I last met him when he came in to be interviewed for Bookshelf, about his Booker-prize-winning novel The Old Devils. It was a deserved winner, a desperately moving, revealing novel which casts a great shadow because in it Kingsley revealed so much of himself and his terrors. It has a gravity and a strange dignity which the lighter comedies he wrote seem to lack – though he wrote nothing, nothing at all, which did not have its darker side.
By the time of our interview, drink had begun to take its toll, on his looks and his mental focus, but he was still grand company, still handsome beneath the ravages of whisky and misery, and he still had enormous charm. I don’t think he actually rated women very much, yet like all such men he attracted them. I was extremely fond of him. And, whatever his son thinks to the contrary, he was enormously proud of Martin – I heard him say so in a way which was entirely genuine. Most of Kingsley Amis’s novels are here next to most of Martin’s. They sit well together. I have just been trying and failing yet again with Lucky Jim, and I think that must be the last time so I have taken down my favourite of his son’s, London Fields and Money, to read one after another, before I go back, because it’s a natural move to make, to Elizabeth Jane Howard’s early novels. I do wish someone would re-publish them and with a bit of a fanfare, too. With books like Something in Disguise, After Julius and The Sea Change she became one of the best women novelists of the post-war years, with a powerful insight into human motivation and the underlying subtleties and complexities of apparently straightforward relationships. She is especially good at depicting family entanglements and she writes so well, describes the world so vividly. I learned a lot about the art and craft of writing from those books, now undeservedly out of print.
Never Got Around to It, Don’t Like the Look of It, Couldn’t Get Beyond Page Ten
and Other Poor Excuses
THERE IS NO REASON why most of the books I own but have never actually read should be more or less in one place. They just are. Maybe they quietly gravitated into the sitting room one by one, to sob and huddle together for warmth.
A few years ago, Pierre Bayard wrote a book called How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read. I haven’t read it, but I do wonder why people should actually want to do this. I daresay it’s all tongue-in-cheek. Italo Calvino is reassuring about this whole subject in his masterly essay Why Read the Classics ?
We need only observe that, however vast any person’s basic reading may be, there still remain an enormous number of fundamental works he has not read. Let alone the non-fundamental ones.
From time to time, lists pop up on the books pages of newspapers. One hundred books nobody has ever read. Fifty books nobody ever finished reading. Ten books you can safely ignore. Well, they have to fill the pages. The trouble with so many of these lists is that they are a peg on which to hang a sneer, besides always, always listing the same books. Here we go, with my eyes shut … Proust, Ulysses, War and Peace, Moby Dick, The Magic Mountain …
The implication always seems to be that nobody can read them, everybody thinks they’re boring and pointless, ergo, they must be boring and pointless, let’s take these damn books down a peg or two.
But if one, just one, person has seen the point of them, has found them rich and life-changing enough to have earned the title of classic, which all of the above are, then their existence is justified and the fault is not in the books but in ourselves. Proust. Yes, I have made many an effort with Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, determined not to be one of those who list it, along with War and Peace and Ulysses, as one of their Unreadables. I have obeyed plenty of instructions as to how to read Proust. ‘Race through it from first page to last, to get the hang of it; then go back and re-read it more carefully.’ ‘Take a volume, any volume, and start from there, don’t feel you have to begin at Volume One.’ ‘Read about Proust first, then read the novel.’ I have read The Year of Reading Proust by Phyllis Rose, and Alain de Botton’s marvellously enlightening, engaging, thought-provoking How Proust Can Change Your Life. And both volumes of George Painter’s Biography. I have even, foolishly, tried reading him in French. But the secret of Proust himself and his great novel continue to elude me. It is clearly me, not him – or rather, as with so many books, the combination of me/ him, which separates rather than mixing smoothly.
Nor can I read Ulysses, though Stephen Fry, cleverer and better read than anyone I know, swears by it. He told me that it was just a question of diving in and swimming fast. Not for me it wasn’t, I drowned. But I will go to the gallows to uphold the right of Ulysses to be called a classic.
The books I own but have not yet read are not all classics, not by a long chalk, though I see that The Magic Mountain is lurking there. So are the complete works of Scott, Westward Ho!, Mrs Gaskell’s North and South and George Eliot’s Romola. But, strangely, here is Julian Barnes’ Staring at the Sun which is odd, given how often I have read his Flaubert’s Parrot. I have actually read the whole of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl and The Ambassadors, which count as 11 on the difficulty scale of 1–10, yet here, to my shame, I find the one everybody else has read and says is his finest, The Portrait of a Lady, and I haven’t read that. Why? I have no idea. I have fallen into the impulse-buy temptation with a good many books that have found their way on to these shelves but remained unread. Here is The Wall Jumper by Peter Schneider, a Penguin Modern Classic I see, with a quote from Ian McEwan telling me it is a wonderful novel, and I daresay I will agree with him when I read it. Here is The Great Gatsby which my daughter loves more than any other book (bar Patrick McGrath’s Asylum) and which she cannot believe I have never read. But then I cannot believe she has never read Animal Farm and, what is more, plans never to read it out of sheer cussedness. I don’t not read books out of cussedness. That is not the reason why I haven’t read any other book by Orwell except Animal Farm. I look at Orwell there, unopened, unsullied. I pick up Down and Out in Paris and London, Keep the Aspidistra Flying and 1984 and read the blurbs and even open the damn things, but a terrible miasma of tedium veils my eyes and I put them back on the shelf. Not Orwell. Me. It is always us, never the book, or almost never. (With Barbara Cartland, it is the book.)
Here is Steppenwolf, here is Gormenghast. Perhaps it’s something to do with the titles? I can’t swallow them whole.
But it is not only older books which shiver together, unread, unloved. Here are three books by Terry Pratchett, and I really have tried but it’s no good … stories of wee small men … I can’t. I bought several to see if they were any different but they’re not. It scarcely matters. Terry Pratchett can do without me, so can every other fantasy writer and historical novelist who ever wrote, as can Linwood Barclay and Sadie Jones, Kate Morton, Julia Gregson, Khaled Hosseini … (You see the power of Richard and Judy? I buy them, I buy them, and that’s that; I never read them. Another good reason for having a year of not buying a single new book.) Books I have never read but still might are on one side of the room. A lot of books I have read but will almost certainly never read again seem to have gathered on the other. It all happened of its own accord, by stealth, at night. I certainly did not make these volume arrangements.
I will never re-read most of the terminally suicidal novels by Jean Rhys though her masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea, is never far away. I will never re-read Anthony Powell, Dick Francis, Mary Renault or the only volume of science fiction I have ever finished, The Voyage to Arcturus, even though I see that Philip Pullman admires it. I read it because I was told it was the sci-fi novel people who hated sci-fi novels loved. Some of them may.
Oh but look, I almost pulled out John Wyndham. What are his books doing on the never-to-be-re-read shelf? The Day of the Triffids. The Midwich Cuckoos. The Chrysalids. They are sci-fi. Or are they? Horror? In a way. Fantasy? Kind of. Frightening? You bet.
I have brought them upstairs and put them on the bedside table where there is always something scary sitting waiting to be read in the wee small hours.
A Little List
&
nbsp; A SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP is formed with books that have been on our shelves for years without being read. They become known in a strange way, perhaps because we have read a lot about them, or they are books that are part of our overall heritage. I think I know a lot about Don Quixote. I do know a lot about Don Quixote. I have just never read it. I doubt if I ever will. But I know what people mean when they talk about tilting at windmills; I recognise a drawing of Quixote and Sancho Panza. I believe Cervantes to be a great European writer. Why do I believe that? What possible grounds have I for believing it? Other people’s opinions, the fact that it has an honourable and permanent place in the canon? So, Don Quixote has an honourable, permanent place on my shelves. It would be wrong to get rid of it and, besides, I should miss its red leather binding.
Some books I have not read are here temporarily – paperbacks bought on a whim, novels someone has persuaded me I will love but I know, by one glance at the cover and blurb, that I will not. They will not stick around. They are waiting for the next consignment to the charity bookshop.
On the other hand, some not-read books are just waiting for their time to come. It will, it will, perhaps when I am very old, or have an illness that requires me to stay in bed for days but that does not make me feel too rotten to read. Perhaps I will take one on a train. I read a lot on trains and if I were to have one book, and that a book I have not yet read, then I would have to read it.
There are books I have not read which I know I will love; and I’ll be amazed and distressed when I do get round to them that I did not allow them to enrich my life years ago. Tom Jones falls into this category. I managed to slither by Fielding quite successfully at university but I should not die without having read him. Or Villette. Or Le Morte d’Arthur. Or Arthur Ransome.
Some people take a pride in not having read a particular book, as if the not-reading were some sort of achievement, a badge to be worn with pride like the one worn by those who do not have a television, or, like dons we knew in Oxford, ‘We do have a set, but only in black and white and we keep it in a cupboard.’
On a bright, brave May day, with the hawthorn blossom creaming all over the hedgerows and the swallows swooping over the chimney pots, I went looking for books I have not read. I was shocked by how many I found here. These, for instance:
The Bonfire of the Vanities. Tom Wolfe.
A day-glo Dickens.’ The Sunday Times. It is all about decadent New York and money in the 1980s. The Washington Post tells me it is ‘a superb human comedy’. So why have I never read this book?
Precious Bane. Mary Webb.
I’ve read Cold Comfort Farm enough times and that was based on this, so maybe I don’t need to read this.
Deceived with Kindness. Angelica Garnett.
Probably the only Bloomsbury book I haven’t read. Which is odd. I must have been saving it up like the last Rolo.
Eucalyptus. Murray Bail.
Someone told me that this was a great novel so I bought it, but then discovered that it was a great Australian novel so I put it away. I find it difficult to get to grips with Australian novels. Difficult, but not impossible.
Buddenbrooks. Thomas Mann.
I want to read this. I mean to read this. I really do.
The House on the Borderland. William Hope Hodgson.
Horror story. I find you have to be in the right mood for these.
The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince). Antoine de Saint-Exupéry I don’t understand how I can have not read it.
Romola. George Eliot.
I do understand how I can have not read it.
There is a wonderful essay called ‘Books Unread’ by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the great American abolitionist. It appeared first in The Atlantic Monthly in 1904.
The only knowledge that involves no burden lies … in the books that are left unread. I mean, those which remain undisturbed, long and perhaps forever, on a student’s bookshelves; books for which he possibly economized and for which he went without his dinner; books on whose back his eyes have rested a thousand times, tenderly and almost lovingly, until he has perhaps forgotten the very language in which they are written. He has never read them, yet during these years there has never been a day when he would have sold them; they are a part of his youth. In dreams he turns to them … He awakens, and whole shelves of his library are, as it were, like fair maidens who smiled on him in their youth and then passed away. Under different circumstances, who knows but one of them might have been his? As it is, they have grown old apart from him; yet for him they retain their charms.
Wordsworth says, ‘Dreams, books, are each a world.’
And the books unread mingle with the dreams and unite the charm of both … Yet if a book is to be left unread at last, the fault must ultimately rest with the author, even as the brilliant Lady Eastlake complained, when she wrote of modern English novelists:
Things are written now to be read once and no more; that is, they are read as often as they deserve. A book in old times took five years to write and was read five hundred times by five hundred people. Now it is written in three months and read once by five hundred thousand people. That’s the proper proportion.
I might one day move all the unread books to one room and see how far they stretch along the shelves. How much should I allow, out of my year of reading from home, for Don Quixote? The Bonfire of the Vanities? Arthur Ransome? Romola? …
Things that Fall out of Books
BILLS, PAID OR UNPAID. Receipts. Picture postcards. Here is a copy of Graham Greene’s The Third Man out of which falls a postcard from Dirk Bogarde:
‘Dear Susan, I have just spent a happy afternoon at Penguin Books with my editor, drinking peppermint tea and trying to think of alternative words for “penis”.’
A receipt for a car service dated 1983 somehow found its way into a spare copy of The Book of Common Prayer. The Order of Service for the funeral of a dear, good friend is in my best copy of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. I know why that is there – this friend knew the Quartets by heart and understood them as well as anyone I ever met so I slipped the funeral sheet in a place he would have liked it to be. Old letters, old shopping lists. ‘Phone chimney sweep.’ ‘Pay gardener.’ Old phone numbers.
And here, out of a work of genius, falls a handmade Christmas card from its author, drawn by herself. It is made out of pale blue folded paper and glued on to the front is an ink drawing of a small boy in long shorts, using a stool to reach a book from a high shelf. It is done in ink and the line is confident and simple, yet the little there actually is on the page somehow reveals an awful lot more, like Eliot’s ‘unheard music, hidden in the shrubbery’.
How absolutely right and all of a piece with the book out of which it fell and with the rest of her work.
‘Dear Susan
A Very Happy Christmas and New Year, With best wishes from Penelope.’
The novel is The Blue Flower. The Penelope is Fitzgerald.
I have never, ever understood why it did not win every prize extant but prize-judging is a law unto itself, as it were. I have been on the panels of many, and never once have things gone as might have been predicted. I was a judge for a major prize the year The Blue Flower was entered and I have never tried so hard to convince others of anything as I did that this was a rare, a great, novel whose like we might none of us see again. It was not that my fellow judges were wilfully determined not to agree, or had anything whatsoever against Penelope Fitzgerald – for who could? They simply could not see it. They saw something pleasing, short. Slight. That was the word I heard again and again. ‘Slight’. I think I sweated blood, but to no purpose.
‘Slight’. Slight? SLIGHT?
The Blue Flower is a masterpiece. It is the most extraordinary book, and half of it is in invisible writing, so much is there that is not there, so much lies below the surface, so much is left unsaid and yet is redolent and rich with meaning. Fitzgerald manages that quite remarkable feat – she simply walks into another world, one of several
hundred years ago in another country, and takes up the story, moving among the characters as if she had known them all her life, and so the reader does so, too. Her prose style, like the line of the drawing on the Christmas card, is so clear, clean and simple, and yet so full of meaning. She was a past-mistress of dialogue, she knew how to make places taste and smell, knew what they sounded like. She saw into other people’s minds and hearts with complete empathy. It is my favourite of all her books and it is gratifying that slowly, slowly over a decade or so, The Blue Flower is being recognised and lauded as indeed a novel of genius, and a masterpiece. During the celebrations for the fortieth anniversary of the Booker Prize, time and again it was mentioned with bewilderment as ‘the one that got away’. I hope that she knew her value. She was a shy and modest woman and yet underneath that exterior, I think she did realise her own worth, though she would never have been vain about it.
When I started a quarterly magazine called Books and Company, I asked Penelope to write for the first issue. She replied that she would and her letter began with characteristic generosity. ‘Please allow me to congratulate you on starting a magazine about books and the enjoyment of reading – something to be wholeheartedly supported.’ Over the next few weeks we exchanged a few letters about her piece – it was on Sarah Orne Jewett’s book The Country of the Pointed Firs – and in one of them she mentioned the pleasure of having grandchildren, in a phrase I will remember to my dying day.