Wild Things!
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“It is, to be sure, one of the greatest fear-based fables ever written for kids,” Staake has reflected. “The short stories in the book are intended to cut right to the chase — absolutely NO shades of gray. Suck your thumbs and they’ll get lopped off. Daydream and you’ll drown. Play with matches and you’ll be reduced to ashes — which will then cause your cats to cry.” Or, as Ellen Handler Spitz notes, the stories place the moral power into the hands of child readers.
The important thing to remember here is that Staake’s book was intended for an adult audience who would appreciate how strange and peculiar these stories really were, even if, as Spitz notes, one of Struwwelpeter’s appeals for children is that it challenges them in ways that adults can no longer remember. Yet true to form, children found ways of getting their hands on it anyway. Children use books to discover the rules by which the world works, then delight in finding stories that subvert those same rules. Hence the existence of all those fractured fairy tales out there in the world. For a child, subversive books are delightful, precisely because they break the rules and no one stops them. It’s the adults who find them so horrific and cast aspersions on the Silversteins, Dahls, and Ungerers. All the more reason to be delighted when we spot contemporary authors and illustrators making the most out of shocking their readers.
Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, is one such author. It’s not surprising that the man who created A Series of Unfortunate Events — which chronicles the adventures of orphans Sunny, Violet, and Klaus Baudelaire in thirteen dark-humored and misery-filled volumes — was a young fan of Edward Gorey, another author who initially set out to write for adults, yet whose tales of death, distraction, diabolical destruction, and debauchery in a highly stylized and very droll world were ultimately appropriated by children. Handler, who writes his tales of the Baudelaire children in a tone that he describes as “dire and ridiculous,” told Marcus that as a child he appreciated Gorey’s deadpan humor: “What’s so perfect about The Gashlycrumb Tinies is that he says, ‘Isn’t it awful that all of these children have been killed in such terrible ways — and now let me list them alphabetically for you to help you learn the alphabet!’ It’s all the more hilarious because he never says, ‘Oh, isn’t this hilarious?’ Books that were pitched as hilarious were never as funny to me as books that had a deadpan feel to them, like Roald Dahl saying, ‘Isn’t it awful that that peach ran over those two wicked aunts?’ or, ‘Thank goodness it ran them over.’ He never says, ‘Isn’t it funny?’ He lets you decide. Books that called themselves ‘goofy’ mortified me when I was a child, and they still mortify me.”
Also mortifying to some is that today there are still parents, librarians, and booksellers who expect a certain degree of “standards.” It's not so much the expectation or existence of standards that is problematic. The problem is agreeing on what those standards ought to be. Children’s literature has, after all, always been populated with gatekeepers of every stripe, worried about sending the “right” message to their kids through books. However, as Randall Jarrell once wrote, children’s stories are full of sorcerers and ogres because their lives are. Sometimes the defeat of those ogres, whether it qualifies as a “positive message” or not, is just what the doctor ordered. Maybe not Doc Hoffmann, but at least we know he — and the Scissor-Man — make house calls for contemporary children who want a good, outrageous laugh.
And as Staake himself says, “I’ve received letters from parents who did give Der Struwwelpeter to their kids, who were delighted, perplexed, or horrified by it. Couldn’t ask for better responses than that.”
Tales of plagiarism, ghostwriting, and flubbed manuscripts are perhaps more closely associated in the public mind with the world of literature for adults. Typically one does not expect to encounter sordid stories when dealing with the seemingly safe and sweet world of books for children. Yet as these four tales show, even the most beloved classic may have something lurking in its history. Here’s a glimpse of how classics like Harry Potter, Madeline, and the Little House books, as well as young adult fare, involving Anonymous and The Pigman, have all kept a little something hidden from the public eye.
Accusations of Plagiarism in Children’s Books
An old adage says if you sat an infinite number of monkeys in front of typewriters for an infinite period of time, one of them would randomly type Hamlet. Of course that would be impossible to prove. It would be hard enough to round up an infinite number of monkeys — but where in the world could we find any typewriters, considering they haven’t been manufactured since 2011?
But the idea still stands, and considering the nearly infinite number of children’s-book writers pounding away at keyboards with monkey-like abandon, we’re surprised there aren’t more cases where plots, scenes, or pages of dialect don’t accidentally duplicate material that has already been written and published. Yet allegations of plagiarism are quite rare in the children’s book world.
But another adage, a relatively recent one, does apply: Follow the money! As soon as a children’s book becomes hugely successful, an author receives a big advance, or a book gets made into a movie, people start yelling “Plagiarism!”
Ever since Harry Potter burst into the public consciousness, a number of writers have accused J. K. Rowling of borrowing their material.
Fantasy master Terry Pratchett noted, “When the HP wagon began to roll, a lot of journalists who knew little or nothing about children’s books took a look at them and said, ‘Great stuff! A school for wizards! Hey! Pet dragons! Magic streets! Fantastic!’ Which was rather strange, because none of this was exactly new.” But Pratchett steered clear of accusing Rowling of plagiarism, stating, “Writers have always put a new spin on old ideas. I can think of a dozen pre-Hogwarts ‘Magic schools.’ Some of them are pre-Unseen University, too. It doesn’t matter. No one is stealing from anyone. It’s a shared heritage.”
However, a couple of other authors did not see it the same way and filed lawsuits against Rowling. One was American Nancy Stouffer, who alleged that Rowling had ripped off The Legend of Rah and the Muggles and Larry Potter and His Best Friend Lilly, both self-published in 1984. The Harry/Larry coincidence was interesting, but Stouffer’s conviction that she’d created the word Muggles was somewhat ridiculous, considering there was a character with that name in Carol Kendall’s brilliant fantasy novel, The Gammage Cup, which was named a Newbery Honor in 1960. Stouffer’s claims buzzed around Rowling like an annoying cloud of gnats for several years until her case was dismissed in a summary judgment, never even going to trial, because she not only lacked sufficient evidence, but also had falsified documents she submitted to the courts. An additional plagiarism case, charging that Rowling had borrowed a portion of the plot of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire from The Adventures of Willy the Wizard: Livid Land by the late British writer Adrian Jacobs, was also dismissed.
Another mega–best-selling author (and that seems to be the key word in modern plagiarism cases: mega–best-selling), Stephenie Meyer, was accused of stealing the plot of her Twilight series novel Breaking Dawn from “The Nocturne,” a vampire story that Jordan Scott had written and posted online as a teenager. This case was also dismissed.
An entirely different kettle of fish is what happens when a person is accused not of stealing someone else’s work but of writing it for them. “Anonymous” was how the author of Go Ask Alice was billed in 1971, and the book remains one of the most popular works of young adult literature to this day. Presented in diary form, it’s a “This is your brain. . . . This is your brain on drugs” propaganda piece, written with the subtlety of a jackhammer and is at times hilariously over-the-top. Purported to be a real diary kept by a real girl, the book’s origins still remain somewhat mysterious — but everyone in the literary world agrees this is no “real” diary. In fact, the book appeared to be the brainchild of Beatrice Sparks, a youth counselor with a PhD who claimed the diary was kept by one of her patients, although she admitted to fictionalizing some element
s of the story. When asked to provide proof of the diary’s authenticity, Sparks said she destroyed part of it herself and the rest is locked in a vault at the publishing house. Sparks’s credibility was further damaged when, over successive years, she published a number of other “anonymous” teen diaries on subjects such as satanism, eating disorders, and AIDS.
A new kink in the story came to light in 1998 with the publication of Beauty Queen, another inexplicably popular novel of teen drug addiction. This novel was written by a picture-book author named Linda Glovach, whose jacket-flap bio identifies her as “co-author of Go Ask Alice.” Co-author? Which was she — Anon or Ymous? And what was her connection to Dr. Sparks? Despite Beauty Queen’s popularity, Glovach kept a low profile and apparently never publicly addressed her contributions to Go Ask Alice. On the back cover of her novel, Glovach provides this spicy blurb: “Writing the book, I saw my old dope dealer and bought $1,500 worth of pure heroin — Brown Gold — and started shooting up ten times a day to get the feel of the book. Well, I did, all right. I ended up in Glen Cove General, almost dead. In truth, you make a deal with the Devil. He takes away your pain, but he owns you. You live for the next fix. After a while, it’s totally physical; your body has to have it. But I’m off it for good.”
No follow-up novel to Beauty Queen has since been forthcoming.
The Pigman’s “Ghost”
or
Mr. Pignati Didn’t Deserve This Kind of Legacy
Speaking of writers acknowledged and otherwise, it was a scandal at the time, and it remains a mystery to this day: Who exactly wrote the Paul Zindel novel The Pigman’s Legacy?
The story begins one evening in the mid-1960s when author Crescent Dragonwagon sat watching a television production of Paul Zindel’s harrowing yet triumphant drama, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, with her mother, legendary children’s book editor Charlotte Zolotow: “I remember Charlotte moving from leaning back into the couch to sitting up straight, almost rigid, transfixed — pointing like a spaniel. ‘There,’ she said, ‘is someone who really understands how teenagers feel. I have to contact him about doing young adult books for us.’ And she did.”
With Zolotow’s encouragement, the young playwright began his first novel, a poignant yet screamingly hilarious story of two teenagers who befriend a lonely old man named Angelo Pignati. Zindel called his manuscript Pardon Me, You’re Stepping on My Eyeball. His publishers suggested using Mr. Pignati’s nickname as the book’s title instead. So the book became The Pigman, and Zindel ended up saving his preferred title for another young adult novel several years later.
The Pigman was that rarest of rare things — a book embraced equally by harsh professional critics and those even harsher critics: kids. An instant classic, it set a benchmark for young adult literature. Author M. E. Kerr credits Zindel’s novel for her entry into books for young people: “I’d read The Pigman and I wanted to try and write something that good.” But what kids wanted was, of course, what kids often want: more of the same. Young readers wanted, needed, were desperate to know what next happened to Zindel’s protagonists John and Lorraine, and the clamor for a sequel was deafening. Finally, in 1980, a full dozen years after the release of his first book, Zindel published The Pigman’s Legacy. While the sequel may have answered the question “What happened next?” it was hard to believe that this anemic and undistinguished book had been written by the same author who created The Pigman.
. . . Or was it?
In May 1980, the New York Times reported that Paul Zindel was being sued by a twenty-six-year-old former neighbor named Dominic Lagotta, who claimed he had ghostwritten the first draft of The Pigman’s Legacy. Seeking over one million dollars in damages and co-authorship credit, Lagotta said he had been paid ten thousand dollars to write the manuscript and claimed that in the end the final product “contains 75 percent of his plot and 22 percent of the draft, word for word.”
Dominic Lagotta’s lawsuit was settled out of court with the provision that none of the parties involved ever discuss the case. The Pigman’s Legacy remains in print to this day. Yet the question remains: Did Lagotta write much of Zindel’s book? Dominic’s still not talking (we know, ’cause we asked him!) and Paul Zindel died in 2003. And as every detective knows, dead men tell no tales.
Little Ghostwriter on the Prairie?
Dominic Lagotta was neither the first nor the last ghostwriter to dabble in the field of children’s books. Laura Ingalls Wilder is such a revered figure in the world of children’s books that it seems almost sacrilegious to suggest that the beloved author of the Little House series had a little help in their creation. But common sense suggests otherwise. While it’s true that Wilder had already evidenced some talent in writing freelance pieces for local newspapers in her middle age, her stunning career as a children’s book author did not begin until she was well past sixty. It probably helped that Laura’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, was a professional writer whose credits included numerous sales to the era’s top magazines, as well as novels (Let the Hurricane Roar, 1932) and many biographical volumes that she ghostwrote for notable individuals such as Henry Ford. So it’s not surprising that Rose would help her mother, whom she called “Mama Bess,” revise a handwritten autobiographical piece entitled “Pioneer Girl” that she’d composed about her prairie childhood, with an eye toward selling it as a magazine serial. At one point, the two women discussed using some of the material for a picture book; a submission to Knopf resulted in an editorial suggestion to expand the story into a novel.
There is no question that Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote the first draft of what would become Little House in the Big Woods all on her own. Rose then revised the book — reportedly in less than a week.
Rose’s participation in Mama Bess’s books may have been questioned at the time (Rose would only admit to having an “advisory” role in the writing), but the amount of assistance she provided was not fully documented until recent decades in books such as The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane by William Holtz (1993) and Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman Behind the Legend by John E. Miller (1998). According to Holtz, “Almost everything we admire about the Little House books — the pace and rhythm of the narrative line, the carefully nuanced flow of feeling, the muted drama of daily life — are created by what Mama Bess called Rose’s ‘fine touch,’ as shining fiction is made from her mother’s tangle of fact. Laura Ingalls Wilder remained a determined but amateurish writer to the end.” John E. Miller gives Laura a bit more credit, stating that by the time the last volume, published as These Happy Golden Years, was written, Rose contributed only minimal revisions, suggesting that “perhaps Laura had achieved her goal of writing better.”
But even Miller admits that the two women worked hard to manufacture the pretense that the work was Laura’s alone. When not staying with parents in Mansfield, Missouri, Rose would work on the manuscripts in New York, then send them back home so that Laura could mail them to her publisher from Missouri, “careful to maintain the illusion that these books were entirely her mother’s work.” He also provides some pithy excerpts from personal letters Rose and Laura wrote. In one letter to a friend, Rose speaks disparagingly about wrapping up work on one of them and seems to resent the amount of time it takes away from her own writing. In a letter to Rose, Mama Bess nearly pleads with her to do whatever necessary to make the story better.
Perhaps scholars and readers will always argue about the true authorship of the series and who exactly wrote what, but what surely can’t be denied is that, between them, mother and daughter created a series of enduring American classics of children’s literature.
Something Is Not Right: A Madeline Mystery
Ludwig Bemelmans won the 1954 Caldecott Medal for Madeline’s Rescue. But that book did not mark Madeline’s first appearance in print. Do you know the book that introduced Madeline to the reading public? You do? Well, go to the bookshelf and bring it back over here. We’ll wait.
Ludwig Bemelmans’s 1939 picture book Madeline?
Wrong! Madeline actually made her debut in The Golden Basket — a short, picture-filled novel from 1936 that won its creator a Newbery (not Caldecott!) Honor.
As it happens, we wouldn’t even have the beloved stories of Madeline and the old house in Paris that was covered in vines, along with the twelve little girls in two straight lines, if it hadn’t been for author-illustrator Ludwig Bemelmans’s own close call. It all started, according to his Caldecott acceptance speech, on a quest for the ingredients of a fish stew. Bemelmans was bicycling during a summer vacation on the Île d’Yeu with a sack of lobsters slung over his shoulder when he collided with a bakery truck, a four-horsepower Super Rosengart, the island’s only automobile. During his subsequent hospital stay, he met a nun, whom he later slipped into his book as the one bringing Madeline her tray. In the adjoining room at the hospital, a small girl was recuperating from — you guessed it — appendicitis, showing off her incision with great pride. And on the ceiling of his hospital room, he could see a crack that looked like a rabbit, which also appears in Madeline. It wasn’t until two years later that Bemelmans put these experiences on paper and wrote the book, even including Léon Blum, the three-time prime minister of France with whom he had visited, as the doctor who comes running to Madeline’s bed.