The effect of this remark was exactly like that of the child’s remark in the story of the emperor’s clothes. It appeared that everyone in the parish house agreed. And it appeared that everyone was grateful to my father for bringing the subject up. There were general exclamations of relief, and then we all wished each other a merry Christmas and went home to bed. If it had not been for my father’s fearlessly voicing an opinion, we might have sat there trying not to look at each other for hours and hours, afraid of being stoned.
The years ahead are going to be full of increasingly difficult problems, all of which will require courage and a good critical eye in the solving. My opinion number twelve is that if we want a peaceful old age, we’d better start now training our children to say what they think. I would like to suggest that wherever there are two or three gathered together, they be sat down to listen to that certified classic The Water-Babies, and then be encouraged to express themselves. It’s as good a place as any to begin, and it just might make a difference.
Publicity photograph for Farrar, Straus and Giroux by Thomas Victor, 1983
“I remember my childhood vividly—what it felt like, what I thought about, what I did and said as opposed to what other children did and said.”
The Way We Were—and Weren’t
(1985)
My home state, Ohio, has always been a hard state to figure. More presidents were born there than in any other state in the union except Virginia, but none, with the possible exception of Taft, were memorable. Two were even assassinated, which makes you wonder. I live in Rhode Island now, and Rhode Island has the same sort of reputation that Ohio has: a place you hurry through on your way to somewhere else. I’m not going somewhere else. At least I hope not. I like Rhode Island. My roots go deep in Ohio, though. My ancestors were there long before it was Ohio, and none of them hurried on to somewhere else. In this they may have shown a serious lack of imagination. But I left Ohio when I got married in 1954 and have lived in Connecticut, Tennessee, Washington, DC, central New York State, Massachusetts, New York City, and now Rhode Island in the forty years since. Sometimes I think all that moving has been bad for me, and sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I don’t because, you see, my family moved around a lot in Ohio, too, long before I got married, and so I went to a lot of very different kinds of schools, and met a lot of very different kinds of children.
I remember my childhood vividly—what it felt like, what I thought about, what I did and said as opposed to what other children did and said. My views on the variety of types of children were and are the same as my views now on the variety of types of adults. So it always comes as a shock to me to hear people talk about “the child.” I’m never sure what child they mean.
I have a sister who is two years older than I am, and we were never very much alike. There’s a truly distressing snapshot of the two of us at ages seven and nine, sitting on a park bench. We are dressed alike, but that’s where the likeness stops, because she was overweight and I was emaciated. The dresses we’re wearing have puffed sleeves, and my arms hang as loose in those sleeves as the clappers in a pair of bells, while my sister’s cuffs are like tourniquets. A sorry sight indeed. We were different in more important ways, too. She was an excellent student, while I was what teachers now tactfully refer to as an underachiever. She was gregarious and I was pretty much of a hermit. If anyone had tried to define us as “the child,” the confusion would have been substantial.
People say to me occasionally, “Do you have ‘the child’ in mind when you write?” What child? Myself? My sister? Or possibly Tempy Pitts? Tempy Pitts—full name Temperance Pitts—has assumed for me by now something of the status of a folk hero. She was in my sister’s class and she was a member of one of those families from West Virginia and Kentucky who, in those days, came across the Ohio River, when summer was over, to find work in the southern Ohio factories. Our town was the home of Armco Steel and attracted great numbers of these families—known locally as “poor white trash”—who would dutifully enroll their children in the schools and then, at the end of the school year, go home again back across the river and live all summer on what they’d earned. This particular fall, my sister’s third-grade teacher was taking her students through the annual September ritual of telling what they’d done during the vacation. When it was Tempy’s turn, the teacher said, “Now, Tempy, tell us about your summer.” And Tempy stood up and said, “Aw, ah jus’ run up ’n’ down a mountain ’n’ eat a piece of bread.”
So do I have Tempy Pitts in mind when I write? Of course. Tempy is always in my mind, I’m happy to say. I am less happy to say that Norma Cox is also always in my mind. Norma Cox was in my class. She was little and even thinner than I was, and her clothes were even thinner than that, and we all avoided her. I was once kind to Norma Cox for half an hour at recess and will never forget the surprise and gratitude on her pinched little face. I then, with the supreme cruelty of childhood, ignored her ever after, feeling that I had done my duty and could face my Sunday school teacher with a clear conscience.
So—yes, I have Norma Cox in mind, but also Janie Dorner. Janie Dorner was blond and beautiful, with shiny straight hair, and sweaters that matched her socks, and she was always smiling, in spite of the fact that her older sister, equally beautiful, was an epileptic who sometimes had seizures in school.
There was Beth McKinnon, who passed through my second grade only briefly. She was, as I recall, a certified genius who could draw like Leonardo da Vinci when she was only seven, and was soon placed in some special school where she could blossom. Before she came, I was the best artist in my class. I was the one who got to draw the princess for our frieze of the story about the princess on the glass mountain. Beth put my nose out of joint and I was very glad when she left.
Do I write for Beth McKinnon? Certainly not. Let her write her own stories.
There was June Green, who had to miss a chunk of third grade when one of her many siblings got bitten by a mad dog and the whole family had to get dreadful, debilitating hydrophobia shots that took weeks to recover from. June was shy and pale and earnest. But Jane Rettig was ruddy and assertive, even in grammar school, and she gave great birthday parties. There was Marsha Klein, who spent her summers in Minnesota and expected everyone to be impressed by the fact. I guess I was impressed—I’ve remembered those vacations for more than fifty years. And then there was Sudie Riley, who was spoiled and had mountains of toys, and tended to be mean to her cat.
As for boys, I fell in love in the first grade with Dwight Neill and was faithful to him until we moved away in the middle of sixth grade. My mother, driving by the school once when we were out for recess in second grade, saw me corner Dwight among the bicycle racks and kiss him. He was very handsome, and I didn’t and don’t apologize.
And there was, ever and always, my sister, my hero, with her stunningly large vocabulary and her tree house where she read Little Women and Oliver Twist and sobbed up there among the catalpa pods while I, down below, in answer to some obscure diabolical urge, occasionally strung up a noose or two and lynched my dolls, a ritual which seems to have worried no one.
So, tell me, who is “the child” we hear so much about? The children I remember had precious little in common. Well, I’ll tell you who “the child” is. “The child” is a construction put together by adults, that’s who. “The child,” once out of diapers, does not cry. “The child” is beautiful and honest and is never without a Kleenex. “The child” watches some television, but accepts parental guidance cheerfully, and would rather read, anyway. “The child” is clean all the time except when being picturesquely dirty. “The child” is never sick except for measles, mumps, and chicken pox, which are passed through with forbearance, with dispatch, and without scratching. “The child” is not afraid of the dark or of swimming or dogs or Great-Aunt Esther’s mustache. “The child” has better manners than Amy Vanderbilt. “The child” will qualify for Harvard without ever being a bookworm or a grind. “The child,” in
short, will go out into the world and stun everyone, especially jealous relatives, with his or her splendid genetic makeup and obviously superior parenting, a combination of nature and nurture impossible to improve on, thereby insuring lasting self-satisfaction for “the parent.”
“The child,” then, is as utterly different from anyone we know personally as are “children.” “Children,” once you get past our national concept of them as “the future,” are not necessarily desirable or attractive on a day-to-day basis. And they are certainly not important except insofar as they will someday be adults. Childhood is something to be got through as quickly as possible so you can get to the good stuff that comes with maturity, and one part of the good stuff is evidently the privilege of looking back and being sentimental about childhood. This means, of course, that one’s own childhood was either sweet beyond the dreams of paradise, or difficult beyond the novels of Charles Dickens. So maybe it would be more accurate to say that one’s own self as a child was important, but children in general are not. In the eyes of the world they’re not, anyway. If they were, we would pay our elementary-school teachers a living wage.
The problem appears to be that children are not a power group. They don’t have any money. If they had money, we’d probably let them vote. But they don’t. Not enough, anyway. They also don’t have any experience—that golden quality, so hard-won, that makes it possible for us adults to conduct our lives without any mistakes in judgment, without any problems, without noise or social disruption or unreasonable behavior of any kind. Children are also unfinished as to education. They have not yet read Proust, like us, and they don’t understand the words all the singers are singing when they go to the opera, and they don’t read the New York Times front to back every day the way we do. And—they don’t know how to spell rhinoceros. We, of course, all know how to spell rhinoceros. The ability to spell rhinoceros is one of the hallmarks of an educated person, and children have yet to come to it.
It is for these reasons that people who write children’s books are suspect. The world looks at us in a puzzled way and wonders, “Why devote your life to writing for a group that has no money, no experience, and can’t spell rhinoceros? Such writing can’t be serious.” And it isn’t just us writers. My husband once worked for Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, and one time at a party I talked to the chief of pediatric services. He told me gloomily that pediatric services are classed among other medical services just as children’s books are classed with books for other ages. So, whatever it is, if it has to do with children, it’s got no clout.
Some of my colleagues are very defensive about their work. Many say sniffily that they don’t write for children—they write to please themselves. Beatrix Potter even said it. But I say horsefeathers. All writers hope to please themselves by what they write; but it seems to me that it’s possible to please oneself at the same time as one is writing for, and hoping to please, children. Why not? Why should those two things be mutually exclusive?
I want it understood, by the way, that when I use the term children, I do not mean it to include teenagers. Teenagers are something else again. One does not call them children in their presence and expect to be applauded, and in fact, they aren’t children, technically, because they aren’t powerless. It’s doubtful that they have much experience, and my guess is that few of them can spell rhinoceros, but the thing is, they’ve got money. So they have the most telling kind of importance. I read somewhere recently that the big spender now for movies is a fourteen-year-old boy. Hollywood producers are taking this into account. And that’s clout.
Writers of books for teenagers are higher up the prestige scale than writers of books for the prepube group. This is because the public is afraid of teenagers, and imagines that people who write books for them have some inside track on understanding them. I imagine this, myself. My picture of the situation is that during the teenage years, people are far more alike than they were as children, and far more alike than they will be as adults. This picture makes of life a sort of hourglass with the top part labeled CHILDHOOD, the squeezed-in neck part labeled TEENAGERS, and the bottom labeled ADULTHOOD.
Or let me put that another way. Childhood is South America (even though it’s at the top) in all its warm and infinite variety from Rio to the Andes. Adulthood is North America (even though it’s at the bottom) with its cold Canadian fronts and all that open land demanding to be dug up and built on. And the teenage years are the Panama Canal: hot and volatile, with everyone in battle fatigues, looking utterly inscrutable.
Well, I am probably wrong. But I was a teenager in that pointless and arid period between Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, and so have grown up uninitiated. I collected Mario Lanza records. When I went away to college and was feeling lonely and homesick, I’d just slip up to my room and put on a 45 recording of Lanza singing “Be My Love.” A person who is turned on by “Be My Love” is not going to find common coin with the Rolling Stones.
So, anyway, teenagers are not children, and I don’t write for them. This has caused no outcry in the high schools, so it’s all right. My books are for children: specifically, I guess, for the last best year of childhood, the fifth grade. And I resent fifth graders being lumped together into some great, unformed ball of clay called “the child.”
There are a lot of special things about fifth grade. Or, at least, there were a lot of special things about my fifth grade. I didn’t know I didn’t have any clout, you see. I didn’t realize the full importance of money, and I was never asked to spell rhinoceros. There was a war on—we were all very much aware of that—but I didn’t read the newspapers front to back to keep up on its progress. And although I was in love with Dwight Neill, it was as innocent a love in fifth grade as in any fairy tale. It became a little less innocent in sixth grade, with the advent of games like post office and spin the bottle, but we moved away before any harm was done.
The thing is, I don’t want to hear about “the child,” that mythical monster we are all supposed to have in mind when we write. I have in mind only myself and all my fifth-grade classmates, from Marcia Ellison, my jolly best friend, to Larry Jones, who died of leukemia, to Donald Crawley, the class jock, to Georgie Bach, who loved me, to Ruth Upton, who didn’t. We were not “the child”—we were people. Separate, distinct, with different dreams and different sorrows.
If we were the future then, now, grown up, we are in large part the past. But all of us at any given moment are the present, and that is what matters. Our childhoods, our adulthoods, our old age, are only a long series of nows, a continuing present where we are always people first and foremost, separate and distinct, regardless of our age. It’s a good thing for all of us to remember: parents, teachers, writers, all of us who work with and for children, all of us who were once children ourselves. And that really is all of us.
Early manuscript page from Tuck Everlasting
“For our fiction, we must construct a life that is not average, not ‘true to life.’ We must construct a plot, and figure out again and again something that can happen, something that will carry conflicts and demons to our child heroes, since they have none ready-made inside their heads.”
Something Has to Happen
(1985)
It has occurred to me recently that there is a difference between juvenile and adult fiction which is so obvious that it has escaped at least my attention, though I and all of us who write for children have always had to deal with it: Child heroes, like their flesh-and-blood counterparts, being powerless, innocent, and mainly unformed, are acted upon rather than acting. That seems simple, and yet it profoundly affects the construction of a story and defines a fundamental variance between the two literatures.
Since the child hero is acted upon, there has to be a plot to a children’s story. Without exterior action there can be no story at all. Interior action—that is, the workings of a character’s thoughts, personality, and the accumulated experience of his own life and that of the people aro
und him—is rare in children’s books. Children, and by association child heroes, haven’t been around long enough; they are not experienced enough to be much guided by reflection, and have very little control over their own lives. Things must, therefore, happen to them, things from which we hope they will learn. And things happening is simply another term for the unfolding of a plot.
Things used to have to happen in adult fiction, too, but not anymore. Short stories in the New Yorker, for instance, are mostly devoid of events. They have no discernible plots. The idea of things happening is so unusual nowadays in adult fiction that Joseph Heller could call his long-awaited second novel Something Happened and keep us turning the pages to find out what in the world it would turn out to be. I suppose you could say that modern adult fiction accurately reflects modern adult life, at least here in safe and insulated America. Nothing much does happen to most of us, after all—nothing you could call an adventure—unless we make it happen, which fact is apt to come as a distinct surprise.
Perhaps this is why adventure novels, and adventure movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark, seem to critics to be fare only for the unsophisticated—escape fare which bears no relationship to reality. But whether this is true or not, there is a difference even between adult adventure novels and movies, and those intended for children. Even though the action in both is all exterior, the heroes are different: The older ones act; the younger are acted upon.
Barking with the Big Dogs Page 7
