When it comes to favourite children's authors, John Masefield's classic kids' book The Midnight Folk, along with its even stranger and more magical sequel The Box of Delights, must certainly have earned him a place in the pantheon.
John Masefield: The Box of Delights (1935)[Illustrated by Judith Masefield (1935) & Faith Jaques (1984)]
I remember recommending these books to Professor D. I. B. Smith while he was supervising my Masters thesis on the novels of John Masefield. Don couldn't see much in them. "Maybe you had to be there," he said. I suppose he meant that unless you read such books at just the right age, when their mixture of talking animals and ambiguous dreamscapes can be assimilated at face value, they're unlikely ever to exert the same charm.
That may be so. But I was brought up on them, and for me they're just as compelling as Through the Looking Glass or The Wind in the Willows (or, for that matter, Norman Lindsay's The Magic Pudding, another staple of our Antipodean childhood).
What I liked best in The Box of Delights were the little vignettes which could only be reached by means of the mysterious box itself. Riding with Herne the Hunter, observing the aftermath of the Siege of Troy, and visiting the court of King Arthur, were all seemingly real experiences sealed within this strange miniature world created by the (fictional) Medieval Magus Arnold of Todi.
The Punch-and-Judy man Cole Hawlings, who guides Kay for much of his quest is, we eventually learn, a contemporary of Arnold's, Ramon Lully - or Ramon Llull (1232-1316): a real person this time - who'd attempted to swap his own elixir of life for the box many centuries before.
I'd never heard of Llull before reading The Box of Delights, and when I began to find out more about him years later, reading France Yates's The Art of Memory, I felt as if the hidden depths of Masefield's book were finally beginning to reveal themselves to me.
If only these mysteries had formed more of a part of the BBC TV adaptation of the book, I would probably have enjoyed it more. As it is, I kept on waiting for my favourite scenes to appear, and was immensely disappointed when they didn't. I'm sure it has its charms for those who watched it as children, but - rather like Don Smith with the book itself - it holds less appeal for me.
In his excellent essay on this particular "musty book" on his Haunted Generation blog, Bob Fischer sees the narrative as one long warning against dwelling too much in the past:
Our collective concept of the past is idealised, even mythologised, and allowing it to intrude into modern life at the expense of the present (no matter how dreary the latter may seem) will inevitably lead to sickness and corruption.Certainly the temptation to freeze the past in a single small compass - as both Arnold and Ramon have attempted to do - is seen as a vital mistake in Masefield's book. It may not be necessary to go as far as Maria, the youngest of the Jones children, who are staying with Kay for the holidays:
Christmas ought to be brought up to date. It ought to have gangsters and aeroplanes, and a lot of automatic pistols.This atmosphere of 1930s pulp fiction, too, is shown to have its perils, when Maria is herself kidnapped by the desperate gang who are after the box. If there is an overall theme in the book, it might be the importance of maintaining a live tradition - the tradition of Christmas in the Cathedral, for instance - rather than neglecting it either through soul-sapping nostalgia or blatant greed.
In keeping with this idea of the need to maintain live traditions, another important creative resource for Masefield throughout his career was the Arthurian legend. There's a definite overlap between his work purely for children, and his work in this particular part-historical, part-fantastic region of the imagination.
The Knights of the Round Table appear in some of Kay's magical journeys in The Box of Delights, and the stories of King Arthur and Camelot also formed a major component of Masefield's fascination with the psychogeography of English places: his birthplace Ledbury, in Herefordshire, for instance, as well as Boar's Hill, near Oxford, where he lived after the First World War.
My own interest in Arthur, sparked by an early reading of the book All About King Arthur by historian (and mystic) Geoffrey Ashe, may seem rather more anomalous, given I was born and brought up in the South Pacific. Whatever the motivations behind it, though, it led me to look out for as many versions as possible of the Arthurian mythos in everything I read subsequently.
The story itself - with its strong underpinning of jealousy, betrayal, and ultimate doom - is, I would have to concede, not one that's entirely comprehensible to children. How are they meant to empathise with characters such as Guinevere, Iseult, or (for that matter) Mordred?
I certainly didn't. But the attempt to do so helped me a lot with my own growing up. Neither Rosemary Sutcliff's Arthur nor Mary Stewart's Merlin - not to mention T. H. White's "Ill-made knight" Lancelot - were straightforward characters, and the stories about them were not especially easy to fathom.
Masefield's version of the Arthurian legend was equally curious and offbeat. On the one hand he seemed determined to claw back to the fifth century roots of these stories. On the other hand, he was drawn to the melodrama of Tristan and Lancelot and the preset, fatalistic love stories they seemed doomed to reenact.
Hence his attempt at the first of these stories in the play Tristan and Isolt. Hence also his attempt at a more complete Arthurian cycle in Midsummer Night and Other Tales in Verse.
This theme in his work would culminate in his last novel, Badon Parchments.
Masefield's fascination with Byzantium was at its height when he wrote this book, so the form that it takes, a series of reports sent back to the Imperial court by Byzantine envoys to the last surviving embers of Roman Britain, in the person of King Arthur and his army, is not as counter-intuitive as it might otherwise appear.
As a novel, though, it's almost nouveau roman-like in its dryness and avoidance of melodrama. Perhaps it was just that he was exhausted with narrative prose by this point - it had, after all, been forty years since he published his first novel, Captain Margaret, in 1908 - or perhaps it was just an experiment that didn't quite come off, but Badon Parchments still seems a curious coda to these two deep fixations of his: Constantinople and King Arthur.
Which is perhaps as good a reason as any to shift our discussion to that earlier era, when Masefield as a young writer was experimenting with different forms of expression - both in order to define the nature of his own talent, and to make a living in pre-war Grub Street. Children's fiction must have seemed, at that time, one of the more obvious genres for him to try.
It's pretty impressive, even so, that he managed to publish no fewer than four boys' books in the years 1910-1911, before the immense success of his first long narrative poem, The Everlasting Mercy, set him on a more individual path.
The first of them, Martin Hyde, is a rather Henty-esque historical novel about the Monmouth rebellion in the 1680s.
It's an interesting book insofar as it attempts to parallel the romantic atmosphere of Martin's experiences ("We were off. I was on my way to Holland. I was a conspirator travelling with a King. There ahead of me was the fine hull of the schooner la Reina, waiting to carry us to all sorts of adventure ...") with the rather more prosaic nature of everyday life aboard ship:
There you are,' said the mate of the schooner. 'Now down on your knees. Scrub the floor here. See you get it mucho blanco.'The older Martin, who is narrating the story of his earlier life, has various sage reflections to make on this experience, but is honest enough not to attribute them to his younger self.
He left me feeling much ashamed at having to work like a common ship's boy, instead of like a prince's page, which is what I had thought myself.
I will not tell you how I finished the deck. I will say only this, that at the end I began to take a sort of pride or pleasure in making the planks white. Afterwards, I always found that there is this pleasure in manual work. There is always pleasure of a sort in doing anything that is not very easy.As for the book itself, its main virtue is the various ingenious ways Masefield finds to undermine the more facile traditions of boys' adventure fiction, as established by authors such as Ballantyne and Stevenson, with a dose of cold reality: 'You don't know what an adventurous life is', the narrator informs us:
I will tell you. It is a life of sordid unquiet, pursued without plan, like the life of an animal.
Its successor, A Book of Discoveries, is more in the tradition of books like Richard Jefferies' Bevis: The Story of a Boy (1882) or Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill (1906) than adventure yarns such as Treasure Island or King Solomon's Mines. It's a kind of bildungsroman, depicting the everyday adventures and explorations of two young boys, Mac and Robin, "on a tributary of the River Tame in the village of Water Orton in Warwickshire."
Their mentor, Mr. Hampton, who catches them trespassing on his land, is (depending on how you look at it) either a tediously didactic and crotchety taskmaster, who lectures the boys incessantly, or an idealised self-portrait of the author himself, itching to correct the erroneous attitudes of the younger generation with a good dose of hard work. Take your pick. Here's a sample of his conversational style:
Xenophon, in his OEconomicus, praises the beautiful order of a big Phoenician ship which he saw at Athens. He makes it clear that even then ships were fitted 'with many machines to oppose hostile vessels, many weapons for the men, all the utensils for each company that take their meals together,' besides the freight of merchandise, and the men themselves. Yet all these things, he says, 'were stowed in a space not much larger than is contained in a room that holds half a score dinner-couches.' How big do you suppose that would be, eh?I like that little "eh?" at the end, as if that's sufficient to transform it all into light banter. Admittedly, it's not all as dry as that, and the boys' finds throughout the book, which include a cave with a number of interesting flints and inscriptions, along with the remnants of a Roman pay-chest surrounded by small heaps of coins, go a long way towards proving Hampton's contention that:
the wonderful discoveries lie under our noses all the time, if we only had the sense to make them.
I love stories. I prefer them to be touched with beauty and strangeness. I like them to go on for a long time, in a river of narrative; and I like tributaries to come in upon the main stream, and exquisite bays and backwaters to open out, into all of which the mind can go exploring after one has learned the main stream.This passage from a 1944 essay of Masefield's with the Blakean title "I Want! I Want!" is a good description of Lost Endeavour, to my mind the richest - though possibly the least popular - of his pre-war boys' books.
In the chapter of my 1984 MA thesis on Masefield devoted to these books, I describe it as "a Treasure Island as Masefield felt it ought to be":
The parallels are very close – even down to the actual treasure on an island – but Masefield is concerned to show what such a life might actually have been like to experience. None of his villains are likeable – unlike Long John Silver – and his pirates in particular are potrayed as brutal ruffians and animals.His twin protagonists, the gloomy boy Charles and the irresponsible grown-up dreamer Theo, reverse the pattern of the romantic Jim Hawkins and the business-like Squire Trelawny. The pattern of the successful quest for riches characteristic of such tales is also inverted in Masefield's novel, where "the meaning shows in the defeated thing" (as he out in in his much-anthologised poem "The Wanderer").
The value of the book lies in its incidental details, such as this description of a tropical forest:
All a wilderness of green things, a chaos of vegetables. No, it is not a chaos, it is a world of the most exquisite order. Every leaf is turned so as to catch life from its surroundings; the greatest and sweetest and fittest kind of life, either of sun or air or water. Not a blossom, not a twig, not a fruit there but has striven, I will not say with its whole intellect, but with its whole nature, to make of itself the utmost possible, and to give to itself in its brief life a deeper crimson, a more tense, elastic toughness, a finer sweetness and odour. Ah! the life that goes on there, the abundant torrent of life, the struggle for beauty and delicacy ... Ah! that forest. It was cool within there, out of the sun, so cool that it was like walking in a well; a dim, cool, beautiful well, full of pale green water from the sea. The flowers called to me: 'I am crimson,' 'I am like a pearl,' 'I am like sapphires.' The fruits called to me that they tasted like great magical moons."Tell me of your cities", concludes Masefield's narrator, "I tell you of the garden and the orchard, where life is not a struggle for wealth, but for nobleness of form and colour."
Unfortunately these poetic extensions of the possibilities of children's fiction were not really built on in Jim Davis, Masefield's final pre-war essay in the genre.
Like its predecessor Martin Hyde, it's a
traditional boys' book in form – told in the first person by the eponymous hero – and the action unfolds in an early nineteenth century Devonshire village.This time, however, it's a story about smugglers. To do him justice, Masefield tries to stress the reality rather than the romance of so stressful a trade. In fact:
so accurately are Jim's reactions to his sufferings depicted, that at times the book becomes a little too poignant to bear. Jim's solitary march to London, to 'see the Lord Mayor' is a case in point, and I suspect that both Masefield and his readers rejoiced when he decided to bring the book to a swift conclusion ... There is no real leavening of 'romance' in the book.Even Jim's protector Marah Gorsuch, though quite an attractive figure, is hardly a trustworthy one:
I had never really liked the man – I had feared him too much to like him – but he had looked after me for so long, and had been, in his rough way, so kind to me, that I cried for him as though he were my only friend.In fact, as I commented in 1984, "Jim Davis ... reads almost like a tract against adventures."
It's nice to record that Masefield's penultimate children's book, Dead Ned, written some thirty years later, and subtitled "The Autobiography of a Corpse Who Rediscovered Life Within the Coast of Dead Ned and Came to What Fortune You Shall Hear", is in many ways the most vivid and enthralling of all his many novels.
His grasp of eighteenth century idiom is far superior to that of subsequent writers such as Leon Garfield or Philip Pullman. It certainly helps to have a poet's sensitivity to language when your material - murder, prison, execution, slave ships - is as melodramatic as this.
There's something of the atmosphere of a nightmare or a fever dream about Ned Mansell's story. It's not so much an escape from the horrors of the late 1930s, as an attempt to see them from a different angle.
Unfortunately its eagerly awaited sequel, Live and Kicking Ned: A Continuation of the Tale of Dead Ned, cannot really sustain the pace and excitement of the original.
The material - a search for a mysterious lost city in the depths of darkest Africa - is as good as ever. Rider Haggard thrived on just such plots. Pierre Benoît's famous (and much filmed) novel L'Atlantide (1919) is a classic piece of French adventure fiction.
I was a little shocked when I found out that the Puffin edition of the novel had been abridged . It was, admittedly, done by Vivian Garfield (neé Vivian Alcock), Leon Garfield's second wife, and a successful children's author in her own right. When, however, some years later I managed to locate:
a copy of the original novel, I began to understand the motives of the editors at Puffin Books in abridging it. Certainly it read better in its original form, but there was a great deal of unnecessary detail about the bureaucratic infighting in the Lost City, which was threatened by an imminent invasion. Clearly Masefield meant this as satire on the unpreparedness of England for the oncoming Second World War, but it did have the effect of undercutting the realism of the rest of the narrative.I'm not sure that the novel really works very well in either form. There's a lot of great material there, though.
How, then, should one conclude? Eight of Masefield's lifetime total of 23 novels were written for children - that's (roughly) one in three. He was not perhaps so well suited to the form as, say, Rudyard Kipling, who found it the ideal way to convey his somewhat reactionary views without the full apparatus of authoritarianism and militarism which pervades so much of his writing for adults.
The Masefield of the children's books is not really that different from the one we meet in the rest of his work - witness the recurrence of many of the themes and characters we encounter in The Midnight Folk and its sequel (Abner Brown, for example: along with the imaginary South American country of Santa Barbara) in earlier "grown-up" novels such as Sard Harker and ODTAA.
I suspect that the children's books have dated better, though. The genre of the "rattling good yarn", one of Masefield's specialities, has now been superseded by more brutal and pitiless thrillers. But I'm pretty sure that books such as Dead Ned and The Box of Delights will continue to delight imaginative children as long as there are libraries with long dusty sets of shelves to discover them in ...
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Children's Books:
- Martin Hyde: The Duke's Messenger (1909)
- Martin Hyde: The Duke’s Messenger. 1910. Redhill, Surrey: Wells Gardner, Darton and Co. Ltd., 1949.
- A Book of Discoveries (1910)
- A Book of Discoveries. Illustrated by R. Gordon Browne. London: Wells, Gardner Darton & Co., 1910.
- Lost Endeavour (1910)
- Lost Endeavour. 1910. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, n.d.
- Jim Davis (1911)
- Jim Davis. 1911. Illustrated by Mead Schaeffer. London: Wells Gardner, Darton and Co. Ltd., 1924.
- The Midnight Folk (1927)
- The Midnight Folk. 1927. Illustrated by Rowland Hilder. World Books Children’s Library. London: The Reprint Society, 1959.
- The Midnight Folk. 1927. Abridged by Patricia Crampton. 1984. Fontana Lions. London: William Collins Sons & Co Ltd., 1985.
- The Box of Delights: or When the Wolves Were Running (1935)
- The Box of Delights, or When the Wolves were Running. 1935. Illustrated by Judith Masefield. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1958.
- The Box of Delights; When The Wolves Were Running. 1935. Illustrated by Faith Jaques. Abridged by Patricia Crampton. 1984. Fontana Lions. London: William Collins Sons & Co Ltd., 1984.
- Dead Ned (1938)
- Dead Ned: The Autobiography of a Corpse Who recovered Life within the Coast of Dead Ned and came to what Fortune you shall hear. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1938.
- Dead Ned: The Autobiography of a Corpse Who Recovered Life within the Coast of Dead Ned and Came to What Fortune you shall hear. 1938. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.
- Live and Kicking Ned (1939)
- Live and Kicking Ned: A Continuation of the Tale of Dead Ned. 1939. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1939.
- Live and Kicking Ned: A Continuation of the Tale of Dead Ned. Abridged by Vivian Garfield. 1939. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.
- Tristan and Isolt: A Play in Verse (1927)
- Tristan and Isolt: A Play in Verse. London: William Heinemann, 1927.
- Midsummer Night and Other Tales in Verse (1928)
- Included in: The Collected Poems. 1923. Enlarged Edition. 1932. Enlarged Edition. 1938. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1941.
- Badon Parchments (1947)
- Badon Parchments. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1947.
- Arthurian Poets: John Masefield. Ed. David Llewellyn Dodds (1994)
- Arthurian Poets: John Masefield. Ed. David Llewellyn Dodds. Arthurian Studies, 32. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1994.
Books about King Arthur:
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David Llewellyn Dodds, ed. Arthurian Poets: John Masefield (1994)Arthurian Poets Series:
[1990-1996]
- Arthurian Poets: Matthew Arnold & William Morris. Ed. James P. Carley. Arthurian Studies. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1990.
- Arthurian Poets: Edwin Arlington Robinson. Ed. James P. Carley. Arthurian Studies. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1990.
- Arthurian Poets: John Masefield. Ed. David Llewellyn Dodds. Arthurian Studies, 32. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1994.
- Arthurian Poets: Charles Williams. Ed. David Llewellyn Dodds. Arthurian Studies, 24. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1995.
- Arthurian Poets: Algernon Charles Swinburne. Arthurian Studies. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1996.
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