A Realm of Ageless Wonder
DAVIS, ROBERT GORHAM
A Realm of Ageless Wonder_ Secret Gardens: The Golden Age of Children's Literature By Humphrey Carpenter Houghton Mifflin. 235 pp, $16.95. Reviewed by Robert Gorham Davis Professor emeritus of...
...Carpenter is sure from the all-male Arcadia depicted in The Wind in the Willows that Kenneth Grahame, like his character Badger, would have preferred a snug bachelor life to marriage...
...The electronic media are only too delighted to teach the young how to shoot with a variety of marvelous weapons on the ground and in the air in all-out wars between "us" and "them...
...Only the Bad Guys get pulverized in Star Wars, and even if the worst happens, there are galaxies upon galaxies where we can proudly plant our flag...
...Reviewed by Robert Gorham Davis Professor emeritus of English, Columbia University In 1918, when I was 10 years old, I had my appendix removed in the sewing room of my aunt's house in Salem, Massachusetts...
...He wished, Carpenter reports, "there were 60,000 volumes of it...
...Instead, as Carpenter reports with evident relish, Grahame's future wife " conducted things very cunningly, taking advantage of an illness of his to pay unchaperoned visits, thereby compromising him (it seems) to a point where marriage was almost obligatory," a marriage that was "a disaster from the beginning.' Though she married late, the soundest of the lot psychically seems to be Beatrix Potter, whose deceptively simple animal tales had buried in them increasingly mature and challenging themes...
...It was "harder to dream up River Banks and Never Never lands after the Battle of the Somme...
...But how many adults took in completely the fact that the signs "eat me" and "drink me" confronted by Alice referred to the blood and body of Christ...
...His and Tolkien's popularity coincided not only with the general conservatism of the' 50s but with the postwar vogue of such theologians as Soren Kierkegaard, Jacques Maritain, Paul Tillich, and Reinhold Niebuhr...
...His writers being a strange crew, however, Carpenter cannot resist describing their distinctly aberrant psyches, including nonliterary details that make lively if morbid reading...
...Louisa May Alcott has been replaced by the tough, sexually expl ici t Judy Blume...
...Carpenter dates his movement from the 1860s with three founders—Charles Kingsley of The Water Babies, Lewis Carroll of the A lice books and George MacDonald of A t the Back of the North Wind and The Princess and the Goblin...
...Lewis...
...In the middle period appeared Bar-rie's Peter Pan, the animal tales of Beatrix Potter, The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, The Treasure Seek-e«byE...
...Secret Gardens is primarily concerned with childhood as a cultural—even a class—concept, and with a related realm of wonder not peculiar to children, since it depends on a belief in magic and myth basic also to religion...
...Some of Steven Spielberg's productions almost meet Carpenter's standards, especially E. T., which contains a Christian death and resurrection myth...
...Holden Caulfield, the novel'shero, has an aggressive, detached, ultra-critical view of adult society, which appealed instantly to American teenage readers of the 1950s...
...Tolkien and C.S...
...Nearly all Carpenter's authors had difficult parentage or marriages or both...
...I speak not from the remoteness of crabbed age, but from listening to the talk and watching the play, including play on the computer, of my grandson and his friends, boys somewhat younger than I was in 1918...
...Secret Gardens is the history of what he considers a unique literary movement, peculiarly British...
...I know of no current fantasists successfully creating sustained other-worlds like those of C. S. Lewis and Tolkien, or of the great figures of Carpenter's Golden Age, Kingsley, Grahame and Mac-Donald...
...For Carpenter, Tolkien and Lewis are not of the true Golden Age...
...The name "Freud" does not appear in the index...
...Lewis, both of them veterans of the World Wars...
...They are a little too conscious and explicit, not subversive enough, not even as subversive as Frank Baum in The Wizard ofOz...
...Since the flu had also closed the schools, I enjoyed a prolonged convalescence that turned out to be sheer bliss...
...What was once a Golden Age is now nuclear, and Armageddon has replaced the Secret Garden...
...In James Thomson's The Seasons, once much anthologized, there are two famous lines on bringing up children: "Delightful task...
...Lewis' seven stories of the land of Narnia also appeared in the' 50s...
...But never fear...
...The newly discovered imagination of these children was busily cultivated by nurses, governesses and parents...
...All were ordained clergymen, deeply insecure in their faith...
...Selling 9 million copies, it became a cult phenomenon for the very generation that at a slightly younger age had seized so eagerly on The Catcher in the Rye...
...Louisa May Alcott is included because she originated the family-centered children's novel, though Carpenter scolds her for not telling the real truth about her family...
...Carpenter argues for World War I " as the cutoff point" of his Golden Age, "with Milne regarded as a survivor of the Edwardians, rather than belonging to the postwar world...
...Humphrey Carpenter is co-author of The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature and the biographer of J.R.R...
...In the general retreat from reading, mythic fantasy for children has been triumphantly captured by cinema spectaculars, animated cartoons and TV space-war serials...
...One of the games included gratuitously on my Basic disk is called "Blood Bath...
...Most of the violent films for children have no more spirituality than the violent adult films they watch during the prime time "family hour...
...Concepts of childhood come and go, along with the children themselves...
...During the late Victorian and Edwardian eras a succession of romantically imaginative writers discovered in fantasies supposedly written for children—ostensibly carefree animal tales or dreams of lost Edens—a vehicle for the expression oftheirownmost private and often anguished concerns...
...This is notably true of Alice, though it does sometimes frighten children, whose parents like it rather more...
...These wars are an unfailing source of excitement...
...Such were the people who chose to write for children, and with great success...
...George Bernard Shaw said of them, "No two people were ever married who were better calculated to make the worst of each other...
...C.S...
...Although we are in a period of revived fundamentalism, with the myths and miracles of the Bible taken quite literally again, there is no corresponding revival of romantic wonder, of nostalgia for vanished Edens in books for children...
...E. Nesbit, the daringly Bohemian author of The Treasure Seekers, married a Fabian publicist and scoundrelly adulterer named Hubert Bland...
...If we look at the posters in the windows of comic book stores or lean over the shoulders of youngsters in video arcades or sample the animated cartoons on Saturday morning television, Postman's gloom in The Disappearance of Childhood seems justified...
...In an attic room I discovered the libraries of cousins half a generation older than I, and for three glorious weeks, lying on a window seat that surveyed the length of Lafayette Street, I read through what Humphrey Carpenter calls "the golden age of children's literature" at the rate of two or three volumes a day...
...Carpenter cites The Disappearance of Childhood by Neil Postman, a deeply pessimistic account of how American society through its schools, its mass media and the home, has irresponsibly been obliterating the distinctiveness of childhood...
...Carpenter's writers created dream worlds for an emergent middle class—secure, educated, moneyed—having fewer children per family...
...On the other hand, in its immediate successor, Raiders of theLostArk, the mystic power of the recovered Ark of the Covenant was used for nothing more spiritual than to vaporize some Nazis...
...Although Tolkien started writing his great trilogy as an undergraduate before World War I, and published TheHobbit in 1936, the Lord of the Rings did not appear until the mid-'50s...
...We avoided the hospital because of the Spanish Influenza...
...I felt as insatiable as one of George MacDonald's young sons did when he was allowed to read an early manuscript of Charles Dodgson's Alice and was asked whether it should be published...
...Secret Gardens contains little purely literary analysis and is quite free of psychoanalysis...
...Curiously, Kipling, Stevenson and Mark Twain are not included, presumably because their works are controlled too completely by their adult or artistic consciousness...
...Later, where America is concerned, he is ready to push the cutoff point forward to 1951...
...Charles Kingsley drew "spiritual" pictures of copulation with his future wife—tied, for instance, to a cross on a raft at sea—that would be hard to credit if a sample were not printed in this book...
...to rear the tender thought, / To teach the young idea how to shoot...
...Tolkien and C.S...
...The trouble with that date is the publication immediately after it of theim-mensely popular fantasies by J.R.R...
...Abruptly in that year, he contends, everything changed where children and their books were concerned, thanks to the publication of J.D...
...The fantasies written for them by adults and with much appeal for adults, inevitably carried religious and social implications—some of them rather heretical—which children could not directly comprehend but which nevertheless added to the sense of mystery...
...Nesbit, and The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett...
...Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye...
...They lack the doubts and inner conflicts that enriched theworksofthe Victorians in ways that would have been shocking if then understood...
...For instance, Louisa Alcott's monstrously selfish Transcendentalist father, Bronson Alcott, in his ultimate infantile dependence on Louisa, produced a full crop of baby hair on a head that had been bald for decades...
Vol. 68 • July 1985 • No. 9
