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

  If Ian Fleming wrote another gambling scene to rival the poker game Bond plays against Le Chiffre, it is the one in Moonraker in which he plays against Drax at bridge and uncovers his (fiendishly clever) habit of cheating. The game takes place at Blades, the archetypal St James’s gambling club, where the food and wine are superb, the club servants impeccable, the surroundings elegant and hushed. The scene, in which the room, and its tables, gradually fill up, and the games commence, with a pall of cigar and cigarette smoke hanging under the shaded lamps, is one of Fleming’s finest pieces of writing. I do not understand or know bridge, as I know poker, but I can just about follow what is going on and feel the mounting tension as Sir Hugo Drax gets bolder and bolder in his cheating and Bond closes in on him.

  Moonraker began life as a screenplay, via which Ian Fleming hoped to make a fortune – and indeed he did make one, but out of the film of his next novel, not this one.

  I don’t like the Bond films much – the only exception is the 2006 version of Casino Royale starring Daniel Craig. Sony Pictures swapped the rights in James Bond with MGM – in exchange for those to Spider-Man. I would love to know which has made more money and if either regrets the deal.

  THIS BEING EXAMINATION MONTH, panic rolls over to my side of the fence. They are cramming at the last minute to answer GCSE questions on The Woman in Black. Most students are fine, and I can calm them down with a simple answer to a sensible question. And then there are the others. They haven’t read the ‘whole book’ until now – dear God!

  It isn’t even long. They think that, because I wrote it, I know the right answers and will tell them, so that they can get A*s – never understanding that there are no ‘right answers’ in this sort of thing, as there are in maths or chemistry. It is about what their own reading of the text is, what it tells them, and whether they can demonstrate how they arrived there. The book stands alone. If they think a certain element ‘means’ something and can show why, then it does, even though I did not put the meaning there and may even disagree with it. This seems to be a near-impossible concept to explain. All they can see is that I am the one who wrote it, ergo I know.

  They are not always well taught and come up with some difficult and half-baked theories. They also cannot quite grasp – and this does sound ridiculous – that these character do not exist, and so have no past or future outside of the book. I do try to help but I do not envy their teachers. I also rather mind when I spend a couple of hours answering a whole class’s questions, via the teacher – only for my reply to vanish into the ether, followed by silence. I rarely get thanked.

  Each time another round of these questions comes in, I vow not to reply. But it is not the fault of this year’s lot that last year’s lot had no manners. So I sigh and answer. And just occasionally along comes one who lets me know that she/he got their A*. ‘It was all down to you, miss. You’re a legend.’ Nice to know.

  ‘TREACHEROUS MONTH, MAY.’ My father – a glass half-empty man if ever there was one. But it certainly can be, with wild gales and lashing rain beating down the best flowers. Apart from roses, everything I love most comes in May. Tree peonies. Iris. May blossom. And never mind that it is a ‘weed’, cow parsley. The line of Iris pallida (dalmatica), a breathtaking blue, is slowly increasing in the starved soil below the low wall. They like starvation. All the sweet-smelling shrubs start now. Philadelphus. Lilac. There is wild lilac along the lane to the ford and, as soon as that fades, the wild honeysuckle flowers take over. I learned the hard way that if you want the best smelling honeysuckle, you avoid anything from a nursery/garden centre, but find instead the wild sort, straggling over a wayside hedge, take a stem for cuttings and go that way. This has not had the scent bred out of it.

  Bluebells come, usually the Spanish sort, but in woods everywhere they mesmerise with their sheets of blue – a blue like no other. No wonder it is said to be a healing colour. Look at a copse of blue-bells long enough and you feel calm and serene and healed in spirit.

  But this year, the rain and the gales have beaten everything in the garden into sad submission. There has been no point in putting out the tables and chairs. The skies are thunderous and scudding across above us. It is cold.

  The next morning, when Thomasin withdrew the curtains of her bedroom window, there stood the Maypole in the middle of the greek, its top cutting into the sky. It had sprung up in the night, or rather early morning, like Jack’s bean-stalk. She opened the casement to get a better view of the garlands and posies that adorned it. The sweet perfume of the flowers had already spread into the surrounding air, which, being free from every taint, conducted to her lips a full measure of the fragrance received from the spire of blossom in its midst. At the top of the pole were crossed hoops decked with small flowers; beneath these came a milk-white zone of Maybloom; then a zone of bluebells, then of cowslips, then of lilacs, then of ragged-robins, daffodils, and so on, till the lowest stage was reached. Thomasin noticed all these, and was delighted that the May revel was to be so near.

  The Return of the Native, my introduction to Thomas Hardy at A Level, and the start of a life of admiration and pleasure. That passage is a little more lyrical than his usual. Hardy was a melancholic man, glass only a quarter full. He had no optimism, no hope for man or the universe. ‘The President of the Immortals … had finished his sport with Tess’ is surely one of the bleakest sentences in English literature. Tess of the d’Urbevilles and Jude the Obscure – the only two I never got on with and cannot re-read. The Return of the Native is still my favourite, though the masterpiece is The Mayor of Casterbridge. What a delineator of character he was. And people talk about Jane Austen.

  WALKED ALONG THE MARSHES at low tide. Oystercatchers and redshanks feeding in the mud. Then, dipping its beak in and skimming it along for a yard, lifting it, skimming again, there was a spoonbill. They were almost extinct in Britain and then they hung on and started to breed and spread and now, especially here, they are fairly common. Egrets were very rare in the early twentieth century; now I see them every time I go to the marshes.

  I saw a spoonbill at Morston marshes recently, and that once unbelievably rare bird, the black-winged stilt. Not quite so rare now, though, since a pair bred on the Wash.

  Sam West, the actor and passionate birder, says the rarest he has ever seen was a black-faced spoonbill, in Hong Kong. Apparently there are only 2700 of them in the world. How do they know that? Waders and shore birds belong in the Ministry of Funny Walks.

  Is a sense of humour one of the things that sets the human race apart? Animals and birds do things that look funny to us but do they know what ‘funny’ is? Do they have/understand jokes? How can we know? Yet they play, and not only when young.

  And not only with humans, who buy them squeaky toys and catnip mice. Poppy and Orlando, dog and cat, play together, aged ten and nine, chasing games, hide and seek through the long grass, ‘biffing’ games.

  Here comes the sun, here comes the sun,

  And I say it’s all right …

  READING IN THE GARDEN is a pleasure after being stuck inside through the long wet chilly days in which you feel summer is already slipping past. If you are a reader, you read anywhere. The children used to read walking along the street, and so bumped into things. Trains and boats and planes. Chair. A hammock. When we had a hammock, that was a great reading place but there are not the right trees here. The bath (but probably not the shower). Bed, of course. Which heroine was it who read curled up inside the Hons cupboard? Oddly, in spite of ‘beach reads’, I have never read on beaches because I don’t lie out in the sun, my beaches are for walking on in winter. Sitting on the dock of the bay. Watching the tide roll away Watching children and dogs run about.

  The parasol and white sand and hot sun and long cold drinks probably make for other sorts of reading, light fiction that doesn’t touch the sides. Whoever saw anyone reading James Joyce or Dr Johnson on a beach?

  PRIZES HAVING MEANT SO MUCH when I was a young writer, I was thrilled to
win the Somerset Maugham Award in 1971, which gave me £500 to be spent on travel. How far would that get me now? Instead of going to Ulan Bator or across the Atlas mountains by yak, I took the night train to Venice and spent six weeks there on the money, staying in a tiny but pleasant and clean hotel and living on their breakfasts and then cheap fruit from the market and tiny pizzas. The orchestras in St Mark’s Square were outrivalling each other with the theme from Love Story and, as I could never afford a coffee at Florian’s, I just walked about, hearing them down every side alley. It was an extraordinary time and I wrote about Venice a great deal afterwards. And thanked Maugham from the heart, every day. A friend who had known him said he was ‘a crocodile’, and so he may have been – though he looks more like a very old tortoise in the marvellous Graham Sutherland portrait. I will not hear a word said against him. But I did not know his books when I won the award. My mother had been an avid reader of his. My university tutors turned up their noses, as indeed did almost everyone then.

  ‘Such a tissue of clichés that one’s wonder is finally aroused at the writer’s ability to assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way’ was a typical dismissal. Edmund Wilson who wrote that, had cloth ears. Maugham writes beautifully, as I discovered. His prose is cool and clear and elegant and he sums up a character, a place, a point of view, a relationship time and time again, in a perfect sentence.

  I came across this:

  As the sun was setting I wandered into the Mosque. I was quite alone. As I looked from one end along the chambers into which it is divided I had an eerie, mysterious sense of its emptiness and silence. I was a trifle scared. I can only put what I felt into words that make no sense. I seemed to hear the noiseless footfall of the infinite.

  I suppose most people who have been alone in an ancient church or other place of worship have had that sensation. It is the same as going into a church after a funeral or a wedding or other service, after everyone has left, and feeling that the prayers and the music are somehow still there, being absorbed into the atmosphere, into the very fabric of the building, and yet also being available to the solitary visitor. Being by oneself in such places can be moving, or disturbing – but it is not usually at all frightening.

  Maugham says that his words make no sense, but of course they do.

  The quotation comes from his A Writer’s Notebook, which he kept for much of his life and filled with observations, records of conversations, short descriptions, comments on being a writer. The edition I have is unsatisfactory in that everything is run together without divisions. The only separations are for the date at the beginning of each new year – it runs from 1892 to 1949. There should have been at the least some space between each entry – it is confusing to read and sometimes, as one reads one paragraph straight after another, it is nonsensical. Still, there is much richness in it and, after a few pages, I found that it was best just to dip in. Towards the end, he says things about growing older which I did not understand until I was seventy myself.

  … it occurred to me that the greatest compensation of old age is its freedom of spirit.

  I suppose that is accompanied by a certain indifference to many of the things that men in their prime think important. Another compensation is that it liberates you from envy, hatred and malice. I do not believe that I envy anyone. I have made the most I could of such gifts as nature provided me with; I do not envy the greater gifts of others. I have had a great deal of success. I do not envy the success of others … I no longer mind what people think of me. They can take me or leave me.

  (Mind you, I have met some writers who, even in old age, bitterly envy the success of others and are still ready to deride them.)

  On the evidence of this book alone, Maugham was a reflective man, and he seems to have made his observations about human nature, writing, life, only after careful thought and the weighing of arguments. Perhaps this is an illusion. He may have jotted things down ‘off the cuff’, but it never seems so. He is worth reading for his balanced mind and judgement alone.

  The game of ‘best novel’ is fun to play but not worth too much because, although literary experience and critical judgement play a part, in the last resort this is largely a matter of personal opinion. I have not read all of Maugham by any means, and some of his best-known books – Liza of Lambeth, The Moon and Sixpence – are not really to my taste. Given that I often find more in a short novel than a long one, it is not surprising that I so admire The Painted Veil, which is really a novella. It is a small masterpiece. There is not a word spare. Not a sentence overlong. Maugham was so good on women. He understood infidelity and the way some women of his time led pointless lives, through no fault of their own, the wives of those in the colonial service of the old days probably more than most. He understood boredom and lassitude and the effects of an extreme climate, to which the English were unaccustomed. He understood the formality of that society and how stifling as well as false it could be. And so he understands the heroine of this painful, vivid novel about a woman, Kitty Garstin, who marries her scientist husband Walter for no better reason than that her younger sister has announced her engagement and so is about to upstage her. They go to Hong Kong, where he works as a bacteriologist and Kitty, who does not love her husband, embarks on an affair with a charming and unreliable colonial civil servant, Charlie Townsend. Inevitably, the story ends tragically. The oppression of the climate, the stiff society, the landscape which seems so alien, the natives who are even more so, the unhappy marriage and the pull of the affair with the handsome ‘bounder’ Charlie – all of these catch and hold the reader from the beginning in a tense, claustrophobic atmosphere. It is a book that asks to be read in one intense sitting and we come out of it not quite knowing where we are.

  WSM was a fine short-story teller, best perhaps when reigned in tightly. In his day, he was a successful and popular dramatist – at one time he had four plays running at the same time in London’s West End. No wonder he made a great deal of money. He was generous, giving a lot of it away, during his lifetime and after his death, including a chunk to endow the prize for a writer under the age of thirty-five which was of so much value to me at just the right moment in my career. Crocodile or not, I salute him.

  THE CUCKOO IS DRIVING ME MAD, from dawn, yet for several years he was barely heard here. I defy anyone to explain. The only time I saw, as against heard, one was when I went out to investigate a bird racket close to the house and saw a mass of swallows, house martins, blue tits and goodness knows what else mobbing a hapless cuckoo around the old walnut tree. There must have been twenty birds diving and bombing until they saw him off.

  I WRITE IN MY BOOKS and I have done so ever since university, when one of the pleasures of buying text books from those going down was trying to decipher the margin notes and underlinings, going back through several previous owners. They were often useful, sometimes not. My university edition of F. N. Robinson’ s The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer is so littered with margin notes and underlinings that the text has a struggle to make itself heard. I still underline, scribble, fold down corners. I like to have a physical relationship with my books.

  I AM GRADUALLY BUILDING UP my book pile for France again, in June this time. Taking the car means there is plenty of space. I have put Moby Dick first. And then taken it out again. Decided on Our Mutual Friend, for the annual Dickens. And changed it for Little Dorrit.

  I ought to add something in French, so I put in a copy of Le Petit Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s beguiling story written in an elegant and straightforward French I can understand. The same applies to Georges Simenon’s detective stories, but all my copies of the Maigret novels are in English so I will have to wait and buy one in Montcuq or Prayssac, both of which small market towns in the Lot have shops selling, as well as newspapers, magazines, stationery, maps, postcards, toys and sweets, a good range of books, new and classic titles, in hard and paperback. I am quite likely to find one or two Simenons in t
he local supermarket, as he is ever popular, never out of print.

  I want to start a three- or four-volume series. Olivia Manning’s war novels were last summer. In previous years, I have worked my way through Paul Scott’s Raj and Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria quartets, and Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy.

  Now I’m stuck. Twitter comes to my aid, as usual, in the shape of Patrick McGrath, who reminds me of Gormenghast among other things.

  HOW MANY PEOPLE are there living in the books here? Only take the complete novels of Dickens and add up all the characters in each one and then multiply by … and I already need to lie down. Overall, there must be thousands of imaginary people sharing this house with us. Silent. Invisible. Dead? No, not dead, or at least not permanently. They spring to life when someone opens the book in which they are held prisoner … But of course they don’t. They do not spring to anything, least of all life. And yet they come alive in the mind, in the imagination of the reader. In one sense, anyway.

  It is not quite the same with real people who once actually lived, and yet, in reading about them, the same process happens … One reads about them on the page and they come alive in the imagination and the mind. In the case of those one has known in life it is in the memory. But they are still no longer flesh and blood and life and spirit, they are still just ‘people in books’, and we get to know them in exactly the same way as we do those fictional characters who never did exist. So literature is the great leveller.

  In a sense.