Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

BOOKS MET IN CHILDHOOD

Recently, reading my way through GrahamGreene’sEntertainments, I found the following intriguing long statement in Chapter 7 of Greene’s thriller The Ministry of Fear:

“In childhood, we live under the brightness of immortality – heaven is as near and actual as the seaside. Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is measured and faultless as a clock. Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those that were read to us in childhood, for those promised a world to us of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory: they are formed out of our own disappointing memories – of the V.C. in the police court dock, of the faked income-tax return, the sins in corners, and the hollow voice of the man we despise talking to us of courage and purity. The little duke is dead and betrayed and forgotten: we cannot recognize the villain and we suspect the hero, and the world is a cramped place. That is what people are saying all the time everywhere: the two great popular statements of faith are ‘What a small place the world is’ and ‘I’m a stranger here myself.’ ”

I’ll ignore Greene’s own childhood tastes for a moment (I don’t recall, as a kid, hearing or reading many books about swordsmen) and I’ll skip over “being read to” as opposed to “reading” as a child. As it happens, my mother was a very good reader to her large brood, me being the youngest; and a real treat for us as children was listening to her reading all of Robert Browning’s narrative poem, “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”. This poem rather complicates Greene’s view of the innocence of childhood reading. It conveys, brilliantly, some people’s treachery and dishonesty (the burghers refuse to pay the piper who has cleaned up their town) and it has a tragic ending (the piper gets revenge by stealing the town’s children). We were given a more sombre, and real, view of life than one of simple heroism and goodness.

Even so, I will concentrate on the part of Greene’s statement which I have underlined above, and modify it slightly: “ no later books satisfy us like those that [we read] in childhood, for those promised a world to us of great simplicity of which we knew the rules.” I happily endorse most of this view. More credulous, or more innocent of experience, we were enchanted by tales in which it was easy to distinguish the good characters from the bad, and the nice from the nasty; and we always knew that, even if sad or tragic things happened along the way, good would triumph and there would be a happy ending.

A bit over six years ago, I produced on this blog two postings, one called  TooMuch Hobbit and the other called C.S.Lewis, in which I listed copiously the many books I had read to my own children. But I did not discuss in much detail those that I had myself read in childhood. And by childhood, I mean before the age of ten or eleven.

I wish I could say that as a tot I read nothing but the best; but it is embarrassing now to note that the very first book I remember reading on my own (that is, a book with more words than pictures) was Enid Blyton’s Come to the Circus! apparently first publshed in 1948. I can recall nothing about it now, except that it was set in a circus and I was reading it in a battered hardback edition with a green cover and no dust-jacket.

I then remember reading and enjoying Tove Jansson’s Moomin series, written in Swedish by the Finnish author, mainly in the 1940s and 1950s. They were translated into English from the 1950s onwards. The first one I encountered was Finn Family Moomintroll. I liked these odd little creatures that resembled delicate little hippopotami walking on their hind legs. The Moomin universe was gentle and funny and largely peaceful, with a lot of space for the benign silliness of Moominpapa. Only recently have I discovered (thanks to Wikipedia) that these books I dimly remember from long ago are still the basis of a whole tourist industry in Finland, a bit like a Scandinavian Disneyland.

Saving my reputation a little, I do remember reading RLS’s Kidnapped at quite an early age, but as to whether I understood it much, that’s another story. I read it again with pleasure (and understanding) as a teenager. The awful fact is this – as a little kid, I had the habit of picking up and trying to read all sorts of books, but giving up on them once I discovered them to be too grown-up for me. Indeed I remember going through a phase when I started reading more books than I finished reading.

But the one book I remember reading avidly when I was about eight or nine was Hilda Lewis’ The Ship That Flew (first published in 1939). It is a fantasy about a boy who finds a model ship in a toyshop, buys it, and discovers that it can grow in size and take him and his friends (or was it his family?) on fantastic journeys to far places and times. It captivated me. I remember spending a whole sunny afternoon absorbing it.

So years later I found a copy and read it to my own children and… clunk! I found it a mediocre, cliché-filled, rather twee piece of writing, typical of English children’s books from its period. It was like a poor imitation of the fantasy books of Edith Nesbit. As adults we have to modify our golden memories of childhood reading with an awareness that children do not have the experience to compare books they read with other and better books. They do not recognise a cliché as a cliché because everything seems freshly-minted. The Ship That Flew was perfect reading for an 8- or 9-year-old, but not for an adult. However, I think my children enjoyed it. 

And what does all this have to do with the opening quotation from Graham Greene? Only this. A book read in childhood is a very different book when read in adulthood. In part it has to do with our innocent moral perspective on the world when we are children, which is the thing that Greene emphasises. But just as much, it has to do with our childish understanding of what writing is in the first place – what is and what is not original, what is an antique plot device or improbable melodrama, what is a forced effect. As children we accept many things because we really do not know what they are or what they are worth.