Reading The Great Writers, part two
Another shorter middle bit
Of the 54 titles in The Great Writers series, I had already read 15 – and I read another 13 in this edition: six before going to university and seven at university.
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847)
I remember finding the opening and the section when Jane tries to make a living away from Rochester a bit of a slog but loved the rest unreservedly. Apart from the preachy ending, which I still hate.
My English degree was in a staunchly Leavisite department, so it was kind of odd that we were required to read any books by women, but even odder was the fact that the only Bronte we read was Villette (1853). Of which I remember nothing apart from the rude bit about blowing cigar smoke into an open desk. But over the last few years, I’ve been reading/rereading all of the Bronte novels, one a year. Only have Shirley (1849) – which has sort of taken the place of The Caine Mutiny in being permanently in my suitcase for travel delay emergencies – and Villette left to go before finishing by returning once more to Jane Eyre. And that ending. Which might not bug me so much any more.
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861)
It turned out I would never ever come to like Dickens beyond an occasional passage here and there but having already read A Christmas Carol and for A-level Our Mutual Friend (1864–5), I guess I thought I’d give Great Expectations a go. After all, it is one of the shorter ones. And there was clearly some trick to learn before you could ‘simply adore’ Dickens and then move on to the Russians. Top marks for the cake and the prison hulks, but nothing much else.
You can only imagine my annoyance when it was one of the set texts in the first year of my degree so I had to read it again. It never occurred to me to just skip that week. For a long time I would have blamed that on my protestant upbringing – work hard, be dutiful, take responsibility blah blah – but it was just as much a twisted FOMO: a fish out of water, with no real sense of how middle class environments functioned, I had no idea if or when the necessary clues would drop so I always turned up. My fear of missteps was greater than my anxiety about having to deal with other people. (More about my whacky adventures in Dickens-land – and the crazy dialectics of dutifulness and rebellion – to follow.)
Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys (1825)
I assume the reason I read this one more or less immediately was that it comes in short sections. One of the skills developed as an autodidact reader is the ability to read anything, and one of the strategies for doing so is to divide books into pages-per-day to get you through them. It’s how I read William T. Vollman’s Imperial (2009) and Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji (before 1021) this year – and probably a couple of others in my 2023 plan to get through one physically outsize volume per month – and it’s a real gift when you have a stack of academic volumes to get through for some project or other. But it is also a curse in its capacity to strip any joy, even pleasure, from the process of reading. And it makes it hard to stop reading things once you’ve started, no matter how awful they are.
It’s probably also why/how I always have several books on the go simultaneously: currently, Ida Yoshinaga, Sean Guynes and Gerry Canavan’s Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction (2022), Andrew Michael Hurley’s Starve Acre (2019), Kevin Barry’s That Old Country Music (2020), Charles Forsdick and Christian Høgsbjerg’s Toussaint Louverture: Black Jacobin in the Age of Revolutions (2017), Zygmunt Bauman’s Retrotopia (2017), Michael Moorcock’s London Peculiar and Other Nonfiction (2012), Joseph Mitchell’s The Bottom of the Harbor (1959) and Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958).)
From the fact I remember no details of Pepys’ sex life, I assume this was an abridged and bowdlerised edition. No coded records of his tireless efforts in the cause of masturbation. Makes you wonder why they even bothered.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
To be honest, I was a little disappointed. Unlike Albert Lewis’s 1945 film adaptation, the book did not contain the delectably naughty George Sanders – nor, sadly, did de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami (1885) and Du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), which also lacked Nigel Bruce (although the former novel is quite a hoot). I guess this Sanders deficit is why, unlike so much other sf/horror/fantasy from the last decade or so of the nineteenth century, I’ve never re-read it. But I suspect I missed quite a bit.
To be honest, though, Wilde always disappoints me a little. Perhaps I’d conjured too strong an image of him from Robert Morley in Oscar Wilde (Ratoff 1960) and/or Peter Finch in The Trial of Oscar Wilde (Ratoff Hughes 1960). When I finally read Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) in preparation for introducing a screening of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1925 adaptation a decade ago, I remember finding the film much more impressive than the play – despite it being silent and thus denying us both Wilde’s dialogue and Ronald Colman’s delicious voice.
Anthology of Romantic Poets and Anthology of the War Poets
I have no idea what these actually contained. I assume primarily Byron/Shelley/Keats and Owen/Brooke/Sassoon. We’d read some of the war poets for O-level English, along with Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, John Betjeman, Charles Causley and, shockingly a women, albeit the ambiguously gendered Stevie Smith (hmm, a suspiciously high proportion of poets with Devon or Cornwall connections; there must have been some kind of fix).
Other than that, my pre-university education in poetry consisted of dirty limericks, Poe and the Central Library’s copies of The Rattle Bag (1982), co-edited by Hughes and Heaney, and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury (the 1954 edition, with the four 1861 books plus Cecil Day-Lewis’s selection of 229 additional poems, including, quite scandalously, some Americans). Oh, and another postal book club come-on, Helen Gardner’s The New Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250–1950 (1972).
I wonder what Thomas Hardy selections are in those anthologies? At my Oxford interview, we had to write an essay on an unseen poem, which turned out to be ‘The Convergence of the Twain’ (1912). Little did they suspect, I’d already seen (and written about) it! Mwa-ha-ha!
While my experience of reading The Great Writers’ novels had always been a marred by their ugly layout, unattractive typeface and heavy printing on thin paper, something far worse awaited at university.
Condescension.
Mark Bould 