Sample Sunday: From The Bapton Books Sampler
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The friends of my youth: The distilled essence of pastoral and ethics: on Kenneth Grahame
Who shaped my life, rough-hew it though I may? Whence do I derive so much that is so deep-dyed in me?
To ask the question, ‘What is the best - or one’s favorite - children’s book?’ is to ask those questions as well: it is not the hand that rocks the cradle, but the hand that turns the page, that holds thereby the sceptre and dominion of the world.
From what ancient rock, then, am I hewn?
Pooh and Paddington. The Jungle Books, of course (qv my review) and the Just-So Stories. Æsop and Plutarch. Both Alices, of which Through the Looking Glass, with its conundra, pleased me best. Chesterton and Verne and Dumas (The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo), unexpurgated. George Macdonald and John Bunyan, Beatrix Potter and Andrew Lang. When, ahem, we were very young, Uncle Wiggily; and the waterfront thereafter, from Hugh Lofting to Jack London (and for that matter, Albert Payson Terhune. Quick tip: do not expect your dachshund to act like one of those Relentlessly Noble Collies). Robert Louis Stevenson, of course, and leave us not forget, also, the incomparable saga of Freddie the Pig, now by the grace of God reissued.
By now, ‘you know my methods, Watson’: I maintain, was raised to maintain, that the distinction between ‘literature’ and ‘children’s literature’ is a false one. There are but two classes of literature: good and bad. I hold with Lewis, Tolkien, and the Inklings, with L’Engle and indeed with Scott and Dickens, that the former class includes works that thrill or enrapture or move the young, yet which can be reread with ever deepening pleasure, on ever deeper levels, by the mature mind. Such maturity, in a world which dismisses with a shrug Ivanhoe, or Don Quixote, or The Hound of the Baskervilles, and exiles them to the children’s shelf, is in short supply; I was here as in all respects fortunate in my parents, who were wiser than that world.
I spent a lot of my youth in England - not physically, but in spirit. Not a little in Fagin’s London, or at Blakeney Hall (‘demmed elusive, Sir Percy’). Some of it in the Fenchurches and at Duke’s Denver. A great deal of it in London fogs when the game was afoot: much of my mental tenor yet bears the marks of the incisive reasoner whose Baker Street study I so often visited.
I spent at least as much time in the Hundred Acre Wood, and am much the better man for it. However bitter the years since, there is for me, as well, somewhere always an enchanted clearing where a small boy and his bear are playing.
And why not? After all, there is a place where the seas turn sweet; a world contained even within a besieged stable. I know I shall yet reach that far country and meet Aslan, shall play chess with Sir Reepicheep and lift a mug with Trufflehunter the Badger. It is a country of many names: it is Westernesse, beyond the bent seas, beyond Numenor, even, and it is where all true quests end. The glad day shall come when I sail from the Havens into the uttermost West, to that blessed shore. Someday.
And when that day comes, I will take with me what memories. What are these but gleams that pierce the darkness of our sad and haunted wood, after all? As Lewis noted in The Pilgrim’s Regress, when the Word is blocked, the true Landlord smuggles in icons to stir the hearts of the oppressed. If ours is Auden’s haunted wood, the Dantean forest at the gates of the Inferno, then as Lewis has noted, all light that penetrates this thicket is holy, redemptive, and of a single source.
An icon, as Madeleine L’Engle has so well pointed out, is not an idol. It is a symbol that directs our worship to its true object.
What have been the icons on the altar of my childhood?
I grew up with Uncle Remus and the Trickster, Brer Rabbit. (As Don Williams poignantly asked, ‘what do you do with good old boys like me?’) And, ‘please take care of this bear,’ which may explain why I like Paddingtonesque marmalade sandwiches. I spent time in merry Sherwood, too, and in Camelot - that of Howard Pyle, then of Malory, and finally of White. Ran with the Seeonee wolf pack.
Nor did I grow up without autumnal longings, a sense of Northing. I know Stuart Little. I know Squirrel Nutkin. And Mrs Tiggywinkle, too. I’ve spent glorious Connecticut autumns at Rabbit Hill.
Old books, so long out of print they are wholly forgotten, shaped me; books that had been part of my father’s childhood in turn: Johnny Texas, and a marvelous collection of stories and lays from the Paul Bunyan saga - including, by the bye, an early poem from Robert Frost. Mumsie took me to the plains of her own childhood as well (though they were and are plains of the mind, she being Kentucky-born and, after my grandfather was transferred to a parish there, St Louis-raised), with the Laura Ingalls Wilder series. It was a principle in our house that there was no such thing as a literary gender gap.
And of course I made the acquaintance of the good and great. Teddy Roosevelt. Winston. The Mighty Stonewall and R. E. Lee. Sam Houston, the Raven of the Cherokees.
But in the end, I come back again and again to the book that most taught me values and ethics - and indeed has imprinted upon me my very taste in architecture. We never forget the heroes of our youth. Mine, in the end, is Mr Badger. I am too often Toad, too often Mole; I wanted and yet want to grow up and become Mr Badger, gruff but kindly, protector of the innocent, sensible, wise, the perfect country gentleman, scourge of the stoats and weasels who, alas, still abound in the adult world.
If, as C. S. Lewis notes, the test of a children’s book is its having deep meaning for the adult mind, then The Wind In the Willows is primus inter pares for me. What is best in me is still tinged with the Water Rat’s cool, no-nonsense valor, and with his regret and renunciation of voyaging far from his responsibilities; with Mole’s staunchness even in the face of his own fears, which is the truest courage. What is best in me emerges from winter drowse with Mr Badger.
And the writing remains superb: better far than that of many bestsellers written for adults. Grahame’s descriptive prose will always be for me how I see the coming of an English spring, flower by flower, meadowsweet and purple loosestrife as players in a pastoral scene. The chatter of the restless birds, the seafaring tales of a mysterious stranger: these are autumn to me. Never can I forget the snow and the huddled sheep - or Mole’s sudden return to his abandoned home, and the Christmas marvel, the carolers and the mulled ale.
And in the end, especially, whether I find myself at ease at Riverbank, or in the Wild Wood on a darkling night, or in the Wide World that lowers on the horizon, I am buoyed and bettered by my having known Mr Badger. All of the works I have mentioned have shaped me. Some - obviously - move me profoundly. Yet in the end, it is this work that has taught me most, been catechism to the further disciplines of Narnia or Middle Earth. All joy, Augustine and Aquinas agreed, has but a single source: Arcadia and the Riverbank and Rabbit Hill are reflections of a single light; the path through Mirkwood or the Wild Wood is the same pilgrimage to that light’s source.
As the carolers sang at Mole End on a frosty Christmas Eve, Joy cometh in the morning.