Current Issue: Fall/Winter 2010

Staying Hungry: on Enid Blyton  
Ru Freeman

Enid Blyton, the British author who penned 753 books before she died in 1968, came to me all the way in Sri Lanka in the form of her many series of books about children - The Famous Five, the Secret Seven, the girls at Malory Towers and St. Clare’s and fairy characters such as Noddy, Big Ears, Dame Washalot, Moon-face, Silky the fairy, the Saucepan Man and the Angry Pixie. Her books, which my brothers and I borrowed one at a time from the boys next door, sat among the many that were brought lovingly into our home by my English literature and Greek & Roman Classics teaching mother and poet and writer father. We did not have money, though we weren’t poor, and the books that came to us were often stamped ‘Gift of the Asia Foundation,’ (a peace-directed initiative head quartered in San Francisco that donates books to countries in Asia), or purchased for next to nothing at the People’s Publishing House, an equally laudable initiative of the Soviet Union and thriving in socialist-leaning countries such as mine.

In 2008, the Costa Book Awards voted Enid Blyton the best-loved author ahead of Roald Dahl, J.K. Rowling and Shakespeare. A new breed of academic, however, has tagged Blyton as a snob and racist whose books were populated by “golliwogs” who in appearance resembled the actors who appeared in Black Face on stages across the United States. Her books have been purged of these characters and her language updated in consideration to present, more global, sensitivities. Another group of academics, including Dr. Rudd (Mysteries of Children’s Literature, Macmillan), contend that "of the children who were not previously aware of the equation 'golliwog equals ethnically black person', none made it." I was one of those children. Alongside the millions of other children in places where we were not being described as being “of color,” the golliwog remained a golliwog. And, waltzing between books from America and books from the Soviet Union and the borrowed books from England, the stories that caught my attention were those that dealt with gumption, resilience, fairytales and escape.

My life as an only girl growing up with nothing but boys in every direction within the family, not to mention those my mother taught at an all-boys school, was devoid of the usual fluff of girlhood. I was tough, my life was full of adult complexities, and I could fight, out-talk, out-climb and out-run the boys, skills necessary in my world, but skills nonetheless that made me less of a girl in a culture where how to be one was quite easy to  understand for those so inclined and the blessed. How sweet it was, then, to read The Wonderful Wishing Chair by Enid Blyton, in which two children named Mollie and Peter (dully named for a kid growing up around Medhavis and Arjunas!), come upon a chair which takes them out of their ordinary lives and into magical places. Places like the Magic Faraway Tree whose uppermost branches graze different lands and where it is equally possible to step one day into the Land of Dame Slap - a particularly terrible school teacher - as it is to find oneself in the Lands of Birthday, Goodies or of Take-What-You-Want!

Most books take readers away from their familiar settings, but children’s books are required to do so. Good children’s books transport in ways that go beyond the usual nonsense of moralistic tales that preach and preach and leave nothing to the imagination. The best ones reach into a child’s world and identifies yearning: for the forbidden thing, the unknown place, balm for a secret hurt, calm for an unuttered desperation, syrup for the unspeakable thirst. Enid Blyton knew those longings and found their antidote in an ordinary looking antique chair which could fly away from their house (in my mind, mine), to far more exciting places. Among their adventures was the escape of the brownie, Winks, rescued from Mr. Grim’s School for Bad Brownies, who is subsequently returned there with a gift from Peter. This gift, a Titbit Dish (won from the Island of Surprises), is a tiffin-carrier which, whenever it is opened, contains a tasty morsel of food. How it warmed my heart to imagine that box filled as it was with foods I’d never seen but could imagine, trifles and puddings and watercress sandwiches, all of which sounded insanely complex and divinely delectable to a child raised on fiery spices.

At the tuck shop run by the nuns at the convent I attended, where I rarely had money to buy anything, I would barter my services as a girl at ease with boyish mannerisms - to sweat and toil and be aggressive if I had to - to purchase treats for my friends so I could share a bite. In that world, where getting to school was hard enough for our mother and her sons and daughter, I did not expect a packed lunch after the first grade. I made do with food when I got it, I made do without it when I needed to. And I dreamed in terms of Tidbit Dishes.

Years later, on full scholarship at Bates College in Maine, I continued to marvel at food as it is presented in American schools - smorgasbords offering multiple choices in every single food group, dozens of cereals, varieties of breads, arrays of juices and less and more milk in flavors, desserts at every meal. Deep within the gratitude I felt for being so well fed was a hunger I desired. A full belly addled my brain; it was no longer possible to yearn when every craving was fulfilled in this manner. A grotesqueness colored the matter of dining. In my heart I had always been hungry and it was a way of existing that had helped me come to America in the first place, and made it possible for me to survive the uprooting.

I was reminded of Enid Blyton while reading an essay written by one of those brothers, himself a poet and an eminent journalist in Sri Lanka, entitled ‘On the Books We Read and Those That Read Us,” in which he speaks about his daughters’ and their love for this same children’s author. Musing on the experience of particular books, he writes, “If ‘book’ is metaphor, then the world is made of answers to any question you can think of. There are pages in flowers, in fragrance, in root. The soil and the sky are leaves of a novel. The cloud is a line of poetry and so too its edge, its blur with sky, its rendering in song, music score, on canvas and its etching in memory and the etch itself.”

So, too, the absence of a book, its own question, its own answer. Now, as I sit here writing this, I gaze at the books that line the shelves before me. The topmost shelves are filed with favorites like Sula and Tar Baby by Toni Morrison, Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, V. S. Naipaul’s A Room for Mr. Biswas, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche’s Half of a Yellow Sun, Lynn Freed’s Home Ground, Ursula Hegi’s Stones From the River. Other shelves are filled with the books written by my friends, ordered again by favorites, among them Preeta Samarasan’s Evening is the Whole Day, Paul Yoon’s Once The Shore, Josh Weil’s The New Valley, Frances de Pontes Peebles’ The Seamstress, and Karen Tai Yamashita’s I, Hotel and shelves there are filled up with the books of poetry that I cannot resist and which include Mahmoud Darwish, Rabindranath Tagore, Evan Boland, Charles Simic, Heather McHugh, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Wislawa Szymborska, Camille T. Dungy, Anne Carson, Sarah Zale...

There is no room now on my shelf for The Wonderful Wishing Chair. That book and dozens of others by Blyton sit on the bookshelves that dominate my daughters’ rooms. I leave it to them to discover an ailing deep within their hearts, some lack that will drive them to discoveries, to adventures, to mishaps, to irredeemable remorse, to life. Over the years I have made peace with my American life where food, shelter and clothing are so easily mine. I have discovered a new craving, perfect and insatiable - for more words, for more books, for the heady and blissful company of writers. My last waking thoughts are, once more, of flight, of other rooms, other lives. From repeating the stories that Blyton told in my own attempts at short fiction as a child, in this world where everything is simultaneously possible and lost, I have grown to spin my own.

Ru Freeman is the author of A Disobedient Girl, which was published by Atria Books/Simon & Schuster in the USA and Canada, and in the UK and territories by Viking.  She has been awarded four consecutive writing scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and will be a fellow at Yaddo in the fall of 2010. A contributing member of the editorial board of the Asian American Literary Review, she was selected to represent the United States, along with four other American poets and writers, in China during the summer of 2010 through the Iowa University International Writing Program’s Life of Discovery Initiative.