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

by E. L. Konigsburg

  Their Influence on other artists was pervasive

  Look at Jun Gris’s The Book

  or Marcel Duchamp’s Brid and

  The Passage from Virgin to Bride

  or Gris’s The Violin,

  As they refined their invention, Picasso and Braque deepened their collaboration. They began to treat the same subjects, and their pictures began to flatten.

  So we have Picasso’s Violin and Guitar, which is not very different from Braque’s Man with Guitar. (The Picasso is smaller.)

  Or we have Braque’s Violin and Palette or Picasso’s The Violin. (The Picasso is smaller.)

  As a last feature of Cubism, Picasso and Braque did away with the distraction of color, and their line became more and more fragmented.

  The results were—left to right, top to bottom— Ma Jolie (Woman with a Zither or Guitar) by Picasso, The Portuguese by Braque, Man with Clarinet by Picasso, and Woman with a Mandolin by Braque.

  Do the names of the artists matter? Without the signature, can you distinguish the Cubist paintings of Braque from those of Picasso? During the height of their collaboration, Picasso and Braque couldn’t distinguish their own work.

  When great artists become consumed with getting across an idea, their products become interchangeable.

  Do the names of the paintings matter? Does the subject—be it man, woman, or zither—matter? When great artists become consumed with getting across an idea, we get dry, flat, dun-colored works of art that look like worn linoleum. When all of an artist’s tools are subordinated to an idea, he sacrifices his most personal gift: his style.

  Whenever an idea is imposed upon works of art, giants become anonymous slaves. This happened to the pre-Raphaelites in 1848 in England. And it happened again when Joseph Stalin devised Socialist Realism in the Soviet Union in 1934. When Soviet artists were forced to paint a required theme, heroic idealization of work and workers, it became impossible to distinguish one socialist realist painter from another; they all looked like Norman Rockwell figures with thunder-thighs.

  Conformity has a deadening effect on art. When all of an artist’s tools become subservient to a single idea, his work becomes—as the Cubists’ paintings did—deadly impersonal.

  Although there is great license in subject matter when writing for children today, there appears to be a tunneling of permissible philosophical position. And that bordering, that enclosing, is threatening the idea base that has been broadened in recent decades. Sex and pot have been allowed into the consecrated territory of children’s literature, but there are forces afoot that deem certain ideas so important that all color, all line, all style must serve them.

  There exists a publication called Interracial Books for Children Bulletin that considers it one of its responsibilities to reevaluate the classics, not in the broad sense of literary merit but in the limited sense of how these books treat race and sex.

  In a box on page 6 of the volume 6, number 7, 1975, issue of Interracial Books for Children Bulletin, under a headline “Racist and Sexist Classics” the following appears:

  Many children’s books about the revolutionary period that are regarded as classics are racist and sexist. Following are sample quotes from several such books.

  Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes (Houghton Mifflin, 1943) winner of the Newbery Medal and considered a classic on the American revolution.

  (And if I may add a personal note: one of the best Newbery Books ever. When I received the award, one of my first bursts of pride was that a book of mine would take its place on an honored shelf with Johnny Tremain.) But to continue with the information about Johnny Tremain that is in a box on page 6 of the Interracial Books for Children Bulletin (ellipses not mine):

  White is synonymous with beauty: “He was a fine-looking young man, with fresh skin and thick blond hair … clean, clear blue eyes.” Black is sinister: “… black as imps from Hell and skinny, slippery-looking old black slave… wiry black fingers…” Of John Hancock’s slave: “[Jehu] came mincing in … rolling his eyes … that dressed up doll of a black boy …” Sexism is also evident: Of Mrs. Lapham: “Slowly like a great sow pulling out of a wallow … her enormous bosom heaving …” And “Men went to war and women wept. All was as it should be.”

  I will not at this time refute the distortions to which this researcher has subjected Ms. Forbes’s depiction of black and white. Ms. Forbes does describe ugly white as well as good black—a small example will follow—and two of the quotations about Jehu are presented out of order as well as out of context; I cannot find the third at all. Let me, for the sake of making the point I want to make about conformity to an idea destroying style, defend Ms. Forbes’s so-called sexist writing.

  The re-reviewer complains that Ms. Forbes has written, “Slowly, like a great sow pulling out of a wallow, her enormous bosom heaving,” and that such writing is sexist. Let me put that quotation into context: Johnny Tremain has just spoken to Mr. Tweedie, the man whom Mrs. Lapham wants to be her business partner and whom she wants one of her daughters to marry. Johnny has come to realize that Mr. Tweedie is a weakling and an opportunist. Mrs. Lapham is bending over repairing a smoking fire when Johnny tells her, “That squeak-pig is trying to horn in on breakfast.” Then we have the famous quote.

  Slowly, like a great sow pulling out of a wallow, Mrs. Lapham got to her feet, glaring down at Johnny, her enormous bosom heaving.

  [Johnny says] “And I’m going to tell you what I think of that squeak-pig.” Without a word and before he could finish his remarks or dodge, Mrs. Lapham gave him a resounding cuff on the ear.

  If that is sexist, why isn’t this non-sexist? and why is it not quoted?

  Lydia, the handsome black [italics mine] laundress at the Queen, extended his own eyes and ears into the very bedrooms of the officers, and often, as he helped her hang up sheets, she would tell him this and that …

  Johnny, a boy, hanging up sheets and helping a black woman, a handsome black woman, to do so. Why doesn’t the Interracial Books for Children Bulletin put this on the credit side of Ms. Forbes’s ledger? But the more important question is this: Isn’t Ms. Forbes to be allowed some personal style? Is not Mrs. Lapham’s bosom, enormous though it may be, allowed to heave when she is angry? Is this gifted writer not to be allowed to use a metaphor about a sow immediately after Mr. Tweedie has been called a variety of pig? Is it permissible to call men pigs—male chauvinist or not—but not permissible to call women sows? Must a writer who can paint with words in Schiaparelli sow pink use a palette of only muted grays and browns?

  About that other sexist remark: “Men went to war and woman wept.” Madge, Mrs. Lapham’s large daughter, has married a British soldier, one Sergeant Gale, a small man, one who is much smaller than she is.

  … Madge, even fatter since her marriage [was] seemingly more in love than ever with her little sergeant. Tears streamed down her thick, red cheeks … she flung herself upon Johnny.

  “I c-c-can’t bear it. But he says he’s g-g-got to go.”

  Near-by tough little Sergeant Gale was strutting about like a bantam cock, roaring at one of his men whose buttons did not shine. He was pretending not to know that his wife was so near-by. He was really showing off in front of her and approved her presence. Men went to war and women wept. All was as it should be.

  After reading this excerpt in context, is there any doubt at all that Ms. Forbes, with all the grace and wisdom of her talent, is having a Tory sexist, a character in a novel, express a sexist thought? Is there any doubt that Ms. Forbes is using one of the tools of the novelist’s trade—colorful characters—to help tell her story?

  Must we be totally colorless when describing sex and paint with Day-Glo red everything that has to do with the sex act?

  In a piece entitled “Dirty Words,” in the New York Times Book Review of August 8, 1976, Mr. Anthony Burgess makes a wonderful point.

  In 1960, I published a novel that had the sentence: “He looked him up and down from his niggerbrown shoes t
o his spinsterishly tightset lips and then said quietly: “_____off.” In the new edition of 1975, the shoes and the lips are more generally and less offensively characterized, and the dirty word is set out in full. One semantic area has been freed from taboo; two others have been freshly enslaved by it. There is a lesson here: Human history does not depict the progressive throwing off of chains, merely the exchange of one set of chains for another, or two others.

  I do not know what librarians do these days with Conrad’s “The Nigger of the Narcissus …”

  I don’t know either, but I do know what they do with Huckleberry Finn in New Trier, Illinois. They take him off the list, the required-reading list. The English Department there has removed Huckleberry Finn from the required-reading list. The parents of New Trier East High maintained that “the book’s repeated references to ‘niggers’ were ‘morally insensitive’ and degrading and destructive to black humanity.”

  If I were one of the fifty blacks out of a school population of 6,387 students, I think I would feel patronized by having Huckleberry Finn removed from the library shelves to protect me. I think I would also feel cheated, cheated of a wonderful black hero named Nigger Jim, cheated of a wonderful treatment of one of the great moral dilemmas of my American history, cheated of a great seminal novel of my American literary heritage.

  June Jordan, black professor and poet, a woman whose work has been nominated for a National Book Award, was a guest on Mr. William Buckley’s program, “Firing Line,” in 1976. The subject was: Should books such as Little Black Sambo be on library shelves? I sent for a transcript.

  Mr. Buckley: … What you have is a bunch of textbooks in which are located certain symbols of oppression, symbols of discrimination, which are nowadays perceived as being vicious, which were previously perceived as being purely conventional— Little Black Sambo would be an obvious example … Would you say that any school that used it as part of the juvenile literature ought not to qualify for the receipt of federal funds?

  Ms. Jordan: No, I would not. It would depend altogether on how the book was used in the schools.

  Are the people of New Trier East High School saying that Huckleberry Finn cannot be properly taught? As Oscar Hammerstein said, “You have to be taught to be afraid of people whose eyes are oddly made,” and you have to be properly taught to see that nigger is as outmoded a name as Huckleberry. And so, too, is the thought, nigger. If properly taught, the chapter called “The Rattlesnake Skin” can do it all. This is the section where Huck deceives the bounty hunters by cleverly making them believe that he wants their help because no one else will give it because “Pap has this fever.” He cleverly leads them to think that he is harboring some victims of smallpox instead of a runaway slave. The bounty hunters sail away leaving two twenty-dollar gold pieces to salve their consciences.

  Smallpox is a dinosaur of a disease. And nigger is a dinosaur of a word, of a thought. But suppressing books that tell about them will not alter the past.

  I want all the books on the shelves.

  I want the books with dinosaur words like nigger that show the skeletons in our national closet. I want books with the word cunt as well as the word kike. Words don’t scare me. Suppressing them does.

  Take away color; subdue every word to someone’s idea of what is correct, and we will have the literary equivalent of The Aficionado by Picasso that looks a lot like Georges Braque’s We will be left with works that have no color and no personal style. We will be left with works that are tight and controlled and dull. Very dull. Very, very dull.

  Le Gueridon that resembles Picasso’s Landscape at Ceret.

  Don’t let current political correctness make Dick and Jane of children’s literature.

  When writing for children, one must use all the tools at one’s command: color, line idea.

  Here is a painting that has all of these elements. It is Marc Chagall’s Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers.

  This is a work that is strongly and fully colored. Replete with distorted but recognizable objects, its elements are unified by the themes of identity and memory. The color and the characters are strong, and the story is told as much by symbol as by narrative. The Eiffel Tower tells us of the artist’s Paris home, and the Hebrew writing in back of him, just over his head, tells us of his Jewish past. Everything is here, but it is not presented in a totally logical order. In short, we have here the heated, steamy world of William Faulkner. We have here a man who has sharpened his tools. He colors his characters distinctively—think of Temple Drake or the Snopeses—and he distorts reality enough to make us believe it. It is a work rich in metaphor and wit. The title, Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers, is appropriate, too. How often an artist must feel that he has seven fingers. And how often he must feel that five of the seven are thumbs.

  What is the difference between that work of Chagall and this work?

  Here again we have all the elements of a work of fiction: plot, characterization, and theme. But when we move from Chagall’s work to this one, we move from fiction for adults to fiction for children. Here we have a straightforward telling. Here we have everything in its place; only proportion and perspective are distorted.

  The painting is called The Muse Inspiring the Poet. The painter, Henri Rousseau, is called a primitive.

  He was a Sunday painter. During the week, he worked as a customs officer, a douanier. (Lionel Trilling once said that the best children’s books are written by people who have something else to do.)

  Until a few years ago, primitive art was outside the body of work taken seriously by the critics. It spoke directly to the people. Until a few years ago, children’s literature was outside the body of literature taken seriously by the critics. It, too, spoke directly to its people—young readers.

  Another way in which this painting represents children’s literature is that it exists outside the realm of good or bad taste. A person leads with his heart when deciding whether or not he loves that broad-faced muse in a lavender dress. A child reading a book leads with his heart, too. And there is something else that this painting shares with a work of children’s fiction: freshness. I think every children’s book should have that as well as color and line and underlying theme.

  This artist has not skimped. He has used everything at his command: line, color, idea; plot, character, theme. Everything is represented in a straightforward, sincere manner—with wonderful and unexpected distortions for emphasis.

  I see something else in this painting that a good work of fiction for children should have: a few elements of the landscape are unfamiliar. The unfamiliar elements are rooted in a very familiar looking lawn. I think a writer of children’s books should also create this mix and match. Let the territory be familiar enough so that the reader is comfortable; make the landscape understandable. Introduce him to all the colors—white and yellow and red; brown and black. All the colors should be there. Use quality paint and brushes—good English—but vary the strokes. Some short, some long, some thin, some thick. Yes, some strokes have to be laid on thick. How can a person recognize purple prose if he has never seen it?

  For all his childlike rendering, Rousseau has not skimped on his vocabulary of naive greens and sophisticated lavenders.

  This particular painting has two other elements that make it an apt recital of what children’s books should be. These two elements are not for every book, but they are often appropriate. One, the douanier, Rousseau, has painted no very great difference between the sexes. Dress for one, pants for the other, but they are more alike than they are different. Two, he has taken an abstract notion, inspiration, and made of it a concrete, very concrete, muse. Medieval artists did this all the time: the holy spirit was a dove, the light of God was a halo of whitish color, and the mouth of Hell was a voracious maw Making the abstract concrete is not appropriate for every children’s book, but done with panache, it adds wonder to the mix.

  This painting has everything a children’s novel should have: a plotline for those readers who
need a rope—most of them do—to get from chapter to chapter. Characters to keep the chapters colorful and lively. And a theme for those readers who like to get more than is visible to the naked eye.

  What else does a children’s novel need? Paragraphs in all sizes from mountain to molehill. Some express sentences and some that whistle-stop. And words, words, words in every color from male-chauvinist-pink to black-is-beautiful.

  Add one ingredient to that mix. Add a muse. The douanier, Rousseau, shows the muse reaching toward Heaven with one hand and touching the poet’s shoulder with the other. I think he got it right. A muse touches the poet and makes everything work right. Poets call it a muse; critics call it inspiration. My readers call it magic. They, too, got it right.

  The 70s (continued)

  Because children themselves often do not have the means to control what they read, their books of every genre from textbook to trade book must pass through more monitors—evaluators—than books for adults. In addition to the usual filters of publisher, editor, and critic, children’s books pass through a net of parents, teachers, and librarians.

  It is in the green room before the book gets to the parent/teacher/librarian stage that the critic waits. He prepares a book for blessing or banning.

  In the world of adult publishing this is often the final stop. Sometimes, as in the case of The Bridges of Madison County, they dance right onto the boards with almost no critical reviews. Sometimes, as in the case of Gone with the Wind, they continue to perform successfully despite never having been taken seriously by the literary establishment.