by Susan Hill
I have been taking two pages at a time and going over them line by line, paragraph by paragraph, in that way of reading that St Benedict called lectio divina, and which is still used for studying the Bible and the works of the Christian fathers, in monasteries and convents. Many more books than those of the spiritual life lend themselves to lectio divina – reading a great novel, and certainly great poetry, in this way is profoundly rewarding and Michael’s books, with their many and widely varied references and allusions, their metaphors and wise observations, yield particular riches on slow, concentrated, wholly focused and attentive reading.
His last book is very painful and not to be read lightly or unadvisedly, or indeed very often. He was stricken with a particularly cruel form of cancer of the jaw and underwent aggressive surgery and other treatments, only to have the disease return, untreatable, incurable. The Enduring Melody is about this last illness, and it is heart-rending to read but always, through the absolutely clear and honest descriptions, not only of his physical but his mental and psychological state, there is the leitmotif of music, poetry and other writing, which helped to sustain him to the end and which sustains the reader going at least part of the way with him on his bitter journey.
I have gained more from reading Michael’s books than from those of any other writer not just about faith and the Christian life, but about all life, any life – and the space they take up on the shelves is holy ground.
There is plenty of theology on my shelves, biblical commentary and other academic work, because, aside from any belief or none, the study is one I have long found interesting from many points of view – historical, cultural, archaeological, geographical, linguistic, metaphorical. It is the same with books about monasticism and in particular the silent orders – the Cistercians, the Carthusians. Paddy Leigh Fermor’s A Time to Keep Silence and Halfway to Heaven by Robin Bruce Lockhart are books to which I turn often. I never come away from either empty-handed. The contrast between the holy silence, calm, peace, order, unhurriedness and deep sense of God of the monastery, and the world outside its walls, always strikes me even when I finish reading a chapter or so of either of these powerful books. Robin Bruce Lockhart spent a week in retreat at St Hugh’s Charterhouse, Parkminster, the only English Carthusian monastery, after a serious personal crisis. He was lucky. The monastery does not normally take in guests in this way. His account of what he found there, how it affected him, and of the life of the monks, is profoundly moving and what he felt when he left always strikes home:
On leaving Parkminster that first time, the whole world outside seemed utterly mad. Roads, cars, houses, telegraph poles … all were futile when set alongside the knowledge I now possessed, that within the Charterhouse walls lay eternal truth, eternal wisdom, eternal peace and eternal sanity.
It is a sobering book, not of platitudes, moral precepts, advice, sermonising or preaching, but full of a truth which has been learned, known, experienced, and of God met face to face. It is about the ‘peace which the world cannot give’ and reading it, like reading the Leigh Fermor, is like drinking draughts of cool water from a deep silent well. There are a couple of dozen more books here on the shelf on the same subject, sitting side by side with the academic theology and biblical criticism, but they never seem right together, any more than the great novels sit comfortably beside literary criticism. They belong to different worlds.
One book of spiritual reading always leads to others – the shelf is constantly refreshed – but I always return to those that have given me most and which continue to bear and yield fruit, year after year. I must put one of Michael Mayne’s books – Learning to Dance, I think – with A Time to Keep Silence and Halfway to Heaven, into my forty, because each one is worth far more than the space a single book will take up, each one holds other books within itself, so that in the end, the three become many, many more.
A Thousand Books of the World
SLIPPED RANDOMLY BETWEEN two even more random volumes – the Collins Naturalist Butterflies and The Count of Monte Cristo is a small red book I do not recognise. Where did it come from?
The Reader’s Guide to Everyman’s Library. It is a nice hardback, beautifully printed, and also on the cover it says ‘Working Copy’ and ‘With the Compliments of J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd’.
I think it must have been given out to bookshops some distant time ago, to help with their ordering, because it is a complete list of all 1000 books in the old Everyman’s Library, from its beginning in 1906 to 1956, with an appendix to 1960. It is in alphabetical order, some of the titles have a brief description, and there is the Everyman number printed beside each one. It is a remarkable selection of both well-known classics and the more obscure and long-forgotten, and if you had read, let alone owned, every one of these books, you could count yourself well educated indeed. I wonder if there is anyone alive who has indeed read every one? I have opened it at random, on the letter L, to look for books I have not read, nor even heard of.
Lagerlöf, Selma. (1858-1940) Swedish Author. Wonderful Adventures of Nils. ‘Illustrated with colour plates and black and white drawings by Hans Baumhauer. This is the Classic Swedish story for children, telling how the boy, Nils Holgersson, became a tiny elf and, riding on the back of a young gander, flew north with a flock of geese and of the exciting adventures they had.’ (There is also Further Adventures of Nils.)
Lane, Edward William. (1801-76) English Author and Orientalist. The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians.
Lever, Charles James. (1806-72) English Novelist. Harry Lorrequer.
‘‘Lever was born and educated in Dublin and Harry Lorrequer, his first novel, originally appeared in the Dublin University Magazine. A humorous story with a military background, it was an immediate success and the author followed it up with several very popular novels.’
Lyell, Sir Charles (1797-1875) English Geologist. The Geological Evidence of the Antiquity of Man.
But also in L are Charles Lamb and La Fontaine, Walter Savage Landor and William Langland, David Herbert Lawrence and Edward Lear, Latimer and Law and Lessing, George Henry Lewes and Abraham Lincoln.
I have this small red book I did not know I owned beside my bed, to open at random if I can’t sleep so that I can read about books I have read, books that I have not, books I certainly ought to have read and books I would probably find well-nigh unreadable, and it makes up a fascinating journey through what the compiler of the Everyman’s Library thought worthy of being included. I would give a lot to own the complete 1000 books in their original form. The collection would last the rest of my lifetime, and round again, without need to venture further. Reading the brief notes about authors and books makes my mouth water. There is something exciting about so much knowledge and information, so many great works of the imagination, so many stories, all set out here in a volume which is like a cross between a catalogue, a bookshop, a library and an array of samples.
I almost feel that if I could have just one book it ought to be this, because it gives me a taste of a thousand, and that if I read it often enough it will somehow expand, to let out all the other books that are concealed here, concentrated, squashed together rather like the miraculous ZIP files on my computer. I sense that this small red book does actually contain the full texts of every book listed, if only I could find the key to unzipping them. If I did that, they would open out like Japanese water flowers. There may be a concealed spring, or an invisible lock, or perhaps I have to discover the password. However I might get the small red book to yield up its secret and provide me, magically, with the complete library, I will do it. I will not need a lot of shelves, for surely the box can be closed and locked again and everything will be secured tightly inside, like the secret contents of My Private Diary with its little brass padlock hanging on the side. Someone could tell me that locked inside the ZIP files of my computer is the text of every one of these books, or that I could purchase a wretched e-reader and download them – but that is not what I want. I want real books
, printed on paper and bound in board and covered in cloth. I know they are in here.
Caesar, Caius Julius. Carlyle, Thomas. Carroll, Lewis. Cellini, Benvenuto. Cervantes, Miguel de. Chaucer, Geoffrey. Chesterfield, Lord. Chesterton, Gilbert Keith. Chrétien de Troyes. Cibber, Colley. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. Cobbett, Coleridge, Collins, Collodi, Conrad, Cook, Cooper, Cowper, Cox, Crofts …
Climbing to the Top
AS I CLIMBED to the top of the house I came upon a book here on a stair, another book there on a window ledge, a small pile of books on the step outside a bedroom door, and saw that half of the books here lead a peripatetic life, never knowing where they will be expected to lay their heads next, while the rest sleep soundly for years in the same position, quite undisturbed. But as in the fairy tales, sooner or later someone wakes you, even from a sleep of a hundred years, and so I have woken books and taken them out, shaken them and slapped them on the back, opened them to the light and fresh air, sneezing as the dust has puffed up from their pages. It must have been a shock for them. Or perhaps it was a wonderful liberation, as they were brought back to life and fresh purpose like Lazarus, for a book which is closed and unread is not alive, it is only packed, like a foetus, with potential.
And as I climbed I noticed a paperback half-hanging out of a shelf and found, as I started to push it back, that it was an alphabet book and that it had found its way next to a book of ‘Letters and Lettering’, like a child and a grandparent, sitting companionably together. I opened them both and read. Or rather, looked.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z.
And that is all. True, the alphabet book had coloured letters and beside them pictures of objects. Apple. Bear. Cherry. Dog. And the book had them in lines and repeated patterns, some with curves and curls, some with thick strokes, some with thin, some with flourishes, some plain. Still, it boiled down in the end to just those twenty-six letters. Out of these few marks, plus some small dots and curves of punctuation, every book in this house has grown, every meaning been inserted and extracted, every character created and poem balanced, every lesson taught and learned. All of it packed into and expanding out of twenty-six letters. ‘It makes your hair catch fire,’ as Charles Causley said.
I have reached the top of the house and the last landing but I have only skimmed the books, there are dozens left alone, unremarked, with the stories that belong to them untold, associations remembered but kept silent.
Here are twenty-three books about Marilyn Monroe, that iconic, extraordinary actress and doomed beauty, exploited, manipulated, destroyed, her story like some terrible fable, her entire life a quest for what she would never find, the happiness and security and love she was never given as a child. Not far away are the plays of her one-time husband, Arthur Miller, and his autobiography Time Bends, one of the best modern examples of the genre. I feel I should put them together, for though it seemed an entirely anachronistic and unsuitable marriage, photographs of them reveal it might not have been, that it could have been one of the great marriages – if he had been able to convince her of the fact, and also to wean her from the drugs, legal as well as otherwise, which helped to ruin her. It is, as Ford Madox Ford writes at the beginning of The Good Soldier, ‘the saddest story I have ever heard’. The Good Soldier. I must find it. I must read that again.
I keep pulling out a book and putting it on a window ledge or the floor. I must read this again, and this, and this and that. I must read everything by this author, and that. Arnold Bennett. Mrs Gaskell. Turgenev. Carson McCullers. Steinbeck. Scott Fitzgerald. Evelyn Waugh. Elizabeth Taylor. Joyce Carey. John Fowles. J.G. Farrell. Paul Scott. Thomas Mann. William Golding … Even Ivy Compton Burnett and Barbara Pym and E.H. Young.
I am taking out far too many books. I need at least another year of reading from home. But now I have reached the landing and here it is. Howards End. There is a shaft of sunlight coming through the small window, in which I just fit, so that I can sit on the elm floorboards with my back to the wall.
I open the book.
‘One may as well begin with Helen’s letters …’
I read until the sun moves round and I am in shadow again.
The Final Forty
The Bible
The Book of Common Prayer (1662)
Our Mutual Friend. Dickens
The Mayor of Casterbridge. Thomas Hardy
Macbeth. Shakespeare
The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. Carson McCullers
A House for Mr Biswas. VS. Naipaul
The Last September. Elizabeth Bowen
Middlemarch. George Eliot
The Way we Live Now. Trollope
The Last Chronicle of Barset. Trollope
The Blue Flower. Penelope Fitzgerald
To the Lighthouse. Virginia Woolf
A Passage to India. E.M. Forster
Washington Square. Henry James
Troylus and Criseyde. Chaucer
The Heart of the Matter. Graham Greene
The House of Mirth. Edith Wharton
The Rector’s Daughter. F.M. Mayor
On the Black Hill. Bruce Chatwin
The Diary of Francis Kilvert
The Mating Season. wodehouse
Galahad at Blandings. IPG. Wodehouse
The Pursuit of Love. Nancy Mitford
The Bell. Iris Murdoch
The Complete Poems of W.H. Auden
The Rattle Bag. Edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes
Learning to Dance. Michael Mayne
Flaubert’s Parrot. Julian Barnes
A Time to Keep Silence. Patrick Leigh Fermor
The Big Sleep. Raymond Chandler
Family and Friends. Anita Brookner
Wuthering Heights. Emily Bronte
The Journals of Sir Walter Scott
Halfway to Heaven. Robin Bruce Lockhart
The Finn Family Moomintroll. Tove Jansson
Clayhanger. Arnold Bennett
Crime and Punishment. Fyodor Dostoevsky
Amongst Women. John McGahern
The Four Quartets. T.S. Eliot
Table of Contents
Next to the Pop-Up Books
The Well-Travelled Bookcase
Things that Fall out of Books
Writing in Books
A Book by its Cover
Picture Books
A Thousand Books of the World
