Shelf Discovery
Page 26
I had a better role model closer at hand. In 1969, three years before Maude debuted, my mother enrolled in graduate school, intent on becoming a children’s librarian. There are many, many wonderful benefits to having a mother who wants to be a children’s librarian—weekly trips to the big library downtown, reading all the Newbery Award winners together, even Gay-Neck, the Story of a Pigeon, God help us—but the thing that stands out for me was the wonder of my mother’s class project. Using knitting needles and index cards, she and a classmate created what can only be described as a non-computerized search engine. They notched the cards with a series of holes, some open at the top. The open holes corresponded to key search criteria—author, reading level, subject matter. With the help of a numeric code, you inserted the needles into the cards and lifted; the cards that fell out were the ones that matched your criteria.
I have been thinking about my mother’s class project because a chance re-encounter with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase convinced me that it is my personal platonic ideal of children’s literature, the card that would fall if I could set up a system controlling for all my favorite things in books: clothing; orphans, real or de facto; villains; England; Nature Boys, a la Dickon; Specialized Schools—a boarding school, a school for the performing arts, an orphanage or—the dream that I have yet to find—an orphanage devoted to the performing arts.
Of course, there are lots of satisfying books that score in only one or two categories. I adore Maud Hart Lovelace’s happy families, thanks to the detailed descriptions of Merry Widow hats, shirtwaists, and jabots, but Deep Valley, Minnesota, is far from England. Elizabeth Enright’s four-book series about the Melendy family offers only tantalizing rumors of boarding school, and only in the final book. E. Nesbit comes awfully close, especially if you’re willing to consider the Psammead [CQ], a boy with a special connection to nature. (Hey, he lives in a sandpit, it’s harder to get much closer to nature than that.) Noel Streatfeild’s “shoe” books qualify, although she often softened her villains in the final act. Except for Mrs. Winter, mother of Dulcie in Dancing Shoes. Remember how she turns away, at the end, when Rachel is revealed to be the big talent in the family? Could someone please tell me why the adorable Uncle Tom is married to that woman? This has bothered me for years.
But The Wolves of Willoughby Chase is the gold standard, the ne plus ultra of the Lippman COVENS Rule. Throw in an opening that reads like the YA version of James Joyce’s The Dead and…oh, excuse me, I passed out briefly from ecstasy. Here, see for yourselves:
It was dusk, winter dusk. Snow lay white and shining over the pleated hills, and icicles hung from the forest trees. Snow lay piled on the dark road across Willoughby Wold, but from dawn men had been clearing it with brooms and shovels. There were hundreds of them at work, wrapped in sacking because of the bitter cold, and keeping together in groups for fear of the wolves, grown savage and reckless from hunger.
And—damn you, Joan Aiken—it gets better. Chapter by chapter, event by event. Wolves has everything. A high-spirited rich girl (Bonnie Green), her virtuous poor relation (Sylvia Green), a tragic shipwreck, an evil governess, loyal retainers, an uncannily clever and gifted goose tender, a horrible boarding school—run by Mrs. Brisket no less, who rewards snitches with little pieces of cheese. And I’m not even going to tell you how the geese foil a dastardly crime.
Aiken, the daughter of Conrad Aiken, is a brisk tour guide. “Do try to keep up,” she all but demands as the story steams along, “we have so much ground to cover.” Sylvia, an orphan (O!) has left her Aunt Jane in London (E!) to go stay with cousin Bonnie, who will be de facto parentless (O!) while Lord Willoughby and Lady Green take a voyage intended to mend Lady Green’s fragile health. Sylvia, genteel but poor, worries that her sole doll, Annabelle, will be humiliated by Bonnie’s dolls for wearing only a “funny little old pelisse!” (C!) Sharing her train compartment with an odd man named Grimshaw (V!), she also frets about her aunt’s very Victorian edict that she never eat in front of a stranger, difficult to do when a train ride takes almost two days. And in the middle of all these little-girl anxieties, she has to deal with wolves, literal ones.
…the train had stopped with a jerk. [Yes, his name is Mr. Grimshaw! Thank you, I’m here all week.]
“Oh! What is it? Where are we?’ she exclaimed before she could stop herself.
“No need to alarm yourself, miss,” said her companion, looking unavailingly out of the black square of window. “Wolves on the line, most likely—they often have trouble hereabouts.”
“Wolves!” Sylvia stared at him in terror.
“They don’t often get into the train, though,” he added reassuringly. “Two years ago they managed to climb into the guard’s van and eat a pig, and once they got the engine driver—another had to be sent in a relief engine—but they don’t often eat a passenger, I promise you.”
If Sylvia was reassured by the notion that the wolves don’t OFTEN eat passengers, she is much braver than I. Yet the wolves turn out to be among the more benign forces that threaten Sylvia and Bonnie in this book. Nature can be thwarted, it turns out. People are much more trickier.
Things sour quickly at Willoughby Manor. Miss Slighcarp (V!), the new governess—and a distant relation—is about as nice as one would expect, given that her name is Miss Slighcarp. She wastes no time trying on Lady Green’s clothes—including (swoon) “a rose-colored crepe with aiguillettes of diamonds on the shoulders. It did not fit her exactly.” (Nice bitchy aside there from meek little Sylvia.) Mr. Grimshaw, the mysterious man from Sylvia’s train, is skulking about, and no good ever came from skulking. Then news comes that the Willoughbys’ ship has sunk, and the girls are packed off quickly to the “boarding school” (S!) run by Mrs. Brisket (V!). The only coddled child in the place is Mrs. Brisket’s own Diana, a selfish brat, and there is a wonderful scene involving Bonnie, Diana, and some fresh eggs, in which you will cheer because someone does NOT get slapped.
A quick aside about orphans: For me, the “O” is the central letter in COVENS. Why do I love them so much? It’s true, I was a latchkey kid, but my mother didn’t start working until I was in junior high, so I had the best of both worlds. The simple fact is that most children’s books benefit when some sort of contrivance whisks the parents offstage. It doesn’t have to be death (although there are a lot of dead moms in my favorite books) or a demanding job (lots of widowers, too, throwing themselves into their work since Mom’s demise). An adults-only trip or troubling surgery (The Time Garden, Knight’s Castle) works just as well. And there’s always boarding school! (The Great Brain at the Academy, The Fog Comes in on Little Pig’s Feet, Apples Every Day.) But, of course, we don’t want them to stay parentless. That would be much too bleak.
In Wolves, the real orphans finally receive much-deserved succor, while the hateful Diana Brisket finds herself quite alone in the world. Yet it is Aiken’s treatment of Diana, in the final act of comeuppances, that makes me love the novel even more.
The orphans, still dazed at their good fortune, sit at a table of their own, eating roast turkey and kindly averting their gaze from the pale cheeks and red eyes of Diana Brisket, who, having been in a position to bully and hector as much as she pleased, is now reduced to a state where she has not a friend to stand by her…. Diana has nowhere to go and is forced, willy-nilly, to stay with the orphans (where, it may be said in passing, wholesome discipline and the example of Aunt Jane’s unselfish nature soon molds an improvement in her character.)
You see, there are no bad children—only bad adults. Otis Spofford, Dulcie-Pulsie in Dancing Shoes, even The Bully of Barkham Street all have their sides to the story. But grownups? Grownups can really suck. Possibly because they did not receive a timely intervention from Aunt Jane. I would add that to COVENS—No bad children, only bad grownups—but it would screw up an acronym that took me, literally, hours to formulate.
BOOK REPORT
The Secret Garden
By Frances Hodgson Burnett 1909<
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Shut-in and Dig
When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable child ever seen. It was true, too.
Somewhere along the line, along with straw prams and caning rods, having a child character not even the narrator can stand went out of business. (Off the top of my head, I can only think of Ingalls Wilder’s Nellie, and you know that was just the God’s honest truth.) In the case of Mary Lennox, daughter of colonial India, Frances Hodgson Burnett, too, begins by insulting her yellow, priggish looks:
She had a little thin face and a little thin body, thin light hair and a sour expression. Her hair was yellow, and her face was yellow, because she had been born in India and had always been ill in one way or another.
This is all on the first page, mind. Moving on to the second. Mary, whose father serves in the colonial government and is cared for only by servants because her careless, beautiful mother and her sickly, absent father cannot be bothered with her, is not only ugly but possessed of a terrible character:
…By the time she was six years old she was as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived.
Okay. Ugliest, most loathsome child ever. Check! But is it possible Burnett may have established how profoundly awful Mary is at this precise moment simply to arm the young reader against becoming too terribly troubled by what’s about to happen? Perhaps. Or it may be that Burnett simply loathed her to such a degree she was unable to restrain herself from killing off her mother, her father, and the entire compound with a cholera outbreak by page 4.
And…moving right along! We soon find Mary in the hands of Mrs. Medlock, her temporary guardian, speeding toward her next home. Mrs. Medlock is not a bad woman, but she is less interested in Mary’s welfare than in the cold chicken and beef—ah, 19th-century British food porn, sigh—they serve on the train they’ve taken. Mrs. Medlock is in the employ of a certain Dickensian-ish Mr. Craven, Mary’s uncle by marriage after the death of his beautiful young wife. (So many beautiful young wives, so little time to kill them all off!) Mr. Craven is the kind of wealthy, damaged recluse who today might drown his grief in Percocet and unwise investments. Instead, he apparently lives in splendid isolation in his gloomy estate, Misselthwaite Manor, traveling on business as much as possible, and cared for by his servants like an exotic reptile whose diet and living area must be observed with strict discipline, despite the creature’s rarely showing itself.
Misselthwaite is the kind of gloomy, old 100-room barn now made stock through a battery of media appearances (see My Cousin Rachel, The Others, Gosford Park, the works of Merchant Ivory in their entirety), and Mary’s abrupt rustication to its gloomy corridors is the first step in toward the young girl becoming not completely the worst child in the world—and the first time we feel some sympathy for the poor girl.
And since Burnett—who in her age wielded literary fame something on the order of J. K. Rowling meshed with Oprah, with a little Elizabeth Taylor thrown in for marital intrigue—spends the next 300 pages emphasizing Mary’s humanity, you can’t fault her too much for destroying the girl’s life at the outset. Before we get ahead of ourselves, however, we must see Mary’s reeducation begin upon waking to her young, red-faced, way talkative Yorkshire servant, Martha:
The native servants she had been used to in India were not in the least like this. They were obsequious and servile and did not presume to talk to their masters as if they were equals. They made salaams and called them “protector of the poor” and names of that sort. Indian servants were commanded to do things, not asked. It was not the custom to say “please” and “thank you” and Mary had always slapped her Ayah in the face when she was angry. She wondered a little what this girl would do if one slapped her in the face. She was a round, rosy, good-natured-looking creature, but she had a sturdy way which made Mistress Mary wonder if she might not even slap back—if the person who slapped her was only a little girl.
It’s Martha who is the first person in Mary’s life to take any real interest in her (even if, at first, a good part of the interest is wondering why Mary is so completely feebleminded that she doesn’t even know to tie her own shoes). It’s from Martha she picks up other important notions for splendidly rich girls who are used to being waited on by ayahs, like that she might rethink not finishing her oatmeal, since all of Martha’s eight brothers and sisters in a shack on the moor would eat it in about two seconds and like it, and from Martha that she learns of Martha’s brother Dickon, a young roustabout who has charmed all the animals of the moor, and can talk to things like missel thrushes, whatever those are. But most important, Martha, who is not a “that’s classified” sort of person, tells Mary about a very interesting garden:
“Mr. Craven had it shut when his wife died so sudden. He won’t let no one go inside. It was her garden. He locked th’ door an’ dug a hole and buried th’ key. There’s Mrs. Medlock’s bell ringing—I must run.”
Goddamn it, Martha, don’t leave a girl hanging! But actually Martha’s leaving Mary hanging saves her from an idle life of misery. Because in failing to follow her orders to spill, Martha has moved Mary from a life of idle indifference into one of curiosity, which apparently kills cats but is very good for children—as are, incidentally, the hot cross buns and milk Mary develops an appetite for from running around on the moor.
Because Mary has been put in a house of secrets. The garden is paramount, but on top of that there is the mystery of Dickon, and how a boy can talk to animals; there is the question of why Mr. Craven is so miserable and hunchbacked; there is the problem of what the hell everyone is saying, because Mary cannot understand the Yorkshire accent at all; and, most important, there is the issue of the wailing Mary often hears through the halls, a fretful sound she knows is more than the wind.
But The Secret Garden, more than anything, is about those who are locked up, and those who grow—both literally and emotionally.
This is true of persons and of nations. Mary is not the only one who, before she becomes a careful gardener, idly skims her wealth off the labor of the poor and is made sick by it. Hodgson is also writing about the wasteful, destructive nature of England—its despicable conquest of another country, its rampant profiteering, the corruption within being caused by the corruption without. England’s idle rich are wealthy, but in The Secret Garden, their wealth only serves to oppress—even to deform, as in the case of the mysterious wailing Colin—those who possess it. Mr. Craven, Colin, and Mary are all England the colonizer—a country as piggish, tyrannical, and sickly as Mary ever was.
But this is not true of the simple people of the moor, armed with their strategic knowledge of larkspur and hot cross buns! Schooled by the simple people of the moor, by their own servants, Mary and the other inhabitants of locked-up Misselthwaite are revived.
Of course, the servants and Dickon are a little too joyously occupied with the happiness of their employers to make this a handy pamphlet for Mao, but in the case of wealthy versus healthy, colonizer versus fertilizer, they win absolutely. Because Burnett’s England itself is a locked-up garden which, only tended by the wealthy and humble alike, can express the true beauty of the nation. And, left with a shovel and hot cross buns ourselves, we could all solve the problems of the world.
OVERDUE
Cheaper by the Dozen & Belles on Their Toes
By Frank B. Gilbreth Junior & Ernestine Gilbreth Carey 1948, 1950
Mother Knows Best
By Laura Lippman
We made quite a sight rolling along in the car, with the top down. As we passed through cities and villages, we caused a stir equaled only by a circus parade….
…Whenever the crowds gathered at some intersection where we were stopped by traffic, the inevitable question came sooner or later.
“How do you feed all those kids, Mister?”
Dad would ponder for a minute. Then, rearing back so those on the outskirts could hear, he’d say as if he had just thought it up:
I was a reporter for 20 years, but I was never an “investigative” reporter. Although that modifier might seem redundant to civilians, it is a precise job description within a newsroom, one of the top positions, reserved for the cream. An investigative reporter needs to be dogged, capable of following extremely complicated paper trails, but also personable enough to woo sources. And in my particular workplace—The (Baltimore) Sun, 1989–2001—it helped to have a penis. Oh, my female colleagues did some impressive work in that time-frame, yet I can’t recall one who was allowed to be a fulltime investigative reporter. But then, as our editors often helpfully explained, our newsroom was a meritocracy. It was so meretricious—um, I mean, meritorious—that it had one of the whitest newspaper staffs among metropolitan dailies, and this was in a city that was two-thirds African American. But, as ever, I digress.
To be candid, even if I lived in a world where someone might get a job based solely on the fact that she has a uterus—just speaking hypothetically here, of course—I would never have made it as an investigative reporter. I’m not thick-skinned enough. I don’t enjoy making people mad at me. I left the city desk for features, then fled the newspaper for the freedom to make stuff up fulltime. So it is with some nervousness and trepidation that I take a stab at investigative journalism and announce my stunning discovery:
There were never a dozen Gilbreth children.
Or, to recast my lede in the self-important newspaper style beloved by my former employer: There were never a dozen Gilbreth children, [PUBLICATION] has learned.
To be sure, twelve children were born to Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, two industrial engineers involved in the field of motion study. But Mary, the second oldest, died from diptheria in 1912. The last of the Gilbreths, Jane, was born in 1922. Frank Gilbreth died in 1924. So there were, for precisely two years in Frank Gilbreth’s life, eleven children, max. Consequently, every story in Cheaper that turns on a “dozen”—and there are many—is patently false. In fact, Cheaper by the Dozen never even mentions Mary’s death, an omission made possible by the fact that it barely mentions Mary at all. Instead, her death is revealed in a footnote at the beginning of the sequel, Belles on Their Toes.