The Child that Books Built

by Francis Spufford

  Stuffing yourself with chocolate pudding is different from dining on a human thigh. The oceanic trances that had started to visit me didn’t feel monstrous. On the contrary; they seemed to be aimed at the opposite of a cannibal’s solipsism, the hellish solitude that would result if you believed you were the only subject in the world, and everyone else was only an (edible) object. It felt as if I was reaching out in them, just beginning to feel the craving for the company of an Other so dimly defined still that I hadn’t yet imagined a face or a body for her that was any more distinct than the whole salty sea. But Wally thrust me into the solitude of a fear that no one else shared; and when the horrible pictures of him biting into a squealing rat, and making the child in the next bed vanish, visited me again, night after night in the dormitory, they menaced me with news of an inchoate something that wouldn’t go away, that was going to go on asking to be dealt with even when the particular imprint made on my mind by Wally mercifully began to fade.

  I wish this chapter had a different name. I wish I’d been brave enough as a teenager to try the experiment of facing the emotions I wanted not to have. But I wasn’t. The story of my life as a reader from thirteen onward doesn’t follow one grim straight line. It was a time of hopes and discoveries too. But when it came to it, whenever fear presented itself to me and asked to be addressed, I always turned back to books as the medium into which I was used to pouring my troublesome emotions. I re-buried my fear in stories, not in stories that frightened me, but in others that seemed capacious, absorbent, open to being saturated by what you brought to them. I looked for stories hungry enough to swallow my fear. I looked for new holes to put it in.

  *

  Clues about appetite are a major goal of reading anyway, at thirteen. At my school we were all doing it. The powers-that-be had put me in charge of the cupboard of paperbacks that boarders were allowed to borrow, having correctly deduced that someone with the leadership qualities of a soap bubble wouldn’t make a good prefect, and the first thing I learned as a librarian was that the James Bond books, once checked out, never ever came back. Every copy vanished to become somebody’s private primer. The thing that made them so attractive to us at that particular age was that they led you seamlessly from the boy’s stuff you had coveted last year – sports cars equipped with machine-guns – on to the enticements that were just starting to figure in your fantasies, and would dominate them next year – naked odalisques painted gold, and female pilots who unzipped their flying suits from neck to crotch in one sinuous southward motion. Unlike the films, the original Ian Fleming novels fitted all the diverse attractions of Bond’s world together as component pieces of one vision of sexed-up, gentlemanly poise. Sean Connery as Bond showed you the Platonic ideal of a lad; Roger Moore was a burlesque smoothie; but Fleming’s Bond, as well as manifesting vestigial signs of being a character with emotions, so that in The Spy Who Loved Me he actually fell in love with somebody, came from a pre-Suez arcadia, where an amoral, good-looking, violent, upper-class Englishman with an infinite budget upon which to lead the good life, could know what exactly were the very best things to have and to do in every single area of life. If you were Bond, said Goldfinger and Live and Let Die, you would drink Bombay gin and smoke Egyptian cigarettes. You would wear a Savile Row suit and shoot the cuffs of a shirt handmade for you in Jermyn Street as you sat down in Monte Carlo to play baccarat against a countess. Your gun would be a Walther PPK: not some gross destructive cannon, as favoured by vulgar American secret agents, but a suave, neat little gentleman’s murdering-piece, to be used against vile foreign masterminds who were usually not alpha males like yourself, but creepy wet-lipped middle-aged creatures of uncertain antecedents. Your women would be an everchanging harem, gathered from the four corners of the late-imperial world, and their names would be suggestive jokes that would reveal themselves to be really quite rude indeed if you happened to possess the bit of arcane knowledge necessary to understand them. (‘Pussy Galore’ was once upon a time a name that only sounded pussy-cattish to the majority of British readers. In the 1950s only a select few knew American slang.)

  The shopping list went on, seductively unflagging. The version of the good life it was selling was, of course, blatantly obsolete in 1977. Britain had just been bailed out by the IMF in an un-suave, un-supercharged-six-litre-Bentley kind of a way. The Sex Pistols had just released Never Mind the Bollocks. The cigarettes I would start smoking three years later would be B & H, not some special blend flown in from Cairo. I do remember somebody buying a pack of black Balkan Sobranies with gold tips, and feeling very sophisticated with one in my gob, but the effect we were trying for was Roxy Music rather than Casino Royale. The James Bond of the novels was as defunct as Bulldog Drummond. It didn’t matter: the shopping list was not for shopping from. It wasn’t as if, at thirteen, with your adam’s apple bobbing as you read, and the first pus-filled craters forming on the back of your neck, you really pictured yourself doing any of the things in the books. Instead, they made you a more general promise. They told you that the world you were on your way into was a world of pleasures for a male person, even if not precisely this archaic worldful. One day, you would travel fast, and women would want you to touch them. James Bond provided our first-ever tips on sexual technique. His mouth would always come down ‘ruthlessly’ on the yielding lips of whichever lovely it was; and then his hand would descend to her left breast. Why always the left? Fleming never explained, which was typical, for the Bond books are not in fact very explicit. On the page, as on the screen when the novels were adapted, the fade followed immediately after the embrace began: which probably, at thirteen, gave you all the detail you needed to be excited, and perhaps all the detail you wanted. Female bodies had only just begun to be objects of fascination, and the rapid fade reflected your own state of soft-focus vagueness about why you were excited. You would just have to wait and see, and look out for hints in other books.

  But I was finding it more and more difficult to find books I enjoyed reading. I had to browse for longer and longer in bookshops before I could settle on one that felt right, whose qualities could form a key that would fit the lock I felt myself to be just then. In the holidays, I sometimes came back from the children’s library in Newcastle without a single book. I’d scoured the shelves, trying book jacket after book jacket with frustrated intentness, and all the descriptions seemed to offer me worlds I already knew to the point of exhaustion, even if I hadn’t read that particular title. Suddenly the imagined worlds that had nourished me had become a set of stale permutations on predictable themes. It was more than over-familiarity that had done this. Just the year before, I had been one of childhood’s senior citizens, and consequently one of the most practised and sophisticated consumers of its landscape of fictional possibilities, its forests and islands and towns. If you’re a boy – the hormonal cascade reaches girls a year or so sooner – then at eleven or twelve you’re just reaching the end of a long period during which change was steady and incremental. Your early childhood now seems remote, a few pictures and flashes of memory caught up in the legendary structure of family history. Except for these hints of your earliest selfhood, ever since you can remember you’ve been the same being, growing a little bit taller every year, getting shoes one size larger, going up another class at school. Not coincidentally, this steady central stretch of your childhood began when you mastered the infancy-ending clump of conservation skills, whether they are defined in the traditional Piagetian way, or as the revisionists do, in terms of a linguistic ability. Literate, with a stable set of expectations about how the world worked, you entered into what Piaget named the period of ‘concrete operations’: when you could handle all the appearances, disappearances, inversions, substitutions and logical transformations that stuff and people in the world go through, so long as they were presented to you in the solid form of examples, or situations. Or stories – for a mind that thinks by thinking through a sequence of things happening is going to be deeply receptive to s
tories’ arrays of organised events. My appetite for books had had a cognitive basis.

  But now, as well becoming the most junior and fumbling possessor of a physically adult body, I was going through a cognitive change too. I had, without knowing I was approaching a limit of any kind, reached the end of the things that the children’s books I cherished could tell me urgently. Not the end of the things they could tell me, full stop. Of course I hadn’t read all the children’s books there were, or met all the characters that children’s authors had ever invented. But I had run out of discoveries that could change my imagination exigently, demandingly, as if they were news from a country that I needed to know about. The Narnia books were still there. I could look nostalgically at the pages that had given me the sensation of touching something live and electric. But the sensation was receding from the sentences that had once given me shocks; The Silver Chair and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader had no new news to give me, and so they were fading out of my repertoire of important books, reduced to the mild status of former favourites. I would have to find other stories to love.

  In psychology, a moment like this is known as an ‘elaborative choice’. When a system of knowledge reaches saturation point in someone’s mind, like my knowledge at thirteen of what books could do for me – when it is fully worked out, so all you can discover without a change are more confirming details of what you already know – there are two ways to go. You can reformulate the system, by altering its underlying principles, shifting its whole paradigm. Or you can articulate it, extending the same system sideways into new areas that can be worked out in the same way as the old ones.

  To reformulate reading at thirteen, you jump to adult books. One entrypoint is via the classics. Amid the baffling profusion of grown-up possibilities, a reassuring sense of order adheres to the novels from the past that have already been sifted through and declared good, and conveniently assembled together, as a row of orange Penguins in a bookshop, or a dump of old Everymans discovered in a cardboard box. The country is dotted with dormant shelves-full of standard editions, put together by a previous generation, and waiting for a bored thirteen-year-old to blow the dust off. Go this way, and your next move when Narnia ceases to satisfy is to Jane Eyre. Fiction recomplicates itself for you: you step up a whole level of complexity. Suddenly you are surrounded anew by difficulties and riches commensurate with your state of mind. From an exhausted territory, you have come to an unexplored one, where manners and intentions are all to find, just like the rules of your own new existence in your own new lurch-prone adolescent body; and here the emotions are urgent again, because the great canonical novels of courtship – Jane Austen is next – all deal with people circling warily, interestedly, as they try to figure each other out, and decide from cues of behaviour like the ones real other people present to you yourself, whether this person or that is the one with whom desire and affection and trust can come together. Here, again, as you were when you first started puzzling out written language, you find yourself understanding only a fraction of what is going on, to begin with. But it is a sufficient fraction for you to follow along, fascinated, the emotional outline of what is happening, just as the fraction of words you could decipher on the first printed pages you pieced together was sufficient for the story to begin to flow, holed and gapped though it was. Grown-up emotion too, it turns out, is a robust system. You can miss a lot and still get a gist that will keep you reading; on through Pride and Prejudice, laughing experimentally, then confidently, at Mr Collins; decoding Jane Austen’s idea of a happy ending, and working out how she expects warm feeling, ideally, to fit inside the container that social calculations make, so that love thrives when the people who feel it are equally gentlemanly and ladylike. What then? Maybe Thomas Hardy, whose characters live in an emotional climate where storms rage, like they rage for the Brontë characters, only now a terrible fatalism is at work as well, and you watch hypnotised as a force like gravity makes things go terribly, grimly, appallingly wrong. You turn the page, and Jude finds all his children hanged in homemade nooses. Then Dickens, and a twinkling, a scintillating of moods in cities as brown as oxtail soup. Or Henry James. Or Scott Fitzgerald. Or Thomas Mann. It’s a new world!

  This is a distinguished, a proven, a reliable path into grown-up literature. A lot of voracious childhood readers have taken it, and turned themselves into voracious adult readers. Perhaps it works especially well for girls. Before the Victorian novel went macho at the end of the nineteenth century, it was acknowledged to be a form in which women authors excelled, and in which the exploration of female perceptions had a central and proper place. Many of the other books the world labels ‘great’ require a woman reading them to make a kind of mental flip and pretend for the duration to be the man the narrative expects its consumer to be. The canon of classic nineteenth-century novels is different. Elizabeth Bennett, Jane Eyre and Dorothea Brooke are not heroines a teenage girl reading sees through the eyes of men for whom they are primarily daughters, sisters, lovers. They are alternate possible selves, speaking directly to the female mind considering them, despite all the differences of history. Perversely, at least until Virago Modern Classics started rectifying the situation in the late 1970s and 80s, there were probably more easily accessible images of three-dimensional female selfhood in the traditional canon of the British novel than in a twentieth-century literature which had systematically forgotten most of its female authors. Maybe now a girl making the jump out of children’s books can turn to Angela Carter and Rosamond Lehmann and Antonia White, as well as George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë.

  But this solution to the elaborative choice works for boys too. And once the jump into new reading is under way, the half-understood complexities of adult novels seem far more attuned to the new bigness of attention you feel in yourself, whether you are female or male, than the stories prepared for children could ever be again. Looked back at, children’s books seem to be set in a doll’s house world, a small reserve where the imagination is arbitrarily prevented from engaging with more than a few small topics. There are also people, of course, for whom children’s stories were never anything but a small space they weren’t tempted to enter, because their entire connection with fiction began on the far side of this choice. I have friends in the word-business – very literary people, people more literary than me – who only started to read as teenagers, at fourteen or fifteen or sixteen. For them, the set texts they had to read for their English O Level, or their GCSE, were the gateway to fiction. It was The Pickwick Papers or The Great Gatsby or The Portrait of a Lady which established their sense of what novels could be, and could do for them; a very different starting point, which grounded all their future reading in the adolescent demand to be let in on adulthood, and to be allowed to engage with all the complexity they could handle. For them, books lack the primary association with comfort that is laid down by childhood reading, and which persists at some deep level even in the psyche of those who never looked back once they had left Swallows and Amazons and My Friend Flicka behind. The foundation for their private reading was a day of revision one summer weekend just before the exams, when they sat indoors in their bedroom watching a fat bluebottle bashing itself against the window, and found that the mingled cadences and emotions and ideas of the book in front of them were settling into their minds, not as a tricky gizmo built so you could answer questions on it, but as something they owned and wanted independently: a kind of unsuspected sculpture that, amazingly, took assorted bits of reality for its material and used the patterning of them to record a richer, subtler and more truthfully multiple comment on living than they had known was possible. When they grew up, they read Flaubert and enjoyed his palette of tonal astringencies, they read Proust with a steady delight in the gorgeous proliferation of his intelligence. But they developed almost no appetite, necessarily, for story as such. They tend not to look to fiction for veins of organised pleasure which satisfy because of their difference from experienced reality. You can spot thes
e people when you go on holiday with them. They are the ones who feel no pull towards the thrillers in the airport bookshop, because they have packed a book of chess problems, some Lacan essays, and Dombey & Son, which they plan to read for the fourth time.

  I tried the great books. I really did. But the elaborate verbal basketwork in which Victorian authors housed the rich perceptions they were interested in just seemed dry to someone who hoped a story would give them a jolt like a bare wire; and I gave up a few paragraphs into the copies of Middlemarch and Barchester Towers I pulled off the shelves at home. I didn’t make my first acquaintance with Jane Eyre till I was in my twenties, and then I kicked myself, and wondered why I had waited so long, but the truth was that at the age other book-children were finding Charlotte Brontë, I refused to believe that anything as ceremonious as Victorian prose seemed to me to be, could contain anything worth having. So I ventured out among the modern novels in the adult section of the library: I had a few successes, like John Le Carré, but I was baffled by the protocol that governed most of the books. Take something as simple as the titles. If a children’s book was called The Blue Hawk, it would have a hawk that was blue in it, with claws and wings and wild raptor eyes. If it was called The Perilous Descent you could count on it being about a descent that was perilous: two World War Two airmen stranded on a sandbank fall through a hole into an underground passage, and go down and down and down, through shafts and chasms, until they land by parachute in a subterranean country peopled by the descendants of shipwrecked refugees. Perfectly straightforward. Adult authors, on the other hand, seemed to be constitutionally incapable of giving a book a truthful name. Try The Middle of the Journey, and you got a bunch of academics in New York State sitting around and talking to each other. Did they set off for anywhere? They did not. The Centaur did not contain a centaur: it turned out to be just some bloody metaphor.