Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

be on the same side of the glass wall. I waited.
    She said, ‘Why be happy when you could be normal?’

9
    English Literature A – Z

    T
HE ACCRINGTON PUBLIC LIBRARY HAD a copy of most things. It had a copy of Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1932).
    When I was sixteen I had only got as far as M – not counting Shakespeare, who is not part of the alphabet, any more than black is a colour. Black is all the colours and Shakespeare is all the alphabet. I was reading his plays and sonnets the way that you get dressed every morning. You don't ask yourself, ‘Shall I get dressed today?’ (On the days you don't get dressed you are not well enough, either mentally or physically, to be able to ask – but we will go there later.)
    M was the seventeenth-century poet, Andrew Marvell. After my encounter with T. S. Eliot on the library steps, I had decided to add poetry to the reading list. Poetry is easier to learn than prose. Once you have learned it you can use it as a light and a laser. It shows up your true situation and it helps you cut through it.
    Marvell wrote one of the most wonderful poems in English – ‘To His Coy Mistress’. That's the one that begins: Had we but world enough, and time . . .
    World enough, and time: I was young, so I had time, but I knew I had to find world – I didn't even have a room of my own.

    What gave me great hope were the closing lines of the poem. It is a seduction poem, which is its charm, but it is also a life poem, urging and celebrating love and desire and declaring desire as a challenge to mortality itself.
    We can't slow time, says Marvell, but we can chase it. We can make time run. Think of the hourglass, the cliche of the sands of time slowly dribbling away, and all those Faust-like wishes of immortality – if only time could stop, if only we could live forever.
    No, says Marvell, forget that, turn it round, live it out as exuberantly as you can. Here he is, much better than me:

Let us roll all our strength and all
    Our sweetness up into one ball;
    And tear our pleasures with rough strife
    Thorough the iron gates of life.
    Thus, though we cannot make our sun
    Stand still, yet we will make him run.

    Read it aloud. And look what Marvell makes happen by putting the line break at ‘sun’. The line break right there forces a nano-pause, and so the sun does indeed stand still – then the line gallops forward.
    I thought, ‘If I can't stay where I am, and I can't, then I will put all that I can into the going.’
    I began to realise that I had company. Writers are often exiles, outsiders, runaways and castaways. These writers were my friends. Every book was a message in a bottle. Open it.
    *

    M. Katherine Mansfield – the only writer Virginia Woolf envied . . . but I had not read Virginia Woolf.
    In any case, I did not think in terms of gender or feminism, not then, because I had no wider politics other than knowing I was working class. But I had noticed that the women were fewer and further apart on the shelves, and when I tried to read books ‘about’ literature (always a mistake), I couldn't help noticing that the books were written by men about men who write.
    That didn't worry me; I was in danger of drowning and nobody lost at sea worries about whether the spar they cling to is made of elm or oak.
    Katherine Mansfield – another tubercular writer like Lawrence and Keats, and they all made me feel better about my non-stop cough. Katherine Mansfield – a writer whose short stories are as far away from any life experience I had had at sixteen.
    But that was the point. Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become. Emily Dickinson barely left her homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, but when we read, ‘My life stood – a loaded gun’ we know we have met an imagination that will detonate life, not decorate it.
    So I read on. And I read on, past my own geography and history, past the foundling stories and the Nori brickworks, past the Devil and the wrong crib. The great writers were not remote; they were in Accrington.
    *

    The Accrington Public Library ran on the Dewey decimal system, which meant that books were meticulously catalogued, except for Pulp Fiction which everybody despised. So