Diana Wynne Jones and the shortage of reading material

Diana Wynne Jones is yet another writer who was a voracious reader as a child. Unfortunately, she never had nearly enough books to satisfy her appetite for reading material. As she put it, she suffered from a perpetual book famine.

Her book Reflections: On the Magic of Writing contains some interesting - although very painful to read - autobiographical material; it was the source of an amusing anecdote, and it also provides some information about the vital part that books and reading played in her early life.

A few extracts will show what she was up against when trying to obtain more books to read. 

A starvation diet of books
Diana Wynne Jones’s father was stingy and tight-fisted in the extreme: 

“...birthdays were the one occasion when my father could be persuaded to buy books. By begging very hard, I got Puck of Pook’s Hill when I was ten and Greenmantle when I was twelve. But my father was inordinately mean about money. He solved the Christmas book-giving by buying an entire set of Arthur Ransome books, which he kept locked in a high cupboard and dispensed one between the three of us each year.”

So she too liked Rudyard Kipling and John Buchan! 

I would have felt very short-changed indeed if all I was given for Christmas was one Arthur Ransome book - and he is not one of my favourite authors anyway!

In praise of public libraries

The previous article mentions the great debt owed by writers such as Terry Pratchett to the public libraries that they used as children. 

They are not alone; public libraries helped to make me what I am today. I briefly mentioned the key role that they played in my early life here; the recently-quoted endorsements have inspired me to cover the subject in more detail.

Libraries in my early life
Going to the library was a major part of life when I was growing up - just as going to school and going to the sweet shop were! 

I did have some books of my own and I also used the school libraries, but this was not nearly enough for me: I always wanted more and better reading material.

I lived 'by chance' close to some very big public libraries as a child. I know that small buildings appear large to small children, but I revisited some of them and found them just as imposing now as they were then.

They gave me a never-ending supply of high quality books. 

I saw libraries as treasure troves; the books on the shelves offered me escape, distraction, education and entertainment. They helped to fill some gaps in my life and gave me things I couldn’t get in the real world. They gave me far more information than I was getting at school or from the people in my life.

I joined the huge local library when my family moved to London. Even though it was very well stocked and I also found many good books in the school library, this still wasn’t enough to feed my insatiable appetite for food for my mind and fuel for my imagination.

The great and positive influence of public libraries

This post 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 as children! 

Isaac Asimov is another writer to acknowledge his debt:

"I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library."

From his memoir I, Asimov

I like to see people giving credit where it is due! 

These quotations have given me the idea of creating a series of articles about public libraries, covering both my personal experiences and those of some of the writers mentioned on here. There will also be some background and general material. 

This exercise will help to pay off the huge debt that I owe to the library books that educated, inspired and entertained me as a child – and still do.

I hope that this dragon doesn't drop his book in the bath!

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 article about Stella Benson’s imagination and the one about her 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.

L. M. Montgomery on the value of words

I knew almost nothing about L. M. Montgomery at the time I produced the article about the value of words. I had always assumed that there would be very little of interest and relevance to this blog in her life and works. I couldn’t have been more wrong!

I eventually got around to reading some of her books and letters, and found a lot to comment on.

She wrote a letter in which she says much the same as I did about the lack of respect for words; it supports what she said in another letter about talking to non-creative people:

"I’ve done a lot of "gadding" this summer, and it was really a horrible waste of time because there was no pleasure in it. Had there been, I’d have considered it a very wise use of time. I had to go out to tea and attend garden parties galore and I was generally bored to death, especially when people thought themselves bound to say something about my book. They all say practically the same thing and I say the same thing in reply and I’m tired of it. Then I talked gossip and made poor jokes and altogether wished I were home in my den with a book or a pen.” 

Many other creative people feel the same way, and have, quite independently, said as much. 

It is better to be alone than with incompatible people. 

Reading, writing and learning are much more rewarding and make better use of one’s time than listening to platitudes and unoriginal drivel and spending time with people who never think about what they are saying and have no respect for the English language. 

There is little point in just going through the motions of interacting with such people if there are no benefits at all. It is like asking for bread and being given a stone.