But I don’t think the moral of the story is to wrap all your books in cellophane and handle them, if at all, wearing gloves. My friend continued to enjoy his books. He got The Waste Land and The Four Quartets by heart from them, he read his Forster and Woolf many times before he died and when he did, his son had them to enjoy. I once asked if he regretted having to sell his private press books. He said he had barely noticed their absence. ‘They were handsome objects’, he said, ‘but they were not books.’
Roots
WHEN I HAD MONEY to buy rather than borrow books, each one had to justify itself, in terms of financial outlay but also in terms of space in the bookcase of my first flat. But I knew I would want more. The advance on royalties for my first book was put into trust for me until I was twenty-one and as soon as I got access to it I bought a bookcase. It was made for me by the generous father of a friend (all I had to pay for was the wood), and he measured and fitted it carefully to fill the whole of one wall. That bookcase moved with me from my first to my second flat, then to a house and even came with me into married life, moving twice before finally being left behind when no wall in a sixteenth-century cottage could accommodate it.
At first, there were a lot of empty spaces, filled with odd photographs and vases, but gradually the books took over, especially once I started reviewing them. The first books I bought were plays – dozens of plays, some classic drama by writers such as Ibsen, Chekhov, Webster, but far more modern plays, by Arthur Miller,
Ionesco, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill and then Pinter, David Storey, Shelagh Delaney and Arnold Wesker. I was far more interested in the theatre than anything else. That was a legacy of my early years in Scarborough, when my mother had taken me to the Repertory Theatre every other week from an age when I was far too young to appreciate most of the plays we saw and yet not too young to be excited by the magic of the theatrical experience. Those were the great days of rep, and the company alternated between Scarborough and York, putting on great plays, even Shakespeare, as well as all sorts of middlebrow, middle-class stuff from Agatha Christie to Emlyn Williams, Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan and that great old rep standby, The Holly and the Ivy. I saw Sheridan and Oscar Wilde, The Browning Version, The Deep Blue Sea, Design for Living, Blithe Spirit … I wonder what my eight-year-old self made of them? But whole scenes, particular actors, are still vivid in my mind. From there, it was only a move across town to Stephen Joseph’s Theatre in the Round, which began in an upstairs space at the Scarborough Public Library. That was to play an even bigger part in my life years later, when it was headed by Alan Ayckbourn, and an actor-cum-writer Stephen Mallatratt had an idea for adapting my ghost story, The Woman in Black, to be performed there as an ‘extra’ alongside the pantomime, one Christmas.
Long before then, my family moved from Scarborough to Coventry, then a city having a great renaissance of rebuilding and a huge injection of life and hope after its devastation during the Second World War. When we arrived there in 1958, the Belgrade Theatre – the Civic Theatre – had just been built and opened. I was sixteen and stage-struck. I went there the week after we arrived, to enrol at the Saturday morning club called the Young Stagers.
We had talks from visiting playwrights, directors and actors, went backstage, did workshops – and then were invited to submit our own short plays which would be produced by one of the theatre team, but acted by Young Stagers themselves. I wrote a play, in the evenings after A-level homework. It was put on. I saw a glittering career as a playwright ahead of me – one which was never to materialise. But it was a heady time. The Belgrade gave first acting jobs to many who went on to become important names in the British theatre, Ian McKellen and Trevor Nunn among them.
It also saw the first performances of Arnold Wesker’s early plays and, in particular, the Roots trilogy, which went from there to the Royal Court Theatre, London, and round the world. I went to every one of the Wesker first nights and, during the school holidays, I got a two-pounds-a-week job at the Belgrade as a general factotum, which was how I got to know Arnold and his wife Dusty, and how, when I went up to King’s, I spent happy evenings babysitting for their small children. Anyone looking at the history of the British theatre, and at the history of Britain in the 1960s, will find Arnold Wesker there among the so-called Angry Young Men. There are plenty of other names, too – Lindsay Anderson, John Osborne, director John Dexter – and other places – the Royal Court, the Round House. It seems a lifetime away now but living through it and in it was incredibly exciting.
The legacy of those days is here in a small row of paperbacks in the Penguin Modern Drama series, with a few Faber plays thrown in. Here are the Wesker plays, here is Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, here are Osborne and Pinter. I have not looked at any of them for years. Something happened. The theatre died on me. Why? How? I had wanted to be a playwright ever since that time. I still do. I never will be. It is the hardest form of writing, I am convinced of that, and one I was never going to master. (The stage adaptation of my ghost story The Woman in Black was brilliantly done by Stephen Mallatratt and the adapter’s skill is another I wish I possessed.) At the back of cupboards are notebooks with half-written plays and ideas for plays. I went on scratching away at the itch for years.
But I have never stopped finding things in plays that I have never found in the novel and so, although I rarely go to the theatre, I sometimes read plays, and when I do, I find elements that I missed when watching a performance. The dialogue flits by, the scene changes, so much is lost. David Hare is a playwright I have admired more than any other and I have re-read Racing Demon and Skylight and Amy’s View until I know them by heart. There is so much depth in them and yet there are so few words. Hare goes through most human emotions in a small space.
These dramas are old friends and when I read the character lists and the names of the actors in the first performances, they open windows on to my past, a youth when I was stage-struck and star-struck. We all were.
A few years ago I was speaking at the Hay Book Festival and staying for a day or two in that pretty town; but it gets hideously crowded so after my talk, rather than try to eat in a packed café, I went down to the delicatessen to buy a sandwich. The shop was busy. I hovered, wondering whether to queue. And then I saw him. Yes? No? Of course, it was. Arnold Wesker is Arnold Wesker. He was unchanged – just a little older.
‘Excuse me – are you Arnold Wesker?’
‘Sometimes.’ Which was exactly the sort of thing Arnold would have said. He turned round to me, and his hug gathered together all the threads of our shared past, forty-five years ago.
When I came home, I took down his plays and read them again. They have never received the appreciation they deserve in this country, though they were highly successful all over Europe from the beginning. They are unlikely to be performed much in Britain now, partly because repertory theatre no longer exists, partly because they have large casts and numerous elaborate sets and so cost a prohibitive amount to stage, but more because they are very much of their time, and that time has not yet become all-time. But if we want to know about post-war life in Britain, about what people’s aspirations and fears were, how they lived and related to one another in a bleak new order which was yet full of all kinds of political and personal hope – hope which has never really been fulfilled – then we should study Wesker’s plays. They are rich and vibrant with articulate human life and dreams; they do not have the bareness of Pinter or the bitterness of Osborne. Wesker was always full of anger, righteous anger, but he was never a bitter writer and cynicism is the very last thing you find in his work. It is full of the warmth and energy and extraordinary life-experience of the man.
Does it matter that it would be hard to find a production of the plays? No, because they read so well, no, because the reader’s imagination liberates them from what I see as, ultimately, a confining art – the drama. The reader’s imagination can supply every character, every setting, every vocal nuance. Theatre sometimes
does these things itself – as Shakespeare says in the opening chorus to Henry V. A whole battlefield can be presented by a handful of actors within the confines of the ‘Wooden O’ so long as the audience is prepared to participate imaginatively by filling in the gaps. That is how Stephen Mallatratt was able to transform a ghost story with swirling London fog, busy railway stations, an isolated house across a causeway, a bustling marketplace not on to film, but into the same ‘Wooden O’ with two actors and a few props. The audience supplies the rest. But The Woman in Black is an adaptation of a novel. Most plays were written for performance in a theatre alone. Yet I still find that almost all of them yield as much, if not more, to the silent and solitary reader who can go back and re-read a line or two, pause and think, work out slowly and carefully what exactly is happening and the meaning of what is being said. Only bad playwrights cannot stand up to such close scrutiny.
Slow, Slow, Slow-Slow, Slow
ALTHOUGH WHEN I was a child and growing up I could borrow books every week from the library, there was a limit on the number to be taken at any one time and so, as there was not the money to buy many books either, I found myself reading, re-reading and rereading again. If I liked a library book I simply got to the end, turned it round and began it again. It was a bit like sweets. Until I was ten, sweets were rationed. I had a quarter of a pound a week and there were various ways in which they could be made to last. One sweet a day. Buy only boiled sweets which could be sucked for a long time. Suck half and re-wrap the rest until tomorrow. Occasionally I would have such a sugar-craving that I bought something that was gobbled up in a great burst of sweetness that exploded in the mouth like a firework and then was gone. Sherbet lemons were like that. Marshmallows did not last long.
On the whole, I preferred to buy fruit drops and suck them slowly to extract every last bit of flavour and sweetness over as long a period as possible. It was the same with books, and although my attitude to sweets may have shifted, it is the same with books now.
When people had only the Bible and the Prayer Book to read, they read them every day, knew them from front to back and in reverse, and for reasons that were not only religious. Whatever your beliefs, the Bible is full of good stories, magnificently told. I am uncertain if I could go for a year without anything else but it would be interesting to see what it was like to have only the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer to read, slowly and carefully, for a month.
A strange competitiveness has emerged among some readers in the last few years. I have known book-bloggers boast of getting through twenty books plus, a week, as if they were trying for a place in the Guinness Book of Records. Why has reading turned into a form of speed dating? And then there is fashion and the desire to have the very latest book – which doesn’t matter a scrap so long as the book is wanted for itself, not just because it is the one everybody is talking about, and so long as plenty of other, unfashionable books are desired as well.
Some years ago, magazines carried adverts for correspondence courses that taught speed reading, a useful skill for those who have to digest a great deal of information quickly – lawyers, perhaps. But lawyers read material that does not have to be retained for long, and is not of great literary or artistic merit.
The best books deserve better. Everything I am reading during this year has so much to yield but only if I give it my full attention and respect it by reading it slowly. Fast reading of a great novel will get us the plot. It will get us names, a shadowy idea of characters, a sketch of settings. It will not get us subtleties, small differentiations, depth of emotion and observation, multilayered human experience, the appreciation of simile and metaphor, any sense of context, any comparison with other novels, other writers. Fast reading will not get us cadence and complexities of style and language. It will not get us anything that enters not just the conscious mind but the unconscious. It will not allow the book to burrow down into our memory and become part of ourselves, the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom and vicarious experience which helps to form us as complete human beings. It will not develop our awareness or add to the sum of our knowledge and intelligence. Read parts of a newspaper quickly or an encyclopaedia entry, or a fast-food thriller, but do not insult yourself or a book which has been created with its author’s painstakingly acquired skill and effort, by seeing how fast you can dispose of it.
Slow reading is deeply satisfying. I read two or three chapters of To the Lighthouse, or Little Dorrit, or The Age of Innocence or Midnight’s Children, and stop, go back, look at how the sentences and paragraphs are put together, how the narrative works, how a character is brought to life. But I want to think about what I have read before I move on for only in this way will I appreciate the whole as being both the sum of, and more than the sum of, its parts.
There is a Slow Movement of which slow reading occupies only a tiny corner – one that has not become as widely known, recommended or practised as Slow Food. I wish it would.
I do not read as much poetry as I should but I do re-read it – Chaucer, George Herbert, Vaughan, Donne, Auden, Hardy, T.S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Charles Causley – the poets who have stood by me through thick and thin over many years. There is more than enough there to last me for the rest of my life. It is in the nature of poetry to demand slow reading before it will yield anything apart from, occasionally, a jolly rhyme and rhythm. You can read ‘The Lady of Shalott’ or ‘The Ballad of John Gilpin’ fast – they gather speed and carry you along and there isn’t much more to them than that. But how could you take in the smallest sliver of meaning from The Four Quartets by reading them in that way? How could Henry James yield a one-hundredth of his meaning or any of the subtleties of his style other than through a slow reading?
Not every book is worth that sort of effort – who pretends that it is? A comic novel, a fast-paced thriller demand little and their reward is immediate – they are ice-cream reading, and barely a trace of the flavour remains half an hour after they are finished. Sometimes, only ice cream will do. But we are not nourished physically, mentally, artistically or spiritually by its literary equivalent.
I wonder what it would be like to have just forty books left to read for the rest of my life. I have a made a mental bookshelf. It is empty now but I am going to place on it the forty books I think I could manage with alone, for the rest of my life – if push came to shove.
Forty books.
I will not even make the Desert Island Discs assumption that the Bible and Shakespeare are already in situ. Even those will have to earn their place.
Where shall I begin?
Not with the Bible but with the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. It is small but it contains everything I may need to nourish me spiritually, and to be a living stream of linguistic glory from which I can drink and be refreshed every day. The Collects and the Psalms are here, and the Orders for Morning and Evening Prayer, and everywhere I open the book I find words that echo from my past. I heard these words at Coventry Cathedral, week in, week out, and became steeped in them, and though I never consciously learned any of them by heart, they are there nevertheless, reminding me of the place and people at the most formative time of any in my life. The Psalms often come to mind with accompanying music too. ‘Like as the Hart’,’O Clap your Hands’, ‘O be Joyful in God all Ye Lands’, ‘Many Waters Cannot Quench Love’. The seasons come and go with the Collects, including one I especially like: ‘Stir up, we beseech Thee O Lord, the wills of Thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of Thee be plenteously rewarded.’ That is the Collect for the Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Trinity, which used to be known as ‘Stir-up Sunday’ not only because of the opening words but because people traditionally stirred their Christmas puddings on that day.
If the Bible and Book of Common Prayer are part of the warp and woof of your upbringing, the words gather meanings to themselves over years, personal meanings, associative meanings, odd meanings. You could be illiterate but, by going to church an
d hearing these words every week, have more riches in heart and mind than many who know how to read but read little of lasting value or significance.
So the cornerstone of my final library of just forty books is the 1662 Prayer Book and, although small versions with India paper are easy to slip into the pocket and stack nicely on the ends of pews, the best edition for reading is in the new Everyman’s Library, so that is the one I will keep.
The Bible earns its place in the King James’s version because of the language, which is as much part of me as that of the Prayer Book, though the New Revised Standard Version is probably a better translation and almost – but only almost – as graceful. About ten years ago I read the Bible all the way through, from soup to nuts, not even skipping the long lists of Kings and the structural engineering instructions for the building of the Temple, and it struck me that, firstly, it is packed full of good stories no matter what your beliefs or lack of them, secondly, that it contains so much that is and will always be pertinent to the human condition, and thirdly, that the Christian faith really is rooted in the Old Testament, and therefore in Judaism. I have a strong sense of kinship with all Jews, and Jewish prayers and services seem to have far more to say to me, as a Christian, than those of any other religions, which are alien, no matter how interesting. But with Judaism I am at home. The Old and the New Testaments – or the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, as we are sometimes urged to say – are two halves of a whole and the second flows out of the first. I wish more people remembered that.