Issue 196 of SOCIALIST REVIEW Published April 1996 Copyright © Socialist Review
My favourite books are all landmarks in my life, at different times and for different reasons. They are books that have made a difference, books that mark a before and an afterwards.
Swift's Gulliver's Travels, James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mobicans, Melville's Moby Dick are three books from childhood which transported me into the world of the imagination the beautiful journey we hope to repeat each time we start a new fictional work. Oliver's film of Hamlet did the same for this working class boy in Willesden just after the war; and great teachers at school showed me there was another way to get there, through acting in and directing drama.
Also during school years I was introduced to the never falling 'strangeness' of Chaucer and Shakespeare, to their 'wildness', and to the poetry of Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley, Eliot, Auden, and others who have fed me all my life.
Shakespeare's work is like a fact of nature, like the greatest mountains, oceans. His writing is not like writing, it seems to he something that is just there, was always there. The scholar Harold Bloom says, He sets the standard and the limits of literature. But where are his limits?'
Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life were the first of his books I read. His rediscovery of the ancient language of the 'unconscious' made him the mind of our age. His writing is his immortality.
Although not always comparable, R D Laing's The Divided Self, The Self and Others and Sanity, Madness and the Family (with David Cooper and others); Zen and the Art of Archery; Paul Tillich's The Courage to Be; works by Erich Fromm; and Jung's Modern Man in Search of a Soul, all come from a period in my late 20s and early 30s when an exploration of my spirit became urgently necessary.
Marx and Engels illuminated the world and the natural history of society in ways that were and remain life changing. The Early Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Socialism Utopian and Scientific, Anti-Dühring, hit me as if on the road to Damascus.
All their great works, which I first encountered as a student but only began to grasp fully much later, inspire me always. The method, transcending Hegel, informs everything. They set the standard and perspective of struggle which took me into revolutionary politics.
But after breaking with the Workers Revolutionary Party in 1980, after 12 years in the party, my life took a different turn. From the past 15 years I would have to name Primo Levi's great testimonies, including If this Is a Man, as decisive in my development (along with Claude Landsmann's film Shoah). To understand our century we must all come to personal terms with the Holocaust, must all find what makes it not a distant historical event but a living presence of which we are all part.
The books of Joseph Campbell on world mythology show that all the great myths from all the traditions are also about now, and are not about distant historical events. His work includes Myths to Live By, The Hero with a Thousand Faces and the three volumed The Masks of God on primitive, oriental and occidental mythology. These books have helped an integration that I dimly realise is a very old and necessary process.
But having started this short attempt, tides are now surfacing at an alarming rate--Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution, William Blake, Hardy, Dante, Dickens, Solzhenitsyn, Beckett, Steinbeck--so I'll stop in the sure knowledge that as soon as I send this off for publication I'll immediately regret not including all the others who sustain me, and millions of us, every day. To finish with Harold Bloom again, 'All that the Western canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality.'