Abstract
In this essay, I will be looking at four particular stages of my reading habits prior to adulthood and questioning how they might have affected my reading and writing practice without my realizing it. By doing this I hope to re-examine my early literary journey under the lens of Literary Criticism. In particular, I will be focussing on Marxist and Feminist critical theory when considering the first times I read and enjoyed certain works of creative writing more than others between the ages of 5 and 15.
The texts I will be looking at are the stories of Enid Blyton, A Kestrel For A Knave by Barry Hines, The UK comic book, Action, and the poem ‘V’ by Tony Harrison. All of these have, I believe, played an essential part in shaping me both as a reader and a writer.
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I will start the essay by introducing myself, the reader, and placing myself in the historical, social, and economic environment I grew up in. I will then re-examine from memory my original relationship with each of these works from my perspective as a working-class boy, looking at them again but this time after a period of between 40 and 50 years, questioning how the individual I was might have shaped my relationship with these texts as much as the texts themselves.
Setting The Scene - Introducing Class and Gender
The first thing I am going to do is set the scene for this literary journey we are about to re-examine, in order to place it in an appropriate context. I, the reader, am a 5-year-old boy. I live with my parents in a council housing estate on the outskirts of a major city in the North of England. The year is 1968.
My father is a semi-skilled manual worker and is the main breadwinner of our family. He is also the shop steward of the union where he works. He is not a big reader of books. He buys two tabloids every weekday and three on a Sunday[footnoteRef:1], but his book collection consists of a small mix of World War II stories, westerns, and a couple of bawdy British comedies. There are perhaps a dozen titles in total tucked away in his wardrobe. Ironically the only book with any literary merit I can recall, the only one that might not be considered coarse, vulgar, or pulp in nature appears to have been ‘Last Exit To Brooklyn’ by Hubert Selby Jr. Looking back though, I suspect my father was far more curious about this book’s notoriety than he was in the way that the text of the novel broke away from the restrictiveness of structuralism.[footnoteRef:2] [1: My father bought The Sun and The Daily Mirror. As a boy, I was unaware that the two were polar opposites on the political spectrum, each with its own editorial slant. To me a newspaper contained facts; except for the problem page, readers’ letters, and one column put aside for what the paper thought or ‘said’.] [2: ‘Last Exit To Brooklyn was at the center of a court case brought against the publishers in the UK. The prosecution argued that the book was likely to be corrupt. The jury was all male. The trial lasted nine days; on November 23, 1966, the jury returned a guilty verdict. The ruling was reversed in 1968. The text disregards the rules of grammar, creating a staccato style to reflect the discordant environment and lifestyles the book describes, and to accurately convey dialect as spoken by the characters. ]
My mother supplemented the family income by working part-time as a cleaner and school dinner lady. Unlike my father, my mother read regularly. She was particularly fond of Mills and Boon's romances, and the novels of Catherine Cookson. She would buy one, read it, and then return it to the shop in exchange for another. This was a time when some of the smaller, independent bookshops would sell second, third, and fourth-hand paperbacks until the copies fell apart.
I was the oldest of two boys by 3 years, and I read almost constantly. I read the books I bought from shops, the books I borrowed from the library, read comics I spent my allowance on, my father’s newspapers, my mother’s magazines, and the backs of the cereal boxes during breakfast. I read anything that caught my eye that I could get my hands on. My bedroom was the only room in the house with a bookcase because I was the only member of the family who owned enough books to warrant one. My younger brother has, to this day, read not one single book since he left school in the early 1980s.
As a child, I was expected to earn my allowance by carrying out chores. Whilst most of these duties were basic self-care and living skills (keeping my room tidy, cleaning my teeth properly, setting the dinner table, etc) it did instill in me at an early age the concept of labor and the workforce.
I knew my parents identified as working class. I knew that they both voted for the Labour party. I knew that my father’s role as a shop steward was to advocate for his fellow workers’ rights in the workplace. I was basically raised in what would be regarded as a left-wing, working-class household, with traditional gender boundaries in place. My world was binary, divided into ‘men and women’, ‘rich and poor’, ‘Labour and Tory’, ‘BBC and ITV’, and ‘us and them’.[footnoteRef:3] [3: This binary outlook might be most closely reflected in the poem ‘V’ by Tony Harrison, which I will look at in more detail later on in the essay.]
‘Us’ was people like me and my family; workers who toiled to live, to pay the rent, to put food on the table, to replace the scuffed school shoes and torn trousers (often already hand-me-downs from older cousins), to pay for a week spent in a Bed and Breakfast in Scarborough or Bridlington once a year, to ensure Santa visited every Christmas Eve. I knew that “them” was my teachers, my father’s bosses, the policeman who walked the beat on the streets where I played out, the man who owned the local shop a few streets away, even the posher kids whose parents might both work in offices.
I was raised to feel proud of the fact I was working class, that I earned my money, and that life was some sort of noble struggle against the forces of oppression; only I seldom saw either of my parents put up any sort of struggle. Even my father’s position as a shop steward seemed to be an inconvenience he reluctantly endured because none of his fellow workers wanted the responsibility.
On reflection, I might be tempted to argue that my own personal view of the working class man was closer to what Richard Hoggart refers to as a ‘middle-class Marxist’s view of the working classes’ and considered myself more as the noble savage than a pawn of the capitalist system.
Enid Blyton
The first writer whose books I collected was Enid Blyton; starting with her fantastical stories for younger children before progressing to the ‘Famous Five’ and ‘Secret Seven books she wrote for older children.
Let us look at this first stage of my literary journey from the untutored viewpoint of a young working-class reader who, it just so happens, will one day become a writer. I have often cited the ‘Enchanted Wood’ and ‘Magic, Faraway Tree stories as being a huge and enduring influence on my writing. I enjoyed the episodic nature of the books as well as the fantasy elements.
I did struggle more with Blyton’s stories written for older children, however. There was something about them that didn’t sit comfortably with me. At first, I thought it might be the lack of fantasy elements, but if that was the case then why did I enjoy reading other books with no fantasy to them?
Blyton’s famous five and secret seven children were undoubtedly middle class, but Blyton is generally considered to have failed in her portrayals of class. It has been acknowledged that there was an undocumented ban on Blyton by the BBC. This ban came to light during a documentary on the writer. The documentary showed that whereas “plenty of middle-class parents…encouraged their children to embrace books – read often and read anything – Blyton was the exception”[footnoteRef:4]. [4: Michael Hann, The BBC's ban on Enid Blyton says more about its shortcomings than hers (16th November 2009 ) [accessed 10 July 2019].]
Now let us consider this love of mine for the earlier works of Blyton, and my discomfort with regards to the ‘Famous Five’ and ‘Secret Seven’ books I read a few years later, but this time looking at them through the lens of Literary Criticism.
Any modern-day reading of Enid Blyton’s work is going to be problematic. This is borne out by the fact that some of her work has been revised in order to avoid causing offense; most famously the removal of ‘gollywogs’ from her books for younger children.
From a Marxist theory perspective the class lines in Blyton’s adventure books are crudely drawn; contrasting the smart, eloquent middle-class child heroes with the scruffier, working-class ‘ruffian’ who sometimes tags along as the five thwart the plans of the vulgar anti-establishment smugglers and thieves they encounter. The powerful are the establishment children; the offspring of middle-class professionals. The villains are enemies of the state, criminals, as vulgar as Magwitch in ‘Great Expectations’. And yet, as Hoggart points out, “…Pip and Joe, at the beginning of Great Expectations – to choose one example from hundreds – automatically hope that King George’s men will not catch the prisoners who escaped from the hulks”. Here, the noble working class blacksmith sides with the escaped villains, rather than the soldiers, the tools of ‘them’. In Blyton’s stories, it is middle-class children chasing the convicts.
Blyton fares worse when her ‘Famous Five’ books are looked at from a feminist theory perspective. The contrast between the youngest and most overtly feminine female character, Anne, and the older ‘tomboy’ female of the group, George, is simple, stark, and unsubtle. Anne is portrayed as the weakling of the group. George strives to be as good as the boys. Revisions of the work have changed this. However, if we look closer at the changes, we see that they have been made to a female writer’s work, and we know that this particular writer’s work has been sneered upon by the middle classes, practically banned by the BBC, and often regarded as lacking in literary merits. The director general from the BBC schools broadcast department, Mr. JE Sutcliffe, explains his feelings towards Mrs. Blyton thus. “My impression of her stories is that they might do for children's hour but certainly not for schools dept…they haven't much literary value.”[footnoteRef:5] [5: Magnús Björgvin Gulmundsson, The Censorship of Enid Blyton in Two of her Novels The Island of Adventure and Five on a Treasure Island (May 2012) [accessed 10 July 2019].]
It could be argued that because these changes were made to a female author’s work, and because there was such a lack of respect given to Blyton as an author, the question that needs to be asked, according to Elaine Showalter’s feminist criticism, should be ‘would these changes have been made if Enid Blyton was male?’.
As a young male reader, I had very little problem with Blyton’s tomboy and weak girl dichotomy. I did struggle knowing that as a working-class child, I was and would always be a character outside the main group of protagonists, that I might be allowed to experience fragments of their lives when they act as vigilantes but then I must return to my working-class community.
Blyton lends herself to structuralist analysis. The heroes and heroines in the adventures exist entirely to serve the plot and defeat the villains. There is nothing particularly heroic about Anne, quite the opposite. There is no psychological development in Blyton’s characters, good must defeat evil and that is that. The Leavisite might well sneer at Blyton, and close analysis of her work does raise a number of uncomfortable conversation points when discussed in modern times. But as David Rudd points out in his book ‘Enid Blyton and the Mystery of Children’s Literature’, a great many writers tell of their childhood enthusiasm for Blyton, and he suggests that reading her books does not preclude a later interest in ‘great literature’. He also points out that not all of the villains in Blyton’s books are working class. I suspect though that this might be damning with faint praise, I think it also illustrates what my parents might have called a snobbish attitude’ I have sometimes sensed since I became a writer from a working-class background. The books I enjoyed were good enough for me to read, but not suitable for middle-class children, for them.
Comic Books
I also read a lot of comics as a boy and continue to do so as an adult. In fact, I often loved reading comics more than I did books. I also knew that they considered some of my comics to be vulgar. It was even suggested that one of the comics I bought regularly with the money I earned by doing my chores was actually dangerous for me[footnoteRef:6]. That particular title was the UK publication, ‘Action’. The comic was intended to break away from the old, stiff upper lip, Good Old Blighty approach, and bring the stories into the present. As Martin Baker points out in ‘Action – The Story of a Violent comic’, the idea of the title was to demonstrate a “…willingness to be violent, tasteless, and anti-middle class”. With stories such as ‘Look Out For Lefty’, ‘Kids Rule OK’, and ‘Probation’. it was clear to me that my days of reading the clean-cut ‘Roy of the Rovers’, the comedic anarchy of ‘The Bash Street Kids’, and the cartoon criminality of ‘Baby Face Finlayson’ would soon fade away. But it was generally agreed; comics were not appropriate for reading, and Action Comics were banned from being brought into my school by the headmaster. [6: Pressure was placed on the Government to tackle the violence (and some might argue left-wing or anarchic undertones) being depicted in the ‘Action’ comic, published by UK publisher, IPC. The title was condemned by the Daily Mail and pressure groups such as the National Viewers and Listeners Association. On October 23rd, 1976, ‘Action’ stopped being published altogether, following a period of self-censorship which resulted in declining sales. Martin Barker, 'Action' - The Story of a Violent Comic (London: Titan Books, 1990), p. 7.]
Hoggart refers to comics as seeing “page after page [of] big-thighed and big-bosomed girls from Mars step out of their space-machines, and gangsters’ molls scream away in high-powered sedans…with the cruder English boys’ comics serving their turn…mass-art geared to a very low mental age.”[footnoteRef:7] [7: Hoggart was describing the pulp titles of the fifties and sixties, but I would argue that he would probably say the same about the UK comics of the seventies. Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy - Aspects of Working-Class Life, 2009 edn (London: Penguin, 1957), p. 178.]
I was reading comics well before the medium was considered to be worthy of critical analysis and yet when I look back on ‘Action’ I see a product crying out for closer analysis. Even if we remove the overt and deliberate anti-middle-class rhetoric from the stories, and look at the format itself in isolation, we are able to see beyond the ‘4 colors’ images and realist depictions of poverty and working-class life in the UK. One simply has to look at the way in which the stories were being told, using text, images, and speech balloons to convey the message. As Amy Kiste Nyberg points out in her chapter of the book Critical Approaches to Comics, entitled ‘Drawing on Words to Picture The Past in Safe Are Gorazde’, “the extensive use of captions [in comics], similar to the cutline used with photojournalism and to the voiceover in broadcast, serves to explain the image to the reader. Theorist Roland Barthes referred to this process as “anchoring”—closing off some interpretations of the image by anchoring its meaning through employing text”.
Could it be that the creators of ‘Action’ were so determined to get their message across to young and impressionable readers such as me, that they chose the perfect medium in which to do so? Image + text + the anchoring caption. Show the disaffected and angry youth an alternative to the oppression he feels he is suffering, use an attractive medium he already loves and subvert it, and then hammer the message home. They apparently thought so; my school, the responsible citizens, the newspapers, the courts, otherwise I might still be reading new stories in Action to this day.
I tended to stick to the comics I knew were written with boys in mind, avoiding those comics specifically marketed towards a female readership. It is only later in life that I learned that many of the writers I admired as a teenager, such as Alan Moore, Pat Mills, and John Wagner, were in fact the same writers working on the girls’ comic titles I avoided, such as ‘Misty’, ‘Jinty’, and ‘Tammy’. Some of these writers were in fact the same ones who were creating outrage in the ‘Action’ comic. These girls' comics were also trying to do something new with the medium, moving away from the old-fashioned “Jolly hockey sticks” stereotype. “Tammy’s stories were often bleak, and many were variations on the darkest aspects of Cinderella. “Alison All Alone” saw a contemporary girl locked up by step-parents for reasons that are never really articulated.[footnoteRef:8] [8: John Wagner’s “The Blind Ballerina” has been described by acclaimed comic book writer Alan Moore as “cynical and possibly actually evil” for example. James Coomray Smith, The dark, forgotten world of British girls’ comics is about to be resurrected (27th September 2016) [accessed 10 July 2019].]
I was aware of feminism at the time and considered myself to be unaffected by discrimination against females. I was after all male. I was however exposed to anti-feminist feminist stereotypes in the media, and the struggle of females was often reduced to jokes about the burning of brassieres. Feminist Literary Theory did exist, but as with its Marxist counterpoint, I was unaware of it, and indeed the need for it. It did not cross my mind to question my reluctance to explore comics written specifically for girls or to question why stories for girls needed to be any less enjoyable than stories written for boys. If Virginia Woolf is correct her essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’, when she “…suggests that language use is gendered…[and] quotes an example and says ‘That is a man’s sentence’” what do I say about a young boy who is uncomfortable reading certain comics, simply because the main character is female, and yet at the same time, the writers creating these comics are not only the same writers working on the stories in the boy’s own, self-approved reading material, they are men. Looking at Feminist criticism, there appears to be nothing that directly represents females in a positive light; the creators are male, and a young male reader regards the stories to be of less worth to him than those stories written for boys. Our reader has conspired against himself because of a lack of awareness; awareness of himself, awareness of the differences between himself and others around him, and awareness of Literary Criticism.
Kes
It is during this tumultuous period that I read ‘A Kestrel For A Knave’ by Barry Hines for the first time. The book was read aloud during English classes; pupils took turns reading out parts of the book. In hindsight I believe that this in fact distanced ‘us’, the readers, from the story itself; concentrating more on our ability to read than our understanding of what we were reading.
It is no surprise that this book had such a huge impact on me, both as a reader and as a writer. I knew as soon as we read the opening pages that this book was different. Here was a character in a world doing things not dissimilar to me; a working-class boy, a reader of comics, a paperboy, living in a council estate somewhere in the North of England. Not only that, the characters spoke the same way I did, and the author spelled the words as I said them. “You had better get up” became “Tha’d better get up”, ”You will be late” became “That’ll be late” and so on. It was reading ‘A Kestrel For a Knave’ that helped me put the pieces together. It was the closest I had come to identify with fictional characters since reading the comic they had declared dangerous for me. Here was a character who could easily have been a pupil in my school. Here was the sadistic Physical Education teacher, here was the pompous headmaster, and here was the kindly teacher who took an interest in a difficult-to-reach pupil. Here it all was, and they were teaching us this book in school which meant it had to be a ‘proper book’.
Hines himself shared my lack of representation in literature and mentions it in ‘This Artistic Life’, where he points out that: “English literature was reading books about people who had been dead for hundreds of years. They had to be dead for that long or it wasn’t literature. (...) It was all too posh. I resented it. I felt I was being imposed upon by middle-class teachers in a middle-class institution glorifying upper-class values. I wanted to read about a world I could identify with, where people had to work for a living[footnoteRef:9].” [9: Hines attended Grammar School and it was here where he first experienced class divide firsthand, according to his introduction to the book. Hines, Barry, This Artistic Life, (Pomona, Hebden Bridge, 2009), pp. 67 & 68]
In the book, Billy Casper is an outcast, failed by his family, his school, and society. He has been in trouble in the past with the police, doesn’t excel academically, and is reluctant to follow his older brother, Jud, down the mines.
Casper finds and trains a young kestrel and the reader follows him for this brief period in what it is safe to assume is a usually grim and depressing existence.
[bookmark: _Hlk14941322]Casper appears to reverse the school dichotomy in ‘A Kestrel For a Knave’ when he is invited by his teacher Mr. Farthing to come to the front of the class and teach both the teacher and the boy’s peers; to explain in detail about how he has trained his kestrel. However, even here, Mr. Farthing maintains control, continues to be one of ‘them’, and instructs Casper throughout his talk, telling him to write particular words on the board. I enjoyed this reversing of the roles and assumed that I was looking at the pupil becoming the teacher for once, the tables having been turned. Had I been schooled in literary criticism however, I might have considered whether this could in fact be an example of what Althusser calls ‘interpellation’, where we are made to “…feel like free agents”[footnoteRef:10] but are still the agents of state control. This subtle switch of perspective would certainly have opened up a whole new way of looking at literature for me, and increased the personal value of the texts I was reading. With this knowledge, I might have broken away from the restrictiveness of structuralism, which might in turn have made reading my father’s copy of Last Exit to Brooklyn less intimidating and frightening for me than it was. As a writer I might not have been so hung up on remembering and sticking to the “rules” of grammar and might have felt more comfortable experimenting with my prose, knowing I would be able to back up my attempts to subvert literature by quoting literary precedents to argue my case. [10: I was aware of the concept of ‘interpellation’ at the time because I knew the famous quote by Ford about the color of his cars: “You can have any color you like…as long as it’s black”. However, I wasn’t given the knowledge necessary to identify it. Peter Barry, Beginning Theory - An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, seventh end (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 158.]
Here was a writer I could maybe aspire to be. Up until now, I had assumed that working-class people like me did not become writers or poets for a living. In fact, by the time I left school, it was the height of Thatcherism, and there were even fewer jobs to go around. There would soon be no mining industry to fall back on or local manufacturing industry. Barry Hines does explore the Thatcher years in his book, ‘Looks and Smiles’, where the story follows the thwarted attempts of its main character, Michael (Mick) Walsh, to secure a job when he leaves school. Unlike Casper in ‘A Kestrel For A Knave’, Mick doesn’t have the local mining industry in place to act as a safety net. Like Casper, Michael might not be particularly book smart but neither does he lack intelligence.
Casper demonstrates his own particular skills by teaching himself how to train a kestrel from a book he steals. Mick on the other hand is adept at fixing motors.
I didn’t feel as though I was being let down by the teachers or the system, however. They introduced him to “Of Mice and Men” and so I discovered that books can make a reader cry. We read “Lord of the Flies” and “Animal Farm” together in class and now understood that books can tell two stories at the same time. I knew Orwell wasn’t really writing about talking animals because I had been taught to recognize and understand the symbolism. We discussed in class what Orwell wanted the pigs in his story to represent, but we were never invited to ask why Orwell wrote what he did.
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