If we do not do these things, it seems clear that all literature will suffer, for it is time we realized that, although Johnny can indeed read, more often than not he doesn’t wish to. And who can blame him when his books seem to say that he need only be amused—and if not amused, then at least occupied—until the magic moment arrives when he, too, will be the Best People? No wonder his books bore him when we seem to imply in them that he doesn’t know a bad one from a good one anyway, so it doesn’t matter what he reads—he’ll come to the good stuff later on when he’s ready; he’ll develop a taste for James and Tolstoy and Faulkner and the rest.
It is seriously debatable whether he will develop such a taste. There is a chance, we are told, that literature may disappear. This is the word from the generation that was raised on those little disposable books from the grocery-store rack, the one next to the checkout counter. You know, the books that cost so little it didn’t matter if Johnny scribbled in them or tore them up. Remember how cute all those little pictures of kittens were, and those talking garbage trucks?
If literature should die, then we who love it will have helped to kill it. In view of this, it would appear that at the very least we had better learn to include children as respected members at the Thanksgiving feast of all literature instead of relegating them to a midmorning snack. As it now stands, it looks as if we are spoiling their appetites.
Speaking at a convention, 1976
“We don’t take [childhood fears] seriously, however. We resent them, or we laugh at them, or we ignore them altogether, either because we cannot understand them and are therefore afraid of them, or because we do understand them and are therefore afraid of them. The result is that, in the novels we write for children, we write about a world that never existed, not for us when we were young, nor for our present-day young audience. We have, in other words, confused childhood with the good old days.”
The Great American Novel for Children—and Why Not?
(1973)
Whenever I am asked to talk about children’s literature, I always seem to find myself in areas about which I don’t know anything really specific and have only my everyday experience to turn to. Writers of fiction form opinions and make statements all the time, heaven knows, but very few of us are scholars. Classicists groan at Robert Graves, historians wince at William Styron, and so on and so on, and I suppose as strong a case can be made against pseudoscholarship in speeches as it can in novels.
Be that as it may, I find it impossible to talk about American children’s fiction without stepping squarely into the preserves of sociology and social psychology, though I am not trained in either of those fields. So if there are any scholars of that stripe present here today, I hope they will be generous and allow me to make a number of observations arising out of precisely that—observation—rather than out of any pretense to formal study.
With this apology out of the way, I will pass on fearlessly and begin by assuming that it is acceptable to say there is such a thing as American fiction as a category in the fiction of the world. By this I do not mean merely fiction written by Americans, but one which has a flavor and a thrust distinguishably American, formed from and arising out of all the attitudes, enthusiasms, biases, and eccentricities, all the history past and in the making, all the sophistications and provincialisms that make the United States unique, for better or worse, from other countries.
If you will allow that there is such a thing—an American fiction—I will go on to note that it can itself be divided, in one of many ways, into two categories: one for people under the age of fourteen, and one for people over. Never mind that this division is scarcely into halves; it is a genuine division nonetheless.
Very well. So now we have this category-within-a-category, loosely called American young people’s fiction, partaking equally with its counterpart for adults in all those things that are distinguishably American, and, once so defined, it too must be broken down into categories. First there is the picture book, for ages up to eight; then the children’s novel for ages eight to twelve; and finally a thing called teenage fiction for ages twelve to fourteen. The age assignments are arbitrary, to be sure, but we’ve grown accustomed to them, and if they are arbitrary, they are also useful.
The opportunities for creativity presented by each of these three subcategories attract artists of different sorts. The picture book, a very old category, is entirely the bailiwick of illustrators, with the result that though the stories are often weak, the pictures are just as often experimental and exciting, a showcase for developing graphic techniques, and if they are not always a joy forever, still they are certainly things of beauty.
Teenage fiction is a very new category, one which is dominated by our society’s shifting definition of what a teenager is and by whatever subject matter the writers suppose will catch the attention of one at any given moment. Since the aberrations of puberty are something no one really understands, least of all those who are going through it, these novels have a hard go trying to order the chaos and must in addition compete with adult novels on the one hand and a widespread impatience with any kind of reading on the other.
Here I will go out on my first limb and suggest to you that in these two categories, picture books and teenage fiction, very little has emerged that properly deserves to be defined as literature, if you are willing to accept the definition offered by Van Wyck Brooks when he said, “What makes literature great, of course, is the quality of its subject-matter … together with as much formal virtue as the writer is able to compass.” Of course, we might all disagree about what that subject matter should be, but Brooks covered the possibilities pretty thoroughly:
What makes [works of literature] great is their imaginative force, or their moral force … or the size of the arc of life which they subtend … their passion for the realities of human nature, or the extent of their outlook, or the typical or central significance which their work possesses.
There are a few picture books which may deserve to be called literature. The Story of Ferdinand and Where the Wild Things Are, perhaps. But those few are the exceptions that prove the rule. We would not turn automatically to picture books when looking for examples of American literature, even if they are all examples of one kind of American fiction.
We would not turn to teenage novels, either. As a category, they are even newer than the group for which they are written, and that is new enough. In addition, they are almost always too much written for the Moment and too narrow in scope to qualify as literature.
However, a children’s novel, written for the last, best, wisest years of childhood, is something else again. With very few exceptions, this is the traditional, time-proven category into which all of the world’s classics for children fall, from Alice in Wonderland to The Little Prince, and no one would dispute their place in literature. A children’s novel is probably the freest of all categories in literature for any age, with the widest range of directions open to the writer, particularly in America, where adult fiction has grown rigid and subjective. And it is dominated by nothing at all, though it has long been the true home of fantasy.
That being so, it would be natural to assume that this category would be enormously attractive and rewarding to serious American writers. But by comparison to the vigorous activity in the other two categories, nothing much has happened in American children’s novels in a very long time, and George Woods, children’s book editor of the New York Times, has called it something of a wasteland. There is activity, to be sure, if the mere production of published manuscripts can be so described, but that activity lacks vigor, certainly, and on the whole lacks also art, ambition, craftsmanship, and commitment. I base this flat statement in part on my experience as a judge in a well-known book-award contest a couple of years ago for which I read more than ninety books in the children’s novel category, all published within a few months of each other and almost all distressingly bad. So it is about this phenomenon and the possible reasons for it that I want to
speak. I think there are reasons for it, and I think the reasons are entirely American, typically American, and I also think that the reasons explain why so many of the best children’s novels were written somewhere else rather than in America and by Americans.
Some critics, de Tocqueville and Frederick Jackson Turner, for instance, when they commented on the American national character, liked to dwell on its youthfulness. They wrote about the freedom of spirit fostered by the endless frontier, and the strength made possible by the marvelous wealth of the land, and they concluded that these things have led to a certain kind of indomitable spirit kept innocent by continuing success in everything attempted in the way of war, education, agriculture, and commerce.
But other critics, such as Leslie Fiedler, point out that while all that may have been true enough up until the First World War, America has since gone through a series of traumas—the end of the endless frontier, the declining wealth of the land, and wars where no one has been successful—and that these have left her standing disillusioned, resentful, and reluctant on the brink of maturity, all innocence gone and nothing of the old zest left—only a clear and wistful memory of the glory of the good old days when anything was possible.
Indeed, we do seem to cling to the memory of those possibilities, in spite of daily lessons in reality. We are still rushing like lemmings toward our pair of seas, piling up our population on our coastlines, producing for speed and growth when it is clearly no longer necessary. It is impossible to keep us down on the farm. The golden streets beckon; opportunity still knocks.
And yet, in spite of ourselves, we can’t really believe in the golden streets and all the rest. Not anymore. And one of the clearest places to find documentation of our disillusionment is in the great American novels of the last sixty years, novels written since the War to End All Wars, which was instead the end of adolescence for our society.
Gloom pervades contemporary novels, and a fine petulance, even a kind of rage. They seem to show an America that has been untimely ripped from the womb of whiz-kid-ism. The rose-colored glasses don’t fit so well anymore. And far from accepting the need for a new prescription—bifocals, perhaps—they storm at the necessity to grow and change and age, and they mourn the passing of all the favorite fantasies.
No doubt the discontent these novels present is largely real. Certainly we hide our old people away if they refuse to wear tennis shoes. Certainly we diet and paint and upholster ourselves to look young, men as well as women. Our advertisers tell us over and over that we can stay young if we buy the right products—“You’re as young as you feel!”—and they tell us this because it’s what we want to hear. Certainly we close our minds to new ideas and to our country as perceived by the truly young, preferring to hold on to what we see as “thinking young” which really means “thinking before.” For without its youthfulness, how can America be defined?
I have just seen a rather disagreeable movie called Last Tango in Paris in which Marlon Brando plays an entirely new breed of American in Paris: middle-aged, lost, half-mad, and entirely unattractive. There are a number of love scenes—well, I guess you couldn’t really call them love scenes—in which he cavorts with a young French girl. She says she is twenty, and he admits that he is forty-five. In these scenes she is often nude, but he never is. It has been reported that Brando didn’t want to be nude in these scenes because he was embarrassed about the condition of his middle-aged body. And yet he was playing the role of a middle-aged man, and any other sort of body would have been a distinct anachronism. So it seems there is a limit to which even our best actors will go in support of the truth.
In any case, we do not like the truth of maturity, or the responsibilities, either. Looking ahead was much more pleasant than the arrival, the past much nicer than the present. If we were Cinderella once, well, so now we’re a married woman and so now what?
Our novels give us the answer. Gloom, disappointment, a general disgust with the facts of humanity. Of course it is not all that simple, but still, for novelists, as Brooks observed, “popular success and critical success hinge equally on a low view of the human condition.” The great American novel, the serious work of American fiction, must reflect the American view of life, which is essentially disillusioned.
Very well. So now to our children. Now that we know there is no Santa Claus, do we stop insisting that our children believe in him? Quite the contrary! No—American childhood is the last repository of the American dream from which we must all wake after puberty, and we guard it as jealously as we guard our old high school yearbooks. We do this for ourselves, not for our children, since we know perfectly well that we are ensuring for them their own crashing disappointments. But we must see childhood as a time of flawless happiness because that way we have a refuge for our fantasies. We smile mistily when we watch our children happy at their play, and we think how lucky they are. But when they are unhappy, when they are crabby or sad, and when they cry, we grow confused and angry, as if they have let us down. American children get spanked for crying. It is against the rules for them to be anything but apple-cheeked and merry. Those children who never are, those who are deprived in any of a number of ways—in other words, those who are uncooperative enough to be unlucky—we look away from them in embarrassment as if they were bad actors in an otherwise charming play.
The literary result of this game we play with our private truths is easy to see. If adult American novels, to be successful, must reflect the American view of adulthood as essentially disillusioned, children’s novels, to be successful, must reflect the American view of childhood as essentially utopian.
But there is something important to remember here: The authors of children’s novels are themselves adults, and America’s adults all, to a greater or lesser degree, accept the disillusioned view of life. This means that the vast majority of children’s authors do not seriously construct a world of promise in their books. Oh, they construct that world, all right, but not seriously. It is nearly always patently artificial, a placebo, lacking one of the essential ingredients literature must possess: consistency with the author’s philosophy.
So there is an absence of one kind of honesty in these books, and peripheral to that, an absence of other kinds as well. For the child protagonists of these novels are almost always so one-dimensional that they blow over at the first snort of disbelief. They represent, I suppose, the adult version of untroubled, sterile childhood, a version we cling to in spite of endless studies that suggest the contrary.
Why, good old Dr. Spock, in his commodious pre-protest masterpiece, Baby and Child Care, has twenty-five different listings under “Fears” alone, and that stern and practical duo, Gesell and Ilg, in The Child From Five to Ten, have written:
Life begins with a cry … [the newborn baby] cries, on the average, about two hours of each day. This is his most eloquent expressional behavior. We know that babies do not cry without reason. They cry from hunger, pain, discomfort—and also from denials which are not too well understood … Many childhood fears seem inconsequential and amusingly absurd. They should, however, always be taken seriously by the adult.
We don’t take them seriously, however. We resent them, or we laugh at them, or we ignore them altogether, either because we cannot understand them and are therefore afraid of them, or because we do understand them and are therefore afraid of them. The result is that, in the novels we write for children, we write about a world that never existed, not for us when we were young, nor for our present-day young audience. We have, in other words, confused childhood with the good old days.
I would like to point out here, however, that the idea is not to present in our novels a world that is one-dimensional in any direction. They need be no more entirely gloomy than they should be entirely sunny. The choice is not between Pollyanna and the Pit. Gesell and Ilg go on to say that
good stories … provide fear experiences that enlarge the child’s imagination. Literature, like life, introduces him to pain and evil and
helps him in the task of surmounting both.
But Gesell and Ilg would no doubt agree that literature, like life, has more facets than merely the dark ones.
Still, we want to avoid sharing the dark ones with our children. We dare not. It would destroy something precious in them, we think, and, by association, in us. We have made them the keepers of the myth, and the myth is sacred. If, when they reach adolescence, we let them have the disillusioned view right between the eyes, well, we say, they’re ready for it. We make them a present of it both as a reward for their arrival and as a swift apology for our previous pretension.
I submit to you that if the world as depicted in American children’s novels is sweet beyond bearing, the world of American adult novels is black beyond reason, and where the two come together, in teenage fiction, the world is melodramatic almost to the point of surrealism. And the whole range is pointlessly mirthless and entirely subjective.
It might be helpful if, instead of sitting about contemplating our national navel, we looked outward for a change. America, after all, is not the world, though, disillusioned or not, we still feel that it is the best part of the world. And while it would be impossible for novels written by Americans not to reflect to a preponderant degree things American—impossible and certainly undesirable—still, it would be refreshing if our novels could reflect also something more. We are, after all, first and foremost, members of the human race, and therefore we have much in common with the rest of the world and much to learn from it.
Barking with the Big Dogs Page 3
