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

by E. L. Konigsburg

  What, you may ask, are the concerns of a woman who began this series of speeches bleating about how “the writing of it [the Radasevitches and the Gabellas] makes normal of it.” Does she want to pull up the ladder after having her turn?

  No, I do not want to pull up the ladder, and no, I don’t want to stop minorities from seeing themselves in books.

  But I am concerned that books written in response to a trend—particularly a trend in subject matter—result in proliferation, not growth.

  Two excerpts from an article in the September 9, 1991, issue of Newsweek magazine under the heading It’s a Not So Small World, subheading Multiculturalism Is Broadening the Horizons of Children’s Literature, help to illustrate my concerns:

  One of the people most responsible for the high standards of these [multicultural] books is Harriet Rohmer, founder of Children’s Book Press in San Francisco … For “The Invisible Hunters” ($12.95), a Miskito Indian folk tale about the first contact of an isolated tribe with the outside world, Rohmer herself tracked down fragments of the story all over Nicaragua; she got a piece of it in one village, another piece down the road, until she could put it all together.

  Are these needle biopsies—placing smaller and smaller slivers of civilization under the microscope—discovering differences or creating them?

  All of [Rohmer’s] books are multicultural, and every story is told (often bilingually) by an author who shares the story’s culture. Blia Xiong is from Laos, and her story, “Nine-in-One Grr! Grr!” ($12.95) is about the Hmong tribe. Artist Carmen Lomas Garza’s “Family Pictures” ($13.95) depicts her own Mexican-American childhood in south Texas … Rohmer’s insistence on authentic ethnic storytellers was unique when she began publishing. Now it is becoming commonplace.

  Who decides who is an authentic ethnic storyteller? In 1971 Gail Haley won a Caldecott Medal for A Story A Story, an African folktale, and in 1975 Jean Craighead George won the Newbery Medal for Julie of the Wolves, the story of an Inuit girl; would that be possible in 1994?

  Can only the Hmong write Hmong books?

  Is The Invisible Hunters as told by Harriet Rohmer more authentic? more ethnic? than Julie of the Wolves as written by Jean Craighead George?

  Tolstoy was not a woman when he wrote Anna Karenina and William Styron was neither a mother nor a concentration-camp survivor when he wrote Sophie’s Choice.

  I am a Jewish-American female. Of Hungarian descent. From a small town. I am a middle-child, small-town, Jewish-American female of Hungarian descent. But that is not all that I am. I am also overweight, prone to headaches, and a klutz. Everything that I write may run through that filter, but filters are not made of the materials they are meant to distill. Just because Baryshnikov has not asked me to dance doesn’t mean I don’t know it will be wonderful when he does.

  I am more than what I was, more than what I am, and part of the reason that I am is because I have learned to wear many masks. I have been allowed to wear many masks because Western civilization—flawed though it may be—has given me the privacy and privilege to do so.

  In years to come, will today’s new immigrants ask the question: Must the Hmong write only Hmong books? I hope they ask; I also hope they won’t have to.

  Because I so profoundly believe that books must come from the hearts and minds of writers, because of the nature of writers and the written, because I say, “Glory be to God for dappled things,” because I believe that the whole of Rashomon is a single truth, because I believe there is a distinction between truth and accuracy, I also don’t believe that wolves must write wolf books. (Beneath the face

  8. The Mask Beneath the Face

  My mother used to say, “If you really want to know someone, marry him or play cards with him.” My mother would say that; she lived in a time when a lot of people believed that the only way nice women really got to know a member of the opposite sex was to marry him, and, besides, she was a terrific poker player. In these modern times when a person does not have to marry someone to know him, and the fine art of poker playing has moved out of the family living room and into the casinos of Atlantic City and Las Vegas, I would like to add that if you really want to know someone, take him to Mardi Gras.

  Going to Mardi Gras had long been an item on my lifetime checklist of things to do before I die. Now that I’ve been, I can tell you that there are three things wrong with it. One, it is crowded. Two, it is gaudy. And three, it is vulgar. On the other hand, Mardi Gras has three things to recommend it. One, it is crowded. Two, it is gaudy. And three, it is vulgar.

  If you want clean and orderly, go to Disney World. If you want vulgarity that is considered to be good taste, go to Williamsburg, Virginia. Mardi Gras, like the city that hosts it, has spontaneity and squalor and charm. There is something authentic about Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and despite its exaggerations of dress and deportment—perhaps, because of them—a person senses she’ll find some truth there in the ungentrified French Quarter.

  Throughout the French Quarter during Mardi Gras, people wore outfits that were outrageous and funny. They wore tinsel wigs and had their faces painted. Men dressed as women; women dressed as men. The fine lines that separate costume from dress, male from female, good taste from bad, disappeared.

  Sometimes under a layer of face paint or beneath a feathered mask, the last boundary, that between acceptable and unacceptable social behavior, also disappeared. Young women wearing masks and others with painted faces leaned over balconies and pulled down their panties or pulled up their T-shirts, exposing that—or those—which are normally hidden.

  Strangely enough, it was the masks that seemed to me to be the most revealing. The masks held the key to the truth that I sensed there. Then the question became: Were people behind the masks exhibiting the persona of the mask they had assumed or were they showing their true character? Did the masks allow them to conceal their true selves? Or reveal them?

  Were the false faces ones they could assume? Or were they ones they could hide behind?

  Were they disguise?

  Or were they protection?

  I arrived home wondering about the behavior behind the masks of Mardi Gras and asked my husband, the psychologist, Dr. David Konigsburg, “Do you think wearing a mask allows a person to be someone else, or do you think that a mask allows a person to be that which he really is?” And my husband, the psychologist, Dr. David Konigsburg, answered, “Yes.”

  Before I could express my annoyance, he pointed out that in my work, I had said, yes, they reveal as well as yes, they conceal. He also mentioned that my fascination with masks was nothing new. It had started with my very first book. With the very first scene of my very first book. He was right, of course. Allow me, please, to demonstrate.

  Elizabeth, who is ten, begins her story (and my career as a writer) in Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinlej and Me, Elizabeth as follows:

  I first met Jennifer on my way to school. It was Halloween, and she was sitting in a tree ... I was dressed as a Pilgrim ... I had my head way back and was watching the leaves when I first saw Jennifer up in the tree … She was sitting on one of the lower branches … swinging her feet … [She was wearing] real Pilgrim shoes made of buckles and cracked old leather. The heel part flapped up and down because the shoes were so big that only the toe part could stay attached …

  “You’re going to lose that shoe,” I said.

  The first thing Jennifer said to me was, “Witches never lose anything.”

  “But you’re not a witch,” I said. “You’re a Pilgrim, and look, so am I.”

  “I won’t argue with you,” she said. “Witches convince; they never argue. But I’ll tell you this much. Real witches are Pilgrims, and just because I don’t have on a silly black costume and carry a silly broom and wear a silly black hat, doesn’t mean that I’m not a witch. I’m a witch all the time and not just on Halloween.”

  When they go trick-or-treating later that evening, Elizabeth asks Jennifer why she isn’t wearing a mask.<
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  She answered that one disguise was enough. She told me that all year long she was a witch, disguised as a perfectly normal girl; on Halloween she became undisguised.

  So in my first book, Jennifer decides that masks make you somebody you aren’t.

  But in a later book, Sabrina in Journey to an 800 Number thinks just the opposite. Maximilian, the narrator and hero of this story, meets Sabrina, a girl about his age who collects newspaper articles about freaks. Max expresses some impatience with her fascination, and Sabrina replies:

  “Maximilian, what you don’t seem to understand is that once you’re a freak, a born one or a man-made one, anything you do that’s normal becomes freakish.”

  “By your logic, then, anything freakish that a freak does is normal.”

  “Sure. Now, you take David.”

  “I know a lot of Davids. Which David?”

  “The boy in the bubble in Houston. His name is David. He has something wrong with him so that his body cannot fight germs, so he lives in a room-sized container where air is pumped in and germs are kept out. If you were to sneeze at David, you could kill him. He’s nine years old now, and the only reason he has reached the age of nine is that he’s never tried to be normal. He never tried to be anything but a freak.”

  “But Renee was not born defective. She’s the victim of an accident. She can still live a normal life.”

  “I wouldn’t call it normal.”

  “She can overcome what happened to her.”

  “Overcoming is not normal. Overcoming means always having to do that plus whatever else she wants to do. It’s like she will always have to put something on before she puts on her clothes … It’s like putting on a suit of armor before you put on your clothes. Everything you wear takes the shape of the armor.”

  “I’d say that makes it basically hard to relax.”

  “And to pretend.”

  “Why would anyone want to pretend?”

  “Everyone wants to pretend sometime. Needs to. But freaks … cannot live with disguises. Only nor mal people like you and me and Lilly and Woody have any choice about whether or not we want to present ourselves or present a disguise.”

  On February 7, 1984, David, the boy in the bubble, was allowed to touch the world unprotected. He crawled out of his bubble and into a hospital room specially equipped to keep the air as sterile as possible. He was kissed by his mother for the first time, gave his father and sister hugs, sat in a chair, and heard sounds clearly instead of through plastic. David died on February 22, 1984. He was twelve.

  Maybe Sabrina is right, and there are times when the only way you can be yourself is to hide behind a mask. But maybe Jennifer is also right: wearing a mask allows you to pretend, to become someone else. And maybe that is a privilege that only normal people have, while those people who are not normal wear a mask so that they can be the person they really are. Yes may, after all, be the correct answer to both of those questions.

  Masks have a place in my latest novel as well as my first, and in some form they are featured in works in between; for those of us who write fiction, it is Fat Tuesday whenever we go to work, for we use our characters as masks. Wearing masks is what writers do, and the masks that one assumes as a writer serve the same purpose as those at Mardi Gras: they reveal; they conceal; they exaggerate, and they do it all for the sake of getting at some truth that is often seen but not fully understood.

  The history of a masked storyteller is older than writing itself. Long ago, a priest or a shaman donned the mask of an animal whose spirit he wanted to assume. While wearing an appropriate animal mask, he danced and sang to an assembly of tribesmen, relating the courage of the lion, the swiftness of the eagle, the cunning of the wolf. These animals were their tribal totems, their ancestral spirits. Even today we celebrate the vestiges of these totem masks when we say “Go

  Gators” or when we cheer the Panthers of Pittsburgh, the Nittany Lions or those of Detroit, or the Tigers of LSU or Clemson or Princeton or Detroit.

  The Greeks introduced masks into literature through the theater. In ancient Greece, the worship of Dionysus, god of fecundity and the harvest, evolved from first impersonating the deity by donning goat skins to finally making masks. The masked man spoke in the first person, assuming the persona of the god, and the art of drama was born.

  Tellers of folktales did as the shaman did and as the performers in Greek theater. Tellers of folktales abstract the characteristics of an animal and form them into stories, but the masks now are words, and there is often a plot to the tale.

  Let me show you four wolf masks, four masks that reveal the wolf. The first is a severe, uncompromising mask from the tales of the Brothers Grimm.

  Little Red Riding Hood went up to the bed and drew back the curtains; there lay the grandmother with her cap pulled over her eyes so that she looked very odd.

  “O grandmother, what large ears you have got!”

  “The better to hear with.”

  “O grandmother, what great eyes you have got!”

  “The better to see with.”

  “O grandmother, what large hands you have got!”

  “The better to take hold of you with.”

  “But grandmother, what a terrible large mouth you have got!”

  “The better to devour you!” And no sooner had the wolf said it than he made one bound from the bed, and swallowed up poor Little Red Riding Hood.

  Then the wolf, having satisfied his hunger, lay down again in the bed, went to sleep, and began to snore loudly.

  Here we have the wolf in drag, which would seem to be the converse of the man in the wolf mask, but isn’t it still the shaman striking fear and respect into tender hearts? Isn’t it still the wolf doing and the wolf saying what the man in a wolf mask believes a wolf would say and do? The story of Little Red Riding Hood is fearsome and uncompromising and altogether suitable for its time and altogether suitable for preschoolers, who are equally fearsome and uncompromising.

  In time the wolf masks of children’s tales grow more sophisticated. In a later story, they are just as feared, but they do not dress up, and they do not speak. Listen to Laura Ingalls Wilder tell about wolves outside the door of her Little House in the Big Woods:

  At night, when Laura lay awake in the trundle bed, she listened and could not hear anything at all but the sound of the trees whispering together. Sometimes, far away in the night, a wolf howled. Then he came nearer and howled again.

  It was a scary sound. Laura knew that wolves would eat little girls. But she was safe inside the solid log walls. Her father’s gun hung over the door and good old Jack, the brindle bull dog, lay on guard before it. Her father would say, “Go to sleep, Laura. Jack won’t let the wolves in.” So Laura snuggled under the covers of the trundle bed, close beside Mary, and went to sleep.

  In this story of frontier life in the late nineteenth century there is a wall between man and the wolf. No one wants to acquire his attributes. There is no Go Wolfpack here. The wolf at the door was not to be admired but to be feared.

  A generation later, fear still features in a portrait of a wolf. But it is fear mingled with admiration. Jack London donned the mask of the heroic lead dog, Buck, to get under the mask of the wolf. This part of the story comes toward the end, when Buck discovers that the master who saved his life and whom he loved above all others is dead, and he answers The Call of the Wild.

  John Thornton was dead. The last tie was broken. Man and the claims of man no longer bound him… . [T]he wolf pack had at last crossed over from the land of streams and timber and invaded Buck’s valley. Into the clearing where the moonlight streamed, they poured in a silvery flood; and in the centre of the clearing stood Buck, motionless as a statue, waiting their coming. They were awed, so still and large he stood, and a moment’s pause fell, till the boldest one leaped straight for him. Like a flash Buck struck, breaking the neck. Then he stood, without movement, as before, the stricken wolf rolling in agony behind him. Three others tried it in
sharp succession; and one after the other they drew back, streaming blood from slashed throats or shoulders … Pivoting on his hind legs, and snapping and gashing, [Buck] was everywhere at once … [A]t the end of half an hour the wolves drew back discomfited. The tongues of all were out and lolling, the white fangs showing cruelly white in the moonlight … One wolf, long and lean and gray, advanced cautiously, in a friendly manner … He was whining softly, and, as Buck whined, they touched noses.

  Then an old wolf, gaunt and battle-scarred, came forward. Buck writhed his lips into the preliminary of a snarl, but sniffed noses with him. Whereupon the old wolf sat down, pointed nose at the moon, and broke out the long wolf howl. The others sat down and howled. And now the call came to Buck in unmistakable accents. He, too, sat down and howled …

  Jack London peeks under the mask of the wolf and finds that all wolves are not alike; they may be killers, but they are selective. Fear is mixed with admiration, not so much for his wolfness, but for those of his traits that border on the human.

  Let us now skip two generations and listen to the howl of the wolf as heard by Miyax, a young Eskimo girl lost in the Alaskan wilderness. She is Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George, and this is how she assumes the mask of the wolf.

  Miyax pushed back the hood of her sealskin parka and looked at the Artie sun. It was a yellow disc in a lime-green sky, the colors of six o’clock in the evening and the time when the wolves awoke … [S]he … focused her attention on the wolves she had come upon two sleeps ago. They were wagging their tails as they awoke and saw each other.

  Her hands trembled and her heartbeat quickened, for she was frightened, not so much of the wolves, who were shy and many harpoon-shots away, but because of her desperate predicament. Miyax was lost … without food for many sleeps … and the very life in her body … depended upon these wolves for survival …