes friends. Over the years, I have read glowing reviews, awaited the paperback, only to be moaning to Pauline about another overhyped volume a week later. This is what projects me back to what I know. Especially as the paperbacks become increasingly expensive. Kindle is the answer but, much as I find it a treasure on holiday, the heft of a book in the hands, the ability to flick back to check something, the lifelong memory of holding that magic thing in my hands, even the smell (!) .... ah!
I have been reading ‘Stalingrad’ by Vasily Grossman, an epic novel which, with its sequel ‘Life and Fate’, has been hailed as the twentieth century ‘War and Peace’, a title with which on finishing ‘Stalingrad’, I fully agree. A great book, full of living, breathing characters, superb descriptions of landscape, astonishingly involving battle sequences. Like Tolstoi, he surveys conflict at the highest level of command and at the level of every tired, suffering soldier, mother, child.
It is monumental in length but ‘great’ books do not need to be huge. ‘As I Lay Dying’ is short. And what a joy it was a few years ago to discover ‘Stoner’, a modest telling of a life, and more recently Days Without End’, where a ‘voice’ of a nineteenth century refugee of the Great Irish Famine is assumed with complete success. I have no wish to ‘rubbish’ the attempts of so many authors to engage my attention and admiration. The fault may well be mine. Would that I could write as well, create such a plot etc. And there are so many ‘classics’ with which I cannot engage. Trollope. Thackeray. Scott. But finding and enjoying my ‘great’ books has been one of the great joys of my life. And, hopefully, will continue. The search never ends!