Stop What You’re Doing and Read This! (6 page)

I would love to say that reading possessed some of the special powers it is often claimed to possess, not least the ability to soothe the troubled mind. But when my mind is troubled, like many people, I find reading hard, if not impossible, and fiction in particular becomes a country from which I feel painfully exiled, so
that
when I’m able to read again it feels like coming home.

Talking about reading as the
cause
of anything is to get things back to front. It exists in the valley of its own making. It gives us pleasure; and our embarrassment about pleasure, our fear that reading is fundamentally no different from sex or sport, tempts us into claiming that reading improves us. But pleasure is a very broad church indeed, and we do literature no great service if we try to sell it as a kind of moral callisthenics.

Reading is primarily a
symptom
. Of a healthy imagination, of our interest in this and other worlds, of our ability to be still and quiet, of our ability to dream during daylight. And if we want more people to enjoy better books, whatever that means, we should concentrate on the things that prevent people reading. Poverty, poor literacy, library closures, feelings of cultural exclusion. Alleviate any of these problems and reading will blossom.

For these, I think, are the real threats to reading; not technology, not the pervasive and rising fear that readers are being tempted elsewhere by the shallow pleasures of
Britain’s Got Talent
and
Call of Duty: Black Ops
.

Indeed, we forget that the novel in English is a relatively new art form (
Robinson Crusoe
, 1719,
Pamela
, 1741; travel writing, science fiction and the picture book are all older), and that for a large part of its life it has attracted the same criticism now directed against TV, films, computer games and the grubbier reaches of the Internet. Novels dragged readers into private worlds that were hard to monitor and police. They aroused violent emotions, reduced social interaction, blurred the line between fantasy and reality, and required insufficient mental effort, thereby softening the impressionable minds of those who did not have the requisite moral strength: women, children, the lower orders. As
Punch
wrote of the nineteenth-century sensation novel, ‘It devotes itself to harrowing the mind, making the flesh creep, causing the hair to stand on end, giving shocks to the nervous system, destroying conventional moralities and generally unfitting the public for the prosaic avocations of life.’

I have no idea what’s going to happen to publishing over the next forty years, and anyone who claims they do is a fool. Forty years ago I was using my father’s slide-rule and thinking that the automatic sliding doors on the
Starship Enterprise
were thrillingly modern. The Internet would
have
seemed not just vanishingly unlikely, but beyond comprehension. God alone knows what 2050 will bring.

Given the speed of technological change, it’s fitting that while writing this essay I’ve been looking at Faber’s iPad app of
The Waste Land
, which includes a filmed performance of the poem by Fiona Shaw, synchronised readings by Eliot, Ted Hughes, Alec Guinness and Viggo Mortensen, original manuscript pages, academic interviews … It is the most wonderful thing. And given the speed of technological change, by the time the essay is published you’ll be able to download something even more extraordinary. Books can piggyback on these huge technological changes in a way that other art forms can’t, because they’re digital, and have been from way before Gutenberg, a string of symbols that can be transmitted in any medium. Turn
Half a Yellow Sun
into Morse code, then spoken English, then British sign language, then binary, bounce it off a satellite, turn it back into written English again and you haven’t lost a thing.

The way in which we make and consume images has been changed utterly by Photoshop and its relations. Pro Tools and the like have done the same for music. Turn on the radio, open a
magazine
and you’re hearing sounds and seeing pictures of a kind that simply could not have been made in 1980. It is rare now to hear a film score played by a real orchestra or to see a hand-drawn animation. I recently watched
The Social Network
and didn’t realise that the Winklevoss twins were played by one actor, despite appearing together in most of their scenes. But if you read
Clarissa
on screen, you’re reading what Richardson wrote, give or take some academic quibbles over spelling and textual variants, because a novel is just the right words in the right order.

And that, for me, is the most magical part of the trick that holds us spellbound. Films, paintings, sculptures … these things are finished products, more or less. But a novel really is just inky shapes on paper. It comes to life only when we read it. And we all read differently. You may think you know Maggie Tulliver or Esther Summerson, better than some members of your own family, and I may feel the same, but you and I know very different versions of those characters. Because reading is never simply reading. Reading always involves writing too. A novel is an invitation to complete an imaginary world. If the novel is good we do it without batting an eyelid.

Films and television programmes, plays and paintings and sculptures never really become friends in the way that novels do. We can admire, we can be impressed, we can be moved and consoled, but we rarely feel that peculiarly personal attachment we feel to a loved novel, because whilst writing novels is a long and solitary business, reading them is always a collaboration, and a good writer gives the reader space and encouragement to play their part so that when we close the final page we have had an experience that is partly of our own making. We create our own Maggie Tullivers. We create our own Esther Summersons.

A few weeks ago I read Padgett Powell’s
The Interrogative Mood
. It has no plot, which is, of course, fine by me. It is composed entirely of questions, and is therefore outrageously experimental, though without the coldness and contrivance that undermines many experimental novels. It is gorgeously written and chock-f of so many underlinable delights that I might as well just quote the opening paragraph:

Are your emotions pure? Are your nerves adjustable? How do you stand in relation to the potato? Should it still be Constantinople? Does a nameless horse
make
you more or less nervous than a named horse? If before you now, would you eat animal crackers? Could you lie down and take a rest on the sidewalk?

It is humane, peculiarly attentive to the workings of the mind and oddly satisfying as a whole, though why this should be so, when most of the questions seem utterly unconnected, was initially a mystery. Was there some hidden structure? Does the reader gradually and unknowingly piece together a jigsaw of the writer’s secret life?

And then it dawned on me. You can’t help reading a string of questions that are addressed to you without answering them, which is precisely what I found myself doing. Some of the questions had no answers and some had obvious answers with no resonance. But some made me dredge up memories that had been buried for a long time, and a few made me probe parts of my mind where I’d never probed before. And I began to realise that this strangest of books was the best example of something as common as rain, something shared by every good book I have ever read. This wasn’t a monologue. This was a conversation. The secret
biography
was my own. It was a book about me. And if you read it, then it will be a book about you.

In an interview after the novel was published Powell was asked who the narrator of the book was. He answered, memorably, ‘Dude, c’est moi.’ He was wrong, I think. The correct answer was, ‘Dude, c’est toi.’

WE ARE ON
holiday on the coast of Yorkshire not far from Whitby. It’s a campsite and there are two families with a couple of friends added in. This is 1959 and I’m thirteen. Just as it’s getting dark we are called to the biggest tent where my father is pumping up the tilley lamp, a large green light that works by burning paraffin under pressure in a ‘mantle’ – a white cylinder of cloth that sits at the top of a tube. He loves faffing about doing this, and that’s what he calls it when he pretends it’s bothersome. ‘It’s a bit of a faff,’ he says whilst adoring the way that it’s his expertise with the paraffin can, the funnel and the little brass handle that delivers this hard, white light.

So we sit ourselves down on sleeping bags, blankets and cushions. The tilley lamp sits on a fold-up wooden chair, my father sits on another
in
the middle of us. Looking round the tent, I can only see our faces catching the light, as if we are just masks hanging there, our bodies left outside in the dark perhaps. In my father’s hands is a book –
Great Expectations
– and every night, there in the tent, he reads it to us. Without any hesitation, backtracking or explanation he reads Pip’s story in the voice of the secondary-school teacher he is, but each and every character is given a flavour – some more than others: Magwitch, of course, allows him to do his native cockney. Thinking about it now, I can see that his Jaggers was probably based on a suburban head teacher from one of the schools he taught in; Uncle Pumblechook could have been derived from the strangely pompous shopkeepers and publicans who peopled the hardware stores and cafés of outer London, where we lived in the 1950s. But over the years, as my father tells us about his own upbringing, some of Dickens’ characters start to mix and merge with our own relatives.

There is someone called Uncle Lesley Sunshine who, like Pumblechook, turned up in my father’s home when he was a boy to offer advice and hold out prospects of betterment. This was London’s East End, a terraced house in one of the streets behind the London Hospital in Whitechapel,
where
my father and his sister were being brought up by their mother, Rose, along with her mother and father, and it’s where several (how many? more than we could ever count) of her sisters and brothers live, too. Lesley Sunshine seems to have dropped into this crowded world from some other well-heeled sphere in order to take the ‘boy’ to places where he will be improved, like a tailor’s, who, because he is a relative, will fit the boy out in a decent bar-mitzvah suit for free.

Rose has plans of her own for the boy. Somehow, in ways that my father never found out, she summons people from another world into their home. On occasions seamen from Russia, Jamaica and America would find their way to their kitchen. At the time my father didn’t know how or why they got there, but looking back, he could see that they were people she had met at meetings and they would sit in the tiny space of that home talking to her own father, who had arrived from Poland, and to my father, who was of course a boy. It was mysterious and different from his friends’ homes and gave him a contradiction to figure out: how come he appeared to be living in such a poor, tiny place, but people from all over the world would choose to come there? It gave him a mix of shame and pride to deal with. His
mother
would also take the boy to the local Whitechapel Library, which had become a kind of international centre for the uplifting of the masses, and this too was a place that opened a window on the world and a door to a future life away from the area. The air was full of people speaking different languages, whispers and rumour passed around, that this or that great back-street scholar was writing a masterpiece over there; the great painter and poet Isaac Rosenberg had sat just here; this or that revolutionary or preacher or teacher was just over there behind the shelves. Some of that was true, but a more powerful if more mundane truth was also at work: it was here that poor boys and girls from migrant cultures were finding their route through the literature and science that would take them to the sixth forms and universities they yearned for. My father’s journey began with a little book about whales, which he took home and pored over, and ended with Milton. More mysteriously, on one occasion, Rose and the boy got on a tram and travelled north to Belsize Park, a place so different, so luxurious as to appear to him as somewhere foreign. There she took him to a flat, where one room was as big as a whole floor in their house. On the walls were paintings of a woman with no clothes on, her skin yellow, her face still. There
were
books everywhere and, between the books, pots and carved figures. In the middle of it all sat someone grand, a woman wearing strange clothes who spoke in a voice that came from another place or from another time. This, he was told, was someone important; perhaps there was a prospect that she could help the boy, and he had to be on his best behaviour. So he sat on a chair while Rose and the woman talked about Communism. It turned out that this woman and the yellow woman with no clothes on were one and the same person – Beatrice Hastings – and the painter was Modigliani.

Thinking back to the tent and the tilley lamp, I can see Pip walking up the stairs, following Estella, to see Miss Havisham on what would be his life-changing climb, a moment that would alter his whole perspective on who he was, what he wanted to be and how he would view others. Beatrice Hastings was no Miss Havisham, but there is something swirling around in both my father’s mind and mine, mixing and blending when I think of the lone woman in a room with these haunted ties to a man from the past. In fact, I can’t really sort out who’s who, real or imaginary, and I think this is how we all read when we have time and space to think about books.
What
I mean is that of course Dickens told us about a Miss Havisham whom he created, but when many of us read about that Miss Havisham, we bring her to life with the Miss Havishams we know in our own lives. I think, in my case, this imaginative leap was given an extra kick, first from the way my father read the book, giving the voices and the scenes such a potency from the place and the way he read it to us, but also because both he and my mother filled our minds and lives with such vivid stories and experiences. The slow, measured reading of the book, the talk and replays of the scenes and the accounts of these people end up as a kind of portrait gallery of pictures that have the ability to change places, so that when I think of Beatrice Hastings – whom I never met – at times she is replaced by Miss Havisham, and when I think of Miss Havisham I can imagine that Modigliani painted her.

My father, back in the tent, packs a lot of power into the moment when Miss Havisham tells Estella to ‘beggar’ the boy when they play ‘Beggar My Neighbour’. He seems to especially love Jaggers; the way Jaggers toys with Pip, clearly knowing more than he lets on about Pip’s mysterious benefactor. He relishes the descriptions of Wemmick’s peculiar house in Walworth –
coincidentally
, where my father taught at one of the new inner-city comprehensives. These characters have a life beyond the tent. They are quoted and referred to as we go about the campsite. If I’m sent off to buy some eggs in the village, my father puts on a Jaggers voice and says, ‘How much do you want? Forty pounds? Thruppence?’ When we get up in the morning, my parents are scurrying around looking for the bread or pulling the milk out from under the eaves of the tent, saying, ‘Vittles, gimme vittles, boy!’ It doesn’t have to be an accurate quote. My father’s performance had given such life to the characters that their vocabulary became ours, and they could now live with us on the campsite and, it turned out, beyond, for years after. Quite out of the blue, my father or mother would transform themselves into Pumblechook, calling out: ‘And three! And nine!’ as if I was Pip and they were calling after me through the railings of Miss Havisham’s house.

The character that my father brought most vividly to life was Trabb’s boy, a young chap who works for the local tailor and who is the first to spot Pip’s efforts to distinguish himself from his lowly background, mocking him for his apparent snobbery. To be honest, at the time I didn’t understand the significance of Trabb’s boy. I couldn’t
really
see the humour in this little chap walking down the street with a pretend cape over his shoulders, calling out, ‘Don’t know yer!’ For my father, this seemed both incredibly funny and especially poignant in ways that I couldn’t see or reach. Why, when he was quiet, prodding the fire, or if we were walking on the moors, would he suddenly say, ‘Don’t know yer!’?

Years later he gave a hint as to why this might have been. He said that there was a boy at school called Rosenberg – David Rosenberg, I think. He showed him to us on his class photo. Rosenberg was, he said, his best friend. But the Rosenbergs were poor. Quite how you could be even poorer than my father, his sister and his mother, I could never understand. After all, Rose had on occasions taken my father to various charities in order to ask for school boots. Both my mother and father talked of the tenements and flats that surrounded them while growing up as being full of bedbugs and grime. My mother hated dirt and could spot it a mile off, whether it was under a table, along the top of a cupboard door or on my face. So I thought, listening to my father, that maybe the Rosenbergs had bedbugs and dirt. Even on their faces. Rosenberg, it seems, had been my father’s friend, but then at some point someone
else
became his best friend, Moishe Kaufman. Indeed, not only did Moishe Kaufman become his best friend, but Moishe Kaufman’s girlfriend, Rene Roder, became the best friend of my father’s girlfriend, Connie Isakofsky. They were a four-some and David Rosenberg wasn’t part of it. In the shuffling of the pack of these East End boys, each in their different ways got what they needed to leave this place, to move northwards or eastwards to get out of this poverty and foreignness, to become less ‘heimish,’ as it was called – the ‘heim’ being the mythical far-away place in Eastern Europe where everyone looked and talked like their grandparents, lived in tiny houses and kept chickens. At some point David Rosenberg got frozen out. But something went deeper than that. There was some moment, some event, some incident, which I never fully heard about or understood, where it seems as if, to my father’s great regret and shame, he did something or said something to David Rosenberg – perhaps he pretended not to know Rosenberg, cold-shouldered him, looked down on him. It was a Trabb’s boy moment and I can now see that my father must have recognised himself in Pip, trying to leave his past behind and better himself.

So, wrapped up in that gesture that my father
did
when he played out Trabb’s Boy was a mockery of himself. Trabb’s boy was doing what I presume David Rosenberg didn’t do, which was act out the snobbery that he saw in my father. To do it on a campsite in Yorkshire in 1959, some twenty-five years after that scene or event that had taken place in a dingy, inky ‘Foundation School’ on the Mile End Road, may, I suppose, have helped him banish the guilt – well, at least for a few seconds.

In the end, my father did a Pip on nearly all of his family. We used to visit Rose – a tired figure he called ‘Ma’. We saw his sister Sylvia, but that was about it. In their place was a set of names, the kinds of names you never heard in the London suburbs of the 1950s – Raina, Lally and Busha – only as real as characters in a novel. We were in John Lewis; this wasn’t somewhere we went very often. In fact, I think it was the first time I had ever been there, though I understood that there were places my parents thought of as rather special: quality places where you could buy tasteful things. John Lewis was one of the places you could go to get such things, and Heal’s was another, and as a result chairs and carpets and curtains appeared in our flat in the suburbs with patterns and designs and colours that I never saw
in
other people’s houses. Perhaps there was a touch of the Beatrice Hastings about the things they tried to acquire. The long arm of my father’s own Miss Havisham determining how he thought about curtains. Anyway, in this place, John Lewis, a woman stopped my father and said, ‘Is it Harold?’ They talked for a few moments. She seemed tall and posh and imposing and then off she went. Who was that? That was his Aunty Rene – her real name was Raina. My father looked bothered and distracted by it.

So, perhaps in Trabb’s boy’s ‘Don’t know yer’ were Raina, Lally and Busha. I never knew exactly why we weren’t part of them, or they not part of us. There was a suggestion that some of them were locked in an old religion, full of what he thought were pointless beliefs. But there were times when he would show regret that he hadn’t kept on with Chanukkah, Purim and Seder nights, and he would talk longingly of dishes we had never tasted, strudel and
charoseth
and
humentaschen
, and fun things like giving away bits of bread before Pesach or hunting matzos.

So as
Great Expectations
got read and re-enacted, and these re-enactions were absorbed and reabsorbed into our family life down through the years, I could see various characters and
situations
in the book intertwine with these missing people. Alf, whom we didn’t ever see, was lovely. My father loved Uncle Alf. He talked of his kindness and the special treats. He was a lovely man, he would say. So was he a Joe Gargery figure to my father? Or, in his mind, was his loving grandfather the Joe figure who kept the stern aunts at bay, those aunts who seemed always in my mind to be frowning at the boy and complaining that he was getting the tastiest bits of the chicken – the ‘fliegel’ or the ‘pulke’. These women were all at once Pip’s sister, bringing him up ‘by hand’.

Of course there doesn’t have to be a like-for-like match between people. Part of the power of stories is the way in which we can see facets of this or that fictional person in the people we know, and scenes from the fictional world have echoes in the events of the real world. As the book, and my father’s reading of the book, and my feelings about the book developed, I felt from him a sense of yearning. Pip is desperate to get away from his old home and, once he’s had a sniff of what Miss Havisham appears to offer, he follows the dream of a better life. My father had some kind of dream. It was that his father would turn up and take him away from these horrible aunts. His father would arrive from America in his swell car, in his swell
suits
, and say, ‘Hey, Harold, let’s make tracks.’ And he would drive down Nelson Street in a convertible while all the family and the kids with their bedbugs and dirty faces would watch open-mouthed. But his father never came. Morris Rosen stayed in America. Rose never said bad words about him. He had special things to do. He was a union organiser. He was standing for the State Senate of Pennsylvania for the Socialists. He was organising support for Sacco and Vanzetti, who had been framed and would be executed. He was busy. So he never came. But the yearning stayed until my father was old enough to realise that he never would. By then, like Pip, he had become what one of the relatives had called a ‘psy-college boy’. He had studied English literature – books like
Great Expectations
. When I too came to do the same thing, I saw how so many things had ended up getting intertwined here: my father’s performance of the book; how the scenes became part of our daily lives and language; how all this spoke to me about the kind of family my father had come from and the changes he had been through before I was in this world. Books can do this. I’d also say that there is an added dimension, when books leave the page and become spoken out loud in a room full of people: of course they
become
live and vivid, but they also become social, they end up belonging to everyone in the room (or tent) at that moment. My father also read us
Little Dorrit
, Walter Scott’s
Guy Mannering
and, much later, most of
Catcher in the Rye
and
Catch-22
. Even more memorably, he also read out loud his own memoir, which he called
Are You Still Circumcised?