On the Pleasure of Reading Aloud / Features / Untitled Books

"We tend to think of reading as a solitary activity and for most of us, most of the time, it probably is. But we read, in part, in order to feel less alone in the world, and a great novel or poem will put us in good company, even when we're on our own."

On the Pleasure of Reading Aloud

Literature is considered a solitary enterprise, for both writer and reader. But words are for speaking as much as they are for reading, and when we give them breath we give them life. Blake Morrison argues the case for reading aloud.

'Poetry makes nothing happen,' Auden wrote in his famous elegy to W. B. Yeats, and those who believe that literature and the arts are a sideline or an indulgence have been all too quick to agree. But Auden was careful to qualify his position. Poetry might not overthrow dictators but it can still have a value as 'a way of happening, a mouth,' he suggested. And for the benefit of readers, he urged poets to sing on - 'With your unconstraining voice/Still persuade us to rejoice'. If poetry can persuade us to rejoice, or even just to keep going, then it serves an important purpose. I have never forgotten the man who came to a writing workshop I ran, many years ago, who said that he'd been about to kill himself - had the bath running, and the razor on the side - when he sat down to write a poem instead and, having finished it, decided life was worth living after all. It's an example of how poetry does make things happen: of its power to inspire, console, heal and transform.

'One sheds one's sicknesses in books,' D. H. Lawrence said, and a growing number of teachers, readers and health professionals seem to share that view. 'Bibliotherapy' might be a new word but the idea behind it has a long history. In Ancient Greece, Apollo was god of both poetry and healing: as Pindar puts it (in his Pythian odes), he's the god

Who sends
Mortal men and women
Relief from grievous disease. Apollo,
Who has given us the lyre.
Who brings the Muse
To whom he chooses, filling the heart
With peace and harmony.

In similar vein, the Bible tells the story of David calming Saul by playing music to him on a harp: 'so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him'. By the Renaissance, the idea that poetry and song could 'banish vexations of soul and body' was well-established, with the effects of tragedy thought to be just as therapeutic as comedy. In The Art of English Poesie (1589) George Puttenham advises the poet to use 'one dolour to expel another', the sad cadence in a line of poetry allaying the burden of pain or depression in the reader, 'one short sorrowing the remedy of a long and grievous sorrow'.

Readers down the ages have testified to literature's capacity to make us feel better - better in ourselves and better about ourselves - by immersing us in the lives of others, or articulating eternal truths ('what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed'), or by speaking of feelings so deep and complex that they're almost impossible to put into words. Some of these readers have themselves been writers. They range from George Eliot (who recovered from the grief of losing her husband George Henry Lewes by reading Dante with a young friend, John Cross, whom she subsequently married) to John Stuart Mill, who recovered from a 'crisis in my mental history [when] I seemed to have nothing left to live for...A vivid conception of the scene and its feelings came over me, and I was moved to tears. From this moment my being grew lighter. The oppression of the thought that all feeling was dead within me was gone. I was no longer hopeless: I was not a stock or a stone.'

The reasons for it may not be clear, but literature in general and poetry in particular do seem capable of raising the human spirit; one of the most elaborate descriptions of the process comes in Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey:

When we are harassed by sorrows or anxieties, or long oppressed by any powerful feelings which we must keep to ourselves, for which we can obtain and seek no sympathy from any living creature, and which yet we cannot, or will not, wholly crush, we often naturally seek relief in poetry - and often find it, too - whether in the effusions of others, which seem to harmonise with our existing case, or in our own attempts to give utterance to those thoughts and feelings in strains less musical, perchance, but more appropriate, and therefore more penetrating and sympathetic, and, for the time, more soothing, or more powerful to rouse and to unburden the oppressed and swollen heart.

To unburden her oppressed heart, Anne Brontë wrote about the natural world she saw around her, in all its bleakness: 'Blow on, wild wind; thy solemn voice,/However sad and drear,/Is nothing to the gloomy silence/I have had to bear.' Better a solemn voice than a gloomy silence. And poets' voices aren't always solemn, of course, even when their subject matter is grave. If you listen to Seamus Heaney read his poem 'Digging' (a poem included in this anthology) you can't miss the sheer enjoyment of the performance, despite the serious questions he raises about loyalty, work and staying true to one's family. It's a poem about finding one's way in life and, by finding the right words, rhymes and rhythms he shows us how that's done and includes us in the process.

We tend to think of reading as a solitary activity and for most of us, most of the time, it probably is. But we read, in part, in order to feel less alone in the world, and a great novel or poem will put us in good company, even when we're on our own. Books are inclusive: they invite us in and help us belong. It's especially heartening when a poet or novelist expresses emotions and ideas that we thought, till we saw them written down, were unique to us: at such moments, as Hector, the schoolteacher in Alan Bennett's play The History Boys puts it, it's as if a hand has reached out and taken our own. Literature has traditionally been presented as an individualist enterprise. But in reality it's communal and collaborative. A book might exist as an object without anyone ever opening it. But it only exists as a text by being read.

And reading isn't necessarily a silent activity. As children we are read to by others (parents, grandparents, teachers): it's aurally rather than visually that we first encounter books. And though it's said that people flock to literary festivals in order to see famous authors, the opportunity to hear them read from their work is part of the attraction, too. I know couples who read books aloud to each other in preference to watching television. And then there are books we read to friends in hospital or to relations in care homes. To share a book in this way can bring insights not available when we read alone. It's as if the author acts as an intermediary, allowing us to broach subjects that there isn't the time or space or intimacy for in the normal pattern of our lives.

Milton knew that reading had its limits, that a man could be 'deep-versed in books and shallow in himself'. But at best, literature touches something deep within us and, because of that, makes our dealings with the world deeper too. What moves us in literature isn't just seeing the words, on the page, but hearing them resonate, in the air. Try it yourself, with the poems and prose passages in this anthology: speak them aloud, to yourself or someone close to you, and (to quote Auden again) 'In the deserts of the heart/Let the healing fountain start'.

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This is an extract from A Little, Aloud: an anthology of prose and poetry for reading aloud, edited by Angela Macmillan of The Reader Organisation and published by Chatto & Windus. Blake Morrison is a patron of The Reader Organisation. His latest novel, The Last Weekend, is published by Chatto & Windus.
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Thursday, 23 September, 2010