Angel in the Parlor (34 page)

The goblins of traditional folklore have blossomed into Marley's ghost and the three spirits appropriate to Scrooge's past, present, and future. Marley's chain clanks with “cash boxes, keys, padlocks, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel.” The ghost of Christmas past is both an old man, like Scrooge, and a child, which Scrooge must become if he is to be saved from his own selfishness and skepticism:

It was a strange figure—like a child: yet not so like a child as like an old man, viewed through some supernatural medium, which gave him the appearance of having receded from the view, and being diminished to a child's proportions. Its hair, which hung about its neck and down its back, was white as if with age; and yet the face had not a wrinkle in it.… But the strangest thing about it was, that from the crown of its head there sprung a bright clear jet of light, by which all this was visible; and which was doubtless the occasion of its using, in its duller moments, a great extinguisher for a cap, which it now held under its arm.
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The moral and the happy ending are earned, both by Scrooge and by the writer. A happy ending is the heart of the fairy tale, and if you tinker with the form, this must not be tinkered with. Fairy tales are a wish unrolled into a story, a wish that when we disappear under the great extinguisher of death, we may not go out forever. More impossible wishes than this have come true in the stories told by our peasant grandmother, in whose stories strange things are common: wands, wishing caps, eight-headed trolls.

But the stories we write today are literature, not folk tales. And as writers, we take common things and make them strange, just as the rutabaga lamp did in Anna Hed-lund's cellar. Do you see the shadows it throws on the wall? The shadow of Anna's pitcher rises like a bird. The shadow of her husband's gun sleeps like a snake. Anna Hedlund lifts her hand and bends her fingers and makes the shadow of a strange animal. Would she mind what I made of her in my story, an earth goddess in a subterranean hotel? I think not. Who among us does not want to be saved? What storyteller will not try to see in an aging grandmother the eternal woman? And to evoke in a weary reader the ageless child?

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Published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1982.

13

“Who Invented Water?”: Magic, Craft, and the Making of Children's Books

I grew up in a house full of books. And once, during a long illness when I was nearly nine years old, I set out to read all of them. What stopped me almost immediately were the books that the previous owner of the house had bought to fill his empty shelves, so that he should appear at least as well educated as his neighbors. Among his stately volumes of Dickens and Swift was a Victorian novel dealing with pregnancy, in which that word was not once mentioned, and a treatise on the human body written for the young, which claimed that all my bodily functions were governed by magic dwarfs. One dwarf inhabited my liver, another lived in the chambers of my heart, a third guarded my kidneys. When I threw up, I could be certain that the dwarf who occupied my intestines was throwing a tantrum. An illustration showed him scattering gumdrops and chocolates still wrapped in foil, like a maddened child.

On the bottom shelves stood the etiquette books. There were several dozen of these. The chapters on servants included the correct liveries for your groom, your coachman, your butler, your page, your parlormaid, your nursemaid, your lady's maid, and your chambermaid. To me, these books were as exotic as the descriptions of court life in “The Sleeping Beauty” or “Cinderella.” Reading the model letters for all occasions in the
Encyclopedia of Etiquette: What to Do, What to Say, What to Write, What to Wear,
I felt like the chambermaid who surreptitiously reads her mistress's postcards:

40 Garden Place

November 24th 19—

My dear Mrs. Carroll:

I return with great regret the cards for the first Assembly Ball, thinking you may wish to pass them on to someone more fortunate than I am. While out riding last week I severely injured my knee and the doctor gives me no hope that it will be sufficiently strong for dancing on the fifth of next month. This is a grievous disappointment, for the Assembly Balls are always such brilliant and successful affairs.

Believe me with many thanks sincerely yours,

Flora Dabney.

The most tantalizing book on the shelf was a textbook on music appreciation. Its chapters described in great detail the major works of Palestrina, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, and others whose names meant nothing to me. The chapters were to be read after you had listened to the recommended selections. Unfortunately we had not a single classical record in our house. Searching among the fox trots and Al Jolson's greatest hits, I did find Act I of “The Student Prince,” but the opening bars of the overture had got chipped off. I tried to imagine those opening bars along with the symphonies and oratorios described in the book, like a deaf man watching an opera and reading the program notes.

Among the discoveries I made in this haphazard course of study was
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
It was number two in a set of ten books that had “Children's Classics” stamped in gold on the bindings. My mother immediately shelved the entire set in my room. This canonized company among my “Little Lulu” comics and my Mickey Mouse flip books was as attractive as a delegation of missionaries at a cocktail party. How, I thought, could any book given the adult seal of approval be entertaining? But the pictures in
Alice
were attractive, and I read the book. Indeed, I read it twice. Then I looked at the other nine volumes in the set. They included
Gulliver's Travels, The Arabian Nights, The Odyssey, The Iliad, The Pilgrim's Progress, Kidnapped,
and
Huckleberry Finn.
Many of these were the same books I had run across in the grown-up library downstairs, bound in red leather, with a frontispiece showing the author or one of his characters hiding behind a piece of tissue paper, waiting to be unveiled like a commemorative statue.

Our local bookseller only made matters more confusing. In his shop
David Copperfield
and the
Collected Poems of Robert Frost
shared a shelf with
Winnie the Pooh
and
Mary Poppins.
Today I am not surprised. For years children have been appropriating books intended for adults and adults have appropriated books intended for children. In his essay on Lewis Carroll, Auden writes, “There are good books which are only for adults, because their comprehension presupposes adult experiences, but there are no good books which are only for children.”
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As a writer of children's books, I have asked myself, What qualities give the best books for children this broad appeal? Thinking back over the books I read with as much pleasure now as I did when I was eight or nine, I realize that my favorite writers never limited their vocabulary because they were writing for children. A writer's vocabulary is part of his style. His favorite words, however peculiar, become our favorite words. If a child wants to know what happened next, he is not going to be put off by an unfamiliar vocabulary.

I know this from experience. When I was ten years old, I sang in a church choir for children. The lady who directed the choir believed that children should be seen and not heard. We sang at Easter and Christmas services, and the rest of the year we lay fallow. I remember one rehearsal in particular. It was the day before Christmas Eve. The kids in Sunday school who couldn't carry a tune were pressed into service as shepherds and wise men for the annual pageant. I sat, bored and restless in my white taffeta wings and white robe, with eleven other angels in the choir stall. The girl next to me was allergic to tinsel and had already gotten a rash from her halo. We were singing the first verse of “Away in a Manger,” the only one we could be counted on not to mumble, when she slipped me, from behind her hymnal, a small brown book. Slim, plain-covered, discreet.

I opened it eagerly. It was a sex manual, sneaked into church not by the devil but by the blond, curly-haired boy playing Gabriel, whom my mother called a holy terror. The sex manual was not illustrated and the account of what grown-ups did when we weren't looking was set forth in admirably scientific language. I didn't know much about sex, but motivation can do a lot, even for the most ignorant; I read it avidly and came away feeling much as Alice felt when she has finished reading “Jabberwocky” and remarks, “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don't know exactly what they are!”

But I noticed that, given unlimited freedom of vocabulary, the best writers for children use simple words instead of complicated ones, short words instead of long ones, not because children won't understand them but because simple language is the most effective. I once heard John Gardner tell a group of students at Bread Loaf to go through the dictionary and make a list of all the simple words they knew but didn't commonly use. I tried it and didn't even finish the A's. I already had more words than I could use in a lifetime. And if I'm ever tempted to choose a long word over a short one, I remember this passage, not from children's literature, but from the book of Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill: but time and chance happeneth to them all.

And here is George Orwell's translation of the same passage into complicated English:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
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When I tell people that I write books for children and that I do not believe a writer should limit his or her vocabulary, I am sometimes asked, “Has an editor ever wanted you to change a word because children might not understand it? And have you done it?” Yes. The one word I've never been able to sneak past an editor is icebox. I am told that modern children will not know what an icebox is, and that I must say refrigerator. I've changed it, but regretfully; to my ear, icebox is the better word. In the house where I grew up, behind our icebox was a little door that could be opened by the man who delivered the ice. We didn't have to depend on his deliveries, as our icebox was electric. But what can I say to the reader who thinks I'm talking about a box of ice?

The question of what makes a book appeal to both adults and children goes well beyond vocabulary, however. Here I want to look at that question using fantasy rather than realistic fiction, since the books I loved best were fantasy. Nevertheless, I grew up aware of two ways of looking at the world that are opposed to each other and yet can exist side by side in the same person. One is the scientific view (my father was a scientist). The other is the magic view (my mother is a storyteller). Most of us come round at last to the scientific view. When we grow up, we put magic away with our other childish things. But I think we can all remember a time when magic was as palatable as science and the things we can't see were as important to us as the things we can.

From my own childhood, one such scene stays with me above all others. Every Easter morning my great-grandmother would rise before sunrise, cross the cold fields of her husband's farm in Deep River, Iowa, kneel beside the muddy river and dip water into a small bottle, chanting as she did so the words she believed turned common water into holy water. The words that brought about this miraculous change were a sort of garbled Latin, and I doubt that my great-grandmother, who spoke and read only German, understood them any better than I did. When I asked her why she used those words and no others she answered, “They always worked for my mother.”

“But that was in Germany. This is America!”

“Water is water,” said my great-grandmother.

“But why can't you speak plain, like I'm talking to you right now?”

Indignantly she answered, “Do you think water will listen to you if you get up and talk to it just any old way? That is no time to make personal remarks. You have to keep yourself out of it.”

Years later, as a graduate student slogging my way through a course in Anglo-Saxon, I came across a charm for healing that reminded me of my great-grandmother's riverbank soliloquies. According to the textbook, the charm was a relic from the days when people believed that spirits lived in rivers and wells. My great-grandmother, a staunch Lutheran who kept her burial clothes in her room to remind her of her mortality, would have been shocked if I had told her she was really indulging in a pagan charm used by her ancestors to heal horses and their masters:

Sing this thrice nine times, evening and morning, above a man's head, and in a horse's left ear, in running water, and turn his head against the stream: “In domo manosin inchorna meoti, otimimeoti quoddealde otuuotiua et marethin …”
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