The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life (7 page)

In making this final cut, I had tried not to think too hard about what ought to be there and to let the heart take over. I only wanted to read books I wanted to read. Here, though, was the ink-blot, the echocardiogram. What did the reading say? What did it say about me?

Well, with one exception, these were all novels – six British, three American, two Russian, one Irish, one German.
¹
Three women, ten men. My internationalist credentials were intact but my gender bias could use some work.

These were all books I had told people I'd read when, actually, I hadn't.

These were books by authors whose work I was unfamiliar with, with the exception of Beckett (plays – short) and Austen (
Emma
– as a student, could not recall anything about it), not that that had prevented me from giving the opposite impression, often to myself. Also, all the authors were dead.

There was nothing here that could be described as a thriller.

There were several books that I had previously started but been unable to finish. For instance, I knew for a fact that on 16 June 1992, after just a couple of pages, I had stopped reading
The Unnamable
, because a till receipt marked the ignoble spot. You must go on; I can't go on; I, er, didn't go on.

These were all books, to a greater or lesser extent, that defined the sort of person I would like to be. They conveyed the innate good taste someone like me would possess, effortlessly. If you asked me if I liked Patrick Hamilton's work, for example, I would almost certainly reply in the affirmative. Moreover, I thought of myself as ‘a Patrick Hamilton fan' –
despite never having read anything by Patrick Hamilton
. It was easy to maintain these two apparently contradictory positions; one did not necessarily cancel out the other. It seemed inevitable that I would become a Patrick Hamilton fan once I found the time to read him, so why refrain from assuming that identity in advance? It need not even alter if I were to discover that, on settling down with a book by Patrick Hamilton, I didn't much care for it. There would always be another book I might read at some hazy point in the future and like more, confirming the high opinion I had of Patrick Hamilton, though to date I had read nothing which matched up to the esteem in which he was held by me. And with this certain prospect fixed on the horizon, so the likelihood of ever reading Patrick Hamilton receded still further. I was the victim of a self-confidence trick.

The same might be said of the entire list. Because I had already forged a connection, presumed a familiarity, with every title on this piece of paper, they summoned up friends or conversations or specific moments from the past; but what lay behind the titles was a blank, and memories which ought to have cheered me instead induced prickles of embarrassment and even guilt, for they evoked little more than my own insincerity. Finally coming to terms with these books would be like reclaiming these far-flung moments and restoring their fidelity, or simply acknowledging and settling a debt.

I considered myself to be well-read. Could someone honestly call themselves well-read without reading
Middlemarch, Moby-Dick
and
Anna Karenina
? Probably not. However, this list was a start. With
Middlemarch
and
The Master and Margarita
behind me, it seemed possible that in the next few weeks, all these books could tumble. They would become part of the texture of my life as it was now. Even the thought of it was revitalising; more than that, it was a relief. I could begin to stop pretending.

Marx and Engels, for example. When I was seventeen, our school organised a week-long visit to Berlin. This was several years before the Wall came down. About a dozen sixth-formers made the trip. We stayed at a hotel in the West and at night went out to bars and strip-clubs off the Kurfürstendamm – well, the others did, including the teachers. I was much too puritanical. I stayed in my room and read
Brighton Rock
.

On two occasions, we crossed over to East Berlin, which I much preferred to the decadent West. Yes, it was dour and repressed – but I was too. I wish I could remember more about these excursions. I can dimly recollect long avenues of shabby apartment blocks lined with identical cars, and shops with sternly rectilinear window displays. Everything looked as though fashion and maintenance had abruptly ceased in the early 1960s, which of course they had.

If you were a tourist, the East German authorities obliged you to change twenty-five Deutsche Marks at the border. You were not permitted to carry this money back to the West at the end of your daytrip. In other words, while you were in East Berlin, you had to find something to spend twenty-five Marks on. In Alexanderplatz, my schoolmates converted their cash into beer and grainy strawberry ices. However, I was captivated by the State-run book and record shop, which had about four Melodiya Beatles and Pink Floyd cassettes for sale, and numerous hardbacks of Karl Marx translated into English. There was nothing modish or faux about these editions. They were big, no-nonsense bricks, with just the title on the dust jacket, bordered by orange stripes along the top and bottom, as though their designer still vaguely recalled a Penguin Library paperback he had seen decades earlier. I bought a copy of
Capital
and another volume called
The Holy Family
and smuggled them back home in my suitcase.

I'm sure I believed I might read these hefty Marxist tomes; I certainly did not buy them solely for the effect they might have on my mother. But the effect they did have on my mother was so electric and so immediately gratifying, that
thereafter reading them never really entered the picture. There was no need. They were accessories to a half-formed left-wing conception of the world which I had no immediate urge to deepen. Besides, at a recent parents evening my mother had been informed in all seriousness by one teacher that me and my best friend Matthew Freedman were communists, so someone else was doing the work for us. (This notoriety was the result of a General Studies discussion in which we had ventured the heretical proposition that there might be some justification in the then-current Miners' Strike.)

So twenty years later, when my mother discovered her only son loitering on a city street corner with
The Communist Manifesto
, it must have seemed, despite his toiling obediently for the capitalist system since graduation, accumulating a significant amount of property, and raising a child along doggedly bourgeois lines, like further evidence of his stubborn refusal to grow up. And – oh, Andrew – who is to say she was wrong?

Of course, then as now, although I was happy to be perceived as a communist, I had no serious yen to be one. This was not from a position of political principle but because of the effort required to first grasp and then assimilate a set of rules to which I would be expected to adhere. So instead I went with a liberal, left-of-centre position and told myself the half-truth that I had been more militant in my youth and that I had mellowed with age. In this, I was scrupulously in step with my generation, the one which spent thirteen years fretting at the lack of socialism in the New Labour government, yet which had made a journey of its own from youthful idealism to battered pragmatism in the face of political reality, career advancement and the school run.

With this journey behind me, I found it much harder to read
The Communist Manifesto
at thirty-seven than I would have done at seventeen, not because its philosophy was difficult to grasp but because it was true to life. The gloomy picture of the world it proposed might have seemed romantic to me then; now it felt dismayingly like the one I actually lived in.

Prior to
The Communist Manifesto
, I had read
Post Office
by Charles Bukowski. Ah, Bukowski. When I was in my early twenties, it seemed like everyone I knew – every male, I should say – read Bukowski. These men of my acquaintance listened to the Go-Betweens, drank Guinness from a straight glass and loved Bukowski like little girls love ponies. From their descriptions of his work and what was good about it, Bukowski sounded like precisely the kind of writer there would be no point in liking if everyone else liked him. So I never bothered.

All these years later, I had soaked up
Post Office
in little more than a day. Bukowski's alter ego, Henry Chinaski, a substitute postman and a drunk, gambled and screwed and occasionally made his mail round and then it was over: tick. The style was fragmentary and brutal. I was given to understand his other novels told a similar, if not identical, tale in a similar, if not identical, register. In an inversion of the old saying, when you'd read all Bukowski's books, you'd read one of them; they were all postcards from the same place, scrawled in a defiantly shaky hand.

As a book about work, though,
Post Office
was even bleaker than
The Communist Manifesto
, which at least offered potential resolution, i.e. total destruction of the apparatus of capital. Henry Chinaski's solution to the same problem was a cocktail of booze, horses and pussy. It would be nice to think the latter was at least an achievable goal but as Chinaski noted in the first few pages: ‘
It began easy. I was sent to West Avon Station and it was just like Christmas except I didn't get laid. Every day I expected to get laid but I didn't
.' And, figuratively at least, this too rang true with the world I found myself living in.

Work was preying on my mind. I had a good job in a successful business yet every day when I set off for the office, somewhere in the back of my head I could hear Sonya's lamentation from the closing scene of
Uncle Vanya
.
²
And my subconscious seemed to have shuffled
Post Office
to the top of the pile along with
The Communist Manifesto
and
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
, suggesting my id urgently required my ego to look into books which might help make sense of this problem of not getting laid, figuratively speaking.

In the event, neither
Post Office
nor
The Communist Manifesto
offered much in the way of solace. That said,
Post Office
was a holiday brochure compared to the toil and hopelessness captured by
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
, the concluding instalment of this subliminal trilogy. Over the course of 600 pages, it catalogued the indignity of labour in
painstaking, crushing detail.

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
is essential to the history of the British Left, both for what it says and what it symbolises. On the wall of the house in Hastings where it was written, in a flat above a bike shop, there is a blue plaque that states: ‘Robert Noonan, 1870–1911. Author as Robert Tressell of “The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists”, The First Working-Class Novel.' It is the story of a year in the life of a group of Mugsborough (i.e. Hastings) painters and decorators and their families. They are the philanthropists of the title and their ‘philanthropy' is ironical; they practically give away their skills and strength to a system that perpetuates their oppression – ‘The Great Money Trick', as it is memorably laid out in the novel. Into their midst comes Frank Owen, a thinker and a Socialist, who tries to rouse his workmates from their unenlightened torpor. Robert Noonan was an accomplished plasterer and sign-painter, and an enthusiastic member of the Social Democratic Federation (a forerunner of the Labour Party). On Sundays, he was often to be seen preaching the word from a soapbox on the beach at St Leonard's-on-Sea.

For the Left,
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
is a totemic document. It dramatises the class conflict of
The Communist Manifesto
in a domestic setting that is immediately recognisable to millions of working people all over the world. Better than that, it was written by a real painter and decorator – the characters and situations feel authentic because they are authentic. (‘
I have invented nothing. There are no scenes or incidents in the story that I have not either witnessed myself or had conclusive evidence of
.') Furthermore, the author was a committed activist who intended his book to ‘
indicate what I believe to be the only real remedy, namely – Socialism
'. And, fifty years before such characters became commonplace on TV, it gave its readers a portrait of working-class life that was compassionate, salty and true. A TUC working group could not have come up with anything more effective.
³

However, it isn't all friendly associations and taproom banter. Tressell's depiction of human fallibility, greed and treachery is unrelenting. I was particularly fascinated by the personality of the ‘journeyman-prophet' Frank Owen, who seems to spend most of the novel in a state of perpetual rage and frustration, both at his masters' deviousness and his workmates' failure to comprehend ‘The Money Trick', in spite of his repeated efforts to explain it to them during tea-breaks. If
Post Office
is an account of the working life of a man without principle, too dazed or apathetic or self-medicated to fundamentally change anything,
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
suggests how much worse it is to be a man of principle trapped in the same system, to know with dreadful clarity what is oppressing and wasting you, but to be powerless to do anything about it, except proselytise and wriggle and rant.

We started well. As I progressed through the novel, though, fifty pages a day, I soon encountered a flaw – the book was obviously far too long. I started reading on a Tuesday; by Friday, nothing had really happened in the plot that had not already happened several times before, most of it on Tuesday. This was alarming, because
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
is a doorstop and the print was very small. At this rate, I would not be in the clear till the weekend after next. On and on and on it goes. Just like the remorseless, infinite grind of capitalism, say its admirers; but if I wanted the remorseless, infinite grind of capitalism, I could get it at work.