Barking with the Big Dogs

by Natalie Babbitt

  “Once upon a time there were three little sisters,” the Dormouse began…; “and their names were Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie; and they lived at the bottom of a well—”

  “What did they live on?” said Alice, who always took a great interest in questions of eating and drinking.

  “They lived on treacle,” said the Dormouse, after thinking a minute or two.

  “They couldn’t have done that, you know,” Alice gently remarked; “they’d have been ill.”

  “So they were,” said the Dormouse; “very ill.”

  Alice tried to fancy to herself what such an extraordinary way of living would be like, but it puzzled her too much: so she went on: “But why did they live at the bottom of a well?” …

  The Dormouse again took a minute or two to think about it, and then said, “It was a treacle-well … And so these three little sisters—they were learning to draw, you know—”

  “What did they draw?” said Alice …

  “Treacle,” said the Dormouse, without considering at all, this time …

  “But I don’t understand,” [said Alice.] “Where did they draw the treacle from?”

  “You can draw water out of a water-well,” said the Hatter; “so I should think you could draw treacle out of a treacle-well—eh, stupid?”

  “But they were in the well,” Alice said to the Dormouse, not choosing to notice this last remark.

  “Of course they were,” said the Dormouse; “—well in.”

  And the charm of all this is that the Dormouse, the Mad Hatter, and the March Hare are serenely, and all the way irrationally, reasonable. It reminds me very much of a televised congressional investigation.

  If you grow up puzzling about irrationality, and then if you begin writing stories, all these puzzling things are bound to turn up in what you write. I wanted to be a children’s book illustrator, and that meant, obviously, that I would need children’s stories to illustrate. I hadn’t ever thought about being a writer. But I discovered right away, when I began trying to write, that many puzzling and difficult moral and ethical questions insisted on cropping up, as they do in many stories for children. At least they do in some kinds of stories, and those seem to be the kinds of stories I tell. After all, if you have any memory at all about your concerns when you were very small, you will know that this is when such questions first arise. I seem to have a particularly vivid memory of those years. In some ways, they were more interesting to me than many of the years that have come along since. Still, the questions themselves are scarcely unique to me. They are questions we all have in common. Some of us don’t give them a lot of head room, and that’s all right, but for those of us who do, stories can be useful. Well—useful up to a point. My stories don’t offer answers, because I don’t know the answers. Maybe there aren’t any. All I’m trying to do is present the questions.

  We began, centuries ago, telling stories in an attempt to explain humanity’s basic mysteries. And then science started to redraw our conception of things like the universe, health, death, and other natural phenomena. Take water, for instance. For hundreds of years, we believed it had magical qualities. I think this is because we knew it gave and maintained life. But now we know there is nothing magical about it. We learned from a British scientist named Henry Cavendish in the late 1700s that water is only a combination of oxygen and hydrogen. And as for this planet Earth, it may be vital to the only kind of life we know, but at the same time it is nothing more than a meaningless speck in the endlessness of space.

  Well, we know these things, but knowing them isn’t much help. The knowledge is simply not enough. Too many questions still remain. How can something be vital, and at the same time be meaningless? The word endlessness, itself, as a description of a dimension, is inconceivable, and therefore completely unsatisfying. My sister said once that trying to understand space brought her to the outermost extent of her intelligence. She came to a place, she told me, where she didn’t even know what it was that she wasn’t understanding. We all know that feeling. And even right here on our own planet, it is impossible to watch the raging water in our Great Lakes in the middle of a storm and hold on to our self-importance by telling ourselves it’s only hydrogen and oxygen flinging themselves around out there. So—we go right on telling stories. We need to. It may be irrational, but at the same time it’s perfectly reasonable.

  Most of the stories I’ve told fall into this category—the category of stories that deal with the questions left over after we’re told that all the questions have been answered. This kind of story isn’t everybody’s cup of tea. I know that perfectly well, and even if I didn’t, children often remind me. A letter I got last year from some boys in Boston told me that Tuck Everlasting would have been a lot better if it had had some dirt-bike racing in it. Maybe so, but I have to write the kind of story I write, because it’s the only kind of story that, for me, anyway, is worth the immense difficulty of writing.

  And into these stories of mine go all the questions about what’s right at any given moment—all the questions like the one about the ten Sunday school pennies. Years ago, not long after Tuck Everlasting was published, I was on a gig somewhere and was approached afterward by a young librarian who was genuinely disturbed by the fact that I had let Mae Tuck kill the man in the yellow suit. We talked about it briefly. I asked her what she would have done if she’d known ahead of time what World War II was going to do to the world. Would she have killed Adolf Hitler before it all began, if she’d had the opportunity? She was horrified by this question, and turned away without answering. Well, of course she was horrified. It’s not a pretty thought. But it’s a very important question. At least, I think so. And of course, where Tuck Everlasting is concerned, there’s more than philosophy involved in the killing. I don’t like violence in any form, but I got right up to the point when the man in the yellow suit was dragging Winnie Foster away, and I knew what I would have done if I’d been Mae Tuck. I knew that if someone had broken into my house and had tried to drag one of my children away, I’d have grabbed anything that came to hand and bashed him as hard as I could. I wouldn’t have paused to think it over. And neither would any other female, two legs or four, in all of the natural world. This is the simple truth. And when you write for children, the truth is vital.

  Violence goes against every rule and law in the land. Yes. But there are times when it’s justified. Well, aren’t there? Aren’t there times when we have to act as the occasion demands? Isn’t that what a war of defense is mostly about? I don’t know for sure. All I know is that it’s adults who are troubled by that scene in Tuck Everlasting. I get a lot of letters from children about the story, and if they mention that scene at all, they tell me that they didn’t like it, but they know Mae did what she had to do, and they are satisfied. They invariably say that the man in the yellow suit got what he deserved. This is not because children have been warped by television or any other outside influence. This is because we are all somehow born with a strong sense of justice. Why else say so often, “It’s not fair!” Why else wonder why Mildred got to steal my sister’s doll underwear while I got a bloody nose for borrowing her new scooter? We laugh at such things remembered from our early lives, and we laugh at them in the lives of our own children. But finally, at bottom, they aren’t really funny. They are our earliest attempts to find and examine reasons, irrational or not. Is it all right to go against the rules when you’re growing up? No. Rules are there for guidance and protection. Except sometimes. Is it all right to kill people? No. Killing is immoral and illegal. Except sometimes. And so, while we’re learning the rules as we grow up, we’re observing at the same time the contradictions, the exceptions, the irrationalities. There’s no way to protect children from all that, and a good thing, too, because they’re going to need the truth.

  What a puzzle it all turns out to be! We would do better with it if we didn’t have so frantic a need to prove ourselves quick and powerful and in control, to prove to ourselves and others that w
e matter. It’s hard, though, because we do matter to ourselves. It’s just that we don’t matter to thunderstorms and oceans and time and the endlessness of space. I think, finally, that we are all mad because of being pulled in half between these two plain truths.

  There are three ways to deal with it, I think. You can put time and space out of your head, and live only in and with the tangible world. Or—you can ignore the tangible world and go live on a mountaintop where you can contemplate time and space. Or—you can say to yourself that it’s impossible to make sense of it all, so we might as well throw up our hands and have as good a time as we can manage in the time we’ve got.

  I don’t know when I decided to adopt the third alternative, but I think I know why. Certainly my father had a lot to do with it because, once you got past politics, he knew how to see irrationalities and the ways in which they affect us, and he knew how to laugh at them. My mother was good at laughing, too, but the simple fact is that the marriage between her and my father was a first-class example of living with two plain and opposing truths. My father was a very conservative Republican, and my mother was a very liberal Democrat, and at the end of every election day, he would say to her, “I suppose you canceled my vote again,” and she would reply, “I certainly did.” But they loved each other anyway, and had what I truly believe was a very happy life together.

  So—well—I think I grew up questioning the contradictions, as we all do, but finally admiring the way we human beings always manage, however clumsily, to build a footing out of not much, and then dance on it. Because we do dance on it, here and everywhere else in the world, regardless of science, religion, and politics. And we dance pretty well, thank you very much. It’s mad to dance on such a footing, because collapse is always imminent, but we do it anyway. There’s a lot to be learned from that. Somehow, in spite of everything, we manage to build. We have always managed to build, even right after we’ve managed to destroy.

  What does this have to do with children and their books? Maybe not much, except that the fact is, children learn early to laugh and to reason, to recognize irrationalities for what they are but at the same time work out reasonable ways to deal with this vital but meaningless speck of a planet they’ve inherited. Writers write the stories that ease their own uncertainties, of course, and that makes most of our work pretty subjective. But for people like me whose childhoods are so real and so ever-present, I think that for the most part what we have to say are things our readers have no trouble understanding.

  And I’ve come to recognize one other thing: I believe I had a perfect right to throw my pears in the sink, that day so long ago. Not as a way of breaking the rules, but as a way of expressing my own views and preferences. I believe we all have that right today, now, whatever age we may be. As long as we’re willing to pay the consequences. We have the right to follow our own sense of what matters. I mean, I had the right not to put dirt-bike racing into Tuck Everlasting. I wrote back to the boys who thought it would have been a good idea, and I told them that if they’d written the story, they could have put anything they wanted into it. But, I told them, by the time they wrote to me, it was way too late for changes. The book was already twenty-five years old, and rather set in its ways. But it has occurred to me since that maybe they’ll all get jobs with the Disney Studios when they grow up. At Disney, it’s never too late for change. It’s never too irrational, either. But, well, so what? Remember the scene in Alice in Wonderland where Alice comes across the Cheshire cat sitting in a tree? She asks him:

  “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

  “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

  “I don’t much care where—” said Alice.

  “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

  “—so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.

  “Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

  Alice felt that this could not be denied, so she tried another question. “What sort of people live about here?”

  “In that direction,” the Cat said, waving its right paw round, “lives a Hatter: and in that direction,” waving the other paw, “lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad.”

  “But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

  “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here.”

  Amen to that, my dears. We may be irrational, but we can be reasonable, too, and we can laugh. If we’ve forgotten about that somewhere along the way, children can remind us. Children can show us how.

  Notes

  Happy Endings? Of Course, and Also Joy

  First published in the New York Times Book Review, November 8, 1970.

  “There is no such thing”: P. L. Travers, “A Kind of Visitation” (a review of The Animal Family by Randall Jarrell), New York Times Book Review, November 21, 1965.

  “muddy streams of conciousness”: Isaac Bashevis Singer, “I See the Child as a Last Refuge,” Signposts to Criticism of Children’s Literature. Ed. R. Bator (Chicago: American Library Association, 1983), 50–54.

  The Child as Chimpanzee

  First published under the title “How Can We Write Children’s Books If We Don’t Know Anything About Children?” in Publishers Weekly, vol. 200, no. 3 (July 19, 1971), 64–66.

  The Great American Novel for Children—and Why Not?

  Presented at the Loughborough International Summer Seminar on Children’s Literature, Towson State College, 1973. Reprinted in the Horn Book Magazine, vol. 50, no. 2 (March/April 1974), 176–185.

  “What makes [works of literature] great”: Van Wyck Brooks, The Writer in America (New York: Dutton, 1953), 20, 26–27.

  “popular success”: Brooks, Writer in America, 161.

  “Life begins with a cry”: Arnold Gesell and Frances L. Ilg, The Child from Five to Ten (New York: Harper, 1946), 276, 301.

  “Good stories”: Gesell and Ilg, Child from Five, 302.

  “Art that merely soothes”: Anthony Burgess, “For Permissiveness, with Misgivings,” New York Times Magazine, July 1, 1973, 19–20.

  You Must Go Home Again

  The Miriam A. Wessel Lecture, Detroit Public Library, April 1978. Reprinted under the title “The Fantastic Voyage” in the Five Owls, vol. 1, no. 6 (July/August 1987).

  “What we want”: Russell P. MacFall, To Please A Child: A Biography of L. Frank Baum, Royal Historian of Oz (Chicago: Reilly & Lee, 1961), 131.

  “the forgotten language”: Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence (New York: Random House, 1977), 180.

  “Myths are things”: Sagan, Dragons of Eden, 7.

  Saying What You Think

  Presented at the Library of Congress, November 16, 1981, for National Children’s Book Week. Reprinted in the Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, vol. 39, no. 2 (Spring 1982), 80–89.

  The Way We Were—and Weren’t

  Presented at the Everychild Conference, 1985. Reprinted, in edited form, under the title “Who is ‘The Child’?” in the Horn Book Magazine, vol. 62, no. 2 (March/April 1986), 161–166.

  Something Has to Happen

  First published in the Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 9 (1985), 7–10.

  The Roots—and Branches—of Fantasy

  First published under the title “The Roots of Fantasy” in the Children’s Literature Assembly Bulletin, vol. 12, no. 2 (Spring 1986), 2–4.

  Easy Does It

  Presented at the Missouri Library Association Conference, 1986. Reprinted in Top of the News, American Library Association, vol. 43 (Summer 1987).

  Metamorphosis

  Presented at Simmons College, 1987. Reprinted, in edited form, in the Horn Book Magazine, vol. 64, no. 5 (September/October 1988), 582–589.

  A Question from Justine

  Keynote address, Annual Reading and Writing Conference for Teacher
s, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 1987. Reprinted as “The Mad Tea Party Maxim: Or How Books Don’t Always Mean What the Writer Intended” in Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 22, no. 2 (1991), 89–96.

  “Children’s literature is a complicated”: Hamida Bosmajian, “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Other Excremental Visions,” Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 9 (1985), 36.

  “the universal subconscious fear”: Michael Tunnell, “Books in the Classroom,” Horn Book Magazine, vol. 63, no. 4 (July/August 1987), 509.

  The Purpose of Literature—and Who Cares?

  Anne Carroll Moore Lecture, The New York Public Library, 1989. Reprinted in School Library Journal, vol. 36, no. 3 (March 1990), 150–152.

  “because there are no easy solutions”: Mark Jonathan Harris, “It’s So Much Easier to Write about the Rich,” New York Times Book Review, November 12, 1989.

  Darkness and Light

  Not previously published.

  Protecting Children’s Literature

  Presented at Simmons College, 1990. Reprinted in the Horn Book Magazine, vol. 66, no. 6 (November/December 1990), 696–703.

  Beacons of Light

  Presented at Simmons College, 1993.

  Finding Paths

  Presented at Children’s Literature New England, Radcliffe College, 1999.

  New World, No World

  Presented at Simmons College, 2001.

  “If you say something negative”: Robin Finn, “Filmmakers Tremble, and Gladiators Fall Apart,” New York Times Book Review, May 16, 2001.