“Lessons from Untaught Books

One of the strongest memories of my state-school education in Ballarat in the 1960s and 1970s is that it consisted to a large extent of unexpected and unexplained events. At my little five-teacher primary school most teachers stayed only a year or two before leaving for—well, I don’t know where, or why, as not one of their departures was ever announced, let alone explained.

Many of my fellow students were even more transient, some staying only weeks, or even days. Seldom did anyone let us know they were going, or where or why they had gone; they just seemed to disappear, and usually we realised they had gone only after an absence too long to be explained by illness.

It was, I suppose, a useful preparation for dealing with the unexplained in life generally, and for living with uncertainty. It could almost have been a deliberate ploy with this purpose in mind. Take the schools movie. A movie would be shown at a special schools session at the local cinema, and if we were in the appropriate year, we would all have to go. In the senior years of secondary school I remember seeing movies such as Cromwell, Anne of a Thousand Days, The Hellstrom Chronicle, Wild Strawberries and David Copperfield. My class was never studying these books or topics or periods, so we went in with no idea of what the movies were about, and with no preparation before or discussion afterwards. Oddest of all was the only movie I attended with my primary school, A Queen is Crowned, the official film of the Coronation, two hours of tedium for little children, screened for us ten years later. One of my classmates walked out of the cinema midway and went home, a bold act for a six-year-old who lived more than two miles from the cinema.

One consequence of the constant movement of teachers was the untaught book. The books our parents had to buy for us to study in secondary school had to be chosen by the teachers who had taught that level the previous year. Between the selection of the books and the final selection some months later of the teachers who were to teach them, much could change. My school had quite an influx of young teachers around that time, and my new young Form Five English teacher used George MacBeth’s anthology Poetry 1900 to 1965 only once or twice, and ignored George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London completely. But those two books changed my life.

To someone like me who has always loved poetry but has often found much of it difficult to penetrate, MacBeth’s Longman anthology is ideal. (It is also a remarkably sturdy paperback—my copy is hardly worn at all despite the more than four decades of pleasure it has given me.) For each of the poems he chooses, MacBeth writes a short comment, 100 to 200 words or so, giving some background, appreciation, and analysis of meaning and technique. Here is his comment on “A Dead Mole” by Andrew Young:

This is perhaps Andrew Young’s best-known poem. The poem’s sombre compassion for the dead mole is tempered by its wit and conceit. The topsy-turvy nature of the mole’s life is beautifully conveyed by the image of it seeming to be buried above ground. At the same time, this diminishes the sense of finality in the mole’s death and enables Young to con­vey a sense of its place in the eternal scheme of things. Young’s power to see the ways of God in and through nature is as great in its own way as Wordsworth’s. At the same time, he never “makes a thing of it”. Religion seems to come as naturally to him as breathing, in a way that is ultimately perhaps medieval. Although the poem seems artless, its form is strict and ingenious: the syllable numbers of the lines are 4, 8, 8, 6, 8, 8, 8, 10.

“A Dead Mole” is not one of the more difficult poems in the anthology, but in this typically concise paragraph MacBeth not only takes me beyond what I could have seen for myself, but also opens up new possibilities for exploration, both in this poem and elsewhere. “See how rich this poem is,” he seems to be saying to us, “and how rich poetry is, and life!”

The critical consensus seems to be against the annotation of poems. Each poem should stand on its merits, unadorned and unexplained, say the critics. Owing so much to George MacBeth, I disagree. But the person doing the annotation has to be someone like MacBeth who continually opens up possibilities, not someone who imposes his opinions and insists that the reader agree with him.

At the end of his introductory essay, “How to Read a Poem”, MacBeth says:

In the First World War when asked what he was fighting for, Wilfred Owen replied: “The English language.” This book will not have failed if it makes readers see what Owen meant.

George Orwell was another who did not insist on being agreed with, which is part of the reason why he has always been read and enjoyed by all but the narrow-minded. Still, because of its subject matter Down and Out in Paris and London would not be to everyone’s taste, and I wonder if my teacher’s aversion to it sprang from a young woman’s understandable fastidiousness.

The dirt and squalor probably added to the book’s attractions for us teenage boys. Raised on adventure stories and still with our boyish relish for dirt which we indulged on our muddy sports fields and elsewhere, we were captivated by Orwell’s adventures in poverty. He got us in from the opening pages, where he describes his hotel in Paris. There is more dirt and squalor there than we could have imagined:

Near the ceiling long lines of bugs marched all day like columns of soldiers, and at night came down ravenously hungry, so that one had to get up every few hours and kill them in hecatombs. Sometimes when the bugs got too bad one used to burn sulphur and drive them into the next room; whereupon the lodger next door would retort by having his room sulphured, and drive the bugs back. It was a dirty place, but homelike …

The Rougiers [a couple in the same hotel, who made their living selling packets of ostensibly pornographic postcards, only the top one of which was actually pornographic] earned about a hundred francs a week, and by strict economy managed to be always half starved and half drunk. The filth of their room was such that one could smell it on the floor below. According to Madame F., neither of the Rougiers had taken off their clothes for four years.

Or there was Henri, who worked in the sewers …

How could we not read on?

Fortunately, I found there was more to Orwell. Although I don’t remember having read an essay till then, one day after I had left school I saw a volume of his essays in the local library, where I was constantly, and nearly always unsuccessfully, searching for books that could mean something to me. It was the third volume of the Penguin edition of his collected essays, which contains all his famous “As I Please” columns, written for the left-wing London newspaper Tribune between 1943 and 1945. In these essays he wrote with high intelligence, in clear prose anyone could understand, on anything that caught his fancy, from the war and literature and English usage to popular superstitions and the pleasures of growing sixpenny roses from Woolworth’s.

The volume also includes essays in praise of English cooking, tea and cricket, all of which I had grown up on, showing me a depth in these familiar things that I had never imagined. These essays were a lesson in the sort of observation and original thought that one doesn’t learn in school, or at least I didn’t. They were a revelation, an opening-out of possibilities. They were what I had been searching for.

I borrowed all four volumes of the essays from the library and read them, then bought the set for myself and read them again. By the time I had finished, my course in life was set: one way or another I would devote my life to the English language.