Barking with the Big Dogs

by Natalie Babbitt

  Campbell would say that all of us know the pattern well without having to be taught. We were born with an understanding of it, subconsciously, and everything that happens in our lives reinforces it. But for most of us, certainly for me, it remains subconscious until it is somehow exposed. I’ve told you that The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a densely scholarly work. I can’t keep much of its wealth of detail in my head for long at a time. I read it first in 1972 and then again this past winter. In between, I wrote several stories, including one called Tuck Everlasting. Imagine my chagrin on coming across the following passage in Hero this winter, one I must have read six years ago, in the chapter dealing with that first step, the call to adventure:

  Typical of the circumstances of the call are the dark forest, the great tree, the babbling spring, and the loathly, underestimated appearance of the carrier of the power of destiny.

  Some of you may have read Tuck Everlasting. If so, you will recall my own dark forest, great tree, babbling spring, and my own loathly carrier, or herald, Winnie Foster’s toad. I had a letter from a child last week asking me why I put a toad into this story. How can I give a simple answer? The toad is there because my subconscious told me I had to supply my hero with a herald? But that is the only true answer.

  It is annoying in the extreme to find that one’s work, struggled with for so long, and finally finished after trying and discarding numberless bits of detail, can be found to have been summed up—parts of it, anyway—by a scholar years before one even began, and described as “typical.” I knew my ash tree and spring were ancient symbols of immortality and I used them for that very reason, but I didn’t know, consciously, that for this story they were representing any kind of threshold. And I certainly didn’t like to think of them as preordained and typical. I didn’t and don’t like to think that I have so little freedom of choice, that the pattern with all of its elements laid out is so deeply instilled in me that it leads me without my knowing I am being led.

  Still, we have to come to the conclusion that all fantasy stories are fundamentally alike. Their patterns are immutable, and as writers we must follow them willy-nilly or suffer the consequences of a plotline gone askew. It is annoying, but it is miraculous, too. We are trapped, but it is a kind of confinement that makes a brotherhood of us all, writers and readers alike, here, everywhere, and on back to our common prehistory ancestors. For the questions have never changed, and the answers are always the same.

  Carl Sagan, in his remarkable book The Dragons of Eden, talks at length about the two halves of the brain—everyone’s brain: how the left side is the residence of logic and language, while the right side is the home of dream and intuition and creativity. Much of the truth of this brain division has been established through surgical experiments on animals, and observance of human accident victims. But Sagan goes on beyond facts and into theory to talk about the content of the brain’s right side. The logical left side tries hard to control and repress the intuitive right side, but in sleep the left relaxes its vigil and the right brings images up to the surface that in the waking state would never be permitted. Sagan quotes Erich Fromm at this point. Fromm, he says, calls these images “the forgotten language” and “argues that they are the common origin of dreams, fairy tales, and myths.” Whether or not these images are common to all of us, whether or not there is such a thing, really, as “race memory,” may be arguable. But I believe with Sagan that we do all ask the same urgent questions and fear the same implacable monsters. There is no other way to explain the remarkable similarity among the world’s myths of creation, for instance, as well as among its wealth of folk and fairy tales.

  The common questions, put simply, seem to be: Who am I? What is the meaning of life? Can I make my way through it alone? And must death be the final end? We all begin, after all, in the same way: We are protected by our parents for a time, and then we are thrust out into the world without them. Sometimes there are happy ceremonies to mark this thrusting out—ceremonies like bar mitzvahs or graduations or weddings—and sometimes the event is unceremonious and harsh. But it must take place if we are to grow. Still, the world is dangerous, and most of us are afraid as we head out into it alone. We wonder if we are strong enough. But we face our trials as bravely as we can, and most of us, fortunately, can say to ourselves, as the theme song of The Mary Tyler Moore Show says to its hero, “You’re going to make it after all.” We must all follow the mythic hero’s path, and his experiences have for centuries served as a guide for us, whether we realize it or not.

  Throughout the struggle, however, no matter how successful we are, we still fear the ultimate separation, death. In myths and fairy tales, the heroes seldom die a literal death within the bounds of the story, but their happy endings are not denials of death. Happy endings, says Campbell in his Hero with a Thousand Faces, are “to be read not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man.” In myth and fairy tale, death is dealt with symbolically. Snow White and Sleeping Beauty are both awakened from their long sleeps—for which read: resurrected from their deaths—by the kiss of a prince, and are carried off to the typical fairy-tale heaven of a castle where it is possible to live happily ever after. In much of children’s fantasy literature, this last step to the hero’s final reward will take place, as I have said, beyond the scope of the story, but we know that some kind of heaven awaits him, for he has completed his trials successfully and has earned that final reward. For my own Tuck family, the final reward is withheld, but Winnie, the standard hero, achieves it fully.

  So how do we explain Peter Pan? He is a herald announcing the call to adventure, and a protector of Wendy and her brothers, but he is also a hero himself, a hero who has refused to take the final step and return to the real world, to adulthood and eventual death. He has chosen instead to remain forever in Neverland, having the same adventures over and over again, and he tries hard to persuade Wendy and the Lost Boys to do the same. Barrie makes it clear, however, that there is a heavy price to pay for refusing to return: One forfeits all rights to putting one’s learned lessons, or “boons,” to work in the real world. To remain a child, though it has advantages, nevertheless means that you will remain immature, ignorant, powerless, and unfulfilled.

  These facts apply as well to James in James and the Giant Peach. But he and Peter Pan are not unique. Campbell points out that the return is often refused in myth and folklore. “The full round,” he says, “requires that the hero … [come] back into the kingdom of humanity, where the boon may redound to the renewing of the community, the nation, the planet, or the ten thousand worlds.” And when the hero refuses to complete the round, he has, in fact, chosen to withdraw from his own humanity.

  It would be well nigh impossible to name a single fantasy or fairy tale where the pattern or some major portion of it does not prevail. Whether the call to adventure is heralded by Pinocchio’s Cat and Fox, or Charlie Bucket’s golden ticket, or the appearance of Mary Poppins, there will be a herald of some kind, always. Whether the threshold is Alice’s rabbit hole, or the desert surrounding Oz, or the closet in the Narnia series, there will be a threshold always. Whether the protective charm is as simple as Cinderella’s fairy godmother or as complex as the usual youngest son’s usual three objects given him by the usual hag he encounters on the road, there will always be some kind of charm. Adventures and trials will always be present, for they form not only the conflict and suspense of the story, but more important, they represent the struggle to learn the necessary lesson and achieve the mastery of one’s own fears. As for coming home again, where it happens, there is a completion of the round and a feeling of satisfaction. And where there is a refusal to return, there is the suggestion that for the particular hero of the particular story, reality is not worth returning to. For most, however, the ending will be happy.

  Why, if the patterns of fantasy are so unchangeable, do writers of fantasy not get tired of it? Well, I, for one, do get tired of it and sometimes wish for more elb
ow room to explore my ideas. The trouble is, I believe in the pattern. It’s the only kind of story line that seems to make any final kind of sense. And this means that I believe in happy endings. Modern adult fiction, and much of what we call teenage fiction, cannot itself entirely escape the pattern; the difference is that in much of this type of fiction, the hero will refuse the call in the first place, or worse, he will cross the threshold only to be defeated in his trials, or to opt for remaining in that other world. This, for instance, is the principal difference between the movies Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Star Wars is a classic fantasy with the hero’s round complete. Close Encounters is a modern study: The hero, after struggling through most of the story merely to answer the call to adventure, crosses the threshold only at the end, and the implication is that the round, which took so long to begin, will never be completed—the hero will not come home again.

  For me and for all writers devoted to fantasy as a means of exploring ideas, the total round of the hero’s path is vitally important. We cannot tell stories that satisfy us without it. And I think there will always be a place for us in the world of fiction. There always has been for as long as the basic, simple questions have been asked. Fantasy will continue to answer those questions symbolically at some level and in some place that is always unexplained and yet universally understood. In The Dragons of Eden, Carl Sagan quotes a fourth-century philosopher, Sallustius: “Myths are things which never happened, but always are.” To carry on in that tradition, to take the hero through his round and bring him home again, over and over, is a tradition that will never lose its vitality or its value. I hope that in these practical times, with their new and urgent practical problems, you will agree with me that while we must, with realistic fiction, define and redefine for our children our rapidly changing physical world, we also have an obligation to serve the needs of their ancient, searching, universal souls.

  Ralph Moore with his two daughters, Natalie (standing) and Diane, 1940

  “I suppose I was word-conscious at an early age because, though we weren’t scholars, we were nevertheless word people. My father loved puns and jokes and could make us laugh over and over again at the same things.”

  Saying What You Think

  (1981)

  Someone said once that the older we get, the more aware we are that we don’t know much, and that’s all right—I don’t have any quarrel with that. But the trouble is, it’s also true that the older we get, the more we’re expected to sound as if we know a great deal.

  It took me a long time to accept the idea that I had to know things, in the first place, and even longer to accept the idea that I would from time to time have to explain what I knew, and even longer than that to realize that what I knew was more than likely going to be challenged by someone who knew something else altogether. That can be very intimidating if you haven’t had much practice. There’s nothing so hard to defend as an opinion.

  I had a lot of opinions when I was a child, hundreds and hundreds, but was almost never asked to defend them. Then, later on, I went through a period when I had no opinions at all. After that came a stretch when I had three or four opinions but was mostly too timid to articulate them and even less able to defend them when challenged. I have in the last fifteen years arrived at a stage where I have, oh, maybe as many as a dozen opinions, all tried and true, and I can defend every one if I have to. What’s more, I don’t care anymore whether anyone agrees with me or not. I am not even alarmed when I meet someone who has maybe as many as fifty or sixty opinions. As you know, a person with fifty or sixty opinions lives an easier life than the rest of us. Decisions are a snap; judgments can be reached in the wink of an eye; the mind is as easy to make up as a daybed. But now when I am confronted by someone like that, I can listen with comparative calm, and, while I’m listening, I just take out one of my own opinions and roll it around in my head without bothering anyone about it, and it’s very reassuring. One opinion of mine that is very good for this purpose, an opinion so old it’s way back at number two on my list, is that The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley is a silly book.

  I can defend that opinion, chapter and verse, to anyone who wishes to challenge it. But I couldn’t always. The Water-Babies was, after all, one of the books on my mother’s list of children’s classics—a list put out by persons unknown—and by the time my sister and I were through with grammar school, she had read every one of them aloud to us.

  I remember being alarmed by parts of Hans Brinker and Heidi, and we never heard the ending of The Yearling because my mother couldn’t get through it without weeping. Robinson Crusoe was a little dull, and, as I’ve said, The Water-Babies was silly. And I was left pretty much untouched by Robin Hood, Peter Pan, and a number of others. But I loved Alice in Wonderland, Penrod, and most of the Just So Stories. Except for Alice, the illustrations in these books had nothing at all to do with what I liked or didn’t like. And I don’t think the stories themselves had as much to do with it as you might expect. It seems to have had mainly to do with the language used—whether or not it was funny, unusual, and evocative. And so when Charles Kingsley said in The Water-Babies that “Tom was always a brave, determined little English bull-dog, who never knew when he was beaten,” I was not amused.

  I suppose I was word-conscious at an early age because, though we weren’t scholars, we were nevertheless word people. My father loved puns and jokes and could make us laugh over and over again at the same things. And I think he made an effort to make his own speech fresh and funny. We laughed often and easily, but I soon learned that whether or not a thing seems funny has much to do with the circumstances under which it’s heard and who is doing the speaking. My friends almost never thought the things my father said were funny when I repeated them.

  I think my friends thought my family was a little weird, and I guess in a lot of ways we were. I suppose that’s why my father’s mother and James Thurber’s mother were such good friends while my father was growing up in Columbus, Ohio. The Thurbers, as we all know from stories like “The Night the Bed Fell,” were not exactly run-of-the-mill, and though my father never knew James Thurber—they went to different schools—he did remember often coming home to find his mother and Mrs. Thurber sitting in rocking chairs on the front porch. Mrs. Thurber always seemed to be telling a funny story, rocking back and forth, slapping her knees and laughing.

  You wouldn’t think offhand that there could be anything particularly fertile for the antic imagination about growing up in Columbus, but maybe people were funny in self-defense. Of course, one man’s funny is another man’s weird. My father’s family was unusual, to put it mildly. But he thought they were funny, and so, of course, we did, too. I would dearly love to tell stories about them, but that would take us far afield from the topic at hand, so I will discipline myself and say instead that the point in all this is that I had a tendency to like books that seemed to me to have a way with words. The stories themselves didn’t have to be funny, necessarily, but they certainly had to be diverting, and they had to have a hero with whom it would be nice to change places. I don’t think I thought very much about content or the thrust of an argument. I don’t recall our ever discussing that aspect. But occasionally it was so obvious that it hit you in the face. That was one of the troubles with The Water-Babies. The whole family disliked The Water-Babies, though we dutifully read it all the way through. I am much gratified by the fact that it doesn’t seem to be required anymore.

  Beyond this—the congenial hero and the language—I remember being beguiled by the environment in which a story was read. We read aloud more often in the summers, particularly during my father’s vacations, when we would sit in a cushioned swing hung in a corner of the screened porch of my mother’s mother’s cottage at a place called Indian Lake in northwestern Ohio. It was lovely to curl up there beside my mother on a hot afternoon and listen to stories. It would have been almost impossible to dislike any author’s works—except Charles Kingsley’s—unde
r those circumstances; the entire ambiance was so charming. My father was always off blissfully fishing, or about to go blissfully fishing, or just coming back from blissfully fishing; my grandmother seemed always to be in the kitchen either baking a pie or making a kind of candy we had a fondness for, which in hindsight seems truly ghastly, since its sole ingredients were powdered sugar, cold mashed potatoes, and peanut butter. And the amusement park across the road was always in full swing, so that the narrative my mother was reading was punctuated by the gradual crescendo and diminuendo of the roller coaster and the shrieking of its happy victims. It was a backdrop Lewis Carroll would have understood and thoroughly approved of, in fiction if not in life.

  The books we read by ourselves were not on my mother’s list, but she didn’t seem to mind. My sister preferred to go off alone, up in a tree if there was a good one near by, and cry over Little Women or Uncle Tom’s Cabin, while I ate oranges in my bedroom and read fairy tales. And in the evenings my father read Arthur Conan Doyle’s The White Company and Rafael Sabatini novels over and over again, as well as every detective story he could get his hands on. Curiously, I don’t remember my mother reading to herself at all, though I suppose she must have.

  But I want you to understand that we didn’t talk about books. We simply enjoyed them or didn’t enjoy them, the way we enjoyed or didn’t enjoy eating depending on the menu. Books were a normal part of our daily lives, and beyond the list of children’s classics, no one told us we should read such and such, or shouldn’t read so and so. We were entirely unselfconscious about it.