On Reading the Wrong Thing
Stringer Reads!
I was mocked once on a bus in Yorkshire for reading. As I’m writing this, I’m a bit surprised to remember that I was physically attacked on buses in Yorkshire several times, but these don’t smart and don’t stick in my mind as much as being mocked for being in possession of a book. For the people who were mocking me, reading anything was the wrong thing. I wonder what they thought I should be doing, sitting on my own all the way from Huddersfield to Skelmanthorpe, via High Burton on the service 236? Menacing old ladies? Ripping up seats? Perhaps for them, the only socially acceptable thing to do on a bus in Yorkshire was to mock other people for doing things that are regarded as “weird” or “gay” (in Yorkshire in the 70’s and 80’s this was a very long list).
Maybe that’s why I have such a bloody-minded and occasionally aggressive attitude to anybody who questions why I’m reading something (actually, this applies to just about any kind of censorship).
Books, Books, Books
I sit here in my flat in North London, I’m looking at a wall covered with books, there are more in the corridors, and in the bedrooms, and in the bathroom. And they aren’t just there for show. I read. I haven’t always read. It’s built up slowly.
I certainly read more now than I’ve ever done. I read so many biographies and autobiographies where people are said to have “devoured” books, to have read “anything that they could lay their hands” on when they were children. I didn’t read like that. I did get to be around books when I was very small - I remember before I could read, or knew anything about alphabetical order, knowing where to go in the tiny library in our village to find the Thomas the Tank Engine books (they were in the top left corner - ‘A’ for Awdry). And I could read from some age not long after four.
Yeah, Yeah, but I’m Missing Scooby Doo
But then for a long time I joined that mysterious group that I spend a lot of my time at the moment trying to communicate with - those who can read, but choose not to. From the ages for four to thirteen, I was pretty much glued to the telly. And that I did devour, I would watch anything. I remember being annoyed about being taken shopping on Saturday mornings and being annoyed when I was taken for a haircut because I would be missing my cartoons.
But there was always reading going on around me. My dad read four or five books a week. I never had the problems that Tony Harrison had with his dad. My dad would get to work early so he could read before he started work and he would read in all his breaks. He wasn’t a book buyer. He would borrow books from the local library and occasionally he would point out something that he’d brought back that he thought might be of interest. My dad wasn’t a pushy parent and so I only acquired some of his tastes. I love John Betjeman and P G Wodehouse but I don’t share his addiction to stories of naval warfare, or science fiction.
Then, at some point in adolescence, I started going with him to the library again. As I said, my dad wasn’t a pushy man, but he would still occasionally say “I’m going to t’library are you coming?” I think I was probably about thirteen and I remember picking up a book called “The Everyman Book of English Verse” in the village library. I was definitely going through a tumultuous teenage episode and for the very first time discovering that I had no idea how to deal with women. I remember this poem: “Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part” expressing what I was feeling about a girl I was getting excited about at the time. And from that, I think I drew the conclusion that poetry could somehow provide me with help and advise for how to deal with life. Oh boy. If only it were that simple.
So I read a lot of poetry. Yeats, Keats, Edward Thomas (Adelstrop - is near-perfect), Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, DH Lawrence (“The Oxford Voice” is still one of my favourite poems) and Robert Graves.
So I did English at ‘A’ level. And I suppose this was one of the few periods when reading the right thing turned out to be fantastically rewarding. I read “A Passage to India” by E.M. Forster, I read “Ariel” by Sylvia Plath, I read “The Crucible” and “All my Sons” and “Death of a Salesman” by Arthur Miller. The stuff I remember best is the drama. We read “The Caretaker” by Harold Pinter and it was like somebody had opened one of those side-doors in a corridor in an unfinished Kafak novel - perhaps Amerika. I’m reminded of this quote from e.e. cummings:
listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go
And of course, Pinter was just a gateway party drug to the real hard stuff. Beckett. Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape and finally the novels.
But I did English Literature ‘A’ level along with Maths and Chemistry, because I had alway been good at them and enjoyed them. This definitely wasn’t supposed to happen. My teachers tried to discourage me for such a radical combination. I think this was the first time that I ran right up against the Victorian/Industrial nature of the University system. There were two “bins” it was explained to me by Mr Pickard the head of sixth form: arts student and science student. It was dangerous (and possibly painful) to try to stradle both. Of course I ignored him, in a way I wish I was still as good at blythely ignoring advice on the way things just are. The result of ignoring this particular advice was that when it came to trying to get a place at University, no English University would touch me. And that’s how I ended up in Scotland doing philosophy.
