If you have small children and they do not like Noddy, you are very lucky. I have; they do; I am not. This insipid wooden doll, with its nodding head crowned with cap and bell, with its taxi and its friend Big Ears, has opened a rift between parents and children which time alone may heal. They love it; we do not. And we cannot agree to differ, because we parents have to sit and read the stuff to them.
The Noddy business has taken its place among Britain's major industries, along with the manufacture of ice-lollies, righteous indignation, and plastic pixies. Two years ago 12m Noddy books had been sold: 12 titles and about 1m sold of each. Noddy is reproduced in countless foreign languages, including Tamil, Hebrew and Swahili. By-products, controlled by five separate companies, include Noddy pyjamas, painting books, jigsaws, Christmas annuals, cut-outs on cereal packets and models. Noddy has also appeared on television and the West End stage, although not yet at the Royal Court.
Noddy's begetter is, of course, a former schoolmistress called Enid Blyton. She has been described by the Daily Express as "a sweet-looking woman in her middle years. The outstanding thing about her is her eyes. They are deep and kind." The really outstanding thing about her is her industry. From 1948-52 she managed to fill nearly four close-printed columns of Whitaker's Cumulative Book List-261 titles. In 1955, she clocked up 59 titles, more than a book a week. Last year she only managed 28. She also produces a fortnightly magazine, runs four children's clubs, and personally answers 1,000 fan letters a week.
The scale of her activities has naturally aroused suspicion that she must be a corporate entity, or even some sort of electronic brain. These allegations she denies. "Once I get started," she has said, "I've just got to go on and on. Oh, I love it... Stories flow from my imagination like cotton from a reel." According to her husband, "It has been a constant battle to restrain her from working. The sheer effort of turning out 10,000 words daily-sometimes 14,000-has resulted in heart strain. She never lets up... She is a remarkable woman, but now she must rest." Fourteen thousand words daily-if we assume a seven hour writing day-means 2,000 words an hour, about 33 words a minute, a word every two seconds. Miss Blyton's style may be flat, her material banal, her method unreflective; written at such a lick it is astonishing that her works make as much sense as they do. Measured beside this literary Stakhanovite, such prodigies of productivity as Trollope, Zola, and Balzac shrink to idle dilettantes.
Miss Blyton is, by Johnson's definition, no blockhead. Two years ago, the royalties on Noddy alone totalled ?400,000. With an income of ?50,000 a year, she is about the highest paid woman in Britain. But she does not write for money only. She writes to amuse, but also to edify. Her art is not for art's sake. She is committed: she has A Message.
"Into my books," she says, "I pack ethical and moral teaching... I do not write merely to entertain. My public, bless them, find in my books a sense of security, an anchor, a sure sense that right is always right and that such things as courage and kindliness deserve to be emulated." Thus does she range herself firmly with FR Leavis against Lord David Cecil's hedonistic aestheticism.
If not "merely" entertaining, however, the Noddy books undoubtedly do entertain the people they are meant to entertain. But the essence of a children's classic-perhaps of any classic-is that it can be enjoyed at a number of different levels. Alice in Wonderland; the tales of Grimm and Andersen; the wistful nonsense of Edward Lear; Beatrix Potter's strange stories; The Wind in the Willows, and Winnie the Pooh-all these books have delighted generations of children. They have also delighted generations of grown-ups. And when parents read them to their children, it is to experience a complex harmony of pleasures: they find delight in the book itself; they recapture the delight it once brought them as children; and they see awakened that same delight in a new generation. These books form a precious link between the generations.
To compare, say, Winnie the Pooh with Noddy is not unfair. Both appeal to the same age group, both with complete success. But the difference is startling. The Pooh stories are written with wit, taste and an almost magical felicity of form. Take the story "in which Pooh and Piglet go hunting and nearly capture a woozle." The mounting suspense as these two enchanting fools plod round and round the tree in the snow, tracking first one woozle, then two, three, and four, and the effortless way in which the illusion is finally pricked, make this in miniature a perfect short story. Compared with such happy mastery, Noddy is mere drooling, shapeless meandering-"cotton from a reel."
If children enjoy Noddy, is that all that matters? Miss Blyton, of course, would not think so; neither would I. By writing ruthlessly down to children, she does not only antagonise grown-ups. Her Noddy books also fail to stretch the imagination of children, to enlarge their experience, to awaken their delight in words. They contain nothing incomprehensible even to the dimmest child. By putting everything within reach of the child's mind, they cripple it.
The idea that children should have special books is a fairly modern one. Until Victorian days, children by and large read grown-up books or none. In Noddy, "the book for children" is carried logically ad absurdum. Victorian children's books often involve long words and quite complex intellectual and moral problems. Since then children's books have been more and more closely geared to the supposed intellectual powers of their public. Enid Blyton is the first successful writer of children's books to write beneath her audience. In fact, her appeal is not only to the not-so-bright. Her books seem to possess a fascination for all children, bright and not-so-bright, rich and poor. "My books are read in palaces as well as working class homes," she says.
To what ends, then, does Miss Blyton use her influence over children? It is not easy to say. For all her protestations of lofty purpose, there is little explicit moralising in the Noddy books. One can only go by the characters Miss Blyton appears to find sympathetic. Of these the chief is Noddy himself.
Noddy is not perhaps intended to be admirable. According to his creator, he "is like the children themselves, but more na?ve and stupid. Children like that-it makes them feel superior. He is the helpless little man who gets into trouble and invites sympathy-a children's version of the early Charlie Chaplin." But he is undoubtedly intended to be attractive and influential. He is "quite the nicest person in Toy Village"; he cleans his teeth, brushes his hair, polishes his shoes, drinks his milk; he can make children respect policemen, tidy their rooms, eat up their porridge; echoing his creator, he thinks it "good to work hard and earn lots of money"; he is also an artist who composes songs which, sung by the composer, are invariably received with rapturous enthusiasm. Mr and Mrs Tubby Bear like to hear one every morning; "Isn't he clever?" says Miss Rabbit. Several critics have thought Wagner rash actually to incorporate in Die Meistersinger a melody, the Prize Song, which he himself declared to be of transcendent beauty, a masterpiece: wiser perhaps, to have funked the challenge and left it to the imagination. Miss Blyton is equally intrepid. Her pages are lavishly enriched with the fruits of Noddy's genius, of which the following is a fair sample:
"I'm only little Noddy
Who's got a song to sing
And a little car to ride in,
And a bell to jingle-jing.
I've a little house to live in
And a little garage too.
But I've something BIG inside me,
And that's my love for YOU-
My love for ALL of you!"
His poetic gifts apart, to call Noddy "more na?ve and stupid" than any normal child is a gross understatement. His imbecility is almost indecent. It is symbolised by the ceaseless nodding of his head, a movement-presumably involuntary-upon which great emphasis is placed. More striking even than Noddy's imbecility is his timidity. Courage may be "a thing to be emulated"; it is not emulated by Noddy. He is terrified of everything. His friend, Big Ears, who acts as a sort of male-nurse symbol, knocks at the door: "'Rat-a-tat-a-tat.' Little Noddy woke up in a hurry and almost fell out of bed in fright. His little wooden head began to nod madly." Bouncing balls scare him so much that he wants to get down a rabbit hole. He is terrified by the sea ("It's too big... and it keeps moving.") and by holidays: "'They sound sort of prickly,' said Noddy. Big Ears laughed and laughed. 'Not holly-days made of prickly holly!' he said."
Though utterly resourceless himself, Noddy is never in trouble for long. There is always somebody to run to: the machinery of benevolent authority (Big Ears) or of the state (Mr Plod). Indeed, Noddy books give the impression of being an unintentional yet not wholly inaccurate satire on the welfare state and its attendant attitudes of mind.
If Noddy is "like the children themselves," it is the most unpleasant child that he most resembles. He is querulous, irritable, and humourless. In this witless, spiritless, snivelling, sneaking doll the children of England are expected to find themselves reflected. From it they are to derive "ethical and moral" edification. But Noddy is not merely an example: he is a symbol. Noddy, according to Miss Blyton, "is completely English, and stands for the English way of life. He's very popular in Germany. It's interesting to think that a generation of young Germans is absorbing English standards and English morals." The Russians, it seems, have pirated some of Miss Blyton's books, but not yet Noddy. "I wish they would," says Miss Blyton. "I don't care about the royalties-I should like the Russian children to read English stories. It might help them to understand our way of life." It is disquieting to reflect that they might indeed.
