How I Became a Reader by Peter Leyland

                                    How I Became a Reader

                  

How I became a reader was all down to my school, the alma mater of Beatles, George Harrison and Paul McCartney, and often much maligned in my blogs. Deservedly so, I think, because if you weren't an Oxbridge candidate it didn't have a great deal to recommend itself, especially to the also-rans, with whom I must confess I belonged from the very first day when, black and green peaked cap in hand, I had stood abashed before its austere and forbidding iron gates.

There were, however, some good teachers: among them Mr Toobe, whose head and neck poked between the lapels of his dusty black gown, and who was appropriately nicknamed ‘turtle’ as he stepped slowly along the school corridors, holding those lapels apart as if they were the opening curtains to some play. And this was a play, a play about the books he collected for us - fourth formers now - and displayed upon the window-ledges of his classroom, spines facing outwards. Mostly they were those famed orange and grey Penguin paperback titles, and in my memory they ranged from G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, to George Orwell’s Animal Farm, 1984, and Homage to Catalonia; The Chrysalids by John Wyndham, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and The Plague by Albert Camus - in translation of course - one of the strangest decisions of my school was that certain forms, and mine was one, were chosen to learn Spanish and Russian. No schoolboy French ever came my way.

 

No books by female writers came my way either you will note, and there were very few in my experience at the time, unless you would include Richmal Crompton, author of the brilliant William books, which lined my bedroom bookshelves along with other notables like Frank Richards and R. M. Ballantyne. It wasn’t until years later that I discovered, that Richmal was actually a woman, and that William’s exploits were based on those of her brother. Female writers didn’t appear on my horizon until I read Middlemarch at University, still my favourite novel, and even the author of that had a man’s name.

But there will be more to come on that book. Male writers were chiefly my boyhood reading, and once the school Sixth Form was reached the play upon which Mr Toobe had drawn the curtains opened further, leaving many of the the riches of English Literature were laid out before me. Under the guidance of another teacher nicknamed Olly, who confided to the class that he and his wife would read Paradise Lost in the evenings after supper, I was taken on a journey with the poetry of John Milton, The Wesker Trilogy, the novels of Thomas Love Peacock, a couple of Shakespeare plays, and my all-time favourite, Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding. 

Henry Fielding has been called ‘The Father of The English Novel’ and The History of Tom Jones was a revelation of what reading could do for me, a boy attuned to the righteous pursuit of justice and love. (Henry Fielding was himself one of the best magistrates in C18 London and helped to establish The Bow street Runners, its first police force.) His Eighteenth Century novel is the story of how a foundling, Tom, after a series of comic adventures, which include his wanton exploits with Molly Seagrim and an amorous tryst in London with Mrs Waters, eventually finds fame, fortune and happiness with the lovely Sophia Weston. Fielding’s description of Sophia cannot avoid a hint of self-mockery, for the character was based on his own wife, and reaches back to Sir John Suckling’s description in ‘A Ballad Upon a Wedding’. Sophia’s lower lip appeared, says Fielding, as if, ‘Some bee had stung it newly’.

 

I must have read this novel, all 850 pages of it, about half a dozen times before taking my A’ Level exams, so when I learned that it was being filmed recently on ITV, I decided to have a look. Warnings were given that it was different and contained a great deal of bawdy humour and, although I gave the first episode a considered viewing, it did not really do the same trick that the book had done for me all those years ago. I have to agree with Guardian reviewer, Jack Seale, that turning Sophia into the black daughter of a slave and plantation owner does not really work, and that there’s nothing there ‘when they talk, flirt or even kiss’. Much better in my opinion is the classic film of Tom Jones by Tony Richardson in 1963 where the famous eating scene between Tom (Albert Finney) and Mrs Waters (Joyce Redman) can be found on Youtube. Did I say ‘eating’?

Anyway, let’s leave this aside and move on to the matchless Middlemarch, which if you haven’t read all 838 pages of it, there’s still time. This was probably my next step into great reading, but it was not such a fun read as Tom Jones had been, because harsh reality came forward. Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch, ''the first novel written for grown up people', and she is right. I would argue that it is a novel about marriage, about getting it wrong; about getting it so badly wrong that even the author can’t really rescue her characters; and in the end about getting it right. 

 

George Eliot gives us Tertius Lydgate, the wonderfully idealistic doctor, ready to embark upon a medical career which he hopes (and we the reader do too) will change the course of history, who is drawn by the charms of the lovely Rosamond Vincey into a marriage to which both are ill-suited, and which eventually becomes loveless and a mire of failed ideals. There was not much living together in those days, but let’s just say that the marriage of Rosamond and Lydgate would have benefited greatly from a bit of getting to know each other first.

 

Her other main character to whom I am always irresistibly drawn, is Dorothea Brooke who learns from her mistakes, or is she just lucky, the reader will have to decide? She marries Edward Casaubon, a failing religious academic, with whom she hopes to change the world of learning but realises by the time of her honeymoon in Rome that she has made a huge mistake. Although it is true that at the time women had little agency in their choice of husbands, George Eliot makes it clear that it is Dorothea’s own thwarted idealism which leads her into the disastrous decision to marry a much older man. The marriage ends, not because of their irreconcilable differences, but because well before the end of the novel Casaubon has a heart attack and dies.

Dorothea finds herself to be free, but freedom is not all plain sailing and she has another lesson to learn. Her immaturity leads her to become more than an onlooker at the failing marriage of Lydgate and Rosamond, and she becomes involved in their travails. When she accidentally stumbles upon an emotional moment between Rosamond and Will Ladislaw, Casaubon's cousin with whom she has fallen deeply in love, Dorothea is shocked and horrified at seeing them together. She misinterprets what is happening between the two of them and flees the room, thinking that Will is lost to her. She spends the night in fitful sleeplessness caused by the despair both of her own failed marriage and her perception of the rift between the aspiring doctor and his pretty wife.

 

The reader is now totally at one with Dorothea, and George Eliot shows her waking from her fitful sleep. In magnificent prose the author shows how she gradually comforts herself and throws off the terrible conflict that is possessing her. Opening her curtains, Dorothea looks out onto the road before the house. There she sees a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby: “Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance. She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining.”

 

In other words, ‘the human condition’. I won’t tell you what happens next, for that you will need to go to the book itself, but you should feel that you are in the hands of a great artist who believed that art has the power to transform our understanding of life, particularly that of the relationships between people. I have now garnered something of this power from reading numerous novels and poems myself, and many other kinds of books, setting out to show the world how important reading is. it is something that began with those early years of schooling as I have described, and it is something that has sustained me in many ways during my life.

I have always believed in the transformative power of reading.

Peter Leyland 30/06/23 

Thanks are due to Griselda Heppel for suggesting this idea to me in her June 

blog: Don't tell boys they can't read books. They can