Reading Those Classics #18

Children’s Classic. Sometimes it's fun and interesting to learn about writers and their curious lives. But other times we get more information than we bargain for and conclude we had better not know about authors and artists living lives as messy as our own. The author of this novel, E. Nesbit, had a complicated open marriage to a man who found it hard to make any money so she was the breadwinner under constant pressure to support a large family. See the article "E. Nesbit and the Happy Moralist" by Gloria G. Fromm. It’s so shocking it’s funny but one also feels how fraught home life must have been for their children. Nesbit was fictionalized in A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book. It’s not a flattering portrait.

The Phoenix and the Carpet - E. Nesbit

The children we met in The Five Children and It set off fireworks inside their house. I can provide first-person testimony that as jolly an activity as this is, count lighting fireworks inside a house as play that causes collateral damage.

So the mother in this novel has to purchase a rug to cover a burned spot on the hardwood floor. Being modest middle-class people that can afford only a cook and maid – it is set at the same time as Ivy Compton-Burnett novels, the early 1900s -  it has to be a used rug.

And after they unroll it, out tumbles an egg, which winds up in the grate where the heat hatches a phoenix. The wondrous bird is verbal, vain and culture-bound to ancient conceptions of hierarchy and traditional rites. He informs the children that the rug will grant them three wishes a day, just like the sand fairy they met in the previous book.

The resulting adventures are not so rousing, but they are told with an irresistible wit and zest. Nesbit goes all intertextual before intertextuality was cool. She alludes to novels by other writers like Arthur Moore (“‘It’s not lying to say she’s a disagreeable pig, and a beastly blue-nosed Bozwoz,’ said Cyril, who had read The Eyes of Light, and intended to talk like Tony as soon as he could teach Robert to talk like Paul."). Referring to the oft-parodied poem Casabianca, sensible Robert says, “No boys on burning decks for me!” Nesbit also recommends other writers ("I am not going to describe the ranee’s palace, because I really have never seen the palace of a ranee, and Mr Kipling has. So you can read about it in his books.")

Nesbit therefore ingratiates herself with us great readers by assuming we have read the same stuff, both good and bad, and thus have developed our own reading tastes:

If you had been stood in Jane’s shoes you would no doubt have run away in them, appealing to the police and neighbours with horrid screams. But Jane knew better. She had read a great many nice stories about burglars, as well as some affecting pieces of poetry, and she knew that no burglar will ever hurt a little girl if he meets her when burgling. Indeed, in all the cases Jane had read of, his burglarishness was almost at once forgotten in the interest he felt in the little girl’s artless prattle. So if Jane hesitated for a moment before addressing the burglar, it was only because she could not at once think of any remark sufficiently prattling and artless to make a beginning with. In the stories and the affecting poetry the child could never speak plainly, though it always looked old enough to in the pictures. And Jane could not make up her mind to lisp and ‘talk baby’, even to a burglar.

It’s incredible, bordering on magical, that Nesbit can connect with her kiddo readers and tune into multiple wavelengths on their ever-sensitive baloney detectors: reading preferences, suspension of belief, familiarity with literary devices and fatigue with stock characters and stereotypical girly-whirly behavior. Not to mention her play with word forms (burglarishness, “artless prattle” to “prattling and artless”) will appeal to a certain kind of lexophilic kid. She assumes kids respond to a mentor if the tuition has a light touch and talks to them just that way. When she is instructive, she winks and never goes on and on.

That the prose is in Edwardian British English is perhaps why the books are still widely read in the UK and read only by the hardest hardcore readers in the USA. Americans like the new and outlandish; the predicaments the English kids land in are rather mundane (though the theater fire at a performance of The Water Babies has its moments). Americans relish the incessant movement on a quest in the Oz books; in this story however the kids go to bed, "tired out and only too thankful that the evening at last was over." And though we Americans see ourselves as friendly and open, we still don’t really understand or connect with the niceness of the English, that ineffable combination of good manners and consideration, spiced with reserve. And the kids in this story are really nice, which may cause eye-rolling and groaning among hard-boiled American kids.

So yes Nesbit is well worth reading, as Gore Vidal observes, “… it is part of Nesbit’s genius that she sees [children] as clearly and unsentimentally as they see themselves, making for that sense of life without which there is no literature at any level.”