There is also something to say about people who make a conscious decision not to pass on to their children the ill-treatment they experienced. They may have been receivers but they did not become transmitters.
The time has come to look at a few examples and try to think of a few explanations. The examples mainly involve writers who have been featured or mentioned on here.
It was something I read recently in Diana Wynne Jones’s account of her early life that made me decide to finally get some ideas down on paper at long last Her story provides a very good example to start with: it tells of someone who passed it on to someone who didn’t.
Diana Wynne Jones and two generations of censorship
In her book Reflections: On the Magic of Writing, Diana Wynne Jones tells us how she was starved for reading material throughout her childhood.
Her mother, who was an appalling person, added insult to injury by censoring the Piper at the Gates of Dawn chapter in The Wind in the Willows because it was ‘too fanciful’.
“When I was about seven, my mother read me The Wind in the Willows at bedtime. I wasn't sure I liked it because Toad kept being the wrong size. But when she came to that particular chapter, she turned it over in a hunk and went on to the one after that.
‘Why are you missing that one out?’ I asked. ‘Because it's very silly and pointless - and you wouldn't understand it anyway,’ she said, and went on reading about Toad.
I was consumed with a feeling that she had missed out a very important piece of the story. I peeped at the title - The Piper at the Gates of Dawn seemed suggestive of magic beyond my experience and totally haunting.
After a week or so, I was so convinced this chapter was important that I sneaked the book when my mother was busy and, with tremendous guilt but quite compulsively, read the chapter...”
So why did Diana’s mother refuse to read this sublime and numinous chapter to her?
“Which brings me back to my mother's censorship of that chapter for me. Why did she do this?
… my mother confessed to me that at the age of nine or so, she was addicted to fairy stories. You could buy little paper books of them for a penny, she said, and she bought a whole stack and buried herself in them avidly.
And her father caught her reading them. He not only took them away. He burned them. Ceremonially, with disgust and loathing. They were not true, he said, not real, and were therefore harming her mind. And he forbade her ever to read such things again. So she didn't. For the rest of her life.
Toad she could allow herself, because he was obvious whimsy and kept changing size, but not the chapter that takes you deep into the archetype of the imagination.
She does read my books, but only because she knows I nearly always put actual, living people into them, and she likes to spot the ones she knows. And she's always asking me why I don't write Real Books.”
Passing it on and breaking the spell
Most of what Diana Wynne Jones tells us speaks for itself, as does what she says about The Piper at the Gates of Dawn:
“...it has remained with me all these years as an ideal of what fantasy should do. Everything I have written is in some way a feeble echo of that chapter.”
How lucky it is for her readers that she defied her mother and read this chapter at an early, very impressionable age!
It is very difficult to understand why her mother didn’t sooner or later defy the grandfather. She knew how awful it was to be forbidden by a parent from reading anything that wasn’t realistic, yet she tried to do censor her own daughter’s reading.
Diana Wynne Jones did not pass it on: we have seen how her children got plenty of good children’s books, and how outraged she was when she realised how deprived she had been and what she had missed.
On the subject of E. Nesbit’s wonderful children’s books, she says this:
“My mother, of course, was carefully shielded from Nesbit, and she took care to shield me. I only read Nesbit when I was an adult.”
Diana Wynne Jones was not allowed to read C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books either.
She was even forbidden to read the final chapter of A. A. Milne’s House at Pooh Corner! This is where Christopher Robin and Pooh Bear come to the enchanted place.
Diana Wynne Jones mostly wrote fantasy and speculative fiction. I wonder how many children in the world of today are not allowed to read her books.
Kenneth Grahame’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn:
