Barking with the Big Dogs

by Natalie Babbitt

  This next may sound like a contradiction, but I have always thought we human beings take ourselves much too seriously. An article in Time magazine, talking about the sun, said that someday, when it runs low on hydrogen, it will swell into a red giant and incinerate our planet. This won’t happen for about five billion years, but it’s coming. Scientists agree on that. Shouldn’t the fact inform our philosophies? Shouldn’t it show us how utterly unimportant we are? For there is nothing at all we can do about the sun. Or about storms, or meteor showers, or ocean tides, or tornadoes, or any other phenomena that nature creates according to laws of its own. Nature is neither good nor bad; it simply exists, and we humans are a very small part of it—the only part that has choices to make, the only part with a separate dark and light side. If we could only be taught to accept ourselves as unimportant, we could control our huge egos and learn how to fit in with natural systems both internal and external.

  The stories I always liked best were the stories which presented life as it really is: the dark and the light all mixed up together, coexisting, with unanswerable questions remaining unanswered, retaining their mystery and their wonder and their endless power to motivate. If life consisted only of the known and good things, if there were no dark to confront and fight, how dull and uninspiring everything would be! I wouldn’t give two cents for a children’s book—or any other kind of book—that tells the reader that life is a bowl of Häagen-Dazs ice cream and that bad feelings are alien and can be shed forever, simply driven out of one’s heart and mind at will. I knew when I was eight that this is ridiculous. Most of us did, if we would only admit it. And I’ve always been glad that it’s ridiculous. I’ve had a lucky external life; I know that and am grateful for it, up to a point. But my head is like everyone else’s from here to Bangladesh: full of demons and dark places and vague but dangerous notions. We’re all the same inside our hearts and minds, and stories that tell the truth about that are loved by us all, all around the world. The truth is pretty simple, after all. It is summed up beautifully in a poem called “Desiderata” written by Max Ehrmann in 1927. Many of you are familiar with it, I’m sure. In part, “Desiderata” says:

  You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should … Whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.

  Here are all the clues anyone needs for storytelling. You are a child of the universe—yes, part of it, and no more or less important than other parts. The universe is unfolding as it should—yes, and will do so whether or not people can discover motives and reasons, so we might as well relax about it. And, yes, in spite of everything, it is still a beautiful world. That is the most important part to remember and to tell about in stories. That is the way around cynicism and despair. It doesn’t deny the dark; it simply reaffirms the light. Not a half-bad way to go forward.

  From the dummy for Nellie: A Cat on Her Own

  “Children are fundamentally pragmatic, and what they don’t see value in, they will reject. I took a copy of my picture book Nellie: A Cat on Her Own to the four-year-old son of a friend the other day. ‘Do you like cats?’ I asked him as I handed him the book. ‘No,’ he said, and dropped the book on the floor. Enviable honesty!”

  Protecting Children’s Literature

  (1990)

  I feel protective about children’s fiction, and I also feel protective about the pleasure it’s supposed to provide. I think that a lot of what’s happened to it lately threatens it. A great deal is being piled on it—things that don’t have much to do with the joy of reading—and that’s a worry. Fiction is a fragile medium; a good story can collapse if it’s made to bear too much weight.

  Many of us, in literature classes in college, had to go through the agonizing business of dismantling a novel in order to examine it critically. It was like taking apart a car engine and laying out the pieces on the floor of the garage. It utterly ceases to resemble a car engine and becomes a jumble of seemingly unrelated parts. Not that I’ve ever taken apart a car engine, mind you, but I once watched a clever niece do it, so I can claim some validity for the metaphor. Sometimes, in those literature classes, stories were put back together in such a way that the pleasure they gave in the beginning was lost forever. Still, it’s perfectly true that once a piece of fiction leaves its author’s hands, it becomes the property of each person who reads it, and each person will see different things in it, often things the author didn’t necessarily intend. So there’s no point in the author insisting on a single set of directions for assembly and operation. No point in being possessive. However, feeling possessive about one’s own fiction and feeling protective about the whole body of fiction are two very different things.

  I know that there is a movement underway to stop using texts for the teaching of reading and to start using works of fiction. In the beginning that seemed to me to be a good idea. But now I’m not so sure. The texts had related workbooks with sentences to complete, quizzes, questions to think about, and all kinds of suggested projects. The feeling, as I understand it, was that these texts and workbooks were making a dry and tedious thing out of learning to read at the very time when concern about literacy levels was growing more and more serious. So it seemed sensible to try using real stories in the classroom—stories that could grab the children’s fancies and show them what the joy of reading is all about.

  But what I see happening now is that these real stories are being used in the same way that the old texts were used. Every once in a while someone sends me something meant to accompany a classroom reading of my story Tuck Everlasting, and here’s what I find: a related workbook with sentences to complete, quizzes, questions to think about, and all kinds of suggested projects. I worry that this will make a dry and tedious thing out of fiction. It’s as if the same recipe for stew were being followed in both cases, except that chicken has been substituted for hot dogs.

  Well, I’m not a teacher, but I can imagine how painfully difficult it must be to try to teach a roomful of kids how to read. And not only how to read but what to read, while at the same time struggling to keep the process reasonably entertaining. The burden teachers have been forced to take on in the last decade or two is truly staggering. And now we’ve come reeling away from a governors’ conference where the glad tidings were announced that we will have 100 percent literacy in this nation by the year 2000. What did they think they were doing? I found it all astonishing and, I must say, irritating. No mention of money being provided for such a horrendous undertaking. No mention of who would be expected to undertake it. Of course, we all know who’s expected to undertake it: our teachers. But the governors didn’t say how to do it. What the governors did, at least in the television reports I saw, was to emerge from their meetings flushed and starry-eyed with noble purpose, and simply announce that in ten years there will be no more illiteracy. It seems to me you might as well announce that in ten years there will be no more salt in the ocean.

  This is not to say that 100 percent literacy isn’t something to strive for; but surely, in a sprawling democracy like ours, it’s an impossibility. Isn’t it? Well, perhaps it depends on what you mean by literacy. And there is something heartbreakingly American about the aspiration. We have always believed we could do anything if we set our minds to it. Just pass a law, and the problem, whatever it may be, is solved automatically. When it doesn’t work—and it very often doesn’t—we are baffled and outraged. We want things to be perfect.

  One of the paths we see as leading to a perfect society is to catch the children early and get them to think about things in the right way. We have all been struck with horror at the truly awful things some of our young people have been doing lately. Drug dealing, murder, rape, random violence with nothing personal in it at all that anyone can see. They are doing things that a
re not so much immoral as amoral. The implication with immorality is that it is behavior performed in opposition to morality, which implies an understanding of morality. But amoral behavior implies no such understanding. Often it isn’t even angry. It is random behavior performed in an emotional vacuum, and it makes a chaos of society. Clearly something has to be done and done without delay if we are to save our children from growing up with no sense at all of social responsibility.

  Social responsibility means, to me, caring about others, obeying the laws, keeping the wheels of society oiled and turning, understanding how our personal behavior affects our environment. We learn the basics of it mainly from our parents and siblings, before we ever enter a classroom. I do not think literature can or should be expected to teach it, and I will try to explain why I feel that way.

  Let us go way, way back to Oog and Mog, my favorite cavemen, at a time during the thawing of the Ice Age. Oog has just clobbered a musk ox. Mog comes along and wants the musk ox for himself, so he bops Oog over the head with a club. Oog is understandably annoyed. He bops Mog back. “Ow!” says Mog to himself. “That hurts! If I bop Oog again, he’ll probably bop me again, and that will hurt, too. So if I don’t want to get hurt, I guess I’d better stop bopping.” And so social responsibility was born. But it was not born out of consideration for one’s fellow man; it was born out of the desire not to get bopped. It appears to me, as this little prehistoric morality play I’ve just presented shows, that social responsibility is a learned thing arising from the instinct for self-preservation. Consideration for one’s fellow man is not instinctive. It has to be demonstrated as wise and useful if one wants to be comfortable. It is, at bottom, selfish.

  Now, you would think, wouldn’t you, after all the centuries that have passed since Oog and Mog, that human beings would have adapted genetically somehow, and would now be born knowing they had better not go around bopping people. But, alas, this is not the case. My grandson is eighteen months old. He has all the external attributes of an angel, and this is not just the blind raving of your average grandmother. But when he comes to my house to visit, as he does very often, and sees our middle-aged golden retriever, a certain unnerving light comes into his eye. He will give a laugh like that of an imp from hell, pick up a toy, and bop the poor dog with it. And then he will laugh again. He finds her funny to look at, and even funnier to bop. He has no conception at all of kindness and consideration. Not even as much as the dog has. He will have to learn it, like everyone else. It would speed things up if Rosie, our dog, were to bite him, but she won’t. She’s already learned about biting and bopping. And anyway, my grandchild doesn’t know he’s doing anything wrong. He is amoral, as we all were at his age. Oog and Mog and all of their descendants, down to you and me and my grandchild, have had to learn social responsibility for the most pragmatic of reasons: to preserve our own comfort and our own skins.

  But what about the people who haven’t learned it? What about adult criminals guilty of vicious crimes? Why has their amorality survived well past their adolescence? We can only presume it is because they have grown up in a place where people have been bopped whether they bop back or not. And there are, of course, all varieties of bopping. You can be bopped in the spirit, the ego, the heart, as well as on the head. If other people have never cared about you, you’re not going to learn how to care about them.

  Our lives are full of minor examples. One of the least important but most annoying is that of the grocery store fast-checkout lane. EIGHT ITEMS OR LESS is the way it’s labeled at my grocery store. But there are people who constantly go through with more than eight items. They go through with two times eight, three times eight. Once or twice I’ve mentioned the infraction mildly to the culprit, but the culprit is liable to turn surly if you say anything. Liable, in fact, to bop. Once I even said something to the checkout clerk. “Come on!” he said. “It’s only a grocery store!” True. But where is the line between the eight-items violation and murder? I’m serious. There has to be a line somewhere, and I want to know where it is. When does it begin to matter whether you obey the rules or not? In my neighborhood, it evidently comes somewhere beyond red lights and stop signs. I complained about this once to a taxi driver. He drew himself up and said proudly, “Rhode Islanders don’t like laws.”

  Clearly, things are out of control around the edges, and something has to be done. Or else I’m getting old and cantankerous. Well, I am getting old and cantankerous. Still, steam should be reserved for issues more worthy of the energy. Like, for instance, preserving what little is left of the pleasure of reading fiction. On the face of it, there wouldn’t seem to be much of a relationship between eight-items-or-less and curling up with a good book. Well, that’s the point. There isn’t any connection, and if we try to create one, it’s the book that will suffer. Or at any rate, that’s my fear.

  I don’t believe in using fiction to teach anything except the appreciation of fiction. At least, not to children. It seems to me that there is enough difficulty getting them to read in the first place, and the more lessons you clog up reading with, the more of a lesson you make of it. Book discussions are a good thing because everyone needs help in learning to read critically—or perhaps I should say, in learning to think critically. And if a given piece of fiction deals with a particular problem of being human, then it is only natural that the problem be dealt with in the discussion. I know that Tuck Everlasting suggests some moral problems, and it’s perfectly reasonable to talk about those in a book discussion. But, you know, it’s interesting to see, from the letters I get, which of those problems really interest children. Curiously, no child has ever written to me about whether or not Mae Tuck should have killed the man in the yellow suit. They always write about whether or not Winnie Foster should have drunk the spring water and gone off with the fascinating Jesse Tuck. They seem to feel that the man in the yellow suit, like the Wicked Witch of the West, needed killing, and so it’s all right. The killing has bothered some grown-ups, but the children don’t seem to turn a hair over it. They also do not write to me about whether Winnie did the right thing in helping Mae Tuck escape from jail.

  Now, surely these two things, both genuine crimes in our society, are examples of social irresponsibility from which we scarcely want our children to learn. In fact, Tuck Everlasting demonstrates, if it demonstrates anything at all, the complicated moral ambiguities of social responsibility. I didn’t think about demonstrating anything while I was writing it, though. I only wanted to tell a story and at the same time explore for myself the question of what eternal life might really be like. A lot of children write that they don’t agree with me that it would be terrible. In some classrooms they write their own endings for the story. That’s perfectly all right with me. What isn’t perfectly all right is when they write to tell me, always rather woodenly, what they “learned” from the story. I know these recitals are not from their own hearts. It’s easy to tell. The most common expression of it I get is that a child will say, I learned that living forever would be a bad thing. And then, in an impassioned postscript, add: But why didn’t Winnie drink the water?

  The best letters of all come from the children who got involved in the story, caught up in what suspense there is, and wanted to see what would happen next. Just normal, everyday fun from a story, the kind we all get with a book we like. Not, you understand, that I imagine they all like Tuck. It often takes real persistence on the part of the teachers to get them past the beginning, which a great many children find boring and confusing, and don’t hesitate to say so in their letters. But some do like it, thank goodness. And what they take away with them when they’ve finished it will depend on each child’s personal needs and personal quirks. It does appear that a good many of the girls take away a desire to meet a Jesse Tuck, but that’s all right. Nothing the matter with romance.

  But I don’t think any of them are coming away with a heightened sense of social responsibility. They could be made to, of course. You can come away from any b
ook with that, if it’s thrust upon you. But how sad for the book! Imagine teaching Peter Rabbit that way. Imagine teaching The Secret Garden that way. Or Alice in Wonderland, or any of the best-loved children’s stories. Why do we remember these tales our whole lives long? What is it in them that endears them to us? Certainly it isn’t because they taught us to be socially responsible.

  I think the single most attractive quality of the stories that have lasted is that their heroes and heroines defy authority and not only get away with it but also create positive and happy endings thereby. To defy authority is to be socially irresponsible, isn’t it? But, you see, children are small and surrounded by rules and restrictions and caveats and coercion. Their longing for independence and self-determination is very strong. So is their passion for justice, which they see little enough of, by their lights, in the world around them. If we leave them alone to identify with Alice, with Peter, with Mary and Colin, and with all the other storybook rebels, we are allowing the books to work the magic of identification, and spread the balm of good therapy on their bruises. A good children’s book says to the reader, “Yes, Virginia, you can escape the pinches of your life and, for a little time, make a difference in the world, even if it is only vicarious.” If we turn children’s stories into handbooks for proper behavior, we will subvert their purpose and destroy their magic, and do the one other thing which is the saddest of all: make of reading a chore, a drag, just another lesson. And when that happens, the joy of reading evaporates.