I was delighted to receive an e-mail from the internationally-acclaimed Shakespeare scholar, Father Peter Milward S.J., offering his positive views on our recent issue on children’s literature (March/April 2011). With his permission, I’m publishing the text of his e-mail here:

StAR for March/April 2011, “Wisdom in Wonderland”

To Joe Pearce

From Peter Milward SJ

Once again, many thanks for the latest issue of StAR, which is not not just “good” (as God says of the several works of creation from day to day) but “very good” (as He says of all the works together). In the first place, as for the creation of light, I very much enjoyed your editorial, with its parabolic and paradoxical opening—though I missed your characteristic turn for alliteration (maybe under the influence of Eustace, no doubt as being one of Lewis’s more objectionable children). Anyhow, I much admired your “p’s and q’s”, and your “pleases” and thank yous”—on which my good Irish mother always insisted, and which I have come to regard as basic to a good education.

Then, Victoria Nelson’s article reminded me of my experience with The Secret Garden in its film version, which I used to show my unruly students at the Catholic women’s college of Junshin, to which I moved in 1996 after my retirement from Sophia University. It took up the whole of one lecture, and it had such a wholesome effect on my students, and I, too, was moved to tears. What specially impressed me about the film was the way the secret garden was set within an old abbey ruin, of which there are so many in the Northern county of Yorkshire. That gave it added pathos.

Again, another film that moved me to tears—though tears of laughter—was Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (with Alec Guinness as Algernon), and so once again I specially enjoyed the two articles on that gifted, if prodigal (in both senses of the word), author. I must particularly commend Patrick Riley for the way he emphasizes Wilde’s death-bed conversion, to which we in Japan refer as “tengoku dorobo” (heavenly thief), like the good thief to whom Jesus promises the reward of Paradise. Only, I was disappointed to find no mention in either article of Wilde’s best loved works among Japanese students, “The Happy Prince.”

Then there was quite a contrast between two succeeding articles, the one by Colin Manlove and the other by Margaret Perry. The former was so pessimistic about the modern, or postmodern, trend in children’s literature, it sent my spirits right down into the dumps of despond. But the latter did much to restore those depressed spirits with her more optimistic view. I suppose it all depends on which among the vast outpouring of children’s literature one chooses for comment. I was expecting the former to lay more emphasis on Philip Pullman, at whom he merely glances without attending to the notorious feud between him and the deceased Lewis.

There are, moreover, two authors of entre deux guerres who are, of course, unmentioned in view of the prevailing emphasis on more recent children’s literature (apart from the above-mentioned articles on Oscar Wilde), and they are Agatha Christie and T.S. Eliot. So many of the former’s detective stories are based on nursery rhymes, as providing her with the frame of the crime and its solution. As for Eliot, I think a whole doctoral thesis could be written on his penchant for playfulness, not only in his Practical Cats, but also in his (more seemingly serious) Four Quartets. I even have an article on his Metaphysical Heritage, with emphasis on the humorous way he leads his pompous critics “up the garden path” with such seemingly pompous critical phrases as “inspissation”, “objective correlative” and “dissociation of sensibility”.

Then, too, I quite agree with Dwight Longenecker (who once visited me at my Renaissance Centre), when he laments the death of imagination as a result of mechanical devices which bring every scene before our eyes and allow no room for the imagination. Such is the way postmodern education is moving in so many of our universities, away from the humanities to the sciences, when even the study of literature has to be undertaken in a scientific, objective, impartial manner.

Finally, I must pass over much else that is worthy of comment and commendation (your kind of alliteration) in order to add my concluding words of praise for Benedict Kiely’s autobiographical “Happy Curmudgeon”—with whom I feel tempted to identify myself at the ripe old age of Lear’s “fourscore and upward”, though you will find little of the proverbial bad temper of that odd fish (I am thinking of the sturgeon) in my foregoing paragraphs. With thanks and congratulations,

Father Peter Milward S.J.