NANDINI NAYAR
 May05 Enid
Blyton II
Apr05 Enid
Blyton I
PENI GRIFFIN
Mar05 Last
Column
Feb05 What's
In Your Notebook?
Jan05 Read
A Little Louder
Nov/Dec04 Creativity
IV
Oct04 Creativity
III
Sep04 Creativity
II
Aug04 Creativity
Jun/Jul04 Social
Angst and All That
May04 Reading
In Public
Apr04 Elephant
In The Living-Room
Mar04 Literary
Synchronicity
Feb04 The
Most Important Thing in the World
Jan04
Year-End Wrap-Ups
Dec03 Editors...
They Ain't Want You Want, They're What You Need
Nov03 The
Secret Formula for Originality - Revealed!
Oct03 An
Incoherent Message Concerning Narrative Structure; or 'Reality. What a
concept.'
Sep03 Preaching
to the Choir
Aug03 FanFic
on ACHUKACHAT, the website discussion board...
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Elephant In The Living-Room
by Peni Griffin
"...He isn't a rat."
"You've said that," said Keith.
"I know," said David. "It's the most important thing
after saying he is human. He isn't a rat, so there's no excuse
for observing him. He can tell us with his own mouth all the rest of
his life. So stop being a scientist, and start being a person yourself,
and let's try to help him."
"I agree with you, really," said Keith. "Only it's
easy to see the other way. That's all. It's the quickest thought."
"It's a hire-purchase thought," said David. "You think
of it and buy it, and pay for it all the rest of your life..."
Earthfasts, Willam Mayne, 1966 (U.S. edition E.P.
Dutton & Co.,
Inc., 1967)
Far be it from me not to mention the elephant in the living room.
My first impulse was to reject the accusations against William Mayne
as yet another "repressed memory" incident. Lord knows plenty
of lives have been scarred by the attempts of overzealous hypnotherapists
to solve their patients' problems by finding someone to blame them on.
It didn't make any sense for a children's writer - a professional empowerer
of children - to exploit them. On the other hand, the words "hypnosis" and "repressed
memory" were never mentioned in the news reports, and the situation
as described sounded plausible. Respectable jolly adult, approved by
parents; naive girls, untrained in asserting themselves, flattered and
coaxed into submission. So I suspended judgement.
And then he confessed. Good for him, as far as it goes. The only thing
worse than committing a crime is lying about it afterward, as my elementary
school teachers used to say. Better for the women who used to be the
girls, finally mustering the courage to speak up; I personally think
that the best way to deal with sexual exploitation is for the intended
victim to stand up one-on-one to her would-be exploiter at the time,
but we don't live in an ideal world and must each do the best we can.
Late is better than never.
And all the time, dead silence all around. No one at Achuka wants to
talk about it.
This is a good sign that something must be talked about.
We - the children's literature public - endorsed this man. We praised
his books and gave them awards. Shouldn't we have noticed something?
Can you be a pervert and keep it out of your books? All I ever find in
Mayne is an intense melancholy that divides me somewhat from the characters.
Should we be reading more closely, and if so, what should we look for?
We are all to be found in our work, but some of us put ourselves there
more visibly than others. This is a difficult truth to convey to the
layman. Even in obvious, overt autobiographical fiction, like that of
Christopher Isherwood and Louisa May Alcott, life is transformed by the
needs of the form and the will of the author into images acceptable to
the market - and where is the autobiography in Alcott's early sensational
potboilers? Our own lives are only one source among many. Most of us
mine our autobiographies subtly, for backdrop and setting rather than
literal detail, inventing rather than re-hashing. Transforming the literal
into the metaphorical, or vice versa, is part of the fun of writing.
And many of us write out what we cannot do, or what, having experienced
it in the writing, we will no longer need to do. Goethe wrote about the
suicide of Young Werther as a substitute for committing suicide himself;
I write about kids who run away, travel in time, and invade abandoned
houses, because for physical and practical reasons I cannot do those
things.
Would it then have been better for Mayne to make his bad urges overt
in his prose? At least, it might have provided him with fewer opportunities,
since parents would have been less likely to trust him alone with their
daughters.
Less likely to buy his books, too, and what then?
And here we find a core problem. To commit a crime is bad, said my
teachers; to lie about it is worse. But - to commit the crime and not
admit it is to escape the consequences, while to hint at the urge to
crime and not commit it is to be punished, sometimes savagely.
A student at a San Francisco arts school recently turned in a writing
assignment which troubled his instructor - an account of intense personal
violence, without plot or character development. The instructor brought
the story to the attention of her superiors and proceeded with her lesson
plan, which was, as far as I could tell from the newspaper stories, to
discuss the piece normally in class. It's easy to imagine a fruitful
discussion, along the lines of: What did you hope to accomplish with
this? Was it a worthy goal? Is the story appropriate to the audience
(i.e. the class)? What are the uses of violence in fiction? Whether
this would have had a good or bad result we will never know, because
the student was expelled and the teacher fired, both without due process.
The excuse for firing the teacher is, that she encouraged the student's
socially unacceptable writing by assigning a violent short story which
was not part of the assigned curriculum to the class - in other words,
she used her own critical sense as a teacher dealing with this particular
class in choosing her materials, instead of restricting herself to the
choices of administrators who had never met her students. Without knowing
any of the participants, it is very hard for me to escape the conclusion
that her real crime was in telling the administrators what they would
have preferred not to know.
This is being treated as a free speech issue. My own first response
is that it is an educational issue. Since my own experience is that if
you write it you don't need to do it, my guess is that the kid is not
a danger to himself and others, but was working through some fears of
his own and/or hoping to shock and appall the class out of mischief;
but the teacher knew the kid and I do not, and since pre- and post-murder
fantasizing is part of the serial killer pattern, it's not outside the
realm of possibility that her precaution was justified. What is outside
the realm of possibility is that any instructor at this college will
ever trust the administration with a moral problem again.
The school administration's actions are only explicable if the individuals
forming the administration don't care whether the student's a serial
killer in the making, as long as he isn't their responsibility; nor what
the teacher's educational goals are, as long as they can't be blamed
for them. This is "zero tolerance" at its most vicious, as
pointless as punishing students for carrying water pistols while ignoring
routine bullying; as shortsighted as removing all racist terminology
from the books in a school library and pretending that this has removed
all racist tendency from the school; as absurdly unrealistic as preaching
abstinence as the first, last, and only defense against teen pregnancy,
drug abuse, and smoking. It is weighing words more heavily than actions
while ignoring the context and grammar that give words meaning.
Words are only words. They're good in their way, and serve many necessary
functions; but they are not actions.
I have derived much wisdom from writers in my life. Louisa May Alcott
knew a lot more about certain facets of my life than my mother did -
or does. I stand up in front of classes and talk as if I really knew
more about life and happiness and creativity than a bunch of eighth graders.
Maybe adult writers are allowed to be foolish; maybe (she thinks, contemplating
the stereotypical glitzy bestseller) they're even expected to be. But
children's writers are suppposed to be automatically wise and trustworthy.
You're not supposed to have to think about whether it's okay to leave
your kids alone with us. We're supposed to Know Better.
And I think Mayne did Know Better, or would have, if he'd let himself.
Knowing better doesn't matter. I can't see any further into his heart
than anybody else's, but this is the only way I can imagine the sequence
of events from his point of view. He finds himself in a position of power
and influence over these girls, and he persuades himself - dishonestly
- that he really does know what they like, what they want - and that
this validates his behavior. Their years of silence on the topic, of
coming back to him even, allow him to continue in this belief; until
they start accusing him and he faces, at last, his lies to himself and
his injury to the girls. Once you've confessed that sort of thing to
yourself and your victims, society's actions are secondary, a mere formal
show unlikely to affect your image of youself.
Punishment may have other uses, but in this case one of its unacknowledged
benefits is of giving others the satisfaction of setting the offender
apart. "He's going to jail and serve him right," the rest of
us can think now. "He's expelled, she's fired, serve them right. We're not
like that."
Except that we are all like that.
I don't mean to say that I personally ever wanted to molest a child
sexually. But I learned, when I was a teen-age babysitter, that it was
very easy indeed, when an infant was crying that incessant relentless
terrible cry that exactly matches the pulse of your blood and will not
be ignored, to picture myself in the role of the psalmist. Psalm 137,
Verse 9. King James: Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth
thy little ones against the stones. It doesn't sound any better in Revised
Standard: Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes
them against the rock! But the Living Bible is the most starkly
horrible: Blessed is the man who takes your babies and smashes them
against the rocks!
I am an agnostic because I read the Bible. But in the end, it's only
words. What you believe doesn't matter. What you do, does. And if I could
picture it, couldn't I do it? I have a bad temper when frustrated and
tired and hungry. Under those circumstances, I do dramatic things -
throwing crockery, for example - before I realize I'm going to do them.
Babies are so small and so frustrating and deprive you of so much rest.
So - I have no children, and I won't put myself in the position of
being alone with babies for more than a few hours. Plenty of people who
love their children, or believe they do, abuse them out of ignorance,
or stress, in moments of wretched frustration, one shake and it's done
- a hire-purchase action, never to be paid off. I don't want to find
out if I'm one of those people.
Some of you are recoiling now, horrified that I would say such a thing,
shoving me into the outer reaches of acceptability and refusing my point. "I'm
not like that!" you say; and I say: "Yes, you are. It's dangerous
to pretend otherwise."
You too have evil in you - maybe not in your heart, maybe not in your
mind - maybe in your hands or mouth or eyes. It comes with being human.
Call it original sin, if you're religious; call it evolutionary baggage,
if you're not. But you and I and J.K. Rowling are only better than William
Mayne if we work at it; if we take note of our temptations and weaknesses,
whatever they are, and resist them, consciously.
One of the things that writers do as we write is work things out for
ourselves. Any wisdom that gets into my books stems from that, not from
any great natural endowment of my own. This gives me, I think, more opportunity
to be wise and to understand myself and avoid my personal potential for
crime than someone who, say, installs plumbing all day; but it doesn't
guarantee any outcome. Nor does having abstract self-knowledge mean we
will apply it when push comes to shove. Eternal vigilance is the price
of virtue.
To think otherwise is a hire-purchase thought.
April 2004 © Peni Griffin
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