Angel in the Parlor

by Nancy Willard

  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 ge
t 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:

  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 hi
s 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.

  1.

  “Notes on Writing,” in The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter (New York: Delta, 1973), pp. 449–450.

  2.

  The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales, intro. Padriac Colum, comment. Joseph Campbell (New York: Pantheon, 1972), pp. 237, 244, 326–327.

  3.

  “The Lass Who Went Out at the Cry of Dawn,” in Thistle and Thyme, Tales and Legends from Scotland (New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston), p. 62.

  Becoming a Writer

  1.

  The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1951).

  2.

  From Marianne Knight’s reminiscence, quoted by C. Hill, Homes and Friends, p. 202, in Mary Lascelles, Jane Austen and Her Art (Oxford: Clarendon, 1939), p. 32.

  3.

  J.E. Austen-Leigh, Memoir of Jane Austen (Oxford: Clarendon, 1926), p. 102.