Fifteen in Fifteen: Terry Pratchett

3. Terry Pratchett

A few months back, I took a short break from my usual hidey-hole in the Department of Archaeology, York, in order to spend a few days teaching on a dig at the other end of the country. It was my first experience of camping, and, according to the rules of novices everywhere, I carefully packed into three large bags pretty much everything I was never likely to need. In between squashing in a pair of sandals, a large cow mandible, the world’s dinkiest pillow and industrial quantities of plastic bags, I committed a grievous error – I forgot to pack a good book. Two days into my stay, I’d completed two of my teaching sessions and had made it out to site just in time to get thunderstormed on. I hadn’t been sleeping well, was tired from having no personal space, and was discovering just how unpleasant it was to go to a Portaloo in the dark. The only book I had with me was a translation of Homer’s Odyssey. I was cold, wet, tired and miserable. And then I discovered that one of the students had with him a copy of Night Watch.

As the unknown writer of Ecclesiastes said, there is a time for everything. There are times you need a challenging book; there are times you need to read some utter junk. And there are times, particularly when I’m exhausted or lonely or far from home, when all I want is a book as familiar and comfortable and well-loved as a pair of old jeans. Night Watch is one of those books. So, in fact, are several other books in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series – Going Postal, Thief of Time, and Interesting Times (which was, incidentally, the book I read on my first night away at university). I’ve read every one of Terry Pratchett’s novels (excepting Nation, which I found unnecessarily apocalyptic), but, whether by accident or design, these four are the ones I’ve ended up owning, reading and re-reading until I can almost quote passages from heart. And there is something wonderfully comforting about revisiting characters and scenes you know so well. Especially when life is taking you on all sorts of voyages into the unknown, it is a gift beyond measure to be able to spend an hour with a familiar book, able to look forward to all the good bits, secure in knowing exactly what comes next.

It’s not only Terry Pratchett books which make it onto my list of “comfort reads” – Douglas Adams also features, as do Charlotte Bronte and Bram Stoker. But there’s a warmth to Terry Pratchett’s novels which make them particularly good for piercing the clouds, and a quality of writing which bears revisiting over and over again. Some sections just never grow old – like in Going Postal, when Moist von Lipwig finds the money to rebuild the Post Office after the fire. Or in Night Watch, when Vimes destroys Big Mary. Or what about Interesting Times, when Rincewind and Twoflower meet again in an Agatean prison after years of separation? (Non-Pratchett obsessives, please bear with me). Of course, there are the set-piece comedic moments – Fred and Nobby trying to shoot a dragon in Guards, Guards – and there’s the impeccably realised fantasy world (perched on the back of a turtle, no less) but it’s the cast which for me make the show. Pratchett’s best characters – Vetinari, Vimes, Moist, Granny Weatherwax, even Rincewind – are bright, cynical, and sharply observant of humanity’s foibles, without ever quite losing their faith in humanity. Much, you feel, like the author himself. And maybe it’s this fondness for how stupid the world can sometimes be which makes books like Night Watch such a great comfort.

Too much has been said about Terry Pratchett by too many people for me to continue eulogising here, quite aside from the fact that everyone seems to like different aspects of his books. If you haven’t read him, give it a try – although don’t bother starting at The Colour of Magic, dive in at Guards, Guards instead. It’s worth it just to see what everyone’s on about. But I’m grateful for books like Night Watch, which cheer up wet and muddy digs so well, in a way which goes beyond them being just the work of any particular author. In my opinion, nobody should be ashamed of reading their favourite book again for the third, tenth, thirteenth or even fiftieth time. These books are your lifelong friends.

With thanks to James - catch me travelling without a good book again...

Fifteen in Fifteen: Coleridge

2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Coleridge may not be the best poet I’ve ever read, but of all the poets I have read, he is certainly my favourite.

This may take a little explaining. In brief, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a Romantic poet writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He was a contemporary and close friend (at least initially) of William Wordsworth, and spent a number of years living with the Wordsworths in the Lake District. Unhappily married, he was in love with Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, Sara Hutchinson, who did not apparently return the sentiment. He was often troubled with ill-health, which only became worse once he became addicted to laudanum, the opium-based painkiller prescribed to cure this. He loved the countryside, whether the Lakes or the Quantocks in Somerset (where he lived initially with his wife), and in youth often walked ridiculous distances (40 miles in one day from Stowey to Bristol, and back again the next day, what’s more). He had an interest in politics, studied philosophy as a hobby, and authored articles, books and lectures. He was a poet throughout his life.

Much of what I know about Coleridge comes from reading Richard Holmes’ excellent two-volume biography about his life. It’s certainly true that once you’ve spent 925 pages getting to know a person, they will always hold a special place in your heart, and undoubtedly the context I got from Richard Holmes helps me to understand Coleridge’s work better. Yet this is not the reason I feel oddly as if this poet who died almost two hundred years before I was born is one of my much-loved friends. Read his poetry, and I defy you not to feel the same. His work comes across as personal and immediate – read his Letter to Sara Hutchinson, the original poem from which the more well-known Dejection: An Ode was then written. Read Frost at Midnight. Read This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, read Constancy to an Ideal Object, read An Ode To The Rain. Read, even, the famous preface to Kubla Khan. Coleridge was unafraid to put himself into his work in a way that seems honest and uncrafted, but which belies the effort and poetic skill which these poems must have taken.

These more personal poems are less well-known than Coleridge’s epic poetry – The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Christabel – and perhaps deservedly so, as these ballads show Coleridge working at the height of his poetic powers, despite the fact that two of them are unfinished. They are poems I admire Coleridge for. But it’s outside of these poems that I feel I really meet him. Whenever I read Coleridge, I will find something new – maybe an acute observation that makes me laugh, as in The Nightingale when he accuses the poet who first called the nightingale’s song “melancholy” of being miserable about something else, “and so, poor wretch! filled all things with himself, / And made all gentle sounds tell back the tale / Of his own sorrow”. Or maybe my own conflicted feelings about returning briefly to a place I have loved dearly (“The Transientness is poison in the wine!”). Coleridge lived and loved and thought and suffered, and the words he wrote to talk about it let me share my own experience of life with him.

I owe Coleridge a great deal – his poetry was some of the first I read when my interest revived several years after English Literature GCSE, and it was partly through Coleridge that I discovered that reading poetry could be quite good fun. I’m now less of a fan of Romantic poetry – I’ve never got on with Wordsworth, I have trouble seeing the point of Keats, and even with Coleridge I find the style and phrasing overblown in some places, impenetrable in others. His poetry might not be my favourite poetry, but nevertheless, he is still my favourite poet. When I’m travelling with Coleridge, I can never quite feel alone.

Incidentally, if anyone else wants The Rime of the Ancient Mariner thoroughly ruined for them, try reading Hunt Emerson’s cartoon version. Featuring an alcoholic Hermit and a rather cute albatross, I would highly recommend it to anyone tempted to take poetry too seriously.

Fifteen in Fifteen: A blogger’s defence of English literature

Part 1. Wendell Berry

The rules of the game are very simple. Give yourself fifteen minutes. In no order of preference, write down fifteen authors whose work has affected you and which will always stay with you. In my case, the sight of the resulting list makes me smile almost as much as my (two) well-stocked bookcases do. The omissions glare at me more than the occasional inclusions whose presence on the list may not be entirely merited – where is Jostein Gaarder? CS Lewis? Liza Picard and her wonderful social histories? Have Richard Holmes’ biographies in fact had more influence on my opinion of Coleridge than Coleridge’s work itself? On the opposite side of the equation, what influence has George Herbert really had on my life? But on the whole, a desert island library stocked with these authors would contain for me many pathways into being human. And with the recession tightening and the government busy reducing funding to everything that makes life worthwhile – as well as in order to do my bit for National Novel Writing Month - maybe now’s the time to celebrate those authors who have a special place in my life.

Wendell Berry feels like an odd place to start, because all I know of him is a single poem. It’s called “How To Be A Poet”, although to me it reads like a guide not only to how to be a poet, but how to be a Christian and, in many respects, how to be a person. It’s easily available online, and I’d advise everyone to take a look. I was introduced to it six months ago by a dear friend and fellow poet – he read it out to me over a cup of tea, and it was the first (and thus far only) time a poem has left me speechless. Once I’d recovered, we quoted back to one another all the best phrases from the list of instructions Berry gives, and in so doing repeated much of the poem.

As with all the best poems, I’m not sure I understood it all right away, nor do I think I understand it all now. Many of the lines contain a wealth of treasure, of possible meaning, which will need a lot of living with before I feel I’ve got to the bottom of them. “Accept what comes from silence” is a line I’ve spent the past month trying to live out – accepting what comes from the silence of prayer, of unemployment, the silence of waiting, the silence of no place you have to be and nobody needing you around. Other lines are more straightforward, although making a place to sit down can be remarkably time-consuming, and staying away from screens (or “anything which obscures the place it is in”) is great advice, but something I signally fail to do. Maybe I should pay attention, since most my poetry comes from my “three-dimensioned life”. Places I have seen, people I have met, feelings I have experienced first-hand – these all seem to translate more easily into verse than things I’ve only read about in books.

I don’t want to read any more of Wendell Berry’s work. “How To Be A Poet” is, for me, such an extraordinary poem that to know anything more about the author or his work would be to break the spell. And it’s a poem I fully intend to carry on living with, exploring what it might mean for there to be no unsacred places, or to depend upon more affection, knowledge and skill than I have, in the hopes that I might yet be able to “make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came”.