Barking with the Big Dogs, Page 2

  Not one of the above proposals will stand up. They are too arbitrary, too trivial, too riddled with exceptions. Perhaps it is possible only to settle for knowing the difference between the two literatures without being able to articulate it. And there are just enough stories that fall somewhere in between to cloud the issue further. Scrooge, Bilbo Baggins, Alice, Huck Finn, even Charlie Brown—for whom were these created? Ichabod Crane, William Baxter, Jason and Medea, on whose shelf do they belong? Perhaps there is no such thing as a children’s book once we are blessedly beyond the forgettable.

  And yet it seems to me that there is a tangible difference when you apply one rather simple sieve to the mass. It does not work for every children’s story, but perhaps it does apply to all that we remember longest and love best and will keep reading aloud to our children and our children’s children as a last remaining kind of oral history, a history of the essence of our own childhood. I am referring, of course, to the Happy Ending.

  Not, please, to a simple “happily ever after,” or to the kind of contrived final sugarcoating that seems tacked on primarily to spare the child any glimpse of what really would have happened had the author not been vigilant; not these, but to something which goes much deeper, something which turns a story ultimately toward hope rather than resignation and contains within it a difference not only between the two literatures but also between youth and age.

  What, in the very simplest terms, is a child, after all, but an unrepressed adult? What is maturity, that supposed nirvana we seem never fully to achieve, but total emotional control learned from confrontation with experience, which teaches us the necessity for compromise? When one learns to compromise, one learns to abandon the happy ending as a pipe dream, or—a children’s story.

  When we envy our children, we envy them this first of all: “Oh,” we say, “they have their whole lives ahead of them,” and we believe with them and for them what we no longer believe for ourselves—that anything is possible. We believe that they may grow up to be another Sarah Bernhardt, a Madame Curie, a Jefferson, a Dickens—pick whichever giant you like. We believe that they may grow up happy, fulfilled, beyond pain. And when we pity our children, we pity them for this: “Oh,” we say, “I wouldn’t be young and have to go through all that again for anything.”

  By “all that” we really mean that we remember all too well the first hard lessons in compromise, the abandonment of the primary and then the secondary dream, and so on and on down to what we have at last settled on as possible. Alas, we have arrived and we are not unique after all. We are not beautiful, nor clever, nor even very good; and no matter how well we do what we do, there is always someone who can do it better. The big house on the hill is lost to us forever, and all of our sweet tomorrows are rapidly becoming yesterdays which were almost (if we were lucky) but not quite.

  But for the children, no matter how unpromising their circumstances, it is not too late. And we who write for them, or, if you must, we whose work seems appropriate for them, are perhaps those who, far from being glum, have a particularly tenacious view of life as an experiment in possibility without compromise. If we are not clever nor unique, we can at least recall without regret how it felt to believe that we might be someday; probably despite plain and discouraging evidence, we are still not totally without hope; and so, in our stories—since, like it or not, every story comes out of the psyche of its author—Wilbur can escape an early death, Cinderella can be queen, Bilbo can outwit the dragon, and the ugly duckling can become a swan. Not without pain, not without violence, not without grief, but in the end, somehow, everything will always be all right.

  To be sure, there are stories for adults which end happily, but it is, in the stories that have lasted, a qualified happiness only, the quiet happiness of characters who have made their peace with their own compromises. So Natasha at the end of War and Peace “had grown stouter and broader … Her features … wore an expression of calm softness and serenity. Only on rare occasions now the old fire glowed in her again.”

  Not so with Ratty and Mole and Toad. Their story ends this way: “The … animals continued to lead their lives … in great joy and contentment … Sometimes, in the course of long summer evenings, the friends would take a stroll together … and it was pleasing to see how respectfully they were greeted … ‘There goes the great Mr. Toad! And that’s the gallant Water Rat … And yonder comes the famous Mr. Mole…!’” Beauty established, nobility achieved, all obstacles overcome. A pipe dream, or—a children’s story.

  In Nashville, 1960, with Lucy, Chris, and Tom

  “Children are placed outside society, outside useful, productive society, to stand with the jet set, hippies, the poor, the aged, and, until recently, women again … It is essential at this point to observe how women have traditionally been excluded from the controlling group on many of the same counts as have children, as well as on separate counts.”

  The Child as Chimpanzee

  (1971)

  The world of American children’s books has a problem. It’s not a new problem, although it seems more visible these days than it once did, but it’s an awkward problem to define because we would vastly prefer to deny its existence. However, deny it as we will, it colors our attitudes in a number of areas of which children’s fiction is only one. To put it flatly, there seems to be a widespread American belief that children are irrelevant.

  As a children’s author, one begins to be aware in a dim way that something is askew when one is asked for the first time, “You write books for children? But why? How come you don’t do something serious?” From there one fumbles along, trying hard not to trip over one’s defensiveness, through all the criticism within the field about how there are too many books, and how too many of them are bad, and about how permissive the reviewers tend to be, and how hard the reviews are to find, anyway. And after a time the suspicion begins to grow that the problem itself must be a good deal larger than the sum of these particular parts—that all of them are merely symptoms of a phenomenon which might better be left to the analytic skills of a social psychologist. However, having been offered the opportunity to discuss the current state of children’s books, I feel duty-bound to rush in like the proverbial fool and attempt to grapple with the problem itself.

  It might be well to begin by looking backward on this belief that children are irrelevant. Consider, then, how as a nation we tend to view all aspects of competence as qualities bestowed, along with the diploma, upon graduation from high school. At that magic moment, the young are ceremoniously separated from the glass through which they have presumably been seeing darkly for eighteen years and—shazam!—they are suddenly become a man. Like so many jovial Saint Peters, commencement speakers across the land welcome them warmly to the heaven of rational adulthood. Even though they may have opted for a stopover in some purgatorial side aisle like the university, they are still counted as among the blessed and are told in ominous tones that they had better act the part. If, through some inexplicable impulse, they should lapse, they are labeled childish with a disgust one might suppose was reserved for pejoratives like leprous and treasonous.

  Where have children been before the age of eighteen? What curious, invisible space in society have they been occupying? If the word childish is derogatory, does that mean that it is somehow ignoble to be a child? If we are to be honest, we must admit that this is exactly what it means.

  For one thing, in a nation where individuals take great pride in the roles they play in their various governments, from the family unit to the White House, children are totally without influence. They stand outside the formal politics of society, along with felons and transients, in an area somewhere beyond the pale where to be cloutless is to be without importance and by extension not worth serious attention, except insofar as children, at least, will eventually “grow out of it” as one “grows out of” acne or asthma.

  For another thing, children are small, and this is not as trivial a crime as it may seem. Small people
of any age have a hard row to hoe. We have a tendency to look down on those we look down on, as if, Napoleon notwithstanding, length of bone were somehow a yardstick for measuring significance.

  Then, too, children are inexperienced. Like the classic job-seeker who has never held a job, they are apt to be denied experience until they have had the experience to handle it. This leads to a curious maze of interconnecting attitudes toward development which culminates in that apron-string-cutting ceremony, the above-mentioned commencement, in which the young are ejected into the world from which they have been scrupulously protected for so long, and expected, by virtue of their sudden attainment of majority, to cope. Until that moment, they have not “set” and are in an unpalatable condition comparable to undercooked pudding. They are not what they will be, which makes them seem unstable and difficult to deal with.

  And finally, as if all this were not enough, children are guilty of the worst crime an American can commit: They are idle. By the rules formulated from the well-known Puritan Ethic, under which we all of us sweat, children are ignoble because childhood is a time of pure pleasure, and pure pleasure is taboo. Never mind that childhood is not a time of pure pleasure; according to the Ethic, anyone who is not working must be having fun, and that is a synonym for wasting time. So once again children are placed outside society, outside useful, productive society, to stand with the jet set, hippies, the poor, the aged, and, until recently, women again.

  Although this is not an article about the condition of women, it is essential at this point to observe how women have traditionally been excluded from the controlling group on many of the same counts as have children, as well as on separate counts. Exclusion carries other stigmas of its own with it, and the most devastating is that nonmembers must by definition be incompetent. In other words, in our society children are the principal responsibility of nonmembers and therefore of incompetents, which says much about their status. The controlling group, turning away from child-raising as “women’s work,” has tended thereby to class children with possessions—a man must have his home, his wife, his children, if he is to be complete. But he participates only marginally in their development, so that children become a facet of home upkeep along with the dish that must be washed and the floor that must be scrubbed—things for someone outside the group to bother about, since group members have other, serious work to do. It might also be interesting to observe here how national attitudes toward children’s books are exactly parallel to attitudes toward women’s magazines: They must be mass-produced for a level of incompetence that cannot absorb anything but trivia.

  Given all of this, one might suppose that we would write off children altogether and leave them to their own devices until they reach the “age of reason.” But of course we do not do that, for we must willy-nilly see them as tomorrow’s citizens, albeit often with dismay, and we are deeply committed to them, but our commitment all too often has a strange flavor consisting of part scorn and part envy: scorn because they must be classed with the Great Excluded, and envy because they can violate the joyless principles of the Puritan Ethic and get away with it, a crime we would all dearly love to commit.

  However, the commitment itself, whatever its flavor, remains firm. In this country, giving birth to and rearing children has always been a sacred duty, and for the most part we perform the duty cheerfully enough. The process, after all, fulfills a number of desires and requirements—a road to immortality through re-creation of self, an opportunity for sacrifice and martyrdom, both of which have their own peculiar satisfactions grimly guaranteed by the Ethic, and, not least, that carrot-before-the-nose ideal of creating a better world by improving the race. These are, of course, all perfectly human aspirations; the only trouble with them is that they work more to the advantage of the adult than the child. Since the child is to reproduce and represent the adult, it becomes rather difficult to think of him as a separate and independent entity, to see him in fact as anything but a potential adult, a not-yet who is at the same time a shall-be, so that the question is always “What sort of person will you be when you grow up?”—never “What are you now?”

  We must, it appears, view children in this light. How else to perpetuate the myth that to be an adult is to be all wise, that the wielder of control is somehow capable to wield? To hint otherwise would be to invite chaos. What is the use of the heaven of our adulthood, that happily-ever-after invented to compensate for the press of responsibility, the fog of compromise, the loss of innocence, the imminence of death—what is the use of it unless we can convince our children, as we were in our turn convinced, that adults are the Best People, worthier than children and inhabiting a better world? We persist, therefore, in the vision of a ladder of life with only two rungs: the bottom rung reserved for children and the top for adults, with nothing in between and no rung at all above adults, by the way, where the aged can rest their bones. And while as adults we allow ourselves certain diversities, children are pressed all together into one vast single child who squats on that bottom rung like a chimpanzee: cute and clever, perhaps, but still only an imitation of humanity.

  It has been explained to me that this is the schematic view, a device by which human experience can be ordered. Positions are assigned and lines drawn—such as the proper age for starting school, for voting, for marriage—and by these means we attempt to make sense of the complexities of civilized society, thereby ensuring its continued functioning. The problem is that we have come to accept the abstract scheme as a true description of reality, which it decidedly is not, and this confusion leads to a sharp division between adult and child whereby each is defined in collective terms that often have nothing at all to do with individual realities. Thus adults become tragic, children comic; adults armored, children vulnerable; adults responsible, children irresponsible; and so on. And the more we compartmentalize, the more tangible the lines between seem to become.

  This schism we have created is clearly visible in the vast majority of books we produce for our children, and accounts for the palpable undertone of apology we can discern so often in the words I write for children. Having erased the recollection that we were ever children ourselves, or, if not that, then having forgotten what it was really like to be a child—caught up in some eviscerating oversimplification which allows us to recall that our own childhood was entirely pain-free (“Oh, my dear, treasure these years!”) or entirely pain-full (“Why, when I was your age,” etc. etc.)—we write for them either nothing books or lesson books and miss the mark nine times out of ten.

  No one would deny the necessity for many kinds of arbitrary lines between adults and children. Clearly a child of ten is not mature enough for the kind of judgments required, for instance, for educated voting. But while eighteen may do very well as an arbitrary line over which to cross into political maturity—we shall soon see if it will or not—there is no need for arbitrary lines where literature is concerned. A bright ten-year-old might very well comprehend more of Huckleberry Finn than a dull sexagenarian. And yet we draw such lines in literature just the same.

  People often say to me, “But then, of course, you must limit your vocabulary/insights/tone so that the child will be able to understand.” There he is again, the great collective child on the bottom rung of the ladder. But who is he, really, the child? Is he some peculiar creature arrested at age four until suddenly, on commencement day, he is miraculously metamorphosed into a generation of rational adults? Evidently. The best writers for adults write “on the curve,” so to speak, knowing perfectly well that their readers will vary—that given the diversity of adult intelligence, there can be layers within layers within layers so that each reader may penetrate as deeply as he can or will. But let the child’s book be a balloon: one thin, simplistic layer and under that, if he should probe, thin air.

  So what is to be done? Children’s fiction will never be all that it can be until there is a basic shift in the national attitude toward children themselves. It will have to be a shift which
will make it possible for good writers to write for children without suspecting—or being told—that they are somehow prostituting themselves, a shift which will encourage serious critical attention of the same gimlet-eyed variety that is lavished on fiction for adults. Children’s fiction must, in other words, be given at least the same level of respectability which child psychology and pediatrics and the manufacture of baby food, among others, now enjoy, with the single difference that these books be allowed to celebrate, as seriously and with as much complexity as they wish, those things which are unique to children as they are, not as they will be, things which are therefore unique in the experience of us all.

  In doing this, we would of course have to give up our envy and our scorn and admit that children, in spite of their idleness and their beauty, are something more than mere lilies of the field. We would have to abandon the idea of life as a ladder and reenvision it more realistically as a simple ramp, a ramp to the very top of which none of us ever wishes to travel, since, as in aboriginal concepts of the edges of the Earth, we can only fall off into nowhere when we get there. And once accepting of the ramp image, we would then be forced to acknowledge that we are all continually on the move upward, that no two travel at the same rate of speed, that instead of the child, there are children—people who vary at least as much as adults in what they are able to or wish to comprehend. Then, in drawing lines, we would be careful to draw only the necessary ones while at the same time being just as careful not to interpret them as anything but arbitrary.

  More than this, we would be forced, with considerable loss to our self-esteem, to admit that adults are not “better” than children, or “worthier”—that we are only as a rule larger and more experienced and a little more tired, with insights that have only replaced other largely forgotten insights. Instead of wondering why an artist of Maurice Sendak’s caliber, for instance, should continue to “waste his time” in the field of children’s books—and I understand that there are people who wonder—we might then learn to be grateful that there are people like Sendak around who have retained some memory of what the earliest insights were and who are able to communicate that memory in such a way that the gap we have created is closed and the continuum is for a precious moment more real than the schism.