2021: My year of reading

2021 has been a very conservative reading year. I’ve apparently only bought 20 books (I received another 3 for Christmas), but I have read over 90, so there’s been a lot of re-reading going on, and this has mainly been comfort reading to help me through the strange times we are living in. And the big clear-out also continues, as I get rid of books I know I’m not going to read or refer to again.

I spent quite a while revisiting Richard Brautigan’s novels, which have been in my library since my hippy days. They are light-hearted froth in a lot of ways, and yet some of them are very well-written, and I didn’t decide to get rid of all of them, but kept one or two just in case, as you do. The same is true of Hermann Hesse’s novels: I’ve now re-read all of these apart from The Glass Bead Game, which somehow I can’t face at the moment, even though some think it’s the best of all his works. I have a very vague recollection of it being a bit of a disappointment way back in the 1970s, too. But as I grow older I realise that Hesse’s fiction, and his ideas about the self and personality were pretty influential in my younger years in terms of how I saw myself and the world I lived in, and the connections between Hesse’s characters’ lives and the psychology of Carl Jung has been quite to the forefront when I’ve been re-reading the novels. Necessarily this led to a re-reading of some of Jung as well. In the end, I think the pandemic has caused me to undertake some fairly deep reflection on my entire life, and I know this has been the case for a good number of people.

There have been some new books this year, and a good number of them I read because they were choices of other members of my current book group. I’m a little surprised that I’ve stuck with the group – I like the people a lot – but at other times when I’ve been in a book group, I’ve dropped out fairly quickly because I didn’t like other people choosing my reading matter for me…

I’ve also realised that I read very little travel writing this year, which struck me as rather odd since my own opportunities for travel have been necessarily rather constrained for the past couple of years. I re-read a short and very lovely book Something of his Art, by Horatio Clare who travelled in the footsteps of my hero J S Bach, making the journey on foot from Arnstadt in Thuringia to Lübeck to hear the master organist Dietrich Buxtehude in the early eighteenth century. Clare records his impressions of the walk and reflects on the music and musician.

Discovery: I’ve wrestled with the Tao Te Ching a few times but not really got anywhere. My liking for Ursula Le Guin led me to get her version (ie version rather than translation, with plenty of her annotation and commentary) and I feel I’m now getting somewhere with it and something from it.

Blog report: more visits than ever this year, but this is largely due, as last year, to the number of what I imagine are students of the literature of the Great War reading up about various poems and poets as part of their studies. I’m grateful for their visits, and for everyone else who reads rather more widely in my meanderings through the world of literature, and I enjoy your comments and interactions.

Best SF: Laurent Binet’s Civilisations, although strictly speaking it’s an alternative history rather than science fiction. But a superb ‘what if?’

Best new novel: this has to be the (for me) long-awaited The Books of Jacob, by Olga Tokarczuk, which was a challenging but rewarding read and shows why she is a Nobel-class writer. Looking forward to more from her.

Best non-fiction: I found Adrift, by Amin Maalouf a fascinating account of the current state of the world, and how we got here. He’s a Lebanese writer, mainly a novelist but he has written about history and society before. He anchors so many of our current political problems in the Middle East and the effects that interfering outsiders have had over the past century as they struggled for control over the region and its resources. That’s oversimplifying a great deal, but is a very thought-provoking approach and one which matches the way I have thought about the world and seen it changing over my lifetime. The West’s appalling and cavalier treatment of Palestine is at the heart of so many problems and conflicts…

Best re-read(s): Amin Maalouf again, and Leo The African, his amazing re-creation of the true story of the Muslim boy from Spain at the time of the Reconquista, and his life, travels and adventures. Simply wonderful. Also Jean Giono’s Regain, about the resurrection of a remote village in France, the power of nature and those who live in harmony with it. Another book from my student days.

Next year’s plans: I want to continue with my reading of all of Shakespeare’s plays, and I’ve also made a resolution to read/re-read more history. I shall continue to sort and tidy up my library, and attempt to buy no new books at all… I am allowing myself one exception, which will be the final volume of Philip Pullman’s Book of Dust trilogy, if it’s published. And lest you think I’m being extremist here, I will point out that I have several feet of as yet unread books on my shelves…

Frieda Fordham: An Introduction to Jung’s Psychology

     I’ve been re-visiting Jung recently, and went back to this introductory text, which is quite old now (Fordham actually knew Jung towards the end of his life). Briefly I wondered why I hadn’t chosen a more recent general text, but I’m finding – perhaps because of my age – that older texts are better organised, more carefully expressed and often much better referenced; this one has an excellent glossary. I’m sure the receptiveness of our brains changes, and has been shaped by our age, and our education, too.

One thing that is quite striking is how dated some of the attitudes and behaviours ascribed to men and women sound today; Jung and Fordham were both of a particular time, and this particular flaw does not invalidate their explanations. In fact, a reaction to what we now call sexist language and attitudes is a useful touchstone in a way, for evaluating the soundness of the underlying ideas: you slow down as you read in order to argue with the text and check how sound the arguments are.

The importance attributed to the unconscious is central to Jung’s exploration and understanding of how we humans ‘work’ mentally and emotionally, and it’s stressed that the unconscious isn’t just a sort of dustbin for the unacceptable parts of us, but something far broader and deeper. Accepting that there is much going on below the surface that is an integral part of us is part of a journey to wholeness; concepts such as the animus/anima and the shadow can be helpful in furthering our self-understanding.

I had not recalled – or perhaps not noticed previously – how much Jung focuses on the second half of life, and this is surely part of the reason that I have returned to his after a good many years. Neither had I taken on board his interest in alchemy, as part of his researches, and reflecting on more recent times I wondered if he would have explored the uses of various psychotropic drugs…

Again I have been struck by the modernity in his methods of analysis, particularly the idea that the work done by analyst/counsellor and client/worker but be open, shared: both are working towards a resolution of the issues and there is no cut-and-dried interpretation to be handed down like stone tablets from analyst to ‘patient’. Such an approach is intrinsic to so much contemporary counselling and psychotherapy.

Overall I have been impressed by the breadth of Jung’s research and knowledge and the way he has attempted to synthesise so much material. It’s not the complete answer for me, but a very useful tool to have on the journey, and Frieda Fordham’s book is mostly a very lucid introduction.

Carl Jung: Modern Man in Search of a Soul

     The main overall impression I gained from this book, published almost a century ago, is how much psychoanalysis has moved on in that time, in terms of its methods, procedures and outcomes, and also how far ahead of his time Jung was, even though he wrote using language which is rather impenetrable nowadays.

He warns against ‘suggestions’ from the ‘analyst’, advising that progress comes from what the client brings to a session; here we see the current way, where the ‘client/worker’ does the work through speaking and making connections, and cannot not remain passive during a therapy session, cannot, having talked for their hour, then have the ‘solution’ to their ‘problems’ presented by the expert analyst.

We see Jung’s clear awareness that people like Freud, Adler and himself were at the very earliest stages in the development of what we now call psychotherapy. Freud and Jung had initially focused on dreams, whereas today the emphasis has shifted to feelings, with dreams perhaps a significant part of what a client brings along. And Jung’s big discovery is the unconscious, and its contribution to us as individuals, and the collective unconscious and its effect on us as a species. There is a humility on Jung’s part in the way he describes so much as a work in progress, and is often quite tentative in what he is suggesting. He does place a lot of emphasis on dreams, which he saw as a useful ‘way in’ to what was going on. There is also a very interesting chapter on art and artists and the potential of art as therapy, which is now something used quite widely and commonly in various schools of psychotherapy.

He also seems to have been ahead of his time in considering the need to be working with healthy as well as unhealthy minds, in terms of developing a greater understanding of how we human beings ‘work’. And I was aware, all the time I was reading, of the huge shadow cast over Europe and its peoples by the horrors of the First World War, which had only ended relatively recently…

The other area where I feel Jung makes a significant contribution is in his recognition of the importance of a spiritual element in the human psyche, no matter what actual language or terminology we use to explore and describe it. For Jung, acknowledging this is necessary to a balanced life. He wrestles with a number of complexities here, but his ideas fit in with his key notion of the collective unconscious.

There is a great deal of thoughtful and measured wisdom and goodness in what he writes, and in the way he writes, even if it is now rather dated and unfamiliar language; it’s certainly worth the effort. Jung is much more spiritual or religious than I remember him from previous reading many years ago, and yet also far more modern in terms of his vision of how the counsellor-therapist and her/his client must work together to succeed.

Hermann Hesse: Steppenwolf

     Back to my re-visiting of the novels of Hermann Hesse, and this one which was all the rage in my student/hippy days such a long time ago…

Autobiographical again? The hero is called Harry Haller, after all. A man lost and oppressed by bourgeois convention, a Mr Normal and his shadow, in Jungian terms, an endless wanderer and seeker who feels that suicide is the only way out of his perceived dilemma of being unable to square the circle, and reconcile being endlessly pulled in two different directions. Haller echoes and parallels some of the heroes of Hesse’s earlier novels, and their dilemmas, but here they are much more sharply focused, more central. It starts off as a treatise on the Steppenwolf, Haller’s name for his darker self, and feels like a manifesto, or an apologia for his condition. This part felt rambling, dated, tedious and self-indulgent this time around.

But Haller is turned away from his sourness, bitterness, mockery and self-loathing by a woman – Hermine – whom he meets in a bar. A hermaphrodite (Herman!), she humanises the misanthrope through a series of drug-like experiences and encounters, opening him up to a new world of self-exploration and self-knowledge, as well as leading him to accept that there are other people, like himself, who do not fit into the conventional world, and who therefore make a new and different one for themselves in which they can flourish.

Partly this is a novel that reflects some of the strangeness of the interwar years – it was published in 1927 – and partly it reflects Hesse’s lifelong interest in Jungian psychology (the two were contemporaries) which explores the duality of our human psyches, and, for me, is recounted most clearly and fully in the beautiful and haunting Narziss and Goldmund, which I hope to re-read next. And although there are all those connections with his earlier novels, here is a much greater depth, maturity and intensity to the writing. I now have a much clearer sense of the unity of Hesse’s oeuvre, and, I suppose, his sense that one’s entire life is a journey, a search for meaning, a notion that speaks to my own condition. There is a sense of the vastness of humans’ potential once one dares to look beyond the limits one has imposed/ had imposed on oneself.

I found myself reflecting on myself and how I’ve changed as I’ve aged; as students we raved about how brilliant this book was, the idea of being great, notable, different… not sliding into being part of the mainstream of life. And yet, this is what happened to most of us; although I never forgot or rejected those hippy days, I followed – happily – the conventional path of career, family, mortgage and have only in retirement felt able to pick up some of those earlier, left-aside threads of my life. Curious, and now more understandable to me at least, that I laid these books aside when I did, and have now returned to them, with a new and different sense of appreciation…

Hermann Hesse, continued

    .         The recurring themes of Hermann Hesse’s writings become clearer as one works one’s way through his novels: difficulties in personal and marital relationships, close personal bonds of friendships between males, and the search for real meaning in life… so plenty to keep a reader thinking as they go.

Rosshalde is a better novel than the three earlier ones I wrote about here, as there’s a real story, and development of more sympathetic characters. The painter Veraguth endures a broken relationship with his wife and she with him; for him it’s all about his hopes for his relationship with his younger child; he is completely estranged from his elder son. We also gain some insight into the source of an artist’s inspiration. The relationship with his wife is difficult, distant, tormented, the one with his boy is fantasy and wishful thinking. Into all this comes a lifelong male friend whose business is in the Far East and who urges Veraguth to give up on this miserable life and join him in the East

Strong bonds of friendship between men are more successful than marriages – what is Hesse telling us, perhaps about himself, here? Veraguth discovers a new decisiveness as he plans to leave his wife for good, but his future must be totally alone, as his young son dies horribly from meningitis before the departure to the East. Everything has disintegrated, and yet the artist looks forward to new inspiration and creativity abroad. Ultimately every human is alone, and must find and sustain her/himself from inner resources.

Knulp is a set of three short stories about a man who is a lifelong, happy and light-hearted vagabond, with friends and acquaintances wherever he goes. He seems to accept the transience of happiness. Everyone he encounters thinks that, in conventional terms he could have ‘made more’ of his life had he put his mind to it; it’s only in the last story where he is in his forties and dying of tuberculosis that we learn of his disappointment in his first love, which seems to have turned his whole life…

Again, those he is closest to are men. He returns to his hometown to die in familiar surroundings and converses with his God, finding a sense of satisfaction in his existence as it comes to an end. It’s a powerful and moving story, in which we find that Hesse has lost the somewhat lumpen dialogue of the earlier novels, and also has something clear to say: yes, everyone is ultimately alone, and yet, despite disappointments and setbacks, can live a life which has meaning and brings contentment. The road is hard, but this is all we have.

Demian is regarded as a minor masterpiece; I’m not really convinced. Here is another oppressed and miserable schoolboy, and his associate male friends and influences. In this novel, it becomes clearer to the reader, even if not to the hero, that the attraction or desire he feels towards Demian, his mentor, is sexual… For me the story was too laden-down with heavily significant dreams of a Jungian nature. Nevertheless, dreams are important in our lives, and what comes across more strongly as Hesse’s novels develop is the importance of the question of self-discovery and self-actualisation: others cannot lead you, they can only help, accompany, point out possible paths; you have to find and make that journey, which is only yours, yourself, and alone.

The novel was written in apocalyptic times – at the start of the Great War – and resolution is found, in a rather trite way, on the battlefield.

Being something of an obsessive, I have kept a log of every book I’ve read for nearly half a century; just the date I finished a book written in pencil on the last page. I note with interest that I read and then re-read all these books in 1974-75. When I get to the end of this Hesse-binge, I shall try and reflect more fully on what this all meant way back then.