My course, among other things, is a kind of detective investigation of the mystery of literary structures.

“How to be a Good Reader” or “Kindness to Authors” – something of that sort might serve to provide a subtitle for these various discussions of various authors, for my plan is to deal lovingly, in loving and lingering detail, with several European Masterpieces. A hundred years ago, Flaubert in a letter to his mistress made the following remark: Commel’on serait savant si l’on connaissait bien seulement cinq a six livres: “What a scholar one might be if one knew well only some half a dozen books.”

In reading, one should notice and fondle details. There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected. If one begins with a ready made generalization, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book before one has started to understand it. Nothing is more boring or more unfair to the author than starting to read, say, Madame Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie. We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know.

When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge.

Another question: Can we expect to glean information about places and times from a novel? Can anybody be so naive as to think he or she can learn anything about the past from those buxom best-sellers that are hawked around by book clubs under the heading of historical novels? But what about the masterpieces? Can we rely on Jane Austen’s picture of landowning England with baronets and landscaped grounds when all she knew was a clergyman’s parlor? And Bleak House, that fantastic romance within a fantastic London, can we call it a study of London a hundred years ago? Certainly not. And the same holds for other such novels in this series. The truth is that great novels are great fairy tales—and the novels in this series are supreme fairy tales.

Time and space, the colors of the seasons, the movements of muscles and minds, all these are for writers of genius (as far as we can guess and I trust we guess right) not traditional notions which may be borrowed from the circulating library of public truths but a series of unique surprises which master artists have learned to express in their own unique way. To minor authors is left the ornamentation of the commonplace: these do not bother about any reinventing of the world; they merely try to squeeze the best they can out of a given order of things, out of traditional patterns of fiction. The various combinations these minor authors are able to produce within these set limits may be quite amusing in a mild ephemeral way because minor readers like to recognize their own ideas in a pleasing disguise. But the real writer, the fellow who sends planets spinning and models a man asleep and eagerly tampers with the sleeper’s rib, that kind of author has no given values at his disposal: he must create them himself. The art of writing is a very futile business if it does not imply first of all the art of seeing the world as the potentiality of fiction.

The material of this world may be real enough (as far as reality goes) but does not exist at all as an accepted entirety: it is chaos, and to this chaos the author says “go!” allowing the world to flicker and to fuse. It is now recombined in its very atoms, not merely in its visible and superficial parts. The writer is the first man to mop it and to form the natural objects it contains. Those berries there are edible. That speckled creature that bolted across my path might be tamed. That lake between those trees will be called Lake Opal or, more artistically, Dishwater Lake. That mist is a mountain—and that mountain must be conquered. Up a trackless slope climbs the master artist, and at the top, on a windy ridge, whom do you think he meets? The panting and happy reader, and there they spontaneously embrace and are linked forever if the book lasts forever.

One evening at a remote provincial college through which I happened to be jogging on a protracted lecture tour, I suggested a little quiz—ten definitions of a reader, and from these ten the students had to choose four definitions that would combine to make a good reader. I have mislaid the list, but as far as I remember the definitions went something like this. Select four answers to the question what should a reader be to be a good reader:

1. The reader should belong to a book club.

2. The reader should identify himself or herself with the hero or heroine.

3. The reader should concentrate on the social-economic angle.

4. The reader should prefer a story with action and dialogue to one with none.

5. The reader should have seen the book in a movie.

6. The reader should be a budding author.

7. The reader should have imagination.

8. The reader should have memory.

9. The reader should have a dictionary.

10. The reader should have some artistic sense.

The students leaned heavily on emotional identification, action, and the social-economic or historical angle. Of course, as you have guessed, the good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense–which sense I propose to develop in myself and in others whenever I have the chance.

Incidentally, I use the word reader very loosely. Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous masterpiece of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is—a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed)—a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.
Now, this being so, we should ponder the question how does the mind work when the sullen reader is confronted by the sunny book. First, the sullen mood melts away, and for better or worse the reader enters into the spirit of the game. The effort to begin a book, especially if it is praised by people whom the young reader secretly deems to be too old-fashioned or too serious, this effort is often difficult to make; but once it is made, rewards are various and abundant.

Since the master artist used his imagination in creating his book, it is natural and fair that the consumer of a book should use his imagination too.

There are, however, at least two varieties of imagination in the reader’s case. So let us see which one of the two is the right one to use in reading a book. First, there is the comparatively lowly kind which turns for support to the simple emotions and is of a definitely personal nature. (There are various subvarieties here, in this first section of emotional reading.) A situation in a book is intensely felt because it reminds us of something that happened to us or to someone we know or knew. Or, again, a reader treasures a book mainly because it evokes a country, a landscape, a mode of living which he nostalgically recalls as part of his own past. Or, and this is the worst thing a reader can do, he identifies himself with a character in the book. This lowly variety is not the kind of imagination I would like readers to use.

So what is the authentic instrument to be used by the reader? It is impersonal imagination and artistic delight. What should be established, I think, is an artistic harmonious balance between the reader’s mind and the author’s mind. We ought to remain a little aloof and take pleasure in this aloofness while at the same time we keenly enjoy—passionately enjoy, enjoy with tears and shivers—the inner weave of a given masterpiece. To be quite objective in these matters is of course impossible. Everything that is worthwhile is to some extent subjective. For instance, you sitting there may be merely my dream, and I may be your nightmare. But what I mean is that the reader must know when and where to curb his imagination and this he does by trying to get clear the specific world the author places at his disposal. We must see things and hear things, we must visualize the rooms, the clothes, the manners of an author’s people. The color of Fanny Price’s eyes in Mansfield Park and the furnishing of her cold little room are important.

We all have different temperaments, and I can tell you right now that the best temperament for a reader to have, or to develop, is a combination of the artistic and the scientific one. The enthusiastic artist alone is apt to be too subjective in his attitude towards a book, and so a scientific coolness of judgment will temper the intuitive heat. If, however, a would-be reader is utterly devoid of passion and patience—of an artist’s passion and a scientist’s patience—he will hardly enjoy great literature.
Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him. That the poor little fellow because he lied too often was finally eaten up by a real beast is quite incidental. But here is what is important. Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature. Nature always deceives. From the simple deception of propagation to the prodigiously sophisticated illusion of protective colors in butterflies or birds, there is in Nature a marvelous system of spells and wiles. The writer of fiction only follows Nature’s lead.

Going back for a moment to our wolf-crying woodland little woolly fellow, we may put it this way: the magic of art was in the shadow of the wolf that he deliberately invented, his dream of the wolf; then the story of his tricks made a good story. When he perished at last, the story told about him acquired a good lesson in the dark around the campfire. But he was the little magician. He was the inventor.
There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three—storyteller, teacher, enchanter—but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.

To the storyteller we turn for entertainment, for mental excitement of the simplest kind, for emotional participation, for the pleasure of traveling in some remote region in space or time. A slightly different though not necessarily higher mind looks for the teacher in the writer.

Propagandist, moralist, prophet—this is the rising sequence. We may go to the teacher not only for moral education but also for direct knowledge, for simple facts. Alas, I have known people whose purpose in reading the French and Russian novelists was to learn something about life in gay Paree or in sad Russia. Finally, and above all, a great writer is always a great enchanter, and it is here that we come to the really exciting part when we try to grasp the individual magic of his genius and to study the style, the imagery, the pattern of his novels or poems.

The three facets of the great writer—magic, story, lesson—are prone to blend in one impression of unified and unique radiance, since the magic of art may be present in the very bones of the story, in the very marrow of thought. There are masterpieces of dry, limpid, organized thought which provoke in us an artistic quiver quite as strongly as a novel like Mansfield Park does or as any rich flow of Dickensian sensual imagery. It seems to me that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science. In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading. Then with a pleasure which is both sensual and intellectual we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass.

I returned, however, with unabated vigour to my work – a more arduous task than anyone can imagine, who has not felt something like the misery of being charged with the care and direction of a set of mischievous turbulent rebels, whom his utmost exertions cannot bind to their duty; while at the same time, he is responsible for their conduct to a higher power, who exacts from him what cannot be achieved without the aid of the superior’s more potent authority: which, either from indolence, or the fear of becoming unpopular with the said rebellious gang, the latter refuses to give.

I read the passage again, and then again, before putting the book to one side and beginning to look for another.

Norway was great, met up with lots of friends, drank and ate too much, swam in the gulf stream, sat through a massive storm, the usual stuff.

Good to be back, though.

OK, what does reading do for you?

I’m just completely addicted to it. Nothing will stop me doing it. I realize now with my baby, I’m breast feeding her and all I do is read all the time. My husband reminded me, “You know you have to speak to the child occasionally” – because otherwise, she might never learn to speak! She’s used to just sitting on my lap and then when I turn a page, she jerks. That will be her childhood memory: this page-turning noise. So I don’t know, it’s something that allows me not to be myself, or allows me to be in other places among other people, and I get great joy out of good sentence making. Nothing makes me happier. I usually spend the mornings reading and then I do my best to write something in the afternoon. The afternoon thing almost never happens, whereas the morning thing always happens.

Basically, the best-selling five hundred books each year will likely be published much like Little Brown publishes James Patterson, on a TV production model, or like Scholastic did Harry Potter and Doubleday Dan Brown, on a big Hollywood blockbuster model.

The rest will be published by niche social publishing communities.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.
Albert Camus

Thanks to English Pen, I gave a reading in the library at Everthorpe Prison last week.

English PEN is actively concerned for the well-being of writers who are imprisoned all over the world. The organization campaigns constantly for writers who suffer intimidation and violence and the loss of their liberty.

Everthorpe is a category C training prison which houses young convicted male prisoners. It includes a workshop complex and a gymnasium and currently holds something short of 700 offenders.

The guidelines I was given before my visit included the following:

Do not be worried about awkwardness of dealing with Offenders as it is exactly the same as visiting any group of people: a positive and direct manner and preparation.
Do not refer to the prisoner’s crime or length of sentence.
Do not bring any personal diaries or headed named paper or any sharp objects; your mobile phone will be kept at the Gate and you will be searched on way in.
Do bring a photo ID preferably a passport.
Do not give out any personal details to prisoners.
Do dress conservatively, flat shoes and loose clothes more practical for women.
Do not take anything in or out of prison without permission.
Do make every effort to be sensitive to the prison officers and their responsibilities.
Do be careful about physical contact. A warm handshake is usually acceptable and respectful.
Do listen; a listening ear is important in prison.
Do be yourself. You are dealing with people who can spot a fake in an instant.

On one level the experience was similar to a visit to a small university, my audience was comprised of men of differing ages and ethnicity and, although they were only present because they had expressed an interest, some were obviously keener than others and a minority were certainly more vocal than the rest. Most were there to listen, but others were potential writers’ and hoped to pick up something or other to aid their ambition.

I opened the session with a fairly long extract from my latest novel, Winged with Death. Although I’m a practiced and fairly good reader, I know from past experience that a long passage can put some people to sleep, or at least into near coma. But there was none of that at Everthorpe. The guys were quiet and attentive, and for the most part engaged with the content of the passage. There was no tell-tale shuffling or fidgeting, and when I came to the end of the reading there was an immediate flourish of questions.

Some of the questions were inane; there’s always someone who wants to know where you get your ideas from. But others were probing and intelligent. Someone wanted to discuss the problems associated with a first-person narrator. Another question, which elicited replies from around the room, was interested in what Scott-Fitzgerald meant by his depiction of Gatsby.

We spoke about the nature of criminality and its fascination for those on the outside, and the comments were mostly insightful and thought-through, often perceptive and original.

Although the library was like any other, and from almost any vantage point could have been in a small village or college, the building itself was dire. Stone corridors punctuated by metal double-doors every few yards, each of which had to be unlocked, opened, closed and relocked for each person passing through. A lack of windows, an overall feeling of claustrophobia and a sense of being caged. In every way, in fact, it felt like you would imagine a prison to feel.

I was told that there is a lot of talent in prison which is untapped on both sides of the cells. And I suppose that that was my over-riding experience. It was a privilege to be allowed to share in that for a short time.

Proposed cover image for the audio version of Winged with Death

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The full cover will look something like this: Winged with Death Cover.

Unabridged audiobook by Isis Audio Books, read by Michael Tudor Barnes, who, after reading Classics at London University, trained at RADA and for five years was a member of the National Theatre Company. He also worked with the RSC, played leading roles both home and abroad and has over 600 radio broadcasts to his credit. Television work includes The Bill and Softly, Softly and he played Willy Roper in EastEnders.

Publication details when available.

For a little while when Walter Henderson was nine years old he thought falling dead was the very zenith of romance, and so did a number of his friends. Having found that the only truly rewarding part of any cops-and-robbers game was the moment when you pretended to be shot, clutched your heart, dropped your pistol and crumpled to the earth, they soon dispensed with the rest of it – the tiresome business of choosing up sides and sneaking around – and refined the game to its essence. It became a matter of individual performance, almost an art. One of them at a time would run dramatically along the crest of a hill, and at a given point the ambush would occur: a simultaneous jerking of aimed toy pistols and a chorus of those staccato throaty sounds – a kind of hoarse-whispered “Pk-k-ew! Pk-k-ew!” with which little boys simulate the noise of gunfire. Then the performer would stop, turn, stand poised for a moment in graceful agony, pitch over and fall down the hill in a whirl of arms and legs and a splendid cloud of dust, and finally sprawl flat at the bottom, a rumpled corpse. When he got up and brushed off his clothes, the others would criticize his form (“Pretty good,” or “Too stiff,” or “Didn’t look natural”), and then it would be the next player’s turn. That was all there was to the game, but Walter Henderson loved it. He was a slight, poorly coordinated boy, and this was the only thing even faintly like a sport at which he excelled. Nobody could match the abandon with which he flung his limp body down the hill, and he revelled in the small acclaim it won him. Eventually the others grew bored with the game, after some older boys had laughed at them. Walter turned reluctantly to more wholesome forms of play, and soon he had forgotten about it. But he had occasion to remember it, vividly, one May afternoon nearly twenty-five years later in a Lexington Avenue office building, while he sat at his desk pretending to work and waiting to be fired.

Richard Yates never wrote anything as fine as Gatsby, but then again, he was more consistent than Scott-Fitzgerald, and in several of his novels and stories he came within a whisker of eclipsing America’s finest exponent of modernist fiction. His subject was always the American Dream and its casualties, the continuing inability of his twentieth century characters to truly live together.

Revolutionary Road is recognised as one of the greatest novels of urban America. The Easter Parade, which chronicles the lives of two sisters searching for happiness in different pockets of the ‘dream’ is always touching, subtle and poignant, brave and beautiful and true. In Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, Yates gives us exactly that, eleven stories, each of them dealing with the loneliness of an individual. The self-destructive Vincent Sabella, who had spent most of his life in some kind of orphanage. Sergeant Reece, the tyrannical Tennessean soldier who insists on doing his job. And Bob Prentice, the mediocre writer who sees himself as Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott-Fitzgerald, but who in reality is not much good at anything. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness is not Dubliners, but each of the stories is a gem, giving us insight into the emptiness of our own lives and people close to us and those we love. Richard Yates spares us nothing. He is a brave and truthful writer and in order to stay with him as a reader, you have to be prepared for the worst.