Enid Blyton

by Barbara Stoney

  My night ‘images’ were always more than merely ‘images’ – they were a coherent line of events in the form of a narrative. My simile of a ‘private cinema screen’ is the best I can think of. But it’s a 3-dimensional screen, complete with sound, smell and taste – and feeling! This is why I can describe things so realistically in my stories, ‘as if I had been there’. I have been there – but only in my imagination! This is probably why all the artists that work for me find my stories easy to illustrate – they visualise the picture at once from the words.

  I did not know that I was ‘training’ my under-mind (or subconscious) in its ability to create and imagine, but I was, of course, and have been all these years. I knew how to get in touch with it, I knew how to be at one with it. I knew how to pull out the imaginings or put them into words – and now, with so much practice, a whole book is formed in a few days, characters alive and complete, incidents, jokes, everything – and my conscious mind has nothing whatever to do with it except record what it sees – by means of my typewriter. Sometimes I find it very strange. For instance, I have been asked to write a book, which will deal with a scout or scouts, with kindness to animals and with a definite religious thread going through it. No more instructions than that.

  Now the ordinary writer would begin to think consciously about the book, plans would take shape in his mind, he would arrange a scheme and so on – and then write the book according to what he had consciously planned.

  All I have done is to say firmly to myself – there must be a scout or scouts – animals – and ethics – and I leave it at that and don’t think another word about it. But those conscious directions penetrate down into the imagination, and when, on Monday, I sit down to begin the book, it will already be complete in my imagination – characters (a scout or scouts will be there) setting, animals, everything. No thought or planning will have gone to the book – it will well up spontaneously and rhythmically, suited for the particular age of child, and will be the right length. This is sometimes rather weird, as you can imagine.

  Your question about recognising things that are thrown up from my imagination is an interesting one. There are, for instance, many islands in my stories, many old castles, many caves – all things that have attracted me in my travels. These things come up time and again in my stories, changed, sometimes almost unrecognisable – and then I see a detail that makes me say – yes – that’s one of the Cheddar Caves, surely! Characters also remind me of people I have met – I think my imagination contains all the things I have ever seen or heard, things my conscious mind has long forgotten – and they have all been jumbled about till a light penetrates into the mass, and a happening here or an object there is taken out, transmuted, or formed into something that takes a natural and rightful place in the story – or I may recognise it – or I may not – I don’t think that I use anything I have not seen or experienced – I don’t think I could. I don’t think one can take out of one’s mind more than one puts in. In the same way I do not think, for instance, that a man can write a funny book if he has no sense of humour – however powerful his imagination – because his mind does not deal with humour! Our books are facets of ourselves.

  My before-sleep imagery (when falling off to sleep) is nothing whatever to do with so-called ‘night stories’ – completely different – just a jumble, fleeting, and of no account, The ‘night stories’ I had were always coherent – and went on evolving like a proper story till I fell asleep. I don’t have the same kind of ‘night stories’ or imaginings now that I had as a child – I have command over that, whatever it is, and use it when I want to, and banish it otherwise. I do no ‘day dreaming’. I work with my subconscious, it doesn’t run away with me! It used to, of course, now I would not let it - it is in harness, and works all the better for it – and makes for a well-balanced personality. (I don’t believe I have answered your questions properly – you must ask again if not.) It’s so difficult to explain something unusual and so elusive.

  You want to know about typing – I always type, for quickness, but I can of course write a story by hand just as well. But typing keeps up with my imagination better. The story evolves so very quickly when I write a book. I could probably dictate just as well, but I’d have to bother with a machine and records then and that would ‘break the spell’!

  You can quote what you like from anything I have said or written if it’s of any help – but it would be nice if you could let me see a proof to make sure everything is absolutely accurate!

  I was interested in your brief reports of students’ hypnagogic imagery. Have you read Timeless Moment? There is a great deal of interesting and thoughtful material there about all these things. Few people, I imagine, experience the ‘Timeless Moment’ (mystics do, of course, but that’srather different). I have only experienced one and have never forgotten it and never will. I wonder if you ever have? The man who wrote Timeless Moment experienced one, and described it extremely well. I’m not a mystic, I’m a very ordinary, cheerful sort of person, but I must say that things of this kind intrigue me very much.

  You will be very sorry you ever wrote to me! I do wish you could throw some light on these strange things. I struggle to explain myself to myself – but when you are at one and the same time, creator and interpreter, using your unconscious and your conscious intermingled for hours, it is sometimes very muddling! Which is really which?

  Enid Blyton to Peter McKellar, January 28th, 1955

  I have recently tried a new medium of writing – that is, writing a play … [see page 165]. I thought you might like to know how an imagination, apparently harnessed only to the writing of books, can adapt itself, and pour itself out in quite a different medium. It took me nearly three weeks to write the play, but I could write another in a week now that I know how to harness my imagination to the new medium. I have just finished a book for Macmillans – the 8th in a popular series that has been translated into many languages: I began it on Monday, and finished it this afternoon (Friday). It is 60,000 words long and flowed like its title (River of Adventure). All the same I know quite well that if I had had to miss even a day in the writing of it I might have had to give it up. Once the river is dammed anywhere, it won’t flow again in that particular direction – which is why I must write a book at ‘full flow’. I wish you could explain to me why I have these limitations and their opposites! It puzzles me very much at times!

  Peter McKellar to Enid Blyton, April 25th, 1957

  At what I hope you will not regard as at long last – it is a very great pleasure to send you this copy of my book.

  It is only a small return for the most valuable and interesting introspections with which you have provided me, and which are now recorded in print in the form you approved. I hope you will like it.

  What pleases me is the way in which your creative processes, though atypical in many ways, nevertheless fit the general theory of original and creative thinking – which has for me been a great mystery.

  I hope you will find the book, as a whole, of some interest. It takes a pretty broad sweep from thinking as represented by the students’ examination answer: the dream; the work of art; oddities like number forms, colour associations and hypnagogic imagery; grossly abnormal thinking; to the kinds of thinking we call theorising in science.

  My impression is there is a lot of room for research in this field; too much that has so far been done has dealt merely with the history of the psychology of thinking; too little has attempted to make a new contribution, however tiny …

  A start on the psychology of literary creativeness seems to me to be being made when we attempt to record, as accurately as human introspection permits, how individual creative thinkers have thought. Later I hope somebody will be able to generalise this know ledge into principles which apply to creative thinking as a whole …

  Enid Blyton to Peter McKellar, May 13th, 1957

  I have just finished reading your remarkably interesting book, and I really must write to con
gratulate you most warmly … You cover a very wide field, as you should, of course, but the reader never gets lost or bored – and your masterly little recapitulations at the end of each chapter are most satisfying – tying all loose ends up neatly for any untidy-minded reader. I do that for children very often!

  I must say that I agree with all your ideas, as far as my own particular knowledge goes. I am no ‘mystic’, as you know, and therefore think that supernatural manifestations can always be reduced to commonsense explanations. You cover so many interesting phases of mind, all of which aroused my curiosity, making me stop and consider, and delve into my own experiences. You used many happy phrases, apt for the reader’s understanding – like the ‘magic lantern’ idea for hypnagogic imagery. I hadn’t thought of that simile before, but it is, of course, exactly right. I’ve been experimenting with this kind of imagery so different from my own way of imagining which really consists of a kind of opening of ‘sluice gates’ and allowing a flow of cinematograph pictures and sounds to flood into my conscious mind, from the ‘under-mind’. Quite different from the magic lantern slides of hypnagogic pictures. I find that the gargoylish and grotesque type do not come along as frequently as the more ordinary type – such as clouds, waves, fountains, the moving, interchanging things– or still pictures in colour (or uncoloured) beautifully etched in every detail, such as a brilliant golden gorse-bush against a clear blue sky, each thorn put in meticulously – or a child’s head in perfect silhouette that I can ‘stare’ at for a long time before it dissolves. Never the kind of fast-moving cinematic picture, complete with sound-track that my conscious mind pulls up from my under-mind when writing. All the same, I think that my hypnagogic imagery (which I find easy to induce now I’ve tried to) is only composed of things in my visual memory, nothing really new – even the gargoylish faces are more like the kind of thing one seeks to find in cloud shapes – just a shape like something, which one’s eye completes on its own and we say ‘there’s a horse’s head in that cloud’ and so on. I have sometimes heard noises in the hypnagogic imagery, but have always assumed (probably quite wrongly) that they were outside noises – a sudden snore from my husband, sounding like a commanding voice – the sudden rattle of my window, which may sound like some kind of spoken or shouted sentence. They have always seemed to me to be too real to be imagined – they must come from outside me, not inside my mind.

  I feel I would also like to comment on your ‘presque vu’ reports. For some reason I had not heard the experiences called by that name, but it is really a very good definition. I have only once had this experience, in my teens, under ‘laughing gas’. I have had gas many times, but only once did I ever experience ‘presque vu’ – and then it was in one respect different from the things you report in that instead of ’almost seeing’, I did see and grasp everything, or so I thought! – and then lost it. This is what happened. 1 have never forgotten it and its extraordinary clarity has always remained with me. I found myself (apparently bodiless but still firmly myself) being drawn through space at a speed so great that I thought I must be going at the pace of light itself. I seemed to go through vibrating waves of light, and thought that I must be passing many suns and many universes. (I love astronomy, hence my suppositions, I suppose!) Finally, after a long, incredibly long journey in an incredibly short time I arrived somewhere. This Somewhere was, as far as I could make out, in my dazed and amazed state, a place of wonderful light (not daylight or sunlight) – and I saw, or knew, that there were Beings there – no shape, nothing tangible – but! knew they were great and holy and ineffable. Then I knew I was going to hear the secret of Everything – and Everything was explained to me, simply and with the utmost lucidity. I was overjoyed – filled with wonder and delight. I knew the reasons behind existence, time, space, evil, goodness, pain – and I rejoiced, and marvelled that no one had guessed such things before. Then I knew I must go back to my body, wherever it was, through all the long eras of time and vastness of space, and as I left in sorrow, my spirit cried out, or seemed to cry out ‘Let me tell everyone this wonderful thing I know, this secret that explains everything and will bring such rejoicing and happiness!’ And as I went back down aeons of time, I was told I must not divulge the secret and I cried out why – and as I went, I was told why, and I said ‘At least let me always remember’, but no, I was not even to be allowed to remember even one small detail myself, and I cried out again – ‘But why may I not remember?’ And then, just at the very moment when I returned to my body in the dentist’s chair, I was told why I must not even hug the knowledge to myself, and it was such a logical and wonderful reason that I accepted it joyfully, in the fullest understanding, and found myself opening my eyes, and smiling happily in the chair, completely overcome with what I thought had been a true and overwhelming revelation. This is the only presque vu experience I have had, and as you will agree, it was more than presque vu – it was ‘complètement vu’ – and yet ended by being completely lost. I can still get back the feeling at the end of it of acquiescing joyfully in my forgoing of the secret, and yet hugging to myself the certainty that ‘all’s well with the world’, despite everything!*

  This experience has nothing to do with religion, it wasn’t a ‘vision’, only something amazingly produced by the gas – but I kept hold of my identity all the time, and did not lose the reporter sense of the practised writer, who instinctively retains all that is essential to her true ‘newsstory’. I have told only two or three people of this experience, as I did not think it sounded believable …

  Your mescaline experiences must have been rather terrifying. They would be to me. I dread the feeling of losing my identity, of not being able to control my own mind!

  *Enid related this experience to her daughter Gillian, but substituted the garden seat at Green Hedges for the ‘dentist’s chair’ and placed the time of this experience as the middle 1950s.

  APPENDIX 9

  The Blyton Line

  A psychologist’s view by Michael Woods

  (An extract from ‘Blyton Revisited’, a special edition of LINES, Autumn 1969)

  Imagine an author with an output of over two hundred books, loved by millions, not only in this country but in most of the English speaking world and the continent of Europe. Suppose, too, that this author not only ran a twice-monthly magazine and contributed to many famous journals, but also wrote many songs, plays and poems. Surely nobody could but admire and respect such phenomenal success – such variety and such creativity? Yes of course, but not if it belongs to a children’s author called Enid Blyton.

  Enid Blyton was probably one of the most successful writers of children’s books this country has known. A visit to any public library will make this clear; usually every one of Enid Blyton’s books the library possesses is out on loan! But what of the writer herself? What information will we find about her? Surely such a large stone in a pond of children’s books must have created some ripples in the adult section. But not Enid Blyton. She has remained virtually ignored, even by those adults who are most concerned with children and children’s books. Even comics have fared better, and have been taken seriously as phenomena of our times by sociologists and others. It is virtually impossible to find any information about Enid Blyton, apart from a line in Who’s Who 1969, which forgot to include her age and the fact that she died in November 1968.

  If one draws a dividing line at puberty, the reactions on either side to the name Enid Blyton will be vastly different. One might almost use it as a test to determine whether a young person is mature enough to be admitted into a cinema to see an ‘X’ film. Amongst her vast public of children, just a whisper of her name conjures up feelings of excitement and anticipation; amongst adults reactions range from derision to nausea. What is it about Enid Blyton’s works that causes such strong feelings? Such admiration on the one side, and anger on the other? Can it be jealousy on the part of the adults at her fantastic success through doing something that appears so obvious and simple? Perhaps it is
, but my feelings are that the answer lies deeper than that. Adults may crave background details as necessary for realism and atmosphere in a story, but to a child, however, they are just an irritation that gets in the way of the main action. It is action they want, and with Enid Blyton it is action they get.

  The same is true for characterisation. Invariably the main characters are groups of four or five children, usually siblings and their cousins, ranging in age from about seven to fourteen, roughly the age boundaries of Blyton readers. Groups this size are usually safe because of their numbers. They are not so large as to be unwieldy. One may suppose they reflect, perhaps, the nuclear family, and offer far less opportunities for tension within the group than, say, units of three – the eternal triangle. It seems a deliberate policy on Enid Blyton’s part to define the characters in her books only in the haziest terms, it is very difficult to tell children apart, especially in a series like the ‘Secret Seven’. Those children who do stand out are complete oddities; George, the girl who tries to be a boy in the ‘Five’ series, and Philip, the boy who talks to animals in the ‘Adventure’ series. Elaborate characterisation may be necessary in an adult novel, but in children’s fiction it is probably a waste of time at best. Children’s imaginations readily supply characters to suit their own needs, and Enid Blyton’s policy of being vague about her characters enables the young reader to identify more easily with them.