A Very Special Puffin - July 2019
I was planning to write about what makes a children’s book a children’s book, but instead I seem to have written about one children’s book written by an author, Jane Gardam, who is now better known for her adult fiction. Interestingly, all of Jane Gardam’s novels are now available in a uniform edition which makes no distinction between books originally marketed for children and young adults, and her other novels. This has led to some comical confusion among Amazon reviewers.
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| A few Puffins — some still waiting to be discovered |
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| A handy book for Puffin fans. |
This is especially so in the case of Puffin books. I can’t resist them and I’ll buy any Puffin with an illustrated cover as long as the price is right. The right price, in case you’re wondering, used to be between 50p and £1, but nowadays I might go as high as £2.50. I tell myself that it’s a harmless hobby, but I have a rule that I won’t indulge it online. The Internet has taken some of the fun out of searching for books, so in the case of Puffins I pretend to myself that it doesn’t exist.
When I bought A Long Way from Verona by Jane Gardam I bought it because it was a Puffin with a nice cover (by Krystyna Turska). It was in the 1980s and I’d never read anything by Jane Gardam at the time. It had been on the shelf for quite a while when I took it down, opened it, and read the first line:
‘I ought to tell you at the beginning that I am not quite normal having had a violent experience at the age of nine.’
How could anyone not read on? I finished the book a few hours later. The narrator, Jessica Vye (13) is unforgettable, though it is easy to see why many people find her annoying (in the book, I mean). She lists her chief characteristics (according to her) early in the story:
1. I am not quite normal
2. I am not very popular
3. I am able to tell what people are thinking.
And I might add
4. I am terribly bad at keeping quiet when I have something on my mind because
5. I ABSOLUTELY ALWAYS AND INVARIABLY TELL THE TRUTH.
Whether any of this is quite true we find out later. The epigram from Disraeli that prefaces Gardam’s 1976 novel, Bilgewater would apply equally well here: Youth is a blunder.
Set in a seaside town on wartime Teeside, A Long Way from Verona is a coming-of-age story that deals with powerful emotions and is laugh-out-loud funny in many places. It is also about becoming a writer, and explores in some detail the question of how you know whether what you have written is any good.
If you haven’t read the book yet you might want to stop here, although I don’t think any spoiler would stop me enjoying this. Indeed, I read it again this morning and my admiration only increased.
The violent experience referred to in the first line of the book is the visit of an author, one Arnold Hanger, to Jessica’s school. Jessica is so inspired that she dashes home and manages to thrust a pile of her own writing into the author’s arms as he boards the train. Some time later she receives a typewritten letter that says:
JESSICA VYE YOU ARE A WRITER
BEYOND ALL POSSIBLE DOUBT!
Months later, after moving to a new house and a new school in another part of the country, her new teacher (and enemy), Miss Dodds, metaphorically rips her essay to shreds in front of the class. The essay is entitled ‘The Best Day of the Summer Holidays’ and it is 47 pages long. Miss Dodds’s speech culminates with the lines, ‘I am going to give you all a very good rule that was given to me at college . . . When you have written something that you think is really good, destroy it. Destroy it.’
Jessica, of course, does think her essay is really good, and she says so. She had been looking forward to hearing, at last, some praise from Miss Dodds, and now she tells Miss Dodds that she is a fool. That’s the kind of girl she is. Trouble follows.
In the second part of the book Jessica is invited to an awful house party where she knows nobody. In a virtuoso piece of comic writing Gardam describes Jessica trying on clothes for the party and writing a poem at the same time:
‘ “Viyella!” I thought, “Lord, I can’t go in viyella.” I sat up and wrote.
How fast the ocean rush sweeps on my soul
How fast the current pulling from the shore
How dark and deep the pain within my breast . . .
. . . I read this through and was extremely pleased with it. I wrote a few more verses and then went and looked in the wardrobe. The viyella hung like a dead bird. It had little round pale-blue flowers all over it and pearl buttons and puff sleeves. I went back to the poem and read it again. It was dreadful.’
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| I know it's not the same but you can imagine . . . |
Finally, in part three of this beautifully structured novel, Jessica writes another poem. We never see this poem, but we know that it concerns the central incident of the first part of the book.
‘I wrote it straight out until it was finished . . . I blotted it and read it through and put in some commas and changed a word . . . then I went to bed and slept until tea-time.’ Jessica wakes up feeling ‘terribly happy. Very peculiar. [ . . .] I got out of bed and saw the blue exercise book and remembered the poem. I went over and read it and stood looking at it for a long time and knew why I felt happy. There was nothing in it I wanted to change.’
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| Wood engraving by Peter Reddick from the 1992 Folio Society edition of Jude the Obscure. Hardy's pessimism resonates with Jessica. |
This is not the end of it, however. When the librarian in the public library finds her reading Jude the Obscure she gives her something that is ‘much more the thing.’ Later, she tries to read this book. ‘…slowly I realized I was reading the most awful, dreadful, ghastly book I had ever read in my life . . .’ The book is by Arnold (YOU ARE A WRITER BEYOND ALL POSSIBLE DOUBT) Hanger.
Doubt is what now comes to Jessica, as it does to all of us, I think. Whose opinion matters about our work in the end? Jessica is haunted in spite of herself by the words of Miss Dodds, who warned that if she didn’t throw away something she thought good she would end up feeling ‘terribly ashamed of it afterwards.’ In an agony of doubt about whether to enter her poem for a national competition she consults the eccentric and sympathetic English teacher, Miss Philemon. After a forensic investigation of Jessica’s true feelings about her poem Miss P says:
‘I don’t think I care whether you are ashamed . . . Poets on the whole are not much given to shame . . . they burn and suffer and get torn to bits — and they drink and grow fat and quarrel and die. They cut themselves to pieces and destroy their relations. They are bitter and mad and sad and heavy of heart. It’s not a soft way, Jessica; but at least they’re not ashamed.’
Jane Gardam is one of those rare writers who write equally well for children and adults. It’s astonishing to me that she has won neither the Booker nor the Carnegie, although she has won many other awards. In 1971, the year when A Long Way from Verona was published, the Carnegie went to Ivan Southall’s Josh. Twenty years later Jane Gardam’s book won the Phoenix award for a book overlooked on its first publication. I’d suggest that Gardam’s first book, published that same year, equally deserved the award. A Few Fair Days is a wonderful, luminous collection of short stories set on the north-east coast and in Cumberland, and well worth seeking out, as are all of Jane Gardam's books.
And in case the information comes in handy for any of you in a pub quiz, there is one writer who has won both the Carnegie and the Booker—Penelope Lively won the Carnegie in 1973 with The Ghost of Thomas Kempe and the Booker in 1987 with Moon Tiger.
According to me, Jane Gardam should have done so too.
This post was originally published on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure.
This post was originally published on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure.
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