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

by E. L. Konigsburg

  You see, they had sibling rivalry in the Renaissance; they just hadn’t heard of it.

  Beatrice showed herself, as she habitually did, to be the more generous of the two. Beatrice, having duly received and admired her brother-in-law’s gifts, sent them back to Mantua with the following note:

  I have today received, by your Highness’s courier, the drapery belonging to the King of France … I thank you exceedingly, but I feel that, under the circumstances, I ought not to keep them. As it is, I have great pleasure in seeing them all together, and now your Highness can give them back to the Marchesana.

  So there was Beatrice after her marriage, a bride overshadowed by her husband’s beautiful mistress as she had been overshadowed at home by her sister. But then something happened. Something strange and wonderful and terribly, terribly romantic. Sometime after he married her, Il Moro fell in love with his wife.

  It is recorded fact. Letters tell how attentive he became to her, how he spoke endearments and kissed her in public. But why? What made him appreciate her? What made him send Cecilia packing, off to marry Count Bergamini?

  Leonardo was in Milan when the duke fell in love with his wife. Knowing the influence of Leonardo on the tastes and manners and style of those who dealt with him, I couldn’t dismiss his presence in the court of Milan as being entirely passive. Leonardo was there, and so was Giacomo Salai.

  Salai is the beautiful young man on the right side of this page from Leonardo’s records. He appears often in Leonardo’s notebooks, where he is drawn in both words and pictures.

  Leonardo wrote, “Giacomo came to live with me on St. Mary Magdalene’s day 1490, aged ten years.” He goes on to relate Salai’s misdeeds during the first few days of his apprenticeship, and then in the margin, he wrote: thief, liar, obstinate, glutton. From that entry forward there are scattered accounts of Salai’s many misdemeanors.

  Yet Leonardo never gave up on him. He kept this Salai with him for more than twenty years, helped pay his sister’s dowry, and remembered him in his will.

  Why? Why did Leonardo do that?

  There is an easy explanation: Leonardo da Vinci was a homosexual. His relationship with Salai was, as Kenneth Clark so delicately put it, “of the kind honored in classical times, and partly tolerated in the Renaissance in spite of the censure of the Church.”

  But, you see, I am glad that I write for children. For that explanation of his use of a young man will never do. Never do altogether. It is simply not enough. It is not deep enough. It does not tell the whole truth. If I were writing for adults at this moment in our American literary history, I would concoct a sordid, fast-paced tale about this relationship. But I know that writing for children requires a deeper truth. You cannot explain a twenty- or twenty-five-year relationship on the basis of sex alone. Anyone who has been married for even half that length of time knows that. Long relationships that withstand annoyances and independent bad habits and that stand up to the minute-by-minute—not the year-by-year—of living together are based on mutual need.

  What would Leonardo need? What could Salai supply to Leonardo’s life? Leonardo, the complete, the total, the Renaissance man?

  Study his scientific work, and I venture you will come away more impressed by his gadgets than his genius. (You see another reason why I am glad I write for children: I can approach the work of Leonardo da Vinci as they do—unshackled by a feeling of awe.) Genius always makes quantum leaps.

  Upon taking up residence in Milan, Leonardo started his notebooks. Did he get lost in the details? He looked at things in a totally accurate way, for I believe he was the world’s greatest observer, but did he become so much the empiricist, so much the anti-Platonist that he would never generalize? Did he become too much the tinkerer, too little the thinker? Did Leonardo become too inhibited to make a quantum leap?

  What was lacking in his ultimate design of the statue of the bronze horse, his great commission for Il Moro? He worked on it on and off for sixteen years. Il Moro sent the metal to a relative to be used for cannon, so it was never cast in bronze, but a full-scale plaster model appeared more massive than majestic. Could that be because Leonardo got too busy working out a mathematical system for the proportions of the anatomy of the horse using fractions of 1/900?

  Leonardo made a quantum leap in art. Not always. But often. Why did some of his works of art possess the quality of genius and others, not?

  What is lacking, for example, in this, his last painting, St. John the Baptist? Why an inhibited, self-conscious, androgynous St. John?

  Something is missing. I think I know what.

  A wild element is missing. Everything is too tight and too controlled. Nothing swings.

  Every great work of art, every work of genius, has a wild element. Some artists carry that wild element within them. Michelangelo did. Rembrandt did. Beethoven did. But Leonardo did not.

  Leonardo, the bastard son, the self-educated, defensive, self-conscious, inhibited genius, needed Salai. He needed Salai to supply the irreverence, the wild element, the all-important something awful that great works of art have. The controlled Leonardo needed Salai’s recklessness. Salai also gave Leonardo a necessary sense of unimportance. We all need a child to do that. In many ways Salai was a perpetual child.

  In the court of Milan Leonardo was employed by Il Moro on many projects. He was Il Moro’s resident wizard: Design a war machine, Maestro Leonardo. Design costumes for a pageant, Maestro. Paint the ceilings in my new rooms; paint a wall in the refectory; paint a portrait of my very good friend, the lovely Madonna Cecilia Gallerani.

  Leonardo did those things. And after Ludovico and Beatrice had been married a few years, and Beatrice was pregnant with their third child, Il Moro called Leonardo to him and requested that he paint another portrait. A portrait of one Lucrezia Crivelli, Il Moro’s new mistress. Leonardo painted Lucrezia.

  He painted the ceiling, and he painted the wall of the refectory; he painted portraits of Il Moro’s mistresses, but for all the years he remained in Milan, Leonardo never, never painted a portrait of poor, dear Beatrice. He did a sketch of her sister Isabella, but he never, never painted Beatrice.

  Why?

  Why did he never paint Beatrice?

  Beatrice died at the age of twenty-two, but there had been time enough before she died for him to have painted her. Her early death was not the reason.

  Shortly after Beatrice died, Milan was invaded by the French, and Ludovico was exiled. Leonardo went to Florence, stopping en route in Mantua to visit Isabella. It was then that he did the charcoal drawing of her.

  When he returned to Florence after having been away for seventeen years, his reputation, partly as a result of the success of The Last Supper, was at its peak. He was bombarded with requests for paintings. Kings, bishops, princes, and princesses—most especially Duchess Isabella—were begging for a portrait from his hand.

  He promised them all, and he delivered to none.

  Yet, during these years back in Florence, he spent three years painting the second wife of an unimportant Florentine merchant. He did the work entirely by himself, allowing no apprentice hand to touch it.

  This is the point, the question with which I begin my book, The Second Mrs. Giaconda. “Why, people ask, why did Leonardo da Vinci choose to paint the second wife of an unimportant Florentine merchant …”

  Look at her. Look at Madonna Lisa Giaconda.

  Can you look at her without awe? Can you look at her without feeling bored by the countless reproductions of her face? Can you look at her without resenting having to wait in line outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a cold February day?

  If you are lucky enough to write books for children, you have a chance for a fresh look at her. You have a chance to introduce some unjaded, but awe-free, young appetites to the mysteries of this lady. What a joy to write for young people who are not weary of seeing her.

  This is a woman who knows that she is not pretty and has learned to live with that knowledge. This is
a woman whose acceptance of herself has made her beautiful in a deep and hidden way. A woman whose look tells you that you are being sized by an invisible measuring rod in her head, a measuring rod on which she alone has etched the units. A woman who knows how to endure. A woman of layers. A woman whose very unimportance allowed Leonardo to swing loose and free with the composition.

  Is she possibly what Beatrice would have become had she lived? She was just the age that Beatrice would have been had she lived. Is this possibly the portrait of Beatrice that Leonardo never painted? A possible surrogate Beatrice without the royal clothes and regal jewelry?

  Young readers give me what Salai gave Leonardo: a highly developed sense of unimportance. We match up quite well. Just as Salai lacked reverence toward important works, so do young readers. They provide me with the necessary wild element. And that is why they are a challenge to write for. And because they are that challenge, I like to write for them.

  Now, when you ask why I write for children, I will tell you that writing for them makes me research history and human emotions. Writing for children makes me research deeply, beyond and beneath the slick, sexy reasons that lie on the surface.

  And writing for children demands a certain kind of excellence: the quality that Salai helped to give Leonardo, the quality that young readers demand in their books as Renaissance viewers demanded it in their art. A quality that says that all works of art must have weight and knowing beneath them, that a work of art must have all the techniques and the skills—it must never be sloppy—but it must never, never, for God’s sake, never show the gears. Make it nonchalant, easy. Make it light. The men of the Renaissance called that kind of excellence sprezzatura.

  And because Salai appreciated it, Leonardo kept him with him. And because children demand it subliminally and appreciate it loudly, and because I do, too, that is why I write for children.

  Into the 80s

  Ever since I have been writing books, whenever and wherever and to whomever I speak, the first question asked of me is: Where do you get your ideas? Writers are always asked that.

  Except for a year at boarding school as a teenager, one trip to Washington, D.C., and a couple of visits to eye doctors in Boston, Emily Dickinson spent every day of her life in Amherst, Massachusetts. She spent her time at home reading, baking cookies, and writing letters and some of the most beautiful poetry in our language. Amherst, Massachusetts, was where her ideas came from, her only where.

  Ernest Hemingway hunted big game in Africa, fished for marlin in the waters of the Gulf Stream, watched bullfights in Spain, drove an ambulance in Italy during World War I, walked away from an airplane crash, won a Nobel Prize for literature, divorced three times, married four, and committed suicide because he had no where to go as a writer.

  When I am asked where I get my ideas, I respond by relating an anecdote or telling about something I read or observed that triggered a story, and what I tell is true.

  It is also not true.

  Anyone who has experienced creative insight—whether in the world of science or the world of art—knows that the where of where ideas come from is inside jour head.

  For example, many people saw the same great block of Carrara marble that Michelangelo saw. As a matter of fact, someone had already chipped away at it before Michelangelo got to it, but it was only Michelangelo who saw a giant statue of David in that stone. In the nineteenth century, a lot of people knew as much about the chemistry of benzene as did Friedrich August Kekule, but it was he who got the idea for the carbon ring structure of benzene. A lot of geneticists were privy to the same information about chromosomes and DNA that Watson and Crick were privy to, but it was they who got the idea for the double helix. A lot of people have Jewish mothers, but only Philip Roth made a Mrs. Portnoy out of that raw material.

  Raw material is all around all the time.

  For the novelist or poet, for the scientist or artist, the question is not where do ideas come from, the question is how they come. The how is the mystery. The how is fragile.

  The how is related to time, to the chronology of time. All advances in the world of science or art depend on what has gone before. Watson and Crick could not have discovered the structure of DNA if someone had not discovered X-ray diffraction first. But ideas depend not only upon chronology but also upon the tenor of the times, for genius does not always live in the age it deserves.

  What if Michelangelo had signed a contract for that giant block of Carrara marble in 1301 instead of 1501? In 1301 the city of Florence was a confused and gloomy battleground for the Black Guelphs and the White Guelphs, the Democrats and Republicans of their day. But on September 13, 1501, when Michelangelo started his work, Florence was a republic that wanted a work of art that would express its civic pride. So out of the giant block of Carrara marble, Michelangelo carved a statue of David, noble, heroic, and naked.

  Had Michelangelo signed his contract in September of 1301 or September of 1901, David might be noble and he might be heroic, but he would not be naked, for creative acts depend upon not only what has gone before but also what is current. Excellence is subject to fashion.

  When the heart and the mind of a writer are out of sync with his times, either his book will go unpublished or unappreciated. Earlier I mentioned how in Up From Jericho Tel. I explored how important timing is to success in the arts, and how important it was to the publication and success of my first book. My heart and my head were in the right place at the right time. The X-ray diffraction of children’s books had been invented. The republic of publishing was ready, and so was I. I saw the statue in the stone. I was ready to transform an idea into a book. The constraints without were gone. I needed only to undo the constraints within.

  Between the imagination and the image-of a molecule of DNA, or a Jewish mother, or a mathematical model—the idea has to be set free. And some conditions help to set it free.

  In 1983 I was asked to address the Fifth Biennial Institute in Children’s Literature at Simmons College. The theme for the institute was “Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?” Their brochure outlining the schedule and participants explained:

  The theme is taken from T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” … Investigative in nature, the Institute will … address questions which go beyond the common round—questions of action and inaction …

  In some way, every creative action disturbs the universe.

  Investigating how creative ideas are translated into action goes beyond the question, “Where do you get your ideas?” The lambent mystery of how remains, but I could investigate what it takes to set ideas free from the hearts and minds of writers.

  The result is “Between a peach and the universe.”

  7. Between a Peach and the Universe

  When I was a sophomore at Carnegie Mellon University, I studied T. S. Eliot, and I studied calculus.

  Well, T. S. Eliot has made it to Broadway, and calculus hasn’t.

  But I must confess that when I was in college, I would not have been surprised if calculus had made it instead. For at that time, I thought that the poetry of Mr. Eliot was every bit as arcane as calculus.

  Upon returning home from seeing a performance of Cats, I opened my sophomore textbook, Chief Modern Poets of England & America, and I saw tucked between its pages a verse of “The Rum Tum Tugger,” complete with notes that make no sense at all, in a hand I do not recognize.

  The Rum Tum Tugger is a curious beast: His disobliging ways are a matter of habit. If you offer him a fish then he always wants a feast;

  When there isn’t any fish then he won’t eat rabbit.

  Here are my notes: Rum Turn Tugger and beast are underlined, and in the margin beside that line, I have written “Lion of Judah.” Beside the line, “If you offer him a fish then he always wants a feast,” I have written, “Miracle of loaves and fishes.” And scribbled in the margin beside the line, “When there isn’t any fish then he won’t eat rabbit,” there is a note to the effect that Catholic
s don’t eat meat on Fridays. (During my sophomore year in college, that was a matter of habit.)

  On Broadway, T. S. Eliot’s Cats appeared to be pretty uncomplicated. I wondered if at Carnegie Mellon, I or my teacher, Mr. John Hart, had been reading a bit too much between the lines. Dr. Hart was one of a group of professors who met once a week to read and discuss a single page of Ulysses by James Joyce, and I was, God forgive me, a sophomore.

  After studying “The Rum Turn Tugger,” I read the textbook section on T. S. Eliot and found “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” I remembered liking that poem for its rhythm.

  Let us go then, you and I,

  When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table;

  I will spare you what I have written in the margin beside “etherized upon a table.” As I continued reading, I stopped trying to decipher my notes—which were marginal in both the literal and figurative senses of the word—and I began to read the poem straight through. I found myself saying, “Yes, I understand,” and “Yes, I don’t.” Not, “No, I don’t understand,” but “Yes, I don’t.” Saying yes, I don’t understand is a privilege that comes either with religious faith or old age. At last I came to these lines: