by Dennis Butts
24. Does Anyone Really Write for Children?
Including Lewis Carroll, J.M. Barrie, Beatrix Potter, Kenneth Grahame, Arthur Ransome, Enid Blyton, and Roald Dahl
One of the most common assumptions about children’s books is that the best of them were written for specific children. There seems to be something deeply satisfying about the image of an adult telling a bedtime story: something innocent and genuine. After all, especially in this paedophobic world, the idea of an adult and a child sharing such an intimate thing as a story begins to look rather suspect or manipulative.
Arthur Ransome worried about the motives of children’s writers in the sense of the possible self-congratulatory spirit of the author, and agreed that some of the best children’s books were written for a specific child:
To write a book for children seems to me to be a sure way of writing what is called a ‘juvenile’, a horrid, artificial thing, a patronising thing, a thing that betrays in every line that the author and intended victim are millions of miles apart, and that the author is enjoying not the stuff of his book but a looking-glass picture of himself or herself ‘being so good with children’ . . . a most unpleasant spectacle for anyone who happens to look over his shoulder. It is true that some of the best children’s books were written with a particular audience in view – Alice in Wonderland and The Wind in the Willows, for example.
C.S. Lewis, in a famous essay ‘On Three Ways of Writing for Children’, also agreed. In the case of Lewis Carroll, Kenneth Grahame, and Tolkien, he wrote,
The printed story grows out of a story told to a particular child with the living voice and perhaps ex tempore . . . You are certainly trying to give that child what it wants . . . but you are dealing with a concrete person, this child who, of course, differs from all other children. There is no question of ‘children’ conceived as a strange species . . . nor, I suspect would it be possible, thus face to face, to regale the child with things calculated to please but regarded by you with indifference or contempt . . . You would become slightly different because you were talking to a child and the child would become slightly different because it was being talked to by an adult. A community, a composite personality is created and out of that the story grows.
(Lewis, you will note, is writing as a theoretician.) The roll call of books that at least began life as a real story – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Treasure Island, Peter Rabbit, Peter Pan, the Just-So Stories, Winnie-the-Pooh, The Hobbit, Swallows and Amazons, James and the Giant Peach – is trotted out by critics to prove that writing for children is essentially a caring act, rather than a literary one, guaranteeing a kind of purity of motive.
It is perhaps surprising to find that many authors bought into this myth. It seems, for example, that the core of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was a set of tales extemporised by Charles Dodgson to Alice Liddell and her sisters in a boat on the Thames. Unfortunately, the idyllic ‘golden afternoon’ of July 4, 1863, still celebrated, was, according to the weather records, rainy. Robert Louis Stevenson’s romantic account of how he came to write Treasure Island for his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, producing a chapter a day, turns out not quite to fit the facts – even to the extent of a disagreement between them about who designed the map in the first place.
But perhaps the most interesting case is that of Kenneth Grahame and The Wind in the Willows. There is no doubt that the book began in a series of letters written from Grahame to his son – they now reside in the Bodleian Library in Oxford – but other features of the story of how the book grew have a distinctly odd flavour. The story begins with a fact: on 15 May, 1904, Grahame wrote to the wife of one of his male companions and old banking-colleagues, Mrs Sidney Ward, that his son Alastair (known as ‘Mouse’) ‘had a bad crying fit on the night of his birthday, and I had to tell him stories about moles, giraffes & water-rats (he selected these subjects) till after 12’. This story was then embellished by Grahame’s wife Elspeth, who went to great lengths, in First Whispers of ‘The Wind in the Willows’ (1944), to build up an image of an idyllic father-son relationship. According to Elspeth, their maid had reported to her that Grahame was ‘up in the night-nursery, telling Master Mouse some ditty [story] or other about a toad’. Then she claims that when the family was staying at a Scottish castle, one of the guests came across Grahame telling a story to Alastair in the night-nursery, and reported to the other guests:
I have been listening to him spell-bound through the door which fortunately happened to be just ajar, and I heard two of the most beautiful voices, one relating a wonderful story, and the other, soft as the south wind blowing, sometimes asking for an explanation, sometimes arguing a point, at others laughing like a whole chime of bells . . .
The evidence of the letters is slightly odd. In the summer of 1907, Alastair and his Nanny/Governess, Naomi Stott, went to Littlehampton for seven weeks (July-August), and then came back home to Cookham Dene around early September. From May to September 1907 Grahame wrote a series of fifteen letters to Alastair, from Fowey, Falmouth, and his house in Kensington, containing part of what eventually became chapter 6 and much of chapters 8, 10, 11 and 12 of The Wind in the Willows (roughly one third of the final book). The first letter is from Green Bank Hotel, Falmouth, dated May 10, 1907: and it begins
My Darling Mouse,
This is a birth-day Letter, to wish you many happy returns of the day. I wish we could have been all together, but we shall meet again soon, & then we will have treats. I have sent you two picture books, one about Brer Rabbit, from Daddy, & one about some other animals, from Mummy, and we have sent you a boat, painted red, with mast & sails, to sail in the round pond by the windmill – & Mummy has sent you a boat-hook to catch it when it comes to shore. Also Mummy has sent you some sand-toys to play in the sand with, and a card-game.
Have you heard about the Toad? He was never taken prisoner by brigands after all . . . ’
All well and good, but as the series progresses, all asides and even salutations disappear – there is nothing but the story. However, the question arises; why were they written at all? From June to September 1907, there is no indication of Grahame having contact with his son. They took their holidays separately, and when the boy was at home at Cookham, his father was working (and apparently living) in London. Grahame’s work at the bank was not onerous. The best train today between London and Cookham takes thirty-two minutes, and the service in 1907 would have been at least as good. For a month, therefore, the devoted parent Kenneth Grahame wrote a story to a son he could not take an hour on the train to visit.
A.A. Milne (despite his ambivalent feelings about the ‘Pooh’ books) was not adverse to making Christopher Robin part of his ‘publicity machine’, and through the 1930s a series of interview articles (one by Enid Blyton) nurtured the image of an idyllic father-son relationship. For example, of the first poem in his collections for children, ‘Vespers’, Milne said, ‘I saw him at his prayers, and the poem wrote itself.’ This is a somewhat different image from that presented in Christopher Milne’s 1974 memoir, The Enchanted Places: ‘ . . . it seemed to me, almost, that my father had got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son.’
This is mild compared to the memoir by Imogen Smallwood, Enid Blyton’s younger daughter, A Childhood at Green Hedges (1989). Blyton’s publicity machine – which put Milne’s in the shade – assiduously marketed her as ‘the mother of the nation’s children’ – the ultimate mother-figure. Imogen did not see it in that way:
There is a well-established myth that my mother read frequently to my sister and myself, trying out her stories on us, her own small critics. This is quite untrue . . . My mother’s love of children was real enough . . . It was only her own children and those belonging to her staff or close friends who somehow failed to capture her love. Her feelings were . . . not maternal at all.
I had been writing short stories for about fifteen years, and then I had children. I always told them stories in bed, and they started asking for some of the stories over and over. I was in New York at the time, and I didn’t have a plot for a short story, so I decided to have a go at a children’s book. I took some of those bed time stories and turned them into James and the Giant Peach.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory also involved some input from children: he showed the manuscript to his nephew: ‘He told me he didn’t think it was much good. That shook me. Then I looked at it and realised he was right.’
He also made an anti-establishment pitch, placing himself firmly on the side of his child readers – child readers in general, that is.
I have a great affinity with children. I see their problems. If you want to remember what it’s like to live in a child’s world, you’ve got to get down on your hands and knees and live like that for a week. You find you have to look up at all these bloody giants around you who are always telling you what to do and what not to do . . . So subconsciously in the child’s mind these giants become the enemy . . . When I wrote Matilda I based it on this theory . . . Children absolutely warm to this. They think, ‘Well, Christ! He’s one of us.’ I don’t think you find many chaps . . . in their mid-seventies who think like I do and joke and fart around.
But despite all this bonhomie, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was (famously) attacked as ‘tasteless, phony and sadistic’ by the critic Eleanor Cameron, who also claimed that it ‘diminishes the human spirit.’ She was, and is, not alone in this view, but it is interesting that Dahl’s initial response was not (as later) that children lack taste and are sadistic, but the personal and evocative one that he had dedicated the book to his disabled son, Theo: ‘The thought that I would write a book for him that might actually do him harm is too ghastly to contemplate. It is an insensitive and monstrous implication.’
Despite his considerable fan-base, Dahl has not escaped sceptical scrutiny. There are reports that when he sent a manuscript to his publisher, Alfred Knoph, he asked himself ‘What the hell am I writing this nonsense for’ and imagined Knoph shouting ‘What the hell am I reading this nonsense for?’ And of course there is the famous, but highly disputed conversation between Dahl and Kingsley Amis, during which Dahl suggested that Amis might make more money by writing for children: ‘that’s where the money is today, believe me’. Amis is alleged to have said he had no talent for it, and Dahl is alleged to have said, ‘never mind, the little bastards’d swallow it.’
Fortunately the integrity of other authors who wrote for specific children do not seem to be compromised. Beatrix Potter was a close friend of Annie Moore, and often visited her and her family in Wandsworth, and was very attached to (and a favourite of) her children. When Noel, who was five, fell ill in September 1893, she sent him a picture-letter which became The Tale of Peter Rabbit. J.M. Barrie, having made friends in Kensington Gardens with George and Jack Llewelyn Davies, and later their mother, Sylvia, told the boys stories (one about their baby brother, Peter) and became closely involved with the family, spending holidays with them and weaving stories about the children which transmuted into The Little White Bird (1902) and then the many versions of Peter Pan (from 1904). Kipling’s Just-So Stories are virtual transcripts of loving family rituals, and Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons began with four real children in mind. Tolkien’s The Hobbit also seems unproblematic: his son Christopher said of it in 1937: ‘Daddy wrote it ages ago, and read it to John, Michael and me in our Winter “Reads” after tea in the evening.’
So far, so good; but, as Ransome sagely put it, it is impossible to read any of those books ‘without realising that one member of the audience, and the one whose taste had dictatorial rights, was the author.’ Between the first inspiration and the final product falls the shadow.
In each case, adulthood takes over, and sometimes with questionable results. Carroll and Grahame both considerably expanded their stories to include layers of both personal therapy and literary satire. Barrie’s books and plays, as they developed, were far from being for children – rather they explore the relationship between adult and child in a way that has concerned many critics (‘Death will be an awfully big adventure’ does not seem to everyone to be a healthy childhood sentiment). Beatrix Potter’s books became progressively detached from real children – indeed, The Tale of Pigling Bland (1912) seems largely autobiographical; Ransome’s later books, similarly, are really about Arthur Ransome. Sadly, he later disowned the origins of Swallows and Amazons, replacing the original dedication – ‘To the four for whom it was written, in exchange for a pair of slippers’ with an ‘Author’s Note’: ‘I have often been asked how I came to write Swallows and Amazons . . . It grew out of . . . old memories. I could not help writing it. It almost wrote itself.’ Tolkien grew to regret the tone in which he had written The Hobbit, as it became part of the larger chronicles of Middle-Earth, and The Lord of the Rings was not conceived as being for children at all: ‘I am not interested in the “child” as such, modern or otherwise, and certainly have no intention of meeting him/her half way, or a quarter of the way. It is a mistaken thing to do anyway, either useless (when applied to the stupid) or pernicious (when inflicted on the gifted).’
Whether or not a children’s book begins as an interaction with a child, the fact that the writer is an adult inevitably turns it into something less pure, whether that is a wrestling with the difficulties of writing for children (as with A.A. Milne), or a skilful exploitation of the form (as with Blyton and Dahl). Perhaps the only ‘pure’ children’s book is one written by a child, for a child, and that is something that adults should never read.
25. Did the Line Really Hold?
Alan Garner, The Stone Book Quartet (1976-8)
One of the two most frequently asked questions that children’s book ‘experts’ get asked is, irritatingly, ‘can a children’s book ever be as good as an adults’ book?’; the second, which is more challenging than irritating is, ‘which is the best children’s book of the past 100 years?’ Of course, the most obvious answer is, to the first, ‘you can’t compare apples with oranges’, and to the second, ‘it depends what you mean by best.’ Or, simpler answers to both would be ‘yes’; and ‘Alan Garner’s The Stone Book Quartet.’ These four novellas represent what many adults think children’s books should be – or predominantly were from about 1920 to 1970 – rural, retreatist, nostalgic, family-oriented, safely exciting, a touch transcendental, recommending conservative values, carefully crafted linguistically. They are also male dominated. However, they also both for and about children, are concerned with children’s preoccupations, contain satisfactory child-sized confrontations, and (possibly) a resolution that contrives to link adults and children.
And that is the conundrum, not only of Garner, but of children’s books in general. Can he satisfactorily speak to two audiences at once without (as Milne did in Winnie-the-Pooh) seeming to patronise the ostensibly main audience? Writers such as Enid Blyton address one audience successfully but totally alienate the other; with other authors (no names mentioned) it seems that the less a book looks like a children’s book, the more likely it is to win prizes. Garner’s children’s books have won prizes, and have been repackaged in adult-looking editions, but for many years he has seen himself as primarily a children’s writer.
His first two books, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) and The Moon of Gomrath (1963) were cheerful farragoes; Garner, who later dismissed them as apprentice pieces, said at the time that he wished to make ‘every page contain something which is pure excitement and horror, giving the story the tempo of a thriller.’ Thrillers they certainly are: contemporary Cheshire becomes quite cluttered with mythological figures – mystic knights, evil svarts,
figures (and hounds) from Welsh and Irish and Scottish legends, snippets from The Mabinogi and gods from Graves’s The White Goddess. But for all the chaos, these figures derive from a good deal of serious research, and there are many passages of seriously distinguished writing – the sequence underground in the Earldelving should have received the Annual Claustrophobia Award. Elidor (1965) is more controlled, a parallel-world fantasy which makes a more conscious attempt to use symbolic treasures. The Owl Service (1967), became, to Garner’s distress, a widely prescribed school text: in a talk, ‘Hard Cases’, in his collection of essays The Voice that Thunders (1997) he quotes a letter that he received from a pupil:
Hi. My name is Paul. Our English teacher made us read your novel The Owl Service. I think that if your book had been written in English more of my fellow students would have understood it.
The Owl Service, an intense study of adolescent relationships which mirror or repeat a legend from The Mabinogi, certainly moved Garner’s style into a more complex and elliptical area. Red Shift (1973), with its stretches of ‘untagged’ dialogue and extreme emotional and physical violence, attempts to link three traumatic events which happened in the same place at different times: the Roman occupation, the Civil War, and the present. It was described at the time as ‘probably the most difficult book ever to be published on a children’s list’, and moved Garner to restate his principles.
