Stop What You’re Doing and Read This! (7 page)

A few years ago I went to Boston because I had found out where Morris Rosen was buried. It was on a long road through the north of the city. I walked past tattoo parlours and empty car dealerships until there were no more buildings, just waste depots and cemeteries. It was November, cold and raining, and I found the graveyard, the ‘Jewish Workmen’s Circle Cemetery’. And there was Morris Rosen. On his grave it said ‘Beloved father’. ‘Beloved father? Beloved?!’ As one of my relatives replied, ‘Haven’t you heard of Jewish humour?’ There was also a number on the grave: the number of the branch of the Workmen’s Circle, the self-help organisation that Jewish workers set up. It was number 666. For several days I scanned pages on the Internet trying to find where branch 666 was. In the end I found it: Mattapan. Boston’s biggest mental institution.

So there in the graveyard was where all that misplaced yearning had ended up, with a number representing the name of an ‘asylum’ on it. No Magwitch came out from behind any gravestones while I was standing there, but in a way all my cemeteries are Magwitch cemeteries. That’s how my father in the tent in Yorkshire goes on working.

LITERATURE AND TIME
Travel
, I had called it, in hope of getting some younger, some different people.

I was thirty-two, with my recent PhD tucked into my belt, relatively new to teaching, and my students in the Extra-Mural Department at the University of Liverpool seemed to me very old. Most of them were surely over fifty, but on the plus side they were interested in the literature, and I came to see them as brave voyagers. Time-travelling, we visited the farms and pastures of thirteenth-century England with
Piers Plowman
, walked with Wordsworth and demobbed vagrant soldiers in rural Cumberland, and in Charlotte Brontë’s
Villette
, with our poor French, battled against loneliness and paranoia in a foreign nineteenth-century town. In other words, I could
have
been done under the Trade Descriptions Act, for despite the title, this was a course of reading in canonical English Literature.

The real USP, though I didn’t advertise it, was that I knew
nothing
, almost literally nothing at all, about most of the texts that were to occupy our attention. This was literature for beginners with an ignoramus sitting at the lecturer’s desk. The only things I was confident about were my ability to read the text (and not even that, in the case of
Piers Plowman
), to engage people in conversation and to bring an applied personality to whatever was up for discussion.

I taught in this way in that Extra-Mural Department for fifteen years. During that time, working alongside a couple of like-minded colleagues, I built up a large, loyal following of people who were willing to read in this inexpert, exploratory way. Often, what was being read was as new to me as it was to my students. Usually we read large portions of the text aloud in the class, to make it lively and present in our minds while we talked about it. That concentration on actually reading the book – here, now, in the room, together – was to become the cornerstone of
Get Into Reading
, the shared-reading model I
developed
when I founded The Reader Organisation in 2002.

Devoted individual readers, solitary and private, look away now. I’m going to suggest changing – or at least adding a new model to – the way you read.

The Reader Organisation’s
Get Into Reading
programme develops read-aloud groups that meet once a week, with children as young as three and with people over ninety, taking place in youth clubs, high-security psychiatric settings, workplaces, dementia care homes, drug rehabs, schools, day-centres, libraries, corporate boardrooms, prisons, supermarket cafés. It’s a reading group, but not as you perhaps know it.

In shared reading the text, poem, novel, short story, play or whatever is read aloud, in its entirety, by one or more members of the group. The group talks about the book as it is read, freely interrupting the flow of the reading with personal responses ranging from ‘My granddad had a dog like that’ to ‘I didn’t know anyone could explain how it feels to go into battle as he’s doing here – it was like this when I …’ (both responses to
War and Peace
). Read in this way, a short poem might take half an hour, a short story two hours,
War and Peace
eighteen months.

The model has profound implications in the realms of the personal and social, in terms of education and health: much of The Reader Organisation’s work has been paid for from NHS and social-inclusion budgets. It would be a mistake, though, to see shared reading as something only for sick or unhappy or economically deprived people. It has simply been easier for us to develop projects in those areas where the need is most obvious. But
the need
, in our fractured society, is everywhere. It is time that shared reading reached the mainstream.

As you are reading this book, it naturally follows that you are an accomplished and dedicated reader. You think of reading as an individual, even a solitary activity, one that you would want to defend as such, because usually, for devoted readers, the act of reading is deeply private. I’m going to argue, though, that even highly proficient readers might want to try shared reading, which is in equal measure about books
and
people. It isn’t just about getting non-readers into reading (though it does do that remarkably well); it is about building relationships out of communal meanings. Sharing a book is a multiplier, as anyone who has ever read, night after night, to a story-besotted child will know. It is about
mutual
recognitions, the sharing of selves. Let me give an example.

We had a good first term in that time-travel class, and celebrated with a Christmas party to which all the travellers brought food and favourite poems to read aloud. Pat, a university administrator, an imposing lady who reminded me of a jolly headmistress – capable, but good fun, and utterly
together
– read ‘I Am’ by John Clare. Written in a lunatic asylum, where Clare was incarcerated, the poem is very moving:

I am – yet what I am, none cares or knows;

My friends forsake me like a memory lost:

I am the self-consumer of my woes –

They rise and vanish in oblivion’s host

Like shadows in love-frenzied stifled throes

And yet I am, and live – like vapours tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,

Into the living sea of waking dreams,

Where there is neither sense of life or joys,

But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;

Even the dearest that I loved the best

Are strange – nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod

A place where woman never smiled or wept

There to abide with my Creator, God,

And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,

Untroubling, and untroubled where I lie

The grass below – above, the vaulted sky.

When she had finished reading there was an appreciative silence, followed by people making some remarks about the poem, but then Pat said (I paraphrase from a probably faulty memory), ‘This poem means a lot to me because I used to live on a farm in Australia and I became an alcoholic. I became so much of an alcoholic that I lost my marriage and my children … lost everything.’

She described, in brief and with a cool, resolute lack of self-pity, her life as an alcoholic who had lost everything. And then went on, ‘And during that time, which lasted some years, I had this poem. I kept it all that time on a scrap of paper in my pocket, and I used to take it out sometimes and read it, and think, yes: I am. I am.’

This was time-travel indeed, this strange shared process that took feelings and thoughts in and out of individuals, in and out of time and place, and connected it and us all up: John Clare, Pat, the other students, me; Northampton General
Lunatic
Asylum, the streets of Melbourne, this Liverpool University seminar room, 1845, 1975, 1990. The room was charged with a powerful energy, the poem electrifying as we listened to Pat read it. It was the most moving thing that had happened to me in my career as a reader and a teacher of literature and it happened at a Christmas party, not in class: we were there as people and fellow readers, off-curriculum.

Look at the life-saving equipment John Clare packed into this poem of human wreckage: ‘I am’ it begins, a great stone slab of assertion. How powerful those opening words are when I imagine being in a state – ‘the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems’ – where who and what I am seems utterly insecure. Giving voice to the unbearably true, and
knowing it
in full consciousness, is like having proof of reality: ‘yet what I am none cares or knows’, most helpful, however painful, when you feel unreal, ungrounded. Clare is not afraid of going deep into his trouble in the second stanza or of imagining an alternative reality – an impossible, damaged, but beautiful vision of a fresh start or even the relief of death – in the beautiful and saddened third.

I wonder now, how had John Clare’s poem worked for Pat all that time she was in thrall to
her
addiction? Did reading it do her good in the pain of it? How could a poem help your life? Keeping hold of stuff when you are down and out is hard, people tell me: you are always on the move, you have to carry what you’ve got, and you often have to leave places sharpish. But she had the poem (first read in an anthology she’d won as a prize at school), and she’d kept or refound it and held onto it because it was valuable. The poem’s very existence, on its scrap of paper in your pocket, tells of other worlds, worlds you might once have inhabited, worlds you may one day wish to find or refind. Read the poem alone and you have your own experience and imagination to touch the poem into life. Read it with six others and you have six lives and six imaginations with which to inhabit this flexible human-shaped space. You also have something non-literary: the growing connections between and among those six people.

Though I knew something powerful was happening at that Christmas party, I ‘had the experience but missed the meaning’, as T. S. Eliot puts it, for the significance of the moment didn’t become clear to me until many years later, when I began to recognise it as part of a phenomenon that occurs when people are reading aloud and
together
, in a particular way. It is to do with the three-sided connection between the text, the personality (which may be more or less explicit) of the person who is reading, and the people sharing the listening, in a kind of personal amplification. The reverberation of Pat’s story has remained part of the poem for me, always there in the background, and I find the poem the more powerful because of the recollection and imagining of Pat’s alcoholic (and recovered-alcoholic) setting. That anyone might have lived those three very different lives (farmer’s wife, rolling-stone alcoholic and university administrator) and that they might all be held together by John Clare’s verses changed the poem for me, for ever.

I think of this story when anxious people challenge me about reading ‘serious’ literature in our shared-reading groups. Why not, they will often say, read
lighter
stuff – surely easier for people who aren’t feeling too happy, or who have different social norms?

The plea for lightness may be a natural and entirely understandable fear of getting serious: lots of us spend a great deal of time not thinking, for fear of being brought down. Often, too, the person who imagines the ‘lighter stuff’ as being more appropriate – and in my experience this has
included
the GP, the prison governor, the librarian, the HR manager, even the literacy tutor – that person, often in authority, is still simply afraid of the word ‘literature’ and especially afraid of ‘poetry’. I’m not sure that anyone
in
the world of literature knows how far
out
of the world of literature most people are. It’s perfectly likely that, if they didn’t do English at A-level (and most people don’t), a senior NHS manager, a child-protection officer, a forensic psychiatrist, a clinical psychologist or police chief will never have read a classic novel or any poetry whatsoever. It says something about the way we see literature that no one finds this either surprising or alarming. At the other end of the literature-experience spectrum is the professional scholar, for whom reading is impersonal and abstract, and almost always deliberately cut off from life as we live it. It is easy to see why, when dealing with literature or life stuff, people think it better if we stick to the surface of things and splash around up there, lightly pretending there are no depths, when the depths seem either unplumbed and terrifying or, on the other hand, intimidatingly aesthetic, to do with a specialist, professionalised and narrow form of education.

In this cleft stick, buying stuff is one way of
getting
by, but Wordsworth put even that impulse into poetry in 1806:

That natural desire for pleasure is why addictions can get such a strong hold on us: getting all sorts of stuff, from alcohol to new trainers, can make you feel momentarily happier. But try as we will, we cannot ignore or shout down what Wordsworth calls ‘our hearts’, and consistently ignoring the inner life has put depression and anxiety high among the world’s most serious epidemics. Depressive disorders are the fourth-highest cause of disability worldwide. In people aged eighteen to forty-four depression is the leading cause of disability and premature death.
¹

Wordsworth argues in the
Preface to the Lyrical Ballads
that human creatures live primarily in and by feelings – and that’s why we need poetry. Thoughts, he says, are what happen when feelings settle down in us through repetition: as coal is to forest, so thought is to feeling. Positive
psychology
is opening up new areas of thinking in these fields, and I am impressed by the thinking of Professors Layard and Seligman, of the happiness and well-being movements
²
. But readers of poetry already know that such ideas have often been the subject of explicit
literary
thinking, in the sort of deeper language, the language seeking depth, to be found in Matthew Arnold’s ‘The Buried Life’ (1852):

Despite our (perhaps also natural) desire to amass, consume and be mindless, the ‘unspeakable desire’ to know ‘our buried life’ is ancient and implacable. If we ignore it, or have no means of
knowing
it, that desire will come back and hurt us, as do all unmet primal needs. For Matthew Arnold, as for many people, the way to the buried life is through connection with another human being, an experience that animates powerful feeling: