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

by E. L. Konigsburg

  Home is really so many things. It is the place that we can hardly wait to leave, and it is the place we can hardly wait to come back to. It is the place that we must outgrow and yet the place that must always live within us. It is the place that we desperately need to escape and yet need always to return to. Home is something that helps create us when we are young, and yet it is something that we create when we are grown.

  And a book is that for me. It is one kind of home as a writer and two other kinds as a reader. Books helped form me when I was young, and now that I am grown, I form them.

  Since I write for children, I know that my books, my going-home books, are ones that my readers will out-grow just as my own children have outgrown home. But just as my children carry the ways of their home within them, I know that my readers will carry my books within them for a long, long time. I hope, too, that my readers will always feel comfortable—even feel a need for—returning home.

  The 70s (finito)

  Public speaking gives a writer of children’s books an opportunity to connect with an audience different from the one that reads her books.

  After delivering “Going Home” to an audience in Jacksonville, Florida, I received a letter that I treasure as evidence that I had, indeed, connected. The letterhead reads: St. John’ Cathedral; The Reverend Nathaniel W. Massey, Canon:

  Dear Mrs. Konigsburg,

  It was a privilege to be in your audience today. I thought, as you were speaking, about a traveler in England, about whom I once read. He (or she) was sure that they had been at the Inn at which they were staying. He asked his spouse and was assured they had never been at that place in England before. He knew the Inn and was sure he knew every bend in the stream behind the Inn. Then he remembered, The Wind in the Willows. He had come home.

  I am sure, as one who depends on words for a living, that the most important gift we can give a child is nurturing his ability to roam the world by the printed page. Thank you for your writings and the reason you write.

  I am

  Faithfully,

  Nathaniel W. Massey

  When the base of allowable subject matter and allowable language had sufficiently broadened, children’s book writers were able to consider previously forbidden subjects, and they did. The result was a crop of “problem novels” for young adults. Every good novel has a plot that sets out a problem that is solved in the course of the story, but they are not necessarily problem novels.

  In Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster distinguishes between story and plot:

  Let us define a plot … “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died and then the queen died of grief” is a plot … Or again: “The queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king.” This is a plot with a mystery in it … Consider the death of the queen. If it is in a story we say “and then?” If it is in a plot we ask “why?” That is the fundamental difference between these two aspects of the novel.

  A story is not a sermon, and a plot is not a pulpit, but in a problem novel, they are. Therein lies the fundamental difference between a novel that sets out a problem and a problem novel.

  In the 1670s, the plot of the problem novel would be:

  The fourteen-year-old died, no one knew why, until it was discovered she starved herself to death, and the devil made her do it.

  In the 1770s, the plot would be:

  The fourteen-year-old died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was starvation by the British troops for refusing to give them information.

  In the 1870s:

  The fourteen-year-old died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was starvation from being too lazy to work for a living.

  In the 1970s:

  The sensitive, bright fourteen-year-old died, no one knew why, until it was discovered it was self-starvation brought on by feelings of inadequacy and rage in a high-achieving family. This disorder has a name: anorexia nervosa.

  In the 1970s the problems of the problem novels all had proper names. Anorexia nervosa was a popular choice.

  A problem novel describes the disease/disorder/disability and then the social/ sexual/medical problem that results and then the diagnosis is made and then the discovery of a socially acceptable solution follows.

  “If it is in a story we say ‘and then?’ If it is in a plot we ask “why?’”

  Plot is the thickening given to story. Plot makes visible the invisible. Plot reveals the hidden motive, the workings of the characters’ minds. As I see it, the principle problem of growing up is hidden. It is the conflict between self-absorption and self-doubt. It is the malaise brought on by wanting two contradictory things: to be like everyone else and to be different from everyone else. And the essential plot of the novel for the middle-aged child resolves the conflict by finding a path between the two.

  Just as I have been able to see myself moving deeper into the world of children’s literature by standing farther back from it, I knew I could move deeper into plot by moving it farther back in time. It was then that I wrote two historical novels: A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver in 1973 and The Second Mrs. Giaconda in 1975.

  I moved into more recent history when I wrote Father’s Arcane Daughter, a story that deals with the effects on a healthy older brother of living with a handicapped sibling. The handicap in my novel has no name. I had known the story, but in developing the plot, I moved it back to a time and place where I had lived—the 1950s in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—to help make my perspective clearer and my thinking deeper.

  (Father’s Arcane Daughter was made into the Emmy Award—winning Hallmark Hall of Fame production called Caroline?. In its transfer to the TV screen, the story was transformed again. Seeing one of my books made into a movie or into a television show is like seeing my children married: different version, different venue, but still blessedly and recognizably mine.)

  Writers of problem novels always deal with “and then’s,” but they do not deal with “the king died and then the queen died” because they do not deal with royalty at all but with people plucked out of the ordinary population. Moving into the past seemed a healthy way to write of real problems without novelizing the TV Movie of the Week or plumbing the psychologist’s handbook of case studies.

  The first of these historical novels, A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver, begins with a queen who is in heaven waiting for her king. The two speeches that follow explain how I plotted my way to “the queen died,” and in the first, that queen was a most remarkable woman, Eleanor of Aquitaine.

  5. How Middle-Aged Child Is Not an Oxymoron

  When I received that first great letter of acceptance from my editor, Jean Karl, I was told that my book, Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinlej and Me, Elizabeth, would be part of their spring list of novels for the middle-aged child. That was the first that I had ever heard of the term, middle-aged child, and I found it ridiculous. I couldn’t think of a more contradictory set of terms than middle-aged and child.

  Life magazine ran this cover in 1972 and stopped publishing a weekly edition ten weeks later.

  But I don’t think this cover did it.

  By the time they ran this story about the middle-aged child I had come to accept the term the way a person accepts an unloved given name: he adapts it to himself. To Life magazine, the middle-aged child meant a child from six to twelve. To the publishing world, the middle-aged child spans the ages eight to twelve—a child whose reading habits are post—Dr. Seuss but pre— The Sensuous Woman. The child rated G through PG-13.

  My adoption of the term middle-aged child has been helped by my establishing a relationship between the child, ages eight through twelve, and the Middle Ages. I mean the Middle Ages of Western civilization, those dark centuries of history from the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire until that great rebirth, the Renaissance.

  I have not always been comfortable in the Middle Ages. I have not always had great respect for t
hem as an era in our civilization. My thinking about them had been that they were those “one thousand years without a bath,” a time when minds were as stiff as the armor considered their trademark. I thought of them as a period in history when people were bound to a role in life, generation after generation, a time when birth, not ability, determined what one could do. I thought of them as downright un-American. And they were.

  Of course they were.

  We had no Middle Ages in the New World. When knighthood was in flower in Europe and China, civilization in the Americas was still in the Bronze Age.

  American history moved directly from infancy to adolescence. As a nation we skipped being middle-aged children. I am sorry we did, for I have come to love a great deal about that period of history since I have come to see a relationship between the middle-aged child and the Middle Ages. But just as I do not love everything about the middle-aged child, I do not love everything about the Middle Ages. But there are some aspects of both that I admire a great deal.

  I would like to explain the evolution of those two loves and the relationship I perceive between them.

  There is in New York a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art called the Cloisters. It is located in a park on a high bluff overlooking the Hudson River. The Cloisters is unique in two ways: it is the only museum in the United States devoted exclusively to medieval art, and it is the only one that incorporates its artifacts into the structure of the building itself. For example:

  This thirteenth-century doorway, through which one enters the Langon Chapel, was moved from a monastery church in Burgundy. Stonework of the chapel itself came from a church near Bordeaux.

  Stained glass windows made during the Middle Ages were installed into the walls of the Cloisters.

  When we lived in suburban New York, I took my children there often, for it was one of the few places in the city to which I had the courage to drive because I didn’t have to travel through Manhattan traffic, and the museum grounds provided parking for timid drivers like me. Besides, it is a beautiful place.

  One of the works of art that fascinated my son Paul was a wooden rosary bead. It was a giant as far as rosary beads go—about the size of a golf ball. It was hinged, and the curators chose to display it opened. There, within that tiny realm, was carved a three-dimensional scene of Christ’s Crucifixion. The medieval artist had found space to carve Mary, Joseph of Arimathea, and troops of Roman soldiers. The whole carving is so exquisite that one can read the expressions on the faces of the people, faces no bigger than a seed of allspice or clove.

  My son was so impressed with this bead that he decided to carve one for his favorite teacher. At the moment, his favorite teacher was Mrs. Helene Braver, his Hebrew teacher. He knew that she would appreciate a scene of Moses on Mt. Sinai more than she would appreciate Christ on Golgotha. So that was the scene he decided upon. He borrowed a paring knife from me and stole a small piece of pine from a construction site near our home and went to work.

  There you have the mind of a middle-aged child—he was eight at the time. He wanted to carve a rosary bead for a teacher of Hebrew. He wanted to do something beautiful, and he stole to do it. His thinking was truly Middle Aged or medieval. The contradictions existed side by side. There was no blending of the right of what he wanted to do with the wrong of it. They existed side by side. There was no blending of the concepts of Christian and Jew. For him, Jewish and rosary head existed side by side.

  On a visit to a different museum with a different child, I witnessed another aspect of the confluence of the medieval mind and that of the middle-aged child.

  The J. P. Morgan Library in New York houses hundreds of famous manuscripts. Many of these treasures are hand-printed, hand-painted works on parchment that were completed from the time before the invention of the printing press. (The invention of the printing press is one possible way of marking the beginning of the end of the Middle Ages.) These manuscripts are shown to the public a few at a time. During one exhibit, the Library displayed pages from the Book of Hours of Catherine of Cleves, a fifteenth-century volume of prayers and psalms. Pages of hand-lettered text with illuminated letters and hand-painted miniatures with elaborate borders filled the display cases.

  One of the miniatures—a picture no bigger than the palm of my hand—was one of

  God creating Eve.

  Here is Adam in the buff, lying on his side, as nonchalant as you please, his head turned in God’s direction, while a woman—full-grown and as naked as Adam himself— unfolds from his side. God is barefoot but dressed like a medieval king.

  In the time I spent in that museum, I watched a little girl return to that picture four times. The little girl was middle-aged. She was ten. She was my daughter.

  Of course she was fascinated.

  Here is a literal interpretation of Genesis 2:21—22.

  And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from the man, made He a woman.

  The middle-aged child listens literally and interprets literally. My daughter was as comfortable with that picture as she was with pictures of David killing Goliath with a slingshot or with this picture of from that same Book of Hours. The mouth of hell is literally depicted as a mouth, and the fires of hell are bright licks of flame.

  the mouth of hell

  This literal translation is not too different from a story related by a friend of mine.

  In the long-ago days before gay pride, she took her ten-year-old daughter to the hairdresser for a haircut. The child settled in the chair, and before the gentleman holding the scissors could begin, she turned around and with a smile that was beatific said, “I heard my daddy tell my mommy that you’re a fairy, and I’ve never seen a real live fairy before.”

  Like the medieval mind, the mind of a middle-aged child prefers a literal interpretation.

  It was at another museum, the Worcester Museum of Art, that I became a true believer in the term the middle-aged child. That museum was housing an exhibit of sculptures by Houdon, the great eighteenth-century artist to whom we owe our most accurate images of Voltaire and George Washington. His work was so accurate that measurements of his statue of Lafayette were used to identify the hero’s bones. As I was taking in the exhibit, a class came through. They stood in front of a statue of George Washington. Before the docent could begin her lecture, one little girl pointed to the statue and asked, “How did he die?” The docent did not answer. They moved on to the next statue. The same little girl pointed again and asked again, “How did he die?” The same thing happened at the next. And the one after that. I found out from their teacher, who was watching from the sidelines, that they were a class of fourth-graders. Nine- and ten-year-olds. They were middle-aged children, and they were concerned with death.

  The Middle Ages were also concerned with death.

  People went to great expense to prepare for it. They built monumental crypts and awe-inspiring tombs to commemorate death. Every Book of Hours has as a standard feature the Book of the Dead. It was not until the Middle Ages that the Crucifixion gained popularity as a suitable subject for works of religious art. Prior to the Middle Ages, it was the Resurrection, not the pain of Christ’s death, that was stressed.

  That is still the case in the Greek Orthodox faith, the Eastern church where feudalism was less completely developed.

  Once I recognized these basic parallels, I easily found others.

  Look at a painting or a piece of sculpture that was executed during the time of the Middle Ages, and it is hard to find perspective in the work. A middle-aged child lacks perspective in his philosophy as well as in his art. A middle-aged child outlines his pictures in bold black crayon and enthusiastically fills in the spaces with bold, bright color. Compare that to Even the spelling bears comparison. Chaucer spells eat, E-T-E, and the middle-aged child asks, “Well, if E-T-E doesn’t spell eat, what in the world does it spell?”

  this piece of thirteenth-century stained glass.

  Abiding, superseding—almost bellowing—over all
this is faith. The people of the Middle Ages were believers. In ghosts, angels, and demons. And fairies. And so are middle-aged kids. The people of the Middle Ages traveled miles and miles to view the relics of Thomas Becket at Canterbury because they believed in the healing power of relics. How different is this from the good-luck ring worn by a child of ten?

  By the time I was convinced that the term middle-aged child is not an oxymoron, I also felt comfortable with the Middle Ages. And then I went to see Becket, the play by Jean Anouilh that tells of the clash between Henry II, king of England, and Thomas Becket, the man he raised to be archbishop of Canterbury. I loved the play, but there was one jarring note in it. I returned home sufficiently bothered to consult an encyclopedia to get the facts.

  Henry Il was one of the all-time great kings of England. He laid the foundation for the whole of English common law. He started a civil service, a corporate policy whereby men were chosen according to ability and paid in coin rather than land. He was a strong king, a powerful executive.

  I have known a lot of executives in my time—and what is a medieval king but an executive in drag?—and I’ve known a lot of executive wives. Executive wives are strong women. To stay with a man of vitality and ego requires a woman of character. The executive wives I have known have a core of strength.