Melvyn Bragg on Depression and the Power of Reading

I'm delighted to have law here with us today Melvin is well-known as a broadcaster as a presenter and also of course a novelist Melvin just to begin with can you talk to us a little bit about your influences I mean did your mother read to you did you have a teacher that was especially significant I can't remember mother reading to me but she might have done my father did occasionally but I was born in 1939 just before the war and so my father was away at the war most of the times at first 6 or 7 years really been in a very complicated house in Council house yard there kind of two and a half families in the same house I don't remember mother having time to do things like Rita me because she had two jobs to keep going I was reading quite early on and I liked reading in bed on my own with a torch or remember your favorites my favorite stories begin with Robin Hood stories in the book of Rama I read it again and again and kidnapped but in pictures with with words underneath anything I could get hold about one of those kids who used to when there's nothing I was going I'd read a HP sauce bottle and what about the light was there a local library for you to get in a place called council house yard in Station Road and the library's in the corner of the yard which was great because I think it was a good yard all sorts of the financial was in the yard there was a horse in the yard and it stalled up and all the rest of it but there's a library and a town clerk mr. Carrick used to open the library two or three times a week in evenings and there was a children's section and he used to more or less tell me what to read oh you again it was he an influence on your reading he must have been quiet way I just like I went every Friday and I got another couple of books and came back read them and then I massively read comics massively read comics so when people talk airily about their influences and they talk about oh I'm really influenced by Tolstoy and Shakespeare and the later Ben Jonson I think I might have been influenced by The Dandy and the Beano also comics can be very distressing actually I know my uncle used to read the Beano when he was stressed because he said it really calmed Noah's for kids for the under fives when you've got a bit older you got these comics which which had one little illustration and a masses of print they've gone now I mean really heavy having column after column after column no real stories there'd be four stories it'd always be serials following Roy of the rover's cannonball kid Nick Smith those sort of people right through and there's a lot of print very small print so warrior eyes though but there was a lot to read yeah was there a teacher who saw something special in you did you saw that you had something and encouraged you in the way that's I'm just thinking Ted Hughes and John Fisher in the way in which he thought that was the person who really saw something special well I had good teachers in the primary school there were all women who spinsters the FIR the blight of the First World War got married and then it was when it was only when I went to the grammar school that I really took an interest in things like homework and formally engaging because I just did the homework as I walked to school or when I was in the school 20 minutes early before I did the lessons there's a man called mr. James as the history teacher and he was he was the teacher that I was was really interested in what I was doing and took an interest and brought me here at Oxford for instance when I was about 15 and then went down to my father and said he should say on at school because I was going to leave when I was 15 and he says you should keep him on it might as it turns out my father took quite a lot of persuading I didn't learn that out until three or four months ago when I talked to mr. James about another program he's 93 94 now totally compost meant to totally sharp as a button and he'd never tell me and my father never told me either so he went down and then he was a big influence because he was such a good teacher it was obviously thought I was okay and then there was same time as a good English teacher mr. Arthur Tillotson blacker and those two together mr. black has big influence was that he would we started a two-year curriculum in September and we finished it in December the whole thing and for the rest of the five term we just read in the class but we read aloud interesting we always the great Victorian writer John Stuart Mill wrote in his autobiography about how he suffered from a terrible bout of depression in his early 20s he said the best way of describing it were in the words of the dejection owed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge but he then found the things which cured him was reading the healing words of William Wordsworth's poetry so the words of a dark poem can help people understand the nature of depression the healing words of a calming uplifting poem perhaps can help people with stress anxiety and depression do these ideas strike a chord with you yes I think when you're I've been clinically depressed twice once I didn't know I was clinically depressed and the next time I did once I was 13 or 14 and I've never known anything like it I don't know anything like it again it was mine I couldn't understand what was going on I couldn't tell anybody about it my half my mind would leave me and I thought I was getting my but there's nobody who could talk to you I'm talking about 1951 or two in a small northern town you couldn't tell your parents she wouldn't any teach you you couldn't possibly go to your doctor you couldn't tell your friends and nobody could talk to you about it and I'm sure that reading which I kept and I was taught my I went from the a forum right down to the we called it L not say a B and C for and I started to be scared of things and people it was it awful time lasted about a year and a half and I'm sure that reading and when I started to work then I'd know what at school but much at all I think that helped to things were important one was coming across pieces of writing she was writing that did it we there was no television man the radio didn't seem to impinge but I was so keen on reading then that reading was was like a sort of a lifeline as if I was connected with you sort of in reading for me it was an intravenous activity and when I registered in a descriptive way when you read something very dark about somebody you say yeah that's right that's that's what that's what I mean it's a recognition that it's happening to somebody else even if it's in a novel I say even even if it's a fictional character he's an immense relief because the thing about that sort of depression when you're young this I was as you're convinced it's only happening to you and you are this a strange person who was isolated and going down a black hole and then you read something and people have felt much the same and that's an enormous relief I spoke to a young girl recently who said when she felt very depressed she read Sylvia Plath and I was quite surprised and I said oh why is that because she's the only one who understands all the only person I feel understands what depressions like so I'm quite interested in why we read and and something that the sense of that's how it feels is really important but also do do did you ever read in those times poems that uplifted you that made you feel uplifted well I got into them by recognizing depression you you talk about the reading coming from reading words was well I stopped at school I read it and we did history in the 6th or history and we did English in the 6th form and when reading the prelude and I came across passages where it was quite clear nobody told me this about words with most of us all nice things flowers went and strong bleak stories but still but there's a passage in that in which the boy is in terrible trouble he's obviously he's got to hold on to stones to maintain his sanity and I thought that that was exactly what I was doing except I immediately connected with Wordsworth in a completely different way it wasn't because what a great bird it wasn't even because he's writing about things that was just outside my back door I can bike up to the lake district to see all these a lot of these places and see and in any day I want but he was talking about me in that sense and that was what drew me into Wordsworth and then you went into the other part of work soft which is very serene and healed and I think he saw himself through this so he'd been through that and then he got to that and he was a very and depressed melancholy young man as you know and he had a lot to be depressed about and then he came through it through reading and writing was there ever a moment when you thought I can't pick up a book because I'm so depressed well there's a moment when you are depressed as depressed as that now was again and 21 29 to 31 but by that time I was able to go for help to an analyst to be with it was even worse than actually I think that in some ways pacce analyst I think 2 years 3 John so he was making me worse really but Dodson of them matter and there was time when you can't do anything so picking up a book is anything that distracts you for one of the terrible things about really personal is you become obsessed by yourself and your right to be obsessed by yourself because you're trying to keep yourself together but being obsessed by yourself as a full-time job you know an exhausting doing other things is why you fade away from society because the things that everybody else is doing that they do they go and see things Lucy you're not doing because she's just taking you all your time and energy to to get through the day I think one of the things that people know who had the press know about depression is the actual business of getting through the next hour can be an incredible strain just that just doing that is a strain and they distends your mind in certain ways that are not at all agreeable not at all sometimes unbearable so I was very fortunate in the sense that I got socketed into my head I got a unreal love of reading I was an obsessive reader from three or four honors not that I played in the town all the time but I just liked reading and so eventually I could come back to that pipeline that was very fortunate pipeline that's really good I want to talk about just a moment about poems on the underground because I'm very fascinated by this idea that I mean that's been going for 20 years now and the idea that you're in you're on a crowded tube or a subway and instead of looking up to advertisements you see a poem and just in all the madness in the chaos of your commute in your busy day you just take that and to just reflect to wind down to read a poem it seems to me that there's something about poetry that can take us into a sort of different place which is would you agree well I'm prose as well I don't think it's just poetry I think novels can take people into a different place I think players can I think music often can more than anything else it depends what you choose but certainly works of imagination can because they activate your imagination once your imagination is activated you become other people you're capable of going out of yourself in a positive way not going out of yourself like I did and I said enough or do you think I was going mad but you're going out of yourself in just somebody else's mind or somebody else's feelings poetry is because it's you know you can hardly put war and peace in that you but you can't put a song it can I just ask you about reading aloud because I'm a firm believer in how important it is to read aloud to children particularly but also to older people one of the things I wanted to do with this new charity is to get schoolchildren to read in care homes I we were taught to learn poems by heart we read aloud a lot I mean think about in Jane Austen's time there's not a lot else to do so in evenings entertainment was often reading aloud in groups women particularly reading aloud and I think one of the reasons that say Pride and Prejudice is it's almost like being at a play because you can tell it they've read it aloud so many and we know that she read it aloud many times because she complains that her mother doesn't read one of the characters properly and she gets annoyed about this lovely idea of them all reading present pages and what do you think about reading aloud did you I know you can't do enough of it I mean I would make it obligatory that you have to have a lesson of reading aloud two three times a week I just think it's the best lining of the mind you can get I think it's a great reservoir for the rest of your life I think it trains you in all sorts of things it trains you in ordering words it trains you in images it gives you tremendous self-confidence you can lean back on that when you have to I think it's essential I think I mean we've been doing it for centuries and centuries until recently and like a lot of things that have been recently it's being dropped without any thought it should be reinstated I'm not being silly about this I think if children in school did reading aloud for quarter of an hour a day they would be better educated do you think is there anything to be said about them I'm very interested in the rhythms with things like I am we talked about dynamic pentameter being very close to the rhythms of speech but also thinking about stresses and rhythms of poetry in the way that a baby's heart beats in a particular way I mean I would just wonder there something very primitive about reading aloud and stresses and poetry do you have you well totally cuz all it is is breath we're talking about breathing that's what reading aloud is that's what I'm doing new to you now I'm breathing with certain modulations it's turning them into words and that's connected with my heartbeat it's connected with everything our city an essential part of the condition by which I live and so I'm breathing words and saying them aloud adds to the store of knowledge but also connects absolutely with what's in you nothing might you be willing to read some lines from Wordsworth poem about Michael the shepherd so that all learners can get a sense of whether Wordsworth's words could have a distressing effect on them and it's from a passage at the end of the poem after Michael has had the terrible news that his only son has been killed in the war it's one of my favorite phones there was one of the plainest it's about the shepherd who we see him building a sheep filled up on the hills and words of love these sort of people and you wrote it they're sort of people these needle of the ordinary people of the Lake District and he wrote about them and this man's heart is broken is their only son and this is what was just rights it's a fantastic first line there is a comfort in the strength of love which will make a thing in durable which else would over set the brain or break the heart I've conversed with more than one who well remembered the old man and what he was years after he had heard this heavy news his bodily frame had been from youth to age of an unusual strength and one of the rocks he went and still looked up to the and cloud and listen to the wind and as before performed all kinds of labor for his sheep and for the land his small inheritance and to that hollow doll from time to time did he repair to build the fold of which his flock had need it is not forgotten yet the pity which was then in every heart for the old man and tis believed by all then many and many day he the other went and never lifted up a single stone

Channel: The ReLit Foundation: reading for wellbeing

Views: 8,818

Rating: 4.9770117 out of 5

Keywords: Melvyn Bragg, depression, William Wordsworth, Michael

Id: NkOlVftDUCs

Length: 16min 22sec (982 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 22 2018