Give me Eeyore, or Give Me Proust

Chatting to a friend the other day, I commented that I occasionally get into trouble for putting milk in espresso coffee. Apparently you’re not meant to do that. My friend fiercely defended my right to put milk, or indeed anything else that took my fancy, into anything I wished to drink. I was grateful for her support. As it happens I drink espresso not only because the espresso maker I have is one of those that you place directly on the hob and therefore guarantees piping hot coffee, something which cafetiéres and percolators cannot, but also that said espresso maker looks ever so slightly like a dalek.

I was reminded of all the above while perusing the Guardian on-line and yet again coming across someone getting remarkably tetchy about adults reading Harry Potter. This is a bit of a King Charles’ Head with CP Scott’s mob*. They have that curious irritation bordering on real anger about the Harry Potter books which I genuinely do not understand. Some of it seems to be down to snobbery, some of it down to jealousy and a lot down to the fact that adults read them too. And this seems to be the real irritant. But what, pray, is so appallingly wrong with adults reading children’s books? Especially that some extremely fun and interesting writing is currently coming from that corner.

*And with me as a quick glance shows I have written about three blogs on this subject over the last six months

The answer, at least for some people, seems to be a sense of propriety. Adults should not read books intended for some other group. It makes a mockery of the whole terribly serious business of being a reader. After all, how can you hold your head up at the Hay on Wye Literary Festival when your bibliophilic superiority is undermined by someone reading The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins (which scores doubly badly as it is not only a YA** book but science fiction as well but which remains one the very few literary responses to the banking crisis that I have come across).

Well the hell with them. I will continue to put milk in my espresso and read what I damn well want to read. It’s just such a terrible shame that I have to assert my right to do so.

**Young Adult as teenagers and children who dislike being called children are now referred to by the publishing industry. As I now have discovered, calling a teenager an old child does not go down well.

Play nicely Martin

There must, as they say, be something in the water. First we have two football bods being rude about female match officials, then Jeremy Clarkson and his droogs mocking Mexicans and now Martin ‘son of Kingsley’ Amis has had a go at children’s authors. You may have missed the last. It was in a TV interview with Sebastian ‘literary writer’ Faulks in the course of which Amis fils stated that he would require to be ‘brain-damaged’ before he could write a book for children.

What is it about children’s books that so irritate Britain’s intelligentsia? I assume it has something to do with Harry Potter being so successful but I don’t remember Roald Dahl getting it in the neck in this way. He would be criticised for being too dark or otherwise unsuitable, but I cannot recall anyone saying that he must have suffered some kind of mental collapse between writing all those ‘tales of the much as we expected’ (as Peter Cook called them) and James & The Giant Peach.

As always when one of these attacks on children’s books pops up, I am reminded of Philip Pullman, a writer who, as a friend once said about Derek Jarman’s films, I don’t really like but I’m very glad he’s there. His reply to someone’s query as to when he was going to start writing grown-up books was to comment that an equivalent was to ask a paediatrician when they were going to start doing grown-up medicine. He also once smugly noted that when the Dark Materials trilogy, which deals with the existence of God and the role of religion amongst other things, was top of the children’s best-selling charts, the best-selling adult’s novel was Does My Bum Look Big In This?.

Which is nice.

Are You Sitting Quietly?

Another Harry Potter film, another flurry of smug people complaining about adults reading children’s books. I am grateful to the anonymous poster on the Guardian website who provided this great quote from C S Lewis:

"Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."

As it happens, I’m not a massive fan of Lewis. Enjoyed The Lion, The Witch & the Wardrobe as a child but could never really get into the rest of the Narnia books. I preferred the Moomins as it happened. I still read children’s books as well as these new YA (Young Adult) novels that we never had when I was a teenager and which seem to be the sole refuge of serious political satire in fiction at the moment.

As I understand it, children’s literature was invented by, of all people, 17^th Century puritans, especially one James Janeway who published in 1671 a book that is a touch startling to our sensibilities as its title reveals:

A Token for Children, being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children

It gets worse. In the preface Janeway exhorts his now presumably already nervous young readers thus:

‘If you love your parents, if you love your souls, if you would escape hellfire, and if you would go to Heaven when you die, do you go and do as these good children.’

The book remained in print right up to the 19^th century.

Mind you, the paedocidal Janeway has to bow to Abraham Chear who in his 1670 book, A Looking-Glass for Children writes this verse in the voice of a young girl looking in a mirror:

What a pity such a pretty maid

As I should go to Hell!

Meanwhile, over in colonial America, the Tracey Beaker du jour was The New England Primer, a sort of children’s ABC and snuff book combined which gives us such cheerful rhymes as:

The Cat doth play

And after slay.

And

Xerxes the Great did die,

And so must you and I.

It does rather put Enid Blyton into context.

I am empiricist Anglophone, hear me roar

In the current issue of the London Review of Books there is a crit of a book about the French cinema magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. It begins thus:

In an essay on Avatar in the March issue of the French film journal Cahiers du cinéma, Slavoj Zizek wrote that, despite its superficial espousal of revolutionary action (by blue-skinned aliens rising up against earthling exploitation), the film was in fact entirely reactionary. In an interview in the following issue of Cahiers, Zizek cheerfully admitted that he had written his piece without actually seeing Avatar. Empiricist Anglophone critics were horrified, no doubt, but Zizek’s article persuasively made its point nonetheless.

I was a tad taken aback. The writer of the crit, one Jonathan Romney, rather deftly seems to be saying that expecting important and busy critics to actually see the film they’re criticising is not only unreasonable but downright parochial. Well, in the spirit of those activist groups in the ‘70s I am going to reclaim the negative vernacular and say loud and proud that I am an empiricist Anglophone critic and proud of it.

To make it worse, the critic in question not only is commenting on a film he has not seen, he is challenging the whole basis of it. He cares not if the makers say that it is about such and such, he has not seen it and so knows that it is not. And critics wonder why they are disliked in some circles.

For the record I have not seen Avatar, nor do I intend to as I disliked the director’s previous film, Titanic, so much. This means that my contribution to any critical discussion on it is limited to why I won’t see it and that seems fair enough. But then I’m an empiricist Anglophone and that’s what we’re like. Get used to it.

This thinking is not, I’m sorry to say, restricted to psychic critics like young master Zizek. It’s very common in the Anglophone literarti as well. In my bookselling days, many were the times that I was informed in a lordly manner that the Harry Potter books were terribly written or that The Da Vinci Code was awful by people who had read none of them. Any attempts at discussion would be waved away with a dismissive laugh. The accuracy of their opinions was, of course, unimportant. The point here was to ensure that everyone knew that they had impeccable taste and so had no need to read such vulgar and, let us be honest, plebeian books and would no more dream of doing so than they would dream of holidaying in Ibiza.

As it happens, I have read the Harry Potter books and The Da Vinci Code and, in my empiricist Anglophonic way, I believe the former to be flatly written, rather than badly written, and the later volumes scream out for heavy editing, while the latter is like a late-night kebab after a night clubbing in a number of surprising ways.