posted on 02 Jan 2023

On Christmas Reading

This year it felt harder than usual to settle to ‘proper’ reading during the Christmas period. I found myself rereading, abandoning and dipping into books. I began huge, ambitious books that I had previously read many years ago, such as Carlos Baker’s Hemingway: A Life, only to find it unreadable. So much is crammed in that the essential Hemingway seems diminished rather than illuminated. In future what relatively little I want to know about Hemingway’s life I will get from the man’s own works, especially the lovely posthumously published memoir A Moveable Feast, no matter how partial and embellished it might be. I read it again recently with great pleasure and it made me realise that what I really want from writers is a glimpse of the mystery whereby base metal is turned into gold. Carlos Baker seemed to be achieving the reverse.

I reread John le Carre’s Call for the Dead (Letterpress review), and found it marvellously atmospheric in its evocation of late-50s London but rather weak in its plotting. (I was interested to see that Smiley lives in Bywater Street – then rather gloomy and surrounded by bomb sites but now apparently one of London’s most beautiful and most Instagrammed streets.)

I tried yet again to read D. H. Lawrence, this time, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I find there is a lot to dislike about Lawrence’s sometimes congested and over-wrought prose style and the themes that obsessed him, but I do hope to persist with Lady Chatterley because I now realise that it is so much more than its notoriety as a ‘dirty book’ suggests. First published in a very small privately printed edition in 1928 it was the subject of prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act in 1960 when Penguin Books published the first unexpurgated edition. Its use of explicit description, four letter words and its depiction of a sexual relationship between an upper class woman, Connie Chatterley, and a working class man, Mellors, the gamekeeper on her husband’s country estate, was seen at the time as an obscene and incendiary combination. It prompted the chief prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, to ask whether it was the kind of book ‘you would wish your wife or servants to read’. 

While one can’t say that sex is incidental in the novel it can be argued that it isn’t in fact its most important theme. Of arguably far greater significance are the themes of class division and the physical and psychic damage of the First World War. To my shame, I certainly hadn’t remembered that Lady Chatterley’s husband, Clifford, is paralysed from the waist down due to wounds received in the Great War and that it is this disability that leads Connie to take a lover. Indeed, Clifford even suggests that she should. But perhaps even more shocking is the realisation that when the novel opens Clifford is not yet thirty and Connie only twenty-two or so. The real obscenity in Lady Chatterley’s Lover is the terrible shadow cast by the Great War and its destruction of a generation. 

A couple of things prompted me to try Lawrence again. First, I found the late-70s copy pictured in a charity shop for a pound. I have always liked the white-jacketed treatment Penguin gave Lawrence’s work in that period and finding this copy made me finally give it another go. Rereading L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between played a part too, because this also involves a sexual relationship across the class divide and I realised that I had never previously made the obvious connection with Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I still think that The Go-Between is a bit too long but Hartley’s evocation of the long-lost Edwardian summer of 1900 is peerless and his story of loss of innocence, of childish desire for approval and the catastrophic consequences of stifling social convention and adult manipulation has been deservedly influential. Ian McEwan, for instance, says it is one of his favourite novels. Its influence on his Atonement seems undeniable.

I also dipped into some classic ghost stories – another volume in the British Library’s excellent series of weird and supernatural tales. This time The Haunted Library, edited by Tanya Kirk (an earlier collection is reviewed here). This collection focuses on hauntings that involve books and libraries and includes M. R. James’s ‘The Tractate Middoth’ and A. N. L. Munby’s extraordinary ‘Herodes Redivivus’ (covered in this review). Munby served as Librarian of King’s College, Cambridge, James’s old college, but began writing ghost stories in a German POW camp during the war.

I also reread Lewis Buzbee’s The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop (reviewed here) but this time I found its historical sections a little intrusive and I realised that as an old bookseller all I really wanted was to read more about Buzbee’s own years as a bookseller and a publisher’s sales rep. Nonetheless, Buzbee’s book provided a bit of impetus when it felt as if my reading was lacking direction. For example, I reread The Go-Between partly because I remembered that my copy is a New York Review of Books paperback, and Buzbee describes being bewitched by these editions as a young man, in exactly the same way that I and some of my friends at around the same time were bewitched by Penguins.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover reawakened my interest in the First World War and I also began to reread Edmund Blunden’s 1928 war memoir, Undertones of War. It has defeated me before but I do feel that this time I will finish it. I hadn’t fully understood how much Blunden did to help create what we might almost call the stereotype of the poet-pastoralist-soldier of the Great War and I want to follow this through. For reasons I can’t entirely put my finger on, I find his prose style a little difficult.

And so as the new year starts I look back on what seemed an unsatisfactory period of reading and find that it really wasn’t so unsatisfactory or directionless after all. There were all kinds of subconscious linkages and relationships between the books I read. I just didn’t realise it. Reading – if we are lucky – has a way of repaying our efforts with just a little bit more than we put into it. At the very least, it is always instructive. I hope your reading rewards you in this way too. Happy New Year.

 

Alun Severn

January 2023