The great and positive influence of public libraries

This article was inspired by a quotation from Terry Pratchett that I found recently. He said this in his introduction to Dragons at Crumbling Castle: And Other Stories:

“... I taught myself how to write by reading as many books as I could carry home from the library.“

Many people do indeed learn to write by extensive reading, although obviously not all voracious readers go on to become published writers. Who knows what wonderful works might never have existed if their authors had not had access to large numbers of good-quality library books!

By coincidence, Neil Gaiman, who wrote the comedy novel Good Omens jointly with Terry Pratchett, was another great reader of library books. I found an interesting article in which he speaks about reading, literacy, fiction, the imagination and the function of libraries in general. 

A last look at Joyce Collin-Smith’s Call No Man Master

This is the final article in the series inspired by Joyce Collin-Smith’s autobiographical work Call No Man Master (1988).  

In this book she describes her 50-year search for a genuine guru, a real spiritual master. She didn’t find one, but she encountered many unusual people of various religions and disciplines and learned a lot along the way.

This article highlights some remaining material of particular interest. There is a little more to say about cults and the damage that they do to their members, about the Maharishi Yogi and about the feeling of being alien to this world.

As I have described in one of the basic cult articles, anyone who gets involved with one is in danger of being left stranded. They may also have been encouraged to burn their bridges behind them, which gets them into double trouble.

There are some examples of this in Call No Man Master. 

The summaries of what Joyce Collin-Smith tells us speak for themselves.

Joyce Collin-Smith: imagination, alienation, and an imaginary friend

Novelist and journalist Joyce Collin-Smith’s autobiographical work Call No Man Master has inspired many articles to date, and there is still a little more miscellaneous material of particular interest to come. 

This article covers some of the attributes that Joyce Collin-Smith had in common with other writers mentioned on here.

The articles about Stella Benson’s imagination and imaginary friends spell out what life is like for someone who is very good with words, has a very vivid imagination and feels alienated from the real world.

Joyce Collin-Smith is another example of such people.

Joyce Collin-Smith’s childhood
There are some very familiar elements here.

Joyce Collin-Smith tells us that she was a thin, ailing, solitary, excessively shy and nervous child. Fearing rebuffs or incomprehension if she voiced her thoughts, she busied herself with private activities, including writing or imagining stories.

L. M. Montgomery on Rudyard Kipling and writing to order

It came as no great surprise to learn recently that L. M. Montgomery was familiar with the works of Rudyard Kipling: as mentioned in previous articles, she was a great reader. 

What was unexpected was that she singled out Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads for special praise - perhaps this was because she was given the poems as a Christmas present. 

Her actual words about the poems surprised me too:

“They are capital — full of virile strength and life. They thrill and pulsate and burn, they carry you along in their rush and swing, till you forget your own petty interests and cares, and burst out into a broader soul-world and gain a much clearer realization of all the myriad forms of life that are beating around your own little one. And this is good for a person even if one does slip back afterwards into the narrow bounds of one’s own life. We can never be quite so narrow again.”

From The Complete Journals of L. M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1900-1911

I certainly know what it is like to be thrilled and taken out of myself and swept into another, wider, world by certain poems, Rudyard Kipling’s in particular, but the Barrack Room Ballads are not among them. They have on the whole a negative effect.

This enthusiasm was so surprising that I went to Project Gutenberg to refresh my memory of the Ballads in the hope of understanding why L. M. Montgomery felt this way about them.