Re: Enid's 1937-1940 diaries
Posted: 01 Dec 2017, 14:56
Although I've unfortunately never found time to update it, further information has come to light since I wrote that. The Faraway Tree and Moonface did not appear in the first edition of The Yellow Fairy Book but were put into the story later on for some reason (perhaps in 1952 when the book was retitled The Queer Adventure - I'm not sure). Incidentally, that book has had several titles over the years. I've mentioned two already but it has also been called The Marvellous Adventure and The Faraway Tree Adventure.Green Hedges wrote:Anita says something very interesting in her "Enid the Writer' piece elsewhere on the EBS site, so I'll paste that in here:
This stresses a difficulty of this exercise. We may not always be able to take at face value something Enid writes in an Old Thatch letter to children, for example.In Chapter 14 of The Story of My Life (1952) Enid Blyton takes us through the process of writing a book, giving The Enchanted Wood (1939) as an example. This is an odd choice, since several key elements of The Enchanted Wood (which, incidentally, was written thirteen years before The Story of My Life) had been used previously in earlier works. These elements may have suddenly sprung into her mind as she worked on The Enchanted Wood, but they were certainly not new creations. Enid ignores that, presenting some of these things as having popped into her head completely out of the blue as she wrote the book, and declaring that she was as surprised by them as anyone.
She tells us that she began with the characters of Jo, Bessie and Fanny. Then she followed a winding path through a wood in her imagination, and suddenly saw "the strange Faraway Tree, a tree that touches the sky, and is the home of little folk. I had never heard of it, or seen it till that moment—but there it is, complete in every detail." In reality, Enid Blyton had already been acquainted with the Faraway Tree for about three years before writing The Enchanted Wood, as she had first written about the tree in The Yellow Fairy Book (1936.)
Enid Blyton goes on to describe climbing the tree in her imagination and seeing a door at the top: "... before I can knock, it is opened, and there stands a round, red-faced, twinkling-eyed little fellow, beaming at me. I know who it is, though I have never in my life seen him before. It is Moonface, of course." Once again, further investigation reveals that Enid Blyton had created Moonface previously. He too had appeared in The Yellow Fairy Book, complete with little round room and slippery-slip.
Enid then writes: "I can hear a strange noise—a jingling-jangling, clinking-clanking noise. What is it? Ah, yes, you know, because you have read the book. But at that moment the story hasn't even been written yet, so I don't know. I have to look and see what makes the noise." It is the Saucepan Man, hung with clanking pots and pans, but then Enid Blyton ought to have known that since she had dreamt up the character of the Saucepan Man thirteen years earlier, when writing The Enid Blyton Book of Brownies (1926.)
She describes following Moonface and the Saucepan Man up the topmost branch of the Faraway Tree to discover that "A little yellow ladder stretches surprisingly from the last branch, up through a purple hole in the cloud that lies on the top of the tree." "Surprisingly" may not be quite the right word, as the ladder and cloud also featured in The Yellow Fairy Book.
So, it appears that in The Story of My Life Enid Blyton is giving us a somewhat fictionalised account of the writing of The Enchanted Wood, making things neater and simpler than they really were. Some valuable insights into her creativity may still be gleaned from her account, but it does not portray the whole truth of what was obviously a rather more complex process.
I think Newnes (who published Sunny Stories) did put some restrictions in place when it came to advertising other publishers' books and related ephemera, though I forget the details.Rob Houghton wrote:I find it a bit odd that you suggest Enid was 'allowed' to plug her books in her Sunny Stories letters...as surely Enid had full rein to do whatever she liked, as she had full control over the Sunny Stories magazine by this time, and no one would have told her what she could and couldn't do.
Good point, Rob. I tend to agree.Rob Houghton wrote:I tend to think its a bit iffy to believe what Enid wrote in her letters in Sunny Stories and in The Enid Blyton Magazine. As you say - we may not be able to take what she writes at face value - in fact, some of it was probably pure fantasy - or embroidered anyway. I often get this impression when going through the Enid Blyton Magazine letters for my reviews each fortnight. I'm quite sure that sometimes Enid was coming out with happenings that never really happened...or maybe they happened years before...or could have happened but didn't. She was above all a teacher and a story teller - so I think quite often her 'letter life' owed more to fiction than to fact.