In memoriam: Diana Wynne Jones

The fantasy writer Diana Wynne Jones died on March 26th 2011, ten years ago today. 

There are several articles on here featuring or referencing various aspects of her life and works; here is another one to mark the occasion.

Diana Wynne Jones's book Reflections: On the Magic of Writing has already been mentioned as a source of fascinating and commentary-inspiring material; more information is available online in the form of interviews and various articles about her life and works.

I am particularly interested in finding connections between writers and detecting views, experiences, influences and elements that they have in common. It is very interesting to see them quite independently make the same points. 

Diana Wynne Jones has provided some good examples of connections with other writers in the past, most recently in the article about Nicholas Stuart Gray; I have found a few more to comment on.

A terrible realisation 

Diana Wynne Jones said this about her awful childhood:

“Children think they are unique in their misfortunes, and I want to tell them they aren’t alone. I thought my childhood was normal, and was terribly angry and miserable when I discovered it wasn’t.”

I hadn't read that when I created the article about parents and prison guards, from which this is an extract:

“...no anger, no fury is stronger than the final, unavoidable realisation that the protector has betrayed his role and is really the destroyer. But it takes a while to find out that the unthinkable is not the status quo, and that your daily 'normal' is very abnormal to a larger world.“

From Cat in a Midnight Choir by Carole Nelson Douglas  

They are both spot on here. Putting personal experiences into the context of other, more fortunate, children's lives often does result in great feelings of anger, outrage and betrayal.

In memoriam: Nicholas Stuart Gray

The writer Nicholas Stuart Gray died on March 17th 1981, 40 years ago today. He was only 58 years old.

There are a few articles on here featuring characters from his books; here is another, more general, post to mark the occasion.

Nicholas Stuart Gray
Nicholas Stuart Gray was a very private person and there is little information available about his life, Much of the material that does exist can be found in a short Wikipedia entry and The Pied Pipers by Justin Wintle and Emma Fisher, which contains interviews with some influential creators of children's literature. 

Nicholas Stuart Gray was interviewed in 1974. He said something that I agree with very strongly. He said that he wrote plays -

“...to give the children a sense of magic. Nobody attends to this enough. They give them too much realism. They can see it all on the box, they can see frightful things there. They can read it in the papers. But they’re not being given a world to escape into…the world of the imagination...Children must have an escape line somewhere.”

Diana Wynne Jones, who was also of Celtic origin, had very similar views. She wrote about the uselessness and harmful effects of realistic children's books versus the beneficial effects of magic and fantasy. 

Both writers enhanced the lives of many children. They provided pathways into other worlds for children who needed to escape from something and escape to somewhere. They knew what this was like themselves; they both had awful mothers and as children they both made up stories to make their younger siblings' lives more bearable:

“From a young age, he (Nicholas Stuart Gray) made up stories and plays to amuse his brothers and sisters, and to try and escape his unhappy childhood.”

Stella Gibbons too created wonderful fairy tales that she told to her two younger brothers to help them escape from and temporarily forget their unhappy situation. 

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.”

L. M. Montgomery, curses and two suspicious deaths

The article about the novelist Mary Webb contains an account of what happened some years after her death to her husband and his second wife. This is a good example of the 'curse or coincidence?' scenario, which is featured in several other articles.

I was reminded of this case by something that I recently read in a biography of Lucy Maud Montgomery: there are two similar, possibly suspicious, deaths in her life too.

Each case is all the more significant in the light of the other one, and even more so when put into the wider context of suspicious deaths involving other creative people who might have used unseen influences against someone who injured them.

A summary of the Mary Webb affair

Mary Webb's husband Henry became more and more distant from her: she was difficult to live with and he was attached to an attractive young pupil of his.  When Mary Webb died, the sales of her books took off; her husband soon married the ex-pupil and they got all the royalties. Their new life of luxury came to an end when Henry Webb died prematurely after an 'accident' while mountain climbing. His widow remarried, but just like Mary Webb she died of an incurable disease at the age of forty-six.

A summary of the L. M. Montgomery affair

When she was around 23 years old, L. M. Montgomery became infatuated with a very attractive man called Herman Leard. They enjoyed each other's company, but nothing came of it. Her side of the story, which she mentioned in journals written for eventual publication, is that despite being overwhelmed by her feelings for him, she rejected him because he was unworthy of her. She considered him beneath her socially, intellectually and educationally. 

Herman Leard died in 1899, one year after she had last seen him, possibly of complications from influenza. He was almost 29 years old. He had been engaged to a very beautiful young woman who mourned him for some years, married someone else and died 10 years after Leard's death.

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. 

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.