An Awful Lot of Books (18 page)

I liked books with magic in them, with marvellous, unaccountable events, and as I accumulated fairy books and my private society was peopled with witches, dragons, king’s sons, woodcutters’ daughters, dwarfs, giants, magicians and princesses, it seemed to me quite reasonable that people should be turned into toads for careless behaviour, or build their houses entirely out of pear seeds, or throw up a golden life in a palace for some mysterious quest. The fact that I did not understand all the language of these stories rather added to their charm for me, and I enjoyed listening to them long before I could read. Their inevitable patterns, with the black and white distinction between chance and fate, never struck me as ruthless or cruel, as one is told today that they should, as I never expected my own life to correspond to the people’s in these stories. Secondly, I liked stories about animals - ordinary, not magic and behaving like themselves and not people. Ernest Thompson-Seton was just right. Thirdly, I loved books about large families of children, particularly E. Nesbit, and of hers,
Five Children and It
, the one about the peevish sand fairy, was my favourite. The Nesbits and some of the Andrew Lang fairy books had belonged to my mother: there was also a work called
Holiday House
, about two children called Harry and Laura who exceeded the wildest bounds of one’s imagination of naughtiness and who had an insufferably priggish elder brother who died (I thought of sheer, stark goodness, as there did not seem to be anything else wrong with him).

Some grandparents had
Struwelpeter
, whose violence left me unmoved excepting for the haunting line ‘ the hare’s own child, the little hare’, at which I invariably wept, and some of the Golliwog books which were written in racy pupperel with large and lovely illustrations about a debonair and optimistic golliwog and his friends, who were all Dutch dolls. ‘Poor Golliwog despairing lay, For heart and hope had fled, He did not wish to live, because, He thought his friends were dead,’ and there was a terrible picture of him lying in a pond with his hair streaming out round some bulrushes. Then, of course, there was
Winnie-the-Pooh
and
The Wind in the Willows.
(Perhaps it is necessary to explain here that our books were censored and drivel and vulgarity - by my mother’s standards - were removed, that we did not suffer in the least from this at the time, and priggish though it may sound, I am extremely grateful for the reasonable standard of language and intelligence that her discrimination secured.) Edward Lear’s
Nonsense Verse
was some of my earliest reading, but not for amusement; ‘Two owls and a hen, four larks and a wren, had all built their nests in his beard’ - one read it with mounting astonishment and consternation; this was no laughing matter, but a credible anxiety. Belloc, however, filled one with a kind of raging rhythmical delight and there were also those serene books about Johnny Crow and his garden: ‘Johnny Crow, whom perhaps you know, has improved his little Garden’.

When I was about ten, and hoping desperately that any minute I would stop being a girl in order to go to prep school with my brother, I started to read the South Sea island shipwreck books: Stevenson, Marryat, Defoe and Ballantyne were some authors, but possibly because I was also addicted to Louisa Alcott,
Black Beauty
and even
The Wide Wide World
, the seamanlike and bloodthirsty adventures failed to change my sex. In the end I compromised with Arthur Ransome, Bevis,
Two Little Savages
, and Stanley Weyman and Charlotte Yonge, these last two satisfactorily combining adventure with romance. I also amassed a good many books about horses, and goodness knows how much more boring I might have become about them if some educational accident had not introduced me to Shakespeare, which was like seeing the sea for the first time in one’s life, or going to the country in June when one had never seen it so rich and beautiful, or the first time I had dinner in the evening alone with my father, and Brahms in the drawing-room afterwards - whole areas which seemed to have been invisible or wasted were suddenly presented like gold or a live bird in the hand … By now, it must be clear that, like most children, I was addicted to series or sets - I carefully counted his plays and thanked God he had written so many. For years it was my chief grudge against Jane Austen, but on the other hand one couldn’t complain about Dickens. I began to press my father’s trousers at threepence a pair to augment the sixpence pocket money and bought books with the proceeds. I bought a complete Shakespeare and
The Imitation of Christ
(both of which were heavy on trousers) and mingled these with second-hand editions of
Little Lord Fauntleroy
and extraordinary work in two volumes called
Coelebs in Search of a Wife
,
Comprehending Observations on Domestic Habits and Manners, Religion and Morals
- this cost a penny and still seems to me intoxicating value.

My library accumulated on these fitful lines for several years: like all children I wanted books that would stand or invite constant re-reading, and like most children I was undeterred by my partial understanding - either of words, or of the behaviour of the characters about whom I read. In this manner I read
Bleak House
, which was my favourite Dickens, more than five times and most of Jane Austen once a year, and learned some three thousand lines of Shakespeare by heart in order to have them handier than they were in my complete volume, which, like a cook we had once said of herself, was ‘bulky, but fragile’. But I also re-read Miss Allcott, and books that my father had about the Great War. I did not read with a great desire to uncover fear, horror or excitement, but fell into the other category who enormously enjoyed and became adept at reading unimpaired by streaming eyes at the sadness of it all.

As to the books that one discarded or disliked practically on sight: I think illustrations had a good deal to do with this. Books that were fraught with rather arty, very black woodcuts were high on my list of hates; or ones that had wispy or woolly pictures in pastel colours with a cowardly amount of detail. Good pictures meant an accurate and thorough representation of the matter in hand - colour was not essential, but if used it must not be anaemic. My favourites were the Henry Ford illustrations to the fairy books, the Edward Lear drawings, the Shepherd drawings for the Pooh books, all the Beatrix Potter pictures excepting of
Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle,
and the original Nesbit illustrations. I loathed coy stories about inanimate objects - like dining-room chairs racketing sentimentally about like people, and for years entertained a sombre aversion to Greek mythology. Also an extremely reliable and good aunt once gave me a book written entirely in French by someone who was naturally called Anatole France: this maddened me.

The only conclusion that I have come to out of these very personal findings is that on the whole there is a part of me which can still enjoy many of the books that I enjoyed as a child, and that when, now I stumble upon a child’s book which gives me great pleasure - such as E. B. White’s two,
Stuart Little
and
Charlotte’s Web
, and Margery Sharp’s
The Rescuers
, which is published this autumn - they seem to me to be direct descendants of these older books: they, too, have ideas, and an invention which is both practical and kept within the bounds of its scale, but above all they have style, and I think children have that mixture of inquiry and love of tradition which gives them a very good appreciation of that.

March 1960

I
t is now a year since I began reviewing books here, and as I have been given the chance of making a few general remarks, there is one point which was perhaps not made clear a year ago. It has been suggested on several occasion that I am always ‘too kind’ (soft, or soppy), have nothing but ‘praise’ (indiscriminate admiration) and that, according to me, ‘all books are marvellous’ (I am a tasteless bore). While all this may be simultaneously true, the intention has been to find books that you might want to read, and not ones that you won’t. Even on this principle, the dozens or hundreds which I have had to omit haunt me. My space, like your time, is limited, and if - like the man when you ask your way - I were to describe in loving or caustic detail a turning which there is no point in your taking. I should be wasting both.

So, out of the great sea of generals, statesmen, professional men, artists, and erstwhile criminals who are pouring out their earliest memories in the form of autobiography, there may only be room to choose one poet; one of the hundreds of people who cross the Pyrenees on a bicycle, the Pacific in a coracle, the deserts by jeep, the Arctic by dog, the Lake District by gumboot, and various other gigantic distances by balloon, raft and camel, there may only be room for one travel book; out of the thousands of attempts at illuminating human relations very few novels can be selected, and however many people write works explaining the innermost motives of General Gordon, the Brontês or Burke and Hare, one book about one of them is probably all that can be managed. This is apart from the vast miscellany outside these categories - there are countless books to choose from; the point is not that there are far too many bad books so much as that there are quite enough good ones, and this is the climate required for anything better than good to emerge…

Christmas 1960

A
t first glance, probably not very much, but if one keeps glancing, differences loom out of the international mist and make themselves plain.

The first distinction which emerges is that all the intellectual leaders of British thought think the British are frightful - unambitious, stupid, resigned, lacking in emotions, tasteless, gullible, conventional and defeatist; a mass of pin-striped lemmings, hurtling (on Public Transport) to disaster, whose behaviour and nature are deemed worse than anywhere else. (The brunt of this disapproval is borne by different classes at different times, but is always loudly evident.)

The British public, however, take absolutely no notice of this, with the result that they are always shouting for leaders of thought, action, or anything else - including people who will write the sort of works they wish to read and hear - much as the leaders of thought shout for an audience intelligent and enlightened enough to appreciate them. Between these two factions lies a sea of contempt and mutual ignorance, which is occasionally bridged by a French film, an American musical, or a novel from the Commonwealth. Perhaps the British would take more notice if the leaders of intellectual thought laughed at them, but this hardly ever happens as the latter are usually too anxious and angry to laugh, and in any case a national fallacy has developed whereby laughter is equated with emotional indifference.

In the centre of all there is a middle class of those who walk a tight rope (and cash in on it) of mass-producing - which involves diluting, complicating and disguising - either Great Thoughts, of frequently unknown antiquity, or current thoughts, of varying sizes, promulgated originally by leading living exponents. The first category often congeals into a platitude, which means, I think, something which has been misunderstood in the same way for a very long time; the second usually produces something which both factions would regard as harmless, i.e., dull and/or un-nourishing, like boiled sweets or tinned beetroot sandwiches - literary frivia or roughage.

The situation arises partly from the facts that the intellectual leaders feel that the external situation can and must be changed (by them), and the British public is desperately trying to catch up with and understand a situation which was at its zenith anything up to thirty years before they came in contact with it. It does not often occur to either of them to discover in what area practical or possible change may lie: if it did, they might appreciate one another more often than they do.

Is this situation peculiarly British? The French intellectuals regard it as graceless and boring to run down the rest of the French; they work that sort of feeling off in frenzied disapproval or cynicism about their political leaders, but the relationship between their public and Malraux, Sartre, Camus, etc., is far more intimate and sympathetic than the approximate equivalent here. The Americans consider it un-American to run down other Americans. If Russian intellectuals said the sort of things about the Russian peoples that the British intellectuals say about the British, it would be the last thing they did. The Italians concentrate upon depreciating their decadent rich minority, who, like grouse, are regarded as fair game, but it really seems that it is only the British who when they denigrate the British, mean very nearly everybody but themselves.

The fitting paradox to this is that more and more books are being published here, and read - whatever publishers, authors and readers will tell you: but this is not the main phenomenon, which is far more arresting and peculiar to this country in particular.

There is a theory, the details of which I cannot remember, but which runs something like this: if a number of monkeys were shown an equal number of typewriters, in four thousand years they would be bound to type a play of Shakespeare’s. This interesting theory cannot be tested here on a really large scale for two reasons. One - a shortage of monkeys; two - a shortage of typewriters. The shortage of monkeys here explains itself; they are very highly strung, and would doubtless be unable to stand intellectual monkeys running down the rest: the shortage of typewriters is a different matter, and arises from a more sinister cause requiring explanation. They are all in use. Why? Excluding a minimum of office work, they are being used by all or any of the population who can buy, hire, borrow or steal them to write verse, novels, biographies, memoirs, travel experiences, vicarious experiences and fantasies of no experience at all.