A Writer's Eye Part 13

Still in the dark, and like a dream, comes his discoveryit is his pursuitof "the marvelous girl." And afterward, when the lights come on again, "they got up, scared, hot-faced, hating the light. 'Come on. We must get out,' he said. And they hurried from the lighted room to get into the darkness of the city."

We read these stories, comic or tragic, with an elation that stems from their intensity. In "When My Girl Comes Home" Pritchett establishes a mood of intensification that spreads far around and above it like a brooding cloud, far-reaching, not promising us to go away. We are with a family in England 10 years after the last World War as they face the return of a daughter, gone all this time, who is thought to be a prisoner of the enemy. Hilda, "rescued" at last from j.a.pan, where she had not, after all, been tortured and raped but had done very well for herself, brings on a shock as excruciating as it is gradual when her s.h.i.+fting and cheapening tales begin to come out.

The youngest boy muses: "We must have all known in our different ways that we had been disturbed in a very long dream. We had been living on inner visions for years. It was an effect of the long war. England had been a prison. Even the sky was closed, and, like convicts, we had been driven to Page 228 dwelling on fancies in our dreary minds. In the cinema," he says, and that cloud begins to reach overhead, "the camera sucks some person forward into an enormous dose-up and holds a face there yards wide, filling the whole screen, all holes and pores, like some sucking octopus that might eat up an audience rows at a time . . . Hilda had been a close-up like this for us when she was lost and far away."

In the shock of reunion, the whole familyseveral generations and their connectionssees appearing, bit by bit, the evidence that all of them have been marred, too, have been driven, are still being driven and still being changed by the same war. Alone and collectively, they have become calloused as Hilda has been and, in some respect of their own, made monsters by their pa.s.sage through an experience too big for them, as it was too big for Hildafor anyone.

"Hilda had been our dream, but now she was home she changed as fast as dreams change," the boy tells us. "She was now, as we looked at her, far more remote to us than she had been all the years when she was away."

Finally, it is not Hilda's errant life in j.a.pan but the "rescue," the return to the family circle, that wrecks her imperviousness. It wrecks the life at home, too. When the young narrator finds himself alone at the end with Hilda, "I wanted to say more. I wanted to touch her. But I couldn't. The ruin had made her untouchable."

None of the stories is livelier than these new stories of Pritchett's written of old age. Old bachelor clubman George is militant, astringent, biting, fearsomely grinning, in training with his cold baths, embattled behind his fossilized anecdotes, victoriously keeping alive ("he got up every day to win") on the adrenalin of outrage and of const.i.tuting himself a trial and a bore to everyone. But afraid. Afraid not of the North wind but of the East wind, afraid not that the Arch Enemy will get him but that the building will be sold out from under him.

"'O G.o.d,' he groaned loudly, but in a manner so sepulchral and private that people moved respectfully away. It was a groan that seemed to come up from the earth, up from his feet, a groan of loneliness that was raging and frightening to the men around him. He had one of those moments when he felt dizzy, when he felt he was lost among unrecognizable faces, without names, alone, in the wrong dub, at the wrong address even, with the tottering story of his life, a story which he was offering or, rather, throwing out as a lifeline for help."

What wins out over George is not the East wind or the Arch Enemy but Page 229 the warm arms of a large, drinking, 40-year-old woman with a kind disposition and a giggle for his indignation, who "drops in" ("What manners!") out of his past that he had thought safely sealed behind anecdotes. She was the woman the old man had admired once "for being so complete an example of everything that made women impossible."

It is thus that he faces "the affronting fact that he had not after all succeeded in owning his own life and closing it to others; that he existed in other people's minds and that all people dissolved in this way, becoming fragments of one another, and nothing in themselves. . . . He knew, too, that he had once lived, or nearly lived."

Of all the stories of desiring, and of all the stories in this collection, "The Camberwell Beauty" is the most marvelous. It is a story of desiring and also of possessingwe are in a world of antique-shop keepersand of possessing that survives beyond the death of desiring. It is a closed world, one that has its own hours, its own landscape inside nighttime warehouses, its edges the streets beneath the sodium lights. It has its own breed of people, its own language, its codes and spies and secrets and shames, jealousies, savageries, fantasies. And like some fairy tale itself, it has its own maiden, carried off and shut up and, you and I would think, wanting to accept rescue, but provided with a bugle to play if this should threaten.

"It broke my heart to think of that pretty girl living among such people and drifting into the shabbiness of the trade," says the young manhe is also of the tradewho discovers her and loses her when an old man named Pliny carries her off for himself and shuts her up in his shop. The boy cannot forget how she had written her name in the dust of a table top and left it unfinished: "I S A Bhalf a name, written by a living finger in the dust."

The young man is left "with a horror of the trade I had joined." He abhors "the stored up l.u.s.t that seemed to pa.s.s between things and men like Pliny." It is not long before "the fever of the trade had come alive in me: Pliny had got something I wanted." The end is unescapablefor all, that is, who are connected with the trade.

"The Camberwell Beauty" is an extraordinary piece of work. Densely complex and unnervingly beautiful in its evocation of those secret, packed rooms, it seems to s.h.i.+mmer with the gleam of its unreliable treasures. There is the strange device of the buglewhich, blown by Isabel, actually kills desire. All the while the story is filled with longing, it remains savage and seething and cra.s.s and gives off the unhidable smell of handled money.

Page 230 Most extraordinarily of all, it expresses, not the confusion of one human desire with another, not s.e.xuality confused with greed, but rather the culmination of these desires in their fusion.

"How unreal people looked in the sodium light," the defeated boy thinks as he walks in the street at the story's end. Or by the light of their obsessions.

Each story's truth is distilled by Pritchett through a pure concentration of human character. It is the essence of his art. And, of course, in plain fact, and just as in a story, it is inherent in the human being to create his own situation, his own plot. The paradoxes, the stratagems, the escapes, the entanglements, the humors and dreams, are all projections of the individual human being, all by himself alone. In its essence, Pritchett's work, so close to fantasy, is deeply true to life.

Page 231 The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen By Elizabeth Bowen Seventy-Nine Stories to Read Again:

New York Times Book Review 8 February 1981: 3, 22

It is not unusual for a period of neglect to follow upon a good writer's death. Elizabeth Bowen, the Anglo-Irish author of nine distinguished novels, six collections of superb short stories and five other books of criticism, memoirs and other nonfiction, died in 1973. Certainly she will command a perpetuity of readers, many of whom have followed and loved her work for 50 years. 166 But her books have not been easy to come by since her death. For this one feels she would have been sorry; her turn of mind was always toward the young, especially the writers to come, and she would have particularly liked her books to take their chances with them. And in their behalf, it could be asked: What writer now coming after her could fail to be nourished by her work, exhilarated by her example? She wrote with originality, bounty, vigor, style, beauty up to the last. Her old publisher and friend Alfred Knopf does an important service for Elizabeth Bowen's readers everywhere in bringing out this present volume of Collected Stories.167 Angus Wilson provides it with an appreciative introduction, generous with personal feeling, valuable for its knowledge of her life and the changing times in which she wrote. He is well situated to give a critical perspective from which to view her work today.

The appearance of all 79 stories in one volume makes several new pleasures possible. The famous stories we know in their own right are seen here Page 232 in the context of their original book editions. To see anew these bright stars set among their own constellations, to read again "Mysterious Kr" in company with "Summer Night," "The Happy Autumn Fields," ''Ivy Gripped the Steps" and "The Demon Lover" is to experience in its full force that concentration of imaginative power which was hers.

We can gain, too, a truer perception of its nature. Her work was in very close affinity with its time and place, as we know. She recalled, in a preface to her Early Stories when they were republished 25 years later, that her story "Daffodils" "overflowed from uncontainable pleasure in the streets of St. Albans on one March afternoon." The lyric impulse was instinctive with her.

In "Her Table Spread," we're at a dinner party in a remote Irish castle overlooking an estuary on a rainy night; in the estuary is the rare sight of a visiting English destroyer. The heiress Miss Cuffe, 24 but "detained in childhood," is "constantly preoccupied with attempts at gravity, as though holding down her skirts in a high wind." And now the destroyer will possibly land, and the officers, uninvited as they are, might still quite naturally call upon the castle. They are momently expected by Miss Cuffe. There is irrepressible excitement, rocketing hilarity at the dinner party. Candles blaze in the windows, there are wet peonies on the table, through the windows can be seen the racing lanternMiss Cuffe is out there waving signalsand now the piano is playing: the visiting English concert pianistthis was to have been the occasion to allow him to meet the heiresshas been asked for a Viennese waltz. At moments notes can be heard through the gales of sympathetic conversation. A whole welcoming world is being made out of that wet, lonely, amorous Irish night.

They are all asleep at the end, even the bat in the boathouse; while the rain goes on falling on the castle, and below in the estuary the destroyer, still keeping to itself, is steaming its way slowly out to sea.

As it ends the story can be seen to be perfect, and the perfection lies in the tellingthe delicacy, the humor, above all the understanding that has enveloped but never intruded upon it, never once p.r.i.c.ked the lovely, free-floating balloon.

Elizabeth Bowen's awareness of place, of where she was, seemed to approach the seismetic; it was equaled only by her close touch with the pa.s.sage, the pulse, of time. (Not only what o'clock it was: She used to say, "I am the same age as our century," a fact she enjoyed.) There was a clock in every story and novel she ever wrote; those not in running order were there to Page 233 give cause for alarm. Time and place were what she found here. Her characters she invented, in consequence.

The lyric impulse itself, which goes loose in the world, is anywhere and everywhere; any lucky human being may be its instrument. Elizabeth Bowen, however, wasand was from the starta highly conscious artist. Being alive as she was in a world of change affected her pa.s.sionately. The nature and workings of human emotions magnetized her imagination; with all her artist mind she set forth to comprehend, and thus capture, human motivesmen's, women's and children's. Time and place that she was so aware of, sensitive to, conveyed to her: situation. Human consciousness meant urgency: drama. Her art was turned full range upon a subject: human relations.h.i.+ps.

Writing did not take for Elizabeth Bowen the direction or the form of "self-expression." From the first, she wrote with enthrallment in the act of writing itself. The imaginative power to envision a sceneacute perception, instinctive psychological insight, in an intensified formwas her gift. It became the greatest gift of an artist who was profoundly happy to give the rest of her life to fathoming it.

The pa.s.sage of time has deactivated "The Needlecase." There are no longer "fallen women," so designated, whose doom it was to earn their living by sewing dresses for other women in other women's houses, poor souls, taking their meals upstairs from a tray. The story dates, and is only mentioned because it const.i.tutes the exception in the 79. The others don't date and will not; their subjects are major.

"The Disinherited" is one of a number of Bowen stories of the dislocations arising from social and psychological disturbance. Davina, young, rebellious, without money, living off an aunt and cadging money from the baleful chauffeur, leads a life of mortification and uncertainty. "Had she had sphere, s.p.a.ce, ease of mind, she might have been generous, active, and even n.o.ble." She and the young wife of a university professor from the raw new housing development, unlikely friends, team together for an evening, borrowing money from the rude chauffeur, driving through the uncertain autumn night under the strain of lost maps, changed plans, undelivered messages, toward a supposed party. Stood up at the first rendezvous, the two women eventually blunder into the right but unfamiliar house, which is not prepared for their coming: Lying on the settee at an angle to the fire, "an enormous, congested old lady slept with her feet apart, letting out stertorous breaths. Her wool Page 234 coatee was pinned over the heaving ledge of her bust with a paste brooch in the form of a sailing-s.h.i.+p, and at each breath this winked out a knowing ray. Her hands, chapped and knouty, lay in the trough of her lap. Half under her skirts a black pair of kitchen bellows lay on the marble fire-kerb. There was not much more furniture in the room.

"'That is Mrs. Bennington, who takes care of me. She's so nice,'" says Oliver, their host.

This story of a long and misspent evening, in which everything is at cross purposes, miscarries, is misdirected, and every intention seems as lost to the world and as in the way as old Mrs. Bennington, is a turning kaleidoscope of s.h.i.+fting, fragmented lives. The startling moment when Prothero, the chauffeur, comes into view seated before the table in his quarters and writing a letter gives us the interlocking piece. Nothing so far has come up in the story as true, as straightforward and brutally lined out, as plain and simple and never to be changed or subject to change, as Prothero's letter addressed to a woman named Anita, which is the full account of how and why he murdered her. At the end of his long day he writes the letter and then burns it in the stove; he writes it every night and burns it. "So his nights succeeded each other." What interlocks the fragments is the cause of their beingit is the bursting power of despair.

Prothero's letter is an example of the extraordinary tour de force of which Elizabeth Bowen was capable. Her imaginative power to envision a scene is almost hallucinatory here; it makes one feel that she might have put herself within the spell of its compulsion. I think it is a fact that she knew out of her experience how close great concentration could come to the hallucinatory state. That a story has a life of its own she would be the first to grant.

How closely she brings "The Disinherited" home to us today! She published it first in 1934.

Her sensuous wisdom was sure and firm; she knew to its last reverberation what she saw, heard, touched, knew what the world wore in its flesh and the clothing it would put on, how near the world came, how close it stood: in every dramatic scene it is beside us at every moment. We see again how pervasive this knowledge was through her stories.

And firmly at home in the world, Elizabeth Bowen was the better prepared to appreciate that it had an edge. For her, terra firma implies the edge of a cliff; suspense arises from the borderlines of experience and can be traced along that nerve. Her supernatural stories gave her further ways to explore Page 235 experience to its excruciating limits, through daydream, fantasy, hallucination, obsessionand enabled her to write as she did about World War II.

In the unsurpa.s.sable "Mysterious Kr," her most extraordinary story of those she wrote out of her life in wartime London, the exalted, white, silent, deserted other city of Kr occupies the same territory as bombed-out London through the agency of the fall moon at its extreme intensity. In "The Happy Autumn Fields" a direct hit in an air raid has opened a woman's house and displaced the present as she lies on her bed; it lets in instead a walking party of her family of 50 years ago on a momentous day in bright fall in a different country; young twin sisters, her ancestors, cement their lives together with a pledge of love promised to be undying. The bomb victim transfers her life.

Of all the stories, it is "Summer Night" that I return to. Not only Emma, bidding her husband good night, driving stockingless through the Irish evening to an a.s.signation with her lover; not only her little daughter Vivie at home, jumping frenzied up and down on her bed like a savage with snakes chalked all over her; but all the characters in "Summer Night" might be in nothing but their skins, exposed to the night.

Aunt Fran, wrapping the savage in an eiderdown, instructs her to kneel and say her prayers. Then in her own room, "the room of a person tolerated," the woman makes her outcry at last: "It's never me, never me, never me! . . . I'm never told, never told, never told. I get the one answer, 'nothing.'" "There are no more children: the children are born knowing,'' thinks the despairing woman. "And to wrap the burning child up did not put out the fire. You cannot look at the sky without seeing the shadow, the men destroying each other. What is the matter tonightis there a battle? This is a threatened night." (And war is indeed raging, of course, across the water.) Emma arrives at her lover Robinson's house; she must waithe has callers; they see her car. There is Justin, the tormented abstainer from life, starved for talk, who will find no other way out of his urgency than by writing a letter after he gets home to tell Robinson, who is never likely to read it, "The extremity to which we are each driven must be the warrant for what we do and say." (It had been a mistake, of course, to ask him before leaving that unpremeditated question, "What is love like?") Robinson is a solid, ordinary, coa.r.s.e-grained, incurious man. Justin's sister Queenie knows this. Her deafness is not a barrier to her awareness of what goes on between people in a room. The night has carried her back to her girlhood, to the Page 236 chaste kiss of her one and only love. The serene, unhearing, aging lady at the story's end is drifting to sleep on her pillow: "This was the night she knew she would find again."

This unforgettable story, the most remarkable of a group of longer ones, is an example of the sheer force of the Bowen imagination. What other writer could have propelled the whole of "Summer Night" from its rus.h.i.+ng headlong start to its softly subsiding conclusion, like a parachute let down to earth gently folding in its petals? The turmoil of all these pa.s.sionate drives, private energies that in their own directions touch yet never can merge or become one together, is yet all magical; their pa.s.sions become part of the night sky and part of the world in wartime.

All carries its momentum; this is the truth that seems to emerge. Time is pa.s.sing. Places are changing. This is what speed is. There is suspense everywhere, all the time: we are living in its element, racing to keep up with being alive. And in the end there is no rest or help for anything but what lies in the acceptance of love.

That the collection richly reconfirms the extraordinary contribution Elizabeth Bowen has made to English letters alleviates the pain one feels at their neglect since her death. Their vitality is their triumph. Read them again. You may even, like me, discover that there is one you have never read before, though I thought I knew her work. "A Day in the Dark," her last story, is the last one in the book. It is a growing girl's story of the accidental way in which one learns the name of the deepening feeling that one has come to live with. An old lady tauntingly remarks to her, "Oh, I'm sure you're a great companion to him." What she has felt for her uncle is love. "There was not a danger till she spoke." Like many another of these stories, it is its own kind of masterpiece.

Page 237 The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature Edited by Humphrey Carpenter and Mari Prichard Innocence, Sin and J. D. Salinger:

New York Times Book Review 19 August 1984: 3, 17

Humphrey Carpenter, a writer, broadcaster and biographer (of Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and others) and Mari Prichard, a writer and teacher, took over The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature after its original editors, Peter and Iona Opie, had begun preparation on it. The Opies (Mr. Opie died in 1982) were of course the preternatural gatherers: tirelessly over 30 years they searched out and brought or subdued into print every existing sc.r.a.p of song and game and bit and tag of folklore that childhood offered. Now they were gathering its literature and were already "advanced" in the new work. The editors have dedicated the book to the memory of Peter Opie. 168 So it is not surprising whose spirit presides over it rather than that of Sir Paul Harvey, the editor of The Oxford Companion to English Literature. In that Companion, Mr. Carpenter and Miss Prichard say, "inclusion of a particular book or author is in itself an indication of merit. . . . This method was one we found did not serve us. The popular and the cla.s.sic are especially hard to keep separate in the field of children's literature, and a book might often rate more s.p.a.ce as a phenomenon than it could for literary merit."

By the Opies' day, the editors say, "Children's books became the focus of countless courses, conferences, centers of study, and works of scholars.h.i.+p. It might be said that the subject reached maturity." (Could it also be said that Page 238 the heart of a reader sinks?) The Companion has been carried out as the Opies probably themselves designed it: "a reference book dealing equally with both English and American children's books and authors, and including articles on traditional materials, ill.u.s.trators, characters from cartoons, films, radio and television, and the recurrent subjects of children's readingmatter." The editors have expanded this to include "very brief summaries of the state of children's literature in all languages, countries, or continents for which we could find reliable information readily available. And while specifically educational writing and publis.h.i.+ng was outside our brief, we decided to deal with early examples of the main categories of school-book, and with some of the educational ideas that affected the juvenile literature of their time." This is exactly what happened.

The editors go on to say that "since the length of entries for particular works could not do the work of criticism for us, we have often had to be more explicit in our judgments, and have made brief comments on what seem to us the qualities or failings of many of the authors and books included."

Yet the length of the entries, which greatly varies, does in effect stand for an estimation, a comparison, when for instance Enid Blyton, of the Noddy books ("the most commercially successful British children's author of the 20th cent.") gets 178 lines; Walter de la Mare gets 60 ("His writing . . . defies cla.s.sification"). As for their judgments, the editors tell us, they have benefited from the advice sought from librarians, educationalists, historians of children's literature, publishers and booksellers. The resulting focus is sharpest, over all, on "reputation." "Reputation'' tells us what is "popular." These editorial evaluations can hardly escape merging into those of the publis.h.i.+ng industry. The Enid Blyton entry reports, as many entries do, explicitly on the author's income, which "by the late 1950s was reportedly over 100,000 per annum." "Her output . . . by the late 1940s totalled more than 30 books a year, and was keeping a whole host of London publishers busy." It continues: "What all agree on, both friends and detractors, is that she had outstanding business ac.u.men and knew how to make the very most out of what talent she had." In contrast, take Andrew Lang, whose entry concludes: "For all his huge output and great success, Lang never acc.u.mulated any wealth, and up to the end he wrote in order to make a living." (So, children, which would you rather be?) Certainly the debt owed by literature to publis.h.i.+ng is boundless and always will be. Beginning with John Newbery, London bookseller, "ac- Page 239 knowledged to be the first British publisher of children's books 'to make a permanent and profitable market for them,'" such mengenerally from publis.h.i.+ng families that often lasted for generationshave given courage, daring and sometimes selfless n.o.bility to their calling. But this doesn't mean that the history of writing books and the history of publis.h.i.+ng and selling them can be told as the same story. If it can, it had better be called the Companion to the Publis.h.i.+ng of Children's Literature.

The desolation of those earliest books designed for children! There were always dolorous schoolbooks. Henry VIII's royal proclamation that Lily's Latin grammar, and no other, should be taught in schools "remained in effect for two centuries." In the 17th century, Latin was still being taught as a spoken language, to be used in conversation in cla.s.s; a child learned how to say, in Latin, that he desired to be taught it, even if it meant he had to be flogged. Noah Webster's American Spelling Book carried a frontispiece of Noah Webster looking so frightful that it was known as the Porcupine Edition. But how much kinder were the schoolbook's lessons than those taught by Mrs. Sherwood in The Fairchild Family.

When the Fairchild children quarreled, "their father 'whipped their hands' with a rod, and 'made them stand in a corner of the room, without their breakfasts.' That evening he takes them to a gibbet where there hangs the body of a man who killed his brother in a quarrel: 'the body had not yet fallen to pieces, although it had hung there some years . . . The face of the corpse was so shocking that the children could not look upon it.'" The Companion quotes the Dictionary of National Biography: "'Most children of the English middle-cla.s.s born in the first quarter of the 19th century may be said to have been brought up on The Fairchild Family." Mr. and Mrs. Fairchild "take every opportunity presented by domestic life to draw religious lessons for the children, who are taught that since the sin of Adam and Eve 'all their children, who have been born in their likeness, are utterly and entirely sinful: so that of ourselves we cannot do a good thing, or think a good thought. . . . There is no such thing as being saved, except by the Lord Jesus Christ, through his death: nothing you can do yourselves can save you.'"

Of course the Companion is a reference book, with listings in alphabetical order, but you realize as you browse that it's putting together in your head, and aligning it, the whole history of children's literature. You see clearly how the crus.h.i.+ng darkness of the Fairchild books and their kind was disrupted by the blaze of newness that came with Alice's Adventures in Won- Page 240 derland. 169 In Alice, Lewis Carroll "revolutionized children's literature with its fantastic plot and brilliant use of nonsense. Characters . . . had never before been created for the amus.e.m.e.nt of children, without any moral purpose whatsoever," and the editors quote the children's book historian Harvey-Darton's words: "It was the coming to the surface, powerfully and permanently, the first un-apologetic appearance in print, for readers who sorely needed it, of liberty of thought in children's books."

Certainly this tide of moral tales rose up in opposition too to the fairy tale. The imagination had to be fought the same as sin. Or maybe it was sin. Children got their hands for the first time on the fairy tale by way of the sensational chapbooks. Tom Thumbe, His Life and Death crept in among The Wandering Jew, Mother s.h.i.+pton, Mother Bunch's Closet Newly Broke Open, and The Life of John Knoxeach about 20 lines long. But the Brothers Grimm, Hans Andersen and the wonderful undertakings of Andrew Lang reached them at last.

Fairy tales were of course oral creations; they were a long time coming into print at all. (The very earliest Cinderella of all was Chinesein a ninth-century book of folk tales.) What may or may not be surprising is that fairy tales were not designed for children. The Companion tells what high fas.h.i.+on they were in 17th-century France. Madame de Sevigne wrote of a visitor's sharing with her salon "the sort of story that was now entertaining the ladies of Versailles: it involved a green isle, a most beautiful princess with fairies breathing continually upon her, a prince of delights, and a journey in a crystal globe. The tale took a full hour to tell."

Fairy tales are the oldest of sources for stories, and the search for sources obviously means nearly everything to the editors in preparing this reference book. They make the same search for the sources of fiction and poetry. Where did the author get his idea?or more often the word is "incentive." The most plausible answer to them is a previously existing book by another author. It is one thing for editors to say, as they do correctly as far as it goes, that Lewis Carroll parodies Isaac Watts's songs in Alice. But they also suggest this: "Blake undoubtedly knew the poetry of Isaac Watts, and his 'Songs of Innocence' may possibly have been a consequence of Watts's suggestion that 'some happy and condescending genius' should one day produce a great work on the model of his own Divine Songs."

The source of fact is helpful as a source, but is sometimes insufficient. Was there a real King Arthur? I liked the editors doing their best for King Arthur: "The fact that a number of people born in Celtic . . . areas of the Page 241 British Isles in the late 6th and early 7th cents. were named Arthur, a name not previously recorded in Britain, suggests that some national figure called Arthur existed at that time, or shortly before." And there's a consolation, if not: "Arthur was still a figure of some importance in Tudor times; Henry VII called his first son Arthur, so that if this prince had not died in 1502, there would have been a real King Arthur."

(There can also be an incentive for not writing. Why didn't Milton go on with the Arthuriad he contemplated? Because "he abandoned this plan in favor of Paradise Lost.") The horrors of the fiction written about the youth of today are the fault of J. D. Salinger; he is blamed in full for starting the "teen-age novel," which is their category for The Catcher in the Rye. 170 This category is, in their view, "a modern phenomenon. Until the middle of the 20th cent. children who grew out of juvenile books were expected to read popular cla.s.sics, such as the works of d.i.c.kens and Scott; before graduating to more demanding adult novels." All in one, they blame Salinger and condescend to d.i.c.kensa condescension they repeat elsewhere.

Humorists, I believe, receive more put-downs than other authors. E. B. White's Stuart Little is called "brilliant in its way" but "too eccentric for the doyenne of American children's librarians, Anne Carroll Moore, who tried to persuade White not to publish it. (She also disliked Charlotte's Web.)" The doyenne's effort might have been intimidating to another librarian, but fortunately for the life of the book, Mr. White is a writer. (And so is Charlotte.)171 Edward Lear gets a demerit for his limericks because he didn't really try: "For the most part he did not attempt to produce a surprising or comic rhyme in the last line, but merely repeated the last word of the first line."172 What is original is perhaps the real suspect. Source unknown.

The handsome volume is copiously supplied with 137 ill.u.s.trations well selected from the wide range of books and publications. The cover bears an Edmund Dulac watercolor ill.u.s.tration from Cinderella, in color. Inside you find work from Bewick to Sendak. And artists of course are written up in the text as well as the authors.

Lear, who was both, is given disappointing treatment on both counts. Writing of The Owl and the p.u.s.s.y-Cat, the editors mention only its 20th-century ill.u.s.trations; his own, the original ones, are ignored. Most importantly, Lear's work is all one, verse and drawings the two halves of the same creation. The drawings of Lear's described elsewhere in the book are called Page 242 "distortions." Of John Tenniel there's a long account, but it takes on the personal terms that simply suggest the editors don't like him: He was blind in one eye, he married but there were no children and his wife died two years later; he would not use live models or draw from nature; and "the excellence of his published drawings owes much to the wood engravers who interpreted them." Randolph Caldecott too is given generous s.p.a.ce; much of it has to do with the money involved in publis.h.i.+ng. For ill.u.s.trating a certain trio of books, "Caldecott received a royalty of one penny per copy, which was very high considering that the books sold at only one s.h.i.+lling." A suggestion of what the editors would like to be able to tell their readers about artist's work may lie in what they say about the ill.u.s.trations of Outside Over There: ''The book is Sendak's eeriest and most disturbing work; he offers no explanation of its significance."

But the pictures are here in the book, ample in size and well reproduced. Without any need of editorial help, they speak for themselves.

Columns and columns and columns have been devoted to chapbooks, tracts, primers, catechisms, Sunday School stories, boys' stories, girls' stories, pony stories, doll stories, Nonconformist poems, moral tales, cautionary tales, courtesy books, books of instruction, manuals in trades. There are travelogue story books: Three Va.s.sar Girls in England came from us as a t.i.t for tat to Mrs. Trollope. But not only these, not only books. Literature covers television and radio, comic strips, Punch and Judy shows, pantomimes, puzzles. All that can be catalogued is here. At what point can the reader ask the Companion. is this category really necessary? Is "full-time hack writer" necessary? Or Blue Peter, a twice-weekly television magazine program intended for children between five and 12 years old, broadcast from the BBC since 1958?

The extravagant attention the editors pay Walt Disney and his employment of children's tales and stories is perhaps the prime example of their position on the importance of what is "phenomenal." He is given s.p.a.ce for his own statement: "Be commercial. What is art, anyway? It's what people like. So give them what they like. There's nothing wrong with being commercial."

But there's something better, to which children's literature has given itself naturallyworks of art, of imagination and taste that sprang from and were nourished by fairy and folk tales, myths, Mother Goose. There are operas and ballets performed on stage, television and filmThe Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, The Firebird, Alice in Wonderland.

Page 243 Like every worthwhile reference book, the Companion provides a lovely grab bag of small treasures: The most notable feature of E. Nesbit's The Children's Shakespeare was that the ill.u.s.trations showed all the characters as children, excepting King Lear.

When The Babes in the Wood was made a pantomime, Robin Hood and his Men came in at the end and rescued the children from death.

When Chatterbox magazine appeared as a protest to the penny dreadfuls, J. M. Barrie, an early subscriber, went out into a field, dug a hole, and buried all of his h.o.a.rd of penny dreadfuls.

"Among those dressed in Fauntleroy outfits in Britain were the infant Compton Mackenzie and A. A. Milne. . . . On the stage the part of Cedric was usually played by a girl, though a New England production in the early 1900s featured the ten-year-old Buster Keaton in the t.i.tle role."

Clearly, no expense, no drudgery of research and selection and compiling, were spared in the preparation of this volume. And nowto whom will it be a companion? The librarians, the collectors, the rare book dealers, the thesis writersyes, all of these from now on. But hardly for the children. It is a reference book, but if a book concerns children, it should be theirs to consult. One hoped for a book they could read and live with that would nourish their love for reading. 173 Perhaps it's my failure to recognize it in the Companion, but I felt the absence of some central love of literature that would have warmed the whole.

Page 245 Appendix A

Books Reviewed by Eudora Welty:

Alphabetical by Author

Amorim, Enrique. Trans. Richard L. O'Connell and James Graham Lujn. The Horse and His Shadow. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1943.

Babbitt, Natalie. Knee-Knock Rise. Illus. by the author. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970.

Baker, Dorothy. Our Gifted Son. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948.

Biddle, George. Artist at War. New York: Viking Press, 1944.

Bowen, Elizabeth. The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981.

. Pictures and Conversations. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1975.

Brock, Betty. No Flying in the House. Illus. Wallace Tripp. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle. Short Novels of Colette. New York: Dial Press, 1951.

Collis, Maurice. The Land of the Great Image. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943.

Carter, Margery Allingham. The Galantrys. Boston: Little, Brown, 1943.

Cartier-Bresson, Henri. About Russia. New York: Viking Press, 1974.

Crane, Aimee. G. I. Sketch Book. New York: Penguin Books, 1944.

Derleth, August, ed. Sleep No More. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1944.

Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. New York: Harper's Magazine Press/Harper & Row, 1974.

Dinesen, Isak. Last Tales. New York: Random House, 1957.