Barking with the Big Dogs

by Natalie Babbitt

  I tried hard to think of a beloved children’s story that demonstrates social responsibility as a natural part of its action, and I couldn’t think of a single one. Every one of the most popular stories I could come up with demonstrated some kind of rebellion along with the need to destroy villains. This was not a surprise to me, though I suppose it’s entirely possible that I couldn’t find what I was looking for because I didn’t want to find it. It’s certainly true that children’s stories have been written specifically to teach beneficial things. But mostly those stories don’t last. Adults may see value in them, but children don’t. 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!

  I would like to say again, flatly, that I think social responsibility comes only from practical experience. I believe in Oog and Mog and the lessons about bopping. Oog and Mog did not need storybooks. I learned about bopping from my sister, not from reading. I read all through my childhood, but the only thing I learned from books was the joy of reading. I rejected stories, like The Water-Babies and Pinocchio, that attempted to teach me how to behave. I relished the stories, like Alice in Wonderland and Mary Poppins, which confirmed my belief that breaking other people’s rules is a fine thing when good things come of it. But I didn’t go around, therefore, in my real life, breaking rules. As children go, I was a very good child. If my mother had told me to stay away from the secret garden, it would still be a tangle of weeds today. But I broke rules along with my stories’ heroes and heroines on a regular basis and got a great deal of vicarious satisfaction from it.

  Yes, our society is messy; yes, our children need to learn to care for each other and to be, in short, socially responsible. But in all our zeal, I hope we can find a way to teach them without destroying more than we create. I hope our teachers will find a way to keep on reading great children’s stories aloud in their classrooms for no other purpose than the joy those stories will bring. I hope the subsequent book discussions will stick to the questions raised by the stories themselves and not get guided, uncomfortably, down other paths. Because if we weigh the stories down with the baggage of unrelated lessons, they will sink and disappear. And then there will be a lot of lamentation in the children’s book section of that echoing library up in heaven where, I like to imagine, Lewis Carroll and J. M. Barrie and E. B. White and Beatrix Potter and Arnold Lobel and Arthur Rackham and Margot Zemach and all the others who have added so much to our lives meet every morning for milk and cookies and have a good time talking shop.

  A good story is sufficient unto the day. It is complete as it stands. If it has something to teach, let it teach in its own sufficiency. Let it keep its magic and fulfill its purpose. In other words, let it be.

  Editor Michael di Capua of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966. The author kept this framed photo on her writing desk.

  “We are craftsmen. We labor and sweat. Almost nothing comes easily. And we’re something else, too: We’re crazy. We’re crazy because nobody asks us to go through all that agony. We just do it to satisfy some obscure impulse that refuses to be denied.”

  Beacons of Light

  (1993)

  It is always unsettling to me to hear what we storytellers and picture makers do described as “radiant” or “enlightening.” It seems to me that what we really do is more like crawling through a dark and very long tunnel toward that proverbial light glimmering at the end. It may be that at the very beginning of the creative process, once in a while, there is kind of a flash of light, which is one way to describe the sensation of being grabbed by a good initial idea. But the initial idea is such a tiny piece of the whole effort that by the time a book is finished, that particular flash of light has long since been overwhelmed. And if what we’ve managed to produce can ever be called enlightening or radiant, I think that’s got to be more of a fluke than anything else. In any case, one man’s radiance is another man’s fog. Or so it has seemed in my experience.

  Let us remember that while radiance may, in rare instances, describe a book, it never describes the book’s creator. We’re rather a motley crew, we makers of stories and pictures. We come in all shapes, colors, and sizes, from all regions of the country, and we have next to nothing in common with each other except our product. Some of us are pleasant; some are crabby. Some talk easily; some are silent as the tomb. Some make a lot of money; some barely survive. Some of us look like stereotypical artists with long hair, sandals, and a tortured expression, while some of us, like me, only look like someone’s grandmother. It would be nice, I suppose, if we were marked in some way, if we looked radiant and enlightening, but we’d have to be radiant and enlightening to begin with in order for that to happen. And we’re simply not.

  In that magnificent movie Amadeus, Mozart’s envious colleague, Salieri, is outraged to find Mozart’s genius housed in what he calls “a boastful, lustful, smutty, infantile boy.” In describing his first encounter with Mozart to a young priest who has come to see him in the insane asylum, Salieri says, “That was Mozart. That giggling, dirty-minded creature I’d just seen crawling on the floor! Why would God choose an obscene child to be his instrument?”

  Well, Mozart, who was indeed a genius, is one thing, of course, and we are another thing altogether. I certainly don’t want to put any of us in the same class. But Salieri’s point is well taken: The creator is neither radiant nor enlightening.

  And yet once we are out in the world, away from the isolation of our work space, we are sometimes treated as if we were radiant and enlightening, and that’s very bad for us. It makes for a particularly debilitating form of schizophrenia. Because we do have this one thing in common: We are very uncertain people, with about the same degree of self-confidence as a rabbit on the highway at rush hour.

  I have never understood why teachers and librarians are so kind to us, why they set us up so high. The fact is that our careers are utterly and completely in their very capable hands, to be made or destroyed on the pages of a review journal or in the classroom. I refer you briefly to accounts by Sir James George Frazer in his famous work The Golden Bough, where he discusses the killing of sacred animals. He talks about a people called the Ainu, on the Japanese island of Yezo, who worshipped the bear as their “chief divinity.” The bear, according to Frazer, received “idolatrous veneration” from the Ainu. But when the time came around, they sacrificed the bear, after first apologizing to it, because, says Frazer, they had “treated the bear kindly as long as they could.” So much for idolatrous veneration! This is a drastic comparison, I know, but it behooves us to remember, always, who’s really in charge here.

  If, as I have suggested, storytellers and picture makers are fundamentally unselfconfident, many have learned to hide that fact. Many seem to take themselves with enormous seriousness, so that it’s not always easy to see through the sheltering layer of arrogance down to the quaking vulnerability beneath. Well, everybody is to some degree an egotist, regardless of profession. It almost seems as if we are all kept afloat on the sea of life by inner tubes of vanity—the only other choice being to push off in nothing but a sieve of humility and very soon sink completely out of sight. Inner tubes make a pretty good metaphor for the human ego; they are easily deflated and just as easily patched and reinflated. And maybe, if it’s true that storytellers and picture makers are especially vulnerable, they need bigger inner tubes just to keep their heads above water.

  But we are still nothing but rabbits, and we are not at all radiant. Nevertheless, many of us do take ourselves pretty seriously, especially if we’ve recently been exposed to “idolatrous veneration” like the Ainu’s sacred bear. I wish there were a lot more humor in the field. Humor helps to keep things in balance. When I was in high school, I had a truly fine studio-art teacher who used to take us, fro
m time to time, down to the art museum in Cleveland to study paintings firsthand. And I can remember being irritated, once in a while, at the utter lack of humor and objectivity displayed in some of the paintings we looked at. I always wondered what the artists were like who created those pictures. I guessed they were as humorless and stiff-minded as their work. Janet Moore, my teacher, would tell us that a certain painting was a masterpiece, and I would want to know why. How could a painting be called a masterpiece when it was so smug and self-satisfied? Surely more was required of a masterpiece than perfection of brushwork! We had some good debates, Miss Moore and I. (Years later, she won praise as the author of a fine book about art called The Many Ways of Seeing.) She was the soul of patience, given the annoying snip of a teenage heretic I must have been. But the thing is, you could take a smug, self-satisfied painting such as Raphael’s portrait of Pope Leo X with the cardinals in the background—a miraculous painting indeed, but very pleased with itself—and you could put into the foreground a large dog, with an expression of utter seriousness on its face, every bit equal to that of the pope and cardinals, except that the dog would be wearing a funny hat. Instantly the painting would acquire another dimension—it would have truth; it would have humanity; it would become accessible—all without losing one iota of its astonishingly beautiful brushwork. Now, that would be a painting! And I, for one, would have liked Signore Raphael personally all the better for it. Still, perhaps Raphael was as uncertain of himself as the rest of us, in spite of his genius, and was only trying to cover up. We’ll never know.

  The point I’m trying to make is that storytellers and picture makers had better not get themselves confused with their product. We’d better not believe that we ourselves are some kind of beacon to readers. If something we have created somehow becomes a beacon, then we’d better remember it didn’t do that all by itself. It had a whole lot of help from teachers and librarians. It would not, in fact, have attracted even a dim-witted night moth, let alone a bright fifth grader, if someone hadn’t held it up to be seen. People say a lot of nice things to me about Tuck Everlasting, and I’m grateful for every word, but the fact is that I know perfectly well, from the letters I get from the children themselves, that very few of them would ever get past chapter 2 without a gentle but firm push from their teachers.

  So here’s where I stand on all this: Pictures and stories can be wonderful, and life would be very dreary without them. We are lucky to be living at a moment in time when there is a great accumulated wealth of good books for our children. But so great is the accumulated wealth that, finally, those of us who are making the new stories and the new pictures don’t matter. I will repeat that: We don’t matter. Childhood is brief—so achingly brief—and there isn’t nearly enough time for the children to get around to what’s already there for them to look at and to read. If there were no new pictures and stories for the next fifty years, children would feel no lack at all. Think about it. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is still going strong after 128 years; Treasure Island after 110. The Wind in the Willows is eighty-five years old; Winnie-the-Pooh is sixty-seven; Millions of Cats is sixty-five; and Mary Poppins is fifty-nine. Even Charlotte’s Web, which somehow seems new, is forty-one years old this year, and Where the Wild Things Are is thirty. I’m not saying that we want children to know only the older, proven books, but on the other hand, we don’t want them to miss those books, either. So we don’t need the four or five thousand new books that make their appearance every year. We simply don’t need them.

  This being the case, no one should try to make celebrities out of us. We work hard, yes, and sometimes very nice things come out as a result, but we are merely craftsmen who make things nobody really needs. We do it because it’s what we can do, and what we do best—what we want to do whether the need is there or not. We have, I suppose, what could be called active imaginations, but an active imagination is not always a blessing, and by no means does it always ensure a worthwhile piece of work. My active imagination is much more apt to furnish me with doomsday visions of highway driving than a good idea for a story.

  Perhaps those not directly involved in the bookmaking part of our field have a romanticized view of what our working lives are like. Perhaps they envision a light-filled studio where the Muses hover and where, like magic, we touch a sheet of paper with a paint-filled brush, or tap out a word with a typewriter or computer, and what emerges is something made with joy and ready to be received with joy by a hungry public. But in reality the process is absolutely nothing like that. We are craftsmen. And what that means is that we start with what seems like a good idea—which may have come to us in a flash of light but is far more likely to have emerged after weeks or months of being pushed, pulled, stretched, squashed, laundered, dyed, thrown out, retrieved, reshaped, and finally settled—and then the work begins. The work is hard and long and painstaking. Our legs go to sleep, at least mine do; we bash our heads against the wall; we drudge. And little by little the work gets done.

  I have just recently finished a new picture book, after nearly four years. In order to get the pictures to look even remotely like what I saw in my head, I had to make costumes and then plead with my family and my dog to get into them and pose for me while I took hundreds of pictures. I had to find somebody who played the lute so I could see what one really looked like, and how the hands went when they were playing it. I had to comb through dozens of books to find the proper historical settings and props. Then I had to paint the pictures, learning as I went along. When I began, my grandson, who is a prominent character, was one and a half years old. He insisted on getting older all the time, till at last his costume didn’t fit him at all and I had to use his little sister instead.

  Friends would ask, “How’s it coming?” and I would groan and say, “The problem is, I don’t know what I’m doing.” And they would turn their eyes up to heaven and say, “Yeah—sure!” But it was true. It’s always true, especially if we’re always trying to break ground that is new to us. I read somewhere that Maurice Sendak spent weeks testing dozens of different tools before he settled on the ones he used for In the Night Kitchen. It’s no simple matter, going out to the art store to buy a paintbrush or a pen, to choose just the right kind of paper. And half of what we do has to be done over again, sometimes many times. My picture book has twelve full-page pictures in it, plus a frontispiece and a jacket. Each one took at least six weeks to complete, which doesn’t count the costume making and the picture taking, and then the first three had to be done over again because, by the time I got to the twelfth, I knew better how to do what I was trying to do, so that the first three looked inexcusably inept. So—we are craftsmen. We labor and sweat. Almost nothing comes easily. And we’re something else, too: We’re crazy. We’re crazy because nobody asks us to go through all that agony. We just do it to satisfy some obscure impulse that refuses to be denied.

  We’re craftsmen, we’re crazy, and—we are expendable. I said that once to a prominent colleague, and he was so shocked that his mouth dropped open. But it’s true. We are expendable. It makes no sense to see us as celebrities. The people who deserve celebrity, the true bringers of light, are the very ones who never get any: the teachers and librarians. Over and over they take a back seat to everyone else. They take a back seat to us crazy people where books are concerned, and what is even more annoying, they take a back seat to their colleagues, the college professors. College professors are held in high esteem in the world. After all, they have PhDs, and they write long books and articles on difficult subjects, and they understand things no one else can make head or tail of. Right? Well, I say phooey. I have spent all of my adult life in the academic world because my husband is a college administrator. Most of my friends are college teachers, and I know that they work very hard and that they aren’t well paid compared to people in other professions. But they don’t work any harder than elementary-school teachers do, and their salaries, by comparison, are downright princely. And anyway, college professors wo
uldn’t have anyone to teach if it weren’t for the elementary schools. And furthermore, I know firsthand from my frequent school visits that the dedication of elementary-school teachers and librarians is unmatched anywhere. It is embarrassing to me, a crazy person who has just spent two whole days painting a picture of a birdcage, to be lionized by one of these amazing people. The injustice of a system which creates this kind of upside-down reasoning makes me angry. I am dispensable. But without them the nation’s culture would collapse. It’s probably not true that the meek shall inherit the earth—and maybe, seeing the shape the earth is in, the meek wouldn’t want it anyhow—but I wish with all my heart that things could be ordered differently, and that credit could be given, with a lavish hand, where credit is due.

  I also hope we won’t forget the reason for all these labors. I hope we won’t forget the children. I don’t know whether I’m simply getting sentimental as I approach my dotage, but more and more frequently, when I come away from school visits, I find I am moved very near to tears by the children I’ve just been talking to. They are nearly always fifth graders—my choice—and they seem to me unfailingly wise and calm and beautiful. I am always struck first off by how beautiful they are. I’ve gone back to my old scrapbook again and again to look at my fifth-grade class picture, and I always find that we were not beautiful, my friends and I. We were scrawny and pasty-faced, and our clothes didn’t fit very well. Maybe we were wise and calm—I don’t know about that—but we were not beautiful. Well—Janie Dorner was beautiful, of course, but every class since the beginning of time has had a Janie Dorner in it, so she doesn’t count.