The Golden Age of Children's Literature (5)

Philippa Pearce, Tom's Midnight Garden

This is one children's book that I know I did try to read when I actually was a child. I forget how old I was exactly, but I know that I was already aware that this was a 'classic', and that therefore it was something I ought to read. Alas, I gave up after only a few chapters, finding it rather boring.

As a consequence, I didn't watch what is apparently a much loved and fondly remembered adaptation for the BBC in 1989. I think one of my brothers must have done, because I do have several memories of scenes from it: a sunlit garden verging on something paradisal, and a young friend to enjoy it with.

In fairness to my younger self, I can understand why I might have found it rather boring. There's very little in the way of plot. Sent away to stay with his aunt and uncle because his brother has measles, young Tom finds himself able to slip back in time when he crosses the threshold of the backdoor at midnight when the unreliable grandfather clock strikes thirteen. Their flat is part of what was formerly a country house in the late 19th century, and it is the lost garden to which he returns each night. What follows is more a series of episodes strung together, as Tom explores the garden and in the process befriends a lonely young girl, Hatty, one of only two people who are able to see him. In the 19th century past, Tom appears as a ghost, unable to leave any mark on the world in which he finds himself. With effort, he's even able to push his way through doors.

The transition back to the past is evoked manner a marvellously eerie manner. We do eventually find a sort of explanation for it, but it's one which is satisfactory only in purely emotional terms. It's simply the narrative means by which two lonely individuals are able to meet and play together, alleviating some of their unhappiness. And that play is threatened not only by the end of summer, but by the fact that Hatty grows older throughout their meetings. Tom never returns to the same time, but drops in on Hatty as grows into adolescence. The later times to which he returns are not the paradise of summer, but an icy winter wonderland of the great frost. Hetty is not only older, but Tom is gradually growing less distinct for her. Several images of the 'thinning' of fantasy to evoke her transition into adolescence. Ultimately we're left with a sense of loss, but it's a very appropriate sense of loss for a children's fantasy since it's only the loss of childhood play which we all experience.

Since that narrative of loss is tied to the transition between an 'aristocratic' 19th century garden and post war reality in which Tom lives, in which the garden has been built over, it's not surprising that some critics have complained that the book idealises that world as a 'lost paradise', obscuring the reality of poverty found elsewhere in Victorian society. It's a view which I have some sympathy with, especially nowadays when we have a popular culture which contains more than it's fair share of representations and pastiches of the Victorian past. Neo-Victorianism is an actual thing, an object of academic study.

On the other hand, I'm a little suspicious of critics who criticise fictions for what they don't contain.  Nor am I convinced that a fictional representation of the Victorian period which does acknowledge the horrors of poverty can't also be idealising. And I'm not sure that the 19th century world to which Tom travels is quite as idealised as some appear to think.

Hatty is an orphan, having been taken in by a considerably unsympathetic aunt who clearly resents the presence of a poor relation in her home. She's left out of the games of her three older cousins, only one of whom appears to have any real sympathy for her. Hatty is eventually lucky; she meets a farmer who is successful and prosperous, and who provides her with everything she could want during their married life together. But it's easy to imagine that life might gone very differently for her if she hadn't been fortunate enough to meet her farmer. And the loss of the garden is explained not simply as the fault of modernity, but as a result of the failure in business of Hatty's cousins who gradually have to sell off their land, eventually losing everything. It's not simply an idealised world that we're presented with here, but rather its a world which is contingent, lodged in time.

*

Time slip fantasies appear to have been a popular mode in post war children's literature. Perhaps some of the impulse was a desire to escape from what was perceived as a drab post war world. The feeling of just stepping through a door to enter a vanished past literalises the nostalgic motive in a way which is also very moving. I do wonder too if the engagement with the Victorian past is not also down to the fact that in 1958 the Victorian world must have still felt very close. One consequence of two world wars and an intervening economic slump is that the pace of building would have slowed. There would was less desire or ability to replace older buildings. It was the modernist planners of the 60s and their successors who really began that process. So in 1958, many more people than nowadays would have lived in places which were surrounded by fragments of the Victorian past. Not that that has entirely vanished, even now.

It's something which I recognise and feel quite strongly myself, because I grew up in old houses. Ironically, this was because of a grandfather clock which my parents owned, and consequently all the houses we lived in required ceilings which where tall enough to accommodate the clock. Hence they were all houses built in the later 19th / early 20th century. I suppose now I would see that as a privilege, although at the time of course it seemed perfectly normal. And perhaps it was only because I was a child, but the past could feel very close.

Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles

'We are not concerned,' he said, 'with long-winded creations, with long-term beings. Our creatures will not be the heroes of romances in many volumes. Their roles will be short, concise; their characters - without a background. Sometimes, for one gesture, for one word alone, we shall make the effort to bring them to life. We openly admit: we shall not insist either on durability or solidity of workmanship; our creations will be temporary, to serve for a single occasion....'

Bruno Schulz, 'Talior's Dummies'

I always knew I'd love the work of Bruno Schulz. Obviously, since I loved Kafka. And the Quay brothers' film of The Street of Crocodiles. He didn't publish much, and I must have passed over a copy of his collected fiction in more than one second hand bookshop, which is where I turned up this edition of his first book. Originally titled Cinnamon Shops in it's original Polish publication in 1934. I don't know why they used a title of another of the stories for the English edition, except perhaps that it sounds more evocative, more indicative of the way his stories and language infuse objects with life, a quality which is magically captured by the Quays' stop motion animation. It's such good writing that the temptation is just to go on quoting him, instead of going to the bother trying to define what it is one likes about it.

Emerging from a similar middle European background as Kafka, both from former outposts of the Austro Hungarian empire, you can see why they might get bracketed together, although in fact the translator's introduction suggests Schulz didn't read The Trial until after his first book was published. And whilst there is perhaps something of a kinship between the two, a similarly subterranean imagination, there are surely just as many differences. Whereas the Father in Kafka is a menacing incarnation of the Law, Schulz's Father is eccentric, something of a clown and buffoon. A figure of authority certainly, but a much more equivocal one. Where Kafka's stories come in shades of grey, Schulz writing delights in colour. In place of Kafka's impenetrable bureaucracies, Schulz celebrates his memories of a provincial petit-bourgeoisie life.

'Memory' is the right word here. So many of his stories begin by placing their events in a particular time within their first line, but this particularity is unsettled by the way in which it's only 'that' July, or August, or Winter. These months and seasons have no relation to each other, no stable chronology so that we're stranded in the eternal flow of memory. For it is always inevitably past. The translator describes it perceptibly as a 'sunken world, lost forever under the lava of history', which gets to the heart of it really well. It's not 'nostalgia', a word I sometimes worry that I overuse on this blog, and in any case there are plenty of works about the remembering the past which don't fit comfortably within the term. It's not the pain of remembering, or the slightly fuzzy cossiness into which much our contemporary culture has transformed the term. Reading these stories I was thinking that I could think of nothing else like them in English, except perhaps the work of Terrence Davies, but that may only be because I received a DVD set of his films at Christmas and recently saw Distant Voices, Still Lives for the first time. There's the same disorientation of memory, the lack of sentimentality, and a very complicated longing, because what's being remembered is as much a source of trauma as it is something the author would wish to regain. We maybe need another term to describe this sensibility. 'Remembrancer' is the slightly clunky term John Fowles coined to describe Flora Thompson's work, and may serve for lack of anything else.

Perhaps that wound would be harder to heal too, if only the present were more welcoming. To belabour the comparison with Kafka, another difference is that Schulz seems more self conscious about his fiction, if this doesn't contradict what I've written above, placing his fantastical transformations within an historical context. Where Kafka transcribes his dreams of his present, the fiction all encompassing, for Schulz this all took place in the past. The present, as encountered in the story 'The Street of Crocodiles', is shoddy and badly made, flimsy and grey. A common trope of modernity perhaps, which here also includes such horrors as miscegenation and effeminacy. This upsets me rather, as it always does when you discover that someone you like might hold opinions which you find offensive. To quote from the translator's introduction one final time, the world his fiction remembers is a patriarchal one. It's inevitable perhaps that such a world would find those aspects of modernity particularly troubling. And in any case, at the story's end Schulz undercuts his tirade when he observes that this area of the city wasn't as bad as he makes out in the story, merely an impoverished provincial reflection of metropolitan reality. It's always remembered aslant, as it were. And it's also the consciousness of being provincial. There's always an elsewhere to which you are looking.

Adela, leaning against the balcony rails, bent over the distant, stormy roar of the city, caught from it all the louder accents and, with a smile, put together the lost syllables of a song, trying to join them, to read some sense into the rising and falling grey monotony of the day.

Bruno Schulz, 'The Comet'

Birthday post

32 years old today!

"...with all the books and all the records of your lifetime..."

Currently doing a fair bit of sorting out, which is one of the reasons I've not being able to blog as much as I'd like to just recently. It's always interesting what you turn up when you have a proper sort out or move house. The things you'd forgotten you had. The things you don't even remember owning. The things you're relieved to see again, glad that you didn't get rid of them during the last sort out you had. One of the things I came across the other day was my old diary, which of course I do remember keeping.

Looking at the entries (I was always carefull to date every entry I made) I see that I must have kept it for a period of roughly 8 years, from shortly after I began my Undergraduate degree, through to 2005, when I think I finally stopped as I'd mostly lost interest in keeping it. The gaps between entries became longer and longer. Maybe I'd finally run out of things to say. Seeing the length of some of the entries I made I can only wonder that I had the time to write so much. And what exactly did I find it so necessary to write about at such length? Memories, daydreams, quotidian day to day stuff which I always wanted to make significant. Which I suppose it was for the person living it. I also collected quotations, and selotaped in pictures and pieces torn out of newspapers. It was something of a scrapbook. And I wrote about the books, comics, music and films that inspired me, which is what I want to try and write about in a more structured way here.

I don't think of this blog as a substitute for that diary. I know that there are people who keep personal blogs, which is something I don't fully understand. Not that I'm critical of the desire to record personal details in such a semi-public forum, it's just not one that I share. Although obviously, as the entries about one's personal taste mount up and the style of your writing becomes familiar to your readers, I'm sure that something of a sense of the person writing a blog must come through. By its very nature blogging feels slightly informal which encourages that personal feel.

Not that I imagine I have any readers at this point! I'm not even sure if I want any. In my first post I described this online space as semi-public, which is how I still tend to think of it. It's personal, but also available to anyone who comes across it. Which at least answers the question I could never quite answer when I did keep a diary, of who I was writing it for.