My parents were great lovers of books. My mother read to me from an early age and, by the time I got to school I was, for my age, a pretty accomplished reader. At the age of eight or nine my father gave me a copy of Dickens's Pickwick Papers as a birthday present. I dutifully read it. I was, of course, impressed by Dickens's literary genius, as opposed to comic genius, but I can't say I 'got' the book. I didn't get it until I got round to re-reading it about age forty, and that time I was bursting into uproarious laughter about every second page. I had a similar experience with Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby, which I first read when I was about twenty. I simply got extremely annoyed and bored by the character of Nicholas Nickleby'ss mother, probably because in some was she cut too close to the bone in her resemblance to my much unlamented stepmother.
The next Dickens book my father bought me, the Christmas after he'd got me Pickwick, was Great Expectations. It took me almost a month to go back to the book after I'd read the first chapter. In my boyish imagination I was too scared to go further. And then, Uncle Pumblechook annoyed me. I simply thought he was a very nasty man. (Which he was.)
About this time my father started taking me to a wonderful second-hand bookshop in Castlereagh Street in Sydney - Greenwoods I think it was called. He bought books like John Halifax, Gentleman, the poetry of Mrs. Hemans - The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck' - Thomas Moore, the Irish poet, (I was brought up on stories from Ireland), Henry Lawson's short stories, the poetry of Paterson and Lawson, (Dorothea Mackellar I was discovering at school), and so on.
At age ten a friend of the family bought me the complete works of Shakespeare, a huge book with a red cover and a giant woodcut of Shakespeare as the frontispiece. I'm sure many grown-up back then hadn't read Shakespeare from cover to cover. I did. The Tempest was okay, parts 1, 2, and 3 of Henry VI were enthralling, especially Jack Cade and the Maid of Orleans, but then I discovered that Shakespearian play of blood, death, mutilation and rape that surely must have been the secret delight of many a pubescent boy in that unenlightened era, Titus Andronicus. Then Pericles, Prince of Tyre, with its salacious opening scenes. I spent hours in the garage learning speeches from Julius Caesar, having been inspired by James Mason in the old MGM black and white movie. And Henry V's speech before the battle of Agincourt. (I tried to sound like Laurence Olivier.) I stumped around distorting my cerebral palsy, dragging my foot along the garage concrete floor, pretending I was Richard III. I was hooked for life.
In those days there were Classic Comics, which I devoured with avidity. (I particularly remember a very thick comic about Robin Hood, and being terrified by the comic version of R. H. Dana's Two Years Before the Mast.) But it wasn't long before I graduated to the books themselves. I struggled through Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and badgered my father for money to buy every work by Robert Lewis Stevenson I could find. He refused the money, but took me down to the local library and signed me up as a member. Of course, I loved Kidnapped and Treasure Island, but the two Stevenson books that made the greatest impression on me were The Master of Ballantrae (which almost gave me nightmares) and a collection of short stories, The New Arabian Nights. I can recall the first story in the book was particularly scary, about, I think, some sort of devilish poker game. Sadly, I've never come across the book since.
Enough of childhood reading. I need to get a little bit biographical here. I was brought up in a very strict anti-Communist Catholic family, with horror tales of the Stalinist gulag. By age 15 I'd decided I wanted to find out more about these ice-bound prison camps for myself, so I trudged off to the local library to see what I could find. There was this book about a writer who had spent time in a prison camp. His name was Dostoevsky and the book was Crime and Punishment. I had absolutely no idea what I was letting myself in for, but I got it out rather eagerly. I remember the librarian giving me a very weird look as I booked the book out. There are some, very few books, that hit you in the guts. They take a little of your soul with them. The Master of Ballantrae was one. Crime and Punishment is another. It was the first truly adult book that I had read. I couldn't turn the pages quick enough. It left me emotionally fraught. I was shaking at the end of it, utterly overcome by its power. I had discovered the glory of reading, that thing you don't get with every book, but when you do get it, you know why books are written. As an adult I would experience it with other books, and I will post about those experiences here some time in the future. But Crime and Punishment was the first.
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