Stop What You’re Doing and Read This! (2 page)

A FRIEND ONCE
told me how she’d built a wall of books round her bed as a teenager. The books came from the local library, and she piled them up like bricks or breezeblocks to shut herself off from her family. The image disturbed me: books as a barrier, bed as a lonely prison cell, a miserable girl immuring herself in words. But for her the memory was a positive one. Those books enclosed a space in which she felt safe and happy – not a bleak dungeon, but a huge room thronging with people who (unlike her family) made her feel at home. Till then she hadn’t known that other world existed. And imaginary though it was – a world invented by poets and novelists – it was as real to her as the world from which she was
escaping
. In fact, the books were less a wall than a ladder. By reading them, and learning from them, and then flourishing academically at school, she climbed up and away to freedom.

She went on to become a writer. But it’s not only writers whose lives are transformed by books. And it’s not only the young and miserable who use books to escape their circumstances. The story has stuck in my mind not because it’s unusual, but because so many other people have similar stories to tell. To an extent it’s even my own story: not that my childhood was unhappy, but the literature I began to discover round the age of sixteen – Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot, Hardy, Wilfred Owen – took my life in a new direction, one that I’d not expected or been encouraged to follow.

Perhaps my friend’s story also struck home because I knew it already, from books. Here is David Copperfield, describing how he escaped from the oppressive regime imposed by the Murdstones:

My father had left a small collection of books in a little room upstairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined my own) and which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room,
Roderick
Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas and Robinson Crusoe came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time – they, and the Arabian Knights, and the Tales of the Genii – and did me no harm; for whatever harm was in some of them was not there for me.

A hope of something beyond our place and time. This is what books – the best books – give us: a lifeline, a reason to believe, a way to breathe more freely.

However much they give, books also demand that we give something back. They may exist as physical objects without ever being opened, but they don’t exist as texts until someone reads them. What we bring to a book – our experiences, our enthusiasms, our desire to know more – will affect our reading as much as the words themselves. As Alberto Manguel puts it, ‘The existence of the text is a silent existence, silent until the moment
in
which a reader reads it. Only when the able eye makes contact with the markings on the tablet does the text come to active life. All writing depends on the generosity of the reader.’

To begin with, while a book is being conceived, authors have exclusive rights over it. The book is their baby: it’s they who bring it into being, nurture its development, see it through to maturity. But once it’s out there in the world, the book has a life of its own: it slides away from its creator and becomes independent. Publication is a coming-of-age party and a handing-over. Authors may flinch and protest if what we take from their text differs from what they intended, but they have to let go. Their baby is ours now.

You can possess a book without really owning it, though. Beyond ownership in a commercial or legal sense, there’s ownership of an emotional or metaphysical kind – when a book speaks so powerfully to us that we feel it’s ours exclusively: that it exists just for us. People we meet sometimes have this effect too; they look into our eyes, and speak in a hushed, intimate voice, and make us feel we’re uniquely important to them – before
going
on to do the same to someone else. In life, we call these people flirts. The best books are flirtatious, too, since they seem to be ours alone when in reality they’re anyone’s.

Illusory or not, a feeling of ownership is crucial to the enjoyment of a book, and many authors have described a moment in childhood or adolescence when they are so absorbed or ‘taken over’ by a text that the gap between it and them disappears. Take the writer Eva Hoffman, for example, born in Cracow in the era of Communism. In her memoir
Lost in Translation
she describes her disenchantment with the reading assigned to her at school – stern political stuff about collective farms and the dignity of labour. But when her mother starts taking her to the library, she comes across more exciting material – Jules Verne, Boccaccio,
Alice in Wonderland, Doctor Dolittle
, and
Anne of Green Gables
. The last makes a particularly deep impression: ‘As long as I’m reading, I assume that I am this girl growing up on Prince Edward Island; the novel’s words enter my head as if they were emanating from it. Since I experience what they describe so vividly, they must be mine.’

In her memoir
Bad Blood
Lorna Sage describes having the same feeling about poetry: ‘I had hundreds and hundreds of lines of verse by heart,
which
I paraded past my mind’s eye as though in a way they were mine.’ And in her memoir
Once in a House on Fire
Andrea Ashworth similarly recalls how when she read Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night’ she took it to be a poem not about death, but about her own condition: ‘for me, the dying of the light had to do with being buried alive in your own smoky front room with your family, stuck together for ever and ever, in front of the TV’. For Ashworth, growing up under the tyranny of an abusive stepfather, books served an urgent purpose. Reading them in secret, in her bedroom, ‘was like holding my breath underwater, immersing myself for as long as possible, until some yell or bang or even a burst of laughter broke in’. The texts she studied at school or borrowed from her posh friend Tamsyn – Hardy, T. S. Eliot, Larkin, Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Brontë – not only explained her sense of suffocation, but liberated her from it: ‘They lifted you up, towards a sort of light, instead of dragging you down into darkness. And the excitement stayed with you, even carried on growing, after you closed the book.’

When a poem or story is working, we don’t just identify with the persona or main protagonist,
we
become
them. At an age when I should have known better I was so taken by Howard Kirk, the anti-hero of Malcolm Bradbury’s
The History Man
, that I spent a couple of months behaving like him – in one case coming on to a girl at a party with a swagger that was his, not mine.

Horace:
Mutato nomine, de te fabula narratur
. ‘Change the name and the story is about you.’

Though ostensibly a novel, Tobias Wolff’s
Old School
is strongly autobiographical and in effect makes up the centre panel between his memoirs
This Boy’s Life
(about his peripatetic childhood) and
In Pharaoh’s Army
(about his years in Vietnam). Its subject is his experience as a scholarship boy and sixth-former in an American private school. He is making his first efforts to write at this point, in a hothouse atmosphere where star pupils compete for prizes and appearances in the
Troubadour
, the school magazine. One day, despairing of how difficult it is to write with truth and authenticity, he comes across a story called ‘Summer Dance’, published in the
magazine
of a nearby girls’ school, and is bowled over by it:

I went back to the beginning and read it again, slowly this time, feeling all the while as if my inmost vault had been smashed open and looted and every hidden thing spread out across the pages. From the very first sentence I was looking myself right in the face … The whole thing came straight from the truthful diary I’d never kept.

Inspired, he sits down and rewrites ‘Summer Dance’ as if it were indeed his story, keeping the title, but changing the name of the narrator (a girl, Ruth) to his own: ‘I didn’t have a lot of adjusting to do. These thoughts were my thoughts, this life my own.’ He feels as if he’s giving himself away as never before, ‘beyond all recall’, but determinedly persists till the story is finished. He is pleased by the result, but shocked by how nakedly it has exposed him: ‘Anyone who read this story would know who I was.’

His story is shortlisted for a school prize, and Ernest Hemingway – acting as judge – chooses it as the winner; he is scheduled to present the award to Wolff in person. But then someone
notices
the uncanny resemblance between the prizewinning story and the one published five years previously in the girls’ school magazine. Summoned to the headmaster’s office, Wolff is asked to explain himself. Which he can’t. Even when a photocopy of the original story is handed to him, he’s lost for words:

I’d completely forgotten it. It had flown my mind as soon as I’d begun reading the story that night in the
Troubadour
office and seen my own life laid bare on the page, and in all the time since then I’d never thought of ‘Summer Dance’ as anyone’s story but mine.

And I still didn’t; not really. Even with the proof in hand, even knowing that someone named Susan Friedman had written the story, I still thought of it as mine.

Found guilty of plagiarism and of bringing the school into disrepute, Wolff is expelled. Yet he commits his crime in all innocence. It’s an extreme case of a common phenomenon: reading as ownership, reading as appropriation.

As Horace said, ‘Change the name and the story is about you.’

In recent years I’ve gone back to teaching creative writing at Goldsmiths College, London, where for several years, in my twenties, I ran a workshop for poets. These days most of my students are life writers, working in prose. The demands of the two forms are very different. But the poets and life writers have something important in common: the use of the first-person pronoun. Speaking in one’s own voice – ‘daring to say I’, as one student put it – is no easy thing. However compelling your story, there’s the anxiety of whether you
can
tell it. ‘I’m worried my mother [father, spouse, children, neighbours, colleagues, second cousins removed] will be upset,’ students say. And no matter how often I advise them to Just Do It (and to save their worries about the ethics of publishing until they’ve finished writing whatever it is), they continue to fret about the rights and wrongs of telling their story. It’s as if they don’t feel entitled.

There are candid memoirs I can direct them to, for reassurance: not just contemporaries like Tobias Wolff, Lorna Sage, Andrea Ashworth, Eva Hoffman, Joan Didion, Dave Eggers, Linda
Grant
and Julia Blackburn, but Rousseau, St Augustine and Thomas de Quincey. There are also arguments I can put to reassure them. ‘If your sister disagrees with your version of events, let her write her own book.’ ‘You’re telling the truth – what’s wrong with that?’ ‘Not everyone objects to being written about. Some people even feel flattered.’ But in the end the best bet is to ask the student: ‘Have you never come across a text that spoke with such truth that you wanted to shake the author’s hand? That made you feel “Oh, so I’m not the only person in the world who has thought or felt that”?’ To which the answer is: ‘Yes, of course I have.’ And to which I then say: ‘That’s the kind of book you’re trying to write. So go ahead. One day some reader might be grateful for it.’

In
Once in a House on Fire
Andrea Ashworth describes how reading poetry became a solace and refuge: ‘My mind flitted and soared over sonnets and odes that made miserable things seem sublime.’ She progressed to writing her own poetry – ‘A poem was a box for your soul … the place where you could save bits of your self, and
shake
out your darkest feelings.’ This is why many people start writing poems: to get things out that can’t otherwise be said. The results are usually terrible: if you’re writing a poem, it’s not enough to shake out your darkest feelings; you have to work at them, shape them, give them form. Still, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong in using writing as therapy. The therapeutic element in writing doesn’t come from pouring things out or ‘washing your dirty linen in public’, but in finding the right words, ordering the experience, and making the story available to others. Once a poem succeeds in this way, then there’s catharsis for the reader, too. When we see thoughts and feelings which we have had set down by someone else, with more clarity or candour than we would be capable of, we don’t feel robbed or plagiarised, we feel relieved. Larkin’s poem ‘Aubade’, for example, speaks of a terror of death which many people share but would feel too awkward to own up to. It gives voice to the bleakest of feelings, but does so with such elegance that its bleakness becomes consolatory and affirming.

It takes courage to own up to dark thoughts and dangerous feelings. But poetry – the most intimate yet public of forms – is the ideal place. Ted Hughes is one writer who recognised this.
Writing
, he said, was about facing up to what we were too scared to face – about saying what we would prefer not to say, but desperately need to share. Poetry, he said, was:

nothing more than a facility for expressing that complicated process in which we locate, and attempt to heal, affliction – whether our own or that of others whose feeling we can share. The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.

In Hughes’ case, the great challenge was learning to speak of his marriage to Sylvia Plath, and how it went wrong, and why she committed suicide – matters on which journalists and scholars felt free to pass opinion, but which he kept silent about until, at the end of his life, he published the
Birthday Letters
. Not all the poems in that collection are models of candour and directness, or indeed of artistry. But the best of them are terrific. And, for Hughes, writing them was a huge relief. ‘I had the sensation of the whole load of long
preoccupation
dropping away,’ he told Seamus Heaney. All the painful memories he’d been hiding, ‘from myself and everybody else’, no longer seemed terrible at all.