My British children's literature, part 4

Read part 1, 2 and 3 of this story. 

 

Yet another unlikely British author, significantly more famous in Russia than in his home country, was Donald Bisset. Bisset was an actor at the National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company, as well as in a large number of profoundly forgotten movies and some TV shows, including Dr Who. But he also published numerous children's books with self-explanatory titles such as Anytime Stories (1954), Some Time Stories (1957), Next Time Stories (1959), This Time Stories (1961), Another Time Stories (1963), as well as a more imaginative Talks with a Tiger (1967). Bisset's stories are very simple, almost devoid of plots, conflicts or morals. They feature anthropomorphised animals and animated objects and machines, including a minibus, a raisin bun, and a birthday. They are perfect for bedtime reading, and Bisset indeed read them on the radio, as well as adapted them for stage.

Again, I can only guess why several of his books were translated, but the translator was also a legendary editor at the central Children's Literature Publishing in Moscow, who was perhaps in a position to translate and publish what she wanted. We know that Bisset visited Moscow in 1969, so it is likely that the first translation was the result of this visit. Unlike the common practice in Russia, the first publication kept Bisset's original illustrations. Most subsequent editions were illustrated by Russian artists. A dozen tales were made into short animations. Today his stories are available at several sites for downloading or online reading.

In my upper teens, everybody in Russia, old and young, loved Bisset's stories, and one reason may be that they are in a way reminiscent of Hans Christian Andersen's tales, tremendously popular in Russia, but without Andersen's dark undertones.

One of the stories is about the rivalry between St Pancrass and King's Cross. I read the story long before I knew that these places were real, and little did I know that King's Cross would one day become my most visited railway station. Not to mention that it would also become world famous thanks to a certain J.K. 

 

The last book in this series of reflections is The Questers, by E. W. Hildick, from 1966, published in Russian in 1969. Again, a book you have hardly heard about, by an author essentially forgotten, although there are very short entries both in the Oxford Companion to Children's Literature and the four-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of Children's Literature. E. W. (Edmund Wallace) Hildick (1925-2001) was educated at Leeds Training College and worked as a teacher until he became a full-time writer. Extremely prolific, he wrote several series of school novels, detective and adventure novels, but as far as I know is completely forgotten today. He also wrote a number of books about children’s literature, including Children and Fiction: a critical study in depth of the artistic and psychological factors involved in writing fiction for and about children (1970), to my surprise available at Homerton College Library. (Was it possibly included in the syllabus of one of those early children's literature courses?) The Questers is one of his less known books, followed by two sequels: Calling Questers Four (1967) and The Questers and the Whispering Spy (1968).

Why would this obscure writer be translated into Russian, when so many significantly more famous writers were not? I have not managed to find any relevant information, but my guess is, just as with Leila Berg, that he either visited the Soviet Union some time during mid-1960s or was among the hosts for a visit from Soviet writers. Hildick was a working+class writer, his books set in working-class environments of Yorkshire, Stevenage, and Southern London. Writers with a working-class background who wrote about working-class children were acceptable and therefore attractive in the Soviet Union, unlike suspicious Christian Oxbridge types such as C S Lewis.

In 1969, I was seventeen and entering university, so strictly speaking this book was not part of my childhood reading, but at that point I already knew that I wanted to study children's literature professionally, even though there were no accessible resources. Every translated book was an event, and I still had an illusion that if a book was translated it had to be a masterpiece by a famous writer. There was no way to find any information about the author or to set the book in a context. By that time, I had read Winnie-the-Pooh, Peter Pan, Mary Poppins and other genuine classics of British children's literature, and I knew that fantasy rather than realism was its strongest aspect. The Questers puzzled me because I could not understand what made it a great book it was supposed to be.

Unlike The Adventures of Chunky, this book does have a chronological progression and a problem in the beginning, partially solved in the end. It is quite interesting in the light of today's disability studies. The main character, Peter, is bedridden with an unnamed disease – possibly polio – that he has little hope of being cured of. And he isn't, but there is a technological improvement of his situation that must have been truly radical in the mid-60s. The plot revolves around obtaining the technology – a walkie-talkie – that would enable Peter to participate in his friends' outdoor adventures and pastimes. As a side comment, a walkie-talkie was to us something from science fiction and would be considered illegal in the Soviet Union.

While planning for the treasure hunt in the local park that will win them the coveted prize, Peter's friends are also engaged in a number of other activities, including ice-cream eating competition, pet show and talent contest, all with disastrous outcomes. These episodes are not particularly funny or engaging, and the characters quite flat, so I am not surprised that the book has gone into oblivion in the UK, but in Russia, in the absence of hundreds of similar stories, it filled, and probably still fills a gap. Unlike classic Soviet gang books featuring brave and virtuous young communists, The Questers is devoid of any ideology or morals, apart from Peter's friends' genuine desire to support him. There are no lessons learned from disasters and no serious consequences either. All adults are nice, and the overall atmosphere benevolent. Even Peter's disability is presented in a positive light.

When I was writing my book From Mythic to Linear, that I still view as my major contribution to scholarship, I considered books such as The Adventures of Chunky and The Questers within my theoretical framework, in which I examined the temporal conditions of children's narratives in three main patterns: prelapsarian, carnivalesque and postlapsarian. Both fit into the first category, since nothing significant happens to the protagonists, and they are not in any way, not even temporarily, introduced to linearity and thus the central aspects of adulthood, such as growing up, death and power hierarchies. It can of course be argued whether it is legitimate to view the temporal structure of realistic stories as mythical, but this will take us to a discussion of the concept of realism and mimesis. Muffin the Mule, although featuring sentient animals, is also an example of Arcadian fiction: a narrative without linear progression, with characters trapped in eternal present. I am not questioning the value of such stories; on the contrary, they are essential to provide young readers with a sense of permanence and stability before they are ready first to explore and interrogate the world through carnival and eventually leave Arcadia in a linear progression toward imminent adulthood. What I find fascinating is that Soviet publishers, at least in the 1950s and '60s, clearly prioritised prelapsarian narratives in their choice of British books to translate. 

I want to conclude this series of blog posts with an event that became a turning point in my career and that most probably eventually brought me to Cambridge. In 1975, after I had finished my undergraduate degree and had a job as far away as imaginable from children's literature, British Council brought a large exhibition of children's books to Moscow. The venue was perhaps odd, a bookstore rather than a library. The nature of my job enabled me to dispose of my time as I saw fit, and for the duration of the exhibition, probably a couple of weeks, I spent day after day there, reading books and taking notes. This was my first encounter with The Borrowers, Tom's Midnight Garden, The Children of Green Knowe, the Narnia Chronicles and many other books that would become central in my research. Then the exhibition was closed and the books gone. And the glossy 12-page exhibition catalogue would for many years remain my only source of information about British children's literature.

The End

My British children's literature, part 3

Read part 1 and part 2 of this story.

While the reason Leila Berg was acceptable in the Soviet Union seems clear, it is less obvious with another favourite: Muffin the Mule. When I started my academic studies of children's literature in Sweden, Muffin the Mule was not a part of children's literature canon, and somehow I lost sight of it, until sometime in mid-90s I was guest lecturing at the University of Edinburgh and visited the Museum of Childhood, where I suddenly saw the puppet of Muffin the Mule in a glass case. This brought back fond childhood memories and kindled by curiosity. 

When I mentioned Muffin the Mule to an elderly Cambridge colleague some years ago, she immediately started singing the signature tune from the television series. Muffin is probably less known to contemporary audience, although BBC Two released a new animated series in 2005, and there are several picturebooks based on this series. However, I don't think Muffin is as famous in the UK today as he is in Russia. I was surprised to find scores of print editions, the most recent from 2017; free digital editions at numerous portals; as well as audio dramatisation from 1972 available both online and on CD. The book is included in the unofficial primary school curriculum. When I was a child, it was presented as one of the most popular children's books in England, and its author, Ann Hogarth, as one of the most important English children's writers. 

 

I could not find any evidence of Ann Hogarth's or her co-author Annette Mills's support of the Soviet Union or the Communist Party of Great Britain, so there must be other factors – as with all translations, extraliterary and frequently serendipitous. I have found information about Hogarth Puppets performing in Moscow, at the famous Obraztsov Puppet Theatre, and indeed the translation from 1958 has a foreword by Sergei Obraztsov, Russia's most celebrated puppeteer. In 1953, a provincial Russian film studio made a puppet animation, featuring crocheted figures and settings. For some reasons, the film was not released until 1974, by which time it was probably only of interest for specialists. I didn't see it then. It's available on YouTube.

The book, which is a collection of Muffin stories, was published in 1958 when I was six. In addition to Muffin stories, it also contained riddles, find five errors, colouring pages, join-the-dots drawings, patterns for cardboard figures and soft toys, and two board games, one a standard snakes-and-ladders game, but the other a child-appropiate version of Monopoly called “Carrots”, played with matches. The reason it is called “Carrots” is that the eponymous protagonist loves carrots. I remember playing it with my friends well in our upper teens. We were not familiar with Monopoly until much later.

But the main attraction was the stories. Anthropomorphic animals are prominent in Russian children's literature, as elsewhere, but Muffin and his friends were particularly attractive because of their exotic English names. I have read on a recent Russian webpage that the author was very clever when she gave her characters interesting English names – no comment! What I didn't know when I was a child, and that most Russian readers probably don't realise still today is that the names in English are alliterations: Muffin the Mule, Peregrine the Penguin, Sally the Seal, Oswald the Ostrich, Peter the Puppy, Grace the Giraffe, Poppy the Parrot, Hubert the Hippo, Louise the Lamb, Willy the Worm, and Katy the Kangaroo. Knowing this now, I wonder whether the translator gave up or simply didn't notice. It would have been difficult, but not impossible to render this wonderful linguistic feature in translation. The Russian Muffin was not a mule, but a donkey, probably because mule doesn't sound particularly nice in Russian. Donkey in Russian sounds even worse, just like “ass”, so Muffin got a diminutive suffix, oslik, little donkey, which is fine.

Muffin is anthropomorphised so that he sleeps in a bed and eats at a table, bakes a cake and combs his mane with a comb in front of a mirror. But he also eats carrots and walks on all four and wears a saddle and a bridle. In my book, the illustrations were printed in monochrome, alternating between red, yellow, green and blue. This irritated me because I didn't know which was the right colour of Muffin's saddle and bridle. Today, I am irritated that an antropomorphised animal wears a saddle and a bridle at all, and is proud of it. There is something profoundly wrong with it.

Muffin's friends are anthropomorphised in various degrees. Sally the Seal and Hubert the Hippo swim or soak in a pool, Peter the Puppy loves digging up flower beds, while Peregrine the Penguin reads scholarly books on statistics. Unlikely friendships, such as between Oswald the Ostrich and Willy the Worm, did not bother me, and I never wondered what had brought all these exotic animals together. One detail that did bother me was Poppy the Parrot who, on learning that Muffin is baking a cake, contributes an egg that she has just laid. Even to a very young me it sounded like cannibalism. Every time I re-read the book, I tried to get over this episode as quickly as possible.

Something that didn't bother me at all were the two characters who would definitely be expunged from any children's book today: the only two human characters, siblings Wolly and Molly. I presume that in the original puppet show they were golliwogs at a time when golliwogs were still acceptable, but I could not find information on whether they featured in the TV show. They are not listed among the TV characters, so probably not; and they definitely do not appear in the 2005 BBC production. Yet they are quite prominent in several stories, and it is mentioned that they come from Louisiana. Today we would of course object to these children being equalled with exotic animals – just as indigenous people were one time displayed in European zoos. For me, as a child, although I knew that these children were supposed to be human, they were certainly in the same category as the animals and came from similarly exotic countries as Peregrin's Antarctica, Oswald's Africa or Katy's Australia. Moreover, the characters were in line with a large number of black children popular in Soviet children's literature for various reasons, but always as tokens and never as central characters. Soviet publishers in the 1950s would not see any reasons for eradicating these characters.

There are two more human characters in the stories whom I, with my critical eyeglasses on, might call metafictional: Annette and Ann. In the story, at least in Russian, they are presented as little girls, but the names point at the creators of the TV show, Annette Mills and Ann Hogarth. The story they appear in was a disturbing one, and it wasn't until I was grown-up that I realised what was really implied. Muffin wants to write a book for Annette and Ann, with each of his friends contributing a chapter. The purpose is, as the Russian text states, for the girls to remember the animals in case they have to travel away. This statement puzzled me. Why would the animals travel away, “for a long time”, as specified some lines further down?

What strikes me now is the inversion of the toy-animal trope we recognise from Winnie-the-Pooh or Toy Story: the toys' anxiety about the child growing up and abandoning them. Here, the toys – if the characters are indeed toys rather than animals – are anxious that something will happen to them and their humans will forget them. With my today's critical eyes, I don't put high demands on the stories' psychological sophistication, but the fact that it troubled me as a child implies that there was definitely something wrong with the idea.

I was also disturbed by what I probably saw as a breach of genre conventions. I was prepared to accept that animals could talk, but I had problems with Muffin's magical gadgets that enable him to catch a thief and retrieve the stolen objects; or with the magic wish-granting comb. I also had problems with a spider who turns out to be an enchanted fairy.

Considering these stories today, I see them as rather bland, not without humour, but also with a good deal of morals. I am sure they worked well as short puppet shows, but there is very little literary merit in them. However, we all know that children do not necessarily appreciate books for their artistic quality. Also of significance is that the book was published in Russian three years before Winnie-the-Pooh, which doubtless offers a substantially more profound animal/toy narrative. Pooh was quickly incorporated in Russian children's literature, followed by a tremendously popular animated film, as far away from Disney in its aesthetics as can be. Pooh quickly started to function as an independent cultural icon, which I have written about and will not repeat now. Muffin was more of an oddity, and far from all in my generation in Russia still remember him. Yet it is still in print today, in dozens of editions, with various illustrations, and available on various online readers.

To be continued

My British children's literature, part 2

Read the first post in this series.

Another favourite was of a totally different kind: The Adventures of Chunky, by Leila Berg, who actually died just a couple of years ago. If I had known that she was alive when I moved to the UK, I would have contacted her to tell her how passionately I loved her book. But to a child, all authors are by definition dead, so it didn't even occur to me that the author of my childhood favourite could be alive. And again, this wasn't a name you saw on every syllabus. Why was this book translated? Why this book, of all English books? By all standards, published in 1950 and translated in 1959, it was obsolete already. Yet I loved this book for its nice everyday adventures and pranks, and without reference frames, without the background of Swallows and Amazons or Just William, I didn't see its flaws. Maybe they aren't flaws; maybe it is just one of many average books that come and go, but for me it was one of the Great Books, an indispensable book from which I still remember long passages by heart. For my critical self, this is an episodic narrative and a middle narrative; it has no logical beginning or end; it can be read in any order – perfect for bedtime reading. The stories take place during summer holidays, so there are no school-related obligations, and the children have, as they had in those simple times, total freedom of movement around the town, including riding buses and going into shops. The relationships between children and adults are idyllic. There is no character development, no conflicts or confrontations, not even moral lessons. Chunky, a seven-year-old boy, is scientifically minded and finds rational explanation to everything, but there isn't any factual knowledge to extract from the stories, which of course isn't important for me now, as it wasn't then.

There were quite a few things that puzzled me in the book. From other translated books, I knew that the British currency was pounds, shillings and pence, but I didn't know how many shillings there were to a pound or how many pence a shilling, therefore the sums Chunky and his friends do were incomprehensible. I was also puzzled that Chunky's parents went to meet the king. Kings didn't fit into a contemporary realistic story. Chunky's parents went to meet the king because, as I realise now, they worked on a super-secret military project, but it wasn't spelled out, and for a dislocated reader like myself it didn't say anything. At one point, a colleague of Chunky's parents, a certain professor Haldane, is mentioned. J B S Haldane was professor of biochemistry at Cambridge, and incidentally the author of a hilarious children's book My Friend Mr Leakey. He was a good friend of Leila Berg, but I wonder whether contemporaneous readers were supposed to recognise the name or whether it was just an internal joke. Like Berg, Haldane was a Communist and a supporter of the Soviet Union.

 Leila Berg                                        J B S Haldane

With Chunky, I was confused because of references to war. I had heard a lot about war from my parents, but it was obviously beyond my lived experience. The book mentions that when Chunky was born, his mother had to stay at home with him, but during the war she hired a housekeeper in order to continue her work as a scientist. This temporal setting that made Chunky perhaps fifteen year older that I was, was disturbing. It was not far back in time enough to be a historical novel, like The little rugamuffin, but it was not a diffuse present either. I was puzzled because one of Chunky's friends didn't know what a refrigerator was. From my upper middle-class position in the late 1950s, I could not imagine a household without a refrigerator, although today I wonder whether all my classmates' families had one. I was puzzled that only Mike's mother had a linen-cupboard. Why was having a linen-cupboard so remarkable in Britain in the 1940s? Where did people otherwise keep their linen? I was totally puzzled by burst water-pipes, because of course in the Russian climate all plumbing was indoors and well insulated, and it wasn't until I moved to the UK that I understood this detail.

I was truly puzzled that when Chunky's friend Mike's father has an accident and goes to hospital, the boys arrange a performance to collect money for the family. The story is thus set pre-NHS, that is, pre-1948, something that young British readers in the early 1950s would still recognise; but for a Russian young reader in the late 1950s it sounded more like Dickens. Surely, when you were sick in hospital, you received sick pay! So wide apart were Chunky's world and mine.

Of more mundane issues, I didn't know what a sandwich was, and it was probably wrong of the translator to transliterate it as exotic “sandwich” rather than a familiar bread-and-butter. Chunky's mother leaves him interesting lunches that fascinated me as a child. The standard Russian lunch was, and still is, a starter, a soup, a main and a dessert. So when Chunky had condensed milk-and-apple sandwiches for lunch it was as outlandish as it could get. But then of course Chunky's parents were scientists. I was also spellbound when Chunky drank milk through a straw. I wasn't familiar with plastic drinking straws. I tried to drink my milk through a real straw when we were staying in a summer cottage – it didn't work too well. Drinking straws first entered my life, tentatively, as a rare and exotic object, in the 1970s. We would save and rinse them for re-use.

Pocket money was an unfamiliar phenomenon in Russia, and the fact that you could save pocket money to buy a watch was inconceivable, but again, it was part of the exoticism, as was chewing gum, that I had encountered in other translated books, but had no idea of what it was. Neither did the translator, particularly when Chunky asks his parents to bring him bubblegum from London, a recent and still rare product unavailable in his little town. The translator was at a loss and had to invent an explanation: in Russian, Chunky says: “Not chewing gum, but bubblegum, to blow soap bubbles with”. It didn't make the episode clearer for me.

I obviously did not recognise the songs featuring in the book, such as Oranges and Lemons or Good King Wenceslas. The latter, incidentally, was presented as New Year song, since Christmas was banned as a phenomenon and a word in the Soviet Union. Progressive boys in England would not celebrate Christmas. I didn't understand rhyming slang, even though it sounded funny. I didn't understand the implication of “running away to sea”; I thought it meant going to the seaside for a holiday, but I had no idea how close or how far away seaside was. I am not sure I had seen a map of the British Isles by that time, and if I had, I did not understand the scale. I also missed the implication of having to turn twenty-one before you could do certain things, because in Russia the coming of age was eighteen.

On the other hand, there were things in the book that didn't puzzle me that would probably puzzle today's young reader: cod-liver oil. Every Russian child had to endure it after lunch. You would hardly find ether in an average British bathroom today, but you could in a Russian bathroom in the '50s. I could absolutely relate to a queue for oranges that were just as as scarce in the late 1950s in Moscow as in the late 1940s in Britain. If I was dislocated in space, I was to a certain extent synchronised in time.

But none of these puzzling details put me off the book, possibly the other way round. Using my critical toolkit of today, I didn't identify with Chunky; instead I was curious about his otherness. I read a lot of books about children in diverse chronotopes, but generally I do not remember ever identifying with fictional characters, not even when their experience was close enough to mine. Instead, it was the unfamiliar experience I cherished. Whether it makes me a sophisticated reader I will not speculate about.

Back to the question of why this book was translated. There was a quota on translated books per country; the central children's publisher that more or less had monopoly on children's books, would publish a translation from English maybe once every third year. Chunky thus effectively blocked any other British book that was perhaps more worth to be available for Russian young readers. But publishers had their guidelines. In the late 1950s, imaginative fiction was out of favour; both Russian and foreign books should be realistic and reflect lives of real children, preferably from working classes. Chunky didn't quite fit into the latter category, his parents being high-rank academics fraternising with royalty; but Leila Berg matched the criteria for acceptable Western authors. As already mentioned, she sympathised with the Soviet Union, was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and wrote for the party newspaper The Daily Worker. I could not find any information about her possible visits to the USSR, but as a member of the Communist Party she would probably be among the British writers hosting Soviet visitors. Casual exchange of books would be enough to justify a publication. It might be interesting to find out whether any Russian children's book was translated in the UK at the same time.

Once again, I deeply regret that I wasn't aware that Berg was still alive when I moved to Cambridge, or indeed when I started visiting the UK for academic purposes: it would have been interesting to hear her story.

To be continued

My British children's literature

It so happened that I never gave the talk that was supposed to be my valedictory appearance. But I did finish it, and I think it may be of interest for some people, both those who were coming to listen and those who weren't. Therefore I have taken the liberty to cut it up into smaller chunks, appropriate for blog posts. If you have followed my blog, you may recognise some facts and arguments, but I don't think it matters.

For this talk, I was asked to share my experience of childhood reading – something that our Cambridge children's literature team asks masters students to do for their first assignment. I must admit that when I first came to Cambridge and saw this assignment on the syllabus, I said to myself: Oh dear, what is it, kindergarten? Then I started to supervise the essay and later grade it, and I realised that I was profoundly wrong. It is an immensely challenging assignment if you do it properly (and if you don't, why bother?). If you manage to balance between the authenticity of your childhood experience (and we know that memory is totally unreliable) and your critical self at the moment of writing.

I have since supervised and graded scores of these assignments, and I have seen both how students struggle with it and how beneficial it is for them to go back to their childhood reading and consider what was appealing and why. I have also read a number of childhood reading memoirs, including Francis Spufford, Margaret Mackey and Lucy Mangan. This is not really my genre, but I accepted the challenge.

However, I decided to limit my reflections to British children's literature, for a number of reasons. Firstly, at least the context, if not the texts themselves would be familiar to the intended audience (and probably to this blog's readers). Secondly, a valedictory talk is supposed to be entertaining, so I hope you, dear reader, will share the amusement of my critical self in contemplating what British children's books reached my young self behind the Iron Curtain and subsequently what my picture of British children's literature was before I was given the opportunity to study it academically outside the restrictions of my home country.

(If you want to know more about my childhood reading, I wrote several blog posts about it). 

Like Jerusha Abbot says in Daddy Long Legs: “I have never read Mother Goose or David Copperfield or Ivanhoe or Cinderella or Bluebeard or Robinson Crusoe or Jane Eyre or Alice in Wonderland or a word of Rudyard Kipling”. Well, I did read David Copperfield and Robinson Crusoe and Just So Stories, but I never read Beatrix Potter or J M Barrie or Frances Hodgson Burnett or Arthur Ransome or a word of C S Lewis. I read and loved a children's edition of Gulliver’s Travels, purged of all indecencies and politics. And of course I read and loved Alice in Wonderland, and I could go on forever explaining why it was so much loved in Russia where “Off with your head!” was not an empty declaration, but a real threat, and where someone could decide what words mean.

But I chose to talk about British children’s literature that few if any of British children's literature scholars would recognise: British books that got translated into Russian for any number of reasons – of which more in a minute – and that created my image of British children’s literature that is radically different from the established canon. For instance, of all Enid Blyton’s production, the only book translated until recently was Tim the Famous Duckling. 

 

Ever heard of him? Probably not, but a web search yields scores of Russian sites offering various editions of Tim the Famous Duckling, as well as audiobooks, stage versions and animation. There is even a lesson plan for teaching Tim the Famous Duckling to 8-year-olds and a variety of reviews on parenting sites. You need to know your Blyton well to figure out that the original story is The Famous Jimmy, published in 1936 and fetching fancy prices on ebay and online bookstores. How did The Famous Jimmy, with its hugely dubious morals, get translated and published in Russia in 1946 and never stayed out of print? It's just one of many mysteries when a mediocre and totally forgotten book becomes a hit in another culture.

One of my favourite books when I was a child was The true history of a little ruggamuffin, by James Greenwood. It wasn't just my favourite, it was everybody's favourite, a classic, mandatory classroom reading, yet still a favourite, as famous as Alice in Wonderland and Robinson Crusoe and mentioned in every Russian source on world children's literature, British children's literature, children's literature, fullstop. When I got professionally interested in children's literature and started reading Western sources, I was puzzled that this masterpiece wasn't mentioned anywhere. What foreign children's books got translated into Russian was a serendipity; and this one was a very progressive book from the point of view of Soviet ideology, showing the misery of the working classes under capitalism.

When I visited London for the first time, many place names, for instance, Covent Garden, were familiar from The little rugamuffin. I still think of The little rugamuffin these days when I take the Tube and pass Covent Garden.

In my book Children's Literature Comes of Age, I have a chapter on canon and an argument about how books can become more prominent in a foreign culture than in their own. The little rugamuffin was obviously a good example, but I needed at least some information about it. I had asked English and American colleagues, and nobody had heard of this book. I found it eventually in the British National Bibliography for 1866 (this was long before Google). It wasn't even a children's book. The book we all loved during my childhood and that is still loved and cherished by Russian children was a retelling of an obscure penny-dreadful. 

James Greenwood (1833–1929) was an investigative journalist with Pall Mall Gazette and later Daily Telegraph and wrote reports from the lives of the London poor, particularly workhouses. He published several books based on these reports. He also wrote adventure stories for Boy's Own and some children's books, mostly high sea adventures and nature stories. The true history of a little rugamuffinin was published in 1866 and only reprinted once in 1884. It was never marketed for young readers, most probably because it was so radically different from contemporaneous Victorian children's literature. In the 1860s and '70s, Greenwood was tremendously popular in Russia both with his reports and his fiction. The true history was translated two years after it appeared in English and published in a progressive literary magazine. The most prominent Russian working-class writer Maxim Gorky mentions it in his autobiography as influential adolescent reading. It was retranslated and retold several times, and in the Soviet Union it had over fifty editions, with printruns of millions of copies. It was acknowledged as a children's literature classic and is still in print. Several academic works have been written on it.

One of my questions in investigating the book further was how much liberty the translator/reteller had taken. This reteller was no other than the Grand Old Man of Soviet children's literature, Kornei Chukovsky, who also gave us Kipling and Doctor Dolittle and many other key texts of British children's literature. But why The little rugamuffin? That we might never know. Maybe the novel reminded him of Dickens. It surely fit in well with other fiction describing the horrors of capitalism that Soviet educationalists viewed as desirable reading for children. On close inspection, Chukovsky was quite faithful to the original, although he deleted episodes of domestic violence, references to wicked Jews and some other minor details. However, he did amend the ending to suit the Soviet ideology. In the original, the protagonist grows up, goes to Australia and makes his fortune there. In the version I know, he becomes a child factory worker, which apparently was a huge improvement for a little boy as compared to being a street urchin. Well, at least he wasn't adopted by a rich lady.

To be continued

Literary Stockholm, part 7: Winter Bay

Read the background for this blog series.
Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 and Part 6.

I remember well when Vinterviken (“Winter bay”) was published in 1993. Mats Wahl was by then a well-known YA writer, particularly for his historical novels Husbonden (“The master”) and Anna-Carolinas krig (“Anna-Carolina's war”), the latter one of several cross-dressing novels that appeared at the same time. Vinterviken was, however, different: focusing on contemporary Swedish society. We were all entranced by it; the reviews were overwhelming, and it won the August Prize for the best children's or YA book of the year. I have written about it, and I taught it on many occasions.

As with the other books I am reading for this challenge, I tried to dig into my memories before re-reading. I remembered the main character and his dilemma, I remembered romance across class and race borders (race issues were not as prominent in Sweden at that time as today), and I remembered crime and violence. What I remembered most of all was the narrative voice. First-person, present tense – it has become so common there days in YA fiction that it is trivial, but it wasn't that usual.

What I had completely forgotten are details that are of overall importance: the fact that the main character attends a drama school and a boxing class, the way he meets the upper-class girl when he saves her little sister from drowning, the conflict with the stepfather (not too original), and a confrontation with a neo-nazi gang.

I had forgotten how unsympathetic, not to say abominable, the main character was. I did remember that he and his friend break and enter, but I did not remember that he also commits other small and big crimes, without slightest regret. I guess I was seduced by the narrative voice, as the reader of course is supposed to be; I fell into identification trap that I have warned so often in my research; I aligned with the underdog ignoring his depravity. But it turned out that I also misremembered the narrative perspective. I must have confused it with a different novel. My sense was that the unreliable narrator “forgets” to mention that he is mixed-race and that it comes as a surprise toward the end, explaining in retrospect some of his behaviour. This is why I reacted so strongly to the cover of my edition, taken from the film adaptation that I also reacted strongly to when it first came: revealing in advance something that the narrator omits. However, this decisive fact is disclosed from start, as John-John is abused and bullied by a gang of neo-nazis, who continue to chase him throughout the plot. And John-John's dreams about his African-American father would not make sense unless we already knew that he was mixed-race. I remembered the dreams, so how these circumstances could be reconciled in my memory I don't understand.

What I remembered correctly though was that being mixed-race is not John-John's dilemma, it's just a part of who he is, and that was what I liked when I first read the novel. His dilemma is class, not race, and in the context the intersection is negligible.

I did not remember that his upper-class girlfriend hits and almost kills his criminal stepfather in self-defence. So she is not precisely an angel either. I did not remember that the stepfather sleeps with his sister, on consent, and the mother does not object. I did not remember that the best friend gets involved with neo-nazis and then asks John-John to help him escape from them.

I did not remember the ending at all so I was kept in suspense about how all these conflicts would be resolved. On re-reading, I wonder why I wasn't disappointed when – skip this if you don't want a spoiler – the enemies conveniently drown in the ice-covered Winter Bay (so the novel starts and ends with drowning). However, while I didn't remember it before reading, I now recall that I was pleased - another spoiler - with the lovers reunited because it was the first Swedish YA novel in many years where the protagonist wasn't killed or committed suicide. I welcomed the happy ending as refreshing. I don't now. I don't find it persuasive.

In short, my memory of the novel was not merely fragmented and distorted, it was next to non-existent. And I have written about it and taught it!

Finally, I had forgotten how badly it was written. Again, I think reviewers, scholars and August jury were enticed by the subject, the voice – and after all, it was perhaps the best book of the year and even decade, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was good.

I am glad I have re-read it and will from now on not misrepresent it in conversations with colleagues. It is also a perfect example of a book that has definitely not survived the trial of time.

Mats Wahl's literary sign is appropriately by Vinterviken in the Western suburb of Stockholm. It is behind bars because of road construction.

Literary Stockholm, part 5: Mio My Son

Read the background for this blog series.
Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.

If I were to decide, I would choose Karlsson-on-the-Roof as featuring Stockholm in the works of Astrid Lindgren. It takes place wholly in Vasastan where Astrid Lindgren also lived for many years. But whoever decided, chose Mio My Son, that is my favourite, so I won't complain, but it can be questioned whether Stockholm setting is integral to it when most of the story takes place in Faraway Land. Unless of course we adhere to the interpretation that Bosse (for whatever reason, Andy in English) never travels to Faraway Land, but sits on a bench in Tegnérlunden in central Stockholm, imagining the wonderful and dangerous adventures in a parallel world. This is the most plausible interpretation, but a sophisticated one, and without doing any research I would guess that most young readers and many adult readers, if asked where the story takes place, would say, Faraway Land. Because we so much want the unhappy orphan Bosse to find a father and friends. Yet does the character-narrator really believe it himself? He has to shout – represented by italics – that he is in Faraway Land and not sitting on a bench in Tegnérlunden.

I have written extensively about Mio My Son and taught it both in Sweden and in the US. Narrative situation and narrative perspective are the aspects that fascinate me, and the novel, published in 1954, is a very early example of first-person narration in fantasy. Writing in 1992, John Stephens claimed that first-person perspective was impossible in fantasy, but of course since then we have seen tons of examples of the opposite. Yet believe me, as someone who wrote her PhD on twentieth-century fantasy, it was unusual until 1990s, so Mio was indeed a daring text.

I re-read Mio as recently as two years ago for a conference in Cambridge about horses in children's literature. Horses are prominent in Astrid Lindgren's work, and I tried to explore Mio's horse not as his dæmon or Patronus, which can of course be done, but as an artistic device to represent the protagonist's emotional states in a more detached way. Writing this paper, I was looking exclusively at horsey moments so I probably didn't read the whole novel as carefully as I did now. I pretty much know it by heart, although there were a couple of details I hadn't remembered; but I did have strong memory of the narrator going back to his life in Stockholm, so maybe the choice of this book to represent Stockholm is not inadequate after all.

I was struck once again by the beauty of language, the rhythmic flow of prose with a folktale flavour to it.

My own Swedish copy is in storage so I borrowed the book from a library. I don't like these luxury editions of Astrid Lindgren with red cloth quarter bindings because I find them distracting. Otherwise it is exactly the same, with wonderful original illustrations by Ilon Wikland.

I enjoyed re-reading Mio even though I remembered it so well. This book is like a poem that you can read again and again.

The sign is of course in Tegnérlunden, and I sat on the bench I think was the right one. But I had no golden apple and found no genie in a beer bottle.

Literary Stockholm, part 4: Johnny, My Friend

Read the background for this blog series.
Read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

 

I first heard about this novel from a student who wanted to write his BA dissertation on it. A recently published book by a totally unknown author. I read it and was blown away. As were all critics and other children's literature people in Sweden.

Pohl, who otherwise was a university lecturer in numeric analysis, wrote the novel in a creative writing course, and rumours have it that it actually was the course instructor who wrote it. I don't really care, and it does happen that a first novel stays the best. Pohl never wrote anything better, and while some of his later books are good enough, most are typical “problem novels”. According to Pohl, Johnny, My Friend is a problem novel, so as usual authors have no idea about what they do.

I taught it in every children's and YA course in Sweden (even the one titled “The Origins of Harry Potter”) as well as in the courses I taught in California. Sadly, courses in Cambridge offered no opportunities to include translated texts. The novel was published in English by Aidan Chambers during his short-lived effort to bring some European YA fiction to Britain. The novel didn't sell, and most of the printrun ended up in Chambers' basement, from which I ordered copies for my American students, and after some US colleagues discovered this brilliant book, they ordered their copies as well. My Californian students didn't like it because they found too many “strange” details in it. I must add that for me the 1950s Stockholm setting, full of period-typical references, was also strange, but I am more tolerant toward strangeness than Californian undergrads.

Roberta Trites wrote a chapter on Johnny, My Friend for my edited collection Beyond Babar.

I only met Peter Pohl once – he wasn't keen on public appearances. On that rare occasion, he showed an amateur short movie he had made with his students. I have never been much interested in meeting authors, and I haven't got any signed copies of Johnny. My own paperback, full of margin notes and underlines, is in storage – one of the very few books I have kept. So I borrowed from a library. I was surprised that so few branches had copies, although I shouldn't have been. A couple of years ago, when I was revising my textbook on children's literature, I asked my Swedish colleagues whether Johnny was still taught in university courses, because it was very prominent in the previous editions. They said it wasn't. But they agreed that it was one of the best Swedish YA novels ever.

I hadn't re-read the book since I moved to Cambridge, although I had it in my shelf both in Swedish and in English. On re-reading now, I could state that I remembered the plot and most details well, even though you always notice something new on re-reading. I had forgotten that the narrator spends quite a long time discussing the penalistic system – one of the “problems” - in the famous elite high school in Stockholm in the 1950s.

What struck me now is the careful topography. The whole novel takes place within a few blocks on Södermalm – precisely the blocks where I live now. My street is mentioned several times; the temporal “now” of the novel takes place on the corner I pass daily. Of course I knew it then and pointed it out to my students, but I had never walked these streets before. My daughter went to the same secondary school as the protagonist (the school structure was different in the '50s, but the school was the same, “with traditions”, for better and for worse). But I used to drop her off and drive back home so I never took time to explore the setting.

I have now. I have walked every street, including the far away (15-minute walk) square where mysterious Johnny lives. There is no bike repair shop now, but there is a car repair shop, so it may be the same. The magnificent tree is never mentioned, probably because trees are of no interest for eleven-year-old boys. 

The novel is still piercing. It doesn't matter that I already know the answer to the mystery, but I could kill the person who reveals it on the title page. It's like revealing on the title page of a crime novel who the murderer is. I will point it out when I return the book to the library. 

The library edition is from 2006, and there is an appendix, compiled by the author, of the '50s Södermalm slang. Apparently, teachers had asked him to do it, to make the novel more palatable for young readers. Perhaps the generation of teachers who could explain it to schoolchildren has died out. But it was already out of date when the book was published in 1985, and it was a deliberate artistic device.

Johnny is a good example of great books that get drowned in the flotsam of today's publishing. Fifty years from now it may be re-discovered and acknowledged again as the best Swedish YA novel ever. Yes, I mean it. Write to Aidan Chambers – he may have some copies left in his basement.

Peter Pohl's sign is appropriately on top of the steps at Kvarnsgatan where Johnny wins a crate of soda by biking down the steps - see cover image above. The bottom of the steps end in the street where I live. It is one of the first signs I noticed on my walks.

Literary Stockholm, part 3: Ture Sventon, Private Detective

Read the background for this blog series.
Read Part 1 and Part 2.

“Drottninggatan in Stockholm is a long and narrow street more or less in the city centre. Traffic goes in an endless stream”.

It made me smile to read this opening today when Drottninggatan is a pedestrian street and has been for ages, but who could imagine it in 1948 when the first Ture Sventon book by Åke Holmberg appeared (published in English by Methuen in 1965 as Tam Sventon, Private Detective).

I have never been a fan of this series, even though I once won the second prize for the best costume at one of the Children's Books Institute unforgettable dress-up parties; I dressed up as Mr Omar, wearing a fez, with the famous flying carpet under my arm. Still, I don't find these books funny or thrilling, but I can see why a child in '40s or early '50s might. Or maybe it is the special kind of Swedish humour that aliens don't get. Perhaps they are those books that nostalgic grandparents give their grandchildren for Christmas, and publishers believe they are still popular and reprint. Maybe these books were revolutionary when they came, part of the great post-war children's book renaissance in Sweden. But today there are so many other children's detective stories, written for today's children, that I cannot see why a childish grown-up detective solving idiotic crimes with the help of a flying carpet would have any appeal.

I had a good memory of the silly plot, but I had forgotten that Ture Sventon (he has a lisp - that's why he is called Tam in English) had four sidekicks, four totally flat and boring children whose role is simply to make the book look child-friendly. For it is obviously a parody that goes above young readers' heads.

My library copy is a reprint from 2008, and although the cover designer is not acknowledged, the cover image has been doctored to bring it at least slightly closer to contemporary readers. Compare with the original.

The main character is the same, but the children have been given “modern” clothes – 1960s maybe? Still stone age for today's readers. Title font has been changed, while in the original it repeats exactly the door sign on Ture Sventon's office on Drottninggatan. Yet we do judge books by covers, and although everything in the text must feel ancient, marketing people probably insisted that the cover should be modernised.

Anyway, re-reading Ture Sventon did not prove to be a great aesthetic experience. Fortunately, it is a short book, as children's books were at the time.

Åke Holmberg's plaque is appropriately on Drottninggatan or actually not quite; the guide says corner of Drottninggatan and Jakobsgatan, and it took me some time to examine the two sides of each corner. The sign is inconspicuous and at the moment obscured by scaffolding. I had almost given up before I finally saw it.

Literary Stockholm: setting a goal

This is what happens when you have all the time in the world: you stumble over a new hobby. (Or shall I call it obsession?) In my previous post, I mentioned that during my flâneurie the other day I happened to see one of those numerous literary signs here and there in Stockholm, commemorating writers and poets who have described this beautiful city in their works. It so happened that the next day I met a friend who had read my post, and she showed me another sign, also children's literature related. This made me curious, and I did some research, finding an incomplete list of these signs, some obvious and of very famous authors, and some of authors I have never read and some, I must admit, I have never heard of, which is totally unacceptable for someone with a doctorate in comparative literature from a Swedish university. But some I have not only read, but actually met, and a couple I would even dare call friends.

On a walk to the centre yesterday, I discovered seven signs, without deviating from my by now usual route. All in all, I have collected eleven, which is quite good in just a few days.

However, walking or traveling around and taking pictures of street signs is not much of a challenge. Contemplating the signs I have visited, I realise that it has been years and years since I read those books, and as I have just confessed, some I haven't read at all. 

The real challenge will be to read or re-read all these books. If I read one book per week, it will take me almost two years. Brushing up my Swedish literature, meeting old favourites, making new acquaintances. This hasn't been on my list of retirement projects, but I feel hugely enthusiastic.

Part of the challenge is getting hold of books. I am sure they are all available in second-hand bookstores, brick-and-mortar or virtual, but I have decided that I will use libraries. I don't remember when I last took a book out of a public library. Maybe when I wrote my article about Stockholm in children's literature.

I have already found out that the two young adult novels I want to start with, Johnny my Friend, by Peter Pohl, and Winter Bay, by Mats Wahl, are not available in my closest library. They were so tremendously popular once upon a time... back in the stone age. But I have located them and will walk there, possibly discovering more literary signs on the way.

Before I re-read them, I will make some notes on what I remember about them. They are not my childhood books, but it was a very, very long time ago. Then I will read them and go back to the signs and walk around to get the sense of place.

Then I will write a blog post. Not a book review, but a personal reflection. Watch out!

A tribute to my mentor

My old professor, Vivi Edström, has passed away.

She was 95, and she had lived a long and happy life. Yet it definitely feels that an important part of my life has gone with her.

Vivi was the first Chair of children's literature in Scandinavia, which was a big thing back in early '80s. And she was at the Comparative Literature department in Stockholm, not Education, not Library and Information, not Childhood Studies, and not even Sociology of Literature in Uppsala where the first PhDs in children's literature were awarded. For Vivi, children's literature was literature, fullstop.

I remember coming to her office for the first time. I had been in Sweden for three weeks, but I had an oral recommendation from the Director of the Swedish Children's Books Institute whom I had meet the previous year in Moscow. I wanted to study children's literature because it hadn't been possible in Russia. I had read Vivi's book Form in Children's Books: A Study in the Art of Narration – I am not sure how I got hold of it in Russia. There I was, scared to death, as I always am with new people and in new situations. Although I had studied Swedish for thirteen years, I had never been to Sweden before, and I hadn't had many opportunities to speak it. Many years later Vivi mentioned that her first impression of me was “scared girl with big eyes”.

I enrolled in two courses, Children's literature and Young Adult Literature and wrote a final undergraduate dissertation on the topic that eventually became my PhD. Vivi gave me special privileges to attend her graduate seminar where I met my future fellow students. She was generous and supportive. I was accepted into the doctoral programme next term, and after a while Vivi managed to get me a four-year studentship, which was unusual at that time. She was like that, always finding way to promote her students and sharing her favours fairly among us. She got us various awards for our theses. She would pass on to us tasks that she didn't want or had no time to do: leading book circles and teaching professional development courses, writing reviews and even more prestigious stuff; for instance, I contributed, on her recommendation, a chapter on children's literature for a History of Swedish Literature with University of Nebraska Press. She also edited several volumes in Swedish, on picturebooks and on children's poetry, and we all contributed to these.

Vivi and I didn't always agree, and she could be quite harsh. Several times after supervisions I came home in tears and told my husband that I would never again set my foot in the department. Vivi strongly opposed my wish to write my thesis in English; my argument was that all my primary and most of my secondary sources were English. It was habitual then, and perhaps still is, in Comparative Literature departments in Sweden to study one particular writer, preferably dead, and even “XX's early writing”, so my Proppian structuralist approach felt alien. I learned later that the night before my defence she called several colleagues asking whether they thought I would pass.

A typical glimpse of our conversations:

Vivi: I think you should let chapters 2 and 3 change places.

Me: But I have just changed them as you told me last time.

Vivi: Good, now we see that it didn't work.

One term I was Vivi's TA for the dissertation seminar on children's literature, and at the first session I introduced myself and said that the professor would join us any minute. Only she didn't, and I had to spend two hours talking to students without preparation or any qualifications apart having done the course myself. Next term, I was entrusted with teaching this course on my own. I had to use Vivi's syllabus, and one session I found particularly challenging. When I told Vivi, she said: “Next time, let them work in groups”.

Toward the end of my PhD as I was considering my future career, Vivi said: “Don't bother about publishing articles, they don't count. Write books”. (Ironically, these days I have to tell my students the opposite).

Vivi was President of the Selma Lagerlöf Society, Lagerlöf her other passion and academic interest apart from children's literature. She invited me to join the board of the Society and pushed me toward Lagerlöf research, which became decisive for me subsequent career. You couldn't get a permanent position in Comparative Literature with children's literature research only, you needed to show that you could do ”real” literature as well. Lagerlöf became my real literature area, and I wrote a book for the Society's series and several other things. Vivi and I spent many nice hours together as I was driving us from Stockholm to Värmland, Lagerlöf's home province where Society's annual meetings were held. I used to drive Vivi home from the University after seminars or guest lectures – it was in the opposite direction from my place, but not too much out of my way. I thought it was quite natural since I had a car and she didn't, but she mentioned this as one of my special virtues at my defence banquet.

We co-edited a volume on Lagerlöf, and I contributed a chapter. Vivi didn't like my interpretation of earthly and heavenly love.

Vivi: You are wrong.

Me: There is no right or wrong in literary analysis; this is the way I see it.

Vivi: You cannot make this claim.

Me: You are not my supervisor any more, you cannot tell me what I can or cannot claim.

Vivi: You are wrong.

This is Vivi in her essence.

After retirement she withdrew from public academic life. She published more books, including one on Jane Austen, but otherwise she took up painting and had small exhibitions and enjoyed life. Every now and then she invited me for tea.

When I got the chair in Cambridge, Staffan called her to brag on my behalf. Well, she said, that's what Masha had always wanted, hadn't she?

In her study Form in Children's Book, Vivi was the first in Sweden and probably among the very first in the world to claim that formal features of children's literature were just as important, or even more important than content, what she referred to ”children's literature here and there, representations of this and that”. She wrote about the significance of narrative perspective and temporality long before these concepts became commonplace in international children's literature scholarship. She was a pathfinder and a flagship. Swedish children's literature research would not have flourished as it has without Vivi. We all owe her. And I certainly would not have been where I am if I hadn't had the privilege of being her disciple.