Talk, Talk : A Children's Book Author Speaks to Grown-Ups

by E. L. Konigsburg

  These speeches are presented in the order in which they were written. I have given these talks in cafetoriums, auditoriums, and the public rooms of Holiday Inns. Even though I have not always been on a stage when addressing an audience, I have tried to set the stage. Between talk and talk, I have written passages connecting the speeches to the time in which they were written and to one another. And that is TalkTalk.

  In Up From Jericho Tel, I tried to explore the gifts it takes to succeed in the arts. One is timing. I believe that if I had written Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley and Me, Elizabeth twelve years before I did, it would not have been published. The time to broaden the base of allowable subject matter coincided with the publication of this, my first book. In my Newbery address, I talk about this first mark of growth in the field of literature for children.

  1. Newbery Award Acceptance

  You see before you today a grateful convert from chemistry. Grateful that I converted and grateful that you have labeled the change successful. The world of chemistry, too, is thankful; it is a neater and safer place since I left. This conversion was not so difficult as some others I have gone through. The transformation from smoker into nonsmoker was far more difficult, and the change from high-school-graduate-me into girl-chemist-me was more revolutionary. My writing is not a conversion, really, but a reversion, a reversion to type. A chemist needs symbols and equations, and a chemist needs test tubes and the exact metric measure. A chemist needs this equipment, but I do not. I can go for maybe even five whole days without thinking about gram molecular weights. But not words. I think about words a lot. I need words. I need written-down, black-on-white, printed words. Let me count the ways.

  There was a long newspaper strike the first winter we moved into metropolitan New York. Saturday used to be my day off, and I used that day for taking art lessons in the morning and for exploring Manhattan in the afternoon. Our suburbs were New Jersey suburbs then, and my last piece of walking involved a cross-town journey toward the Port Authority Bus Terminal. On one of those Saturdays, as I was in the heart of the theater district, a volley of teen-age girls came larruping down the street bellowing, “The Rolling Stones! The Rolling Stones!” Up ahead, a small bunch of long-haired boys broke into a run and ducked into an alley, Shubert Alley. The girls pursued, and the Rolling Stones gathered; they pushed their collective hair out of their collective eyes and signed autographs.

  I told my family about this small happening when I came home, but that was not enough. The next day I wanted to show them an account of it in the paper. But there was no Sunday paper then. It didn’t get written down. I had seen it happen, and still I missed its not being written down. Even now, I miss its never having been written down. I need to see the words to make more real that which I have experienced. And that is the first way I need words. A quotation from my old world of science explains it: ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Each animal in its individual development passes through stages in which it resembles its remote ancestors. I spread words on paper for the same reasons that Cro-Magnon man spread pictures on the walls of caves. I need to see it put down: the Rolling Stones and the squealing girls. Thus, first of all, writing it down adds another dimension to reality and satisfies an atavistic need.

  And I need words for a second reason. I need them for the reasons that Jane Austen probably did. She told about the dailiness of living. She presented a picture that only someone both involved with her times and detached from them could present. Just like me. I am involved in the everyday, cornflakes, worn-out-sneakers way of life of my children; yet I am detached from it by several decades. And I give words to the supermarket shopping and to the laundromat just as Jane Austen gave words to afternoon visiting and worry about drafts from open windows.

  Just as she stood in a corridor, sheltered by roof and walls from the larger world of her century, just as she stood there and described what was happening in the cubicles of civilization, I stand in my corridor. My corridor is my generation, a hallway away from the children that I breed and need and write about. I peek into homes sitting on quarter-acre lots and into apartments with two bedrooms and two baths. So I need words for this reason: to make a record of a place, suburban America, and a time, early autumn of the twentieth century.

  My phylogenetic need, adding another dimension to reality, and my class and order need, making record, are certainly the wind at my back, but a family need is the directed, strong gust that pushes me to my desk. And here I don’t mean family in the taxonomic sense. I mean family that I lived in when I was growing up and family that I live in now.

  Read Mary Poppins, and you get a good glimpse of upper-middle-class family life in England a quarter of a century ago, a family that had basis in fact. Besides Mary there were Cook and Robertson Ay, and Ellen to lay the table. The outside of the Banks house needed paint. Would such a household exist in a middle-class neighborhood in a Shaker Heights, Ohio, or a Paramus, New Jersey? Hardly. There would be no cook; mother would be subscribing to Gourmet magazine. Robertson Ay’s salary would easily buy the paint, and Mr. Banks would be cleaning the leaves out of his gutters on a Sunday afternoon. No one in the Scarsdales of this country allows the house to get run down. It is not in the order of things to purchase services instead of paint.

  Read The Secret Garden, and you find another world that I know about only in words. Here is a family living on a large estate staffed by servants who are devoted to the two generations living there. Here is a father who has no visible source of income. He neither reaps nor sows; he doesn’t even commute. He apparently never heard of permissiveness in raising children. He travels around Europe in search of himself, and no one resents his leaving his family to do it. Families of this kind had a basis in fact, but fact remote from me.

  I have such faith in words that when I read about such families as a child, I thought that they were the norm and that the way I lived was subnormal, waiting for normal.

  Where were the stories then about growing up in a small mill town where there was no one named Jones in your class? Where were the stories that made having a class full of Radasevitches and Gabellas and Zaharious normal? There were stories about the crowd meeting at the corner drugstore after school. Where were the stories that told about the store owner closing his place from 3:15 until 4:00 p.m. because he found that what he gained in sales of Coca-Cola he lost in stolen Hershey Bars? How come that druggist never seemed normal to me? He was supposed to be grumpy but lovable; the stories of my time all said so.

  Where are the stories now about fathers who come home from work grouchy? Not mean. Not mad. Just nicely, mildly grouchy. Where are the words that tell about mothers who are just slightly hungover on the morning after New Year’s Eve? Not drunkard mothers. Just headachey ones. Where are the stories that tell about the pushy ladies? Not real social climbers. Just moderately pushy. Where are all the parents who are experts on schools? They are all around me in the suburbs of New Jersey and New York, in Pennsylvania and Florida, too. Where are they in books? Some of them are in my books.

  And I put them there for my kids. To excuse myself to my kids. Because I have this foolish faith in words. Because I want to show it happening. Because for some atavistic, artistic, inexplicable reason, I believe that the writing of it makes normal of it.

  Some of the words come from another family part of me. From being a mother. From the part of me that urges, “Say something else, too. Describe, sure, describe what life is like in these suburbs. Tell how it is normal to be very comfortable on the outside but very uncomfortable on the inside. Tell how funny it all is. But tell a little something else, too. What can it hurt? Tell a little something else—about how you can be a nonconformist and about how you can be an outsider. And tell how you are entitled to a little privacy. But for goodness’ sake, say all that very softly. Let the telling be like fudge-ripple ice cream. You keep licking vanilla, but every now and then you come to something darker and deeper and with a stronger flavor. Let the something
-else words be the chocolate.”

  The illustrations probably come from the kindergartener who lives inside, somewhere inside me, who says, “Silly, don’t you know that it is called show and tell? Hold up and show and then tell.” I have to show how Mrs. Frankweiler looks and how Jennifer looks. Besides, I like to draw, and I like to complete things, and doing the illustrations answers these simple needs.

  And that is my metamorphosis; I guess it was really that and not a conversion at all. The egg that gives form to the caterpillar and then to the chrysalis was really meant to be a butterfly in the first place. Chemistry was my larval stage, and those nine years at home doing diaper service were my cocoon. And you see standing before you today the moth I was always meant to be. (Well, I hardly qualify as a butterfly.) A moth who lives on words.

  On January 13, after I had finished doing my Zorba Dance and after I had cried over the phone to Mae Durham and to Jean Karl, after I had said all the I can’t believe it’s and all the Oh, no, not Teally’s, I turned to my husband and asked a typical-wife question, “Did you ever think fifteen years ago when you married a li’l ole organic chemist from Farrell, Pennsylvania, that you were marrying a future Newbery winner and runner-up?” And my husband answered in typical-David fashion, “No, but I knew it would be a nice day when it happened.”

  And it was a nice day. It’s been a whole row of wonderful days since it happened. Thank you, Jean Karl, for helping to give Jennifer and Elizabeth and Claudia and Jamie that all-important extra dimension, print on paper. Thank you, Mae Durham and all the members of the committee, for deciding that my words were special. And thank you, Mr. Melcher, for the medal that stamps them special. All of you, thank you, for giving me something that allows me to go home like Claudia-different on the inside where it counts.

  Those 60s

  Broadening the base of allowable subject matter in children’s literature preceded broadening the base of allowable language. It has always been so. In The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, the narrator, Jake Barnes, alludes to a war injury that makes him unable to help him and Lady Ashley get rid of their pimples. In chapter 4, Jake makes his most direct reference to his injury:

  Well, it was a rotten way to be wounded and flying on a joke front like the Italian. In the Italian hospital we were going to form a society. It had a funny name in Italian.

  Had Hemingway published The Sun Also Rises in 1994 instead of 1926, no one would have had to guess the nature of Jake Barnes’s injury or look up the funny name in Italian. In the summer of 1993 Lorena Bobbitt (real name, real person) cut off her husband’s penis, and every respectable newspaper in the country said so. The “funny name in Italian” is senzapene.

  Show always precedes tell.

  Take the story of the publication of two children’s books: The Secret River, a 1956 Newbery Honor Book by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and my own novel, Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley and Me, Elizabeth, a 1968 Newbery Honor Book.

  Several years after Atheneum Publishers had merged with Scribner’s, two friends and I visited Ms. Rawlings’s home in Cross Creek, Florida. I mentioned to the guide that I and one of the gentlemen I was with were associated with Scribner’s, Ms. Rawlings’s publisher, and that we were involved with children’s books.

  The guide took out a copy of The Secret River, the only children’s story that Rawlings ever wrote. She mentioned that Mr. Scribner had thought of an ingenious way to circumvent any reader resistance to the fact that the story’s heroine, Calpurnia, was black. He had the book printed on brown paper.

  As originally written, the manuscript of Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinlej and Me, Elizabeth made no mention of the fact that Jennifer, one of the protagonists in the story, is black. Not because I wanted to circumvent the issue but because I wanted to show how unimportant race was to the friendship that develops between her and the narrator, Elizabeth. I had submitted a sample set of illustrations that clearly showed that Jennifer was, indeed, black.

  In a letter dated January 20, 1966, ten years after Rawlings’s The Secret River was named a Newbery Honor Book, Jean Karl wrote:

  There are a few minor questions that need answering … Why, for example, if Jennifer is a Negro does the text not say so. Elizabeth is forthright enough to be casual about it, I would think.

  I agreed that if Jennifer’s color were to be truly unimportant— except that it marked her as an outsider—it would be an affectation not to mention that she was black, so I slipped a reference into the story in a place where it would further detail Jennifer’s outsiderness.

  The difference between printing Calpurnia’s story of The Secret River on brown paper and portraying a black heroine in Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley and Me, Elizabeth marks an important change that has taken place in the world of children’s books.

  When my book was published in 1967, I used the term Negro for that single reference. In the mid-1970s when the book was being reprinted, I requested that the word be changed to black. If I were writing the story today, I would use the term African-American. The choice of terms is a reflection of the current cultural trend. However, I shall not request another change. Twenty-five years from now I trust readers will see my use of black as the local color of the times.

  Words do, indeed, add a dimension to reality, for they are the artifacts of a civilization. But language—language—is a form of behavior.

  Language reflects culture.

  Today’s language inevitably reflects the omnipresence of television. I am not concerned with the appearance of fad phrases—Cowabunga! Dy-no-mite! or Kiss my grits—but I am concerned with writing that attempts to reflect contemporary culture by imitating the dialogue patterns on TV. It is called “Waiting for the Punchline.”

  Here is the formula: A says a1; B says b1;A says a2; B delivers put-down. Sometimes another put-down follows. Sometimes they escalate. The dialogue on TV is delivered with body language and canned laughter. Books have to deliver without shtick.

  Since language is the only tool with which writers can reflect and shape a culture, it must be transformed into art. Language is not a limitation on the art of literature; it is a glorification. It has been the scaffolding inside which nations and philosophies have been built, and the language of literature has added the ornamental pediment by which the culture is remembered.

  In a speech that I call “Lethal Weapon” I talk about language shaping one’s thinking. I wrote this speech in the fall following my Newbery address and have revised it several times since. The first major revision came about after a trip to China in 1980. I couldn’t imagine doing library research, as the Chinese must, without an alphabet. (Mao Zedong himself had once been a librarian at the University of Beijing.)

  “How do you file anything?” I asked our Chinese guide. “How do you look something up in a dictionary?” I asked. It took several explanations before I could be convinced that indexing could be done at all. That is only one way that language shapes a person’s thinking. Imagine having to learn a language that conveys not just shades of meaning but whole different meanings by using different tones. Wouldn’t that also shape the way you listen?

  As we moved through the seventies and eighties, I have revised the references I used in this speech. I have brought the slang and the slogans up to date, for slang and slogans are fads, but what has happened to the language in children’s books is change. As presented here, “Lethal Weapon” is the most recent version of the speech I wrote about my respect for, love of, need for, and delight in language.

  2. Lethal Weapon

  Not too long ago, a certain distant relative of mine told me that I ought to buy a word processor. She said, “Just think how much better you would write, darling, if you had one. In your line of work, my dear, you ought to have the best possible tools.” I told her that I had a word processor, and she said, “Oh,” and asked me if in my line of work, it was tax deductible.

  With some relatives you can’t explain anything tha
t is not tax deductible, so I made no effort to explain to this person that the computer that sits on top of my desk is, indeed, tax deductible, but the best possible tool in my line of work is not.

  My IBM PC does, indeed, process words. It can process them into columns; it can fill pages with X’s and O’s; it can cut and splice sentences or even whole paragraphs and rearrange them, and when I write, I use many of these processes, and I find them useful, but the computer is not my best possible tool.

  The best possible tool of my line of work is the word processor that lies not in the middle of my desk but in the left side of my brain, for it is the brain and not the IBM PC that processes words into language.

  It is language that is the basic tool of my trade, and it is language—words processed into language—that I would like to explore with you.

  I love language. I speak no foreign tongue, so I must qualify that statement to: I love the English language. It is a good language to love. It is—well—so American. I think it is more American than it is English.

  First of all, the English language developed from the Anglo-Saxons, the people who were conquered by William the Conqueror, and who were considered the lower classes. From 1066 until about the time of the invention of the printing press, Norman French was the language of the aristocracy in England. The lower classes gave birth to English, and because it is a blend of many dialects it has lost the refined declensions of the Romance languages. We have a paucity of verb and noun endings in English, and I find that blurring of differences to be very American. Americans—much more than the English—are always filing away at marginal differentiations. The office secretary and office executive both dress for success, and the Chevrolet used to try to look like a Cadillac, and nowadays, the Cadillac tries to look like a Chevy.