#47: Literary heritage

copyright: Puffin Books By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35076834

Childhood reading and literary inheritance

‘I now know that was the week I stepped into my inheritance,’ says children’s author Frank Cottrell-Boyce, speaking of first reading a children’s version of the Greek classics, edited by Roger Lancelyn Green, while on holiday as a child in Wales. ‘His retellings have stayed with me and they have become part of the matrix through which I see and think about the world.’ (The Reader Magazine, issue 71).

Strangely enough, one of my most vivid early reading memories is of a retelling by Green, King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, also on holiday as a child, though in a caravan in Suffolk. In that caravan Merlin brought the child Arthur, wrapped in his cloak, along the cliffs to England; Sir Gawain married the loathly Lady Ragnell to save the King’s life and then had to choose whether she would be beautiful by day or by night; and Sir Galahad leapt up from the Round Table one stormy night, his companions asleep, to follow the Grail wherever it might lead.

On one of the local holiday walks we would pass a dark wooded driveway with a metalwork gate bearing the name Greyfriars and a metal outline of a monk in silhouette, his hooded head bowed over his hands. This somehow blended in my mind with the realm of Logres described by Green, peopled by monks, ladies, knights and hermits, so that for all I knew real monks lived at the end of that driveway.

Why define a literary heritage?

I have never felt the need to define my literary heritage before, but I do now that much of the literature I love, and the traditions it comes from, seem to be under attack for being part of a world in which huge injustices and cruelties were practised (we are still in such a world — does that invalidate today’s literature?). Or, equally crudely, because some of these stories were written by people now regarded simplistically as ‘elite’. But enough negativity.

Is it important to have heritage?

I think so. Why?

Partly confidence and reassurance of stability. When Queen of Carthage Dido rescues the refugee Aeneas, in Virgil’s Aeneid, he and his men are ‘utterly spent by/Every disaster on land and sea, deprived of everything’, having come from Troy, destroyed by the Greeks after a 10-year siege. Young and old have been slaughtered and Troy burnt. She welcomes him: ‘Being acquainted with grief, I am learning to help the unlucky.’ She offers him a banquet with a service

Of solid silver on the tables; and golden vessels chased

With the legends of family history — a long lineage of glory

Traced through many heroes right from its earliest source. (I/640-642)

She is sharing her heritage with him — ‘the legends of family history’ — along with the food and drink, and you can feel how much Aeneas needs this reassurance of stability, along with physical comfort. He has lost confidence in himself and in the worth of his achievements and those of his country – when he tells Dido the story of the fall of Troy he says not even a Greek would be able to tell it without crying (II/7).

Why do the Classics form part of a modern British heritage?

And why should I, along with Virgil and Frank Cottrell-Boyce, consider stories written 2,500 years ago in a faraway country (Greece) part of my heritage? Because they have formed an important part of my subsequent reading, writing and thinking, and are part of the literature, philosophy, art and architecture I have lived and grown up with (for example, Lancelyn Green’s Tales of Troy was another of my childhood favourites).

In fact I have lived in both Greece and Italy but would certainly not regard the Greek and Roman myths as part of my heritage on that account. I think it is connected with the country, England and later the UK, where I come from and where the writers I am most familiar with do and did. It’s also connected with childhood and education. Personal preference and ability also come into it — there are other parts of Britain’s heritage I don’t feel so strongly about; for example, the proud tradition of technological achievement, such as the Bletchley Park code-breaking during World War II and development of the world’s first programmable electronic computer, the Colossus. But not being a computer specialist, this doesn’t feel part of my personal heritage, ‘the matrix through which I see and think about the world’, in the same way.

Local places

For me at least, it is tied up with place in a more intimate, local way as well. I think I will forever associate King Arthur with that mysterious shadowy driveway in East Anglia and with the nearby woods (now diminished through cliff fall, though otherwise marvellously similar to how I experienced them as a child). And another poem I return to fairly often, the Rubaiyat of Omar Kayyam, I would not consider part of my heritage, since it comes from the Arab world, which does not figure strongly in the English or British literary tradition. But because it was first translated into English and popularised in the UK in the 19th century by Edward Fitzgerald, now buried in the village of Boulge (coincidentally not so far from our childhood caravan), in countryside which I love, and where I have heard it recited (in Woodbridge library), it has added meaning to me.

Writing this, I’ve been surprised how much my heritage is connected with place, both in the sense of country and of localities. I expected something more free-floating, more in tune with being a world, or at least a European, citizen. But no.

Basic diagram of influences on my literary heritage — in reality the different elements overlap

Heritage is part of thinking and feeling

Heritage is not a package of national achievements to be accepted or rejected wholesale, and which can be slipped on or slipped off at will. My literary heritage is part of how I feel, how I think, what I enjoy, how I see the world Orwell’s (I think) ‘mental furniture’. Traditions are sometimes tied up with the desire to nation-, culture- and even empire-build, just as in the Aeneid Virgil wanted to bolster the legitimacy of the Roman Empire at the same time as tell a touching, thrilling story. But that does not mean they have to be rejected, just modified, understood and acknowledged in various ways.

Notes and sources

Virgil, The Aeneid, (OUP’s World’s Classics series, 1986) edited by Cecil Day Lewis in 1952, introduced by Jasper Griffin.

King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table was reissued in 2008 with an introduction by David Almond and a cover like a modern children’s fantasy, but still illustrated with the same paper silhouette pictures by Lotte Reiniger which fascinated me as a child. While writing this I learned that Reiniger was a groundbreaking German film animator and director.

Greyfriars turns out to be the childhood home of journalist John Simpson, which I learned after reading part of his autobiography.

I’m aware I’ve used the words ‘inheritance’ and ‘heritage’ interchangeably, and that the latter in particular has become a politically loaded word, in the hands, mouths, leaflets and websites of people with a wide range of political beliefs. On this score, I agree with this statement from a candidate in the 2021 London Mayoral Election (although I will be voting for another party): ‘Our modern United Kingdom was born out of the respectful inclusion of so many individual voices.…The people of the United Kingdom are tired of being told that we represent the very thing we have in history stood together against. We are all privileged to be the custodians of our shared heritage.’ (Laurence Fox, Reclaim Party).