by Susan Hill
I have spent a long time among the Victorians this winter but the year is on the turn, the first spring crocuses are pushing up through the grass. It is not yet warm, there are no leaves on the trees but just perceptibly the nights are drawing out.
I am restless for the twentieth century again. Upstairs then, to the landing. Why Forster sits next to Graham Greene, or Anita Brookner is tucked in beside VS. Naipaul, let alone why they are interspersed with odd volumes of the Finn Family Moomintroll, is one of the mysteries of the reading life.
I put my hand out, bypassing the Moomins just for now, and, as it rests on A House for Mr Biswas, I have a flash of recall: VS. Naipaul entering through the door of the BBC Radio 4 studio for an interview with me on Bookshelf. It is 1987 and pride comes before a fall. When he comes up to me and takes my hand in his silken ones, he bows.
‘I am most honoured to meet …’ a pause. Then ‘… the wife of the distinguished Shakespeare scholar Stanley Wells.’
It is difficult to put the second half of the twentieth century together with the first when trying to arrange novelists into a tentative order of greatness. Many would say it is a pointless task, but there are levels of achievement, in this as in anything else: there are the great and the ordinary, and time helps us to see the great more clearly as the rest fall away. We need a mark against which to measure greatness, but the first half of the twentieth century contains some novelists who have not so far been surpassed, and some who really belong with the Victorians. Thomas Hardy is the obvious example of the latter, but so is another great, and greatly underestimated novelist, Arnold Bennett.
But there is surely no novelist writing since the 1950s who is greater than Naipaul. He is a complex thinker, a magnificent prose writer, a painter on a broad canvas, able to portray not just a place but a continent and a philosophy, a history and a civilisation. Yet he is always clear, always readable, deep but never obscure, which surely adds to the measure of his achievement – almost all the best novelists can be read by the interested and committed reader. However great a writer is – Proust, say, or James Joyce – the fact that so very many willing and intelligent readers find them difficult, even impenetrable, is surely a mark, albeit in pencil, against them. This is not a plea for an ‘easy read’ – concentration, focus and application are necessary in direct proportion to the richness and depth of a text, and bring their own reward. But linguistic or stylistic obscurity is a hindrance to understanding. VS. Naipaul’s prose, by contrast, is supple and clear, his vocabulary huge, and his manipulation of language masterly. He is able to make us laugh and cry and marvel within a couple of sentences, and packs in a wealth of multifaceted meaning and reference.
The exchange took place on the back steps and reached the ears of Mr Biswas, lying in pants and vest on the Slumberking bed in the room which contained most of the possessions he had gathered after forty-one years. He had carried on a war with Suniti ever since she was a child but his contempt had never been able to quell her sarcasm.
‘Shama,’ he shouted. ‘Tell that girl to go back and help that worthless husband of hers look after their goats at Pokima Halt.’
‘The goats were an invention of Mr Biswas which never failed to irritate Suniti. ‘Goats!’ she said to the yard, and sucked her teeth. ‘Well, some people at least have goats. Which is more than I could say for some other people.’
‘‘Tcha!’ Mr Biswas said softly; and refusing to be drawn into an argument with Suniti, he turned on his side and continued to read the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.
The last incongruity is typical of a novel whose whole identity, like that of its hero, Mohun Biswas, is bound up in incongruity. A House for Mr Biswas is a masterpiece which finds its way effortlessly on to my shelf. There is plenty more Naipaul dotted about the house and every volume adds to the sum of his stature but no one novel compares with Mr Biswas.
With Graham Greene, though, it is different. They are all here, as well as his Collected Essays and several books about him, of which my two favourites are Shirley Hazzard’s delightful short book Greene on Capri, about a friendship formed during his later years, and the illuminating The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene by Marie-Françoise Allain. Greene straddles the twentieth century and I think he does so alone. There is no other novelist as good, writing over the same period. Many people reject some aspects of his work – his Catholicism, his anti-Americanism, but these do not detract from his greatness even if they are vital parts of his character and history. He gets under the skin of people so well, knows what makes them tick, especially in moral extremis, he understands and forgives and emphathises, he is clear-eyed, he can explain and apportion blame yet is always non-judgemental. His style is so straightforward, so lucid, so unshowy and yet it packs a massive punch.
But it was one of his essays, ‘The Lost Childhood’, which struck the loudest chord with me when I first read it, because there Greene puts his finger on what first spurred him to write – the books he read, and was so totally caught up in, as a child. The essay provoked an answering cry of recognition inside me. ‘But that’s how it was with me too!’ When they come, however they come, those moments of spontaneous response are very significant.
I always longed to meet Greene, though I doubt if he would have had anything to say to me and many who did meet him found him difficult, tetchy, even dull. But I did once write to him.
In 1961 Greene’s A Burnt-Out Case appeared on the same day as my first novel, and one of the popular newspapers, seeking to provoke, led with a long and flattering review of mine, while consigning Greene to a corner. It was an act of unpardonable rudeness, as well as bad judgement and, although my publisher was amused, I felt mortified enough to write to Greene and apologise. Of course it was not my fault but it somehow felt as if it was. He wrote a most courteous and charming reply by hand. The letter has disappeared. I have longed for it to drop out of a Greene novel, or to find it stuck in some ancient notebook. When moving house or having a rearrangement of books, I have made a thorough search for it and unearthed many another lost treasure. But never, alas, my letter from Graham Greene.
I must have one of his books among my forty and, because I am anxious for my collection to include humour and lightness, I am tempted to take Travels with my Aunt, or the wonderfully funny Our Man in Havana, about a vacuum-cleaner salesman, but perhaps they would pall. I dither between The Quiet American, The End of the Affair and The Heart of the Matter, eliminate the middle title, dither again. It has to be the greatest, I think, the most moving and, above all, that rarest of things, the novel which is entirely convincing about love. Graham Greene wrote about human love as well as Tolstoy and never better than in The Heart of the Matter, which is also so good at conveying the atmosphere, the heat, the squalor, the ennui of the West Africa he knew so well. So in it goes.
Picture Books
ONE OF THE PLEASURES of reading aloud to small children is that you’re also reading aloud to yourself. Many of the storybooks my daughters had are still here, battered and creased, well read and well loved, though many others flowed under the bridges, borrowed from the library, bought but never quite taken into the bosom of the family, as it were. The favourites were read aloud long after the children could read independently because the pleasures of being read to are many and carry on into adult life. Reading alone provides quite different literary pleasure. It is saddening to know that the majority of children never have stories read to them at home. How much they miss, of shared pleasure and fun, comfort and closeness, interest and learning. The children’s books still left here are mainly paperbacks, apart from the pop-up books that is – but those are what used to be called Sunday Books, for careful page-turning with clean hands.
There is a strange assortment of the everyday, the fantastic, the simple and cheerful, the weird and the scary, and all were read, according to mood. The younger child liked nightmarish tales – a favourite was the Russian story of the witch with iron teeth, Baba Yaga – but the el
der one had bad dreams and preferred gentler tales without too much sadness.
Beatrix Potter’s small books with the shiny white jackets are here, masterpieces of observation and imagination. How comforting Peter Rabbit is, even though it is also a profoundly moral tale, and how realistically red in tooth and claw is The Tale of Jemima Puddleduck. Potter understood the countryside and there is not a trace of sentimentality in her. The stories are redolent of the Victorian nursery; rabbit and cat mothers speak kindly but firmly, and issue terrible warnings of the consequences of folly and misdeeds.
I have just gone through a shelf packed with picture books, and I find that most of the old favourites are a mixture of the ordinary and the odd and that many, chosen on a whim, stayed the course not because they are great children’s literature – like Potter – but because they struck the right note at the right time, found favour and stood up to countless re-readings.
So familiar were they that they have become leitmotifs running through family life. They run still. The small boy James who cut his finger in the playground and felt, like the title, Just Awful, is remembered fondly whenever anybody in the family has to go to see the GP practice nurse; and one called Ben, who went fishing with his father, lives on every time anyone makes a tomato sandwich (which he used as unsuccessful bait). Nobody who forgets their manners can escape being reminded of Elfrida Vipont’s The Elephant and the Bad Baby (who went ‘Rumpeta, Rumpeta, Rumpeta, all down the road’) – another moral tale. We take an animal to what is always referred to as the VE.T. – because it was thought that Mog the Forgetful Cat understood if you said the word aloud – and thinking of an owl inevitably means thinking either of Meg and Mog too, or of The Owl who was Afraid of the Dark.
Every family in which children are read to, and where books are part of the furniture and the reading of them part of life, must have its own mythology, one that has arisen out of early books. Characters become companions, they help form the imagination, they people a child’s inner landscape. Alice in Wonderland and the White Rabbit, the Red Queen and the Caterpillar were far more to me than invented characters in a storybook. They still are. Looking at the children’s picture books now, I realise that they are my books too, they became as much part of my inner landscape as of theirs. The best children’s books defy age barriers though plenty of others do not move up with us into adulthood.
Enid Blyton served a purpose well but I doubt if I could last the course all the way through even one of them now, and I note how few are left on our shelves. Once outgrown, they have been given away with alacrity.
On a small bookcase in the hall I found a row of fiction which came after picture books. I wonder why they are still here, whether either girl would want them in future, if they hold sentimental memories, or none at all. There is a series about a girl called Ramona the Pest, another of horse and pony stories, and the much-loved Laura Ingalls Wilder books about the Little House on the Prairie. Others? The House that Sailed Away, The Mona Lisa Mystery, The Worst Witch, Gobbolino the Witch’s Cat, The Mouse and his Child…
I take them out and put them back. One day, somebody will come upon them again and decide if they are wanted, but meanwhile, they take up little room and every one was once read and loved, which is the best reason for letting them stay here for a while longer.
A couple of years ago a friend of extremely left-wing and politically correct bent was looking at the shelf of children’s books and remarked that they were all ‘escapist’. She felt that my children had not been encouraged to engage in the gritty problems and troubles of real life through their reading. No, they had not. I always steered clear of ‘issue literature’ when choosing picture books for them – but then, there were few of that kind available for the under-fives in the 1970s and early 1980s, though occasionally there were titles aimed at helping children overcome a fear of dogs, for example, or the dentist. But she did not mean that sort of simple, helpful story. She was looking through the fiction they read between the ages of around eight to thirteen or so, before they moved on to adult novels. Escapist? I would call it imaginative. But if the lives of children in Elizabethan England, or a magical country called Narnia, and stories about creatures called Moomins are a means of escape from the often dull and tiresome everyday world, as well as being good books, what is the argument against that? Computer games are escapist, going to football matches or the cinema, or watching soaps or costume drama on television, are all forms of escapism. We need some.
Since our children’s books were first bought, fiction for young readers has become more and more issue-led. Divorce, step-parents, drugs, alcohol, early sex, knife-crime, foster-care, child abuse, unemployment, gang warfare, AIDS, terminal illness … you name it, there is a novel for children about it. But all children are anxious, adult life contains much that is ugly and unhappy, unpleasant or downright bad. Why introduce them to that too early, through books, which can be such a force for enjoyment, imaginative enrichment, fun, excitement, adventure, magic? Realism comes home soon enough and many children have too much anguish to cope with in their everyday lives as it is. Their books can be one corner of life that remains untainted by the troubles brought upon their heads by unthinking, unloving adults. I am glad mine remained ignorant of much that is polluted, cruel, ugly, hurtful, wrong as long as possible (which is not, after all, very long, in the scheme of things) and that their books were wholesome, enriching, enlivening, enjoyable, lovable and, for the most part, were about worlds into which they could happily, innocently escape.
Bad Bed-Fellows
… it was unthinkable to put a book by Borges next to one by Garcia Lorca, whom the Argentine author once described as ‘a professional Andalusian’. And given the dreadful accusation of plagiarism between the two of them, he could not put something by Shakespeare next to a work by Marlowe, even though this meant not respecting the volume numbers of the sets in his collections. Nor, of course, could he place a book by Martin Amis next to one by Julian Barnes after the two friends had fallen out, or leave Vargas Llosa with Garcia Marquez.
THAT IS FROM a charming novella about the perils and dangers of books and book owning, The Paper House by Carlos María Domínguez, which is on a shelf of small books because – well, it is a small book. Before I took it down to copy the quotation, it was sitting next to an old World’s Classic edition of Silas Marner, but I might replace it beside the Observer Book of British Moths, which is also small. I hope they will not quarrel. The Paper House is about a man who has many thousands of books which not only take on personalities of their own but come to replace people in his life. A friend went upstairs in his house, ‘and as he passed the open bedroom door, on the bed he glimpsed twenty or so books carefully laid out in such a way that they reproduced the mass and outline of a human body’.
So books may drive a man mad. ‘Books change people’s destinies,’ the author writes, and ‘Whenever my grandmother saw me reading in bed, she would say, “Stop that! Books are dangerous.”‘
I go upstairs and downstairs early one February evening when the light is just beginning to fade, looking for something to read and, seeing the shelf after shelf, row after row, pile after pile of pale colours and square shapes, wonder if it is all true. Occasionally, someone is found dead in a house, buried among carrier bags and boxes of things bought compulsively in shops and never so much as opened, or trapped and lost in a maze of piles of old newspapers and magazines. And books. Walled in by books. Immured with books. Killed by books, then. And if one had gone blind and was still inhabiting a house of books? This is indeed the stuff of nightmares. I go downstairs and the books blink at me from the shelves. Or stare. In a trick of the light, a row of them seems to shift very slightly, like a curtain blown by the breeze through an open window. Red is next to blue is next to cream is adjacent to beige. But when I look again, cream is next to green is next to black. A tall book shelters a small book, a huge Folio bullies a cowering line of Quartos. A child’s nursery rhyme book does not have t
he language in which to speak to a Latin dictionary. Chaucer does not know the words in which Henry James communicates but here they are forced to live together, forever speechless. Their covers are closed shut. How can the words breathe? Do the stories only spring to life when we open the volumes out?
Does Elizabeth Bowen find Swift congenial company? Ah yes, surely, they were both Irish, they have a lot in common. I should like to sit here on the landing in the last glimmer of daylight and listen to them whispering together. If I set Richard Dawkins beside the Oxford Companion to the Old Testament, will there be the sound of raised voices? I could put a biography of St Francis of Assisi between them to keep the peace, but that would mean tearing St Francis away from a dictionary of animals. Why do we have a dictionary of animals? Where did it come from? Perhaps St Francis brought it with him.
Here is a short run of books about crime, and within crime, principally murder. Forensic Psychology. The Psychology of the Psychopath. Police Forensics. Crime Scene Investigation. The Female Murderer. That sort of thing. How much more useful a role they could play if they were moved, en bloc, away from a doorstep encyclopaedia and Who’s Who (1996) and taken to where they can help solve the mysteries within Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Moving Toyshop, The Murder at the Vicarage, Devices and Desires, The Journeying Boy, Death of an Expert Witness. Books should pay rent. On the other hand, they did not ask to come here and they may be unhappy and dissatisfied, bored and prone to put on weight. So perhaps we should pay them.
