Thoughts on Treasure Island
Tuesday, November 10, 2020
My current light reading is Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson, a book I had always thought of as a children's classic and was slightly hesitant to read. Having read and enjoyed Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde recently, I at least was okay with the thought I kind of know the basic story already: That one wasn't spoiled despite its subject's status as a trope.
Curiosity about the origins of modern ideas about pirates got the better of me, and I did wonder if the book might be a good one to read to the kids in installments at bedtime, so I decided I'd at least start it.
To my mild surprise, I have been enjoying the read, as did the late Roger Ebert:
I cannot help but wonder if Stevenson's unsuitability for young readers is real or apparent; the former being due to changes in style and language over time and the latter owing to a general decline in our culture and the quality of primary education. I can see bright teenagers or young adults enjoying it.I was talking to a friend the other day who said he'd never met a child who liked reading Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island.
Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver (Image by Louis Rhead, via Project Gutenberg, permission.)
Neither have I, I said. And he'd never met a child who liked reading Stevenson's Kidnapped. Me neither, I said. My early exposure to both books was via the Classics Illustrated comic books. But I did read the books later, when I was no longer a kid, and I enjoyed them enormously. Same goes for Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
The fact is, Stevenson is a splendid writer of stories for adults, and he should be put on the same shelf with Joseph Conrad and Jack London instead of in between Winnie the Pooh and Peter Pan. [format edits, notes and links omitted]
Regardless, I have found in Treasure Island an enjoyable and suspenseful adventure story which offers the adult reader the additional joy of re-experiencing part of the magic of youth through the eyes of its protagonist, who is the main narrator.
Stevenson masterfully leverages Jim Hawkins's youthful inexperience to make his both his actions and his assessments of situations a little different from what an adult might do or think in his shoes: I think it this is a big part of why the book brings back for me fond memories of what it was like to be a child.
So, while the book is a bit long-winded and gory for my seven-year-old son or my nine-year-old daughter, I'll definitely have it in mind when they get a little older.
-- CAV
18 comments:
I had a similar experience reading "Shane" by Jack Schaefer. As a child it's a pretty good cowboy book. Not the best--a bit slow, not a lot of action until the end, but okay. As an adult you see more of the nuances. The author touches on some major events in the history of the West, as well as some heavy ethical philosophy. But there's enough childish antics (not in the sense of idiotic, but in the sense of "appropriate for a child") to remind a man approaching middle age of how little boys think. And it's not bad to be reminded of that on occasion as a father.
"[I]t's not bad to be reminded of that on occasion as a father."
Yes! Thanks for mentioning that.
I think Jack London also belongs in the "not actually children's books" category.
It's a good book, but you have Kidnapped to look forward to when you finish it! Stevenson also wrote the non-fiction Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes that I really enjoyed. This bit of Stevenson's later travel writing, about the fog in California, has stuck with me for years. And of course for amusing writing from that time, you should read Three Men in a Boat. That was one my father loved; I tried reading it around age 10 and got nowhere fast; when I reread it about age 20, it had somehow gotten much funnier. My father also loved Peter Lovesey's mystery inspired by it, or rather its popularity in its day, Swing, Swing Together, which I also highly recommend. That was one I think I would have appreciated at that age, but at least I did get around to reading it eventually. And finally, an obscurer, much obscurer mystery novel from 1888 that you might enjoy is The Passenger from Scotland Yard by H. Freeman Wood; if I remember aright, it was his only book and he is only known for it; there seems to be nothing surviving in any paper trail about the guy. The Dover reprint was well deserved.
(Amusingly, age 20 was also when I read Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh and loved it; a couple of grad students in English lit I knew questioned my sanity at that, but then I suspect they didn't like Trollope either, whom I enjoyed five years after that, what of his I read. Those are two authors I liked more in the past than now, though I still like them fine.)
Jennifer,
I wondered why you echoed Roger Ebert's sentiment, but have some very odd holes in my knowledge: I have not read any Jack London. Sure enough, it's easy to find "children's books" listed with him as author, so good to know.
Snedcat,
Thanks for your additional recommendations, especially the verdict on Kidnapped. I was already intrigued, so that shoves it into the hopper.
Gus
Hi Gus, (etal.) ;-)
Tolkien had some interesting things to say about 'writing for children'. And though it is a fairly long read, here is the bulk of the essay online.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/12/05/j-r-r-tolkien-on-fairy-stories/
There are some interesting areas of congruency with Rand's Romantic Aesthetics. His idea of 'secondary or sub-creation' echoes Rand's point on where fictional ideas ultimately originate.
This is not included in the essay, and since most of my books are still in storage I can't chase down the original, but hopefully a paraphrase will do.
He told parents not to be overly concerned with the violence in traditional fairy tales. That particular squeamishness is acquired with adulthood and a knowledge of our own mixed ethical status. One thing that distinguishes children from adults, generally, is their burning desire for justice, however it may be meted out.
On the topic of of books for children that can still be read by adults, I would say that Dr. Alan E. Nourse has a few such entries. His "Star Surgeon" compares with Heinlein's juveniles as does his "Universe Between". Of interest, given his status as an MD, is the short novel, "Blade Runner". Yes, that is where Ridley Scott grabbed his re-title for Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep". And Nourse's book has nothing to do with the movie. But it is the portrayal of Socialized Medicine from the perspective of the gentler 1950s, particularly with the treatment of the government agents as 'mistaken but well-meaning' instead of the power-lusting second handers they have since been revealed to be.
c andrew
C.,
Thanks for adding another thoughtful comment to the thread, and for the additional recommendations.
The "burning desire for justice" I see first hand in youth soccer games, when overlenient coach-referees fail to call "hands" and other fouls, as if this is too complicated or over their heads. Perhaps a post for another day, but I'm thinking about taking over a team because I'M getting fed up, too.
Gus
C. Andrew writes, "[Tolkien's] idea of 'secondary or sub-creation' echoes Rand's point on where fictional ideas ultimately originate." Though it's worth bearing in mind that "sub-creation" is also fairly orthodox Catholic theology.
"On the topic of of books for children that can still be read by adults, I would say that Dr. Alan E. Nourse has a few such entries."
Yes, he's quite good. Another SF writer notionally for children is James H. Schmitz, who was one of the few SF writers in the 60s and before to write excellent girl/young woman heroines. His stories set in the Federation of the Hub have three: Telzey Amberdon, Trigger Argee, and Niles Etland. All three are good characters in mostly excellent stories; my favorite is probably The Demon Breed, in which Niles almost single-handedly stops an alien invasion. (She had the help of two otters genetically engineered for intelligence, which works a heck of a lot better in the story than it might sound). All are excellent stories for teens and eminently readable for adults as well.
C. Andrew also writes, "He told parents not to be overly concerned with the violence in traditional fairy tales. That particular squeamishness is acquired with adulthood and a knowledge of our own mixed ethical status. One thing that distinguishes children from adults, generally, is their burning desire for justice, however it may be meted out."
True. Also a point the late great Richard Mitchell made, regarding a modernized version of Jack and the Beanstalk in which the giant doesn't die at the end:
Little children know, even blithering idiots know–except for one tribe–that the Giant must die. The story is about the Good and the Bad, which, in the outer world of the social order, must be always cutting deals. That sad necessity is sad; it is not to our credit. When we forget to be ashamed of that compromise, when we ordain it as a principle of the inner life of the mind, when we learn to flatter ourselves for the “liberality” out of which we tolerate the intolerable, and the “flexibility” with which we gladly bend to every gust of popular novelty, then we aren’t even cutting any deals. We are simply capitulating.
Jack does not capitulate. Nor does he cut a deal by accepting, instead of justice, an “enhanced interpersonal relationship” with brutal greed. He does not “view the situation from various perspectives,” but seizes what is truly his, not by “the basic principles of our legal system relating to fairness and honesty,” whatever the murky notions intended by that awkward phrasing, but by the one deepest principle of Lawfulness itself. And it is Unlawfulness that dies with the Giant.
And Tyranny, too, dies with the Giant, for that is another of the many names of Unlawfulness. That is why children are not frightened by the death of a brutal monster. They know Tyranny when they see it, for they see it regularly. It is the continued life of the monster, watching and waiting, that frightens them.
Hi Snedcat,
Not being a communicant and with my interests in Catholic Theology being concentrated in other spheres, I didn't realize that sub-creation was Catholic dogma. It would be interesting to follow up and see if JRRT departed in any significant way from the doctrine. In my copious free time, of course ;-)
Thanks for the link to Richard Mitchell's essay. I've skimmed it, but marked it down for more closely reading it; it looks like it would repay such effort.
And thanks for more reading material. For the most part, I find that if an author writes a juvenile story well enough, it is still enjoyable to the adult reader. So I've ordered the first book at the link you provided.
c andrew
I grew up a Roman Catholic, with a father that went to seminary and multiple priests that were adopted into the family (not blood relatives, but they were part of the family anyway), and I've never heard of sub-creation. I will say that I greatly prefer Tolkien's take on Catholic theology than Lewis'--Tolkien took it as a given, and focused on building an interesting world and interesting stories. Lewis took it as something to be defended and argued for, and his world is much more shallow, with stories that aren't as well-crafted.
Maybe they're a bit beyond "children's books"--maybe "best for teens or middle-school kids--but the Horatio Hornblower series is one that seems to fit this category. I read them in middle school, and I occasionally re-read them. "Hotspur" is perhaps the best of the stories, though "Ship of the Line" is the most iconic. Swashbuckling adventure set within historic events. Each chapter is a sort of mini-story. There's violence, even graphic violence, but while it's sometimes random it's never gratuitous. It takes a good writer to make a dinner party as exciting, and perhaps as dangerous, as a fleet action, but Forester succeeded.
Dinwar writes, "I grew up a Roman Catholic...and I've never heard of sub-creation."
I suppose I should expand upon my comment. In Christian thought, God created everything. Some theologians state that this is the only true act of creation; everything that man creates must make use of these pre-created materials, and many would say that such reworkings of pre-created material are good to the extent they reflect their divine origin. Similarly, in "On Fairy-Stories," Tolkien writes:
The nearer the so-called 'nature-myth', or allegory of the large processes of nature, is to its supposed archetype, the less interesting it is, and indeed the less is it of a myth capable of throwing any illumination whatever on the world...The gods may derive their colour and beauty from the high splendours of nature, but it was Man who obtained these for them, abstracted them from sun and moon and cloud; their personality they get direct from him; the shadow or flicker of divinity that is upon them they receive through him from the invisible world, the Supernatural.
His idea of "Sub-Creation" is related to that:
The mental power of image-making is one thing, or aspect; and it should appropriately be called Imagination. The perception of the image, the grasp of its implications, and the control, which are necessary to a successful expression, may vary in vividness and strength: but this is a difference of degree...The achievement of the expression, which gives (or seems to give) 'the inner consistency of reality', is indeed another thing or aspect, needing another name: Art, the operative link between Imagination and the final result, Sub-Creation.
It's a brilliant idea that he used brilliantly to try to explain the power that literature in general and fantastic literature in particular has (...the storymaker proves a successful 'subcreator'. He makes a Secondary world which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is 'true': it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed). It is a basic question in esthetics: How can what we freely admit is falsehoods nonetheless have such a profound emotional effect? Tolkien is addressing that question, and in doing so he's falling back on his own religious background. And this shows up especially in his letters.
[Here endeth Part the First.]
[Part the Second.]
There is the strain in Catholic theology that sin is fundamentally a misvaluing of things, and hence it is a sin to value anything material (and hence secondary) over more divine things, or even God, which is seen as the root of such sins as greed and why they are sins. This shows up in The Silmarillion, where much evil and the creation of Middle Earth result from such things as Feanor refusing to give up the Silmarils, the dearest creation of his craft, for a greater good. It was also a topic he discussed with correspondents, as he quotes in "On Fairy Stories" (I was glad I reread it and found that, because I don't care to go through the selected letters, which I only have on Kindle and find difficult to navigate):
I...a brief passage from a letter I once wrote to a man who described myth and fairy-story as 'lies'; though to do him justice he was kind enough and confused enough to call fairy-story making 'Breathing a lie through Silver'.
'Dear Sir,' I said--'Although now long estranged, Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed. Dis-graced he may be, yet is not de-throned, and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned: Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light through whom is splintered from a single white to many hues, and endlessly combined in living shapes from mind to mind...
It's a fine image, and with capitalized "Light" he gives it religious significance. In other letters he defended himself as a fantasist against various religious arguments against his craft, in which he followed up somewhat in this same line. This comment at the end of the section in which that letter is quoted is similar; see especially the last sentence:
Fantasy can, of course, be carried to excess. It can be ill done. It can be put to evil uses. It may even delude the minds out of which it came. But of what human thing in this fallen world is that not true? Men have conceived not only of elves, but they have imagined gods, and worshipped them, even worshipped those most deformed by their authors' own evil. But they have made false gods out of other materials: their notions, their banners, their monies; even their sciences and their social and economic theories have demanded human sacrifice. Abusus non tollit usum. Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.
Dinwar continues, "I will say that I greatly prefer Tolkien's take on Catholic theology than Lewis'--Tolkien took it as a given, and focused on building an interesting world and interesting stories. Lewis took it as something to be defended and argued for, and his world is much more shallow, with stories that aren't as well-crafted."
Frankly, I find Lewis rather dreadful in fiction. His works on literary history are brilliant, even when he takes perverse positions, but the further he moves from that, the more perverse and less valuable they become. I smiled when I read Tolkien write to a correspondent in one of his letters that he was grateful that Lewis didn't dedicate his Studies in Words to him, or acknowledge him in it, or some-such; linguistically it's a dreadful book. Similarly, his fiction is often tiresome and his inspiration too obvious. His theological maunderings were very popular among the Baptist seminarians I worked with once, who seemed to consider him a balm for every theological doubt, but from what I have read of him, he's a balm mostly as setting an example of a literate scholar seeing nothing wrong in traipsing lightly past every real theological difficulty. (For instance, six-pence none the richer: By equating God with a father who suspects what his child might do, he completely drains the quandary of predestination vs. free-will of any significance and slathers it with treacle, which might be acceptable to a Baptist seminarian but not to a thinking mind.) It's odd on the face of it: Lewis was a very intelligent man who enjoyed nothing more than discussing medieval literature over drinks and cigars--what has he in common with Baptist seminarians? Easy: Profound mental sloppiness. In his case it's almost like he's just making up chaff as he goes along for the fun of it; among his theological admirers, you get the idea they like the chaff because the hard work in theology's too much for them.
Reminds me too of when I was studying medieval Latin in college, and we read a chapter from Augustine's Confessions. Afterwards, one fellow piped up, "Incredible! That's almost as beautiful as C.S. Lewis!" The rest of us simply passed that over in silence; my thought was that someone in the class was less of a Latinist than the rest of us if that was the only reaction he had to it. More than that, I suspect Lewis himself would be bemused by that claim, as the African fathers were brilliant Latinists, vivid and a delight, while Lewis was in my experience at best a pedestrian stylist.
And an amusing story about the Baptist seminarians, or, as I called them, "God's little helpers." They were dismayed that I was so unreligious yet so interested in religious history (medieval history, actually, which that grew out of), but I avoided getting into any theological discussions with them. We got a new fellow, an English major at a university rather than a Baptist seminary, and his first day he decided to wage battle against the wrong believers when they were discussing Erasmus versus Luther on free will. Finally he turned to me in exasperation in the lunch room near the end of my lunch break right as the chapter of the mystery I was reading was getting really good and dared to interrupt me to try to enlist me on the side of, I guess, the fallen angels, and I shrugged and said, "A man meant for hanging needn't fear drowning." He sneered, "Oh yeah, what if he trips and falls into a pond on the way to the gibbet and drowns, huh?" I just smiled, "Wow, an English major who can't tell Shakespeare's Tempest from Gilligan's lousy Island."
And another couple of comments along these lines. First, there was a tendency in SF during its golden ages to consider that SF the best that most closely predicted the future. Similarly, there was a broader tendency to consider "real SF" that which most closely hewed to what we know of physical reality and physical laws. Mind you, I'm an inveterate fan of the latter; Hal Clement was my favorite SF author when I was in high school and still one of my favorites. However, that bundle of ideas has long struck me as a rationalization for engaging in fairy stories for the modern era, as if imagination is allowed only within certain strict limits--and then if you look at the ideas they enjoyed working out, things like Freudianism, ESP (J.B. Rhine got name-checked a lot as a scientist whose discoveries allowed the use of this essentially magical device in supposedly scientific fiction), social engineering, and so on, and consider the fascination crap like Dianetics had for John Campbell and certain of his stable of writers, it's hard not to think they were mostly interested in updated fairy tales, fairy tales with a 20th century gloss, and technocratic dictator fantasies (change "technocratic" to "insipidly leftist" and you get much of the contemporary SF that the literati entering the field from the writing programs and English departments ballyhoo).
Taking Tolkien's line, they're all different flavors of Secondary Worlds, and they all have their individual merits as art; since the literati like to sneer at SF and fantasy as juvenile escapism, the proper retort is that that's healthier fare to escape to than pointlessly overstylized gossip about white-bre(a)d middle-class academics, busy gazing at either their navels or six inches lower, who are too damn afraid on principle to dare to write about any people and any cultures outside the tiny inbred milieu they inhabit. [*] Those odd early 20th century fads are then ideas these authors were playing with, and their use should be judged by their results in the stories. So I tend to think of things like the reliance on faster-than-light drives, artificial gravity, etc., as literary devices for updating traditional stories as modern fairy tales.
[*] To quote Stanley Crouch about far too many modern American writers:
Some of their best friends might be--you name it. But when they sit down to write about this big country, they punk out, far, far more often than not.
That is now the norm: punking out. Hiding under the bed. Walking beneath a flag of white underwear stained fully yellow by liquefied fear. Like all forms of cowardice in our moment, there is a self-serving psychological process tailor-made for this particular variation. The lack of aesthetic gumption is remade into a smugness that eventually grants itself a pedigree in narcissism. As life in America becomes an ever more intriguing mix of styles, relationships, alliances, and even combinations of cuisine, things have gotten so mucked up and segregated in the world of literature that one does not expect American writers to tell us about anything other than themselves... ("Segregated Fiction Blues," in The Artificial White Man: Essays on Authenticity)
As one example of that, there's Madison Smartt Bell's trilogy of novels on the Haitian Revolution (All Souls' Rising and its sequels), in which he wrote from the point of view of Haitian characters, and did so quite well; I greatly enjoyed them as works of art. Haitian writers consider them brilliant (for example, in this conversation); I gather American writers of the modern persuasion consider them cultural appropriation and probably thoroughly wicked.
And finally, I used to spend a lot of time debating cranks on Usenet--useful experience in small doses. There are, of course, legions of cranks, including language cranks. The stupidest I encountered were probably the pyramidiots, who when pressed enough would announce that the law of conservation of energy is a western creation that doesn't apply to other cultures.
There was one fellow who was a spherical crank--a language crank, math crank, economics crank, history crank, even backgammon crank. And while not the most insulting crank I encountered, he was easily the most abusive. (The most insulting was a Hindutva who with great politeness told me that Sanskrit was the language of the gods given to the ancient Hindus, who then debased their gift by migrating out of India and interbreeding with apes; thus, the more different a language is from Sanskrit, the more ape admixture and the less intelligence its speakers have.)
In any case, this fellow was a Turk who was convinced that Proto-Turkic was the original language of mankind and the ancient Turks the founders of western civilization. (This follows a long line of semi-official language crankery the Turkish state has flirted with for decades.) As a math crank, he applied math to linguistics--very badly because he was incompetent in both [*]. More than that, he didn't care. Language did not interest him, only the glory of the Turks.
Anyway, the guy was a living embodiment of the stupidest sort of scientism. He said that all knowledge is either science or lies; and as science is only scientific if it is mathematized, then the humanities are lies and should not be taught in the universities, especially literature. To the question of how something false can nonetheless convey something true, he answered that it didn't convey truth. Falsehoods can only convey falsehoods. He taunted everyone with traditional Central Asian folk stories; when I asked him the exact date and location where each occurred, he as usual insulted me and changed the topic. Then someone sympathetic to him told of his life, and the guy replied there are some things you can't understand at all until they happen to you, to which the fellow pointed out that you can, you just have to read good fiction, which lost him a friendship right there.
Of course, the guy was an idiot, but it is a good question--how can fiction convey something true? And secondary to that, need it be realistic to do so? If so, just how realistic must it be? If not, how unrealistic can it be?
[*] Among other things, he argued that all decimal representations of fractions must terminate; no non-terminating decimals are licit. I responded about five minutes after he posted with a solid mathematical proof that this implied that there was a largest integer and gave an upper bound on it in terms of the length of the longest terminating decimal. His reply was that I needed to shut up until I'd studied enough algebra to know what the hell I was talking about. I replied, "After you, Alphonse," whereupon he said that I had gone into linguistics because my penis was too small to cut it in physics, and then emailed my department urging them to kick me out of my graduate program. My chairman told me about that later and said, "So I read the thread he was talking about, and I have to say, you have such an amazing brand of stupidity we might just have to give you tenure."
Thanks, Snedcat, for the extended replies.
I particularly liked your closing line about tenure. Having a father and an oldest brother who taught in University for most of their adult lives, it has a certain 'resonance' to it ;-)
My first exposure to Lewis was the "Screwtape Letters," which, in my religious days, I found profoundly satisfying. Ditto "Mere Christianity."
I have not revisited "Screwtape" but my occasional returns to "Mere" found it more and more unsatisfactory as the distance from my religious days increased.
I found the allegory and symbolism in "Narnia" to be oppressive, but I did read them for the first time in my 20s, and was still devout at that time. My siblings, who read them much younger (and have retained their religious faith) find them quite satisfying, even in their adulthood.
"Perelandra", which I read in my teens, when I was still devout, struck me as merely lamenting the fact that in our own Eden, Adam and Eve failed in their continence and thus denied us a continuing existence in paradise. And that leaves aside St. Paul's comment in regard to who actually sinned in that scenario. (I Timothy, 2:14)
At any rate, some interesting discourse here. I have to say that I prefer Tolkien's construction [paraphrase] of myth being truth tarnished with falsehood rather than Lewis' idea of it being falsehood overlaid with truth.
c andrew
Just a quick last note:
C. Andrew writes, "My first exposure to Lewis was the "Screwtape Letters," which, in my religious days, I found profoundly satisfying. Ditto "Mere Christianity."
I have not revisited "Screwtape" but my occasional returns to "Mere" found it more and more unsatisfactory as the distance from my religious days increased."
I still have fond memories of Screwtape Letters, though it's been decades since I read it, from some of the paradoxical play in it. I should reread it and see if it holds up, but even back in the day I thought Chesterton funnier and better at that sort of writing. (Speaking of light reading for the leisure hours, this collection of playful essays by Chesterton is an entertaining option. Nothing profound, nothing controversial, and none so long as to overstay its welcome.) Moreover, I much prefer Chesterton's religiously shaped novels to Lewis's as well: The Man Who Was Thursday has long been a minor favorite of mine. I think it's partly because Chesterton didn't back down or sidle around things. On a much lower level, it's why a few Christian ska songs are favorites of mine. Most are only a step or two higher than CCM in my opinion (which is to say roughly in the country of country)--but the ones that make the cut are pretty good. This one, for instance, I like for its insistence on making the right choice; I consider the forced choice it offers false, but that's what one thinks about when the song is over, not while it's playing. (But then, by the same token, one of my favorite Yank ska songs is this one, which Gus knows from a gift. The politics implied are quite lefty, but the song itself is excellent.)
"I found the allegory and symbolism in "Narnia" to be oppressive..."
I liked them a lot ages 8-10. I was rereading the second book at the end of that period and suddenly just revolted against it--I wanted something else and better. (I actually started the series with Voyage of the Dawn Treader because I loved ships, then went back to the first.) I still remember the series on the whole fondly though as flawed, but have little desire to reread it. Perelandra I tried as a boy, got about five pages in and abandoned, and finally finished a few years ago. It was okay, but I had no desire to finish the trilogy.
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