Angel in the Parlor (35 page)

In these rituals my great-grandmother was a magician, and like the magicians in the fairy tales, she was dealing with invisible powers. The water of life looks no different than the water of death. The water she brought back from that muddy river was used only for emergencies of the spirit, not afflictions of the flesh. The last time I can recall its being used was at a family dinner. A child who had not yet been baptized choked on a chicken bone. My greatgrandfather seized the water, baptized the child, and then called the doctor. Perhaps the water really was charmed, for the child recovered before the doctor arrived. Language was the instrument that brought about this transformation from the insignificant to the powerful, and so it has always been, ever since the first Maker said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

This belief that everything is alive, this faith in the power of what is invisible, I call the magic view of life. And I believe that all small children and some adults hold this view at the same time that they hold the scientific one. I also believe that the great books for children come from those writers who hold both.

I have recently had a chance to observe how the magic view shapes our understanding of the most common events. Over a period of several years I kept a notebook in our kitchen where I jotted down the questions my son asked me. I kept it in the kitchen because I have noticed that the great revelations between parents and children occur most often there, in the hectic half hour before dinner must be put on the table. Many of the questions an adult could have asked; they could be answered with facts, that is, with a scientific or historical answer. Did the Pharaohs brush their teeth? Who was the first person to think of using a fork? Who invented the pretzel?

There is a book in our public library that answers such questions, and it is so popular that I am lucky if I can find it on the shelf once in six months. It is called
The Stone Soup,
by Maria Leach, and it is the history of common things. The table of contents reads like an abbreviated index of the Sears Roebuck catalog. There you will find the name of the woman who first introduced the fork to England. And if you turn to another book,
The Book of Firsts,
by Patrick Robertson, you will find that the Chinese claim to have invented the first toothbrush in 1498 and that the earliest mention of toothbrushes in Europe occurs in a letter, sent to one Sir Ralph Verney in 1649, asking him to bring back from Paris some of those “little brushes for making cleane of the teeth, most covered with sylver and some few with gold and sylver twiste …” And I always assumed that pretzels had no history until
Cricket
magazine ran an article on them several years ago. Pretzels are said to have been invented in the thirteenth century by a monk who gave them as a reward to children for learning their prayers. In the shape of the pretzel a sharp eye can discern the shape of the children's folded hands. Which all goes to show that there are a good many stories in the world that need not be made up but only found out. Cats, dogs, flowers, seashells, presidents, wars, knives, eyeglasses, shoes—everything in the world has a history, and to a child, for whom these things are new, every history is worth telling.

But there is another kind of question that children ask, which comes not from a scientific or historic interest in things but from a magic view of them. I will give you a selection from the questions I jotted down in my kitchen, as I believe they speak for themselves:

When a mouse falls on its knees, does it hurt?

Can I eat a star?

If I stand on my head, will the sleep in my eye roll up into my head?

If I drop my tooth in the telephone, will it go through the wires and bite someone's ear?

Who tied my navel? Did God tie it?

When my grandpa died, did he get young again? Will he be an invisible baby? Does everything have a birthday, even air?

Does the sun give you freckles? How long do I have to hold out my hand to get one?

When Grandma broke her arm, did it come right off?

How soft can loud be and still be loud?

Am I growing all the time? Even when I'm walking?

Do moths eat the wool off lambs?

Where does time go? Into the air?

Do the years ever run out?

Do caterpillars play like children? Do butterflies make a noise?

Are they part of our family?

Who invented water?

Could we xerox the moon?

Am I in my life? Are you in yours?

What happens if I open a clock and touch the ticky part?

Have all the kinds of shells in the sea been discovered?

These questions arise from a belief that practically everything in the universe is alive and that there is more than one way of being alive. Things that pass out of sight and hearing do not pass out of existence, and the failure to see and hear them is our failure. When my son, at the age of four, asked me if he could marry our cat, he really did believe that animals could understand human speech and only some defect in himself kept him from understanding theirs. Further, he had heard a great many stories about animals that turned out to be human beings in disguise. He is still especially fond of a fairy tale called “The White Cat,” in which a king sends his three sons off on a journey to see who can find the most beautiful wife. The youngest son comes to a castle in which all the courtiers are cats. The princess, though a cat, is so lovely and wise that he chooses her for his wife and takes her home to meet his father. The last scene, in the version of the story my son knows, runs as follows:

Crowds gathered again around the king's palace to see the prince's return.

The two elder princes presented their brides to their father. The king welcomed them politely, but the two ladies were equally beautiful and he did not know how to choose between them.

“Where is my youngest son?” the king asked.

At that moment the youngest prince appeared, leading the White Cat. The courtiers looked at her in amazement.

“My son,” the king said, “what does this mean? I asked you to bring a beautiful bride and you have brought a white cat. A beautiful cat, I admit, but do you want her to be your wife?”

The prince looked at the White Cat; she only smiled and said nothing. “I know she is a cat, Father,” he said, “but I love her and want her to be my wife.”

At the prince's words the Cat put her paws to her face and furled back her fur like a cloak. “An evil fairy cast a spell on me,” she said to the prince, “but your love has broken it. Now I am a woman again.” And so she was.

“You are the most beautiful woman in the world,” the king said, “and now you shall be a queen.”
⁴

The White Cat is not the first whom love has changed from a beast to an angel. Though the metaphor is fantastic, the story is true, as the best fantasies for children always are. You have only to leaf through Grimms' fairy tales to see that fantasy need not be an escape from the problems of what we like to call the “real world,” and you won't find a better collection of stories about murder, poverty, child abuse, and abandonment.

Nothing could be further from the “problem” books now being published on these subjects than Grimms' fairy tales. There are books about divorce for children whose parents are getting a divorce, books about going to the hospital for the first time for a child who is about to have his tonsils out, and so on. A problem book is first cousin to those jokes that the traveling patent medicine man would tell when he wanted to collect a good crowd. He'd start out telling you a good story and end up trying to sell you something. And once you saw the ulterior motive, you felt cheated. The problem is a sort of Procrustean bed and the story is cut to fit it. You and I know that the best stories are like rivers, which cut their own channels. The only problems the storyteller should worry about are narrative ones. How do I start my story? How do I keep my reader interested? How do I end my story?

As a child I loved Grimms' fairy tales, not because they instructed me or enlarged my understanding, but because they kept me sitting on the edge of my chair. Their makers never forgot their audience wanted to be entertained and would just as soon go out and climb a tree as listen to you. It's no accident that some of the most popular children's books started as stories told to or written for real children. Lovers of the Alice books know that Lewis Carroll invented Alice's adventures for the entertainment of the three young daughters of the dean of Christ Church at Oxford, during a boating expedition. A friend of Carroll's says of that expedition:

I rowed
stroke
and he rowed
bow
… the story was actually composed and spoken over my shoulder for the benefit of Alice Liddell, who was acting as “cox” of our gig. I remember turning round and saying “Dodgson, is this an extempore romance of yours?” And he replied: “Yes, I'm inventing as we go along.”
⁵

Johnny Gruelle claims to have told the Raggedy Ann stories to his daughter Marcella and to have written them down afterward. And Beatrix Potter says of her picture books, which often got their start in illustrated letters for her child friends, “It is much more satisfactory to address a real live child: I often think that was the secret of the success of Peter Rabbit, it was written to a child—not made to order.”
⁶
The first draft of
The Story of Peter Rabbit
is to be found in a letter to Noel Moore, the son of the young woman who had been her own governess:

My dear Noel,

I don't know what to write to you, so I shall tell you a story about four little rabbits whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter. They lived with their mother in a sand bank under the root of a big fir tree.

“Now, my dears,” said old Mrs. Bunny, “you may go into the field or down the lane, but don't go into Mr. McGregor's garden.”
⁷

But I believe that in all these cases the child was as much the catalyst that got the stories going as the shaper of the tales themselves. Beatrix Potter makes it plain in her letters and conversations that she wrote chiefly to please herself.

I have just made stories to please myself because I never grew up! … I think I write carefully because I enjoy my writing, and enjoy taking pains over it.… My usual way of writing is to scribble, and cut out, and write it again and again. The shorter and plainer the better. And read the Bible (
unrevised
version and Old Testament) if I feel my style wants chastening.… I think the great point in writing for children is to have something to say and to say it in simple direct language.… I polish, polish, polish! to the last, revise.
⁸

Christopher Robin Milne's remarks on the way his father created the world of Winnie the Pooh are not so different from Potter's. “There was no question of tossing off something that was good enough for kiddies,” he writes. “He was writing first to please and satisfy himself.”
⁹

I think what Maurice Sendak says about the source of his own work holds true for all makers of children's books. For Sendak, the child for whom he writes is the part of himself that still believes in magic:

… all I have to go on is what I know not only about my childhood but about the child I was as he exists now.… You see, I don't believe, in a way, that the kid I was grew up into me.… He still exists somewhere, in the most graphic, plastic, physical way. It's as if he had moved somewhere. I have a tremendous concern for him and interest in him. I communicate with him—or try to—all the time.… The pleasures I get as an adult are heightened by the fact that I experience them as a child at the same time. Like, when autumn comes, as an adult I welcome the departure of the heat, and simultaneously, as a child would, I start anticipating the snow and the first day it will be possible to use a sled. This dual apperception does break down occasionally. That usually happens when my work is going badly. I get a sour feeling about books in general and my own in particular. The next stage is annoyance at my dependence on this dual apperception, and I reject it. Then I become depressed. When excitement about what I'm working on returns, so does the child. We're on happy terms again.
¹⁰

The child is the imagination at its most free, the adult is the disciplined craftsman who shapes it into a book. In the end, what really makes a book beloved both by children and adults is the high quality of the writing itself. When I reread the books I loved as a child, I always notice the scenes and characters that stayed with me. That is, I notice first of all the parts I remembered. Then I notice the parts I forgot. And the passages that time did not touch are insignificant, unexciting, and unessential to the plot. But they are vividly written and often symbolic, a single metaphor, perhaps, that brings the many strands of the book together. The writing, not the action, fixed them in my mind.

Here are three passages from three favorite stories of mine. They are, in fact, the opening paragraphs:

“Are you quite sure he will be at home?” said Jane, as they got off the bus, she and Michael and Mary Poppins.

“Would my uncle ask me to bring you to tea if he intended to go out, I'd like to know?” said Mary Poppins, who was evidently very offended by the question.
¹¹

“Perhaps she won't be there,” said Michael.

“Yes, she will,” said Jane. “She's always there for ever and ever.”
¹²

“And be sure you don't drop it!” said Mary Poppins, as she handed Michael a large black bottle.

He met the warning glint in her eye and shook his head earnestly.

“I'll be extra specially careful,” he promised. He could not have gone more cautiously if he had been a burglar.
¹³

What these three beginnings have in common, of course, is a situation that only the rest of the story can resolve. The first opens with a question: “Are you quite sure he will be at home?” The second opens with an argument, a sure-fire way of getting your reader's attention. The third involves danger. If Michael drops the bottle, there will be serious consequences. How serious? What's in the bottle? Will he drop it? Further, they all start with dialogue that puts you into the middle of an ongoing conversation, so that you feel the action has already started. No slow warm-up here. But the slow warm-up can also be a powerful beginning. Here is the opening of
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: