Vybarr Cregan-Reid is an author, academic, award-winning teacher and sometimes broadcaster. Here we catch up with him and hear about his latest book, We Are What We Read.
Which book or author had a significant impact on you during your formative years?
Although, like most, I acquired full literacy at school, I didn’t actually start reading until I was twenty-one. I’ve written in We Are What We Read in some detail about how and why this happened. But the author that cued me up for these experiences was undoubtedly E. M. Forster. He’s often misconstrued as polite and genteel, but he was the mouse that roared. A Room with a View is a novel that masquerades as a simple heterosexual love story, but it is really a young gay man’s coming-out fantasy. I saw the film of the novel as a teenager in the 1980s, when I was all but lost to the world, and it pulled me back from the brink.
How do you believe books can influence our life choices?
Much literature becomes a part of our library; it gets read and some details of it may stay with you, but it doesn’t invite much ongoing curiosity. Special literature is like Pinocchio’s sidekick and principal advice-giver, Jiminy Cricket, where the book stays with you and whispers in your ear at key moments in your life – certain poems can even become like prayers. Sometimes literature will reassure you in moments of crisis or it will light the way out of a particular problem. Then there’s some that crash into your life like a truck ramming into a shop window (obliterature!). I can think of one example, when reading a particular poem on a particular day made me leave a seventeen-year relationship. It was a piece by Rainer Maria Rilke that ended with the gnomic statement: ‘You must change your life.’ So, I did.
When and why do you think the war on the humanities started?
If you really want to get into it, the answer is probably the Enlightenment or the Industrial Revolution. At the end of the eighteenth century, there was a mechanistic turn so strong that evidence is everywhere in our sight lines today. (Even our national parks are just that, parks reserved for the recreation of enervated workers in need of sustenance, rather than natural spaces.) I write in the book about how Charles Dickens articulated and rehearsed many of the debates on education in the 1850s that are still ongoing today. More recently, the rise of free-market capitalism on both sides of the Atlantic in the ’80s spread an increasingly mechanistic model of education – just like the baddies in Dickens’s novels. In the last decade or so, there have been dozens of incremental changes to the university system in terms of teaching and research, which have telegraphed the government’s intentions of removing access to the humanities for many but especially the working classes.
What advice would you give to someone who feels they’ve been written off by the education system?
When one of my friends told his school careers adviser that he wanted to go to university, the adviser laughed in his face, saying, ‘Well, no one has ever been to university from this school.’ My friend is now the Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. Likewise, I have had PhD students who, having been turned down for funding, misinterpreted the rejection as meaning they were not good enough to undertake a PhD or become an academic. Neither of which was true. I’ve thought about this a lot and I think the advice I could have done with was someone saying that it was going to be all right, that I was OK. On any given day, you don’t have to decide who you’ll be in thirty years’ time; just get on with progressing to the next rung and soon enough you’ll have climbed a lot higher than you ever thought you could. My advice is to never let someone who doesn’t know you, or does not have your best interests at heart, dictate your future.
If you could have lunch with three authors, dead or alive, who would you pick?
My first guest would be the Gawain Poet (who authored Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and likely several other verses), because I would love to know more about them. They penned some of the most moving, perplexing early works in English literature and we know almost nothing about them. Next would be George Eliot, because I’d love to know how she got from Scenes of Clerical Life to Impressions of Theophrastus Such in one lifetime. Finally, Forster, because I’d like to ask him so many things and also because he didn’t eat very much so I could probably polish off his share of the shawarma.
We Are What We Read: A Life Within and Without Books is out on 11 July.
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