More about invisibility and Hurrying People streaming past

One of the articles in the series inspired by Stella Gibbons's My American covers Amy's Lee's nightmare experience in the form of a horrible recurring dream in which she is invisible to the crowds of Hurrying People who stream past and ignore her no matter how hard she tries to attract their attention. She also has a few daytime experiences that trigger memories of her dream.

Amy Lee is not alone in sometimes feeling like a ghost in a world full of real people. 

A nightmare from Neverwhere

This is an extract from Neil Gaiman's wonderful urban fantasy story Neverwhere:

“As a child, Richard had had nightmares in which he simply wasn’t there, in which, no matter how much noise he made, no matter what he did, nobody ever noticed him at all. He began to feel like that now, as people pushed in front of him...”

This is uncannily similar to what Amy Lee experiences in My American.

Examples from real life 

It is not just fictional people who sometimes feel invisible.

The former friend who is featured in the story about the sultanas and the fox cub told me that she often had a sense of standing apart and invisible while crowds of people streamed past. Another friend who was involved in some of the other synchronicities in that article had similar experiences. 

A last look at Stella Gibbons's My American

This final article in the series inspired by Stella Gibbons’s novel My American features a major influence that I detected.  

First, a few comments about the construction and content of My American. I suspect that some of this book was written with the cooperation of what Rudyard Kipling would call a daemon and much of it without.

Up to the point where Amy Lee takes a trip to America, London scenes are alternated with US scenes; from then on most of the action takes place in the U.S. This construction seems bizarre, as though two separate novels have been merged.

The scenes involving guns, gangsters, bootleggers and violence do not inspire commentary, and unlike the descriptions of north London and its people are obviously not based on personal experience. 

I think that Stella Gibbons embarrasses herself when she writes about people, settings and activities that she has not seen for herself. She is not the sort of writer who can get away with relying entirely on research, her imagination and the media.

The inspiration for My American

My American was obviously partly based on Stella Gibbons's early life. However, just as I am certain that some elements in John Christopher’s Guardians were inspired by a book that he had read, I am sure that parts of My American were inspired by a book that Stella Gibbons had read. As with John Christopher, I am talking about being inspired to produce something with a similar theme rather than plagiarism. 

My American has some elements and settings in common with J. B. Priestley’s best-selling novel Angel Pavement, which was first published nine years earlier in 1930. 

I think that Stella Gibbons would not have written My American if she had not read Priestley's book, which is about ordinary people and their lives in London in the late 1920s. Perhaps she found Angel Pavement particularly interesting because many of the characters live in areas of north London that she knew well.

Hurrying People: another nightmare for Stella Gibbons's Amy Lee

In her novel My American, Stella Gibbons goes into great detail when describing a journey home that is one long endurance test for her young writer Amy Lee.

Amy Lee experiences another kind of nightmare in the form of a horrible recurring dream about Hurrying People and daytime reminders of it. 

A foretaste of the nightmare

Amy Lee is on the way to her father's funeral:

“She had cried so much in the last two days that her head felt empty and light. She was so dreadfully lonely! She peeped out of the window as the car moved along the Holloway Road, staring at the crowds hurrying past in the spring sunshine. So many people, in so many cities all over the huge world! and not one of them belonged to her or would know who you meant if you said, “Amy Lee.” For the first time in her life she wondered what was going to become of her.”

No wonder that she seeks comfort and compensation in her inner world.

The Hurrying People nightmare

The nightmare is first mentioned when Amy Lee has been living with the Beeding family for two years. Her parents are dead; she is often lonely, depressed and desolate. She has a reasonably good home with the Beedings, but despite their kindness this foster family is not enough. Perhaps having to hide her writing and her real self is another factor that contributes to the nightmare she occasionally experiences:

“Then she dreamed that the crowds in the streets could not see her, because they were all hurrying past her on their way back to happy homes. She dreamed she stood in front of them screaming: “I’m Amy Lee! Look, I’m Amy Lee!” but nobody saw her or stopped, and she awoke crying heart brokenly in the dark bedroom.”

Daydreams and the imagination in Stella Gibbons's My American

There is some material about daydreams and the imagination in Stella Gibbons's My American that reminds me of points I have made in various articles in the past, articles written long before I had read this novel. The contexts and the people may be very different but the principles are the same.

The young writer Amy Lee in My American spends much of her time in a trance-like state; her life is one long waking dream. What Stella Gibbons tells us about Amy's imagination and the imaginary people she dreams about provides independent confirmation of and adds to material in articles such as the ones about Stella Benson's imagination and Stella Benson's imaginary friends.

Stella Gibbons's words provide further support for the proposition that a strong, vivid imagination can be a two-edged sword, a handicap or even a curse that ruins lives and destroys its possessor. She mentions the dangers of having a super-developed imagination: it can cause mild delusions; it can create a mist that shuts the owner away from the world; it can prevent the owner from growing up, getting on well with people and acting effectively in the real world. The article about Terry Pratchett's sinister Fairyland is relevant here.

Amy Lee's imaginary companions

Stella Gibbons says this about Amy's attitude towards the characters she created for her stories:

“Day by day she cared less for people and more for imaginary pictures so strong that they were more like feelings or dreams than ideas inside her head. She felt only a passive affection for the Beedings. Indeed, she did not feel active affection for anyone living; she only loved the memory of her mother, while for the dream-people in her mind she felt such a strong interest and concern that it could have been described as love.”

This is exactly how some people feel about fictional and imaginary characters who are much more glamorous and  interesting and do more exciting things than the real people in the dreamers' and readers' lives. 

Yet more about Stella Gibbons's My American

Amy Lee's story has been told and the writing, money and envy elements in Stella Gibbons's My American covered; now there is some amusing material, an unexpected connection and yet another unconvincing element to be commented on. 

I find this very funny:

“It was May Day, and Mrs. Beeding was indignant because on her way out to buy sausages she had been held up by a procession of Communists and on her way back from buying sausages she had been held up by a procession of Fascists.”

Such processions were very common in London in the years leading up to World War II. This is from 1936, the year of Amy Lee's 21st birthday:

Demands to join in

I know from experience how unpleasant it is to be pestered to say something or do something or go somewhere by someone who just cannot keep quiet or sit still and must have company at all times, but the descriptions of the young Mona Beeding's unwelcome, sometimes unbearable, demands do have their funny side in addition to being very painful to read because of the memories they stir up.

Amy's first evening with the Beeding family after her father's death slowly turns into a nightmare:

“Only Mona was left, a bored and ever-present peril to the occupied, lounging round the room, picking up things and dropping them again, putting on the headphones and taking them off, interrupting Baby’s game, saying at intervals she wished she hadn’t finished her knitting.

Money and envy in Stella Gibbons's My American

This article in the series inspired by Stella Gibbons’s My American contains some minor material of particular interest.

The power of money
Stella Gibbons obviously knew the value of money. Some of her books describe the big difference that a small increase in someone's wages - or even a few extra coins - can make. 

She informs us that the Beeding children were rather afraid of their mother – until they became old enough to leave school and start earning some money for themselves:

“All three were larger, more self-confident, less afraid of their mother than they had been three years ago. Mona and Maurice’s weekly pay envelopes had done that for them...Dora had recently been given a rise of five shillings a week and promoted to taking letters in Spanish, which had considerably increased her ambition and self-respect.”

There are some good points here. I know from experience that having an income of one's own – money that has been fairly earned from suitable work, reflects competence and is a by-product of self-improvement – does indeed increase morale and self-assurance. A certain amount of independence is no bad thing; people treat you better when they know that you have other options.

Stella Gibbons balances the positive effect that earning a wage has on the young Beedings with an account of Amy Lee's increasing unhappiness after she becomes very wealthy: 

“It is commonly admitted that money is delightful: but it must also be admitted that money is not much use if you happen to want things which money cannot buy. There is no extraordinary merit in wanting such things; to want them does not give you the right to despise other people who want the things that money can buy; it only means that your money, though useful, will not be more important to you than anything else in the world.

Amy did not know what she wanted; but she was already sure that money could not buy it. She was deeply unhappy, and her unhappiness grew deeper every week. Her luxurious home, her lovely clothes, the charming and intelligent people to whom Lady Welwoodham had introduced her, did not make her one atom less unhappy.”

Stella Gibbons’s My American and writing: Part III

There comes a time when Amy Lee changes direction: she stops producing tales of heroism and adventure and joins the school of domestic realism. 

The  reasons given for this drastic transformation are rather contrived and not altogether convincing. I suspect that this element was introduced mainly for the sake of the plot and to make some points; Stella Gibbons could also have used it to clear up some unfinished business of her own .

From danger and death to domesticity

As a child Amy Lee scribbles non-stop, producing exciting adventure stories such as Pharaoh’s Curse: A Tale of  Ancient Egypt and The Wolf of Leningrad: A Thrilling Story of The Russian Revolution purely for her own enjoyment. The books she reads fire her imagination and provide the ideas for her stories.

As a young woman, she writes exciting adventure stories for publication.  She may not have any first-hand knowledge, any personal experience, of the sort of people and action that she writes about, but her readers love her work. She becomes a best-seller; her books are made into films and this gains her world-wide popularity.

After moving to America, Amy Lee changes track and writes a very different kind of story for a whole new constituency of readers:

“Her stories of family life communicated (because she herself felt it) to the passing of an examination or the breaking of a betrothal the excitement she had once given to escapes from death and last-minute rescues, and she charmed her readers by showing them the variety and interest of every day.”

So what happened here? Why did Amy abandon her heroic avatars? Why the farewell to adventure in favour of embracing mundane subject matters? One of the reasons given is that Amy's adventure stories lack moral values; they are in some ways unethical, unedifying and unwholesome, something that she is unaware of until she visits America and comes in for some direct criticism. She also cools off after experiencing danger, death amd great fear at first hand.

John Christopher’s Guardians: Part IV

One criticism I have of The Guardians is that it ends just when the most interesting and exciting part of the story is about to start. Perhaps John Christopher was intending to write a sequel but never got around to it!

I also find the final part of the story and the ending disappointing and unsatisfactory. What we get seems just an outline or a summary when compared with the early chapters. 

There is a lack of balance and consistency of approach in that while it takes two thirds of the book just to get the young hero Rob Randall out of his old life in the Conurb of London and into his new school in the County, some of the most crucial developments in the story are covered in just the last few pages. Perhaps there was a mad rush to beat a deadline or there was a problem with exceeding an agreed word count.

The detailed description of’ Rob’s escape from the awful boarding school and journey to the County is not balanced with equally detailed accounts of his subsequent experiences up to the point where he learns something terrible about how the Guardians of the County deal with dissidents. 

The Guardians 

After the revolt has been put down, a patrol of Guardians comes to the house looking for Mike. Even though the Giffords insist that Rob knows nothing and was not involved in the uprising, they take him away for questioning.

He is ‘interviewed’ by Sir Percy Gregory, the Lord Lieutenant of the County. Sir Percy reveals that he has known all along that Rob is an imposter:

“You can, of course, no longer be treated as an ordinary member of our society. You are not one, after all. You are a Conurban, posing as County. You are listed by the Conurb police as a runaway from the boarding school at Barnes. So I don't mind telling you that this society is not so haphazard and unorganized as it seems. Things are investigated and checked: thoroughly. We had the boy from Nepal and the absentee from the boarding school matched within twenty-four hours of the first automatic query.”

Rob realises that it is useless to say that he knows nothing at all about the plot. He tells Sir Percy everything he knows about the dissident schoolboys, but he doesn’t mention Mike’s recent visit to the Gifford home.

Stella Gibbons’s My American and writing: Part II

Stella Gibbons's romance My American contains much writing-related material. The previous article contains extracts that describe the writing process; this article is mainly about the relationship between Amy Lee, adventure stories and Stella Gibbons herself.

There are some autobiographical elements in My American: some of what Stella Gibbons says about Amy Lee, her childhood, her inner states, her imagination and her stories applies to Stella herself. 

Stella Gibbons and adventure stories

Reading about Amy Lee's early tales of danger and adventure such as The Hero of the Desert and The Mummy's Curse reminded me of something I once read about Stella Gibbons: she liked the books of Sir Henry Rider Haggard very much indeed, and more than anything else she wanted to write similar stories.

Her nephew and biographer Reggie Oliver said this:

“Amy as a writer is Stella, but without her sophistication or intellect; and to create her character, Stella projected her immature, adolescent self into Amy’s adulthood. Amy writes romantic adventure stories of the kind that Stella wrote at the age of twelve, based on Rider Haggard and Ouida.”

Amy Lee's early stories certainly sound just like the sort that Stella Gibbons wished she could write. She must eventually have come to realise that she had no talent for creating such stories; she had to settle for describing ordinary people shopping at the Archway in north London as opposed to colourful characters searching for King Solomon's mines in Africa! 

It makes sense that if Stella Gibbons couldn't do in real life something she very much wanted to do, she would do it vicariously in fiction. This may be a second-best substitute and form of compensation, but it is better than nothing – for both readers and writers.

Stella Gibbons’s My American and writing: Part I

As previously mentioned, Stella Gibbons makes some insightful comments about writers, writing and the imagination in her novel My American, in which Amy Lee is the main character. Amy's love of reading, writing and research and her need for solitude as a young girl are all very typical of people who grow up to be writers. 

This article contains some particularly significant extracts with the commentary they inspire:

Freely flowing words and ideas

What Stella Gibbons says about Amy's writing is a good description of what it feels like when the ideas and words come easily:

“Her stories never stuck, but sometimes she enjoyed writing them more than she did at other times. When the pen flew and her hand ached, when there was nothing real in the world except the white paper before her and the flying tip of the nib, and the picture in her mind that she was describing turned so quickly into words that she could no longer tell at what instant the figures in it became marks on the paper—then the story was Beginning to Run, and unfortunate is the writer who has never tasted such a moment.”

Unfortunate indeed is the writer whose creations are never fluent and painless - or frictionless as Rudyard Kipling would say.

And yes, the whole outer world often does disappear for some people when they are engrossed in reading or writing.

More freely flowing words and ideas

After getting a job as an office girl, Amy is sent to collect some copy from a very famous writer who has produced many stories for the boys’ magazine she works for.

John Christopher’s Guardians: Part I

The Guardians by John Christopher is a dystopian science fiction novel that was first published in 1970. Just like Michael de Larrabeiti’s Borribles trilogy, it was written for children and teenagers. 

The Guardians has nothing like the number of characters and adventures that can be found in the Borrible books, but this little story has an issue in common with them. 

The Guardians is a book of interest because of the character of the young hero Rob Randall and the question of which is the better of the two very different and complementary lifestyles it describes. It also contains some material that reminds me of other books mentioned on here.

The two worlds of The Guardians
The Guardians is set in England in the year 2052. England is divided into two distinct societies, the Conurbs and the County.

The Conurbs are highly-populated towns where modern technology is much in evidence. The majority of English people live in Conurbs. They are mainly workers. There are occasional riots, but the people are mostly kept quiet with entertainment in the form of carnivals and arena games that appeal to the bloodthirsty - bread and circuses with holovision.

The County is the sparsely-populated countryside, the home of the aristocratic minority. They are mainly people of independent means. They prefer not to use much technology; they have horses for transport. Their lifestyle is rather like that of Edwardian gentry at the height of the British Empire.

Huge fences keep the two societies separate physically, and a carefully controlled, conditioned and manipulated mutual 'us and them' mentality keeps them apart psychologically.

Something about Rob Randall
The story opens in a public library - this is an encouraging start!

The library is in the Conurb of London. Unfortunately it is dilapidated, decaying and well past its prime. People have become less individual, less inquiring and have mostly stopped reading books. Rob Randall, who likes solitude and has a love of reading, is the only person under fifty who goes there. He likes stories filled with excitement and adventures.

Rob’s mother, who was born in the County and who encouraged him to use the library, is dead; his father, who is an electrician, is killed in a work accident early on in the book. Rob is then sent by the authorities to a horrible state boarding school where the food is awful and he is given a very hard time by the masters, the prefects and the other boys.

Stella Gibbons’s Amy Lee and the nightmare journey

Stella Gibbons lived her entire life in the Hampstead and Highgate area of London; she displays her great knowledge of and love for ‘Ham & High’ and other areas of north London in many of her books. 

Stella Gibbons was surely also familiar from personal experience with the sort of nightmare journeys that are mentioned in several other articles on here; there is a similar but much smaller-scale nightmare episode in her novel My American. 

My American opens with a description of 12-year-old Amy Lee’s visit to Kenwood House in Hampstead on a beautiful autumn day in 1928. Exploring the house and grounds is a wonderful way to spend her birthday, but Amy's journey home is something of an endurance test. 

The nightmare is very short-lived; Amy gets just a tiny taste of what people in other articles got in huge doses, and she soon recovers.

There are some very familiar elements in the account of the return journey: bad decisions, wasted effort, unexpected setbacks, 'difficult' people and being cold, tired, hungry, alone and penniless with darkness coming on. It is these familiar features make her ordeal worth commenting on.

The end of the visit to Kenwood

Amy enjoys her visit to Kenwood very much. However, the day is very cold and when dusk is imminent she decides it is time to go home. 

She now has to face a reality that is full of problems.

She is sick with hunger as she has had nothing to eat since early morning.  

She spent her birthday shilling on a packet of postcards as a souvenir of her visit; now she has almost no money left. Buying something for her collection of mementos rather than saving her money for the practicalities reminds me of Antonia White, whose purchase of an expensive handbag in Vienna left her very short of money for her return journey. 

More about Stella Gibbons’s young writer Amy Lee

Stella Gibbons's My American is described as a romance. As mentioned in the first article, the main aspect of interest in the book is not the story itself but what Stella Gibbons has to say about writers and writing. 

The young writer Amy Lee may be a fictional character, but she is in many ways a classic, textbook case. She shares many attributes and experiences with people featured on here. She needs solitude; she lives to read and write. 

A new life for the young orphan Amy Lee
Luckily for Amy her father has left a small amount of money, enough to cover her expenses until she leaves school. 

She moves downstairs to live with her landlady Mrs Beeding, a tough but kindly Yorkshirewoman, and the rest of the Beeding family:

“Their only fault as a family was their inability to imagine a human being who might sometimes wish to be alone; and in this they were not unique.”

Amy has to share a bedroom with one of the Beeding girls; luckily it is not that dreadful young drama queen Mona, who is always poking into Amy’s affairs!

Family life benefits Amy in some ways. She is well fed, well clothed and well treated. Her worst fears are not realised: she even manages to get some time to herself and a place to read:

“For a week after Tim’s funeral Amy was able to escape for a little while every evening up to the flat and read or dream (she did not dare to write, for fear of interruption and consequent discovery)..."

Amy starts to resettle herself into her secret world:

“The Beedings were used to her ways and left her in peace except for an occasional friendly shriek up the stairs, explaining her taste for solitude to one another by saying that Aime was a great reader, for none of them knew that she was also a great writer.”

Stella Gibbons’s young writer Amy Lee

The writer Amy Lee is the main character and main person of interest in Stella Gibbons’s novel My American (1939).

This is not a book that I enjoy reading for the story - I am not too wild about the title either! The plot is rather contrived, and I don't find the American scenes and characters very convincing; they don’t hold my attention at all and I have nothing to say about them. Amy Lee herself becomes much less interesting once she grows up and moves to the USA too.

The many references to parts of north London in the early chapters of the book are another matter; I love to read about places that I know very well. 

Just as Michael de Larrabeiti’s detailed descriptions of Battersea and Wandsworth came from personal experience, so did Stella Gibbons’s descriptions of places such as Highbury and the Holloway Road.

My American opens with a description of the beauties of Hampstead’s Kenwood House and its grounds, which Stella Gibbons obviously liked very much as she mentions Kenwood in several of her other novels.

The most relevant and significant aspect is what this book says about the personality, outlook, behaviour, problems and experiences of a developing young writer and about writers and writing in general. Stella Gibbons makes some very insightful comments from time to time. Some of this material may be autobiographical; some of it may be wishful thinking!

I detect a few more examples of Stella Gibbons’s white magic too.

While most of Stella Gibbons’s other books - apart from The Shadow of a Sorcerer - inspire little or no commentary, My American is full of relevant and quotable material, some of which comes very close to home. 

It is a book that is partly boring, partly annoying, partly painful and partly fascinating to read. 

It even contains a few amusing passages.