Jacob's Room Is Full of Books: A Year of Reading Read online

  It must be difficult to scratch a living in the everyday secondhand book market. Occasionally I go into a dusty little shop and find so many easily obtained titles which are so grossly over-priced that I wonder who will ever buy them, when all people have to do is trawl through eBay to find what they want for a tenth of the amount. And there we have it. The internet has done the damage. Obviously, the really valuable rare book will always command a high price, but you are unlikely to find a twelfth-century illuminated manuscript or a Shakespeare first folio on eBay – that is another world – and if you only want to read the text of an out-of-print book, then so long as it is also out of copyright you are likely to find it, in full, on Project Gutenberg or some other free internet site.

  I cannot help thinking that this is a good thing. It is a tricky area in which to set foot, this one of copyright, but I think that copyright should last for the lifetime of the writer plus ten years and no more. Why should not only an author’s children but their grand- and great-grandchildren be able to live off the proceeds of their relative’s hard work for their entire lifetimes? Because if an author has been famous and bestselling and continued to write and publish into their nineties, say, then that is what will happen, because at the time of writing copyright extends until seventy years after the death of the author. And that is not right. I wish there were some way of ensuring that my own books go into the public domain no more than ten years after my death.

  IT ISN’T THE PLOT. It isn’t even the characters – although they are some of the best ever created by a novelist. It is the writing. The style. And even more, the crisp one-liners, the short, dazzling paragraphs that make you trip over yourself. You might be forgiven for thinking that his books, like Shakespeare’s plays, consist entirely of quotations:

  She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.

  From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.

  Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.

  It got dark and the rain-clouded lights of the stores were soaked up by the black street.

  It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.

  So Raymond Chandler does consist entirely of quotations, any one of which would make another writer proud to have composed.

  He is in a class of his own, a genius pure and simple, and every single time I re-read The Big Sleep, or The Little Sister, or The High Window – any of them – I am struck by his genius, his wit, his command of the language. He makes it do exactly what he wants it to do, no less and no more, and that is a talent given to very few. He invented the mean streets, the hard-boiled private eye, the sleazy little hotels, the cocktail bars as seen by the cold light of day as well as by the neon light of 2 a.m. He owned the whole set-up and, although he has had imitators – not too many, because most wannabes back off the moment they have tried to construct a sentence like any of his – he brushed them off like specks of fluff on his sleeve.

  As well as the brilliant novels, he wrote some of the best analysis of crime fiction, of what works, what does not, and any aspiring writer in the genre should read and take permanent note of his golden advice. And then, if he likes, ignore it. Chandler would have said that. There are no rules but there are plenty of sensible observations. The one I took to heart at the very beginning of writing a crime series was that no fictional private eye, or detective, should ever marry.

  I have just found another quotation, which isn’t a wise crack or a slick observation, just a piece of perfect descriptive writing (from The High Window):

  The bar entrance was to the left. It was dusky and quiet and a bartender moved moth-like against the faint glitter of piled glassware. A tall handsome blonde, in a dress that looked like sea-water sifted over with gold dust, came out of the Ladies’ Room touching up her lips, and turned towards the arch, humming.

  I press Chandler on anyone who has not yet discovered him for themselves – and urge them to watch Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe in any of the films. I have never had anyone tell me that either Chandler himself, or Bogart, failed for them.

  I have often found people who failed with P. G. Wodehouse, though – another master of the language, another whose plots and characters are of second and third importance to the writing. But some cannot get past the receding chins, the brainlessness, the vacuousness, the frippery, the juvenile mentality of the characters. The only one to whom none of the above descriptions apply is, of course, Jeeves. Lord Emsworth sometimes succeeds where Bertie Wooster fails, but I never press home my argument about Wodehouse, because if the magic doesn’t work, it doesn’t and it never will. It is the uncomprehending reader’s loss. Nobody half-likes Wodehouse (though the golfing stories fail with me because golf is of no interest and I don’t understand the rules). You are an addict or you are left stone cold.

  I have reminded myself to get The Mating Season, Summer Lightning, Joy in the Morning, Right Ho, Jeeves, Lord Emsworth and Others and others down from the long row of Everyman Wodehouse, in perfectly formed hardbacks, on the shelf in the lobby. A Chandler binge, followed by a PGW binge. If the weather holds, I can read them in a deckchair in the garden, which is where Lord Emsworth’s brother Galahad Threepwood is generally to be found, a large whisky and soda to hand.

  THE DEADLY MONTHS, July and August. The weather often disappoints, the birds have stopped singing, the roads round here are crammed with mobile homes and caravans being towed, the beaches are also crammed full and, yes, it is thoroughly selfish of me to complain about it. But winter is best here. Empty everywhere. In high summer it is best to get back from any shopping trip by ten o’clock and then stay in the garden, to read, or write, cold drink to hand, intermittently watching the swallows high overhead.

  THERE ARE WATER VOLES nesting in the bank, just below the bridge over the ford. Children – and sometimes adults – play Pooh Sticks there, but the voles take no notice. Reminds me of Ratty in … actually not The Wind in the Willows, but the play by A. A. Milne, Toad of Toad Hall. It is still the best adaptation and the music crowns all. I have seen it so many times, including the 1970s RSC production in Stratford when Judi Dench was a very pregnant Mama Rabbit and Michael Williams, her husband, was Mole and Jeffrey Dench, her brother, played a very agile Ratty. I have often re-cast it in my mind and planned, if I win the lottery, to put it on for a run one Christmas. Stephen Fry would be Badger, David Walliams Toad, David Tennant Ratty. I have not yet found my perfect Mole.

  There would, of course, be a proper orchestra, with a good conductor. I would ask Nicholas Daniel, who is up for anything.

  Alan Bennett took over at one time, with his The Wind in the Willows for the National, but it was nowhere near as good as the Milne. Though, come to think of it, AB made a decent fist of Mole himself.

  THE BIBLE IS WONDERFUL to read, no matter what one’s personal belief. I would not be without the majestic language of the King James’s Version, and Genesis, the Book of Job and Ecclesiastes and the Psalms, as well as the Gospels, which repay many a reading.

  We do not often get the long-familiar words of the BCP funeral service now and Heaven help us looking to find one of the old hymns at a crematorium – though we may be luckier at church weddings. I hope they do not wither and fade like the flower and the grass. It is still possible to hear all the Songs of Praise well sung by choirs in recordings online and via CDs, though. Great to sing along to when travelling on a boring journey.

  I sound like one of those people who lament that things have all changed and gone to the bad and everything new is by definition worthless, but I don’t feel like that at all. Only the admonition not to throw the baby out with the bathwater is one to take seriously.

  That the Bible and the Prayer Book can be sustaining is evident. Many people in dreadful circumstances have been strengthened, uplifted and given the hope and help to see them
through by reading both. Not long ago, I learned that a priest I knew and admired greatly, the former Bishop of Gloucester, Michael Perham, was terminally ill with a brain tumour. He was a man whose books had impressed me with their clarity, faith and commitment to the Christian liturgy and I have read several of them often. He had sent out a last message to his former clergy, parishioners and friends, just before Easter this year, in which he explained that he was weakening but always sustained by his belief that he was being held in God’s hands and upheld by those many who were praying for him – the ‘Communion of Saints’. He ended by quoting a Collect and giving a blessing to us all.

  (Bishop Michael died after having spent the Festival with his close and loving family on Easter Monday, 17 April 2017.)

  I was reminded of Joseph Poole, friend, mentor and Precentor of Coventry Cathedral when I was part of that community, and who was one of the great liturgists of the Church of England. Also of Michael Mayne, former Dean of Westminster and one whose books have inspired and enlightened and sustained so many. All three men of faith and goodness have had an impact far beyond what may have been their own expectations, and that impact will continue to impact upon others.

  Bishop Michael’s last letter includes this, the Collect for All Saints Day from The Book of Common Prayer.

  Almighty God

  you have knit together your elect

  in one communion and fellowship

  in the mystical body of your Son Christ our Lord:

  grant us grace so to follow your blessed saints

  in all virtuous and godly living,

  that we may come to those inexpressible joys

  That you have prepared for those who truly love you;

  through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord

  who is alive and reigns with you

  in the unity of the Holy Spirit

  one God, now and for ever.

  I often think that everyone has a lesson to teach, and it doesn’t matter really what, so long as they do, and we learn it. Michael Perham was one who, like many others I have been blessed to know, taught, among other things, how to die well. No matter what faith the teacher has, or if they have none, no matter how the lesson is taught, I wonder if there can be a more important one. The test, of course, is if we have learned it well. And we won’t know that until our own time comes.

  THE SPARROWS HAVE BEEN FLEDGING. There seem to be dozens of nests, in the eaves, under the roof tiles, in the hedges all round the village. When it rains, they are fluttering in the puddles, washing themselves, I suppose, and, if it’s dry, they are having dust baths. In his Natural History of Selborne, Gilbert White records not only dozens upon dozens of sparrows but of every other sort of ‘common’ bird – thrushes, blackbirds, finches, tits – as well as the migrants … flycatchers were everywhere. ‘Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing?’ Even in my own childhood, there were probably several hundred per cent more song birds than now. The telephone wires were lined with swallows and martins, the air thick with swifts.

  The loss of so many over the last hundred or so years is forgotten – everyone talks about the pandas and the tigers and the giraffes, and of course they are important. Meanwhile, not far from home, people trap thousands of small birds for food. We are reaping the whirlwind. I do not fuss greatly about climate change because man does infinitely more harm in far more ways. But it is distressing when people say they haven’t heard a cuckoo for years and yet that was a sound of my childhood that even became tiresome, it went on so, from dawn to dusk through the spring and early summer. Neighbours in this village say that twenty years ago the house martins’ nests lined the eaves the whole way round this house. Now there are just three and last year they came late and barely managed a single brood.*

  ‘Things are not what they were in my day.’ Maddening how old people say it. But in this respect, and many others, I know it to be true. And ‘things’ have not been replaced by ‘better things’ either.

  The sparrows are chatter-chattering in and out of the roof tiles as I write.

  JOHN UPDIKE IS QUOTED AS SAYING of Muriel Spark that her novels ‘remain in the mind as brilliant shards’. Is that how I would want to be remembered, as just a brilliant shard in someone’s mind?

  IT IS A SAD THING when you discover that a book you loved beyond many, a book of which you knew whole paragraphs and conversational exchanges by heart, a book you thought you would be wedded to for life, has lost its appeal, its charm, its ability to amuse and entertain, delight and impress. How does this happen? Does it mean the book has become dated, or outdated, its humour old-fashioned, its charm rusty, its brilliance tarnished? Was it a book you simply grew out of? Or one that, as you read more and got more life experience, could not keep up with you? Was it simply not up to the job, did it not bear any more re-readings, yield any more wisdom, reveal any new aspect to the wit, so that you laughed again but in a slightly different way?

  What I am saying is that my love affair with E. F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia novels seems to be over. There are odd things that still delight: Quaint Irene, Georgie Pilson and his bibelots – a warm-hearted but wickedly funny camp character – the morning procession of women shopping in Tilling High Street while keeping beady eyes on what everyone else is doing, wearing, buying, saying. But I droop after reading three chapters of any of them and I no longer smile at all. It was a blow when this first happened. I decided it was just me and left the books alone for a while. But it went on happening. I found myself becoming impatient with these silly people – and that was fatal.

  I don’t expect to enjoy most children’s books in the old way, though I have never wavered about the Moomin tales, or Alice, and I was very surprised to find I delighted almost as much when reading The Magic Faraway Tree to grand-daughter Lila as I did when I too was five years old.

  But if ever Nancy Mitford or Dickens or Thomas Hardy fail me, I shall know my reading days are numbered.

  WATCHED A HEN HARRIER on the marshes. There are several pairs, almost always visible, swooping across, looking for prey. They were rare once, but now they are common. The campaign to make hawks protected birds has seen to this, so they breed safely and murder small birds unhampered.

  THE ONLY BOOK BY SHIRLEY HAZZARD I had read until recently was her memoir of Graham Greene, Greene on Capri. When Hazzard died in December 2016 I took it down from the shelf, and also bought two of her novels and a book of essays. My passion for Graham Greene was probably at its height forty years ago, but the admiration has always been there, burning bright. Every time I have looked along the shelf where a dozen or more of his books sit and I have taken one down at random and read a few paragraphs, I have been reminded how great a writer he is.

  Shirley Hazzard was married to the biographer Francis Steegmuller, and during the 1960s and 1970s, when Greene was in old age, they got to know him, and his last partner, Yvonne Cloetta, when they all spent weeks, sometimes months, on the island of Capri. They were friends, they went on expeditions together, met for drinks and lunches and dinners from time to time, talked endlessly, liked one another. Hazzard is so sharp about GG. She quickly recognised certain familiar traits in him, certain patterns of behaviour, anticipated them, watched them recur. She was both admiring and fond of him, but she was clear-eyed about his failings and flaws – not literary at all, but personal ones. He liked to throw a small bomb into the conversation and watch it explode. He liked to disagree, to argue, to fall out. He bore small grudges for a disproportionately long time. He was set in his ways, in Capri – 350 words, no more, no less, each morning, the same bar for drinks, the same café for dinner. A strange gap in his sensitivities was his lack of response to visual beauty, natural, architectural, pictorial. Nor was he at all interested in music. ‘He almost never spoke to us of a painting or a painter, a piece of music or a composer … To have suggested that he visit a museum, attend an exhibition or a concert, was unthinkable.’

  Literature was all to him, ‘the longest and most consistent
pleasure of Graham’s life’. Hazzard quotes Greene: ‘One’s life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books that one learns about love and pain at second hand.’

  In Greene on Capri I re-discovered a small masterpiece of biography, the story of a man caught and held in a particular period of his life, in just one place, which is both background, foreground and character. And in writing about the writer on the island, Hazzard also – almost inadvertently, perhaps – presents us with a quiet portrait of her own marriage to Steegmuller: contented, perfectly balanced, mutually responsive. By then, after a lifetime of intense, anguished loves, Greene himself was settled calmly, with the pert, pretty, slight, slim Yvonne, a woman with monkey looks, very short white hair, and an adoration of Graham which lasted over thirty years and was in such contrast to all his other tense, stressful, high-octane relationships. He was not a lover of women in general. He did not really rate them intellectually or spiritually. He was a man’s man who fell in thrall to individual women, and lastly to Yvonne. Shirley Hazzard is critical, in a stern but understanding way, of his misogyny.

  In John le Carré’s interesting if enigmatic book The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life, Graham Greene is confirmed not only as a writer of spy stories but as a spy, working for MI6, but he pricks Greene’s balloon of secrecy and self-importance neatly, in telling the story of the moment when at last GG was able to demand sight of his own FBI file. He had been convinced that he had been on the FBI blacklist of subversive pro-communists, but when he saw it he learned that, far from being so important that his file was a foot thick, in fact it contained only one entry – accusing him of having kept company with the ‘politically erratic’ ballerina Margot Fonteyn when she was fighting the (doomed) cause of her Panamanian husband, Roberto Arias. But if Greene was a minnow in the real world of spying, he caught its grubby and shadowy half-life brilliantly in his fiction. Not, though, as brilliantly as le Carré himself.