Talking of children's books
New frontiers
Benny Green
In all three of the municipal libraries whose defences I have succeeded in penetrating lately, I have noticed a profound change in the contents ofthe children's shelves. Under evasive headings like "For Junior Readers" or The Young Folk", I find Pride and Prejudice and Rupert of Hentzau, The Good Companions and Gigi, David Copperfield and The Return of the Native. Clearly since my day drastic adjustments have been made to the location of that frontier between extreme innocence and gathering worldliness. A faint flicker of concern registers on the seismograph of my literary sensibilities, although „not for the children. They will do what they always did, which is take from a book only what they need, discarding the rest with the kind of calm cruelty which once inspired a classmate of mine to write, after having been duped by a feeble-minded teacher into reading Tess of the D'urbervilles at far too tender an age, "There comes a time in every man's life when he begins to appreciate Thomas Hardy. So far nobody has lived that long".
It is not the children who are put at risk by the new tactics, but the books. I would hate to think that because he tackled, say, David Copperfield a couple of years too soon, a reader would spend the next twenty years shying away from the genius of the 'first seventeen chapters, the most brilliant evocation of the
childhood condition in English.fiction. I know' .that children are said to come along faster in these supersonic times than they did in my day, but I doubt if questions of literary sensibility are affected much by technological aids to dissipation. Literacy in a child is a tightrope along which he walks with much less concern than the adult who is trying so desperately to slip him the right book at the right moment. By the right book I intend no moral connotations, but merely those of enjoyment and comprehension. My nine-year-old, for instance, a voracious reader, prefers us to read E. Nesbit together, I suspect because of the archaisms of style and vocabulary, and yet races through Gerald Durrell unaided. which somehow surprises me.
What of those authors whose work flourishes in that hinterland dividing the junior library from the adult world? Last year Stevenson was glimpsed on our small screen and there was a general call through the family for Treasure Island to which I responded. But Treasure Island turned out to be a failure, or rather a" premature gesture. And yet Stevenson fits in somewhere. The trouble is that not even I, who retain such an obse-ssive hold over the minutiae of my childhood, can remember exactly when it was that I first entered the 'Admiral Benbow', first heard the tread of Mrs Hudson on the landing, first followed Harris into the Hampton Court maze. I have noticed a general tendency among adults to exaggerate their own infant prowess, advancing the age at which they first read this or that book, until in old age they have themselves-appreciating Proust or savouring Sterne between nappy-changes. 'For example, I tend to look back on my own childhood as a time suffused with the russet glow of the White Knight and the Red Queen. And yet my copy of Alice in Wonderland, the oldest -inhabitant of my bookshelves, bears on its inner cover a prize .label naming the date as 5.6.1936, which means that I must have been nearly nine years old before I actually sat down and read the book.
There is nothing in Wonderland to disturb the emotional flow of a child's reaction, which' is what makes the book a masterpiece. But in reading Peter Green's biography' of Kenneth Grahame, I was suddenly reminded of the violence of the gear-change in the otherwise paradisal journey of The Wind in the Willows when Grahame's healthy paganism lapses into the uneasy pantheism of 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn', that chapter whose stained-glass attitudes I saw then, and still do now, as a breach of that trust which Grahame had spent the first six sections building. After revelling in Toad and company, I did not take kindly to being sandbagged without warning by Grahame's platitudes regarding What It All Means. The question has absolutely no relevance to the child reader, who, being a child, .is immortal anyway and has no time at all for such footling ruminations.
And yet The Wind in the Willows is a great children's book, by which I mean it remains a book in which the adult may, if he has the sense, still lose himself. I understand from theatrical managements who have in the past staged Toad of Toad Hall as an annual Christmas show, that the vogue for that kind of entertainment has been superseded among the young by the cheapjack jargon of the 'Dr Who' genre, but I find it hard to believe. Badger, \ Ratty and Toad are English archetypes masquerading as animals, and as archetyPes, their appeal remains. To what extent this is true of some of the older classics I have no way of knowing. A few months ago a new biography of Charles Kingsley revealed that familiar contradiction in a Victorian gentleman's life between animal appetites and the Pauline misogyny which passed in those days for authentic Christian ethics. iVo doubt like the
• Reverent Dodgson, Kingsley sought relief from .the struggle in composing fiction for those too young to bother their heads with such troubles. Books like • The Water Babies appear to have been-a kind of half-time lemon in the Cup Final between the temptations of the flesh and the blandishments of paradise. Now that Westward Ho is scheduled for republication (by Collins, at £3.50) I find myself wondering whether the constant reader of the later twentieth century will be able to navigate outbursts like "You sir, the eavesdropper, you the sunderer of loving hearts! You, serpent, who found our home a paradise, and see it now a hell!". Or even more alarming, "A young heart is one of God's precious treasures", a claim which a great many juveniles will find a bit difficult to swallow. But Westward Ho has a lot of good fighting in it, and I see no reason to believe why a junior population which has over the last two
• years fallen for the Disneyfied reworking of the Robin Hood myth should not swallow large gobbets of Kingsley's tale of the defeat of the Armada.
A new edition of The Secret Garden by . Frances Hodgson Burnett (J. M. Dent, £2.75), beautifully illustrated and printed in an engaging typography whose colour will probably commend itself to junior gourmets as being identical to that of HP sauce, raises similar problems of comprehension. I always feel that the first chapter, which implies that the British used to live in India, and assumes on the part of a reader an awareness of what "Ayah" and -Memsahib" mean, needs a brief verbal explanation from some sympathetic adult before the reading begins, and my detestation for all texts printed in dialect tempts me to wonder if the chapter entitled `Tha' Munnot waste no time' will not lose a few potential readers. On the other hand, The Secret Garden
Myths of a more generalised twentieth century nature stand a better chance even if not so formally composed as the Victorian classics. Rex Benedict's Last Stand at Goodbye
Gulch (Hamish Hamilton £2.00) has everything the Wild West can offer from faithful horses to beautiful Indian half-breeds, from ransoms to shoot-ups and people who say things like "Sure looks good to me". I enjoyed it, but have to say that the works of Ben Lucien Burman are on an altogether higher plane. Burman's books are a fascinating example of what can be done when the anthropomorphic conventions of Kenneth Grahame are sifted through the sensibilities of the legend of the Old West. Kestrel Books have sensibly issued the four Catfish Bend classics in to pairs, The Owl Hoots Twice at Catfish Bend and Blow a Wild Bugle for Catfish Bend; and High Water at Catfish Bend and Seven. Stars for Catfish Bend (£2.70 each). The style is assured, the tact consummate and the stories all exciting.
A few weeks ago I sent down a batch of slimmer, larger volumes to the infant reading department, which is presided over, and staffed in its entirety, by my five-year-old, who has now sent back a detailed report of each volume. Some of the reports consisted of a large wodge of paper and cardboard with the book inside, and the whole flung out of the bedroom window, which I suppose is an allegory of, rather than a departure from more adult methods of appraising the relative merits of. books. This reader of mine has recently discovered Winnie the Pooh, and so is not too receptive to other ideas at present, having just come through a long preoccupation with the highly commendable Richard Scarry books. But he has turned aside from Pooh for long enough to give his seal of approval, a jamstained thumb, to at least one new publication, called Angus by Hans Carl Artmaan (Methuen £1.95). I have been through the story with him two or three times, and find it an engaging affair about an old sea-lion whose lighthouse is full of mice. But what attracts readers, I think, must be the sumptuous colour illustrations by Sita Jucker. What is interesting is that although the book has German origins, its illustrations are strongly redolent of that domestic cosy clutter which is so hypnotic an ingredient of English classics like The Wind in the Wiitows. The infant gazes on Angus's patchwork quilt and his orange dresser and his barometer and the pictures on his wall, and instantly flings himself into that world because it looks comfortable and reassuring in there.
An attempt to become more topical to the point of being mundane is found in Henderson the Supermarket Cat (Sidgwick and Jackson £2.50), which shows us modern offices, boxes of breakfast food and long-haired young men featured in a plot whose lineaments are identical to those which turned up in a Paddington Bear story of a year or two back. Henderson is the creation of Rachel Donnison, and sounds to me like a pretty durable character. Durability of a different kind can be found in the bargain offer of the year The Adventures of Uncle Lubin (Puffin 40p), in which W. Heath Robinson narrates and illustrates the tale he first published back in 1902. The design of the book is exemplary, sticking to its original typography and beguiling the eye as much as it does the mind. The whimsicality of the twelve adventures can be guessed at where Heath Robinson is involved, and any doubts as to the inspiration for the entire product is resolved by the author's introduction which, addressing itself to "Gentle Infant", goes on to refer to "You, dear child, who nearly always try to be perfect and often succeed, you, who are sorry for those in trouble, and only sometimes cross when you are in trouble yourself; you who hardly ever grizzle, will, I am sure, admire Uncle Lubin, who was always so braiTe and good". Take away the whimsical fooling and we are back yet again on the Isis. It is July 4, 1862, and on board are the Reverend Dodgson and Canon Duckworth, accompanied by, or should I say chaperoned by, the three small daughters of Dean Liddell. It was all in the golden afternoon ...
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