The Child that Books Built

by Francis Spufford

  But I was nourished most, and felt the people were most real, when the town was a real town, and above all when it was a small town in America. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s De Smet; Louisa May Alcott’s Concord; Tom Sawyer’s Hannibal; Harper Lee’s Maycomb; even the small towns in Illinois, lit by gothic flashes of lightning, to which Ray Bradbury returned (Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes) whenever he wanted to set supernatural perils in a landscape of archetypal boyhood. America was far away. I wasn’t entirely sure where to find it on a globe, and I didn’t quite know when it was either. How did the shreds of its history I was picking up align with the running order I’d put together for the British past? As the child of historians, I scorned the idea of having one big bin called ‘the olden days’ you threw everything into. In Britain, the Romans came before the Vikings who came before William the Conqueror who came before knights in castles who came before Queen Elizabeth who came before men in wigs who came before the Victorians who came before the War against Hitler, which happened when my parents were children; and the past ended just before I was born, conveniently and miserably symbolised by them taking away steam trains. In America … well, George Washington was a man in a wig, so he came before the covered wagons. The Civil War that Jo March’s father had gone off to be a chaplain in was completely mysterious, but Little Women’s emphasis on being good clearly linked up with the time of the Victorians, as did Ma’s upbringing of the girls in the Little House books, only more remotely. Presumably the New York of the skyscrapers and the big benevolent Irish policemen came later again.

  The trouble was that America seemed to have reached a state I thought of as modern, with things like cars to tell you so, a long time ago, and then to have stayed like that, showing the passing of time with subtler changes in its status quo of presidents and high schools and football games, none of which I knew how to interpret. When, for example, was this? ‘Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer’s day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.’ I had no idea what I would have found if I had visited President Nixon’s present-day America. I’d been taken into a room full of hushed, awed adults to see a white blob that was Neil Armstrong float awkwardly across a fuzz of static which was the surface of the moon. On the other hand my cousins went to America, and a grizzly bear tried to steal their cocoa. Did Americans still listen to Victrolas? Still eat meatloaf? Still drive Pierce Arrow limousines? Still wear jackets with big letters of the alphabet on the back?

  We had no TV then, by my parents’ choice. Perhaps if we’d had one, a picture of America would have built up by itself in my mind – silt from the river of images in Kojak and Columbo – which at least resembled the real thing as a film set resembles reality. Instead, with a bit of help from book illustrations, I supplied my own images for screen-doors and storm-windows, Thanksgiving dinners and feed stores, courthouses and midwinter skating parties. I hoisted Old Glory on its pole, and blew the wind to make it flap. Often I got things wrong, because I followed my European models too closely. I always assumed in To Kill a Mockingbird, for example, that because Jem and Scout and Atticus lived in a town, they and all the neighbours must live in town-houses, two or three storeys high and joined together in a terrace. I knew that Jem had to sprint across a front yard to slap the railing of Boo Radley’s house, when Dill dared him to, but I never imagined that the Radley place might have garden all around it. When I finally saw the film of the book late in my teens, with Gregory Peck as Atticus, I was astonished to see the children walking home up a kind of meandering avenue of bungalows. I felt a disorienting pang. It was the sensation of my home-made Maycomb being peeled off the armature of Newcastle-under-Lyme that I had wrapped it round, and without the familiar town beneath it to give it bulk, being revealed as papery-thin, like the discarded skin of a snake. But I believed in what I visualised while I was reading, because the reality of the towns’ inhabitants was palpable, and that made the places real no matter how much of the stuff in them I had to supply. Miss Maudie Atkinson of Maycomb is a sharp-tongued, cake-baking, fanatically gardening middle-aged lady with a liberal intelligence, who never laughs at Scout Finch except when Scout means to be funny. ‘She had never told on us, had never played cat-and-mouse with us, she was not at all interested in our private lives. She was our friend.’ This solidity transfused itself into Miss Maudie’s scuppernongs, whatever the hell they were. (I only knew that Jem and Scout were allowed to eat them.)

  I learned to recognise the intense existence with which characters like Miss Maudie were endowed as something particularly American, though at ten I could not possibly have named it, for I knew nothing about American history and culture, and it grew from the sense, engrained deeply in both of them, that American life is a revolution without banners. Small towns in the US do not fly flags exhorting their citizens to fulfil the Five-Year Plan, or broadcast stirring music from loudspeakers to strengthen them while they work in the fields. The apparatus is missing that you associate with a social experiment. There is only the bank, the courthouse, the grain elevator, the railroad depot. But then the social experiment under way is the construction of a shared life from the pursuit of individual happiness. Americans often imagine that certain freedoms are uniquely their own, when in fact they are common to the citizens of every democracy. But America is unique in its emphasis on liberty, not as the means to some further end like social justice, but as the final and ultimate end in itself, the completion of everything that politics can do for the individual. The freedoms of speech and of assembly are valuable because they allow the individual man and woman to exercise their faculties as widely they wish, not because anything systematic might need changing. In Britain in the 1970s I grew up with the idea that elections existed so that people could make a fundamental choice every five years about how society ought to be organised. These days, of course, Britain and the rest of Western Europe have drifted a long way towards the American perception of the electoral process; but the outlines of a difference are still visible. Beneath the amazing firework displays of cash and the passionate attention to small differences between the candidates, American elections are really about selecting competent administrators, to oversee an ancient consensus. It is still an honour to meet the President, and he is guarded by chocolate-box soldiers who satisfy the Ruritanian urge that never goes away even in republics; but those are shallow, almost vestigial emotions. It is just living that is invested with revolutionary fervour.

  In fiction, this has meant that the hopes and desires of individuals, and the connections they make among each other, tacitly carry the whole national story, which has no arena except the particular lives of particular Americans. They are full of immanent importance. A hundred and twenty years ago, Henry James listed all the things American novelists couldn’t write about, because in the deconstructed landscape of American society, the institutions simply did not exist to generate some of the great standard situations of European fiction. No cathedrals, he said; no clergy, no army, no aristocracy with castles, no diplomats, no sporting gentry. ‘One might enumerate the items of high civilisation which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.’ Virtues which elsewhere might be celebrated in epic narratives are arranged instead in domestic ones – and then scrutinised with tender intensity as tests of the feasibility of freedom. Of course, starting long before James wrote that in 1879, and proceeding with his own very active participation, American life has compiled its own set of unique types, who inspire fictions as moulded to their protagonists’ social qualities as Trollope’s novels were to the gallery of deans, majors and baronets who are missing in America. Boston Brahmins; Gilded Age robber barons; Texas oilmen; film stars; the buzz-cut intelligentsia of
national security; advertising men who commute from Connecticut, drink martinis, and have mid-life crises; software geeks; Gen-X slackers. Social forms are constantly renewed. And in fact, there have been some institutions in America more crushingly hierarchical and determining of behaviour than even the crustiest Old World drawing room: slavery, for example, and its long legacy of apartheid in the South. But the picture that characteristically emerges from American storytelling is one of people making deliberate experiments with their destinies. Compare Tom Wolfe with Balzac, the model for the social range of his fiction, or Dickens, his model of comic energy: his people are far more self-determined, more self-invented than theirs.

  Or consider the sharp difference of emphasis in the great European and American novels that set out to explore the psyche of a modern, average man. Joyce made the thoughts and feelings of Leopold Bloom, his specimen Dubliner, open out into perpetuity, where experience proves to follow again and again the same ancient structures of meaning. Bloom is ordinary going-on universal. Rabbit Angstrom on the other hand, the hero of John Updike’s Rabbit novels, lives specimen days in America in the sense that he takes one specimen path through his times’ possibilities for love and sex and work and betrayal. Sometimes he succeeds, sometimes he fails; his choices are exhilarating to read about in the same way that it is exhilarating for a European traveller to wake in a Holiday Inn in Middle America, and to draw back the curtain and look out on a parking lot struck by the morning sun, and, seeing the Turtle-Waxed hoods of the cars shining in as many colours as there are in the rainbow of towels displayed in a department store, or in a paint company’s catalogue of shades, to realise that he is in a place devoted to the frank, practical, literal satisfaction of ordinary desires. Of course, America’s array of stuff is no guarantee of happiness, just an incitement to try for it: that’s what makes it exciting. The flood of things from the horn of plenty co-exists with the difficulty there has always been in obtaining the inner possessions that cannot be bought, cannot be commanded. Rabbit knows himself incompletely, makes a sense of his life which is constantly eroded by forgetting. When he dies, which he does on the page in front of us during a pick-up game of basketball, the whole semi-illuminated structure of his existence slips out of sight for good, never to be known again, unless there is a God to catch the falling soul of a basketball-playing car-dealing sensualist; which Updike, a Lutheran, does not rule out. But the partiality and incompleteness of his life is what makes him typical. Rabbit is a citizen of a republic that only exists in the lives of its citizens. Rabbit is routinely unique. When the grand designs are gone, wrote Henry James, ‘The American knows that a good deal remains; what it is that remains – that is his secret, his joke, as one might say.’

  I didn’t get the joke, when I was ten. But I could plot the stories of American towns against material I was familiar with. I knew that the people I met in these towns were a different proposition from the inhabitants of the funny books of fantasy I was reading at the same time, and loved just as much. I interleaved reading The Little House with reading Joan Aiken’s Black Hearts in Battersea and T. H. White’s Sword in the Stone. The effect in my mind was like opening a fan made up of alternate dollar bills and peacock feathers. And the people in the fantasies were certainly different. They were already complete when you met them. Joan Aiken’s heroine Dido Twite is a skinny little urchin when first encountered in Battersea in the made-up days of King James III amidst her family of lugubrious oboe-playing assassins; she is bigger and taller in Night Birds on Nantucket, thanks to a diet of whale oil, when she foils a scheme to fire a supergun across the Atlantic at St James’s Palace; and she is a highly competent near-teenager in The Cuckoo Tree, when she thwarts a conspiracy to kill the King by rolling St Paul’s Cathedral down Ludgate Hill on castors. But fundamentally she is always the same, always unflappable and street-smart, always eloquent in the made-up London patois that emerged when Joan Aiken threw a dictionary of historical slang into the Magimix of her imagination. (‘Coo,’ said Dido. ‘What a jobberknoll.’) In fact, it is curiously difficult to describe her. Once you have read one of the books, so that she exists in your imagination, your impulse is just to point her out, in the same way that it is easier to point at Bertie Wooster than to summarise him. This is one of the signs of a great comic character. However new-minted they are, they have a secure obviousness about them which is also inexhaustible, and can be carried from context to context, giving the reader more and more of the pleasure of seeing them be themselves. It is as if they have always been there. You cannot envisage them changing. When the Wart in The Sword in the Stone – the young King Arthur, but he doesn’t know that, and neither do you the first time you read the book – when the Wart brings Merlyn home from the great forest to be his tutor, the old enchanter, with his owl sitting on his head and owl droppings in his white beard, meets the Wart’s gruff country squire of a guardian, Sir Ector, in the castle courtyard.

  ‘Ought to have some testimonials, you know,’ said Sir Ector doubtfully. ‘It’s usual.’

  ‘Testimonials,’ said Merlyn, holding out his hand. Instantly there were some heavy tablets in it, signed by Aristotle, a parchment signed by Hecate, and some typewritten duplicates signed by the Master of Trinity …

  ‘He had’em up his sleeve,’ said Sir Ector wisely. ‘Can you do anything else?’

  ‘Tree,’ said Merlyn. At once there was an enormous mulberry growing in the middle of the courtyard, with its luscious blue fruits ready to patter down.

  ‘They do it with mirrors,’ said Sir Ector.

  Can Merlyn be anything less than a crabbed, ideally benevolent don, adrift in time? Can Sir Ector be anything other than dim and good-hearted? Of course not. Their natures are fixed. They cannot be altered by an altering mood. (There are some moods and circumstances you simply could not place them in.) This does not mean that real emotion did not go into their creation. In inventing them, T. H. White flung all he could manage of love and all he could manage of parenthood free from the buzzing mandala of neuroses that consumed him when he was not writing. But it does mean that they do not really exist in relation to anything else in the story. What they are is not established by interaction. They stand in their setting like an actor in front of a curtain, quite independent of circumstances, and effectively invulnerable. They do not require your participation to be, either. Since you already know them completely, you do not have to make an effort of understanding when you read about them.

  On the other hand, when I read the stories that took me to town, I had to learn about even the most simplified, or idealised, or stylised people by watching what they did. Understanding came bit by bit, and it resembled the knowledge you had of real people; and so, as with real people, you needed to pay attention to what it was kind, or generous, or honourable to conclude about their characters. They existed in relationship to each other, but also, in a way, in relationship to you. You had a kind of responsibility towards them – with no penalty, if you let them down, except that you understood less than you might have done. You could find yourself in a position like Emma at the Box Hill picnic, doing Miss Bates the injustice of judging her only by one irritating quality. You could deserve Mr Knightley’s reproof: ‘That was ill-done, Emma; ill-done indeed.’

  Oddly, though they wore bonnets and said ma’am, I could tell that the people of the town stories had much more in common with the blood-spattered gods and mortals of Greek mythology, when you found the myths in their un-nice-ified form. Roger Lancelyn Green’s retellings were useless, making all their highs and lows smoothly, mildly reasonable, as if the myths were schizophrenics and he was administering a massive dose of lithium. But years earlier I’d been given Edward Blishen and Leon Garfield’s The God Beneath the Sea, and this, and its sequel The Golden Shadow, put the beauty and the terror back, incomparably. Zeus sees his newborn son Hephaestus is ugly, and hurls the baby out of heaven by his ankle, to howl down the sky, a golden line lengthening from the zenith. The god of the unde
rworld steals Persephone, and her mother Demeter wanders the world weeping for her; where she walks, the crops die, and winter grips the fields. Prometheus the titan makes human beings from seeds in clay. He gives us fire, and Zeus sends a vulture to rip out his liver, daily.

  These creatures were not individuals, as you’d find them in a novel. They were far less individual than Dido Twite. They embodied qualities: they were Power, Wisdom, Rage, Desire, and Tenderness, undiluted and unshielded, so that they glared with brightness. But they did have free will, in the most wild and catastrophic form. They acted, and the world buckled, twisted, changed shape; a touch of their hands, and they caused metamorphosis, the magical change of one thing or person into another that was usually violent, and usually irreversible. The God Beneath the Sea had pictures by Charles Keeping. He turned this world of savage impulses into line drawings so kinetic, so full of force, that they were on the verge of mania. I looked at the rotary explosion which was his chariot of Poseidon, drawn by the horses of the sea; I looked at the dead young men who had raced Atalanta and lost, her spears in them each surrounded by a big black blot of blood; and I believed them. We were on holiday in Greece, the heat and the smell of cloves worked their way into the stories, and my parents had just confirmed, in answer to a direct question, that my sister was going to die. I took this calmly, flattered to be trusted with such important adult stuff. Anyway, there Bridget was, sharp-tongued, wearing a wide straw hat, just having her fourth birthday as I was just having my seventh. But another part of me thought: all right, there is this heavy knowledge in the world, parts of the world have this cruel weight, which I see illustrated here, and that’s just how it is. Deserving has nothing to do with it, any more than it has anything to do with the exultations and horrors in here. Bridget is going to die. Zeus can punish Prometheus for doing something obviously kind and good. So what now?