The year was 1920 when Polly Plummer boarded the boat to France, fearless in a smartly-tailored skirt and a ruffled blouse. She was indomitable; game for whatever adventure life would give her.
The previous night Digory had asked her what she was going to do abroad. He still smelled of the trenches, a bit, but his spirits were higher and so Polly did not fret about leaving. Sipping ginger beer like they had in the old days, Polly laid out her plan.
I’m going to explore. I’m going to drink champagne in France and eat chocolate in Belgium. Ride a camel. Catch a tiger by the ear. I’m going to dance and sing and smoke in far-flung cafes. And I’m going to write great books for you and your students to analyze in your great dusty library.
(This was to say that Polly did not really have a plan to speak of. Of course, she never would have admitted it. Polly Plummer was a sensible young woman, you know.)
She landed in Calais in one piece and checked herself into the first hotel she found. It was a little ramshackle, still reeling from the war, but her room had four walls and a ceiling, and a little desk where she could sit and write besides. The exposed wood beams reminded her a little of her one-time attic, where Polly had started and finished her first book. It was childish tripe, in retrospect (perhaps that was why she’d never let Digory read it), but it had been an accomplishment all the same. Yes, all told, as Polly settled herself in to her temporary dwelling, she felt game for anything.
She stayed three weeks in Calais, strolling the promenade and basking in the seaside air. She left for Paris in January, a completed short story in her suitcase.
A child travels across the sea on the back of a great gull. When she arrives home, she finds it marred by war. She restores her dead brother to life with a secret told to her by the ocean winds.
It was then that Polly made herself a promise: she would not leave any city until she had completed a story with which she was satisfied.She did not qualify length, though she dearly hoped to have written a novel by the time she returned to England. For now, she wrapped the pages of her first story in twine and tucked them away.
In Paris, Polly fell in with a group of American expatriates, all writing terse, nihilistic novels about the horrors of war. They’d sit around in parlors and bars, drinking and smoking and reading bits of their work to one another. Polly enjoyed her fair share of Parisian cigarettes and champagne (check two off her list for Digory!), but the story she was writing was rather different from her companions’ work.
Led by an old army chaplain, a company of former soldiers searches France for the Holy Grail. While the Grail is never found, the company finds new hope in their search. They rediscover the beauty of the world, a few find love, and together they beat back the lingering clouds of war.
After nearly eight months in Paris, Polly presented the finished work to her fellows. It was a short novella, written in the terse prose the others favored. Most appreciated the work, but they all said it would never sell.
Polly took her discouragement out dancing.
She arrived in Pamplona, Spain in time to witness the famous running of the bulls and wrote a story of a girl-knight upon the world’s fastest steed. In Belgium, she ate chocolates, drank wine, and wrote about becoming lost in an enormous, fantastical castle. In Italy, she paced among the ruins and came away with a collection of melancholy poems.
As she toured Europe, Miss Polly Plummer fell in with the trends. She raised her skirts, bobbed her hair, and painted her lips. Sometimes she eschewed her sensible day clothes for beaded dresses and feathers and danced all night long.
But after two years, seven months of traveling round the continent writing and enjoying herself, Polly decided she was done with Europe. So, she traveled to Arabia to follow in the footsteps of Gertrude Bell and her far more famous compatriot, T.E. Lawrence.
There was a great book seared into her soul, Polly was certain. Adventure would reveal it, for she had first tasted it when she leaped into the pool that led to Charn so long ago. She just had to find the rightadventure.
Polly wanted adventure, and she found it racing camels in the desert and strolling round the great Egyptian pyramids until her back felt like it was about to split in two. Yet even then, her ideas ran dry a hundred pages in. No spark of inspiration, no matter how new or exciting, proved vibrant enough for Polly to wring a whole novel out of it, much less a greatnovel.
In a pair of riding boots and a large, floppy hat, the indomitable Polly Plummer boarded a ship to the South Pacific. She stayed for nearly a year in a fishing village on the island of Yap. Officially, she went as a missionary, and indeed she was able to do excellent work as such. The people of the Marshall Islands had, by and large, a mighty Christian tradition and the Yapese villagers embraced Polly as a member of their church family.
On Yap, Polly learned to cut open a coconut with a machete, to do business with the enormous stones the Yapese used as currency, and to race an outrigger canoe. It was the furthest from home Polly had ever been, and the closest she had ever come to knowing a foreign people.
Painstakingly, she wrote another story, this one based on the history of the island she had come to love. This, perhaps, would be her great novel.
A great prince receives news that the Emperor-beyond-the-Sea had sent his son to dwell on his island. The prince cedes his birthright (for no kingdom can have two kings) and serves the Emporer’s son, learning his ways and the ways of his Father, until at last the Emperor-beyond-the-Sea adopts the man as his own son and he becomes a prince once more.
At two hundred and twenty-eight pages, her words ran dry and the story felt complete. It was a novel, but only just. It took all the power of her indomitable will not to scream when she realized this.
When Polly left Yap, the pastor of the church there gave her a storyboard carved and painted with the events of her novella. Polly threw her arms around the man. “I will never forget you,” she said.
“Nor will I,” replied the pastor.
She travelled away first on an outrigger, then on a boat called the St. Mary that sat alarmingly low in the water, until she arrived at a larger port and chose her next destination.
Then, on a steamship headed for Hong Kong, Polly received an urgent telegram from Digory. “Your mother very ill. Stop. Come at once.” it read.
So, as soon as Polly arrived in Hong Kong, she found a ship bound for Britain and began the long journey home. Her mother was already dead when she arrived.
Digory came to the old row-house to help Polly with her mother’s things. He kept her eating, sat beside her when she wept, and only once asked, “did you write any great books?” One sharp look from Polly ended that line of inquiry.
When all closets were emptied and the house was ready to be sold, Polly climbed up to the old attic and sat cross-legged where her makeshift writing desk used to be. She cried herself out there in the attic, feeling like a fool of a woman who had wasted six years traveling the world and produced nothing at all of any value.
There were no more places to visit. Polly’s words were all exhausted. She took a job as a secretary and, one day, drove up to Oxford with her suitcase. “Here!” she cried, tossing it on Digory’s desk and flinging it open. She turned heel and left without waiting for his reaction.
Digory telephoned two nights later. Polly was already in bed, with her curlers in and cream on her face, and almost didn’t answer. Yet when she did, she heard tears on the other end of the line.
“Polly. Oh Polly. They’re beautiful.”
“What?”
“Your stories. They’re all so beautiful.”
Polly groaned. “I never managed my great novel. I don’t think I ever will.”
“Does it matter? Polly, you’ve got the rest of your life to write great books. But even if you never manage another word in your life—you should be proud, Pol. All of it, everything you gave me to read is beautiful. And, speaking as a professor of literature, you ought to understand that I know what I’m talking about.”
“Are you sure you aren’t simply biased towards me? We are old friends, after all.”
“Plenty of the great books aren’t beautiful in the slightest, you know. Many of them are, but plenty aren’t. It’s sixty-forty, maybe.”
Polly laughed. “It’ll be dratted work finding anyone who wants to publish any of it.”
“Yes, it will be. But that’s okay. I’ll ask around a bit, see if I can be any help.”
A silence. “Don’t you dare stop writing, Polly Plummer,” Digory said. He hung up the telephone.
Polly went back to bed. She dreamed, perhaps, of the story still seared on her soul.
Had a Moment last night reading The Horse and His Boy aloud to the little’uns and it has been a hot minute since I read it last, and likely a regeneration. So Shasta is eavesdropping on Arsheesh and the Taarkan and starts imagining what life in service to that new master might be like. Maybe he’ll take me in and give me new beautiful things to wear and then maybe he’ll decide to adopt me as his son and make me his heir and…
And AND AND (okay yes I know this is going an obvious direction but it still got me) but that is what actually happens, yes? Only not the misplaced son of a wicked man, but the True son of a True King, beyond any shadow of a doubt, and given a Name and an Inheritance and a Brother and a Father and a Kingdom…
And then bonus, as if I wasn’t already having a typological meltdown, Bree has to go and say something like how breathing Narnian air for one day is better than a thousand days in other countries…
Q:I was thinking about your system lately and I was wondering if it’d be accurate to say that someone’s secondary is where they’re most likely to be “mis-sorted”? And by the way, thank you for making this lovely blog ‘cause it’s really useful for character stuff. - Anonymous
First point: It depends what you mean by “mis-sorting.” It’s very important to my heart to affirm that even if you’re a Hufflepuff Primary by the way we define it, and a Gryffindor Secondary, but you say your House is Slytherin? You’re a Slytherin. Green and silver, lives under the lake, wave those colors proudly, buy that scarf. Even if you intuitively “need-base” in Hufflepuff ways and charge like a Gryffindor, if the thing you want/value most/call your own is the green and silver, you’re a snake, love, good and true. This is a story about choice.
However, in terms of Sorting inside our sortinghatchats system, which is less a claiming and more of a personality descriptor and analysis: a secondary (or even a model) can distract from the other parts of the Sorting.
I have strong opinions about the Pevensie children, for instance, that contradict with the classic sorting of Gryff Peter, Puff Lucy, Slytherin Edmund (let me rage against this), and Ravenclaw Susan.
The way we sort them in Primaries (WHY they do things):
duty-bound Peter is a Hufflepuff Primary
shining, faithful, certain Lucy is a Gryffindor Primary
methodical, deliberate Edmund, who decides to be Just and then never strays, is a Ravenclaw Primary
and Susan, dear Susan, is a Slytherin (or potentially a Gryffindor) who reclaimed her own life.
However, that classic sorting lines up perfectly with what I think their secondaries are (HOW they do things):
Brave Peter can be nothing but himself in the things he does (Gryffindor)
Lucy builds her power with kindnesses that nearly have birds flying in circles around her head (Hufflepuff)
Edmund is cunning and reactive, quick on his feet and improvisational, even if his reasons are hardcore Claw Primary (Slytherin)
Susan’s practicality, logic, and general distress at the madness that is Narnia are pretty solid Ravenclaw Secondary
I do think it’s a common phenomena, that the Houses people assign others match the thing Kat and I like to call a secondary. I think secondaries tend to be “louder” than primaries—people don’t normally sit you down and explain the rationale and prioritizing that led to their life choices and mottos. They do things in front of you, and those secondary actions are a lot more apparent than the inner motivations that determine the primary.
The people who do get Sorted into their primaries (or their models! That, too, is surprisingly common I think) tend to have LOUD primaries (or be protagonists in whose heads you live intimately).
Harry Potter himself, for instance, has a cute little Slytherin Secondary but a LOUD ALL-CAPS GRYFFINDOR Primary (and we’re conveniently privy to his innermost thoughts, which makes it more intuitive to sort him with his Primary first). Steve Roger’s stunningly effective Hufflepuff Secondary is overwhelmed by the sheer fervor of his Gryffindor primary and model. G(a)linda the Good Witch from Wicked has a Slytherin Primary so unapologetic that (to the audience, though not the citizens of Oz) it screams through even her three levels of Hufflepuff—secondary, model, and performance.
(Want to know more about what we’re talking about here? Check out our quiz and explanatory posts atsortinghatchats.wordpress.com)
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion: At the beginning of the world there were two trees, one silver and one gold, brought forth by the song of Yavanna, Valar of Earth, and the tears of Nienna, Valar of Mercy.
C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew: At the beginning of the world there were two trees, one silver and one gold, because some coins fell out of a guy’s pocket lol
One of the things I love most about Narnia–something I understood instinctively as a kid but only was able to articulate as an adult–is that Narnia is a place where ordinary life becomes magical. A lamppost in London is so ordinary you don’t even notice it. A lamppost in the middle of a snowy wood is magical. Coins and toffee–boring. Beautiful trees that grow from coins and toffee–magical. A sewing machine? Who cares? A beaver using a sewing machine in the middle of her lodge? Now THAT’S magic.
In Narnia, four ordinary children can become mighty kings and queens. Traitors can mend. Dragons are made human again. Flat paintings turn into vibrant real life. Narnia is alchemy, taking lead and transforming it into pure gold.
Middle Earth is a lament for the fading of magic out of the world. Narnia is a promise of magic returned.
Some Jewish kids go to Narnia and the White Witch is endlessly frustrated because she wants to make it always winter but never Hanukkah, but she doesn’t follow the Hebrew calendar so she can’t accurately predict when it’s supposed to be.
I was going to scroll past this but then I stopped to think about it and now I just have to ask:
would Elijah show up in this version of the story to give the kids swords and wine?
“But why won’t you give me a weapon?” asked Lucy. “I’m sure I could fight if I needed to.”
“Because you have not yet reached the age of bat mitzvah,” said the prophet. “I would not place such responsibility upon you before our laws count you as ready.”
I am furrowed like the field, torn open like the dirt.
Cor offered to help her remove the last of her bandages, but Aravis refused him. He pressed, and again she rebuffed him. She regretted the vehemence of her refusal later—he was only trying to help, after all—but not the words. Aravis wanted to be alone when she assessed the damage to her back.
She seated herself on a stool facing away from the bedroom mirror. She squared her shoulders. The hermit had said that if she left the wounds covered for too long, they would fester. So, she began to painstakingly remove the bandages.
There wounds were well sealed and they were neat. At least there was that. The skin around the marks was still puckered and red, but that would fade in time. Eventually, there would be nothing left of Aslan’s scratches but ten long white furrows down her back.
In the hot, arid climate of Calormen, many of Aravis’s gowns had low, open backs. Archen gowns were different: high-necked and fur-covered to keep out the mountain chill. Likely, no one but Aravis’s husband and the midwife who delivered her children would ever see the extent of the scars on her back. Aravis was glad of the fact, but a part of her—a very small part—regretted it. Her wounds, which would soon be scars, had become the most vulnerable part of her. She wanted to hide them, yet she had a quiet hope that someday, someone else might see them and understand.
As providence would have it, she married Cor.
Fourteen and frightened, Aravis had once run from the prospect of marriage to an old man. Twenty-eight and an esteemed lady in her own right, her dearest friend and most challenging rival asked for her hand in a moonlit courtyard. Aravis said yes of her own free will.
Her wedding gown was low-backed in the Calormene style. She wore it with a fur stole, a concession to both Archen sensibilities and climate. Yet after the wedding, alone with her new husband for the first time, Aravis turned and let him remove it.
There, running along her back, were ten long white furrows. Cor drew in a breath. “May I?” he asked.
“You may.”
Cor brushed feather-light fingers along the scars. Aravis inhaled sharply.
Her husband paused then, mistaking her reaction. “I don’t find them ugly, in case you were worried. They’re beautiful.”
“Thank you. I’m glad you think so but—they aren’t there for the sake of pleasing you.”
Some days, her scars still stung. Aravis didn’t know if they were true pains or merely the memory of pain, but she winced all the same. Once, many years ago now, Aslan had torn her open. She’d been a different person since: less proud, more compassionate. The scars and the pain were hers. It was not an easy thing to share.
(Is it ever easy to bare one’s soul, even to the one you love?)
“They’re not there for you, Cor. But you may see and touch them. Perhaps someday, I’ll be able to tell you what they mean to me.”
The qualities that divide good children’s literature from bad children’s literature:
1) The dragons are real.
2) The adults don’t believe you.
will elaborate
what I’m getting at here is that being a child is an experience defined by marginalization—by powerlessness, not being taken seriously, not being believed.
when you are a child you are aware of the terrible things in the world and terrified by them, and you feel everything so intensely. Before you learn to manage your emotions, they are consuming, incandescent experiences that are almost impossible to access again as an adult. You are small but your emotions and experiences are as large and as vivid as anyone else’s, but they are not taken as seriously as everyone else’s. You recognize that adults condescend to you and dismiss you.
As a child, you know that the world ought to be fair, that people ought to be helped, and you ask “Why?” And you ask “What is the point?” And as you become an adult you learn to repress those things. The answer to every question you ask as a child is “Because you have to” or “Because that’s the way it is,” and these are bullshit answers and we all know it, but defending an authoritarian relationship to someone weaker is easier than defending things about our world that are indefensible if we look at them honestly.
In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, when Lucy first enters Narnia, she is not believed. Narnia has so much about it that makes it THE quintessential children’s book series, the archetype for children’s book series, and it all centers around how Narnia cannot be understood by adults.
Imitators have reduced this down to something about the Wonder of Childhood, something about how children are innocent and special that means only they can see magic because only they are able to believe in it. This is Not Correct. Books that do this are saccharine and awful because this is fake and we all know deep down that it’s fake.
Here’s the truth. Children do not live in an idyllic fantasy land where bad things aren’t real, adults do. For kids who have dealt with grief, abuse, trauma of all kinds—and let’s be real, that’s most of us—it’s condescending and idiotic to treat children as if they’re innocent about the evils in the world. Almost every child experiences evil early and is unable to communicate that experience to adults, whether this is in the form of a relatively innocent childhood fear or deeply damaging abuse.
There is much that has been said about how the Narnia books are about the trauma of World War 1, but most of that can also be said about how Narnia is about childhood in general—the traumatic nature of the return to the Real World is left unstated, because it is understood by the audience. Children have a vivid inner world that they do not have the vocabulary to explain to adults, and this is what Narnia is about.
There’s a reason why Neil Gaiman’s children’s books are so memorable, and it’s the same reason that they scared the living shit out of adults. There’s a reason why Where the Wild Things Are and Shel Silverstein’s poetry have had such a long cultural shelf life. These are not cozy, comfy stories that affirm adult perceptions of the childhood world as flat and innocent; they are troubling and ambiguous.
There’s also a reason why the children’s books that are so important often piss adults off. The best example I can think of is the Captain Underpants series. I never read any of them and yet I remember the extraordinary disdain people had for those books; they were the poster child for What Terrible Thing Has Become Of Literature.
And sure, maybe to an uncritical adult eye the adventures of misbehaving kids thwarting the rules of the world with poop jokes has no value, but I would argue the opposite—the poop jokes are, in fact, fundamental to the anti-authoritarian message. Adult attempts to suppress the scatological sense of humor children have hold a very important message about power.
Because here’s the thing: poop and farts are funny because they’re taboo, and especially so to children because we are constantly telling children what they Can and Can’t say. It’s not about poop, it’s about how adults betray themselves every time they get in a tizzy about a seven year old saying “turd,” because the fact that “turd” gets such a reaction means that uptight adults don’t have the power over kids that they want kids to think they have.
Scatological subjects embarrass adults, and the more uptight and controlling those adults are, the more devastating the embarrassment is. Kids are super conscious of the power dynamics in all their dealings with adults—how could they not be? And the explosion of raucous laughter that results from an elementary school teacher saying something that sounds sort of like “doody” wouldn’t happen if elementary school teachers weren’t constantly trying to reassert and solidify their position of power.
They, too, can be mortified and laid low by a humble “doody,” and if it did not have the power to do so, they wouldn’t try so hard to stop the kids from saying it.
I’d argue that where that all stands for Captain Underpants, part of it is also that it’s a comic book series for kids that features two kids who constantly disobey their teachers and principal. Dav Pilkey, the author of Captain Underpants, has ADHD and dyslexia and has been open about the fact that he was punished very often for both of these things. The reason why many adults find Captain Underpants distasteful is not only because of fart and poop jokes, though that is certainly a factor, it’s that the series is for those kids who can’t focus, who struggle in school academically because the author himself was a kid like that, and as a result Captain Underpants has some pretty strong anti-authority messages. For example:
Dab Pilkey genuinely has the best ‘about the author’ I’ve ever read and I think it’s a crime that it hasn’t been included yet
Dav Pilkey is not even in the vicinity of fucking around, is he.
What if you got the power to talk to animals but it turned out that animals are all aggressively Christian and keep trying to get you to come to youth group
We always see the cast of films/TV shows so things like reading their lines in another accent or reading funny lyrics as their character but you know what I wanna see?
Cast members reading incorrect quotes of their characters right off tumblr.
We always see the cast of films/TV shows so things like reading their lines in another accent or reading funny lyrics as their character but you know what I wanna see?
Cast members reading incorrect quotes of their characters right off tumblr.
“Sometimes since I’ve been in the garden I’ve looked up through the trees at the sky and I have had a strange feeling of being happy as if something was pushing and drawing in my chest and making me breathe fast. Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing. Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us. In this garden - in all the places.” ― Frances Hodgson Burnett
