trennels | the Brontes and Peter's Room

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peter's room

the Brontes and Peter's Room

I cast an eye over Peter's Room (which I don't own, and know far less well than other AFs) lately, and found myself wondering about the sections that deal with the Brontes, before the Marlow/Merrick Gondal kicks off - the conversation in the Shippen where Ginty tells the others about the Brontes, and Gondal and Angria, and the slightly later one where Karen (all hot water bottle and Thucydides) nudges Nick and Ginty through a sort of Socratic dialogue about art vs life and the general wrongheadedness of adult addiction to fantasy games. (I suppose there weren't role-playing societies at Oxford in her day, and one can imagine her opinion of on-line RPGs...)

It's completely fascinating and the usual intellectually-sophisticated AF stuff, but I found myself wondering whether the novel actually required so much Bronte material? It's probably my own favourite part of the novel, but, after all, all the characters in PR have independent capacities for starring in their own fantasies, as shown in the novels as a whole, and the collective fantasy isn't so much of a stretch from Nick's Scott or Lawrie being a resistance fighter when her conduct mark is read out etc etc. So - in some ways the Bronte stuff reads like a compulsively readable red herring. I'd forgotten simply how much of the early part of the novel those two conversations actually take up, effectively postponing the start of the 'action'. Also, I have no memory of when I first read the novel, but I read the Brontes young, and so probably knew what AF was talking about from other sources, but there may well have been readers completely befogged by the very elliptical way in which the Brontes' story is told by various AF characters. I was talking about it to a children's book agent friend the other night and she didn't think that kind of digression would get past an editor these days.

So - how effective/necessary is the Bronte stuff to Peter's Room? If you read PR young and without any knowledge of the Brontes, were you at sea or not? Did anyone read the Brontes because of PR? And, because this occurred to me as I was reading, how does anyone imagine the Marlow/Merrick Gondal to have been carried out, exactly? We know they don't act it out by actually moving around and doing the actions, apart from the very end, because Patrick says so, but are we to imagine them taking it in turns to narrate a kind of recitative, something like the italicised narrative the reader gets? Or just speaking their own parts?

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I don't remember the Bronte bits being that long, but I only read PR first a few years ago, when my only knowledge of the family was an ad for the London Review of Books with the acerbic quote "It can't have been easy being the brother of those Bronte sisters, but Branwell does seem to have made more of a hash of it than strictly necessary." So the Bronte content made the book into a quasi-historical novel.

I'd always considered the book to be part of the anti-roleplaying fearmongering that was a response to D&D and roleplaying becoming popular at universities and among disaffected youth, in the early 70s, but having just checked, PR was first published in 1961, and I'm not sure whether roleplaying had been heard of then - my impression from the book was that Patrick was familiar with the idea and the others weren't, which fits with Patrick being a geeky boy at boarding school. On the other hand, they're all at boarding school with no TV and only improving books - inventing characters as entertainment wouldn't be as odd as for similar kids doing the same now.

I see them sitting in a circle each speaking their own roles, with lots of gestures and "so I go over here and I'm hiding behind this snowdrift" etc. Like roleplayers now without anyone wanting to get into endless dice-throwing and point-totting...

I read PR probably fairly shortly after it came out, in the 60s, and I already knew about the Brontes (have a feeling that the Sad Story of the Sisters may have featured in girls' comics of the more serious and improving kind) and had probably read Jane Eyre Villette and Wuthering Heights by that time, but had not previously heard about Gondal/Angria - the idea of which I found very exciting indeed. This stuff was, yes, I agree, compulsively readable, at least to this bookish adolescent who created private fantasy worlds.

There was at least one other YA book around the same time inspired by the Brontes' web of childhood - in which the wooden soldiers who started it all are discovered by a modern family.

I know I'd read the Brontes before I read Peter's Room, because for ages I only owned the four school books and was utterly perplexed by the Gondal bit at the beginning of The Attic Term.

I think I imagine some of them just speaking their own parts and some doing descriptive bits as well - I can see Ginty, for example, going into narrative flourishes about the frozen sea, far more easily than I can see Nicola doing so.

I have tried and failed about three times to articulate why I feel that those opening sections are so important. I am now giving up, but I might try and come back to it. Certainly AF in general made me think more deeply than anything else I read as a teenager, with the exception of some of Chaim Potok, and an odd little book called 'I, Juan de Pareja', about the moral valency of art, and of what kind of troubling relation their might be (to be pompous) between art and virtue, both for the artist and the reader. (Northanger Abbey might have done this too but I read it a good deal later; actually re: adolescent girls 'The Rainbow' is very good on this too, Ursula in her hay loft thrilling to 'Elaine the fair, Elaine the lovable, Elaine the lily maid of Astolat'.)

I only actually got hold of 'Peter's Room' in quite late adolescence, but it certainly fitted with, and expanded upon, thought prompted by what I had already read of her.

I had an imaginary world myself as a child, but a solitary one, and rather different from the Gondal version - more in the line of endless maps and law acts and treaties and graphs of language distribution (seriously!). I did the accounts for my vast and populous country every Saturday morning for quite some time, and occasionally wrote speeches to deliver to my cabinet . . . (I don't know why I'm admitting all this. I'm going to stop right now.)

Having imaginary countries and role-playing is very common, I think; I role-played a lot as a child (er, not admitting that I still do!), and often wandered into the world of what is now called fanfic! It was always so disillusioning that none of my friends ever wanted to play in my world. Sigh....

Didn't C S Lewis have an imaginary country where he played with his brother?

I was 19 by the time I found a copy of Peter's Room in a charity shop for 50p (this is the only sought-after book this has happened to me with and it's happened twice) and by then I'd read quite a lot of Brontes, as well as Pauline Clarke's children's book The Twelve and the Genii, which involves the toy soldiers and the imaginary worlds. I'm not sure what I'd have made of it without all of that background information.

I had imaginary boarding schools with registers and school play cast lists and dormitory lists and floor plans and complicated timetables but I would have died rather than admit this to anyone, let alone pretend it with people listening. My sympathies in PR are entirely with Nicola and for years I skipped the fantasy sections altogether because they were just plain silly.

>>>We know they don't act it out by actually moving around and doing the actions, apart from the very end, because Patrick says so, but are we to imagine them taking it in turns to narrate a kind of recitative, something like the italicised narrative the reader gets? Or just speaking their own parts?

I don't remember speculating about that. At that time I was much more familiar with the C S Lewis type of a fantasy world - all on paper, except when the toys were used to act out the scenes.
We all had "puppet theatres" during the 1950s, and the puppets were usually home made. I think that AF was ahead of her time in seeing the potential dangers of role playing games.

I've always thought that PR is to role-playing rather like Mansfield Park is to amateur theatricals - and, indeed, having read Peter's Room it helped me with reading MP for 'A" Level no end. After all, our English teacher made it clear to us that Austen enthusiastically participated in the plays they put on in the barn: it's far too over-simplified to see MP as being "The Theatre Is Eval Oh Woah!" And Nicola, of course, is quite happily a Polar Expedition. What I think AF is doing is saying that just like Lovers' Vows is wrong for the MP crew, Gondal is wrong for the mob in the Shippen. It isn't in the least saying this is wrong in itself (which is why the line about plenty of people living at Haworth without turning into Brontes). I think she's warning against hidden agendas, not against role playing per se.

I read PR often as a child and although I can't exactly remember my first response I don't think I was thrown by the Brontes or those long discussions. I've always enjoyed them, and I think they balance the two "set-pieces" - the Twelth Night Party and the Hunt which are both more obviously exciting and dramatic.

If anything was/is off-putting I think it is the rather slow opening chapter - just inside Peter's head mainly, clearing out the Old Shippen. I think an editor might ask for a punchier start.

I think the general warning against fantasy in the books is on two levels:
first, if you get completely immersed it can get dangerous (most notably illustrated by Patrick, the near jumping on Nicola and the near shooting)
second, there's a danger you just moon around in a mediocre day-dream (the argument put by Karen when she said Emily B. should have been writing novels rather than "rather bad Gondal verse")
I think it's a wonderful book, but I'm not sure how successful it is really in terms of these central themes. It seems to me its a big problem when you have dual narratives (or a narrative within a narrative) to make them equally compelling, and although I admire the Gondal bits, they don't suck me in completely. And so its hard to see why the characters might find them more appealing than the rather interesting lifes they already seem to be leading. I can't immediately think of any other children's or adults book where a characters purely imaginary world achieves this feat either.

In children's books, I think the most successful examples give some kind of reality to the children's dreams/imaginings - eg Tom's Midnight Garden or Marianne Dreams - and make sure that the "real" existence of the children is pretty dull so it can't compete with the more vivid dream/inner lives of the characters. That said, I'd still much rather read Peter's Room any day!

I imagine them sitting sitting around doing dialogue with more (Lawrie) or less (Nicola) gusto, along with stage directions, eg "So Rupert's going over to Crispin to say". Interspersed with arguments about what's about to happen.

I think perhaps the book could have been written with much less Bronte, but it would have been a very different book. The Ginty-Patrick-Nicola relationship, for example, would have had to be resolved entirely differently.

I think "Peter's Room" contains two chapters which, for various reason, should be among any anthology of great children's writing - "All the Birds of the Air", and "Hounds are Running". If Peter's Room had been different, we'd probably have lost those two chapters, too.

I wonder if AF used the Brontes as a shield and a justification for writing on this topic. I can't help thinking that she must have had her own private experience of intense imaginings/roleplay and this was why she wanted to write about it (she just GETS it, doesn't she?) but perhaps didn't realise just how common it is - maybe had only the Brontes as an example of others 'indulging'?

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Gondal

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