Childhood reading

{Photo by rocketlass.}

As I read Laura Miller's charmingly conversational yet thoughtful The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia (2008), I perked up at this passage about J. R. R. Tolkien:

Tolkien has had many admirers of considerable intellectual stature--Auden was his great champion in the press, and the novelist Iris Murdoch sent him fan mail--but this, too, doesn't go very far in persuading other intelligent people who can't abide his books. Murdoch perhaps chose the wisest course when her husband, the Oxford professor John Bayley, would demand to know how she could be so enthralled by books that were so "fantastically badly written": she'd stare at him in amazement and insist that she didn't know what he was talking about.

Murdoch's response seems just right to me: Bayley is asking a question that doesn't really apply to the Lord of the Rings. Yes, they're badly written, teeth-clackingly awkward at times, but that's not the point. At their best, they immerse the reader in a world that seems inexhaustible, so fully imagined that we begin to suspect there's no question we could ask that Tolkien wouldn't have been able to answer--we feel that we've been invited to enter a supreme work of focused imagination, the vitality of which makes the clunky archaisms of Tolkien's prose entirely beside the point.

That said, neither Tolkien nor his friend C. S. Lewis were real touchstones for me as a young reader, like the latter was for Miller. I read and loved The Hobbit and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but I felt none of the same magic from the two men's subsequent books. Looking back, I can see that they represented two important poles of imagination for me: the jumble-sale quality of Lewis's imagination--which, as Miller writes, "lifted figures and motifs in whole cloth from a motley assortment of national traditions, making no effort to integrate them into any coherent mythos"--clashed with my desire for order, while Tolkien's obsessive attention to detail (a quality I would later come to admire) took the books too far in the other direction, bogging them down in hours of elvensong when all I really wanted was for someone to draw sword in anger.

Neither author could match Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain or Susan Cooper's Dark Is Risingi sequence (and in particular its first, and least fantastic book, Over Sea, Under Stone, which I read over and over). Looking back, I think that one overarching reason for my preference was that Narnia and Middle-Earth both lacked a quality I prized in fiction even as a boy: a sense of the everyday reality that lies underneath the fantasy and adventure. As Miller points out, neither Tolkien nor Lewis seemed all that interested in the day-to-day life of their worlds: there's no discernible economic activity, no incidental change, and--outside of Sam Gamgee--no characters who reveal long-range plans or aspirations that are disrupted by the events that have swept them up.

Alexander and Cooper, on the other hand, offer plenty of hints of what people in their worlds do when not questing: Taran is an assistant pig-keeper; Coll a full pig-keeper; Fflewddur Fflam a bard; Eilonwy, as a princess, is expected to do nothing--and that limitation drives her nuts. At the end of a battle, Coll laments the crops churned under by the fighting, a loss that will be felt that winter in the surrounding villages. In Over Sea, Under Stone, the Cornish village that the children visit on holiday is entirely ordinary, which makes the irruption of sinister forces and ancient magic all the more astonishing. It is a simple vacation with a somewhat distant relative, a situation we can all recognize--and then suddenly it's much more.

I was a very fortunate child, surrounded by a loving family in a rural freedom that seems more idyllic with every passing year. I didn't want to escape to somewhere: I wanted a world where adventure and dailiness could live side by side, where I could be part of momentous events but not have to give up the home I loved. Alexander and Cooper seemed to understand that in a way that Tolkien and Lewis--whom I now know were themselves in search of full-on escape from a world grown uncongenial--did not.

To circle back to where this post started, I'll turn once again to Iris Murdoch. In a 1962 interview for the Sunday Times, collected in From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch (2003, edited by Gillian Dooley), Murdoch responds to a question about whether there's a division between fantasy and reality in her own work:

If fantasy and realism are visible and separate aspects in a novel, then the novel is likely to be a failure. In real life the fantastic and the ordinary, the plain and the symbolic, are often indissolubly joined together, and I think the best novels explore and exhibit life without disjoining them.

Though Murdoch wasn't referring here strictly, or even at all, to fantastic literature as represented by Tolkien, Lewis, et al., I think her point nonetheless has some validity. Cooper's and Alexander's books were so powerful for this young reader exactly because they "indissolubly joined" the world of the everyday and the world of the imagination; they offered a new reality I could believe in, and set alongside my own, rather than escape to.

"You sound as if all we had to look forward to was being gobbled up."

{My nephew as Harry Potter. Photo by rocketlass}

As my annual family vacation followed a week that I began with two posts about children's books, and as Stacey and I were looking forward to capping the vacation with a midnight Harry Potter party in the company of our eight-year-old nephew, it probably comes as no surprise that I read some children's books during the trip.

No, I haven't read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows yet; from the moment just after midnight when we were handed it at the very pleasant Treehouse Books in Holland, Michigan, until 4:15 this morning, Stacey was buried in it. She says she stopped reading at 4:15 because

I started thinking about how very weird it is that we look at this set of little marks on a page, and they make words, and then those words make a story. That got very distracting, so I decided that meant it was time for bed.

Meanwhile, my mother, waking up at 3:00 and going to check that we'd all made it back from the bookstore, saw her and said,

A-ha. I thought so.

{Stacey as Nymphadora Tonks. Photo by rocketlass}

The children's books I read instead were older, and accompanied by considerably less hooplah. In the comments at The Dizzies last week, I weighed in on the side of Lloyd Alexander regarding the question of whether his Chronicles of Prydain are better than Susan Cooper's Dark Is Rising sequence--but I realized that my confidence was somewhat inappropriate, as I'd not read the Prydain books since childhood. So in the car on the way to the house we were renting for the week, I blazed through the first of the series, The Book of Three (1964).

I was surprised at how little of the plot I remembered, especially as so many of the characters remained so vivid. The more mysterious characters must have resonated with me most strongly as a boy, for they're the ones I remember most clearly. When Taran and Lord Gwydion were captured by the evil sorceress Achren, her terrifying seductiveness rushed back whole into my mind, as if I'd tapped a cobwebbed keg containing my actual memories of reading the book as a boy; her mix of femininity, ruthlessness, and power must have mightily addled my adolescent brains. Gurgi's appearance had a similar, if less powerful, effect, reminding me of how much I was entertained by him when I first read the books--though it has to be admitted that he's a character who wears better on pre-teens than on adults. He remains fun, but I now understand a bit better why the adults in the book get frustrated with his wheedling and yammering.

The one character whom I'd almost totally forgotten was the young princess, Eilonwy (Yet I remembered Taran clearly--evidence, should any have been needed, that I was not a preteen girl when I first read the book?). Not that I had forgotten her existence, or her role in the series--instead, I'd forgotten her essence: she's weird. She shares all her rambling thoughts (including her frank opinions--the headline for this post is from Eilonwy's mouth) and she makes odd leaps of logic and intuition. I don't remember quite how she develops in the following books--except that she retains her bravery while growing nicely into leadership--but in The Book of Three her most entertaining and endearing characteristic is her tendency to invent strange, yet apt metaphors. Here's a batch from throughout the book:

I know it isn't nice to vex people on purpose--it's like handing them a toad.

You can't just sit there like a fly in a jug.

[Petting this fawn] is lovely; it makes you feel all tingly, as if you were touching the wind.

You've been carrying that harp ever since I met you, and you've never once played it. That's like telling somebody you want to talk to them, and when they get ready to listen, you don't say anything.

It's silly to worry because you can't do something you simply can't do. That's worse than trying to make yourself taller by standing on your head.

I can't stand people who say, "I told you so." That's worse than somebody coming up and eating your dinner before you have a chance to sit down.

Other than recovering Eilonwy for me, what this reading has revealed is that The Book of Three, though great fun, isn't even in the same league as Over Sea, Under Stone, the first book of Susan Cooper's sequence. But one book is insufficient evidence by which to judge a whole series--Over Sea, Under Stone is by far Cooper's best book, while I remember the emotional power of the Prydain Chronicles growing along with Taran as he meets new people and spends more time with the ones we've met already. Before I can render a proper judgment, I'll have to reread the rest of the Prydain books, which I'll likely do over the next several months. I'll let you know how it goes.

Tomorrow (or possibly Monday), I'll write about the other children's book I read on vacation, which was a birthday gift from my friend Maggie, giver of impeccably chosen gifts: Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle (1948).

But when I became a man I put away childish things

Oh, how wrong you are, I Corinthians! After all, the final volume of Harry Potter is on its way . . .

That, along with thinking about Lloyd Alexander, has me in the mood for a few notes on children's books.

1 In the comments on my Lloyd Alexander post, Idalia wrote:

That *is* an awesome first sentence, I had forgotten that one. However I have yet to see a children's book first sentence that can go up against Charlotte's Web's "Where's Papa going with that ax?"

Just as she had forgotten the opening of The Book of Three, I had forgotten the opening of Charlotte's Web. What strikes me now, reading that line, is how perfectly in keeping it is with the tone of E. B. White's letters, a collection of which I've been reading off an on for the past few months.

Here, for example, is his reply to a batch of letters from a fifth-grade class, in which he was asked about animals on his farm:

I have raised a good many young pigs, lambs, chicks, and goslings in my barn. I will tell you something that happened to the young geese last winter. There is a small pond down in the pasture and the geese use it for a swimming pool. They start from the barnyard, walking slowly; then as they get nearer the water, they break into a run; and then they spread their wings, take to the air, and land on the pond with a splash. But one night, early last winter, the pond froze during the night. The young geese had never seen ice, and knew nothing about it. They started for the pond, sailed into the air, and when they came down for a landing their feet struck the ice and they skidded the whole length of the pond and crashed into the opposite bank. That's how they learned about ice.

White's prose, whether in a letter or in a more polished piece of writing, has a kindness and matter-of-factness that rescues it from the ever-present danger of archness. What ultimately comes across is the sense of an observant man who enjoys sharing what he's seen, particularly glimpses of the livees of animals or unusual people. The bounce and balance of his sentences ends up seeming effortless, only natural to his storytelling style, as in this letter to James Thurber:

I made the drive in an open car with a turkey in the back seat and a retriever in the front. Stopped off at the Coatses' and we ate the bird and freshened up the dog.

Even when, as so often, he's being thoroughly ironic, as in this 1943 letter to Gustave Lobrano, his charm wins out:

Hospitals are fun now because all the competent people have gone off to the fighting fronts, leaving the place in charge of a wonderfully high-spirited group of schoolgirls to whom sickness is the greatest lark of the century.

All of which leads me to wonder if maybe it's time to reread Charlotte's Web? Or maybe The Trumpet of the Swan, which I remember liking more when I was young?

2 Thinking yesterday of waiting for books to be sent to me through the regional library system also reminded me of the annual trips my parents would take to Chicago for the Farm Bureau convention. I had never been to Chicago, which was 300 miles away from our town, but I imagined it as a paradise, because it had Kroch's and Brentano's, a multi-story downtown bookstore that, it seemed, stocked nearly every book. Before each trip, my parents would ask me for a list of books I was looking for, and invariably they would bring back the majority of them.

The very idea of such a big bookstore was fantastic to me in those pre-superstore days; the fact that in a city you could walk out of a bookstore with not only The Rescuers but Miss Bianca and Miss Bianca in the Salt Mines as well--to say nothing of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH--was, I think, the first seed of my desire to transform from a a country mouse to a city mouse.

It was the right choice: Kroch's is long gone, and books of all sorts are far more readily available to rural residents, adults and children alike, but the lure of the city remains powerful, the rich variety emerging from density no less compelling.

3 I've also had J. M. Barrie on the brain lately, perhaps a lingering reaction to once again seeing the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens this spring--or possibly because of a surfeit of Thomas Hardy, of whom Barrie was a champion. Explains Lisa Chaney, in Hide and Seek with Angels: A Life of J. M. Barrie:

Amongst living writers it was Hardy and Meredith whom Barrie admired the most. . . . Barrie's capacity for hero worship might at time have made the diffident Hardy feel a little uneasy, but where Barrie worshiped he also protected, supported, even nurtured. He was capable of immense loyalty, and throughout his life was prepared to expend gargantuan efforts on behalf of his friends.

That loyalty could unquestionably be smothering for its objects, as Barrie was a strange and difficult man, never quite comfortable with adults but at the same time unable to achieve that relatively easy (some might say too easy) understanding with children that Lewis Carroll seems to have had. After his wife left him for a younger man, Barrie successively insinuated himself uncomfortably into two different families--Anthony Powell describes him in this stage as "Dracula-like"--in the unpleasantly overlapping roles of father figure/friend of children/third wheel to a marriage. Though his adopted families were often glad of his company, attention, and, it must be said, money, the situation, it seems, never quite escaped awkwardness, if not outright discomfort.

The following story of Penelope Fitzgerald's father, longtime Punch editor E. V. Knox, meeting Barrie for the first time, which she relates in The Knox Brothers, seems typical of Barrie's uncomfortable nature:

Desmond MacCarthy, the most genial of Irish critics, had been at King's, and wanted to help [Edmund], as he wanted to help everybody he met. He also knew everybody. Eddie must come to him and ask advice from James Barrie, who was at the height of his fame, though he could sometimes be a little disconcerting, unless the side of him which spoke to adults, and which he called "McConachie," happened to be foremost. Buoyed up by MacCarthy's confidence, the two of them called at 133 Gloucester Terrace, where they found the room empty, except for a large dog, with which Barrie used to play hide-and-seek in the Park. While they waited, Eddie in sheer nervousness hit his hand on the marble mantelpiece. It began to bleed profusely. MacCarthy was aghast. Barrie could not bear the sight of blood. They tried to staunch it with handkerchiefs, and with the cuffs of MacCarthy's soft shirt, which became deeply stained. Barrie appeared at the doorway, took one look at them, and withdrew. Kind-hearted though he was, he was obliged to send down a message that he could not see them.

Overall, Barrie's was an odd, sad life, with far more than its share of sorrow and loss to leaven his success. Powell, in a review of Janet Dunbar's J. M. Barrie: The Man Behind the Image (1970) writes:

In the end one feels that only Dostoevsky could do justice to Barrie's life, the passionate sexless love affairs, the money, the rows, the reiterated tragedies. It is all Dostoevsky's meat.

4 All this has lead me to wonder whether some children's or young adult books should accompany me on my upcoming vacation. On my shelf, unread, is The Brilliance of the Moon (2004), the third volume of Lian Hearn's samurai adventure series, Tales of the Otori. Should it be packed? And, having hauled down the Prydain Chronicles to write about Lloyd Alexander--and then finding myself wanting to argue that they're better than Susan Cooper's sequence, The Dark Is Rising--I wonder if I should bring those along?

That would help solve my problem of bringing too many books on trips: if I get tired of hauling these around, I can always send them home with my nephew, further cementing Stacey's and my reputation as that aunt and uncle who always give books. I guess there are worse types of aunt and uncle to be.