DON DONOVAN wrote this 12 months go but I so enjoyed re-reading it that I thought it should be shared.
I don’t know whether the books hold the walls up
or vice versa but I fear that if I took them all away the house would collapse.
It’s always been that way. I’ve had a weakness
bordering on obsession about books since I was a spotty schoolboy in torn grey
flannel shorts, telescoped socks, tortured collar, stained school tie, and
shoes whose toe caps were more familiar with empty cans than Cherry Blossom
boot polish.
I spent my boyhood reading. It used to drive my
mother nuts. She would search all over the house for me then find me reclining
on the sofa in the ‘front room’ devouring the latest Arthur Ransome and chewing
my fingernails down to the elbows (I guess I needed the calcium). Why she
didn’t look into that room in the first place always puzzled me. I think she
couldn’t believe my repeated violations of the sanctity of that tiny, peaceful
retreat which smelled of wax polish and whose air sparkled with motes drifting
in the beams of late sunlight.
When she found me she would tut and warn me ‘If
you spend all your time reading you’ll lose the use of your eyes!’
The front room was a sort of sanctum sanctorum
kept for Christmas and visitors. As none ever came it was officially used only
once a year so if I hadn’t crept into its silence it would have been shut up
and musty like Tutankhamen’s tomb. And if I hadn’t regularly disturbed the
ancient dust my mother would not have needed to do any housework: that, I
suspect, would have left her with a sense of unfulfilment. I don’t know that
she had anything to complain about because she, too, was an avid reader.
Indeed, one of my earliest memories, from before I could read, is of lying in
bed beside her and dad on a Sunday morning fascinated by the rivers of space
between the words running down the printed pages of her book.
In the early days all my reading was of books from
the public library. It was wartime and they were more often than not dog-eared,
stained, bound and re-bound volumes with racked spines, their spreads often
crumbed with residual toast or corn flake grit. Countless unwashed fingers
might have softened their pages to a warm, comfortable texture like flannelette
sheets but that was of no consequence; it was the magic of their contents that
mattered.
In the front room I met Ben Gunn and Long John
Silver; I joined Biggles in his cockpit as we played chicken with some enemy
air ace, flying directly towards each other at a combined speed of 300 miles an
hour; I partook, vicariously, in endless explorations and campaigns with the
heroes of G.A. Henty, travelled twenty thousand submarine leagues with Jules
Verne and sailed the romantic waters of the Lake District with John, Susan,
Titty, Roger, Nancy and Peggy in Swallows
and Amazons.
Later, I started to buy rather than borrow and
moved on to more serious stuff. (I needed to, I left school when I was fifteen
woefully under-educated and if I hadn’t developed a lust for reading I guess my
intellect would have withered on the vine). I suppose the big change from
children’s to adults’ books is the appearance of sex in some form or another.
These days nothing is left to the imagination but then - in the forties - the
introduction to the subject came by way of romantic love.
I think John Buchan started it for me; his heroes
were all good sporting men who smoked pipes (and must have reeked) and
invariably won some lithe, young, boyish! woman with tossing golden curls: but
they never got much beyond holding hands. Nevertheless it was enough to trigger
the purchase of instructive volumes such as Havelock Ellis’s The Psychology of Sex which I kept hidden behind the hot water
cylinder in my bedroom. I’ve still got the book and can report that the hottest
thing in that cupboard was the hot water cylinder! It was around then that the
famous Kinsey Reports were published. I never read them but relaxed in the
knowledge that they, like any good work of reference, were accessible if
needed.
Kinsey pierced a hole in the post-Victorian wall
of silence and it was a short step from there to the substantial freedoms of
publication that followed. I remember the enormous victory, that great stride
into national adulthood, that was achieved when Lady Chatterley’s Lover was at last allowed to be published without
restriction. Everybody hungered to read it and many were titillated by the
shenanigans of the gamekeeper and her ladyship while completely overlooking the
artistry of D.H.Lawrence’s prose. It’s a measure of how much we’ve grown up
that if we read that book today the sex is tame and leaves us wondering what
the fuss was all about. It pales beside what we see on television on Sunday
evenings!
The final stage of my bookish obsession was to
become a collector. I’ve never thrown a book away and so, in that sense, have
collected. But there’s a deeper meaning to ‘collector’. It means having
something rare or special and prized. To the reading of a book it adds values
like the feel of a beautiful binding or the triumph of having acquired
something desirable at a fraction of its value - not that you’ll ever sell it!
A business acquaintance came to dinner once and
after looking around the walls of the sitting room asked ‘Why do you have all
these books?’ I could only then say ‘Why do you ask?’ I couldn’t imagine a
house without them. If I were asked the same question now I would say ‘I read them. I refer to them. I love
them and I glory in them.’ Then I
would show him Henry Williamson’s Tarka
the Otter and say, ‘Read that’. I would hand him Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable and say, ‘Refer to that’. I
would pull out T.E.Lawrence’s Seven
Pillars of Wisdom - the limited first public edition with those four
enchanting colour plates - and say, ‘Love that’, and I would show him the
modest little first edition of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood that I bought for $4.50 in Browns Bay and that was
recently offered for $1000.00 in a catalogue and say, ‘Glory in that!’
Between the ages of, say, twenty-five and now my
library has expanded to become, as I have said, part of the structure of the
house. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than to sit in the gloaming of a
winter’s evening and see the gold leaf of naked spines wink at me in reflected
firelight. I find enormous comfort in these old friends - some cheap and hard
worn, some valuable - as they stand, shoulder to shoulder around the room ready
to give me companionship, knowledge and escape whenever I need them.
And I think they gave the same support and joy to
my children and grandchildren as they grew up for, I know, they read more than
the average of their peers.
And although I might be swimming against the tide,
I’d still rather read a book than watch anything on television.
Perhaps that’s because we didn’t have a telly in
the ‘front room’ when I was a boy.
No comments:
Post a Comment