A life in letters: Books

I loved books as a young child, borrowing from the library, and buying with Christmas and birthday money hardbacks by authors still-remembered (such as Enid Blyton) and long forgotten (such as Stephen Mogridge). From memory it wasn’t until the early 1960s that children’s books became more widely available in paperback – I remember the back ledge of our car being completely awash one summer with the paperbacks which I had bought and devoured during the course of our fortnight’s holiday at Seamill in Ayrshire.

Quite frequently, I would read in bed at night before going to sleep, and I remember quite clearly the joy of gaining admission to another world. I would often find the first few pages of a book slow, as I imagined myself into the landscape of the story, but soon felt completely at home there, and reached the words THE END with a palpable sense of loss.

I remember once after we moved to Carluke being severely disappointed with the person in charge of the library there, when it was still housed in a small room in the Rankin Memorial Town Hall at the foot of the High Street. He must have been a rather curmudgeonly stickler for rules, and unlike most library workers I have ever met, because having lent me books in the morning, he objected to me coming back and exchanging these same books later in the same day. Perhaps he simply could not believe that I had already read them, and I felt justifiably aggrieved.

Also when we used that library someone – could it have been the same gentleman? – suggested that I should supplement my reading of fiction with some factual titles. I was indignant. To me, ‘factual’ meant ‘educational’ meant ‘connected with school.’  Surely, I felt, the library of all places should be a refuge from education!  I remember showing my parents the Lanark County Libraries slogan which every book carried ‘For your pleasure, profit and enjoyment’ and arguing that if I wanted to read for pleasure and enjoyment then I should be spared the attentions of do-gooders trying to ensure I ‘profited’ as well.

But I was also introduced to some books which I realised even as I enjoyed them had a greater weight than most of the literature I read. One neighbour across the street from us was clearing out her possessions prior to entering a convent, and she gave me a pile of Puffin Paperbacks which presumably had been hers in childhood.  Thus I read, and relished Marjorie Lloyd’s Fell Farm books. And Mrs Frame, who lived on the other side of the ‘wee road’ which separated our houses allowed me to borrow, one at a time, the handsome hardbacks of Arthur Ransome’s books which had been her son’s when he was a boy, and I loved them.

I am unsure how much all this reading helped shape the person I was becoming, but I know it brought joy and an inner freedom.

Despite my fairly strict evangelical upbringing, little of my reading as I child was, as far as I remember, specifically Christian. The two Sunday School prizes I remember being given were Pilgrim’s Progress, in a Blackie edition (which I found quaint and simply didn’t ‘get’ when my father tried reading it to me in instalments, Sunday by Sunday) and a Victorian title, Teddy’s button by Amy le Feuvre which I found dated and disturbing – it begins with a boy’s gruesome description of his father’s death in battle.

The other Christian story I recall was The black mark, which again I found disquieting. One of a group of children – I think the story was set in a missionary context – had done something mildly naughty, and no-one was owning up. All the kids were put in a dark shed overnight, told to put their palms flat on the wall in front of them, and assured that when they emerged in the morning there would be a black mark on the guilty child’s forehead. And so it came about – it transpired that there was soot on the brickwork the children were touching, and in trying to rub his brow to wipe away any sign of guilt, the child with the guilty conscience had in fact made the mark. That this distasteful story, abusive, and so lacking and love and grace should have been considered appropriate reading for children is beyond belief.

There were writers however, who were writing fiction from a Christian worldview with tenderness and truth – one of these was Patricia St John, author of Treasures of the snow and other titles. I think I may have discovered at least one of her books as a child – I remember my deep perplexity that a book I had borrowed from the library ‘mentioned Jesus’ (as I put it to my parents.)  It puzzled me that the world of faith and the world of everything else, which I thought inhabited discrete silos should overlap in this way.

From an early age, I found my instinctively interested in the business of writing and publishing books. I was a natural writer, and had filled a jotter with stories by the time I was ten. But writing did not seem an end in itself – I was interested in how you got your words into print, how you got yourself between hard covers. I seemed to have the impression as a child that being published was something worthwhile, a source of status and satisfaction.

As a teenager, I didn’t find the transition to reading adult fiction easy, although by then I had learned to relish non-fiction. I enjoyed biographies, especially of writers, engineers and composers. I particularly cherished Michael Kennedy’s biography of Edward Elgar when it appeared in 1968 with its moving descriptions of how the great music which I was learning to appreciate had been created.

Initially, the problem with adult fiction was how to know what was ‘acceptable’ from a Christian perspective - ie what my parents would be comfortable with me reading. (I never was particularly good at rebellion.) ‘Would it be OK for me to buy an Agatha Christie?’ I asked my mother when I was about 15, and we were on our summer holidays at Seahouses.  My mother was comfortable with this, and I remember buying The mysterious affair at Styles and running back to our hotel almost leaping along the pavement and chanting over and over ‘I’ve got an Agatha Christie!

I also read classics selected from Carluke Library in a rather arbitrary way, including many of Thomas Hardy’s works. I was, I guess, reading in hope: these books were classics; such books were, by some mysterious process of osmosis supposed to enrich you. But in time I came to realise that while I enjoy a good story, I don’t normally find my understanding deepened and my humanity enriched through reading fiction.  One book however, – John Buchan’s Witch wood - which I read in an old, re-bound edition touched me in some indefinable way as no other book did. I re-read it recently to try to put my finger on why it affected me in this way, and can only assume that I felt at home in its pages because of the spirit of sane Christian grace which coloured Buchan’s writing.

We weren’t given much help by the English Department at Wishaw High School in appreciating fiction. I don’t remember being given anything to read which was contemporary in language or theme. Class readers were old texts such as John Masefield’s Jim Davis, and this gave the impression that ‘literature’ was stuffy and irrelevant. I don’t think any of the English staff managed to convey to us the excitement and power of fiction – or was I simply dense or unreceptive?

But I do remember the day our best English teachers handing round copies of a very dull-looking volume and encouraging us to read it. With a dubious scepticism, I started the first chapter, and within a few paragraphs I found myself caught up in another world as I had been as a child. It was D.K. Broster’s Flight of the Heron, set at the time of the Jacobite Rebellion – once I had finished it, I read the two sequels with equal enthusiasm.

I must have read many Christian books as a teenager, but I recall very few of these. I remember sitting on the bus on my way back from Scripture Union camp in Perthshire in 1965 sucking a stick of rock, and reading The small woman, the biography of missionary Gladys Aylward by Alan Burgess. And I know I had in my bag a book I’d been given at the camp, Some want it tough by Len Moules, the story of missionary work in the Himalayas.  I also remember my mother buying me a copy of Norman Vincent Peale’s book The power of positive thinking for your people which I suspect I needed.

I studied English and Scottish literature as part of my degree, but I approached titles like Middlemarch, and Portrait of a lady and Portrait of the artist as a young man as texts to be dutifully plodded through. Though I still had the sense that as ‘classics’ these titles somehow held the key to deeper understanding, I still lacked the maturity to engage with the themes of such texts. I don’t recall anyone ever teaching me how to study a novel, or explaining the complex interaction of setting, plot, symbol, language and character. I think I still naively thought that it was through the story alone that a novel communicated and so regarded critical analysis with incomprehension or jejeune disdain. I recall being moved to some extent by Sunset Song, but I think what captivated me was simply the flow of the language. It was the work of John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins which made the most impact on me as a student.

When I was at university, I bought far more books than I needed to, spending time in Glasgow’s bookshops - Grants, Smiths, Holmes Macdougall – most nights before catching the train home. I bought literature and history and anything which caught my eye, but I don’t suppose I read very many of them. In retrospect, I understand what all this buying of books says about me.  I think there was a sense that posessing the books, and owning the knowledge they contained was the same thing, that I could overcome some intellectual insecurity by lining my shelves at home. I think I bought books which I felt would be good to read, despite the fact that they were too academic for me, frankly too ‘boring.’ I think at times I bought the books which I felt that the person I thought I should be would read.  I think I felt buying these books projected an image, and somehow gave me membership of an intellectual clan of people whom I thought ‘mattered.’ And so my happy-go-lucky book-buying was to some extent a symptom of my insecurity, neediness and lack of confidence in being ‘me’. Years later, these many volumes were boxed up, and years later still they were sold to Voltaire and Rousseau, a second-hand bookshop in Glasgow’s university district.

In the early part of my career in libraries, a large part of my working life was spent with books. Stamping them at the issue desk; unpacking them from cardboard boxes; struggling round the library with vast armfuls of them; selecting new stock at the weekly ‘Key Copy’ meetings when we’d sit round a table on which lay the week’s new releases, marking on slips of paper the titles we wanted to order for our libraries.

As part of my Post-Graduate Course in Librarianship, I took a unit which fed my passion for the history of book-making and book production from the invention of the printing press onwards, a unit in Historical Bibliography and Textual Criticism taught by the colourful Professor, W. E. Tyler with whom I formed an excellent relationship.

For three years, from 1977-1980, I worked in bookselling with the Scottish Scripture Union organisation, which at that point had a small network of bookshops. I managed the Falkirk shop for one year, and the Glasgow shop for two. I enjoyed working with Christian product, but I became aware of a tension between the desire to maximise sales on the one hand  and on the other a wish for discernment in what you sell, so that you are not hyping the newest thing simply by virtue of its novelty.  In addition at that stage I was still very naïve theologically, believing that only books with an evangelical imprimatur were ‘sound’ or reliable.

Later, in the 1980s, I ran a church bookstall at Airdrie Baptist Church. Each Sunday I would set it up dutifully before the morning service, and dismount it at the end of the evening. During the week, I’d be invited to take it to evening Christian events in the community, and I’d go along, even though sales could be non-existent. Each Saturday, I would drive across to the Gospel Literature Outreach Bookshop in Motherwell to replenish my stock, and I often called in during the week as well on my way home from work. I sold about £1,000-worth of books every year. I’m sure some people found my bookstall’s presence helpful and I am glad I undertook this work. In retrospect however, I recognise that the extent of my self-investment in this project was beyond reason, and was another symptom of my neediness. The bookstall gave me something to do; it gave me a role in the church; it helped me feel more positive about myself; the more I sold, the more I felt I would be esteemed.

The research which I undertook in the 1980s (initially under the auspices of Professor Tyler) combined my interest in book trade history with my personal experience of tensions between the drivers of profitability and ministry. I examined the work of three 19th century Scottish publishers (chosen because of the availability of archive material), Blackie, Thomas Nelson and T. & T. Clark. In the case of the Clarks, the rich archive from the 1880s and 1890s especially enabled detailed analysis. I found this research healing and satisfying in itself, although it had no connection with my everyday work.  I felt I could have sat down in that publishing office in Edinburgh’s George Street a century earlier and taken up the reigns of the Clark publishing business with no problems whatsoever.

I associate my reading of specifically Christian titles from the 1970s onwards. I read all the ‘classic’ evangelical biographies published in the 1960s and 70s – The hiding place, God’s Smuggler, The Cross and the Switchblade, Run Baby Run. These books gave me a momentary desire to be different, a momentary hope that I might be different, but none of them actually changed me. It was more solid books, notably the sermons of Martyn Lloyd-Jones and the writings of John R. W. Stott which helped lay in my life a foundation of faith. In the 1980s, I was helped by a number of Christian books on identity and emotional healing, such as David Seamands’ Healing for damaged emotions.  I bought many Bible commentaries and Christian books in the 1970s and 80s: however I still had not learned that theology is not a completed enterprise, but a living thing, an art rather than a science, and that God can’t be tied down and boxed in by theological constructs.

In the 1990s and 2000s I came across books which stand out as life-changing because they helped me view life and faith through a different paradigm. The title which affected me most powerfully was Dave Tomlinson’s The post-evangelical, while Alan Jamieson’s research project published as A churchless faith: faith journeys beyond the churches reassured me that I did not walk this new way alone.

Throughout my life, I have continued to consume books, but much of this reading has been in support of research projects and writing.  Comparatively recently, I have joined a book group and regularly read the assigned texts and go along prepared to discuss them. But while I am now able to appreciate the workings of a novel, and to discuss how it resonates with or challenges my understandings for me this is always the result of an intellectual process rather than the instinctive, passionate engagement with the text which seems to move most of my fellow book-group members. Similarly, while colleagues at work are enthusing about fiction they have read, I feel rather bemused and on the edge. I guess I simply don’t have ‘yes!’ moments when reading novels – or looking at art, for that matter – while music speaks directly and powerfully to me.

I have published a couple of very different books myself. The T. &. T. Clark Story (1992) was an edited version of my PhD thesis, while Singing God’s Song (2011) was a collection of Christian Viewpoint columns from the Highland News which was published by a local charity. Neither of these titles sold in large numbers, and I was particularly disappointed that the latter didn’t perform better. I have also contributed to a number of other volumes, notably the Dictionary of Scottish Church History and Theology. (1993)

Over the last two decades, the publishing of texts and information has been revolutionised in every bit as dramatic a way as it was by the early practitioners of printing from movable type whose work W. E. Tyler used to describe with such humour and passion. I still prefer the physical book – it is so much easier, in reading, to refer backwards and forwards, to identify remembered passages. But I value the ability which the internet offers to network, share thoughts, and enable material of only limited interest.

I’ve become aware that I have developed a tendency to bookshop phobia – or perhaps particularly Christian bookshop phobia. General booksellers present such a range of books, shelf upon shelf of them all clamouring for my attention, and I can find myself flapping distractedly from book to book, aware of how much there is I will never know but sensing that somewhere in all these pages there is something I need to know, something that will make a difference. But I recognise this as a lingering, residual symptom of my neediness.

And it seems sometimes in Christian shops that each volume stands to attention on its shelf proclaiming ‘Read me! This is something you need to know!’ or ‘Read me! You need to change your life and I will tell you how.’ And I cringe, and remind myself that I don’t need to listen to this.

Throughout my life, I think I detect two strands in my attitude to books. The dominant strand has been a restless seeking to use books to fulfil my own agendas through books. As author, as bookseller, as teenager over-filling his shelves, as reader out to mine information I have not encountered books, in joy, for their own sake, but have sought to make books and the words they contain a way of wholeness, a way of salvation.

But the earlier strand which first emerged in childhood, and the more wholesome is when I come to a text secure in myself, coming as I am, recognising there is much I will never know, coming in joy open to whatever pleasure or profit the book holds for me, realising I will never match up to the expectations of all those volumes on the Christian bookshop shelves, but knowing myself secure.

A friend and I regularly meet for coffee at Eden Court Theatre, and often we’ll discuss what we’ve been reading – often something theological. And this sharing of things which have come alive for us during our reading are about the most meaningful discussion of books I have ever had. And in fact good, imaginative theology does something which few other texts achieve, taking you into another world while planting your feet more firmly in this world.