Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading From Home Read online

  ‘A little jewel of a memoir that will be irresistible to any bookworm.’ Independent on Sunday

  ‘A totally beguiling, utterly persuasive, argument for re-immersing yourself in literature’s past … part memoir, part outpouring of affection for those Hill has loved’ Michael Grove, The Times

  ‘What a delightful book this is – and so old-fashioned in approach almost to be trendy’ Trevor Royle, Herald

  ‘Hill is nicely opinionated throughout … she is whimsical and intimate, scattering rhetorical questions and colloquial half-sentences … beguiling’ Victoria Glendinning, Spectator

  ‘Hill holds little truck with notions of canon or hierarchies, instead viewing books and their authors with a learned, gossipy warmth. She understands that the best books make great companions, and this one is no exception.’ Claire Allfree, Metro

  ‘Pure pleasure’ Carla Carlisle, Country Life

  ‘An elegiac tone … a lament for lost cultural habits’ John Sutherland, Literary Review

  ‘A mind-map of a novelist in her late 60s who has spent her life reading and writing books … the autobiographical elements in the book are often delightful … charming’ Ian Pindar, Guardian

  ‘An enjoyable meander, a genial pillow book of light wit and broad reading … whose tone remains on the pleasantly whimsical side of erudition’ James Urquhart, Independent

  ‘A patchwork of literary musing, quotation and anecdote, the memoir’s texture is wholesome and cosy’ Caroline Howitt, TLS

  ‘Personal, practical and anecdotal … delightful … the list itself is an idiosyncratic commingling of fiction, non-fiction and poetry’ Leo Robson, New Statesman

  ‘A light-hearted memoir using books as anchors on which to fasten life experiences. Funny, educational and occasionally surprising.’ Maria Jones, Catholic Herald

  ‘Delightful … Hill’s opinion is worth hearing … her range is all-embracing and can be read as an invitation to a writer’s, as well as a reader’s mind’ Mary Leland, Irish Examiner

  ‘Hill writes extensively and eloquently about her literary influences and preferences, as well as her thoughts about the process of writing … a unique book’ Leah O’Hearn, Mslexia

  SUSAN HILL was born in Scarborough and educated at grammar schools there and in Coventry, and at King’s College, London. She has been a professional writer for fifty years and is the author of thirty-seven books, including The Woman In Black and The Man In The Picture. She lives in a farmhouse in the North Cotswolds with her husband, Professor Stanley Wells. They have two daughters. Visit www.susan-hill.com.

  Howards End is on the Landing

  A YEAR OF READING FROM HOME

  Susan Hill

  ‘To my friends pictured within.’

  This paperback edition published in 2010

  First published in Great Britain in 2009 by

  PROFILE BOOKS LTD

  3A Exmouth House

  Pine Street

  London EC1R 0JH

  www.profilebooks.com

  Copyright © Susan Hill, 2009, 2010

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  Printed and bound in the UK by

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  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

  no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a

  retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic,

  mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 1 84668 266 7

  eISBN 978 1 84765 263 8

  Starting Point

  IT BEGAN LIKE THIS. I went to the shelves on the landing to look for a book I knew was there. it was not. but plenty of others were and among them I noticed at least a dozen I realised I had never read.

  I pursued the elusive book through several rooms and did not find it in any of them, but each time I did find at least a dozen, perhaps two dozen, perhaps two hundred, that I had never read.

  And then I picked out a book I had read but had forgotten I owned. and another and another. After that came the books I had read, knew I owned and realised that I wanted to read again.

  I found the book I was looking for in the end, but by then it had become far more than a book. It marked the start of a journey through my own library.

  Some people give up drink for January or chocolate for Lent, others decide to live for a year on just a pound a day, or without buying any new clothes. Their reasons may be financial (to save money), physical (to lose weight), or spiritual (to become more holy). I decided to spend a year reading only books already on my shelves for several reasons.*

  The journey through my own books involved giving up buying new ones, and that will seem a perverse act for someone who is both an author and a publisher. but this was a personal journey, not a mission. I felt the need to get to know my own books again, but I am not about to persuade other people to abandon the purchase of new ones.

  I wanted to repossess my books, to explore what I had accumulated over a lifetime of reading, and to map this house of many volumes. There are enough here to divert, instruct, entertain, amaze, amuse, edify, improve, enrich me for far longer than a year and every one of them deserves to be taken down and dusted off, opened and read. A book which is left on a shelf is a dead thing but it is also a chrysalis, an inanimate object packed with the potential to burst into new life. Wandering through the house that day looking for one elusive book, my eyes were opened to how much of that life was stored here, neglected or ignored.

  The start of the journey also coincided with my decision to curtail my use of the internet, which can have an insidious, corrosive effect. Too much internet usage fragments the brain and dissipates concentration so that after a while, one’s ability to spend long, focused hours immersed in a single subject becomes blunted. information comes pre-digested in small pieces, one grazes on endless ready-meals and snacks of the mind, and the result is mental malnutrition.

  *(There were one or two caveats. I would borrow academic books from libraries and I would read some of the books sent by literary editors, for review.)

  The internet can also have a pernicious influence on reading because it is full of book-related gossip and chatter on which it is fatally easy to waste time that should be spent actually paying close, careful attention to the books themselves, whether writing them or reading them.

  Rationing it strictly gave me back more than time. Within a few days, my attention span increased again, my butterfly-brain settled down and I was able to spend longer periods concentrating on single topics, difficult long books, subjects requiring my full focus. It was like diving into a deep, cool ocean after flitting about in the shallows, Slow Reading as against Gobbling-up.

  I did not begin my year of reading from home in order to save money, but of course that is what happened. I buy too many books, excusing impulse purchases on the vague grounds that buying a new paperback is better for me than buying a bar of chocolate. But that depends on the quality of the paperback. I wanted to reacquaint myself with old books and resist the pressure to buy something because it was new, because it was in the top twenty or shortlisted for the Booker Prize or even the Nobel, for that matter, or recommended by Richard and Judy or discounted, heavily
promoted or chattered about on the internet. A friend joined a book club because she wanted to expand her literary horizons and left it because the only titles ever chosen were the latest hyped or shortlisted novels. There is no doubt that of the thousands of new books published every year many are excellent and some will stand the test of time. A few will become classics. But I wanted to stand back and let the dust settle on everything new, while I set off on a journey through my books.

  What follows is a description of that journey, which has also and inevitably led to my thinking, remembering, ordering, assessing, my entire book-reading life. I have let myself recall places where I read, bookshelves of the past, gone back in my imagination to libraries I used to know, and know intimately, libraries I visited daily and which contributed to forming me, changing me, helping me to grow. Books lead to people, of course. Over the past fifty years I have had the privilege of meeting some of the great writers of our time. As a young writer I was very lucky to be introduced to people whose work already meant a great deal to me and many of them gave me help and advice at a stage in my career when it was invaluable. So many taught me a lesson I have tried never to forget – that the young need encouragement. They also need a few allowances made for naivety and bumptiousness. This book is not an autobiography in the usual sense but it is a record of so much more than just reading, more than just books. Name-dropping is a tiresome, if harmless, trait. But I have been encouraged and inspired by many people in the world of books, not all of whose names I remember (or perhaps even knew): librarians, bookshop staff, school and university teachers, fellow readers, correspondents. I salute them, too, for I owe them so much.

  The journey began one early autumn afternoon, in the old farmhouse where I live, surrounded by the gently rising hills and graceful trees, the ploughed and planted fields, the hedgerows and flower borders and orchards and old stone walls, the deer and birds and hedgehogs and rabbits, the foxes and badgers and moths and bees of Gloucestershire. I climbed two flights of elm-wood stairs to the top landing in search of a book, and found myself embarked on a year of travelling through the books of a lifetime.

  No Order, No Order

  I SOMETIMES WONDER if the books came into this house or if the house grew around them. Either way, they feel as organic a part of it as the beams, the Aga in the kitchen, the wood burner in the sitting room, or the old pine wardrobe that arrived in half a dozen sections and had to be assembled once it was in the right bedroom. The bookshelves were built or bought to fit not only whole walls but nooks and crannies and have filled up in the same slightly haphazard way over the years. I can think of only one shelf which was made to measure, for very small books, mainly the Oxford World’s Classics series printed on fine paper and published in demy octavo. The old words for book sizes are still in use – Demy, Quarto, Royal – just like the old names for paper sizes, though others go alongside them: B Format, and A2, A3. I hope those of us who learned pints and quarts, feet and inches, pounds and ounces, let alone pecks and bushels, can be forgiven a fondness for the old-fashioned terminology.

  Next to the World’s Classics on the shelf above the door is a long row of small square Observer Books, which I started to collect as a child, alongside the I Spy series. The Observer books of Moths, Birds’ Eggs, Aeroplanes, Trees, Churches, Archaeology, Ferns, Mosses … I sometimes take a handful down and pore over forgotten facts about the Tiger Hawk Moth or the Wild Service Tree, the Saddleback Church and the Spitfire. Someone once told me that these were the sort of books that boys like because they are essentially lists and boys like lists more than girls do. I wonder.

  I know people whose books are housed in something resembling public libraries, one or two whose books are even catalogued, in card indexes, on spreadsheets or even on infernal systems on websites where it is possible to log your own library and arrange virtual books on virtual shelves.

  I know people who own thousands of books and can tell you the exact spot where every single one of them is shelved. They colour coordinate them, or arrange them by alphabet or author or subject. Well, that is what collectors enjoy doing, with books arranged like stamps in albums. Good luck to them. My father’s sock drawer was just the same.

  Alas, there is no plan to the housing of the books here, no classification system, no order – or rather, there is an order, one that has come about by a process of accumulation and illogic, and the small but constant shifts and changes in family life, activity and volume-acquisition. It works. Yes, books do go missing. I take one from its place, wander into another room and put it down, leave it on my bedside or the kitchen table. in a rare fit of helpfulness, someone else may even put it back on a shelf, though probably not the one from which it came.

  But if I were an orderly person with a Dewey decimal classification system, I would never have gone hunting for the elusive book, reached the second-floor landing, and the start of this journey.

  A book collector would be better organised, but I am not a book collector. I have spent my life working with books in numerous ways. I have accumulated a wide assortment of them over sixty-plus years and many, many have gone – lent or left, sold or given away, for there is nothing essentially sacred about a book just because it is printed on paper and bound between covers. Only look at the rubbish available in book form. Some are quickly read, been, gone. You don’t read many thrillers twice. Others served a temporary practical need – your cat was having kittens and you needed to know how to look after them; you were travelling to Denmark and wanted a guide. But the kittens grew up and the cat was neutered and you will never visit Denmark again. Pass the thriller to a friend, give the cat book to the charity shop, sell the guide to Denmark on eBay. You don’t have to pay its rent just because it is a book.

  When I did not find my elusive title upstairs, I came down to the room I call the Small Dark Den. I would not want to spend a year in it, but it has such an eclectic mixture on its shelves that I could probably spend one just reading books taken from it.

  It’s an odd room and one that, uniquely in this house, gets little natural light – it faces north, and the side of a stone barn, and it’s overshadowed by an old walnut tree. No amount of Brilliant White emulsion ever made it lighter so we gave up and lined the walls with bookshelves instead. The SDD also houses the piano which no one now ever plays, and the television on which I watch rubbish.

  The Small Dark Den has a long row of dull-looking, uniform books bound in porridge-coloured card with hessian on the spine and titles in black Times Roman. They are old plays published by the Malone Society, they belong to the Shakespeare Professor, and I have never read a single one nor will I, even in this year. But the titles made me take a few down and open them.

  The Wisdom of Dr Dodypoll (1600)

  [Actus Prima. A Curtaine drawne. Earl Lassinbergh is discovered (like a Painter) painting Lucilia, who sits working on a piece of Cushion worke.]

  The Play of the Wether

  (A new and a very merry interlude of all manner wethers made by John Heywood.)

  The Hog Hath Lost his Pearl

  The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon

  The Faithfull Friends

  An Interlude called Lusty Juventus

  The Queen of Corsica

  The Shepherd’s Paradise

  The Pardoner and the Friar and the Four Ps

  On and on they run and if they were novels I would be reading them, but Elizabethan plays are not as enticing as their titles and if they were any good we would have heard of them, as we have heard of The Merchant of Venice, The Duchess of Malfi and Dr Faustus.

  These books are facsimiles, too, and several are printed in old Gothic font which is almost impossible for modern eyes to take in.

  Ah, fonts. Typeface. Hot metal. Typography. Printing Presses. We’ll be here all night. In the Small Dark Den there is a book called An Alphabet of Fonts and sometimes I look through it and gaze at their beauty and the subtle, subtle differences between each one. If you ask me to choose m
y favourite I would need three – Garamond, Perpetua and one other. But that is hard to find. It was designed by Ralph Beyer for the new Coventry Cathedral, consecrated in 1962, and it is not a font you can order from your printer, but if you go to the Cathedral you will see it everywhere, on the lettering carved on stone, and the Orders of Service. it is strange to have a font, of all things, bound up with your life, but this one speaks to me of places and people and a time, all precious to me; if you cut me open, I daresay that whatever is carved upon my heart will be in Ralph Beyer lettering.

  The titles of the old plays reprinted by the Malone Society are in Times Roman, the font everyone recognises, the classic font and one which serves almost every purpose and always looks handsome, though I prefer Garamond. But whatever the font, it must have a serif or I cannot read much of it. There is a long modern novel on one of the shelves of the Small Dark Den that I certainly should read. It came to me with recommendations from all sides, but I can’t read it because it is printed in a sans serif font, Arial, probably, and I simply cannot force my eyes to take it in for more than a few lines. Why should that be? Do others agree with me? Do publishers think about these things? This one does.

  Publishers also think about titles, but I wonder, with both my author’s and my publisher’s hats on, if we think about them quite enough. I love book titles and they’re important. Many a new novel has sunk without trace because it has a dull, unmemorable title. One of Us. Two by Two. Far and Near. I made those up but you could find plenty like them and if you saw them in a shop your eye would slide over them; if someone recommended one you would instantly forget what it was called.