Barking with the Big Dogs

by Natalie Babbitt

  And then, during her adolescence, my sister suddenly developed another point of view about reading. I’m not sure how it began. But all at once she was plowing through very difficult books—or so they seemed to me—and though she didn’t force them on me or our parents, still she seemed to me to be expressing silent but palpable disapproval of my fairy tales and my father’s whodunits. Some of her new tastes may have been implanted by a series of curmudgeonly English teachers in high school, but however it began, she was soon off in corners every night reading Faulkner and Melville—the days for reading aloud being largely over—while my mother and I played a word game called anagrams. Looking back, I know she loved those books and I understand why, but at the time, since she never laughed aloud or even smiled while she was reading, I couldn’t understand what she saw in them. But she was a straight-A student—a hard and conscientious worker—while I avoided everything that didn’t come easily, so I wrote off her new reading habits as the tiresome behavior of a grind and began to devour my father’s Sabatinis, which I assure you I enjoyed very much indeed.

  Needless to say, knowing what we now know about sibling rivalry, my preferences were no doubt partly dictated by a strong desire to identify myself in opposition to my sister, but it is just as true that a lot of my distaste for the books I had to read in school had to do with the way they were presented. They were homework, while the reading I did on my own was fun.

  I discovered a lot of books on my own, outside of school and college, books that, had they been assigned to me by a teacher, might well have seemed just as painful as Oliver Wiswell and Tess of the d’Urbervilles. I read Tolstoy and Dreiser and Dickens and Sinclair Lewis, and a number of others too dubious to mention, and found them wonderful, and was launched on a bad habit I still have of discovering an author and proceeding to read straight through the entire oeuvre without a pause. This is a bad habit because a writer’s devices and biases soon begin to stick out, and his work becomes predictable by the time you’re into the third or fourth novel. Still, the point is, I read for the great pleasure it gave me but never really talked about it to anybody.

  I married, after college, a man who was in the process of acquiring a PhD in American studies with a concentration in American literature. I didn’t marry him for his PhD, but rather for a number of other reasons having more to do with fun. And a good thing, too, since we didn’t at all have the same taste in books. One day early in our marriage I had been reading something or other and said enthusiastically that I liked it, and this man I had married turned a shrewd professorial eye on me and said, “Why?”

  Believe it or not, all through twelve years of school and four years of college, no one had ever asked me that question. I had been led and sometimes dragged through large numbers of works I have comfortably forgotten, without my own opinion about them ever having been solicited. The stories we read aloud at home we either liked or didn’t like, but we never talked about why. And in school, if the teacher or professor thought a writer was important, who was I to contradict in exams and term papers? You gave the professors what they wanted, and what they wanted was not your opinion, but your acceptance of their opinion. At least, that is what I remember.

  And anyway, I was vaguely ashamed of not liking writers like Thomas Hardy and William Faulkner. And that is important, I think, that sense of shame. We are fond of assuming that children are so unselfconscious and direct that they can always be depended on to point out that the emperor has no clothes on. Some children are unselfconscious and direct, for a while. But they get it pounded out of them. We all learn pretty quickly that honesty is not always the best policy when it comes to such hard-to-defend areas as opinions. On the whole, it seems safer to lean with the prevailing wind—to wear the stylish but uncomfortable shoes, to eat the snails, to read Charles Kingsley. Or else suffer the consequences: to be ostracized, laughed at, or stoned in the streets.

  My father, a happy exception, resisted all efforts to civilize him, and why not? He had an adored uncle who deserted from the Spanish-American War, went west, and then came back to Columbus selling patent medicine with a thoroughly disreputable partner. He set up shop in a wagon at the foot of the State House steps, where he could joyfully accost his brother, my grandfather, as that very proper gentleman came down from his office in his tall silk hat—my grandfather was “in government”—and embarrass him nearly to tears. And my grandmother, who “got religion” in middle age, used to scour the streets of Columbus for bums and tramps and bring them home for Sunday dinner. With things like that in your family, you either escape into Kingsley and snails with a vengeance and never admit to Columbus, or you spend your whole life laughing. My father was of the latter persuasion. He had a hard time taking anything very seriously—except the Republican Party.

  But my mother took lots of things seriously, and so it was difficult sometimes to know what to think. I solved this problem the way many of us do: I kept my mouth shut. As Hamlet would have advised, I assumed a virtue if I had it not, and what virtue I assumed had mainly to do with who I was with at the time. It was a new version of an old song: “If you’re not near the people you agree with, agree with the people you’re near.”

  Still, here I was, faced with a new husband who wanted to know why I liked a certain book. What to answer? After all, he was the expert. I had no idea what I was expected to say. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to like the book. Maybe if I liked it, I was revealing ignorance or bad taste. Maybe he would stone me in the streets—metaphorically, of course. In those simpler days, pre-Betty Friedan, it didn’t occur to me to say that I liked it because I liked it and so what, Buster, you want to make something of it? As I recall, I mumbled something incoherent and changed the subject. But I thought about it a lot, that simple and yet not so simple “why” and my reflexive reaction to it, which was to wonder what I was expected to say, rather than to wonder how best I could say what I really felt. I think in many ways it marked a turning point.

  For, finally, though it’s good to have an opinion, it isn’t enough by itself. It isn’t enough simply to say that you do or you don’t like something. It’s terribly important to know why, to be able to examine your own reactions and not be afraid to expound on them and, if necessary, defend them. This is true in all the parts of our lives, not just with books. But books are a good place to begin because they are readily accessible containers for someone else’s ideas and style, and give the reader a good way to measure those things against his own.

  Maurice Sendak has said that little children often like or dislike their picture books for reasons that may be obscure to them as well as to their parents. But surely by the time children are ready for novels like The Water-Babies, they are articulate enough, and enough in touch with their feelings, to make talking about their reading valuable. And surely, parents and teachers can make an effort to be liberal and accept the fact that no single book will be admired by every child in a classroom.

  My mother read aloud the children’s classics to my sister and me because some unknown person said they were the books we ought to hear, and it didn’t occur to us to challenge that opinion, even though we were less than enthralled with some of them. They are all still in print today, including The Water-Babies; still on the bookstore shelf labeled CLASSICS. I know because I went and looked.

  Although I realize that reading is not as popular a pastime as it used to be, and although I also realize that some children would not read at all if it weren’t for classroom assignments, nevertheless it makes me uncomfortable to know that my story Tuck Everlasting is required reading in some classrooms. My sympathies are entirely with the children, for many will react to Tuck as I well might have: with a shudder. Tuck is not a crowd-pleaser. But it has apparently come to seem useful, particularly for classroom discussions about death, though that is not, to my mind, its central theme. If the classroom discussion could be about whether the children like it as a story, and why—or why not—that would be useful. If they could be encour
aged to examine their own reactions to it as a piece of fiction, and not simply talk about whether they would like to live forever or not—which is a separate question—that would be useful. That would be a good first step toward developing a critical eye. If some of those who didn’t like it, for their own reasons, could admit at the same time that it was nevertheless a good book—or, if some of those who did like it, for their own reasons, could admit at the same time that it was nevertheless a bad book—that would be invaluable.

  But the letters I get indicate that for the most part this is not what is happening. On occasion I will get a large envelope which encloses letters from every child in a class, and all are complimentary. Obviously, the letters are part of a class assignment, an exercise, and do not involve any independent thought at all. The teacher has said, “Now we shall all write to an author,” and what emerges is the same kind of good manners that we see in a Christmas thank-you note to Aunt Minnie enthusing over the lovely record album of Kate Smith’s greatest hits. These poor children have just had another lesson in learning not to say that, as far as they’re concerned, the emperor is walking around stark naked.

  Naturally I hope that there are some children who really like my stories, and I do sometimes get letters written outside of school which are clearly sincere in their approval. And naturally I hope that, since writing letters is not to everyone’s taste, there are many more children who really like my stories but don’t bother to tell me about it. I myself have written only one fan letter in my life, and that was to ice skater Sonja Henie in 1938.

  Actually, the most enthusiastic fan letter I ever got, though it was far from an articulate critical appraisal, was not a letter at all but a kind of graffiti, and I only heard about it secondhand. I was told by a librarian in Charlotte, North Carolina, that someone wrote in the front of a copy of Goody Hall: This is a good book, and funny, too. Right on, Brother! No jive, funky Mama! I suppose you could say that it is criticism of a sort, in one sense, since the writer says that the book is funny in addition to being good, not good because it’s funny. But still, nice as it is, I prefer a sharply critical letter I got two years ago from a reader named Lainie Moskowitz:

  Dear Miss Babbitt,

  I’m a ten year old girl, who is in the fifth grade and I have just finished reading your book, The Eyes Of The Amarayllis [sic]. I’m writing this letter to inform you of some of my thoughts while reading your book. I didn’t think it was very interesting because many of the parts were too confusing to understand. The book didn’t give any explanation about what happened to the grandfather when he drowned. In my opinion I would [have] liked information about Jenny and Gran. I would have liked to know more about their lives and a better description of their character. I was expecting a more exciting ending. If you write another book that you think would be more interesting I’d be glad to read it.

  How fine that is! If only I could have expressed my judgments as well and as fearlessly as that at the age of ten! Or even twenty! Lainie Moskowitz will never eat snails unless she truly wants to, and that makes her a rare human being: an honest one. It’s good to be honest about books, good to see clearly with your critical eye. Naturally I hope that Lainie Moskowitz will not be so candid in a Christmas thank-you note, but literary criticism should have nothing to do with good manners.

  We are very kind to each other in the children’s book world, kind to the point that we often mislead each other, I think. At the least our reviewers search for redeeming virtues in otherwise impossible books, and at the most they are gently chiding. This does not do the writer or the reader any favors, or the poor parent who must rely on reviews or else read every one of the two thousand books published every year. There is a tendency to believe that anyone who writes for children must be good-hearted and well-intentioned, which can scarcely be proven one way or another; and even if it were true, it certainly has nothing at all to do with the quality of the product.

  When I was younger and had more opinions than I do now, I more or less wanted to ban all books that didn’t measure up to my opinion of what a good one was. Now I feel that it’s far more important for children to make up their own minds about what they like, to be able to say why, and to learn to have confidence in their own decisions. How else will they be able, later on, to choose well among everything from brands of toothpaste to candidates for public office—choose well and independently instead of leaning like grass in the prevailing wind to all the various forms of public and private pressure?

  I’m not suggesting that teachers, librarians, and parents stay out of the selection process. And I know because I have three children of my own—at least, they used to be children—that it’s often extremely difficult to get them to read at all. But in the best of all possible worlds, the adult in charge doesn’t say, “Here’s a good book. The Horn Book says it’s good, the Washington Post says it’s good, the jacket blurb says it’s good, and I say it’s good. Go and read it.” Neither does he or she say, “Here’s a good book. Go and read it and tell me why it’s good.” That’s a little better, but it still misses the point. Instead, the adult in charge might say, “Here’s a book some people think is good. Go read it and tell me what you think.” That would be lovely—to be asked by an adult what you think about something another adult has done, and to know that what you think is actually important, whether you agree with those adults or not. It implies, happily, that you are something other than a sponge.

  And anyway, it’s a given of human nature that we are deeply suspicious of what other people claim will be good for us. Other people always want to improve us in one way or another. To bring us up to snuff. Leafing through a recent issue of Publishers Weekly, I found the following phrases in reviews and advertisements: “outstanding graphic design, splendidly printed and beautifully bound”; “ingenious charm … instantly appealing”; “what a treat!”; “a marvelously human portrait”; “the most extraordinary book to shine under the Christmas star”; “children around the world love these books.” My reaction to all this is apt to be, “Oh yeah?”

  Of course, I write reviews myself, occasionally, and though I try to avoid hyperbole, still, often I do feel strongly that a book is wonderful. Or terrible. And will try to say why as clearly as possible in the space allowed. But I certainly don’t expect people reading the review to say, “Oh—well—gee—is that so? Well, I guess that’s right, then.” I hope people will say, “Oh yeah?” and then go see for themselves.

  Putting something into print, whether it’s fiction or criticism or even advertising, lends it the force of authority somehow. Print is formal and assertive. It looks as if it knows what it is saying. Italics leap out; exclamation points insist; a line of type goes marching across the page like God trampling out the vintage. Learning to say “Oh yeah?” is a vitally important defense against it all. We are not, after all, going to find many advertisers, or authors, or newspaper columnists who will finish their pieces by saying, “Of course, that’s only my opinion. You may feel that Sydney Carton was doing a far, far stupider thing than he had ever done.” Or, “You may feel that our instant hollandaise sauce tastes like Elmer’s Glue.” Or, “You may think that killing Herman Tarnower, the diet doctor, was a dirty job but somebody had to do it.” And since they won’t say these things, but will instead go right on insisting, in print, on their own versions of the truth, we must learn early to read defensively, to read critically, to try as hard as we can to make up our own minds. To try, in other words, to take pride in thinking for ourselves.

  Probably what we need to do is to demystify books, along with a number of other things. There is nothing holy, after all, about a piece of fiction except possibly to its author, and as a rule, writers who feel their works are holy are probably not very good writers, by virtue of the fact that a workmanlike detachment is at some point in the creative process absolutely essential. That’s one of my more recent opinions, by the way—number eleven, if my memory serves me, which it often doesn’t. Anyway, whoev
er said, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” was clearly nervous about being stoned in the streets. Good manners notwithstanding, it’s getting increasingly important to have a critical eye and to respect your own brain even if the expert standing next to you at the cocktail party or in front of you in the fifth-grade classroom turns hostile. As long as you know why. As John Simon, the New York magazine drama critic, said in a recent interview, “A critic needs to be able to explain his position.”

  The only reason why I don’t still go around thumping on podiums about how bad most of our books for children are is that it doesn’t seem much to the point anymore. And anyway, it turns out to be a very old complaint. I reread The Water-Babies recently to make sure it was as dreary and silly as it seemed when it was first read aloud to me forty years ago. It is. It holds up wonderfully. But toward the end, in a section where the hero is on a long journey to a place called the-Other-end-of-Nowhere, there is a paragraph that reads this way:

  And first he went through Waste-paper-land, where all the stupid books lie in heaps, up hill and down dale, like leaves in a winter wood; and there he saw people digging … among them, to make worse books out of bad ones … and a very good trade they drove thereby, especially among children.

  So of course it occurred to me that it may take one to know one.

  In fairness, I should tell you that Charles Kingsley wrote The Water-Babies in 1863, when the world was rather a different place. No doubt we should make allowances, especially as he couldn’t be here to defend himself. Nevertheless, I wish we would be more careful how we bandy the term classic about, particularly if we catch ourselves using it to scare little children.

  Once, when I was in high school, we managed to get my father to church for a midnight carol service on Christmas Eve. The church was so crowded with people putting in their annual attendance in the nick of time that, since we neglected to come half an hour early, we and a few dozen luckless others were relegated to the parish hall, where we had to listen to the service over a loudspeaker. About ten minutes into it, the loudspeaker went dead. We all sat there like good lambs in utter silence for quite a while, and then my father said in a clear voice, “This church doesn’t need a minister. What this church needs is a good electrician.”