Set texts
‘Set Texts’ because these are the authors I generally came to through school or university, either because they were set for exams, for the weekly essay, or simply recommended.
In most cases, it was a positive experience. Through the thoughtful guidance of some of my favourite teachers I found my way to the Greek myths and Homer, Jonathan Swift and William Golding, the unique comedy stylings of Jerome K Jerome and Stella Gibbons, and some of my favourite British classics like Laurie Lee and George Orwell. Shakespeare of course was a waste of time. (You drink the Kool-Aid, don’t you? You go along with the received wisdom that he must be good because he’s so famous, but I wonder how many of us, at this remove, would place Shakespeare at the top of the heap if we were given the choice between him and, say, Jonson or Marlowe or Webster or Donne? I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to distinguish who wrote what if you took the title pages off, and I’m meant to be good at this stuff. Ah well. Having said that, I did use the term ‘arboreal images’ in a discussion on Troilus and Cressida once, which earned me a surprised but appreciative glance from my English teacher, and a look of pure venom from the thugs busy wanking at the back.)
At university the strain of having to read several books a week in a foreign language in order to crank out the inevitably dull-as-ditchwater essay was particularly irksome, and interfered with my own writing. Still, it was good discipline, effortful if enervating, and at the same time you got this undeniable sense of achievement. Knowledge of a kind was going in, and you were exercising your little grey cells in a way that no other activity could match. And how many other people you knew could do what you were doing? (That is, apart from everyone else on your course? And every other student across the country also doing Modern Languages? Not to mention everybody in the world who had spoken French and German from birth? Shut up.) I was an English person learning a second and a third language. I was in a tiny minority of the population, and I shall go to my grave insufferably proud of the fact that in my life I have read both La Chartreuse de Parme and Buddenbrooks in the original. They were both about, um… foreign people.
Robert Bolt
(1924‒1995)
A Man for All Seasons (1960)
We all had to sit round the classroom reading this out. I was the Common Man. I put a bit of ginger into it, even attempted a Cockney accent. Kenneth Tynan, whose critical writings I admire hugely, thought the play did not say enough about More’s actual beliefs. He was frustrated by More’s silence under interrogation, like a Communist in the ’50s taking the Fifth. Whatever, at least we still had Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago and Ryan’s Daughter to come.
Bertolt Brecht
(1898‒1956)
Leben des Galilei (‘Life of Galileo’, 1938)
At uni you had to choose someone to study in depth and I chose Brecht because he wrote plays which were easier to plough through for the weekly essay than, say, a whole sequence of doorstops by Thomas Mann or Heinrich von Kleist. Turned out they were more austere and political than I preferred, but I like biographical plays and didn’t know much about Galileo before I read it – so, you know, you do the best you can with what you’ve got where you are.
Albert Camus
(1913‒1960)
L’Étranger (‘The Outsider’, 1942)
School set text, seminal as all get out, but I still couldn’t define what existentialism means if you deprived me of jelly babies for a week. I remember becoming very miserable around the time we were studying it, though I don’t know whether it was because of this book or simply being a moody teenager. Probably a bit of both. But Meursault and his sun-drenched shenanigans on the beach certainly didn’t help.
Honoré de Balzac
(1799‒1850)
Le Père Goriot (‘Old Goriot’, 1835)
TLDR, as the kids say, or rather type, these days. We all took the exam having read the English translation in a US edition. Not ideal. But I always admired the man’s capacity for sustained effort, writing an entire first draft in one mammoth session. “He lived mostly on coffee and work,” our teacher said, and I took that to heart. Not a bad way to go, I remember thinking, like a twat. But look at that swaggering pose. He knew he was on to something. And Graham Robb’s 1994 biography of him is masterful.
Guy de Maupassant
(1850‒1893)
Quinze Contes (‘Fifteen Tales’)
School set text. Now these I could get into. There was one spooky one I remember first reading late at night during a thunderstorm which affected me as deeply as that time our junior school teacher read us WW Jacobs’s The Monkey’s Paw. I realised I couldn’t have been so frightened unless I’d understood every word. It was a turning point.
Gustave Flaubert
(1821‒1880)
Trois Contes (‘Three Tales’, 1877)
Our French teacher at school told us Flaubert could take days sometimes finding the right word. Good to know. Couldn’t tell. But this led me on to Madame Bovary and then Salammbô (which I bought for the titillating cover), fin de siècle decadence before the century had actually finished. Beardsley, Wilde, Richard Strauss – it was all starting to come together.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(1749‒1832)
Hermann und Dorothea (1797)
Goethe is as big in Germany as Shakespeare is, well, everywhere, but I’d never even heard of him before I went up to Oxford to study French and German. Just as well I kept that little nugget up my sleeve at interview or I’d never have got in. This was one of those epic poems they went in for in those days. I read it for an essay then promptly forgot everything about it. Sorry, Professor Reed. I know you did your best.
Sir William Golding
(1911‒1993)
Lord of the Flies (1954)
We all did this one at school didn’t we? At least it’s accessible. I’ve read almost all his others by now with varying degrees of bafflement. I still think this is the best, though the late trilogy To the Ends of the Earth is a rare classic of research and imagination, and Pincher Martin still bites like a North Sea crab. (Golding himself would have fluffed that image up a bit.)
Franz Grillparzer
(1791‒1872)
Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen (‘Waves of Sea and Love’, 1797)
Now there’s a name you don’t hear every day. For some reason this verse play stuck a chord with me, probably because it was based on mythic models – the story of Hero and Leander – and I was drowning in romantic melancholy at the time. I think I read it in one of those minuscule paperback versions from Blackwell’s, about as thick is a 10p piece and not much bigger than a Post-it note.
Homer
(c8th century BCE)
The Odyssey
The first essay I was set when I arrived at Oxford in 1974 to start my degree course in Modern Languages was entitled ‘What is epic poetry?’ based on a reading of The Iliad and The Odyssey. I knew I had come to the right place. The slaughter of the suitors in the latter is one of the great climaxes in world literature.
James Joyce
(1882‒1941)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
School set text and I wish I’d never read it. Without being at all religious, I have always suffered from Catholic guilt, and the famous sermon about hell gives me nightmares to this day. But love it or loathe, that must be some great writing right there, to have lodged in my psyche so long. Damn the man.
Laurie Lee
(1914‒1997)
Cider with Rosie (1959)
A past so lushly evoked you can smell it. The sequel, As I walked Out One Midsummer Morning, deals with the author’s experiences in the Spanish Civil War and probably contains just as much poetic truth.
Thomas Mann
(1875‒1955)
Tonio Kröger (1901)
We did this little novella for O-level, or was it A-level? I identified with the artist-hero caught between the conflicting attractions of art and society. Or something. Come on, I was only sixteen and it was in German for Christ’s sake.
Katherine Mansfield
(1888‒1923)
The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922)
The sixth form at the German school I was taught at in the mid-seventies were doing this collection. I read some, but not all. Maybe they were a bit too polite for my tastes, and I missed any deeper, darker undercurrents. I have zero feelings for the pampered Bloomsbury bunch she fell amongst, though I’m sad she had such a short life.
Molière
(1622‒1673)
Le Misanthrope (1666)
Did we touch on Molière at school as some kind of corollary or companion piece to the 17th-century classical theatre texts we were studying, your Racines and your Corneilles? Can’t remember now. But I liked the spirit of the age he conjured up, and I admired his industry. Good bloke. Always a great subject for those colourful historical costume dramas French cinema is so good at.
George Orwell
(1903‒1950)
Nineteen Eighty-Four
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” Try getting that opening line out of your head, and that’s even before you reach the bit with the rats.
William Shakespeare
(1564‒1616)
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c1595)
Of course, he’s wasted on schoolkids. They only like Romeo and Juliet for the fighting and the snogging. Admittedly you do get a flash of the teenage Olivia Hussey’s nipples in the 1968 Zeffirelli film, but only if you’re quick. We did Troilus and Cressida and Antony and Cleopatra, but the Dream was my favourite after I managed to catch Peter Brook’s ground-breaking 1970s version at the Hippodrome in Bristol, and then had a small part in a student production at college in the long hot summer of 1976.
Stendhal
(1783‒1842)
La Chartreuse de Parme (1839)
This came under the heading of ‘vacation reading’ and I remember clogging through the heavy yellow paperback flat out on my bedroom floor while the summer sun pored mockingly in through the window. I stupidly made minimal notes so I have zero recollection of it now, though I do recall a brilliantly sustained passage where the hero Fabrice del Dongo gallops pointlessly about the battlefield of Waterloo, and is left wondering at the end whether he has even been in a battle at all. (Le Rouge et le Noir was Stendhal’s other big hit but, hefty as its reputation was, I felt one French doorstop was enough for one vac.)
Jonathan Swift
(1667‒1745)
Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
School set text. I believe someone once said there’s a line in this about getting sunlight from cucumbers which is the funniest and most satirical line ever written in English. Dunno about that. But I liked the travel aspect, and the horses at the end are strangely simpatico.
Voltaire
(1694‒1778)
Candide, ou l’Optimisme (‘Candide, or Optimism’,1759)
French A-level. Rather enjoyed it. This one taught me two famous sayings: “Revenons à nos moutons” and “Il faut cultiver notre jardin” (‘Let’s get back to our sheep’, or return to the subject at hand, and ‘We must cultivate our garden’.) Good advice. As important now as it has ever been. Oh yes. Oh yes indeedy.
John Webster
(c1578‒1632)
The Duchess of Malfi (1613)
The phrase ‘revenge tragedy’ accrues to a lot of plays from the Jacobean period, and The Duchess of Malfi was the one we got flung at us. It has left not a rack behind. Forty-five years later it was my daughter’s turn, so to try and help her get to grips with it, we took her to see a professional production, starring one of my favourite actresses. It was by far the worst production of any play I have ever seen. Updating it to the modern period was only the first of many egregious artistic decisions they made, so I feel no qualms at all in guiding you towards my own shameless spoof of the original in the Revues section here.