Margery Fisher - Is fiction educational? As editor of Growing Point, the reviewjournai which she founded in 1962 and which is now in its eighth volume, Margery Fisher is intimately concerned with alI aspects of children's literature. She has six children of her own and has written about children's fiction in her book Intent Upon

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MargeryFisher

Is fiction educational?

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Many of you are, like me, middlemen between children and books and the discussions that you are going to have here will reach a great many people in the long run. It would hardly be sensible for me to take the edge off future discussion by taking up any of the specific points suggested for our discussions this week. All the same, I don't want to address you without saying anything, like the lady of the manor opening the village fete, so perhaps I may be allowed to take at least a text from this list of suggested topics. 'Is fiction educational?' Now the list came to me with a letter suggesting that some of' the questions might be a little loaded. 'Is fiction educational?' I think that's a loaded question in an audience of teachers, but it is the crux of the conference. It appears again, this question, on another of the sheets sent to me under the heading 'The Aims of the Conference:'. May I just remind you of them ? The aim of the conference is first 'to bring together some of the most outstanding of recent writers for children and get them talking about their works.' I don't know what the writers think about this, we shall see. Second, 'to consider in small working groups the part that such writing should play in education.' For the moment, I want to consider the second of these aims and especially the implications of that rather ambiguous conditional verb, the part that such writing should play in education. What do we mean by stories being educational? A child who has just finished King Solornon's Mines will have a vague idea of what the landscape of central Africa is like, but he won't be able to recite the chief products and river systems of the country. What he will carry to his grave (at any rate I know I shall) is a mental image, not always the same in detail with each reading but "always the same in essence, of that mysterious, rocky, hot, exciting land. This image in my mind has always been altered by later impressions of Af~)ica, but I know it won't be wholly blotted out even ifI go there, and I wouldn't want to lose this image, although I have now added many which are far truer in the literal sense. This is what fiction does. It educates in a way. not neces-

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sarily more valuable, but quite different from the education in geography of film strips or lectures or visits or books of direct information. Esther Hautzig The Endless Steppe Hamish Hamilton 1969

Alan Garner The Owl Service Collins 1967 Penguin 1969 Philippa Pearce A Dog So Small Constable 1962 Penguin 1964 Ivan Southall Finn's Folly Angus and Robertson 1969

If I can give another example, the child who reads that story by Esther Hautzig, The Endless Steppe, is not going to be able to reconstruct the political situation of eastern Europe from it. He will take from it perhaps his first and possibly his strongest impression of the Siberian Steppes from the author's descriptions, but the most important lesson he will learn will be more directly relevant to him. He will have learnt something about people, the way they laugh and suffer and work and contrive, and he will never entirely forget this lesson. The Endless Steppe was not primarily written as a book for children and its British editor has put it on record that she had to be very persistent before she succeeded in getting the book for her children's list. I have not heard any protests about this and I do not expect to but I do foresee that there may be incidental protests from some list makers and card indexers, because this book won't fit into separate categories. It isn't a teenage novel. It isn't an adventure story with a foreign setting. It does not suit the heading World War Two and Its Aftermath or Family Story, and this I think is going to worry people who like to have books neatly docketed in pigeonholes like brands of soap powder. I can think of other works of fiction published in recent years which have bothered the orderly minded. The Owl Service for one. Philippa Pearce's A Dog So Small - perhaps few books have been so variously classified and of course it belongs everywhere. Ivan Southall's electrifying story Finn's Folly. We can all think of many more. Certainly we have to put books like this somewhere on some list. There must be lists to help those who work with the young and have not the time or opportunity to read all the hundreds of books published each year for children. We are here this week to demonstrate the need to do more work, not less, in classifying and studying children's books, examining them in relation to this kind of child or that kind of child. We are all of us, directly or indirectly, looking for the perfect system of education. I don't believe we shall ever find it. But as we look for it and legislate for it and argue about it we do turn up interesting ideas and methods of work by the way, and we find out a great deal about the way children feel and think and behave. We also find out, if we are lucky, how little we know about them as individuals. In all this activity we necessarily examine books as one of the great tools of education and a great deal of time and typewriter ink is spent discussing the response of children to stories. What do they remember best in a story? Do they want to read about children older or younger than themselves? What are they frightened by? We even remember to ask sometimes what kind of stories they enjoy.

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In all our queries we put the children first, because they ale our first responsibility. But the book was there before the child and it will be there after him. I think there's a danger in the remarkable acceleration of work on children's books in the past few years. I think it has brought increased and unjustified pressure on writers. An author writes of course in order to communicate something to other people. He can never be completely unaware of his audience. He calls upon his craftsmanship to shape an original impulse, so as to bring it out of the depths of himself and make it accessible to other people. But it is stil 1.his book - it ispart of himself. Something inside him has forced him to manipulate it into independent life. Once he has done this (in other words, once his book has been published) he has exposed it to criticism and analysis and categorizing. He has given us the right to consider it closely in relation to accepted literary principles and to decide what we think of it and what kind of child might read it. But he hasn't given us the right to meddle with his writing of the book. He has not given us the right to say, 'Please accept this or that formula. Please avoid violence, because we don't think it's good for children. Please don't use any words they don't understand. It might bother them.' As they say of television programmes, we can always switch off. We have the right to put a book aside if we object to it, but we haven't the right to try to dictate to the author in the first place. We must accept his book as an entity. We must approach it without prejudice or prejudgment and make it our first business to try to find out why the author wrote it, what he is aiming at.

Maurice Sendak Where the Wild Things Are Bodley Head 1967

A book is not primarily educational. It is an experience for the reader. It is an individual creation existing in its own right made by the indMdual who, in the long run, makes his own rules. Now every art is susceptible to fashion and to public demand. Johann Sebastian Bach was criticized by his employers at Arnstadt because he extended and elaborated the preambles to the hymns so that the congregation did not know when to start singing. His answer was to stop preambling altogether. Now I would hate to start a writer's strike. Music of course has seldom been as susceptible to direction from outside as it was for Bach. The medium of painting is not so direct and universal that it could be easily controlled by the customers, except perhaps in the sphere of illustration. I hope very much that Charles Keeping will have something to say on this subject. I am sure that any discussion of censorship will have to concern itself with the surprising a~tations aroused in adults (not in children) by Sendak's picture book Where the Wild Things Are. But I think it will be admitted that words, which are the easiest and most universal means of communication, are unusually vulnerable. A writer may choose to work within specified limits. He may on the other hand

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offer something entirely original, but whatever he writes the germ of the book is his own and it is for him to choose his theme and his attitude and the words he will use. I think the writer of children's books is probably the most often harried and impeded of all writers in this matter of vocabulary. We are all familiar with the attempts of the late Miss Blyton to have Beatrix Potter rewritten so that the kiddies can understand her. We all express pious horror at the very idea. But there are more ways of killing the cat than choking it with butter and we are just as guilty if we ask that a book of personal vision should be carried out within word limits, or if we provide a difficult future for a writer by suggesting that he has used words too difficult for his supposed readership. The words the writer chooses are part of himself. He chooses partly from a practical point of view because they are suitable to his dialogue or his narrative or his description, but to some extent the words choose themselves as an expression of his personality. In their identity and their arrangement they make up th~:t intangible thatwe call style. I should like to illustrate this with examples from two very individual writers. The first passage comes from a book I have already mentioned, Finn9 Folly by Ivan Southall. The situation is this: a boy of 14 is climbing down a steep hillside in Australia to confirm what he is trying not to know, that his parents have been killed in a motor accident. The time is a cold after-midnight with a clearing fog. He fought against everything that held him to the ground. Again ~ d again he felt himself turn, felt his feet lift, felt the wild slide, the slipping and the scramble into a steep place of stones and sticks and cloud, but then looked back with shock and saw himself as before, unmoving, still drooping on the road. It was a sensation so weird that it began to hurt, as though something inside him was forcing its way out of his body then fleeing in dismay back into it. He tried with all the strength he had to stop it and suddenly the wild slide, the slipping and the scramble were real. He was clawing with feet and hands in a shower of pebbles and twigs; rocks were hard, undergrowth was rough, the slope was like a steeple. He crashed against a tree trunk and it felled him. There was the stink of fungus and decomposing leaves, a deep, wet softness with sharp fragments like thorns that penetrated his clothes. He lay stunned by the force of impact, aching to his teeth. In a while he groped out of the mould and pulled himself upright beside the tree and clung to it, spitting dirt from his mouth, rubbing creepy things like spider webs from his eyes and ears and hair.

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Where was the road? Somewhere up in the cloud. For how long had he slid and scrambled? He didn't know; he could draw no Iine of time between the real event and the others he had imagined. It was an effort of comprehension to accept the tree and the slope and the ankle-deep humus, to accept that everything had suddeniy changed, that the mood of sadness up there had gone forever, had belonged to a time that might as well have been years ago. Wreckage lay up there, deadly poisoned, solitude, and a half-dream world of imaginings. Up there the window dressing; down here the things that were real. Meindert Dejong

Journey from Peppermint Street Lutterworth 1969

The second extract comes from Meindert Dejong's Journey from Peppermint Street. Here is a little boy travelling across a marsh with his grandfather, again at night, and he has to wait alone until his aunt rows back with her boat to take him out of a flooded area to her farmhouse. He settled himself on the hump in the middle of the waggon path between the deep wheel ruts. He hugged his knees to his chest. He squeezed the cane between his knees. The bail lay tight against him; the lantern stood warm with its light - close to his other side. It wasn't good, though, to be quiet; he sang his one-line song again. If he didn't sing, he could hear the watery muck ... still making dark ugly noises. There were flIthy plopping sounds when great welling black bubbles broke - it was just as if a giant were breathing under the muck. A giant ... he hastily started to sing again. An owl, or something fierce and horrible, cried far across the swamp. Horror rose higher and higher in its screeching call, then the calls went low and weepy and spooky. Siebren's song stopped in his mouth. The owl, or whatever awfulness, also stopped. Now everything was unnaturally still, and clouds swept low. He sat very small~ The horrible owl started up again. Suddenly Siebren sang out fiercely at the owl - for his little aunt's sake ... He made his one-line song go up and down the way the owl screeched high and low. It made it fun; it made it brave. It was a iittie nothing song, but it was brave. When his throat felt tired from singing the one-line song up and down, he began to sing the naked-frog song over and over. He kept count. And it was when he had sung the silly song thirty-eight times that suddenly near - his aunt began singing along. -

In each of these pieces the writer is getting to the roots of fear, describing the child alone, responsible for himself in a situation full of terror. The first passage, and quite possibly also the second, will be objected to by people who believe that children should not meet fear in their books, but

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that is not the point that concerns me at the moment. The point I want to make here is that there is an individual voice in each of these passages. There is the rough, abrupt, deliberately crowded sequence of words from Ivan Southall, containing difficult emotional changes and mixing abstract and concrete words; and there is the artless., child-like sequence of words in which Meindert Dejong calls back his own childhood. Each author has chosen his words not for children but for the whole impact of the prose. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Was the kind of style chosen to suit the subject? Not really, because this is the typical style of Southall and of Dejong. The subjects were chosen, but the style is the man himself. I do not mean to suggest that anyone's ideas of what children can or can't understand are likely to influence these writers or indeed any of the writers present at this conference, but I do suggest that any attempt to restrict words and the use of words is an impertinence on our part and suggests that we expect books to exist primarily to serve our own ends. Any attempt to erode the individuality of a writer's style is a disservice to children, because t h e y need books o f integrity and strength and not books written to rule.

Ted Hughes The lron Man

Faber 1968

Now another way in which we serve children badly in serving them too well is by being dogmatic about the age range of a book. On the face of it Meindert Dejong's artless books might seem perfectly suited to readers around 8 or so but if we try to restrict books to this age group it would be to deprive other children older and occasionally younger who could enjoy Dejong's innocent shrewdness. I notice that in the lists of books sent out in connection with this conference, Ted Hughes' fantasy The Iron Man appears on one page under a primary heading for children of 5 - 7 and on another list it is suggested for a range of 6 - 8. Most of us would agree that this fantasy really belongs to that age range which is sometimes rather coyly rendered as 7 - 70. To take another example, Philippa Pearce's A Dog So Small has been put in the 10 - 12 category for the purpose of this week's discussion. I am sure many people here today have read this book to children as young as 7 with great success and no adult could fail to fall under its spell. Obviously we shall often find it convenient to group books under age headings, but this mustn't be more than a convenience. An author who is pressed to write within a very strict age range is bound to cripple his original conception and we shall get fewer books like the two I have just mentioned books that are expandable and have something to offer children at many stages and to adults as well. This isn't to say that an author does not often find the space he needs within an apparently restricted length or subject. The point is that the author finds his ideal form. It hasn't been wished on -

Margery Fisher -

William Mayne House on Farrnont

Hamish Hamilton 1968 Barbara Willard The Pocket Mouse

Hamish Hamilton 1969

John Masefield Odtaa

Heinemarm 1926

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him because of the needs of some particular readership. I'd recommend you to consider two books in particular in which a picture book length and format have mysteriously expanded to contain wit, a perceptive study of character, a wonderfully rounded story with a beginning and end and a middle and a humour that reaches out to adults as well as children. The two stories are William Mayne's House on Farmont and Barbara Willard's recently published story The Pocket Mouse. Incidentally, although these two books are technically picture-story books, they are going to bother some classifiers quite a bit. They are originals and not altogether cIassifiable. Life would be frustrating for the writer of stories if we insisted on being dogmatic about age groups. Also of course we should do a great deal of harm to young readers. The books that affect us most are often those that we find ourselves. Children are more likely to discover the full pleasures of reading if they are left to skirmish through a broadly based collection of books, many of which may in theory not be for their age group at all. Well meaning suggestions to children can be very chancy, as t am sure you all know. t thought I was a fair judge of what was suitable after noticing the peculiarities of my six children's taste in books. Evidently I hadn't learnt my lesson thoroughly enough. The other day I was picking out books for my eldest granddaughter who is a late reader of nearly 8. I was thinking in theoretical terms. I thought,'Ah, yes, reluctant reader, repetition to help her along.' and I found an easy book with a repetitive pattern. When she came to the fourth repetition of words and situations she heaved a great sigh and said, 'Not again.' So I left her by the bookshelf. It is obvious that we can't think in telTmsof groups of children but only in terms of individuals. When John Masefield was a child of 5 he was made free of his grandfather's library and, as Ear as I know, nobody told him that he wasn't old enough for Chambers Journal; and it was in the pages of Chambers Journal a year or two later that he found the adventure stories of Mayne Reid. That, of course, led to books like Odtaa and Live and Kicking Ned. Incidentally, if we work to rule we shall never give these books to the young, because they are not children's books. It seems a pity. An expandable book, a book that offers something to everyone, has surely a rather special value for that very difficult age group, the group of young people of eighteen to twenty-two who are training to be teachers and studying children's books as a curriculum subject. Many students Iike this have poor reading backgrounds through no fault of their own and they have to approach the field of children's literature, as it were, in cold blood. On the face of it no category can be directly relevant to them but of course there are stories in every category very relevant to their stage of development if they read properly.

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They can find something of much more than academic interest in a great many picture books, in some fantasies, in farces, in adventure stories, in these books which offer them a complete experience and not just an example of one kind of story or another. If these young students are going to introduce books to children they must be able to believe in them and they must be able to enjoy them. Sto W telling and reading aloud are I suppose accepted as an essential part of teaching in almost every school nowadays, but is it regarded as essential that there must be shared pleasure? I don't mean to suggest that students may be allowed to regard children's literature as a soft option, though I believe that in some colleges in the United States the subject is known as 'Kiddy Lit'. If there are dangers in being too strictly occupied with children's books as a part of childhood there is no danger in a proper study of them.

John Rowe Townsend Growing Point Vol 6, No. 6 December 1967 and Vol 7, No. 1 May 1968

I am proud to be among the people currently discussing the possibility of a centre for children's literature and I am proud that Grgwing Point provided John Townsend with a medium for the two articles on the subject which you have been circulated with. One of the possible functions of such a centre is the encouragement of the study of individual writers and their work. Obviously the best way to enjoy a writer is to look closely at his work as a whole, with respect and with intelligence. As I have already said a great deal of work is being don e on the response of children to books, especially to story books. This r/eedn'{ mean, as some people seem to think, that less work must consequently be done on the books themselves. There are far too few places, for instance, where properly considered articles on writers for children can be published. One of the advantages of literary articles is that they may help students in training who are too old and yet too young to enjoy children's books to see some point in them and to recognize them as part of the mainstream of literature and to see that they are a real force in education, but only in their own right and in their own way. All those of us who are working with children must learn to fit the child to the book and not the book to the child. This way I think we shall get the books we deserve and we might perhaps deserve the books that we get.

Extracts from the discussion session with Margery Fisher Brian Atderson

I wonder if I could ask a rather naive question of Mr Robbins relating really to the conference as a whole, but arising out of Mrs Fisher's preliminary remarks to say that she was going to start off by saying 'Is fiction educational' because this is after all a week to be devoted to children's fiction and its role in education. Could we have some clearer definition of what you understand

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b y education? One foresees us wallowing for ~%ur days otherwise without getting anywhere at all. I am not a librarian, but speaking for librarians whom I teach, or at least hopeful librarians, they would perhaps not see eye to eye with teachers over the definition of this rather vague word 'education' and might want to talk in such terms as 'children's fiction in the maturation process of the individual' or something like this which takes it well away from the classroom, where I fear a lot of the educationists here may be seeing it. Sidney Robbins

I give you one word and that is 'growth'. t suppose the emphasis is inevitably the concern of the English teacher, of the teacher or librarian who wants to see a child's language develop. It may be inadequate but it is a useful term. We are concerned with the way the child grows in language and we alI know that when you grow in language you are growing in many rnme ways than just linguistically. Will this satisfy you? Growth?

Brian Alderson

You would not limit it merely to the growth of language ... growth in ima~nation?

Sidney Robbins

I have said earlier that growth in language implies so much else as well. It can never be just in language alone.

Brian A Ide rson

I think it is important that we should get this established right at the start, because I have a great horror that these few days may get bogged down with discussions of how we should deal with set books in classes or something like this and if in fact we are seeing it in these broader terms then at least we know what you are thinking about and can adjust ourselves accordingly.

John Merrick

Would it be safe to say that we have to take some of these things on trust? We haven't any evidence, in fact, that people do improve all that much necessarily. We know that they get pleasure from reading and that is a good thing to go for, but what is the evidence? It is possible to get a First in Engiish literature and be a scoundrel. But we do know that it gives pleasure.

Sidney Robbins

Yes, I did indicate to you in my opening remarks that all my experience had led me to believe that children do grow in this way in certain kinds of activity that draw upon the absorption of their feelings. I am not sure whether I can prove this. I am not sure whether anyone could measure it. If I say I don't real!y care whether they can or not, I am ducking the issue perhaps I should care. I said we've got to ask the question. Does this really happen? Can we demonstrate it?

Q4

Is that why you give children books to read, or read[ to them, for their growth? Do you just not do it for pleasure?

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Sidney Robbins

But one is aware that as well as pleasure, other things are happening. The English teacher is often manipulating the children in various ways, often in very cold blood. My experience, when I have tried to do this, to manipulate the growth of language intellectually, abstractedly, through exercises or comprehension passages, is that it doesn't work; nothing really takes place because there is no involvement in feeling. It seems to me that that king of growth that we are so consciously, intellectually trying to stimulate doesn't take place, but it does take place when we are reading stories to them or when they are reading, and when they are utterly committed to writing a poem or a story or enacting, dancing out some kind of dramatic movement.

Q4

Surely that is because it's creating pleasure? I f a child enjoys what he is reading then he will absorb other things from it. If he doesn't enjoy it he will never get anything from it.

Qs

I think sometimes the book is not really the child's own until it can tackle it directly, read it silently. It seems to me that ultimately if it can only be a success when it is helped in class that it has not won its way.

Sidney Robbins

The only thing is that this would cut out a lot of books for children. Think of Lucy Boston's books. Many children, perhaps the majority, are not really going to be capable of assimilating A Stranger atGreen Knowe by themselves yet I am quite convinced that a teacher who believes in it and can read well, can take that into a class of 11 or 12 year olds and make it come alive for many children who simply would not get near it by themselves.

Lucy Boston' A Stranger at Green Knowe Faber 1961

Brian Alderson

Mr Robbins, are you now going to tell us why you don't think they are going to be able to tackle it on their own? This is a critical statement. Can we now have the chapter and verse for why you are saying that?

Sidney Robbins

I suppose it's a question of the plentitude and variety of the language. It's a very demanding use of language, isn't it? Don't misunderstand me. I admire Lucy Boston tremendously and I only wish she could have come here. But one has to make critical judgments like this, sure!y. I know they're difficult because we are doing two things: we are thinking of this as literature and we are also thinking of it as an educational tool - Godhelp us.

Brian Alde~on

But I fear that just to say that it is because of the language does not really bring us any closer to what children are going to find if they take these books away themselves. There is more than just language in these books. There is a portrayal in A Stranger at Green Knowe of a very curious situation, and I know of one secondary schoolteacher who has found the first section of this quite astonishingly successful and commented on it because he says there is no

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conversation in it. Yet the children are wrapped up in this because of the portrayal of the animal and I think you must say something about this aspect as well as the linguistic aspect. Do you feel that Lucy Boston has been unsuccessful in portraying the characters or the animal here so that the children will not understand what she is trying to do? Sidney Robbins

I am not implying that at all. I think in the books that she wrote for older readers, she has been true to a very tangible impulse inside herself and they seem to me marvellous books. There are some books that are not accessible, because o f their language, to many children.

Margery Fisher

I can't quite seewhat the point is of not pushing children bang into books from the word go as soon as they can read. I don't think it matters if they can't read half the words that they are reading. They get more out of a book if they are left. If I was in the ideal school with all the power in the world I should simply have a large room with books all over the floor or all over the tables and leave children there. They do get an awful tot out of listening, obviously, and one always reads aloud to children but w h a t t h e y get is not help with words. They get an idea of sound and rhythm ~ d they get the essence of a book from hearing it in a different sort of way, but I don't think it matters if they don't understand what they read. It comes, but it only comes if they try and they have got to be made to try somehow. I was absolutely made to try in the way I was made to learn to spell. If children don't start at the very beginning trying to understand books on their own, they probably never will.