Books Do Furnish A Mind, Part II
by Ibn Warraq (May 2015)
—“In this Tibullus I found pencilled on the last page: “Perlegi, Oct. 4, 1792.” Who was that possessor of the book, nearly a hundred years ago? There is no other inscription. I like to imagine some poor scholar, poor and eager as I myself, who bought the volume with drops of his blood, and enjoyed the reading of it even as I did. How much that was I could not easily say. Gentle-hearted Tibullus!—of whom there remains to us a poet’s portrait more delightful, I think, than anything of the kind in Roman literature.
“An tacitum silvas inter reptare salubres,
Curantem quidquid dignum sapiente bonoque est? ” Horace Letter to Tibullus
Or dost thou gravely walk the healthy wood,
Considering what befits the wise and good? Translated by Thomas Creech [1659-1700]
—what was his name ?—the bookseller who had been, I believe, a Catholic priest, and still had a certain priestly dignity about him. He took the volume, opened it, mused for a moment, then, with a glance at me, said, as if thinking aloud: “Yes, I wish I had time to read it.”
—George Gissing. The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. 1903
I have several mitigating facts, and one overriding reason, to explain the paucity of my collection. But before I get to those facts and that one reason I should begin with my early passion for reading, and buying books. I do not remember there being many books in our smallish apartment in Karachi, Pakistan where I grew up. I think my father had a few books in Gujarati and an enormous illustrated English dictionary that he would proudly show his friends by placing it on his bed with pillows on the left and right side, so that the pillows cradled the huge tome when opened. My father was well-read—he often translated European works into Gujarati: Balzac, for example. But I have no idea how he acquired his literary tastes and knowledge, and what happened to all his books.
There were a few other sources of reading material for me and my brother, who was a year older. Newspapers in Karachi in the 1950s carried cartoon strips of Tarzan, Mandrake the Magician and The Phantom, preserving the English captions but including a translation into Urdu and Gujarati. Many of my father’s friends in Karachi were Gujarati language journalists with whom he spent hours and hours. (The newspaper was very probably the Gujurati Daily Millat.)
My brother and I were happy to accompany my father on his very late night visits to the newspaper offices, for there we could read the following day’s episodes, all ready to go to the printers.
I am not sure which of the early Tarzan artists appeared in the Gujarati dailies of 1950s Karachi but I do remember Tarzan’s costume being polka-dotted.
Tarzan began appearing as a comic strip as early as 1929 drawn by Hal Foster. By 1931 Rex Maxon’s Tarzan artwork was appearing in color Sunday strips, with Hal Foster and Burne Hogarth also contributing later on. So I suspect that the artist we enjoyed was one of these illustrious pioneers of Tarzan comic strips and comics.
[1]. Mandrake the Magician began as a daily newspaper strip in 1934. The Phantom started in 1936, followed by a color Sunday strip in 1939, and astonishingly both continue to this day in 2015. Mandrake’s best friend is Lothar, an African prince of the Seven Nations, whom he treats as an equal, and surely the first African superhero. Mandrake and The Phantom were at first written and drawn by Falk but the art work was later taken over by Ray Moore, Phil Davis and Paul Ryan, among others.
*****
“If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying.” John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, Lecture I, Sesame, Of King’s Treasuries, 1865
—‘BB’ wrote of the countryside in and around the village of Lamport, Northamptonshire passionately and knowledgeably. ‘BB’ studied art in Paris, and taught art at Rugby school for seventeen years, and was able to illustrate his own books, and later those of other writers: woodcuts, paintings and watercolors. We were read to extracts from Wild Lone (life of a fox), The Idle Countryman (“complete record of a year in the heart of the country…”), and The Little Grey Men (“the epic adventure of the brothers Dodder, Baldmoney, Sneezewort and Cloudberry, the last four gnomes in England”). But the story that seems to have made the deepest impression on me was Manka, The Sky Gipsy: The Story of a Wild Goose, largely because of a character called “Foxy” Fordham, who was “the most skilful poacher in the district” [of the Wash, northern East Anglia].
Going to school in rural Worcestershire, and then spending my school holidays in the Norfolk countryside meant I was naturally disposed to stories that reflected life in spinneys, woods, meadows, meres and brooks, particularly their natural history. Thus the combined influence of ‘BB’ and dreams of an English Arcadia led me on the inexorable path to classics, such as Gilbert White’s The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789), and especially the three enduring favourites Tarka the Otter,[6] Salar the Salmon, and the Peregrine Saga, by Henry Williamson, works that can still be read with pleasure for their vivid evocation of rural life: plants, trees, streams and wildlife. It so happens that many of Williamson’s books of the countryside were illustrated by someone who became one of my heroes, Charles F. Tuniciffe [1901-1979]. I was an avid bird watcher, and the sketches of British birds by Tunicliffe were my favourites.
*****
“Build yourself a book-nest to forget the world without.” Abraham Cowley [1618 – 1667].
In 1986, my wife and I won a trip to India, and we spent three weeks in Delhi, Agra, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, and Bombay. I left, very graciously, all the purchases to my wife who bought $600 worth of clothes and pots and pans. At the last moment, the night before we took the plane back to Paris, I made just one purchase, a book, Salim Ali’s beautifully written autobiography The Fall of a Sparrow, published by Oxford University Press in 1985. Salim Moizuddin Abdul Ali [1896 – 1987] was an Indian ornithologist of international reputation, and author of another elegantly written book, which I was able to afford, and bought a few years later, The Book of Indian Birds, 1941. His magnum opus was, however, the unaffordable ten-volume Handbook of the Birds of India and Pakistan written with Dillon Ripley. Salim Ali was also responsible for persuading the Indian Government to create the Bharatpur bird sanctuary (Keoladeo National Park), and also to finance the Bombay Natural History Society.
[7]
One of the most fascinating details to emerge out of this history is that the resultant books were often illustrated by Indian artists, with the scientific text provided by the British officers. For example, Major General Thomas Hardwicke [1755-1835] was stationed in India for more than 14 years, beginning in 1777, and a pioneer in the exploration of India. He realised that it would be easier to have paintings of the birds he had collected than to have them all stuffed, and the result was a collection of more than 4500 paintings by local artists. These paintings were used later in J.E. Gray’s Illustrations of Indian Zoology (1830-1834). Other pioneers include Colonel William Henry Sykes [1790-1872], and Colonel Samuel Richard Tickell [1811-1875]. One of the most influential early works was published by Thomas Claverhill Jerdon (1811-1872), who came to India as a surgeon for the East India Company in 1835. He quickly collected and later studied, many birds, publishing many works on Indian avifauna in which he discusses 420 species. As Chansigaud concludes, “After having published the four parts of Illustrations of Indian Ornithology from 1843 to 1847, he published a major work, The Birds of India, from 1862 to 1864. This work, in which more than 1,000 species were described, would be reprinted 12 times. Jerdon was not just a desginator of species, he took it upon himself, as much as possible, to describe the habits of the birds and mammals that he studied.”[8]
[9] Salim Ali called Hume the father of Indian Ornithology, for having put that discipline on a scientific footing.
In 1872 Hume began publishing Stray Feathers, A Journal of Ornithology for India and Its Dependencies (which ran to eleven volumes, 1872-1888), and was the author of My scrap book: or rough notes on Indian zoology and ornithology (1869) The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds (1883), and Game Birds of India, Burma and Ceylon (1879).
“There was an Old man of Dumbree,
Who taught little Owls to drink Tea,
For he said, ‘To eat mice
Is not proper or nice’,
That amiable Man of Dumbree.”
[12] or Audobon, for grace of design, perspective, or anatomical accuracy. I am so particularly pleased with these, that I should feel much gratified by possessing a duplicate copy of each. They will then be framed, as fit companions in my drawing rooms to hang by the side of a pair by my friend Audobon.”[13]
Again I was able to purchase a modern reprint of this work which, however, only reproduced some of his famous illustrations, Edward Lear, The Family of Parrots (Portland, OR: Pomegranate Publishers 1997), and there were further illustrations in Susan Hyman’s Edward Lear’s Birds.[14] (Stamford, CT: Longmeadow Press, 1989).
Lear went on to illustrate Transactions of the Zoological Society, The Zoology of Captain Beechey’s Voyage, and The Zoology of the Voyage of HMS Beagle, a boat made famous by Charles Darwin. He did the drawings for Bell’s A History of British Quadrupeds, and some lithographs for Bell’s Tortoises, Terrapins and Turtles.
[15] Nonetheless, Lear continued to do some very good work for Gould, especially in The Birds of Europe [1832-1837].
******
Let us return to my school days in Worcestershire: looking back, I now think it is decidedly strange that our teacher should have read to us A.E. Housman [1859 –1936], whose work is hardly suitable for children since his poetry is permeated with doom and gloom, of the hangman’s noose, of brother killing brother, of war and hardship, harshness of fate, and infidelity. I think what appealed to some of us twelve-year-olds, though we did not understand fully the sense, were the ballad-like rhythms of the poems.
[16] Here is one example:
[17]
Here are a few verses from the Shropshire Lad:
“From Clee to heaven the beacon burns,
The shires have seen it plain,
From north and south the sign returns
And beacons burn again…” Shropshire Lad, I
*****
“In valleys of springs of rivers,
By Ony and Teme and Clun,
The country for easy livers,
The quietest under the sun,…” Shropshire Lad, L.
Later, in my thirties, I was able to buy and read Housman’s The Collected Poems, his biography by Richard Graves[18] (a totally inadequate account), and much later, his collected letters edited by Archie Burnett[19], and those edited by Henry Maas.[20] I also borrowed and never returned to an English friend living in a nearby village in S.W. France a copy of Housman’s Selected Prose, edited by John Carter.[21] While writing this essay, I remembered that Tom Stoppard had written a play about him, The Invention of Love (1997), so I ordered it immediately. The play broaches the subject of Housman’s homosexuality. Housman was in love with Moses Jackson, who did not reciprocate his love. Partly in order to get away from Housman, Jackson accepted the post of headmaster of a school in Karachi, India in 1887.
While Housman’s association with India, in this case Karachi, my hometown, is rather tenuous and indirect, with no significance whatsoever for his writings, it is perhaps unsurprising that some writers and scholars who have meant much to me do have an affinity for the culture and life of India, with obvious consequences for their work. Sir William Jones, Rudyard Kipling, Sir Richard Francis Burton, E.M. Forster, V.S. Naipaul, and Paul Scott, as we shall see presently, all had far more direct and profound encounters with India, writers who influenced, instructed, and gave me solace in many intangible ways. They also provided clues to my sense of identity.
*****
Yet it is just
That here, in memory of all books which lay
Their sure foundations in the heart of man,
Whether by native prose, or numerous verse,
That in the name of all inspired souls,
From Homer the great Thunderer, from the voice
That roars along the bed of Jewish song,
And more varied and elaborate,
Those trumpet-tones of harmony that shake
Our shores in England,- from those loftiest notes
Down to the low and wren-like warblings,
….
’Tis just that in behalf of these, the works,
And the men that framed them, whether known
Or sleeping nameless in scattered graves,
That I should here assert their rights, attest
Their honours, and should, once and for all, pronounce
For what we are and what we may become
Than Nature’s self, which is the breath of God
Or His pure word by miracle revealed.
Wordsworth, Prelude, 1850
[22], where my school, Bryanston[23], is located. I was to read many of Hardy’s novels while at school, though I did not appreciate his poetry, where Hardy’s true originality lay, until much later. It was in Blandford Forum that I stole for the first time, a book. There was one bookshop in the sleepy market town run by two old ladies; they were quite charming and chatty which makes my crime even more unforgivable. I had reached the town on my bicycle, wearing a water-proof cape that covered the handle bars, and my hands. I kept it on when entering the bookshop, which was tiny, with overflowing bookshelves so that there were boxes of books on the floor. When I squatted down, the cape billowed out and formed a bell tent round me, always keeping my thieving hands concealed. The ladies were having some fun after the visit of two giggling girls who had asked for “a book to read.” “Such silly creatures! What else do you do with a book but read it? The whole shop is full of books and they are all for reading.” The book I stole was Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native. Outside, shaking and ashamed, I thought what if everyone did that, and my conscience replied, “Well, we would all be damned well read.”
I was forever making reading plans. Three works were decisive in helping me choose: F. Seymour Smith’s An English Library. A Bookman’s Guide to the Classics, Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise, and The Penguin Book Catalogue.
Miss Tully (fl.1780-96), LETTERS WRITTEN …AT THE COURT OF TRIPOLI (1816) ed. by Seton Dearden, [London:]Arthur Barker 1957, 42 shillings.
Miss Tully wrote these remarkably interesting letters to her family in England, ‘simply to relate facts as they occur, without the least embellishment’. She had accompanied her brother Richard to take up residence at the British Consulate, Court of Tripoli, for ten years, 1783-93. The letters relate in a vivid, spontaneous style, events at court of political intrigue, murder, the plague and many horrors, and have provided posterity with a picture of semi-oriental squalor in this Moorish city under the rule of Bashaw.
Seymour Smith’s guide was available in the school library but I found a secondhand paperback copy for a few shillings in a shop in the Charing Cross Road.[24] Henceforth, I was ticking off books from the eminently useful comprehensive index of titles as I triumphantly acquired yet another item on the list. The work listed approximately 2630 books, and my dream being to construct just such a complete English Library.
I do not know if most children when they begin reading start with stories, and then novels, but it was certainly still the case with me at the age of fourteen. Armed with F. Seymour Smith as my mentor, I decided to read the whole of English Literature (meaning novels) starting, logically, with all authors whose surnames began with “A.” I began reading Old Saint Paul’s: A Tale of the Plague and the Fire by an author little read now, William Harrison Ainsworth [1805 -1882.] I do not remember finishing it. For by now, I had come under the influence of Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise,[25] which carried the unattributed epigraph: Quando sovviemmi di cotanta speme (When I remember so much hope).[26]
I certainly did not understand at that time Connolly’s distinction between the vernacular and the mandarin style, nor their definitions. What interested me was simply the list of authors who somehow defined the Modern Movement (1900-1922), such as Geoge Gissing, Baron Corvo, Norman Douglas, Edmund Gosse, James Joyce, George Moore (not the philosopher), Ronald Firbank, et al. I was to ready an extraordinary number of these authors by the time I was twenty, beginning with the writings of Aldous Huxley in his early phase: Crome Yellow [27][1921] Antic Hay [1923] and Those Barren Leaves [1925], and a little later, Brave New World [1932]. Oscar Wilde was another early obessession, further stimulated by a reading of his biography by Hesketh Pearson, and William Gaunt’s account of the aesthetic movement in Victorian England, The Aesthetic Adventure. My Pelican edition of this book, published in 1957, carries a wonderful cover in fading blue with a characteristic black and white drawing in the middle by Aubrey Beardsley. Gaunt’s work opened up further vistas, introducing me to Rossetti, Ruskin, Swinburne, Pater, Whistler, and of course, Oscar Wilde.
[1] Found at: http://falkonthewildside.blogspot.com/2011/09/new-lee-falk-book.html
[2] Architect Henry Woodyer. The school was famous for its founder’s collection of musical manuscripts, and its choral concerts. Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert and Sullivan) sang there on September 29, 1856 at the dedication ceremony for the College. He was just fourteen years old. (See Arthur Jacobs. Arthur Sullivan. A Victorian Musician, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, p,13. Jacobs incorrectly gives the address of St.Michael’s College as “Tenbury, Herefordshire”. It is, of course, in Worcestershire.)
[4] See Salman Rushdie’s comments on Billy Bunter in Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands. Essays and Criticism 1981-1991(London: Granta Books, 1991),pp. 18-19.
[5] There have been several Indian princes at English public schools such as Eton, even called Singh. Perhaps the most famous is Prince Prince Victor Albert Jay Duleep Singh [1866-1918] who was the eldest son of Maharani Bamba Müller and Maharaja Duleep Singh, the last Maharaja of Lahore, and of the Sikh Empire, and the grandson of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. He was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge.
[6] My downstairs neighbour in Crouch End, North London, was Barry Driscoll, a famous illustrator of Tarka the Ottter, published by the Nonesuch Press in 1964.
[7] Valérie Chansigaud. The History of Ornithology. London: New Holland Publishers, 2009 (original French edn., 2007) pp110-116.
[8] Ibid.,pp.112-113.
[10] Susan Hyman, Edward Lear’s Birds, Stamford, CT: Longmeadow Press, 1989, p.76.
[11] Vivien Noakes, Edward Lear, London: Ariel Books, 1985 [Ist edn. 1968] p.24.
[12] Jacques Barraband [1768-1809] illustrated the works of François Levaillant [1753-1824]. See Valérie Chansigaud. The History of Ornithology. London: New Holland Publishers, 2009 (original French edn., 2007) pp110-112 for illustrations of Barraband
[13] Ibid.,p.26.
[14] See also Brian Reade. Edward Lear’s Parrots, London: Duckworth, 1949, with 12 colour plates.
[15] Vivien Noakes, Edward Lear, London: Ariel Books, 1985 [Ist edn. 1968] p.29.
[17] A. E. Housman, Selected Prose, ed. John Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), pp.144-145.
[18] Richard P.Graves, A.E. Housman: The Scholar-Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
[19] The Letters of A. E. Housman, ed. Archie Burnett, Oxford: Oxford University Press, (2007).
[20] Ed. Henry Maas, The Letters of A.E.Housman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971.
[21] A.E. Housman, Selected Prose, edited by John Carter, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961.
[23] Bryanston School was originally a house designed by Richard Norman Shaw for the second Viscount Portman. Shaw, perhaps better known as the architect of New Scotland Yard on the Embankment in London, in this case seems to have been inspired, at least for the garden front, by the Chateau Menars, as added to by Ange-Jacques Gabriel, at the request of Madame de Pompadour, in the 1760s. Menars, in the Loire valley, France, has the same “very red brick walls, strong stone dressings, and much rusticated detail [as Bryanston]” (Andrew Saint, Richard Norman Shaw, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976, p.327) The house was completed in 1894 , and became a school in 1928.It is still a boarding school, but, unlike, alas,during my years there, is now co-educational.
[24] F.Seymour Smith. An English Library. A Bookman’s Guide to the Classics. London: The English Language Book Society and Andre Deutsch, Revised and Enlarged Edition, 1964 [Ist pub. 1943]
[25] Cyril Connolly. Enemies of Promise. Harmondsworth: Penguin books, 1961 [Ist. Published, 1938]
[26] I had no idea who it was from until I began this essay, and was able to retrieve the source in less three minutes on the Internet: “To Silvia”, 1828, Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837).
[27] In my Penguin edition of Enemies of Promise, Crome Yellow was incorrectly spelt on page 55 as “Chrome Yellow”. __________________________________ . To comment on this essay, please click here. To help New English Review continue to publish scholarly and interesting essays such as this, please click here. If you have enjoyed this article by Ibn Warraq and would like to read more, please click here.