Bruce Charlton's Notions

Enid Blyton was on the side of Good, a writer of genius, and (genuinely, not faked) a Great Woman: so of course she has-been and is a prime target for the totalitarian Establishment

Over the years I have written a couple of posts about my admiration for Enid Blyton. 

In 2013 I discussed why it was that the British intellectual classes always failed to perceive Blyton's unmatched quality as a writer for the youngest children. 

Then - a couple of years ago - I amplified and confirmed the aspect that what 'They' really hate, hate, hate about Blyton is that she was effectively and explicitly on the side of Good in her writings: she aimed to be, and was, a Good Influence on children (Good, by Christian standards). 

This, combined with her unmatched popularity, makes Blyton very dangerous to those who have taken the side against God in the spiritual war of this world. 

I am also very interested in Enid Blyton the woman, since she was a true genius (as defined in my Genius Famine book). 

Most real women geniuses are literary, and usually worked in prose - and in literature Women have had a highly significant effect; although no woman has matched the supreme heights of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare or Goethe. 

Thus Jane Austen and George Eliot are among the most important of novelists; and modern children's literature (a very significant genre) was mostly a product of women like Frances Hodgson Burnett and Edith Nesbit. This continues with JK Rowling. 

However, it is a fact that women geniuses are often, even more often than men geniuses, subject to 'mental pathology' - neuroticism, instability, self-destructiveness (including sexually). 

And Enid Blyton was - despite her almost superhuman efficiency as a writer, or perhaps related to it - was no exception. Her two marriages and divorce were apparently driven by a calculated selfishness; while a short period of (apparent) mid-life sexual promiscuity had a reckless and self-destructive quality.  

This makes Blyton what modern leftists mean by 'a hypocrite'; in other words, her moral values were higher than her own behaviour. Also she kept this information out of public knowledge - where, if known, it would surely have been harmful to her reputation and sales. 

And there was of course a further 'hypocrisy' to the extent that Blyton presented herself as dedicated mother; when being the most prolific published author ever, and running a business empire, and sustaining contact with a huge fan base - naturally meant that the time spent on mothering was inevitably considerably sub-optimal. 

But - thanks to Jesus Christ - we are not judged by our sinful behavior but by our choices: by 'what side we take' in the spiritual war between God and Satan. And Blyton was solidly On God's Side - which is exactly why she is so hated by the left.  

If Enid Blyton had been a subversive writer, whose public persona and work encouraged immorality; then she would have been a poster girl for the left. If she had flaunted her bad behaviour and justified it by saying it was Good - she would have been admired and praised. 

If, instead of promoting truth-telling, beauty and honesty - Blyton's writings had subtly advocated sly-selfishness, under-age promiscuity, divorce and destruction - she would have been the darling of the intellectuals - and would have been taught in colleges, featured on bank-notes and stamps, and held-up as an exemplary Strong and Successful Woman (which she certainly was). 

So Enid Blyton has always been attacked, denigrated, bowdlerized and suppressed by the mainstream Left and this continues; while her enduring fame and influence (despite this) is almost wholly a bottom-up phenomenon: driven by generations and multitudes of young children who love reading her; and of ordinary parents who are glad that they do!  

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I read a great deal of Enid Blyton in my early and middle childhood, and was aware of the continual denigration of her work which came from the likes of critics, teachers and librarians.

I just ignored them and carried on reading.

Since her brooks are for the younger child, there is not much to attract adult readers, so from teens onwards I don't think I re-read any Blyton.

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Then when my children came along I read some Blyton with them, and read Barbara Stoney's biography of Enid Blyton - which I re-read with great enjoyment and profit last week.

It is very clear now that Enid Blyton was a genuine female genius - not just in terms of the quality (bearing in mind that she is par excellence a writer for children and must be evaluated as such), and quantity of her work - which was simply staggering (topping-off which was that she did not even employ a literary agent or secretary, yet solicited letters from readers and personally answered a huge mailbag) - but a genius, too, in terms of her mode of work, her way of thinking.

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Blyton left a detailed account of her method of composition in some fascinating letters to a psychologist called Peter McKellar. Here is part of an excerpt given by Barbara Stoney:

I shut my eyes for a few minutes, with my portable typewriter on my knees; and I make my mind a blank and wait - and then, as clearly as I could see real children, my characters stand before me in mind's eye... The story is enacted almost as if I had a private cinema screen there... I don't know what is going to happen... Sometimes a character makes a joke, a really funny one that makes me laugh as I type it on my paper and I think, "Well, I couldn't have thought of that myself in hundred years!", and then I think: "Well, who did think of it?

Blyton thus wrote in a trance state, a shamanic state - and her mastery of this state was the key to the reality of her world and her tremendous productivity. 

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In the days when Blyton was criticized without restraint, people used to say she was a 'bad writer' in the sense that her prose was supposedly badly formed and her plotting was supposedly crude. 

This is false. Her prose is clean and smooth and the books are very tightly written. Compared with most of the feted modern children writers - whose work is often padded-out, flaccid - Blyton's stories are all meat with no gristle.

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So why was she so hated?

The answer is obvious, her work was designed to exemplify and promote Goodness:

...my public, bless them, feel in my books a sense of security, an anchor, a sure knowledge that right is right, and that such things as courage and kindness deserve to be emulated. Naturally the morals or ethics are intrinsic to the story - and therein lies their true power.  

Blyton was brought up a nonconformist Christian, a Baptist, but (as with many geniuses) her observance and belief faded as her created talent waxed.

She consequently did not live fully by Christian ideals, especially in terms of the sexual arena - marriage and divorce and remarriage, both to divorced men; however, unlike most literary geniuses, Blyton retained almost all her Christian practices, ethics and principles. Indeed, she wrote a great deal of Christian literature for children. 

Blyton was, therefore, that thing most loathed by the Left - a hypocrite. That is someone whose life does not match up to their publicly stated beliefs. Not all that much of a hypocrite, in fact, but enough for the Left who wanted to destroy her.

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To try and destroy, Blyton, the Leftist establishment said (and are still saying) all kinds of incompetent and ignorant nonsense and gibberish (indeed, I have never read or heard so much pure garbage talked about any other writer) to conceal that what the Left really hate about Enid Blyton was her effectiveness as a writer, and that her books were a good influence on children.

Therefore, being both good and effective and amazingly productive; quite naturally (to the Leftist mindset) Blyton should be slandered, ridiculed, bowdlerized, suppressed.  

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My childhood, from the dawn of consciousness (aged about four) to age nine, was a progression through the worlds of Enid Blyton.

The short stories about fairies and suchlike were there at the beginning, then came Noddy (we owned the EP record I have posted above), and at the end were the adventure books: Secret Seven, Famous Five, Five Find-Outers etc.

The phase lasted about five years, and then I moved onto more 'grown-up' books - such as the Lone Pine Club by Malcolm Saville, Narnia, Biggles...

But those years of early childhood are spun-out in memory, and were extremely intense at the time; so I have always been very grateful to Enid Blyton, and had warm and positive feelings about her. These were enhanced by my recognition of her extraordinary character and achievements, from reading the Barbara Stoney biography.


Yet even as a child I became aware of a powerful strain of disdain and spitefulness directed against Blyton. This began in the middle 1950s, and has been maintained and strengthened since (e.g. the recent biopic).

The systematic denigration emanated from the higher levels of British society: the intellectual ruling elites and their willing minions in government and officialdom, in libraries, and among teachers.

There is no mystery to this hostility - at least not once you have recognised that the British intellectual elites were the first class to become corrupted into strategic evil. No doubt they correctly recognised that the most popular and prolific young children's author was a formidable enemy.

Blyton was primarily a story teller; but in 1949 she was explicit about her secondary aim:

I'm not only out to tell stories - much as I love this - I am out to inculcate decent thinking, loyalty, honesty, kindliness, and all the things that children should be taught.

Given that her works encourage values so directly opposed to those of the modern ruling caste; it is obvious why Enid Blyton's reputation has been treated so badly for so long.

Spite, spitefulness is a strong candidate for The Worst Sin (I've blogged on this often). 

Fadedpage.com is a great website run by volunteers who produce excellent free downloadable online books from authors out of copyright - your one-stop shop for Biggles or Enid Blyton, for instance. 

Well, they have just made available The Great Divorce by CS Lewis - which I regard as the best book I've ever read about sin, repentance, and what makes people choose Hell. 

If you haven't already read TGD: why not try it? 

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L Jagi Lamplighter, The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin, 2013. pp 380.

This was one of the most wholly enjoyable books I have read for some time, thoroughly entertaining and thoroughly interesting; an experience especially welcome coming from an author new to me. And unusual; given that I am increasingly hard to please, therefore not always reading fiction nowadays. I may go for a few weeks without having a novel 'on the go' - and even longer if re-reads are not counted.

It is in the Young Adult fantasy genre, set in a co-educational boarding school for sorcerers - something like a more wholesome and hopeful Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams: that is to say, a highly intelligent and witty fiction, bubbling with ideas.

The action is seen through the eyes of a thirteen year old girl who - as well as being an untrained sorcerer - has (inherited from her mother) a special power of memory, with total recall and rewind facilities. This ability is central to the plot - and depicted very convincingly. She is just starting at school, and the action of the book unfolds over the first days, consisting of detailed scenes almost in 'real time'.

As might be expected from a young teen heroine and in the 'girls boarding school genre' (a few Enid Blyton examples of which I read as a kid); nearly all the characters are depicted as very good looking, but in different ways and degrees; and life is seen through a lens of friends and friendship-groups. In addition, each child and teacher seems to have some distinctive magical or personal ability - rather like Marvel or DC superhero teams - so the characters are not inter-changeable.

My point is that the style is light, humourous, somewhat detached. Although there is plenty of emotion and action; these have a 'classical' objectivity - more like a Shaw play or a Mozart opera, than the emotional focus of Shakespeare or Puccini! Rachel Griffin has its passions and romances; but is a world away from the 'hormone storms' and doomed love of most YA fiction. The young heroine is precociously intelligent, sensible, philosophical as well as empathic - and consequently dominates the situation in a way which is essentially feminine - but tom-boyishly feminine. 

So, from my perspective, Rachel Griffin was a completely-successful example of its type - and had me beguiled and mentally-stimulated throughout. And I was pleased to note that this is the first of a series, and there is another Rachel Griffin book for me to look forward to!

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The question arises because I saw a video of Enid Blyton - at her peak, probably the most prolific fiction writer (up to 10,000 published words per day at her peak, apparently) - typing with two fingers (and with the typewriter in her lap).  

This seems to be normal - I mean that most of the best writers who type, are not 'touch typists' - but instead type with two (or a few*) fingers while looking at the keyboard. 

The only outstanding writer I know of who was a proper typist was Philip K Dick - who learned touch typing at school, and could work as a professional copy typist/ secretary. He was also a very fast fiction writer at his peak - and most of his best novels were done in his most rapid-publishing era of the early and middle 1960s. 

Readers may be able to provide other counter-examples from among the very best writers since the invention of typewriters. 

But what is surprising is how many writers, including most of the most productive, do not touch type. 

I think the reason is that not many people can think faster than two-fingered typing speed - most are indeed much slower; and when one is composing then it does not matter if one looks at the fingers from time to time. 

So typing speed is seldom a constraint on speed of writing. 

*I am mostly a three-fingered typist - index and middle fingers of the right hand and index of the left. All of my family are, however, touch typists who do not need to look at the keyboard - and my daughter is very rapid indeed. They have often 'gone on' at me, saying I ought to learn to type properly because it would help with my writing. Yet I am the published writer and they are not; so I have carried on ignoring their advice... It is probably because I use that third finger, instead of sticking to two, that I am not a better writer.

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Continuing from:

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/drama-is-nearly-all-ephemeral.html

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Last Christmastide I had the experience of discovering that my favourite TV programme ever was no good:

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/dont-forget-to-write-favourite-tv.html

This is now becoming a pattern. Last week I bought a DVD of the 6 X 1 hour, 1985 TV drama Edge of Darkness - written by Troy Kennedy Martin, and starring Bob Peck. I have always said that this was at the pinnacle of TV drama, and contained one of the great acting performances with Bob Peck.

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In re-watching, I knew that I would now be out of sympathy with the eco-thriller premise (back in 1985 I was a member of both Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth and a Subscriber to the Schumacher Society's Resurgence magazine - and all the rest of it...).

But it was worse than that. Edge of Darkness just wasn't very good. It was incredibly slow, for reasons that seems pretentious rather than dramatically justified; Peck's performance was uneven and unable to convince - and included more than one unconvincing 'breakdown and scream' episode (there were *far* too many of these!); the plot was contrived, full of coincidences and pumped with trivialized murders; the characters were cynical, crude and stereotyped; and the famous climax was terribly disappointing on re-viewing.

My star rating dropped from five (out of five) to just two.

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My point is that drama relies on topicality to a far greater extent than the other literary arts. A really effective and enjoyable drama can becomealmost un-watchable very quickly - as the topicality subsides - and indeed, a drama with which you do not share the assumptions is very difficult to enjoy in the first place.

I remember watching Look Back in Anger by John Osborne,from 1956, which revolutionized the post-war theatre; had a huge impact. Twenty years later it had become not only dull, but positively embarrassing.

This does not happen with novels! I can re-read novels which I especially enjoyed ten, twenty, forty years ago - and I can always enjoy them now; maybe not quite as much, but I do enjoy them - even children's stories like Enid Blyton or the Jennings books by Anthony Buckeridge. 

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My conclusion: Drama is different - and usually inferior.

Or, maybe it is too easy to write high impact but ephemeral drama: the 'theatrical' experience casts a spell which persuades us that there is more going-on than really is there.

But most drama is ephemeral, very little lasts - and the counter-examples of Shakespeare and Shaw are merely exceptions that prove the rule. 

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If you had asked me last week what was the most impressive literary town (not city) in England; I would probably have said Keswick, in the Lake District - despite that the major figure among Lakeland writers - William Wordsworth - was born and resided nearby, rather than in Keswick itself. 

But I now realize that the prize must go to Beaconsfield (pronounced "Beckonsfield") in Berkshire. 

I should have noticed the fact years ago, but had not made the connection until I began listening to the audiobook of Terry Pratchett's authorized biography "A Life with Footnotes". 

I had not clocked that Pratchett was born and raised in Beaconsfield; but I knew that GK Chesterton had been a long-term resident, and that Robert Frost had also lived there while he was in England. Already a very impressive trio!

But when I checked the relevant page in Wikipedia I was reminded that Enid Blyton had also resided in that small town; along with a large number of other eminent authors including Edmund Burke, Benjamin Disraeli, and Alison Uttley. 

While Beaconsfield's roster probably does not match Concord, Massachusetts (Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott...) in terms of literary significance and influence - it is nonetheless probably unbeatable in the UK. 

Or is it? 

Any other suggestions?