It might be quiet around here for a while... I'm flying to Albania tomorrow, as a nanny. Perhaps I will have bookish things to post, perhaps I will not. My email is the same, if you miss me too terribly. Otherwise, have a wonderful summer, and watch for me by moonlight.

March Reading Log

God's Missionary, by Amy Carmichael
Keep a Quiet Heart, by Elisabeth Elliot
Strong Poison, by Dorothy Sayers
We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson
The 21 Balloons, by William Pene du Bois

my marble orchard

Isn't up, and isn't down...
isn't really anywhere... it's somewhere else instead

I'm reading what people on NPR have to say about Stephenie Meyer's writing ability (no, such copy is not dead, not as long as people are picking up the books and talking about them), and one commenter stops me with a shot in the heart:

It does not matter whether I can write as well (or with as much success) as Stephenie Meyer or not. If I go to a restaurant and am served terrible food, do I not have a right to complain, however well or poorly I myself can cook?

I foresee a thoughtful post on that theme in my future.

Primers of the Imagination

Two writers on a bench, scribbling what they see. Same park, same sky, same joggers and nannies and dogs. If you leaned over their shoulders and read their words, however, no two pages could be less alike.

It’s impossible to dissect the infinite variables of education, environment and personality that mold an author’s content, voice and style. There isn’t a formula for raising an Austen or a Tolkien. We are all anomalies, and yet, there is nothing new under the sun. Every author stands on the shoulders of some giant.

As a children’s librarian, I’m fascinated with a piece of the puzzle that is often neglected—the fiction that influenced an author’s childhood. Perhaps we cannot realize just how sovereign these stories are until we examine their offspring: the stories their readers create.

“My life changed,” says Printz award-winning author Melina Marchetta, “from the moment Anne hit Gilbert Blythe over the head with a slate and I think I’ve been writing that scene metaphorically ever since (think Francesca Spinelli and Will Trombal’s exchange about Trotsky/Tolstoy in Saving Francesca).”

Children’s author Edward Eager’s official biography reads, “In each of his books he carefully acknowledges his indebtedness to E. Nesbit, whom he considered the best children’s writer of all time—“so that any child who likes my books and doesn’t know hers may be led back to the master of us all.”

This tradition is continued by National Book Award-winning author Jeanne Birdsall: “When I was 10 or so, I learned that Edward Eager wrote his wonderful set of books partly in tribute to the great E. Nesbit. Since I loved these authors, I vowed that, when I grew up, I would try to write books that would be tributes to both of them.”

In Mervyn Nicholson’s intriguing essay, “C. S. Lewis and the Scholarship of Imagination in E. Nesbit and Rider Haggard,” he examines the “way writers absorb, transmute, and recreate earlier writing. This kind of scholarship … is a theory which is simultaneously a practice, like the ability to improvise in music. In essence, this scholarship of the imagination is a matter of studying, with sensitivity and thoroughness, how other writers have handled the elements of story in the past as objects of imagination rather than as "texts," with an eye to using them oneself. Hence the scholarship of imagination is intrinsically a matter of reading…”

This scholarship was recently evidenced in headlines such as, “Madeleine L'Engle returns to Newbery medal, thanks to A Wrinkle in Time,” referencing 2009’s most distinguished children’s book, When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead, a book which, the Guardian article continues, “tells the story of sixth-grade New Yorker Miranda, caught up in reading L'Engle's time-and-space-travelling tale, who begins to receive notes that she believes are from the future and which could help prevent a tragic death.” When You Reach Me would certainly not be the same novel without its author having loved L’Engle as a child.

Nicholson’s essay, however, focuses on the work of C.S. Lewis, arguing that “this process of absorbing/transmuting [is] mostly unconscious, and it proceeds with all writers of importance; it is not a matter of "borrowing" (still less copying or plagiarizing) but of recreating.”

He draws attention to the books Lewis read as a child, “the writers who deposited the first layer of imaginative materials in Lewis' psyche. Some of these Lewis speaks of, and some he does not; some are major figures, some are marginal.... This group includes H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker, Rider Haggard, and E. Nesbit, among others (including L. Frank Baum, the creator of the Oz books). Again, these writers are either not Christian at all or are not concerned with Christian apologetics; they belong rather to the efflorescence of romance around the turn of the century—around the time Lewis was born and the period of his childhood and youth—and they provided, in effect, a primer of the imagination. They gave him a vocabulary from which he would always draw, for both materials and inspiration. Again, Lewis' extensive use of these materials was not "plagiarism": rather, it is typical of the way writers build on and create out of the work of earlier writers. Hence his use of them illustrates the creative process itself.”

This process, concludes Nicholson, "accounts in part for the resonance and magic of his scenes: they were themselves the product of the magic of creation--indeed they derive from a stream of imagination which stretches "beneath" Lewis' work into the writers who inspired him when he was as young and receptive as the eager Caspian..."

Whether or not the influence is conscious, adults would not be the humans they are without their childhood experiences. In a similar way, writers could not tell the tales they do without the childhood stories that baptized their imaginations.

on the death of London (right side first)

I read We Have Always Lived in the Castle this week.

!

Amazing tone.

My diagnosis: Jane Eyre meets Tamsin meets The Murder of Roger Ackroyd meets Til We Have Faces. Adore the mood she creates, the voice, the gentle teasing out of plot. Morbid, but sputtering-worthy strong.

The 21 Balloons

Inspired by the fantastic reviews at The Bookie Woogie (seriously, go there), my siblings and I decided to transcript a discussion of a book we recently read together.

Noel We are reviewing The 21 Balloons, by William Pène du Bois. Did you guys like this book?

All Yeah!

Noel What did you like about it?

Caleb (11) I liked the gold mines—

Noel The gold mines?

Caleb The diamond mines, and I liked the balloon merry-go-round

Adeline (8) I liked how the volcano went off, and they had a platform with 20 balloons on it, and with his balloon, it made 21, and that’s why they call it 21 Balloons.

Henry (5) I like the part when Mr. F was showing Professor Sherman the bedrooms and some tricks—

Noel What was special about the houses on Krakatoa?

Henry Their homes?

Noel Mmmhmm.

Adeline I know!

Henry There was a special day at each restaurant—

Noel The houses were restaurants?

Henry Yeah.

Caleb I remember that they had diamond foundations for their houses.

Noel Why did they need those?

Henry I, well, each day they had a special restaurant to go to.

Noel And what was different about the restaurants?

Caleb They are from all different countries.

Henry They’re all different letters of the alphabet.

Adeline All the way to “T.”

Noel So, each of the families had a different last name that was a different letter of the alphabet—

Caleb Like Mr. F, his wife, and F1 and F2.

Noel What kind of food did they serve?

Caleb French

Henry Yeah, because their names were F.

Noel So, Professor Sherman goes on a journey in his balloon, and where does his balloon come down?

Caleb Krakatoa. It’s a small island out in the Pacific Ocean.

Noel Who lived there?

Adeline Twenty families.

Caleb Each family had four members in it, that means there were eighty one people after Professor Sherman landed. And, in the second year that they were there, they had this really bad earthquake, and some of their houses fell down, and they had to sleep in the mines.

Noel So the whole world knew about these people living on the island?

All No!

Henry Because it was—

Caleb A secret.

Henry A secret.

Noel Why?

Caleb Because of the mines.

Noel What were in the mines?

Caleb Diamonds! Millions and trillions, some were the size of baseballs—

Adeline He had a verrry long talk.

Noel Professor Sherman gave a very long talk?

Caleb He gave a talk at the San Francisco Explorers Society, and that was the only place where he would reveal the secrets of his unknown past.

(pause)

Caleb Squirrel.

(pause)

Noel Anything else you’d like to say?

Caleb Um, I still can’t figure out how he went to the bathroom on his balloon.

Henry I know how.

Adleline I liked his bed on the balloon, how it was filled up with gas and every time he didn’t need it, it would float up to the ceiling and it wouldn’t be in his way.

Henry I remember that Professor Sherman, he took a break from his talk.

Caleb An intermission.

Noel Because he told the entire story, didn’t he, the book is made up of the story he told to the Explorer Society.

Adeline I like the pictures in the book.

Noel They show the inventions of the people on Krakatoa.

Caleb I liked F1 and F2’s beds, how they would go out of the ceiling through sky lights right onto the roof. And they would never use blankets because they were just a few miles from the equator.

Henry A few? Well, maybe an hour from it.

Adeline Mr. F had a boy and a girl.

Caleb Every family had a boy and a girl. They had to, to ensure the further inhabitance of Krakatoa.

Noel All right, thank you.

Caleb And now we’re off.

Henry Let’s listen to it.

Imagination (and trading music for words)

Sometimes (all the time) my imagination is cracked and dry compared to (yes I know comparisons are odorous but) the open eyes, the Argus eyes, of every one around me.

Why, asks my five-year brother, why, during the day, are the planets so far away, and at night they're close?

Forsaking earbud music for Lent: to obey, my Protestant child, says my mother, to obey is better than sacrifice. But to forsake is to watch days disappear, beads slipping off a string, to turn your face toward the verity we usually shut out with sound and fury: man is mortal. Perhaps once in a while, obedience and sacrifice?

Lectures in the absence of music, then. Words, then. Not to shut out, but to scrape and chafe the matted lashes on my Argus arms. Peter Kreeft, GK Chesterton.