Only Connect, Part Two by Peter Leyland
It could have been a change of medication or my final retirement from a long-cherished teaching role, or it may have been simply that I was getting older. Whatever the cause, I was struck down soon after my last birthday by the most awful bout of insomnia linked to the anxiety that I had so often suffered from. I had tried a number of remedies – lots of exercise, further medication, daily sessions of yoga nidra, counselling - even rereading favourite novels in search of the bibliotherapy that had aided me in the past - but none of this seemed to work. Apart from an hour or two each night, I lay awake, finding sleep impossible to come by. It was as though for some reason of its own my mind was refusing to allow me to switch off. At length, buoyed up by the optimism that had served me so well in the past, I decided to go to other aspects of the bibliotherapy that I had built up around myself since my original discovery of the idea. ‘There is a blessing in this gentle breeze,’ Wordsworth writes in The Prelude as he is looking for guidance. Here I would find my way.
There were a number of areas in which I might find an answer. The first was reading a book, Bibliotherapy: The Healing Power of Reading (2024) by Bijal Shah; the second was listening to audio-books, which my sister had recommended to me; the third was meetings with a group of ex- students with whom I shared regular poetry readings; the fourth was writing a monthly blog for AuthorsElectric where authors share ideas; and the final one was contributing ideas for books to a reading group called CarersFirst, led by author, Sam Mills.
Bijal Shah, whom I had originally encountered through a course called “Book Therapy” and whom I had eventually met in a face-to-face discussion on Zoom to discuss her book about the healing power of reading, has recently published an article about her book in Good Housekeeping. In the introduction she mentions something that really resonated with me: ‘Books allow us to connect with people who we’d not otherwise meet in our daily lives’. She goes on to mention a number of difficult situations covered by her book, such as my own problems concerning anxiety and insomnia, and she gives details of the books that she recommends in order to help resolve them. There are a number of non-fictional recommendations, but those that I took away with me and intended to try, were the fiction suggestions: After Dark by Haruki Murakami and I Was Born for This by Alice Oseman.
Fiction and memoir are the areas I generally go to when looking for books to help me when I am experiencing difficult mental health issues. For my insomnia I tried supplementing sleep medication with the audio books that I purchased online for a monthly fee. For this you get a range of books that are matched to skilled readings by readers, who may be actors of whom you have heard. For example, by a happy co-incidence my first choice, The Woodlanders, by Thomas Hardy was read by Samuel West. He was an actor who had appeared in Between the Covers, a book programme hosted by Sara Cox. He said on the programme that he had been ‘knocked sideways’ as a teenager by E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910). This book had had the same effect upon me. I made a note:
Samuel West’s reading of The Woodlanders (1887) was magnificent. I followed it in my copy of the print book as he took me through the machinations of the young doctor Giles Fitzpiers’s attempts to marry Miss Grace Melbury whom he has to prise away from Mr Winterborne, her former sweetheart. The story ends not as so often with Hardy in tragedy but with the characters’ acceptance of their lot in the fortunes and misfortunes of love.
Two further books were chosen in this manner, The Great Fire (2003) by Shirley Hazzard and Caleb Williams (1794) by William Godwin, father of Mary Shelley. Both of these were completely absorbing when listened to in conjunction with a reading of the print books and I derived great benefit from them. The extraordinary story of Caleb Williams was linked to my own interest in detective fiction which I had taught to students and published a book about: The Detective in Fiction (2016).
The meetings with my poetry students followed an established pattern of shared readings. The group was from an adult education class I had once taught which had agreed to meet on-line for poetry sessions after their course had finished. They had invited me to join them. As the idea developed, one member of the group suggested we follow a book entitled Contraflow edited by John Greening and Kevin Gardner which we all subsequently bought. Poems from the book, which deal with the ups and downs of being English, are chosen in advance and then read aloud individually. We recently read The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin, a great favourite of mine but they found it cruel. Nevertheless, there is a deep level of trust between us: the subject matter and authors of the poems are accepted and critiqued at the level of the group, which is one of friendship and some literary expertise. One member is a regular attendee at poetry readings and is able to give out details of some of the authors represented. All of us generally agree at the end of the session that our sense of wellbeing has been raised by listening to poems read aloud.
Writing a monthly blog column about aspects of reading and literature was another thing that helped with my recovery. AuthorsElectric is a disparate group of writers, all of whom are successful authors of books for both children and adults. I have joined them as an essayist. Each blog that we write is shared and can be commented on by members of the group. At times during my plunge into the existential despair described here, I felt really reluctant to complete my monthly blog, and I needed a good deal of internal prompting to continue. I found it useful that I had downloaded and printed each essay that I had written since I began, and so I was able to glance through my back pages and find encouragement. In one I had mentioned Howards End, referred to earlier, and this had resulted in an essay that I called “Only Connect” with reference to Forster’s idea of bringing our outer and inner worlds together as a whole.
My final example of how the bibliotherapy process is more than just reading, comes from my membership of a book group called CarersFirst which also meets on Zoom. I became a member of the group quite by chance: I had read on Twitter that the author, Sam Mills, would be talking about the book The Enchanted April (1922) by Elizabeth Von Arnim with her book group online and that anyone could join the discussion. As I knew the book well and had enjoyed it, I immediately signed up and began meeting the group monthly. All were people who were caring for partners and relatives through various stages of illness, some quite severe. One or two members of the group had not managed to read The Enchanted April, but this did not matter - it was an online forum to share a love of books by those who had chosen to care for others.
Reading can connect the inner and outer life as defined by E.M. Forster, and I think this connection is essential for the improvement of our mental health. In her book, Why Women Read Fiction (2020) Helen Taylor, Professor of English at The University of Exeter, asked questions of women readers and their answers showed that through reading fiction they had gained some insight into their lives and the direction in which those lives were taking them. My own direction in my life was to recover the equanimity that would enable me to have a sound sleep and I had found new ways of reaching this with the reading activities that I have described.
The act of writing too can create a form of catharsis during which one is very close to the process. Cream bass player Jack Bruce talks in an interview about the power of being at one with the process of performing, and this idea is explored more fully in Flow (2002) by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: he talks of the rock climber who looks back in awe at what she has achieved; the lawyer involved in complex and challenging cases who forgets to have lunch and only realises she is hungry when it gets dark; the teacher who enjoys interacting with his pupils – that moment when the light goes on; and as I have observed from my own recent experience as a member of a local choir - the musician when she gets the perfect rendition of a song that she has been rehearsing with her class. In the same way the writing of AuthorsElectric blogs over the last few years has enabled me to make a Forster-like connection with positive episodes from my past life.
I met the author, Sam Mills, recently at the launch of her novel, The Watermark. There were fifty or more people gathered at Daunts bookshop in Holland Park Avenue in London. She talked briefly about her book and signed a copy for me. I was delighted to share this success with her and to meet up with the real person. I also met many other readers and writers and left the launch feeling renewed and refreshed, both from this and from all the aspects of bibliotherapy that I have described. The act of reading, I thought, is a lot more than just eyes on the page.
Some of these stories have been covered in previous AuthorsElectric pieces, and in an article where I referred to a TV interview with the bass player pictured above.
Every child has the potential to become a gifted and talented pupil by Peter Leyland in G&T Update Issue 13, 13th May 2007
“Only Connect”, AuthorsElectric, December 2nd 2022
Comments
I was struck by your link between reading fiction and mental health, connecting the inner with the outer world and thereby balancing the two. That rings so true and makes it even more important for children to gain a love of reading. Sadly reading rates among the young have gone down while anxiety levels are rising. I know there are a number of possible causes for the latter but I can’t help feeling that the joy of losing yourself in another world that a good book gives you would help.