The Child that Books Built

by Francis Spufford

  In 1993 William Holtz announced that he had studied the manuscripts of the books, and that they had effectively been ghost-written by Rose Wilder Lane, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter and a highly skilled novelist in her own right. Rather than being the memories of an ‘untutored genius’, they were the disguised handiwork of a pro. Laura-the-character was a construct. Events from the family history had been selected and combined to give the stories dramatic unity, and sometimes excised altogether. In the writing of The Long Winter, for example, Rose had deleted the presence of a married couple who had shared the building on Main Street with the Ingalls for those seven months, and made a hard time worse with their insufficient stoicism.

  Holtz’s book caused outrage. It was not the idea that particular incidents might not be trustworthy which so upset a large section of the Little House audience: it was the threat to the emotional authenticity of the experience each had had. There was a feeling that a promise had been made to the reader by the little girl they had first met in Little House in the Big Woods, and this news seemed to break it. ‘If you’re a true Laura fan you can’t stand the idea that Laura could have been for one moment dishonest,’ one of the ladies from the Memorial Society said to me stoutly. ‘I know that if Laura hadn’t written those books she’d have said so.’ There was no room for cynicism within the books, so it would have been horrible if cynicism had gone into the making of them. Since 1993, other critics and biographers have looked at the evidence without Holtz’s debunking ferocity, and a picture is building of a much more subtle and active collaboration between mother and daughter, which need not be counted as a dirty secret. If the Little House books are better than anything Laura wrote without Rose’s help, they are also warmer and livelier and more perceptive than anything Rose wrote without Laura’s input. The books are still there, undamaged, though Laura Ingalls Wilder will no longer be praised as a creator of naive art; no one will say any more, as a critic once did, that she wrote prose ‘as good as bread’.

  But Holtz also showed that the books had been influenced by Rose’s politics, which were right-wing libertarian, in the style of Ayn Rand or Robert Heinlein. Her beliefs did overlap with her mother’s. Both women believed that the New Deal was an abuse of the federal government’s powers, and a terrible attack on the self-reliant traditions of the frontier. Around the house, they referred to President Roosevelt as ‘the dictator’. But Rose went much further. As a young journalist in San Francisco, she’d been a romantic socialist of the Jack London school, but by the time she returned to the family home in Missouri after a failed marriage, she thought that all taxes were theft, that social security numbers were incipiently totalitarian, and that the FBI was as bad as the Gestapo. (Oddly enough, it didn’t bother her a bit when the G-men persecuted leftists during the McCarthy era.) Her vision of the revolutionary nature of American life stripped everything out of it but God, families and the market. She interpreted it as a place where absolutely nothing should be collective except the desire to be an individualist. Even elections were dubious: they might give an imprudent majority the power to demand their neighbours’ property. To her, the time when the frontier was being settled almost represented utopia. The pioneers, entirely dependent on their own labours, were the type of what Americans should be – though she herself refused to go out with any of the boys in the small town where Laura and Almanzo brought her up, on the grounds that it might’ve been heroic for their fathers to found the town, but only a dullard would want to stay there. To her, the essential promise of America was imbued in the life of the frontier, right down to the details of its housekeeping. (As well as her fiction, Rose wrote the world’s only ideological celebration of American needlework. She saw expansive, unprecedented liberty in the Ohio Star and Log Cabin patterns of American quilts, and oppression in European patchwork, cramped by kings and communists.) And this vision shaped the books, especially the later ones in the series: not as anything as dishonourable as propaganda, but as a deep substructure of values.

  Which made the Ingalls family’s desperate need for a handout in The Long Winter extremely tricky to negotiate with dignity. Right at the beginning of the book, when the sun is still shining on the prairie, Laura and Pa look at a muskrat’s house together. It is a clay mound by the edge of a prairie pool, and its walls are exceptionally thick. Pa knows that is another sign that a very hard winter is coming. Laura wonders how the muskrats know; Pa thinks that perhaps God tells them, as a kind of compensation for the muskrats not having free will, and having to build the same kind of house by instinct every year. No such protection applies to humans. ‘A man can build any kind of house he can think of,’ says Pa. ‘So if his house doesn’t keep out the weather, that’s his lookout; he’s free and independent.’ The lesson is plain. The price of freedom is that no one rescues you from the consequences of your mistakes. But the great winter that follows is a climatic disaster beyond the scope of normal human preparation for the future, and pure self-reliance is not an option for the family.

  When I re-read The Long Winter now, I see the book manoeuvring delicately to arrive at a picture of community that will be consistent with Pa’s muskrat manifesto. It’s something that’s handled at the level of interpretation, for the actions by which starvation was prevented in De Smet were a matter of record, and heroic record at that. Almanzo Wilder and his friend Cap Garland went looking for the wheat raised south of town that Ma had forbidden Pa to risk his neck for. They found it, they bought it from the lonely farmer who grew it, and they sledged it back to town, all sixty bushels of it, in the treacherous clear interval between blizzards: two unmarried young men braving the wastes to bring their town enough food to get it through till spring. But the novel carefully inscribes their altruism with more specific meanings. Almanzo goes because, he tells his brother, the town will have to eat his precious seed wheat unless he can find a substitute. We are to note that he donates his courage to the community, and not his property. The chapter in which he decides to go is called ‘Free and Independent’.

  When the wheat reaches town, the story is not over; and here Pa becomes the hero. Mr Loftus the storekeeper, who bankrolled Almanzo and Cap to buy the wheat, proposes to make the best return he can on his money by charging three times the dollar-and-a-quarter per bushel that the boys paid for it. An indignation meeting gathers at Fuller’s Hardware. Let’s go and take the wheat, says a hothead. No, says Pa, ‘Let’s all go reason with Loftus.’ Taking the lead, he points out that while Loftus has a perfect right to charge what he pleases, ‘It works both ways.’ They have a perfect right never to buy another thing from him once spring comes. Loftus backs down, in the interests of conscience, and also in the longer-term interests of his business. He sells the wheat to them at cost price. Something has been achieved, civilisation has been maintained when it need not have been. The men of the town have faced down the threat of losing their identities in the angry collectivity of a mob. They have reconciled their conflicting interests, long-term and short-term, hungry and greedy, by subjecting them to the give-and-take of commerce. Now that they have reached a settlement in which the atoms of self-interest form a molecule of law of the sort that Rose Wilder Lane respected, the wheat can be distributed in proportion to need. ‘What do you say we all get together and kind of ration it out?’ suggests Pa. His share is two bushels at $1.25 a bushel. The Ingalls eat bread that night, and everybody in De Smet lives till spring.

  I did not notice any of these pieces of delicate ideological filigree when I read the book as a kid. They were far outside my experience. I saw a simple story about a town that shared things in order to survive. And I was right: that is the story of The Long Winter. It is the inevitable story of every town. The subtle reservations and qualifications passed me by, because none of them altered the emotional sequence of the events. The Ingalls need help: Almanzo and Cap do a brave thing and scorn any payment for it: the Ingalls get help. The problem that The Long Winter confronts with its particular set of ideologic
al tools is the central problem of life in any group of people bigger than the family. Every society has to sort it out somehow; every individual has to sort it out, too, as they grow up and look beyond the family, from a realm where people have absolute obligations to each other, to one in which all obligations are provisional, and have to be negotiated. You can’t stop being a son or a brother. But you can lose a friend, you can leave a job, you can stop being someone’s lover. So the question is: how do we rely on those who are not obliged to look after us? How shall we be fed by strangers? We must be, unless we are content to live in isolation.

  Rose Wilder Lane’s answer was, more or less, that you do it through the market, that great contractual brokerage for different needs. At ten, I didn’t notice. I didn’t see the negotiations required to reconcile mutual aid with an edgy defence of being free and independent; I didn’t take in the twisting path the book follows to the point where it can say ‘we’. I only knew that it arrived there. I would always remember the songs the family sang in the face of the blizzard. The emotions in them needed no caveats. Sometimes it was individual hope that they asserted:

  When I can read my title clear

  To mansions in the skies,

  I’ll bid farewell to every fear

  And wipe my weeping eyes.

  Perhaps heaven is one possession you can hope to have without the free market being involved. But in the language of religious yearning, the individual flowed into the collective without any difficulty at all.

  If religion was a thing that money could buy,

  Do thy-self-a no harm,

  The rich would live and the poor would die,

  Do thy-self-a no harm.

  We’re all here, we’re all here!

  Do thy-self-a no harm.

  We’re all here, we’re all here!

  Do thy-self-a no harm!

  At the worst moment of the winter, when it looks as if Almanzo and Cap have been snuffed out by the returning blizzard before they could make it back to town, Pa loses his temper with the storm, and shouts back at it. ‘Howl! blast you! howl! … We’re all here safe! You can’t get at us! You’ve tried all winter but we’ll beat you yet! We’ll be right here when spring comes!’ I didn’t care then what intricate steps had to be taken for ‘we’ not to end at the frontier of the family: I just knew that it did not.

  *

  So from The Long Winter I learned about what people did and did not owe each other; and that was just one lesson among the situations to puzzle out, the voices to attend to, the intentions to plumb, that the stories of the town brought me. I even began to understand what was not said on the page. This was the kind of reading that can magnify your curiosity about real people, and send you back to the world better equipped to observe and to comprehend. The perceptions of fiction are transferable, when they’re the fictions of the town. When novels offer you knowledge of their characters that’s difficult and precious in a way which parallels the hard-won knowledge of real people, they make you more interested in the life off the page, not less. At this point in my history as a book-child, I could have been born as a different sort of reader. I might have become someone who went to the printed word believing I’d find there variants of the stuff I saw and heard with my real eyes and ears. I could have journeyed onward towards adult reading in which the knowledge of people and the knowledge of characters converged – to the enrichment of both.

  But I was more dependent than I knew on the idealistic, almost didactic impulse in the stories of the American town. There, ought ran very close below the surface of is: reality was constantly being tested against the promise of American life, and judged by it. The newness of the American towns was often a powerful reinforcement to ought, telling you that what you saw in existence had just been brought into existence, by deliberate choices. But even when they were old, by American standards, they were still judged as if the town had been an experiment; as if what the inhabitants had allowed to develop there was a demonstration of their best efforts at a community. In the Maycomb of To Kill A Mockingbird, the past is an inheritance, and a very confining and omnipresent one. The respectable white families have grown so used to each other over the generations that they have become ‘utterly predictable’ to one another. ‘Thus the dicta No Crawford Minds His Own Business, Every Third Merriweather is Morbid, The Truth Is Not in the Delafields, All the Buford Walk Like That, were simply guides to daily living …’ Above all the great unmentioned shadow of slavery hangs over the place, inducing a mixture of fear and guilt in Maycomb’s whites that issues out in acts of cruelty towards the black half of the town that they cannot even acknowledge. Yet in Maycomb too, it is accepted that what is, is there to be examined, and to be tested against principles. And for me, pattern-minded child that I was, ought was the key that opened the folds and tucks of human behaviour, and spread it out, and made it knowable.

  Without it, I was bewildered; there seemed to be too little order. We were celebrating the octocentenary of Newcastle-under-Lyme, at my school. It had been 800 years since it had been founded by some baron who built a new castle. We went in a bus to see what was left of it, a stump of masonry behind a railing on a rainy street. We also got an Octocentenary Mug each. But this history had no point to it, the way Maycomb’s did; it did not bear down on the present in a way that suggested you ought to do anything; it was just what had happened to happen. In the same way, when I read British children’s books about the shared life, I felt some crucial structure was missing. I was most puzzled by William Mayne, whose beautifully written books always observed the pattern of what was rather than the pattern of what should be. I often borrowed them from the library, because I would think from what the dustjackets said that they were going to be led by an idea. Earthfasts, said its blurb, was about an eighteenth-century drummer boy who marches out of a modern hillside. In Sand, the jacket promised, some grammar school boys discover their very own narrow-gauge railway under the dunes that’re engulfing a coastal town. And the drummer boy did march out, and they did dig out a railway, but actually the books always turned out to be very low-concept, in Hollywood terms. The big idea was always subordinated to conversation. There were no signposts, nothing to extract or to paraphrase; just exquisite observation, Mayne showing rather than telling. His novels left me, always, with the sense that more was going on than I could understand, that the fabric of his towns was all unpredictable specifics. They made me feel like Alice, at the beginning of her adventures, when she wants to get into the garden, but the door is too small for her.

  What societies did I know? When I was very little, before my sister’s illness separated my parents from the lives their faculty contemporaries were having, they gave parties; I could remember pushing through the crowd in our sitting room carefully, and big hands coming down to take peanuts from the bowl I was carrying. But after that, to me the university mainly meant solitary rooms I found my parents working in. My father’s office in the Chancellor’s Building smelled of floor-polish, and the butterscotches he sucked when he was concentrating. It was a modernist box, whose glass and concrete he’d fitted out with the old desk and the heraldic panels he had brought with him from Cambridge, pouring the spirit of the history he studied into the future he believed in: the civilised welfare state that educated all its talented sons and daughters. The past flowed into the future without any break for him, because the student revolution and the counterculture had happened while his attention was elsewhere. Princess Margaret had come to a University of Keele function in 1965 or thereabouts and made a beeline for my parents, the youngest people in the room, hoping they would be groovy. ‘Do you know anything about pop music?’ she asked. ‘No,’ they said, embarrassed. And it was true. As a teenager I would test them with pictures of Elvis, unable to believe that two people who had been young in the fifties could really fail to recognise him. I gave them clues. Memphis? No. Blue suede shoes? No. Rock ’n’ roll? ‘Ah yes,’ said my father proudly – ‘the music with the very stro
ng beat!’ By the time I was nine and ten, and old enough to go with them to the occasional Sunday lunch given by their fellow professors, I was beginning to pick up hints that most of their colleagues saw my parents as innocents abroad, while a few, disbelieving, thought they must be secret machiavellians, or at least manipulators. Gossip never passed through our house, that I ever heard. My parents believed in noticing intentions, not the words people actually spoke, or the unparaphraseable hints of personality trapped in the fine mesh of social particulars: attention to which is an absolute prerequisite for successful gossip.

  And then there was school. I had two friends, Richard and Roger, and at break-time we sometimes lay in the long grass at the edge of the playing field trying to fart at will. Well, they did, but I primly pretended not to be interested, until their cackles got too catching. But Richard and Roger played soccer most break-times, so I would dodge Julie, who liked to pounce on innocent-looking kids and ask them The Question – ‘D’you know what having it off means?’ – and banish my uncertainty by walking around and around the white line at the edge of the playground. Pace, pace, pace, corner; pace, pace, pace, corner, looking neither to right nor to left until the whistle blew. I abolished loneliness, I abolished school, by thinking myself into the towns I had read about. There was nothing on the playground that was half so comprehensible as the way people treated each other in the towns I read about, there was nothing I knew how to pay half so much attention to, and I told myself that reality was at fault: which was the lie that has comforted compulsive readers at least since Rousseau wrote his Confessions, and blamed ‘that trait in my character which seems so gloomy and misanthropic’, on ‘my too loving heart … my too tender and affectionate nature, which find no living creatures akin to them, and so are forced to feed on fictions’. I hated the playground.