Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning: Christmas P.S.
Jorinda Bells, Jorindel Bells
Hello again, Friends of Mavis. I hadn’t intended to clutter your holiday inbox with still more Mavis Gallant (MG) musings, but this is germane to the season and some might find it of interest.
Reading MG’s early journalism — the hundreds of thousands of words she pounded out on her standard typewriter, features and reviews, for the photo-weekly The Montreal Standard between 1944 and 1950 — and annotating that writing, I was often reminded of how it’s the work of every succeeding generation to discover what every previous generation has already learned and to tailor that discovery to make it fit the particular anxiety of their emergent era. Nothing elemental shifts. We’re born. We die. Between times, we ingest, excrete, breed, and vie for dominance. All that changes, and it doesn’t change much, is the interstitial chatter and the roster of who, for whatever brief span of time, brays loudest.
Every generation looks over its collective shoulder at the one coming along behind and thinks dark, not necessarily irrational, thoughts about the quality of intellect of the heel nippers; worries about the pernicious influences that are generating mind rot. TikTok brain, video game brain, television brain, movie brain, radio brain: each passes the baton in a never-ending deleterious relay. A hundred years ago, it was the funny pages and Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang that were clothed in a cloak of corruption which was then handed down, needing no major alteration, to comic books. Their long season of scrutiny jibed with MG’s tenure at the Standard.
Here are a few of the many, many headlines — 1946, 1947 — that speak to this particular post-war moral panic
What is and what is not suitable for young people to read, and what harms might come from inappropriate exposure to material too hot for the not fully-formed to handle, is one of those chameleon questions that never goes away and changes its stripes to match the decade. MG grappled with it.
MG’s “apprenticeship years”— as she later called them — at the Standard, were characterized by latitude and attitude. She was given liberal, if not absolutely free, rein to choose her subjects and speak her mind and she was purposeful about steering clear of the themes and concerns that might typically have been found on the women’s pages. (One of MG’s colleagues was the tireless Kate Aitken, the Canadian Queen of Home Making, whom she mentions a couple of times with what I read as admiration and fondness, and I wish I knew more about whatever might have been their day-to-day interactions.)
Exceptionally in this regard, MG did write often, and at considerable length, and with comme il faut clarity and certitude about child rearing. Given that she was not then herself, and would never be, an active player in the particular game, she speaks with a confidence both surprising and a bit off-putting about, say, schooling and play and behavioural issues and the latest psychological theories on bringing up baby right.
Any parent hankering after the cutting of a little slack should look elsewhere for succour. MG is often harsh or, well, arrogant in her assertions. Is your child shy? That’s a problem, no one likes a shy child, and it’s all your fault. Is your child afraid of dogs? So easy to avoid, just shoulder your sack of blame and deal with it. Bedtime a challenge? For the love of God, use some common sense! (I actually find such candour refreshing, and that sort of no-nonsense frankness was much more usual in those post-war years, when everyone knew someone who had died and the habit of mollycoddling had been set aside.)
There are times, too, when MG is more Socratic than definitive in her arguments, and that’s the case when she considers childhood reading in “Give the Kids a Gory Story,” published in the Standard June 29, 1946. The illustrations were by Leo Henry.
A time and a reason attaches to everything that’s written, and the genus of “Gory Story” was, I suspect, MG’s reading of The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales, published by Pantheon late in 1944. The translations are by Margaret Hunt, revised by James Stern; there’s an introduction by Padaric Colum, and commentary by Joseph Campbell. It’s still in print; I’ve got a copy on my table.
Here’s the opening paragraph of “Jorinda and Joringel,” about which MG wrote in “Gory Story” in 1946, and which provided the foundation for her own spooky tale of a haunted childhood, “Jorinda and Jorindel,” written round about the same time but not published in The New Yorker until 1959. (I’m not sure why the variance in title — it’s Joringel in the original, Jorindel in the MG version.)
In fairy tales, sometimes, bad things happen to good peasants and the hot coals / nails in barrels punishments doled out to uncharitable stepmothers aren’t really conducive to visions of sugar plums so — should they be struck from the canon? The question is baldly and crudely put, but it’s a pretty fair summation of what was at issue when MG wrote “Gory Story” almost 80 years ago, and those same concerns made the public rounds again 30 years later when Bruno Bettelheim published The Uses of Enchantment. I imagine they still come up as a matter of course in children’s literature classes, and are probably still debated amongst librarians.
Here’s an excerpt from “Give the Kid a Gory Story.”
To many adults, the fuss over fairy tales seems ridiculous. Somewhere along the line, they've heard the expression that make-believe is the heritage of childhood, or that children will have to face reality soon enough so why not let them have their dream world? The answer to that, of course, is whose dream world? The child's or the one you wish you had?
Anyone who has ever worked with children knows that they love fantasy. They constantly make up their own. But unless their parents have deliberately encouraged them to believe their own stories, they know perfectly well which level they're on. “Hansel and Gretel” or “Rapunzel” are fine if the child is old enough to understand them (although they do bother some youngsters); but they should never be related as if they had actually happened. The danger of this is not only the difference between imagination and reality, which many adults would wistfully like to span, but the plain difference between telling a child the truth and telling him a lie.
Few parents nowadays go in for frightening children with the boogie man. Yet they don't stop to consider how frightening a story like "The Little Mermaid" can be. According to one child psychologist, the results may not show right away, except in the case of an extremely sensitive or maladjusted youngster. The harm may crop up years later. To this, the pro-fairy tale group replies that an adult simply cannot judge what frightens a child. Very often, a mother, with years of accumulated fears and impressions behind her, plus a dose of term one psychology, rereads “Beauty and the Beast.” She gets a significance she naturally missed as a child.
"Did I ever read that?" she wonders and promptly tucks it away from the little ones. To such an adult, all folk-lore, including the more common children's fairy tales, are laden with symbols. One example of many is "The Frog Prince," in which an ugly frog insists on a young princess taking him into her bed. He promptly changes into a handsome prince. Another is “The King of the Golden Mountain.” Here, a merchant's son wanders into a dangerous and forbidden palace. After exploring his way through a maze of rooms, he finds a white snake who is really an enchanted princess. She tells him how he can get her out of her difficulties.
"This night twelve men will come: their faces will be black, and they will be hung round with chains … let them do what they will — beat and torment thee… The second night twelve others will come; and the third night twenty-four, who will cut off thy head, but … I shall be free…”
…
By the time a child is old enough to go to a children's library by himself, he is ready to read fairy tales of any kind — providing he knows just where they stand, and if, by some miracle, his parents have managed to let him get to that stage without filling his head full of untruths. It isn't quite the way the parents remember being treated, but after all, as Brock Chisholm has pointed out, we don't want the next generation to be like us, do we?
Probably the rest of you remember Brock Chisholm (b. 1896), but in the event there are among you a few for whom his name rings no silver bells — it didn’t for me — he was a psychiatrist who was the head of medical services for the Canadian army in WW 2. A humanist, highly rational, he riled the nation, and became the target of lavishly snorted scorn, when, as the Deputy Minister of Health and Welfare, in 1945, speaking to group of war-weary parents in Ottawa, he declared that children should be dissuaded from believing in Santa Claus, saying that to do otherwise would permanently impair a child’s ability to think and that he “will become the kind of man who develops a sore back when there is a tough job to do, and refuses to think realistically when war threatens.”
I won’t trouble you with a full recitation of the articles and editorial salvos that followed. Suffice it to say, Dr. Chisholm failed — not for the first or last time — to read the room and the grousing made it as far as the floor of the House of Commons. Nonetheless, he prospered, developed an international reputation, ascended the ranks of the WHO and served there as Director General from 1948 - 1953. Perhaps his presence as a prophet of post-war doom is best summed up by this headline in the Montreal Gazette, May 21 1946: “Brock Chisholm Predicts Death For World Lying To Its Children.” He eventually retired to Victoria, B.C. and died there in 1971.
So there you go. That’s all I have to share, a few more Christmas vapour trails from the jet MG, from my house to yours, with best wishes for a happy holiday, and with thanks for reading, BR
I'm chiming in late, Bill, to say I love the look of your Prairie house. Quite envious, actually.
Bill, hello! You don't know me - friend of Colin H's. Would you like to join us at his b'day dinner on Wed? Let me know, I can send details! :)