On the beach, I built a long series of sand tombs modelled on the beehive tombs at Mycenae. In the book, something almost imperceptible was happening. Gradually, gradually, without a hint of apology for savagery past, the completely raw world of the book’s opening, where fathers ate their children, was becoming a place where custom had an influence, where there was even a kind of contract between gods and humans. It wasn’t that the gods grew any less capricious, but being worshipped involved them in policing human life. Grain upon grain, the atoms of pure force were assembling into molecules of law. This was the basis of civilisation, the foundation on which everything else depended. At the end of The Golden Shadow, the hero Hercules rescues Prometheus from the pillar at the end of the world where he is tortured, and Zeus permits it. The God Beneath the Sea insists that you can’t get there without the blood and the death first. They are real, so they have to be included when you build anything that stands: an ancient idea. I would meet it again and again when I was older. As a student, I had to read translations of the Greek tragedies Garfield and Blishen had drawn on, and there it was in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, a trilogy which ecstatically transforms a blood feud into a legal case, and the Furies from avengers who rend the world into the Eumenides, the ‘Kindly Ones’, who thicken the fabric of the shared life by giving it the dark backing of punishment for crimes. Later again, there it was in the Koran. ‘In retribution there is life for you, O men who have minds,’ God tells Mohammed: a verse whose meaning has been obscured in the West by translations that make it sound as if vengeance is what is meant. The Arabic word actually means legal retribution. In vendetta-racked Arabia, God is calling attention to the larger life that becomes possible when you live in a community of laws. ‘One day I too will create/Beauty out of cruel weight,’ wrote the Russian poet Mandelstam, looking at the pillars of Notre-Dame.
But the book I’d read, by the time I was ten, that had worked as a bridge from the force of myth to the laws of the town, was Marianne Dreams, a Puffin by Catherine Storr. Reading it over now, I’m not surprised to find that the author was a psychoanalyst. Marianne is ill. She draws to entertain herself, with a particular pencil, and at night she finds herself in the landscape of her drawings, where a house with four slightly wonky windows, and a curl of smoke from its chimney like a piglet’s tail, stands on an endless plain of short grass. But she is not alone in the dream house. A boy is there, also ill in the waking world, and what she draws sets the terms of his nights. She draws him eggs to eat and a bicycle to ride. They quarrel, and in a fit of fury she blacks out the windows of the house and sets a ring of living stones to watch it. They are very phallic, with their single eye, and they are truly terrifying. Now the faint surrealism of her dreams becomes definite nightmare. Marianne cannot erase the watchers and the darkness, though she tries; she finds it is up to her to get the boy out of the trap she put him in. When I read this, I saw it bringing the unaccountable, unfair power of the gods halfway into the ordinary world. In dreams begin responsibilities, it said. Loyalties emerge from the play of impulse. The freedom of myth, where there need never be any reason for anything except I-wanted-to, is the ancestor of the freedom in stories about living together.
The ancient horrors were silent in the American towns, but the stakes were still high. It was still a world where what could happen went to the limits of life and death. Scarlet fever could still blind Laura’s sister Mary, the locusts could still devour Pa’s crop; bristle-chinned, reeking of green whiskey, Bob Ewell could still come at Scout and Jem Finch through the dusk with a sharpened kitchen knife; Jim really was a slave in Huck Finn, and Indian Joe really would kill Tom Sawyer if he caught him. The laws that governed behaviour were no longer as huge and simple as the blocks of golden stone in the wall of Agamemnon’s palace at Mycenae, which I climbed up, thinking of gods, the day I was seven. In the Little House books the rules sometimes seemed as fiddly and filigreed, instead, as the corner-whatnot Ma and the girls made to display china, with its fringes of cut paper. Sometimes it seemed ridiculous that Ma was making Laura sit still and not fidget and attend to her duties when the whole wide uncivilised intoxicating prairie began right on the other side of whatever flimsy wall they were sitting behind. You really felt Laura’s sense of liberation when she got to run, or to help Pa with the harvest. But you could also tell that Ma created safety in those improvised rooms where her precious china shepherdess presided. Her rules about the proper upbringing of girls won a little place where it was safe to be a family from an environment otherwise subject to gusts of unmodified force, in the shape of storms, or Indians, or the drunk men singing in a railroad camp. They were constructive, her rules; that was why the Little House books were not oppressive to read, unlike the classic Victorian stories about good children, like Little Lord Fauntleroy and Eric, which made you want to set their heroes’ curls on fire. In Harper Lee’s Maycomb, custom was omnipresent, but the law didn’t work, and Tom Robinson died on the prison farm, because the rules of equity the community claimed to live by did not correspond to the racial code they actually followed. Atticus Finch, in trying to move the darker emotions of fear and dread into the law’s daylight, was doing something that Aeschylus or Mohammed would have recognised.
In town, men didn’t metamorphose into stags, girls weren’t transformed into willow trees or running water, lovers didn’t become leopards. But people did change. They led consequential lives, in a network of relationships you could never detach them from so that they stood in front of it like an actor in front of a curtain. They could be idealised, like Atticus Finch, or stylised, like Ma and Pa Ingalls, but they were what they were because they acted and were acted upon. Their nature was in play in each action they took. If Atticus had wavered and let the lynch mob into the jail to get at Tom Robinson, he would not have been the same man afterwards. This was unthinkable, of course: but unthinkable because his character forbade it, not because such a thing was ruled out by the structure of the fictional universe he inhabited. It could have happened. People could surprise you, disappoint you, show you new sides to themselves. They could change; they could even be destroyed.
All of this meant that you had to interpret the famous moral of To Kill a Mockingbird very carefully. ‘You’ll never understand someone until you get into their skin and walk around in it,’ said Atticus to his daughter. But understanding someone in the towns entailed you recognising, first of all, that their skin was full. There was somebody else already there, whose personality had a different grain from yours as you read about them. If you tried to step into their skin by imagining them being you, you learned nothing except on the level of sensation. The stimuli that made them wince and gasp now made you wince and gasp too, in imagination. This kind of vicarious experience can be very powerful. It is, for example, how nicely brought-up white children learn to imagine what it is like to be on the receiving end of racism – how they share, to a small extent, the slow fire in the belly of an adult man, the father of children, who has just been addressed as ‘boy’. But it still displaces the individual whose shoes, whose skin, you just borrowed. To understand somebody else’s life as it feels to the person living it, you have to imagine you being them, a far harder task, for it refuses sympathy’s speedy, magical wiring-together of two nervous systems. Instead, reading, you empty yourself so far as you can, and you try to subdue yourself to the material of another life, to have the horizons another life has, to enter into its separate density, which can seem as hard, at times, as for water to enter a block of solid close-grained hardwood. But fiction’s access to people’s unspoken thoughts made it possible; and the ultimate reward of the town was an empathy independent of liking, broader than justice, that if you had been applying to real people, as opposed to fictional ones, you might have called ‘respect’.
*
My favourite of all the Little House books was The Long Winter. This story about the seven-month winter of 1880 that nearly killed the Ingallses was also the one in which the world of the se
ries conclusively opened out, beyond the boundaries of Laura’s immediate family. Laura is fourteen in The Long Winter. After an unseasonably early blizzard, weathered by the family in their thin-walled shanty out on their land claim outside De Smet, Pa goes to town to buy groceries. In the store he hears an old Indian predict ‘Heap big snow, big wind’. Feeling in his bones that trouble is indeed on the way, Pa decides there and then that the family must move in off the open prairie to Main Street; and for the first time in her life Laura is living with neighbours instead of in the only house for miles around.
There had always been reminders of the wider world in the series. There was always news, there were always visitors. From the very beginning, in Little House in the Big Woods, Pa’s fiddle brings a stream of music and song into the life of the family, keeping them connected to Yankee-Scots-Irish folk culture. Mr Edwards, their family friend, a ‘Tennessee wildcat’ who whoops and hollers, turns up out of the blue every so often like an envoy from the rougher side of frontier life, to chew over politics with Pa, and to flirt ever so decorously with Ma. In On the Banks of Plum Creek, Laura goes to school for the first time, and has her first encounter with the snooty Nellie Olson, she of the curly hair and ‘store-bought’ clothes, who Laura will run into again in her adolescence in De Smet. As Laura’s rival, Nellie is a kind of key in the lock of schoolhouse society to her, opening the door for her on the bitchy politics of best friendship among little girls. In By the Shores of Silver Lake, the family has taken in paying guests, giving Laura the interesting, unsettling opportunity to inspect people who had never had the benefit of Ma’s upbringing, as they snore in the parlour. Above all, there has always been Laura’s strong response to the wide-open land that starts just outside the door of every one of her childhood homes. She is ambivalent. She looks inwards, to the zone of domestic security that Ma heroically creates wherever she unpacks her precious china shepherdess; she also yearns to be away, flying like a bird, moving westward like the free wind over the prairie grasses. Pa sees this in her and sympathises. From time to time he has gently stretched the limits imposed by Ma’s sense of propriety, and taken Laura with him to see things or do things whose energy he knows they will enjoy together. She’s built haystacks with him. With him she’s seen a team of men and horses working together like clockwork to build the railroad. But almost always, these different tastes of the lives outside the family have come to Laura when she is at home; or have happened when she is with Pa; or have happened to Pa, and been filtered through his storytelling when he gets home.
Now though, in The Long Winter, the tactics of the series change to match the family’s new connectedness. You see Laura making friendships with other girls her age, you see Pa, for the first time, alone in the company of other men. You are told about things that happened when Laura wasn’t there, and moreover you’re told about them directly, by the author, without Pa’s voice in between. You see inside the male society of the drugstore, where the menfolk of the town play checkers huddled round the stove; and there the narration calls Pa ‘Ingalls’ or ‘Mr Ingalls’, for the first time ever. You get to see inside the snug backroom up the street where the Wilder brothers, Royal and Almanzo, are leading a bachelor life that contrasts scandalously with Ma’s idea of good housekeeping. They eat pancakes all day long. ‘“So long as we keep eating, we don’t have to wash the dishes,” said Royal.’ So, though the gender rules are starting to bite now Laura is growing up, and she feels funny when she automatically leaps to catch a stray ball from the baseball game the boys at school are playing, her overall feeling, and yours as you read, is one of a greatly expanded set of social possibilities, with far more to do and to know, and far more fascinatingly strange people to observe, and to try to understand. When they first move into town, Laura is frightened by the thought of all those strangers: having to speak to them, having to deal with them. It’s an ordeal and an adventure to collect the spare part for Pa’s mowing machine from Fuller’s store. But her perception very swiftly changes. As the ‘blinding, smothering, scratching snow’ descends, and the wind begins to howl, it becomes a dangerous journey back through the blizzard from the schoolhouse to the other buildings on Main Street, for if the line of groping children miss the small row of newly built wooden houses, ‘they would all have been lost on the endless prairie’. School is closed. Fewer and fewer trains get through to De Smet with supplies; then none at all. The seventy-five people in town no longer look like an impossible crowd. Laura starts to think of them as possibly sheltering. They are folded, at least, into her sense that even counting the whole town, they are all frighteningly alone.
But even after Laura was warm she lay awake listening to the wind’s wild tune and thinking of each little house, in town, alone in the whirling snow with not even a light from the next house shining through. And the little town was alone on the wide prairie. Town and prairie were lost in the wild storm which was neither earth nor sky, nothing but fierce winds and a blank whiteness.
Her anxiety has changed. No longer: is this too many people? But: is it enough?
Pa and Ma had not expected that the small harvest from their first summer on their prairie claim would have to feed the family through the winter without bought groceries to eke it out. But without the trains, the shops are soon empty. The town settles into a ferocious pattern of blizzards: two or three days of howling whiteness, and then one day of brilliant blue clarity, bitingly cold, that ends when the next blizzard cloud appears in the north-west. The cold has driven the prairie animals far away to the south, so that source of food is closed too. On clear days, Pa drives his sledge out of town to fetch hay from the claim, out onto snowfields wiped of every trace of human presence. ‘Only the wind had furrowed them in tiny wavelets, each holding its own faint line of blue shadow, and the wind was blowing a spray of snow from each smooth, hard crest.’ On the blizzard days, there is nothing to do but to sit and to twist hay endlessly into sticks that will serve as fuel, and to listen to the storm. It howls like an embodiment of nature’s obduracy, which has thwarted the family before, but never seemed so deliberate or so malignant. It is as if the wind scouring Main Street is filled with flying elemental spirits. The eeriest moment of the book comes when Pa tries to play the storm’s music on his violin. ‘The fiddle moaned a deep rushing undertone and wild notes flickered high above it, rising until they thinned away into nothingness, only to come wailing back, the same notes but not quite the same, as if they had been changed while out of hearing.’ Laura shivers: so did I reading.
The Long Winter is as rich, and as direct, in its observation of human behaviour. It is one of the quiet excellences of the whole series that they tactfully register, and offer to readers who are able to notice them, far more complication in the picture of the family than they ever comment on explicitly. You can see Laura wrestling with the problem of having resentful feelings towards her all-too-perfect older sister Mary, when Mary’s blindness ought to overrule all impulses toward her except compassion. (I found that problem especially sympathetic.) You can tell from Pa’s pleasure in Laura’s adventurous spirit that he is just slightly wistful that he doesn’t have a son to share men’s things with. You can tell that, though they never contradict each other except in emergencies, Pa and Ma are very different personalities. Pa is mercurial, a risk-taker, someone who has to restrain his impulse always to be starting again from scratch, for the sake of the family. Ma is a homebody and a natural conservative, who has faithfully followed her man into the wilderness. Ma is afraid a lot of the time. Because of the rules she has imposed on herself, you rarely see it, but it flashes out at the rare moments when she puts her foot down – in The Long Winter, when Pa proposes that he should go out in the snow to look for a farmer twenty miles south of town who is rumoured to have a store of wheat. ‘Your hauling hay is bad enough … You don’t go hunting for that wheat.’ Pa always acquiesces at these moments. In The Long Winter, Laura is old enough for the first time to be included in her parents’ unspoken un
derstanding of how bad their situation is. She too is now responsible for keeping the little ones from worrying. Pa squeezes her shoulder as she manages to laugh at the funny story he has contrived to make out of the news that the railroad company has given up on the town till spring. But even this parental estimate of things is shown to be incomplete. The noticing that happens from outside the family is now important. They need an external eye to judge their situation truly. Like polar explorers who’ve gradually got used to eating smaller and smaller rations, they adjust to living on one small loaf a day baked by Ma from grain cracked in the coffee grinder. They – and therefore you, reading – get so absorbed in the things they do to maintain a routine, and to keep up their spirits, that they lose track. It takes Almanzo Wilder up the street – young, brave, well-fed on pancakes and unburdened by Pa’s responsibilities – to look at Pa and shock you into realising what’s happening. ‘“I think there’s folks in this town that’re starving,” Almanzo stated. “Some are getting pretty hungry, maybe,” Royal admitted, turning the pancakes. “I said starving,” Almanzo repeated. “Take Ingalls, there’s six in his family. You notice his eyes and how thin he was?”’ It is February. The crunch has come. With their own resources exhausted, the family must depend on other people. They need the town; they need help. But how?
This was a far more difficult question than I knew when I read The Long Winter, or than anybody knew until 1993, when the critic William Holtz published a book called The Ghost in the Little House. Like everyone else, I thought the books’ beautiful directness was a sign of their plain, documentary truth. ‘This is the fifth of the true stories about Laura and her family,’ it said inside the cover of my Puffin paperback of The Long Winter. I thought that Laura the character, Laura the real historical child on the Dakota frontier, and Laura the elderly farmer’s wife who wrote the books in the 1930s and 40s, were one and the same person, with no significant differences between them. It could never have been this simple really. At ten I knew already that the books were stories, story-shaped, with a story’s deliberate pace and selected heights and depths. But I thought that Laura was so vividly present on the page – gave you such a strong sense of her shoes being full, of there being a substantial person there for you to respectfully become – because each of her thoughts and feelings had truly been thought or felt back in the 1880s. It never occurred to me that something which felt one way to read could have been created out of anything except the same emotion.
The Child that Books Built Page 13