Posted on by Vincent Hanley · 3 Comments

My Favourite Books

Just a flavour of what’s on the shelves!

I’ve always been fascinated by books, although I wouldn’t consider myself a good reader. I’m definitely not a consistent reader, and my iPad constantly berates me for not meeting my daily targets.

When Kate and I began to settle into our new home in Knockaderry, we gradually undertook a series of necessary improvements. The house was a mess, and we often said that there was so much wrong with it that it was no wonder no one else wanted to buy it! In time, we added two bedrooms and a new bathroom, and we converted what had been the second bedroom in the old house into a study. The study soon filled up with books; many were prescribed texts from school.

One of our early purchases was Encyclopaedia Britannica, and we used it as a piece of furniture and a kind of 1980s status symbol for the sitting room rather than as a reference library. It’s still there on the top shelf, out of reach and neglected! This was later added to with the acquisition of World Book Encyclopaedia and Childcraft. When the kids were young, one of Kate’s many jobs outside the home was as an agent for World Book. In my hazy recollection, both sets were very rarely referred to and have remained for years untouched by human hand. They were nearly as neglected as the copy of The Jerusalem Bible, which I purchased in 1982!

My study is my favourite room in our home – book-lined and snug with its one window looking out upon wind-ravaged, leggy Lawson Cypress. One of my secret joys was seeing Don begin to assemble an alternative library and reading list of epic proportions.  And, today, pride of place goes to the remnants of Don’s library, who is a far more serious reader than I am. His adolescent infatuation with Hemingway is still well represented, as are other examples of his voracious and enquiring mind.

I had earlier figured out when I came to stay with my Aunty Meg in September 1977 that the way to find out what was best to read was to locate a great reader and follow in his or her footsteps and Meg fulfilled that role for me and, of course I quickly realised that there are surprisingly very few great readers – they are in fact as rare as giant pandas!

I think I have mentioned earlier that my love of books began in earnest in Fifth Class in Primary school in Glenroe. It was a great honour for me to have been appointed school librarian, and the school library, even though it consisted of a single pine press in the corner of the room, was magical. What mattered was that the press was new and the books were new and had that glorious, magical new-book smell. I felt I had to lead by example, so my first two books borrowed – and read – were Old Celtic Romances by P.W. Joyce and Ben-Hur by Lew Wallace (first published in 1880!).  In that pre-television age, I was also fascinated by comics that recounted the exploits of Roy of the Rovers and other daredevil heroes. Looking back now, there was much racist content in those black-and-white comics. The anti-German content in the war stories was criminal, and I began to put a rudimentary German vocabulary together. Words like Achtung! Achtung!, Himmel, etc., were common as the Germans were always defeated and butchered from machine gun nests in the hills. American comics were no less racist, and the indigenous Red Indian population were depicted as savage, uneducated, and primitive in their treatment of the swashbuckling cowboys and their women and children. Those comics were like gold dust, and we swapped them continuously with our friends.

Shortly after this, I graduated to novels, and I remember reading hundreds of Biggles books, novels written by Capt. W. E. Johns, who told of the wartime exploits of Biggles flying mission after mission with his beloved Royal Air Force.  Biggles had an unusually lengthy career, flying a number of aircraft representative of the history of British military aviation, from Sopwith Camels during the First World War, Hawker Hurricanes and Supermarine Spitfires in the Second World War, right up to the Hawker Hunter jet fighter in a post-World War II adventure. Enid Blyton was also very popular, and I didn’t consider it beneath me to read her Famous Five books or her Secret Seven stories of adventure and mystery in merry old middle-class England of the ‘50s.

My reading in secondary school was largely determined by prescribed texts, and generally those were dreadful, musty, and dusty, and they relied almost totally on the ancient English classics. Most of the poets were dead, and all the prose writers were long gone to their stuffy library in the sky.  University wasn’t much better: in UCC it was Beowulf, Sir Gawain, Chaucer, Spencer, Shakespeare, Donne. Yeats and Kavanagh were mentioned in passing, and we were lucky in the 70s to have a few rebels like John Montague to counterbalance the primness and the staidness of Professor Seán Lucy and Sr. Una Nelly. As far as I could see, UCC and its English Department were firmly rooted in the past. The notion was prevalent then that all good literature was in the past, so we had to find Hemingway, Steinbeck, Salinger, McGahern, Daniel Corkery, Séan Ó Faoláin, Liam O’Flaherty, and Joyce for ourselves! I believe the twentieth century began in UCC around 1980!

Ironically, when I got my first teaching job at St. Ita’s Secondary School in Newcastle West, the school was located in an old Carnegie Library – one of the myriad such libraries dotted throughout West Limerick. So, I taught in ‘The Library’ for 15 years and enjoyed every single minute of it. Needless to say, there wasn’t much spare time for reading, but I tried valiantly to keep up with my main mentor at the time, my Aunty Meg.  I stayed with Meg, Jack, Mary and Pat for the two years 1977 and ‘78. She treated me like her fifth son, much to my own mother’s chagrin! She gave me four precious gifts. She instructed me in the intricacies of 45, that distinctly Irish card game; she challenged me regularly to improve my Scrabble skills; she introduced me to the delights of 16-ounce bags of Cherry Brandy flavoured pipe tobacco from America; and she provided me with an endless supply of American blockbuster novels which she picked up on her frequent visits to New York where she went to visit her son, Michael.

Under her mentorship, I read Leon Uris when no one else had heard of him. I was the second person in Knockaderry to read all those bestselling novels, like Exodus, Mila 18, Battle Cry, Topaz, and Armageddon.  We also took great interest when he ventured into Irish politics with his novel Trinity (1976) and its sequel Redemption (1995).  As a wedding present in 1979, she presented me with Robert Ludlum’s The Matarese Circle, and during the ‘80s, each time she visited Mike, she brought me back the latest of the Bourne trilogy: The Bourne Identity (1980), The Bourne Supremacy (1986) and The Bourne Ultimatum (1990). Twenty years later, Matt Damon made Jason Bourne famous on the big screen, and I was able to say that Meg and I knew every twist and turn of those convoluted plots. She also introduced me to Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Fools Die and The Sicilian. She also loved the novels of former Champion Jockey, Dick Francis, whose novels were set in the murky underworld that was horse racing, which was centred in and around Newmarket.

I must say that the greatest development in my career as an English teacher was the introduction of the new Leaving Cert English syllabus around 2000. It breathed new life into a language subject that, up to then, was nearly as dead and moribund as Latin. Suddenly, the subject came to life. Now students were studying modern, living writers, and because of the emergence of Irish writing, many of the novels and plays were by Irish writers like Donal Ryan, Sebastian Barry, Joseph O’Connor, Claire Keegan, Emma Donoghue, Brian Friel and John B. Keane. It was a pleasure to teach poetry, which was relevant and vibrant and Irish: poets like Heaney, Mahon, Longley,  Kavanagh, Yeats, Boland, Paula Meehan, and Montague were studied avidly.

Here, I have to mention my own favourite book of all time. That accolade goes to Reading in the Dark by Seamus Deane – definitely the best book never to win The Booker! This incredibly well-crafted novel is set in Derry over 16 years, from 1945 to 1961. The book presents a child’s view of the tensions in the city during that time. Throughout the book, we are reminded of the conflict that surrounds the narrator.  As a teacher, I got great satisfaction in revealing and solving the mystery and compiling the jigsaw with my many Leaving Cert students when it made its way onto the Higher Level English syllabus in the early 2000s. Deane parallels the personal story at the heart of the novel with the political developments that are taking place in his native Derry. The secrets and mistaken beliefs that divide a family are symbolic of the secrets and divisions that divide a whole people. The author is not a detached observer: the gap between Seamus Deane and the narrator is so narrow as to be almost indistinguishable. The reader is invited to sympathise with the boy in the unique position he finds himself in. I would encourage you, if you can find a copy, to put it on your reading list – you will then be expected to do your fair share of ‘reading in the dark’ also!

If you’d like to explore it further, just click on the link in red.  Better still, find it in a second-hand bookstore and read the novel first.  See if you agree with me!  My favourite Novel of all Time: Reading in the Dark by Seamus Deane

Today, when I travel to Glenroe or Sandymount or beyond, I always have with me in my Roy Cropper black bag my myriad pills and potions and an ever-changing selection of my favourite writers and poets. In the black bag at present, I have Seamus Heaney’s 100 Poems, which was a treasured gift from my daughter Mary, Hartnett’s Collected Poems, and his beautiful 1987 collection, A Necklace of Wrens, along with Michael Dooley’s In Spring We Turned to Water, and Dean Browne’s amazing first collection, After Party.

Reading allows you to borrow someone else’s brain and have a conversation with the most consequential minds in history. However, it’s a learned skill and requires discipline, and you have to set aside time for it. Keep your phone in another room. Always carry a book with you and steal 5-10 minute intervals when you can and avoid audiobooks like the plague!  Nothing beats having an actual book in your hands – Kindle, the iPad and other virtual books don’t really count – except in emergencies.  Keep as many physical copies (trophies) surrounding you as possible, especially if they are as beautifully produced as Faber and Faber and Picador books.  (Faber has done much to make Claire Keegan’s novellas collector’s items; they are so exquisitely produced).  The aim is to gradually amass a treasured library over time.  These aren’t just books, but tangible links to the very best of literature, history and culture, offering the reader authentic sources beyond the internet’s scattered AI-flawed information.

Some of my favourite books – and memories!
Posted on by Vincent Hanley

Stoner by John Williams – A Belated Review

 

51nu26tHj-L._SX323_BO1,204,203,200_

Better late than never I suppose!  But then it seems I’m in good company!  My son suggested Stoner as part of my required reading on a recent week of rest and relaxation, good food and daily rambles by the sea.  His only comments were that it was achingly sad and that it came with a glowing imprimatur from John McGahern.  He was right – it is a stunning page-turner of a book, depicting the life, and indeed the death, of William Stoner, who lived his life in the quad and in the rooms and classrooms adjacent to Jesse Hall in Columbia University, Missouri.  Stoner’s time at the fledgling University, as student and as instructor and finally professor, spans a half century from 1914 and the outbreak of the Great War until the mid-nineteen fifties when another war, the Korean War, threatens to thin the ranks in Columbia’s hallowed halls for a third time in the one century.

John Williams’ novel is a deceptive masterpiece of writing – he manages by inference and sustained inner dialogue and by being confessional to evoke an era and to allow us close as he suffers the slings and arrows of a life which has been enriched by the study of literature.  His lack of confidence in his own ability as a teacher, his constant self-doubt and soul-searching in his own ability, struck a resonant chord with me – the hours of preparation, the repetition of courses, the grading of tests, the hours of mentoring and supervising post grads as they finalise their dissertations and theses, all necessary but removing him from his own specialisation, Renaissance Literature.

William Stoner is an unglamorous, hardworking academic who marries badly, is estranged from his child, toils manfully teaching sophomores and freshmen, year in year out, as his parents before him toiled in the arid, unproductive soil of their Missouri farmholding. Then he dies and is forgotten: a failure, an anti-hero.

A feature of the novel for me was the seamless continuity, the effortless move from one life period to the next as the story unfolds. We pass from Great War to The Roaring Twenties to the Wall Street Crash to Depression to World War as the backdrop to a humdrum life lived well.  Stoner’s life is ordinary, he doesn’t achieve a great deal, nor is he remembered often by his students or colleagues. Stoner isn’t a novel about a man achieving great heights or altering the world, it’s far more personal than that. The novel examines the quiet moments of a person’s life, their small victories and crushing defeats. A life may seem unremarkable on paper, but look a little closer and you will always find hidden depths. John Williams is, in effect, exploring the concept of heroism in twentieth century America.

As we read we find ourselves, then, to use Heaney’s phrase, ‘gleaning the unsaid off the palpable’ as the story unfolds, or to use Stoner’s phrase, we become aware of, “the epiphany of knowing something through words that could not be put in words.” I can only vouch for the fact that there are moments in its reading when the hairs on the nape of my neck stood on edge and I was transported to glimpse eternity through the darkening view from an office window on a winter’s evening as the shades of night come down.

 The novel’s values seem old-fashioned, and William Stoner is cocooned within the university milieu, cloistered would probably be a better description.  He finds his calling and labours conscientiously with little acclaim or recognition.  There are echoes of C.S. Lewis’s work in Oxford here and I also find echoes of Steinbeck and Salinger in John Williams’s depiction of a world view which no longer exists but is attractive for its simplicity and old world charm.

At times in my reading, I was left with the nagging suspicion that the novel is autobiographical and depicts and mirrors Williams’s own academic odyssey. I don’t know enough about John Williams’s life to support or refute this theory but if true his wife, his ‘Edith’, must be glad that the novel has remained obscure and neglected!  It definitely is a paean to his idea of a university and he extols the virtues of university life, a life sharply juxtaposed with the shortcomings and periodic savagery of the world outside the hallowed halls. I am also reminded of Heaney’s beautiful ‘Villanelle for an Anniversary’, commissioned for the three-hundredth anniversary of Harvard University, which evokes the pioneering work of the founder of that great university:

A spirit moved. John Harvard walked the yard,

The atom lay unsplit, the west unwon,

The books stood open and the gates unbarred.

The novel is a kind of masterclass in creative writing.  At times it is subtle and at other times – in its structure, for example – it can be almost brutal, cruelly juxtaposing characters, indeed at times tending to caricature rather than characterise.   For me, the craftsmanship is reminiscent of George Eliot or Dickens.  The juxtaposition of the two women in Willaim Stoner’s life is a very good example of this.  There are no shades of grey here!  Edith and Katherine Driscoll are cruelly juxtaposed as in a melodrama. Edith, has been raised in an emotional vacuum, taught only useless ornamental skills, sheltered as wholly as possible from reality, and “her moral training … was negative in nature, prohibitive in intent, and almost entirely sexual” – effectively cultivated to become a brittle, conniving hysteric. Also, to add to the unsubtlety of the novel’s structure, two of Stoner’s antagonists are disfigured and maimed: Hollis Lomax, Stoner’s bête noir and academic adversary and Lomax’s protégé, Charles Walker.

Stoner isn’t an easy read – not because it’s dense or abstruse but because, as I’ve mentioned earlier, it’s so painful and achingly sad. In a vengeful act, Stoner’s wife, Edith, undertakes a deliberate campaign to separate him from his daughter, the one person he truly loves. Later on, after his daughter has been lost to him, Stoner finds real love again with a young student, Katherine Driscoll, his intellectual equal – and once again an enemy, seeing his happiness, sets out to take it from him. At the university, his superior, Hollis Lomax, contrives to make his teaching life a hell, a horrendous endurance test, a battle of wills.  Williams contrives to forcibly deprive his hero of happiness in his marriage, his daughter, his lover, even his vocation. Here again, there are echoes of Silas Marner and it all feels grindingly inevitable, like the notion of the gods in Tennyson’s ‘Lotus Eaters’ or a Greek tragedy.

Part of the novel’s greatness is that it sees life whole and as it is, without delusion yet without despair. The confessional inner dialogue is sustained and Stoner realises at the last that he found what he sought at the university not in books but in his love and study of them. His life has not been in vain, he has had a Pauline conversion and has discovered the joys of literature and he has also loved and lost in his relationships with his parents, his wife, Edith, his daughter, Grace, and his lover, Katherine. The book’s conclusion, such as it is, is that there is nothing better in this life. The line, “It hardly mattered to him that the book was forgotten and served no use; and the question of its worth at any time seemed almost trivial,” in reference to his own published text on Renaissance Literature, could be seen as the novel’s own epitaph. As he slips quietly towards oblivion he gives us one of the most beautiful sentences in the novel, as his book falls from lifeless fingers into silence:

“The fingers loosened, and the book they had held moved slowly and then swiftly across his still body and fell into the silence of the room.”

 Every word is perfect.

**************

After finishing Stoner, my son thrust the Vintage copy into my hands and told me I just had to read it straight away.  Now, days later having finished it myself, I sit here at my laptop desperately trying to find the right words to describe how John Williams’ novel Stoner has affected me.  I’m speechless, I’m in awe,  I’m wide awake, and all I know for sure is that my head is buzzing way too much for me to get to sleep.

Stoner-Quote