I’ve seen a lot of articles lately, both in print and online, as to what we might read during the lockdown. A lot of self-improving advice of the “now is the time to tackle Ulysses or In Search of Lost Time” sort. But then I have also seen quite a lot of people saying that, when it all started, they found their concentration affected, particularly when it came to fiction. I had that problem myself. It was as if the events going on in the real world made it impossible to live in an imaginary one.
What could possibly be the right sort of thing to read in these strange times that seem to create such an odd state of mind, I kept asking myself. Should I go for humour and escapism or no-holds-barred realism? In the end I decided I was over-thinking the whole question and stopped agonising about it. I would carry on with my unread pile, as usual. When that was done, I would pick an old favourite off the shelf and just see how I got on.
The unread pile was down to two. First was John Gardner’s James Bond continuation novel, Death is Forever, hugely enjoyable, expertly crafted escapism. Next up was Henry Williamson, and It Was The Nightingale, escapism of a different sort, into the rural North Devon of the 1920s.
Now it was time to look at the shelf. After several false starts, I settled on the Gorse Trilogy by Patrick Hamilton. I have written about these novels in more detail elsewhere. The combination of mordant humour and insights into the darker aspects of human nature seemed to hit exactly the right spot.
Around this time I heard a very interesting podcast on the subject of reading, with American academic Alan Jacobs. His basic idea is “reading by Whim” (note the upper case “W”), which comes from the American poet Randall Jarrell.
Reading should not be about laboriously working one’s way through a list of “great books”. It is not a box-ticking exercise. If one talks about “getting through” a book, one is in fact talking about wanting to have read the book, possibly to impress other people.
An alternative method of finding good books is to read the books that the authors you like had read themselves. This will eventually lead you back to the “great books”, but in a way that means more to you.
He also addressed the vexed question of whether or not you should finish a book if you are not getting much from it. It’s ok not to finish. It probably means that you are simply not the right reader for that book. (That made me feel much better about my inability to finish The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, despite having tried three times!) I think you could summarise this approach to reading as “one thing leads to another”.
I realised that in my own reading, one thing had been leading to another without my noticing it. The 1920s setting of Henry Williamson had perhaps reminded me of Patrick Hamilton’s rather different view of that same era.
I found myself drawn to a volume of Joseph Conrad’s short stories. Perhaps he popped back into my mind because his death is mentioned by Henry Williamson. Whatever it was that brought me to them, I have to say there is something about the mood and feel of these stories by Conrad that perfectly suits my current state of mind.
The life and death struggle with the ship that is first leaking, then burning in Youth; the decline into madness and death of the two lazy and incompetent traders in An Outpost of Progress; the plight of the central European emigrant, washed up on the beach in Kent to become an alien in a strange land in Amy Foster.
I have read Conrad all my life, but it’s as if I never truly understood what he was trying to tell us until now.
I think I have answered my own question. Conrad’s tales of the extremes of human experience in an indifferent world seem just right for where we find ourselves at the moment.
The Good Reader 