The Secret Joy of Reading Read online

him rises the difficult, intensely rewarding peak which only the good and great reader can hope to attempt.

  Of course, no matter how keenly, how admirably, a story, a piece of music, a picture is discussed and analysed, there will be minds that remain blank and spines that remain unkindled. “To take upon us the mystery of things” – what King Lear so wistfully says for himself and for Cordelia – this is also my suggestion for everyone who takes art seriously. A poor man is robbed of his overcoat (Gogol’s “The Greatcoat”, or more correctly “The Carrick”); another poor fellow is turned into a beetle (Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”) – so what? There is no rational answer to “so what.” We can take the story apart, we can find out how the bits fit, how one part of the pattern responds to the other; but you have to have in you some cell, some gene, some germ that will vibrate in answer to sensations that you can neither define, nor dismiss. Beauty plus pity – that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual. If Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” strikes anyone as something more than an entomological fantasy, then I congratulate him on having joined the ranks of good and great readers.

  — Vladimir Nabokov

  Writing good fiction is difficult. The physical means of producing it are so easily acquired, and self-delusion is so widespread, that many people fancy themselves skilled when they are not. In the same way, reading appears to be simple. You are taught at school how to decipher the marks on a page and fancy yourself a reader, but unless you develop your technique you will never even get near the foothills. That’s fair enough, if diversion is all you seek, if you are prepared to forgo the panorama awaiting you at the summit.

  At the core of reading technique is discernment. First you must discern whether what you are reading is sincere. Has it been written from the heart?

  Next: does the author know his job? You cannot construct a piece of furniture if you know nothing about carpentry. Watch out for an inadequate vocabulary, an absence of poetry, an ignorance of flow – and by “flow” I mean the ability to present meanings in the correct order, which is the key to storytelling. Does the author have a clear idea of what he’s up to? If he doesn’t, you certainly won’t, and he is wasting unique and precious hours of your life, hours you can never get back.

  By practising discernment you improve your taste. You graduate to better work, and as you graduate the act of reading becomes more and more involving. Your mental eyesight becomes keener. You appreciate an artist when you find one and understand what he is doing, and then you begin to plug into his mind.

  I have said elsewhere that writing fiction is primarily a function of the subconscious: the ability to share someone else’s inmost feelings is one of the most exciting rewards for the good and great reader. While reading a good and great book, the good and great reader’s mind merges with that of the author, is exercised, enlarged, and made stronger. The chances are he will read the rest of the author’s oeuvre. He will do this in order to clarify and expand what he has already gained, to check that the experience was authentic, and to see how the author’s sensibilities have changed over the years.

  There is, however, more than that to reading a good and great book. The prose itself will be beautiful. Its aptness and rhythm will give you delight. Its vocabulary will enrich your own, allowing you to express yourself more clearly and make closer contact with your fellow humans. That alone is worth the price of admission.

  But it gets better. Literature offers an infinity of alternative worlds. The reader inhabits them in complete safety. He can learn from the mistakes the characters make; he can admire and try to emulate their generosity or wisdom. By so doing, he grows spiritually. He takes upon himself “the mystery of things”.

  The deepest mystery is an understanding of other people, and that, I feel, is what C S Lewis had in mind.

  Feminism

  Towards the end of the Second World War my mother went for a job interview. Her husband was serving in Egypt with the Eighth Army. She had not set eyes on him since early in 1940: and would not do so again until the end of 1945. Her current employer, a manufacturer of bombsights, was on the verge of bankruptcy caused by mismanagement and waste.

  The interview was conducted by a Mr Weiss, a Viennese businessman who had escaped the Nazis by the skin of his teeth, his life having been saved by a phone call saying that arrest was only minutes away. He had fled Austria with his wife and two suitcases, together with her jewellery and whatever sum of cash he had been able, in the anxiety of the preceding weeks, to scrape together and convert into precious metal. His house, his thriving business, his extensive factory, Weiss had bequeathed to Hitler.

  Soon after his arrival in London war had broken out and he had been temporarily interned as a suspicious alien. On release he had bought a manufacturing business in the town where my mother then lived. The business was very small, not much more than a kitchen-table outfit, but he was working it up and needed a personal assistant, a secretary, someone intelligent and responsible who, if he were away trying to drum up trade, could make decisions on his behalf.

  My mother had left school at fourteen, when she was miraculously chosen from a snaking queue of girls and their mothers who had heard that a job was vacant in a box factory. By dint of voracious reading and night school she educated herself and became proficient in shorthand and typing, skills which in the 1930s could lift a girl out of the swamp and into the uplands of office work. The factory made boxes for a large and very famous London department store. At sixteen she was transferred to the store itself, being given, for her first day, the humiliating job of wandering the floors selling Boat Race favours – little ribbons in dark or light blue – from a tray suspended by a strap round her neck. She had been given this job because she was pretty: more than pretty, and she attracted a steady stream of customers, preponderantly young and preponderantly male. The following day she was found some proper work to do.

  By this time her typing speed and accuracy were impressive, thanks to the night school, though she knew she had more progress to make. From the typing pool she soon found herself appropriated by a management type, the head of legal affairs, who needed a secretary. Quickly realizing what he had, this excellent man encouraged my mother in every fatherly way, and under his tutelage she began to learn a great deal about human nature, the judicious exercise of authority, and the way the world works. But in the course of time she was poached by someone higher up, the son of the owner, and then by the owner himself. In 1938 she married and left the company. Had she stayed, I don’t doubt that she would have ended up on the board.

  So there she was, in 1944, not just being interviewed by Mr Weiss but also – if he did but know it – interviewing him. She liked what she saw, she needed the job, and he offered it to her.

  Mr Weiss wished to get back to the industry he knew best, making electrical fittings. That was what he had been doing in Vienna. A few months after the interview, he found some suitable premises, a smallish factory that had been used for light assembly. He assumed there would be no difficulty with the planning permission, with the change of use: what concerned him more was getting the necessary certification to make the metal parts for his plugs and sockets. Priority was given to “war work” – manufacturing directly related to the struggle against Germany.

  To his surprise, the town council turned down his application for change of use. The factory was located at the end of a somewhat lowly residential street, but the use Weiss was proposing was no more disruptive than the last: he couldn’t make it out.

  Meanwhile, the request for certification was in train. Having seen what had gone on at the bombsight factory, my mother had a jaundiced view about this. She reasoned also that electrical fittings were crucial to the war effort in many different ways, and had felt no compunction in applying for the most enabling permission there was.

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bsp; The local official charged with dispensing such permissions was a man of about my mother’s age. Somewhat unconventionally, he invited her to lunch to discuss the matter, and during the conversation my mother mentioned her employer’s troubles with the town hall.

  “Oh,” said the man. “That factory? He’ll never get his hands on it.”

  “Really?”

  “Course not.” He gave her a conspiratorial smile. “You know. He’s one of those.”

  “One of what?”

  “The Chosen.”

  If her life had worked out differently, my mother might have been an actress. She could maintain a most equable front, no matter what was going on inside. At this critical moment she managed to produce a smile of her own, a counterpart of the one he had given her.

  “Thompkins wants it,” he went on, thinking that he had achieved his goal and impressed her with his inside knowledge. “The builder. He’s on the council. The planning committee, as a matter of fact.”

  “That explains it.”

  “Oh yes. Thing is, he’s having trouble raising the money. We’re at the same lodge, you know.” The Masonic Lodge.

  On my father’s left hand, somewhere in Egypt, was a gold ring. Its companion, in plain sight, was on