Alphabeticon: Concerning Secular Authors
DEDICATION: for Robert Weaver
lover of good writing
patron of good writers
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
This portrait gallery of twenty-six writers is the almost inevitable by-product of a lifelong love of books. One of my earliest memories is of sitting in our family living-room in the late afternoon, aged four, listening to my mother reading to me. No doubt she had always read me bedtime stories in infancy, but I have no memory of that. What I do fondly remember, though, was four-year-old exposure to A.A. Milne’s books about Winnie-the-Pooh and his enchanting children’s-poems. I badgered Mum to teach me to read, so that I could devour all this marvelous stuff on my own; and she did so — rather to the consternation of the teacher in the kindergarten I insisted on going to a year early, who was struggling to get my classmates started on learning what I already knew. At the same time, I was also exposed to the English language at its very best: my father was an Anglo-Catholic priest, and regular attendance at Mass and Evensong acquainted me, for ever, with the unsurpassed beauties and strengths of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer.
Later in boyhood, I adored Dickens. My family had left Canada for England, and by 1933 we were living in a somewhat isolated Lincolnshire village. Its isolation was not just geographical: the whole culture there was still stuck in nineteenth-century attitudes; I read Dickens as, so to speak, a contemporary author. In subsequent adulthood, I came to see his defects: his mawkish sentimentality, his indulgence in melodrama. But I still respect his merits: his wonderfully boisterous humour, his espousal of causes that sought to remedy social injustices.
Dickens is not one of the authors portrayed in this book — I write of him elsewhere in “Alphabeticon”. But there are other authors here who share his gut response to injustice: James Agee, writing about destitute farm-workers in the Depression; George Orwell, who was down and out in London and Paris; Umberto Eco, who assailed anti-Semitism in France and Italy and Russia; Laurens van der Post, who denounced racism in South Africa. Others, in different ways and at various times in many places, wrote of the human condition with unflinching honesty, and consummate grace. They are all fine models for any would-be writer to emulate — though not, of course, to imitate. And for readers of them who have no writing ambitions themselves, they serve as lenses to widen the horizons of our often narrow lives.
EDITOR’S FOOTNOTE
John Reeves’ previously published books are as follows. “A Beach of Strangers” (Oxford Press) is a radio play. Four detective novels (Doubleday) are “Murder by Microphone”, set in CBC Radio; “Murder Before Matins”, set in a monastery; “Murder with Muskets”, set in an opera production; and “Death in Prague”, set in the community of Czechoslovak dissidents. “The Arithmetic of Love” (’68 Publishers) is a history, in prose and verse, of political, religious, and social reform in Czechoslovakia. “Triptych” (CBC Publications) is the world’s first quadriphonic radio feature. Two texts-for-voices (Eerdmans) are “The St Matthew Passion”, a homage to the Bach masterpiece, and “A Book of Hours”, a chronicle of the Christian year, in verse.
