The Enchanted Hour

by Meghan Cox Gurdon

  It takes time to look, and really to see, what’s in front of us. With children’s picture books, it can be tempting for adults to flip through the pages at the pace of the prose. Given that today’s books are far less chatty and discursive than the children’s fare of even half a century ago, a grown-up may zip through thirty-two or forty illustrated pages in a matter of minutes.

  Looking with intensity, or “close looking,” as Doonan puts it, calls for a change of gears, a downshift. “If we want to be able to make the most of a picture—to be open to it and wonder why we feel as we do in front of it—we need to look not just at what’s being represented but rather at everything that presents itself, and grasp at the how as well as the what,” Doonan told Jonathan Cott for his book about Maurice Sendak’s “primal vision,” There’s a Mystery There. “The more you know, the more you’ll be able to discover and the more meanings you’ll be able to make.”

  As a professional, Doonan is steeped in art and its manifold interpretations, but the close looking method that she advocates is entirely accessible to the amateur, meaning, in this case, the parent who wants to help children appreciate picture-book illustrations at a deeper level.

  In Doonan’s primer on the subject, Looking at Pictures in Picture Books, she writes, “Interpreting pictures fully involves attending to everything which presents itself to the eye. It is not necessarily obvious that the qualities of a picture come from the artist’s style, choice of materials and compositions, nor how these pictorial means achieve their effects. Once children are shown and told how lines and shapes and colors are able to refer to ideas and feelings, they can explore the dimension beyond what is literally represented. They move into partnership with the artist through the picture itself.”

  What does it mean to “attend to everything which presents itself to the eye”? It might mean considering the straightness or crookedness of lines of ink; the depth and abundance of color, or lack of it; the perspective or viewpoint (are we looking down on a scene, up at it, or are we peeking at it around a corner?). What shapes and edges predominate in the pictures? Do the people and things depicted appear soft and gauzy, or jagged and anxious? Each of these artistic decisions contributes to the feeling a work gives us, and to the meaning we assign to it.

  The lovely thing about engaging in this kind of interrogation with a child is that it can be playful, experimental, and open-ended. We may be talking here of the wise insights of art historians and distinguished artists, but in the domestic context everything is up for exploration. It’s not a test, and there isn’t a grade. It’s just a grown-up and a child, diving into pictures, noticing how they feel, what they think, and talking it all over.

  * * *

  WHEN ENGAGING WITH our children and with creative works from the past, whether storybooks or novels or paintings or illustrations, from time to time we are going to come to depictions that startle and displease. That’s understandable. The early twenty-first century is a time of intense social, historical, and aesthetic reexamination. In children’s books, especially, there’s a big push to widen the range of stories and storytellers so as to better represent the broad panoply of human experience. With this laudable and expansive attitude has come, however, a rising contempt for works that fail to reflect the new understanding. There’s a broad temptation to view the past through the prism of our contemporary attitudes and taboos—and to find its people shameful and wanting. We believe ourselves to be so much more enlightened; but, then, people always do.

  A saga of young scallywags on the Mississippi, a fictionalized memoir of the American frontier, an adventure in a turban-wearing land of a “wise, wealthy, courteous, cruel and ancient people”: many classic novels for young readers reveal the existence of retrograde attitudes. The way their authors depict religion, ethnicity, skin color, and especially the sexes and their lively differences may not accord with modern sensibilities.

  This is a short-term problem for novels, but it’s a long-term problem for the culture. When the Wang brothers first pitched the idea of their toddler-friendly Cozy Classics, an uneasy publisher demurred: “I don’t think you should do Pride and Prejudice because the word ‘prejudice’ is inappropriate for a children’s book, and if we do it, we should change the title.” Jack Wang laughed with incredulity when he told me the story. “We were like, do you not understand this concept? People know this book and love it. There is no way you’re going to change the title of this beloved book!” That a publisher would propose changing the title of a novel by Jane Austen is a sign of the extreme skittishness of our times.

  Long before our digital age, an American writer named Walter Edmonds wrote historical fiction for young adults and won prizes for it. Accepting one of these accolades, Edmonds observed, with perspective that applies to us, “The present is important, but today will be yesterday in less than twelve hours, just as a little over twelve hours ago it was unpredictable tomorrow. This present that some of us get so het up about is less than the wink of an eyelid in the face of time. The past is as alive as we are.”

  Human cultures are deep and dynamic, as fathomless as Maria Tatar’s ocean of stories, as shifting and complex as Salman Rushdie’s liquid tapestry. That being the case, we are bound to encounter anachronisms. The world has changed since Sappho, since Dryden, since Hans Christian Andersen and Lucy Maud Montgomery and even E. B. White. The ways that people live and think have altered, often for the better. Still, we are wise not to assume that of all the human beings ever born, we just happen to be the ones who’ve got it all right.

  * * *

  OUR EPOCH IS, of course, hardly the first to be alarmed by earlier cultural assumptions. In the early nineteenth century, when reading aloud was a popular pastime of the English-speaking home, a man named Thomas Bowdler worried that the works of William Shakespeare, unexpurgated and read out loud, were inappropriate in a domestic setting. Bowdler, whose antics would give rise to the verb to bowdlerize, meaning to modify or remove offensive passages of text, brought forth a volume designed to forestall any unpleasantness. Shakespeare’s sixteenth-century brilliance was, in Bowdler’s view, marred by elements that today might be labeled “problematic.” So he stripped out all the bawdy banter and vulgar double entendres, as well as Catholic references that might offend the Anglican book-buying public. The title of the resulting sanitized work is sublime in its comic prolixity: The Family Shakspeare [sic], In Which Nothing is Added to the Original Text but those Words and Expressions are Omitted Which Cannot with Propriety be Read Aloud in a Family.

  It may seem silly to us now, as well as stunningly arrogant, but Bowdler had good intentions. He wanted to protect vulnerable young ears from injury. His reasoning in this respect was not so different from that of the small Chicago publisher that in 2011 printed bowdlerized editions of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

  The American Library Association, to its credit, condemned the expurgation of words that distress the modern reader. “Twain used the ‘n-word’ deliberately because he hated racism and he hated slavery,” the director of the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom said at the time. “Children who read this book deserve the chance to read the book thoughtfully and in its entirety and to understand and to ask questions about why [Twain] used the word and then allow teachers, parents and librarians to answer their questions.”

  That’s absolutely right—and we can take it a step further. Mark Twain is easy to forgive because we know his heart was in the right place. A harder case might seem to be the unenlightened or unrepentant writer, he or she who validates, through fictional characters, thoughts that have become socially unacceptable.

  In Laura Miller’s literary memoir The Magician’s Book, she acknowledges the reader’s dilemma: “How to acknowledge an author’s darker side without losing the ability to enjoy and value the book.”

  Miller writes: “Prejudice is repellent, but if we were to purge our shelves of all the great books tainted
by one vile idea or another, we’d have nothing left to read—at least nothing but the new and blandly virtuous. For the stone-cold truth is that Virginia Woolf was an awful snob, and Milton was a male chauvinist.”

  So too was Rudyard Kipling a colonial man of his times—and a brilliant adventure writer. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books give irreplaceable insight into the lives and attitudes of white Americans during the westward expansion of the late nineteenth century. There is also no avoiding the fact that, through her characters, Wilder gives voice to prejudices that disturb us today. Modern readers flinch at Ma’s open hatred and fear of Indians. Pa shows more equanimity, and even a measure of respect for the civilization his own is displacing. (Missing, of course, is perspective going the other way: In Wilder’s work, we don’t learn from an Indian mother her opinion of homesteaders, nor from an Indian father his views of the foreign practices of white newcomers.) There’s also, in Little Town on the Prairie, a notorious scene in which Pa and other men of a South Dakota town appear in blackface and sing and dance in a minstrel show that all the townspeople are shown to enjoy.

  Should children today know that such attitudes and events ever existed? Will they be permitted to know, as the years go by and the books are reissued? Or will problematic scenes and characters be dropped down the memory hole and made to disappear?

  Ray Bradbury used his 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 to warn of the danger posed to literature by the ranks of the offended. In an incredible twist—considering that censorship and the destruction of troubling narratives are two of the most important ideas animating the book—Bradbury’s own publisher censored certain passages behind the author’s back in later editions. As the years progressed, Bradbury started to get complaints about defects in his novel, such as male chauvinism.

  In an afterword to the 1979 reissue of Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury let fly: “It is a mad world and it will get madder, if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics.”

  “There is more than one way to burn a book,” Bradbury wrote, “and the world is full of people running about with lit matches.” It was true forty years ago, and it is true now. It’s important to keep in mind that art and literature belong to the last generation and to future generations as much they do to ours. We have no more right to edit or expurgate the classics to suit our tastes than the Victorians would have had to invade the Uffizi Gallery and paint a frock over Botticelli’s Venus.

  * * *

  NONE OF THIS means that, reading at home, we are obliged to speak every word out loud. In private, we can take liberties. In some cases, we may be obliged to: after the first time I read Gillian Cross’s retelling of The Iliad to Flora, she would never again allow me to describe the death of Hector. Cross’s version is far less upsetting than Homer’s, yet I absolutely must stop the moment Achilles throws his spear at Hector’s unprotected throat. Flora knows how the scene unfolds, but she doesn’t want to be made to walk through it. When we get to that scene, I am allowed only to say, “Hector died.”

  That sort of responsive adaptation is part of what makes reading aloud such a vibrant experience. We can tailor the reading to the child, and to ourselves. Some parents skip past the awful moment when the hunter shoots Babar’s mother. Some children, like a little boy named Theo, hide when the page comes rather than risk glimpsing the terrible scene. That’s fine! There are lots of reasons to adjust as we go. Some readers skip long descriptive passages, for fear of making their audience restive. One mother I know didn’t want her small daughter to hear her say, “Shut up!” even in the guise of a fictional character, so when the words appeared in the text she would instead say: “Be quiet!”

  My favorite scene of literary meddling comes not from real life but from the 1960s TV show Bewitched, in an episode that has the redheaded witch Endora sitting down with her little granddaughter, Tabitha, to read a well-known fairy tale:

  Once upon a time, a nice kindly witch lived in a gingerbread house in the forest. She wasn’t bothering anyone, or causing any harm, you understand that, Tabitha?

  Unfortunately, one day, two nasty little hooligans called Hansel and Gretel found the gingerbread house. Well! Without so much as a by-your-leave, the two little gluttons broke off her window ledge and ate it!

  Now what do you think of that? Naturally the nice witch was concerned. I mean, who likes vandalism?

  In subverting the story of Hansel and Gretel, the witch achieves a number of ends: while snuggling up with her granddaughter, she’s sharing a classic tale and, at the same time, supplying her own idiosyncratic critique. Not to give a humorous retro TV scene too much weight, but one day Tabitha will be able to read the story for herself, and she will see the difference between the words as written and the ones her grandmother “read” to her. And she will learn something.

  We do children no service in cutting them off from transcendent works of the imagination, even if it means introducing them to troublesome ideas and assumptions, and to characters we would rather they not admire. Like life itself, literature is unruly. It raises moral, cultural, and philosophical questions. Well, where better to talk about these things than at home? The human story is messy and imperfect. It is full of color and peril, creation and destruction—of cruelty and villainy, prejudice and hatred, love and comedy, sacrifice and virtue. We needn’t be afraid of it. It’s foolish to cover it up and pretend history never happened. It is far better to talk about what we think of these matters with our children, using books as a starting point for the conversation.

  “Great art has often been made by bad people,” says the writer and provocateuse Camille Paglia. “So what?”

  * * *

  WHATEVER CURRENTS STIR in the wider culture may be beyond our control, but we have private recourse. At home, like Chen Guangcheng’s father, we can read what we like. If we read to children, widely and without fear, we can expand their hearts and furnish their minds and, in doing so, give them a place to contend with ideas that may be too painful or awkward to discuss anywhere else.

  “History, after all, is people,” observed another pre-Internet writer, Elizabeth Janet Gray, author of the Newbery Medal winner Adam of the Road, which is set in thirteenth-century England. Historical perspective, Gray said, “gives us a profound sense of being part of a long chain of life that went on years before us and will go on years after us, with customs and events differing in many ways but man’s problems and aspirations, his grief and joys, remaining substantially the same. The realization that we are not alone, not unattended, brings color and richness to our present experiences, reinforces our fortitude, and resolves our hesitancies.”

  We are not stranded on a desert island with a single book to occupy the rest of our days. We can mix it up. We can read our children Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods, and we can read them Louise Erdrich’s The Birchbark House and let them see—let the authors show them—at once how similar life is when you are a little girl with annoying siblings who lives close to the land and must engage in yucky, tiresome chores, and how different westward expansion appeared, depending on the type of house and society you occupied. The solution to problematic passages in any particular book is not fewer books, but more of them.

  We are fortunate to have access to more books and stories and paintings and sculptures and other art forms than people at any other time in history. We have schools and libraries and museums, brick-and-mortar bookstores and online leviathans that will sell us new volumes and old, real and virtual, pricey and at a heavy discount. Through Project Gutenberg, we can take classics off the Internet for free.

  No single book has to scratch every itch. If the problem is that some literature expresses old-fashioned views, the solution is to read our children more books of every kind. The more reading, the more voices; the more voices, the more imagination; the more imagination, the more opinion
s; the more opinions, the more freedom of thought; and the more children engage in freedom of thought, the better.

  “If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind,” writes the philosopher John Stuart Mill, who, since we’re cataloging faults, was also an adulterer who held grudges. “But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race, posterity as well as the existing generation—those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error.”

  Be not afraid. Let the stories flow. There are simple and sensible ways to convey optimism and openheartedness while acknowledging the limitations (as we regard them) of people who went before us. One of the best models I’ve seen for handling volatile topics with children comes from a book published almost a century ago, A Child’s History of the World, by a Baltimore educator named Virgil Hillyer. The chapters are short, packed with nifty details, and they convey the eccentricities of the past with refreshing reason and perspective. In the book’s discussion of the Hellenic Golden Age, we learn about a man named Phidias who fashioned a colossal ivory and gold statue of Athena for the Parthenon, in Athens.