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

by E. L. Konigsburg

  Listen to what Anouilh has written for the wife of Henry II; she is called the Young Queen in the play. In act 4 he has given her the following lines:

  ... I am your wife and your Queen. I refuse to be treated like this! I shall complain to my father, the Duke of Aquitaine! I shall complain to my uncle, the Emperor! I shall complain to all the Kings of Europe, my cousins! I shall complain to God!

  After I consulted the encyclopedia, I found out the Young Queen’s father, the duke of Aquitaine, had died long before she married Henry, but that inaccuracy did not bother me. I also found out that her uncle was not the emperor but was the king of Jerusalem, but that did not bother me. All the kings of Europe were not her cousins, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was the Young Queen’s manner. It did not ring true. After I consulted the encyclopedia, I found out that the Young Queen was twelve years older than Henry—that did not matter either. She had a name; she was not simply wife of. She was not simply the Young Queen. She had a name, and she mattered. She was Eleanor. Eleanor of Aquitaine. I wanted to tell the playwright that Eleanor of Aquitaine may have been a bitch, but—let’s give credit where it’s due—she was a great one.

  What started as a cursory examination became a passion.

  What a woman! What a woman was Eleanor of Aquitaine.

  At a time when a king-husband could keep his queen-wife in prison, and Henry did—he did that; he locked Eleanor up for fifteen years—at a time when women were considered chattel, Eleanor of Aquitaine was in essence everything that women’s liberation was in slogans.

  Eleanor of Aquitaine was the woman who was wife not to one king, but to two. She divorced Louis VII of France and married Henry of England. She was thirty at the time, and he was eighteen, and if that does not spell doing your own thing, what in the world does it spell?

  Eleanor was rich. Richer than either of her two husbands. Richer than Henry when she married him. After their wedding, they traveled through the lands that he received from her dowry. It was a medieval combination of honeymoon, political show-and-tell, and photo-op. It was during this trip that Now it can be seen on a column in the chapel at the Cloisters, just beyond that thirteenth-century doorway from Burgundy.

  this double portrait of her and Henry was sculpted in Langon near Bordeaux.

  Eleanor of Aquitaine was the woman responsible for lifting a minor Saxon king by the name of Arthur from the dusty pages of a history book and handing him over to troubadours who imbued him with grace and chivalry, bedecked him with honor, and seated him at a Round Table with a band of noble, if sometimes lecherous, knights in shining armor. Eleanor of Aquitaine was the woman responsible for establishing the rules of courtly love, rules by which many of us grew up. Rules whose vestiges we witness when a man tips his hat or rises when a woman enters a room, or gives up his seat on a crowded bus

  Eleanor of Aquitaine was wife to two kings and mother of two. You know her sons by name. One lies under That same King John who signed a great charter at Runnymede in the year 1215.

  this effigy in Worcester Cathedral. His name was John.

  Her other son was Richard the Lion-Hearted. He led the Third Crusade. He was captured on his way home. His English subjects paid—guess what?— a king’s ransom to get him back. Do kids still use that term? Do they know where it came from?

  Richard is buried in France. He lies on his mother’s left at Fontevrault. His father, King Henry II, lies on her right. All three of them wear crowns. Henry and Richard hold scepters. Only Eleanor holds a book.

  The lifetime of Eleanor of Aquitaine is a watershed. The years from 1122 to 1204 mark the time when the Crusades, perhaps the greatest cultural exchanges of all time, were at their peak. Hers was the time when the great universities were established. It was the time when the middle classes started their upward mobility. And European art was changing from Romanesque to Gothic.

  I wanted to write about this queen for children. Most historical novels written for children invent a young character and plop him into the chosen era. Unless it is done well—as it is in Johnny Tremain—one can hear the splash. I didn’t want to do that. Eleanor of Aquitaine already had an age—the middle ages—in common with the readers I wished to reach.

  So I wrote a book of a bastard genre. Everyone who inhabits its pages has lived. They speak in phrases that are historically documented as well as others I invented. But there is over, under, and throughout this mixture of fact and fiction, and even some fantasy, a truth. A truth about a woman.

  A truth about a woman of purpose. A woman of the Middle Ages linked to middle-aged children. I hope that when they meet Eleanor of Aquitaine in the pages of A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver, they will come to love her as I have and to know themselves a little better for doing so.

  6. Sorezzatura: A Kind of Excellence

  When people ask me why I write for children, I usually give them the answers they most want to hear. For example, when the ladies-who-lunch ask me, I tell them that I write for children because it’s so damn much fun. That’s what they thought all along, anyway. I always add the damn because writers are supposed to be profane; writers for children are allowed to be only slightly profane so that’s why I say damn instead of goddamn. When my in-laws who still refer to me as whatser-name ask, I tell them that I write for children because I have a very limited vocabulary. They like that because it’s what they believed all along, anyway. To a chance dinner partner, the gentleman at my left, the executive making polite dinner conversation with Dr. Konigsburg’s wife, I say that I write for children because my husband won’t allow me to write hardcore pornography. He likes to hear that; it means that, working woman though I am, the man of the family is still boss.

  But today I would like to give all of you the smartest possible answer. Smartest because it is the real one, and I would like to tell you why I write for children by tracing the specific roots of my book called The Second Mrs. Giaconda.

  The whispered beginnings of The Second Mrs. Giaconda go back to George Washington’s birthday in 1963. Back in 1963, you could ask any schoolchild in the northeastern part of the United States where we then lived, “When was George Washington born?” and that schoolchild would tell you, “February 22, 1732.” Nowadays, he would answer that George Washington was born on the third Monday of every February, and so was Abraham Lincoln.

  Back in 1963, George Washington’s birthday was a school holiday that fell during the period that the Mona Lisa was on loan from the Louvre in Paris to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The grand lady was receiving, and I and my entire family were in the receiving line … behind a police barricade, in the cold twenty-five-degree air, stamping our feet to keep the blood moving because we certainly weren’t. It took us forty-five minutes to climb the steps to get a glimpse of the picture. And we got just that—a glimpse—because once inside, we moved very fast. We were herded in and out, just a little slower—a little, mind you—than in and out of the doors of a rush-hour subway.

  Considering the cold and hurried reception we got, my family vocalized on the way home about how Madonna Lisa wasn’t worth the trip from New Jersey, let alone the trip from France. It had been my idea to go, so I spoke in self-defense and said, “Well, it was free.”

  My husband reminded me that even though entrance to the museum was free (at that time it still was) there was the matter of parking and bridge tolls, the five giant pretzels and the; six bags of roasted chestnuts that we had managed to consume during that forty-five-minute climb up the stairs. I was quiet but resentful the rest of the way home and for years to come. I don’t carry a grudge well, but I carry it forever. Or almost.

  On October 25, 1965, the New York Times announced that the Metropolitan Museum of Art had acquired a wonderful bargain. For the sum of only $225, it had obtained at auction this The newspaper said that this sculpture dated from the time of Leonardo da Vinci and might be his work or that of his teacher, Andrea del Verrocchio.

  plaster and stucco Bus
t of a Lady.

  When I adapted that piece of information as well as the experience of waiting in line to see a famous work of art in my book From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, I changed the possible authorship of the mystery statue from Leonardo to Michelangelo. Because I had never had to wait in line to see a work of his on loan from France.

  In 1967 the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., paid a record $5 million for Some art critics questioned if Ginevra were worth it, and I did, too, until I went to Washington and saw for myself what has given a lot of pleasure to a lot of eyes for five hundred years.

  this portrait of Ginevra de’Benci, the only painting by Leonardo in the United States.

  Now we’re up to 1969, the year of my maiden trip to Italy. The trip was a Michelangelo pilgrimage, really, but there in the Uffizi, I came within an arm’s length of two of Leonardo’s paintings I had often seen in reproduction. One of them, the Annunciation, held me spellbound. There is a freshness in that painting that one experiences after a summer rain in a temperate zone, a feeling of newness that almost eerily suits the mood of an annunciation.

  When we went to Milan, we visited the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie. There, gazing at that wall, it happened again.

  There in the presence of Leonardo’s magnificent ruin of The Last Supper, I once again felt touched by magic.

  This was magic powerful enough to overcome—even overwhelm—all the triteness that comes from the myriad copies and roadside interpretations done on black velvet.

  I stood there in the refectory and wanted to bite my tongue for a remark I had made at a friend’s house. Sitting in her dining room, facing the wall on which hung just such a reproduction, I had nudged my dinner partner and said, “Caption: Separate checks, please.”

  If trite reproductions inspire sarcasm, the work itself inspires awe.

  What quality does Leonardo have that comes to us from the original work and not from reproductions? Something besides size shrinks when his work is reproduced. Something organic is lost when his work is reduced and reproduced.

  I returned from that trip to Italy with respect but not yet love for Leonardo. New loves come slowly in middle age. But love came. And the vehicle of love was a book I bought at an estate sale. A friend who is an antique dealer was given the contents of an estate to dispose of. The sale had to be private and by appointment because the property belonged to the wife of a man whose name is infamous; his brother had committed murder fifty years before in a case so famous that the books and plays and movies it has spawned will not let the details or the names die.

  I found my way into the study, and there, all alone, I pored over the books. All the lovely coffee-table books were being sold by size. The largest were four dollars apiece. I bought several, one of which was called The Horizon Book of the Renaissance. In that book I found an essay that led first to love of Leonardo and then to a book about him.

  The essay was written by the scientist Jacob Bronowski. In it Bronowski speculates that at the age of thirty-one Leonardo left Florence and went to Milan because he was uneasy in the rarefied, super-snobbish intellectual atmosphere that prevailed in the Florence of the Medici. Leonardo was not a bookish man; he was not a person who believed in ideas instead of observation. His notebooks contain a heated defense of his beliefs, written with an almost adolescent scorn for men who are very bookish. Leonardo calls men fools who will not trust their own senses.

  Leonardo needed approval. He needed admiration, and he was not emotionally equipped to fight it out in Florence, so he chose to go to Milan, where he had less competition, where he was indisputably the maestro.

  Bronowski’s article made Leonardo something more than a genius; it made him a human genius. Every great love requires some imperfection, and Leonardo’s pride was a weakness that I found endearing.

  I began to study Leonardo’s life and his work, and I would like to take you now to where that study took me. It took me ultimately to the question with which I begin The Second Mrs. Giaconda.

  Why, people ask, why did Leonardo da Vinci choose to paint the portrait of the second wife of an unimportant Florentine merchant when dukes and duchesses all over Italy and the King of France as well, were all begging for a portrait by his hand? Why, they ask, why?

  The answer lies with Salai.

  Yes, Salai. You must meet him, but before you do, let me set the stage. Come with me.

  Come with me now to Milan in the year 1492. I picked the year 1492 because it was a very good year. If you remember your history, Columbus discovered America on the second Monday of every October of that year.

  Let me introduce you to some of the people that you and Barbara Walters would have enjoyed meeting at the court of Milan.

  First, there was the duke of Milan. His name was Ludovico Sforza, and he was forty years old.

  He was also called Il Moro because his complexion was dark, and he resembled a Moor. Like Othello. Like Othello, he was an excellent lover and soldier. He rose to his position not through a direct line of descent but through an L-shaped move and maybe a few judicious murders. But, remember, this was the age of Machiavelli, and Il Moro was a product of his times.

  II Moro’s court, the court of Milan, was rich. Richer than Florence. Its riches were newer; it was nouveau riche, a bit too lavish in its display and a bit too loud in its self-celebration. The court of Milan stood to the city of Florence as Los Angeles stands to the city of New York: more spread out, flashier, more experimental, and just a little defensive about being so.

  But this duke, this Il Moro, had an eye for quality. He was a fine patron of the arts. Not only did he have fine taste and vast powers of organization, but he was always open to new ideas. Capable of minute attention to detail, he also gave rein to talent.

  Milan under the rule of Il Moro was proclaimed the new Athens. It is no wonder that Leonardo stayed there for seventeen years. There will always be those who in the history of the Renaissance regard Il Moro as a parvenu, but then, there are always those who regard the Kennedys of Massachusetts as parvenu compared to the Cabots and the Lodges.

  I mentioned that in addition to being a fine soldier and an excellent patron of the arts, Il Moro was also a fine lover. In 1492 he was in love with this beautiful lady.

  Her name was Cecilia Gallerani. Il Moro had Leonardo paint this portrait of her.

  Beautiful, intelligent, and accomplished. She must have been quite a woman to have Il Moro fall in love with her because at the time, he still qualified as a bridegroom.

  Only a year before, Il Moro had been married. His wife was young—very young—only seventeen. She was small and dark and plain.

  Her maiden name was Beatrice d’Este. She was the second daughter of the duke and duchess of Ferrara.

  Beatrice had an older sister whose name was Isabella. Her mother and father had not minded when their first child was a girl. After all, their first-born was beautiful and talented and precocious, and they felt certain that sons would follow. What followed was Beatrice, small and dark and plain.

  When Beatrice was still a baby, her mother, the beautiful Leonora, took her two daughters on a visit to her father, the king of Naples. She returned to Ferrara, leaving Beatrice, but not Isabella, in Naples. She collected Beatrice later—eight years later. It appears that even during the Renaissance blondes had more fun.

  Perhaps such parental neglect was good after all. There were at least those eight years in which Beatrice did not grow up in the shadow of her blonde and beautiful sister.

  It was Isabella, not Beatrice, who Il Moro had wanted to marry. When Isabella was a mere child, he had traveled to Ferrara, and as was the custom at the time, asked for her hand in marriage. But he was a little too late. Just two weeks before, she had been promised to Francesco Gonzaga, the marquis of Mantua, a much younger man. So Il Moro, anxious to cement political ties with the house of Ferrara, consented to marry Beatrice instead.

  Poor, pitiful Beatrice. Married to a man
twenty-three years her senior. A man in love with another woman. No sooner had their wedding ceremony been performed than the bridegroom left his bride at the church in the company of her mother and sister. Saying that he had to arrange for her reception, he rushed back to Milan.

  Cecilia was in Milan.

  Poor, plain Beatrice. Second daughter, second choice, second thought.

  Now meet Isabella d’Este. She has been called the First Lady of the Renaissance.

  Since she was always commissioning poets, it is entirely possible that the phrase was a designated title. Isabella was acquisitive and spoiled. She was an accumulator rather than a collector.

  Leonardo did this charcoal drawing of her, but she could never get him to commit it to oils even though she nagged and nagged by letter and messenger. She was an inveterate letter writer.

  Allow me to present one of her letters and one of Beatrice’s replies. They reveal a lot about the two sisters.

  In the first, Isabella is writing to her husband:

  Most Illustrious Lord:

  Your excellency has desired me to send the four pieces of drapery that belonged to the French king, in order that you may present them to my sister, the Duchess of Milan. I, of course, obey you, but in this instance I must say I do it with great reluctance, as I think these royal spoils ought to remain in our family, in perpetual memory of your glorious deeds, of which we have no other record. By giving them to others you appear to surrender the honor of the enterprise with these trophies of the victory. I do not send them today because they require a mule, and I also hope that you will be able to make some excuse to the duchess and tell her, for instance that you have already given me these hangings. If I had not seen them already, I should not have cared so much, but since you gave them to me in the first place, and they were won at the peril of your own life, I shall only give them up with tears in my eyes. All the same, as I said before, I will obey your excellency, but shall hope to receive some explanation in reply. If these draperies were a thousand times more valuable than they are, and had they been acquired in any other way, I should gladly give them up to my sister the duchess, whom, as you know, I love and honor with all my heart. But under the circumstances, I must own it is very hard for me to part with them.