The Haunted Wood, page 42
Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit
RICHARD ADAMS
Watership Down
RICHARD ADAMS’S WATERSHIP DOWN (1972), AT FIRST glance, might look like a counterexample to the current of psychological and social realism I’ve described as taking hold in the 1970s. To state the obvious: it’s about rabbits – and what’s more, it’s about psychic rabbits. But it’s also a work of considerable literary and psychological subtlety, a work that speaks to young adult readers without any compromise of tone or hint of condescension. It doesn’t in any straightforward way stand in the tradition of animal stories for children. Hazel, Fiver, and Bigwig are much closer kin to Ponyboy Curtis and Jerry Renault than they are to Peter Rabbit or Mole from The Wind in the Willows. And it’s aggressively realistic: it’s realistic about rabbits. (Extrasensory perception aside, that is.)
The story had its origins, as so many children’s stories have, in oral tales improvised by the author for his own children. Richard Adams (1920–2016) beguiled long car journeys by telling his daughters Juliet and Rosamond an adventure story about rabbits, and it was at their insistent urging that he eventually came to write the story down. It’s another book, though, that sits on the borderline between adult literature and children’s writing. Despite its origins, Adams himself didn’t think of it as a children’s book, and it was first published in an adult imprint. It is a very, very strange work. Its first publisher Rex Collings, who took it on after most of the major London publishers had turned it down flat, wrote to a friend: “I’ve just taken on a novel about rabbits, one of them with extra-sensory perception. Do you think I’m mad?”*
He was not mad. This very singular book tells a hugely exciting story, and an archetypal one: about a group of outcast rabbits who (after Fiver senses danger) leave the safety of their familiar warren to strike out in search of a new home, the titular Watership Down; who arrive there after a series of false starts and terrible dangers; and who are then forced to defend their new home when a gang of rabbit fascists turn up in the hopes of seeing them off.
I said it was realistic about rabbits, and it is: often solemnly so. Its principal source, credited frankly not only several times in the text but also in Adams’s original acknowledgements, is a natural history book about bunnies.
I am indebted, for a knowledge of rabbits and their ways, to Mr R.M. Lockley’s remarkable book, The Private Life of the Rabbit. Anyone who wishes to know more about the migrations of yearlings, about pressing chin glands, chewing pellets, the effects of over-crowding in warrens, the phenomenon of re-absorption of fertilized embryos, the capacity of buck rabbits to fight stoats, or any other features of Lapine life, should refer to that definitive work.
Female rabbits reabsorbing embryos into the linings of their wombs is only one of the gruesome biological details from life that feature in the plot. Adams set his story, too, in a real place – Nuthanger Farm and its surrounding fields are real places in Hampshire. Like Alan Garner, Adams wrote “under the discipline of Ordnance Survey grid references.”
Yet at the same time, Adams gives these true-to-life bunnies a mythic grandeur, and shapes his narrative according to the precepts of classical epic. Adams was familiar with Joseph Campbell’s work on comparative mythology. Watership Down has echoes of the biblical Exodus, with Hazel as Moses. It has been described by the novelist Madeline Miller as “a sort of Lapine retelling of the Aeneid… mixed with a few other famous mythological episodes, including the kidnapping of the Sabine Women and the Land of the Lotus-Eaters”; she notes debts, too, to Homer, Shakespeare, and Livy. Chapter epigraphs come from Aeschylus, xenophon, Yeats, and Browning at their more vatic, Bunyan,and the Bible.
It is further layered by the series of stories-within-stories, often told by Dandelion, about the rabbits’ own mythology: tales of the adventures of El-ahrairah, the trickster hero and rabbit ancestor, alternatively favored and punished by the creator god Frith. And in its wire-tight accounts of patrol, siege, and ambush – both strategy and close combat – it adds in what cannot but be versions of its author’s experiences as a lieutenant in the Second World War. His daughter Juliet Johnson, announcing his death in 2016, said that his wartime experiences had informed his fiction: “He missed terribly his friends who were killed in the war.”
The disparity between the small lives of its bunny heroes and the weight of the mythic motifs they bear is what makes the book so moving and effective. It rolls the dice on something that shouldn’t come off at all – but, such is Adams’s conviction and skill in inhabiting his characters’ worldview, it does. These rabbits are human, in the sense that their emotions and interactions are recognizable to the reader; but they are rabbits, too.
Adams never loses sight of how short a rabbit’s life is, nor how dangerous. These rabbits, even the lionhearted Bigwig, are physically exhausted after traveling just a few hundred yards; and they are terrified, debilitatingly terrified, almost all the time:
Rabbits above ground, unless they are in proved, familiar surroundings close to their holes, live in continual fear. If it grows intense enough they can become glazed and paralysed by it – tharn, to use their own word.
Adams has imagined his way into a non-human worldview, even down to the different way they negotiate the landscape:
A man walks upright. For him it is strenuous to climb a steep hill, because he has to keep pushing his own vertical mass upwards and cannot gain any momentum. The rabbit is better off. His forelegs support his horizontal body and the great back legs do the work… On the other hand the man is five or six feet above the hillside and can see all round. To him the ground may be steep and rough but on the whole it is even; and he can pick his direction easily from the top of his moving, six-foot tower. The rabbits’ anxieties and strain in climbing the down were different, therefore, from those which you, reader, will experience if you go there.
In several sections, where the rabbits attempt to grasp something for which their rabbit-hood does not equip them (they can’t count past four, for instance), the literary comparison that springs to mind is William Golding’s The Inheritors (1955).* Here’s Holly, surviving witness to the destruction of the original warren by gas:
‘Then another of the men fetched some long, thin, bending things. I haven’t got words for all these men-things, but they were something like lengths of very thick bramble. Each of the men took one and put it on one of the heavy things. There was a kind of hissing noise and – and – well, I know you must find this difficult to understand, but the air began to turn bad.’
The worldview of these rabbits, even though it invites the reader’s human sympathy, is not human. Rabbits live too short a time to be sentimental. They have strong emotions but short memories:
They have a certain quality which it would not be accurate to describe as callousness or indifference. It is, rather, a blessedly circumscribed imagination and an intuitive feeling that Life is Now. A foraging wild creature, intent above all upon survival, is as strong as the grass.
Adams compares them to “primitive humans.” They are also, you could say, a little like children. Nor does Adams fudge or humanize the pragmatic morality of the rabbit world; there’s nothing very progressive about their attitude to women. Does, in their Darwinian world, are a resource.
‘Right,’ said Bigwig. ‘By the way, what are the rules about mating?’
‘Mating?’ said Chervil. ‘Well, if you want a doe you have one – any doe in the Mark, that is. We’re not officers for nothing, are we? The does are under orders and none of the bucks can stop you.’
The apocalyptic conflict between the Watership Down rabbits and the Efrafan minions of General Woundwort is set off by the former having set out in search of female rabbits: they know that an all-male warren will die out in a generation (not to mention that does, rather than bucks, are the great excavators of the rabbit world). This is a war that starts because a bunch of bunny-rabbits have blue balls. Silly, perhaps, but no less silly than The Iliad.
The terrifying General Woundwort – grizzled, scarred, ferocious, a cotton-tailed voldemort – is, we learn, three years old. A year is a long time in rabbits. The sketch we get of his early life is one of unrelenting violence and trauma: his “happy-go-lucky and reckless buck” of a father is ambushed in a potato patch and shot; their warren is dug out; a weasel kills his mother before his eyes.
A “kind old schoolmaster from Overton” picks the kitten Woundwort up and nurses him to health, feeding him milk from a dropper – but he can’t mend the rabbit’s mind: Woundwort “grew up very wild, and like Cowper’s hare, would bite when he could.” The rabbit turns his trauma into aggression. His rabbit nature itself has been crumpled. As Bigwig says, “‘He’s not like a rabbit at all,’ he thought. ‘Flight’s the last thing he ever thinks of.’”
The shortness of rabbit generations, and the contrast with their epic striving, is what gives the book not only its pathos but one of its most magnificent literary effects. As it closes, and we look back on the events of the main narrative from the future, we come to realize that the adventures of Hazel and Fiver, which we have watched close up, have already themselves become myths. Hazel creeps up on a doe, vilthuril, telling her children a story:
‘So after they had swum the river,’ said vilthuril, ‘El-ahrairah led his people on in the dark, through a wild, lonely place. Some of them were afraid, but he knew the way and in the morning he brought them safely to some green fields, very beautiful, with good, sweet grass. […]
‘But Frith came to Rabscuttle in a dream and warned him that the warren was enchanted. And he dug into the ground to find where the spell was buried. Deep he dug, and hard was the search, but at last he found that wicked spell and dragged it out. So they all fled from it, but it turned into a great rat and flew at El-ahrairah. Then El-ahrairah fought the rat, up and down, and at last he held it, pinned under his claws, and it turned into a great, white bird which spoke to him and blessed him.’
‘I seem to know this story,’ whispered Hazel, ‘but I can’t remember where I’ve heard it.’
Hazel lives long – for a rabbit: “He saw more young rabbits than he could remember. And sometimes, when they told tales on a sunny evening by the beech trees, he could not clearly recall whether they were about himself or about some other rabbit hero of days gone by.” Bigwig is a King Arthur figure: “a great and solitary rabbit, a giant who drove the elil like mice and sometimes went to silflay in the sky. If ever great danger arose, he would come back to fight for those who honoured his name.” General Woundwort has become a bogeyman to scare kittens with: “first cousin to the Black Rabbit himself.”
And when Hazel finally departs this world, invited by El-ahrairah himself to join his Owsla, Adams has abundantly earned the sense that we’re seeing the hinge between one great era and the next. He brings the story in to land just beautifully:
The sun was shining and in spite of the cold there were a few bucks and does at silflay, keeping out of the wind as they nibbled the shoots of spring grass. It seemed to Hazel that he would not be needing his body any more, so he left it lying on the edge of the ditch, but stopped for a moment to watch his rabbits and to try to get used to the extraordinary feeling that strength and speed were flowing inexhaustibly out of him into their sleek young bodies and healthy senses.
‘You needn’t worry about them,’ said his companion. ‘They’ll be all right – and thousands like them. If you’ll come along, I’ll show you what I mean.’
He reached the top of the bank in a single, powerful leap. Hazel followed; and together they slipped away, running easily down through the wood, where the first primroses were beginning to bloom.
* Quoted by Isabel Quigly (recipient of the letter) in “Obituary: Rex Collings,” Independent, 8 June 1996.
* Here’s Golding’s exquisitely disorienting account from a Neanderthal’s uncomprehending point of view of having an arrow shot at him: “Suddenly Lok understood that the man was holding the stick out to him but neither he nor Lok could reach across the river. He would have laughed if it were not for the echo of the screaming in his head. The stick began to grow shorter at both ends. Then it shot out to full length again. The dead tree by Lok’s ear acquired a voice. “Clop!” His ears twitched and he turned to the tree. By his face there had grown a twig: a twig that smelt of other, and of goose, and of the bitter berries that Lok’s stomach told him he must not eat. This twig had a white bone at the end. There were hooks in the bone and sticky brown stuff hung in the crooks. His nose examined this stuff and did not like it.”
Little Horrors
ROALD DAHL
James and the Giant Peach; Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory; Charlie and the Great Glass
Elevator; The Witches; The BFG; The Giraffe
and the Pelly and Me; Danny, the Champion
of the World; Matilda; George’s Marvellous
Medicine; The Twits, Fantastic Mr Fox;
The Enormous Crocodile; Revolting Rhymes; Boy
AMID THE CONTINUING DRIFT TOWARD SOME VERSION of realism, then, how are we to place the dominant writer of children’s fiction of his age? Roald Dahl couldn’t, on the face of it, have cared less about representing the real lives of children back to them. He succeeded, instead, in nourishing their imaginative lives by piling magic on fantasy on absurdism. Here were window-cleaning giraffes, potions that caused disagreeable old women (and blameless chickens) to swell to many times their ordinary size, toeless witches, seafaring peaches, magic fingers, and glass elevators that shoot into outer space. Between, roughly, the publication of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) and Matilda (1988), Dahl enjoyed a quarter of a century of ascendency. By 1968 Charlie alone had earned Dahl more than a million dollars in royalties.
Like so many children’s writers, Dahl mined his own childhood – be it greed for sweeties, tobacco-stinking Scandinavian grandparents or the “mean and loathsome” old sweetshop owner who inspired Matilda’s Miss Trunchbull. There is a demonic energy to Dahl’s work, a directness of address and a linguistic fizz that instantly captivates its intended audience. The voice of the books is almost anti-literary: it’s a storyteller’s voice, an oral performance on the page. The reader is a disciple or a co-conspirator.
He was clear about what children liked: “They love being spooked. They love suspense. They love action. They love ghosts. They love the finding of treasure. They love chocolates and toys and money. They love magic.” (He might have added: they love practical jokes and fart gags and violence.) Dahl had an unerring sense of the basic and extravagant appetites of children, perhaps because his own inner child was so near the surface. He loved inventions and ingenuity and silliness. And he empathized intensely with children chafing under the authority of lazy, cruel, thwarting or inconsiderate adults, their agency limited, and wanting more. The most basic form of this is appetite for food. Can there have been a more feelingly written passage in all his works than the one in which he describes how Charlie Bucket eats the chocolate bar he gets once a year?
Only once a year, on his birthday, did Charlie Bucket ever get to taste a bit of chocolate. The whole family saved up their money for that special occasion, and when the great day arrived, Charlie was always presented with one small chocolate bar to eat all by himself. And each time he received it, on those marvellous birthday mornings, he would place it carefully in a small wooden box that he owned, and treasure it as though it were a bar of solid gold; and for the next few days, he would allow himself only to look at it, but never to touch it. Then at last, when he could stand it no longer, he would peel back a tiny bit of the paper wrapping at one corner to expose a tiny bit of chocolate, and then he would take a tiny nibble – just enough to allow the lovely sweet taste to spread out slowly over his tongue. The next day, he would take another tiny nibble, and so on, and so on. And in this way, Charlie would make his sixpenny bar of birthday chocolate last him for more than a month.
Here is a child’s-eye view, an intensity of sensual focus, that reminds me of Stephen Spielberg’s trick of shooting E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) with the camera at the height of an eightyear-old. The passage not only sets up Charlie’s archetypal child’s yearning to become less powerless, to have access to treats that are ordinarily out of his reach – but it wraps the meaning of the chocolate bar in a penumbra of familial love. The whole family saves up their money so that, once a year, Charlie can get a taste of chocolate.
As his life story shows, Dahl himself was prey to strong appetites – for fantasy, for adventure and intrigue, for food (especially chocolate), for power over others and the freedom to act, for the affirming love of family, and (which did not come out in his children’s books but was a theme of his bawdy novels and short stories for adults) for sex. The critic Kathryn Hughes talked of his “grandiosity, dishonesty and spite.” His first wife, Patricia Neal, talked of his conviction that “although life was a two-way street, he had right of way.” That he was not an especially nice guy, and the ways in which he was not an especially nice guy, may have been part and parcel of what made him so effective a writer for children. He had a child’s id.
He was a vain, bullying, entitled man – though one of hugely impressive productive energies; in a speech at his daughter’s wedding he declared, oddly for a writer, “action is always better than words” – and he was a spoilt boy. His older sister Astri and his father Harald died in close succession when Dahl was a little boy, leaving him the adored only son in a household of women. He was nicknamed “Apple” for the position he held in his mother Sofie Magdalene’s eye. He didn’t get in much trouble, as a child, when he was caught tying pillows round his baby sister and shooting at her with an air rifle. His relationship with his mother seems to have been the most sustained and respectful relationship he ever had with a member of the opposite sex.
RICHARD ADAMS
Watership Down
RICHARD ADAMS’S WATERSHIP DOWN (1972), AT FIRST glance, might look like a counterexample to the current of psychological and social realism I’ve described as taking hold in the 1970s. To state the obvious: it’s about rabbits – and what’s more, it’s about psychic rabbits. But it’s also a work of considerable literary and psychological subtlety, a work that speaks to young adult readers without any compromise of tone or hint of condescension. It doesn’t in any straightforward way stand in the tradition of animal stories for children. Hazel, Fiver, and Bigwig are much closer kin to Ponyboy Curtis and Jerry Renault than they are to Peter Rabbit or Mole from The Wind in the Willows. And it’s aggressively realistic: it’s realistic about rabbits. (Extrasensory perception aside, that is.)
The story had its origins, as so many children’s stories have, in oral tales improvised by the author for his own children. Richard Adams (1920–2016) beguiled long car journeys by telling his daughters Juliet and Rosamond an adventure story about rabbits, and it was at their insistent urging that he eventually came to write the story down. It’s another book, though, that sits on the borderline between adult literature and children’s writing. Despite its origins, Adams himself didn’t think of it as a children’s book, and it was first published in an adult imprint. It is a very, very strange work. Its first publisher Rex Collings, who took it on after most of the major London publishers had turned it down flat, wrote to a friend: “I’ve just taken on a novel about rabbits, one of them with extra-sensory perception. Do you think I’m mad?”*
He was not mad. This very singular book tells a hugely exciting story, and an archetypal one: about a group of outcast rabbits who (after Fiver senses danger) leave the safety of their familiar warren to strike out in search of a new home, the titular Watership Down; who arrive there after a series of false starts and terrible dangers; and who are then forced to defend their new home when a gang of rabbit fascists turn up in the hopes of seeing them off.
I said it was realistic about rabbits, and it is: often solemnly so. Its principal source, credited frankly not only several times in the text but also in Adams’s original acknowledgements, is a natural history book about bunnies.
I am indebted, for a knowledge of rabbits and their ways, to Mr R.M. Lockley’s remarkable book, The Private Life of the Rabbit. Anyone who wishes to know more about the migrations of yearlings, about pressing chin glands, chewing pellets, the effects of over-crowding in warrens, the phenomenon of re-absorption of fertilized embryos, the capacity of buck rabbits to fight stoats, or any other features of Lapine life, should refer to that definitive work.
Female rabbits reabsorbing embryos into the linings of their wombs is only one of the gruesome biological details from life that feature in the plot. Adams set his story, too, in a real place – Nuthanger Farm and its surrounding fields are real places in Hampshire. Like Alan Garner, Adams wrote “under the discipline of Ordnance Survey grid references.”
Yet at the same time, Adams gives these true-to-life bunnies a mythic grandeur, and shapes his narrative according to the precepts of classical epic. Adams was familiar with Joseph Campbell’s work on comparative mythology. Watership Down has echoes of the biblical Exodus, with Hazel as Moses. It has been described by the novelist Madeline Miller as “a sort of Lapine retelling of the Aeneid… mixed with a few other famous mythological episodes, including the kidnapping of the Sabine Women and the Land of the Lotus-Eaters”; she notes debts, too, to Homer, Shakespeare, and Livy. Chapter epigraphs come from Aeschylus, xenophon, Yeats, and Browning at their more vatic, Bunyan,and the Bible.
It is further layered by the series of stories-within-stories, often told by Dandelion, about the rabbits’ own mythology: tales of the adventures of El-ahrairah, the trickster hero and rabbit ancestor, alternatively favored and punished by the creator god Frith. And in its wire-tight accounts of patrol, siege, and ambush – both strategy and close combat – it adds in what cannot but be versions of its author’s experiences as a lieutenant in the Second World War. His daughter Juliet Johnson, announcing his death in 2016, said that his wartime experiences had informed his fiction: “He missed terribly his friends who were killed in the war.”
The disparity between the small lives of its bunny heroes and the weight of the mythic motifs they bear is what makes the book so moving and effective. It rolls the dice on something that shouldn’t come off at all – but, such is Adams’s conviction and skill in inhabiting his characters’ worldview, it does. These rabbits are human, in the sense that their emotions and interactions are recognizable to the reader; but they are rabbits, too.
Adams never loses sight of how short a rabbit’s life is, nor how dangerous. These rabbits, even the lionhearted Bigwig, are physically exhausted after traveling just a few hundred yards; and they are terrified, debilitatingly terrified, almost all the time:
Rabbits above ground, unless they are in proved, familiar surroundings close to their holes, live in continual fear. If it grows intense enough they can become glazed and paralysed by it – tharn, to use their own word.
Adams has imagined his way into a non-human worldview, even down to the different way they negotiate the landscape:
A man walks upright. For him it is strenuous to climb a steep hill, because he has to keep pushing his own vertical mass upwards and cannot gain any momentum. The rabbit is better off. His forelegs support his horizontal body and the great back legs do the work… On the other hand the man is five or six feet above the hillside and can see all round. To him the ground may be steep and rough but on the whole it is even; and he can pick his direction easily from the top of his moving, six-foot tower. The rabbits’ anxieties and strain in climbing the down were different, therefore, from those which you, reader, will experience if you go there.
In several sections, where the rabbits attempt to grasp something for which their rabbit-hood does not equip them (they can’t count past four, for instance), the literary comparison that springs to mind is William Golding’s The Inheritors (1955).* Here’s Holly, surviving witness to the destruction of the original warren by gas:
‘Then another of the men fetched some long, thin, bending things. I haven’t got words for all these men-things, but they were something like lengths of very thick bramble. Each of the men took one and put it on one of the heavy things. There was a kind of hissing noise and – and – well, I know you must find this difficult to understand, but the air began to turn bad.’
The worldview of these rabbits, even though it invites the reader’s human sympathy, is not human. Rabbits live too short a time to be sentimental. They have strong emotions but short memories:
They have a certain quality which it would not be accurate to describe as callousness or indifference. It is, rather, a blessedly circumscribed imagination and an intuitive feeling that Life is Now. A foraging wild creature, intent above all upon survival, is as strong as the grass.
Adams compares them to “primitive humans.” They are also, you could say, a little like children. Nor does Adams fudge or humanize the pragmatic morality of the rabbit world; there’s nothing very progressive about their attitude to women. Does, in their Darwinian world, are a resource.
‘Right,’ said Bigwig. ‘By the way, what are the rules about mating?’
‘Mating?’ said Chervil. ‘Well, if you want a doe you have one – any doe in the Mark, that is. We’re not officers for nothing, are we? The does are under orders and none of the bucks can stop you.’
The apocalyptic conflict between the Watership Down rabbits and the Efrafan minions of General Woundwort is set off by the former having set out in search of female rabbits: they know that an all-male warren will die out in a generation (not to mention that does, rather than bucks, are the great excavators of the rabbit world). This is a war that starts because a bunch of bunny-rabbits have blue balls. Silly, perhaps, but no less silly than The Iliad.
The terrifying General Woundwort – grizzled, scarred, ferocious, a cotton-tailed voldemort – is, we learn, three years old. A year is a long time in rabbits. The sketch we get of his early life is one of unrelenting violence and trauma: his “happy-go-lucky and reckless buck” of a father is ambushed in a potato patch and shot; their warren is dug out; a weasel kills his mother before his eyes.
A “kind old schoolmaster from Overton” picks the kitten Woundwort up and nurses him to health, feeding him milk from a dropper – but he can’t mend the rabbit’s mind: Woundwort “grew up very wild, and like Cowper’s hare, would bite when he could.” The rabbit turns his trauma into aggression. His rabbit nature itself has been crumpled. As Bigwig says, “‘He’s not like a rabbit at all,’ he thought. ‘Flight’s the last thing he ever thinks of.’”
The shortness of rabbit generations, and the contrast with their epic striving, is what gives the book not only its pathos but one of its most magnificent literary effects. As it closes, and we look back on the events of the main narrative from the future, we come to realize that the adventures of Hazel and Fiver, which we have watched close up, have already themselves become myths. Hazel creeps up on a doe, vilthuril, telling her children a story:
‘So after they had swum the river,’ said vilthuril, ‘El-ahrairah led his people on in the dark, through a wild, lonely place. Some of them were afraid, but he knew the way and in the morning he brought them safely to some green fields, very beautiful, with good, sweet grass. […]
‘But Frith came to Rabscuttle in a dream and warned him that the warren was enchanted. And he dug into the ground to find where the spell was buried. Deep he dug, and hard was the search, but at last he found that wicked spell and dragged it out. So they all fled from it, but it turned into a great rat and flew at El-ahrairah. Then El-ahrairah fought the rat, up and down, and at last he held it, pinned under his claws, and it turned into a great, white bird which spoke to him and blessed him.’
‘I seem to know this story,’ whispered Hazel, ‘but I can’t remember where I’ve heard it.’
Hazel lives long – for a rabbit: “He saw more young rabbits than he could remember. And sometimes, when they told tales on a sunny evening by the beech trees, he could not clearly recall whether they were about himself or about some other rabbit hero of days gone by.” Bigwig is a King Arthur figure: “a great and solitary rabbit, a giant who drove the elil like mice and sometimes went to silflay in the sky. If ever great danger arose, he would come back to fight for those who honoured his name.” General Woundwort has become a bogeyman to scare kittens with: “first cousin to the Black Rabbit himself.”
And when Hazel finally departs this world, invited by El-ahrairah himself to join his Owsla, Adams has abundantly earned the sense that we’re seeing the hinge between one great era and the next. He brings the story in to land just beautifully:
The sun was shining and in spite of the cold there were a few bucks and does at silflay, keeping out of the wind as they nibbled the shoots of spring grass. It seemed to Hazel that he would not be needing his body any more, so he left it lying on the edge of the ditch, but stopped for a moment to watch his rabbits and to try to get used to the extraordinary feeling that strength and speed were flowing inexhaustibly out of him into their sleek young bodies and healthy senses.
‘You needn’t worry about them,’ said his companion. ‘They’ll be all right – and thousands like them. If you’ll come along, I’ll show you what I mean.’
He reached the top of the bank in a single, powerful leap. Hazel followed; and together they slipped away, running easily down through the wood, where the first primroses were beginning to bloom.
* Quoted by Isabel Quigly (recipient of the letter) in “Obituary: Rex Collings,” Independent, 8 June 1996.
* Here’s Golding’s exquisitely disorienting account from a Neanderthal’s uncomprehending point of view of having an arrow shot at him: “Suddenly Lok understood that the man was holding the stick out to him but neither he nor Lok could reach across the river. He would have laughed if it were not for the echo of the screaming in his head. The stick began to grow shorter at both ends. Then it shot out to full length again. The dead tree by Lok’s ear acquired a voice. “Clop!” His ears twitched and he turned to the tree. By his face there had grown a twig: a twig that smelt of other, and of goose, and of the bitter berries that Lok’s stomach told him he must not eat. This twig had a white bone at the end. There were hooks in the bone and sticky brown stuff hung in the crooks. His nose examined this stuff and did not like it.”
Little Horrors
ROALD DAHL
James and the Giant Peach; Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory; Charlie and the Great Glass
Elevator; The Witches; The BFG; The Giraffe
and the Pelly and Me; Danny, the Champion
of the World; Matilda; George’s Marvellous
Medicine; The Twits, Fantastic Mr Fox;
The Enormous Crocodile; Revolting Rhymes; Boy
AMID THE CONTINUING DRIFT TOWARD SOME VERSION of realism, then, how are we to place the dominant writer of children’s fiction of his age? Roald Dahl couldn’t, on the face of it, have cared less about representing the real lives of children back to them. He succeeded, instead, in nourishing their imaginative lives by piling magic on fantasy on absurdism. Here were window-cleaning giraffes, potions that caused disagreeable old women (and blameless chickens) to swell to many times their ordinary size, toeless witches, seafaring peaches, magic fingers, and glass elevators that shoot into outer space. Between, roughly, the publication of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) and Matilda (1988), Dahl enjoyed a quarter of a century of ascendency. By 1968 Charlie alone had earned Dahl more than a million dollars in royalties.
Like so many children’s writers, Dahl mined his own childhood – be it greed for sweeties, tobacco-stinking Scandinavian grandparents or the “mean and loathsome” old sweetshop owner who inspired Matilda’s Miss Trunchbull. There is a demonic energy to Dahl’s work, a directness of address and a linguistic fizz that instantly captivates its intended audience. The voice of the books is almost anti-literary: it’s a storyteller’s voice, an oral performance on the page. The reader is a disciple or a co-conspirator.
He was clear about what children liked: “They love being spooked. They love suspense. They love action. They love ghosts. They love the finding of treasure. They love chocolates and toys and money. They love magic.” (He might have added: they love practical jokes and fart gags and violence.) Dahl had an unerring sense of the basic and extravagant appetites of children, perhaps because his own inner child was so near the surface. He loved inventions and ingenuity and silliness. And he empathized intensely with children chafing under the authority of lazy, cruel, thwarting or inconsiderate adults, their agency limited, and wanting more. The most basic form of this is appetite for food. Can there have been a more feelingly written passage in all his works than the one in which he describes how Charlie Bucket eats the chocolate bar he gets once a year?
Only once a year, on his birthday, did Charlie Bucket ever get to taste a bit of chocolate. The whole family saved up their money for that special occasion, and when the great day arrived, Charlie was always presented with one small chocolate bar to eat all by himself. And each time he received it, on those marvellous birthday mornings, he would place it carefully in a small wooden box that he owned, and treasure it as though it were a bar of solid gold; and for the next few days, he would allow himself only to look at it, but never to touch it. Then at last, when he could stand it no longer, he would peel back a tiny bit of the paper wrapping at one corner to expose a tiny bit of chocolate, and then he would take a tiny nibble – just enough to allow the lovely sweet taste to spread out slowly over his tongue. The next day, he would take another tiny nibble, and so on, and so on. And in this way, Charlie would make his sixpenny bar of birthday chocolate last him for more than a month.
Here is a child’s-eye view, an intensity of sensual focus, that reminds me of Stephen Spielberg’s trick of shooting E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) with the camera at the height of an eightyear-old. The passage not only sets up Charlie’s archetypal child’s yearning to become less powerless, to have access to treats that are ordinarily out of his reach – but it wraps the meaning of the chocolate bar in a penumbra of familial love. The whole family saves up their money so that, once a year, Charlie can get a taste of chocolate.
As his life story shows, Dahl himself was prey to strong appetites – for fantasy, for adventure and intrigue, for food (especially chocolate), for power over others and the freedom to act, for the affirming love of family, and (which did not come out in his children’s books but was a theme of his bawdy novels and short stories for adults) for sex. The critic Kathryn Hughes talked of his “grandiosity, dishonesty and spite.” His first wife, Patricia Neal, talked of his conviction that “although life was a two-way street, he had right of way.” That he was not an especially nice guy, and the ways in which he was not an especially nice guy, may have been part and parcel of what made him so effective a writer for children. He had a child’s id.
He was a vain, bullying, entitled man – though one of hugely impressive productive energies; in a speech at his daughter’s wedding he declared, oddly for a writer, “action is always better than words” – and he was a spoilt boy. His older sister Astri and his father Harald died in close succession when Dahl was a little boy, leaving him the adored only son in a household of women. He was nicknamed “Apple” for the position he held in his mother Sofie Magdalene’s eye. He didn’t get in much trouble, as a child, when he was caught tying pillows round his baby sister and shooting at her with an air rifle. His relationship with his mother seems to have been the most sustained and respectful relationship he ever had with a member of the opposite sex.
