Talk, Talk : A Children's Book Author Speaks to Grown-Ups

by E. L. Konigsburg

  For a long time, children’s books were reviewed by user-friendly people, people who had contact with children. Reviewers acted as book counselors. They were not professional critics but teachers or librarians who arranged marriages between readers and books. They were not interested in demonstrating how literary or how avant-garde their reviews were. They knew literature and they knew children, and they were interested in making the relationship between the two work.

  Before they attracted celebrity authors, children’s books attracted celebrity reviewers. In 1972 the award panel for the National Book Award for Children’s Literature drew two of three judges from their ranks. The award, initiated in 1969, was to be given to a juvenile book that a panel of judges considered the most distinguished, written by an American and published in the United States during the previous year. The award was discontinued in 1979.

  In 1972 the National Book Award for Children’s Literature went to Donald Barthelme for The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine or The Hithering Thithering Djinn, his only children’s book. That year the jury failed to reach a unanimous agreement. Whereas the two celebrity jurors felt “that this is a book of originality, wit, and intellectual adventure,” the third juror knew that whatever it was, it wasn’t for children and made an unprecedented public statement that he had not concurred with the decision of the other two panelists. The third juror was Paul Heins, editor of The Horn Book, a bimonthly periodical devoted exclusively to children’s literature.

  The first printing of The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine was remaindered, a remarkably short shelf life for an award-winning children’s book. Mr. Heins knew that children—not critics, not committees—are the sine qua non of children’s books.

  So much in our culture is new to children, there are so many firsts in their young lives, that they live on the cutting edge. They have little need for the avant-garde. The old-fashioned is new to anyone meeting it for the first time. And children—unlike critics, unlike committees—have only one agenda: intelligent enjoyment of the printed word. They are far less docile than adults when it comes to paying attention to professional critics. They do not hesitate to put back on its shelf a book that does not reach out to them. Affection for a book is its best award, and books that earn that award arrive from the hearts and minds of writers, not juries.

  Real books, keeper books, take children someplace. They take them out of themselves or to a place deep inside themselves with a new sense of discovery.

  “Going Home” grew out of my reflecting upon what books have meant to me as a reader and as a writer. It illustrates my belief that real books start in the hearts and minds of writers and, if the writer is lucky, real books find a home in the hearts and heads of children.

  4. Going Home

  Some years ago on a return trip from driving our daughter back to college in upstate New York, my husband and I decided to spend a few days in New York City. We checked into the Hilton Hotel at Rockefeller Center, prepared to spend our time going to foreign films and Broadway shows and visiting museums.

  Both of us love to walk in the city, and we always chose to walk back to our hotel following our evening’s entertainment. Each night we noticed some attractive and startlingly dressed ladies waiting at various spots along the Fifty-third Street side of the hotel. There was a convention of sociologists headquartered there at the time.

  David and I were pretty sure that these women were not volunteering their services for any longitudinal study of patterns of culture in a modern urban center. We were pretty sure that the services they offered were of a more horizontal nature, and we felt that whatever they had to offer, it was not being volunteered.

  They were there every night, beautifully made up, dressed not stylishly but with panache. They had a basic attention-getting style—something of a combination of Dolly Parton and Frederick’s of Hollywood. David and I came to recognize a few of them and would nod hello to them as we came and went from the hotel.

  We had theater tickets for our last evening there. As often happens, going to the theater in a taxi, the cross-town traffic was impossible. We realized that if we were not to miss the curtain, we would have to get out on Broadway and walk. We asked the driver to let us out at the next red light, and he did. We emerged into the Broadway throng and started pushing our way toward Forty-fifth Street. It happened—as it often does in a crowd as bustling as that one—that David and I got separated. He waited for me on the corner of Forty-fifth, and in the short time that it took for me to catch up with him, he was approached by a cheaply dressed and not altogether clean lady of the night.

  I caught up with him in record time and took his arm in a proprietary manner and pulled him around the corner.

  “You know,” I said, “ours are much prettier.”

  By OUTS, of course, I meant the ladies outside the Hilton.

  And why were they suddenly OUTS? Because in the short time that we had been there, the Hilton Hotel had become home. And a person has special feelings about home and about the people from home.

  And more than that, I think that a person has a need for home.

  And for going home.

  And that is what I would like to talk about today. About going home.

  There are many kinds of homes. There is the single-parent home, and there is the orphan home and the old-folks home and the foster home and the dormitory and the apartment and the condominium and—temporarily—the Hilton. But I will leave those kinds of homes—plus a house is not a home—to that convention of sociologists at the Hilton. There are other kinds of homes I would like to talk about today: homes that have relevance to the world of books, and most especially, children’s books.

  The first kind of home I would like to talk about is the kind of home I reach for as a writer.

  When someone writes a novel—especially a novel for children—he is going home in the sense that a home is where something is discovered or founded. Like Cooperstown, New York, is the home of baseball because that is where baseball was founded, and the University of Florida is the home of Gatorade because that is where Gatorade was invented. And Florence, Italy, is the home of the Italian Renaissance because Florence is where the Renaissance started in Italy.

  Home for a writer is going home to where things were started. It is the place where there exists the protocell of emotions, the place where there exists the protomorphic ego, and the act of writing is the process of going home to where things got started. And that place is childhood.

  When a person writes he returns home—to childhood—and in that sense, home is a time as well as a place. It is often a small, dark place where we were often frightened. Childhood as home was not always comfortable, and it is often not fun to return to, but it is a place we all carry around inside of us, and it must be looked into and occasionally aired out. It is the place where we felt both most belonging and, strangely, most singular. It is the place where we were most raw, most unvarnished, most uncluttered with the packaging of civilization. And this is what a writer returns to.

  The first time I went home as a writer was in Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinlej and Me, Elizabeth. I went back to the child in me who was the outsider. I returned to being the new kid on the block, to the place where I discovered loneliness and the need for a friend, just one, please God, instead of curly hair. That was in Youngstown, Ohio, where I attended William McKinley Elementary School for one half of fifth grade and all of sixth. I went home as Elizabeth and to the Elizabeth who still lives within me. I also went home as Jennifer, the friend that Elizabeth finds. In that case I returned to the place where I discovered other people’s consciousness of my being a member of a minority group. I went back to the place where I discovered how much more satisfying it was to offer myself up for friendship, not as a plain old minority-group member but as something exotic, just to make myself more interesting, to make myself, I thought, more worthy of friendship.

  I might add that this trip home was triggered by watching my own three
children adjust to being the new kids on their block; their block was an apartment house in suburban New York.

  When I went home in About the B’nai Bagels, I went to find the place in me where I discovered the joys of being a team player plus that other need, a room of one’s own, the need to be private. I have said that this kind of going home means journeying to a place and time where discoveries are made, and this ride was not as long as some of the others have been. This time I had to go only as far as my freshman year at college. This time I returned to the place where I had left home and had moved into a dormitory and discovered that I wanted to be part of the group, this great gaggle of girls—there were no coed dorms back then—but that there was also a part of me that didn’t want to belong. I was a slow developer in this respect because before leaving home, I did not know that such choices existed. My own three children made this discovery at a much younger age—at the age of Mark Setzer, the hero of About the B’nai Bagels.

  In (George) I returned to the time—the critical time—when I thought I was losing contact with my inner self. It was a time even before I knew the words id or persona. It was a time when no one searched for an identity or spoke of an identity crisis. I knew only that I had this funny little woman who lived inside me: she was much older than I was, and although she didn’t know the words for everything, she knew much more than I did. It was a time when my friends were screaming for attention, and so was she. I didn’t want to lose my friends or lose touch with this funny old lady because she was a source of much amusement and nourishment and—even though I did not then know the word for it— perspective in my life.

  I always try to go home, to childhood as it represents origins, when I write. Not only because I write for children but also because there is something honest and authentic about one’s childhood. And honesty and authenticity are good places to start when writing anything.

  When a person is middle-aged, there are many things that get in the way of going home.

  There is, first of all, the discovery—the minute you sit down to write—that you have four inch-long whiskers growing out of your chin. It takes a trip to the mirror to examine them. That necessitates a trip to the medicine cabinet for the tweezers and then back to the mirror to pluck them. Then back to your desk to think about those four hairs on your chin, to think that you don’t remember having had a problem with chin hairs when you were a child. There were never any problems as definite and as numerical as chin hairs when you were a child. There were vague problems. There were fears and loose uncertainties. You rub your chin again, thinking (and incidentally checking for more hairs) and wondering about how to make concrete words out of those vague, pervading anxieties that existed at a time when you never had hairs appear full grown and an inch long out of your chin.

  Chin hairs are one problem for a writer trying to go home.

  There are other problems, too.

  There are the inhibitions that have formed a scum over those protofeelings. There are the years and the events between the then and the now that have hardened into a scab. In its way, a scab is protective, and it is painful to lift that protective, ugly covering and examine the wound underneath.

  But suppose a writer admits that the pain of not looking is worse than the pain of looking. Then there is the worry that even though you got home last time, you’ll probably get lost this time, and there is the foregone knowledge that home is often cheaper and smaller and less attractively populated than we remembered it.

  There is always the temptation to call off the trip.

  But something drives us home. Something drives all of us there.

  Because of what home is.

  Home is “Something you somehow haven’t to deserve” (Robert Frost). “The place we come from” (Herman Hesse). “The place they know how you feel about a banana” (Damon Runyon).

  Home is, ultimately, the place where the truth, the awful truth, the naked truth, the hairless truth about ourselves, exists.

  It is our genesis.

  And that is what going home is about for a writer.

  There are also ways of going home as a reader. There are two ways that I would like to talk about. One is a certain kind of book that prepares your imagination for feeling at home away from home.

  Perhaps, by contrasting two trips that my husband and I have taken, I can demonstrate this kind of going-home book.

  Many summers ago we went to South America. We started our tour in Bogota, Colombia. There, at the beginning, I felt that something was missing. I didn’t know what. I thought about it for a time and then tried to pin it down by contrasting this with other trips we had taken. And that gave me a clue.

  When we arrived in London, for example, the first thing we did was go to see the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. Even as I say this now, I am hearing in my head, “They’re changing the guard at Buckingham Palace-Christopher Robin went down with Alice.” Before ever getting to Buckingham Palace, I lived for a long time—a long, long time—with the changing of the guard there. We saw a guard in a sentry box. “‘One of the sergeants looks after their socks,’ said Alice.” What fun it was to compare what I thought changing the guards would be like with what it actually was. Had Christopher Robin never gone down with Alice, I would have been robbed of half the pleasure of that very first morning in London because the whole thing could not have happened in my imagination before I saw it happening on the streets.

  As a reader, I look for this kind of going-home book. I love books that give us place names, books that make a reality for us before we discover it. A reality more true than any travel guide can create because the geography of fiction is peopled, whereas that of travel guides is merely placed.

  Place names exist all over England. A person gets a feeling of déjà vu wherever he turns. Can anyone visit Dorset and not in some sense feel that he, too, is one of Thomas Hardy’s natives returning on a Can you drive through that country and not look for Eustacia Vye and Diggory Venn, the ruddleman, and Michael Hen-chard, the Mayor of Casterbridge?

  … Saturday afternoon in November … approaching the time of twilight, [as] the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment…

  Can anyone go to Canterbury—even in a Hertz—without also going “[E]asily on an ambling horse” with the Wife of Bath? Can anyone go to Yorkshire and not feel the ghosts of Heathcliff and Cathy on the moor?

  The British have given us all these books, all these families, all these homes to go to. They have made us rich in adopted families. Thanks to a glorious body of literature, there is almost nowhere a person can go in England and not feel at home.

  Allow me to contrast my first visit to England with my first trip to South America. In those days before the flowering of magical realism, I knew no centuries-old ghosts to travel with. There was one recent one.

  There was One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He is Colombian. Let me read you a short paragraph from an interview with him that appeared on July 16, 1978 in the New York Times Book Review.

  Do you know that nowadays hundreds of people are visiting Aracataca, Colombia, which is the setting of One Hundred Years of Solitude? All sorts of people, including American scholars, come because they want to see the actual house, the actual tree and so forth mentioned in the novel. Now the local children, who know nothing about the book but who are eager to cash in on it, run up to the visitors and say, “For five centavos I’ll show you the house,” and then they lead the tourist off to any old house or any old tree and pretend it’s the one from the novel.

  Colombia has over four hundred thousand square miles, and England has fifty thousand. There is only one literary home in all of Colombia and that one is an agreed-upon myth, but in England, a person can hardly turn a corner without meeting someone from the literary home within us.

  For that first trip to South America I missed bumping into people I’d met in the pages of a book. I missed having read books that would h
ave given me a home away from home, books that would have prepared my imagination as it was prepared to go to Paris and find in the district that lies between the Latin Quarter and the Faubourg Saint-Marcel a certain lodging house

  owned by Madame Vauquer. It stands at the lower end of the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve, at the place where the street makes a sharp drop toward the Rue de l’Arbalète … [T]hese streets huddled between the domes of the Val-de-Grace and the Pantheon …

  Until I read Père Goriot, I didn’t know that Paris as well as Rome has a Pantheon. I went to see it. But not only it. I went to see the descendants of Eugene Rastignac and Madame Vauquer.

  I have never been to Russia, but I know that when I go—if ever I do—I shall visit St. Petersburg, and part of me will not be there at all but will be in another century, and I shall travel with Anna Karenina and Vronsky (even though I do not like them very much), and I shall look over a bridge at the Neva River, and Raskolnikoff will be breathing over my shoulder.

  We don’t like to walk alone.

  Look at what happened to Vlad the Impaler. He was a Knight of the Dragon in the fifteenth century, a rather obscure knight, and then, at the end of the nineteenth century a rather obscure writer wrote a gothic novel about him and his castle. The writer was Bram Stoker, and the novel was Dracula. Look at what has happened since. The Romanian government has done to his castle in Transylvania what the children of Aracataca, Colombia, have done. They will show you the house, the castle, the staircase, the window, or anything else that Bram Stoker dreamed up.

  I have never been able to get through James Joyce’s Ulysses, yet I found myself thrilled to read in the travel section of a Sunday issue of my local paper:

  … Every June 16, Bloomsday, [Joyce’s] faithful fans from all over the world don Edwardian dress and retrace street by street Leopold Bloom’s odyssey about the city on that June Thursday in 1904. Along the way there are readings from the novel, restaurants offering “Bloom’s menue,” even a James Joyce look-alike contest.