Reflections (20 page)

In her third talk in Australia, Diana explores the nature of “Real Books.” The talk was based on an article she wrote for a children's science fiction edition of
Vector
, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association, issue number 140, published in October/November 1987. The talk took place at the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney.

 

I
t's a real pleasure to start answering this question. People have been asking me, “Why don't you write Real Books?” ever since I had my first book published. Sometimes they ask it by implication, sometimes they ask it outright—but they never stop asking it.

The question first came from close relatives, who were ashamed to tell their neighbors what I did. My mother-in-law, indeed, clearly felt that the only excuse for my not being solely a wife and mother would have been that I wrote for adults—provided of course that I did not write what she called “popular fiction.” Because I was unable to oblige her in either of these requirements, she preferred to pretend that I did nothing but bring up her grandchildren. This could be very awkward at times. There was one occasion when she was due for a visit—arriving at teatime, for which she always required a heaped plate of sandwiches and at least two different kinds of homemade cake. I was in the middle of trying to produce these items, when my dog came in soaking wet and managed to convey to me that he was freezing and uncomfortable and needed to be dried off
now
. We were not in our usual house, but he nevertheless led me to the towel cupboard and opened it to show me what he wanted. And I thought, “That was clever! How does it feel to be that intelligent, but without hands or speech?
Wait
a moment!” And I had the idea for
Dogsbody
—and I had it so pressingly that I had to race away and get down at least the outline of the first chapter. The result was that when my mother-in-law arrived, there was no cake. I explained and apologized, naturally, and my mother-in-law, having made it clear to me that I had committed a major solecism, then said, “Poor Diana—the children keep you so busy that I don't blame you for going to sleep.” It was then that I realized that my books were so unreal to her that they were assumed not to exist. The odd thing was that, whenever I had a new book out, she always insisted on having a copy, in order, as far as I could see, to put it on a special shelf in her spare bedroom, ostentatiously unread.

Well, you can live with this kind of thing. But the question also shortly came at me from every other quarter, often in insidious and indirect forms. It came in the embarrassed look from the hairdresser, if I said what I did. Or the same look from the wives of my husband's academic colleagues, who would then gush on about this charming little book about frogs they had just given their grandchildren (“Such
lovely
little pictures and almost
no
text!”)—the implication being, I always suppose, that what I do
must
be about frogs, with pictures. Or I will get the question in another form from teachers, who suggest that I should write about “real” things like racism and unemployment. Sometimes the teachers claim that fantasy is too difficult, or “beyond the average child,” but a lot of them complain that it doesn't give them opportunities for class discussion of important modern issues. Tough, isn't it? As time went on, I kept getting the same question in yet another form from adult fantasy fans. When I first started writing, there was no such thing as an adult fantasy fan; they appeared in numbers about ten years later. These are always male, with interesting things written on their T-shirts, and they come up to me at conventions and explain that they
would
read my books—probably—if only the jackets looked less juvenile. Oddly, their female counterparts don't seem to experience this problem. Most recently, I have had a whole crop of letters from guilt-ridden students. These are mostly in their first year at university and not altogether happy in it, and they are afraid that there is something wrong with them because they're still rereading and enjoying my books at the advanced age of eighteen or nineteen.

But the real heavy brigade, the hardest of all to answer, are roughly two-thirds of the head teachers of Great Britain. I get to recognize these the moment I enter a school on an author visit. The male head advances on me with an outstretched hand, prepared to spare me half a minute of his time—and I know now to hold my hand stiff, because he is going to scrunch my knuckles. He does, always. As his hand tightens like a vise, he always says, “I haven't read any of your books,
of course
.” Always
of course
. The female head doesn't approach. She stands chilly yards off and says coldly, “I only read biography myself,
of course
.” Note again the
of course
.

The proper response, I suppose, should be, “What are you people doing
not
reading books someone has specially written for the children in your charge?” But I never say it. I am too annoyingly polite. Besides, I am continually bemused by the way the question—particularly in this form—is on the same lines as “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?” And the other thing that bemuses me is the way the question takes so many forms. Even at its simplest—“Why don't you write Real Books?”—it is truly protean in its implications.

Before I start to answer it, I'd like to take a look at these implications.

The first implication—my mother-in-law's—is that writing fantasy for young people is not respectable in a woman, because a woman's function is solely to bring up children, but it is probably peculiar enough to keep a secret record of. This rather resembles Dr. Johnson's strictures of a woman preaching, which he likened to a dog standing on its hind legs. I think it is this aspect of the activity which so embarrasses the hairdresser. But my mother-in-law is also worried by the fact that anything written for children is necessarily going to have a wide appeal. It is, in its very nature, what she would call “popular fiction.” My husband's colleague's wife widens this assumption, by concluding instantly that this means it is going to be largely without content though possibly quite pretty. And lurking under this is the assumption that none of it can be either worthwhile or any good. The teachers who feel thwarted of their class discussions pick up on this assumption: to their minds, the only real or worthwhile literature is concerned with current modern problems posed in a narrative that purports to be a slice of everyday life. There is a further implication here—that such problems are only
real
if they are acutely distressing to read about and maybe even insoluble into the bargain.

The fantasy fans bring in another aspect. What makes a book unreal for
them
is that it is not written for adults. I think the implication here is that no one under the age of, say, eighteen is a real person. This is a very common assumption, as anyone will agree who has stood in a shop and watched adults pushing aside any children waiting to be served. And the students, who have just attained the status of being real people, are worried about the fact that their chosen reading makes them unreal all over again. And they
enjoy
my books, which worries them on another account, because they think that at their advanced ages books are not to be enjoyed. (The teachers would back them up there.) Another thing that perplexes the students is that they are, at this late stage in their lives, getting new things out of the books, which they did not see as they read them as children—and they tend to find these new things supportive. Most of them write because they are feeling let down and disillusioned: university in your first year seldom seems anything like it was cracked up to be. The heartening thing here is that most of the students then conclude that they have made the wrong assumptions about what makes a Real Book. Even though some of them simply regard their first-year reading as regression, like thumb-sucking or a security toy, and grandly give it up in their second year, quite a few seriously revise their opinion and go on to write theses about children's literature.

I get to know about the theses because they write to me again in their third year for further information.

But there stand the heads of two-thirds of British schools, like monuments engraved with what a Real Book should be. Implicit in
their
attitudes is the thing that causes the question to be put to me in the first place. I am a woman. The male head would not crunch the knuckles of a male writer; the female head would stand closer to him. Both might phrase their remarks more apologetically—at least without the
of course
—and they might even have had the politeness to skim through one of his books before meeting him. But with me they have the backing of all the other posers of the question, from my mother-in-law on: females shouldn't really be doing this. This is particularly noticeable when, as quite often happens, one of my books is reviewed alongside a book by a male writer. He, being a man, is assumed to have powerful motives for writing fantasy for young people (for who otherwise would?) and the delicacy and power with which he conveys his message is most seriously gone into. The felicities of his language are remarked on and praised. Then the reviewer passes on to me: Jones always does this sort of thing—it's in her chromosomes, she can't help it, take no notice—but, really, as a woman, she should stop being
clever
. My brain hurts.

I think the hidden but constant assumption that, as a woman, I can't help writing for children because it is a byproduct of my natural function as a mother, and therefore as meaningless as a lullaby or a nonsense rhyme, is the one I probably resent most.

Actually my Pig of the Year Award went to the male reviewer of
Fire and Hemlock
. I quote it here in full: “This is a girl's book and I don't see why I should try to understand it.” End review.

The same attitude is implicit in the teachers who want class discussion. They are prepared to notice that the fantasy element in the man's book might be a metaphor for something else. At least I am spared this. When I wrote
Witch Week
, I was afraid my metaphor for oppression might be too transparent, and that teachers might notice and use the book for class discussion. But so far as I know, not a single one has noticed. Women's books don't
mean
anything. And I have noticed that the male fans of fantasy never seem ashamed to be seen reading Terry Pratchett's
Truckers
, despite its juvenile jacket. As for the students, they write to me as a mother figure, trusting me to understand. The trouble is, I
do
. There seems nothing to do about the fact of my femininity except teach people to live with it.

Anyway, to get back to the Real Book as engraved in the minds of head teachers. It is written by a man. For adults. It contains only facts, or narrative purporting to be facts. It should appeal to few people. It should not be amusing. And it should contain a message, or at least a serious discussion of current problems, set out in such a way that this can be extracted for teaching purposes.

And there is a rider to this, or maybe it's another underlying and hidden assumption: that any exercise of the imagination on the part of writer or reader instantly renders a book unreal.

Probably we should be thankful that there are so few Real Books around.

Put tendentiously like this, no one will wonder why I fail to write Real Books, but this definition of the Real Book was one I only arrived at
after
I had already decided not to write them, and in response to people asking me why not in all these protean ways. The true answer lies, at least partly, way back in the past and is probably almost as protean as the question. What I want to do now is to try to give you some of the answers anyway.

Looking back on it, I can see now that the entire shape of my early life was pushing me toward writing the kind of books I write, right from the moment in the middle of one afternoon, at the age of eight, when I knew I was going to be a writer. I went downstairs and made a solemn announcement of this fact to my parents, who responded with jeering laughter. At the time, I thought this was because I was wildly dyslexic and had the utmost difficulty writing—two lines at the top of the page took me most of a day. I now realize that this was my parents' stock response to almost anything their children said.

I was the eldest of three girls, and my parents ran what would these days be called a conference center, in which they were occupied full-time, with no time for children. We were put to live in an unheated outhouse away across a yard, just the three of us, and largely forgotten. And I mean forgotten. Such clothes as we had, until I started being able to make clothes, were castoffs from the local orphanage, and the people in the main house were quite often too preoccupied to remember to feed us. Looking back on it, I often wonder how we didn't kill one another in our outhouse, since the only heating we had was a crude paraffin stove which we knocked over daily, when it was alight, in the course of various games. In fact, at one point, my youngest sister and I pretty nearly hanged our middle sister—with two skipping ropes—at this sister's own earnest request, I hasten to say; she wanted to know how it felt to be a pantomime fairy flying on ropes across the stage. This would have been a sad loss in every way, because this sister, under her married name of Isobel Armstrong, is now professor of English at Birkbeck College in London. But luckily we noticed she was beginning to die and cut her down in time.

Anyone who has read
The Time of the Ghost
will probably recognize this incident, and indeed quite a bit of the rest.

What you may not recognize are the various deeply ingrained lessons I learned from this life. For a start, it occurred to none of us then to question the fact that my father, as the son of a patriarchal Welsh preacher, had nothing but contempt for girls, or that my mother hated all females and regarded her daughters as rivals (to the extent of dressing us in rags). We speculate now, like anything. None of us can see why our parents went on and had three of us. We can only conclude they were trying for a boy. But at that time it was just part of normal life. So was all the rest of it. We just saw it as
normal
. I can't stress this too strongly, how
ordinary
this seemed. If anyone showed us a factual story at that time in which our particular problems were represented, we were bored and disregarded the story as just ordinary, or, by the time we had reached our teens and were dimly aware that our life was by no means ordinary, we responded with acute distress. From this I concluded, very early on, that it was both unproductive and unkind to write the kind of book that was a factual presentation of any social problem. Either it passed you by, or it upset you because there was nothing you could do about it. I think teachers who demand discussion of such things are wholly insensitive to how
helpless
a child is before problems imposed by parents or society.