By the Book

by Ramona Koval

  CHAPTER 16

  A good disposition

  They wear ragged clothes and two of them have no shoes, but the three young boys in the photograph are hunched over a book that is sitting on the lap of the middle boy, his knees showing through his trousers. It is 1915, World War One is raging and in the city of Esztergom, the old capital of Hungary, not far from Budapest, the boys in their grubby caps forget their cold limbs and are transported by the book, but to where?

  The photographer was André Kertész, born at the end of the nineteenth century. He liked to photograph readers of all descriptions, and all his life he did so from Hungary to Paris to New York. He published a book of these pictures, called On Reading.

  In another Kertész photograph, taken in 1944, another boy is caught in an act of pure pleasure. In the doorway of a New York shop under a sign saying Paper is needed now! Bring it at any time, he eats an ice cream on a messy pile of newspapers spilling onto the street, his focus on a page of comic strips.

  On balconies, and rooftops, among chimney pots and washing lines, people snatch reading time, utterly engrossed and devoted only to their books.

  In 1948 by the Medici Fountain in Paris, a couple read on folding wooden chairs, their faces turned from us towards the words in the book. Is it poetry? Are they illicit lovers? I imagine my mama reading there with a man she has met in the gardens, while my father plays cards in a café, oblivious to what my mother is doing in another part of the forest. Banned books were not the only forbidden fruit my mother enjoyed. But that is a story for another time.

  And on an ancient edition of Voltaire, in New York in 1969, a beetle is snapped by Kertész, lost in contemplation of the paper beneath its feet, a last meal, perhaps, for a Kafka character?

  On Reading was first published in 1971 and an exhibition followed in the UK and USA in 2009. The pictures in this book remind us of the private and reverential pleasure of reading, how it transports us from our prosaic lives to anywhere we care to imagine. While our world looks small on the outside, it’s huge on the inside, in the magical spaces between the page and our absorption.

  When I was growing up, I knew children whose parents would exclaim that they were ‘doing nothing’ if they were found with a book in their hands. They had to help around the house or go outside and do some real playing. The book was at best a distraction from what they ought to be doing, at worst a corrupter of young minds or a sissy enterprise.

  But in none of the Kertész images does anyone read a book with a pencil or pen in their hand. Until recently I never read a book without taking notes. I already had something to write on—the book itself was my work desk.

  My mother taught me to revere books. I once saw her kissing one of the books in a prayer-book set that I had accidently dropped. I had never before seen her do this, but she explained it was an old habit from her ultra-orthodox childhood where, she said, there was a rule and a prayer for everything, including dropping the sacred words.

  But just before the turn of the century, when I began to read books for money as well as for love, I employed all formerly forbidden practices to get close to the book. And if that meant dog-earing the pages, writing questions in the end notes, and underlining and marking the text itself, so be it. Because things are different when the point of reading is not simply pleasure of self-improvement or wiling the days away, but working towards having a conversation with the author. For this you need to be prepared.

  So I would read with several tracks in my head. One track is the way anybody reads for enjoyment: getting lost in the words and the story and the characters. The other tracks have questions attached: how does the writer know about this or that setting or historical moment or the work practices of horse whisperers or whale hunters or philosophers? Why does this character feel, say, do that? This book made me think such-and-such—was that what the writer wanted? How did the writer make me care? How did they paint a picture in my mind with mere word-strokes?

  Apart from forming questions, I took note of sentences, phrases, words. I tried to isolate a few paragraphs or pages that the author might read to give people a flavour of the tone or the voice of the book. Sometimes it was better not to let the speaking voice of the author spoil the beautiful prose. My notes transcribed my conversation with the book.

  If I’m sounding like an engineer rather than a reader, that was my task: to engineer a conversation. And like any journey over a beautiful bridge, I wanted to admire the span and be sure I would survive the crossing. I hoped that the engineer had done the calculations properly and that the bridge would remain standing. I needed to think about how the conversation might begin, where it might go, and what sights to point out along the way. This makes for very particular reading.

  This kind of reading could make it hard to relax with a book on holidays. Each time I took out a book to read, I would find myself reading with a view to talking about it. I would reach for a writing implement. To cure myself of this habit I tried to read only dead authors on holiday. How could I interview them? But my mind would wander to ideas of interviewing their biographers, for example, and the pen would come out. Just one book, I’d say to myself, just one interview prepared before I go back to work. And then one became two, two became four and by midholiday I was once more working flat out.

  As an interim measure I decided to study French again, and used my summers to sit with a private teacher at my kitchen table several times a week. The idea was for me to start reading only French novels on holidays. I was almost sure I wouldn’t find myself interviewing these authors, as I was broadcasting only in English.

  It never occurred to me to cure myself by vowing not to read at all. That would be like vowing not to breathe.

  Finally I decided to find a mid-path. I would read for self-improvement, which was a kind of work, but I would read only dead people whose biographies had been long discussed and shelved.

  I began to seek out the Penguin Classics series, the black spines with a purple stripe across the top. I started with Suetonius’s The Twelve Caesars. I felt as though I was entering a foreign country without a map.

  But to my complete surprise the translation by Robert Graves introduced me to a world of intrigue, gossip and reportage that was like a contemporary report from the capital—be it London, Washington or Canberra. Suetonius told me all about Julius Caesar’s rise to political power, his marriages, his love affairs and his errors. I learned that he was embarrassed about being bald, and combed his hair forwards, and that he was rumoured to remove hair from other parts of his body. He was said to have had an affair with King Nicomedes IV of Bithynia in Anatolia, and was called the ‘Queen of Bithynia’ in some quarters. He was also a great womaniser and among his mistresses was Cleopatra. In fact he had a law drawn up to legitimise his marriage to any woman he wanted ‘for the procreation of children’. He was not a drinker. His enemy Marcus Cato said he was ‘the only sober man who ever tried to wreck the Constitution’.

  I like the fact that I smile at Cato’s joke, that the defender of the Roman Republic who died in 46 BC can give me pleasure so far from his world and his time. Two millennia later, Suetonius can horrify me with reports of Caligula’s madness and cruelty, his troubling mental illness, his ‘over-confidence and extreme timorousness’ as a despiser of gods, who was afraid of thunder.

  Suetonius can whisper like a fashion blogger, telling us that Caligula wore an embroidered and precious-stoneencrusted cloak at public appearances teamed with silk forbidden to men and women’s dresses over military boots or women’s shoes:

  Often he affected a golden beard and carried a thunder bolt, trident, or serpent-twined staff in his hand. He even dressed up as Venus and, even before his expedition, wore the uniform of a triumphant general, including sometimes the breastplate which he had stolen from Alexander the Great’s tomb at Alexandria.

  Suetonius remarks that ‘such frantic and reckless behaviour roused murderous thoughts in certain minds’. When Caligula died at twenty-
nine after ruling for just over three years, I was relieved.

  I was on the edge of my seat at the historian’s description of the Emperor Claudius, whose own mother called him ‘a monster: a man whom Nature had not finished but had merely begun’. When Claudius hid behind a curtain on hearing of the murder of his nephew Caligula, fearing for his own life, he was found by a soldier who, in a scene from a French farce, saw his feet sticking out. And instead of being killed he was proclaimed emperor. He died fourteen years later, a dish of mushrooms and a gruel chaser deliberately poisoned.

  Suetonius was a friend and employee of the writer and magistrate Pliny the Younger, whose book The Letters of the Younger Pliny I turned to next. There’s an added intimacy in reading these letters from the wealthy landowner, lawyer, writer and poet to his friends, to his beloved wife, to the historian Tacitus, to the emperor Trajan and to those who ask favours and advice.

  Pliny is proud of the life he lives at his country estate. He describes his villa and its gardens and invites people to come and stay and talk with him. I want to visit too.

  He gives a detailed account to Tacitus of the death of his uncle, Pliny the Elder, the writer and philosopher who tried to rescue his friends by ship after Vesuvius had erupted, destroying Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 AD. Pliny the Younger was eighteen years old and staying with his uncle in Misenum, across the Bay of Naples from the volcano. It’s a dramatic eyewitness description of the cloud on the horizon, the broad sheets of fire and leaping flames, the falling ash and stones and the smell of sulphur in the darkness at noon.

  The elder Pliny tried to cross the bay against advice, and was defeated by the fierceness of the elements. His body was found two days later.

  I admire Pliny the Elder, so I find his Natural History and discover the ancient world’s encyclopaedic book of agriculture, astronomy, geography, metallurgy, architecture, zoology, medicine and pharmacy. I check out Tacitus too, to see what he did with Pliny the Younger’s description of Mount Vesuvius exploding.

  I fall upon the love poetry of Ovid, and his advice, to men and to women, on how to go about the arts of seduction: Amores (The Loves), Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), Remedia Amoris (The Cure for Love) and the fragmentary Medicamina Faciei Femineae (On Facial Treatment for Ladies).

  In Peter Green’s translation Ovid tells young men that they must stick at wooing the love object, even when all seems hopeless, because, in the end, her resistance is futile: ‘Birds will sooner fall dumb in springtime, cicadas in summer, or a hunting dog turn his back on a hare, than a lover’s bland inducements can fail with a woman.’

  He is firm on the matter of women keeping their beauty preparations private—’shut your door, don’t reveal the half-finished process…there’s a lot men are better not knowing’—and when age has done its damage he is wise:

  When a woman’s manners are good, she never fails to attract. Manners indeed are more than half the battle. Time will lay waste your beauty, and your pretty face will be lined with wrinkles. The day will come when you will be sorry you looked at yourself in the mirror, and regret for your vanished beauty will bring you still more wrinkles. But a good disposition is a virtue in itself, and it is lasting; the burden of the years cannot depress it, and love that is founded on it endures to the end.

  And on the matter of wooing older women, whose experience and versatility make up for their lack of youth:

  Don’t ask her age, don’t inquire under just which consul

  She was born—leave that kind of chore

  To the Censor’s office, especially if she is past her girlish

  Prime, and already plucking those first

  White hairs.

  Reading these classical writers made it possible to go for several summer holidays without reverting to literary journalism. I rediscovered the joy of browsing. True browsing means that we discover shelves and subjects that we could not have anticipated when we started. And the books we read introduce us to other books, as if we are at a magnificent party of the mind, being ever welcomed by new friends to join in the conversation. An essay on Iceland, ‘Paradice’, by Eliot Weinberger leads me to read Independent People by Iceland’s only Nobel Prize winner, Halldór Laxness.

  At the height of my work in literary journalism, I avoided bookshops, as they reminded me of the piles of books on and around my desk, and the obligation to choose and to read and to consider and to discuss. I found no rest there, and if I was with people who spent their weekends in beloved bookshops I would wait outside or in the guidebook section or among the foreign language dictionaries or impatiently flip through the CDs just to appease my friends until they had had their fill.

  Now I can love bookstores again, and I see their managers as curators not just of what will sell but also of what they think fine and good to read. They are the guardians of the culture, like librarians used to be before the whirring of computers could be heard in the previously silent halls of the hallowed book-lined buildings I remember.

  The bookshelves of friends can also be read as the outward expression of the soul within. They are reflections of the accidents of education, and of passions and former interests and ways of leisure. How warming to find a loved book on the shelf of a new friend. How exciting to find books that you have never read. How daunting to find classics that you feel you should have read. You might console yourself with the thought that your friend may not have read them either. We all have shelves of possibility. I have many: The Essential Tagore, the Bible, Proust, the complete annotated works of Shakespeare and the collected Freud are just a sample. And I know I should go back to the testing volumes of my impatience, for surely they are called classics for a reason.

  Can we really be friends with those who don’t love the books that we do? Of course we can, but can we really be friends with those who don’t love any books? I’m not so sure of that.

  When my daughters were younger I talked about the books I thought they should read, but I didn’t use books in the way my mother had, as messages in a bottle, or silent longings to be interpreted. When I had something to say, I said it. I was direct and candid. Sometimes when I say to them, ‘Do you know what I think about that?’ they chorus ‘Yes!’ before I have a chance to tell them.

  My younger daughter refused to read my recommendations for improving literature; her passion was the Sweet Valley High series by Francine Pascal. It sold millions of copies so she was not alone.

  But when my older daughter was a teenager, she was a little estranged from me. After she left home, she once returned to recuperate after an illness. I lay on her bed reading aloud a story from my beloved My Mother’s House by Colette. ‘Maternity’ is about Colette’s mysterious older ‘sister with the long hair’ who was in a financial dispute with Sido and the Captain, and had ‘exiled herself with a husband in a neighbouring house’.

  The family hears the sister is about to have a child, and Sido begins to behave erratically. ‘One day she seasoned the strawberry tart with salt instead of sugar, and instead of showing distress she met my father’s expostulations with a face of stony irony that upset me terribly.’

  The night they hear that the sister’s labour has begun, Colette observes her mother from an upstairs window, crossing the road and entering the garden at the side of the house in which her daughter’s cries of pain could be heard:

  Then I saw my mother grip her own loins with desperate hands, spin round and stamp on the ground as she began to assist and share, by her low groans, by the rocking of her tormented body, by the clasping of her unwanted arms, and by all her maternal anguish and strength, the anguish and the strength of the ungrateful daughter who, so near to her and yet so far away, was bringing a child into the world.

  My daughter and I cried together on the bed that day, and I still choke up reading the passage now. So maybe I did learn something of the art of semaphore from Mama.

  These days I have taken the place of my beloved Mama on the couch. Here I sit among five little grandchil
dren. One of them can already read, two can pretend to read, and the little twins are just able to hold their first book of ducks and boats and turn the stiff-backed pages, getting ready for their own life in books.

  Like me on the floor of the mobile bus library, the older ones lie on their bellies on the bed when they sleep at my house, at first listening to me tell them stories—how many ways can I do Goldilocks?—then to my reading of Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree and Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I do all the voices and they laugh and copy me.

  And more recently our eyes are transfixed by my iPad as I read to them from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Sir John Tenniel’s illustrations are strange to them, but familiar to me. Sometimes I paraphrase Lewis Carroll’s nineteenth-century language to save from losing the thread of the story through having to explain all the time. But they get the absurdity and the wonder of the adventure, laughing aloud at the idea of Alice drowning herself in her own tears. I am spellbound by their little fingers sweeping along the screen to turn the pages, and the way that even the littlest ones expect all screens to be responsive to their touch.

  I know they will grow up with a more diverse reading experience than mine. I had only paper and cardboard and illustrations. Digital reading is already modified by books that show video instead of still pictures, and split screens that show you what others think of your book even before you have read it yourself. Novels have secret spaces where you can read ‘backstories’ about the characters. You can choose your own story branch and turn reading a book into a kind of game. And as we’re in a revolution this is just the beginning. I wonder how much my grandchildren’s imaginations might atrophy with so much on offer. Will all the extras result in a subtraction from what the reading experience has been for me? Can we have too much information?