ON BEING LITERATE WHEN YOUNG

 ON BEING LITERATE WHEN YOUNG

 

‘Holy’ books of practically all religions known to mankind, like the Bible or the Koran, serve as singular texts for children to become fundamentalist believers who will not read and study any other books, thus becoming intolerant of any other point of view. Putting aside this unpalatable scenario, however much destructive it is, there are many other less fundamentalist positions taken that are based on just a few texts to the exclusion of all others. Extreme versions of Capitalism as much as Communism rely on the absurdly venerated texts of a few authors, be it Marx or Smith. This filters down to so-called schools of thought whereby ‘seminal’ works by a few authors (disciples of each other) dictate the field of inquiry. While Mao-tse-tung advocated for a multitude of schools of thought to blossom, there is of course one instance where a single text becomes the new dogma. This is in the so-called natural sciences where so-called laws of nature are discovered and described by the likes of Newton and Einstein, and whereby it is utterly futile to request a second opinion. Granted that there are laws-of-nature that can be rendered by precise mathematical formulae, there cannot be a proof to the contrary, and whoever the ‘scientist’ is that came up with it in a single paper published in a peer-reviewed journal of physics, will forever be cited as the great one. Obviously religious texts lay claim to the same procedure, i.e. that the world was created in seven days is an indisputable fact if not a law-of-nature – never mind the logical fallacy involved. Since the natural sciences usually deal with empirical evidence there is less of a danger that any law-of-nature turns out to be a fake – the real danger being in its applications, e.g. nuclear physics giving rise to nuclear bombs and chemistry giving rise to plastic pollution. 

 

A somewhat less consequential but more fascinating scenario is that of a literary education foisted upon unsuspecting minors, and I don’t mean that of formal education which is well known to distort young minds (I know from experience that the German and English education systems are highly selective in their literary canons, turning the vast majority of students off reading, having to endlessly pick over elitist texts by Shakespeare and Goethe). What I mean is the case of the literate parental influence on what their children read. We all know of the often preached (by the educated middle classes) benefits of parents reading bed-side stories to their children until they awaken a love of reading in their children, and lo and behold, they learn to read and write even before they go to school. These days, they are the ‘woke’ kids who will become litterateurs of various distinctions. The somewhat tragic – and therefor educational – case I want to highlight here, is that of the Australian writer Charmian Clift (at least as interpreted by her biographer Nadia Wheatley). Clift’s parents who lived a lower-working-class life, were nevertheless educated and avid readers (the mother also composed poetry for her own entertainment) and so their children acquired the same habit – Charmian especially so. Charmian’s dominant father, or so the story goes, foist upon Charmian his favourite book when she was only some eight years old, namely Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and then by association Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel. To my mind these are very odd choices even for an adult, let alone for a little girl. According to Nadia Wheatly, Charmain didn’t really understand the books in question but discovered that her father’s great oratorial skills were all based on these two sources, thus making him appear rather less original and a bit of a fake. By the sound of it, Charmian’s father loved the physicality of the lower working classes he sought to emulate (to the distress of his wife who wanted to climb the social ladder) while holding on to an intellectual attitude that made little sense. To delight in Rabelaisian bawdiness in small-town Australian in the 1920s may have gone unnoticed in working class slang but would have raised eyebrows in polite up-town society – confused by his economic status of a relatively well-off engineer working in the local quarry, slugging it out with the precariat in his immediate neighbourhood. His absolute belief in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy in association with his economic Social Credit theories was not exactly a working-class ideology either. No wonder it confused his daughter but at some stage in later life would emerge as a strategy to understand life as a single proposition. In her case, as attributed by her biographer with textual evidence, it was the dichotomy of Icarus versus Daedalus. To categorise people in these terms, assembling psychological profiles to fit the picture, becomes an obsession that does little service to the lives of real people. Actually, in Charmian’s published works I have read, she transcends this dichotomy not unlike a Nietzsche does in his Beyond Good and Evil. It is her biographer’s obsession to show that Charmian’s trajectory to suicide mirrored that of Icarus. I think here the fundamental mistake is to mix and match unrelated categories, i.e. Icarus is a fiction while Charmian is not. Real people do not resemble abstractions like Picasso’s women (pictorial abstractions are valid nevertheless). In psychology the concept of Yin and Yang as depicting a dichotomy (a bit of this and a bit of that) to emerge as a wholesome profile is in my opinion much more realistic: we all have a bit of Icarus and Daedalus in us, to varying degrees of course but never in pure black and white. To explain away Charmian’s suicide as a reckless and inevitable act in the vein of Icarus, is to miss the random nature of such events. Sure, her parents – and her father in particular – failed their daughter by instilling a singular point of view of life, via a literary education that mandated just a couple of texts. However admirable it is of parents instilling a love of reading in their children, the danger is that they put them on the road to an undesirable destination. The aim should be to open the door to the real world and let them see the many junctions before them. The books should not indicate which direction to take – merely an accompaniment along the journey. I have read hundreds of books, many of which I have forgotten, for they were of interest only at the time of reading. I cannot credit any book with the direction my life has taken, nor should it. To Charmian’s writerly credit, she must have realised the pointless exercise in reading Sterne and Rabelais in the context of her life at the time in Australia. Luckily, she did not follow the route of academic literature – where she would have encountered at least Rabelais again as part of the prescribed canon – and instead developed her own eclectic literary canon that served her so well when writing about her time on the Greek islands of Kalymnos and Hydra. A psychological cliché might be that her choice of husband resembled that of her father – which in a small part may well be true – and thus succumbed to being a literary handmaiden to her writer-husband who also engaged in a single-minded genre of at times a rather vicious autobiographical fiction. In reading Nadia Wheatley’s biography of Charmian Clift, I am struck by the fascinating details of what happened in her life (and before and after) but I am occasionally annoyed by Wheatley’s speculation as to why something happened, especially when in terms of a one-dimensional explanation referenced yet to another one-dimensional literary text. She should have followed Charmian’s often acknowledged literary fine art of blurring the lines of fact and fiction, giving the reader some leeway to read between the lines or just be happy with the lines that take you beyond the realm of the words alone. To disentangle the mysteries of a life like Charmian’s is not a forensic detective task but, if attempted at all, a task at establishing a new mythology of classical proportions. In large part Nadia Wheatley succeeds in this attempt if only to quote from Charmian’s published and unpublished texts. As a parent one should definitely recommend Clift’s Mermaid Singing and Peel me a Lotus to one’s eight-year-old already literate daughter but keep the biography for much later. To make her read Sterne and Rabelais is a minor crime. What is a major crime, as noted above, is to force millions of children to read nothing but a holy book.

 

The next question is whether we are supposed to know all this seemingly private information about the early literary education of a writer? Well, in the case of Charmian Clift, she told us more or less herself, albeit disguised as fictional characters, given fictional names. This sort of autobiographical fiction writing does lay bare the private lives of parents, siblings, relatives, friends, enemies, neighbours and what have you, possibly without due consideration for them being dragged into the public limelight against their will or without consent – especially if the hitherto unknown writer and her work become famous and subsequently of deep interest of biographers. This is somewhat different from celebrity culture whereby the celebrities actually feed on making their private lives public, or by dint of being public personae are forever subject to scrutiny in their public and private lives. 

 

Returning to Charmian’s biographer, the effort to disclose the details of private lives is doubled up. Did Charmian’s father really do and say all that is detailed under his fictional name? Was he violent? Did he treat his wife badly? While the key protagonists have all passed away, the biographer can still  interview those left behind, and dig up secrets and gossip, to confirm or to deny what was published as fiction or memoirs. Obviously, there is a deep-seated human interest in the question of how parents influence their children’s lives as adults, or to which degree parents and significant others are responsible for a person’s life story. If the child becomes successful in the public eye, the parents will no doubt delight in her success and be flattered if, for example, the successful writer credits them with a positive influence. If a success story has a tragic end, as with Charmian Clift, who is to blame, if anyone? If the child becomes an infamous serial killer in adulthood, who is to blame, if anyone? The notorious Nazi grandee Heinrich Himmler had a father too – was he to blame, at least in parts, for his son’s crimes? Here we have a literary treatment as well, namely the German writer Alfred Andersch who wrote The Father of a Murderer (Der Vater eines Mörders) based on the autobiographical experience of having attended the Munich high school where Himmler’s father was the headmaster. Portrayed in somewhat ambiguous terms it was nevertheless clear that an element of pedagogical sadism was part of his makeup. So, father like son? 

 

Fast-forward to today’s instant coffee culture and consider in above light what is happening to a new and up-coming writer that has hit the world stage, namely Sally Rooney (read my review of her novel Normal People on my blog). In a recent Guardian article, she is said to disclaim her ‘unexpected’ fame as an unwelcome intrusion into her private life, and more so when it comes to literary paparazzi digging for dirt in her family background. Since Sally has claimed on occasion to be a ‘Marxist’, the perplexed mainstream media must immediately look for the culprit, like, are her parents to blame? Like, they weren’t really poor, were they? Looks like, like, they were sort of lower middle-class. Like, how dare she write books with a working class theme? So, what does Sally Rooney say in her defence?

 

She says, “I don’t think many people could reasonably conclude that my upbringing was so privileged as to disqualify me from writing books. But there is still a part of me that feels like these facts about my family life are nobody’s business in the first place. My parents presumably did not conduct their lives in the expectation that their jobs and incomes would be dissected by strangers on the internet one day. It seems bizarre, and actually wrong. I understand and accept that I have become to some degree an object of scrutiny because of my work. But I find it very hard to accept that other people in my life should have to endure that. They’ve done nothing to deserve it. So yes, I think the discourse around representation in cultural fields is valuable, and even broadly necessary. And at the same time, I find it intrusive and difficult, and I don’t know how to reconcile those positions.” 

 

Sally is media-savvy enough not to piss off the mainstream media by hedging her position with a humble “and I don’t know how to reconcile those positions”, giving the Guardian journalist the chance to remedy herself with

 

This is all true, and fair, but if Rooney’s structural analysis of fame has a shortcoming, it’s a failure to recognise that, with no bad faith intended, most people simply want to know more about those they admire.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/aug/28/sally-rooney-hell-of-fame-normal-people

 

How sweet! I want to get to know your parents because I admire you! Your parents must be worth admiring too, having brought up such an admirable daughter! But really, wouldn’t it be very interesting if we find a skeleton in the closet? Is your father a fellow traveller? Was he ever a member of the Irish Communist Party? Did he make you read Das Kapital when you were eight years old? OK, Sally, just stay away from your father, he might be a bad influence on you. Sally, you’re not really a Marxist, are you? You’re a sweet young, beautiful writer and your sex scenes on TV are just so romantic! We admire you and we love your books. Keep it up!

 

Given the instant culture commodification of today, we are not surprised that biographies are commissioned and written long before the famous writer’s demise, so I put my hand up too (after all I was commissioned in 2006 to write a sort of biography of the very much alive Noam Chomsky for the British publisher Reaktion Books) and I promise to do a fantastic job for Sally before she even hits her forties, and I promise not to interview her parents because I’m a Marxist too. 

 

While it is always good to learn from the mistakes of others, or better still from the entrepreneurial point of view, learn from the secrets of success from others, there is the nagging suspicion that the lives of others are only worth investigating when it makes good copy to sell. In the extreme – as it played out on the daily news – a single death of an extraordinary person is always a sensation while, as Stalin is said to have remarked – a thousand deaths are a mere statistic. What if Charmian Clift had not committed suicide – if indeed it was intentional – and lived to a ripe old age? Why the morbid fascination with possible causes? Why spin a tale that leads up to the inevitable end? Why sow a seed that has a fatal flaw? Why trace the seed to the seed before? Life is not a chain reaction, although sometimes it looks like it. Conflating nature and nurture by literary means is a somewhat dangerous enterprise, especially for the younger minds, and not true to real life, even if scintillating to the human imagination. As such, the art of literary biography as much as the original literature as an art form should always remain in the realm of social (and possibly magic) realism, without descending anywhere near the holy book of totalitarian, religious knowledge that can so negatively determine a child’s adult life - and if not allowed to read books by the likes of Charmian Clift, Nadia Wheatley and Sally Rooney, to name but a few from the millions out there.