“WE WERE SO PRETENTIOUS!”

Nick Drake’s reading list

JEREMY Mason is leafing through the small black notebook in which he jotted down the titles of books he read during the ’60s. It also lists the books he shared with Drake during their two teenage seasons in France. “In September 1966,” he says, “when Nick was at my parents’ house in France and we were 16, we read Camus. The Outsider, The Plague, The Fall. We were very French-oriented. Crime And Punishment, The Old Man And The Sea, The Grapes Of Wrath, Catcher In The Rye. Christopher Isherwood. Dante. We were quite keen on ‘Howl’ by Ginsberg. Günter Grass, Gide’s The Immoralist, Tom Wolfe’s The Kandy-kolored Tangerine-flake Streamline Baby, Carson Mccullers’ The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter. Balzac, Flaubert. Are you getting a picture?”

He turns a page, to a list headed by the brief indented word “-Aix”. These are the books he and Drake passed between them in their shared bedroom in Aix-en-provence in 1967.

● The Lord Of The Rings – Tolkien

● The Cossacks – Tolstoy

● The Death Of Ivan Ilyich – Tolstoy

● Happy Ever After – Tolstoy

● The Golden Ass – Apuleius

● The Last Tycoon – Fitzgerald

● The Devils – Dostoevsky

● Les Enfants Terribles – Cocteau

● Sentimental Education – Flaubert

● And Quiet Flows The Don – Sholokhov

● War And Peace – Tolstoy

The notebook is blank after Aix. “I stopped writing, or tore out what came next,” says Mason. “That list is a very good summary of where our minds were at then. When we talked about books, we were exchanging ideas. We had a lively interest in everything, and the music went along with it. We were reading all these books and listening to modern jazz. We were so fucking pretentious! We thought the world was our oyster – and intellectually we thought we were getting there.”