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By Will Johnson
This is something which I wrote a while back. I perhaps should have entitled it "The Joy of Reading".
Here of late I have added another burden to my workload. My failing eyesight may not allow me the joy of reading for many more years. Therefore besides my regular reading I have assigned myself to reading some of the great literary giants of the ages. I have already been challenged by some of them in my faith and beliefs. Reading W.Somerset Maughan's "Of Human Bondage" can put your faith to the test.
Some others which I have scheduled to read soon are: Turgenov's: " A Nest Of Gentlefolk", Somerset Maughan's "The Razor's Edge", D.H. Lawrence's :"Sons and Lovers",
Villaverde,s "Cecilia Valdez", and A.J. Cronin's "The Citadel."
I just finished Feyodor Dostoevsky's "The Double", and still working on "Vanity Fair" by Tackeray.
According to C.R.L. James (Minty Alley, Black Jacobins etc), his obligatory reading of "Vanity Fair" in elementary school in Trinidad had given him a lifelong appreciation of English literature. I was staying at the Pegasus Hotel in Kingston, Jamaica. We were there for Carifesta l976 at which he was honoured. I used the occasion to have a two hour chat with that famous writer in the lobby of the hotel.
On a recent trip I took along John Steinbecks " The Grapes of Wrath". When I reached the passage with the turtle crossing the road I realized I had read this book in the past.This too is a book one cannot read often enough as well as other Steinbeck books, and not to forget Faulkner another great writer from the USA.
I want to share a small portion of how I became a reader and how much reading has contributed to my general knowledge.
Although I try not to read disturbing books, I must still do so in order to understand what motivates my fellow human beings into doing certain things, and learn to appreciate other people and their histories and cultures.
In the late nineteen forties, early fifties I started to read in earnest. No television on Saba in those days of course. And one had to read by the old oil lamp. I can still smell the mildew of the old books and the lampoil burning away. When the hurricanes passed and I was out of electricity it brought back wonderful memories when I had to go back to reading under the old oil lamp.
Before I was twelve I had already read all of Frank Slaughter's, "Hardy Boys", Edgar Rice Burroughs "Tarzan" series, and all of the books written about the old west by Zane Grey.
The power of reading on the imagination of a young child cannot be underestimated. In Zane Grey's books I read about the "high plateaus", "canyons", "arroyos", and the great "plains".
Years later when I saw actual photo's of these places I was not surprised. Although my small volcanic island had none of these geographic features, nor winter or snow, in my minds eye when reading Zane Grey they were all familiar to me.
And then came William Henry Hudson in "Long Ago and Far Away". Many years after reading that book I finally saw Argentina. I was having lunch at a beautiful restaurant on Calle Florida with the young Foreign Minister. I told him that I had had a life long desire to visit his country. When he asked me for what reason, I told him about having read all of Hudson's books as a boy. He went crazy. Turns out he was a life long fan of Hudson's and could not believe that Hudsons books had ended up on a small island in the Caribbean. The lunch turned into a discussion as to whether or not Hudson had actually crossed the Rio Negro into Patagonia. For me having read "Idle Days in Patagonia" was enough. For the Minister however, being a native Argentinean and a purist in that regard, the devil was in the details. To him it was important that the real Patagonia was beyond the Rio Negro.
Soon I will be in Patagonia myself. The wife and I have booked a cruise from Chile, down the coast, straits of Magellan, Beagle Channel, around Cape Horn to the Falkland islands to visit Governor Huckle. Anyway before you get jealous I will be having a bar-b-que on a sheep ranch in Tierra del Fuego, as well as on a family cattle ranch outside of Montevideo, Uruguay, a country I have already visited.As a boy I used to listen to our old captains and sailors telling harrowing stories about going around Cape Horn on those old windjammers they sailed on. Now I will be able to see the Cape for myself. Captain Ernest A. Johnson in his memoirs writes eloquently of the times he spent in Argentina. When I visited one of these great ranches years ago the drive there reminded me of something I already knew. Then I realized that Capt. Johnson had described a similar drive to one of the great ranches outside of the city of Buenos Aires.
During my years on Curacao I also learned to appreciate Dutch literature as well. Curacao has produced three giants in Dutch literature; Tip Marugg, "Weekend Pilgrimage, De Morgen Loeit Weer Aan etc.), Boeli van Leeuwen (Geniale Anarchie etc.) and Frank Martinus Arion
Dubbelspel etc. Both Boeli and Frank are personal friends and I have regular e-mail contact with Frank.
I have read many of the Caribbean and Latin American giants of literature. I have read the details of their lives and the impression which their culture and the landscape had on them.
My favourite Caribbean woman writer is the legendary Jean Rhys of Dominica (Wide Saragossa Sea etc.)
Lennox Honeychurch is a personal friend. He has visited my home on Saba and I have visited him in Dominica on several occasions.He too has written much about his native Domiinica as well as the rest of the Caribbean.
I have read everything written by Naipaul as well as other Caribbean writer like George Lamming and Edgar Mittelholzer (A Day at the Office etc.).
And let us not forget the good book as a primary source of good literature. Many of the greatest writers and poets of the Western world have been inspired by and have liberally quoted from the great books of the Bible.
The Curacao author Boeli van Leeuwen once said that as a source of inspiration the Book of Job did not have its equal for a writer.
Thomas Carlyle said: " I call the Bible of Job, apart from all theories about it, one of the grandest things ever written with pen."
He had to be talking about the St.James version of course. The politically correct versions of the Bible and other books don't send me.The St.James version and the Book of Job do the trick for me to get inspired.
Finally, Job himself must have had adversaries comparable to those I have had to deal with.
When dealing with uneducated, bold faced, people, just like Job, many times I too have expressed the wish as expressed by him. "Behold my desire is....that mine adversary had written a book." (3l.35 Job).
What he meant was that a certain amount of education is needed for that task. And if that had been the case Job would not have had an adversary as the adversary too would have been enlightened as Job was.
My message to our young people is, visit your library, pick out a good book and start to read. It will be worth more to you than you can ever imagine.
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