My Most Precious Book

In general, I’m cavalier about books. I lend them and therefore lose them, scribble in them, festoon them in pink Post-it notes, share baths with them and pile them up on shelves and tables in no particular order.

Only one book is treated differently. Traditional Romance and Tale: How Stories Mean, by Anne Wilson, has a shelf-space of its own on the top left-hand side of the bookcase in my study. As light as balsa wood, it comes to little more than 100 chalky pages. The index takes up one page and the cover, royal blue, has an image from the Book of Hours in which a young knight reads the script on a stone, while the setting sun casts shadows behind him. I love the knight’s modesty, and the modesty of the book itself: the object in my house which takes up the least space carries the most weight. I would lend this book to no one; nor would I write in it or take it anywhere near hot water. Traditional Romance and Tale taught me how to read – not in the sense of taking me through the alphabet, but of showing me what a strange and mysterious thing reading is, how the part of the mind that absorbs itself in the structure and pattern of stories is at the same time primitive and supremely intelligent. Anne Wilson begins with a question: why didn’t the Sleeping Beauty’s parents put a note in their diaries, to remind them that on her fifteenth birthday she would be pricked by a needle? What on earth were they doing, letting her wander around by herself on that day of all days? Wilson’s thesis is this: many of the indestructible stories we live amongst – fairytales, folk tales, medieval romances, the Odyssey, Jane Eyre – don’t make sense: ‘the thinking in them is not predominantly the kind of thinking which we bring to everyday affairs’. Their thinking is closer to that of dreams, and if we search in these texts for rational meanings ‘the answers to our questions will be somewhat like the answers given to Macbeth by the Weird Sisters’ Anne Wilson always makes her own meanings clear and her ideas, explored in the clean, nimble prose of a writer untainted by university life, are as fresh today as they were when the book was published in 1976. Traditional Romance and Tale awakened me to the power of the unconscious mind, and also showed me how tough writing was. The book took years to build; like Emily Dickinson, Anne Wilson wrote from a desk in her bedroom, rarely coming downstairs. I know this because I grew up around the book’s creation. It began life when I was 7 and was published when I was 12: it was my question about the Sleeping Beauty’s negligent parents that my mother set out to answer in her opening chapter. Great lengths of paper hung from her wall, charting the movements of the plots she was studying. When I wondered what these labyrinthine maps meant, she explained: ‘This, Frances, is how the mind works.’ I would get home from school to find her asleep, exhausted from a day’s thought and unravelling in her dreams – so she told me – a problem she was pursuing in King Horn or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Thus I watched the book grow, from seed to full flowering, and saw my mother’s disappointment when her work was initially ignored. English Departments were taken over by structuralism and deconstruction; scholarship was seen as old-school. Wordsworth praised all books which ‘lay their sure foundations in the heart of man’: this precious volume has provided the foundation, the heart, of my love of reading and my determination to write.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 47 © Frances Wilson 2015