by Betsy Bird
At Elaine’s, there is one famous house rule. At a place where table-hopping and squeezing in at a table to join even the vaguest of friends (“Mind if I join you?”) is very much de rigueur, it is not done at Woody Allen’s table. Even on the way to the Gents, nothing more than a side glance at the brooding figure of Woody Allen, mournfully glancing down at his chicken francese, which I am told is his favorite dish, is permissible. To interrupt his meal by leaning over and saying, “Hi ya, Woody, how’s it going?” would be unheard of. . . . But I thought of Spinelli’s $425, and the long trip up on Amtrak, and the $5 left in the savings account, and the half-finished manuscript in its typewriter-paper cardboard box.
“Woody,” I said, “forgive me. This is Jerry Spinelli, the writer from Philadelphia.” Woody looked up slowly. It was done very dramatically, as if he were looking up from under the brim of a large hat.
“Yes,” he said evenly. “I know.”
Some time later, George Plimpton received a letter from Spinelli saying that his first book, Space Station Seventh Grade, had been released. Within a few more years, he was one of the most famous names in children’s literature, eventually winning the 1991 Newbery Medal and a Newbery Honor in 1998.
ARE WE SELLING CHILDREN SHORT?
Celebrity children’s book publishing may be the new reality — as well as an impetus for the heretofore relatively insulated world of children’s book publishing to learn about the hard-knock-life world of competitive publishing — but to that we still say: Will someone please think of the children? They deserve, at all times, the very best we can give them. Or, as Walter de la Mare once said, “Only the rarest kind of best in anything can be good enough for the young.” And let us take a moment to quote some wisdom from two of his cohorts: A. A. Milne once said, “Whatever fears one has, one need not fear that one is writing too well for a child, any more than one need fear that one is becoming almost too lovable.” And Michael Bond, the creator of Paddington Bear, has written, “Children hate being written down to or made to feel they are being patronized. . . . They also — quite rightly — dislike being sold short.”
In other words, it’s the poor tots of the world who not only have to read the often patronizing, flat prose offered by most celebrity authors, but also simply do not understand the connection between the author and celebrity status — unlike the parent, who most likely is buying the book simply based on the fact that they adore that particular celebrity, no matter his or her talent (or lack thereof) with the pen. However, author Jennifer Armstrong counters, “Not all readers are sensitive souls for whom a beautiful image cycle or extended metaphor is an awakening. Not everybody in the world has to like excellent books. It’s OK if there are people who never buy a book unless it’s connected to a celebrity. (I don’t expect to hang out with them, but you never know.) As long as they aren’t the only books on the market, I say live and let live.”
Could the whole phenomenon be even more pernicious than it seems on the surface? Amanda Craig, novelist and children’s book critic, thinks so. In 2010, she weighed in on celebrity children’s books, writing that — while celebrities sometimes turn to children’s books in an attempt to repair a varnished reputation (the Duchess of York, post-royal-toe-sucking scandal) or to project an altogether newer, more wholesome image (Geri Halliwell in pushing her philanthropist persona with her series about Ugenia Lavender, based on Halliwell herself) — children may take on the author as a role model. “An exchange happens between corruption and innocence, which is to the advantage of the celebrity and to the disadvantage of the child,” Craig writes. “Someone like. . . Madonna is introduced into a child’s life and made normal to them.” Publishers who publish such books, Craig posits, are actively participating in the “pornification” of young girls, a term taken from Natasha Walter’s 2010 book on sexism, Living Dolls.
[Publishers] fail to see that [books by this type of celebrity] lead to breast enlargements, pole dancing and all the most nauseating forms of celebrity antics looking acceptable and desirable to impressionable children. However tempting it may look to add celebrity names to a publishing list, it should be resisted. They are not only a form of vanity publishing, but a craven collusion in celebrity re-branding which makes books themselves tawdry.
Sure, many condescending children’s books exist, written by folks who don’t have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. But do publishers have to pour salt in this wound by glutting the market with celebrity books, which are usually touted in such overreaching, ridiculous ways (think along the lines of “a classic for the ages” or “an inspirational story for new generations”)? For authors who have endured plenty of rejection notices, it’s difficult to see a celebrity author get loads of attention, particularly television time, to promote his or her new book.
In 2010, the day after receiving the two most distinguished children’s book awards in the U.S. for their writing, singled out by the American Library Association for their excellence, newly minted Newbery Award–winning author Rebecca Stead and Caldecott winner Jerry Pinkney were asked only one question apiece on The Today Show in a segment a little more than two minutes long. During the same episode, Whoopi Goldberg was given over five minutes of talk time to promote her new children’s book. In 2011, many children’s lit enthusiasts eagerly tuned in to The Today Show to see its annual interviews, if brief and sometimes bumbling, of the Caldecott and Newbery winners (the winners that year being, respectively, Erin E. Stead and Clare Vanderpool). Much to their dismay, no such interviews were aired, NBC stating they were booked solid that week. Anyone looking for such interviews the day following the big awards announcements, which is when The Today Show typically aired them, were instead subjected to an interview with MTV reality star Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, given air time to discuss her new book, in which she schooled Matt Lauer in the meaning of “badonk” and admitted the novel she co-wrote was, essentially, 289 pages of Jersey Shore, the reality show upon which it was based.
“I’m not against anyone writing a book,” said British author Philip Pullman. “If they write a good book and people like it, then that’s wonderful. Unfortunately, the chances are with books of this kind is that it won’t be good, and even if it says on the front that a celebrity has written it, the chances are that they haven’t actually written it. The pity is that publishers throw so much money at books of this kind, and serious writers, who depend on the publishers to make their living and who have real talent, are getting sidelined.”
As for us, we don’t mind if one or two preternaturally talented celebrities choose to write the odd picture books for small-fry. However, a glut of poorly written, hyped-up books makes for an unhappy market, an unhappy job for discerning gatekeepers, unhappy authors — those without bodyguards, mind you — slaving for years over their own manuscripts, and unhappy children, who have to hear from someone like Tori Spelling about how to “be yourself.”
Besides, folks like Ms. Spelling may be missing out on the one big secret of writing for children anyway. As Jon Scieszka once noted, children are unrelenting critics, and they do not care about the number of movies or television shows in which someone has starred, dahling. They just want to read a good book. It was with sincerity that Jon spoke: “So, welcome, Jay. Good luck, Madonna. Best wishes, Jerry. Glad to see you, Billy. Come on, Whoopi. Do your best, you celebrity children’s book writers. You have nothing to fear, except maybe standing in front of an audience that doesn’t really know and doesn’t really care who you are — with nothing but the words and pictures in the book in front of you. Go get ’em, kids!”
If people weren’t interested in fucking, they wouldn’t have children and we wouldn’t need children’s books.
— Tomi Ungerer
Sex and death. Here we have two constants responsible for some of the greatest art humanity has ever produced, and we include art meant for children in that statement. Taken as a whole, humans are just as fascinated by the one as they are by the other. Humans are also a
s prone to the one as to the other, and that includes writers of every stripe. If folks feel all too inclined to set the authors and illustrators of their favorite children’s books upon a pedestal, that is not a bad thing to do in theory. Yet in practice it means that these people aren’t allowed to be human. There’s a feeling that if you are not “good” as a children’s author in the strict moral sense of the word, then you cannot possibly be creatively “good” as a children’s author. Yet some of our greatest children’s authors, the ones you might find in the canon of literature for youth, were grown-ups with grown-up tendencies. They were human. They wrote tawdry material when they were first starting out, had fun when they could, and lived strange double lives.
And then they died. Death is one thing. What you do with your death, or the death of others, is another matter entirely.
In our first two interludes, we looked at instances of stories intended to be hidden from the public eye. Flip your perceptions and now the stories hidden from the public eye aren’t for children at all. With tales of sex, age, and death, we come to the most adult of stories, some left unknown and forgotten for years and years.
Sex
Young Lyndon would have been called precocious in her day, though in describing herself later, she probably said she was merely curious. A voracious reader, she would look into books on her father’s shelf with names like Twelve Deathbed Scenes. Or, while her mother took her afternoon nap, she would sneak into her room to read the love stories there, which she sought out not because they were interesting “but because they were so dull. . . . I was ensnared, as a snake is by a snake charmer, by such a distorted view of life.” But the book that really did it for her was the Bible. The stories in that particular tome had not been written with young Australian schoolgirls in mind, and so she found herself diving into tales that enthralled and perplexed her, sometimes to the point where she needed some clarification. Having learned that David “took concubines” and that Solomon had some three hundred of his own, naturally Lyndon wanted to know what precisely a concubine was. Her father attempted to explain but in his fumbling managed to make the profession sound as if concubines were hardly more than just servants. Lyndon speculated aloud that it was a pity her father kept only two, then, the maids Katie and Bella. When he protested, with increasing discomfort, that they weren’t concubines at all, she asked in frustration, “ ‘Well, father, who are your concubines?’ ‘I have no concubines!’ he roared and stormed out of the room.” All this she would recall with pleasure years later, and it may set the scene for some of the more shocking writings she indulged in at the beginning of her career as an author.
Author Pamela Lyndon Travers can be a difficult woman to pin down and an even harder one to read. Actress, shocking writer, beloved creator of Mary Poppins. One way to get a grasp on her personality, however, is to place her life in the context of her times. An actress at heart, Travers was able to escape her family (and some social mores) and take her act to the stage, performing as Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Lady Macduff in Macbeth in the early 1920s. In time Pamela (who found the name “Lyndon” inappropriate for the stage’s limelight) also wrote lurid poems and stories for newspapers that had an interest.
Travers knew how to include erotic content when she wanted to. A local newspaper The Triad handed her her very own regular series called “A Woman Hits Back.” Given free rein to write whatever she wanted, Travers wrote poems that spoke of women swooning “deep in an ecstasy of love” and would include selections as luscious as this:
The clip clip of fastenings giggling deliciously as they fly apart. . . and then the silky hush of intimate things, fragrant with my fragrance, steal softly down, so loath to rob me of my last dear concealment. . . but there is left this flower white, flower pink, radiant shy thing, tremulous. It’s Me, Me, Me! . . . Ah, darling God, how dear of you to make me! My sobbing laughter is buried in the pillow’s lavender. Life is so sweet. . . so sweet. . . God!
Travers knew that such writings were just the means to an end, and by saving enough money through acting and writing she was able to fulfill her lifelong dream of traveling to faraway England. From there she would pen poetry and eventually create one of the world’s most memorable characters, a woman who was part witch, part mother, and entirely modern — Mary Poppins, the world’s most memorable nanny, and a character who could not have come into being without the existence of stories that she, no doubt, would have disapproved of.
If we were to dub a picture-book author-illustrator with the title Least Uptight Square (admittedly outdated though that term may be), we would have to cast our lot with the irrepressible Wanda Gág. Though not exactly a household name herself, her picture book Millions of Cats has remained a classic since its late 1920s publication. The story involves a man who acquires “millions and billions and trillions of cats.” Its author, too, knew a bit about excess.
Born in 1893 in New Ulm, Minnesota, to Bohemian parents (which is to say, they were actually from Bohemia), Gág grew to become one of the greatest printmakers of the 1920s and ’30s. An artist who truly earned her “bohemian” label, she was tapped in 1928 by editor Ernestine Evans at Coward-McCann, to try her hand at a picture book. She managed on her first try to produce a classic. Millions of Cats sold well right from the start, with ten thousand copies in January of 1929 and fifteen thousand in February. Today, children wishing to learn more about her can read the picture-book biography Wanda Gág: The Girl Who Loved to Draw by Deborah Kogan Ray. And like all good picture-book bios, it does not tell the full, very adult, story.
Artists tap into their creative veins in a number of different ways. For Gág, sex was key. As biographer Audur H. Winnan says in Wanda Gág: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Prints, “Her life revolved around her work and her sex life, sometimes in the reverse order.” As proof, we have her diaries. In them, Gág recounts everything in her life, and we do mean everything. Her frank entries about various affairs don’t feel early twentieth century. Heck, they don’t feel particularly late twentieth century. This is twenty-first-century fare. For example:
Two men in the subway took such liberties as the morning jam often affords. The second one slid his hand up and down my thighs and came very near to the middle. I turned around — I don’t know why, for I was half enjoying it and rather hoped I would have the courage to let him get there.
Gág recorded pretty much everything, though she would use code from time to time. “Treetop” was sex, “Linga” and “Youri” for male and female parts (as in “My Youri has become very voluptuous by this time and is not used to being totally neglected”). It’s amazing to ponder that these diaries even exist, since some of their caretakers were also former lovers who wouldn’t have minded doing away with them altogether.
We would quote some more of the passages for you, but the pages of this book might ignite. Suffice it to say, no Harlequin romance novel was ever quite so frank.
When we think of Roald Dahl, we sometimes imagine a bald, gangly Englishman with a penchant for the absurd. Go back a little in time, however, and Roald Dahl wasn’t just attractive. The man was smokin’. Roald Dahl was a wounded RAF pilot and diplomat serving with the British Embassy in Washington, D.C. Bored out of his skull and prone to getting in trouble, he expressed interest in doing something a little more covert. Somewhat surprisingly, he got his wish, though as one agent warned him, “If you join us, you mustn’t be afraid of forgery, and you mustn’t be afraid of murder.” Working for the British Security Coordination (BSC), Dahl had a simple job. He was to help mount a secret propaganda program to convince America to go to war. Britain desperately needed America’s help to defeat Hitler, but isolationist viewpoints in the U.S. stood in the way. So alongside compatriots like Noel Coward, Dahl helped as the BSC influenced journalists, plotted against companies that did business with Nazi Germany, and planted propaganda in newspapers and radio programs.
Then there were the women. Yes, Dahl definitely had to sleep with wome
n. A lot of them, apparently. And “had” isn’t too strong a word. He enjoyed the interest of a fair number of ladies, spy or no spy. He was of Norwegian and Scottish ancestry, claiming that his mother was descended from Sir William Wallace’s illegitimate son. Antoinette Marsh Haskell, daughter of Dahl’s friend the Texas oil tycoon Charles Edward Marsh, commented, “I think he slept with everybody on the East and West Coasts that had more than fifty thousand dollars a year.” Among his conquests was the Standard Oil heiress Millicent Rogers, who gave him a Tiffany gold key to her front door.
Once the BSC got word of his special “abilities” (shall we say), he was instructed to romance the congresswoman Clare Booth Luce. Luce had raised a red flag overseas by criticizing British colonialism, particularly in India. She sat on the House of Military Affairs Committee and spoke out vociferously for American “air sovereignty,” which also didn’t sit well overseas. If only she could be convinced to see the British position. The solution? Dahl was tapped to tap Luce. He was not entirely thrilled with the proposition, later telling Texan lawyer Creekmore Fath, “I am all fucked out. That goddam woman has absolutely screwed me from one end of the room to another for three goddam nights.” When he complained to the ambassador, the response was, “Roald, did you see the Charles Laughton movie of Henry VIII? . . . Well, do you remember the scene with Henry going into the bedroom with Anne of Cleves, and he turns and says, ‘the things I’ve done for England’? Well that’s what you’ve got to do.”
Mention The Cricket in Times Square and watch the smiles appear as fans recall its upbeat tone and honest child-friendly appeal. From the Garth Williams illustrations to its tale of a musical Manhattanite cricket and the friends he makes, this book truly earns its moniker of “beloved classic” (though it is admittedly difficult to ignore the now-all-too-dated racist attitudes that dot the text).
