Childhood is Calling, and It Wants Its Innocence Back

Thinking about sci-fi put me in a going-back-to-my-reading-roots mood, so I perused my bookshelves for a childhood classic to re-read. The lucky winner was Roald Dahl's Danny: The Champion of the World, and what a fine choice it ended up being. It's a nut just waiting to be cracked by some sharp insights about class tensions, aristocratic inconsequentiality, economic influences on childhood, and the transferral of masculinity between generations. What made me sit up straight and take a deep breath though, was the difference between my reading of Danny umpteen years ago and my reading of it yesterday.

A quick version of the story: Danny's mother died when he was very young, and now he lives with his father, William, who is a mechanic. Their shop lies a bit out of town, and they house themselves in an old gypsy caravan behind the shop. Danny loves his father, for all the surprising and exciting things William says and does. One of the most surprising turns out to be pheasant poaching in Mr. Victor Hazell's woods six miles up the road. Danny suggests a scheme for the ultimate pheasant-poaching experience, they try it out, bag 120 drugged-up pheasants, deliver them to the Vicar's wife, the sleeping pills wear off the next morning and pandemonium ensues. Cue hilarity and a riotous sendup of the heavy-jowled, red-faced Mr. Hazell. (That would be the class tensions coming into play.)

I only had the vaguest recollections of this plot when I pulled Danny off the bookshelves this last time. A few pages in, I had the most comfortable feeling, as though this was a space which I knew fairly well, and wouldn't need to work too hard to reacquaint myself with. It was a bit like finding an old, lost sweater and discovering it's still worn into the shape of your shoulders. Except that a few pages further, that sweater was starting to itch and pull and grow tight in all the wrong places.

That 'wrong' feeling? It all boiled down to Dahl's characterization of William. Danny is our narrator, so we see William only through the eyes of an adoring, idolizing son. When I first read Danny, I was probably pretty close to his age in the book. I identified with him, idolized his father along with him, wished I had crazy illegal pheasanty adventures with him. Perhaps I give my younger self too much credit, but I do recall knowing that money was an issue for Danny and William. They clearly didn't have much of it, and living outside of town was a clear indicator of that for a little girl living in a tiny German village with farming still struggling to make it all around the village. Again, perhaps my hindsight is a bit misty.

I know I had no critical thoughts about William, though. How can I know, after all these years? Well, I can't really, but what I can do is extrapolate from those initial cozy feelings from yesterday that I already mentioned. Five pages in, I was simply enjoying an escapist romp in 19early-something-ish England. As soon as William started in on his poaching, though, those feelings evaporated, replaced by the slow settle of heavy responsibility and adult concerns. See, William is rather upfront about the dangers of poaching: The pheasant keepers carry guns and will shoot at anything without feathers that moves. And yet, he continues to poach.

How?

How could a single father justify putting himself in mortal danger, with no care for his son's welfare should he be shot and unable to work, or even killed? Obviously, I ask this question with a very post-2000 attitude about the responsibilities of parents, and particularly with contemporary ideas about the necessity of gender-equal distribution of those responsibilities. In Danny's days, having a caring father who not only earned the dough, but also baked it, and told bed-time stories and walked his son to school every day, would have been something else. Indeed, if Danny wasn't the Champion of the World, at least he would be the Champion of Sons with Concerned, Involved Fathers. If that was all William was, I wouldn't be having this odd now-vs-then discrepancy as per my view of him.

Danny's narration gives us insights into William's character, as well as his activities. This bit just blew my mind:

Danny has discovered that his headmaster, Mr. Snoddy, drinks gin all day. He decides to keep the secret, save for telling one person.
"The only person I told was my father, and when he heard it, he said, "I don't blame him one bit. If I was unlucky enough to be married to Mrs. Snoddy, I would drink something a bit stronger than gin."
"What would you drink, dad?"
"Poison," he said. "She's a frightful woman."

Whoa. You want to talk about sending negative signals to children about women, marriage, relationships, and appropriate responses to unfortunate circumstances?

But then I'm stuck asking, What would I have kids read? Once they get out of picture books, and before I'm ready to loose them into Updike, there must be a middle ground. By middle ground, I mean thematically and topically, something that trades some childhood concerns ("But I don't like sharing!) for adult ones ("But I don't like sharing, so I'm going to do destructive things and act like a child!). Thinking through that last explication of this ambiguous middle ground, I've come to a new conclusion about it. It's not that children and adults require different topics or themes, but rather that children and adults can generally handle different levels of sophistication in treating the same topics and themes.

So applied to Danny, that means I'm not going to take Dahl to task for setting up this possibly misogynistic and irresponsible father as the model all fathers should follow if they would like to be "sparky," not "stodgy"! Rather, I will take to task guardians, parents, librarians, teachers who have kids read this book without providing other examples and models to follow.

Don't get me wrong. I don't mean we should live in a crazy PC-world in which every possible viewpoint is represented as equally valid. The resulting who-can-be-more-liberal-and-accepting pissing contest gives me the shivers. What I do mean is that if I gave a kid Danny, I would do it with full awareness both of how I read it as a kid and how I read it now. I've had an extra 17ish years to gain some perspective on what types of people are out there in world. I would like to share some of that perspective with the (made-up, non-specific) kid reading Danny and loving William, just like I did at that age. Perhaps that sharing takes the form of another book, with different models of masculinity and fatherhood. Perhaps it is introducing the imaginary kid to lots of real people: fathers, brothers, policemen, baristas, teachers, friends, who are all different, and--more importantly--show those differences in their attitudes and behaviors.

The child who is sheltered, kept only with kids exactly her own age for the length of the school-day, then shuttled back home to spend time in exactly one family environment, observing one set of relationships and interactions is ill-prepared to understand William as a three-dimensional, and sometimes negative, character. That sheltered (made-up, non-specific) child simply has no basis for comparison.

So get those kids out in the world! Let them talk to strangers, at the coffeeshop or the library or the farmer's market! Give them more books than they can possibly read, and read those books yourself, and then talk about them! Make friends with the neighbor kids, but check out the neighbor adults and see if they're friendly and unthreatening too!

How else can a child in love with reading learn enough of the world for their emotional and judgemental faculties to keep pace with what they can, and therefore want, to read? Books can be a child's ticket to a whole new world. Don't adults have the responsibility of making sure that world is as rich and diverse and complete as possible?