URSABLOG: The Long Summer Read

Tomorrow, finally, I’m off. I’m going to Naxos, the largest island in the Cyclades, and I’m taking my new red Vespa, so it will be, in all senses, a question of balance: what do I really need, and what is absolutely necessary? Those who know me well enough will understand that if it’s a choice between my coolest clothes and books, then I’d rather go naked. I will board the ferry tomorrow morning, and make my way to the aft deck, and settle down with what will I hope become the theme of my week away: καφ?, βιβλ?ο, τσιγ?ρα, θ?λασσα. Coffee, book, cigarettes and the sea.

Going away by myself gives me the opportunity to wallow in self-indulgence: lying under an umbrella, swimming, reading, smoking, dozing until the sun goes down when I wander off in search of a suitable taverna, my other passion. Naxos is well chosen for all these activities, especially with enough sightseeing thrown in to make me get up in the morning.

By far the majority of time spent yesterday in packing was choosing which books to take. I try and read one fiction and then one non-fiction book in that order. I love literature but I also push myself to learn things that fiction cannot always teach. The non-fiction can range from self-help and business books, psychology, economics, history, politics to biography, music and of course shipping. The fiction comes from many sources, from the elegant beauty of Henry James to the page turning fun of Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano series. And everything in between.

Books, in every form, have featured very prominently for me this year. Regular readers will know that an idea I had when I was teaching in Mombasa earlier this year has grown into a monster, albeit a very agreeable one. The Daystar Book Drop Project has overwhelmed me: we are sending many boxes of books down in the next few days. But this was a labour of love, as it combined many of the things that are important to me: shipping, education, books and generally making the world a slightly better place.

But books, as you may well have guessed, have always featured in my life. In an essay called Why Bother? by Jonathan Franzen (a favourite novelist of mine), included in a collection called How To Be Alone, he analysed, amongst other things, the lonely work of being a reader and writer, as both require isolation and withdrawal from the world around. You cannot write (unless you are in one of those awful creative writing therapy sessions) or read with other people; you have to do it alone. He mentions research by Shirley Brice Heath who investigated what makes a reader of literature. She made a couple of discoveries:

-         For a person to sustain an interest in literature they have to be “heavily modelled” when very young, i.e. one or both of the parents must have been reading serious books and must have encouraged the child to do the same.

-         Young readers also need to find a person with whom they can share this interest.

Thinking about this I didn’t really qualify. My parents were busy, with work and five children, eventually, running around, and although they did read, I don’t remember seeing my father ever read a novel. My mother did, but it was just something she did from time to time. What was evident however was that they had read, that if not when I was growing up, but certainly in the past, books were an important part of their lives. The dining room, where the television was, had one long wall of bookcases. When watching television my eyes would be drawn to the books above; I still remember the titles.

I read voraciously up to about the age of eleven. When we had “toy days” at school, I took books. But then I went to secondary school, and in the rough and tumble of daily life, I lost my interest in favour of trying to fit in with the others. Being no good at sport, and being ‘too cool for school’ (I admit that up until the age of sixteen I found it easy enough to cruise through my studies without much effort), I developed an interest in drink, music, cigarettes and girls, interests that are still very much with me. Reading was simply uncool, and in the comprehensive state school I was at, fitting in was paramount. Or rather, standing out from the others brought all types of social exclusion and casual violence on your head. It was simply not worth the fight.

Heath points out that there is also a second type of reader, the child who from an early age felt very different from the those around him. This does not mean they are a nerd, antisocial in fact, but you can become a “social isolate”. As Frantzen says:

Simply being a “social isolate” as a child does not, however, doom you to bad breath and poor party skills as an adult. In fact, it can make you hypersocial. It’s just that at some point you’ll begin to feel a gnawing, almost remorseful need to be alone and do some reading—to reconnect to that community. [The community of readers of the ‘imagined world’ of literature]

That fits the bill, for me, at least. He goes on:

According to Heath, readers of the social-isolate variety (she also calls them “resistant” readers) are much more likely to become writers than those of the modeled habit variety. … What’s perceived as the antisocial nature of “substantive” authors, whether it’s James Joyce’s exile or J. D. Salinger’s reclusion, derives in large part from the social isolation that’s necessary for inhabiting an imagined world.

Bullseye. Both Joyce and Salinger influenced me heavily in my teenage years, when I started reading again. When I reached the age of sixteen, I had to start seriously studying, but having never formed the habit, or even the skills, to do academic work I quickly started slipping behind. I hung out with the intellectual kids at school, a small group admittedly, and started dressing differently, listening to alternative music, and writing terrible teenage poetry and songs (some still exist somewhere, but have not seen the light of day for many a year). But lacking a mentor, or an example, I retreated into books and, paradoxically, academic failure.

Why did this happen? It’s hard to say. I was no star student, and was significantly poor in English Language and Literature not to consider them for further study. I think this was the reason in fact: by not having to study it I felt I could try it out with the freedom of not being judged for it. So I started taking down the books from the shelves above the television, authors that, although I did not realise it at the time, made a deep impression on my tender years: Graham Greene, Hemmingway, John Braine, F Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh amongst others.

I also found that being a reader was cool, and sexy. It made you look mysterious and deep: combine that with cigarettes, drink and music, and you were far more attractive to girls than being a star student. Or so I thought anyway.

This enabled me to restart my reading career, and as I grew up and went to college I naturally met other people who read for enjoyment. One of the many reasons I fell in love with ex-wife, Sarah, was that we both shared this passion: we found that we were happiest in front of a fire place, each on our own sofas, after dinner, sharing a bottle of wine, and reading. We went everywhere with a book or two, on holidays there was always space for a bag or box of books. Our house slowly filled up with books, and there was always one room full of bookshelves. It should be no surprise that Sarah is now a published author, and a successful one.

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I have just bought a new house in Piraeus. It is a significant milestone in my life, having reaffirmed my commitment to Greece. It is neo-classical, about a hundred years old, and I must admit I fell in love with it the moment I saw it. As with all things that involve the Greek state bureaucracy however it has taken a bit longer than I expected to sign the contract, but on Tuesday I paid for it and took the keys.

On Wednesday I went to see the architects to see what they had come up with in terms of the design. The house was uninhabited for many years and needs a lot of work, not least a new roof and floors. When I first went to see the architects they asked what my priorities were. It will not surprise you to learn that the three most important features for me are the library, the kitchen and a new wine cellar (which should solve my post-Brexit customs problems).

The library will be based in a beautiful high-ceilinged room at the front of the building on the first floor. The architects had some difficulty in envisaging what the room would be used for; they even incorporated a mezzanine office type structure because surely a room cannot just contain books? Oh yes it can. In my current flat I have once again run out of shelf space as the books breed.

The idea, or desire, for a library crystallised for me last year when I was invited by friends for a weekend in Tsagkarada, in Pilio, one of my favourite spots in Greece. It rained all weekend, and on the Sunday we escaped in waterproofs to go for tea in a hotel up the hill (everything is on a slope in Pilio). I was pointed towards the library by my host, and I fell in love with the room. Earlier this year, whilst spending the weekend with a friend at his house in Germany, I experienced the same feeling with a somewhat grander version (it included a Guttenberg bible, amongst other treasures), but the concept was the same. “I WANT ONE!” I said to myself. My brother, knowing this, sent me a link this week of the worlds most beautiful libraries to give a me a few ideas. I don’t think I can incorporate all of them, but I’ll have a go.

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I read a book recently, on the non-fiction side, called Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives, by Daisy Hay. I loved it, and it made me hungry to dive again into their poetry and literature. I should take Shelley and Keats with me to Naxos, now I think about it: poetry is perfect for those lazy hot days on the beach when sea and sun combine into sleepy dozes to the sound of the waves. One thing that struck me in reading the book was that even these tortured romantic heroes did not just go off by themselves to bleed their souls on to the page in a lonely garret or Italian villa somewhere. They also needed an active and lively social life to engage, challenge and inspire them. Yes reading and writing needs to be done in seclusion, but the ideas do not come by themselves; conversation and, yes, life itself is as important.

This is true of life in shipping too, especially as a shipbroker. You cannot hide behind a computer, just reading, you need to get out and engage with people, the market, to find opportunities. You need to be fed, and to feed, to make a living. I am guilty myself of retreating into knowledge gathering sometimes, but I know that is not enough. If some of the greatest works of literature, like Frankenstein or Childe Harold, were inspired and created by interaction, even though laboured over alone, then shipbroking too needs to balance, and even use, the tension between the two. Funny to think that Keats’ Ode To A Grecian Urn should be the inspiration to sell ships, but what the hell, whatever it takes.

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But libraries are not, as I now realise, just depositories for books, even though (as Anthony Powell called one of his books) Books Do Furnish a Room. They are places for the exchange, silent or otherwise, of knowledge. A library where books neither leave or arrive is just a room full of books. So it was with interest I read in the Financial Times about an article that had first appeared on the Forbes website and then subsequently deleted. In it, economist Panos Mourdoukoutas suggested that all public libraries should close to “save taxpayers money” and be replaced by Amazon. Amazon would sell the books of course, and not function as a library as we know it, but as a bookstore. So severe was the backlash that the article was deleted. Libraries it seems, even in these days of digitalised knowledge, are still valued as important places for physically holding knowledge, as well as sharing it, and through various other functions and events, allowing others without the access or economic means to reach beyond their own immediate horizons.

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There is a project currently underway where academics are attempting to trace the flowering of knowledge, ideas and, important for us, trade in the first 50 years since the first of Guttenberg’s groundbreaking innovations in the 15th century. But printing did not take really take off until the technology reached Venice where a combination of risk taking entrepreneurs, technical know-how, investment capital and above all, a ready made Europe wide trading network. And what were the best sellers? Not bibles printed in German, as is popularly believed, but cookbooks, medical guides and most importantly Latin grammars. Then, as now, education was extremely important

To get an idea of how important this invention was, think about how the internet has changed our world. Younger readers will not realise how revolutionary this has been having grown up with it, but older ones, who remember life and study before the net will know. For example, I can write this article without leaving my desk because I can double check everything via Google, without having to go home and refer my books, or go to a library. This, apart from saving time, allows the mind to travel more freely. We are indeed living in a new age. The printing press changed the world completely: the Reformation would never have got off the ground, science would not have developed at the speed it did, and the age of Enlightenment would never have happened. Whether you think this are good or bad is up to you, but without the printed word and image, produced cheaply and dispersed widely, progress would have been much slower. The internet and digitalisation therefore will have effects that, considering how cheap and widespread it is, will be far wider, for good or bad. We have only just started.

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That said, I still prefer books, for all the reasons I mention above: as inspiration, engagement, escape, destressing, work or the simple enjoyment of beauty. I like the physical feel, and the reminder of what both what I have read and what I should get round to reading next. But this is not for everyone: I fully appreciate that I am fairly unique. A couple of years ago I used to run a book club in Athens where we would meet and discuss a novel that we had all read. I loved it, and was sorry when I had to stop due to pressure of work. Perhaps one of the reasons I loved it was that I was surrounded by women; very few men read books for some reason, and if they do it tends to be non-fiction. Why is this? I guess it is just an extension of being either too cool for school, or not to have had the experience of reading fiction before the age of eleven. I am grateful I did, whether the cause was having parents who read, or for the desire to escape my surroundings into the imaginary world (a mixture of both I suspect). Without books I would be lost, and would not have gained so much.

It is very unlikely that the profile of readers in Mombasa is any different from here or the UK, in fact I would suspect the habit of reading from an early age is restricted to an even smaller proportion considering the lack of opportunity, and by that I mean the effects of poverty and the ignorance that goes with it. So why send books down there?

When I was in Mombasa, I was strolling with Robert, the head of the Institute of Chartered Shipbrokers (ICS) East Africa Branch, and he told me he had been inspired to create a library following a visit to our branch in Greece the year before. Libraries are a good place to study, and as I know when I was finally studying properly, for my Master’s degree and for the exams for the ICS, I would take down books that caught my eye, or wouldn’t have otherwise consulted if I hadn’t been browsing along the shelves. This is an extension, of course, of finally taking down the books of Greene and Waugh from the shelves above the television when there was nothing worth watching, a real turning point in my life, as I look back now.

My hope is that the 500 odd books that will find their way to Mombasa, and eventually other branches in Africa and other parts of the developing world, will have similar effects on those hungry for knowledge, even if, like me, they were unaware they had an appetite at all.

But libraries are also places where the social aspect of studying is affirmed; it helps you to work when there are other people around you working at the same time. It’s also a great place (or so I understand) for making eye contact, and even real contact, with people you may find attractive. A lot more exciting (and challenging) than Tinder I imagine.

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One book I am definitely taking with me to Naxos is Outline by Rachel Cusk. When you read the description you will understand why:

A woman writer goes to Athens in the height of summer to teach a writing course. Though her own circumstances remain indistinct, she becomes the audience to a chain of narratives, as the people she meets tell her one after another the stories of their lives.

Beginning with the neighbouring passenger on the flight out and his tales of fast boats and failed marriages, the storytellers talk of their loves and ambitions and pains, their anxieties, their perceptions and daily lives. In the stifling heat and noise of the city the sequence of voice begins to weave a complex human tapestry. The more they talk the more elliptical their listener becomes, as she shapes and directs their accounts until certain themes begin to emerge: the experience of loss, the nature of family life, the difficulty of intimacy and the mystery of creativity itself.

But what is significant is that Outline, a book that was on my wish list anyway, was given to me as a gift by someone I’d never met. In June, during Posidonia, I was very kindly invited to speak at a conference organised by BMS, the bunker traders and suppliers. The panel moderator for my bit approached me before we spoke and told me not to run away because he had something for me. I thought it would be a tie, a pen, or something similar given to all the speakers. I was naturally very touched that the gift was a book, but when he explained that he was a regular reader of this blog, and he thought that I would appreciate it, as a writer as well as a reader, I was really surprised.

He further explained that he had attended a creative writing course led by Cusk (and inspired by it) and through his reading of my blog he told me he thought I had found my voice. I was so speechless that I may not have fully shown my appreciation. I have not written to thank him yet, not because I am ungrateful – far from it – because I want to read the book and then write to him with my thoughts and my appreciation.

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This has been an eventful year for me, as you may imagine. But it is the gift of that book that really brings all these strands together. It was given by someone who reads the blog, via LinkedIn, and went out of his way to not only buy a book, but to buy that book, to give to someone he has never met, because he thought I would value it and learn from it. And I see now that this is what I have been trying to do with the Book Drop Project, and with my lecturing and, in fact, with shipbroking.

You may think that I am trying to give shipbroking a higher purpose and dignity than it deserves; surely it is a dirty, money grabbing, duplicitous industry peopled by sharks with an eye out for the main chance. Well maybe, but that does not mean it does not provide an essential service for the good of the industry, and by reverse derivation, for trade itself. Bookselling was necessary to kick start the process that led to the Age of Enlightenment and consequently the Industrial Revolution, but it needed both the new technology of printing and the existence of trading networks, serviced mainly by ships, to get books into the hands of ordinary people. Whenever I come across people in the book trade, the publishers, marketers and printers (not to mention the literary agents) they do not do it just for the love of books, but for money as well. Trade, and profits, make the world a better place. Economic growth at the end of the day is a good thing, especially when done well.

The thing, through all of history, that has encouraged economic growth and human development, through technology, art, science, in fact all knowledge and ideas, is trade and the movement and subsequent interaction of people. Books are excellent ambassadors of this, and can travel more easily over longer distances. The internet and digitalisation will only increase the pace of change, if used for good. Libraries, whether physical or virtual, are only as good as the knowledge they hold, and the knowledge is only as good as the means, the language, the writing, used to communicate it.

On Naxos, amongst other things, I will be thinking about not just how my library will look, but how it will be used. Will it be for me alone, a retreat from the world? Or a place where before (or after) food and wine, it can be used as a venue and forum for the exchange of ideas, in the form of conversation, laughter, reading, writing but also by setting books free into the world? I prefer the second version, because it feels more like the life I want to live. After all, what is life without food, wine, friends, conversations and books? It is like asking me what is life without love. Liveable, but colourless, lonely and unhappy, in fact not really life at all. I choose life.

Simon Ward

www.ursashipbrokers.com