by David Mason
And, like many another insatiable young reader, I also read some inappropriate books, simply because they were there, loaned to my parents or left by a guest. Which is how, at around eight years old, I read perhaps the first book of many which profoundly altered my life. This was The Royal Road to Romance, by Richard Halliburton. Halliburton was a rather strange American, who spent his whole life travelling the world and writing books about it. He did things like climb the Matterhorn by himself and sneak into the grounds of the Taj Mahal to swim in the pool in front of it. He also swam across the Hellespont, copying Byron, and then swam the entire length of the Panama Canal, for which he was charged the lowest toll recorded in history—36¢. Halliburton wrote many books of his adventures, which culminated in his building a replica Chinese junk in Hong Kong and sailing off to conquer the Pacific, never to be seen again. He was a real hero to me, and his infectious sense of adventure and daring profoundly affected me, causing me some years later to take off myself, to spend several years travelling in Europe and North Africa, seeking adventure. Books really can change your life!
Aside from these occasional loans, the only books I remember seeing in our house were compilations of facile platitudes called Tony’s Scrapbook, issued yearly by a man called Tony Wons, which my mother religiously bought as they came out—although I can’t remember ever seeing her read one. As a pointless aside, I can’t resist mentioning that I now have an almost complete set of this man’s puerile, cliché-ridden books, partially because seeing them on the shelves provides a sentimental renewal of the connection to my mother. But more practically, because another of my collecting interests is publisher’s design bindings, and all the covers of Tony Wons’ books are wonderful examples of the best in that period’s Art Deco design. So are their dust jackets. And since I also collect early dust jackets I have here a double justification. Being a collector demands finding plenty of justifications for your collections, and I’ve become very good at that.
So, my first thirteen years were spent in a respectable middle-class neighbourhood with the same neighbours, my own gang of friends, with whom I shared all those boyhood adventures and all those experiences every child has, and I walked every day to the same school. There, except for the trading of comics and Big Little Books with some of the kids I knew, no one read books. I did—incessantly—but since none of my pals did, it became a private passion. I never felt that was strange, but neither did I ever feel the need to attempt to share it with any of my friends.
My friend Blake’s parents were members of the Book-of-the-Month Club, and one day Blake handed me a book with a page marked saying, “Read this part—it’s really sexy.” He leered, knowingly.
We would have been eleven years old, just becoming enthralled with the mysteries and possibilities of women and sex.
I read the “sexy” part, which could only have been sexy to an eleven-year-old who was still so naïve as to think that two adults disrobing in front of each other just before the fade-out could be wildly exciting.
Of course, being a reader, after I read the sexy part, I then read the whole book, which wasn’t really appropriate for an eleven-year-old, it being George Orwell’s 1984. I still remember how bleak everything was, from the decrepit slums to the life led in Orwell’s fictional London. Years later I read all of Orwell, even those terrible novels which made all of Britain appear a dull, filthy and depressing place. When as a nineteen-year-old I went to Britain by ship and got on the Liverpool-to-London train and passed through the soot-encrusted slums of Liverpool all I could think was, “Jesus, Orwell was right.”
Once I spent a night in a doss house in London and Orwell was right about them too. It was horrible, a room with a dozen cots, bedbugs, the freezing damp making the smell of unwashed bodies and filthy socks even worse.
Since I grew up in a house where books seldom entered, my reading really began when my older sister and I started visiting the library every Saturday. The closest library was the St. Clements branch, which was then, I think, the only library branch in North Toronto. But its real importance was that half of it was devoted entirely to children’s books, and it featured regular Saturday storytellings.
I have three indelible memories of St. Clements in those early days. One was sitting in a circle with a bunch of other kids being read to by one of the librarians. The second, of a librarian examining the books I was returning from the previous week and, based on them, recommending new ones. The third and perhaps key memory involves the thrill of excitement I felt every Saturday morning when my older sister led me by the hand to return last week’s books and borrow ten more. The thrill of anticipation I felt then, returning home with ten new books, has continued to this day some sixty years later. And the excitement I still feel, as I head home to solitude and the wonder of our incredible human imagination with a new book by an author I love, still provides that thrill, one of the few patterns of my character which has never changed.
I also remember, with some satisfaction, my attempts to con my mother into thinking I was sick on Monday mornings so I could stay home from school and read. At first my mother was too smart and too strict for such transparent ploys, but I quickly learned that if one started demonstrating the symptoms of some dire illness on Sunday afternoon, before dinner—after cleverly hiding food under the bed to replace the dinner which you claimed to be too sick to eat—even the most suspicious mother could be fooled into accepting fraudulent symptoms. And it didn’t take long before I realized that it was pointless to stage such elaborate productions for only one day off school—why not two or three days? So, I have a family history of having endured a sickly childhood without ever actually having been sick.
Just recently I read an interview with the late Jack McClelland of McClelland & Stewart, who suffered from asthma as a child. McClelland relates that all he had to do was fake a wheezy cough on Monday mornings for his mother to say “Oh, another asthma attack—you’d better stay home from school.” McClelland, like me, was an indifferent student who was happiest at home by himself, reading.
Because St. Clements served the entire north end of Toronto it must have been well-used, and I presume that it therefore influenced a lot of kids as it did me. One of those kids who became well-known was James Houston, the man most responsible for bringing Inuit art to the attention of the world and who initiated much of the commercial success in the dissemination of Eskimo art and sculpture, which now is known and collected worldwide and is perhaps Canada’s sole indigenous art form.
James Houston, now dead, gave a talk at The Osborne Collection—the world-famous collection of children’s literature, one of the greatest treasures held by the Toronto Public Library—which I unfortunately missed, but part of which was recounted to me afterwards by my friend Margaret Maloney, the retired past director. As Margaret told it to me, Houston talked of proposing marriage to one of the librarians when he was nine years old. The librarian apparently responded by suggesting that it might be better if they waited awhile. I told this wonderful anecdote in a talk once and suggested that anyone with the wisdom to give such a reply should have been running the country, not a children’s library.
So, my earliest heroines were those nameless librarians at St. Clements. Except, of course, for my sister.
Although I mustn’t leave out Poor Mrs. Quack, Mrs. Peter Rabbit and Old Mother West Wind. For the first books I clearly remember reading were the wonderful nature stories written by Thornton W. Burgess. Reddy Fox, Paddy the Beaver and all their friends so filled my imagination that when I couldn’t find any new ones I hadn’t read I reread them countless times. When I became a bookseller I started a collection of them, constantly upgrading as I found better copies. I was surprised to find at International bookfairs how expensive first editions and signed copies of Burgess’ books are. I shouldn’t have been; it is another indication of the universality of Burgess and the nostalgia he arouses in so many.
A few ye
ars ago I finally turned over my collection of Burgess to the Osborne. I was surprised how good it made me feel. I felt I was giving back something in memory of those wonderful librarians who did so much to influence my life, and I also felt I might be helping to influence some future generation into a love of reading and books. And, of course, the next day I started acquiring more Burgess for the next gift.
When the George Locke Branch of the Toronto Public Library opened at Yonge and Lawrence in 1950 I started going there and dropped St. Clements. Since I was now 12 years old it made sense anyway. I had graduated from Burgess through Doctor Doolittle, the series of the Twins from various countries—like the Dutch Twins and the Chinese Twins—and a similar series I liked, the Little Cousin series (Our Little Japanese Cousin, Our Little German Cousin, etc.), all of which I have collections of. All were intended to teach kids the customs of foreign countries. It instilled the idea that even with all these different customs and beliefs we were all remarkably similar in our humanity. It seems to me that we could use a bit more understanding of this fact these days.
And, of course, I devoured all of Arthur Ransome’s wonderful sailing adventures, Swallows and Amazons.
But one of my great disappointments is that somehow I missed all those great British juvenile stories by G.A. Henty, Westerman, Manville Fenn, Brereton and others. But at least I got Tarzan and, in the Big Little Books, all the now-mythic American superheroes, Buck Rogers, Dick Tracy and Terry and the Pirates. Very recently I appraised a gift of six hundred Big Little Books gifted to The Osborne Collection by an eighty-two-year-old who had collected them all his life. What a wonderful experience. I actually wanted to read (or reread) most of them, but I had to keep a professional distance.
It would be around this time that I read what would certainly be my all-time favourite children’s book, The Wind in the Willows. I still reread it every few years, and while I loved the pompous blustering Toad, and still do, I strongly identified with Mole with his cozy underground sanctuary which I always envisioned, and still do, as being lined with bookshelves.
The Wind in the Willows is another of my many personal collections, copies now numbering over two hundred variant editions and formats. It even includes the first edition, a very expensive book, which I found with damaged covers and which I then had rebound in a stunning design binding commissioned from Michael Wilcox, the Canadian bookbinder who some people, including me, consider the best in the world.
This collection will someday be donated to the Osborne, although I’m not certain the Wilcox binding will accompany it. I may leave that to my son. That is, unless he continues to argue with me and I have to disinherit him.
But by then I was beginning to discover some of the great classic children’s literature, like Mark Twain and Dickens and Dumas’ great adventure novels, all of which I still read.
For some reason I found comic books a bit lacking, just as I’m not much taken by the graphic novels we’re seeing so much of these days, but I did read them. So, besides my library visits I also read and collected some comic books. But mostly I loved the Big Little Books, which some of my pals and I bought, read, discussed and passionately traded. Dick Tracy, Tarzan, Little Orphan Annie, and The Shadow enthralled us. And also about that time I discovered the fairly new Classic Comics, which were a brilliant innovation, rendering some of our great classical literature into comic book formats designed for children. I bought these avidly, blowing my allowance regularly on them, even sacrificing the sweets we usually spent our meagre allowances and gift money on.
I still recall with great pleasure the part Classic Comics played in my education. As an adult I often cannot remember if I have actually read a famous book as a child, or only the Classic’s version of it. When that happens the only thing to do is to read the actual book to find out, which continues to introduce me to great literature.
After I left school at fifteen and was working, a different part of my education began.
Still living with my parents and still reading late into every night, I discovered another kind of literature, for like all young men of fifteen or sixteen I was obsessed by sex. Every night after a quick dinner I would head for the local pool hall where, along with pool, I was learning life lessons from an assortment of
businessmen, hustlers, conmen, losers and gamblers and, of course, other delinquents like me.
And every night on the way home I would stop at the corner store (they were then called cigar stores) where I would explore the paperback racks in search of the texts relating to my new educational obsession: sex.
Paperbacks of the time took certain liberties with their cover design. I guess they still do. The publishers knew that I, and many people much older than me, read paperbacks seeking sex. Even women, no matter their denials, sought the same, albeit somewhat disguised, the phenomenal success of the Harlequin Romances compelling proof of that. And in the fifties, with paperbacks revolutionizing the reading habits of many, the publishers sought an edge by promising rather different rewards than the text might provide. Lurid covers sporting near-naked women and suggestive blurbs designed to sell to the sex-starved worked—certainly they worked on me.
All of this led me to read some unlikely books in those days. The novels of Louis Auchincloss or Wright Morris are no doubt literature, but not exactly what sex-besotted fifteen-year-old boys are looking for. And the same with Madame Bovary; it was sex, not sin and its consequences, that I sought.
One night, going home from the poolroom and suffering from a recurring pain which I knew from experience would only be alleviated by a night spent in a bathtub full of hot water, I stopped to get the necessary reading material.
This night I chose a book on Roman orgies, the cover picturing all sorts of toga-clad men surrounded by voluptuous women whose breasts threatened to pop out at any moment. The cover blurbs reinforced their lurid promise: “Depraved Romans,” “Pagan, Corrupt and Debauched,” etc. At home everyone was asleep, so I drew a hot bath, got in, feeling some immediate comfort, picked up the book which was to save me from a night of pain, and started reading.
It wasn’t anything like what I expected. An old man complained about being a cripple and a stutterer, and his constant humiliations from the laughter of others—it was boring. And worse, the only woman was an old lady, a shrew. There wasn’t even a hint of sex, never mind orgies. I was enraged. False advertising, I thought. How dare they. I read two chapters and stopped in disgust. I am reminded of a news item about an elderly lady exiting a movie theatre when Deep Throat had popularized pornography in America demanding her money back, disappointed at the film she had just seen. “That’s disgraceful,” she fulminated, “I paid to see smut and it’s smut I want to see.” But I had no other book to read. I could have gotten out of the tub, dried off, gone to my bookshelf and found something to reread, but I didn’t want to reread—I wanted something new. I had no option: I had to continue with the disappointing book. The next thing I knew the bath water was cold, quite cold, freezing in fact. Looking at the book I saw I was halfway through it, so engrossed had I been that I hadn’t even noticed the cold water.
I ran another hot tub and read the rest of the book that night.
I had never read anything like that book before, and given its effect on me I can say that I have never experienced that feeling from any other book I’ve read. It literally changed everything, forever. The book about Roman orgies was I, Claudius, by Robert Graves. And further in, while one didn’t get a lot of orgies, one did get all the scurrilous details of the excesses of Tiberius, Caligula and Nero, so I did get my money’s worth even in the sex department. I had always loved historical fiction, but it had always been the stories which captivated, the adventures of the swashbuckler fighting the evil Lord in seventeenth-century Scotland, or invading the harems of the despicable infidel corsairs of Barbary (now, of course, it’s we who are the despicable infidels). But it was only many years later
that I came to see that what I had really loved was the history, the details of life in different times and places.
Robert Graves showed me that Claudius, and all the Romans, were people. Real people with real passions, who had real lives and real problems. From my dry school texts I had believed that all those people from the past were boring. They married, they fought battles, but they didn’t seem to have sex like they did in my novels, and of the history they made, we, it seemed, only needed to learn the dates. As far as I could see, passion played no part in history; only who won, and when, counted. They were all cardboard cut-outs with names to me. I, Claudius demonstrated that life offered opportunities for the brave and the daring; and that there were consequences. That was the beginning of my real intellectual life.
That night led to everything. Because of I, Claudius I have forever held Robert Graves in great affection, my awe at his stupendous gifts not even slightly dampened when I read many years later that he considered his novels hack work, necessary to earn the money to enable him to survive for his true destiny, the pursuit of the White Goddess.
I had discovered the Romans. And I started some serious exploration of those times, all with the help of those wonderful Penguin Classics translations. Suetonius first, but then all the others, poets, playwrights, suffering with Catullus, conquering Gaul with Caesar. I’ve heard it said that those Penguin translations are too pedantic, too scholarly, but they weren’t for me. For not even a pedant could still that passion and exuberance for life one finds in the classics, and I have come to believe that to be the mark of the true artist. No artist whose muse is passion can ever be boring.