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.

Some amusing criticisms of public libraries

This is the sixth article in the series about public libraries, with more still to come.

As previously mentioned, the value or otherwise of public libraries to the community was discussed in detail on the old Conservative Conserpiracy Forum. Four members including me were strongly in favour of them while three took a negative view. 

While I couldn’t agree from my own experience with some of the criticisms, at least one of the antis lived in a small village so what they said may be true in the case of public libraries outside the big cities.

While some of the points made by the critics may have been valid, others seemed feeble, off the mark or even a little bizarre. 

I have salvaged some of the old material for reproducing on here. 

Uncomfortable chairs and spying

One CC member said this:

“I pretty much stopped using the library when they changed all the chairs to uncomfortable plastic jobs, because lots kept on breaking, and staining.”

Who says you have to read your library books in house! 

This is a good point where reference libraries and people who go in to use the Internet are concerned though.

Then there was this gem:

“You're being spied upon in the library, too - those places are covered in CCTV cameras, and every book you take out is kept on your record in the library's database, which can be accessed at will by the local government. Unfortunately, Big Brother surveillance is a feature of 21st century life, whether you're online or offline.”

I would be happy for anyone to see a list of the books I have borrowed, and anyway why would anyone be interested in me as an individual? Monitoring borrowings highlights patterns; it enables libraries to obtain statistics on which books are being taken out and by which demographics. Such information may help to decide which books are bought and which sold off. Maybe they discard certain books when they have not been borrowed for many years.

John Christopher’s Guardians: Part II

Just like Elizabeth Goudge’s Linnets and Valerians, John Christopher’s Guardians is a slender little children’s paperback that at first sight might just possibly have enough material to inspire a paragraph or two of commentary. I found however that the more times I went through these books, the more material of interest I noticed and the more articles I needed to produce in order to cover it.

I investigated the Linnets book because I learned that it had a witch in it; working on the Borribles article reminded me of the Guardians book, which I first read ages ago just for the story. This time around, it is the issues and connections that are the main objects of interest.

In addition to the connections mentioned in Part I, The Guardians has some scenes and elements that remind me very much of Robert A. Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy.  Before going into this and some further connections, there is more of Rob Randall’s story to be told.

Rob arrives in the County
Rob Randall, the young orphaned Conurban hero of The Guardians, runs away from his hated boarding school to a place that he sees as his only option i.e. the County. 

He may have planned his escape and journey to the County carefully, but he has not thought much about what he will do when he gets there. 

Conurbans are like Borribles in that they prefer crowded streets to empty fields! Rob has not thought about the effect that the wide open spaces will have on him:

“Rob found himself shivering, not just with cold but at the sight of darkness, the thought of the emptiness beyond. All his life, like everyone else in the Conurbs, he had been surrounded by the comforting presence of others - all the millions of them. Being glad to have a little privacy occasionally was not the same as wanting to go out there, alone.”

However, Rob is tough and adaptable and he is interested in new experiences:

“Two rabbits appeared from the wood and he watched them, fascinated. It was hard to believe he was really here, in the County, with plants budding, wild things living all around him. And yet already this was the reality, the Conurb  - with its packed streets, high-rise buildings, crawling electrocars - the fantasy.”

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. 

Context and the total picture: Part III

The previous article in the series describes how some people who for better or worse put painful personal experiences into the context of a few other, often well-known, people’s lives decide to leave it at that.  They go just as far as they want or are able to go.

Now it is time to say something about the next steps on the path to detecting and understanding the unseen influences that appear to be at work in certain people’s lives.

Up to this point, candidates for moving on may have come across some interesting information incidentally and in small amounts; now they change their approach and do some investigations - actively looking for writers with Celtic connections after coming across one or two with Scottish ancestry for example. This involves a top-down rather than a bottom-up approach. 

This stage also involves putting aside the personal approach in favour of thinking objectively and analytically about various patterns and common elements in the lives of many people of interest. These may or may not be elements that the investigator shares with them. 

Investigators may then move on to a stage where they start to wonder what, if anything, might be behind the patterns they detect. They start to think about the What, the Who, the How and the Why.

For example, I have experienced some unexpected, unwelcome and unsettling encounters  with people from the past. Recently I discovered that this also happened to the novelist Antonia White.  These encounters are not just random painful personal experiences shared with one or two others: looked at objectively and summarised, they are typical of the unpleasant incidents that certain selected people endure when, for example, they are at a low ebb, have received a jarring shock or had an encounter with an energy vampire.

This leads to speculation about orchestration, distress signals, telepathy and people who are remotely controlled by puppet masters behind the scenes! What forces are in operation? How does it all work? Who or what is behind it?

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.”