Wild Things!

by Betsy Bird

  Clarke may have squandered much of his money, but at least there could be no doubt that Brown’s will was legitimate. When it comes to the great classics of children’s literature, however, some folks are willing to do anything to get their hands on a little sweet kid-lit dough.

  Do you remember the Rose? The lovely little flower that the Little Prince, from the book of the same name, devotes himself to, in spite of her vanity and insecurity? We know now that characters like Christopher Robin and Alice in Wonderland were based on real children. Yet sometimes characters can be based on real adults as well, and in the history of children’s literature, one of the most duplicitous and daring was none other than Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, the wife of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The clear inspiration for her husband’s literary flora, Consuelo embraced her role, even going so far as to write an autobiography called The Tale of the Rose: The Passion That Inspired the Little Prince.

  There is no denying that Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry was beautiful. She was also a liar. If you asked her how she met her husband, she made sure never to tell the same story twice. She could make up elaborate stories of their courtship (forty-eight at one count), never countered by Antoine, since he left no records of their early years together behind after his death. As an example of Consuelo’s propensity for exaggeration, however, when recounting her own life, she spoke of how she had been born prematurely in an earthquake in El Salvador, which in turn swallowed up her mother. Needless to say, no such earthquake appears on record at that time.

  And yet no one ever denied that Consuelo and her husband seemed very much in love. Indeed, it wasn’t ridiculous to find that after Saint-Exupéry’s disappearance in 1944, it looked as though he had left half of his royalties to his wife and half to his mother (who would split them with his sisters). Then, in 2009, one Jean-Claude Perrier penned a fascinating and revealing memoir of the great author. Les Mystères de Saint-Exupéry contained a great many revelations about the estate of Saint-Exupéry. Of particular note? Consuelo was not just a liar. She was a forger as well.

  The chronology works like this:

  • 1944 (July 31): Antoine de Saint-Exupéry disappears.

  • 1946: Consuelo suddenly produces two wills signed by Saint-Exupéry, dated January 1 and January 29, 1944. These are later proven to be gross fakes. She then sells the movie adaptation rights to The Little Prince to Paramount Studios.

  • 1947 (May): Saint-Exupéry’s mother, Marie de Saint-Exupéry, finds an accord with Consuelo where the rights are shared equally.

  Paramount had every reason to think that it was purchasing the movie-adaptation rights to The Little Prince from Consuelo back in 1946. In fact, it wasn’t until the new millennium, when Paramount wanted to make a film of The Little Prince, that the company discovered it might not own any rights at all. You see, while Consuelo was busy forging wills, the author’s mother was busy covering them up. A proper woman, Marie de Saint-Exupéry wanted to avoid the scandal that such a trial would have caused if she officially challenged Consuelo, so the two came to an agreement in May 1947 in which the literary rights of Saint-Exupéry would be shared equally.

  Looking at them today, the two fake wills are kind of fun. Consuelo was nothing if not creative. Will number one is a collage of a real letter from Antoine (he had a habit of not dating his letters), consisting of nineteen handwritten lines. Consuelo then added six lines of her own, which translate to “Consuelo, my wife: If I die far from you I bequeath my work to you. You are my only heir. Your husband. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. 1 January 44.”

  It took no particularly high-tech code breakers to crack these forgeries. Indeed, figuring out the fakes was a simple matter of just comparing the writings and examining the problems with the letters’ chronology.

  In will number two, another piece of evidence comes in the form of a drawing taken from The Little Prince bearing the words, “9/6/44 Where is my Consuelo? My wife my love. If I am killed Consuelo dear I bequeath my work to you, you are my sole heir. Your husband Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Take care of yourself, keep safe, protect yourself for me.” When specialists went over this drawing, they noted that whoever had drawn it sketched the image in pencil first and then went over it a second time with ink. Such a technique was not Saint-Exupéry’s style. So not only did Consuelo fake a will; she faked a Saint-Exupéry illustration as well.

  In the end, and in spite of all her work (and success!), Consuelo’s life ended with remarkably little money. She didn’t pay her taxes and asked the French government to forgive several years’ worth of them. Oddly, she made seemingly no attempt to publish her own memoir of her time with Saint-Exupéry, instead keeping her manuscript locked in a trunk for years. Certainly she had no savings and endured multiple threats by those willing to seize her property. In the coup de grâce, she was buried next to her second husband, Gómez Carrillo, in Père-Lachaise. Meanwhile, the body of Saint-Exupéry lay with his plane on the ocean floor off Marseilles near the Île de Riou until 1998, when a fisherman found a silver identity bracelet in his net containing the words “Antoine” and “Saint-Exupéry.” After the authenticity of the wreck was determined, in September of 2005 the plane was dredged up and its remains were placed at the Musée de l’Air at Paris-Le Bourget. Anyone who wishes to see it may do so today.

  My God, Max would be what now, forty-eight? He’s still unmarried, he’s living in Brooklyn. He’s a computer maven. He’s totally ungifted. He wears a wolf suit when he’s at home with his mother!

  — Maurice Sendak on his most famous picture-book protagonist

  It sometimes feels as though modern children’s literature can be divided into two eras: BP and AP.

  As in “Before Potter” and “After Potter.”

  That is how cataclysmically Harry Potter shook up the literary world.

  Sure, there have been plenty of children’s-book fads and phenomena over the years. In recent decades alone, there were Judy Blume and Goosebumps and Sweet Valley High and Animorphs, but the Potter series were the first children’s books that kept stores open late for midnight release parties, the first children’s books that adults read openly on subways and airplanes. They made author J. K. Rowling a billionaire. And that made nearly everyone sit up and take notice. Suddenly children’s books were part of popular culture — and the trend shows no signs of slowing down.

  HARRY POTTER: THE BESTSELLER IN THE BASEMENT

  For most of 1999 and 2000, the first three books in Rowling’s series dominated the New York Times bestseller list, with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone lodged so securely in the number-one slot that it frequently blocked such adult-book stalwarts as James Patterson, Danielle Steel, and Nicholas Sparks from the position they customarily held. But Harry’s reign came to an abrupt end on July 23, 2000. This wasn’t due to any slowdown in the series’ sales. If anything, they were about to get a huge bump with the imminent publication of Rowling’s fourth volume, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. But July 23 was the Sunday when, after sixty-eight years, the New York Times decided to move all children’s books to a separate bestseller list devoted only to kids’ books. A Salon magazine article summed it up nicely: “For many in the publishing business, the new bestseller list is the publishing equivalent of moving from a penthouse into a basement apartment.” Many cynics felt the move was mainly instituted to soothe the bruised egos of writers for adults who were getting their butts kicked by a boy wizard — not to mention their publishers, who could no longer use some valuable, time-tested phrases (“The #1 Bestseller, At Last in Paperback!”) in their advertising.

  Some felt the change would benefit children’s books. A former HarperCollins editor stated, “I’ve always looked at the New York Times’s best-seller list as wonderful free advertising. Now children’s books get it, too.” Lemony Snicket opined, “Just because adults are reading books that are on the kids’ list doesn’t seem to me a reason to keep it in the same category. The Story of O gets passed around among a lot of fourteen-ye
ar-old boys, and that doesn’t make it a book for children.” Some predicted that the Times would phase out their juvenile list once children’s books stopped outselling their adult counterparts, but the newspaper — to its credit — continues to publish this feature more than a decade later and has even added three additional lists for children’s picture books, paperbacks, and series. Though segregated from the adult books, the New York Times now does provide the books on these bestseller lists more “free advertising” and more of a mainstream presence than it ever gave children’s books in the years BP.

  SO THEY GOT THEIR OWN BESTSELLER LIST BACK, THEN TURNED RIGHT AROUND AND . . .

  With Harry Potter and his cronies banished to a separate list, you’d think that the regular authors of adult fare would now be happy as clams. No longer held back by a juvenile literary phenomenon, these authors could keep writing their grown-up mysteries and romances and continue vying for the top spot on the NYT weekly bestseller list.

  But it must have occurred to some of them that, during Harry’s reign, they were #2 (or #3 or #7 or #10) for a reason: they were clearly selling fewer copies than that novel about kids flying around on broomsticks.

  Fewer copies equals less money.

  If there was one thing J. K. Rowling — now the twelfth richest woman in Great Britain — had taught the literary world, it’s that there’s big money out there if you produce the right children’s book.

  So it’s not surprising that many writers for adults suddenly decided to try their hand at writing for children. Some defended this decision on highly principled grounds. James Patterson stated that he entered the field because his young son was not interested in reading. “It’s our responsibility as parents to get our kids to read. This one is big. Huge! We can’t wait for teachers or librarians or their peers to do it,” states the author, who, to his credit, also created a website to promote children’s books. But John Grisham, who ruled the Times bestseller list for much of his career, was refreshingly candid in explaining why he turned to children’s fiction. He noted that in the 1990s he was known as the world’s best-selling author and would “pretend. . . it was no big deal. Then along came Harry Potter, and suddenly I was number two. I’ve got to tell you, I really miss being number one. I’m going to catch Harry one way or another.”

  Grisham hasn’t yet caught Harry in children’s book sales, but he has appeared on the NYT children’s bestseller list, as have James Patterson, Pittacus Lore (a dual pseudonym, half of which belongs to James Frey), and a number of other authors, whose previous work was written for mature audiences. One wonders how these authors, unpracticed in the art of writing for children, were able to make such an easy transition to the children’s best-seller list. The two biggest factors are probably name recognition by parents and other adult-book buyers — and the kind of advertising budgets built into their book contracts of which most first-time children’s authors (or, let’s face it, even the most critically acclaimed Newbery winner) can only dream.

  Yet, when all is said and done, one must consider the irony of all those adult authors who resented Harry Potter topping their bestseller list now doing their darnedest to get their names atop the children’s list alongside Rowling.

  SIZE MATTERS

  Everything about the Harry Potter phenomenon was big: big bestsellers, big cultural impact, big movie sales. Even the books themselves were mammoth, often running over six and seven hundred pages in an era when the average children’s novel seldom hit two hundred. Volumes shelved beside these behemoths began looking downright puny and inconsequential in comparison. Then, in the years following Harry Potter’s success, something unusual happened: children’s books began to bulk up like ninety-eight-pound weaklings taking a Charles Atlas course. You don’t need a bibliographical reference or footnote to prove this one — just a shelf of books and a ruler. Compare almost any twentieth-century children’s book to a twenty-first-century book and you’ll notice the increased size and heft. It’s as if, once Harry proved that young readers don’t mind carrying around a book that could also serve as a weight-lifting instrument, every other author suddenly realized they could expound at greater length. A few of these books (M. T. Anderson’s Octavian Nothing novels come immediately to mind) are so full of plot, character, and thought that they truly deserve the extended pagination; many more seem wordy, self-indulgent, and in need of some good old-fashioned editing. Yet they do make a nice showing in bookstores, where their sheer size gives these volumes a sense of increased importance (plus more perceived bang for your buck) and helps attract adult readers.

  Harry Potter made it OK for grown-ups to read children’s books, but it was young adult books such as the Twilight series that really sealed the deal.

  OLD ADULTS AND THEIR YOUNG ADULT BOOKS

  Many writers dream of success. For young Mormon housewife Stephenie Meyer, a dream literally led to her success.

  One night in June 2003, Meyer had a dream about a girl in love with a vampire. Over the next few months, she expanded this vision into a novel about Bella, a chaste teenager who falls for the mysterious vampire Edward Cullen. Released in 2005, Twilight was not a surprise bestseller, but rather a novel that was expected to become — some would even say groomed to become — a great success from the word go. Why else would its heretofore-unknown author have been given an astonishing $750,000 three-book deal with publisher Little, Brown? And Twilight did not disappoint. Within a month of publication, the book appeared on the New York Times bestseller list (yeah, the children’s list) and continued selling so well that USA Today listed it as the top-selling book of 2008. It would have achieved that rank in 2009 as well, if it hadn’t been beaten by its sequel, New Moon (Bella, meet Werewolf). These books would be followed by two more series entries, Eclipse (initial print run: one million copies) and Breaking Dawn (first print run: 3.7 million copies).

  Critical response to the books was mixed. Both Publishers Weekly and School Library Journal named Twilight one of the best books of 2005, and many compared Meyer to J. K. Rowling. But Stephen King was unconvinced, stating, “The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer, and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn.” Many literary critics agreed. Not that it mattered, by that point. The books were already a phenomenon, spawning imitators, inspiring a huge fandom (they called themselves “Twihards”), and becoming even more successful in a blockbuster film franchise. By 2010, the two top baby names in the country were Isabella (the name of Twilight’s protagonist) and Jacob (the werewolf).

  Who, one wonders, was naming their infants after characters in a young adult novel?

  Teenage pregnancy is a troubling social issue, but could there really be so many high schoolers — so many literate, book-reading high schoolers — pushing out infants that they could also push “Isabella” and “Jacob” to the top of the baby-name list? Probably not. That achievement was much more likely due to the books’ twenty- and thirtysomething fans, of whom there are legion. They write fan fiction about the characters, post stills from the movies on their Facebook pages, and are part of the reason Twilight and its ilk can be found in both the adult and the children’s sections of libraries and bookstores. This crossover success has helped bring Meyer’s books — and a not-insignificant number of other young adult paranormal romances — into the mainstream. In a 2012 editorial about the never-ending question of how one delineates children’s and teen literature from literature for adults, Roger Sutton noted that this series for teenagers was responsible for the success of the adult blockbuster Fifty Shades of Grey, a book that began its life online as Twilight fan fiction. “What kind of a world is it when a novel for teenagers. . . inspires smut for adults?” he asked, adding, “How is anyone supposed to keep track of what goes under whose mattress?”

  The question remains: Is it merely a fad, or have children’s books truly arrived and become a permanent part of pop culture? If it’s a fad, it’s now lasted for almost a generation. That’s a very long time for a
trend to last.

  Consider also that the number of movies based on children’s books, old and new, continues to increase as well.

  Then there are all the adults who blog about children’s books. (Three of them are listed on the title page of this book.)

  There are also book clubs especially for adults who read children’s and YA novels.

  It may be too soon to say, but it appears that children’s books are part of the mainstream for good. And note the double meaning of those two words — “for good” — meaning “permanently,” but also alluding to the positive aspects of this trend. There is definitely something to be said for children having their own literature — a separate, secret, subversive world of their own. But there may also be some good in having a common ground of reading between children and adults: books discussed across generations; books that make adults say, “I remember,” and kids say, “Maybe someday. . . ”; books that provide a bridge and understanding. Books we all can share.

  THE NEXT HARRY POTTER

  Once Wall Street discovered how much money could be made from a children’s book, nothing was ever the same. Corporate types, who previously couldn’t be bothered to read a Dr. Seuss book to their own children, now became transfixed by the cover of Hop on Pop, wondering if the movie rights were available, envisioning Hop on Pop theme parks, Hop on Pop pogo sticks and Hop-on-Popsicles, not to mention McDonald’s “Hoppy” Meals. And of course the question on everybody’s lips was, is, and always will be: “What’s the next Harry Potter?”