Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill, and Outside of A Dog by Rick Gekoski: review
Susan Hill and Rick Gekoski reflect on the influence of literature in shaping their lives
By Michael Arditti

Published, The Telegraph

Outside of a Dog by Rick Gekoski
Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill

It is hard to imagine a future chronicler of literary life entitling a novel: “Screens do Furnish a Room”. Whatever the benefits of the e-book, it will never possess the romance of print and paper.

Susan Hill and Rick Gekoski have spent their lives reading, writing, teaching, publishing and selling books and, in their own new works, each reflects on how literature has formed their lives. While they touch on their family lives – parents, grandparents and extended families – it is books that lie at their heart.
Their backgrounds could scarcely be more different. Gekoski is an expatriate Jewish American, with communist parents, who studied at Oxford, taught at Warwick, longed to be a novelist but only found his voice in later life with a portrait of Coventry City football club. Hill is an Anglican Yorkshirewoman, who had her first novel published while an undergraduate, and is now one of the country’s most respected writers.

Hill lives in a Gloucestershire farmhouse with her husband, the Shakespeare scholar Stanley Wells, among the accumulated books of a lifetime. These range from childhood annuals (she still gets The Beano every year), classics both read and unread (the latter including Don Quixote, Buddenbrooks and Romola) and the latest Richard & Judy bestseller.

It was while searching for something to read on her ramshackle shelves that she decided to spend a year rereading a selection of books, with the aim of producing a list of the 40 that “I think I could manage with alone, for the rest of my life.” Howards End Is On the Landing is her record of this project.

Gekoski, on the other hand, lost all his books after an acrimonious divorce. Though at first traumatised by the loss (“I howled, I hooted, I imprecated. I cursed Barbara and I cursed God”), he soon came to feel liberated. Relieved of the physical presence of his library, he was able to examine its influence on his life, including his broken marriage. His account of his 25 most significant books constitutes Outside of a Dog.

The two writers take very different approaches and choose very different books. Hill picks hers seemingly at random, in the process producing an impressionistic autobiography. Gekoski starts with the Dr Seuss books of his Long Island childhood and ends with his own recently published works. Hill includes mostly novels and spiritual writing; Gekoski an almost equal balance of fiction, poetry, philosophy and psychiatry. His writing is the more intimate, hers the more personal. He offers penetrating portraits of his parents, ex-wife and children; she offers fascinating sketches of literary and artistic figures she has known while vouchsafing little of note about her husband and daughters (indeed, her most rounded family portrait is of her great aunt). Yet both authors afford highly revealing glimpses into the book-lined recesses of their minds.
They each use their chosen titles as a means to recall and record the past. Dorothy L Sayers’s The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club brings back memories of Hill’s student days when she lived with “a minor order of rather haughty and snobbish nuns” in a Kensington lodging house that boasted every Penguin detective story; Francis Kilvert’s Diary of her friendship with its enigmatic editor, William Plomer; and Great Expectations of family holidays in Southport.

Read the full fascinating piece at The Telegraph online.

Howards End Is On the Landing
by Susan Hill
234PP, Profile, £12.99

Outside of a Dog: a Bibliomemoir
by Rick Gekoski
278PP, Constable, £14.99