Fracas! Ruckus! Brouhaha!

Vignette by Clive Hicks-Jenkins for Thaliad

Dear Slate,

What a lot of grief you are getting for publishing an article about how adults ought to be embarrassed to read children's books. ("Against YA" by Ruth Graham.) I guess maybe that was the point, as it is so often the point in these days. To get attention. To cause a commotion, a hullaballoo, a hoo-ha. To make a sort of paparazzi fuss, all lightbulbs and yelling and jeering. I'm a bit tired of the ruckus, you hear?

A long time ago C. S. Lewis told us that "A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest." Likewise, Maurice Sendak made it clear that it was whether books were good that mattered. And as to fantasy and fantasizing being for children, he said, "I believe there is no part of our lives, our adult as well as child life, when we're not fantasizing, but we prefer to relegate fantasy to children, as though it were some tomfoolery only fit for the immature minds of the young."

I agree with Lewis and Sendak. Ages and genres make no difference at all. Being packed with energy and life counts the most when it comes to a book, not some idea of audience age and kind or mode. I read the Alice books when I was five, and I am still reading them today. Stand where two roads diverge in a yellow wood, and take the way with the nooks for reading and the stones for skipping and the books without labels, without ages. Hey, it'll make all the difference.

Good cheer,
Marly

P. S. To somewhat change the subject, I don't like the idea that grownups desire to read weak, thin, smarmy books. And that's where the real criticism is hidden, I think--in the idea that some people are content with such books, whether they are written for toddlers, young adults, or grownups. And the writer assumes that children's books are, indeed, lesser, and that an adult could not have a rich experience reading them. Carroll. Sendak. L'Engle. Those are a few of many arguments against that thought.

P. S. So you don't think I'm being mean to her, here's another article by Ruth Graham--a highly sensible proposal that suggests that maybe we've dropped something we should pick up again, revised for our own day.

Notes on my recent books, no. 2

In THALIAD, Marly Youmans has written a powerful and beautiful saga of seven children who escape a fiery apocalypse----though "written" is hardly the word to use, as this extraordinary account seems rather "channeled" or dreamed or imparted in a vision, told in heroic poetry of the highest calibre. Amazing, mesmerizing, filled with pithy wisdom, THALIAD is a work of genius which also seems particularly relevant to our own time.  --Lee Smith

Chivalrous mice and other matters

Jeff de Boer, The Seven Samurai Mice
2005, copper, brass, mixed media, 4.5" x 3.5" x 2"
Back in 2007, I wrote a post about de Boer called
In the Realm of the Mouse Warrior.

From 4:45 a.m. until 9:15 p.m. yesterday, my life was given over to attending a gigantic and nigh-endless wrestling tournament. I am a wee bit . . . exhausted, without ever so much as tangling with an opponent. And I have a dire need to work on some essay commissions. So maybe today I'll give you some thoughts from a book I'm reading, On Stories and Other Essays on Literature, a collection of essays by C. S. Lewis. Here are some interesting snips from Walter Hooper's introduction.

This is a charming note:

C. S. Lewis can't have been more than five or six years old when he wrote, in a notebook he much later passed on to me, a story called 'To Mars and Back' and another little romance about chivalrous mice and rabbits riding out in full armour to kill cats.  --Walter Hooper

Here is a well-known quote from one famous name to another:

Just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth. We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by become a 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man ascribe to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. --J. R. R. Tolkien to Lewis, quoted by Hooper

And here is another of the same, in the reverse direction:

Tollers, there is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to write some ourselves. --Hooper quotes Lewis to Tolkien, not long before he wrote Out of the Silent Planet

Lewis and drafts of writing:

Except for his academic works, Lewis never wrote more than a single draft of his novels, which indeed suggests that the stories were worked out in his head before he put pen to paper. --Walter Hooper

Here's a riposte to those who have attacked adult readers for reading books written for children or young adults:

When I was ten, I read fairy stories in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. WhenI became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.  --Hooper quotes Lewis, from "Three Ways of Writing for Children"

Narnia and Cair Paravel

As I'm still toiling in the endlessness of the flu, my husband amused me early this morning by reading from that excessively odd and sometimes alarming personage, Montague Summers. And the passage he read struck us both as interesting for the name Narnia, both for the name itself (the Italian name already being known) and for the creation of the Narnian world. (If you're not interested in children's books and Narnia, read another post!)

As is not surprising, you can find something about the sources for the name Narnia online; in Professor Downing's essay on names in the Narnia books, one learns, "As to the world in which we meet all these characters, there is an actual place called Narnia. It is best reached, not by climbing into a wardrobe, but by boarding a northbound bus from Rome. Narnia, now called Narni, is a mountain village in the Italian province of Umbria. Lewis would have encountered the name as a passing reference in Tacitus, Livy, and other Latin authors, and he probably liked the sound of the name."

As he had such marvelous libraries available to him for browsing and reading, I'm wondering if he peeped into Johannes M. Watterich's Pontificum Romanorum Vitae (Leipzig, 1862.) Montague Summers describes a matter contained in it this way:

A very extraordinary circumstance is related by Wipert, Archdeacon of the celebrated see of Toul, who wrote the life of Pope S. Leo IX, a Pontiff, who had been for more than twenty years Bishop of Toul, and who died in March, 1054. The historian [Johannes Watterich, I believe he intends here] tells us that some years before the death of S. Leo IX, the citizens of Narni, a little burgh which is picturesquely situated on a lofty rock at the point where the river Nera forces its way through a narrow ravine to join the Tiber, were one day greatly surprised and indeed alarmed to see a mysterious company of persons who appeared to be advancing toward the town. The magistrates, fearing some surprise, gave orders than the gates should be fast closed, whilst the inhabitants incontinently betook themselves to the walls. The procession, however, which was clothed in white and seemed from time to time to vanish among the morning mists and then once again to reappear, was obviously no inimical band. They passed on their way without turning to right or to left, and it is said they seemed to be defiling with measured pace until eventide. All wondered who these persons could be, and at last one of the most prominent citizens, a man of great resolution and courage resolved to address them. To his amazement he saw among them a certain person who had been his host many years before Ascoli, and of whose death he had been recently informed. Calling upon him loudly by his name he asked: "Who are you, and whence cometh this throng?" "I am your old friend," was the reply, "and this multitude is phantom; we have not yet atoned for the sins we committed whilst on earth, and we are not yet deemed worthy to enter the Kingdom of Heaven; therefore are we sent forth as humble penitents, lowly palmers... --Montague Summers, The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1960

The account goes on from there, as the living friend has a fit from astonishment and is ill for twelve months. Let that me a warning to you not to have truck with ghosts! And it's a reminder to me that 12 days (thus far) is not all that bad...

What strikes me is the "picturesque" little "burgh" on "rock" at the point where one water meets another water--here, it is where the Neva joins the Tiber. What we know as the royal seat of the Narnian world changes a great deal over time, but it fits--at one time or another--this description. Cair refers to walled city or castle. (Paravel most likely stems from tenant paravail, or the feudal concept of tenant-of-a-tenant, but that goes in another direction entirely, with the idea of the ruler as servant to Aslan, who is in turn servant to his father--and also with the idea of ruler as servant to those ruled.) At an unknown time, either in hope of fulfilled prophecy or for use, Cair Paravel was built where one great water meets another; that is, where the Great River, not long after it is joined by the Rush River, flows into the Eastern Ocean. Sometimes in its history, Cair Paravel is surrounded by city, other times not. Sometimes it is sited on a peninsula, and sometimes the sea takes it for an island, and it becomes a palace with protective walls of water. It is, like the "little burgh" of Narni, seated on rock.

Summers' retelling of the story of a ghostly pilgrimage passing by Narni suggests bonds with Narnia and Cair Paravel having to do with "thin places," where one world verges on another. The Narni of Watterich's account is a place on earth where world and the spectral meet and may even converse. It's a "thin place" where our world impinges on the realm of the dead. Likewise Cair Paravel is a border place, sited in the eastern coast and so suggestive of the unknown realm belonging to the Emperor Beyond-the-Sea who is the father of Aslan. The eastern edge is the closest one can come to him in the land of Narnia.

That's why the ruling seat of Narnia is neither at Lantern Waste (where the first human king and queen ruled), nor somewhere central like the spot where the White Witch set her camp. As the Eastern Ocean surrounds what was once a peninsula, Cair Paravel becomes more and more a "between" place that exists on the boundary between earth and water. Even its design reflects this identity. While it may be built stone on stone, the cair has an eastern door that can be flung open onto the Eastern Ocean, where the mermaids sing. As a "thin place" and as a border spot, it mediates between earth and water, between the four human kings and queens and the realm of nature, between civilization and the wild, and between all Narnia and the world beyond ruled by the Emperor Beyond-the-Sea, the King of all Kings.

* * *

Tolkienesque postscript:
As my husband said, you can just imagine Lewis and Tolkien talking this story over in the Bird and Baby (more properly, The Eagle and Child, and less properly, Fowl and Foetus), one nabbing the name and the other daydreaming about an army of wanderers who have to work out their redemption by a particular task--one dayAragorn will hold them to their crime and allegiance.