Society
Doris Lessing thinks kids can learn to read from the Bible. Has she seen the illiteracy rates for the 17th century?
Published 13 December 1999
One of the incidental pleasures of December is the "International Books of the Year" feature in the Times Literary Supplement. The one-upmanship that is a part of the books of the year features in other newspapers ("this year I reread The Magic Mountain in an amusing Spanish translation") is taken to stratospheric levels. The essential point is to choose books that other people haven't heard of in languages they can't read. Clive James chooses books in French and Spanish. Leszek Kolakowski chooses a book only available in Polish, but then I suppose he does have the excuse of actually being Polish.
Marina Warner trumped everybody. Contributors were also asked to nominate their books of the millennium, and most people settled for Dante, Shakespeare, Proust, that crowd. But Warner chose Scivias, the 12th-century "mystical autobiography" by Hildegarde of Bingen. This work apparently only became "widely accessible" in 1882 in the "huge" Patrologia Latina of the Abbe Migne. Warner concludes that Hildegarde's "extensive work is still hard to find in a good translation". So it looks like we'll all have to tackle it in the original.
The most bonkers contribution was by Doris Lessing. Like several other people, she chose the King James Bible (I wish someone had acknowledged William Tyndale, who was tortured and executed because of his illegal English translation of the Bible, which then became the basis of the official version). "Nothing has replaced it as a teacher of language, a broadener of minds, a unifier of people," Lessing wrote. One might ask whether this great book hasn't actually done more to narrow minds and divide communities.
But this is just my own private moan. I was more irritated by what came next: "For instance, we complain that children cannot read long books or understand difficult words; they want things easy, but we have not made a connection. Their grandparents, generations of forebears, had to hear this book and to read it. They were soaked in the magnificence of language that conferred authority on this hotch-potch of history, parables, myth, magic, the strange and the ordinary, tender tales like Ruth, savage ones like Esther. What they get instead is the jokey banality of children's television programmes."
It sounds rather as if Lessing switched on the TV one morning when she should have been at her desk, the Teletubbies came on and now she blames them for the decline of western civilisation. Somewhere there is an authentic point that relates to a British puritan tradition. It goes all the way back to the fine (doubtless false) anecdote about Tyndale in Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Tyndale was arguing with a "learned man" who said that "we were better be without God's law than the Pope's", to which Tyndale answered: "I defy the Pope and all his laws. If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost." I always want to make those quick ripostes, but I never think of them at the time. Anyway, you can hear an anticipation of a later tradition of British stubbornness in Tyndale's tone: John Bunyan, William Blake, D H Lawrence.
But the Bible's authority didn't derive from the beauty of Jacobean prose but from religious faith. The idea that we troubled agnostics should be reciting it to our children in order to - what? Develop their prose style? Keep them away from the TV? - is absurd. When Tyndale smuggled copies of his translation of the New Testament to England in the 1520s they were like grenades aimed at the church hierarchy. Now they are very beautiful curios.
And has Lessing spent any time with children lately? Does she think literacy is inferior now to what it was in the 17th century? Or to the 1970s? For the 17th century I only know the figures on illiteracy, but I was a child in the early seventies and I have the Jennings and Biggles books to prove it. At times I thought I should urge them on my own children, but then I look at the books they're reading.
Lessing should take a look at, say, the work of Philip Pullman if she doubts the ability of children to cope with long words and strange ideas. Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife are books I'd urge on adult readers, let alone the children who find them so compelling. They are steeped in the mythology of Milton and Blake and make startlingly serious demands on their young readers.
My own young mind was soaked in the language of Captain W E Johns, and it's never really recovered.
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
