The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life

by Miller, Andy

  Shortly after the portrait is completed, Anna and Vronsky return to St Petersburg, and neither they nor we meet Mikhaylov again. But in four short chapters, Tolstoy sums up the never-ending transaction between the eternal values of art and the muddled world of the artist. Plus he makes you laugh. I had just finished this Mikhaylov interlude when I took Alex to look at Bathers at Asnières at the National. Seurat’s picture had long since escaped the shackles of Seurat’s life but it still bore the imprint of his character. Although his technique of painting in thousands of tiny dots had been given a technical name – ‘divisionism’ or ‘pointillism’ – it remained the product of an individual’s vision. And like Mikhaylov reluctantly courting Anna and Vronsky, an artist’s posthumous reputation was still subject to the ebb and flow of public opinion and the readiness of galleries and institutions to popularise the image of his painting, and thus their own reputations, via mouse mats or jigsaws, ginger fridge magnets or big wax dolls. The picture was finished years ago but the rent is always due.

  The same nagging tension lies at the heart of Sunday in the Park with George (which, it hardly needs saying, is a bit more complicated than Jersey Boys). As Seurat works on Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte, we are first shown the personal sacrifices that go into its creation and then, in the second act, the tricky negotiations with popularity that continue into the present day – the business of art. From my seat in the stalls, not five minutes from the Bathers, I watched as both painting and sacrifice were brought miraculously to life.

  Fig. 9: Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte (A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte). Georges Seurat, 1886.

  Never mind the dogs, here’s a monkey, bottom right.

  (courtesy Art Institute of Chicago)

  Sondheim and playwright James Lapine build the show around Seurat’s real writings on pointillist theories of colour and light – design, tension, composition, balance, harmony – and apply them first to the imagined lives of the characters in the painting, then Seurat and his mistress Dot (their invention), then the modern art scene and the efforts of Seurat’s great-grandson George to find inspiration and funding for his own artworks. Much of this is sung to a score whose staccato notes suggest the dots of paint from Seurat’s paintbrush. The songs jump between the real world and the painting, and characters come and go from both. At one point, Seurat gives voice to the dogs in the park, which rise or fall from the stage at his command.2 ‘Finishing the Hat’, ‘Color and Light’, ‘Move On’, ‘Putting it Together’: the metaphor should buckle under the strain but it never does. The refrain of the latter – art isn’t easy – repeated by the younger George as he schmoozes a gallery of wealthy potential patrons, could be the theme tune of the last few months. I have rarely, if ever, been so moved in a theatre. For much of the second half, I felt like something enormous was trying to escape from my chest.

  In Act II, Seurat’s daughter, now in her nineties and confined to a wheelchair, reports one of her mother’s favourite sayings. ‘You know, there are only two worthwhile things to leave behind when you depart this world of ours – children and art.’ She then sings wistfully and delicately of ‘. . . La Grande Jatte’, painted by her father long ago, as ‘our family tree’. Great art is our family tree, just as children are a glimpse into the future and the past. Tolstoy came to view these essential elements of life, children and art as barriers to enlightenment, but surely he was wrong? When we find a painting or a novel or a musical we love, we are briefly connected to the best that human beings are capable of, in ourselves and others, and we are reminded that our path through the world must intersect with others. Whether we like it or not, we are not alone. Tolstoy realised this in Anna Karenina but after his conversion he spent much of his subsequent life trying to deny it or postpone it to the afterlife. Families and art, paintings and crowds, books and their troublesome readers: composition, balance, tension, harmony. It is our duty and our privilege to try to resolve these things here and now, with the help of a song or a decent book. Because they will not wait for later.

  When we got home, I looked in at Alex, asleep. I was somebody’s son and somebody’s father. It had not been much consolation for Tolstoy but I was not Tolstoy.

  I could do better.

  Books Twelve and Thirteen

  Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham

  Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

  ‘“How despicably I have acted!” she cried. “I, who have prided myself on my discernment! – I, who have valued myself on my abilities! Who have often disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my vanity, in useless or blameable distrust! – How humiliating is this discovery! – Yet, how just a humiliation!”’

  Pride and Prejudice

  ‘“That’s all literature,” she said, a little contemptuously. “You must get away from that.”’

  Of Human Bondage

  It was a new year but the end was nigh. There were only two books left to read and afterwards I could go back to the Standard and spreadsheets and half-finished manuscripts and magazines. Except of course, I couldn’t.

  Reading is not an activity one associates with action. Yet as the end of the List approached, I found it difficult to accept that I had done nothing except look at words on the page. There had to be more to it than that. The last couple of months had made me ask serious questions about art, work, family, freedom, integrity and packed lunches. Now it was up to me to answer those questions. How was I going to move on? And what was I going to do when the List was finished?

  These momentous decisions would have to be put off a little longer, however, while I wrestled with a new problem: Of Human Bondage. On the surface, this should have been an easy task. Although it was 700 pages long, Somerset Maugham wrote in a clear, plain style, and the novel recounted a straightforward rites-of-passage story in a series of appealing settings: the stretch of Kent coast where we lived, the Paris milieu of Seurat and the Post-Impressionists, and a London of pubs, poverty and omnibuses.

  On day two, I sought advice from the person from whom I had borrowed the book. Her maiden name was written in blue on the title page; although her copy of Of Human Bondage had clearly been read, the blocky spine remained commendably unbroken. Its owner took good care of her personal library, a quality I found nerdily attractive.

  ‘Tina,’ I said, ‘I’m not getting on with this at all. Does it pick up?’

  ‘I can’t remember much about it. Is that the one where he’s got a club foot?’

  On day four, precisely two hundred pages in and not a word more – I had in fact left off mid-sentence, just as Philip Carey, the novel’s hero, claps eyes on a shrivel-breasted naked woman for the first time – I asked again. When might I expect a breakthrough?

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Tina. ‘It’s ages since I read it. I liked it at the time. Is that the one with the waitress?’

  ‘Not yet,’ I said hesitantly. It did not augur well for the remaining 500 pages that the two most memorable items were the club foot, which had first been alluded to on page two, and a waitress.

  On day six, the waitress appeared. Her name was Mildred and she was common and anaemic. Philip Carey was ruinously obsessed with her, though not in any way which seemed very original or interesting. The story laboured on. It felt to me like an anaemic retread of Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, which I knew to be unfair, because Maugham’s novel had been published fifteen years before Patrick Hamilton’s. But still.1 As far as I could tell, Maugham seemed to think he was a terrifically astute judge of human character. He presided over the novel like a magistrate. Nothing anyone did or said seemed to come as a surprise. It was deathly.

  After a week of Of Human Bondage, I felt confident enough to venture an informed opinion to my wife.

  ‘This book is rubbish,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I didn’t think you’d like it,’ she replied. ‘The Razor’s Edge is good though.’

  That deci
ded it. What I did was, I gave up.

  Giving up on a book was expressly against the rules of Betterment, but, oh, it felt wonderful. My problem with Of Human Bondage was not that it was too difficult or experimental or eccentric or trivial. It was none of these. The problem was that it was so excruciatingly boring.

  How should we deal with books we do not like? This was the first time I had encountered this question in the List of Betterment and, strangely, I had not really expected it. I had assumed that all the classics I chose would have something unambiguous to recommend them, a point of interest or excellence that would guide my reading. And so it had proved, until now. Of Human Bondage, for all its reputation, for all the elements that ought to have commended it to me – the plain, clear prose, the recognisable streets and cities, the enchanting seediness of it all – stubbornly refused to yield, well, anything very much. I could have carried on to the end but I knew it would not be worth the considerable effort. Halfway through, I had the measure of it – or I thought I did. So I stopped.

  Although I had not anticipated this problem, I knew how to deal with it. For some years now, I had coped with any book I did not like by rejecting it, fast. Partly, this was professional expediency. As a bookseller and later as an editor, the sheer volume of incoming words could be overwhelming. These jobs often required a rush to judgement – form a decisive opinion, then act upon it. But I also subscribed to some vague notion of readers’ rights: life is brief, time is precious, why waste either on doing something you do not enjoy, consumer choice, and so forth. Do you need to have read a book all the way through in order to have an opinion about it? Of course not. You do not need to have read a book at all and you can still let the world know how you feel, just as at the public swimming baths, you don’t have to complete a length of the adult pool before deciding to take a wee in the deep end. That is between you and your conscience.

  However, once you start to give up on books, you may lose the skill of finishing them – my early difficulties with The Master and Margarita and Middlemarch proved this. In addition, your opinion will automatically be worth less than that of someone who has taken the trouble to finish the book because, in at least one key respect, they know what they are talking about and you don’t.2 And little by little you may erode your integrity to a point where you sincerely believe the difference between saying you have read a book and actually reading it is little more than semantics. You come to believe that it doesn’t matter anyway, because it’s all a load of shit.

  For a period in the mid-1930s, between more anthropologically prestigious engagements, George Orwell worked in a bookshop. He tired of it quickly. ‘The real reason why I should not like to be in the book trade for life is that while I was in it I lost my love of books,’ he later wrote. ‘A bookseller has to tell lies about books, and that gives him a distaste for them; still worse is the fact that he is constantly dusting them and hauling them to and fro.’ However, he was not merely alienated from the stock. ‘The thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people. Our shop had an exceptionally interesting stock, yet I doubt whether ten per cent of our customers knew a good book from a bad one . . . Many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop.’

  I do not know how true this is today but it was certainly the case twenty years ago, when I first started telling lies about books professionally. Often when a customer brought a book to the till and asked, ‘Have you read this? Is it good?’, the worst thing you could do was tell the truth. It was kinder, and cleaner, to answer all such queries with a ‘yes’. The customer rarely wanted the honest opinion of a shop assistant anyway. At the moment of purchase, they were looking for their own discerning taste to be confirmed by the approval of someone who was not in a position to disagree.3

  And what if you had read the book in question? If you thought it was rubbish and said so, you satisfied no one. ‘Have you read this?’ enquired a middle-aged lady, holding up a copy of The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. ‘Is it good?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘It’s awful.’ (I had read some of it and I believed it was.) ‘Oh,’ she said, somewhat startled. At this point, another customer, a younger woman in her thirties, intervened. ‘Oh no,’ she said earnestly. ‘It’s beautiful.’ She then turned to me and said: ‘But it’s not a thriller . . .’ A heated discussion of the merits of The English Patient ensued. While the young woman and I argued, the older lady returned The English Patient to the shelf. The carefree moment of purchase had been spoiled. On the other hand, if you had read a book and really liked it, it could still turn out badly. I once inadvertently dissuaded a customer from buying Gordon Burn’s Alma Cogan by recommending it with such boggle-eyed fervour that, smiling and nodding, they backed out of the shop and never came back.

  No, it was better to conceal what you really thought. How much simpler, as yet another copy of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin or The Secret History passed through your hands, to go with the flow of received opinion.4 Yes, it is an excellent book, well done you for selecting it, a distinctive choice. In the era I worked in the shop, it sometimes felt like the only books we ever sold were the same half dozen novels, over and over: Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, The Secret History, Perfume, Birdsong . . . I personally recommended these titles hundreds of times, though I had only read one of them, and not thought much of it. But these were the books people wanted, even when they did not know they wanted them. ‘I’m looking for a new novel, I can’t remember the title, I heard something about it on Radio 4 . . .’ ‘Was it Captain Corelli’s Mandolin?’ ‘Yes, that was it! How on earth did you know?’ To which one could not reply, ‘You are obviously from the same socio-economic group as everyone else who buys this one’ or just ‘You look the type’.

  Books are different. You would not go into a greengrocer or a grocery store and announce, apropos of nothing, that you were looking for something to eat; or approach the cashier at B&Q and ask them to recommend some cutting-edge screws. (‘Well, sir, what kind of screws do you usually enjoy?’) It is a peculiarity of bookshops, and our relationships with books, that when we go browsing in them, or on their homepages, we feel we are – cough – ‘joining an on-going conversation’. But for precisely this reason, we can find it hard to accept that Orwell’s ‘really bookish people’ are the ones behind the counter. It is more flattering to all concerned to pretend otherwise.5

  Over time, I came to see that what a customer really wants from a bookseller is not a love of books per se but a love of selling books – not an unreasonable demand. However, for the whole business to run smoothly, the latter needs to masquerade as the former. If you love books more than you love selling them, then eventually that discrepancy will get the better of you. Let us suppose that you prize the novels of Tolstoy above all others. You imagine that, while working with books, you will have the opportunity to share your enthusiasm for Tolstoy with the public. How frustrated you will be, then, when you discover that the majority of the public are more interested in the novels of, say, Alan Titchmarsh. To them, your sincere passion for Tolstoy, if expressed openly, will seem like one-upmanship or hoity-toity elitism. So you repress it. But wait – not only do you have to deny your true feelings for Tolstoy, they want you to be overjoyed every time you sell another Titchmarsh. You try to do it because it is your job. But it is debilitating. And so, in order to protect your love of books, you start telling lies about them – inevitably. Orwell saw this and got out after a year or so; I was not so vigilant.6

  Similarly, when, several years later, I became an editor and got the chance to publish books myself, I soon learned the value of the judicious fib. Most publishers receive their books from literary agents, either as finished manuscripts or sketched-out proposals with sample chapters attached. In the majority of cases, the editor will not like the manuscript or proposal and not wish to publish it. It then falls to the editor to telephone or email the agent and reject the book. However, when re
jecting these non-starters, it can be necessary to invent excuses: not right for the list at this time, cannot see where such a book would fit into the market, and so on. An editor will rarely have the daring to say simply ‘I didn’t like it’ for fear of appearing unprofessional or uninformed or, in due course, when the book becomes a bestseller and wins a prize or two, wrong. And when a manuscript or proposal is terrible, the same line of defence is usually followed. No one wants to be unkind; and besides, next week the same agent might have something far more prize-worthy or commercial to offer, perhaps both. To a good editor, the white lie is every bit as important as the blue pencil.

  When I was a junior editor, one of my new colleagues was offered the first novel of an up-and-coming broadsheet journalist and reviewer, whom we shall call ‘J’. ‘J’ was under thirty; his agent was highly regarded; and the novel was eye-wateringly atrocious. It was a lame, penile dog of a book. To complicate matters, my colleague was on drinking terms with the journalist and we had been offered the novel exclusively: it was ours to refuse. How might she reject it without causing offence to the agent, spoiling a friendship and jeopardising future positive reviews ‘J’ might pen for her books? ‘I think someone younger needs to have a look at it,’ she said. ‘Maybe I’m not getting it. Would you mind . . . ?’ In my naivety, I was thrilled to help. I wrote an email in which I methodically detailed the novel’s many glaring faults. ‘Crikey,’ she said. ‘Look, I think you ought to let them know we don’t want the book. I’ve told them I’ve passed it on to you.’ So I copied and pasted much of my email into a letter and sent the manuscript back to the agent. ‘Thank you for your candour,’ said the agent, and never submitted anything to me again. Subsequently, the novel was picked up by another publisher and became a modest success, receiving positive notices in all those papers and magazines to which ‘J’ contributed, though noticeably less so elsewhere. It was an early lesson in literary Realpolitik.