by Susan Hill
SOME NOVELISTS SEEM to be ashamed of stories. Of telling stories. Of novels containing stories. Stories are the least of it, they seem to say, and if I have to have a story as a sort of coathanger on which to hang my coat of many coloured words, it will have to be thin and spare, plain and dull, a story no one will actually want to read, but they must bear with me because I am told that my novel must contain a story of some sort. Stories are what people like. Stories sell books.
The great novelists knew better. Imagine Dickens without any stories. What are Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales but a series of linked stories? Where would Shakespeare be without the stories, even if Shaw did say that Shakespeare had the ‘gift of telling a story (provided someone told it to him first)’.
Italo Calvino was a story genius. So was Nabokov. And they both believed in stories as others believe in God. They played with stories. Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, one of the most playful, delightful and brilliant modern novels written, is all about stories. Only about stories: ‘I’m producing too many stories, because what I want for you is to feel around the story, a saturation of other stories I could tell and maybe will tell or who knows may already have told on some other occasion …’ David Mitchell, in Cloud Atlas, produced a novel in the Calvino mode, which is not to say that he plagiarised or copied the idea. A series of separate stories told and interwoven until they become one big story – that is really a literary form as old as literature itself.
‘I can’t be doing with that,’ a friend said – a friend who reads a lot. ‘I like to know where I am and who I am with, in a book. I don’t like all this stopping and starting and changing about once I have settled into it.’
I know what she means. I like to know where I am in a novel, too. Sometimes. But just as a long straight road has its pleasures and its purposes, so does a series of winding, unexpected lanes which eventually converge, but which give you a lot of surprises on the way, even when they appear to come to dead ends.
WHEN I FIRST WENT TO LIVE IN LONDON, in 1960, and indeed for the next decade or more, there were no bookshop chains, other than WHSmith, which was not even then primarily a bookseller. There were no Waterstones, Daunts … But London had plenty of famous independent book shops with style and character: Bumpus, Truslove & Hanson, Foyles, with its almost impenetrable system of purchasing books by way of several chits and queues. The anarchic Better Books. The insanely anarchic Parton Bookshop, belonging to a man called David Archer, who seemed not to want to sell anything, and where writers drank coffee and talked and smoked and read books and nicked them.
Of course they are all gone, other than Foyles, whose present-day premises are like an ocean liner and whose system for purchasing has become normal. But there are plenty of bookshops with character, where you are likely to find both the obvious and the unexpected and where the stock is not arranged in uniform ranks, edge to edge, but presents something of a challenge to the browser. So long as the staff know where to put a hand on what you have come in for, a bit of disarrangement and disorganisation lends charm. There are no probably none left with histories and personalities, like 88 Charing Cross Road or Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, the stuff of legend, bookshops about which people wrote books. People still do travel great distances to particular bookshops, though. A friend journeyed from Devon specifically to check out Topping & Co. of Ely. She may still be in there.
The internet did not kill off bookshops, any more than the e-reader killed the physical book, though online antiquarian bookselling has dealt a mortal blow to many small second-hand shops. But poke around country towns and you can still find them, eccentric, idiosyncratic and only seeming, in the dusty chaos, to contain tremendous rare bargains for pence. The proprietors who lurk in their dim depths know their stock and its worth down to the last 1940s Film Fun annual.
‘IT DRIVES ME MAD when David isn’t reading,’ the friend said. I wasn’t sure what she meant, but apparently her husband has a binge on reading every evening, every night, on the commuter train, and for a couple of hours in bed on Sunday mornings. This lasts for several weeks, or even months, during which time he gets through dozens of books, mainly but not all non-fiction. And then he stops. He reads no book at all for weeks. Months. Once, for a whole year and a half.
How is this possible? How can one be an intermittent reader?
‘THIRTY DAYS HATH SEPTEMBER …’
Home again, and the trees are still green. It is mild, but an English dampness is in the air, the nights are chill, and every dawn and dusk fine veils of pale spooky mist weave over the surface of the river and the pond, a few feet above the ground. The apples are thumping down. Maybe it is time to re-read Laurie Lee and Cider with Rosie, but I can’t find it, and there are plenty of the new autumn titles to look at and maybe even to read. Publishers are kind enough to send me all manner of books for nothing and I browse in our local bookshop and online to see what is predicted to be this year’s Christmas bestseller. But the best-laid plans of publishers ‘aft gang aglay’ because those always come from left field, leaving printers burning the midnight oil to meet sudden massive demand. Last year, I remember, it was a book about how to chop and store logs.
A DECADE AGO I did what I had longed to do since 1963, when I received my first degree, and started to read for another, an MA this time, in theology. Having been brought up in a Catholic convent, and spent many years as an adult Anglican, particularly as a member of the Coventry Cathedral community, I felt – and indeed, still feel – that I knew too little about the basis of and background to it all and about various aspects of Christian history. But I wasn’t about to return as a full-time student to what is now called the campus, I studied by distance learning. If you have already taken a first degree, and especially if you are older and doing this voluntarily, and so anxious to learn and put the hours in, this is an ideal way. The internet has made it all possible. My essays were e-mailed in and marked and returned by the same route, but nice, fat, printed books of the modules came by post.
I loved the course from Day 1. I immersed myself in it as in a warm bath. I studied Genesis, Paul and – my favourite, rather to my own surprise – the Cistercians in England in the twelfth century. And among those Cistercians I discovered and fell in love with, as it were, Aelred of Rievaulx. I had been to Rievaulx Abbey, and I visited it again after finishing the course. It is wonderfully atmospheric, in spite of all the bossy English Heritage notices. If you arrive late and out of season, when the sun is going down, you really can get some sense of what life was like in this bowl of the Yorkshire Dales, where sheep bleat through the soft air and the light gleams through the majestic ruins, archways, slit windows, whole ‘rooms’ and magnificent spaces.
I came to love Aelred because I came to know him. So much of that time is very distant and different, yet there is enough left of Aelred’s writings, we know so much of his life and personality, that he can come closer to us than many who have lived later. Or so we suppose. Life then was not like life now and it is easy to fall into the error of familiarity. But human is human. Aelred was a great and good man.
This evening, with the rain setting in early, I take down several books about the Cistercians and about Aelred, marvelling in particular at how often and how far he travelled, on horseback, to meetings every three years of all the Cistercian abbots in Rome. Rome seems far enough if you drive there today. The journey from Yorkshire would have taken months, was perilous and must certainly have been wearying. Aelred was a good administrator. He loved and also looked after his monks at Rievaulx, made plans for improvements to the abbey, took charge of the outlying tenant farms and of the lay brothers who worked in them, beyond the monastery itself. He was well read, devout, perspicacious, and he knew the world – as a young man he had been a steward in the court of the King of Scotland and it was in King David’s company that he was travelling down through northern England when the little band sought and naturally were given hospitality at Rievaulx. Aelred fell in love with th
e place, and he felt an overwhelming call to become a monk there. He rode away that time – but he was soon back, looking down from the hill above on the calm, handsome, grey stone buildings, certain then that he must stay. And stay he did, eventually to become abbot, to write, preach, study, work, organise, pray. He was as devout a man as could be found – when not all those who became monks were, or took the monastic life seriously and lived it so well.
As a result of taking cold baths – and baths in North Yorkshire water come down from the hills above would have been icy – in order to curb his strong physical desires and do penance, he became arthritic and was in extreme pain for much of his later life. The pain of arthritis is severe enough now, with analgesics as strong as can be. I looked at the book in my hand, and at a page in which the scribe tells how much physical agony the Abbot of Rievaulx was constantly in, and I imagined what it would have been like in the fierce Yorkshire winters, when ice and snow lasted for months and the great fires that blazed inside the walls would barely have taken the chill off the smallest spaces.
Aelred was a good man and a good monk and a good abbot simply because he believed that love and friendship were everything. For him, the monastery should be a community of friends. The monastic life was about friendship.
Perhaps that is why, from so far away, he speaks so clearly and readily to us now.
I had thought of doing a PhD about Aelred of Rievaulx. But I was put off, by myself and others, for all the right reasons. I could easily have become one of those people who never quite manages to finish their thesis but I might also, in stumbling along with it, have failed to write the books it is more important for me to write. So I just read his work and about his life and about twelfth-century Cistercian monasticism, from time to time, as tonight, and sometimes go back to Rievaulx, which, thank God, is still there, even as a ruin. Plenty of monasteries, destroyed by that vandal Henry VIII, were razed to the ground, with perhaps a few bases of stone pillars left, like stumps of teeth. I am glad there is so much left of Rievaulx. When you stand alone there, even though the sky and not a roof is over your head, you can hear the whispers of monastic chant and the faint ghostly swish of the heavy robes, see the shadowy procession of hooded figures on their way to and from the chapel. And there is nothing remotely spooky about it.
I sometimes read a chapter or so of one of the histories I studied while doing my MA – books by Dom David Knowles or, more recently, Janet Burton – and I dive back into those times with joy. But I was right not to attempt a PhD. I am not scholarly material. Keeping up the subject, and Biblical studies, via ‘books about’ is the most I will ever do.
One of my modules, about St Paul, was tough, because there is a whole new school of thought about him, about his Jewishness, and I did not fully understand it. Whether you are a believer or not is irrelevant to the study of Paul’s life. Jerome Murphy-O’Connor has written two biographies which seem to get right under his skin, and they follow him on his physical as well as his spiritual journeys, taking us with him as willing companions. Like Aelred and his fellow abbots, Paul travelled hundreds of miles, sometimes by ship – and suffered after being shipwrecked, too – but mainly on foot. Travel was even more dangerous then and people banded together for safety against marauding wild animals and brigands. Paul went to and from his churches all over the Holy Land, numerous times. He does not strike one as an especially ‘nice’ man, he was fierce and neither relaxed nor amiable, but he loved his disciples in a stern sort of way, he worked hard as a tent-maker, he stumped through heat and dust over hard terrain in the course of being a follower of Christ – and, like so many, was eventually imprisoned and executed for his pains. They were made of strong stuff, men like Paul and Aelred.
SOMEONE SOMEWHERE COMPLAINED recently that there were far too many books ‘about books and reading’. Meta-literature is probably what it is called and when I see such a book, I generally buy it. I see I have on one shelf: The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, Ex Libris, The Child that Books Built, The Bookshop Book, The Library Book, 100 Books You Must Read Before You Die, Where I’m Reading From, A History of Reading, So Many Books, So Little Time, The Library at Night, A Reader on Reading, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, Women Who Read are Dangerous, Phantoms on the Bookshelves, How Literature Saved My Life. The last is by an American author, David Shields, and he has some good things to say, but he is also a ‘the novel is dead’ person and if anything ever flew in the face of the evidence, that does. If the novel is dead, what are all those people who write them doing? Why the queues for creative writing degrees? Why so many novels published? Why so many printed and sold in bookshops? Why so many now self-published as e-books by novelists whose work never sees the light of physical print but who still manage to make money out of them? Quality is not the point here. It is a question of numbers. Novels are written and published in their many thousands because they are read ditto. Or else they would not be. Shields says, rather sadly it seems, that ‘the novel has long been dead to me’.
Meanwhile, in the pomposity department, he files a nice story. There is a very prestigious American prize called the National Book Award. In 1987, ‘after the fiction panel did not name Toni Morrison the winner, she approached the committee’s chair … and said, “Thank you for ruining my life.” If your life depends on winning an award chosen by a few people over lunch, there’s something wrong with your life.’
There is something wrong with the lives of other writers, too, judging by the story about the one whose editor was driving him somewhere when they heard the announcement of the Man Booker shortlist on the radio. The author was so disappointed, shocked and angry that he was not included that the car had to be stopped while he beat his fists on the dashboard and screamed at his editor. I knew a then-famous novelist who did not/could not/would not speak to anyone for twenty-four hours, so astonished and furious was he that his latest book was not the American Book of the Month Club Choice. And I learned quite a bit about people’s sense of entitlement when I was a judge of the Man Booker Prize myself. At one of those terrible prize-giving dinners, when the announcement of the winning book was named, yet another anonymous author banged something again – the table this time – and said, ‘I have been cheated of this prize.’ Disappointment is entirely understandable. If your name is mentioned promisingly in conjunction with a valuable prize, or you are even shortlisted, you are entitled to feel disappointed when you do not win. But that’s it. Otherwise, ‘Get a life’ really is the appropriate response.
A LONG SKEIN of pink-footed geese has just gone over towards the marshes.
THIS GOLDEN OCTOBER continues to drift slowly down like a twirling leaf. Sitting in the garden in the sun reading a biography of Jean Rhys.
Two young muntjac deer come for the windfall apples at the far end of the meadow. Indeed, not only for the windfalls … they reach up and take the apples right off the branches. Sometimes, they play, chasing one another in and out of the trees. Pretty things, but a worry on the roads. One jumped out of the hedge, followed by two young, when I was driving the leafy back road to Holt and I barely missed them. Yet I have never seen a single badger in Norfolk, alive or dead. Our Cotswold fields were riddled with badger setts. You could hear them lumbering about at night, they attacked the Border terriers and the road kill was significant.
Still reading the Jean Rhys biography. I have re-read all her novels during the last eighteen months. I muddle them up, apart from Wide Sargasso Sea, which is her masterpiece and will surely remain as one of best novels of the twentieth century – and it does not seem to detract from my understanding and admiration of it that I have never read Jane Eyre.
I was accused of setting my face against doing so recently, and maybe that has become true, but at least when people find echoes of it all over The Woman in Black, I know they are wrong. Or do I? Can a book have echoes of another book which the author has never read? I feel I have read JE, I know so much about it – the mad wife in the attic, the blind
ness … But that’s the sum of what Jean Rhys does, too. But although the biography is interesting, and beyond poignant, and although Jean was a strange mixture – a genius and a monster; a pathetic, lonely woman stuck, in her last years, in a damp, ugly modern house in a remote Devon village she hated – I think the puzzle is easy enough to solve. Not only the careful biography, but the chapter about her in Difficult Women written in the 1970s by David Plante, give the clues and the answer. Everything that was wrong with her, all of her dreadful behaviour, her melancholy, her aggressive moods, her impulsiveness, her maudlin outbursts, her inability to write other than slowly, painfully and in a muddle – all can be laid at the feet of alcohol. Jean Rhys succumbed to drink early and she was a hopeless alcoholic the whole of her adult life. It is astonishing that it did not kill her years earlier. She must have had an extraordinarily strong constitution. But it destroyed her mentally. There is nothing more pathetic, and tedious, than the rantings of a drinker. The friends who stood by her and put up with her abuse and ingratitude were saints.
And now none of it matters, not in the slightest. Out of a wreck of a life, out of disastrous relationships, out of misery and loneliness and error, she wrote great novels, a distillation of her own life and psyche – for she was another who could never invent. Everything of her is in the books, everything is about her in some way. Isn’t that all we need to know?
What she is about – other than exploited women and women who are their own worst enemies – is style, in the way Muriel Spark is about style. They are both dangerous to other writers, in that you need to beware reading their books if you are mid-book yourself. They have a style and a manner which is extremely infectious. I don’t think I have ever ‘caught’ another writer’s characters, or scenes or atmosphere, let alone their plots, aka stories, but I have caught style many a time until I realised what I was doing and pulled myself up short. I certainly caught Muriel Spark. I almost caught Ivy Compton-Burnett, but that’s an easy one to avoid. Is she unreadable now? Was she ever ‘readable’? Yet in Mona Simpson’s excellent and revealing series of interviews in the Paris Review, Hilary Mantel says she re-reads ICB often, in order to remind herself of what fine writing is, and I yield to no one in my admiration of Hilary. I don’t think I agree with her on this, though – or maybe it’s the old ‘Marmite’ thing.