I have shared my life continuously with dogs. One dog after another, and sometimes two or three at a time. I have cleaned up after them; sat up with them through thunderstorms; vacuumed up their hairs; pursued their fleas with collars, powders, sprays, and exterminators; spent time and money on endless veterinarians for shots, X-rays, pills, and bandages. I have even driven our current dog, Rosie, long miles to visit two separate veterinary gastroenterologists on the advice of two separate regular vets who couldn’t get to the bottom, so to speak, of her terrible intestinal problems.
These four-legged creatures have been indisputably dogs. And yet I will confess that when I think about them, they don’t quite have the faces of dogs, somehow. Their faces, in my mental pictures of them, are rather blurred and indistinct, but decidedly more human than canine. I suspect that I am not alone in this. In fact, I know I am not alone. So do the dog-food people. So of course we are entranced by dogs who talk in television commercials, or by rabbits who talk in books as small and simple as Beatrix Potter’s or as long and complex as Watership Down. Giving human speech to nonhuman life is one of the most endearing things we do in our fantasies of diversion, though I should point out that we do it in our fear and hope fantasies, too. Perhaps we do it because we are lonely. I don’t know. I do know that we sometimes do it to point out things that would seem too harsh or preachy if our characters were human beings. But most of the time we do it simply because it gives us pleasure.
There is another kind of fantasy of diversion that has been around longer than the pyramids, and this kind involves creatures we wish were there but aren’t. Generation after generation, we pass along the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus, more than willing to risk the indignation of our children when they find out it’s all a tissue of lies. But then they grow up and join us in our wistful longing for proof that there really is a Loch Ness monster, an Abominable Snowman, a Bigfoot. Expensive expeditions go out again and again to look for these creatures and they never find anything. But no expedition is ever the once-and-for-all final expedition. Like psychosomatics going from doctor to doctor in search of confirmation that they really are sick, we are never satisfied with the diagnosis that there is nothing there. And why should we be? Life is infinitely more interesting when we can believe in the possibility of something wonderful hidden just over the next hill, to be discovered at last by just one more expensive expedition. For, every once in a while, a tenacious and fantasy-laden person does find something wonderful. With nothing more to go on than that well-known myth Homer’s Iliad, Heinrich Schliemann went out and dug up Troy.
All fantasy is rooted somewhere very deep in reality. It is the voice of our reachings-out for explanations of the riddles of our lives and for enrichment of their texture. All can be set forth in stories told in many different ways: in dream stories like Alice in Wonderland, in stories where the fantasy world exists across some kind of threshold as with Oz and Narnia, in stories where some single element of fantasy appears in the hard, real world as with Charlotte’s Web, or in stories where a rich fantasy world coexists on the same plane with reality, as Shakespeare presented it in such plays as The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
And little by little some fantasies come true. My mother had an expression she used to demonstrate impossibility: She would say, “Why, I could no more do that than fly to the moon!” I find myself saying the same thing sometimes before I remember it’s no longer an impossibility. In my favorite childhood version of “Beauty and the Beast,” Beauty found, in a room in the Beast’s palace, a picture that could move and talk—and now we have television. A real gorilla has a real kitten for a pet, and has his picture taken while he cuddles it. There is a kind of photography now that can create a three-dimensional image that isn’t really there at all.
In these terrible days of uncertainty, and fear not just for our own individual lives but for the life of our lovely, lonely planet, we need our fantasies more than ever, especially our fantasies of hope. I wish the adult world could recognize that need, and stop insisting that such things are only for children. For these fantasies are not something to retreat into, not sand in which we can bury our heads. They are the voices of our innermost cravings for pleasure and beauty and peace. Oh, Charlotte, how lovely if you could come back and spin a miraculous web of words at the next summit meeting! If our leaders won’t listen to us, surely they are human, with hope fantasies of their own, and maybe they would listen to you.
Babbitt’s illustration for the poem “Library,” from Small Poems Again (1986) by Valerie Worth
“It is our job to do the very best we can to stimulate as much love of reading as we can.”
Easy Does It
(1986)
Will things be golden in the future? When you get to be my age, it’s far more common to believe that things were only golden in the past. You mostly have to be the age of Little Orphan Annie, in her Broadway show, in order to belt out a song about how you love tomorrow. For people over forty, it’s more appropriate to sing about memories, like the old cat in that other Broadway show.
I suppose the reasons for this are not very complicated. But they go beyond the fact that the young have more tomorrows than yesterdays, while the over-forty group probably has it the other way around. A lot of it has also to do with an ongoing and all-too-human dissatisfaction with the present: a conviction that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. People of all eras have always believed the world was going to hell in a handbasket and that things were better at some other time, usually before. Before the appearance of the waltz, for instance, which marked the onset of moral decay. Or, if not the waltz, then before automobiles, or before the war (any war), before movies, before television.
It’s easy to imagine a couple of elderly cavemen sitting around complaining about the invention of the wheel. Oog might say, “Well, there goes honest labor and life lived at a reasonable pace.” And Mog might reply, “You’re right. Why, when I was a boy, I had to lug the mammoth meat ten miles home on my back. It wasn’t easy, but it built character.”
We don’t know exactly how fire was discovered, but a lot of people must have believed it signaled the end of the world, until Oog’s wife accidentally dropped a mammoth joint on a pile of hot coals, which was the first glorious step toward boil-in-a-bag turkey tetrazzini.
It’s hard to believe anyone could have thought things were better before fire. But look at it this way: Oog’s wife may have been barefoot and pregnant a lot, but before fire, she certainly didn’t have to spend any time in the kitchen.
The point is that change has always seemed to come in sudden great leaps instead of gradually, depriving people over thirty, say, of the necessary time to prepare their minds and their lives. Like Oog and Mog, adults sometimes don’t know what to make of it all, and that creates crankiness and resistance. I say people over thirty because it’s been amply demonstrated that before that time, we are more flexible. We haven’t got set in our ways yet, and we’re too inexperienced to anticipate difficulties. Look at Rubik’s Cube. Average kids could solve it in a few carefree, intuitive twists. But their average elders looked at it and said to themselves, “This looks hard! Gee—six colors!” And proceeded to try to apply reason to it, thereby making any intuitive solution impossible.
I remember watching on TV the first space-rocket liftoff with tears in my eyes, it was so beautiful and astonishing. But my children, then three, five, and seven, were utterly blasé. They were so new themselves that they couldn’t really grasp other newnesses—if there is such a word. What did they care that, in the good old days, people had been wont to say, when confronted with a difficulty, “Might as well try to fly to the moon”?
In the good old days when I was a child, there seemed to be a lot more room in houses. And I don’t especially remember anyone being annoyed about too few electrical outlets. But now the average house, mostly built in the thirties or forties, is jammed with electric and electronic gadgets and too many twisting extension
cords, making it look rather like a combination of Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory and a snake pit. In my kitchen, you have to unplug either the dustbuster or the humidifier before you can plug in the toaster. The dustbuster has to stay plugged in all the time because, you see, it’s cordless. The only time it’s not plugged in is when you’re using it. When you really stop to think about that, you want to run screaming into the wilderness, except there’s no wilderness left to run screaming into. And as for the humidifier, it has to run all the time from September to May because the modern furnace is so efficient that it dries out everything from furniture glue to the dog’s water dish in a mere twinkling. The toaster, however, is more humble. Nothing newfangled about the toaster. It burns bread just as nicely as the toasters of my childhood.
Everywhere the humble hunches up next to the new. We live in half of a carriage house that was built around 1880, and has recently been gutted, the interior rebuilt to make it very contemporary. But the original brick walls were kept un-plastered-over, inside and out, and though they let in winter winds as generously as a screen door, they’re very nice and humble to look at. However, against one of them, the television set with its great gray empty face sits on a sort of rolling table. On top of the television set is a box for controls of the cable system, a box that looks like a squashed Darth Vader helmet. And on a shelf below is the sleek new VCR. Behind it all, wires and switches hang down, reach out, and tangle up, with their plugs pressed to the outlet like hungry mouths.
Well, we’re used to all this proliferation of electric things. And our gadgets do make our lives easier and more pleasant; no point denying that. Ease and pleasure are what it’s always been about, from the wheel all the way up to the digital watch. No one has ever invented something in order to make life more difficult. At least, not on purpose.
So—what, after all, was so good about the good old days? I can remember my mother doing laundry in the 1930s, standing for long periods in the basement on cold concrete while she fed our sopping clothes through a wringer she had to turn by hand. And then she had to hang everything outside on a line. It took her all day. And all of another day to iron everything. All I have to do—well, you know how easy it is, and I never iron. I own an iron, but it’s the least-used thing in the house.
Does hard work really build character? Oog and Mog thought so. Are things that are easy and pleasant bad for us? Our Puritan forebears thought so. I don’t have an opinion on it. One man’s easy is another man’s hard, is what I think. Most progress has two sides to it, some good, some bad, and that’s true for just about everything.
There are a lot of concerns about today’s education, but it seems to me that this is an area where we have made remarkable progress, all of it good. I did some research to prepare this paper, and found out a few pretty amazing things. For instance, we’ve only had national free public education for about a hundred years. A hundred years! My mother-in-law is ninety and still going strong. Somehow, having a ninety-year-old in the family makes a century seem short, and so it is if you measure it by anything but the average life span.
Here’s another statistic: The very first public high school in America didn’t come along until 1821, the first public kindergarten in 1873. And there weren’t any free public libraries in this country before the 1850s. We had twenty-one subscription libraries by 1760, but nothing free to the public for another hundred years. The American Library Association wasn’t founded until 1876, and there wasn’t a single library school in existence until 1887. Seems to me we’ve done a lot in a hundred years.
Let’s see if I can tie all this together. There is a great national outcry these days about a number of issues centered on reading, but in a curious way it’s paradoxical. On the one hand we say that the world is changing too fast—let’s slow it down. And then on the other hand, we want it to change even faster. After all, my research revealed that as short a time ago as 1900—when my mother-in-law was already four years old—a whopping 10 percent of our population over age fourteen was illiterate. Ten percent! And less than three-fourths of our children age five to seventeen were enrolled in school. Think about that—a full 25 percent of American children not in school at all only eighty-six years ago. That was the good old days? So we have progressed. There can be no question about it. It’s just that it seems we don’t progress at a steady pace. We slip and slide around a lot.
And so we have this outcry now. It began when we started to suspect that somehow or other our children’s reading and writing skills are not what they ought to be, and it’s culminating in alarming statistics having to do with current literacy levels. They seem alarming, anyway, if you don’t look back to 1900.
We are blaming our children’s poor reading and writing skills on television, an easy and pleasant machine, and also on the seductive and mysterious computer, which, I understand, is easy and pleasant, too, though I have so far resisted finding out for myself. There can be no question about the fact that these two inventions are changing our world. They are only the latest things to change our world, which has been in a constant process of change since its creation. But latest or not, they are changing it profoundly. Still, I think it’s highly debatable that they are single-handedly responsible for our difficulties. I’m no sociologist, but it seems to me that it’s not so much the difficulties that are new as it is our expectations.
I come from a word-loving family, and I married a word-loving man. My children are all word lovers, each in his or her own way. But when I was a child in the good old days, my friends weren’t all word lovers, not all book lovers, not all good readers and writers; and this is notwithstanding the fact that my friends and I all went to the same public school, had the same teachers, and were all pretty much at the same economic level. And all were growing up without television and computers. It looks to me as if we simply can’t expect a universally high level of enthusiasm about reading. That expectation seems new to me. And, unfulfilled, it carries with it for our teachers a heavy and inevitable load of blame. But there always was and always will be a percentage of children that finds reading stale, flat, and unprofitable.
This is hard to accept in a democracy which states, as one of the self-evident truths, that everyone is created equal. It’s a beautiful concept, and we believe it’s true from a political point of view, as well as from the point of view of opportunity. Well, we Americans may be born equal, but we are certainly born different. We don’t all want the same things, or value the same things. I’ve moved around enough to be convinced of the truth of that. And if we—you and I—go on believing that we can, should, and must graduate all children from high school and college into a lifetime of appreciative reading of literature, and a capacity for clear and graceful writing, we will, quite simply, break our hearts.
Do you think I believe that, because I have always loved to read, and because I care about clear and graceful writing, I am somehow the product of a good-old-days perfect education? Nonsense. I have always been a washout at mathematics. I had to take high school algebra twice and was finally allowed to pass only because, my teacher said with a discouraged sigh, at least I was good at drawing. My grades in history were disgraceful; somehow, for me, history was the subject that seemed stale, flat, and unprofitable. I nearly flunked Latin, and did flunk my midyear exam in a college course in astronomy. Math, history, science—these things are growing in importance every day, and I am not prepared. I say all this to remind us that there is only so much a good educational system can do, and there is only so far the average brain can go in any field without a basic ability, some level of motivation, and at least a dim grasp of what a given subject will mean to the future. But children are notoriously disinterested in the realities of the future. There’s too much of it ahead of them to make it seem important.
Well—still—you will say, correctly, that reading is fundamental. If you can’t read, you can’t learn history whether it interests you or not. And it is our job to do the very best we can to stimulate as
much love of reading as we can. We have chosen our professions because we care about books more than we care about fame and fortune; the vast majority of us are veritable paupers—at least, compared to your average big-league athlete—and we are certainly unsung in the wide world.
But were we more sung in the good old days than we are now? Did people really care more about literature back then? I came across something extremely interesting in my research: a list of annual bestsellers from the beginning of the time when such things began to be tabulated. And I found that in the seventy-five years from 1865 to 1940, children’s books were on top a full ten times. “Wow!” I said to myself. “This is significant! People must really have cared about their children’s reading back then.” But, looking into it all, I found that, yes, it is significant, but not in the way I expected.
In the first eleven of those seventy-five years, Hans Brinker, Little Women, Little Men, and Tom Sawyer were all top bestsellers. But those same eleven years saw new novels from Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Leo Tolstoy, and Victor Hugo. Great writers all; they just didn’t sell very well.
In 1886, Little Lord Fauntleroy took the honors well over Henry James’s The Bostonians and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In 1901, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch beat out Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. And in 1938, a year that saw new novels from William Faulkner, Graham Greene, Richard Wright, Sinclair Lewis, and Ernest Hemingway, guess what sold best? The Yearling.
I’m not saying Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch wasn’t a terrific book. But surely none of us is so fatuous as to think it is a better book than Sister Carrie or Lord Jim. Remember, we are talking about books bought by adults, not children. Mrs. Wiggs is a better book than Jane Fonda’s Workout Book, yes, but not better than Dreiser or Conrad. It simply won’t wash to tell ourselves that Mrs. Wiggs sold best because in 1901 people cared more about buying books for their children than for themselves. We have to acknowledge that, in 1901, books like Mrs. Wiggs were read by everyone. Mrs. Wiggs, like television, was easy and pleasant, especially compared to Sister Carrie and Lord Jim, which are hard and depressing and make you think. And maybe, since the beginning of time, most of us haven’t wanted to think more than is absolutely necessary.
Barking with the Big Dogs Page 9
