LITERATURE & HUMANITIES

The Book that Influenced Me: short presentations by 5 BRLSI Members

Meeting chaired by Rex Valentine

The meeting was well attended, and much more popular than expected. None of the subjects chosen were trivial, and two were illustrated with overheads. If there was a theme it was ‘the strength of the human spirit’. Some could have been full-length talks. In future similar meetings will be held, once a year involving not more than 4 speakers, who will be given 30 minutes to present.

Summaries are as follows.

Albert Schweitzer’s Life 1875-1965

Rex Valentine

Starting with a recording of Schweitzer playing Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor for organ, in 1935 when he was 60. The speaker emphasised that Schweitzer’s life span of nearly a century encompassed two world wars, and what he called the 20^th century. Reformation brought about by Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud and Einstein. But Schweitzer did not see this as an advance of civilisation, but rather as decay. In his main work published in 1924 he sees the Restoration of Civilisation, as Reverence for All Life, Life Affirmation & A World View. He never reconciled his own innate religiosity with his intellectual need for evidence based Biblical text.

Albert Schweitzer with a patient in Lambarene.

The speaker said that as a young man he was inspired by three aspects of Schweitzer, who at that time was known as ‘The Most Famous Man in the World’. Firstly his facial image was of, above all humanity and humility, perhaps a father figure. Secondly his world of Music and Medicine, which seemed so different but were reconciled in one man. And thirdly, and above all, with his physical energy and will power with which he refused to be content with the easy option of a celebrated academic life in Music, Philosophy and Theology.

Instead, this ‘Tragic Christian’ (as Don Cupitt calls him) marries a Jewess, Helen Bressleu, and chooses to work as a missionary doctor, in a pagan country, in the heart of darkness of West Africa.

The speaker then concentrated on Schweitzer’s wilderness years during and after WWI when he had to rebuild not only his Hospital but his personal confidence and celebrity status as well.

During this time Schweitzer was first interned in Cape Lopez, Gabon then St Remy, France as a German enemy alien. There he contracted Dysentery and surgical complications. During 1918-21 his mother died in an accident and his only child Rhena was born. As his health improved he became pastor and Physician in Strasbourg. In 1920 he met an old student friend Soderblom who has become Archbishop of Sweden. Soderblom encouraged and supported Schweitzer by inviting him to lecture and give organ recitals in Sweden to regain his status and earn the necessary funds to return to Lambarene.

At 50 in 1924 The Decay & Restoration of Civilisation is published, and Schweitzer returns to the ‘Primeval Forest’ without his wife, and apart from sojourns in Europe, makes it his home for the rest of his life including the duration of WWII. During this time the hospital is retrenched and a civil war exists between the Free French, under de Gaulle and Vichy French. Schweitzer is 70 when the War ends.

The Hospital is now sustained by Unitarian funds and Fellowships from North America.

In 1964 Dr Walter Muntz takes over, and in 1965, only 2 days before his death Schweitzer designates his daughter Rhena to become chief administrator of the hospital.(The speaker showed an Internet page of the hospital today publicising its Fellowships for American medical Students.)

In Sept 1965 Schweitzer died in Lambarene and was buried there next to his wife.

The speaker said that although he recognised Schweitzer was a controversial figure and perhaps a tragic Christian, he was also a Heroic figure, whose views were as relevant today as ever.

Rex Valentine

Francis Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911)

Janet Cunliffe-Jones

Is discussing a children’s book lowering the level? What you read when your mind is fresh enters very deeply into the imaginative world you have in your head.

The story is simple and well known. Mary Lennox, orphaned in India by a cholera epidemic, is sent to the home of her reclusive uncle, a big house on the Yorkshire moors. She is a plain, selfish, unattractive child, who has been neglected and un-loved. She soon encounters a blunt-spoken housemaid, and a grumpy gardener. Fresh air and exercise improve her health, and she begins to take more interest in things beyond herself. She is intrigued by tales of a "secret" garden – shut up and locked ten years ago when her uncle’s young wife died. She finds the garden, and plans to make it her own. She also meets her cousin Colin, ten years old, as she is, a spoilt invalid and hypochondriac. To sum up, the enterprise of the garden restores both these unattractive children to health of body and mind.

I wouldn’t call it a story of ‘redemption’, which sounds too heavy for a children’s book, but of ‘restoration’ perhaps, or ‘recovery’.

I don’t know how far I can say the book has influenced me, but many things in it feed into interests in my life.

The book’s title: Secret Garden – the idea of a secret is always intriguing; the concept of the garden has been important in myth, in literature, in our imaginations for centuries: the Garden of Eden; mediaeval romance where the garden is an image of the world. Gardens are very special places - fenced from the world outside, they represent nature made safe; but they also represent escape from the confines of the house, offering fresh air and freedom, sometimes seclusion to have private conversation ... (Readers of 19^th century novels may notice how many conversations take place in gardens)

None of this, of course, was in my mind when I first read the book, but I’ve read it often since, and all these connections are there, explicit or implicit, to some extent.

The whole garden theme plays into my own life. I’m not a knowledgeable gardener, but an enthusiastic one – and have inherited a big, unruly garden, which had suffered some years of neglect. The idea of restoring and reclaiming a garden is now very topical. (Lost Gardens of Heligan, Prior Park and other historic gardens are being reclaimed; paths are restored, summerhouses rebuilt...)

I can’t say The Secret Garden turned me into a gardener, but every time I clear weeds around some struggling plant, I remember, at some level, Mary when she first discovers the garden, and sees bulbs pushing through the soil.

I grew up in Southern England. My introduction to Yorkshire – the north – also came from The Secret Garden – long before I met the Brontës. (I knew what ‘wuthering’ meant before I’d heard of Wuthering Heights!)

The idea of moorland – wild country, which might seem bleak, but was also very beautiful - I encountered early in my life in The Secret Garden.

Dialect: It may be the first time I realised that there are different ways of speaking English, and that they are OK. Mary, having been in India, knows that people study ‘native’ dialects, and sets herself to learn to speak ‘Yorkshire’. I have an interest in different kinds of English, and later found the Brontës, Gaskell etc.

This book is not perfect – it is occasionally twee. Perhaps it goes on a little too long. The healing of Colin’s father – ten years selfishly absorbed in mourning for his wife – is less believable than that of the children; and there is some cod psychology which the children call magic.

But the book has considerable merits: notably humour, and, at best, a refreshing bluntness and unsentimentality:

They have a splendid quarrel, when Colin has a screaming tantrum. The servants are scared to do anything with him, but Mary loses her temper.

And I must read part of the passage where Mary first sees the secret garden – even though my practical, gardening sister in law says that any garden neglected for ten years would be in a much worse state.

My sister in law is right, of course, but I am happy here to suspend my disbelief, and find this picture quite magical.

Janet Cunliffe-Jones

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932)

John Bulman

The speaker said he first read this book in the 50s, this was the impression it made on him. The speaker said he had been brought up from his earliest years to be an engineer, taught that the basic human need was material well being through technology, and that other pursuits could provide merely the icing on the cake. Then in 1945, when he already had his engineering degree, the atom bombs were dropped on Japan. This destructive use of technology was way beyond anything he had heard of in WWII and it seemed to threaten the very existence of the human race. For him the lesson was that science and technology must be controlled for benevolent uses only.

Now here was Aldous Huxley’s vision of the way technology might in the far future be used to meet all the needs of mankind and to end human suffering. How could this be done?

• Under a benevolent dictatorship
• All reproduction by Al,
• Conditioning of all children — by tuition while they slept (a technique in which Aldous Huxley seems to have had unjustified faith in) to provide the necessary numbers of people with the appropriate capacity and attitude to perform all the work required, for a due reward, in perfect contentment.
• Classes would range from alpha plus, as managers, to epsilon minus to do the most menial jobs.
• Sex could be had freely (using birth control) with anyone consenting, any frustration being cured at once by a sex-satisfaction ‘surrogate’.
• Any other dissatisfaction could be similarly cured by a drug restoring a sense of perfect well-being. Nobody would suffer disease or any aging process, but would die painlessly and happily at a pre-planned date,

But there was a snag. A ‘Savage’ was brought in as a curiosity from one of the few unreconstructed islands off the shores of the Brave New World, where human suffering continued much as it does now, with tedious labor, discontent, conflict, disease, decay and death, and some consolation only in the arts and religious rituals.

But the Savage was repelled by the Brave New World, as he needed there to be human suffering and its consolations. Therefore he killed himself rather than live in it.

The speaker was also repelled by Huxley’s vision, and have remembered this book all these years as a telling demonstration that to conquer human dissatisfaction by all the means of science and technology was not an adequate goal for society. Yet it was the goal of national governments and societies when Huxley wrote the book in 1932, in the 1950s when he first read it, and still today.

When he reopened this same book the other day he found in it some notes he had written for himself back in the 1950s, and see that he did then read the ‘Foreword’, written by Huxley in 1946, which he wished to be printed in all later editions. What the speaker had chosen to quote for himself from this ‘Foreword’ was this:

In other words what apparently then seemed to the speaker crucially important was that human beings should be free to develop In all possible directions arising from random genetics and random environmental conditioning, so that ‘reality’, and the human existence within it, could be constantly re-explored by fresh human minds.

What the speaker barely mentioned at the time was how Huxley says he would have liked to revise his novel. The Savage, he says, should have been offered a third alternative to what Huxley referred to as the ‘insanities’ of both the Brave New World, and the primitive island without the benefits of technology: a society using science and technology to help each of its people to one supreme ultimate goal; the realization of his or her oneness with the entirety of reality — in broad terms, a religious goal.

Curiously, from about the time the speaker had read The Brave New World he has, slowly and laboriously, come to share that view of Huxley about the ultimate human goal, using among other books Huxley’s anthology, ‘The Perennial Philosophy’, from which he quoted one line:

Learn to live with an equal eye upon all beings, seeing the one Self in all.

Perhaps, he though although he did not realize it at the time, that was the most important lesson this book brought him.

John Bulman

Helen Keller’s The Story of my Life (1903)

Hannah Bagnell

I was given a copy of this book when I was seven or eight by Des Kenny, now CEO of the National Council for the Blind of Ireland. One of our neighbours worked for him and I remember being fascinated by the idea of a boss who couldn’t see what his employees were doing. Poor Des was inundated with questions about what it was like to be blind. I think he gave me the book to distract me. And it worked. If life as a blind or deaf person was difficult, how much more tragic, my eight year old self wondered, to be both blind and deaf?

Helen Keller lived for eighty eight years but she has been crystallised in the popular imagination as a young deafblind girl holding one hand under a stream of flowing water while her teacher spells the letters w-a-t-e-r into her other hand.

Born into a landowning family in Alabama in 1880, Helen became deaf-blind after an unidentified illness when she was 19 months old. Her frustration at not being able to understand what people were saying made her ‘so angry at times that I kicked and screamed until I was exhausted’. She describes how she gradually developed a number of crude signs to communicate her needs to others. 'If I wanted my mother to make ice-cream for dinner I made the sign for working (i.e. hand-cranking) the freezer and shivered, indicating cold.’

When Helen was seven, Annie Sullivan, a graduate of the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, joined the Keller household as her teacher. Annie’s method was to spell the name of every object into Helen's hands and then move the girl’s hand to touch the object. It was some time before Helen had her ‘Eureka!’ moment:

Much of The Story of my Life describes Helen's meetings with many famous people including Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone. Bell's wife was deaf and he was particularly interested in the education of deaf children. However, he believed that deaf people should learn to speak and abandon their first language, sign. The influence of such a famous figure contributed to the widespread practice of educating deaf children through speech, a second language in which they could never hope to be fluent. The results were poor education and employment prospects for most deaf people; issues that were only addressed when education began to build on what the child already knew.

Although I didn’t realise it when I first read her book, I now see that Helen's resolve to learn to speak was to try to ‘fit in’ to the hearing and sighted word. It was incredibly hard work and, at 22, Helen writes that her teacher still calls her attention every day to mispronounced words.

Helen Keller was an exceptional woman who was able to access educational opportunities that were denied to her deaf-blind contemporaries, thanks to her determination, her family connections and the interest of some rich and influential people. She was a writer, a political activist and a socialist. This book, despite its title, is not the story of her life. It is just the first chapter. I think it’s time we allowed her to walk away from that famous water pump, to dry her hands and to get on with living the life of the fully-rounded person she really was.

Keller, Helen. The Story of my Life (NY, Doubleday, Page & Co, 1903)

Helen Bagnell

The Diary of Anne Frank (published in English 1952)

Marie-Louise Luxemburg

In 1933 the Frank family moved from Germany to Holland to escape the Nazi persecution of the Jews. In Amsterdam, Anne Frank’s father Otto Frank started a Dutch branch of the Opekta Company, manufacturing products used in jam making, such as pectin. The Franks lived in a house in the southern side of the city, and Anne and her sister Margot attended the local school and made friends with the local children.

Anne Frank (second right) and her family

However the German invasion of Holland in May 1940 brought an end to the Franks’ relatively carefree life. After the initial shock, most Dutch citizens were relieved to find the Germans behaving with restraint, and did not question their right to impose new laws on them. At first, the laws were relatively innocuous, but just as had happened in Germany, they were passed in quick succession and soon began to restrict and expel Jews from all aspects of business and social life. By September 1941 every Dutch citizen was required to carry an ID card. Jewish teachers and children were banned from mainstream schools, and Margot and Anne moved to a Jewish Lyceum. Otto Frank turned his business into a non-Jewish firm, but remained in charge behind the scenes.

In the Autumn of 1941 All Dutch citizens were required to fill in the ‘Declaration of Aryanism’ stating whether or not they or their personnel’s parents or grandparents were Jewish. This widespread Dutch compliance provided the German authorities with crucial information that would make the persecution of Dutch Jews an easy next step. By April 1942 Jews were ordered to wear a yellow star. They could not enter a tram, go to the cinema or ride on a bicycle. They could not step outside their house after 8 pm.

On 12 June 1942 Anne Frank was given a diary on her thirteenth birthday, and began to record the events around her. The following month, her sister Margot received the notorious call to report to a ‘labour camp’. It was the beginning of the deportation of Dutch Jews from Amsterdam to extermination camps such as Auschwitz and Birkenau. The family was badly shaken and Otto Frank had to act quickly. The very next day he moved his family into the ‘Secret Annex’ at 263 Prinsengracht, Amsterdam. (He had been making careful plans over the last ten months to go into hiding, and had prepared a secret place for his family in the upper back floors of the old building that his firm occupied. For months, clothes, fuel and tinned food had been systematically stored in the Annex.) A week later the Franks were joined in the Secret Annex by the van Pels family - Hermann, his wife and their son Peter (whom Anne called the van Daan family in her diary). The dentist Fritz Pfeffer (called Albert Dussel in the diary) joined then three months later.

For just over two years Anne Frank recorded the everyday life of these eight very different people crammed into four tiny rooms. They were unable to go outside, look out of the windows, flush the lavatory at night, cough or sing. Their only contact with the outside world was through the selfless support of four trusted members of Otto Frank’s staff, who provided them with provisions, books and news of life outside, at considerable danger to themselves and their families. Yet Anne’s diary is never dull or repetitive. She was a natural writer, and could evoke, directly and perceptively, the difficulties and tensions of life in hiding. Each entry is fresh, sometimes amusing, and always insightful. We have to keep reminding ourselves that she was only thirteen years old.

‘If you are shut up for a year and a half, it can get to you sometimes,’ wrote Anne in her diary. ‘I long to ride, dance, whistle, look at the world, feel young and know that I’m free, and yet I can’t let it show.’

On 4 August 1944 the Secret Annex was raided by the SS. Everyone was arrested and put on the very last train that would leave for Auschwitz. Miraculously, Anne’s diaries were left unnoticed, scattered over the Annex floor. Miep Gies, one of those faithful members of Otto Frank’s staff, kept them unread in a drawer in the office, and after the War, she gave them to Anne’s father. He had survived, but everyone else from the Secret Annex died in the concentration camps. (Margot and Anne Frank had contacted typhoid and died in Bergen-Bergen in March 1945, a few weeks before the camp was liberated.)

The Publication of Anne Frank’s Diary

Friends persuaded Otto Frank to publish his daughter’s diary. It first appeared in Dutch under the title Het Achterhuis (The Annex) in 1947. In 1952, on Anne’s birthday, the Diary was published in the USA, and a ‘dazzling, compelling review’ appeared on the first page of the New York Times Book Review. The review in the Jewish Congress Weekly described the diary ‘without doubt the most important human document to have come from the great catastrophe… The Holocaust at long last comes home, and our defences are shattered. We weep.’

In Japan, like America, the publication of the Diary exceeded all expectations. Anne Frank became a national heroine.

The play of the Diary opened on 5 October 1955 in New York’s Court Theatre. It broke all records, and toured 20 major North American cities. In New York alone, over 1 million people saw the play. The following year it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Anne Frank had become a household name.

‘No one was prepared for what happened on the evening of 1 October 1956,’ one reviewer recalled, ‘when seven theatres across Germany premiered the German version of The Diary of Anne Frank. In Berlin, after the final curtain, the audience sat in stunned silence. There was no applause. Only the welling sound of deep sobs broke the absolute stillness. Then, not speaking, and seeing not to look at each other, the Berliners filed out of the theatre.’

‘I was a good Nazi,’ said one theatregoer in Dusseldorf, ‘but I never knew what it meant until the other night.’

In Mainz, the local theatre was thrown open after the second performance for a public discussion of the play. Hundreds of teenagers jammed the house,’ recalled a German newspaper article entitled, ‘The Diary that Shook a Nation’.

Over the next few months the play was performed in 58 German cities. A pilgrimage, organized by the Hamburg Society for Christian and Jewish Co-operation, marshalled thousands of teenagers to walk to Bergen-Bergen in 1957 to remember her death.

‘Anne Frank died for all of us, for freedom and human dignity,’ said one teenager.

‘Germans have named streets, schools and youth centres after Anne Frank, but to this day most probably do not comprehend why, a generation ago, a significant number of their countrymen deemed in necessary to hunt down a fifteen year old Jewish girl and send her to suffer and die,’ reflected the author Alvin Rosenfeld.

Two years after the play caused such ructions in Germany, it reached the British Colony of Singapore. I was eleven years old and had lived in the Far East all my life. Holland was a distant country from where, every so often, my Dutch Grandmother would send me stilted letters, loving scribed in her broken English. My teacher, Mrs Fraser, introduced me to The Diary of Anne Frank. Mrs Fraser was Jewish, had been brought up in the East End and had lived through the Blitz. Her husband was responsible for putting on the first production of the play at the Victoria Theatre, Singapore.

I read the Diary in 1958, and the effect was electrifying. Anne seemed to express in words all the anxieties and difficulties that I was going through. It was like reading personal letters from the big sister I had always wanted, but had never had. I was entranced by Anne’s tender love affair with Peter, and her disclosures about how it felt to be on the brink of womanhood. But not only was I reading about the pain and anguish of growing up, I was also learning about my own background: my Dutch grandmother, like many thousands of Dutch citizens, had endured terrible hardship under the brutal Nazi occupation of The Netherlands.

Anne Frank wrote: ‘my greatest wish is to become a journalist someday and later to become a famous writer… In any case I want to publish a book entitled The Annex after the war. Whether I will succeed or not, I cannot say, but my diary will be a great help.’ As I read those words, I vowed that I, too, would keep a diary, and one day, I too, would try to become a writer. Like Anne, I would also use my diaries as an aide-mémoire to remember how it had felt to be young.

Re-reading the Diary again as an adult, I thought would be disappointing, but I was astonished at Anne’s mature and perceptive eye.

We have her father Otto Frank to thank for publicising her diaries with restraint, and for his insistence on not apportioning blame. Despite all that had happened to him and his family, he never lost his love for his German homeland. He wanted the Diary to carry a universal message and to have worldwide appeal. Oppressed peoples everywhere can take The Diary to their hearts; it is a book that all young people, regardless of race creed or colour should read. Anne Frank speaks for them all. To date more than 55 different language editions have appeared, and over 25 million copies have been sold worldwide.

Marie-Louise Luxemburg