Open Writing

Page 18 in last Saturday’s edition of The Guardian was most unusual.

A sea of small print, filling the whole of a broadsheet page - with only four words in larger type.

I Like To Read

You couldn’t accurately call those words a headline because they were “buried’’ a third of the way down the page, surrounded by smaller print.

Was it an advert? An insidious appeal by a political party?

The only way to find out was to start reading.

“I had lunch with a fellow bookworm last week. As it happens he’s given up his lucrative career in the music industry to concentrate on writing his first novel, which I think shows more dedication than authors like Graham Greene who hedged their bets and stuck with their day job. Over the (now necessarily) frugal meal his eyes lit up as he told me of his latest bookish hobby: he was compiling a list of asthmatic characters in literature. So far he’d got Mr Bleary in Hard Times - ‘people mutht be amuthed’ - and the shark in Pinocchio (or whale depending on translation, but shark is better). Could I help with any more?…’’

And on I read, engrossed in a long, literary, name-dropping essay. Fitzgerald, Waugh, Richard Brautigan, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Jane Austen, Barbara Pym, H P Lovecraft, Philip K Dick, Edith Wharton, Emily Bronte, John Kennedy Toole, Henry James, James Thurber…

On and on, an immensely varied literary roll call.

Inevitably I found myself playing the game which the anonymous author of the essay intended I should play. — read him, read her, read that, and that, must read that…—

With a balancing inevitability. I began to list the books not mentioned in the essay: those books, borrowed from Dewsbury Library, which, in a pre-television age, lifted me out of the loneliness of only-childhood into limitless pleasure.

Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, H G Wells’s Invisible Man and warring Martians, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World…

(Surely everyone has a second slow train of thought rumbling through the stations of the brain while travelling first-class on the “express’’ of a well-written essay or novel?)

From Huxley, on to Dickens, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Proust…with interlaced helpings of C S Forrester, Paul Theroux and Wilbur Smith along my journey.

The reading of Dickens and Tolstoy will probably not add a single pound to your bank balance; but, try as you may to quell the thought, you are smugly aware of being “richer’’ than those who have not read them.

“The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it,’’ said Dr Johnson.

Thanks to hundreds of writers, some great, some not so great, there has been much more enjoying than enduring in my life.

So what was that lengthy Guardian essay all about?

Here’s how it ended.

“A journalist joined the ultimate pub quiz team with its members drawn from winners of Mastermind and Fifteen to One, as they travelled around the country. In one pub they were asked, ‘What was the name of the main character in The Catcher in the Rye?’ The other team members all knew the answer, whereas the journalist had forgotten. But none of the team had read the book, except the journalist who had read it several times. I know which member of the team I’d bag a seat next to if they visited my local.

“If you also like to read, you’ll be interested in the Review section of the Guardian every Saturday.

“But if you’ve skipped straight to the end of this piece, it’s probably not for you.’’

So it was an advert after all, the most enjoyable advert that I have ever read.

And I do regularly derive pleasure from the Guardian’s Saturday review section. Though there’s a small element of guilt in the time spent leafing through the best literary mag. It has to be subtracted from the time devoted to books.

Now if you will excuse me, I am going to spend some of my valuable time in the company of Balzac’s Cousin Pons.

Bliss!