Humphrey Carpenter Research Articles

'Arid clarity': Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, and Jules Laforgue

To review the connections between Mina Loy and Ezra Pound should be a relatively straightforward matter. There is, after all, no shortage of biographical material on Pound, and we now have Carolyn Burke's Becoming Modern, as well as the essays brought together in Mina Loy: Woman and Poet. (1) Yet, while Pound's reading of Loy and his support for her work have received a fair amount of comment, the available biographical studies of the two poets tell surprisingly little about their meetings and intellectual exchanges. Of course, Loy hardly seemed a significant player when Norman and Stock wrote their early books on Pound, but it is slightly surprising to find no mention of her in Humphrey Carpenter's more recent work (and Carpenter certainly has a developed interest in Pound's relations with women, particularly in the early stages of the poet's career). (2) What is even more striking is the absence of any hard information about their meetings in Paris in the early twenties in Burke's Becoming Modern, especially as she reproduces two photographs of them together (Burke is equally unforthcoming about Loy's encounters with Wyndham Lewis in Paris and London, tantalizing indeed). (3) One can actually glean very little: we know, for example, from Virgil Thomson's autobiography (but not from Burke) that Loy attended the Parisian premiere of Pound's opera, The Testament of Villon, in 1926, and she must have heard other arrangments by him because she notes in the recently recovered essay of 1925, `Modern Poetry', that `his music was played in Paris', (4) but of the conversations they must have had only one intriguing trace seems to remain: in a 1943 interview, Loy recalled that `Pound was like a child, and an old professor at the same time. His craze then was endocrine glands. He would talk about it a great deal--very learned discussion. Glands [...] were the latest thing at the time'. (5) Just how illuminating Loy found this it is impossible to know, but it is likely that Pound's often hectoring manner did not appeal. Loy went on: `He was a sensitive man who didn't think other people were sensitive. One of his friends said he had brought from America the faults of America, and none of the virtues.' (Williams Carlos Williams is the likely source of that last remark.) There is surprisingly little to go on, then, apart from Pound's isolated comments on Loy which are, with the exception of the 1918 Little Review piece on the Others anthology, usually brief, but insistent that Loy be considered part of the American vanguard. The 1918 account of Loy and Moore is well known, for it was there that Pound first produced his account of `logopoeia', `a dance of the intelligence among words and ideas and modification of ideas and characters' (in `How to Read' (1929) the formulation would be slightly modified to `the dance of the intellect', now the most familiar version). (6) Pound famously aligned the `arid clarity' he discerned in Loy and Moore with a specifically American modernism. Several months later, in a review section for the magazine Future, he wrote of the Others anthology again, this time quoting passages from Loy's `Effectual Marriage' (misremembering--perhaps deliberately?--its title as `Ineffectual Marriage') and observing that `Laforgue's influence or some kindred tendency is present in the whimsicalities of Marianne Moore, and of Mina Loy'. (7) Beyond this, we have sporadic comments in letters to the editor of the Little Review, Margaret Anderson, which tell us little more than that Pound wanted to retain Loy as a regular contributor, and several remarks in letters to Williams and Moore which argue more forcefully for her prominence in the American literary scene (`is there anyone in America', he writes to Moore, `except you, Bill and Mina Loy who can write anything of interest in verse?'). (8) Pound, of course, spent parts of 1924 in Italy and settled permanently in Rapallo the following year, thus removing himself from the round of dinners and parties Loy attended and which Williams enjoyed during his visit to Paris during Pound's absence in 1924. …

The pleasures for adults in children's fiction

The paper interrogates the pleasures for adults of reading children's fiction and locates these pleasures within literary and cultural repertoires, which encompass the essentialist view of childhood. Thus the enquiry critically addresses the framework of literary and cultural traditions. It examines three canonical children's texts, namely Alice in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows and Peter Pan. The paper also demonstrates, with reference to analytical approaches produced by critics such as Fred Inglis and Humphrey Carpenter (who the author believes are representatives of a particular view still encountered in children's literary criticism), the manner in which the pleasure of reading children's fiction is culturally construed and constructed.

Reviews. Dennis Potter: a Biography. Humphrey Carpenter. Dennis Potter: a Life on the Screen (second edition). John R Cook. Dennis Potter: Between Two Worlds. A Critical Reassessment. Glen Creeber

Journal Article Humphrey Carpenter, Dennis Potter: a Biography; John R. Cook, Dennis Potter: a Life on the Screen; Glen Creeber, Dennis Potter: Between Two Worlds. A Critical Reassessment Get access Humphrey Carpenter, Dennis Potter: a Biography. London: Faber and Faber, 1998, 672pp. John R. Cook, Dennis Potter: a Life on the Screen (Second Edition). Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998, 389pp. Glen Creeber, Dennis Potter: Between Two Worlds. A Critical Reassessment. London: MacMillan, 1998, 219pp. Philip Simpson Philip Simpson Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 40, Issue 2, Summer 1999, Pages 223–228, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/40.2.223 Published: 01 July 1999

Late Modern

The Waning of ‘Old Corruption’: The Politics of Economical Reform in Britain, 1779–1846. By Philip Harling Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past. Volume 1: Conflicts and Divisions. Edited by Pierre Nora and Lawrence D. Kritzman A Jew in the French Revolution: The Life of Zalkind Hourwitz. By Frances Malino The Impact of Napoleon: Prussian High Politics, Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Executive, 1797–1806. By Brendan Simms Napoleon's Irish Legion. By John G. Gallaher The Dissenters. Volume II: The Expansion of Evangelical Nonconformity. By Michael R. Watts Fearful Realities: New Perspectives on the Famine. Edited By Chris Monash and Richard Hayes The Homicidal Earl: The Life of Lord Cardigan. By Saul David John Bull's Other Homes: State Housing and British Policy in Ireland, 1883–1922. By Murray Fraser A Kingdom on Earth: Anglo‐American Social Christianity, 1880–1940. By Paul T. Phillips Ernie O'Malley: IRA Intellectual. By Richard English Michael Collins: The Secret File. Edited by A. T. Q. Stewart The Life of Edvard Beneš 1884–1948: Czechoslovakia in Peace and War. By Zbynek Zeman with Antonin Klimek Futurism and Politics: Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909–1944. By Günter Berghaus His Father's Son: The Life of Randolph Churchill. By Winston S. Churchill What Happened Where: A Guide to Places and Events in Twentieth‐century History. By Chris Cook and Diccon Bewes From Belloc to Churchill: Private Scholars, Public Culture, and the Crisis of British Liberalism, 1900–1939. By Victor Feske The War from Within: German Working‐class Women in the First World War. By Ute Daniel The Great War 1914–1918. By Spencer C. Tucker The Irish Guards in the Great War: The First Battalion. By Rudyard Kipling Germany 1916–1941. By E. J. Feuchtwanger Mandate Days: British Lives in Palestine 1918–1948. By A. J. Sherman Pariahs, Partners, Predators: German–Soviet Relations, 1922–1941. By Aleksandr M. Nekrich The Struggle for Power: Russia in 1923. By Valentina Vilkova Mussolini. By Jasper Ridley Mussolini and the British. By Richard Lamb Brethren in Adversity: Bishop George Bell, the Church of England and the Crisis of German Protestantism, 1933–1939. Edited by Andrew Chandler British Policy and the Refugees, 1933–1941. By Yvonne Kapp and Margaret Mynatt The Blueshirts and Irish Politics. By Mike Cronin Atlantic Roulette: A Merchantman at War, 1940. By Morris Beckman In the Combat Zone: Special Forces since 1945. By Robin Neillands Industrial Policy in Britain 1945–1951: Economic Planning, Nationalisation and the Labour Governments. By Martin Chick Youth in Britain since 1945. By Bill Osgerby The Envy of the World: Fifty Years of the BBC Third Programme and Radio 3. By Humphrey Carpenter The Cold War: An International History, 1947–1991. By S. J. Ball

Of School and the River: The Wind in the Willows and its Immediate Audience

Wind in the Willows is most innocently appreciated as nostalgic fantasy: a pastoral celebration of life along the riverbank, where the four primary animal gentlemen Mole, Rat, Badger, and Toad enjoy a series of picaresque adventures that often involve messing about in boats but always end with a return to their snug and com- fortable homes. novel's episodes promote friendship, courtesy, competence, courage, and generosity in an idyllic world where sex, work, violence, and death are beyond the horizon. Experienced readers contextualize the story in var- ious ways. For Humphrey Carpenter the riverbank consti- tutes an Arcadia, one of the secret gardens characterizing the Golden Age of children's literature. Kenneth Grahame's biographer Peter Green sees the novel as a psychological escape for its author, Grahame's refuge from his disastrous marriage and his mundane, if well-compensated, job in the Bank of England. Lois Kuznets points out the mock-epic Odyssean theme and structure. Peter Hunt sees the novel as idyll, Bildungsroman, sociological document on class warfare, anarchist comedy, burlesque, nostalgia, sexist con- servative tract—by fits and starts, all of these (97). novel richly repays all such readings, but here I would like to head back to the text's origins, curiously neg- lected by most interpreters of the book and warranting examination of the sort Marilyn Butler calls for when she observes, The writings of the past ask for an educated read- ing, as far as possible from within their own discourse or code or cultural system (43). It is particularly worth remembering that the narrative involves not only a specific author but also a specific addressee. Wind in the Willows began as a series of bedtime stories that Grahame told his son Alastair in 1904, evolved into story letters when the two were apart in 1907, and finally took published form in 1908. In this essay, I contend that what Grahame wanted to pass down to Alastair, from father to son, from public- school old boy to future new boy, is material designed to inform the child about his future education, presented in a form meant to be palatable and accessible to the four-year- old audience of the oral stories and the seven-year-old on holiday with his governess. story of the neophyte Mole, who makes friends, acquires knowledge and skills, and widens his world, is specifically applicable to the situation Alastair was shortly to face. Though Wind in the Willows serves admirably as a general guidebook to the ways of that interesting young the English schoolboy, its fictive and rhetorical strategies specifically reflect the particular anxieties and circumstances of its author and its addressee.

American Expatriate Writing and the Paris Moment: Modernism and Place, and: Modern Lives: A Cultural Re-reading of "The Lost Generation" (review)

Reviewed by: American Expatriate Writing and the Paris Moment: Modernism and Place, and: Modern Lives: A Cultural Re-reading of “The Lost Generation.” Joseph C. Schöpp Donald Pizer. American Expatriate Writing and the Paris Moment: Modernism and Place. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1996. xv + 149 pp. Marc Dolan. Modern Lives: A Cultural Re-reading of “The Lost Generation.” West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1996. x + 253 pp. In the last decade or so Paris as a haven for self-exiled American writers in the 1920s has more and more attracted the critics’ attention. Studies by Humphrey Carpenter, Arlen J. Hansen, J. Gerald Kennedy, Shari Benstock, or Andrea Weiss document this increased critical interest. A sufficient temporal distance seems to generate such contributions “to the currently emerging synthesis” of modernist America, as Marc Dolan convincingly argues. Modernism can finally be inspected from a postmodernist perspective and comprehended as a historical entity. The two studies under discussion, complementary yet different in their approach of the subject, are further attempts to re-view and revisit high-modernist Paris and assess its significance for American culture. Whereas Pizer reads his texts to trace their distinct “themes and shapes” which critics, in his opinion, have largely ignored, Dolan “rereads” his texts in order to look behind the textual shapes in search of covert subtexts. Where Pizer sees the texts “participate in the creation of a mythic expression of American self-exile,” Dolan′s effort lies in the demythologization of such mythmaking attempts. Pizer’s study is undoubtedly the more traditional of the two. He explicitly opts for what he calls the “old-fashioned—but often still rewarding—critical method of approaching the themes of the work [End Page 467] through aspects of its technique and structure.” Three autobiographies (Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Anaïs Nin’s Diary), three novels (Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Dos Passos’s Ninteen-Nineteen, Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night) and Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, which he sees as a synthesis of the autobiographical and the fictional mode, feature as Pizer’s core-texts. They, in his view, represent both “the basic configuration of and best expression within the expatriate writing.” Each writer sees “the Paris moment” as a mythic moment of liberation with a strong artistic momentum. Paris represents freedom from a coercive American culture; it sets free whereas America stifles creativity. It circumscribes an artistic space which each writer then invests with his/her meaning. As a diligent and attentive close-reader Pizer detects certain basic tropes which all his featured texts have more or less in common. Mobility, feeding, sexuality are diagnosed as the dominant structuring metaphors which characterize the Paris moment as free, nourishing, and creative. The creativity, Pizer argues, finds its most apt expression in formal experiments, discontinuous and fragmented, which can be read as attempts to transform the pictorial techniques of cubism and surrealism into textual equivalents. In all the texts discussed Pizer finds a strong autobiographical impulse which he convincingly explains as the authors’ attempts to come to terms with their experiences of dislocation and otherness. The autobiographic mode provides an ideal form to re-create and re-imagine one’s self in an alien context. Yet autobiography proper and the autobiographic fictions for Pizer serve different functions. Whereas Hemingway, Stein, and Nin as autobiographers view Paris as a space of artistic maturation, a place of “radiant richness and freedom,” the fictional versions of Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, and Miller paint a much darker picture. Hemingway, who is discussed both as autobiographer and fiction writer, casts his autobiographical self as one who, journeying through a world populated by good and evil spirits matures, and in the end reaches his artistic mastery, while the fictional creation of Jake Barnes represents a writer’s more problematic side. In fictional disguises, it seems, a writer more readily reveals the darker corners of one’s self, while autobiography as a confessional mode which purportedly dispenses with personae practices its own art of exclusion and creates [End Page 468] its own masks behind which the autobiographer can hide what is not to be disclosed. Though Pizer repeatedly...

"You Catch It if You Try to Do Otherwise": The Limitations of E. Nesbit's Cross-Written Vision of the Child

"You Catch It if You Try to Do Otherwise":The Limitations of E. Nesbit's Cross-Written Vision of the Child Erika Rothwell (bio) Edith Nesbit did not begin writing for children consistently or particularly successfully until she produced The Treasure Seekers in 1899. After this success, the majority of her books were children's, but she also continued to write for adults. Nesbit, however, not only alternates between addressing child and adult audiences, but also cross-writes for adult and child within and across works. The children's books that make up the Bastable trilogy—The Treasure Seekers (1899), The Wouldbegoods (1901), and The New Treasure Seekers (1904)—though told from a child's point of view, address both child and adult readers and focus attention upon the common, but conflicting, experiences of adult and child. Meanwhile, the domestic novel The Red House (1902), which is intended for an adult audience, calls attention to the same phenomena of shared, yet conflicting, experience by introducing the child Bastable characters as "guest stars" and telling, from Len's adult point of view, an episode that is later renarrated by Oswald in The Treasure Seekers. Virtually all critical consideration of Nesbit and her view of the child is based solely upon her children's books and does not incorporate the intersection of child and adult books that I have just described. Humphrey Carpenter finds Nesbit's Bastable trilogy "as condescending towards children as are any of the Beautiful Child books of the Molesworth era" (132), but more often Nesbit's children's books are thought of as iconoclastic.1 Mary Croxson, for example, believes that Nesbit's purpose is to emancipate the child. Nesbit's children "are no longer enslaved by the repressive or over-indulgent adult domination of an earlier age. They converse freely with their elders, are at liberty to develop as they will and have the freedom of personal awareness given by a rich imaginative life" (Croxson 63). In [End Page 60] short, Nesbit is typically defined as a juvenile author who writes for children as equals and as an uncompromising advocate of the child's viewpoint, rights, and freedoms. I believe, however, that the cross-written vision of the child that emerges from the sum of the Bastable books and the Red House reveals that Nesbit's view of the child is more complex and contradictory than is usually acknowledged and that this perspective is neither liberating nor emancipating. It is true that the Bastables are remarkably free of regulations and inhibitions, and that Nesbit clearly does reject some Victorian manifestations of the child when she dismisses evangelical classics like Maria Charlesworth's Ministering Children (1854) as the "wrong sort of books" (328).2 Nevertheless, I do not think that Nesbit's works truly can be said to address the child as an equal or to grant him or her any significant liberation. The Bastable books contain much that is inaccessible to the child reader, and the final picture that emerges from Nesbit's texts reveals the young as separate and powerless beings who are repeatedly subject to failure and confusion. Unable to understand fully or to affect knowingly the adult world, Nesbit's children can hope for no more than amused condescension from the kindest of adults. Nesbit may well owe her reputation as a child-centered author to the creation of Oswald Bastable, who sees and speaks to the adult world from a child's perspective. Alison Lurie writes that "the decision to tell her story through the persona of Oswald Bastable, a child much after her own pattern: bold, quick-tempered, egotistic, and literary," was a decision which "released Nesbit's genius" (424).3 Oswald voices the collective opinions, observations, and conclusions of the Bastable children as they attempt to understand adults and the adult world. Thus, Oswald has been considered an "Everychild" who can speak directly to child readers in a way adult narrators cannot. Oswald's jaunty narration, however, which combines detail, incident, observation, and reflection, balances the Bastable tales between child and adult readers through a style designed to suggest realism to the child reader while simultaneously communicating both realism and humor...

The Representation of Nature in The Wind in the Willows and The Secret Garden

The Representation of Nature in The Wind in the Willows and The Secret Garden Jane Darcy (bio) In some recent criticism of books for children from the late Victorian and Edwardian period, there is a tendency to set up an opposition between fantasy and realism when discussing their representation of nature. This criticism often focuses on what is perceived as a general tendency on the part of children’s writers in this period to idealize and romanticize childhood by depicting children or childlike figures leading an idyllic life in a rural environment. Because such representations do not appear to reflect the realities of emerging democracy in what had become a complex industrial and urban society, they are seen as backward looking and as evading the “truth.” Jacqueline Rose, for example, in her book The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (1984) maintains that children’s fiction perpetuates a notion of childhood and of the relationship between children and the natural world that runs right through from Rousseau to Alan Garner. This notion, she argues, projects onto the child an idea of childhood innocence and instinctive contact with the nonrational, nonverbal world of nature that is what adults want children to have. Writing of Alan Garner’s later work, she remarks: The child is placed in a rural community of ironsmiths, stonemasons and agricultural labour. Here—in moments of recognition uncontaminated by industry or literacy—the child reads off from the land, the earth and the sky its own truth and a nature which would otherwise perish. . . . In Rousseau, education preserves nature in the child, and it recovers nature through the child. In much the same way, literature for Garner gives back to children, and to us, something innocent and precious which we have destroyed. . . . (44–45) [End Page 211] For Rose, there can be no such thing as children’s fiction, because this idealizing is not a true representation of what childhood is like, but an adult remaking of it in its own image, which constitutes a kind of oppression. The view that children’s books, by their very nature, cannot deal with realities is also expressed by Humphrey Carpenter in the “prologue” to Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (1985), though he approaches it from a different angle to Rose: “All children’s books are about ideals. Adult fiction sets out to portray and explain the world as it really is; books for children present it as it should be” (1). Furthermore, we find that as Carpenter’s popular and readable (if controversial) study progresses with chapters on individual authors, the mixture of literary criticism and biography he employs conveys the strong impression that the classic writers of children’s books were not idealizing but evading the “real” world in their work. Almost every one of his subjects—which include Charles Kingsley, Lewis Carroll, Richard Jefferies, Kenneth Grahame, E. Nesbit, James Barrie, and A. A. Milne—is seen as turning to writing as an escape from some inadequacy or unhappiness in his or her own life. It is this, as much as any desire to explore their created worlds, that appears to interest Carpenter about these writers. He says, for instance, of Grahame, “He wished to revisit childhood because of the possibilities it offered of Escape” (120). What Grahame apparently wanted to escape from was his wife Elspeth, who “poured out, in the bad poems she wrote in large quantities, her resentment at his coldness and neglect of her” (152). In his endeavor to escape, Grahame created The Wind in the Willows, which Carpenter considers a fine achievement because, “Of all the Victorians and Edwardians who tried to create Arcadia in print, only Grahame really managed it” (155). Again, New Historicism has rightly drawn to our attention the importance of studying the text in relation to its cultural context and the conditions of its production and consumption. In a New Historicist reading, texts such as The Wind in the Willows and The Secret Garden can also become somewhat suspect, because they are seen to perpetuate myths about Englishness in their representation of nature and country life. Mitzi Myers...

Books

Journal Article Books Get access Benjamin Britten: A Biography Humphrey Carpenter New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1993 677 pages, $30.00 Benjamin Britten: “Billy Budd” Cambridge Opera Handbooks Edited by Mervyn Cooke and Philip ReedCambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993 180 pages, $44.95 (cloth), $15.95 (paper) Joe K. Law Joe K. Law Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Opera Quarterly, Volume 10, Issue 4, summer 1994, Pages 108–112, https://doi.org/10.1093/oq/10.4.108 Published: 01 July 1994

Obvious Subversions

Obvious Subversions Lois R. Kuznets (bio) Don't Tell the Grown-Ups: Subversive Children's Literature, by Alison Lurie. Boston: Little, Brown, 1990. I always enjoy reading Alison Lurie's prose, fiction or nonfiction. The pieces collected in this volume, most of which I had read in the seventies in Children's Literature, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review, reveal her usual self-confident erudition, wit, and determination to treat the writers and writing of children's literature seriously while taking her role as critic and scholar with the proverbial grain of salt. These qualities are not always found in the rather ponderous American critics and scholars (among whom I include myself) of children's literature. The British are better practitioners of belle-lettres, and Lurie reveals her transatlantic affinities admirably. Ties with the British literary tradition can be seen not only in Lurie's style but also in her subject matter and theoretical approach. With few exceptions, the authors and works Lurie considers are British of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Like many British critics who write about children's literature (Humphrey Carpenter, for instance), Lurie likes to link authors and works through telling biographical detail while generally shunning Freudian analysis of the texts. As Lurie notes in her foreword, in her childhood she discovered that there were: two sorts of books on [the library] shelves. . . . The first kind, the great majority, told me what grown-ups had decided I ought to know or believe about the world. . . . But there was another sort of children's literature. . . . These books . . . recommended—even celebrated—daydreaming, disobedience, answering back, running away from home, and concealing one's private thoughts and feelings from unsympathetic grown-ups. They overturned adult pretensions and made fun of adult [End Page 189] institutions, including school and family. In a word, they were subversive, just like many of the rhymes and jokes and games I learned on the school playground. [ix-x] And in her first chapter, Lurie attempts to tie together the wideranging subjects in the volume under the rubric of "subversive literature," dubbing as subversive all those works that seem to challenge the didactic mode of many children's books from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. As she loosely defines it, the subversive may be discovered in the scatological sexuality of skiprope rhymes as well as in texts that portray relatively powerless characters—like the children and the protagonists of fairy tales—who subtly challenge or evade prevailing adult authority. She also includes in her idea of subversion a somewhat stronger anti-establishment stance, rarer in children's literature: such politically challenging tendencies as T. H. White's pacifism in the face of World War II or E. Nesbit's late nineteenth-century Fabianism. Only the foreword—in which Lurie expresses her own childhood preference for such subversive literature—seems to have been written especially for this volume, which is made up of diverse works, including book reviews. The subsequent chapters seem not to have undergone much change from their original presentation, although she has occasionally combined two pieces. The short studies that follow Lurie's initial thematic linking chapter meander into many areas and consider the following: folktales as liberating for female and male protagonists; American novelists of the twentieth century ("Fitzgerald to Updike") who employ fairytale motifs; books about elves that have become "Fashionable Folklore for Adults"; the literary and personal effects of Kate Greenaway's relationship with John Ruskin; Lucy Clifford's "Tales of Terror"; the fairy tales of Ford Madox Ford; Beatrix Potter's struggle, expressed in her animal stories, to emerge from her suffocating family; the "Modern Magic" of E. Nesbit; J.M. Barrie's Peter Panism; Frances Hodgson Burnett's need for happy endings; A. A. Milne's retreat to "Pooh Corner"; J. R. R. Tolkien and T. H. White as producing "Heroes for Our Time"; the godlike bear in Richard Adams's Shardik; William Mayne's Games of Dark; and finally, the rhymes, games, jokes, riddles, and superstitions that belong to the "Folklore of Childhood." [End Page 190] Don't Tell the Grown-Ups also includes an extensive bibliography of...

W. H. Auden as Seriocomic Critic

W. H. Auden is a brave rhetorician when, The Dyer's Hand, he plays with self-refuting syllogisms to define and qualify his authority as a poet writing criticism: am always interested, he writes, in hearing what a poet has to say about the nature of poetry, though I do not take it too seriously. As objective statements his definitions are never accurate, never complete, and always one-sided. Not one would stand up under a rigorous analysis (52). Predictably, readers have used such sophisticated modesty as a pretext for treating him not seriously enough. His biographer Humphrey Carpenter sloughs off apparent inconsistency thus: often his life, Auden adopted a dogmatic attitude which did not reflect the full range of his opinions, and which he sometimes flatly contradicted (xv). Carpenter, like many critics, fails to recognize a strategy Auden's use of emphatic pronouncement. In his mature critical writings Auden developed a style, by turns assertive and self-qualifying, that acknowledged the process of trial, error, and correction by which his judgments were being shaped. Auden's acknowledgment of ineluctable limitation and error had benefits as well as risks. When he lived up to its discipline, correcting and clarifying his theoretical principles, they refreshed his art so that it changed and developed coherent ways throughout his life. Furthermore, conceding his critical principles were but partial truths, he set them into strenuous dialectic relation with the debates of other

The Wind in the Willows and the Plotting of Contrast

The Wind in the Willows and the Plotting of Contrast Michael Mendelson (bio) All readers or listeners know that there are really two stories in The Wind in the Willows: that of the madcap, adventurous Toad the Gaol-breaker; and that of friendship, home life, and the simple joys of "messing about in boats," the story of Mole, Rat, and Badger. The story of Toad-of-the-Highways is centrifugal, an outgoing, Odyssean song of the open road; the other is centripetal, a riverbank idyll of domestic, pastoral pleasure. And because the values of the dusty road and the riverbank seem so opposed, readers naturally tend to align themselves with one of these stories at the expense of the other. Roger Sale, for example, has a distinct predilection for the homely adventures of the River Bank; for him, the book as a whole is "'about' coziness," while Toad belongs "over to one side" (174, 185). William W. Robson also finds the finest insights in the friendship of Rat and Mole, with the Toad chapters playing "a scherzo in the symphony" of quiet domestic life (98). And Humphrey Carpenter, though he grants that Toad "has a certain energy," maintains that the idiom of adventure was not the author's forte and that Toad lies outside the "heart of Grahame's Arcadian dream" (Gardens 154, 161). Such priorities were not, of course, shared by the work's first audience, Alistair Grahame, who responded enthusiastically to his father's original stories in which "Toad played the principal part" (Carpenter and Prichard, Oxford Companion 573).1 Most other child readers remain devoted to the Toad, as we may deduce from adaptations of Grahame's story: A. A. Milne's unifocal dramatization of the story in "Toad of Toad Hall"; the 1949 Disney film, which claims that for children Toad is "the most fabulous character in English literature"; and more recently, the Nederlander Theater's production, promoted with buttons that read "I Toad You So."2 This split between child and adult sensibility, between what Geraldine Poss calls the mock-heroic and arcadian impulses within the text, has itself been the focus of considerable criticism.3 [End Page 127] Peter Green was perhaps the first to refer to the "double theme" of the book (Grahame 202), while Carpenter asserts that "there are really two separate books" (Gardens 229n). Peter Hunt has taken this position to its logical end, arguing that "if there are two texts in The Wind in the Willows," they are structurally autonomous: "Mole's serious story once resolved, we can go on to Toad's more farcical one" (116).4 Criticism, then, has tended to separate the two stories, as if the contrasting impulses that motivate the narrative action operated independently. I will argue, however, that the clash between two such natural instincts as domesticity and romantic enthusiasm generates the special richness of the text as a whole. Instead of separating the two stories and devaluing one, I examine how Grahame not only juxtaposes but interlaces his two different plots and values. The question of narrative structure becomes all the more provocative when we remember that the oscillation between the two stories resulted from careful engineering. Peter Green has argued plausibly that Grahame composed the Toad sequence first, the episodes of the River Bank and the Wild Wood second, and the two set pieces, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" and "Wayfarers All," last (Beyond the Wild Wood, chap. 11). In the final 1908 copy, however, Grahame steadily alternated between the stories of the open road and those of the woodlands, an alternation that I will argue functions as a narrative dialectic between the "contrary states" of individualistic hedonism and communal affection.5 As the plot progresses, Grahame advances ever more subtle variations of this dialectical argument. It is my intention, then, to explore Grahame's dialectic by paying close attention to the plotting of the work (the narrative order in which the simple chronology of the two stories is rearranged) and especially to the relation between adjoining chapters and groups of chapters.6 This method should clarify embedded contrasts and parallels that require the reader to activate their meaning by...

Secret Gardens: The Golden Age of Children's Literature. Humphrey Carpenter

<i>Secret Gardens: The Golden Age of Children's Literature</i>. Humphrey Carpenter

Casting Nets for Children's Literature

Casting Nets for Children's Literature Irving P. Cummings (bio) Children's Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life, by F. J. Harvey Darton. Third edition, revised by Brian Alderson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Fifteen Centuries of Children's Literature: An Annotated Chronology of British and American Works in Historical Context, by Jane Bingham and Grayce Scholt. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980. The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature, by Humphrey Carpenter and Mari Prichard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. A new edition of a standard history and two new reference works join the rapidly expanding materials for students, teachers, and scholars of children's literature in England and America. The new edition of the history makes that book even more valuable, but the two reference works are not entirely successful in realizing their aims. F. J. Harvey Darton's Children's Booh in Englandhas been meticulously and tactfully edited by Brian Alderson, bringing this classic history up to date. Darton's text has been clarified, corrected, and amended where information not available or not known in 1932 has emerged in the last fifty years. Sometimes silent corrections have been made, sometimes paragraphs have been recast, and sometimes editor's notes, at the back of the book, have extended or commented on Darton's text. The net effect of these editorial amendments has been to leave Darton's narrative relatively untouched but at the same time to make the facts as dependable and as accurate as current scholarship can make them and to keep the paraphernalia of footnoting to a minimum. If there is—as there might well be—an uncomfortable feeling about this kind of tinkering with the text, a reading of that text makes clear why the revision was done that way. For Darton's book is an engaging narrative, with the impress of a relaxed, informed, and [End Page 187]discriminating mind. If one wonders how the "good godly books" of the Puritans, with their narratives of the edifying deaths of children, could have been called "pleasurable," Darton's page or so in chapter 4 effectively explains it. We may not accept those books on our own terms. There is a largeness of mind here that avoids temporal provinciality and yet can articulate judgments that are not trapped in mere historical relativism. The several pages on Martha Mary Sherwood's once famous (notorious?) The Fairchild Familyor those on J. M. Barrie's still famous (notorious?) Peter Panare only two instances of Darton's large mind, acute judgment, and elegant prose. This is still the best history of children's books in England: its opening sentence clearly and accurately announces its focus. "By 'children's books' I mean printed works produced ostensibly to give children spontaneous pleasure, and not primarily to teach them, nor solely to make them good, nor to keep them profitablyquiet." It is a deceptively simple sentence whose crucially discriminating adverbs make clear that Darton knows how difficult it is to chart this terrain. Newbery is the one pole of Darton's history; in six brief chapters he tells how Newbery used the six kinds of children's tales that preceded him. In his middle chapter Darton narrates the Newbery story, and then, in seven chapters, sweeps from Day and Edgeworth to his other pole, Lewis Carroll, then on to the age of Kipling, Barrie, Grahame, Nesbit, and Stevenson. Throughout Darton does more than survey books. He indicates the context in which the books appear, a context that reviews the shifting ideas of what spontaneous pleasure might and ought to be, and a context that depends upon the changing technology of printing, the creation of audiences, and the financial concerns of publishers. Darton's narrative laid out the mainlines of the history; most of the works since then have been expansions of his work, rarely matching his in elegance, easy clarity, and narrative power. Alderson's edition is a remarkably handsome book. There are more illustrations than in the earlier editions, most of them the actual size of the originals, and all carefully captioned so that they do more than illustrate the text—they extend it. Alderson has updated...