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27/10/96 My kind of hero- from the Tang dynasty
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14/7/96 Old world's cracked, but Conard lives on
2/6/96 No winner-take-all society for Singapore
25/2/96 Once, there was a girl, the prettiest in a line
11/2/96 Reading with a pen and ruler by your side
28/1/96 The gravy that was the last five years
7/5/95 Collapse of resiraints and breakdown of family
23/5/87 When writer and man come together again
The Sunday Times, Page 4
Reading witha pena nd ruler by your side
THE actor Omar Sharif once said he liked to read in bed, under a light, with his cigarette and ashtray.
I knew someone once who spooned peanut butter jam out of a jar to eat as she read, and often, by the time she finished reading, would discover that she had finished two jars of the stuff.
Reading is a solitary pleasure, and unless we are cooped up in the economy class of a plane or are reading in a public place, we like to give ourselves over fully to that pleasure. So it may mean curling up in bed, with nothing but the light on; or it may mean moving your lips silently as you read, and wetting your thumb with your saliva to turn the page.
The last habit can kill, if you believe the tale about the lascivious official who lapped up the pornographic The Golden Pillow whose pages were dipped in poison, or as in the case of the monk in Umberto Eco's The Name Of The Rose, who was murdered in a similar manner.
I read the way Graham Greene said he did, with a pen and a ruler by my side. Whenever a passage strikes me, by its startling orchestration of words, or by its evocation of a time and a place, or by a point well made, I will underline the sentences.
I used to copy these passages into scrap books, until about more than 15 years ago, when I had the good fortune to be a neighbour of the Malaysian-born poet and writer Shirley Lim, who ended up becoming a mentor of sorts.
You should write them down on three-by-five cards and file them in a shoe-box, she told me. Any passage that is too long for the card, you should discard, and not use in any article you write, for it will be too much of a disruption for your reader.
I have been doing that faithfully since, and I have a whole shoe-box of cards, filed under authors and sometimes subjects. It is my treasure-trove, which I dip into whenever I write articles or columns like this one.
It is also my storehouse of memories, the way photo albums are for others, for each card marks a certain time, it marks a certain fascination with a subject, or an author, and together, the cards add up to a life- my life.
TWO weeks ago, when I heard that the exiled Russian poet and Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky had died, the first thing that came to mind was a line of his which I had recorded on a card.
It says: "For in art lightness of touch more often than not comes from the very darkness of its absence."
It is from an essay about the English poet W. D. Auden, where Brodsky makes the point that a writer's sentiments subordinate themselves inevitably to the merciless progression of art.
"This sort of thing secures, in art, a higher degree of Iyricism; in life, an equivalent in isolation," he says.
Brodsky read Auden when he was in his mid-2Os, after he dared to call himself a poet in a Soviet court in 1964, when he was not even properly educated. He was despatched to a psychiatric clinic and thereafter sentenced to five years in a labour camp near the Arctic Circle. (He was released after two years following pressure on Moscow from Western writers.)
He discovered Auden in an anthology, which a friend had sent him from Moscow.
In a small wooden shack in a village lost among swamps and forests near the Arctic circle, with light from a porthole-sized window, he read the one poem by the English poet in the anthology again and again, with what he describes as "a veritable boulder of an English-Russian dictionary" by his side.
In 1972, when he was finally thrown out of Russia and put on a flight to Austria, one of the first people he looked up was Auden. The English poet helped launch him in the West, and soon he was in America with a chair in a university and laden with grants of all sorts. In 1987, although he had written little after his exile, he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature.
WHY did I copy down that line? I guess I have always been romantic about the kind of writers and artists who, I imagine, have to make a Faustian pact to give up the richness, depth and warmth in their lives for their art.
I think of the painter in Herman Hesse's Rosshalde, whose rooms "knew only work and self-denial, where one could find nothing festive, nothing useless, no cherished baubles or bric-a-brac, no fragrance of wine or flowers, no memory of women".
The painter is estranged from his wife. He has a son whom he loves, but whom he has no time for when he is working, and who dies finally from the suffocating chill that pervades their cottage home. All he has left is the cold consolation of his art.
I remember the biographer in Bernard Malamud's Dubin's Lives, who gives up life to write lives.
"When will you take the time to live?" his wife asks him.
He tells her: "Don't begrudge my taking time to do difficult work. To do it well one has to do it many times. You have to make time or steal it."
She retorts: "You steal it from us all."
They have two grown childrcn, whom he has neglected, just as he has neglected his wife.
The English critic Cyril Conolly pronounces in his book, Enemies Of Promise: "If, as Dr Johnson said, a man who is not married is only half a man, so a man who is very much married is only half a writer."
The following is certainly sexist, but this is what he adds: "Marriage can succeed for an artist only where there is enough money to save him from taking on uncongenial work, and a wife who is intelligent and unselfish enough to understand and respect the working of the unfriendly cycle of the creative imagination."
I can hear Philip Jeyaratnam, a model husband and father if there is one, groan here, if he is reading this. Or Simon Tay. I beg their pardon. There must have been great artists who were also good husbands or wives and good parents. And there always will be.
MY FRIEND Ah Seng, who helps me to attend to all things practical, once suggested that I should buy a hand-held scanner to copy passages from books that can then be stored in a diskette. It is so much easier and faster.
But, for the moment, I still prefer the pen and ruler approach. Technology has come to govern so many aspects of my life that I want my books to be a sanctuary from it.
I want to keep my three-byfive cards and my shoebox. Ah Seng is not around for me to
check this, but I think diskettes are resistant to fire, and so they cannot follow me into an urn somewhere in my afterlife. Can you imagine my isolation then?
