by Susan Hill
Marlowe, as the man in The Paper House well knew, was a drunken, quarrelsome fellow, though we have no reason to suppose that he fell out with Shakespeare. Still, perhaps it is right to keep them apart as we might keep apart Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre from the novel it inspired, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. No. If Brontë has not yet encountered the Rhys, she should, and she was a woman of sense, open-minded and fair. She would have been interested. Can books learn from one another? Can they change as a result of sitting on a shelf beside another for years? If not, might they regret being forever trapped, as it were, within their own content, doomed never to grow old, never to return to a state before they were created? We find it hard to imagine a world which does not contain us, or at least does not contain knowledge and awareness of ourselves even if it does not know our physical presence. We need to know that we are taken account of. When small children put their hands over their eyes they think you cannot see them.
The last streaks of light have gone from the sky and I am on the upstairs landing in the gloaming. Do the books believe I am no longer there because they do not see me? Can they hear the sound of my breathing? I can still stretch out a hand and grasp one. Does that startle and terrify them, as poor Bill the lizard was terrified when Alice reached down her great hand and plucked him from the smashed roof of the conservatory? Once it is dark and they settle back, do they sleep? Do they move closer together or turn over and re-arrange their covers?
I could take a couple of the picture books for very small children into the drawing room and slip them between a couple of very old books, so old they might crumble to dust if I handle them too roughly – and if books crumble to dust, they die. The books for babies do not know about death nor will they for a hundred years, for their paper is coated and shiny and though pages may become stuck together if the air is damp, they will never crumble away to dust.
Books help to form us. If you cut me open, will you find volume after volume, page after page, the contents of every one I have ever read, somehow transmuted and transformed into me? Alice in Wonderland. The Magic Faraway Tree. The Hound of the Baskervilles. The Book of Job. Bleak House. Wuthering Heights. The Complete Poems of W.H. Auden. The Tale of Mr Tod. Howards End. What a strange person I must be. But if the books I have read have helped to form me, then probably nobody else who ever lived has read exactly the same books, all the same books and only the same books, as me. So just as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me, so I am the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA.
I have put the light on, but the bulb is weak on the top landing. The books have somehow shrunken back into the shelves. Into themselves, like old people hunched into jackets that are too big for them, sleeves that are too long. They seem to be singing.
All through the house, the books are murmuring, turning over in sleep like pebbles on the shoreline as the tide recedes.
But when I reach the stone-flagged hall and stand for a moment, listening, everything falls silent. I hear the comforting, inhabited, friendly silence of a house full of books.
Sea Interludes
IT BEGAN IN the music room overlooking the garden at my Coventry grammar school. I had done three A levels the previous summer but I had to spend a third year in the sixth form to get Latin, so I kicked my heels, doing double and quadruple Latin lessons, plus odd courses in art and music appreciation. Both of these were a pleasure, more so as they came with neither homework nor exams attached, but the music appreciation was the more interesting because of the enthusiasm and knowledge of one teacher. She introduced us to English composers, for whom she had a passion, talked about their lives and careers, told anecdotes (she herself had studied under Holst) and then played us records. Vaughan Williams, Elgar, Parry, Purcell – wisely, she presented them to us in no particular order so that every lesson was a surprise and if we had not responded to the composer of the previous hour, we might enjoy the one she had for us today. It worked well. I enjoyed the classes.
But one afternoon, something happened to change my life. For some reason, instead of introducing us to the composer, Miss Pellow had decided to play the music first. I can remember everything about the day, as one does remember significant moments. It was the summer term, early May, warm and sunny. The lilac was out in the gardens and the trees had come into the first pale green leaf. Some people were playing on the tennis courts.
And the ‘Sea Interludes’ from Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes came flooding into the music room, with the sunshine. I knew that I was missing the sea. I had been land-bound in the heart of England for two years, after having spent the previous sixteen by the North Sea, and I longed for it every day; but until I heard the music, I had not understood quite how much, nor realised that the sea was in my blood and part of what had formed me and that I would spend the rest of my life longing to go back to it.
I had never heard of Benjamin Britten until that afternoon but the ‘Sea Interludes’ made me want more of his work and when, on the following afternoon, we listened to Peter Pears singing Les Illuminations (some of the poems from which I had studied for A-level French) I knew that I wanted to hear more of that voice, too.
It was the start of a passion for Britten’s music, and for the voice of Pears, and of a determination to find out everything about the place on the east coast in which Britten lived and worked and which had helped form him – the same coast, albeit further north, which had helped form me.
Long before I could get to Suffolk something else happened. I continued to discover as much as I could about Britten but at the same time, I had another obsession, one going back to childhood. My maternal grandmother was one of nine children, eight girls and one boy, Sidney, who was killed in the Battle of the Somme. We often went to see my grandmother and there was always a photograph of the beloved young brother, in uniform, on the piano. A new poppy was placed on it every 11 November. I asked a lot of questions about my great-uncle and learned for the first time about the war in which he was killed, alongside so many, many other young men. I read about the Great War and thought about it often. Then, while I was at King’s, a friend wrote to tell me she had tickets for the first performance of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem in the new Coventry Cathedral, which, she had read, was a setting of poems from the Great War. I walked under the great Euston Arch to catch the steam train home.
The impact of the music, the words, the new Cathedral – the effect of the whole experience is impossible to convey. I had no idea then that both Britten and the Cathedral were to play such an important part in my future life but for the time being, my passion for Britten was consolidated.
He was a composer with a great knowledge and love of literature, and his sound world is steeped in words. For introducing me to so many writers – to Wilfred Owen, Crabbe, Hölderlin, Henry James, and many others, all of whom influenced me profoundly – I owe him the greatest of all debts. Every one led me eventually to write a book of my own, every visit I made to Aldeburgh and Britten-country led me to write more. My obsession with his music, his authors, his places, and especially, at first, with everything to do with the Great War to which I felt such personal ties, continued and became the most important force in my writing life. My links to Coventry Cathedral led to an even more important relationship, out of the anguish of which came another book. But that is a different story.
It was not until 1970 that I managed to get to Aldeburgh at last. It could not have changed for many years and every inch of it was haunted by Britten and his music. I walked the shingle beach and the steep, narrow streets, I bought a mug in the shop run by Mrs Beech, where Britten had bought a string of them with which to improvise a musical instrument. I watched the lifeboat go out to rescue a fishing boat and saw others sail out every dawn from the beach just below the window of the house I was renting. The music of Peter Grimes sang through the sound of the waves rushing up the shingle and every corner spoke of the composer and his life.
By then I h
ad come to know John and Myfanwy Piper. Out of the first few weeks I spent in Aldeburgh in 1970 had come the first book I had written under its spell, a novella called The Albatross and, thinking it would be, as they said ‘up Ben’s street’, they sent him a copy. I was terrified of his response but when I went back to Aldeburgh again in 1971, there had been none.
Perhaps I had always known that I would write a book about the First World War but I was afraid of it, uncertain how I could tackle it. For the whole of the preceding winter I had read everything I could lay my hands on – history, militaria, poetry, biography, autobiography, and volumes of privately published letters from young soldiers, produced by their families after they had been killed. And I talked to as many men as I could find who had been in the Great War. There were still plenty of them at that time and I sat listening as they told me variations on the same theme, for the whole of their experience seemed to merge into a single, terrible one. Yet these were men who had lived to fight another day. Slowly, a picture emerged, slowly, characters grew in my mind and in notebooks, until the moment came, not so much when I felt ready to begin as when I could not put off writing the novel any longer.
I drove back to a bitterly cold, sunny Aldeburgh to begin work. And a couple of days after I arrived I received a letter from Britten, telling me how much he had liked The Albatross and inviting me to lunch. Every detail of the occasion is carved on my memory. We talked about many things though little about music, partly because it is difficult for a professional to talk about their area of expertise with someone relatively ignorant, however enthusiastic, partly because Britten hated discussing his work at all. He asked what I was writing then and I told him.
‘Good luck,’ he said. ‘I am sure you are right to do it and I quite understand your obsession but I hope you won’t be offended if I never read it. I’ve done with all that and I can’t go back to it.’
I did not understand what he meant but I came to do so later, when I had finished the novel. I wrote the First World War out of myself and I, too, have never been able to go back to it.
Because we could not talk about music we talked about books. Ben was well, widely and deeply read – in fiction, in poetry, in biography. He suggested I read two or three Henry James short stories and had the volume numbers of the collected works in which they appeared by heart. If I could not get hold of them he offered to lend me his copies.
I wish I had been able to tell him how much I owed to him but there are never really words for such things.
There are more than thirty books here about him, his life, his letters, his music, his places, and for once they are neatly together on the shelves. I used to re-read them often, now I rarely do. But his influence remains and the greatest debt of any I owe is still to him. Opening a volume of his letters at random, an envelope falls out. It contains a letter from Britten to me. It was in Aldeburgh that I received the telephone call telling me of a death, the call that dealt the heaviest blow of my life. I packed hurriedly and left for home that day, but word reached Ben. His letter was the first I received and the one that gave the greatest comfort, if comfort was ever to be found. He knew how to write it because he had known the man who died and had valued him highly as a musician, because he felt and wanted to express a sympathy that came from his heart, and because he could express himself as well in words as in music.
Looking at the Britten books reminds me of that, as it reminds me of my debt to him, and of the immense privilege of having been touched, personally and professionally, by genius.
But I doubt if he would have wanted me to keep a place for any book about him among my precious forty. He would have urged me to take any of those that had inspired him to write his music, not some volume of musical criticism, account of past Aldeburgh Festivals or collection of his own letters, let alone any biography, which he would have regarded as unnecessary and intrusive.
Crabbe? Wilfred Owen? Henry James? Rimbaud? Hölderlin?
None of those. The Thomas Hardy poems which Britten set as Winter Words will fit into a pamphlet, leaving me free to take one of his novels as well.
Besides, we talked about Hardy that bright February day at lunch, discovering a mutual appreciation, and Ben suddenly recited the whole of ‘The Journeying Boy’ from memory. If I close my eyes, I can see him, sitting in the pale clear east coast light that comes flooding through the windows, and hear the beautiful voice people always remarked on, speaking the lines, plainly and without affectation and so fixing them for ever in my mind.
Hardy it is.
Hardy
THERE ARE THREE complete editions of his novels here, which is surely two more than necessary, plus some random extra copies lying about. Publishing has always done things the wrong way round, presenting new and untried authors in expensive large-format hardback and then converting them to small, handy, cheaper paperback later. But should authors not earn the right to be printed on better paper, case-bound rather than paperbacked? I know some of Hardy’s novels well, and the better I know them and the more I find in them, the more I want to have handsome hardback editions to read. It is as if they had graduated from the cheap, disposable paperback to the format which costs more money and takes up more precious space but which is designed to be kept and treasured. Perhaps the economics of publishing will change things round soon. I know many people who wait for the paperback of a new novel not because they cannot afford to buy the initial hardback, but because they do not want to invest in something so large and apparently permanent when it might be of little merit.
There is a row of paperback Hardy novels here, treated badly, underlined, annotated, dog-eared – or in other words, well read.
I came to many other classic novelists before I had heard of Hardy – Dickens, the Brontës, George Eliot, Jane Austen, Mrs Gaskell … I discovered them myself or was introduced to them in the classroom. When my family left Yorkshire, I was already two terms into the A levels but on arrival at my new grammar school in Coventry, I came up against an entirely different exam syllabus. I had to catch up fast, with Donne and Auden and two different Shakespeare plays, with Middlemarch – and with Hardy’s The Return of the Native. It had already been taught for two terms, so the others knew it well and I had six weeks to get to grips with it for the end-of-year exams. I plunged into the first page and that extraordinarily, and typically Hardyean, opening in which two figures are seen in the distance, crossing the great landscape of Egdon Heath. Wessex was far from the North Yorkshire moors I had left but Hardy’s brooding Barrow, his way of writing about places as if they were as important as characters and sometimes more so, was immediately familiar. I responded to The Return of the Native at once, so that having to catch up fast, even to the extent of learning the whole opening scene by heart, was a pleasure.
Some people find an author so congenial they can never find fault. I do not know many ardent Jane Austen-ites who are not in love with the entire canon. Perhaps to them she is perfect. But even the greatest authors produce lesser books, as well as books to which the individual reader does not respond. It is certainly true of Hardy. After The Return of the Native I picked the next at random, and picked gold with The Mayor of Casterbridge, then again with Far from the Madding Crowd, but after that, I read Jude the Obscure and almost abandoned Hardy for ever. I was saved by The Trumpet Major and The Woodlanders. Some of the novels can rightly be called great, others are often dubbed minor. Two on a Tower or A Pair of Blue Eyes are not of the stature of The Mayor of Casterbridge, but they are surely not ‘minor works’ by any reckoning.
And if you want to know and understand Hardy and learn why he is one of the greatest English novelists then reading the lesser-known, but by no means minor, books is essential.
Knowing about a writer’s life is rarely necessary to an appreciation of their work. But occasionally it is. I think I understand Dickens better for knowing about his childhood and about his way of working, and I gain more from the Bronte novels by having read a good biography wh
ich explained much about their strange, isolated life at Haworth Parsonage (not to mention having gone to Haworth some fifty-five years ago, before it was a commercial trap).
Places tell us so much about certain writers. Although London has now changed out of all recognition, when I first went to live there some of its corners would still have been recognised by Dickens. Though the towns and villages are no longer the same, Hardy’s Wessex Barrows and Heaths would be familiar to him. Ten years after first encountering Hardy, in the mid-1960s, I rented a farm cottage in a remote corner of Dorset and drove and walked for miles round the county he knew, where the working country people might have stepped out of his novels. Certainly, they spoke as if they had.
There are some very good biographies of Hardy. I have not re-read the two volumes by Robert Gittings for many years, but he is a sensitive, straightforward, approachable biographer and always rewards a return to his books. So, of course, does the best of all contemporary biographers, Claire Tomalin. Here is her Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man, long, exhaustive but clear as crystal. Of how many writers can you say that the life was as interesting as the work? Hardy’s was, and so was his melancholic, tormented, personality.
But having read about his anguished affairs and unhappy marriages, his bleak philosophy and pessimistic view of the universe, and man, the tiny inconsequential speck upon its vast impassive face, somehow, it is all made less depressing by Virginia Woolf’s account of her one meeting with him, late in his life.
By then, not long before he died, Hardy had become a courteous, slightly vague old man whose novels had been written long before and seemed to mean nothing very much to him. His world had grown smaller, to focus on short walks and his old dog, and though he remembered Virginia’s father, Leslie Stephen, and gave them ‘what is known as a good tea’, he took her book away to sign it and had some difficulty remembering her name before he wrote. She records his wife as being solicitous, as for a child, reminding him gently of this or that, anxious for his health.
