The Children's Fiction of Russell Hoban: Some aspects and themes.

by

John Urquhart, BA.

A Mas ter' s dissertation, submi t ted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the Master of Arts degree of the Loughborough University of Technology

February 1992

Supervisors: Professor A.J. Meadows, MA, DPhil, MSc, FLA, FIInfSc, FInstP, FRAS. Mrs M. Evans, BA, MBA, PhD, PGCE, ALA, MIInfSc.

Department of Information and Library Studies

€) J.C.C. Urquhart, 1992 ,------.. _-- , tOU';ilh' . ;;:u',.n ~.,...;.-lt ... ;...f~'ty of : .. ; ,./ov' ... q, Ltbrilry

-:)!~.- IQtjl.. I-(-'!·-'-"---,-::...:r:.-___ _ O~GOt> Q'I'1.. '----- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I should like to thank Dr Evans for her help when I was starting this project, and Professor Meadows for kindly taking over as my supervisor during Dr Evans's absence on study leave. Thanks are also due to my personal tutor, Dr A. Irving, and to Dr H. Dyer and Mrs I. Smith for their help and advice.

I have been privileged to have access to a number of libraries, both personally and through inter-library loan, and would like to thank staff in the Pilkington Library, Loughborough Public Library, the Education Service in Leicester, Lei th Library and the Central Library of the City of Edinburgh, and the National Library of Scotland. I also owe a great deal to those who have been willing to discuss my progress with me, among others: Mr C. Bailey, Mrs S. Gordon, Mr B. High, Mr A. Lilley, and Mr C. Skelton-Foord. To Mrs Moira Dobbie, to whose patience and flexibility this page and those that follow it owe their present appearance, obviously much is due.

-i- I have not space to mention all who have undertaken to pray for me while this dissertation was in preparation, but without them, and without God's help and upholding power, I do not think it would be near completion. Lastly, I would like to thank my parents, whose help, encouragement and prayers have been with me in Loughborough and in Edinburgh, and who have patiently listened and commented on drafts of my chapters, as they emerged.

Edinburgh, February 1992.

-ii- ABSTRACT

The Children's Fiction of Russell Hoban: some aspects and themes/by John Urquhart

Three essays:

1. Hoban' s picture books move from didacticism to anti­ didacticism and satire, and from direct observation to exploiting the American literary tradition, particularly Mark Twain and O. Henry. The appeal of his didactic books stems from his use of animals and the child's need for order. His undidactic books reflect the concerns of his adult novels. 2. In The Mouse and his Child the toy mice break free from clockwork rules and from oppression by exploi ters to become sel f-winding and free. Hoban's existential values and secular world-picture conflict with the use of destiny and prophecy in the book. His use of mystical language to describe the writing process argues that we can rationalize images of destiny as referring to opportunity, coincidence, unconscious drives and a sense of rightness in the story's outcome; but some inconsistency remains. This relates to the necessary paradox of freedom in a fictional world and the human desire for purpose, identity and harmony. 3. Hoban is, like Hans Andersen, a writer of stories about small, lost and broken things: inanimate objects treated as living. Hoban uses clockwork as an embodied metaphor of human imperfection and pain, and teaches the interconnectedness of things.

-iii- CONTENTS

Page No

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS i

ABSTRACT iti

CHAPTER ONE: FROM COSINESS TO COMPLEXITY: 1 Family situations and didacticism in Hoban's picture books.

Notes 25 References 27

CHAPTER TWO: BREAKING THE CIRCLE: 34 Destiny and Free Will in The Mouse and his Child. Notes 74 References 76

CHAPTER THREE: LOVE, LONELINESS AND LOST THINGS: 84 Russell Hoban and Hans Andersen.

Notes 102

References 103

BIBLIOGRAPHY 107

-iv- CHAPTER ONE

FROM COSINESS TO COMPLEXITY:

Family situations and didacticism in

Hoban's picture books.

Bedtime for Frances, 1 published in America in 1960, was

the first commercially successful book written by Russell Hoban,2 and the start of a series of picture books about a small badger and her family. Up till then Hoban's books for children had been about machinery: non-fiction explications of bulldozers and atomic submarines. 3 He had illustrated these himself, and the books really grew out of the pictures. Hoban, then a freelance illustrator, was encouraged to build a text around some drawings by friends. 4 Bedtime for Frances was different. Hoban produced the text and an established illustra tor,

Garth Williams, the pictures. Hoban is vague about this change of role: he "got into" this new writing,5 "fell into" a new genre;6 but once in, he stayed there, writing what he calls "little didactic, pleasantly cautionary tales."7 In a BBC book programme in 1979 he expanded upon this:

Back in 1958 or 1959, I fell into a particular genre, a particular kind of book. The characters were little cuddly, furry animals - badgers, in this case - and the situations were drawn from family life: some kind of a domestic conflict, some difficulty between the

- 1 - child and the parents, which would be resolved entertainingly and plausibly. They have to do with the idea of cosiness more than anything else. They have to do with the world where, if everything is not all right just this minute, it can be made all right in a fairly short time, with a little bit of careful attention and hard work on the part of everybody. 8

Each book takes one particular situation or difficulty in a child's life and concentrates on that. Bedtime for

Frances is about a child's unwillingness to go to bed and the parents' initial tolerance of, and then growing annoyance at, such constant prevarication. A Baby

Sister for Frances9 portrays the feelings of rejection and unwantedness which a child may feel on the arrival of a new baby into the family. Again, the parents adopt a wise, and somewhat subtle, approach to the problem: in this case, reassuring Frances of her worth, while trying to balance tha t wi th the principle tha t "a family is everybody all together."lO

In Bread and Jam for Frances11 the parents allow a food- fussy Frances to adopt for a while a self-imposed diet of bread and jam, until she tires of the monotony of it, and apprecia tes the benefi t of a more varied menu. All three books blend parental tolerance and a judicious connivance with the child's whims and imaginations with a

- 2 - wise direction of her mind to more solid values, but with considerable humour too.

A Birthday for Frances12 again takes up the subject of sibling rivalry. Whatever the title might imply, it is not Frances but Gloria, her little sister, who has a birthday; it is, however, a situation that Frances must come to terms with. Frances wrestles first of all with feelings of being left out, inventing a sympathetic and invisible, friend called Alice who does not have a birthday either, and must make do with a "happy Thursday" instead, sung to her by Frances. 13 She then comes round from self-pity to the problem of whether she should give

Gloria a birthday present. 14 She must overcome resentment of past injuries and present jealousies. Amusingly, the urge to give Gloria a present stems from the unhappiness of being the only one in the family who is not involved in the giving of presents;15 if Frances gives no present she will be even more left out. A further problem is getting the present to Gloria without eating it first. It is a "Chompo bar,,16 and desirable.

She must not give in to her own careful rationalisations of the instinct towards self-gratification. She is helped overcome the first set of difficulties by her mother, who talks her through them;17 the later problems are solved by her father who undertakes to look after the Chompo bar until the party.18 The ba t tIe is not over

- 3 - yet. Stirred to a fresh bout of resentment by a conversation on the demerits of little sisters with her friend Albert, just before the party, Frances gives way to that resentment with many self-justifications,19 only to be brought once more to magnanimity by Gloria's benevolent and contrite attitude to her bigger sister. 20 Giving over the Chompo bar is still hard, but it is achievable.

In Best Friends for Frances , 21 Frances's relationship with her sister improves when Albert and Harold exercise a ban on female participation in backyard baseball,22 and when· Albert will not let Frances come with him on his "wandering day." 23 Gloria becomes a friend by default on Albert's part. Albert is readmi tted to friendship after careful negotiation of equal rights by Frances, helped by Albert's weakness for food which Frances exploits in her negotiations: She threatens to retain a 'no boys' stipulation for her picnic outing with Gloria. 24 Albert backs down on the the baseball restriction25 and everything is shrewdly resolved. Perhaps in keeping with Frances's new tougher image and grea ter degree of independence, there is no large role for her parents in this book.

-4- A Bargain for Frances26 again takes relationships with friends. as its focus. Frances's mother warns her to be careful of Thelma:

" • " Because when you play wi th Thelma you always get the worst of it"

27 Frances does get the worst of a bad bargain, taking home the wrong sort of tea-set at some financial 10ss.28

Shrewdly, she manages to turn things to her advantage. She learns the importance of being careful, but also that there is something more satisfying than carefulness in our relationships with others. As her song puts it: Being careful isn't nice. Being friends is better. 29

Each book contains much that is shrewd and each abounds in humour and a delight in language which is expressed in

Frances's songs. They are not bare moralities or earnest treatises that betray their earnestness, but there is obviously a serious intent. It would be almost impossible to become familiar with the stories without receiving some instruction in living at the same time.

Frances, as has been said, is a young badger, the age- equivalent of a small child, who although she grows older and a little wiser in the course of six picture books, never quite makes it to a teenager, despite a brief

- 5 - flirtation with the word "boyfriend" in Best Friends for Frances. 30 I have called her a badger and Hoban has done the same in his comments on the series,31 but the text of the books never does. Only the pictures give animal identity to the characters. 32 ,33 There is no anatomical vocabulary that would give the game away: no paws or whiskers, fur or claws, and no hands or fingers either. Neither are there any giveaway names such as Mrs Badger, or even Mr Brock. If there were no pictures, the text would, from its references to human things and activities, seem to be clearly about people, and yet with the addition of badger illustrations there is no resultant clash of worlds. It is a world apart from the crea tions of Bea trix Potter or Mary Tourtel, where human beings occasionally intrude upon a separate animal world going about their business in human dress. 34

Instead, it is acknowledged that we find "ourselves in fur,"35 - " a child/animal substitution so complete as to be unnoticeable."36

This careful use of anthropomorphized animals, or rather this cunning use of animals to disguise and prettify the uncomfortable truth of Hoban's observations about the behaviour of young humans, has not escaped the attention of the critics. May Hill Arbuthnot and Zena Sutherland argue that "the fact that Frances is a badger makes the story applicable without being didactic. "37 The idea

-6- behind this is that children accept the lessons taught by the storybooks because they are more willing to identify

freely with a young badger, than make the more uncomfortable moral ident ifica tion of themselves wi th a

badly-behaved human child to whom" they already know they

bear a resemblance. To put it more simply, the child

might say: "books about children doing wrong things are

about me," and feel "got at" by the book. Such a book

"offers too easy an identification. A more beguiling identification is where the child says: "I like that

li t tIe badger; she is soft and small and furry, and she

behaves a bit like me." Mary Rayner makes a further

point about the child identifying wi th the animal; it would be difficult to prove, but it is compelling nevertheless:

The whole connection between animal writing and children is that children - like animals - are more vulnerable in the world in which they find themselves than adults, and so they identify very strongly with them. 38

Unlike Arbuthnot and Sutherland, Hoban is quite content

to call the Frances books "didactic."39 (Words aside, I

do not think Arbuthnot and Sutherland radically disagree

with him on this. For them stories overtly about

children are plain didactic; stories about animals can be regarded as non-didactic but "applicable," which is

their own way of getting didacticism by without the

reader noticing.) Hoban, when asked why his "didactic"

- 7- Frances books were selling better than what he calls his "anti-didactic" books, said this: I think that probably parents tend to approve of books that reinforce law and order in some way. I don't know why children like it so much. My three boys, when they were smaller, would ask me for these same books. So why do children like to read books in which it is pointed out that they must go to bed on time or they must not just eat bread and jam or they should do this or should do tha t? I know children take naturally to the idea of limitations - they don't like there to be no boundaries whatever - but I can't explain why those books should be so popular. 40

Rayner makes a shared vulnerabili ty lead to an identification with animal characters. Hoban alludes to the vulnerability of the child but bases his argument for the appeal of didactic literature on a need for order. This order is a necessity for the parents, that he or she might remain in control, and it is a protection for the vulnerable child. Parents have to enforce order and desire help in their task. That is why they like the book. Children need that reassurance of being secure which the order underpinning any kind of didacticism brings. They come up against a boundary and, rather than being frustrated by it, are given shape and solidity for their small world. Note I They are both tolerated and cared for. Guarding and limiting are interpreted as caring.

-8- This is close to what Hoban calls "cosiness, ,,41 even

although the word is used to disturb us with the possible falseness of such a bounded vision of domestic security. An ordered world is maybe not like the real one. Barbara Bader, author of one of the most extensive cri tiques of the first four Frances books, 42 does not think of Hoban' s domestic setting as being an unreal world: From Bedtime for Frances onward, Russell Hoban situates his families in the material world - as natural to a child as grass and trees - where not to get to work on time means not to have a job (a mouthful more than 'Daddy goes to work in the morning'), where a trademark is a byword and (in A Birthday for Frances) a Chompo Bar is candy covered with glory. 43

She outlines processes of development in Hoban's picture

books. One of these is described in terms of the maturing personality of Frances who moves from being "all psyche all vulnerable, all malleable" to a person "engaged in a struggle with herself," having to make

ethical choices; Hoban is taking us from the issue of "adjustment" to that of "right action.,,44 Another

process revolves around the contrast between the threat of a spanking in Bedtime for Frances45 with the parents' affirmation in Herman the Loser46 that they would not spank him for losing his watch, even as they are trying to teach him not to lose things:

-9- We can see the wheels turning ever so gently: it is an 'enlightened,' constructive treatment of childhood, careful to value Rerman' s independent procli vi ties, equally careful to inculcate in him reasonable responsibility and demonstrate how to use it. Implicitly, parents are not to be arbi trary, nei ther are children to be left undirected, the one productive of fear, the other of gUilt; and both destructive of the child's individual personality. 47

It is interesting to note that the book is seen here as not only directing its message at children but also at their parents. There is a framework of understanding which takes its strength from an apprecia tion of the child's motives and feelings and of the value of gently­ drawn boundaries in assisting the child's judgement and sense of security; but there is also implicit guidance for parents unsure of their role in bringing up children.

As Roban develops his ideas in more picture books, we can see the wheels take a sharper turn. Some of the cosier aspects of the family situation disappear. Roban turns from gentle observation to a more obvious satire of the behaviour of adults and children in a family. In Arthur's New Power48 and Dinner at Alberta' s49 there remains something of a didactic intent: lessons about overusing electric power and the importance of good table manners are embedded in stories about a young crocodile who evidently feels he is persecuted by his family. We

-10- have entered the jungle world of teenage years and concerns, even although the readership of the books is presumably a great deal younger. The less cosy aspects of such a world are not just to do with authorial intent: the animals are no longer furry. Instead of mammals there are reptiles; instead of small child-badgers there are teenage crocodiles, saurians, boas and some, admittedly mammalian, but unfurry, hippopotami. James Marshall's or Byron Barton's illustrations are cruder and harsher than the soft-pencil badgers drawn by Garth Williams or Lillian Hoban; they are not ineffective, but they are not so charming.

In Dinner at Alberta's the subject is young Arthur Crocodile's lack of table manners. The situation cannot be improved merely by his parents' and sister's cri ticisms, which he shrugs off wi th an air of being picked on, but can only be changed by family tui tion coupled with Arthur's new motivation: a desire to impress Alberta Saurian, at whose house he is soon to have dinner. 50 Tension between siblings is still a theme, but it is of a different order. Frances's fragile insecurity at having a new baby sister is replaced by Emma Crocodile's undisguised spitefulness towards her brother. Her wit is less innocent than that of Frances:

-11- "Between his table manners and his electric gUitar that boy will destroy the world," said Mother. "Maybe the world will get him first," said Emma, and she excused herself, and went to clean the tomato sauce off her dress. 51 (Arthur has been eating ravioli, and not keeping his mouth closed while eating it, hence the tomato sauce.)52

In Arthur's New Power Arthur gets the blame for a

blackout in the family house, because of a power drain caused by his electric guitar. 53 In fact, his mother

and sister were using several electrical appliances each at the time,54 so the blame is not all on one side. The seeming inabili ty of the family to endure a period of temporary self-restraint involving the non-use of electrical appliances 55 is a satirical reflection on modern man's state of machine-dependency. Arthur organizes an alternative power source on two occasions:

first an extension cord from next door 56 and later a water-powered generator 57 but on both occasions his

family overload the supply and it packs in. Families are not always a help, even though the resulting peace and· quiet is appreciated by all, even Arthur who is "tired of all this machinery anyway.,,58

Unlike the Frances books, the Arthur stories exploit the comic virtues of the characters being animals

-12- masquerading as humans, or vice versa. Boas are allowed to be 'ornery critters' at times 59 and can break others' ri bs when playing. 60 The Hippopotamus family live in suburban ease, but in their natural habitat, as John

Hippopotamus lets slip: "Take my sons for instance. They seem to think that just because we live at the bottom of the river they can tread mud all over the living room." 61

Animals here can no longer be taken as furry representations of childlike vulnerability. Irony and sarcasm are freely employed by Arthur's family and their neighbours. They have sharper tongues than Frances' s family. But whatever the differences of tone between the Frances books and the Arthur books an acute observation of real-life, modern families is common to both. My next examples of Hoban's family fiction, by contrast, seem to have more li terary roots: that is, they exploi texis ting his torical traditions or li terary models rather than springing directly, or primarily, from observation. These examples are How Tom beat Captain Najork and his Hired Sportsmen62 and Emmet Otter's

Jug-band Christmas. 63

Emmet Otter's Jug-band Christmas comes in a very American tradition. I find it sentimental in a way that Americans apparently do not, as their reviews testify.64

-13- Emmet lives with his widowed mother by the riverbank in an old-style, Great Depression America of old wooden shacks and broken-down jetties, inhabited by anthropomorphised animals. It is winter, and a hard one at that, and Christmas is approaching without much prospect of cheer. Emmet's mother takes in washing and Emmet fishes in the river and does "odd jobs around the neighbourhood. ,,65 The setting is an American equivalent of the sort of 'poor but honest' past that Dickens is supposed to have created for England: A Christmas Carol66 without the savage indignation of that author. It is not done clumsily but it is poverty with cosiness, warmed with the glow of the past as well as infused with some of its realities. The premise of the plot is virtually the same as one of O. Henry's short stories, The Gift of the Magi,67 and it is hard not to see that story as a conscious or semi - conscious model for Hoban's story.Note 2 O. Henry was the grea t observer and sketcher of those who in turn-of-the-century America had to scrape together a living out of pennies. He describes his story The Gift of the Magi as:

the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat [husband and wife] who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. 68 They did this in order to buy, after the tradition inspired by the wise men or Magi,69 Christmas presents for each other. The wife sells her beautiful long hair

-14- to buy a pIa tinum watch-chain for her husband. The husband sells his valuable watch to buy a pair of expensive, inlaid tortoiseshell combs for his wife. Emmet Otter and his mother do not fall into such a tragic irony, but their motive is the same as that of the young couple, and their actions similar, but with a neat twist: it is each other's possessions they despoil. Mother Otter pawns her son's toolbox to buy material to make a dress to wear in a talent contest, which she hopes to win by her singing and buy Emmet a guitar with the cash prize. 70 Emmet, meanwhile, takes his mother's washtub and broom handle and, having made a hole in the tub, threads a string through to make a washtub bass fiddle to play with his friends' band in the same talent contest. With the prize he hopes to buy a piano for his mother. 7l Each, in the possible event of failure, is banking on the object the other has taken in order to get by.72

Predictably, they both fail to win. The day is saved, when playing and singing for themselves on the frozen river, both mother and band are overheard and hired by a local restaurateur, Doc Bullfrog, who promises regular pay and meals on the job. 73 Despite the almost~ obligatory happy ending for a children's book, the spirit of the work is like that of O. Henry's story. What both sets of protagonists have done is foolish, but there is more to it than that, as O. Henry says at the close of his short story:

-15- But in a last word to the wise of these days, let it be said that of all who gave gifts these two were the wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are the wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi. 74

This is akin to Frances's contention that being friends is better than being careful. 75 Love and generosity are to be valued more than calculating carefulness. That is why the Otters do not feel too bad about having taken a chance and lost:

"I guess I ought to feel pretty bad," said Ma, "but the funny thing is that I don't. I feel pretty good." "So do I," said Emmet. "I don't know why, but I do." 76

Even so, happy ending notwithstanding, there is a recognition that, as with O. Henry's Della and her curling tongs, "repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love is always a tremendous task ... a mammoth task."77 Emmet's Pa took a chance on selling snake oil up and down the river, and lost. Their poverty is a result of that. But love forgave that:

Ma never complained though. She said if Pa was willing to take a chance on snake oil she was willing to take a chance on him. 78

The last sentences of the book are a proud remembrance of Pa, as the otters play their favourite hymn,

-16- "Downstream where the River meets the Sea," in his memory.79 They should f~el bad about him, but they do not. Emmet Ot ter' s Jug-band Christmas is evoca ti ve, beautifully told and illustrated; but for all the strength of its themes of love and generosity, it is perilously, though beautifully, close to schmaltz.

Frances and Arthur live in "typical" nuclear families. Emmet Ot ter lives wi th one loving parent. Tom, the hero of How Tom beat Captain Najork and his Hired Sportsmen, lives with a stern and repressive aunt by a ri ver. He likes fooling around and his aunt seeks to stop him.80 He is a type of that archetypal American boy, Tom Sawyer, 81 who lives wi th a fierce aunt in a similar situation and is given to fooling around. Note 3

In Emmet Otter's Jug-band Christmas an American literary and cultural tradition is taken at face-value and employed seriously. In How Tom beat Captain Najork an American tradition of comparable long standing is burlesqued in a surreal tale of how a boy triumphs over his elders. It is what Hoban calls "one of my anti­ didactic books. ,,82 The extent of this will be seen;

it extends to more than a boy teaching some adults a lesson.

Tom Sawyer's Aunt Polly was a tartar, but Aunt Fidget

Wonkham-Strong is positively Prussian:

-17- She wore an iron ha t and took no nonsense from anyone. Where she walked the flowers drooped, and when she sang the trees all shivered. 83 At base, however, Tom's maiden aunt is, like Aunt Polly, firmly in what is commonly called, though sometimes unfairly, the Puritan tradition: "Too much playing is not good, and you play too much. You had better stop it and do something useful." 84 This is redolent of an earlier age which sought to encourage children to "improve each shining hour,,,85 not

least in studying and learning the Scriptures. Note 4

The topic of scripture memorization takes up a whole

chapter of Tom Sawyer. 86 The Bible would be too sensitive a volume for Hoban to introduce into his picture book. Instead Aunt Fidget makes Tom "learn off" pages of the Nautical Almanac. 87

Tom Sawyer's aunt, living as she does on a more natural plane of fiction, is thankfully more moderate than Miss Wonkham-Strong, but she has similar opinions to the other formidable lady. Even as Aunt Polly rewards Tom with an apple, for labours she assumes are all his own, she also dispenses an improving lecture upon the added value and flavour a treat took to itself when it came wi thout . sin through virtuous effort. And while she closed with a happy scriptural flourish, he 'hooked' a doughnut. 88

-18- This after she has made him work on Saturday because of unauthorized expeditions during the week. 89 l'ihat Tom

Sawyer has done to 'deserve' a reward is to persuade his school fellows that whitewashing a fence is not really like 'work' but is something altogether more exciting and unusual, and so he is able to get them to ~ him for the privilege of whitewashing for him. 90 Mark Twain outlines th.e principle:

l,ork consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and •. , play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. 91

Hoban's Tom benefits from an innate knowledge of much the same principle; a knowledge which Captain Najork and his Hired Sportsmen do not possess. (As Twain observes, paying someone for something they would otherwise do for a pleasure and a pastime often turns it into an unwelcome chore. ) 92 Captain Najork and his men go about their play in a workmanlike manner. Miss Fidget Wonkham-Strong tells Tom his opponents

play hard games and they play them jolly hard 93 This proves to be their undoing: The hired sport smen played so hard tha t they wombled too fast and were shaky with the rakes. Tom fooled around the way he always did, and all his stakes dropped true. 94

-19- It is the adults, as has been already mentioned, that are taught a lesson - not a particularly valuable one - but a definite lesson: "maybe that will teach you not to fool around with a boy who knows how to fool around" 95

I f there is anything to be learned by the reader, it is that a little ease in the manner in which one does something may help towards doing it bet ter; whereas a tense attitude may be a handicap. Joan Bowers, however, says that in How Tom beat Captain Najork ••• "didacticism seems directed towards adults and their treatment of children. "96 If this is so, Hoban is attacking the wrong generation. Most of those who might profit by it are long dead.

In his avowedly antididactic approach97 Hoban does not really differ from Twain. He burlesques the elements of Twain's novel, but would seem to fall into line behind much of what Twain placed as a prefatory notice to his sequel to Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn:

Persons a ttempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. 98

-20- Plots aside, the two authors are not really so very far apart in their aims, even if the resulting stories are ra ther different. In both books the boy comes out on top, with the adults a poor second. The adults in Tom Sawyer admit that they have been "made ridiculous" by the children proudly turning up at their own memorial service. 99 By letting her think that he is drowned, Tom Sawyer softens his aunt's attitude to him somewhat. Hoban's Tom actually manages to swap aunts by advertising in the newspaper for a new one. lOO She is Aunt Bundlejoy Cosysweet, and has "a floppy hat with flowers on it."IOI

How Tom beat Captain Najork was published the year after Hoban's adult novel, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz,I02 came out. The novel describes a man parting company with his wife and finding a new partner - something which Hoban himself did prior to writing it. I03 It may be that Tom's change of aunts is an echo of the plot of the adult novel, at least. The novel, in turn, has strong autobiographical characteristics, particularly in its accumulation of significant detail. The names of the aunts bear out the possibility of a connection, as they seem to encapsulate the attitudes of the father in The Lion to the old woman and the new. 'Fidget' captures the restlessness he feels with his wife,104 and

Bundlejoy Cosysweet the domestic bliss he associates with his new companion. I05 The sequel A Near Thing

-21- for Captain Najork,106 published the following year, features a contest between two women over a man: Aunt Fidget and the headmistress of the local girls school arm­ wrestle to determine who should keep Captain Najork. 107 It may be that these two books arose out of unresolved family tensions rather than out of an attempt to address such tensions dispassionately; or perhaps they are merely the froth and bubble on top of Hoban's adult, and - by implication - serious, fiction. (I am in danger of, in Twain's terms, being "prosecuted" for trying to find a motive in the narrative which belonged to the author when he wrote it. C.S. Lewis was apt to warn against that sort of thi!lg, which he called "the personal heresy,,).108

Certainly, the father in The Lion is full of doubt that there is any wisdom the older generation can pass on to children that will be of lasting value to them. He burns the map109 he has devised for his son. It was a map of received Wisdom, designed to be a master map that would show him where to find wha tever he might wish to look for, and so would assure him of a proper start in life as a man. 110 "There are no maps,,111 is the conclusion he comes to, and the surveyor tells us earlier in the novel that "boundaries waver and lose accuracy.,,112 Hoban does not give here the same assurance of order and established

-22- boundaries which he says children warm to in the Frances books. 113

In Turtle Diary,114 another adult novel by Hoban, one of the characters, Neaera H., a children's author complains about children's literature in words much quoted or referred to by the critics:1l5,ll6,l17,et a1

possibly the biggest tragedy in children's literature is that people won't stop writing it ••• people write books for children and other people write about the books written for children but I don't think it's for the children at all. I think that all the people who worry so much about the children are really worrying about themselves, about keeping their world together and getting the children to help them to do it, getting the children to agree that it is indeed a world. Each new genera tion of children has to be told: "This is a world, this is what one does, one lives like this." Maybe our constant fear is that a generation of children will come along and say: "This is not a world, this is nothing, there's no way to live at all." 118

A. Joan Bowers would like to accept some of this statement as expressing Hoban's own opinions,119 and when questioned about it by Rhonda Bunbury, Hoban seems to own up to its being, at least in part, his own thinking on the matter. 120 Bowers, on that basis, would say that any sense of authoritarian "mission" which ••• [Hoban) may have had with respect to writing for children has undergone a profound sea­ change. 121

-23- He has abandoned "good manners" for "whimsical fantasy. ,,122 But, at the last, Bowers remains unsure that this is a true picture of Hoban's state of mind: Hoban, in his bleaker moments, mayor may not feel like Neaera H., but he can only make such thinking explicit in his adult novels while allowing the changing form of his children's books to mirror his growing philosophical unease. 123

A "philosophical unease" about the world-picture of the dominant culture, or the world-picture of the liberal intellectual culture, or indeed the world-picture of the individual, may seem a titanic concern compared with the rationale behind the homely wisdom dispensed in the Frances books. But if Hoban's mind has actually tended that way he will indeed have less time for dispensing cosy solutions for cosy situations, no matter how sound and practical they actually are. Complexi ty often beggars simplicity. As Bowers indicates, the children's fiction may simply have become the partial reflection of concerns more sharply and visibly expressed in his adult fiction.

-24- Notes

1. Fred Inglis makes a similar point: Stories shape a child's day until, as it was the point of The Tale of Peter Rabbit to press home earlier, aesthetic shape and moral understanding share a common structure. Making sense of a child's day is then a matter of giving ita proper shape. So we put a child's distress right by insisting on the rituals of bedtime which confirm shape: a hot drink in bed, a story, a good-night kiss, a coming-back-in-a- minute-to-put-the-1ight-out. So too we try to_ give our life and lives a proper shape, and criticize the mess we've made of them in the name of greati24 coherence and a perfected, rational order.

2. It is worth noting that Hoban's description of the tramp outside the toyshop in The Mouse and his Child125 is similar to O. Henry's description of the hobo in the street and the child at the confectioner's window in his short story The Passing of Black Eagle. 126

3. Others have compared Hoban to Twain. Fred Inglis calls Hoban "a strong exuberant writer, with something of Ted Hughes and Mark Twain in him. ,,127

U.C. Knoepf1macher contends that The Mouse and his Child is "deeply indebted to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. ,,128 and tha t in Ridd1ey Walker129

Hoban returns to Huckleberry Finn as a mode1. 130

-25- 4. It is perhaps unfair to quote Watts in this context. Watts lived in an age in which he says the children were protesting to him about his teaching on Christian conduct with the pert reply: "Must we turn old puritans again ,,,131 Watts rejoins: No, my friends, I am not persuading you to return to the habit and guise of your ancestors, nor to transact your visits, nor to model your diver sions by the pa t tern of fourscore years ago. 132 His verses on the industriousness of the bee have, however, become inextricably linked with a certain attitude towards work and leisure, which is loosely called "puritan." His views on the balance of work and

play, expressed in prose, seem moderate and reasonable. 133

-26- References

1. HOBAN, Russell. Bedtime for Frances. London: Hippo Books, 1983.

2. HOBAN, Russell. Russell Hoban on tigers, turtles and freedom. The Listener, 1979, 101, 5 April, 494. 3. BUNBURY, Rhonda M. "Always a dance going on in the stone": an interview with Russell Hoban. Children's Literature in Education, 1986, !l(3), 140. 4. Ibid., p.140.

5. Ibid., p.140. 6. HOBAN, ref.2, p.494.

7. BUNBURY, ref.3, p.140.

8. HOBAN, ref.2, p.494.

9. HOBAN, Russell. A baby sister for Frances. London: Hippo Books, 1983. 10. Ibid., p.23.

11. HOBAN, Russel1. Bread and 1am for Frances. Harmondsworth: Puffin, 197 • 12. HOBAN, Russel1. A birthday for Frances. London: Hippo Books, 1983.

13. Ibid., p.5.

14. Ibid. , pp 13-14. 15. Ibid., p.13 • 16. Ibid., p.14. 17. Ibid., pp 5-14.

18. Ibid. , p.18.

19. Ibid. , pp 20-23.

20. Ibid. , pp 27-31.

-27- 21. HOBAN, Russell. Best friends for Frances. London: Hippo Books, 1983. 22. Ibid. , pp 10-14. 23. Ibid., pp 6-8. 24. Ibid., pp 18-23. 25. Ibid. , p.23. 26. HOBAN, Russell. A bargain for Frances. Kingswood: World's Work, 1971. 27. Ibid., p.12. 28. Ibid., pp 17-37. 29. Ibid., p.60. 30. HOBAN, ref.2l, pp 29-31. 31. BUNBURY, ref.3, p.140. 32. The Junior Bookshelf. 1966, February, 26-27. (review) Quoted in: Children's Literature Review vol.3. Ed. Gerard J. Senick. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1978, p.75. 33. BOWERS, A. Joan. The fantasy world of Russell Hoban. Children's Literature, 1980, ~, 84. 34. cf. BLOUNT, Margaret. Animal land; the creatures of children's fiction. New York: William Morrow, 1975, pp 140-141. 35. ARBUTHNOT, May Hill and Zena SUTHERLAND. Children and books. 4th ed. [ 1: Scott, Foresman, 1972, pp 396-97. Quoted in: Children's Literature Review vol,3. Ed Gerard J. Senick. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1978, p.76. 36. BLOUNT, ref.34, p.14l. 37. ARBUTHNOT and SUTHERLAND, ref.35, p.76. 38. RAYNER, Mary. Some thoughts on animals in children's books. Signal, 1979, ~, 84.

39. BUNBURY, ref.3, pp 140, 142. 40 BUNBURY, ref.3, p.142. 41. HOBAN, ref.2, p.494. -28- 42. BADER, Barbara. American picture books from Noah's ark to the beast wIthin. New York: Ifacmillan, 1976, pp 472-477. 43. Ibid., p.474. 44. Ibid., p.477. 45. HOBAN, ref.1, [p.26]. 46. HOBAN, Russe1l. Herman the loser. New York: Harper, 1961; Kingswood: World's Work, 1972. Cited in: D.L. Kirkpatrick, ed. Contemporary novelists. 4th ed.London: St James Press, 1986, p. 424. 47. BADER, ref.42, p.473. 48. HOBAN, Russell. Arthur's new power. London: Victor Gollancz, 1980. 49. HOBAN, Russell. Dinner at Alberta's. London: Jonathan Cape, 1977 • 50. Ibid., [pp 12-24]. 51. Ibid. , [p.6]. 52. Ibid. , [p.3]. 53. HOBAN, ref.48, p.6. 54. HOBAN, ref.48, pp.12-l5. 55. HOBAN, ref.48, pp 17 -27. 56. HOBAN, ref.48, pp 8-11. 57. HOBAN, ref. 48, pp 28-37. 58. HOBAN, ref.48, p.38. 59. HOBAN, ref.48, p.9. 60. HOBAN, ref.49, [p.ll]. 61. HOBAN, ref. 49, [p.8]. 62. HOBAN, Russell. How Tom beat Captain Najork and his hired sportsmen. London: Jonathan Cape, 1974. 63. HOBAN, Russell. Emmet Otter's jug-band Christmas. Kingswood: World's Work, 1971.

-29- 64. Children's Literature Review, vol.3. Ed. Gerard J. Senick. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1978, pp 76-77. 65. HOBAN, ref.63, [pp 6-7]. 66. , DICKENS, Charles. Christmas books. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954, pp 1-77. 67. HENRY, O. Short stories. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1989, pp 72-77. 68. Ibid., p.77. 69. Matthew 11; xi. 70. HOBAN, ref.63, [p.24]. 71. HOBAN, ref.63,[pp 17-18]. 72 • HOBAN, re f. 63, [pp 23,24]. 73. HOBAN, ref.63, [pp37-40]. 74. HENRY, ref.67, p.77. 75. HOBAN, ref.26, p.60. 76. HOBAN, ref.63, [p.36]. 77. HENRY, ref.67, p.74.

78. HOBAN, ref. 63, [p.10]. 79. HOBAN, ref.63, [p.41]. 80. HOBAN, ref.62, [pp 4-13]. 81. TWAIN, Mark. Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1991. 82. BUNBURY, ref.3, p.142. 83. HOBAN, ref.62, [p.3]. 84. HOBAN, ref.62, [p.8].

85. WATTS, Isaac. Works. London: John Barfield, 1810, p.399. ("Divine songs for children" - song 20). 86. TWAIN, ref.81, pp 19-27.

87. HOBAN, ref.62, [p.9].

-30- 88. TWAIN, ref.81, pp 14-15. 89. TWAIN, ref.81, p.9.

90. TWAIN, ref.81, pp 9-14.

91. TWAIN, ref.81, p.13. 92. TWAIN, ref.81, p.14. 93. HOBAN, ref.62, [p.12].

94. HOBAN, ref.62, [p.19]. 95. HOBAN, ref.62, [p.29].

96. BOWERS, ref. 33, p.81. 97. BUNBURY, ref. 3, p.142. 98. TWAIN, ref. 81, p.182.

99. TWAIN, ref.81, p.96. 100. HOBAN, ref. 62, [p. 30] •

101. HOBAN, ref.62, [p.31].

102. HOBAN, Russell. The lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin­ Boaz. London: Jonathan Cape, 1973.

103. ALLISON, Alida. Russell Hoban. In: Dictionary of Literary Bio~raphy, vol.52. Ed. Glenn E. Estes. Detroit: Ga e Research Company, 1986, p.199. 104. HOBAN, ref.102, pp 10-11.

105. HOBAN, ref.102, pp 27, 32-35.

106. ,HOBAN, Russell. A near thing for Captain Najork. London: Jonathan Cape, 1975. 107. Ibid., pp 14,29. 108. GRIFFIN, Wi11iam. C.S. Lewis: the authentic voice. Tring: Lion, 1988, pp 77,86, 161-162. 109. HOBAN, ref.102, p.188.

110. HOBAN, ref.102, p.12. 111. HOBAN, ref.102, p.188.

112. HOBAN, ref.102, p.17.

-31- 113. BUNBURY, ref.3, p.142.

114. HOBAN, Russe11. ~T~urr~t~1~e~d~1f·a~r~y~. New York: Random House, 1975. Cited in: A. Joan Bowers. The fantasy world of Russell Hoban. Children's Literature, 1980, ~, 97. 115. BUNBURY, ref.3, p.148.

116. Authorgraph No 12: Russel1 Hoban. Books for Keeps, 1982, No.12 (January), 17.

117. BOWERS, ref.33, p.95.

118. HOBAN, Russe11. Turtle diary. New York: Random House, 1975, p.113. Quoted in: A. Joan Bowers. The fantasy world of Russell Hoban. Children's Literature, 1980, ~, 95. 119. BOWERS, ref.33, p.95.

120. BUNBURY, ref.3, p.148. 121. BOWERS, ref.33, p.95. 122. BOWERS, ref.33, p.95.

123. BOWERS, ref.33, p.96.

124. INGLIS, Fred. The promise of happiness: value and meaning in children's fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, p.309.

125. HOBAN, Russel1. The mouse and his child. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1985, pp 13-16.

126. HENRY, ref.67, pp 1-11.

127. INGLIS, ref.124, p.304.

128. KNOEPFLMACHER, U.C. Roads half taken: travel, fantasy, and growing up. In: Susan R. Gannon and Ruth Anne Thomson, eds. Proceedings of the thirteenth annual conference of the Children's Literature Association, University of Missouri­ Kansas City, May 16-18, 1986. West Lafayette: Education Dept, Purdue University, 1988, p.56.

129. HOBAN, Russel1. Riddley Walker. London: Jonathan Cape, 1980. 130. KNOEPFLMACHER, ref.128, p.58.

131. WATTS, ref.85, p.385.

-32- 132. WATTS, ref.8S, p.386 133. WATTS, ref.8S, p.382

-33- CHAPTER TWO

BREAKING THE CIRCLE:

Destiny and Free Will in The Mouse and his Child.

how many children will grasp the point tha t the power of the mouse and his child appears to be their ability to express emotion in the face of mechanical stoicism, breaking the rules of their pre-ordained destiny as circular-dancing wind-up toys by the sheer force of their own will? That this book is about the juggling of free will and destiny ? Sheila Egoff in Thursday's Childl

Whether children grasp this point or not, it seems to be the case that not many critics have done more than mention it, or cover it in passing. The words above appeared in 1981 in Sheila Egoff's book on "trends and patterns in contemporary children's literature"2 as part of a one-and-a-half page piece3 on The Mouse and his Child.4 Her words on free will and destiny are almost throwaway comments towards the end of the piece, as she proceeds to berate Hoban on his "adult cleverness" which gives "a flawed view of a child's world."5 Joanne Lynn, in an article published some five years later, 6 after demonstrating how widespread and respectable the critical acclaim for The Mouse and his Child has been, remarks

-34- that "curiously ••• most commentators have stopped short of 'genuine interpretation." 7 They have admired the contents but left the meaning largely unpacked. Lynn's article sought to make good that omission, treating The

Mouse and his Child as an example of modern pastoral.

Others have followed with their own readings of the book, but none, as far as I can gather, have concentrated on wha t Sheila Egoff has said the book is about: "the juggling of free will and destiny." Of course, some things which are relevant to this theme come through in the critical literature, but they are subservient to other arguments. This chapter, without ignoring what has already been written, seeks to address the topic, and the problem, of destiny and free will in The Mouse and his Child.

Constraints on Being and Going The mouse father and mouse child are designed by the makers of their clockwork to dance in a circle: the mouse father holding the mouse child and swinging him round in his arms. It is the first thing they are made to do after being removed from their box in the toyshop.8

This is their first action; but it is not until after midnight that night that they make their first intimation of their self-awareness: "Where are we ?" asks the mouse child, followed by "What are we ?,,9 These questions are summarily answered for them by the clockwork elephant

-35- which stands on the counter. They are in a toyshop and they are toy mice. lO

What the elephant has more difficulty answering, once she has dealt with the "where" and the "what" is the "why" implicit in the child's statement: "I don't want to go out into the world. ,,11 The bland statement which awoke this response in the child - that "one simply goes out into the world and does whatever one does ,,12 - needs to be rethought and repackaged. The elephant at first chooses to ignore the underlying question and does not bother to explain why one must go out into the world. Instead, she finds a social reason for the child's awkward behaviour: "Obviously the child isn't properly brought up.,,13

She prides herself on being a society lady all because of her proximity on the counter to a large and elaborate dolls' house, which she presumes is hers. She imputes a lack of manners or a lack of a sense of responsibility to the mouse child, on account of a faulty upbringing, because she attaches grea t importance to these things. Manners, responsibility and upbringing are things a society lady should prize. The child, of course, has not had any upbringing: he is a toy mouse who has just been brought out of his box a few hours earlier. The elephant presumably has not had an upbringing ei ther.

-36- Her values are all assumed because of the situation she finds herself in. The role she has chosen, and which she believes is rightly hers, defines her approach to the problem.

The elephant softens her approach. She allows for the fact that the child does not have "a mother's guidance, ,,14 although her own understanding of what that might be is clearly deficient, based, as it is, not on her own experience, but on words she once heard "a large teddy bear sing to a small one.,,15 Values and relationships in the world of the toyshop are based on accidents of place and aspects of design. The elephant derives her picture of herself and of the world from the dolls' house and the teddy bears; the teddy bears and the toy mice exist in mother-child and father-child relationships, respectively, because they are linked together by design.

The elephant is still no closer to explaining the necessity of going out into the world until a gentleman doll's interjection gives her an idea. The doll's head, like those of the other dolls, is made of papier-mache," , and as a consequence of being made of "paste and newsprint" he always speaks "in scraps of news and advertising.,,16 Composi tion, like design, determines the doll's way of being and doing. Each doll has his or

-37------

her own place in the house and his or her own constant occupation. 17 All of them are garrulously absurd in what they say. What the gentleman doll says is taken from reconstructed scraps of an advertisement for a shop sale: "PRICES SLASHED ••. EVERYTHING MUST GO. ,,18 The elephant sei zes on this and makes a point out of it, although in intention and utterance it is clearly pointless: "You're qui te right, " said the elephant. "Everything must, in one way or another go. One does what one is wound to do. It is expected of me that I walk up and down in front of my house; it is expected of you that you drink tea. And it is expected of this young mouse that he go out into the world with his father and dance in a circle." 19

The elephant is not being flippant in her puns, nor is the author, entirely. The two senses of "go" are more relevant than the elephant thinks. Everything must go: tha t is, be sold and leave the shop. The elephant herself, despite her illusion of being "part of the establishment,,,20 will also be sold. 21 Everything must go: there is a purpose in being a thing, particularly a clockwork thing. Every clockwork thing is wound up, and goes: "Wound to do" is equivalent to "bound to do." And that for the elephant is tied up with social expectations which must be fulfilled. One is wound to do something, and it is expected that one should, even if one does not want to. A high sense of responsibility

-38- can seem like destiny. A plain fact of the nature of clockwork can be elevated into a lofty obligation.

Noblesse oblige meets the necessity of clockwork.

In the toyshop the mice discover that they are bound also by the rules of clockwork: "No talking before midnight

and after dawn, and no crying on the job."22 These

rules prescribe a code of behaviour and they can be broken; but they are also descriptive of innate principles, we later discover. The clock warns the mouse child that he is in danger of crying on the job if

he cries at other times. 23 The mouse child does in time

break this law, not wilfully, although he knows he is on the job,24 but because he cannot keep himself from

crying: "I didn't mean to cry," he says. "I couldn't help it. "25 When the time comes that the father and the

child break the other rule, it is less of a transgression

of the clockwork code, and more of a victory over a law

of their nature: "But I've often tried to speak after dawn, "said the child, "and I never could till now. I wonder how it happened ?" "Perhaps your laughter freed you from the ancient clockwork laws. " [The frog is speaking.] 26

Frog's conception of the laws is here like an ancient

curse which enslaves the spirit of the toys and prevents

them being truly free. It is like some enchantment in a

-39- fairy tale which only one appropriate loving action or declaration will break. Here the liberating power belongs to unsuppressed emotion. One law deals explicitly with the suppression of emotion while one is doing wha t one is "wound to do." This is the one that may inadvertently be broken. The other is robbed of its power to bind the mice only by the free expression of emotion in liberating laughter. To cry or laugh in an uninhibited manner goes against the purpose of the laws as well as the let ter. The rules are more than a safeguard against discovery by those who do not know the living na ture of clockwork; they are laws which keep clockwork toys what they should be: mechanical copies of life that fall short of the full possibilities which life offers to the living.

Going Nowhere: the Human Predicament The child's crying on the job arises from a nostalgic longing for the toyshop and its association with the lost possibility of a mother in the shape of the elephant. 27

It is not the only sense of dislocation and dissatisfaction that a clockwork toy may feel. There are other griefs more basic to their function, which do not rely on memories to make themselves felt. The monkey complained of being made to play the same tune over and over on a cheap fiddle; the bird complained of having to peck a t a bare floor; the rabbit complained that there was no meaning in his cymbals. And soon the mouse and his child complained of the futility -40- of dancing in an endless circle that led nowhere. 28

There is no variety, no prospect of real nourishment, no meaning, no direction and no future. Everything is the same in their ordered lives and it is not fulfilling. Hoban, who revels in language, again uses a pun; but again it is a pun with a serious intent. "Symbols" unlike "cymbals" should have meaning. A symbol without meaning is a contradiction in terms: it stands for nothing when its very nature demands that it should be significant. That little pun is one of the first indica tions that the saga of the toys is more than a clever exercise in animation; that their sorrows merge with the pains of being human. For a human being that sense of being significant, but having no meaning and no direction, is not only tenable, but an accurate representation of the human condition. It is of particular relevance to our modern Wes tern cuI ture of secular humanism where the recognition that "all is meaningless,,29 is not balanced by the (discarded) idea that humanity is made in the image of God, though fallen from its original purpose and become murky in its nature. That fall produces a sense of loss. "0 what we ben,,,30 cries Riddley Walker in Hoban's novel of the same name. There Hoban blends images of the fall with the experience of a disordered society centuries after a nuclear

-41- holocaust, as it struggles to come to terms with its double inheritance of confusion. Another sense of loss stems, for the atheistic humanist and the nihilist, from the discarding of that religious world picture. Nietzsche, who was anxious to see wha t he called .. the Christian moral hypothesis,,3l dispensed with, still recognized what would be lost in its passing. It granted man an absolute value, as opposed to his smallness and accidental occurrence in the flux of becoming and passing away. 32

Hoban is more of Nietzsche' s opinion than of the other party. He says in an interview: I read that our present universe may be part of a much larger universe. So I think this is just a li t tIe bi t of action going on in this corner of the universe. Everything is not necessarily going to come out all right. It may be just an experiment [i.e. an evolut ionary experiment 1 that is a dead end. But to me, the whole thing is worth it for the action. 33

, Destiny has no place in this picture of the universe.

There are no fixed ends; there is only the haphazard operation of chance, and the struggle to survive. There are no absolute values: life is worth it for its own sake. There is no governing intelligence which stands outside the system, no God to be in control. If there is anything larger than the individual it is within the system: "one single universal consciousness .. 34 Hoban

-42- calls it; Alida Allison's name for it is "that impersonal, vast, and random power - call it the mindless flow of birth and death and circumstances. "35 Hoban gives it a mind; Allison does not, but they are both speaking of the sense that life is bigger that we are, and seeking to establish a unity in such vastness, such diversity.

Going Somewhere For the mice to begin to function more meaningfully the repetitive pattern of their existence as toys, with its attendant lack of a sense of purpose, must be broken. This for them is a physical as well as an existential crisis. When undernea th the Chris tmas tree the mouse child begins to cry on the job it disturbs the family cat. She inadvertently knocks a vase on top of them leaving them broken. 36 They are recovered from the junkyard by a tramp who mends them as best he can, breaking some of the clockwork parts in the process. 37 Now when it was wound up the motor worked without jamming, but the mouse and his child danced no more. The father, his legs somewhat bent, lurched straight ahead with a rolling stride, pushing the child backwards before him. 38

They now no longer move in a circle, but more or less straight ahead. Later we discover that even their 'straight line' is part of a larger circle. They walk

-43- in "a series of long arcs" because of the father's bent leg. 39 But the significance of the change remains: they have stopped going nowhere and have started going somewhere. Hoban says elsewhere: "they stopped playing around, and they moved out into the world."40 This time it is really out into the world, not just from the toyshop to the Christmas tree. In that world it is a struggle for them to keep going somewhere. They sti11 need to be wound, and are dependent on others to do it for them. In that world they encounter animals who are engaged in what are essentially human pursuits: crime, war, art, science and philosophy. There are Manny Rat and his gangster cronies;4l a shrew army;42 a travelling thea tre company led by crows; 43 a mechanically-minded muskrat,44 and a nihilistic turtle and playwright, C.

Serpentina. 45 Their unlikely ally is a fortune-telling frog who helps them at several critical points in their travels. Some of the animals, like Frog, are friendly and wi11 help; others find that it is not in their interests to help the mice move ahead with what they want , to do. Manny Rat who exploits "wind-ups" as scavengers would at first keep them in slavery at the dump. The Caws of Art Theatre Company offer them limited sympathy and the limited arena of the stage, turning them into performers again.

-44- Muskrat, to whom they go in the hope of being made self­ winding, never gets round to solving their problem. They are made to solve his first. He has them pace around inside his circular house in order to assist his thinking. (He is lame and can no longer do this for himself. ) They are pleased at first to do this as it seems as if this activity has a purpose and an aim: "We're going in a circle again, Papa," said the child, "but this time it's going to get us somewhere." 46

When Muskrat turns his attention to a practical outworking of his own scheme for tree-felling, and not theirs for self-winding, he once again makes ·use of the mice. This time they are harnessed to a tree-felling device, walking around in what Muskrat pedantically

insists is an oval. 47 Muskrat directs the attention of the frustrated mice towards the end result of their labours:

Don't think of the walking. Think of the crash; think of the splash; think of the ever-widening ripples. 48 Geraldine DeLuca directs our attention to the same end, when she says that going round in circles can be seen as a setback but can also be a recogni tion of the seeming repetitiveness involved in our striving. 49

-45- By the end of a long winter the mouse child has not much enthusiasm for what Muskrat or DeLuca is saying. The author follows the child's mood, disparaging the fine distinction that Muskrat has made between an oval and a circle. Onward walked the mouse child, backwards, in his oval track that was only the old and endless circle made more narrow. He followed his own footsteps going nowhere, his one reward the tension of the string as he moved outward from the tree, the chonking bite as he returned to see the axe blade fall again. 50 "Onward ••• backwards •.• nowhere" is the least progress one might conceivably make short of standing still. "Onward" is wha t the warlike shrews shouted as they marched in armies to destruction. 5l "Onward, mice !" was the cry adopted by the child as he and his father escaped the ba t tlefield to continue their quest. 52 It has echoes of both futility and bravery. "A way forward and out of the dump,,53 was what the father hoped for, yet could not look beyond, when he saw he and his son might be used by Ralphie in his bankraid. That was the father's. forward-looking perspective. Now we have achieved the viewpoint of the child as he faces the forward-moving father: backwards, leading nowhere. They had hoped that Muskrat would enable them to get "somewhere,,,54 but he has disappointed them.

-46- As the father's motor grows rustier and moves from slower working to rigidity, and his spirit sinks almost to despair within him, these perspectives change. The father's motor is no longer the motive force and he does no t move the two 0 f t hem onwards. The child has no motor in him and "fills the empty space inside himself with foolish dreams that cannot possibly come true,"55 or so his father thinks. But it is these "foolish dreams" inside the child which provide the motivation to bring them out of their next entrapment, when the father's motor is useless and his spirit dull. The child becomes the onward motivator, or as Serpentina puts it, "the child is father to the mouse."56

First the mouse child must go on a mental journey on which he is sent by Serpentina the philsopher-turtle. 57 It is a circular odyssey out beyond "the last visible dog" and back, to discover themselves in their reflected image on the bare metal of the BONZO dog food can, once Miss Mudd has stripped it of its portentous label of infinitely regressing dogs. Otherwise this is the most static episode of their adventure as they are stuck in the mud at the bottom of a pond. Meanwhile, Serpentina undermines the notion of a "somewhere" to get to with his nihilistic philosophy, enabling Hoban to pun again on the sense of "go."

-47- "Key times Winding equals Go," said the child. "Go ?" said the snapping turtle. "Go where ? This mud being like other mud, we may assume that other mud is like this mud, which is to say that one place is all places and all places are one. Thus by staying here we are at the same time everywhere, and there is obviously no place to go. Winding, therefore, is futile." Serpentina settled himself comfortably in the ooze, and dismissed the subject of winding from his mind. 58 This might be geographically accurate if there were only mud in which to live. Serpentina is content with mud, hence his dismissal of alternatives. But even if there were only mud the mouse child would not be content. He still would desire the objects of his dreams: a home, a family and self-winding. 59 Going is important because of his self-set aims, and going somewhere is the only way to achieve them. And, perhaps, Hoban might say, going is important even if one does not achieve one's aims: "the whole thing is worth it for the action.,,60

That decision to act according to what one hopes for is what sets the child to work out a way of escape from the pond, while his father becomes lulled by encroaching

despair into forgetfulness and a longing for extinction. 61 The child devises a practical scheme inspired by Muskrat's example. With the help of a friendly dragonfly nymph and an unintelligent fish, it

works; and the mouse and his child "rise on the propulsion of [their] own thought,,62 to the surface

-48- of the pond. This is not, as Serpentina intended, a purely metaphorical ascent while they remain firmly embedded in the mud, but an actual ascent and a literal interpretation of his words.

It is the mouse child's way, with the naivety of a child, to treat metaphor as literal truth. The dogs on the BONZO can are a metaphor used by Serpentina in his p1ay.63 They may have a legitimate use as an image to express what Serpentina believes about ultimate truth and the nature of infini ty, but they betray no truths of themselves. The mouse child takes the quest for the ultimate truth seriously, and takes the concrete image of the BONZO can as the thing itself, concentrating on the can as if it were actually infinity. He even wants to look behind or beyond infini ty, on "the other side of nothing.,,64 Miss Mudd fulfils this naive request by eating up the paper label, bi t by bit, to reveal the shiny surface of the can. In it the mouse child recognizes the reflection of his father and himself.

Serpentina knows that this is taking metaphor too far: "That's cheating ... You can't swallow infinity.,,65 (He decides however'to treat the removing of the label as the expression of an argument, and allows the mouse child "to develop his premise.,,)66 The objections67 Miss Mudd has to the thought that nothing is the ultimate truth are

-49- thus as valid as Serpentina's assertions of it. The can embodies an idea merely and does not teach us about objective reali ty, or prove an argument. We learn nothing about the true nature of reality, but the mouse child derives courage to act on his own behalf. For an existentialist this is the only valid response in such a si tua tion. The existentialis t' s emphasis is not on perceived truth, but on authentic action. 68 Hoban' s novel seems to promote existential values above any others. The motto is after all "Look if you like, but you will have to leap.,,69

Favourable Signs If the picture dogs do relate to any other things outside themselves, then, within the context of the book, it is to the black and white spotted dog adopted by the tramp and to the Dog Star, Sirius. (The BONZO dog food can is also the receptacle of Manny's spare parts for wind-ups. It is both the provider of new parts for the clockwork mice70 and a siege-engine in their defeat of the rats. 71 It is an emblem of strength. They adopt the label as their flag,72 and later name their house "The Last Visible Dog.,,)73

The Dog Star is the star which the mouse child sees when they arrive in the dump for the first time. 74 It shares the sky with the constellation of Orion the Hunter, which

-50- seems to be associated with Manny Rat, who spends most of the book hunting the toy mice. The child identifies with Sirius. When Euterpe the parrot flies them away from the riot at the amphitheatre Sirius is above them. It seemed to fly onwards, keeping pace beside them through the distant sky. 75

Its light is a comfort then to the child and it has been a comfort before at the dump.76 Orion shines "down on the hunted"77 who run to escape predators in the night.

This is in the descriptive passage in chapter five, just before the story of Manny Rat's search for the mice resumes. In that same passage "bright Sirius kept his track across the sky" while the clockwork mice, toiling a t tree-felling, "trod theirs below." 78 Before the defeat of the rats the Dog Star rises - in reality as Sirius rising in the heavens, and symbolically as the

BONZO can borne aloft by the kingfisher. 79 This fulfils the prophecy spoken by Frog: "a dog shall rise; a rat shall fall."80 Stars are traditionally associated with the destinies of individuals and nations. The interpretation by events of Frog's prophecy as referring to the Dog Star makes this connection explici t. Manny Rat falls from fortune when the star of the mice is in the ascendant. In less fatalistic terms, more fitting to the existential aspects of the book, the Dog Star visible far out in the heavens becomes their star,

-51- because they have adopted it. The star above the dump comforts the child at a moment of crisis. It puts the events of his life in perspective. At the bottom of the pond "the last visible dog" gives him a new and brave outlook on life and on how he and his father must influence their own future. It is "the only favourable sign, ,,81 not because the star favours their cause, but because it is the only one that helped them to rise, on the propulsion of their own thought, to find a way out and a way ahead. As a star sign it is a token of hope and redemption; as an inn sign it is the declaration that they should not look to destiny but to themselves to help themselves; that they can themselves, with the help of others, achieve some of their dreams.

Sirius, when the mouse child first sees it, does not seem entirely auspicious. It opens up a frightening revelation of near-infinite space in which the only comfort to be taken is a rather cold one. the child was tilted at such an angle that he too saw the Dog Star, beyond his father's shoulder. He had never looked up at the sky before; indeed, he had as ye t seen li ttle of the earth, and even that little was more frightening than he had imagined. At first the icy glitter of the far-off star was terri fying to him; he sensed a distanc'e so vast as to reduce him to nothing. But as he looked and looked upon that steady burning he was comforted a little; if he was nothing, he thought, so also was this rat and all the dump. His father's hands were firm upon his, and he resolved to see what next the great world offered. 82 -52- There are many attitudes one can have when looking up into the heavens. There is the psalmist's a tti tude which places that vastness in relation to the greatness of God and the smallness of man among his creation, and the great favour that God should care for him. When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honour. 83

Then there is the wonder of the medieval mind looking out at the crystal spheres turning in their courses through the heavens in silent harmony, moved by the primum mobile, which is itself moved by its love for God. 84

The love that moves the sun and the other stars.

85

Reaching more modern times, there is the sublime terror and disquiet, akin to that of the mouse child, experienced by Blaise Pascal: '''le silence '"eternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie." (The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.),86 And in our own century there is the sense, which again the mouse child shares, that this distance relativizes misery and pain, and even the problem of evil. Albert Einstein, contemplating the gross inhumanity working itself out in Europe during the

-53- Second World War, is. reputed to have been heard muttering: "After all this is only a small star."87 The rat and the dump are small. The horror of my own insignificance is alleviated not by the grace of God, or what his creative intent has made me, but by the knowledge that suffering, that evil are also inconsequential. At leas t there is still the sense of 'human' relationship, of "his father's hands ... firm upon hiS," which gives him strength to see what the world will offer.

Active Agents of Fortune

The other dog that matches the image on the BONZO can is the tramp's companion. The tramp is a strange and enigmatic figure. He appears at the beginning of the book and also at the end, and is the agent of the mouse pair's first rehabilitation, the engineer of their new motion.

He is a strong reinforcer of the circular pattern in the book's structure. The first two words of the story are "the tramp" and the last two words are "the tramp."88 He only speaks twice, each time in rather grand utterances. "Be tramps," he says, after he has mended the mice;89 and at the end of the book when all are safely gathered together he tells them: "Be happy."90 His words make, and bless, and issue forth as simple commands. He is, as Alida Allison calls him, "the closest figure to a god in

Hoban's work."91 He speaks twice, and mends the mice, and yet, as Allison points out, neither mouse nor child

-54- seem to be aware of him. 92 There are "no epiphanies ••• there is 'nothing but us. ".93 It is inevitable that he should also be compared with the author,94 because of his role of intervening in the action while remaining an observer and not a true participant in the main drama. With this I shall deal more fully later. Suffice it to say for now that he is a god from the machine more than an expression of a transcendent rea1i ty: a literary device to rescue the mice from the scrapheap rather than a figure standing for God in any meaningful sense. Despite the references in the book to destiny and the key role of prophecy in the plot, there is no overwhelming sense of "a divinity that shapes our ends,/Rough-hew them how we wi11.,,95 There is more emphasis on the rough-hewing the characters themselves must engage in, whether chopping down trees or fighting for the right to their own terri tory and to their own happiness. A11ison says of Hoban's novels: That human beings continue in the face of our powerlessness is an existential, a titanic value, not a religious or a spiritual one. There are no benign gods in Hoban's writing, no ascent through grace. There are only undergrounds oozing pond bottoms ••• and primitive powers which kill ••• 96

Other characters may act the role of the one who brings together the necessary elements for a new start or a proper resolution. It is Frog who puts the mouse and his

-55- child back together again the second time they are broken. 97 In a bellowing voice he outlines the importance of such an act, and manages at the same time to avoid being ea ten by the bi ttern by virtue of Frog's startling tone of command. "TO HOW MANY OF US IS GIVEN THE OPPORTUNITY OF SEIZING THAT PRICELESS MOMENT IN WHICH THE TANGLED THREADS OF MINGLED FATES CAN BE UNSNARLED AND WOVEN, WARP AND WOOF, INTO THEIR PREORDAINED DESIGN !" 98 This concept owes something to the dangerous position Frog is in, and its unquestioned acceptance owes a lot to its histrionic delivery. It is not, however, inconsis tent with Manny Rat's view of Frog. The rat fears him, regarding him as "not only a prophet of good or bad luck, but its active agent as well. ,,99 Frog is the one who saves the mice from being smashed by Manny Rat. He shouts out "RATIONS !" at the critical moment. The shrew army appears and Manny Rat retreats. lOO Frog is a strong acti ve agent in the sense tha t he partly makes his own luck. Destiny for him is better called opportunity, but he mystifies the concept to his own advantage, as in the desperate speech to the bittern. Frog is a shrewd animal. Up until his meeting with the mouse and his child he has kept alive by "paying closer attention to not being ea ten than his enemies could bring to bear on ea ting him. ,,101 His sudden altruistic action goes against his previous instinct for self-preservation; but, although he

-56- has abandoned the policy of manipulating a situation for his own advantage merely, it is with a view towards gaining an advantage for others. He is still seeking to control the situation. His relationship with destiny is not based on knowledge of what is going to happen, but on an eye for the main chance. The frog as far as he himself knew, had never accurately predicted the future in his entire life. 102

In common with most false prophets he normally frames his words according to what his hearers want to hear. When the toy mice have their fortune told, that changes. Frog is unable to speak the words he has planned. l03 His fortune-telling takes on a mystical dimension which it has previously not had. What is more, the prophecy in all its elements comes true. It is the same when he attempts to tell a fair-sounding fortune for Manny Rat: "other words, obscure and cryptic, came into the fortune teller's mind.,,104 It also comes true. The prophecy he gives to Ralphiel05 is one of the old client-pleasing variety. He bases it on what he can observe. He sees the bag the mice are carrying for the rat, and predicts a long journey. Ralphie says that he is wrong: it is a short one. Ralphie, thinking of the intended journey to the bank vault, smacks his lips as he visualizes the treacle brittle that lies inside. Frog, observing this, tells

-57- him there will be good eating." Frog, according to the assumptions he is making is wrong, and Ralphie does not have the good fortune he has desired. The words of the prophecy come ironically true, however: Ralphie goes on the long journey of death and the badger guard at the bank who devours him has "good eating."106 The mystic prophecy comes gradually true; the cynical, manipulative prophecy is proved ironically true by the contrariness of events.

Despite this lack of eventual difference between one prophecy and another, the difference for Frog is profound. It is therefore difficult to completely rationalize the mystical aspects of the book with the existential values which Hoban promotes inside and outside the book. It is as if a spiritual world is darkly suggested but never boldly affirmed. Hoban is interested in these things in their own right, and not just as plot devices. He describes writing as a "mediumistic activity a

shamanistic activity, "107 rather than a means of "self- expression. " This does not mean that he believes in an external, unseen reality in the traditional sense - in a world of spirits. It may be rather, what one of his interviewers calls, "a delightful relationship with your subconscious. "lOB Another explains it all in terms suitable to Jungians, Freudians and Christians, after having used a number of odd words for the artist which

-58- suggest a range of other possibilities: "he is like an alchemist, or a soothsayer ... or like a ham radio operator" hoping to hear and interpret "the authentic voice of human desire."109 She goes on:

There is an evocative phrase which crops up over and over again in his novels: "the thing which looks out of our eyes." Tha t "thing" (which Jungians would call the collective unconscious, Freudians the subconscious and Christ ians the soul, and which Hoban himself has described as "one transmission of which we are all receivers") is not rational, and cannot be understood rationally, but he does believe it speaks through art. 110 This, despite its cultivated vagueness, is a naturalistic explanation without any possibility of mistaking it for anything else. Hoban at other times can use language to describe his feeling of not being wholly in control of his own fiction which gives the impression of a mystical reality behind and beyond what he is doing. Writers have for a long time now been apt to use traditional language about the Muse and inspiration, and often in a rather loose way. Hoban is obviously not unfamiliar with this. Euterpe the parrot in The Mouse and his Child is named after one of the Muses .111. Note 1 Writers also use religious phrases to dignify their thought processes. Classic poets will invoke the aid of well-defined beings. Romantic poets can gush feelingly about "the holiness of the heart's affections,,112 or talk of "that blessed mood, fIn which the bur then of the mys tery f ••• is lightened. ,,113 Hoban, by contrast, can sound

-59- disturbingly matter-of-fact about it. He invi tes the danger, as does Serpentina with the mouse child, that we will take his figurative speech as literal truth: I like to play with language unthinkingly, and I always trust in what I like to do unthinkingly ••• Lorna tell s Riddley, [Walker 1 "Someone is thinking us. It thinks us but it don't think like us." Well, it feels to me as if things or forces we don't know of look for utterance through us. Maybe it's nothing that can be explained, or maybe its frivolity rather than anything heavy, but I find myself walking around the house saying "nuz" or "kruld" - just to hear the sound of these things •.• But wSy does something want to make those soun s through me? I don't know. 114

I do not think I would want to argue on the basis of these statements that Hoban is acting as a medium for spiritual beings that want to say "nuz" or "kruld·' through him. Note 2 It does show, however, that he is happy to use language that suggests shadowy external influences on human behaviour both inside and outside his fiction, without necessarily adhering to any belief-system that gives objective validity to such things.

Reasoning out Destiny Isabel Quigly nicely rationalizes the use of destiny in The Mouse and his Child, making ita ma tter of fine li terary craft. In her review for The Spectator, she says the book is "brilliantly plotted, so that everything is satisfactorily linked and coincidence seems like

-60- destiny.,,115 This may adequately reflect what is a very tidy and highly-structured plot, but it does not explain away all of the book's references to destiny. Each one of these must be tidily explained away, and it can be done. Indeed the book often carries the alternative explanation alongside. The description of the dolls' house upon its pole is one example: Manny Rat lettered a little signboard that was appended to the larger one. MIGRANTS YES, it said, and the house seemed atlas t to have attained its full identity. The sign swung with a motion so august, and creaked with such a seasoned, veteran creak, that it and the house seemed always to have been in that predestined place, at the edge of the dump, beside the railway tracks, between the earth and sky. 116

"The house seemed at last to have attained its full identity. The sign ••• and the house seemed always to have been in that predestined place." Hoban is careful to use the word "seemed" to avoid giving these apparent states his sanction as truth. The addition, "MIGRANTS YES," is right for the house, not because of any preordained plan of the house's identity, but because it expresses the sympathy the mouse child and his father feel for travellers and seekers of new lands, after their own experience of travelling and seeking. The sense of a predestined place for the house comes from the august motion and "veteran creak" of a sign .that has just been put up. Things are not always what they seem. And yet

-61- the situation of the house is paraded as an immensity by the ringing phrase "between the earth and sky."

It was Destiny, says Frog, which gave him over to the shrews,117 but it is his own choice and his own shout which betrays him. Manny Rat in his relentless pursuit of the clockwork mice is initially fuelled by his fear of being a laughing-stock at the dump.118 It becomes a

"quest to which he found himself committed.,,119 He "was bound to smash them ••• sheer tenacity had driven him.,,120 If "found bound ... driven" do not express the externalized oppression of an internal motive sufficiently, Hoban goes on to make it clearer: Manny Rat had no choice left; some force beyond himself was pulling him whichever way his quarry turned. He ••• shuffled on as if at the end of an invisible chain by which his prey would drag him to his doom. 121

Here, apart from one "as if," there is no distinction made between what is apparent and what is actual. There is no "seemed." Manny had no choice; "Some force beyond himself" was pulling him. Manny's feelings are so detached from his rational mind that they become portrayed as independent forces acting on him. There is feeling of despair that goes wi th this grim I determina tion I which makes him feel chained, not only to a purpose, but to those who will become the very instruments of his doom.

-62- Elsewhere in the book he finds himself "by some strange magnetism drawn to the father and the son ... 122 Margaret and Michael Rustin see Manny's being drawn to the clockwork mice as the identification between characters who are equally passionately committed to action; an identification Manny does not understand. 123 More importantly, they see his desire to smash them as .. the need to destroy the vulnerable parts of himself ... 124 The clockwork mice externally represent his own "interior weakness ... 125 Hoban chooses to represent this irrational drive as a "force beyond" Manny Rat, even as he represents his own non-rational artistic instincts as forces outside himself.

The good luck coin which Frog leaves with the mice126 does not inevitably bring them good luck. The mice go through some hard times. The coin, however, twice becomes a vital part of a mechanical means of deliverance. It becomes the lure for the fish to activate the self-rescue mechanism for getting them out of the pond. 127 It becomes the missile which, ca tapul ted from the father's replacement arms, knocks out Manny's teeth. 128 Part of the legend on one side of the coin is obli tera ted by a hole for the string, < leaving only the words "YOUR LUCKY OAY IS ..... 129 It does not identify a particular day on which the mouse and his child will triumph. The legend on the other side - "YOU WILL SUCCEEO .. 130 - gives them the

-63- encouragement needed to find their own day of triumph, to make their own instruments of success. The coin is an empty token unless they personally act upon it. And yet they still need their friends,whose aid often only comes through those cOincidences which Isabel Quigly says seem like destiny.

How to Succeed: Destiny as Opportunity The only lesson the mouse and his child will give on the subject of success, even though they are pressed, is this: "simply and at all costs to move steadily ahead."131 It is a lesson admirably suited to the nature of clockwork, because that is what clockwork, barring breakdown and obstruction, will do. The special achievement of the mouse and his child is that they have managed to move steadily ahead, or at least to move ahead, despite both breakdown and obstructions. For humans, as well as for clockwork, that is an achievement. The mice have "prevailed" against such overwhelming odds. "132 This is reminiscent of what Bruno Bettelheim calls "Freud IS prescription:" "that only by struggling courageously against what seem like overwhelming odds can man succeed in wringing meaning out of his existence.« 133 The meaning is in the struggle, not in any pattern outside of it.

-64- Another lesson ought to be: "Seize the day," or as Frog puts it, "Destiny does not wait.,,134 Destiny for Frog, as has already been observed, is more like opportuni ty than anything. There is a danger, however, in being too hasty in seizing an opportunity. That is why the adverb "steadily" is needed: to modify our haste, as well as rebuke our tendency to give up. Little thought and sudden action reap few rewards in the book. All the impetuous characters fare ill. Frog warns the bittern: "DO NOT COMMIT THE TRAGIC ERROR OF SATISFYING PRESENT APPETITE AT THE COST OF FUTURE FULF ILMENT • " 135

Ralphie forgets Manny's plan and rushes straight into the bank vault for the treacle brittle - straight into the "waiting jaws of the badger," who eats him up.136

Curiosity gets the better of Manny Rat when he comes across the tree-chopping mice. In order to see the splash it will make, he accelerates the process and in the resulting confusion, loses the opportunity of smashing his quarry.137

Characters who do not move ahead do not receive much better treatment at the hands of the author. Serpentina is made to seem absurd because of his stick-in-the-mud philosophy, his comfortable nihilism which has disinvented any new worlds that there might be to conquer. The

-65- rabbi t playing Gretch in Serpentina' s play fares worse. In common with the clockwork rabbit who had "no meaning in

his cymbals," he is given a role which, not unlike the

whole of the play, is lacking in obvious significance:

The rabbit, as Gretch, entered and stood on his stone, shading his eyes with one paw as he looked around, hopeful of investing his silence with heavy meaning before he settled into immobility. 138

This does not prove a critical or a practical success.

The rabbit is killed in "a rush of weasels.,,139 No doubt

Serpentina would come off worse if he were not a predator

himself. The laws of nature or destiny in Hoban's book

seem to favour action. Even the bittern who might presumably be better off standing still in the reeds,

where he is properly camouflaged, is persuaded out of

seclusion by his involvement in the drama of the retaking

of the doll s ' house. 140 And Serpentina, in turn, is,

rather unconvincingly, brought out of his pond to propagate his ideas in public, in person. 141

To be the prey rather than the predator is something of a

disadvantage. .The clockwork mice are safer than most because they are made of tin and therefore inedible. The marsh hawk rejects them as "not part of the balance of nature. ,,142 Only Manny Rat preys on clockwork mice: he is the one enemy that matters. Hoban demonstrates that

-66- for others the hope of a better future is less certain. The odds are stacked higher against them in the battle for survival and the struggle for success. Shrews kill each other and are massacred by weasels; the weasels are, in turn, caught by the ow1. 143 As Joanne Lynn points out, the mice are spared the full extent of this vision. 144 But other things pass before their eyes. The possibility of failure without remedy, of hope without fulfilment, is most neatly encapsulated in the minor episode of the tadpoles in Serpentina's pond: Two passing tadpoles swam between him and the BONZO can, where they encountered a water snake. "This way, please," said the snake, and swallowed them. "It looks bad," said one of the tadpoles as they disappeared down the snake's throat. "You never know," said the other. "If we can just get through this, maybe everything will be all right." "Keep your eyes on the dogs," said Miss Mudd to the mouse child. "Let us persevere even though the prospects are uncertain." 145 This ironic counterpoint to the main theme of moving steadily ahead to find success is less grim than events at the end of the shrew war. It achieves its effectiveness through its wittiness and not through the sheer horror of bloodshed. Uncertainty as a principle has its place beside the mental certainty of the mice in their dogged

'determination, , and it exerts itself against the certainty that is inherent in the concept of a predetermined destiny.

-67- Destiny. Reality and Fiction Why then does Hoban use so many images of destiny, when he is prepared to undermine them, sometimes in the same sentence, or to make them paradoxical to the point of absurdity by the strength of his existential themes and by his admission of the principle of uncertainty in the scheme of things? It is perhaps the paradox of fiction that he is playing with. Fiction. whether dramatic realism or fantasy, seeks to replica te something of the nature of reality. But whatever the nature of that reality might be, be it fixed or random, the fictional world created by an author is always a bounded one. It is subject to the conscious artistic aims of its creator, and under the influence of his unconscious mind, which makes its own uncharted connections and introduces them into the writing. Some of these unplanned connections the author then consciously works on. The motive for an event in fiction, whether it stems from conscious or unconscious thought on the author's part. never truly comes from anything in the internal action of the fictional work, or from any thought in a character's head. There are no true causes wi thin it. Everything is determined from the outside. The sequence of events in the work comes from the controlling intelligence behind the work, even if that intelligence does not itself feel fully in conscious control. Every fictional character has a destiny no matter how insignificant he is. This is

-68- the paradox Tom Stoppard plays with in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead .146 Stephen Sondheim plays with the same idea when he has his cast of fairy-tale characters in Into the Woods147 feed their narrator (who spends part of the play disguised as a Mysterious Man) to the giant. Before they get rid of him, the narrator protests that he is the only one who knows how the story goes from then on. Their reply is to the effect tha t they can cope with finding out their own lives for themsel ves, and they hand him over to the giant. The suspended disbelief of the audience is broken and the difference between the ordered world of story and the bewilderingly uncertain nature of life is revealed.

Hoban does not need to break the spell of the story in order to play with the idea of his role in creating it. The tramp, as has been said, can be seen to function as the author: Hoban's Mysterious Man. He and his dog are at the beginning of the book the only creatures "not moving in a fixed direction, ,,148 emblems of the freedom

the mouse and his child desire, and free agents in a world of fiction where all the characters are really complex clockwork. The tramp walks with steps "too big" for "the li t tIe town. ,,149 He is not on the same scale as the inhabitants of this little world. The tramp, like the

-69- author, changes things and tells things what they should be. ,He begins the book and he ends it. He is the disguised, god of this small fictional world.

The author is the figure behind the prophecies too. He has a sibylline way of playing with language. He is fond

of puns and irony. "A painful spring, a shattering

fall ,,150 finds both a seasonal and a mechanical fulfilment.

Conclusion It remains at best questionable that beyond the lessons the book teaches about individual and shared effort and

beyond its celebration of the spirit of conquest, The Mouse and his Child has anything serious to say on the possibility of a real destiny at work. Existential values do not sit well with what essentially belongs to a religious world-picture, but Hoban carries it off well. This basic discrepancy does not hinder the development of what seems like a fully-formed world within the book, largely due to Hoban's gift for significant detail, combined with the urgency of a really exciting plot.

There is a process going on within the book, however, that involves the rejection of certain well-defined influences

on the lives of the clockwork mice. There are the social expectations which people, like the elephant, think must

-70- be fulfilled. There are rules and values, like the rules of clockwork, that seek to limit actions, and actually limit the full development of the emotional life. There is the general stream of life hurrying in its fixed directions, which only those who become tramps manage to escape. The mouse and his child must not let these influences "determine" their actions. They are indeed caught in difficult situations from which, as for the tadpoles, there may be no way of escape; but they must "persevere, even though the prospects are uncertain." 151

Existential answers to life's questions put no-one in the driving seat but ourselves. As the mouse child says:

Nobody can get us out of here but us. That gives us Why. Now we have to figure out the Hows and the Whats. 152

We stand with the mouse child on the brink of infinity, looking upwards and being afraid; comforted only by the possibility of human relationship and the relative smallness of all that opposes us. Out there, beyond the last visible star, where the light distorts into the invisible end of the spectrum, some unseen experiment in natural selection may just be beginning to look promising, as the one of which we are a part takes a dip into disaster. Never mind, it is "worth it for the action.,,153 Looking out into the universe was not always so chilly:

-71- The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd. 154. Note 3 For some it lies there still; for others there is only the panorama of insignificance and the probability of our extinction as the balance of nature changes. The theologian S. G. F. Brandon says, tha t despi te this being the only world picture that modern science authorizes -

Yet, instinc ti vely Wes tern Man still tends to think •.• in terms of an old fashioned doctrine of progress, which is s till recognizably inspired by the Christian tradition that 'God is working his purpose out.' 155 Perhaps this unresolved dilemma lies at the heart of the problem of why Hoban should use aspects of two contradictory world views in The Mouse and his Child.

The human yearning for purpose and identity needs a higher val ue for a basi s than our sel ves • Even after removing God from our sense of how things fit together, we still desire the reassurance tha t there is a point to it all.

Hoban is not one to go in for unfounded optimism, but maybe his assertion that for him "the whole thing is worth it for the action ,,156 is bluster, and like Kleinzei t, in his novel of the same name, he desires to find "the hidden soul of harmony, "157 a connection at the base of things.

Then the use of destiny is explicable in terms of that yearning:

-72- Kleinzeit felt a surge of well-being through his whole system. Not alone! Somebody looking after him, giving him a key ! 158, Note 4 The dilemma remains a dilemma for the author, however, and so the two pictures of life, of ordered event and of chaotic struggle, are not reconciled into one. The mouse child's "Why?," properly remains unanswered.

,

-73- Notes

1. Hoban enjoys using bizarre classical allusions. The hideous Dr. Bashan in Kleinzei t has a yacht named

Atropos 159 after one of the Fates. Atropos is the sister who "cuts the thread of human life with her

shears.,,160 It is therefore not inappropriate for an

unfeeling physician who is always recommending unnecessary opera tions. Euterpe, whose name means "well pleasing," has chosen a name for herself which pleases her better" than her original name, Polly.16l

2. In another interview the words, or sounds, Hoban says in the bathroom are "crolge" and "nnnnzzzz.,,162 It is

difficult to determine whether these are actual

variants of Hoban's, or whether they merely demonstrate the difficulty of producing a transcript

of a tape-recorded interview.

3. It would appear that Hoban was thinking of this poem ( 'Dover Beach') when he wrote chapter three. The

context of both the chapter and the poem is, in Arnold's words,

a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. 163

-74- At the beginning of the chapter, Hoban echoes Arnold's

opening image in the poem.

In the shadows of the trees ahead a green light, pale and dim, glimmered and was gone. 164 Arnold's image is:

on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast out in the tranquil bay. 165

4. Kleinzeit is doomed to disappointment as far as

overall harmony is concerned. Despi te a series of

strange coincidences, the key dropped in his

collecting box while he is busking in the

Underground166 opens no doors and does not belong to a

secret benefactor, but to a lady who has dropped it in

by mistake. 167 The best he must make do with is a

series of Moments of harmony.168

-75- References

1. EGOFF, Shei1a. Thursday's child: trends and atterns in contem orar children's literature. Chicago: American L1 rary Association, 9 I, p.1l6. 2. Ibid., title page. 3. Ibid., pp 115-116. 4. HOBAN, Russell. The mouse and his child. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1985. 5. EGOFF, ref.l, p.1l6. 6. LYNN, Joanne. Threadbare utopia: Hoban's modern pastoral. Children's Literature Association Quarterly, 1986, 11 (1) , 19-24.

7. Ibid. , p.20. 8. HOBAN, ref. 4, pp 14-15. 9. HOBAN, ref.4, p.16. 10. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.17. 11. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.19. 12. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.19. 13. HOBAN, ref.4, p.19. 14. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.19. 15. HOBAN, re f .4, p.20. 16. HOBAN, ref. 4, p .18. 17 . HOBAN, ref.4, pp 18-19. 18. HOBAN, ref.4, p.19. 19. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.19. 20. HOBAN, ref. 4, p .17 • 21. HOBAN, re f • 4, p.43.

-76- 22. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.20. 23. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.20. 24. HOBAN, ref.4, p.23. 25. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.26. 26. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.46. 27. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.23. 28. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.22. 29. Ecclesiastes. I', ii, et alibi (own paraphrase) 30. HOBAN, Riddley Walker, London: Jonathan Cape, 1980, P.t J. Quoted in: Edward Myers. An Interview with Russell Hoban. The Literary Review: an international 'ourna1 of contem orar writing, 9 31. NIETZSCHE, Friedrich. The will to tower. Ed. Halter Kaufmann. London: Weidenfe d and Nicolson, 1968, p.9. 32. Ibid., p.9. 33. MYERS, Edward. An interview with Russell Hoban. The Literary Review: an international iournal of contemporary writing, 1985, 28 (2), 11- 2. 34. Ibid., p.11. 35. ALLISON, A1ida. Russell Hoban. In: Dictionary of Literary Biography, vo1.52. Ed. G1enn E. Estes. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1986, p.201. 36. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.23. 37. HOBAN, ref. 4, pp 24-25. 38. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.24. 39. HOBAN, ref.4, p.60. 40. BUNBURY, Rhonda M. "Always a dance going on in the stone": an interview with Russe1l Hoban. Children's Literature in Education, 1986, 17 (3) , 144. 41. HOBAN, ref.4, pp 26-50. 42. HOBAN, ref.4, pp 51-66. -77- 43. HOBAN, ref. 4, pp 67-86. 44. HOBAN, ref. 4, pp 87-112. 45. HOBAN, ref. 4, pp 113-129. 46. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.95. 47. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.101. 48. HOBAN, ref.4, p.101. 49. DELUCA, Geraldine. "A condition of complete simplicity" : the toy as child in The mouse and his child. Children's Literature in Education, 1988, .!2. (4), 218 • 50. HOBAN, ref. 4, pp 107-108. 51. HOBAN, ref.4, pp 52, 61. 52. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.62. 53. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.36. 54. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.95. 55. HOBAN, ref.4, p.48. 56. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.ll9. 57. HOBAN, ref.4, pp 118-127. 58. HOBAN, ref.4, p.ll7. 59. HOBAN, ref. 4, pp 47-48, 86. 60. MYERS, ref. 33, p.12. 61. HOBAN, re f • 4, pp 122-124, 127, 132-134. 62. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.ll9. 63. HOBAN, ref. 4, pp72-75, 119. 64. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.125. 65. HOBAN, re f • 4, p.126. 66. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.126. 67. HOBAN, ref.4, p.125.

-78- 68. The new ency c10 aedia Britannica. 15th ed. Vo1.4. Chicago: Encyc1 opaedia Britannica Inc., 1974, pp 631-632. 69. AUDEN, W.H. Collected shorter poem, 1927-1957. London: Faber and Faber, 1966, p.200. 70. HOBAN, ref.4, pp 151, 154, 156. 71. HOBAN, ref.4, p.160. 72. HOBAN, ref.4, pp 173-174. 73. HOBAN, ref.4, p.190. 74. HOBAN, ref.4, pp 31-32. 75. HOBAN, ref.4, p.85. 76. HOBAN, ref.4, pp 32, 85. 77. HOBAN, ref.4, p.103. 78. HOBAN, ref.4, p.104. 79. HOBAN, ref.4, pp 154-155, 161. 80. HOBAN, ref.4, p.55. 81. HOBAN, ref.4, p.190. 82. HOBAN, ref.4, p.32. 83. Psalm VIII; iii-v. (New International Version) 84. LEWIS, C.S. The discarded ima e: an introduction to Medieval an Renaissance iterature. Cam Cambridge University Press, 1967, pp 92-121.

85. DANTE. Paradiso. XXX111, 145. Quoted in: The Oxford dictionary of quotations. 3rd ed. Oxfora: Oxford University Press, 1979, p.171. 86. PASCAL, B1aise. Pensees. iii, 206. Quoted in: The Oxford dictionary of quotations. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford university Press, 1979, p.369. 87. GUINNESS, Os. The dust of death: a critique of the Establishment and the counter culture and a proposal for a third way. London: Inter-Varsity Press, 1973, p.16. 88. HOBAN, ref.4, pp 13, 200.

-79- 89. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.25. 90. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.200.

91. ALLISON, ref. 35, p.201. 92. ALLISON, ref. 35, p.201.

93. ALLISON, ref.35, p. 201 • 94. KNOEPFLMACHER, U.C. Roads half taken: travel, fantasy and growing up. In: Susan R. Gannon and Ruth Anne Thomson, eds. Proceedings of the thirteenth annual conference of the Children's Literature Association, University of Missouri - Kansas City, May 16-18, 1986. West Lafayette: Education Dept, Purdue University, 1988. p.57.

95. SHAKESPEARE, William. Hamlet Vii, 10. Quoted in: The Oxford dictionary of quotations. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. p.437.

96. ALLISON, ref. 35, p.201.

97. HOBAN, ref. 4, pp 142-143, 146. 98. HOBAN, ref.4, p.138. 99. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.54. 100. HOBAN, re f • 4, p.55.

101. HOBAN, ref. 4, pp 59-60. 102. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.40.

103. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.41.

104. HOBAN, re f .4, p. 54.

105. HOBAN, ref.4, p.39.

106. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.45.

107. HOBAN, Russell. Russell Hoban on tigers, turtles and freedom. The Listener, 1979, 101, 5 April, 495. 108. BROOKS, David. Russell Hoban. Helix, 1985, Spring, 83.

109. HUGHES-HALLETT, Lucy. Russell Hoban's vision of the future. Good Housekeeping, 1985, 128, (1), 187.

110. Ibid., p.187.

-80- Ill. HOBAN, ref.4, p.69.

11Z. KEATS, John. Letters. Quoted in: The Oxford dictionary of quotations. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979, p.Z93.

113. WORDSIWRTH, William. Quoted in: The Oxford dictionary of quotations. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979, p.578. (lines from 'Tintern Abbey' )

114. McCAFFERY, Larry and Sinda GREGORY, eds. Alive & writing: interviews with American authors of the 1980s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987, p. 130. 115. QUIGLY, Isabel. Nice Mice. The Spectator, 1969, 16 May, 655.

116. HOBAN, ref.4, pp 191-192. 117. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.57.

118. HOBAN, re f . 4 , p.50.

119. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.105. 120. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.105.

1Z1. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.105.

1ZZ. HOBAN, ref.4, p. 54. lZ3. RUSTIN, Margaret and Michael RUSTIN. Narratives of love & loss: studies in modern children's fiction. London: Verso, 1987, p.189. lZ4. Ibid. , p.194. lZ5. Ibid. , p.195.

126. HOBAN, ref. 4, pp 65, 68-69.

127. HOBAN, ref.4, pp 127-130.

1Z8. HOBAN, ref. 4, pp 164-165.

129. HOBAN, ref. 4, pp 68-69.

130. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.68. 131. HOBAN, ref.4, p.195.

132. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.195.

-81- 133. enchantment: the tales. London: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

134. HOBAN, ref.4, p.138.

135. HOBAN, ref.4, p.137. 136. HOBAN, ref.4, p.45.

137. HOBAN, ref.4, pp 110-112.

138. HOBAN, ref.4, p.77.

139. HOBAN, ref.4, p.78. 140. HOBAN, ref.4, pp 130-132, 136-138, 167.

141. HOBAN, ref.4, pp 196-197.

142. HOBAN, ref.4, p.134. 143. HOBAN, ref.4, pp 61-64.

144. LYNN, ref.6, p.21. 145. HOBAN, ref.4, p.124. 146. STOPPARD, Tom. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. London: Faber and Faber, 1967. 147. SONDHEIM, Stephen. Into the woods. New York: Theatre. Communications Group, 1989, pp 70, 102-102. er vi & II ii) 148. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.16.

149. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.13 •

150. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.41.

151. HOBAN, ref.4, p.124.

152. HOBAN, ref. 4, p.125. 153. MYERS, ref.33, p.12.

154. ARNOLD, Matthew. Selected Eoems and Erose. Ed. F.W. l,a tt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964, p.155. (lines from I Dover Beach I )

-82- 155. BRAND ON , S.G.F. Time and the destiny of man. In: J.T. Fraser, ed. The voices of time. London: AlIen Lane, 1968, p.157. Quoted in: Guinness, ref.87, p.71. 156. MYERS, ref.33, p.12. 157. ROBAN, Russell. Kleinzeit. London: Jonathan Cape, 1974, p.181. (after Milton, 'L'allegro')

158. Ibid., p.104. 159. Ibid., p.138.

160. The Oxford companion to EnyliSh literature. 4th ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 967, p.616. 161. The new encyclopaedia Britannica, ref.68, p.440. 162. BROOKS, ref.108, p.74. 163. ARNOLD, ref.154, p.156. 164. ROBAN, ref.4, p.51. 165. ARNOLD, ref.154, p.155. 166. ROBAN, ref.157, p.104. 167. ROBAN, ref.157, p.113. 168. ROBAN, ref.157, pp 181-182.

-83- CHAPTER THREE

LOVE, LONELINESS AND LOST THINGS:

RUBBe11 Hoban and Hans Andersen.

Pene10pe Farmer, in her exposition of Russe11 Hoban as an "introvert fantasist,,,l,Note 1 compares The Mouse and his Child to two of Hans Andersen's tales: The Fir Tree2

and The Steadfast Tin-Soldier. 3 ,4 Margaret B10unt also makes a comparison between Hoban and Andersen:

Hans Andersen with the clockwork nightingale and lead [sic] soldier, Kings1ey with the fate of the lost doll, Collodi with the strange quest of the puppet who wanted to be a boy - all tell of the human sadness of toys, which is something that adults see, and one wonders if children really enjoy The Mouse and His Child. As an adult it is impossible to read it unmoved. 5 Andersen is credited by his biographer, Elias Bredsdorff, with being the first successfully to tell such a story:

"Andersen's ability to give life to inanimate objects was

one of the most striking innovations of the nursery

tale," he says.6 Bredsdorff quotes from Chambers's

Journal of 13 October 1855, which speaks of "the top, the

ball, and even the Nurse's darning-needle" as having

become "so many dea thless heroes of romance." 7 G.K.

Chesterton is brought in to endorse in his habitually

alliterative style the greatness of Andersen's gift in

- 84 - giving life to household objects. The words could equally apply to Russell Hoban: His treatment of inanimate things as animate was not a cold and awkward allegory: it was a true sense of dumb divinity in things that are ••• He suggested, in the true tradition of the folk tales, that the dignity of the fighter is not in his largeness but rather in his smallness, in his still loyalty and heroic helplessness in the hands of larger and lower things. 8

That mixture of heroism and vulnerability could easily be taken to describe the mouse and his child at the hands of their exploiters as much as its original exemplar, Andersen's steadfast tin-soldier: hero of the first tale of Andersen's to bring inanimate objects to life. 9

Andersen's stories more often than not feature objects which get lost, broken or discarded. The fir tree (a li ving thing of a kind) is taken from its place of Christmas splendour and honour, left to decay in an attic, and la ter chopped up and burned .10 The tin­ soldier falls out of the window and his young owners cannot find him; he is discovered by other boys, set in a paper boat and left to sail along a street gutter until the boat sinks and he is swallowed by a fish. The fish is caught and, miraculously, is taken to the house where the soldier came from. The fish is cut open and the soldier is discovered. Then, in one of Andersen' s

- 85 - characteristically cruel turns of fate, he is taken by one of the little boys, and thrown in the stove where he melts. 11 Andersen's money pig falls off the wardrobe and shatters.12 The darning needle breaks, survives for a while as a makeshift brooch to hold a scarf together, then is lost in the sink and ends up in the gutter. 13

Hoban's objects and characters suffer similar fates. The clockwork mice in The Mouse and his Child are broken by the cat knocking over the vase, thrown on the junkheap, mended by the tramp, and taken by a rat to the dump.14 The dolls' house in The Mouse and his Child is ravaged by a fire owing to its "youthful owners" playing with matches .15 In a passage which was taken by the anonymous reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement to sum up "something of the meaning"16 of The Mouse and his Child, the clockwork elephant suffers many things. She had endured what toys endure. She had been smeared with jam and worried by the dog; she had been sat upon, and she had been dropped. She had been made to pull wagons, had been shot at by toy cannons, and had been left out in the rain until her works rusted fast and she was thrown away. Still she endured, and deep within her tin there blazed a spirit that would not be quenched. 17

- 86- The reviewer is not wrong to take "wha t toys endure" as his or her keynote. Hoban, himself, in a signed review of other people's books, also in the TLS, harps on the same theme, and its meaning to him:

Writing about anything, one writes about everything. The most limited history, the very smallest and mos t neatly painted door, opens on immensities. I lost a Noah's ark when I was a child. Not an immensi ty. Both the ark and the animals were made of thin wood with glossy printed paper glued to it. I think they were lost in the cellar behind the big black hot-water tank, a thing not standing up like the little ones you see in bathrooms but lying down like a locomotive boiler. Crouching really. God knew what was behind it in the cobwebs and the darkness. I never dared to have a really good look. Forty five years and three thousand miles away from that cellar I still believe those animals are there, mouldered into blackness and gone to rot. Wood and paper, flesh and bone, they are of the animals lost to me. Immensity. 18

It is not just, in Margaret Blount's phrase, "the human sadness of toys,,19 that Hoban feels and portrays, but the sadness of lost toys, battered toys, their loneliness and their unquenchable spirit.

The story of Hoban's which is most like one of Andersen's is The Marzipan Pig. 20 Even its title would make it sound similar to almost any of Andersen's. From its opening line there is that sense of mild despair that pervades

Andersen, that which speaks of the inevitability of breakage and loss, and the disappointment of fond hopes:

- 87 - There was nothing to be done for the marzipan pig. He fell behind the sofa and tha t was that. No one had seen him fall and no-one knew where he was. He shouted "Help '" but no one heard him. Nigh t came, and morning, and he was still there. 21 This is similar to the plight of the tin-soldier, though the reason for the soldier's not being found is that, accustomed to military discipline, he does not cry out. But even the word pattern is similar in this translation, at any rate: If the tin-soldier had cried: "Here I am," they would surely have found him; but he did not consider it proper to cry aloud, because he was in uniform. 22 The simple narrative style, common to both, and the way each author treats a small event in a household as if it were an immensity make the two stories very similar in appearance. Hoban's is of course a modern setting and Andersen's a nineteenth-century one. Hoban seems to have used his own house in Fulham, overlooking Eel Brook Common where the District Line runs,23 as the model for the house in The Marzipan Pig. The Common and the District Line are mentioned in the book, as is the nearby Albert Bridge. 24 Andersen also wrote from life, although often with him it is the object-characters, as well as the settings. His characters represent real people or aspects of himself. Andersen said: Most of what I have written is a reflection of myself. Every character is from life. 25

- 88- Even the story of Andersen's three unrequited love affairs is represented in his tales. 26 ,27 In The Lovers28 a spinning top proposes to a morocco leather

ball, and is rejected.

Hoban also deals wi th unrequi ted love. The mouse who eats the marzipan pig, acquires the pig's sense of loneliness, and wishes she had listened to what he was trying to say as she nibbled at him. 29 This leads to an unrequited love for the clock that sits in the room30 as she tries to get another to respond to her as the pig also tried, in his isolation behind the sofa. The pig, in a poignant oxymoron, spoke of "friends unknown" coming

to his rescue, 31 but only the mouse came, and she ate him.

The pig's highly developed sense of self-worth, which borders on pomposity and egocentricity, is like that of many of Andersen's characters. He soliloquizes behind the sofa: "There is,'' he said, "such sweetness in me! ..... "I am growing hard," he said, "and bitter. What a waste of me !" 32

Compare this with Andersen's darning needle who fancies herself as a sewing needle:

- 89 - "1 am too fine for this world," it said, when it was lying in the gutter, "but 1 know who 1 am, and that is always a pleasure." 33 The pig imagines being asked to make a speech by his rescuers, and that he will be placed on top of a cake with pink icing, which would match his pink marzipan. 34 The darning needle "sat there proudly, and had many great thoughts.,,35 Each makes much of their personal attributes: attributes which go with the objects they are or imagine they are. The darning needle constantly talks about her fineness, because sewing needles are fine. The pig, being made of marzipan, talks of his sweetness, and laments that he is growing hard and bitter, as marzipan will if left in the air. One has more sympathy with the pig because he genuinely is sweet, whereas the darning-needle is really not very fine, just conceited.

The relation of the composition and the design of a thing to its thoughts and feelings is important in Hoban as in Andersen, as is the link between feeling something as a physical pain and feeling the pain of an emotion. When Andersen's tin-soldier is thrown into the stove he does not know whether his deteriorated state is a result of his feelings or of physical forces: The tin-soldier stood there in the strong light and felt an unbearable heat, but whether this hea t was caused by the real fire or by love, he did not know. His colours had

- 90- vanished, but nobody could say if that happened during his journey, or if heart grief was the cause of it. 36 Hoban's clock in The Marzipan Pig feels his own mechanism and the design of his hollow case as expressing the love he now feels for the mouse. (As in Henryson's 'Robene &

Makyne,37 and Burns's 'Duncan Gray,' 38 and, doubtless, umpteen other stories of unrequited love, the object of the passion only feels capable of returning the emotion when the opportunity has passed.) While the lamp shone outside the window he struck all the hours and half-hours of the night, but the mouse never came. The li t tIe warm place where she used to sit was cold and empty. By day the clock could feel himself coiled tight inside and waiting for the night. By night he felt the empty place inside him as he waited for the day to come. The next time he was wound his spring broke and his ticking stopped and time went on without him. 39

The clockwork characters in The Mouse and his Child have human feelings which are expressed through the embodied metaphors of their parts, function and design. The hollow space inside the clock corresponds to the empty space inside the mouse child, which he fills with "foolish dreams that cannot possibly come true."40 The mouse father's seemingly hopeless love for the clockwork elephant, whom he thinks he will never see again, is expressed in terms that relate to his own clockwork mechanism:

- 91 - The startling, sudden, lightning-bright image of the elephant in the mist of that departed morning was sharp within his memory, and it was painful to him, as if a spring within his mind were wound up achingly tight. Powerless to act, he could not convert that coiled energy into motion, and his determination faded as he settled deeper in the mud. 41

We find in time that the father's mechanism is broken. He is wound up but the coiled spring will not unwind. 42 He waits for the "familiar feeling of release,"43 but it does not come. The inability to find emotional release is portrayed in terms of the potential energy of a spring unable to convert itself into kinetic energy. The mechanical breakdown of the mouse father, and the fact that his spring will not unwind, are portrayed in words we frequently use for emotional constriction and release. The two ailments, of the father's spiri t and of his mechanism, come together in a "painful tightness"44 of body and mind. On top of that is the hurt caused by the realisation of brokenness. Like the tin-soldier, the mouse father is almost at a loss to know which of two things is causing him his pain:

"We're broken !" said the father, hurt as much by the dreaded word as by the painful tightness of his spring inside him. 45 As for the elephant, the spring inside her also serves as a gauge of her emotions. She loses the mouse and child

-92- in the flood, just as she has begun to apprecia te them for the first time. 46 She too undergoes an emotional upheaval: She wept as if her spring would break. 47

The familiar form of words Hoban employs here would normally have 'heart' in place of 'spring.' Both this substitution of 'spring' for 'heart' and the use of the father's spring to convey the emotions of a clockwork toy are apposite. Do not humans speak of the heart both as a pumping-engine and as the seat of their emotions ? And yet, in Chesterton's words, it is no ·cold and awkward allegory·48 that Hoban is creating by the use of such substi tutions and images, but something which is somehow right within its own context.

The clockwork mechanism is also associated with the humiliation of being dependent on others for one's basic motion: [The mouse father] saw now that for him and his son the whole wide world was someone else's territory, on which he could not even walk without someone to wind him up. Frog wound him now as they marched, and the father felt the key turn in his back as a knife turns in a wound. 49

- 93 - Physical dependence feels like physical pain: the key turning in the father's back is like a knife turning in a wound. Hoban uses a sombre visual pun to reinforce this. "Wound" is first a verb, then a noun with a different pronunciation: the "wound" in which the knife turns.

Andersen shows the same vision as Hoban of a world where toys come alive at night. In The Steadfast Tin-Soldier the toys at night "began to play, to pay visits, to make war, and to go to balls.,,50 They both have a satirical purpose in creating a minor world in the image of human society. Andersen is not so sensitive as Hoban, however, to the human pathos of clockwork. For Andersen, clockwork is something to be unfavourably compared wi th flesh and bone. Andersen's clockwork nightingale is more richly bejewelled than the real one, but it cannot drive Death from the Emperor's heart. Tha t only the real bird can do. 51 When the clockwork bird breaks there is "great sorrow" in the court,52 but there is little sympathy on the part of the author. For

Hoban, by contrast, even the construction of the shell of a clockwork toy is an emblem of the imperfect state of being human. In the Puffin edition of The Mouse and his Child53 he writes in the afterword:

- 94- these toys, whether covered wi th fabric or plush, or with the tin exposed, are always made in two halves that never fit together exactly. I find tha t touching, and not irrelevant to the human situation. 54

Andersen uses clockwork to portray artificiality. Hoban sees in clockwork a mirror of ourselves: the two halves of our minds do not fit together perfectly, and we have a tendency to fall apart, both in our memories and our bodies. Like them, we often seem to stop midway through the action. Hoban, in Kleinzeit,55 elaborates these ideas using the image of Orpheus. Hospital (perhaps the largest inanimate object that Hoban brings to life) confides in Sister, who works in the Hospital, that Orpheus was not torn apart by the frustrated women of Thrace, but fell apart. Men are continually in danger of falling apart. 56 There is a pun which runs through Kleinzeit on the word "remembering."57 It is taken to mean both the process of memory and the attempt to put oneself back together again after one has fallen apart: Kleinzeit needs to re-member himself even as Orpheus needs to regather his own scattered limbs. 58

There is less sense of the humanness of clockwork in The Marzipan Pig, but aspects of the human condition are portrayed by clockwork in the book. There are two clockwork instruments featured in The Marzipan Pig: the

- 95- clock and the taxi meter. Neither are toys, and only the clock suffers a breakdown of its mechanism. They are both loved by living animals: the clock by the mouse, and the taxi meter by an owl. 59 They are the only 'characters' in the book so favoured. None of the living ones attracts such love. Neither of the clockwork loved ones returns the love at the time, and the meter never. They both keep on doing what they are "wound to do. ,,60 The mouse sits inside the clock every night, waiting for it to tell her that it loves her. 61

But the clock would tell her nothing but the time. 62 When the owl says to the taxi meter, "I love you," the only thing the meter will say is "FOR HIRE." When the owl takes a ride in the taxi the meter's answer to his question "How much do you love me 7" is only the steadily increasing fare for the journey. 64 Love meets with little response in either case. For the mouse there is only the knowledge that time reinforces loneliness. "Lonely night," the clock said. "Lonely, lonely, lonely night." ••• "Minutes, hours, days and years," the clock said. 65 For the owl, there is a response that hints at the meretricious or the mercenary. The meter may look "viole t and lovely" 66 but it has no real warmth in it.

- 96- We never find, as with the clock, that it regrets not being kinder to its lover.

In The Marzipan Pig there are many failures to communicate. The mouse will not listen to the pig, because she cannot stop eating him. 67 The clock will not tell the mouse anything but the time. The taxi driver cannot understand what the owl is saying and misinterprets his anger as exuberance. 68 The taxi meter says no more to the owl than it would to you or me. The owl when it tries to say one thing to the upstairs mouse says another; he betrays his uncontrollable appe ti te, even as the downstairs mouse does when meeting the pig.

"Love I" shouted the owl. "The breakfast of your eyes I" He meant to say "brightness." 69 All this ought to make for a profound sense of alienation throughout the book, but Hoban saves us from this by his humour and his revelation of the interconnectedness of things. Throughout the book little tastes, scents and memories of marzipan appear; even although the original pig has been ea ten up on page three. Relationships between the characters in the book may fail to be established, and their dreams disappointed through the unwillingness of others to act in a way which serves other than their own ends or appetites, but they are still each affected by their contact with others. The spirit of the pig lives on in each character's own

- 97- thoughts and feelings. The whiff of marzipan establishes and confirms this. Under the plane tree where the owl has ea ten the mouse who ate the pig, a little flower grows, the nectar of which a bee discovers tastes of marzipan. 70 The bee lets a little of that marzipan scent escape as she dances on the window sill for the benefit of the hibiscus flower. 7! Near the end of the book a new marzipan pig pops through the letter box. His parcel is invaded by the upstairs mouse and he is eaten. Being new, "fresh from the confectioner's," there is not a thought in him, "just marzipan," so no feelings flow from him to the mouse. 72

This sense of continuity and interconnectedness pervades Russell Hoban' s Ponders: 73 a series of short episodes featuring animals who live in or around a pond. One of the characters, Lavinia Bat, dreams that a voice says "Pass it on."74 For her tha t is connected wi th the mysteries of reproduction and the shared instincts of animals that are passed on from one generation to another. In Ponders a ghostly voice of one of the animals dralyS another to discover what has been most important in his life: his "mystery,"75 an object he has treasured, never knowing what it was. (It is a combination lock.) What was a source of joy and delight to him becomes of practical use to the new finder. 76

- 98- These intimations of connectedness are different from the themes and morals which underlie Andersen's work. Andersen's main concerns are to ridicule pride and self- concei t, and to give lessons in what is some times a rather warped piety. Nevertheless Hoban and Andersen are both interested in producing stories that will resonate at a level deeper than the surface of the action. Since there is a depth to his work Andersen would know how to answer such as Margaret Blount who· wonders how children can enjoy The Mouse and his Child. 77 Andersen said of his own work and the two audiences he cultivated, the old and the young: I had arrived at a conviction that people of different ages were equally amused by the tales. The children made themselves merry for the most part over what might be called the actors; older people, on the contrary, were interested in the deeper meaning. 78

The title of Ponders shows that Hoban is perhaps aiming at the same thing. On one level the title is simply those who live near a pond: the 'actors,' as Andersen calls them. On another level it is an encouragement to think about the ideas in the book: to ponder in our hearts what Hoban has pondered before us.

I have covered some of the similarities in style and content between Russell Hoban and Hans Andersen. They are both witty writers who can affect a simple style.

- 99- They are interested in fantasies of small, forgotten or passed-over things. Pen elope Farmer when she uses the term "introvert fantasists"79 for Hoban and Andersen is thinking of authors who create fantasies out of "purely pri vate experiences," whose work is "psychological image coloured and transformed by the workings of a single mind. "80 Thus, she argues, these fantasies differ from myth, fairy tales proper and legends, for although they may use "universal symbols" these are not the main source of inspiration. 81 She asks:

Do the writers of introvert fantasies have to go deeper into smaller areas precisely because they are less inventive, even if no less imaginative ? 82 Such a question, even if the rather fine distinction between invention and imagination is honoured, is apt to be invidious. Hoban's reasons, and Andersen's for that matter, for going into the precisely-focused worlds that make up their fictions are vindicated by the quality of their work. To enquire into Andersen' s psychological background is permitted as he is long dead. There is a free field for the psychological critic, but no guarantee of complete success. For Hoban it is still the close season. As Farmer says: these decidedly personal origins of my kind of fantasy make it very hard to discuss. To say much more about what appears to be the genesis of one or other of my books would involve revela tions I have no intention of making. Equally, to investigate the origins of books

-100- written by other writers could well lead one into exceedingly impertinent assumptions unless they are safely dead, that is. 83

Speculations into a deeper kinship between Hoban and

Andersen are thus out of order. If there are psychological similarities between the two they remain undiscussed; if the patterns of their individual lives are in reality very different it remains unproved. It would be difficult to delve into wha t is, according to Farmer, "purely priva te" in any case, and more difficul t to be fair about it. But if Hoban might be permitted to say in closing what he has said before on the subject of his interest in lost things - an interest he shares with Andersen - then perhaps his personal motivation might not lie completely in the dark:

All of my books, in one way or another, are about finding one's way, finding how to be, finding lvhere to be, finding what to be. I am obsessed with the idea of finding or being lost, and it's been a hell of a struggle for me to get to where I stop being lost. Somebody asked Daniel Boone whether he'd ever been lost. He said: "No, I was bewildered for three days once. " And I feel as if I've been lost for years and years, and I'm gradually getting to where I'm just bewildered. And I'm doing better than that I' feel as if, by now, wherever I am is home. 84,Note 2

-101- Notes

1. A discussion of Penelope Farmer's use of the term "introvert fantasists" begins on page 100 of this chapter.

2. Hoban is possibly creating a false antithesis between "bewildered" and "lost" by the addition of the word "no." The older meaning of 'bewildered' is 'lost,' (li terally

los t in the wilderness or among the wild beasts) 85 and Boone may have meant that he was once lost - if we assume that the word "no" belongs to Hoban' s retelling.. But wha tever the original meaning, the point Hoban is making about mental confusion and identity still stands.

-102- References

1. FARMER, Pene1ope. 'Jorinda and Jorindel' and other stories. Children's Literature in Education, 1972, o.s. no.7,23,24,26. 2. ANDERSEN, Hans Christian. Stories and fairy tales, vol.1. London: George AlIen, 1893, pp 50-58.

3. Ibid., pp 32-36.

4. FARMER, ref.1, p.36.

5 • BLOUNT, Margaret. Animal land: the creatures of children's fiction. New York: Wi1liam Morrow, 1975, p .186.

6. BREDSDORFF, Elias. Hans Christian Andersen: the story of his life and work 1805-75. London: Phaidon, 1975, p.325. 7. Ibid., p.325. 8. CHESTERTON, G.K. The crimes of England. London: [ J, 1915, p.[ J. Quoted in: Bredsdorff, ref.6, p.325. 9. BREDSDORFF, ref. 6, p.325. 10. ANDERSEN, ref. 2, pp 50-58. 11. ANDERSEN, ref. 2, pp 33-36.

12. ANDERSEN, ref. 2, vol. 2. pp 74-76. 13. ANDERSEN, ref. 2, pp 226-228. 14. HOBAN, Russell. The mouse and his child. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1985, pp 23-31.

15. Ibid., p.104. 16. What toys endure: a clockwork odyssey. Times Literary Supplement, 1969, 3 April, 357. 17. HOBAN, ref.14, p.43.

18. HOBAN, Russel1. From a death to a view. Times Literary Supplement, 1976, 30 April, 506. 19. BLOUNT, ref.5, p.186.

-103- 20. HOBAN, Russell. The marzipan pig. London: Puffin, 1988. 21. Ibid., p.1. 22. ANDERSEN, ref.2, p.33. 23. HUGHES-HALLETT, Lucy. Russel1 Hoban's vision of the future. Good Housekeeping, 1985, 128 (1), 64. 24. HOBAN, ref.20, pp 8, 11, 17, 18. 25. Quoted in: The Oxford companion to children's literature. Ed. Humphrey Carpenter and Mari Prichard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, p.22. 26. Ibid., p.22. 27. BREDSDORFF, ref.6, p.162. 28. ANDERSEN, ref.2, pp 165-168. 29. HOBAN, ref.20, p.4. 30. HOBAN, ref.20, pp 4-7. 31. HOBAN, ref.20, p.3. 32. HOBAN, ref.20, p.2. 33. ANDERSEN, ref.2, p.227. 34. HOBAN, ref.20, p.3. 35. ANDERSEN, ref.2, p.228. 36. ANDERSEN, ref.2, p.35. 37. HENRYS ON , Robert. Poems. 2nd ed. Ed. Charles E1liott. Oxford: C1arendon Press, 1974, pp 140-143. 38 BURNS, Robert. Poetical works. Ed. William Wallace. Edinburgh: Chambers, 1958, pp 387-388. 39. HOBAN, ref.20, p.7. 40. HOBAN, ref.14, p.48. 41. HOBAN, ref.14, p.124.

42. HOBAN, ref. 14, pp 131-132.

43. HOBAN, ref.14, p.131.

44. HOBAN, ref. 14, p.132.

-104-

~., 45. HOBAN, ref.14, p.132.

46. HOBAN, ref.14, pp 110-113.

47. HOBAN, ref.14, p.113. 48. CHESTERTON, ref.8, p.325.

49. HOBAN, ref.14, p.59.

50. ANDERSEN, ref.2, p.33.

51. ANDERSEN, ref.2, pp 6, 10.

52. ANDERSEN, ref.2, p.8.

53. HOBAN, Russel1. The mouse and his child. Harmondsworth: Puffin, 1976. 54. Ibid., p.185. (afterword)

55. HOBAN, Russell. Kleinzeit. London: Jonathan Cape, 1974. 56. Ibid., p.150. 57. Ibid., pp 144, 173. 58. Ibid., p.165.

59. HOBAN, ref. 20, pp 6, 9. 60. HOBAN, ref.14, p .19.

61. HOBAN, ref. 20, p.6.

62. HOBAN, ref.20, p.6.

63. HOBAN, ref. 20, p.9.

64. HOBAN, ref.20, p.13.

65. HOBAN, ref. 20, pp 4-6.

66. HOBAN, ref.20, p.14.

67. HOBAN, ref. 20, p.4. 68. HOBAN, ref. 20, pp 10, 16.

69. HOBAN, ref.20, p.31. 70. HOBAN, ref. 20, p.17.

71. HOBAN, ref. 20, p.23.

-105- 72. HO BAN , ref.20, pp 32-33. 73. HOBAN, Russell. Ponders. London: Walker Books, 1989. 74. Ibid., p.30. 75. Ibid., pp 47-48. 76. Ibid., pp 74, 77-79. 77. BLOUNT, ref.5, p.186. 78. Quoted in: The Oxford companion to children's literature, ref. 25, p.22. 79. FARMER, ref.1, p.26. 80. FARMER, ref.1, p.23. 81. FARMER, ref.1, p.23. 82. FARMER, ref.1, p.26. 83. FARMER, ref.1, p.27. 84. HOBAN, Russell. Russell Hoban on tigers, turtles and freedom. The Listener, 1979, 101, 5 April, 495-496. 85. Chambers twentieth century dictionary. Ed. A.M. Macdonald. Edinburgh: Chambers, 1972, p.126.

-106- BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Fictional Works HOBAN, Russe11. Arthur's new power. London: Victor Go11ancz, 1980. HOBAN, Russe11. A baby sister for Frances. London: Hippo Books, 1983. HOBAN, Russe11. A bargain for Frances. Kingswood: World's Work, 1971. HOBAN, Russe11. Bedtime for Frances. London: Hippo Books, 1983. HOBAN, Russe11. Best friends for Frances. London: Hippo Books, 1983. HOBAN, Russe11. A birthday for Frances. London: Hippo Books, 1983. HOBAN, Russe11. Bread and 1am for Frances. Harmondsworth: Puffin, 197 • HOBAN, Russe11. Dinner at Alberta's. London: Jonathan Cape, 1977. HOBAN, Russe11. Emmet Otter's jug-band Christmas. Kingswood: World's Work, 1971. HOBAN, Russe11. How Tom beat Captain Najork and his hired sportsmen. London: Jonathan Cape, 1974. HOBAN, Russe11. K1einzeit. London: Jonathan Cape, 1974. HOBAN, Russe11. The lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz. London: Jonathan Cape, 1973. HOBAN, Russe11. The marzipan pig. London: Puffin,1988. HOBAN, Russe11. The mouse and his child. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1985.

-107- HOBAN, Russell. A near thing for Captain Najork. London: Jonathan Cape, 1975. HOBAN, Russell. Ponders. London: Walker Rooks, 1989. HOBAN, Russell. Riddley Walker. London: Jonathan Cape, 1980.

Non-Fictional Works BLISHEN, Edward, ed. on writing for children. Harmon Kestre ,

HOBAN, Russel1. From a death to a view. Times Literary Supplement, 1976, 30 April, 506. HOBAN, Russel!. The mouse and his child. Harmondsworth: Puffin, 1976. (afterword) HOBAN, Russell. Russel1 Hoban on tigers, turtles and freedom. The Listener, 1979, 101, 5 April, 494-6. HOBAN Russell. Thoughts on a shirtless cyclist, Robin Hood, Johann Sebastian Bach, and one or two other things. Children's Literature in Education, 1971, o.s. no.4, 5-23. HOBAN, Russell. Time slip, uphill lean, 1aminar flow, p1ace-to-place talking and hearing the silence. Children's Literature in Education, 1972, o.s. no.9, 33-47.

Interviews

BUNBURY, Rhonda M. "Always a dance going on in the stone": an interview with Russe11 Hoban. Children's Literature in Education, 1986, 1l(3), 139-149. BROOKS, "David. Russe11 Hoban. Helix, 1985, Spring, 71-85. McCAFFERY, Larry and Sinda GREGORY, eds. Alive and writing; interviews with American authors of the 1980s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

MYERS, Edward. An interview with Russell Hoban. Literary Review: an international ·ournal of contem orar writin , 1985, 28 2 , 5-

-108- Secondary Sources - Biography and criticism

Authorgraph No 12: Russell Hoban. Books for keeps, 1982, no.12 (January), 16-17.

BADER, Barbara. American picturebooks from Noah's ark to the beast within. New York: Macmi1lan, 1976. BLOUNT, Margaret. Animal land: the creatures of children's fiction. New York: William Morrow, 1975. BOWERS, A. Joan. The fantasy world of Russel1 Hoban. Children's Literature, 1980, ~, 80-97. BUTTS, Dennis. Ridd1ey Walker and the novels of Russell Hoban. Use of English, 1982, 33 (3), 20-27.

BUTTS, Dennis, ed. Good writers for ;oung readers. St A1bans: Hart-Davis Educational, 197 •

Children's Literature review, vol.3. Ed. Gerard J. Senick. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1978. CROUCH, Marcus. The Nesbit tradition: the children's novel in England 1945-1970. London: Ernest Benn, 1972.

DELUCA, Geraldine. "A condition of complete simplicity": the toy as child in The mouse and his child. Children's Literature in Education, 1988, 19 (4), 211-221.

Dictionary of literary biography, vol. 52. Ed. Glenn E. Estes. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1986.

EGOFF, Shei1a. Thursda 's child: trends and atterns in contemporary children s literature. Chicago American Library Association, 1981. FARMER, Penelope. 'Jorinda and Jorindel' and other stories. Children's Literature in Education, 1972, o.s. no.7, 23-37.

GANNON, Susan R: and Ruth Anne THOMSON, eds. Proceedings of the thirteenth annual conference of the Children's Literature Association, University of Missouri - Kansas Cita' May 16-18, 1986. West Lafayette: Education Dept, Pur ue University, 1988.

HUGHES-HALLETT, LUcy. Russell Hoban's vision of the future. Good Housekeeping, 1985, 128 (1), 64, 65, 187, 189-90. -

-109- HUNTER, Linnet. The mouse and his child, by Russell Hoban: two exercises in literary criticism: archetypal and sociological. Review Bulletin, 1988, 20 (1), 11-16.

INGLIS, Fred. The promise of happiness: value and meaning in children's fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

KIRKPATRICK, D.L., ed. Contemporary novelists, 4th ed. London: St. James Press, 1986. LANDSBERG, Michele. The world of children's books: a gUide to choosing the best. London: Simon & Schuster, 1988. LYNNE, Joanne. Threadbare utopia: Hoban's modern pastoral. Children's Literature Association uarterl 1986, 11 (1 , 19-2 • MacCLEOD, Anne S. Undercurrents: pessimism in contemporary children's fiction. Children's Literature in Education, 1976, o.s. no.21, 96-102. McMAHON-HILL, Gillian. A narrow pavement says 'Walk alone': the books of Russell Hoban. Children's Literature in Education, 1976, o.s. no.20, 41-55. QUIGLY, Isabe1. Nice mice. The Spectator, 1969, 16 May, 654-655. RAYNER, Mary. Some thoughts on animals in children's books. Signal, 1979, 29, 81-87. REES, David. Painted desert, green shade: essays on contemporary writers of fiction for children and young adults. Boston, Mass.: Horn Book, 1984. RUSTIN, Margaret and Michael RUSTIN, eds. Narratives of love & loss: studies in modern children's fiction. London: Verso, 1987. THWAITE, Ann. Problem pages. New Statesman, 1969, 16 May, 701.

TOOMEY, Phillippa. An explorer who maps the continents of his imagination. The Times, 1974, 15 November, 20. TOWNSEND, John Rowe. Written for children: an outline of English-language children's literature. 3rd ed. London: PengUin, 1987. What toys endure: a clockwork odyssey. Times Literary Supplement, 1969, 3 April, 357.

-110- Tertiary Sources - Works incidental to the argument

ANDERSEN, Hans, Christian. Stories and fairy tales. London: George AlIen, 1893. ARNOLD, Matthew. Selected poems and prose. Ed. F.W. Watt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964. AUDEN, W.H. Collected shorter poems, 1927-1957. London: Faber and Faber, 1966. BETTELHEIM, Bruno. The uses of enchantment: the meaning and importance of fairy tales. London: Thames and Hudson, 1976. BREDSDORFF, Elias. Hans Christian Andersen: the story of his life and work 1805-75. London: Phaidon, 1975. BURNS, Robert. Poetical works. Ed. William Wallace. Edinburgh: Chambers, 1958. Chambers twentieth century dictionary. Ed. A.M. Macdonald. Edinburgh: Chambers, 1972. DICKENS, Charles. Christmas books. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954. GRIFFIN, William. C.S. Lewis: the authentic voice. Tring: Lion, 1988. GUINNESS, Os. The dust of death" a critique of the Establishment and the counter cuiture and a ro osa1 for a t ird way. Lon on: Inter-Varsity Press, 9 HENRYSON, Robert. Poems. 2nd ed. Ed. Charles Elliot. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974. HENRY, O. Short Stories. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1989. LEWIS, C.S. The discarded image: an introduction to Medieval and Renaissance literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967. The new encyclopaedia Britannica. 15th ed. Vol.4. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., 1974. NIETZSCHE, Friedrich. The will to power. Ed. WaIter Kaufmann. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968. The Oxford corn anion to children's literature. Ed. Humphrey Carpenter an Mari Prichar. Oxfor: Oxford University Press, 1984. -111- The Oxford companion to Enf1ish literature. 4th ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 967.

The Oxford dictionary of iuotations. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 979. SONDHEIM, Stephen. Into the woods. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1989. STOPPARD, Tom. Rosencrantz and Gui1denstern are dead. London: Faber and Faber, 1967. TWAIN, Mark. Tom Sawyer & Huck1eberry Finn. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1991. WATTS, Isaac. Works. London: John Barfie1d, 1810.

-112- I

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