In praise of Rumer Godden’s ‘An Episode of Sparrows’

There are some books, I realise, that we wait all our lives to discover; there are tales we have never heard that we long to be told.  For instance, I have long wished for a novel that tells of the ordinary lives of ordinary people so richly and compellingly as to make those lives seem momentous, as momentous as our own joys and sorrows are to ourselves — indeed, as momentous as they really are.  No stunts, no fireworks, no shock-tactics; simply the writer’s skill — and it would have to be a skilful writer — in depicting the heights and depths of lives the world calls unspectacular, and in showing how perfectly plausibly a miracle might, with soundless brilliance, burst into the mundane.  

Well, I have now found this book.  Somehow I had heard of neither its name, ‘An Episode of Sparrows’, nor its author, Rumer Godden (1907–1998), before I came across two articles about it (here and here) by Dorothy Cummings McLean (to whom I owe a debt of gratitude).  For indeed I have found it at last, and have spent the past week or so feeling rather as if I had been electrocuted.

Here are some of the many reasons why.  For one thing, there is the extraordinary challenge that Godden set herself from the very beginning: practically the entire novel is confined to two or three bomb-disfigured streets in the dilapidated but self-respecting London of the 1950s; specifically in a district strongly reminiscent of (though never explicitly identified as) Pimlico.  All the action, bar a few vignettes, is in or around the ‘gracious and imposing’ Mortimer Square and its more down-at-heel neighbour, Catford Street, running (with its ‘swarming vital houses’) from the High Street down to the river.  Narrow as these bounds may seem, the setting they contain is to prove more than ample.  The Street and the Square form a world of their own; even a world of worlds.  In the very opening sentence, our sense of scale is already being calibrated:

The Garden Committee had met to discuss the earth; not the whole earth, the terrestrial globe, but the bit of it that had been stolen from the Gardens in the Square.

For the briskly competent committee woman Angela Chesney, the unfolding narrative, the ‘episode of the sparrows’, initially presents simply another item to be crossed off her to-do list.  She is blind to its quiet significance, and at one moment of crisis accuses her lonely, regretful, listless older sister Olivia, who has taken a different view of things altogether, of is “making a mountain out of a molehill.”  Olivia’s answer is perhaps the crux of the whole book.  “A molehill can be a mountain to a sparrow,” she replies.  Beyond the Street and the Square many large things loom: the river, its ships and their sirens, the Power Station, the whole mass of London, the rest of the world.  Yet it is that tiny quantity of stolen earth which is to bring the story magnificently to its climax, just as a a single packet of cornflower seeds began it.

Who are the sparrows of the novel’s title?  They are the street children of Catford Street; specifically those aged between seven and about fifteen.  Ubiquitous but unnoticed, they ‘disappear into anonymity, camouflaged by the stones and bricks they played in’.  Even at the scale of this small sliver of London, their projects and squabbles merit no attention, for ‘they led a different life and scarcely anyone noticed them.’  But Rumer Godden notices them.  Moreover, she understands them; she teaches us again how to see and think as a child, as in a vivid street scene to which we are soon treated: Saturday morning on the High Street, as observed by sharp-eyed Sparkey, the newspaper-seller’s five-year-old son —

When the bus came it stopped just by Sparkey and sent out visible fumes of warmth and smell from under its red sides, it looked as if it were a real big animal breathing.  Sparkey watched the people file in; the bus looked comfortable with its paint, the pale steel of its handles, the glimpse of seats behind its glass.  It started with a harsh grinding noise, the people were carried away, and Sparkey’s mother rattled the coppers in the pocket of her big newspaper sling; she rattled them, thought Sparkey, because the conductor had rattled his in his bag.

‘Melodramatic’ is one word Godden applies to Sparkey; even before he can read he seems somehow to have imbibed the papers’ lurid headlines, and he gleefully terrorises other children with his blood-curdling tales.  Though sickly, he also aspires to a full and active membership of the boys’ street gangs — indeed, specifically of the toughest, his hero Tip Malone’s, for all that Tip is eight years his senior.  Yet even Tip is only one of a large Irish family living at number seventeen (“There can’t be more than nine,” Angela says), and his gang scarcely lacks competition in the streets round about.  Soon, though, we meet the sparrow par excellence: Lovejoy Mason, aged nearly eleven, who in spite of her saccharine name is a tough little nut, quite capable of scrapping and biting and spitting according to the law of Catford Street — though still not as tough or hard as all that, as we are to discover.  Her mother, a singer who between her bookings lodges at Vincent’s restaurant in Catford Street, is mostly absent from her daughter’s life; her father is simply never mentioned; Lovejoy herself is looked after to an extent by the restaurant’s owners, Vincent and Mrs. Combie, but even for them, as we are told, she is a ‘little extra tacked on’.  

Nevertheless, it is inside this little girl’s head that we are to spend most of the novel, among her words and thoughts.  Insignificant even among the insignificant sparrows, unremarked-on even in that unremarkable street, the doings and feelings of this wayward ‘little extra’ are set deliberately and carefully at the story’s centrepiece.  The most trifling of trifles, the world would consider them, but Rumer Godden makes them momentous.

Godden’s depiction of childhood is astonishingly lucid.  She conveys its enthusiasms and eagernesses, its frustrations and sorrows, its humour and simplicity; but also its powerlessness, its loneliness; the impossibility of finding solitude; the primal hierarchies, the ruthlessly-enacted instincts.  Godden knows the speech, too; the ‘pecking questions from sharp little beaks’, the interrogations which their victims can never hope to withstand — 

 ‘Where d’ya live?’ 
 ‘Two-hundred-and-three, Catford Street.’
 ‘That’s the rest’raunt.  No-one lives there.’ 
 ‘Mrs. Combie does,’ said Lovejoy.
 ‘Is Mrs. Combie your Mum?’ 
 ‘No, she’s not,’ said Lovejoy indignantly. 

 ‘Where is your Mum?’ 

 ‘She’s away.’ 

 And then one of the children would cry, ‘Don’t believe you’ve got a Mum.’ 

 ‘I have,’ but Lovejoy said it too fiercely and they would know and cry, ‘There’s something fishy about her Mum.’

Rumer Godden understands the dignity of children, and in this book they are as rich in character as any of the adults, with individual and distinctive, even complex, virtues and vices.  Lovejoy’s battle against her own vanity, for example, culminating in the hard choice she makes over her red shoes, forms a tiny sub-plot, easily missed, but it is there.  We are reminded of important and easily-forgotten truths: that a ten-year-old can be nostalgic for a lost past, that children are often highly principled and serious by nature; that they notice small details and are generally able to see right through dissimulation; and again, above all, that ‘a molehill can be a mountain to a sparrow’.  She renders the relationship — or the gulf — between children and adults with the same striking realism, at one point evoking with terrible accuracy ‘the dreadful power of grown-ups, the power and the knowledge’.  There is one particular moment, at a crucial juncture in the tale, when a Literary Discussion group, the sort of thing that Godden would have known herself and her own readers to enjoy, is made to appear so hilariously, so tragically irrelevant, so frivolous — one could almost say childish — with its silly little dainty salmon sandwiches — which Vincent could have provided, you poor blind fools! — that the adult reader can perceive it as a child would.  We feel in our bones once again how unimportant and how stupid a roomful of chattering grown-ups appears to a child’s eye — especially by comparison to a mountainous molehill.

The book’s main characters are children: is it a children’s book?  Not straightforwardly so.  It is true that many reviewers on the Goodreads website attest to having read and loved it at a young age; the children’s author Jacqueline Wilson, who encountered it aged ten, says it was the first book that ever made her cry.  I could well believe it; all the same, I would not say it was primarily a book for children.  I sense that it is grown-ups who should read it most urgently; who have more to gain from it; more to learn.

There are other reviews, too, that call the book ‘sweet’ and ‘charming’ — but its taste is far deeper and more lingering than that.  Most of the time it is at least as bitter as it is sweet.  The worldly powers in the tale are real and threatening and seemingly closing in all the time; and then there are the dangers from within, people about to be undone by their own folly or short-sightedness or plain weakness.  Injustices gross and petty, self-interest, destitution, betrayal: all loom large even when they do not actually do their worst.  There are misunderstandings, too — and how acutely Godden understands misunderstandings, both the everyday and the catastrophic, the tragedy in them as well as the comedy, showing how easily hurt can be done with how few hardly-meant, careless words.  And even apart from mere misunderstandings, the tale has some truly agonising moments.  The book does admittedly now carry a sepia overtone that it would not have had when first published in 1955 — in that ‘street children’ are now more or less an extinct species in British cities, and there are now cruelties in modern Western childhood worse even than those of Catford Street — but still, this is certainly not, as it could easily have been, a merely sentimental book.  Just as easily it could have been a gritty nihilistic desolation, but the author steers adroitly in between.

It is not only the plot that lends this book its power, but Godden’s remarkable prose style.  Writing as if she herself had lived in the street for years, using the definite article and proper nouns to create a seemingly well-established and long-familiar world, she has a neat way of interlacing dialogue and description, whereby she quotes constantly from her own characters, using their words to set the scene as well as to unfold the plot.  Few of the characters are ever short of words, but the narrator deftly clarifies their meaning if needed: she and her cast seem to be helping each other to tell the story.  Some might dismiss this technique as a conceit, but to me it seemed completely natural and entirely convincing.  It has several considerable advantages: it enlivens the descriptive passages, often with a dash of humour; it whets our anticipation by hinting at future developments in the plot; it allows a momentary scene to linger for a little while without dragging; and also, over the course of the whole book, it has the effect of building up the characters so wonderfully richly that by the end we have come to know them, as we do real people, mainly through their own words — or the kinds of things they say — even if we do not quite remember exactly when or why they said them.  This makes the novel something else altogether that I have long hoped to read: a tale doubling as a tapestry of rich character portraits.  (The characters have such depth, such an aura of their own, that Godden can even speak of what they ‘might have said’ or ‘would have thought’, as one might of a real person).

And her ear for dialogue is flawless, allowing for brilliant little flashbacks and snippets of conversation which add to the novel’s beautiful depth without strain on the reader.  There is her eye for detail, too; her descriptive brush-strokes are fine and bold and unerring.  Every individual character, however minor or fleeting, has a name, and the world of the Street and the Square is lavish with smells and sounds and sensations: the barren rubbly wasteland of a bomb-site, the ‘apricot’ light shining invitingly from Vincent’s restaurant at night, or the crushing sunshine of a London summer, ‘white and mercilessly bright’.

All this takes place, too, against a backdrop of countless vividly-drawn contrasts: between the rich and the poor, the large and the small, cleanliness and dirt, strength and weakness, noise and peace.  And between still profounder opposites: age and youth, Adam and Eve, the spiritual and the earthly, innocence and guilt, power and love.  The contrasts are not simplistic, either.  For instance, the faded Square is no longer as rich as it once was, nor is the Street quite as poor.  Nor even is it simply the case that the children are innocent while the adults are guilty.  The young characters are quite capable of duplicity and manipulation, to say nothing of violence.  We hear Lovejoy described variously as a ‘marauder’ and a ‘tyrant’; Tip as a ‘dictator’; we laugh, but Godden is only half-joking.  With an extraordinary subtlety the novel records how the tense, serious, fastidious Lovejoy (whom Mrs. Combie’s dreadful sister Cassie even mocks as ‘an old woman’ at one point) actually recovers an innocence that almost nobody realises she had lost, shedding age that has grown over her before her years, so that she becomes something like a healthy child again.  Tip has had a happier start to life than Lovejoy, and received a stronger moral formation, but even this brings with it unexpected and insidious temptations: to vindictiveness, even to a kind of pharisaism which is depicted with extraordinary subtlety.  And yet, in spite of the hardness of their surroundings, in spite even of themselves, and in a way without realising it, these two bring into being something ‘careful and innocent’, as Olivia is to call it.  The Garden of Eden is almost remade in Catford Street.  One of the many things this novel does is to affirm the tenacity of innocence and wonder, growing green and fierce against the forces of cynicism and nihilism.

Finally, this is also, in my view — though Rumer Godden was not received into the Church until fourteen years after writing it — a profoundly Catholic novel.  It contains that rare thing (in English-speaking literature at least), a recognisable and reasonably sympathetic portrait of the Church.  The church of Our Lady of Sion, having been bombed in the war, now consists merely of a ‘makeshift and gimcrack’ substitute put up hurriedly amid the ruins.  The parish is hopelessly short of money, materially on its beam end — and yet it is exactly where it should be, down among the poor and the poorest of the poor: the sparrows, whom Olivia remembers are sold for three farthings, ‘and yet not one should fall to the ground without your Father knowing…’  And there are other lines of Scripture, not all explicitly mentioned, that come to mind: ‘the kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed’… ‘blessed are the poor in spirit’… ‘a sword shall pierce your heart also’…  The sacramentality of plain objects, the earthiness of the miraculous, the gently chastening wisdom, the keen moral sense equally alive to justice and to mercy, the obstinate concern for the smallest and humblest… all suffuse the book with an unobtrusive but unmistakeable spirituality.  

All these qualities this novel has — its masterful craftsmanship, its piercing and compassionate morality, its cinematic detail, its rejoicing in particularity — and yet there is a curious weightlessness about it.  It is never prim or ponderous; it wears its profoundness as lightly as spring leaves.  So natural are its pace, its dialogue and the cadences of its prose that we hardly notice them, and meanwhile its understated brilliance and quiet urgency creep up on us, waiting to dawn silently but overwhelmingly in the mind and heart.  Is there anything at all wrong with this book?  If there is, I will write about it once I have come down to earth — earth about which I shall think differently from now on.

Three Childhoods

  On whose account, then, of these hundreds
  Ashrill in this playground of anguish,
  Under the yellowish, suburb-smothering noon,
  Of these hundreds at sixes and sevens at ten and eleven,

  Should Heaven be loudest appealed to?

  Luke Salt’s, for example?  Wild-hearted and gleeful of limb,
  Eager to get stuck in
  To some challenge in which to triumph
  And bring out the best in his allies and rivals alike,
  But a boisterous-elbowed boy,
  Blind to his own wayward roughness, so can’t think why
  Teachers all pick on him.
  And what he might do without meaning, though done on purpose,
  Others do back, so he does back back —
  To be punished with shunning and shame.
  And trouble at home he carries in secret to school
  In goblets of anger that always, eventually, spill
  Awfully over, costing him comrades,
  Marring his soul with a dark and deepening stain,
  And laying to waste the Luke Salt who might yet be,
  But whom, if lost, shall we ever regain?

  Or Connie-May Bushell, alight
  With gregarious giggles, and bright with wit,
  A brilliant play-mate aflash with ideas,
  Lively and bookish, but apt to be led astray,
  Whose innocence, if undefended,
  Will soon be ended?
  For what will prevent her, some day not far hence,
  Seeing the world’s ways,
  From trashing her own constitution
  And wholly dismantling her soul,
  Abolishing all the old ways with all her might,
  Shuttering, barring, veiling,
  Uprooting and ridding her whole
  Self of her former self?
  The passionate games will die,
  Sullenness cloud her eye,
  The voice that should sweeten will harden,
  And only a shadow will loiter
  Where light should have lightened the lives of all around.

  Or perhaps Peter Palmer,
  Standing out under the branches still,
  Imagining friendship under the dust-brown leaves,
  Friendship and conversation;
  Given to sniffiness, true, towards most of the rest,
  Vexed by their posturings, irked by their noise
  (The bossy and fussy girls and the mindless boys) —
  But heart set firm on a distant bearing:
  Transcendent good, and to do what is just
  Will endure what he must.

  O Lord, save thy people, and bless thine heritage.
  Govern them, and lift them up for ever.
  O Lord, in thee have they trusted.
  Let them never be confounded.

8,894,355

In the end I have decided I cannot in good conscience let this day pass without a note, however sombre it must be, on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 Abortion Act.  This week the Catholic Herald’s front cover announces that this law has now cost us nearly nine million lives.  This does not take account of almost the same number of mothers to whom it will have caused suffering without mercy, one way or another, sooner or later.  Nor the abortions funded by the British government abroad, especially in developing countries.

Lord Alton’s tour de force in the same issue of the Herald, which contained as much compassion as it did force, sets out the situation as well as anyone else could.  The fundamental question remains whether the sanctity of human life is irreducible, or merely negotiable.  I say with the Church that it is the former, by Heaven, and therefore that its deliberate destruction is out of the question.  I am unconvinced by any argument that life does not begin at conception.  Even those who are not sure should feel hesitant to to take the risk.  We may and must move mountains to help any expectant mother in a crisis, but we have no right to extinguish the new life being knit within her.  How can one unborn child be revered, and another deemed unfit for life?

I should think, and at least hope, that many of the Members of Parliament who voted in favour of the 1967 Act did so with compassionate intentions, and in the sincere belief that an abortion would remain a regrettable last resort to rare and extreme crises.  What would they make of the incomputable figure at which we have now arrived, though?  Is this moral landscape of 2017 really what most of them intended?

The pro-life movement now faces two different fronts.  One is the explicitly pro-choice movement, with which I have very little patience: forthright and sinister, understanding women’s independence of mind and body through a particularly contorted prism, sloganising, resorting to intimidation and accordingly unafraid to requisition the law in the promotion of such slogans.  Abortion, for them, is not regrettable in the slightest, but a positive political ideal; their claim is to the symbolic liberation of all women.  Well, their questions deserve answering, but bluntly.   The pro-life generation holds the life of the mother and the life of the child to be equal.  Both lives must be preserved.  If the growing being is a child, then it is a child, and its life is sacrosanct, just as the mother’s life is sacrosanct.  Meanwhile, the proclamations of ‘choice’ are, for all their vehemence, quite vacuous: for instance there is no acknowledgement of women who have felt precisely that they have had no choice at all but to see an abortionist, often under pressure from families withholding material or moral support, or from men unwilling to face their responsibilities.  While such men are certainly liberated in their wickedness, there is no liberation for the women concerned.

On the other hand, there is is the other front of people with whom I hope my tone would be quite different.  They are the plain folk of Britain, who I suppose are not so different from the House of Commons of 1967.  Surely most of them, if asked, otherwise preferring not to think about abortion, would regret its existence but, meaning to be compassionate, express a view along lines that under extreme circumstances it must be considered a necessary evil.  They are people of good will.  So they might well understand justice and mercy; they might reasonably expect the pro-life movement’s mettle to be shown in action as well as in words, and want proof that a culture of life they propose will abound in practical and merciful help to those in difficulties.  And indeed it already does precisely this where it is not prevented from doing so: the Life Charity provides moral and material support to mothers in crisis, and until recently the Catholic Church was free to run adoption services and thereby bring help to mothers in distress and happiness to childless couples.

Much is said, too, about sitting in judgment on women who seek abortions.  I think the pro-life movement makes it very clear that, certainly in these days of commonplace abortion, the moral culpability of a mother who has recourse to this avenue is often, even generally, significantly diminished.  The abortion is always wrong, but the mother is not always guilty.  There is, however, surely seldom a guiltier party than the abortionist, who in sober mind and cold blood has devoted all that precious medical knowledge to the opposite of its purpose, to the destruction of life.  Yet when we say that the Church, in obedience to its Founder, is as rich in mercy as it is resolute in justice, we mean it.  Even for the abortionist.

If Martin Luther King’s niece, Alveda King, calls the pro-life cause ‘the new civil rights movement’, then I think we had better take notice.  Lord Alton’s estimation that ‘the tide is turning’ may well be correct: the pro-choice quarters are powerful but they are beginning to bluster and lash out, which is a sign of an awareness of losing ground.  They are going to try very hard to persuade the Irish people to repeal the Eighth Amendment of their constitution next year, but those slogans cannot last forever, and at some point they will have to ask themselves more carefully what really motivates the defenders of life, and why they will not give up.  The sooner they do so the better, and the sooner we can turn our attention to the real business of helping women and the unborn in need, rather than numbing our consciences to a dangerous compromise and wounding short-cut.  Let there rise up a proliferation of pro-lifers, holding aloft the twin lanterns of justice and mercy, in this as in all things!

‘O the mind, mind has mountains’: Pixar, the Poets and the Teenager

This post has somehow ballooned into a 2,000-word tract.  Nevertheless, I don’t think I have said anything that will spoil the film for those who have not seen it, nor given away the plot beyond about the film’s half-way mark, though I let slip clues to the mood of its resolution.  Put simply, two hours spent watching the film is recommended over two hours trying to read my review of it. 

Film fare at the university Cathsoc on Shrove Tuesday was Pixar studios’ Inside Out.  I suppose I had been expecting something fairly light after all those pancakes.  Yet here I am a week afterwards still puzzling out this unusual film.

Inside Out has been selling itself on the point of its being set mainly inside the main character’s own head.  Riley is an ordinary American girl, with a strong and steady mother and father, who has been steered through her eleven years (and counting) by five characters who are her emotions personified: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust.  They oversee her mind, react to all she meets, influence her actions, send off a daily consignment of memories to the archives and engage themselves perpetually in a well-intentioned squabble for the upper hand.  The apparently whimsical premise is rather like the Numbskulls series in the Beano comic, except that, for all its bright colours, for all its lashings of humour and for all its characteristically American warm-heartedness, this is a not a trivial film.  It has something serious to say to adults and children alike.  In other words, it does not reach over the heads of the young audience but has two rare qualities: firstly, it is a children’s film which takes itself seriously because it takes its young audience seriously, and secondly it remembers most of the time, as it also speaks seriously to an older audience, that both old and young are in the same room.

Inside Out’s first triumph, in my view, is its astonishing animation.  It is slick without quite being too rushed and lavishes detail on the viewer.  No stone is left unturned in recreating wan sunlight on concrete or the cold yellow sweep of street lamps through a moving car.  Most impressive of all is that, out of nothing but pixels under a computer’s bonnet, it is now possible to breathe the very subtleties and shadows of emotions into a character’s face: the face falling, the collapse into laughter, the dawning of disappointment, the hesitant brightening of hope, the dance of dozens of movements or half-smiles or twitches or blinks in conversation, and (crucially, as it turns out) the zero of numb expressionlessness.  Even in this age of commonplace technological wonder it is amazing to watch.  The personified emotions may be very clever on their own, but they are, after all, (deliberately) undisguised stock characters.  The really remarkable achievement is their way of mingling and moderating each other in the heroine’s expressions.  The whole film has surely been designed to show off this animation; at any rate, it certainly depends upon its success.  I think the ambitious gamble has paid off.  

I am hoping that it is all right to link to this short extract from the beginning of the film,  which gives a better impression of its cleverness than the trailer does.

Then there is the film’s setting, the landscape of the mind.  They have the most important thing right: its scale is enormous.  The five emotions sit dizzyingly high up in a sort of control tower, from which they and the viewer can see miles of shelves of long-term memory in the distance.  There is also an archipelago of ‘islands of personality’, great floating citadels to Riley’s particular strengths and talents, which are (if I remember properly) ‘Family’, ‘Friendship’, ‘Hockey’, ‘Honesty’ and something like high spirits.  Between these and the control-tower yawns a dark void, a hopeless pit of forgotten memories.  They have depicted Gerard Manley Hopkins’ lines exactly:

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne’er hung there.

The mind is not a mere safe or chamber.  It is its own country.  Yes, this scale is completely right: yes, this setting is entirely fitting, as the film’s audience will have known, in fact.

Having built up this mountainous mythology of the mind, the directors have kept the narrative simple.  All that is made to happen to Riley is that her family moves from the Mid-West of the U.S. to San Francisco in California.  Yet the setting’s palette means that this realistic uprooting and her understandable struggle to settle in her new home can be depicted in scrupulous, meditative detail.  In Riley’s mind its effect is literally upheaving, even seismic.  Setbacks and threats, real or imagined but all of an unfamiliar potency, suddenly come thick and fast at home and at school.  The five emotion characters struggle to maintain control over the mind.  There is a panicked tussle over the memory-mechanism, and then there is catastrophe: the Joy character — the sole optimist — and the Sadness character — a combination of Eeyore and King Midas, who cannot help tainting anything she touches with a contagious blue gloom — manage to catapult themselves out of the control tower, across the mind’s chasm and into the archives of memory, hopelessly far away from any influence over their charge and leaving to hold sway over the mind only Fear, Disgust and Anger who, as might be expected in spite of their efforts, cannot sustain Riley’s character by themselves.  One by one, her ‘islands of personality’ begin to founder and topple; a tectonic catastrophe threatens and weakens her whole person.  (How puny and trivial San Francisco’s immense Golden Gate bridge, seen in opening shots, is made to seem now).  That is the plot seen from the inside.  From the outside, and from the perspective of her parents, she withdraws into herself, turns her back on her surroundings and slumps into disillusion.  Come to that, the narrative can be stated more simply still.  The move to California jolts Riley’s mind into a new age: her growing up enters a painful phase.

This linearity and simplicity of narrative leaves plenty of room for a remarkable richness and dignity in the portrayal of her character which, it is also worth noticing, also provides the film’s setting.  This richness of character is its fourth and crowning triumph in my book, and the reason why I think so many people have found it so powerful.  Just as the animation shows the emotions mingling in Riley’s face, so their overall effect is to mingle in her character.  Inside Out’s heroine is at intervals joyful, sorrowful, disgusted, angry, fearful, or somewhere in between, but remains always plainly the same person.  She is exalted and deepened where, in many modern children’s books and films, characterisation often suffers from being crowded out by over-complicated narratives.  Even though I had trouble keeping up with the frenetic dialogue (once a line is missed it is gone), I can see that such slickness is justified here.  It makes sense for these emotions, being the voices in Riley’s head, to chatter away at the speed of thought: their speech, perhaps along with the musical score, is the very sound of her thinking.  (The film’s dialogue outside the mind is very well paced and particularly cleverly delivered).  The distinction between first person and third person is gloriously vague. The result, then, is a meticulous and self-unconscious chronicle not only of a character’s actions and words but also of her every thought.  It might even be possible to treat this film as a moving portrait instead of as a story, and to be content with studying and contemplating a single character, painted as richly as any in literature, for its two hours’ length.  

I have longed for a work of literature for children (for I think this is literature) that is brave and serious enough to do something like this.  I have often thought that the most moving stories work on this sort of scale, painting the apparently prosaic or normal in monumental colours without taking leave of a realistic world, and by making characters deep enough to let their young audiences almost befriend them.  Such literature triumphs because it upholds human dignity — as I persist in believing all literature ought to, one way or another — by portraying its majesty.   For majesty is the cornerstone of Inside Out, in spite of its psychedelic appearance.  Riley’s loss of heart, manifested on the outside only in despondency and flouncing (which I thought her parents indulged too much!), is actually the interior landscape’s very ruin. The doomed realm of childhood imagination is depicted as a sprawling rubble-strewn demolition site, leered over by lofty cranes; the collapse of an ‘island of personality’ is always slow, grave and noble, more terrible than the foundering of a battleship, or the schism of an iceberg or indeed a San Franciscan earthquake.  ‘O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed’, and, come to that, O it carries enough quests and perils for a trillion trilogies, even at eleven. 

For all that I praise the film, I must also admit to being unsettled by it.  This is not really the directors’ fault but the fault of the culture that engulfs Pixar Studios and audience alike.  I have two criticisms to make of the film’s powerful depiction of growing up, which I think is what most moves its older audience.  Firstly, curmudgeon that I am, I find myself deprived of the film’s cathartic relief because I do not see much hope in the culture into which Riley is about to graduate.   The end of the film shows that the screen-writers are uncritical of the principles, and the implications, of modern Western teenager- and adulthood.  When Riley is more than once given the line ‘I’ve got to go’ — just before some setback, always ‘I’ve got to go’, words delivered casually but which become profoundly haunting once they are recognised as a refrain — it really feels like a permanent farewell.  This is why I find myself hoping that they do not attempt a sequel and instead leave Inside Out alone atop a plinth of its own.  My second regret is that this growing up produces in her mind nothing short of revolution, rather than a less traumatic formation — or, in other, broader words, I lament that she must be delivered up to teenagerhood without comment or criticism.

I am compelled to wonder why the growth from child to adult must now, since the invention of the teenager, necessarily involve more ruin and revolution than mellowing and deepening.   Why a campaign of levelling and rebuilding, rather than a programme of refurbishment and extension?  Why must the teenage attitude be one of self-repudiation, a developer’s instead of a gardener’s?  We have all surely seen it happen: young people, feeling compelled to rebel against themselves, vandalise any part of their character they perceive as childlike and re-engineer themselves aggressively into almost a different person.  In fact, one of Inside Out’s finest strokes is to look briefly into the mind of a worldly, eye-shadowed-up ‘in-crowd’ girl from school during the credits.  Underneath the façade her emotional characters are wailing, ‘We’re a complete fraud; do you think they can see through us?’, ‘It’s so tiring being cool’, and so on.  Teenagers will go to such lengths because they are now even more afraid of being thought childish than of being thought stuffy.  Of course we must all in the end put aside childish things; of course we squirm at some of the things we have said and done in childhood; of course the teenager plumbs depths unknown by the child; of course we must arm ourselves for the adult world.  But why is that adult world so unforgiving of childhood at present?  What is the attitude, I wonder, of the ordinary modern man to his boyhood, or the ordinary modern woman’s to her girlhood?   What does the adult do with the child’s spirit and ambitions?  Do we remain loyal to the principles, if not the practice, of youth?  (Shouldn’t we?).  What do old and young versions of the same person have in common?  Were such a thing possible, could they any longer have a sincere conversation with each other?  What would the child think of the teenager’s later policy of disinterest, scoffery and sullenness adopted precisely in order to spite the old earnestness, enthusiasm and high spirits?  

In response to Wordsworth, who was able to sing

My heart leaps up when I behold 
  A rainbow in the sky: 
So was it when my life began, 
  So is it now I am a man, 
So be it when I shall grow old
    Or let me die! 
The child is father of the man: 
And I could wish my days to be 
Bound each to each by natural piety,

Gerard Manley Hopkins, who might have been joking, went to the trouble of cementing into a triolet his view that ‘the words are wild’, scoffing ‘Suck any sense from that who can’.  Supposing Wordsworth was certainly not joking, though?  If the child is indeed father of the man, then the parental authority against which the teenager actually rebels is not, in the first instance, that wielded by the real mother and father.  The struggle is more against the authority of the childhood self.  This is why, in Inside Out, Riley’s personality must be torn down and demolished rather than refurbished from within; why there must take place not merely a broadening and deepening of the mind but its wholesale razing and rebuilding.  Watching the film, I thought this dramatic, even violent depiction of the end of her interior childhood was unwarranted except, of course, by cinematic purposes.  Surely we ought to grow up more steadily, more slowly, more gently, than that?

There is, of course, a sorrow about the necessary fading of childhood that is sewn into us irrevocably.  I do not take these lines, also by Wordsworth (from his Intimations of Immortality, set vividly to music by Gerald Finzi) altogether as the whole truth, but they are very moving, and perhaps we all know what he means:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

        Hath had elsewhere its setting,

          And cometh from afar:

        Not in entire forgetfulness,

        And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

        From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

        Upon the growing Boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

        He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily farther from the east

    Must travel, still is Nature’s priest,

      And by the vision splendid

      Is on his way attended;

At length the Man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day.

And how about the note struck here (by Cecil Day-Lewis, in his poem Walking Away), also sounded in  Inside Out’s ‘I’ve got to go’ refrain:

                                                              … I can see

You walking away from me towards the school

With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free

Into a wilderness, the gait of one

Who finds no path where the path should be.

For all its pain, felt by the self and by others, the farewell to childhood is necessary.  Why, though, must our culture insist on so high a price, paid in full and not in instalments, as ransom for the passage into modern adulthood?  Why must it harden children so swiftly into so hollow a cynicism; why must its economics compel parents to leave their children for days on end in nurseries and child-care; why must even its entertainment exclude the young for the sake of adults’ freedom to snigger?  Why should we not revere childhood to the point of costing ourselves and society something?  We might even keep in mind Herbert Howells’ titanic Hymnus Paradisi, which, as I have written about here, he saw fit to consecrate to his small son, lost suddenly to polio at the age of nine?  Why should we not say of the child, with Eliot, 

Let him continue in the spirit of wonder…

… So that the reverence and the gaiety

May not be forgotten in later experience,

In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium,

The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure…  ?

I ask all these questions, but see no good answers.

Comparison of Inside Out to the age that has produced it also makes me restless because it throws light on all the good things that Western culture — not simply American culture, though this is an American film through and through — is capable of if only it tried.  Why do we not make more films like this instead of the catastrophic waste of money and time and talent there is, I am tempted to fume, on idiotic, violent or lurid films that trample human dignity in a stampede for fame and wealth?  Pixar has produced a justly popular film (and incidentally made a great deal of money) without graphic violence, almost entirely wholesome humour and, apart from three rather surreal scenes that might alarm very young children, no gratuitously upsetting scenes.  (I should say that there are upsetting scenes, but they are not gratuitous!).  Why can we not have more films with fine actors and symphonic musical scores, dispensing with the low and the sordid but confronting the great questions of the spirit and soul, elevating the detail of ordinary life, depicting the fortress of a traditional family deepening and strengthening in love even in crisis, and underlain by an uplifting vision of human life and dignity?  Whole swathes of this film resound in a majestic minor key that, astonishingly for a children’s film, never quite resolves wholly to major.  If I had seen it at the age of its intended audience — as the reviewers interviewed here on BBC Radio 5 have done — I suspect that I would impulsively have declared it film of the century.  It is tempting to do so even now.

----------------------------------------------------

Further viewing / listening:

Readers who have seen the film might appreciate this.

Poem for National Libraries Day

Here — a little too late! — is a short poem to mark National Libraries Day, celebrated in the United Kingdom on the 6th February, 2016.

Library

It is a wayside house for passers-by;

It offers shoppers wares they need not buy:

It is already theirs.  Outside they pause

And glance between a wrist-watch and the doors,

And peer inside, and then surprise themselves

Ten minutes later deep among the shelves.

It is a sitting-room; it is a street;

It has been set aside for minds to meet

Across an arm-chair, or beyond a page.

It squashes miles and bends the gulfs of age.

It holds the civic treasure; how much gold

Would buy the joy it sows cannot be told.

It is a match for any shade of mood:

For here is company or solitude;

A laden heart of aches and sorrow will

Discover that it wakes and wonders still.

And anyone can nestle in a nook

And bury all their cares beneath a book.

It is the shelter of the thoughtful child

From boredom or the tediously wild

And raucous playground.  It is a reward

That parents more than earn and can afford.

The wisest, who should know, call it the crown

That quietly lends the life to any town.

The Central Library, Sutton, Surrey.

Lux aeterna

Today (6th September) is the eightieth anniversary of the death, at the age of nine, of Michael Kendrick Howells.  A form of polio or meningitis felled him in only three days; his father Herbert Howells, in the nearly fifty years by which he outlived his son, never overcame this loss.  

Herbert Howells had been, before the Great War, a promising young composer of mainly orchestral work; he was Stanford’s favourite at the Royal College of Music and shone among the brightest in that fascinating constellation, darkened forever by the 1914-1918 war, of Edwardian and Georgian composers and writers with some connection to Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire or the Marches.  He was a close friend of Ivor Gurney and the poet F.W. Harvey; all three had Gloucester connections.  During the war he had narrowly avoided death not in the trenches but from Graves’ disease, and become the first person in the country to undergo radium treatment.  Afterwards his career had flagged rather, especially after the unfavourable reception of his (sublime!) second piano concerto, about which more here.  His son’s death in 1935 silenced him utterly.

Only his daughter Ursula was able to persuade him to compose again; she suggested that he ‘write something for Michael’.  The work that resulted remained untouched for thirty years, before Herbert Sumsion and Ralph Vaughan Williams found out about it and persuaded him to allow it to be performed at the Three Choirs Festival.  Hymnus Paradisi is a monumental work, a Requiem with various additions from the Psalms and the Sarum Book of Hours.  It is performed rarely mainly because it calls for two soloists, an enormous orchestra, two choirs and organ, but these were mustered during the Proms in 2012, and I was very fortunate indeed to be there in the Royal Albert Hall to hear it.  I will never forget looking up from the arena to see a wall of singers rise up to sing, nor feeling the organ’s low bellow through my feet, nor indeed the thirty seconds of silence before Martyn Brabbins lowered the baton and unfettered the applause, during which he held the score aloft for us to applaud.

Howells is one of those composers whose work, listened to the first time, often seems to be thoroughly difficult and complex but for a few striking moments which demand a second listen, and then a third, and so on, until its beauty can be heard properly.  This might be said of Hymnus Paradisi, but even a first hearing cannot miss the crescendo of grief just before the three minute mark, nor the audible light which brightens and brightens until it fills the whole work from the Sanctus (22 min) onwards: 

The loss of his son is generally regarded as a clear rupture in Howells’ compositional career as well as in his life.  The music he wrote after 1935 was almost all intended for the Anglican choral tradition (in all he wrote twenty settings of the Evening Canticles), more melismatic and often more searing.  However, Howells did occasionally return to the past for material.  The Hymnus Paradisi itself draws heavily on the Requiem that he had already written.  And I have an idea that the final movement (Holy is the True Light, and passing wonderful…), which begins like this:

…might be a more magnificent, a heavier, yet also a more luminous version, in which wistfulness has hardened into grief, of the opening of the old Howells’ Piano Quartet of 1916 (itself perhaps a response to death, since Howells himself was gravely ill at this point)?

While I am on the subject, I wonder if the second theme of the Shropshire Lad rhapsody of George Butterworth (killed in action in 1916)…

… is quoted in the 1925 piano concerto, by the clarinet once only, at the point below?

To return to this post’s original subject, I would like to record another thought about Hymnus Paradisi: all the luminous chords, the massed choirs and the thundering organ were summoned all for the sake of a child of nine years.  It is too easy to forget, not least in a Britain which I find hardly heeds children, that this is entirely fitting; that is a lesson for us all.

Further reading and listening: 

• B.B.C. Radio 3’s ‘Composer of the Week’ programme on Herbert Howells.
• An article by Simon Heffer about Hymnus Paradisi

Conversation with a Grandmother

Several weeks ago, at Sunday morning Mass, a newborn parishioner was baptised in our church.  Afterwards we were invited to dinner with the family, who are Nigerian — the child’s grandmother had travelled from Nigeria to be present.  We fell into conversation with her, and the subject came round to churchgoing in her home country.  In her parish, she told us, there are four Masses on Sundays (6 a.m., 8 a.m., 10 a.m. and an evening Mass).  She laughed as she told us that the morning Masses all overrun, so that the 8 and 10 o’clock services begin hopelessly late, even to the order of hours!  This is not least due to the fact that the parish church, which holds two thousand worshippers, is actually overflowing on Sundays.  This is not in a particularly large urban area, but in a town between Abuja and the coast.

Nigeria is a country which bears, and has borne, much suffering.  There is still material poverty and political instability.  It is well known that much of the north-east of the country is threatened by Boko Haram, which is convulsed with hatred for Christianity and has had bombs set off in full churches.  Martyrdom is real and even familiar.  I had been aware that the Church in Nigeria was growing nevertheless, but this vignette seems to me to give startling hope.  The new grandmother herself radiated a kind of forthright joy which gave rise to outbursts of “To God be the glory!”… her more reserved British interlocutors struggled to supply the hearty echoes required!

This hope is not only for Nigeria; it overflows into other lands, I think, much as the churches overflow.  This is what the Church is like outside Europe.  Surely this flourishing will beget many vocations — I am thinking of the priesthood in particular.  Among Nigeria’s sons, perhaps among those being baptised even now, will surely be counted a great number of priests.  Many of them might well relish the challenge of the New Evangelisation in the West.  Their confident and joyful faith would make them tremendous missionaries in our sulky, disillusioned culture.

Update, 28th July, 2020.  I have had the sad news that that this lady died last week in Nigeria.  Please pray for her soul; may she see Paradise, and the glory of God in whom she had such joy.