Without Literature, No Freedom

Gustave Doré, Ezra Reads the Law to the People

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Wednesday

My friend Dennis Johnson recently alerted me to a powerful commencement address, delivered by the accomplished novelist Nicole Krauss and published in the Washington Post. Author of The History of Love and The Great House, both of which I highly recommend, Krauss argues that literature is essential if humans are to step into freedom and live up to our potential.

Krauss grounds her case in a powerful historical moment. When the Jews were captives in Babylon, they had turned to writing and transcribing the Torah because they had no access to their land or their Temple. Upon their return to Jerusalem, the question was whether they were going to be a people of the Temple or a people of the Torah. Krauss describes what happened next:

[I]t is in Nehemiah that we read of something truly extraordinary: the first record of the Torah being read in public. Ezra brought the scroll out and read from it, “facing the square before the Water Gate, from the first light until midday, to the men and the women and those who could understand; the ears of all the people were given to the scroll of the Torah. … They read from [it], translating it and giving the sense; so they understood the reading.”

Krauss says that “it is impossible to exaggerate how momentous this moment was”:

 At perhaps the greatest juncture the Jews have ever faced, the Temple was replaced by Torah. Sacrifice was replaced by reading, teaching and study. And Judaism was made independent of place and became portable, ensuring its survival to this day.

Not only did Judaism become portable but the first steps towards democratization had been taken. As Krauss explains it,

In those few lines of Nehemiah, we find a rejection of a hierarchical system based on hereditary power in the hands of the few, toward the town square, where all men and women are offered the chance to participate, to listen, learn and understand the teachings for themselves. It might be argued that from that day on, all that is required to live as a Jew are words. No more, and no less.

This is where the importance of writing comes in. Krauss says that she writes, just as she reads, because she believes that

in the realm of literature we are, each of us, free. Free to imagine, to invent, to change our minds, to travel through time, across space, to feel and experience the full breadth of ourselves, and to do what I don’t believe can be done in any other realm, medium or dimension: to step into the mind of another. Feel what it is to live inside another and, in the process, enlarge ourselves beyond the borders of selfhood, into the vaster fields of mutual understanding and empathy.

To intrude into Krauss’s argument for a moment, in my book Better Living through Literature I make the case that the 19th century Romantic Imagination expanded the franchise in a similar way. When a poet like Wordsworth began to make shepherds, leech gatherers, and wheat gatherers the subjects of his verse, he opened the door for poets and writers

to use the Imagination to step beyond their own narrow class boundaries in ways that would have been, well, unimaginable in earlier times. Through literature authors have entered the lives of the marginalized (Walt Whitman), the urban poor (Charles Dickens), American slaves (Harriet Beecher Stowe), Dorset dairy maids (Thomas Hardy), French coalminers (Emile Zola), Nebraska pioneers (Willa Cather), Harlem residents (Langston Hughes), African American sharecroppers (Jean Toomer), African American homosexuals (James Baldwin), bankrupted Oklahoma farmers (John Steinbeck), Laguna Pueblo war veterans (Leslie Marmon Silko), transplanted Pakistanis (Hanif Kureishi), West Indian immigrants (Zadie Smith), American lesbians (Alison Bechdel), and on and on….[T]he Romantic Imagination elevated lower-class figures to new levels of importance. In the process, it inspired generations of social and political idealists and changed conversations about public policy.

Krauss, however, adds one major caveat to her argument that literature is “fundamentally democratic.” “To access its freedoms,” she writes, “we must be taught to read, value and engage with literature.” She sees us standing at a crossroads where the future of reading, writing, and literature is at stake, along with “all of the expansive freedom they have afforded us.”

Concerned about AI and “the demolition of the capacity to read and engage with a book,” she worries that we

have lost not just our ability to concentrate on deciphering long passages of written language; we have, I believe, begun to lose our attachments to the meaning of words and sentences, which we once trusted to carry the precious freight of communicating who we are — to ourselves and to each other. The blatantly, proudly senseless speech of our current leaders is not the cause, it is merely the most extravagant example of what happens when an entire culture — increasingly, the monoculture of the world — gives up on, and ceases to be capable of, the struggle to funnel meaning into language — to translate themselves, their thoughts, and their ideas into words that others can read and share.

Writing and reading take effort, she points out, and without that effort “we will slide deeper and deeper into inchoateness, darkness, violence, diminished freedom for all and a diminished state of human being.”

She takes heart, however, from all the professors who make it their life work to ensure that their students “have access to the freedom that comes with becoming a reader, being able to write for oneself, and partake in a culture of literature and ideas.” (Remember, this is a commencement address.) She also takes the long view, noting that, after all, we have been finding words for ourselves and have been writing our own story for thousands of years. In the process, we “have done something far more radical than expressed ourselves: We have invented ourselves. We have asked the essential question: Who are we, and what kind of people do we want to be?”

“Where there is destruction,” she concludes, “there is also the potential for tikkun, for repair.” To rise to the occasion, however, we must be educated “in the bonding of language and meaning.”

Authors, teachers, librarians, parents, bloggers, social workers, therapists, friends, and others are critical to making this educational bonding happen.

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Darkness at Noon in Trump’s America

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Tuesday

In Trumpism’s assault on democracy, the name Curtis Yarvin keeps appearing. Ava Kovman’s recent New Yorker profile identifies him as the guru of rightwing Silicon Valley oligarchs, especially former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel, and Yarvin appears to have shaped the thinking of Vice President J.D. Vance. Essentially Yarvin believes that autocracy is preferable to democracy, and he would like to see the world (including the United States) divided into fiefdoms run by billionaires.

Normally people with Yarvin’s views would be shrugged off, but with rightwing billionaires playing an ever-increasing role in American politics, it’s important to know the ideology they espouse.

As I read the Yarvin profile, I thought of Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon (1940), which focuses on Stalin’s purge of Bolshevik intellectuals (although Stalin is never named, referred to only as No. 1). And that book came to mind because of a perfect putdown of Yarvin by author Joyce Carol Oates, who tweeted,

over-all takeaway from the Curtis Yarvin profile is that there must be millions of smart-aleck show-offy kids who annoy their teachers & go on to annoy other adults through their lives with their “contrarian” pose that hardens to a carapace over their faces; until, as adults, they still harbor a delusion that, if there is a king, or a fűhrer, he’d be impressed with the guy’s motor mouth & appoint him to his cabinet rather than deleting him with a negligent swipe of his wrist as Stalin did routinely.

Oates’s slam reminds me of blogger John Rogers’s well-known depiction of Ayn Rand fans (who include a number of Silicon Valley oligarchs):

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

To show what Oates is responding to, here’s Yarvin’s opinion on authoritarian regimes:

Picking at a plate of fried calamari, Yarvin praised China and Rwanda (neither of which he has visited) for having strong governments that insured both public safety and personal liberty. In China, he told me, “you can think and pretty much say whatever you want.” He may have sensed my skepticism, given the country’s record of imprisoning critics and detaining ethnic minorities in concentration camps. “If you want to organize against the government, you’re gonna have problems,” he admitted. Then he returned to his airbrush: “Not Stalin problems. You’ll just, like, be cancelled.”

I suppose there’s some comfort that Yarvin can’t bring himself to openly endorse mass killing or genocide, but he comes close:

Whatever the exact solution, he has written, it is crucial to find “a humane alternative to genocide,” an outcome that “achieves the same result as mass murder (the removal of undesirable elements from society) but without any of the moral stigma.”

So the problem with genocide is not that it’s immoral, inhumane, and abhorrent but that there’s a “moral stigma” attached. In other words, it’s got a public relations problem. It’s worth remembering that the Nazis originally defended concentration camps as a humane way of segregating out people they regarded as undesirable (Roma, homosexuals, the neurodiverse, Jews, socialists, and communists). Unfortunately, dehumanizing a certain population—as we are seeing–can lead to suspension of habeas corpus, illegal deportation to concentration camps abroad, and military intervention to quash protests. It’s not hard to see the logical end as mass murder. Or, to use Yarvin’s weasel word, cancellation.

Darkness at Noon is about a former Bolshevik revolutionary that is imprisoned and tried for treason by the government he helped set up. In Oates’s phrasing, he is deleted with a negligent swipe of Stalin’s wrist. However, whereas Yarvin is essentially a troll and bullshit artist—one whom unfortunately various powerful men take seriously—Rubashov is an introspective revolutionary who is now tormented by various ethical choices he made in the past. The supposedly necessary violence meant to usher in a just and prosperous society has instead led to unimaginable misery:

So consequent, that in the interests of a just distribution of land we deliberately let die of starvation about five million farmers and their families in one year. So consequent were we in the liberation of human beings from the shackles of industrial exploitation that we sent about ten million people to do forced labor in the Arctic regions and the jungles of the East, under conditions similar to those of antique galley slaves. So consequent that, to settle a difference of opinion, we know only one argument: death, whether it is a matter of submarines, manure, or the Party line to be followed in Indochina.

His interrogator and former comrade Ivanov, by contrast, tells him that the ends justify the means and only weak-minded humanists think one can avoid tough choices:

There are only two conceptions of human ethics, and they are at opposite poles. One of them is Christian and humane, declares the individual to be sacrosanct, and asserts that the rules of arithmetic are not to be applied to human units. The other starts from the basic principle that a collective aim justifies all means, and not only allows, but demands, that the individual should in every way be subordinated and sacrificed to the community–which may dispose of it as an experimentation rabbit or a sacrificial lamb. The first conception could be called anti-vivisection morality, the second, vivisection morality. Humbugs and dilettantes have always tried to mix the two conceptions; in practice, it is impossible.

The difference between Rubashov and Yarvin—what makes the literary character more interesting than the actual man—is that he reflects. “The fact is: I no longer believe in my own infallibility. That is why I am lost,” he writes in his journal. Yarvin, who talks incessantly, appears to ascribe to the Trumpian imperative, “Never admit you’re wrong. Never apologize.”

Trumpism has declared war on science, on critical thinking, and on empathy, ad figures like Yarvin are providing an intellectual-sounding justification, however bogus, for its attacks. Literature helps keep us grounded in the true and the good as we resist.

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The Brownings’ Marriage–and My Own

Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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Monday

My faculty reading group has been discussing the poetry of Robert Browning, and as yesterday was Julia’s and my 52nd wedding anniversary, I share today a marriage love poem written to him by his spouse. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How do I love you, let me count the ways” is one of the best-known love poems—is there anyone who hasn’t encountered its opening line?—but it takes on special meaning when you think of it as arising out of a marriage.

Robert and Elizabeth married over the strenuous objection of her father—he disinherited her—and Robert persuaded her to publish Sonnets of the Portuguese, which she feared were too personal. One of his pet names for her was “my little Portuguese,” which explains the title.

Speaking from my own experience, there are times in marriage when one experiences oceanic feelings of love and times when one experiences moments of quiet tenderness. Barrett Browning touches on both. She knows that her love for her husband has stretched her soul beyond physical parameters—beyond depth and breadth and height—but also that this love dwells in “every day’s most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.” Any number of domestic moments could behind her declaration that “I love thee with the breath,/ Smiles, tears, of all my life.” This love she associates with humankind’s noblest ends—“I love thee freely, as men strive for right”—and knows that it transcends the egotistical self: she love purely, not transactionally, not for praise.

It sounds as though she may once have lost her childhood religious faith—she mentions “lost saints”—but she remembers the passionate immersion of that time, and now regards marital love and divine love as indistinguishable. Love, after all, is the foundation—”the love that moves the sun and the other stars,” as Dante puts it—and this love is at once domestic and divine.

And because it is, she can imagine it transcending death itself. “If God choose, I shall but love thee better after death,” she writes.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

The poem has traveled quite a distance from the poet’s initial claim that she will be enumerating love’s aspects. The matter-of-fact opening contrasts with, and therefore serves to accentuate, the way that love refuses to be confined by time, space, or life itself.

So happy anniversary, my dear. My love for you over these 52 years—53 actually—has deepened and expanded in ways I could never have imagined.

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Something Green in a Dry, Barren Heart

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Pentecost Sunday

Franciscan priest Murray Bodo has written the following lyric for Pentecost Sunday. Pentecost was the moment when the disciples understood, in a visceral way, that the God of love dwells in us as He/She dwelt in Jesus. Like John Donne, the Bodo plays with the pun “sun/son,” capturing the miraculous reversal of life and death as we understand them (“the sun rising at sunset”). Searching for “a horizon to free my mind from prison,” the speaker experiences “a crack of light happening.”

The final line reminds me of Mary Oliver’s conclusion in “Crossing the Swamp,” amongst my  favorites of her poems. After wading through “pathless, seamless, peerless mud”—her own road to calvary, one could say–she describes herself as a “poor dry stick

           given
one more chance by the whims
                   of swamp water— a bough
                           that still, after all these years,
could take root,
           sprout, branch out, bud–
                  make of its life a breathing
                            palace of leaves.

Bodo, meanwhile, detects, “out of the dry, barren heart/ the shoot of something green.”

Still Movement (Motets I-V for Pentecost Sunday)
By Murray Bodo

You have gone the way you came
burning in and out of the dark.

My eye searches for a horizon
to free my mind from prison.

The day, gray with backward growing,
the sun rising at sunset.

And you return the way you left,
a crack of light happening:

Out of the dry, barren heart
the shoot of something green.

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Trump=Gingham Dog, Musk=Calico Cat

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Saturday

Because I don’t want to pay too much attention to Trump-Musk spat—“A plague on both your houses,” I hear Mercutio saying—but also because I don’t want to waste a perfect poem for the feud, I’m writing a rare Saturday post. The featured poem is Eugene Field’s “The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat,” a gem that I remember from my childhood:

The gingham dog and the calico cat
Side by side on the table sat;
‘T was half-past twelve, and (what do you think!)
Nor one nor t’ other had slept a wink!
      The old Dutch clock and the Chinese plate
      Appeared to know as sure as fate
There was going to be a terrible spat.
            (I wasn’t there; I simply state
            What was told to me by the Chinese plate!)

The gingham dog went “Bow-wow-wow!”
And the calico cat replied “Mee-ow!”
The air was littered, an hour or so,
With bits of gingham and calico,
      While the old Dutch clock in the chimney-place
      Up with its hands before its face,
For it always dreaded a family row!
            (Now mind: I’m only telling you
            What the old Dutch clock declares is true!)

The Chinese plate looked very blue,
And wailed, “Oh, dear! what shall we do!”
But the gingham dog and the calico cat
Wallowed this way and tumbled that,
      Employing every tooth and claw
      In the awfullest way you ever saw—
And, oh! how the gingham and calico flew!
            (Don’t fancy I exaggerate—
            I got my news from the Chinese plate!)

Next morning, where the two had sat
They found no trace of dog or cat;
And some folks think unto this day
That burglars stole that pair away!
      But the truth about the cat and pup
      Is this: they ate each other up!
Now what do you really think of that!
            (The old Dutch clock it told me so,
            And that is how I came to know.)

To borrow from MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, our own gingham dog has the nuclear codes while our own calico cat has access to all our personal data. Good riddance if they were to eath each other up.

Sadly, I don’t think this is the outcome we can expect. Rather, as has been the case with Vladimir Putin and his former oligarch buddies, most of the power lies with the head of government. Trump is already threatening to cancel Musk’s government contracts, and while such a personalized threat is blatantly corrupt—just as his major campaign contributor getting special favors was blatantly corrupt—that won’t stop the president. Nor will the GOP Congress intervene. Odds are that Musk will either come groveling back or he will be crushed while Trump emerges more powerful than ever.

Entertaining though it may be to watch the air be littered with bits of gingham and calico, therefore, I expect that, by maybe as early as next week, we can expect at least one and possibly both figures to be sitting in their customary positions on the table.

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Trump, Musk, and Little Black Sambo

Helen Bannerman, Little Black Sambo

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Friday

When I was a young child, one of my favorite books was Helen Bannerman’s Little Black Sambo (1899). I forced my parents to read it to me over and over, and to this day I have parts of it memorized. Unfortunately, the fact that “Sambo” became a racial slur means that I haven’t been able to read it to my grandchildren, which is a pity because its plot is great for enhancing a child’s self-esteem. In the course of the story we see Sambo outwit five tigers, each of which threatens to devour him.

Sambo must bargain away his fine suit of clothes, piece by piece, to escape. By the end, however, not only has he retrieved his clothes, but he has entirely turned the tables. He himself has become the devourer.

I’ll explain how in a moment, but I need to explain why I’m bringing it up. At present, the world’s richest man and the world’s most powerful man are having a spectacular falling out after having had—briefly to be sure—what MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace describes as “the most corrupt and superficial relationship in American history.” While the relationship held, they managed to do untold damage to America, but now their competing narcissism has led to a conflagration. No one is sure where this one ends.

Now to the story. Sambo is walking proudly through the jungle since his parents have bestowed upon him a fine set of clothes, including a “pair of shoes with crimson soles and crimson linings” and a large green umbrella. When each tiger threatens our hero—“Little Black Sambo, I’m going to eat you up”—Sambo gives away first his “beautiful little red coat,” then his “beautiful little blue trousers,” then his shoes, and finally his umbrella. When the last two tigers initially reject his offer (two shoes for four feet, no way for a tiger to hold an umbrella), Sambo quickly comes up with ingenious solutions.

As each of the tigers strives off with one of Sambo’s possessions, he proudly announces, “Now I’m the grandest Tiger in the Jungle.”

Which, of course, is how both Trump and Musk see themselves. And as in the story, there’s room for only one grandest tiger.

The consoling message here, for those dispirited at how the country we love is being trashed, is that we have but to wait. The destroyers will destroy themselves. Here’s what Sambo witnesses from his hiding place behind a tree:

[H]e saw all the Tigers fighting, and disputing which of them was the grandest. And at last they all got so angry that they jumped up and took off all the fine clothes, and began to tear each other with their claws, and bite each other with their great big white teeth.

At this point, each tiger grabs another tiger’s tail, leading to a climactic conclusion:

And the Tigers were very, very angry, but still they would not let go of each other’s tails. And they were so angry, that they ran round the tree, trying to eat each other up, and they ran faster and faster, till they were whirling round so fast that you couldn’t see their legs at all.

And they still ran faster and faster and faster, till they all just melted away, and there was nothing left but a great big pool of melted butter (or “ghi,” as it is called in India) round the foot of the tree.

Sambo gets his clothes back and his father, returning from work, collects the ghi in a big brass pot he happens to be carrying. In her turn, Sambo’s mother uses it for pancakes. In this eating drama, Sambo gets the last bite:

And then they all sat down to supper. And Black Mumbo ate Twenty-seven pancakes, and Black Jumbo ate Fifty-five but Little Black Sambo ate a Hundred and Sixty-nine, because he was so hungry.

Sadly, winning back America will take more that watching its oligarchs fight amongst themselves. Still, the two are exposing vulnerabilities that patriots can exploit.

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Budget Cutters vs. Art

Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa

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Thursday

I’ve become a fan of Joseph Fasano, who posts many of his poems on Bluesky. As the GOP tries to ram its billionaire bill through Congress while cutting everything that is of worth, it’s nice to have two poems calling out these vultures.

Both poems approach the subject from a child’s point of view. Many of us can remember being Fasano’s “child with a light” who reads beneath the covers. I think of the line early in John’s Gospel (1:5): “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” We’re seeing a lot of uncomprehending darkness in MAGA these days.

For Those Who Try to Cut Funding for the Arts
By Joseph Fasano

I know
you won’t be reading this anyway.
But maybe,
alone under the covers,
a child with a light
in the darkness
is opening
the first words of a story,
a story that your hands
would try to close now.
Whatever you do
for the darkness
that child with the light will survive you.

The theme of darkness continues in the second poem, and I like how Fasano associates the GOP looters (thanks Ayn Rand for that label) with the dark arts. The poem feels vaguely familiar as I’ve been reading A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, which opens with an impoverished child so enamored of art that he hides out in the British Museum, undergoing hunger and cold in order to sketch the treasures he finds there.

For Those Who Defund the Arts as a Political Weapon
By Joseph Fasano

You can waste your life on the dark arts.
But the soul in you knows what matters.
Like the boy who broke into the Louvre
and was found alone in the morning, asleep
beside the Mona Lisa.
He said  she looked like his mother.

They led him back
to the orphanage–
to his century, to his little cot, his life.

Listen. A heart is what you do with it.
The world will give us sieges
and great plagues
and prophets of doom and ruin,
but who will be there for that child
who hacks for days at the window-lock
and only wants comfort
and immensity
and the smile that cannot die

What shall we do with the hearts we have been given? Those who lock them down imprison the child within, who longs for comfort and immensity and “the smile that cannot die?”

Note: Fasano’s most recent collection of poetry is The Last Song of the World (BOA Editions, 2024).

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Children’s Lit in the Golden Age

Jessie Wilcox Smith, cover illus. of Fairy Tales

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Wednesday

Yesterday I wrote of how A.S. Byatt’s novel about artist communities in late Victorian and Edwardian England has taken me back to my own childhood. From the moment we could understand “chapter books,” my father read my brothers and me novels from that period, and they have shaped the way that I see the world.

Byatt observes that children’s lit flourished because people were coming to see children in a new way:

The Fabians and social scientists, writers and teachers saw, in a way earlier generations had not, that children were people, with identities and desires and intelligences. They saw that they were neither dolls, nor toys, nor miniature adults. They saw, many of them, that children needed freedom, needed not only to learn, and be good, but to play and be wild

Byatt notes that many of them saw this “out of a desire of their own for a perpetual childhood.” She then turns to some of these works:

In 1901 James Barrie wrote The Boy Castaways for the Llewelyn-Davies boys, Peter Rabbit was published, and Kipling published Kim, the tale of a boy scout. In 1902 E. Nesbit wrote Five Children and It, a tale where resourceful, unwise children meet a sand-fairy. In that year Barrie published the Little White Bird, in which an embryonic Peter Pan, the little boy who wouldn’t grow up, made his first appearance. [It] was staged (in a primitive form) in 1904. Rupert Brooke went to see it twelve times. In 1906 [Kipling’s] Puck of Pook’s Hill appeared, and so did The Railway Children and Benjamin Bunny. It was seriously suggested that the great writing of the time was writing for children, which was also ready by grown-ups.

Byatt also mentions Kenneth Grahame, who balanced working as a high-level bank secretary with writing The Golden Age, Dream Days, and The Wind in the Willows (1908).

We don’t only see children’s literature in Byatt’s novel. In an Edenic scene, we watch as the children, now adolescents, gather to camp out, swim, and converse. Among their topics of conversation is literature:

They read plays—[John Milton’s] Comus, with Griselda as the Lady, Julian as Comus and Gerry as the Attendant Spirit, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with Wolfgang as Oberon, Florence as Titania, Imogen as Hippolyta and Charles, Griselda, Dorothy and Geraint as the confused lovers. Tom was Puck. Toby Youlgreave read Sir Philip Sidney and Malory, Joachim Susskind and the Sterns read poems by Schiller and Goethe, Julia read Marvell’s “Garden” and Tom read Tennyson. Julian had learned conversations with Toby Youlgreave about Philip Sidney.

The discussion about the Elizabethan poet Sidney leads to an insight into how what we read can transform what we see. The passage is from Sidney’s Defence of Poesy:

Sidney had written what Julian believed was his favorite sentence—certainly his favorite this year. “Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry, as divers Poets have done, neither with pleasant rivers fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers: nor whatever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely. Her world is brazen, the Poets only deliver a golden…”

From this experience Julian, a student at Oxford, determines to study the pastoral form:

He said he had been looking for a thesis subject, in case he decided to apply for a Fellowship at King’s, and he rather thought there might be something there. “English pastoral, in poetry and painting—” Pastoral was always at another time, in another place. Even the green pool and the long walk, over the Downs, would not become pastoral until they were past. And yet, the sun shone on them, and the leaves and the water and the grass shone with its reflections.

If we sometimes look back at the Edwardians with pastoral nostalgia, it’s because World War I blasted it utterly, flinging us violently into “the Age of Lead.” Rupert Brooke, of “If I should die, think only this of me,” would die in that war, as would many fellow poets and artists.

To be sure, the ending of childhood is often traumatic. It’s just that the break is not normally so violent.

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Byatt and Childhood Memories

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Tuesday

I’m currently immersed in A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, which I first read in 2012. This time the novel has sent me spiraling into my past for reasons I share with you today.

Set mostly in the latter years of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th (up through World War I), Children’s Book takes as its focus the family of Olive Wellwood, who is loosely based on children’s author Edith Nesbit. My father read to us Treasure Seekers, Wouldbegoods, New Treasure Seekers, and Five Children and It, and I would later add The Railway Children, The Phoenix and the Carpet, and The Story of the Amulet to the E. Nesbit books I read to my own children. They made a deep impression on me, and one reason I sign off my weekly newsletter with “Good reading” is because I remember how the Bastable children in Treasure Seekers are always quoting the sign-off in Kipling’s Jungle Books: “Good hunting.”

There’s one scene that has haunted me ever since I first read the novel in 2012. Tom, who is Olive’s golden child and the model for her story about a boy who has his shadow stolen, is sexually molested and brutally bullied by senior students when he is sent off to boarding school. Seeking to hold on to his innocence, Tom runs away from the school, and for weeks his family doesn’t know if he is alive or dead. When he finally returns home, he retreats into the idyllic natural landscape that surrounds the family house. From then on, he makes a determined effort to hold on to his innocence, resisting family pressure to study for his exams and go off to college.

My father Scott was a kind of Tom. Unlike his two older brothers, who were outgoing and successful in sports, my father was sickly and shy. My grandmother, born in 1886 in England and a veritable angel of the house, dressed him as Little Lord Fauntleroy when he was small. (I have a picture of him in velvet with a lace collar.) He was more drawn to her and his grandmother Sarah Ricker than to his father, who worried that he wasn’t masculine enough. Scott wrote poetry, drew pictures, and was an ardent bird watcher. He would eventually go on to become a French literature major in college.

Throughout my childhood, I remember my father saying that the worst thing in the world was “the desecration of innocence,” and Byatt’s novel is bringing clarity to what he meant by that. The book sees the late Victorian and Edwardian ages as a time of innocence where people didn’t reveal their innermost secrets but put their energy into being polite and well-mannered. Better to close one’s eyes to dark realities, such as child abuse and infidelity, than cause a social scene. As Byatt writes of Olive at one point,

Things had always been behind thick, felted, invisible curtains, or closed into heavy, locked, invisible boxes. She herself had hung the curtains, held the keys to the boxes, made sure that the knowable was kept from the unknown, in the minds of her children, most of all. And now she knew that grey, invisible cats had crept from their bags and were dancing and spitting on stair-corners, that curtains had been shaken, lifted, peeped behind by curious eyes, and her rooms were full of visible and invisible dust and strange smells.

And because she is an author, Oliver finds a way to transform this into fantasy narrative:

She was rather pleased with all these metaphors and began to plan a story in which the gentle and innocent inhabitants of a house became aware that a dark, invisible, dangerous house stood on exactly the same plot of land, and was interwoven, interleaved with their own. Like thoughts which had to stay in the head taking on an independent life, becoming solid objects, to be negotiated.

One sees this longing for innocence, for not knowing, in the popularity of the children’s fiction of the time. In addition to the E. Nesbit books, there were The Jungle Books (1894), Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit (1902), James Barrie’s Peter Pan; or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (1904), Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows (1908), and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Secret Garden (1910).

My father, who was born in 1923, was raised on these books, and he then read them to me and my brothers as we were growing up—up through middle school. Reading took the place of television for us, and I can see how the novels allowed my father to revisit his own childhood innocence.

As the first born, I particularly got caught up in this innocence drama. I was born in 1951, six years after my father returned from World War II, and my mother tells me that he was enthralled with having a child after not being sure what to expect. Although he hadn’t been in combat, he had witnessed horrors, most notably the Dachau concentration camp three days after it was liberated. Indeed, it became his job, in 1945, to take German civilians on required tours of the camp to show them what their government had done. He was 22 at the time.

In the books he read us, I noted that he hated endings where children leave the fantasy worlds they inhabit, as occurs to Wendy at the end of Peter Pan and Christopher Robin at the end of House at Pooh Corner. Meanwhile, he filled our childhood with games, in which he fully participated. In fact, he extended this to the entire faculty at the University of the South. Each year following graduation, he and my mother held a large party of over a hundred. The house he built for the occasion (which I have inherited) has a shuffleboard court down one side, a deck on the roof for playing badminton, a sunroom for playing ping pong and foosball, and a horseshoe court out in the yard. Faculty got the opportunity to be children again when they attended.

From all this I intuited, early on, that I was supposed to remain innocent for as long as possible. I consciously worked on it, closing my ears to the profanities and dirty jokes of my classmates and shying away from rock music. I chose instead to immerse myself in the fantasy worlds of George MacDonald, J.R.R. Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis.

In my book I’ve written how I loathed J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, assigned to me in sophomore English, because of the way he enters the adult world. It was only years later that I realized that Holden has the same longing I did, which is for his sister Phoebe and him to remain innocent. He fantasizes catching little children as they run through tall rye grass, saving them from growing up.

The end of Edwardian innocence was World War I, just as the end of my father’s innocence was World War II. It took me a while before I realized that I myself had to grow up. (The prospect of being drafted into the Vietnam War played a role.) And even though I did make my piece with adulthood, I relived my childhood by reading to my own children deep into their childhoods and teaching courses in literary fantasy.

The E. Nesbit character in the book imagines her child without a shadow—in other words, a perpetually golden child—but as Jung teaches us, we all have a shadow side. If we wish to grow into mature and well-balanced people, we must open ourselves to it, not wish it away. Because I wished to please my father, I struggled with this issue for a long while.

As frustrating as he could be, however, I find myself deeply grateful to my father for the world he created around for me and my brothers. If there were blindnesses, they were benign. He died 13 years ago, at age 90, and thanks to Byatt’s novel the memories have come flooding back. I miss him terribly.

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