Angel in the Parlor (36 page)

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”

So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisychain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.

There was nothing so
very
remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so
very
much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!” (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but when the Rabbit actually
took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket,
and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and, burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.

In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.
¹⁴

In the first paragraph Alice is bored. Why isn't the reader bored? Because from Alice's discontent springs the story. If her sister's book had had more pictures and conversations, Alice would never have noticed the White Rabbit. By the fourth paragraph, she is off on a journey.

The more I read, the more I am convinced that nearly all the great stories for children start out with people taking journeys. In that set of classics I discovered as a child, the journey was so common that one could almost have accused the publisher of being in league with a travel agency. Another favorite book of mine,
Five Children and It,
by E. Nesbit, opens with the conclusion of a realistic journey that is the beginning of a whole series of imaginary ones:

The house was three miles from the station, but before the dusty hired fly had rattled along for five minutes the children began to put their heads out of the carriage window and to say, “Aren't we nearly there?” And every time they passed a house, which was not very often, they all said, “Oh, is this it?” But it never was, till they reached the very top of the hill, just past the chalk-quarry and before you come to the gravel-pit. And then there was a white house with a green garden and an orchard beyond, and mother said, “Here we are!”…

The children had explored the gardens and the outhouses thoroughly before they were caught and cleaned for tea, and they saw quite well that they were certain to be happy at the White House. They thought so from the first moment, but when they found the back of the house covered with jasmine, all in white flower, and smelling like a bottle of the most expensive scent that is ever given for a birthday present; and when they had seen the lawn, all green and smooth, and quite different from the brown grass in the gardens at Camden Town; and when they found the stable with a loft over it and some old hay still left, they were almost certain; and when Robert had found the broken swing and tumbled out of it and got a lump on his head the size of an egg, and Cyril had nipped his finger in the door of a hutch that seemed made to keep rabbits in, if you ever had any, they had no longer any doubts whatever.
¹⁵

And I, as a reader, no longer had any doubts that I wanted to read the book and go exploring with them. But something else contributes to the power of this beginning: the rhythm of the sentences, the sounds of the words themselves. Nesbit is mistress of the long sentence, which speeds forward and gathers events together. Here it is not the events but the syntax that keeps you in suspense, all those dependent clauses piling up, one after the other. On what main clause do they depend? An entirely different kind of suspense results when you use the long sentence to catalog events, poeple, or things. In this passage from Charles Kingsley's
The Water Babies,
the catalog is used to suggest that everyone has come together pell-mell, in the greatest confusion:

… never was there heard at Hall Place—not even when the fox was killed in the conservatory, among acres of broken glass, and tons of smashed flower-pots—such a noise, row, hubbub, babel, shindy, hullabaloo, stramash, charivari, and total contempt of dignity, repose, and order, as that day, when Grimes, the gardener, the groom, the dairy-man, Sir John, the steward, the ploughman, the keeper, and the Irishwoman, all ran up the park, shouting “Stop thief,” in the belief that Tom had at least a thousand pounds' worth of jewels in his empty pockets; and the very magpies and jays followed Tom up, screaking and screaming, as if he were a hunted fox beginning to droop his brush.
¹⁶

None of the books from which I have just been quoting tell realistic stories. They are all fantasies. It is one of the paradoxes of writing for children that the more fantastic the events you describe, the more you must convince your reader that you are not making anything up. To borrow an image from Marianne Moore, if you make up imaginary gardens, you must put real toads in them. Beatrix Potter claimed that she never made anything up. I did not realize the truth of this until I visited her house in Sawrey and recognized the chimneys, cupboards, lanes, barnyards, and pastures of her own farm as the very places I had come to love in her books. The writers of the greatest fantasies for children could not have written as convincingly of other worlds without a thorough knowledge of this one. Beatrix Potter started out as a naturalist. Lewis Carroll wrote nonsense, but Charles Dodgson was a logician. The creator of hobbits was a medieval scholar. (When I used his texts as a graduate student, I knew nothing of his fiction.) The greatest fantasies for children come from a fullness of knowledge of human nature, of science, of history, of life.

Anything made to last is not made quickly. You are writing for the child who will pick up your book a hundred years from now and for the child who may read it tomorrow. A friend of mine, Lore Segal, once told me the effect of the
Iliad
on her son, Jacob, when he was a child. She had read up to the chapter in which the Greeks enter Troy, concealed in the belly of the wooden horse. The revelation of what this meant for the Trojans came to Jacob as he was riding with his mother on a bus, in the middle of Manhattan. The Trojans were doomed. Jacob burst into tears. What a tribute to Homer! In the twentieth century, on a bus in the middle of Manhattan, a child was weeping for the lost Trojans. A classic is a book that makes you weep or laugh more than twenty centuries after it was written. What writer could possibly ask for more?

Notes

The One Who Goes Out at the Cry of Dawn: The Secret Process of Stories.

Becoming a Writer

Angel in the Parlor: The Reading and Writing of Fantasy

The Well-tempered Falsehood: The Art of Storytelling

The Spinning Room: Symbols and Storytellers

The Game and the Garden: The Lively Art of Nonsense