Kia ora koutou,
I’ve been reading a few books I loved as a kid. Its been part pleasure, part amazement, part disbelief.
Take Keeper of the Bees by Gene Stratton Porter for example. I loved it. I had nothing but good feelings about it. I regarded it, in memory, as a highlight of my reading at that time. Until last week when I decided to read it again.
Its the story of a serviceman, badly injured, in hospital for ages, given up by the doctors, who walks out of the hospital and goes on the road where he has some adventures, finds a place where the owner has a heart attack and is taken off to hospital, leaving the ex–soldier to look after everything. Our hero gradually gets better as he looks after the bees, the house, the garden, and makes friends with locals.
This rather inspiring storyline is wrecked by over rich layers of stuff about God and something called Americanism, taught apparently as a subject, by the woman he falls in love with.
What astonishes me is that around age 10, I read it so uncriticially. I wasn’t like that in real life. In real life I saw clearly what people should do. I knew if they did what I knew they should do, they would be much better off. In my head I rearranged people’s clothes, their hair-do, their lipstick, their haircut (short back and sides), their too short trousers, even their laugh, but when I read, I fell into the book and let it wash over me in a sunshiny romantic haze.
I recomended Keeper of the Bees to dozens of readers. I also read Stratton-Porter’s Girl of the Limberlost and loved that too.
Every time I thought of Keeper of the Bees, I felt a warmth of remembered pleasure but last week after re-reading it, all I could think of was how the hell had I ignored all this other stuff?
Maybe it was the romance? A wounded soldier slowly returning to health with the help of kindess, work, and looking after bees. I had romantic ideas about bees in those days.
I’ve re-read Anne of Green Gables, and the three Emily books. I liked Emily better than I liked Anne. I expect a bit of conservative religious stuff from Lucy Maud as well as the rather breathless romantic tone at times, but even so, LM Montgomery stands up better. Maybe its because Emily has a sense of humour. Given that, I don’t know, never knew, what she saw in Teddy Blair. But we all think that about real people at times anyway, don’t we?
I’m not sure if I want to shatter any more illusions but if I read another one it’ll have to be The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Surely, if nothing else about this story appeals to me now, the idea of a secret garden will still have the power to enchant, to make me read on in uncritical delight, just as it did the first time.
Renée
