The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life. Andy Miller

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Kathleen Noonan’s bed. Richards had been declared bankrupt in 1905 and was certainly no well-heeled Bloomsbury toff; and his cuts were intended to make the story more palatable to readers of popular working-class sagas by the likes of Somerset Maugham or Arnold Bennett, while bringing the book down to a length at which Richards could afford to publish it. The first edition cost a pricey six shillings because, in the words of the writer Travis Elborough, ‘Richards understood that the novel’s authenticity could enhance its cachet amongst reviewers, perhaps especially with the more affluent radicals who would, initially at least, be its main purchasers.’ And when, in 1918, Richards produced the yet-shorter second printing for a shilling, it was partly in response to the pleas of a Glasgow bookseller, whose potential customers included workers at the nearby Clydeside shipyard, an early home of trade union agitation.

      In other words, from the very beginning, as a publisher Grant Richards did his utmost, within the system, to permit some version of Tressell’s text to reach the widest possible readership. No one else would take the risk. He edited it not because he wished to suppress its message of working-class unity but because he sought to disseminate it – and because the book needed an edit. To reach the audience it deserved, from drawing room to factory floor, the novel was too long and repetitive; owing to the well-meaning efforts of those on the Left, arguably it remains so.

      I am not saying one of these accounts is correct and the other incorrect. There is more than one way to look at history, as there is more than one way to interpret a book. As a writer and a liberal I am sentimentally inclined towards the former explanation; I respect the author’s conception of his own work. But a reading of events which follows the money – philosophical rather than dogmatic Marxism – would conclude that the novel owes its national treasure status to the shrewd stewardship of Grant Richards. For forty years, the text which was passed from hand to hand, which spread by word of mouth in mills and workshops and barracks, which was subsequently circulated as agitprop by the nascent British Left, often in tandem with The Communist Manifesto, was Richards’ dramatically shortened version. Only once its place in the hearts of the British public was thus assured could Lawrence & Wishart afford to take the liberty of introducing the much lengthier, purer rendition which is on sale in bookshops today.

      The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists continues to be treasured, regularly making appearances in polls of best-loved British novels. But when we read the book of that title today, we are essentially reading a restored, unedited first draft; and the qualities that still endear it to us – its humour, its passion, its social(ist) conscience – remain so inimitable that they overcome the inevitable drag caused by its size and Tressell’s reluctance to tell his story straightforwardly. I finished it, and admired it, but I felt it would not have made much difference had I started somewhere in the middle, or read my daily fifty pages from wherever the book happened to fall open. Perhaps one day someone might edit it properly – but then perhaps it would lose its power.

      At this point, I should declare an interest. If I seem to be overly concerned with the minutiae of the publishing process it is because I am, in my own way, a scoundrel like Grant Richards. If I am taking this matter of the manuscript rather personally, then I have to confess that it is personal. You may, or may not, know me as the author of two other books, but I’m afraid this is not a case of brotherly solicitude towards a fellow scribbler. If only.

      At the time I was reading The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, and working my way through the List of Betterment, I had a day job, like many writers do. It was this day job which was causing me such anguish and which had thrust these books to front of mind. Was I a plasterer? I was not. A postman? No. My hands were soft and lily-white; the only bags I carried were the ones underneath my eyes. A journalist, then? No.

      I was an editor of books. Several times a week, I commuted to a publishing house in London and sat amidst many piles of paper, more and more each day, and tried to work out which were good and which were bad, which deserved to be published and which consigned to oblivion, which could be saved by judicious editing and which were fit only to be sent to the recycling depot to make yet more manuscripts. I am a writer. Every day, for money, I held the destinies of other writers in my hands. It was a chronic bout of double alienation.

      ‘The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognizes estrangement as its own power and has in it the semblance of a human existence. The class of the proletariat feels annihilated, this means that they cease to exist in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence.’

      Oh Fred, oh Karl. If only it were that simple.

       Book Six

      The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch

      (Supplementary Book One – Cooking with Pomiane by Edouard de Pomiane)

      ‘I was utterly horrified in the kitchen this morning to see what I took to be a grotesquely huge fat fleshy spider emerging from the larder. It turned out to be a most engaging toad.’

       The Sea, The Sea

      ‘There is no doubt that people in England are becoming much more adventurous in their eating habits, and snails appear quite tame compared with the bumble bees, grasshoppers and chocolate-covered ants which I believe are selling well at some of the big stores.’

       Cooking with Pomiane

      How do you go about becoming a writer? I had paper and pencils. I had a notebook for ideas. I had an Amstrad PCW 9512 word processor. But I did not know anyone who made a living from their writing and I did not know how you went from sitting in front of a blank screen to sipping Bellinis with Jeanette Winterson. So, for rather longer than planned, I got a job in a bookshop. I signed up for six months and stayed for five years.

      To be precise, it was a chain of bookshops. During my time, I worked in three different branches, the last of which was an elegant superstore in a posh quarter of West London. After a couple of years there, I was allowed to run the fiction section on the ground floor, a responsibility I loved. It was a spectacular sight, shelf after shelf of new paperbacks; prize-winners, potboilers, whodunits, whydunits and all points in-between. The manager of the shop took the view that we were the chain’s London flagship store – the managers of the Hampstead and Charing Cross Road stores told their staff the same thing – and therefore we had to offer what he called ‘perfect stock’. ‘Perfect stock’ meant never running out of anything. Woe betide you if, on recommending Robertson Davies to a customer, he went to the shelf and discovered a space where, say, The Lyre of Orpheus should have been. In this atmosphere of edgy competitiveness, good retail sense often took a back seat to hawk-eyed completism. So when the previous incumbent suffered a nervous breakdown and went on semi-permanent sick leave, I had been the obvious candidate to succeed him.

      Every day, I would patrol the fiction bays, roaming up and down with a publishers’ stocklist, hunting out the telltale gaps. In the process, I inadvertently absorbed the names of many authors of whom I had never heard before. I also became familiar with the more obscure corners of the well-known writers’ back catalogue. So, for instance, Muriel Spark became not just the author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, but also The Public Image, The Takeover and Territorial Rights. I quickly came to know the works of Miss Read, Hubert Selby Jr and Lisa St Aubin de Téran, though only by sight, spine-out. It was here and not at university that I learned all you really needed to appear indisputably bookish, i.e. titles and names. The shop was a finishing school for bullshitters.

      In the never-ending pursuit of ‘perfect stock’, СКАЧАТЬ