Reflections: On the Magic of Writing

  Lecture Two: Negatives and Positives in Children’s Literature

  In her second talk in Australia, Diana develops her ideas on fantasy and the imagination. This talk was later published in issue 25 of Focus, the writers’ magazine of the British Science Fiction Society, in December 1993/January 1994.

  There is one bizarre and creepy fact about my books which never gets onto the backs of jackets or into reviews—that is that they come true. This usually happens after I have written them. For instance, I now live in the house in The Ogre Downstairs. When I wrote the book, I was living in Oxford in a house that was the reverse of that one in every way—for instance, it had a flat roof that was soluble in water—and I had no thoughts of moving to Bristol, where I now live. Sometimes, however, the book comes true while I am actually writing it, and this can be quite upsetting. Fire and Hemlock was one of those. One of the many things that happened while I was writing it was that an eccentric bachelor friend from Sussex University, who stayed with us while he was lecturing in Bristol, insisted on my driving him to some stone circles in our neighborhood. There, he began having mystic experiences, while I kept getting hung up astride the electric fences that crisscrossed the site. My outcries, he said, were disturbing the vibes, so he sent me to the local pub to wait for him. As soon as I got there, the landlady and the other customers began talking about these same stone circles and related the local story about their origins. This story is called “The Wicked Wedding”: the bride, who is an evil woman, chooses a young man to marry, but at the wedding, the devil comes, kills the young bridegroom, and marries the lady himself. This is the story behind Fire and Hemlock and, believe it or not, I had never heard it before—I thought I’d made it up. Well, after various other strange experiences, my eccentric friend went back to Sussex and I finished the book. I then started, immediately, to write Archer’s Goon. Just picked up a fresh block of paper and began. Now those of you who have read this book will know that it hinges on a man called Quentin Sykes discovering a newborn baby in the snow. I had just started the second draft of this book when my eccentric Sussex friend went for a walk in the middle of a winter’s night and discovered a baby. He found it a very moving experience—but I felt acutely responsible. It is all very well my books coming true on me—it is a risk I take—but when this starts rubbing off on other people it is no joke. The trouble is, a book demands that certain incidents are present in it, and to deny this is to spoil the book. So I thought deeply about the matter. And though I realized I could do nothing about parts of my books coming true—that really is beyond my control—there are things very much in my control over which I feel a very strong sense of responsibility indeed. It is this sense of responsibility that I want to talk about.

  Soon after Archer’s Goon was published, I was invited to a fantasy convention in London. Here I was approached by a prolific and original writer of adult fantasy—a Canadian—who told me that he would not be writing the books he did had he not read my books when he was an adolescent. I was stunned—he has the most stunning blue eyes!—not only by the eyes but simply by that fact. It was hard to handle. Something I wrote had got so deeply into someone else’s imagination as to become part of his adult personality and to influence his career. I wasn’t actually able to look at this matter calmly until last year, when my American publishers sent me his latest book as a gift. This book had a postscript in which he declared that this particular book would not have been written had he not chanced to read, as a child, that chapter of The Wind in the Willows called “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.”

  Now that I could handle. I knew what he meant because I could say exactly the same about almost everything I had written. When I was about seven, my mother read me The Wind in the Willows at bedtime. I wasn’t sure I liked it because Toad kept being the wrong size. But when she came to that particular chapter, she turned it over in a hunk and went on to the one after that. “Why are you missing that one out?” I asked. “Because it’s very silly and pointless—and you wouldn’t understand it anyway,” she said, and went on reading about Toad. I was consumed with a feeling that she had missed out a very important piece of the story. I peeped at the title—“The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” seemed suggestive of magic beyond my experience and totally haunting. After a week or so, I was so convinced this chapter was important that I sneaked the book when my mother was busy and, with tremendous guilt but quite compulsively, read the chapter. You couldn’t say it was part of the main story, but it was important because what was in that chapter matched its title—numinous and strange and sad and urgent and very dangerous and utterly beautiful and safe all at the same time; so much so, that it has remained with me all these years as an ideal of what fantasy should do. Everything I have written is in some way a feeble echo of that chapter.

  But the fact that another writer felt the same really brought it home to me—that people were liable to read what I wrote at the most impressionable times of their lives, and that this might actually determine the kind of people they grew up to be. To my relief, I realized that I had known this all along, deep down, but not really believed it before. And it was even more of a relief to me to see that from the moment I first started to write for children and young adults, I had proceeded as if I did know it. But at this earlier stage, it was mostly as if I knew that this position of extreme responsibility was enormously open to abuse—if you’re going to influence someone that much, you have to be enormously careful—and so I mostly put it to myself in terms of what I shouldn’t do.

  One thing I realized at the outset was that this was a branch of writing entirely dominated by adults. It must be the only branch in which a writer cannot address his/her audience directly. In order to say something to readers of fifteen and under, I (who am an adult) must first speak to an agent (who is an adult), then a publisher (who is another adult), a reviewer (who is an adult whose brain hurts), a bookseller (again an adult), and if I make it through this barrage, then the book is usually bought by teachers, parents, and librarians, all of whom are adults too. All these people have preconceptions about what should be in this book—preconceptions brought about by their own early reading and their upbringing—and they are going to, quite inevitably, exercise an unprecedented degree of censorship over this book. Now there is a strong plus side to this: this phalanx of adults is going to insist on high quality. They are not going to let me, or any writer, get away with shoddy, unclear language, or a story that does not make sense, nor the whimsical changes of size that so worried me about Toad. Rather more importantly on the plus side, is that what I write, just because it has to speak to adults too, is going to be written on two levels at least—maybe more. This is something I shall come back to. For the moment, I want to look at the minus side.

  The minus side is that many adults are going to make all sorts of insanely wrong assumptions about what should go into a good book for young readers. When I first started writing, many of these assumptions were elevated into rules—nay, laws!—which you broke at your peril. I broke most of them very deliberately, because they were truly absurd. For instance, all adults in your story had to be godlike and above reproach. This applied particularly to parents. The ideal was Daddy in Arthur Ransome’s books, who is offstage mostly but occasionally sends godlike telegrams: “Don’t be duffers.” The only adults allowed to have faults were baddies, and they had to be killed at the end of the book even if all they had done was purloin the family silver. Now the absurdity here is that, just as children’s books are adult dominated, so are children themselves. On my rough reckoning, most children spend two-thirds of their waking hours dealing with parents at home and teachers at school—and only spend the remaining third of their time in that ideal world of the old-type children’s book, entirely composed of other children. And as everyone knows, adults are by no means flawless—especially if they happen to be divorcing—and children have to deal with a lot of that. So I put adults in my books who behaved like real people do (and didn’t get kill
ed for it). This worried publishers. Even worse, I also allowed these adults in the story to perceive that strange things were happening to the children and—worse!—to become involved in the strange things too. You wouldn’t believe how many publishers turned down The Ogre Downstairs for that reason. I admit this is an extreme case, since the Ogre does nearly get murdered, twice, by magical means. But what really bothered the publishers was not that. It was that the Ogre got involved. Adults were supposed to be sacrosanct.

  This ties in with the next unwritten law from those days. I had a number of books turned down at that time because I didn’t say what ages the children in them were. This was another deliberate flouting of rules. You were supposed to say. My most obvious reason for not saying was that you feel a fool, if you are a mature twelve, if you discover you have been eagerly identifying with a character who turns out to be five years old. But there is a more important, hidden reason which comes out if you consider the situation in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books. Lewis doesn’t say what ages his children are either, but there comes a point where Peter and Susan, the two elder ones, are unable to enter Narnia because they are too old. Susan is specifically stated to have begun—horrors!—wearing make-up and thinking of boys. But, oddly enough, four adults are able to enter Narnia. These are two outright villains and two industrious working people. Nobody else gets to Narnia unless they are dead. Now, I know Lewis was certainly thinking in religious terms—no one shall enter the kingdom of heaven unless they become as a little child—but the land of Narnia is, in spite of being an allegory of heaven, to most readers preeminently the vivid land of the imagination. So what Lewis has ended up implying is that only young children, criminals, and the uneducated working class can be allowed to exercise their imaginations. I think this has come about because, as well as thinking of Narnia as heaven, Lewis supposed himself to be keeping the rule that adults are not to be involved in children’s books. But because he was gifted with penetrating intuition, he has in fact uncovered the basis for both the first rule and the second, which is that no one past puberty should have anything to do with fantasy.

  In other words, after the age of fourteen at the most, you have to close down one very large area of your brain.

  Put like this, the notion seems absurd, but it is still very much alive, unfortunately. I think everything I write is basically devoted to saying it is nonsense to believe you have to close yourself down like this, but there are quite a large number of adults who believe you have to, and earnestly devote a lot of effort into preparing children for what they regard as this inevitable shutdown.

  To take an early example: around the time I wrote The Ogre Downstairs, my eldest son was given John Masefield’s The Box of Delights. He read it at a sitting and then said that it would have been his all-time marvelous book—to him it had all the things I found in “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”—except that at the end everything turned out to have been only a dream. He was utterly disgusted. He said it was cheating—and still says so more than twenty years later. And he is quite right. Masefield gives you a feast of the imagination with one hand and takes it away with the other. He says, “Now, as an adult I have to make sure you know none of this stuff is real. Ordinary life is what you’re in for, my child, and that is dull. Prepare to close down that part of you that enjoyed this story.”

  This base trick is now out of date, I’m glad to say, but it has been superseded by another which is worse. This trick is played by the school of thought that identifies a child’s problem—this child is of the wrong race, has a physical disability, has violent parents, or is the victim of poverty, and so on—and then writes a book in the most detailed and factual terms about a child with this problem. And then gives it to the child with this problem to read. I call this the white-of-egg approach: if it’s nasty it has to be good for you (bearing in mind that most kids hate white of egg). There are two implications to this mistaken approach, both of them equally dreadful. The first implication is that only unhappiness is real. (Think about this—can this be true?) The second implication is that you should face up to this unhappiness like a man—facing problems is supposed to be an adult thing to do—and the problems will disappear. Well, of course they don’t. I know this from personal experience. I had a miserable childhood—so miserable that I like to think that nowadays we’d be identified as the victims of abuse and put in care, though I doubt this because we were supposed to have come from what is called “a good home.” Now I have an American friend who knows my background, and she is always giving me autobiographies of black ladies whose early lives, as far as I can bear to read of them, were as awful as mine. She thinks this will “help” me. But I can’t bear to read the things. I start to shake and to weep, and lie awake many nights afterward reliving things I’m helpless to do anything about. This is the crux of the mistake. Children are helpless—helpless before problems that are superimposed on them either by birth or by society. It does not help anyone to be forced yet again into a situation in which they are impotent. And I know no sane adult who would force themselves into such a situation—but people do seem to think this is how to force children into adulthood.

  What no one seems to notice is that children can’t wait to grow up. The third dreadful mistake seems to stem from people not noticing this fact. This is the prepare-them-for-real-life-by-using-a-fantasy approach. There are lots of this kind of book. We used to call them Goddy Books when we were children. But books get used in schools too. When my youngest son was ten he had this teacher—I forget her name: she was always known as Fanny Cradock2—and she taught everything out of The Wind in the Willows. Everything. They did Toad sums and Mole stories and the Wild Wood for art—apparently she even contrived to teach history, geography, and social studies out of the book, but don’t ask me how! The poor kids couldn’t get away from The Wind in the Willows—significantly, however, they too never once got taught the chapter “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.” And after a whole year, they were sick of it. So I suggested that they have a party to relieve their feelings and offered to supply a large effigy of this Fanny. We roped the effigy to a chair and provided a large basket of windfall apples to throw at it. It was the most successful party I ever gave. Practically the whole class turned up, and they pelted that effigy, screaming abuse of Fanny. They went on until all the apples were pulp, and enjoyed it so much they almost forgot to eat the food. They broke the chair, but they didn’t make much impression on the effigy.

  This seems to me symbolic. You don’t make much impression on people who are determined to use a book this way. I wish I could think of a way of avoiding it with my own books. Only last year I was proudly shown a passage of Drowned Ammet set in an examination paper. What saddens me about this, and about my youngest son’s experience, is that none of these children are going to want to look at those books again. No one in my son’s class is going to read that suppressed chapter, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.”

  Which brings me back to my mother’s censorship of that chapter for me. Why did she do this? Well, a year or so after the Fanny party, my mother confessed to me that at the age of nine or so, she was addicted to fairy stories. You could buy little paper books of them for a penny, she said, and she bought a whole stack and buried herself in them avidly. And her father caught her reading them. He not only took them away. He burned them. Ceremonially, with disgust and loathing. They were not true, he said, not real, and were therefore harming her mind. And he forbade her ever to read such things again. So she didn’t. For the rest of her life. Toad she could allow herself, because he was obvious whimsy and kept changing size, but not the chapter that takes you deep into the archetype of the imagination. She does read my books, but only because she knows I nearly always put actual, living people into them, and she likes to spot the ones she knows. And she’s always asking me why I don’t write Real Books.

  This grandfather of mine died long before I was born, or I would have had a few things to say to him. Among the first thin
gs I would have said is that his belief (which I call the Don Quixote fallacy)—that reading things that are not true damages your mind—was held by far too many people in the first half of this century, and I do not think this is unconnected with the fact that we had two world wars during that time. Certainly my impression is that this burning of books has caused my mother to be one of the most unhappy and maladjusted people I know. And it does bring you hard up against the responsibility adults have, if only because it shows you what a truly lasting impression can be made on a child.

  But this Don Quixote fallacy is not dead. It is alive and well and living in Britain. Recently I was reading for the Whitbread Prize, and I came upon no less than five books purveying this notion in an even more advanced form than my grandfather’s. In the face of it they were “child with a problem” books. There was this young person who was the wrong color, or disabled, or with divorcing parents and so on, and each of these kids tried to offset their troubles by imagining some vivid, or better or more exciting life. This was usually a world in which they had splendid adventures. Then, halfway through the book, it became clear that the child who had invented this world was not able to tell which bit of life was physically real and which was only in his or her mind. In other words, imagining things had driven this young person mad.

  This struck me as such an appalling, irresponsible threat to hold over impressionable people that I tried to find out who these writers were. Two of them seemed to be teachers who were annoyed that their pupils were addicted to computer games, and the rest were social workers who seemed to be equating fantasy with drug abuse. Possibly none of them were quite aware of what they were saying. But the fact is that by making this threat—imagination drives you mad—they were closing off for their impressionable readers their most important route to sanity. The source of their threat seems to lie in a grand combination of all the mistakes I have mentioned so far: the beliefs that the only reality is dull and unpleasant, that young people must be prepared to confront this and this only, and that the way to do this is to close down the imagination. To these, they have added a further error: that what a person has in his or her head does not exist in everyday life.