With Stubble and Overcoat

Books – books are the greatest enemy of man – after the radio, that is. Just think. If ninety per cent of the population couldn’t read, all their thoughts would be their own – you’d get ballads, legends, everything, pouring out of the popular mind – but the way it is, they can read, and so they just echo the books. Books mean the end of original thinking.

Because I am a poet, and have to have my own ideas to put down, I read very few books – and a big proportion of the ones I do read are other people’s poems. You might say I read poetry to get to know the way other poets write – it’s a matter of the tricks of the trade. But I won’t talk to you about that. It’s too technical. Instead I’ll talk about those very few books which have been of personal value to me, which have helped me to grow, as far as I have grown.

When you go into the bookshop, and look round, you just might see me there. That intellectual-looking man with a new edition of Keats’s letters? No that’s not me. That’s a Professor of English. He wants to find out how badly his chief enemy has edited the book. The man with the stubble and overcoat mooching round in the paperback section? That’s me! What’s he reading? Let’s take a closer look.

I was Stalin’s Concubine: a story of torture, rape and extermination in the deserts of Siberia. That’s right. My favourite author – Anon – masquerading as Zaranovya Oubolovski, a black-haired lady in a sweater with a face like a Byzantine ikon. That’s me, all right – lapping it up. And you won’t see me pay for it either. When I’ve galloped through it, I’ll just put it back on the table, and get out of the shop as if I’d suddenly remembered an important engagement.

My reading has always been unhealthy. Or put it another way – I read in order to get second-hand experience. A man can’t do everything – be a Hindu, a Muslim and a Communist – smoke opium and climb Kilimanjaro – have ten wives and play the saxophone – it would wear me down to the bootsoles even to do half of it. But I want to know what it’s like – how other people get their kicks – that’s how the young people describe it. I’m not young. But I’ve got a strong interest in human nature. When it comes to an end, I’ll be ready to come to an end.

I ploughed my way through most of Walter Scott’s novels when I was a kid. Out of boredom probably. But the books I remember are the ones I discovered for myself – Rider Haggard’s Cleopatra, Nada the Lily, Ayesha, She – marvellous books! Radioactive! And earlier still – Champions – Rockfist Rogan R.A.F. hanging on a ladder from the wing of a plane. Or those girls’ comics, with a ghost surrounded with green light gliding along the corridors of the old castle become boarding school. I couldn’t sleep after reading them – I’d pull the blanket over my head and shudder. There were acres of ghost stories. They helped to turn me into a nervous wreck at thirteen (if a boypage 741 isn’t a nervous wreck at thirteen, there’s something wrong with him). Thank God, my parents left me to myself. My reading was always unhealthy; and it still is.

Books have one important function for the adolescent in our society, where physically mature boys and girls are still treated as kids. They help them to form a clear picture of what adult sex could be like – above all, an image of a partner. I remember the novels of Dos Passos with gratitude. They satisfied my gigantic curiosity. [And then there was one of the Winds of Love – East, West, South or North – by Somebody Mackenzie. I wouldn’t dream of looking the name up. It doesn’t matter. But there was a passage where a smooth but motherly girl teaches the adolescent hero how to fornicate in a shrubbery somewhere after a party. I owe a debt of gratitude to Somebody Mackenzie. I must have re-read that passage at least nine hundred times. The advocates of clean books for adolescents should remember their own adolescence. How can you get a clear image of what it’s all about from a clean book? My sex instruction came from American novelists – a bit romantic maybe, but not hazy, not too vague. They don’t fascinate me so much now. But that’s natural. I’m thirty-eight, not eighteen.]

Tolstoy was a help. He’s broad and deep, like most of the Russians, even the Marxist writers. His Death of Ivan Ilyich literally taught me what it was to die – the absolute helplessness, the inevitability, and the blindness of those whose turn hasn’t come yet. It showed me that men might live without God, but they couldn’t die without Him. Later on W.H. Auden put it another way:

How could the Eternal do a temporal act?
The Infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible.
We who must die demand a miracle . . .

That comes from Auden’s Christmas oratorio, For the Time Being. I wasn’t a Christian; but he almost turned me into one. He showed me that the Christian mystery embraces doubt and atheism and the labyrinth of evil – as indeed it does, on Holy Saturday, when God has died, and even the Cross is taken down, and the universe stands bare as an empty house.

But it was Dylan Thomas who actually made a Christian of me:

For I was lost who am
Crying at the man drenched throne
In the first fury of his stream
And the lightnings of adoration . . .

He enters the wounds of Christ; and in another poem he announces the marriage of the soul to God in terms of sexual intercourse:

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And through the thighs of the engulfing bride,
The woman breasted and the heaven headed
Bird, he was brought low
Burning in the bride bed of love, in the whirl-
Pool at the wanting centre, in the folds
Of paradise, in the spun bud of the world.
And she rose with him flowering in her melting snow . . .

When I got a copy of that little book, Deaths and Entrances, I carried it in the inside pocket of my working coat – through the iron works, the freezing works, the pubs – drunk and sober – until those poems were part of the structure of my own mind. That’s what a real book can do. It turned my soul inside out.

I was nineteen or twenty. I can think of several other books that were almost as valuable to me – C.S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain, John Lehmann’s New Writing in Europe, Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. But most books are chatter, garbage, dry rubbish, wadding . . . Naturally enough; because they are written to make money.

[What about reading for escape? Well – I used to read Wild West stories – but I don’t any longer. Not that I’m too proud – I just lost interest. I’d rather write, talk, work, sleep. What is there to escape from, anyway? Oneself? It can’t be done.]

Remember this, though – if you see your son or daughter reading True Confessions or a lurid paperback, don’t interrupt them. They’re getting some valuable second-hand experience. Half of it may be guff. But where else are they going to get it from?

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