Barking with the Big Dogs

by Natalie Babbitt

  Our beloved democracy treads right along that line that is so hard to pinpoint. Yes, it is absolutely true that America is the land of opportunity. But we’d better be sure our children know that “opportunity” means a chance to achieve one’s ambitions. If one is willing to work hard. And, yes, it is absolutely true that in America anyone can grow up to be president, but the word is can, not will. We’d better be sure our children know that while luck is always a factor in how things turn out, there will be no magic, no fairy godmother, no hag on the road with her basket of charms. We’d better be sure they understand that in real life, a metamorphosis is usually so gradual as to be almost imperceptible.

  I am talking to myself as much, here, as I am talking to anyone else. I am thinking about my own children as I watch them establishing themselves in their own lives, defining for themselves their own essences, unraveling for themselves the contradictions created by the facts and fantasies that surrounded them when they were genuinely children. They’re doing all right, but it’s not as easy as they thought it would be. Why do our children think it will be easy? Is it because it looked so easy in the storybooks and on the TV screen? Is it because we, as parents, somehow failed to inform them? Or do all children automatically think it will be easy? I can’t remember whether I thought it would be easy or hard. I simply took it for granted that I would grow up to do what I wanted to do. I am doing what I wanted to do, but it certainly has not been easy.

  I loved fairy tales when I was a child. And I love them now. The concept of metamorphosis is wonderfully compelling. To be different, to solve all problems at the stroke of a wand, to grow up in an instant, to be rich and beautiful and powerful and happy simply by giving the right answer to a riddle! I am the last person in the world to knock fantasy, because the best fantasy is actually a tool for understanding reality. The only idea I want to stress is the idea that we need to be careful to make a balance.

  Yes, the very nature of childhood is metamorphic. But the physical, intellectual, and moral changes are not so much alterations, it seems to me, as developments. Given the proper conditions, a morning-glory bud will grow into a blossom, but a morning-glory blossom, not a daffodil. Both are beautiful, but the essence of one is quite different from the essence of the other. I would like to imagine that a morning-glory bud would hope and dream about becoming the best morning-glory blossom there ever was, and not to be discontent, when the moment arrives, that it is not, instead, a daffodil.

  I don’t know whether I’m making any sense or not. It all seems very clear inside my head, but saying it plainly is another matter altogether. Perhaps an anecdote will help. On a recent school visit, I was asked by a fifth grader if the magic spring water in Tuck Everlasting is real. “No,” I said, “it isn’t real.” “But,” said the fifth grader, “didn’t you ever think that when you described it so well, as if it was real, we might believe you?” I have lain awake nights over this question. Are we somehow implying in our books that the unreal, the impossible, is more greatly to be desired than the real and the possible? Are we maybe whispering that there are instant metamorphoses to be had somewhere, and that everyone can and should be a hero?

  I am only trying to say that we had better tread carefully. Let me end with another reference to Alice. Do you remember the scene where Alice visits the Duchess? The Duchess is singing a violent lullaby to a baby as she tosses it up and down, and all the while the cook is shaking pepper into a large pot of soup. An argument erupts and the cook begins throwing things at the Duchess and the baby: pots, pans, dishes. Alice, as Lewis Carroll puts it, is in an “agony of terror” for the baby’s life, and so, when at last the Duchess flings the baby at her, Alice carries it out into the open air. The baby, over the next few minutes, goes through a metamorphosis. It changes, in fact, into a pig. And here I quote from the story:

  So she set the little creature down, and felt quite relieved to see it trot away quietly into the wood. “If it had grown up,” she said to herself, “it would have made a dreadfully ugly child: but it makes rather a handsome pig, I think.”

  I always thought that the baby had begun as a pig, and was only changing back to what it was intended to be. Whether or not this is what Carroll had in mind, I agree with Alice: better, symbolically, a handsome pig than a dreadfully ugly child. As a baby, the creature shrieked and struggled. As a pig, it “trotted away quietly,” back to its natural environment.

  We were not all intended to be heroes—or swans. If there is any character to emulate in fantasy literature, it is perhaps the Bee-Man. He is entirely contented to have grown up once again into a bee-man. And contentment may well be the richest of all rewards.

  Taking questions at a New York City school, 1981

  “Once, on a school visit, I was asked what the message in Tuck Everlasting is. I said, as I always do, that I didn’t mean it to have any message at all. But a boy stood up and declared with some heat that he didn’t care what I said, Tuck had a message for him, and the message was that you have to pay a price for what you do. A stern message indeed! And a message it wouldn’t occur to me to write a book about. Still, that’s what Tuck meant to this fifth grader.”

  A Question from Justine

  (1987)

  Storytellers don’t always know what they’re saying. This is the conclusion I came to after careful consideration of a letter from a little girl named Justine. She asked me, “Do you have to understand your books before you publish them?” It struck me as a very funny question at first, but the more I thought about it, the more penetrating it came to seem. It’s the kind of question Lewis Carroll might well have put into the mouth of one of his characters in Alice in Wonderland.

  Alice in Wonderland is full of things that seem like nonsense until you really think about them. My favorite chapter is the one about the mad tea party. All of it makes me laugh, but after Justine’s letter, there was one particular part that kept coming back to me. You will recall that the Mad Hatter has asked Alice the riddle about why a raven is like a writing desk, and Alice says, “I believe I can guess that.” And then the following exchange takes place:

  “Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?” said the March Hare.

  “Exactly so,” said Alice.

  “Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.

  “I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least—at least I mean what I say—that’s the same thing, you know.”

  “Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter.

  I had probably read the mad tea party chapter a hundred times without stopping to think about what was really being said here. It took Justine’s letter to make it all clear to me. I have come to understand that the Mad Hatter and the March Hare are absolutely correct: There is a difference between meaning what you say and saying what you mean. And it’s a difference that writers would probably be better off not looking into too deeply. Nevertheless, that’s what I’m going to do here—look into it—and we’ll see what comes of the exercise.

  Now, certainly most writers mean what they say—especially writers for children—if by “say” you mean the message or lesson put forth in a given book. Writers for adults—well, I sometimes have trouble figuring out what some of them are saying. If a critic or a teacher tells me what a particular writer for adults is saying, I’m not only willing to believe him or her, I’m grateful for the information, because sometimes I think there’s a conspiracy among writers for adults—especially poets—to make what they’re saying as obscure and inscrutable as possible, thereby running counter to the age-old notion that writing is a form of communication. Years ago, when I lived in another place—I have often lived in another place, and not the same other place, either—I belonged to a small group called the Wednesday Afternoon Tea and Poetry Society. There were only six of us, and we read all kinds of poems by all kinds of poets. Once, I remember, we struggled with one by Theodore Roethke which was utterly impenetrable. It was my opinion, finally, that it had t
o be about a fire in a greenhouse, but we never did know for sure. So it’s hard to figure if Roethke really did mean what he was saying.

  Writers for children, on the whole, do mean what they say, I think, although storytellers all have to say things they don’t believe when they write dialogue for the characters who are supposed to be morally unattractive. And they have to do it convincingly, or else those characters will be flabby and two-dimensional. But all that convincing writing doesn’t really confuse the issue, because the thrust of the story itself is a guide to figuring out which characters the author is promoting as good, and therefore representative of the author himself or herself, who is, presumably, also good. Or if not good, then at least sincere. So I think you can take it for granted that most of us in the children’s field mean what we say.

  But—do we say what we mean? Ah—that’s the real question. Here’s where the whole thing gets murky. I think most of us think we are saying what we mean—while we’re saying it. But clearly we also say a great many things we don’t understand. And if we don’t understand what we’re saying—if we don’t see what it is that’s actually going down on the paper—then it’s probable that we sometimes turn out to have said a great many things we didn’t mean. At least, things we didn’t mean to say.

  Are you following this? I’m having some trouble with it myself. Let’s see if I can make it more comprehensible. About fifteen years ago, in the journal The Lion and the Unicorn, a critic named Hamida Bosmajian, a professor of English at Seattle University in Washington State, published an essay called “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Other Excremental Visions.” It’s an absolutely fascinating essay. It says near the beginning, and I quote, “Children’s literature is a complicated artistic, psychological, and social phenomenon, in some ways more so than adult literature because the author projects memories and libidinal releases through forms pretending innocence.” And then Dr. Bosmajian says, if you’ll forgive my being explicit, that Roald Dahl is using chocolate as a symbol for excrement. She says, and I quote, “Children respond gleefully to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, not only because it is a luxurious food fantasy, but also because it is a fantasy of aggression expressed frequently in terms of bathroom humor. This sweet book is quite nasty.” And what’s more, she says, “Dahl is quite aware of what he is doing.”

  In other words, Dr. Bosmajian believes that Roald Dahl was saying what he meant. Well—maybe. I didn’t know Roald Dahl personally. But somehow I doubt he sat down and said to himself, “Gee, I think I’ll write a book in which chocolate will be a symbol for excrement, and I’ll make it as nasty as possible, all the while pretending innocently to make it sweet.” It seems far more likely to me that Roald Dahl was never consciously aware of what he was saying, if in fact he was saying what Dr. Bosmajian says he was saying.

  Unless they get it from the horse’s mouth, the fact is that critics and other analytical thinkers can only assume that writers are saying what they mean. And another fact is that, based on what I know about my own stories, writers often say things the meaning of which is either totally obscure to them, or utterly devoid of meaning in the first place.

  For instance: People sometimes look at me narrowly and say, “All right. Come clean. What is the actual meaning of the fact that the villain in Tuck Everlasting wears a yellow suit? You’re saying he’s a coward, right?” Now, it’s true that the word yellow suggests a number of things, some disagreeable and some not. But that’s not why I chose it. I chose it simply because I needed a two-syllable color, and purple was out of the question. I had to have a two-syllable color because the phrase man in the yellow suit is repeated quite often and needs the rhythm that two syllables give it. It makes much better music with yellow than it would have with black or gray. And in addition, in the days in which the story is set—and even now, in the summertime—men did and do sometimes wear cream-colored, yellowish suits. But they never wear purple. Not if they have any sense. So the fact is that the term yellow is utterly devoid, here, of any symbolism whatever. People are often disappointed to hear this, but I cannot tell a lie just to please an analytical mind.

  On the other hand, in my one novel for adults, Herbert Rowbarge, there’s a character who’s got a neurosis about carpeting. She’s afraid it will roll up on her and smother her. My daughter, Lucy, who is among other things a writer herself, asked me, “Where in the world did that come from?” and I had to say I didn’t have the slightest idea.

  I also have no idea where most of the stuff in my stories about the Devil comes from. When my husband and I, years ago, went to the Weston Woods studio so that he, who reads aloud far better than I do, could record the stories from the first collection, the woman in charge said to me, “You know, I like these stories, but how did you come up with them? You must be really weird!”

  Well, what can I tell you? Someone said once that all my stories are about death, one way or another. But if that’s so, it’s not necessarily what I mean to write about, so I guess I haven’t been saying what I thought I meant.

  A first-class reviewer said a lot of nice things about The Search for Delicious once long ago. She said that Gaylen, the young hero, “symbolically immerses himself in a clear stream and descends into the womblike subterranean world of the dwarfs … where every act assumes sacramental value.” (That’s sacramental, not excremental.) She suggested that the music and the dancing of the dwarfs is a religious ritual, and that later when Gaylen goes alone into the mountains, he is “experiencing the hero’s characteristic withdrawal stage, a time of meditation and acquisition of spiritual wisdom.” I liked the sound of that. And in fact, when she put it that way, I could see it was probably true. Also, it made me sound as if I knew what I was doing. But the fact is, I think, most writers do not at all take a scholarly approach to what they’re doing, at least not writers of fiction. At least, not writers of fantasy fiction. You can believe what you like, but it seems to me that most just do it from instinct. In other words, if we’re saying what we mean, what we mean is something that functions primarily on a subconscious level. So it may be that in some cases, in spite of what I’ve said above about Roald Dahl and Dr. Bosmajian, a scholar may be better able to say what a writer means than the writer is.

  But there’s plenty of stuff in the subconscious of us all which is far more personal than an inborn understanding of quest patterns and religious symbolism, and here’s where I think we are in for trouble. A good deal has been written in recent years about my beloved Lewis Carroll. It appears that he had rather a thing about little girls. It appears that he lost interest in Alice Liddell, the real-life model for his stories’ heroine, as soon as she grew up. He liked little girls. And he took pictures of them, sometimes without their having any clothes on. I don’t know what to make of this. And I don’t know if it ought to matter, by which you can tell I’m not a scholar, because from a scholar’s point of view it does matter. A scholar would say that understanding a writer’s psyche helps to understand a writer’s work. This seems to make sense. And, as I’ve said, it also makes sense that a scholar might sometimes understand an author’s work better than the author does. Nevertheless, as a reader, I don’t always want to know disagreeable things about the author of the book I’m reading. All I want is the book itself.

  A man named Michael Tunnell, who was and maybe still is an assistant professor at Arkansas State University, once wrote an essay about Tuck Everlasting. In it he said that I recognize, and I quote, “the universal subconscious fear adolescents harbor concerning parental domination and their inability to achieve independence.” This came as happy news to me. I had no idea that I recognized such things. Actually, as a child, I basked in parental domination and had no desire at all to achieve independence. Or so my conscious memory tells me. Even now, as I approach my dotage, I still view independence as a decidedly mixed blessing. And yet, in reading what Mr. Tunnell had to say, I could see that I was saying what he said I was saying. In other words, I was saying what I didn�
�t know I meant.

  In thinking it all over, though, it seems to me that in the final analysis, it doesn’t matter in the least to the average reader what a writer thinks he has said. A book, once it’s published, takes on a sort of chameleonlike character. It becomes something different for each person who reads it, and who’s to say that one of these interpretations is more valid than another? Once, on a school visit, I was asked what the message in Tuck Everlasting is. I said, as I always do, that I didn’t mean it to have any message at all. But a boy stood up and declared with some heat that he didn’t care what I said, Tuck had a message for him, and the message was that you have to pay a price for what you do. A stern message indeed! And a message it wouldn’t occur to me to write a book about. Still, that’s what Tuck meant to this fifth grader. He was doing what all of us do who are not real critics. He was applying his own filters to a story and taking from it what seemed to him to be true and useful. Writers should be grateful when anyone can find true and useful things in their stories, whether or not those things were put into the stories on purpose.

  So what does it matter what the writer thinks he or she has said? It’s quite possible that stories have their own body language and are revealing things their authors didn’t mean them to reveal. It just so happens that I do believe, like the fifth grader I just spoke of, that you have to pay a price for what you do, most of the time, whether or not I thought I was saying so in Tuck Everlasting.

  I once read that when Ferdinand the Bull first came out, it got short shrift because it was taken to be a pacifist political statement about the Spanish Civil War. Well, maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t. I don’t know. My picture book Phoebe’s Revolt was once reprinted for use in a textbook of some sort, and the people who were doing it felt they had to change a picture where Phoebe’s father is helping her out of a bathtub. It made them uncomfortable that she didn’t have any clothes on, what with her father right there in front of her. They fixed the picture up by putting a towel around her. I didn’t mind this, but the really funny part was that my editor, Michael di Capua, confessed to me afterward that the picture had always made him uncomfortable, too. Not because Phoebe didn’t have any clothes on, however. What bothered him was that the position she’s in made it look to him as if she’s trying to kick her father in the groin. This is certainly not what I meant the picture to say. I think of myself as a feminist, but I have certainly never to my conscious knowledge wanted to kick any of my male relatives, in the groin or anywhere else.