The Boy Who Was Afraid, Armstrong Sperry (1941)
Lots of people have hymned the pleasures of reading. But what about the pleasures of re-reading? And re-re-reading? And re-re-re-reading? If I enjoy a book, I always try to read it again. If I enjoy it again, I’ll read it again. And keep on reading it.
Maybe this habit comes from my deprived childhood. I wasn’t deprived of food or anything like that: I was deprived of books. So maybe you could say I was deprived of food after all – deprived of brain-food. Food for the imagination. There just weren’t many books around in my parents’ house and for five or so years my family lived in the countryside, a long way from a big library. I owned few books myself and I read them again and again.
The Boy Who Was Afraid was one of those few books. I wouldn’t have called it my favorite at the time, but looking back I think it was the most powerful and most pleasurable. Maybe that’s because it was also the purest and most primal. Unlike the Famous Five books or the James Bond books, which were also treasured pleasures of mine, it wasn’t about people speaking English and living in the twentieth century.
No, it was about Polynesian islanders living hundreds of years ago without plastic or metal or electricity or writing. But though they lived without metal, they centered their lives on mettle. You had to have it: the courage to face Moana, the great and glorious and greedy god who kept them alive but sometimes killed them. That’s because Moana is the god of the sea. The hero of this book, Mafatu, has a name that means “Stout Heart”. But he doesn’t have a stout heart at all. He’s afraid of the sea:
He could not remember when the fear of it first had taken hold of him. Perhaps it was during the great hurricane which swept Hikueru when he was a child of three. Even now, twelve years later, Mafatu could remember that terrible morning. His mother had taken him out to the barrier-reef to search for sea urchins in the reef pools. There were other canoes scattered at wide intervals along the reef. With late afternoon the other fishermen began to turn back.
They shouted warnings to Mafatu’s mother. It was the season of hurricane and the people of Hikueru were nervous and ill at ease, charged, it seemed, with an almost animal awareness of impending storm.
But when at last Mafatu’s mother turned back toward shore, a swift current had set in around the shoulder of the reef-passage: a meeting of tides that swept like a millrace out into the open sea. It seized the frail craft in its swift race. Despite all the woman’s skill, the canoe was carried on the crest of the churning tide, through the reef-passage, into the outer ocean.
What happens after that turns Mafatu into the Boy Who Was Afraid. And he’s afraid of the worst possible thing for someone living then and there. This book is the story of how he acquired his fear, then confronted it and overcame it using what you might call a primal scheme: “He must face Moana, the Sea God — face him and conquer him.” He decides to sail unaccompanied out to sea, find a new island, and win a name for himself there. He’s unaccompanied by humans, that is:
A nondescript yellow dog named Uri was Mafatu’s inseparable companion — Uri with his thin coat, which showed his ribs and his eyes so puzzled and true. He followed the boy wherever he went. Their only other friend was Kivi, an albatross. The boy had once found the bird on his lonely wanderings. One of Kivi’s feet was smaller than the other. Perhaps because it was different from its kind, the older birds were heckling and pestering the fledgling. Something about that small bird trying to fight off its more powerful fellows touched the boy’s heart. He picked it up and carried it home — caught fish for it in the shallows of the lagoon. The bird followed Mafatu and Uri about, limping on its one good leg. At length, when the young albatross learned to fly, it began to find its own food. In the air it achieved perfection, floating serenely against the sky while Mafatu followed its effortless flight with envious eyes. If only he, too, could escape to some world far removed from Hikueru!
As you can see in those names, there’s more primality in Mafatu’s mother-tongue. It uses simple consonant-vowel syllables that sound as though they’re freshly created by the first folk to see and feel the world: Mo-a-na, Ma-fa-tu, U-ri, Ki-vi. And there’s primality in the way Mafatu and his people live very close to nature. But Mafatu is mocked and excluded by his people, so he turns to nature for companionship. Uri and Kivi accompany him to an uninhabited island, but they can’t appreciate what he does there: face Moana and win treasures from him. There’s more primality in the whale-bone knife he fashions for himself and the shark-tooth necklace he risks his life for. And Mafatu isn’t facing just Moana. He discovers a darker threat on the island soon after he arrives, a threat of horror and death, and he knows that sooner or later the threat will become reality. That’s the last thing he’ll have to face on his journey from fear to courage and boyhood to manhood.
Which brings me to the final primal: the title of this book. The title I knew was The Boy Who Was Afraid. That’s pure Anglo-Saxon, with roots deep into linguistic history. Even if you don’t know that, you can taste it in the words. The Boy Who Was Afraid is an interesting and inviting title, raising questions that you want to answer by reading the book. Who was the boy? Why was he afraid? What happens to him? But it turns out that the original title of the book was Call It Courage. And that’s the title it became famous under. But it isn’t primal or inviting. It’s dull – and even duller by comparison with The Boy Who Was Afraid. I’m glad that I met this book under its alternate title.
I’m also glad that I still find it pleasurable to read. It doesn’t feel as pure and primal as it once did. And it seemed much shorter than it did when I was a kid. But most of the old power is still there. Like Treasure Island, this is a book that creates a solid or scented or star-strewn world inside your head:
Warily, moving with utmost caution, Mafatu crept out of the house. The beach was softly brilliant in the light of the waning moon. Any figure moving along the sand he could have seen instantly. He stopped, every nerve strung like a wire: the beach was deserted, the jungle silent and black with mystery. The boy rose to his feet. Swift as a shadow he turned into the undergrowth where the trail led to the high plateau. The jungle had never seemed so dark, so ominous with peril. The tormented roots of the mo trees clutched at him. Lianas tripped him. Tree-ferns, ghostly in the half-light, rustled about him as he passed, their muted hush seeming to say: “Not yet, Mafatu, not yet.”
And I’d guess that Treasure Island inspired and influenced the book. The bones of the plot are the same: boy, sea, island, adventures. Armstrong Sperry doesn’t write as well as Robert Louis Stevenson, but Sperry could do something that Stevenson couldn’t: create skilful drawings to go with his skilful prose. However, I found that I’d completely forgotten the drawings when I came to the book again. I assume I’d forgotten them, at least. Did the edition I owned in childhood not have them? I can’t think so: they’re integral to the text and they must have been an important part of why the book was so successful.
Mafatu in his boat with Uri (and Kivi somewhere above)
That’s because they’re very good drawings: clean-lined and primal. But they aren’t as good or as powerful as the prose. You can’t live a story through drawings. They don’t have the magic of words and they can’t conjure the fullness of reality. How do you illustrate scent, for example? Or the sensation of blood pounding in your chest and hard earth bruising your feet and roots trying to trip you as you flee down a mountain path from the most fearsome of enemies?
The drawings allow you to see what Mafatu and his world looked like; the prose allows you to be Mafatu, inhabit his world and have his adventures. And the prose will go on doing that. Armstrong Sperry himself died in 1976 and most of the original readers of this book must be dead now too. I and every other current reader will be dead in the end too. But the book itself sails on. Like Treasure Island, it will continue to carry readers away to another time and another world.
Elsewhere Other-Accessible…
• Paper-Deep — reviews of Robert Louis Steveson’s Treasure Island and Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde
• Armstrong Sperry at Wikipedia
• Call It Courage at the Internet Archive
Papyrocentric Performativity 