Authors and After Words

There was probably no children’s section in the great library at Alexandria because, at the time, there was no such thing as childhood! There were, however, children, some of whom appeared in ancient myth and literature. Icarus paid mightily for his witless adolescent behavior on high with a long fall into the sea. The toddler Astyanax, Hector’s son, appeared in that lovely family moment in Book VI of the Iliad. Astyanax’s death is remembered as one of the three horrid atrocities at the end of the Trojan War. But the idea of childhood as distinct along with a separate literary type pertaining primarily to youngsters did not emerge until the nineteenth century.

Early in that century, two literary phenomena coalesced to form the idea of children’s literature. The first was a result of the work of folklorists who went about the countryside collecting folk and fairy tales; people like the Grimm Brothers in Germany, Asbjørnson and Moe in Norway and many others. They brought the “folk” heritage out of the rude countryside and into the city. In the countryside, folk and fairy tales were not, a priori, consigned to an audience of children. They were enjoyed by the whole community, and the messages of these tales were taken seriously by adults and children alike.

Secondly, the stories that emerged from these collections were tailor made for the Romantic imagination. Writers were looking for the strange, the bizarre, the weird, even the downright morbid – like a wicked stepmother dancing to her death in red hot shoes, as in the original version of “Snow White.” In response to these folk and fairy tales, writers began to delve into dreams and the subconscious to harvest elements they could creatively incorporate into their own original work. Neither Hans Christian Andersen in Denmark nor E. T. A. Hoffmann in Germany wrote initially with children in mind and at first their work was received without being categorized. Any serious reading of the original un-expurgated versions of “The Snow Queen” or “The Nightingale” by Andersen or any story by E. T. A. Hoffman will reveal how they emerge from an adult imagination with symbols and innuendos accordingly. Hoffman’s stories have never become children’s classics, and Anderson finally accepted the label of “children’s author” reluctantly.

As Andersen became better known as a “children’s writer” and as the folk and fairy tales from Europe became popular in bowdlerized versions suitable for youngsters, other writers began writing “for children.” In Britain in particular, with such a long history of fantasy, much of the early literature written for children feels like it was only partly written so. The “Alice” books of Lewis Carroll, have a decidedly adult edge to them. They are still well loved by adults as virtually proto-absurdist works, and rightly so. Likewise, The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame works because the animal characters are only very thinly disguised English country gentlemen, satirized with affectionate relish. In the chapter entitled “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” Grahame transplants the transcendental nature god Pan into the British countryside. In so doing, he surely paved the way for C. S. Lewis to embrace the Greek heritage of mythological characters in the Narnia Chronicles. Speaking of C. S. Lewis, his take on children’s literature was that writing for children should adhere to the same standards as writing for adults; that if a book didn’t work for adults, it wouldn’t work for younger readers either.

Evidently, Lewis’s concerns are being met these days. While preparing for the series I’m introducing with this essay, one of my librarian consultants recommended a “juvenile” novel called The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. I was swept away by this book and my enthusiasm continues to this day. Another librarian told me that the book has a greater circulation among adults than it does among children. I’m not surprised.

The Book Thief is by no means the only “children’s book” that adults have taken a shine to recently. Don’t think for a moment that all those Harry Potter books were snapped up for children’s eyes only. Indeed, it was the Potter series that drew the attention of publishers to what is now known as the “crossover,” i.e. a book published for children that crosses over to adults. The Book Thief was designated the great crossover book of the 2006-7 season. The same “crossover” occurs with books by Phillip Pullman, Lloyd Alexander, Ursula LeGuin and Madeleine L’Engle. I’ll be looking at these authors and others because they write fine books that grapple with the great issues: epic questions of life and death, love and hate, the ultimate relation of body to mind to spirit to each other, to the universe, and to the Great Beyond. Bringing these themes into human proportions calls for metaphors, speculations and other worlds that are impossible in a fiction that demands a strict imitation of our day to day experiences – otherwise known as “realism.” Life is a grand adventure which calls for flights of fantasy, daring theoretical inventions and open minded imaginations – the way children imagine who want to learn it all at once and the way adults imagine who want to keep learning as long as humanly possible.

Many years ago I was asked by a young producer at WGBH Radio in Boston to read children’s books on the air. As the work on “The Spider’s Web” progressed, I became more and more drawn to those books. Frankly, most of what I read for adults these days, with certain exceptions, leaves me cold. But the books designated as “children’s books” almost never disappoint me.