{"id":89859,"date":"2015-09-16T15:49:20","date_gmt":"2015-09-16T19:49:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=89859"},"modified":"2015-09-16T17:08:58","modified_gmt":"2015-09-16T21:08:58","slug":"playing-cards-with-enid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/09\/16\/playing-cards-with-enid\/","title":{"rendered":"Playing Cards with Enid"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/jKluTnhZmgM?rel=0\" width=\"600\" height=\"450\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The British Path\u00e9 newsreel series Personality is fascinating. Each consists of clips of the \u201chome life\u201d of a British celebrity of the 1940s or 1950s: artists, actors, musicians. We see them romping with dogs or wandering on lawns or, in the case of Daphne du Maurier, looking over the Cornish coast.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>No one could call this hard-hitting stuff. The cheery narration and jolly music give every life a sense of ordered industry. (No domestic strife here!) And yet, I fancy, if you really listen hard, there are dark things stirring below the produced surface. Take, for instance, this clip of Enid Blyton, the children\u2019s writer, from 1946.\u00a0<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Blyton\u2019s life was tempestuous: her first husband\u2019s drinking and infidelity, along with her own string of affairs (one with her children\u2019s nanny) led to a contentious divorce. By the time this reel was made, Blyton had forbidden the girls contact with their father and remarried. (\u201cFather\u201d is in fact their stepfather\u2014Blyton had her daughters take his name.) Her legendary output\u2014and good business sense\u2014made her one of the most famous writers of her day, yet by modern standards her messy personal life was kept remarkably quiet.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Even so, it seems to me hard to watch this and not feel an inkling of something coming through\u2014that jolly narration is curiously barbed. In 1989, her daughter Imogen wrote a devastating tell-all in which she described her mother as \u201carrogant, insecure, pretentious, very skilled at putting difficult or unpleasant things out of her mind, and without a trace of maternal instinct. As a child, I viewed her as a rather strict authority. As an adult I pitied her.\u201d Even if you\u2019re a connoisseur of bitter-child memoirs, this one\u2019s hard going. But then, you just need to see Enid\u2019s face at the end of the video to know that.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><em>Sadie Stein is contributing editor of <\/em>The Paris Review<em>, and the <\/em>Daily<em>\u2019s correspondent.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The British Path\u00e9 newsreel series Personality is fascinating. Each consists of clips of the \u201chome life\u201d of a British celebrity of the 1940s or 1950s: artists, actors, musicians. We see them romping with dogs or wandering on lawns or, in the case of Daphne du Maurier, looking over the Cornish coast.\u00a0 No one could call [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[17369,19458,12555,17247,5568,1132,7214],"class_list":["post-89859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-british-authors","tag-british-pathe","tag-childrens-literature","tag-domestic-life","tag-enid-blyton","tag-interviews","tag-videos"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>\u201cPersonality\u201d: Meeting Enid Blyton<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"September 16, 2015 \u2013 The British Path\u00e9 newsreel series Personality is fascinating. 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