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

by Susan Hill

  A FEW DECADES AGO the Times Literary Supplement asked prominent literary people for their favourite out-of-print authors and two, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil, chose Barbara Pym. Not many people had heard of her then, but a new season of admiration and sales for her books was kicked off and it was especially nice that she was still alive to enjoy the fuss – it’s usually too late. (Pym died of cancer a few years later.)

  I read most of the re-issued novels at the time and never entirely saw the point of the praise, probably because everyone compared them to Jane Austen and that is never a good recommendation to me. I forgot them, more or less, until I saw a mention of Quartet in Autumn in Shirley Hazzard’s essays and reviews, and that is a recommendation.

  Hazzard reviewed her alongside Muriel Spark and the latter comes off by far the best, but still she says that what Barbara Pym does on a small canvas she nevertheless does supremely well.

  Quartet in Autumn is a perceptive and touching novel, about two men and two women who all work in the same office – of what sort of firm we are never told, and it matters little because their work is both routine and dull and of no interest either to them or to us. The book is set in the 1950s, but it might have been in the 1920s because women of thirty-five are seen as middle aged, and fifty-five positively ancient. Men of forty-five are well past their prime and looking ahead to retirement. They all are, and soon retirement comes. They are all single, live alone in grim bedsitters, bleak flats, a house left by an aunt. They have few friends, though one man spends his life going to church – or rather, churches, for he is familiar with a whole host of them and does the rounds. They eat sad little lunches by themselves in cafés and even sadder poached eggs on toast or tinned pilchards at home every evening. One of the women is decidedly eccentric and gets worse in the course of the book, dressing like a bag lady and collecting empty milk bottles and stashing them away by the dozen in her shed.

  The Anglican Church as it used to be, and bachelor vicars who wear birettas and live with their sisters, is prime Pym territory, and that is the first snag. Not many people under the age of fifty (and that is erring on the generous side) know the routines, mores, services, rituals, social hierarchy of the old C of E, as it was until the time Pym was writing of and into the 1960s and 1970s. There are still church bazaars and people still have the vicar to tea, but unmarried women – who were always, of course, called spinsters – do not pine to rescue the vicar or the curate from bachelordom and knit him warm cardies, and the church routine is not the centre of many people’s lives. The idea of a woman priest in a Pym novel is unthinkable.

  So, the books are dated but not dated enough. It’s a familiar story. They have a very small compass, which does not necessarily mean they cannot be first rate (people point at Austen again …) They are well written but not wonderfully well written, like Muriel Spark’s novels. Pym can be very funny in a rueful sort of way but not acerbically witty. It was just not in her nature. She was probably a very much nicer person than Spark, but that is not really the point.

  Quartet in Autumn is moving and Pym is clear-eyed about ageing, loneliness, narrowing lives. It’s a book whose four characters linger in the memory. They are the sort of people one meets and the smell of loneliness comes off them. One ought to invite them in for coffee but somehow one never does. And then they die in sad circumstances and one feels desperately guilty. A strange third cousin or nephew appears at the funeral, unrecognised by everyone, and vanishes again, after having cherry-picked the contents of the deceased’s bedsit.

  Even friendship, in these novels, is hesitant and ringed about with embarrassment.

  I won’t return to the others, but I am keeping Quartet in Autumn on the shelf and I would recommend it – not lightly, though. It isn’t a novel for everyone.

  HAD TO STOP THE CAR along the coast road just beyond Salt-house, beside the stream and a great reed bed, because the boot was not properly closed. As I reached up for the handle something caught my eye. It was a bittern, moving out of and back into the reeds. I have never seen one before, probably never will again. It was unmistakeable. It had that ugly, paleolithic look of herons and egrets, to whom bitterns are related. All I have to do now is hear one boom. These things always happen by chance, at least where I am concerned, though the dedicated birders and twitchers put in the hours and are (sometimes) rewarded.

  A FRIEND INTRODUCED ME to the novels of the American writer Richard Ford. I had never heard of him, but I am not ashamed of that. We all have massive gaps in our reading. Which is good, we need gaps – for the pleasure of filling them.

  I like long novels which suck me into the everyday life of provincial America, so that I find out what people eat and what furniture they have in their houses, how they celebrate birthdays and Christmas and relate, or don’t, to their next-door neighbours, how their communities work, how far they travel, what size the schools are and how their teachers teach and their pastors preach. Above all, I like to get inside their heads. That is why I found Ford’s The Sportswriter so interesting. The narrator, Frank Bascombe, has been a sportswriter on a newspaper. He has also been married and lost a son, whose death tore the marriage apart. Americans write well about family – usually broken and dispersed. They write about it better than we do now, though not better than the Victorians. Bascombe’s wife, referred to always as X, has moved out, leaving him in the family home with a rather off-screen lodger. He also has a girlfriend, a nurse who hails from Texas, and perhaps Bascombe, or the reader, will decide that she isn’t right/good enough for him. But she is the one who decides that, when she announces round her family’s dinner table that they don’t have much in common and that she doesn’t love him enough to marry him.

  He also belongs to a marvellous invention of Ford’s – the local Divorced Men’s Club. It doesn’t dive very deep. The husbands are drinking buddies and fishing pals more than anything more complex. Complexity only surfaces, to Bascombe’s discomfiture, when one of them commits suicide. Nothing is safe, nothing is easy-going, nothing is allowed to jog along in the shallows of small town life.

  So, there I was, grateful for having discovered Richard Ford and The Sportswriter, admiring it a great deal, looking forward to the later Bascombe novels – three more. And then, in search of a reference for something else, I came upon a piece by Vanity Fair writer James Wolcott about The Sportswriter. When I had finished it, I wondered if he and I had read the same novel. This sometimes happens, especially if you read book reviews regularly. It is one just one of the reasons why I don’t.

  Wolcott finds the novel full of condescension and bookish banality. ‘Frank Bascombe isn’t a decent man, he’s a long-faced creep pulling the long face of a decent man. It’s a pious impersonation that fooled the critics …’ and so on and so sneeringly on. Clever criticism? Too clever by half. But whatever Wolcott or any other critic may say, whatever agenda they may have, whatever axe to grind – and believe me, there usually is one – I found The Sportswriter a deeply satisfying book and, more than anything else, I found it a very genuine novel. Which is quite the opposite of the phoney one Wolcott seems to have found.

  WHY SHIRLEY HAZZARD’S book of essays, We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think, is not published in the UK, I do not know, but perhaps now that she has died and so is being re-discovered and praised all round, someone will have the good sense to pick it up. I have a very physical relationship with my books, which is probably only one reason why I never got on with an e-reader. I write in the margins, dog-ear the pages, underline whole sentences, but I have not treated a book so intimately for years as I have manhandled these essays. There is something memorable, some insight or wise deduction, some wonderfully expressed observation, something witty, pithy or beautiful, on almost every page.

  But art is not technology and cannot be ‘mastered’. It is an endless access to revelatory states of mind, a vast extension of living experience and a way of communing with the dead. An intimacy with truth, through which, however
much instruction is provided and absorbed, each of us must pass alone.

  She herself must have left her physical mark on books. Either that or she had a phenomenal memory. She quotes from all manner of writers – on just one page there is Samuel Johnson, Lord Byron and Eugenio Montale, Giacomo Leopardi, W. H. Auden and Cleanth Brooks. Not that she does not have a mind and opinions of her own. She does and they are expressed clearly and elegantly.

  The more I read, the more I am sure that above everything it is the quality of the writing that counts. How often do I start a promising-looking novel, with a beautiful or dramatic setting, intriguing subject matter, good, well-created structure, only to abandon it after a few chapters, or even pages, because the writing is bad – bad or boring, dull, clumsy writing, without distinctiveness, without individuality, form, balance, harmony, tone. Not fancy writing, not pretentious writing, not innovative – in the worst sense – writing. Just bad writing. It will not do. Of course, fine words are not all and we should forgive the occasional ill-formed sentence, or banal paragraph – but only that. Graceful, elegant, apposite, balanced, intelligent prose is then good, is beautiful prose and fit for purpose. Some writers could make a book about bathroom fittings delightful and satisfying to read. Shirley Hazzard is such a one.

  I WAS LOOKING for something on Amazon, and slid sideways, as you do. There was a section of titles which had been shortlisted for various prizes over the last year or two. I looked carefully at the novel category in each – say, twenty-five titles, and, apart from the winners in each one, I did not recognise any of them, they had sunk without trace. I could not even remember having heard of them at all. Some of the winners have not fared much better either, yet people still go on believing that their book will break through. People still want to be writers. People dream of giving up the day job. If you asked any one of these aspirants how they would feel if their novel was long- or even shortlisted for the Costa/Baileys/Desmond Elliott, let alone the Man Booker, they would doubtless say their dreams had come true, they had made it, reached the peak of their ambition, that from now on the writing life was a primrose path. I wouldn’t draw their attention to those lists of the so-recently forgotten. Robert Robinson used to entertain panellists on his radio and TV programmes, during the warm-up or the inevitable technical hitch, by reciting a list of names and then asking you what they had in common. They were all winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature and none were familiar. Obscurity had shrouded ever single one.

  IT HAS RAINED ALL DAY and, as usual, the lanes are awash, with massive floods across the road to Wiveton. You would think it had been pouring for a month.

  NOVEMBER

  ‘FOR ALL THE SAINTS.’ One of the best hymn tunes. As with the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, you do not have to be a Christian, or even a believer, to appreciate and be uplifted by hearing a church full of people singing something out of Hymns Ancient & Modern. Modern hymns are awful. I don’t know why they bothered. If they felt the words were outdated, and so of limited appeal to the young, it would not have been beyond the wit of an Anglican subcommittee to write new ones to the old tunes. But no, baby went out with the bathwater and we got slush and soup and sentimentality.

  NOTEBOOKS. I start to use them, lose them, never fill one because I have started another and so they pile up, all shapes and sizes, with two or twenty-two pages covered in scribble and oddments. This is shameful when I think back to our first exercise books at school and how we had to turn them over and write on top of the lines already used, because there was still a paper shortage after the war. After that, if new ones still had not come in, we had to write long-ways, in the margin. Now, paper is cheap and I buy a notebook when I see one.

  Flipping through a few just now, looking for a half-remembered line I shall probably never find, I do find this: ‘It is true enough, writers all do use each other.’ Is it true, and if so, in what sense? Yes, as a writer I ‘use’, albeit unconsciously, most of the books I have ever read. It is not a question of plagiarism. But the atmosphere of a novel can linger in the mind for half a century and then one finds oneself re-creating it. I did that with Dickens and Printer’s Devil Court, with Virginia Woolf and Air and Angels – though there it is the style. Other novels may make one rush off and start a novel of one’s own, which is totally different. Sometimes just the mention of a book in a trade journal will kick-start something. I think of it as the interweaving of literature down the centuries, not as any sort of personal failure. What is poor form is when a book is a bestseller, and half a dozen other publishers immediately look for a manuscript like it – they even echo it on their own cover, with font and image, to make the reader pick it up because of the subliminal association.

  RAINING. Sky like the inside of a saucepan. I have just received the proofs of From the Heart. Now it is in proper print, I shall be able to read it and see what it is like. I can’t judge on typescript. I have read many others say the same. I suppose it is a question of distancing it from oneself, the writer. That and time.

  THERE IS A SHORTHAND, shared among people who have read the same book more than once, and mostly they are parents. Once learned, the words of the stories stay with you for a lifetime. In the doctor’s surgery, I sat near a mother reading to her 3-year-old.

  ‘So Chicken Licken, Henny Penny, Cocky Locky and Drakey Lakey, scurried off to tell the King that the sky was falling in.’

  She turned the page.

  ‘You’ve missed out Ducky Lucky,’ I said, beating the 3-year-old to it by a nanosecond.

  A FRIEND MADE A COMMENT on Facebook about someone’s new dog. ‘It looks like Bottomley Potts,’ she said.

  ‘All covered in spots,’ someone chimed in at once.

  Someone else contributed ‘Hercules Morse …’

  ‘As big as a horse …’

  We had finished the entire book in the time it takes to drink your morning coffee. (Facebook being the solitary writer’s social break in the middle of work.) How many people know Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy as well as our little gang?

  The only other children’s book I have found recalled by heart so widely among adults is Janet and Allan Ahlbergs’ Each Peach Pear Plum. Now there’s a meta-book if ever there was one.

  ‘SO WE BEAT ON, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’

  The last lines of The Great Gatsby may be the best known – and the best – of any in fiction. First lines are always arresting, but this beautiful sentence, bringing the novel to a dying-fall conclusion, somehow seals the whole book in a bubble in one’s memory. No wonder F. Scott Fitzgerald chose to have it engraved on his head-stone. (Or did he choose himself?)

  There are plenty of other endings which sum up the whole Sturm und Drang of a mighty novel and bring it to rest.

  ‘I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.’ Wuthering Heights, another book full of huge emotions, like storms at sea, brought to such a peaceful close.

  I wish I had written either of those.

  Meanwhile, it has rained the entire day and I have not accomplished very much.

  IN THE END, you just don’t get on with some writers, it’s a pure case of Dr Fell, but I have been thinking that, regarding my long-term inability to get on with Patricia Highsmith, there has to be more to it than that. Beautiful Shadow, Andrew Wilson’s thorough and interesting biography of her, has helped, but I also have my own idea. Highsmith is not a describer. Her characters inhabit large and small, famous and unknown American cities and the suburbs of those cities, but they all feel the same. We don’t know what they look like, in what way they are different from all the other cities in America. Apartment blocks, small houses in anonymous streets, walkways, train stations … but we could be anywhere. It all feels anonymous. She is good at suspense and tension, but
those are not the same as atmosphere. The Talented Mr Ripley is an exception. The Italian village to which Ripley comes is so well evoked we can smell it, feel the heat, see the colours. The interior of the house he rents – we could walk round it and feel at home. But too many of the books lack a vital element because of their bareness. They have characters: we are told where they go, what they do, what they say – and that’s it.

  The second vacuum is a moral one. Andrew Wilson points out, and picks up on other critics who have done the same, that High-smith has no moral compass. None. Ripley kills. Other characters kill, or commit crimes almost as bad, but there is no justice, no redemption – no comment, in fact. Does Highsmith have any desire to bring about retribution? Does she blame her characters for what they do? It seems not. She just presents these deeds and leaves them there. She herself believed life was like that. No justice and no point in any. But she is writing crime, the essential fictional mode for depicting the eternal struggle … and yet she seems not to notice either good or evil, as such. And that lack of notice leaves a blank, a vacuum, a nothing, at the heart of many of her books.

  She comes out of Wilson’s biography as a bit of a monster, yet she was the victim of monsters, too. Many of her relationships were death struggles between two people who could not be together because they tore one another apart – and yet who kept returning just because that tearing-apart seemed to be necessary to them. They felt only half-people without the emotional violence and conflict.

  One novel of hers I read last year is very moving, though it is written in such a laconic way we do not realise that it is a domestic tragedy until many chapters in. Edith’s Diary is a strange, disturbing, unsettling, eerie novel set in uninteresting, dull small-town America. Nothing happens. Everything happens. Life goes on and gets worse. Death happens. It is a tragedy, not a crime novel. One of those books that hangs around the corners of your mind, like cobwebs.