The Voice That Thunders, page 6
The physical immobility of my family was the lifeline. My family is so rooted that it ignores social classification by others. On one square mile of Cheshire hillside, the Garners are. And this sense of fusion with a land rescued me.
The education that had made me a stranger to my own people, yet had shown me no acceptable alternative, did increase my understanding of that hill. The awareness of place that was my birthright was increased by the opening of my mind to the physical sciences and to the metaphors of stability and of change that were given by that hill. Until I came to terms with the paradox I was denied, and myself denied, the people. But those people had their analogue in the land, and towards that root I began to move the stem of the intellect grown hydroponically in the academic hothouse. The process has taken twenty-seven years, so far; and my writing is the result.
It is a writing prompted by a feeling of outrage personal, social, political and linguistic. Yet, if any of it were to show overtly on the page, it would defeat itself. My way is to tell stories.
It may be enlightening, or at least entertaining, to illustrate what I mean. My primary tongue, which I share with several million other people, a number greater than the population of Estonia, a country with a substantial literature, I would call North-West Mercian. My secondary tongue is Standard English, which is a dialect of the seat of power, London. Both are valid. Both can be described. Standard English, because of its dominance has the greater number of abstract words. North-West Mercian is the more concrete, with little of the Romance in its vocabulary, and native speakers think of it as “talking broad”, and will not use it, out of a xenophobic pride and a sense of a last privacy, in the presence of social strangers. Social strangers treat it as a barbarism. There are differences between the dialects; but they are little more than differences. Neither is superior to the other.
In the sixteenth century, English achieved an elegance of Germanic and Romance integration that it has not recaptured. We respond instinctively to its excellence. The Bible had the good fortune to be translated into this excellence, and the debility of English thereafter is plotted in all subsequent failures to improve on that text. Here is a short passage from the King James’ Bible and its equivalent in North-West Mercian, which I shall have to write in a phonetic abomination in order for it to be understood. But, spoken, it is poetry as is the other.
King James’:
And Boaz said unto her, “At mealtime come thou hither, and eat of the bread, and dip thy morsel in the vinegar.” And she sat beside the reapers: and she reached out her parched corn, and she did eat, and was sufficed, and left.
And when she had risen up to glean, Boaz commanded his young men, saying, “Let her glean among the sheaves and reproach her not:
“And let fall some handfuls of purpose for her, and leave them, that she may glean them, and rebuke her not.”
So she gleaned in the field until even, and beat out that she had gleaned; and it was about an ephah of barley.
North-West Mercian:
Un Boaz sed to ur, “Ut baggintaym, thay kum eyur, un av sum u’ th’ bread, un dip thi bit u’ meet i’ th’ alliger.” Un oo sit ursel dayn usayd u’ th’ reepers; un oo raut ur parcht kuurn, un oo et it, un ad ur filt, un went uwee.
Un wen oo wuz gotten up fer t’ songger, Boaz gy’en aurders t’ iz yungg yooths, sez ay, “Lerrer songger reyt umungg th’ kivvers, un dunner yay skuwl er.
“Un let faw sum antlz u’ purpus fer er, un leeuv sum fer er fer t’ leeze um, un dunner sneep er.”
“So ur songgert in th’ felt ter th’ neet, un oo bumpt wor oo songgert, un it koom ter ubayt too mishur u’ barley.
The language of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is still spoken in the North-West of England today; but it has no voice in modern literature. The detriment works both ways. Modern literature does not feed from its soil. North-West Mercian is not illiterate, nor preliterate; it has been rendered non-literate and non-functional. I have just demonstrated its failure to communicate anything other than an emotion.
It would be retrogressive, a negation, if I were to try to impose North-West Mercian on the speakers of Standard English; and I should deservedly fail. Writer and language are involved in the process of history, and in history Standard English has become supreme over all regional dialects, of which North-West Mercian is but one. How then can I feed the two, to both of which I must own?
The answer is seen only with hindsight. Each step has appeared at the time to be simple expediency, in order to tell a story. One image, though, has remained: the awareness of standing between two cultures represented by two dialects: the concrete, direct culture from which I was removed and to which I could not return, even if I would; and the culture of abstract, conceptual thought, which had no root in me, but in which I have grown and which I cherish. It was self-awareness without self-pity, but full of violence. I knew that I had to hold on to that violence, and, somehow, by channelling them through me, make the negative energies positive.
All my writing has been fuelled by the instinctive drive to speak with a true and Northern voice integrated with the language of literary fluency, because I need both if I am to span my story. It was instinctive, not conscious, and I have only recently become aware enough to define the nuances.
First efforts were crude and embarrassing: a debased phonetic dialogue in the nineteenth-century manner. Such awkwardness gets in the way, translates nothing. Phonetic spelling condescends. Phonetic spelling is not good enough in its representation of the speakers. It is ugly to look at, bespattered with apostrophes, as my example from The Bible has shown.
It is the sign of a writer alienated from his subject and linguistically unschooled. Worst of all, in my writing and in that of others, the result, when incorporated in dialogue as an attempt to promote character, is to reduce demotic culture to a mockery; to render quaint, at best, the people we should serve. The novel, I would suggest, is not the place for phonetics.
Dialect vocabulary may be used to enrich a text, but it should be used sparingly, with the greatest precision, with accurate deployment, otherwise the balance is tipped through the absurd to the obscure. The art is to create the illusion of demotic rather than to reproduce it. The quality of North-West Mercian, as of all dialects, lies not in the individual words but in the cadence, in the music of it all.
So what words can tell my story? The words are the language, heart and head: a language at once idiosyncratic and universal, in the full growth of the disciplined mind, fed from a deep root. To employ one without the other is to be fluent with nothing to say; or to have everything to say, and no adequate means of saying it. Yet, for historical reasons, those are the alternatives for the artist in Britain today, unless he or she, consciously or unconsciously, wages total war, by which I mean total life, on the divisive forces within the individual and within society.
The conflict of the paradox must consume, but not destroy. It must be grasped until, leached of hurt, it is a clear and positive force, matched to an equal clarity of prose. It must be rage: rage for, not rage against. That way, although there is no guarantee, a new language may result that is neither false nor sentimental, that can stand without risk of degradation, without loss of ambivalence, and be at all times complete. Twenty-seven years have not given me that language, but at least I feel that I know some of its qualities, and where to look for them in myself.
Here is a tentative example, from The Aimer Gate. It describes, as did the earlier passage from the Bible, a harvest field:
The men stood in a line, at the field edge, facing the hill, Ozzie on the outside, and began the swing. It was a slow swing, scythes and men like a big clock, back and to, back and to, against the hill they walked. They walked and swung, hips forward, letting the weight cut. It was as if they were walking in a yellow water before them. Each blade came up in time with each blade, at Ozzie’s march, for if they ever got out of time the blades would cut flesh and bone.
Behind each man the corn swarf lay like silk in the light of poppies. And the women gathered the swarf into sheaves, stacked sheaves into kivvers. Six sheaves stood to a kivver, and the kivvers must stand till the church bells had rung over them three times. Three weeks to harvest: but first was the getting.
Standard English and North-West Mercian are there combined in syntax, vocabulary and cadence. They speak for me, as the head to the heart; as the consonant to the vowel; as Romance to Germanic; as the stem to the root.
From such are the words formed. Now what else is the story? To answer that, I have to draw on the work of the late Professor Mircea Eliade, in whose precision of discourse I have often found my instincts to be defined.
The story that the writer must tell is no less than the truth. At the beginning, I took “art” to mean the fabrication whereby a reality may be the better revealed. I would equate “truth” with that same reality.
A true story is religious, as drama is religious. Any other fiction is didactic, instruction rather than revelation, and not what I am talking about. “Religious”, too, is a quarrelsome word. For me, “religion” describes that area of human concern for, and involvement with, the question of our being within the cosmos. The concern and involvement are often stated through the imagery of a god, or gods, or ghosts, or ancestors; but not necessarily so. Therefore, I would consider humanism, and atheism to be religious activities.
The function of the storyteller is to relate the truth in a manner that is simple; for it is rarely possible to declare the truth as it is, because the universe presents itself as a Mystery. We have to find parables, we have to tell stories to unriddle the world. It is yet another paradox. Language, no matter how finely worked, will not speak the truth. What we feel most deeply we cannot say in words. At such levels only images connect; and hence story becomes symbol.
A symbol is not a replica of an objective fact. It is not responsive to reductive analytical rationalism. A symbol is always religious and always multivalent. It has the capacity to reveal several meanings simultaneously, the unity between which is not evident on the plane of experience. This capacity to reveal a multitude of united meanings has a consequence. The symbol can reveal a perspective in which diverse realities may be linked without reduction; so that the symbolism of the moon speaks to a unity between the lunar rhythms, water, women, death and resurrection, horses, ravens, madness, the weaver’s craft and human destiny – which includes the Apollo space missions. All that is not an act of reason; but it is an act of story. Here is a dimension where paradox is resolved; for story itself is myth.
In the beginning, the earth was a desolate plain, without hills or rivers, lying in darkness. The sun, the moon and the stars were still under the earth. Above was Mam-ngata, and beneath, in a waterhole, was Binbeal.
Binbeal stirred. And the sun and the moon and the stars rose to Mam-ngata. Binbeal moved. And, with every movement, the world was made: hills, rivers and sea, and life was woken. And all this Binbeal did “altijirana nambakala”, “from his own Dreaming”; that is, from his own Eternity.
The life that Binbeal woke was eternal, but lacked form. This life became animals and men. And these, the Ancestors, were given shape and came onto the face of the new earth. And the place where each Ancestor came is sacred for ever.
That is a synthesis of a pan-Australian myth. From myth came the totemism of the Aboriginal Australian, and an awareness that amounts to symbiosis with the land. For the Australian, the Ancestor exists at the same time under the earth; in ritual objects; in places such as rocks, hills, springs, waterfalls; and as “spirit children” waiting between death and rebirth; and, most significantly, as the man in whom he is incarnate. It is a world view close to the one I discovered for myself, as a child of my family on Alderley Edge in Cheshire.
Through the mediation of myth, the Aboriginal Australian has not only a religious nobility of thought, but, coincident with the “real” earth, a mystical earth, a mystical geography, a mystical sequence of Time, a mystical history, and, through the individual, a mystical and personal responsibility for the universe.
Ritual initiation of the individual is the assumption by the individual of this knowledge and responsibility.
When an Aboriginal Australian boy is initiated into manhood, the sacred places of his People are visited, the sacred rites performed, to help the boy to remember. For this boy, this reincarnated Ancestor, has to recall the primordial time and his own most remote deeds. Through initiation, the novice discovers that he has been here already, in the Beginning, Altjira, the Dreaming. It is a Second Coming. It is a Holy Communion. To learn is to remember.
In Classical Greek the word is “anamnesis” and was first expounded to us by the father of Western philosophy, Plato. There are many differences between the Australian “altjira” and Greek “anamnesis”, but both are a spiritual activity: philosophy for the Greek; life itself for the Australian.
I am not advocating a rejection of sophisticated values in favour of “primitive” animism. I am a rationalist, a product of the Classical Mediterranean, and an inheritor of two thousand five hundred years of Western thought. I need Manchester Grammar School just as much as I need Alderley Edge. But I do need them both.
My concern, in writing and in life, is that, by developing our greatness, the intellect, we should not lose the other greatness, our capacity to Dream. The two can work side by side, even if it means that I have to imagine a railway system to get me to my desk. Achilles can walk in Altjira. Indeed he must: he has such a lot to remember.
Not least of the memories is that to live as a human being is in itself a religious act.
That is why the stories must be told. It is why Eric James had such a catalytic effect upon one of his sixth-formers; and so justified his function as a chemist, after all.
* * *
1 This lecture was delivered at the Children’s Literature Association Tenth Annual Conference, entitled “Frontiers in Children’s Literature” at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, on 15 May 1983.
4
A Bit More Practice
“WHEN YOU’VE HAD a bit more practice, will you try to write a real book?”1
This frequent question is asked in the context of my having written four novels “for children”, and, by now, there is a stock answer ready that seals off the conversation harmlessly, without bloodshed.
I do not write for children, but entirely for myself. Yet I do write for some children, and have done so from the beginning. This contradiction may be explained by two levels at which the brain works. Hindsight gives scope for rationalisation, but, at the time, the conscious motive for an action is crude and opportunist.
For this reason, any romantic picture of The Artist must be discarded straight away. I became an author through no burning ambition, but through a process of elimination, which lasted from the age of sixteen to twenty-one, rejecting everything until I had isolated the only occupation to offer what seemed necessary: complete physical and intellectual freedom from the tyranny of job, place, boss and time. The fact that ever since that decision I have worked a twenty-four-hour day, seven-day week, fifty-two-week year is a nice irony.
No publisher is interested in an unknown with nothing to show, nor is it common to find the sympathetic publisher and editor for a manuscript at the first attempt. I was lucky. Two years to write the book; one year to find the publisher; one year to publish. Four years of dole queues and National Assistance. Some sharp lessons in human communication were learnt in this period, and one interview with the committee of the National Assistance board was so hilarious that it later provided material for a radio play. But “success” changes public attitude, and what was once called skiving, or irresponsibility, or failure to see reality, is now called integrity.
My first attempt, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, is a fairly bad book, but there had to be a start somewhere, and consolation rests in the even worse first drafts of the opening chapter, which I pin up when things seem to be going well. Only recently have I come to realise that, when writing for myself, I am still writing for children; or, rather, for adolescents. By adolescence I mean an arbitrary age of somewhere between ten and eighteen. This group of people is the most important of all, and it makes the best audience. Few adults read with a comparable involvement. Yet I suspect that even here is not the true answer. In each of my books, the child protagonists have aged. The distance between them and me has stayed the same. Is that a coincidence, or have I been engaged in something much more subtle and unconscious, to do with my own psyche, not theirs?
But an argument can still be made that avoids such inner plunderings. The age of the individual does not necessarily relate to the maturity. Therefore, in order to connect, the book must be written for all levels of experience. This means that any given piece of text must work at simple plot level, so that the reader is compelled to turn the page, if only to find out what happens next; and it must also work for me, and for every stage of reader in between. My concern for the reader is slight, to say the least, but I am concerned not to be the agent of future illiteracy. Anything else that comes through is a bonus. An onion can be peeled down through its layers, but it is always at every layer an onion. I try to write onions.
The disciplines of poetry are called for to achieve validity at so many levels. Simplicity, pace, compression are needed, so that the reader who has not experienced what I am getting at will not be held up, since the same text is also fulfilling the demands of the plot. And my requirements are satisfied, because this discipline has made me reduce what I have to say to its purest form, communicating primarily with the emotions.
I make the first draft in longhand, because the elbow is the best editor, revise to the point of illegibility, and type out the result, some, but only a little, revision taking place on the typewriter. This first typescript is corrected, and, when it is as good as it can be made, a clean, second typescript is prepared, corrected, and sent to the publisher, who sends back a long editorial comment. Any second thoughts engendered by this are put into the typescript, and I consider the book finished. Corrections at the proof stage are almost entirely of compositor’s errors.
