Is there any gentler set of children’s book characters than A A Milne’s Winnie the Pooh and the other inhabitants of Hundred Acre Wood? Now a hundred years old, they are still ubiquitous and loved today, and justifiably so. Alan Alexander Milne (1882–1956) was primarily a playwright before he wrote his children’s books and was a modestly successful one at that, but it is unsurprising that his plays have been somewhat overshadowed by his later success in children’s literature. The story of his characters’ inception is quite well-known but interesting nonetheless, so if you’re comfortable, I’ll begin…
Milne was of course the father of Christopher Robin Milne, upon whom the character Christopher Robin is based, and he enjoyed writing poetry inspired by his son. One day they visited London Zoo and out of all the animals there, young Christopher was particularly taken by the tame and amiable Canadian black bear Winnipeg, or Winnie for short. Christopher had a stuffed bear, originally named Edward, like a million other stuffed bears, but now he renamed him Winnie. A future star was born. The “Pooh” part came later from a nickname the very young Christopher had adopted for a local swan.
Not yet known as Pooh, the character made his first appearance in a poem, Teddy Bear, published in Punch magazine in February 1924 and republished the same year in Milne’s book of poetry When We Were Very Young. Illustrated by E H Shepard (1879–1976) we can see the recognisable character for the first time.
When We Were Very Young, First Edition
Winnie-the-Pooh was published in 1926, followed by The House at Pooh Corner in 1928. A second collection of nursery rhymes, Now We Are Six, was published in 1927. These three books were also illustrated by E H Shepard, who was of course a hugely important part of the Pooh story. Christopher Robin, meanwhile, seems to have had quite the knack for naming toy animals: his collection also included the perfectly-named Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, Roo and Tigger. Indeed, it was only Owl and Rabbit that A A Milne himself contributed to the final grouping, though of course it was his genius to imbue all the animals with their unique characters.
The fictional Hundred Acre Wood of the Pooh stories derives from Five Hundred Acre Wood in Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, where Milne went on walks with his son. Shepard drew on these landscapes to the point that the grown-up Christopher Robin would comment: “Pooh’s Forest and Ashdown Forest are identical”. You can visit the forest today, and look out for such spots as the Heffalump Trap, Eeyore’s Sad and Gloomy Place, and the wooden Pooh Bridge where Pooh and Piglet invented Poohsticks.
The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), fought between General Franco’s Nationalist forces and the Loyalist/Republican faction, was a pivotal conflict shaping Spain’s political landscape but also having a profound impact on the arts, given the involvement of an array of writers, artists, and intellectuals who were compelled to take a stance on this cause célèbre. Perhaps most famously, Picasso’s Guernica was a powerful anti-war painting made in response to the bombing of the small Basque town of Guernica by Nazi Germany in support of Franco. George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia was a memoir of his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Miguel Hernández spent most of the war in prison and wrote a collection of poems now considered one of the finest pieces of Spanish poetry of the 20th century.
In 1936 Ernest Hemingway travelled to Spain to cover the war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. He had already fallen in love with Spain over a decade earlier when he attended the famous bull run at Pamplona, but now he moved from being a cultural observer to an active participant in Spanish history. Three years later he completed his great novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Set in the Sierra de Guadarrama mountains during a Republican guerrilla operation, the novel follows Robert Jordan, a young American demolitions expert, in the International Brigades, assigned to blow up a bridge during the Segovia Offensive.
Broad in scope, the novel deals movingly with themes of loyalty and courage, of love and defeat, of identity and the complexities of moral action. “If the function of a writer is to reveal reality,” his editor Maxwell Perkins wrote, “no one ever so completely performed it.” The novel was published in 1940, just after the end of the Spanish Civil War, and is regarded as one of Hemingway’s best works, along with The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and The Old Man and the Sea. It stands as one of the best war novels of all time, and here are its opening lines:
He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees. The mountainside sloped gently where he lay; but below it was steep and he could see the dark of the oiled road winding through the pass. There was a stream alongside the road and far down the pass he saw a mill beside the stream and the falling water of the dam, white in the summer sunlight.
“Is that the mill?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I do not remember it.”
“It was built since you were here. The old mill is farther down; much below the pass.”
He spread the photostated military map out on the forest floor and looked at it carefully. The old man looked over his shoulder. He was a short and solid old man in a black peasant’s smock and gray iron-stiff trousers and he wore rope-soled shoes. He was breathing heavily from the climb and his hand rested on one of the two heavy packs they had been carrying.
“Then you cannot see the bridge from here.”
“No,” the old man said. “This is the easy country of the pass where the stream flows gently. Below, where the road turns out of sight in the trees, it drops suddenly and there is a steep gorge — ”
“I remember.”
“Across this gorge is the bridge.”
“And where are their posts?”
“There is a post at the mill that you see there.”
The young man, who was studying the country, took his glasses from the pocket of his faded, khaki flannel shirt, wiped the lenses with a handkerchief, screwed the eyepieces around until the boards of the mill showed suddenly clearly and he saw the wooden bench beside the door; the huge pile of sawdust that rose behind the open shed where the circular saw was, and a stretch of the flume that brought the logs down from the mountainside on the other bank of the stream. The stream showed clear and smooth-looking in the glasses and, below the curl of the falling water, the spray from the dam was blowing in the wind.
“There is no sentry.”
“There is smoke coming from the millhouse,” the old man said. “There are also clothes hanging on a line.”
“I see them but I do not see any sentry.”
“Perhaps he is in the shade,” the old man explained. “It is hot there now. He would be in the shadow at the end we do not see.”
“Probably. Where is the next post?”
“Below the bridge. It is at the roadmender’s hut at kilometer five from the top of the pass.”
“How many men are here?” He pointed at the mill.
“Perhaps four and a corporal.”
“And below?”
“More. I will find out.”
“And at the bridge?”
“Always two. One at each end.”
“We will need a certain number of men,” he said. “How many men can you get?”
“I can bring as many men as you wish,” the old man said. “There are many men now here in the hills.”
“How many?”
“There are more than a hundred. But they are in small bands. How many men will you need?”
“I will let you know when we have studied the bridge.”
“Do you wish to study it now?”
“No. Now I wish to go to where we will hide this explosive until it is time. I would like to have it hidden in utmost security at a distance no greater than half an hour from the bridge, if that is possible.”
“That is simple,” the old man said. “From where we are going, it will all be downhill to the bridge. But now we must climb a little in seriousness to get there. Are you hungry?”
“Yes,” the young man said. “But we will eat later. How are you called? I have forgotten.” It was a bad sign to him that he had forgotten.
“Anselmo,” the old man said. “I am called Anselmo and I come from Barco de Avila. Let me help you with that pack.”
Disinformation, misinformation, distraction, misdirection…pertinent to everyone in today’s pitfall-ridden world of the Internet and social media, but particularly pertinent to people in the spy game. Spooks love devising stings to disrupt their enemies’ networks by planting fake information. Take Operation Mincemeat for example: this was the successful British deception operation of the Second World War to disguise the 1943 Allied invasion of Sicily.
British intelligence obtained the body of a recently deceased tramp, dressed him as an officer of the Royal Marines (and presumably also gave the corpse a haircut and a shave?), and dumped him into the sea off the southern coast of Spain, knowing that the body would inevitably come to the attention of the Spanish government. Suspecting also that the nominally neutral Spanish government might spill the beans to the Germans (which they duly did), they planted personal items on him identifying him as the fictitious Captain William Martin and included fake documents suggesting that the Allies planned to invade Greece and Sardinia instead of Sicily. The ruse worked: the Germans shifted their reinforcements to Greece and Sardinia and the Allies successfully invaded Sicily.
One young intelligence officer involved in that operation was one Ian Fleming, working in the Naval Intelligence Division; we needn’t go far to find the sources of his inspiration for a certain 007. However, today we’re visiting another writer for whom the spy game inspired literary gold: Graham Greene and his 1958 novel Our Man In Havana. Greene was an MI6 man, joining in August 1941 and despatched to the Iberian peninsula where he learnt about a group of double agents who fed misinformation to their German handlers. One such was “Garbo”, a Spanish double agent in Lisbon, who pretended to control a ring of agents all over England and was a past master at disinformation. Garbo was the main inspiration for Wormold, the protagonist of Our Man in Havana.
Greene wrote a first version of his story in 1946, having a film script in mind and setting it in Estonia in 1938, though soon realising that Havana, which he had visited several times, would be the better location. The black comedy novel follows the life of Jim Wormold, an English vacuum cleaner salesman living in Havana during the Fulgencio Batista regime, who is recruited into MI6 to spy on the Cuban government. Finding no useful dirt, Wormold takes to fabricating reports; just as his confidence grows so too grows the excitement and drama of his tall tales.
Greene builds his plot using comically sketched scenes of espionage escapades, in an atmosphere of a Cuba on the brink of communist revolution and the Cuban Missile Crisis. In this excerpt, Wormold is having his daily constitutional in Sloppy Joe’s bar when he is met by his recruiter.
Wormold led the stranger through a door at the back, down a short passage, and indicated the toilet. ‘It’s in there.’ ‘After you, old man.’ ‘But I don’t need it.’ ‘Don’t be difficult,’ the stranger said. He put a hand on Wormold’s shoulder and pushed him through the door. Inside there were two washbasins, a chair with a broken back, and the usual cabinets and pissoirs. ‘Take a pew, old man,’ the stranger said, ‘while I turn on a tap.’ But when the water ran he made no attempt to wash. ‘Looks more natural,’ he explained (the word ‘natural’ seemed a favourite adjective of his), ‘if someone barges in. And of course it confuses a mike.’ ‘A mike?’ ‘You’re quite right to question that. Quite right. There probably wouldn’t be a mike in a place like this, but it’s the drill, you know, that counts. You’ll find it always pays in the end to follow the drill. It’s lucky they don’t run to waste-plugs in Havana. We can just keep the water running.’ ‘Please will you explain…?’ ‘Can’t be too careful even in a Gents, when I come to think of it. A chap of ours in Denmark in 1940 saw from his own window the German fleet coming down the Kattegat.’ ‘What gut?’ ‘Kattegat. Of course he knew then the balloon had gone up. Started burning his papers. Put the ashes down the lay and pulled the chain. Trouble was – late frost. Pipes frozen. All the ashes floated up into the bath down below. Flat belonged to an old maiden lady – Baronin someone or other. She was just going to have a bath. Most embarrassing for our chap.’ ‘It sounds like the Secret Service.’ ‘It is the Secret Service, old man, or so the novelists call it. That’s why I wanted to talk to you about your chap Lopez. Is he reliable or ought you to fire him?’ ‘Are you in the Secret Service?’ ‘If you like to put it that way.’ ‘Why on earth should I fire Lopez? He’s been with me ten years.’ ‘We could find you a chap who knew all about vacuum cleaners. But of course – naturally – we’ll leave that decision to you.’ ‘But I’m not in your Service.’ ‘We’ll come to that in a moment, old man. Anyway we’ve traced Lopez—he seems clear. But your friend Hasselbacher, I’d be a bit careful of him.’ ‘How do you know about Hasselbacher?’ ‘I’ve been around a day or two, picking things up. One has to on these occasions.’ ‘What occasions?’ ‘Where was Hasselbacher born?’ ‘Berlin, I think.’ ‘Sympathies East or West?’ ‘We never talk politics.’ ‘Not that it matters. East or West they play the German game. Remember the Ribbentrop Pact. We won’t be caught that way again.’ ‘Hasselbacher’s not a politician. He’s an old doctor and he’s lived here for thirty years.’ ‘All the same, you’d be surprised… But I agree with you, it would be conspicuous if you dropped him. Just play him carefully, that’s all. He might even be useful if you handle him right.’ ‘I’ve no intention of handling him.’ ‘You’ll find it necessary for the job.’ ‘I don’t want any job. Why do you pick on me?’ ‘Patriotic Englishman. Been here for years. Respected member of the European Traders’ Association. We must have our man in Havana, you know.’
In another life I could easily see myself as an antiquarian, cycling around remote villages in search of ancient churches to take brass rubbings and explore wind-bent, lichen-covered gravestones, and the hum of summer insects or a distant tractor the only sounds gently reaching my ears. Ah my! Then back to my cloistered chambers at the University to study medievalism and write beautifully enigmatic ghost stories for friends and select students. Perhaps an aged brandy to sip before bed. Oh wait, it seems I’m M R James!
Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936) was an English medievalist scholar who served variously as provost and Vice-Chancellor at Kings’ College Cambridge, the University of Cambridge and Eton College. His lifetime was dedicated to education and in good old Mr Chips’ fashion, he died whilst still teaching, at Eton in 1936. His scholarly work was very highly regarded but his enduring legacy is his collections of ghost stories which he wrote originally as Christmas Eve entertainments. He remains the master ghost story writer.
James’s stories were published in the collections Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911), A Thin Ghost and Others (1919), A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories (1925), and the hardback omnibus The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James (1931). In these, he redefined the ghost story by grounding his stories in realism and dry humour. His stories often featured a mild-mannered academic turning up at some quaint seaside resort or old French village and accidentally acquiring a cursed artefact which unleashes some dark force. His ghouls were not overt: James was well aware that the greatest horrors lie within the human imagination and that one only needs to stimulate that imagination to conjure up the most frightening apparitions.
M.R. James, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
Have you heard of the ‘M R James Test’? The rules are simple: you must read one of his ghost stories by the light of a single candle in a deserted house in an empty room, with your back to an open door. You succeed if your nerve holds and you don’t need to turn around and look over your shoulder! I haven’t tried it myself but having read several of his stories I can well imagine the potential for goosebumps…Happy Halloween!
Another throwback to childhood memories this week: we’re going to be looking at the endlessly charming children’s novel, The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, first published in 1908. Who isn’t fondly familiar with Grahame’s story of Mole, Ratty, Badger and Toad, and their adventures on the river and in the Wild Wood? I used to get mixed up between this and a sixties’ children’s TV show called Tales of the Riverbank, which was clearly influenced by The Wind in the Willows given that it featured anthropomorphised woodland creatures like Hammy Hamster and Roderick the Water Rat, messing about in boats (and voiced by a suitably “hammy” Johnny Morris).
The novel was based on bedtime stories told by Grahame to his disabled son, Alastair. Grahame had frequent boating holidays and on these he would write tales about characters that in time would become Toad, Mole, Ratty, and Badger. He lived in Cookham Dean in Berkshire and was inspired by the farmland, lanes and villages of the area and the woodlands of local Bisham Woods which would become the Wild Wood. In 1908, he took early retirement from his job at the Bank of England and moved with his wife and son to an old farmhouse in Blewbury. There, he used the stories he had told Alastair as a basis for the manuscript of The Wind in the Willows.
The Wind in the Willows, book cover
The plot, you will perhaps recall, begins with Mole abandoning his spring-cleaning of his hole in the ground to join Ratty the water vole on the bank of the river, where Ratty inducts him into the ways of the river. They visit Toad, the wealthy and jovial resident of Toad Hall whose obsession with the new-fangled motorcar gives Mole and Ratty much cause for concern due to Toad’s propensity to crash vehicles. Mole visits the Wild Wood, gets lost and then found by Ratty and the two are taken in by Badger, who, upon learning of Toad’s numerous car crashes, joins the two to stage an intervention. They place Toad under house arrest, but Toad escapes, steals a car, and ends up in gaol. So far, so Grand Theft Auto…
Toad escapes from prison and winds up at Ratty’s home, whereupon Ratty informs him that Toad Hall is being squatted by weasels, stoats and ferrets. Toad, Badger, Mole and Ratty invade Toad Hall and drive out the interlopers. Toad holds a banquet to celebrate, mends his former ways and they all live happily ever after. In addition to this main narrative, the book contains several diversionary tales featuring Mole and Ratty, such as their encounter with the god Pan in the chapter called The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (which Pink Floyd would use as the title of their debut studio album).
Here’s an excerpt featuring Ratty and Mole during their first encounter with Badger and his very appealing home…
THEY waited patiently for what seemed a very long time, stamping in the snow to keep their feet warm. At last they heard the sound of slow shuffling footsteps approaching the door from the inside. It seemed, as the Mole remarked to the Rat, like someone walking in carpet slippers that were too large for him and down at heel; which was intelligent of Mole, because that was exactly what it was.
There was the noise of a bolt shot back, and the door opened a few inches, enough to show a long snout and a pair of sleepy blinking eyes.
“Now, the very next time this happens,” said a gruff and suspicious voice, “I shall be exceedingly angry. Who is it this time, disturbing people on such a night? Speak up!”
“Oh, Badger,” cried the Rat, “let us in, please. It’s me, Rat, and my friend Mole, and we’ve lost our way in the snow.”
“What, Ratty, my dear little man!” exclaimed the Badger, in quite a different voice. “Come along in, both of you, at once. Why, you must be perished. Well I never! Lost in the snow! And in the Wild Wood, too, and at this time of night! But come in with you.”
The two animals tumbled over each other in their eagerness to get inside, and heard the door shut behind them with great joy and relief.
The Badger, who wore a long dressing-gown, and whose slippers were indeed very down at heel, carried a flat candlestick in his paw and had probably been on his way to bed when their summons sounded. He looked kindly down on them and patted both their heads. “This is not the sort of night for small animals to be out,” he said paternally. “I’m afraid you’ve been up to some of your pranks again, Ratty. But come along; come into the kitchen. There’s a first-rate fire there, and supper and everything.”
He shuffled on in front of them, carrying the light, and they followed him, nudging each other in an anticipating sort of way, down a long, gloomy, and, to tell the truth, decidedly shabby passage, into a sort of a central hall; out of which they could dimly see other long tunnel-like passages branching, passages mysterious and without apparent end. But there were doors in the hall as well—stout oaken comfortable-looking doors. One of these the Badger flung open, and at once they found themselves in all the glow and warmth of a large fire-lit kitchen.
The floor was well-worn red brick, and on the wide hearth burnt a fire of logs, between two attractive chimney-corners tucked away in the wall, well out of any suspicion of draught. A couple of high-backed settles, facing each other on either side of the fire, gave further sitting accommodations for the sociably disposed. In the middle of the room stood a long table of plain boards placed on trestles, with benches down each side. At one end of it, where an arm-chair stood pushed back, were spread the remains of the Badger’s plain but ample supper. Rows of spotless plates winked from the shelves of the dresser at the far end of the room, and from the rafters overhead hung hams, bundles of dried herbs, nets of onions, and baskets of eggs. It seemed a place where heroes could fitly feast after victory, where weary harvesters could line up in scores along the table and keep their Harvest Home with mirth and song, or where two or three friends of simple tastes could sit about as they pleased and eat and smoke and talk in comfort and contentment. The ruddy brick floor smiled up at the smoky ceiling; the oaken settles, shiny with long wear, exchanged cheerful glances with each other; plates on the dresser grinned at pots on the shelf, and the merry firelight flickered and played over everything without distinction.
Just two miles up the road from me, at 2 Darnley Road, West Park, is a fine old semi-detached Edwardian dwelling which bears a blue plaque declaring this as the one-time home of J R R Tolkien when he was Reader in English at Leeds University in the 1920s. This was some years before The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings but it is still quite a thrill to know that the young Tolkien was studying so close to where I’m writing now. I discovered The Hobbit whilst at school and absolutely loved it, and I’ll never forget the book cover: it was this one here, that took a few scrolls to find amongst the myriad different versions!
The Hobbit
The Hobbit turned out to be a springboard to the much larger, grown-up, epic high fantasy novel that was The Lord of the Rings. What an amazing piece of work! It is a journey for the reader just as it is a journey for the characters. It is underpinned, of course, by an astonishing depth of scholarship on its author’s part. Tolkien studied etymology and philology, and, as a keen medievalist, produced, whilst still at Leeds and long before writing his books, A Middle English Vocabulary and the definitive edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Also whilst at Leeds, Tolkien completed a translation of Beowulf, which was a powerful influence on his later Middle-earth “legendarium” (this was Tolkien’s own term for his body of fictionalised mythology that would inform The Lord of the Rings). He also studied the Prose Edda and Norse mythology, as well as the Finnish Kalevala and other Scandinavian mythic literature. Tolkien’s knowledge of the myriad legends and myths of the Middle Ages and earlier would give rise to the world of Middle-earth with its inhabitants of hobbits, men, elves, dwarves, wizards, orcs and trolls familiar to Tolkien readers of today.
The Lord of the Rings, 1st single-volume edition (1968)
As most people know (but here’s a brief summary anyway), the story revolves around the Dark Lord Sauron, who in an earlier age created the One Ring, allowing him to rule the other Rings of Power given to men, dwarves, and elves, in his campaign to conquer all of Middle-earth. From homely beginnings in the Shire, a hobbit land reminiscent of the English countryside, the story ranges across Middle-earth, following the quest to destroy the One Ring, seen mainly through the eyes of the hobbits Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin. Aiding the hobbits are the wizard Gandalf, the men Aragorn and Boromir, the elf Legolas, and the dwarf Gimli, who unite as the Company of the Ring in order to rally the Free Peoples of Middle-earth against Sauron’s armies and give Frodo a chance to destroy the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom.
Here’s an excerpt from the earlier stages of the story (in Book 1, The Fellowship of the Ring), when the hobbits have recently left their beloved Shire behind and ventured beyond to the town of Bree where they stay overnight in the Prancing Pony inn, and meet Aragorn (Strider) for the first time. I choose it because it it was the first time (though not the last) of experiencing a real thrill whilst reading it: that gradual transition from a sense of foreboding about this dark stranger in the corner to the realisation that Strider was in fact an ally, and a safe pair of hands at that!
Suddenly Frodo noticed that a strange-looking weatherbeaten man, sitting in the shadows near the wall, was also listening intently to the hobbit-talk. He had a tall tankard in front of him, and was smoking a long-stemmed pipe curiously carved. His legs were stretched out before him, showing high boots of supple leather that fitted him well, but had seen much wear and were now caked with mud. A travel-stained cloak of heavy dark-green cloth was drawn close about him, and in spite of the heat of the room he wore a hood that overshadowed his face; but the gleam of his eyes could be seen as he watched the hobbits.
‘Who is that?’ Frodo asked, when he got a chance to whisper to Mr. Butterbur. ‘I don’t think you introduced him?’
‘Him?’ said the landlord in an answering whisper, cocking an eye without turning his head. ‘I don’t rightly know. He is one of the wandering folk – Rangers we call them. He seldom talks: not but what he can tell a rare tale when he has the mind. He disappears for a month, or a year, and then he pops up again. He was in and out pretty often last spring; but I haven’t seen him about lately. What his right name is I’ve never heard: but he’s known round here as Strider. Goes about at a great pace on his long shanks; though he don’t tell nobody what cause he has to hurry. But there’s no accounting for East and West, as we say in Bree, meaning the Rangers and the Shire-folk, begging your pardon. Funny you should ask about him.’ But at that moment Mr. Butterbur was called away by a demand for more ale and his last remark remained unexplained.
Frodo found that Strider was now looking at him, as if he had heard or guessed all that had been said. Presently, with a wave of his hand and a nod, he invited Frodo to come over and sit by him. As Frodo drew near he threw back his hood, showing a shaggy head of dark hair flecked with grey, and in a pale stern face a pair of keen grey eyes.
‘I am called Strider,’ he said in a low voice. ‘I am very pleased to meet you, Master – Underhill, if old Butterbur got your name right.’
‘He did,’ said Frodo stiffly. He felt far from comfortable under the stare of those keen eyes.
‘Well, Master Underhill,’ said Strider, ‘if I were you, I should stop your young friends from talking too much. Drink, fire, and chance-meeting are pleasant enough, but, well this isn’t the Shire. There are queer folk about. Though I say it as shouldn’t, you may think,’ he added with a wry smile, seeing Frodo’s glance. ‘And there have been even stranger travellers through Bree lately,’ he went on, watching Frodo’s face.
Frodo returned his gaze but said nothing; and Strider made no further sign. His attention seemed suddenly to be fixed on Pippin. To his alarm Frodo became aware that the ridiculous young Took, encouraged by his success with the fat Mayor of Michel Delving, was now actually giving a comic account of Bilbo’s farewell party. He was already giving an imitation of the Speech, and was drawing near to the astonishing Disappearance.
Frodo was annoyed. It was a harmless enough tale for most of the local hobbits, no doubt: just a funny story about those funny people away beyond the River; but some (old Butterbur, for instance) knew a thing or two, and had probably heard rumours long ago about Bilbo’s vanishing. It would bring the name of Baggins to their minds, especially if there had been inquiries in Bree after that name. Frodo fidgeted, wondering what to do. Pippin was evidently much enjoying the attention he was getting, and had become quite forgetful of their danger. Frodo had a sudden fear that in his present mood he might even mention the Ring; and that might well be disastrous.
‘You had better do something quick!’ whispered Strider in his ear.
When it comes to literature as the subject of this blog – that is, books, generally – it can be taken as read that I have actually read said books. And whilst that is normally the case, my integrity compels me to admit that I never finished today’s subject, Miguel de Cervantes’ epic masterpiece, Don Quixote. I think I got about a quarter of the way through before surrender, many years ago now. It’s a long, dense book and really, there are better things to do than wade through early 17th century Spanish novels. Nonetheless, Don Quixote remains an important piece of work worthy of inspection.
For one thing, Don Quixote (the full title being The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha), originally published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, is considered a founding work of Western literature and is often said to be the first modern novel. Of course, the claim to be ‘first novel’ is inevitably going to be contentious, since much depends on the definition of the word ‘novel’. Vying for that title are everything from Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) and even Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur (c. 1485), but we needn’t worry about that now. All we need to know is that Don Quixote is one of the most translated and best-selling books of all time, and that it has bequeathed to the lexicon the word ‘quixotic’ and the phrase ‘tilting at windmills’.
The plot revolves around the adventures of a hidalgo from La Mancha who reads so many chivalric romances that he decides to become a knight-errant himself under the name Don Quixote de la Mancha, and sets out with his squire, Sancho Panza, to save his lady love Dulcinea del Toboso, in the name of chivalry and all that is noble and good. It’s clear that Don Quixote has essentially lost his mind and is living a fantasy life, and whilst in his mind we know that he is living out an epic knightly story of honour and glory, we are seeing a fantasist being humoured, ignored, or attacked by all he encounters.
The adventures begin with the famous windmill scene, in which Don Quixote mistakes a group of windmills for ferocious giants and charges at them, armed with a lance, on his old horse Rocinante. Whilst Sancho Panza tries to ground him in reality, it is a lost cause: even when Don Quixote realises that they are indeed windmills, he claims that a magician must have transformed the giants. ‘Tilting at windmills’ has become synonymous with wasting time and energy on the wrong targets or taking on hopelessly lost causes or imaginary foes. Here’s the relevant excerpt, and you have to admire Don Quixote for the courage of his conviction! It’s funny, and I might just have to go back and finish the last three-quarters of the book some time.
Just then, they discovered thirty or forty windmills in that plain. And as soon as don Quixote saw them, he said to his squire: “Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we could have ever hoped. Look over there, Sancho Panza, my friend, where there are thirty or more monstrous giants with whom I plan to do battle and take all their lives, and with their spoils we’ll start to get rich. This is righteous warfare, and it’s a great service to God to rid the earth of such a wicked seed.”
“What giants?” said Sancho Panza.
“Those that you see over there,” responded his master, “with the long arms—some of them almost two leagues long.”
“Look, your grace,” responded Sancho, “what you see over there aren’t giants—they’re windmills; and what seems to be arms are the sails that rotate the millstone when they’re turned by the wind.”
“It seems to me,” responded don Quixote, “that you aren’t well-versed in adventures—they are giants; and if you’re afraid, get away from here and start praying while I go into fierce and unequal battle with them.”
And saying this, he spurred his horse Rocinante without heeding what his squire Sancho was shouting to him, that he was attacking windmills and not giants. But he was so certain they were giants that he paid no attention to his squire Sancho’s shouts, nor did he see what they were, even though he was very close. Rather, he went on shouting: “Do not flee, cowards and vile creatures, for it’s just one knight attacking you!”
At this point, the wind increased a bit and the large sails began to move, which don Quixote observed and said: “Even though you wave more arms than Briaræus, you’ll have to answer to me.”
When he said this—and commending himself with all his heart to his lady Dulcinea, asking her to aid him in that peril, well-covered by his shield, with his lance on the lance rest —he attacked at Rocinante’s full gallop and assailed the first windmill he came to. He gave a thrust into the sail with his lance just as a rush of air accelerated it with such fury that it broke the lance to bits, taking the horse and knight with it, and tossed him rolling onto the ground, very battered.
Sancho went as fast as his donkey could take him to help his master, and when he got there, he saw that don Quixote couldn’t stir—such was the result of Rocinante’s landing on top of him. “God help us,” said Sancho. “Didn’t I tell you to watch what you were doing; that they were just windmills, and that only a person who had windmills in his head could fail to realize it?”
“Keep still, Sancho, my friend,” responded don Quixote. “Things associated with war, more than others, are subject to continual change. Moreover, I believe—and it’s true—that the sage Frestón—he who robbed me of my library—has changed these giants into windmills to take away the glory of my having conquered them, such is the enmity he bears me. But in the long run, his evil cunning will have little power over the might of my sword.”
J D Salinger (1919–2010) was quite the enigma. Having created one of the Great American Novels in The Catcher In The Rye in 1951, he never published another full-length novel and gradually withdrew from society. Within two years of the publication of Catcher, Salinger had moved from New York to the small town of Cornish, New Hampshire, and was rarely seen out and about. In the role of “reclusive writer”, he gives Thomas Pynchon a run for his money (Pynchon, prolific and still-living novelist known for Gravity’s Rainbow amongst others, is so reclusive that no-one knows where he lives and there aren’t any pictures of him in the public domain from any time after about 1955). Salinger didn’t stop writing however: it is rumoured that he wrote up to fifteen novels…but just didn’t publish them!
The Catcher in the Rye was originally intended for adults, but of course has since been celebrated as a novel for adolescents due to its themes of angst and alienation, and its icon of teenage rebellion, Holden Caulfield. 16-year-old Holden has been expelled from prep school and wanders New York City, grappling with feelings about the superficiality of adult society (its “phoniness”), and embodying for the reader themes of innocence, identity, sex, and depression. His journey takes in a number of awkward altercations and misadventures with prostitutes and pimps and other exemplars of an underbelly of society that does nothing to disabuse him of his suspicions of the adult world.
The Catcher In The Rye, First Edition
Heartily sick of the harsh realities of growing up, Holden sneaks back into his parents’ home while they are out and wakes his little sister, Phoebe. Although she is happy to see him, Phoebe is annoyed that he’s aimlessly ruining his life. Isn’t there anything he cares about? It turns out that there is: Holden shares a fantasy, which he seems to have cooked up based on a literal interpretation of some lines in Robert Burns’s Comin’ Through the Rye (“when a body catch a body, comin’ through the rye”). There is a field of rye through which children are running dangerously towards a cliff, and Holden is there to catch them before they fall off. This seems to point towards a compassionate streak that his parents and teachers have hitherto failed to uncover. Although the novel leaves his future uncertain, who knows, perhaps some inchoate purpose in life is being hinted at?
Meanwhile, here is a flavour of the narrator’s dialogue and you can feel (perhaps remember?) the teenage disdain…
I’m not too sure what the name of the song was that he was playing when I came in, but whatever it was, he was really stinking it up. He was putting all these dumb, show-offy ripples in the high notes, and a lot of other very tricky stuff that gives me a pain in the ass. You should’ve heard the crowd, though, when he was finished. You would’ve puked. They went mad. They were exactly the same morons that laugh like hyenas in the movies at stuff that isn’t funny. I swear to God, if I were a piano player or an actor or something and all those dopes though I was terrific, I’d hate it. I wouldn’t even want them to clap for me. People always clap for the wrong things. If I were a piano player, I’d play it in the goddam closet. Anyway, when he was finished, and everybody was clapping their heads off, old Ernie turned around on his stool and gave this very phony, humble bow. Like as if he was a helluva humble guy, besides being a terrific piano player. It was very phony—I mean him being such a big snob and all. In a funny way, though, I felt sort of sorry for him when he was finished. I don’t even think he knows any more when he’s playing right or not. It isn’t all his fault. I partly blame all those dopes that clap their heads off—they’d foul up anybody, if you gave them a chance.
I don’t often go in for biographies or autobiographies and am usually found reading material by people rather than about people (though I suppose biographies are also by people, but you know what I mean). However, it’s a genre as old as writing itself. In the 1st century CE, Plutarch wrote his Parallel Lives in which he pairs up and writes about famous Greeks and Romans that seem to have an equivalence e.g. the orators Demosthenes (Greek) and Cicero (Roman). In the 3rd century, Diogenes Laërtius was writing his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers about all the known Greek philosophers from Thales to Epicurus. In the 16th century, Georgio Vasari wrote The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects covering Renaissance artists from Cimabue to Bronzino. Incidentally, reading these three books is a good way to acquire a pretty comprehensive classical education!
What these biographies have in common is that they are essentially sketches; they write potted histories of multiple people. When it comes to full-blown biography about one individual, however, one book stands out as an early landmark of the genre and that is James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), about English writer and literary critic Samuel Johnson. It enjoys a reputation as being one of the greatest biographies ever written, and it is valued as an important source of information not just about Johnson but his times.
Samuel Johnson was a celebrated character in 18th century London, admired for his intellect and pithy one-liners (a bit like Oscar Wilde or Stephen Fry in different ages) and famed for his reputation in literary criticism and lexicography in the form of his Dictionary of the English Language (1755). It was Johnson who famously said “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life”. And it was Johnson also who provided a memorable response to the new, monist, idealist philosophy of George Berkeley, which conjectured that all that exists – including “matter” — could be reduced to one ontological fundamental, namely “mind”. When asked, whilst out for a walk, what he thought about this idea, Johnson is said to have kicked a stone with a contemptuous “I refute it thus!”.
In 1763, travelling Scottish lawyer James Boswell first met Johnson in the book shop of a friend of Johnson’s and they quickly became friends. In the ensuing years they spent a lot of time together in long conversations whilst on walking holidays in places like the Hebrides. Boswell was a diligent keeper of journals and thoroughly recorded his day-to-day experiences, and it was on this large collection of detailed notes that Boswell would base his works on Johnson’s life. Johnson commented on Boswell’s excessive note-taking: “One would think the man had been hired to spy upon me!”.
Boswell first published his account of their walking holiday The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides in 1786, published after Johnson’s death, and this proved to be a decent trial run of his biographical method for when he took on his Life of Johnson. With the success of the Journal, Boswell started working on the “vast treasure of his conversations at different times” that he recorded in his journals. His goal was to recreate Johnson’s “life in scenes”, and this he did spectacularly well, with the first edition published in 1791.
James Boswell by George WillisonSamuel Johnson by Sir Joshua Reynolds
Another stalwart from my memories of our primary school bookshelf, the brilliant, ground-breaking The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C S Lewis, published in 1950 as the first in what would become a series of seven, collectively known as The Chronicles of Narnia:
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) Prince Caspian (1951) The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952) The Silver Chair (1953) The Horse and His Boy (1954) The Magician’s Nephew (1955) The Last Battle (1956)
I can picture the covers of some three or four of these in my own collection of books that I had at home, though criminally, I don’t think I actually read any of them other than the TLTWATW (even the acronym is a mouthful). I must have done? Well perhaps, but it was a long time ago…
Still, I definitely read TLTWATW and I remember it as a magical experience. There can’t be many people who don’t know that it involves a portal to the realm of Narnia, a world of magic, strange beasts and talking animals, found by four evacuee children at the back of a wardrobe in their temporary guardian’s country home. They find themselves called upon by the lion Aslan to protect Narnia from the evil White Witch and become embroiled in adventures that go on for years without affecting the real world’s timeline.
The story was prompted by Lewis’s own hosting of three evacuated schoolgirls at his house in Risinghurst near Oxford, in September 1939. The experience prompted him to begin a story, and the rest is history. Writing about it later he wrote:
At first, I had very little idea how the story would go. But then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it. I think I had been having a good many dreams of lions about that time. Apart from that, I don’t know where the Lion came from or why he came. But once he was there, he pulled the whole story together, and soon he pulled the six other Narnian stories in after him.
A number of years ago I went to an interactive event at a converted church building in Leeds in which all we participants started the journey by walking though a long line of coats and clothes in a “wardrobe” before breaking through to a snowy landscape people by actors playing the various animal characters. Let’s read the excerpt from the book that this experience actually recreated very impressively. The children are exploring their new environment and Lucy has been left behind in one of the rooms, intrigued by a big old wardrobe which she opens and enters…
Looking into the inside, she saw several coats hanging up — mostly long fur coats. There was nothing Lucy liked so much as the smell and feel of fur. She immediately stepped into the wardrobe and got in among the coats and rubbed her face against them, leaving the door open, of course, because she knew that it is very foolish to shut oneself into any wardrobe. Soon she went further in and found that there was a second row of coats hanging up behind the first one. It was almost quite dark in there and she kept her arms stretched out in front of her so as not to bump her face into the back of the wardrobe. She took a step further in — then two or three steps always expecting to feel woodwork against the tips of her fingers. But she could not feel it.
“This must be a simply enormous wardrobe!” thought Lucy, going still further in and pushing the soft folds of the coats aside to make room for her. Then she noticed that there was something crunching under her feet. “I wonder is that more mothballs?” she thought, stooping down to feel it with her hand. But instead of feeling the hard, smooth wood of the floor of the wardrobe, she felt something soft and powdery and extremely cold. “This is very queer,” she said, and went on a step or two further.
Next moment she found that what was rubbing against her face and hands was no longer soft fur but something hard and rough and even prickly. “Why, it is just like branches of trees!” exclaimed Lucy. And then she saw that there was a light ahead of her; not a few inches away where the back of the wardrobe ought to have been, but a long way off. Something cold and soft was falling on her. A moment later she found that she was standing in the middle of a wood at night-time with snow under her feet and snowflakes falling through the air.
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, book cover
C S Lewis
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