Kiddie Litter
Dunlap, John R.
John R. Dunlap KIDDIE LITTER Children's books do a thriving business in the U.S.— in titles more likely to prepare your kids for a dreary life in the New Age than for real life. T n 1745, at St....
...B and kind of preachy...
...is overshadowed by a tedious psychologizing delivered in (what else...
...and of course there was already a certain portion of adult literature which had been taken over by a growing class of literate children: Homer's Odyssey, Aesop's Fables, Malory's Arthur, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, and the like...
...When Forster is fired for being a homosexual, Louis is naturally upset and must sort through a range of emotions...
...Samuel Johnson called him Jack Whirler...
...In her survey of the late nineteenth century, Anne Thaxter Eaton, noting the emergence of Mary Mapes Dodge's St...
...As nuclear winter sets in, the two bond with the wolf pack for mutual support and make their way south to a warmer climate where chances are better for continued survival...
...But the violence done by these "vital" books may be far more serious than the physical violence usually disapproved of by their enthusiasts...
...The problem book, absorbed with such troubles and with the consequent emotional distress, evinces a crimped imagination which sees the "real world" as an impoverished little place circumscribed by news copy and psychology texts...
...Among the immutable cliches in the large body of commentary on children's literature, none pops up more often than the remark that children's books reflect the times...
...What are we to call them...
...By the 1920s the bright thought had dawned on publishers that most people do most of their life's reading during childhood...
...The honored place accorded children by Anglo-Saxon culture transferred easily to America, where the Boston printer Isaiah Thomas pirated many of Newbery's books...
...He was portrayed by Oliver Goldsmith in The Vicar of Wakefield as "a red-faced, good-natured man, always in a hurry...
...But we should know too that the serpent has been lurking there, doing violence, for quite a bit longer than Ms...
...if ethical relativism is not coherently admissible as life's only absolute—well, then, a lot of contemporary books for children are telling a lot of big fibs to our kids...
...if sentimental naturalism is not a very natural human pose...
...In 1921, Frederic G. Melcher, a co-editor of Publishers Weekly, proposed to a meeting of the American Library Association (ALA) the idea of an annual award "for the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children...
...A third volume of the Guide to Nonsexist Children's Books is promised for 1990...
...Stevenson's effortless proportion and moral balance are totally absent in books like Bauer's On My Honor, wherein the worst tragedy isburied while the most petty moral indecision is blown up to heroic stature...
...Within a generation of Newbery's death in 1767, books for children were commonplace in Britain and America...
...L us not belabor the consequences l a of all this prolixity...
...Recall by contrast Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, a familiar story and perhaps the best child's adventure tale ever written...
...A runner-up is the attendant cliché that children's literature has outgrown a "didacticism" whereby any material for children had to be attached to a moral lesson...
...Italy, Spain, and France tend to regard children as no more than small candidates for the career of adulthood...
...In an essay on "Magic, Craft, and the Making of Children's Books" (1973), Nancy Willard gives a useful answer by drawing a distinction between fantasies and "problem books": 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...
...Of several conflicts in the story, one is the ambivalence young Jim Hawkins comes to feel about Long John Silver...
...Lost in this lugubrious preoccupation—rendered in a stiff, idiotized prose ("The racking sobs flowed out of him like water")—is the sheer horror of a child losing his life...
...Nor is thematic content the only business at issue here...
...Fifteen minutes in the children's section of a well-stocked bookstore should be enough to persuade any browser with moderate cultivation (or any parent with ordinary horse sense) that no small portion of kiddie lit these days—from the phonic emptiness of Dr...
...For kids in the seventh through twelfth grades, there is comic relief in M. E. Kerr's Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack: Dinky Hocker is unhappy but cannot get her parents' attention—they're too busy doing social work with drug addicts...
...about half the Medals awarded since 1958 have gone to relatively new writers...
...In fact, only three medalists since 1958 have received the Newbery twice, and Beverly Cleary's 1984 Medal THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1989 19 for the stultifying Dear Mr...
...Johnson probably stretched it when he confessed an uncertainty as to whether Newbery had read or written the most books, but Newbery's astonishingly active life inspired such exaggeration...
...Forster...
...If the parents, teachers, and librarians who shell out in support of America's $2 billion kiddie lit industry would just keep their eyes and ears open, they could easily spot the serpent among the flowers by his mode of expression...
...Forever...
...Needless to say, Up a Road Slowly is quintessentially a problem book, about a "questing, senThe honored place accorded children by Anglo-Saxon culture transferred easily to America, where the Boston printer Isaiah Thomas pirated many of John Newbery's books...
...Book Industry Trends projects sales of $2 billion by the end of 1992...
...For the same age group, there is also straight talk about developments and relationships, or something, as in Norma Fox Mazer's Up in Seth's Room: Fifteen-year-old Finn Rousseau has decided to remain a virgin although her friends and her older sister do not accept her attitude for themselves...
...He was a risk-taker too, the first publisher to produce books designed specifically for children...
...In a recent editorial for the Horn Book Magazine (the most influential of the trade publications dealing with children's literature), Anita Silvey complains bitterly about the current crop of children's books—not because of the pervasive New Age proselytizing, to which she appears oblivious, but because of the physical violence she sees pouring out of the books, and not just the mediocre ones...
...Bauer specializes in books relating psychological turmoil in youngsters, and the bulk of On My Honor dwells on Joel's convoluted indecision about whether to tell the truth about the fatal escapade to his and Tony's parents...
...but among Anglo-Saxons, "childhood has the right to exist, and this gives them all through life the nostalgia of a lost paradise...
...Nicholas children's magazine (1873), ballyhoos the event in hosannas that burst out of an otherwise deadpan objectivity: "With the advent of St...
...He's boring and kind of preachy...
...Children's literature was taking on literary respectability...
...if America is not really just a congeries of bigots and victims...
...The reason for the profusion and the profits needn't be complicated by theories about Anglo-American fixations on youth...
...The worst of the lot—books like Bauer's psychological melodramas and such angry, obsessive Newbery award-winners as Krumgold's Onion John, Paula Fox's Slave Dancer, Cynthia Voigt's Dicey's Song—turn Steven-son's dictum right on its head, so that sensitive young readers are likely to be rapt clean into themselves on a solipsistic binge...
...To the truly good storyteller, however, the only "problems" are "narrative ones...
...If, for example, divorce is really something of a crippling disaster and not a "problem" which enlightened kids can easily adjust to...
...if homosexuality is a pathetic disorder andnot a "life style" impugned by craven moralists...
...violence is also pervading the work of our best and our brightest creators...
...In the eight years from 1970 to 1977, half the Newbery Medals (as might be expected) went to books that deal with the "black experience" in America, a theme rippling with problem-book potential...
...My oldest son, the 12-year-old critic and research assistant David Dunlap, has firmly declined (despite my orders) to read Onion John, having judged And Now Miguel to be "boring and kinda preachy...
...In 1932, a conference of the American Library Association passed a resolution declaring that no single author could take the Newbery Medal more than once without a (well-nigh impossible) unanimous vote of the Newbery Committee...
...so do Madeleine L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time (1963 Newbery), Lloyd Alexander's High King (1969), and Susan Cooper's Grey King (1976...
...His name was John Newbery...
...Nicholas didacticism as the chief element in reading for children fled away forever...
...a brooding first-person narrative...
...By 1954, though, the trend was back to understanding (with early stirrings of New Age self-absorption), when Joseph Krumgold took the Newbery for And Now Miguel, a rather moody first-person narrative about a 12-yearold boy caught between different cultures...
...The resolution was in keeping with the intent of the award—to encourage "original and creative work" among books for children...
...One may perhaps take it to be a sign of the times that most contemporary professionals in the "field" of children's literature exhibit a secular cast of mind in which "didacticism" is strictly a code word for religious admonition, which is strictly taboo...
...But what of the "good" children's books—the ones that come wrapped in critical acclaim, literary awards, and professional recommendations...
...But we never know exactly what to make of Long John, and neither does Jim—and it doesn't matter much because ambivalent feelings are just a few strokes on life's huge canvas, and Treasure Island is busy with the whole canvas...
...The best stories "are like rivers, which cut their own channels," and the greatest fantasies "come from a fullness of knowledge of human nature, of science, of history, of life...
...He'd start out telling you a good story and end up trying to sell you something...
...Recommended for fifth- and sixth-graders is Astrid Lindgren's Ronia, the Robber's Daughter...
...The problem in this inadvertently chilling story is the "inner struggle" suffered by 12-year-old Joel after his best friend, Tony, drowns while the two are swimming in a forbidden river...
...When Finn meets Seth, however, a relationship develops that causes both of them to reevaluate their attitudes toward sex...
...But Newbery was on to something different with his notion that children deserved their own books...
...A second Newbery Medal went to the same author in 1960 for Onion John, another first-person narrative wherein, roughly speaking, a stubborn father learns to respect the whims of his son...
...Before Newbery, there had been children's books of a sort, mostly ragged chapbooks of condensed fables which sold on London streets for a penny...
...The fantasy, on the other hand, is written not to instruct you or to enlarge your understanding, but to keep you sitting on the edge of your chair...
...It is merely incidental that throughout Grimm's fairy tales, for example, "you won't find a better collection of stories about murder, poverty, child abuse, and abandonment...
...It wasn't much longer before the books had broken out of a mold whichthe literary historian Cornelia Meigs referred to as "the age of admonition"—a period typified by moral up-lifters like Sarah Trimmer (1741-1802), who denounced Robinson Crusoe on the grounds that the story might lead boys "to an early taste for a rambling life and a desire for adventures...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1989 21...
...We should, however, be alert that "the serpent has invaded the garden...
...Onion John was judged by the critic Carolyn Horovitz to be hardly a children's book at all, but "a teaching story, a parable, aimed at parents...
...Melcher's John Newbery Medal, first awarded in 1922, was to become the oldest and most prestigious children's book award among dozens which would come and go in subsequent years...
...only in Krumgold's And Now Miguel and to a lesser degree in Virginia Sorensen's Miracles on Maple Hill (1957 Newbery) do the authors seem occupied more by the message than by the story...
...In 1944, near the climax of World War II and therefore under somewhat less understanding international circumstances, Esther Forbes accepted the Newbery Medal for Johnny Tremain, a rousing piece of historical fiction which she wrote to inspire patriotism in American boys approaching draft age...
...Stevenson himself, at about the time he was working on Measure Island (1882), wrote an essay which he called "A Gossip on Romance...
...Other forms of admonition are . . . what...
...Forster Louis Lamb's confidence is bolstered because of the kindly supportiveness of his teacher, Mr...
...Silver is a rogue, a cheat, a liar—but there is a warmth about him to which Jim is first attracted before being repelled by Silver's treachery, and then drawn back by Silver's apparent kindness...
...And once you saw the ulterior motive, you felt cheated...
...This relative marketability helps explain those circulars at your local supermarket which advertise mail-order courses for budding writers of children's books—or, in the credit lines of freelance book reviewers, the frequency of such remarks as "writes books for children" or "is currently at work on a book of poems for children...
...For 1989 alone, sales of children's books will top $1.5 billion (up from $500 million in 1983...
...but the first Newbery Medal was awarded in 1922 to a Dutch immigrant named Hendrik Willem van Loon for his Story of Mankind, a child's survey of world history intended by Van Loon to promote international understanding...
...A lively comedy with a serious underlying message...
...Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (1972) is a fantasy already dated by its undercurrent of environmentalist insistence, and the wooden characters in Robin McKinley's Hero and the Crown (1985) are little more than backdrop for a feminist yawp...
...at the turn of the century, America's public libraries—once forbidden to children—were opening sections exclusively for young people and their books...
...Nancy Willard's Visit to William Blake's Inn, which took the Newbery in 1982, meets her own high standards of fantasy...
...But Robert O'Brien's Mrs...
...A writer and publisher as well as bookshop proprietor, he had financed the growth of his book trade with years of travel selling haberdashery, cutlery, and patent medicines...
...But not all entries are so grim...
...The problem is a sort of Procrustean bed and the story is cut to fit it...
...Volume II offers an annotated list of 685 approved books published between 1976 and 1985...
...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1989 sitive child" who acquires "values" in "the learning process" of her "growth," and like that...
...In America especially, the 1920s marked an unprecedented profusion of children's books continuing right up to this "Year of the Young Reader," as 1989 has been designated by the Library of Congress...
...By 1958, however, the avalanche of creativity "in the children's field" had become oppressive enough to convince the committee reviewers that new talent no longer needed their encouragement...
...Taking the Newbery Medal for Up a Road Slowly in 1967, Irene Hunt may have let the cat out when, in her acceptance speech, she referred passingly to children's literature as "a substitute for our ineffective sermons...
...Mere l'Oie which Newbery called, simply, Mother Goose...
...In Books, Children and Men (1944), Hazard remarks at length on the "superiority of the North over the South" in the production of children's literature...
...The problem books among the four are Virginia Hamilton's M C Higgins the Great (1975 Newbery—it also took the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award and the National Book Award, all of which should give future cultural historians something to ponder about the state of mind of the American verbal class in 1975), in which an episodic plot is dominated by a heavy-handed symbolism, and Paula Fox's Slave Dancer (1974), in which the predicament of a 13-year-old boy (a New Orleans street musician shanghaied onto a slave ship in 1840—it could have been a good story...
...Henshaw seems to have been the only Newbery so far motivated by a sentimental deference to a big name in the field...
...Seuss to the cutesy nostrums of the Berenstain Bears to the kinky enticements of the teen romances—is unadulterated schlock...
...If we include these two fractured fantasies, we really have twenty problem books out of thirty honored since 1960 by the most prestigious children's book award...
...if moral choice is not exclusively a "private matter...
...Other descriptions are more direct, like the entry on Vivian Sheldon Epstein's History of Women for Children: This social and cultural history of women from the beginnings of civilization emphasizes the difficulties encountered by women when men began to look upon them as property...
...A broader sampling of the "problems" in such books is available in what has become, since 1976, a standard reference work, "a reference classic" according to a credit notice on its own dustcover: Denise Wilms and Ilene Cooper's Guide to Non-sexist Children's Books...
...There are, to be sure, greater costs incurred by elaborate design work and by color printing (and cited by some publishers to justify low advances), but children's books entail far less risk because of their larger potential market and their greater longevity as backlist sellers...
...In addition to reevaluating attitudes, there is opportunity for fifth- through eighth-graders to sort out emotions by reading, for instance, Gary Barger's What Happened to Mr...
...Another enduring brainchild of Melcher's was the annual Randolph Caldecott Medal, named after the nineteenth-century English illustrator and first awarded in 1938 for the year's best children's picture book...
...He is enshrined today by various iconographers as "the father of children's books...
...Well, the Sarah Trimmers and the Puritan hornbooks had departed the children's literary scene, probably forever...
...But among thirty books honored by the Newbery Medal since 1960, at least eighteen have been problem books—a number that does not include borderline stuff like Sid Fleischman's Whipping Boy (1987 Newbery) or E. L. Konigsburg's From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs...
...Publishers Weekly lists about 150 publishing houses and subsidiaries which altogether brought out roughly 1,500 new titles or new series in children's books just for the spring season of 1989...
...The keynote in problem books, regardless of theme, seems to be a preoccupation with the self, so that feelings per se wind up taking center stage rather than modestly serving the storyline...
...The least harmful among them are diversions bearing the outlines of ragged templates cut according to safe, secular formulas...
...Most contemporary books for children do not have such power...
...Yes—we should, one may suppose...
...Rivaling Jack London is Whitley Streiber with the gripping Wolf of Shadows: A girl and her mother, an ethologist studying wolves in a remote wilderness area, survive a nuclear attack...
...Some of the descriptions are rather obscure, as in this blurb on The Practical Princess by Jay Williams: "Six fairy tales, in which the heroes and heroines do not behave like stereotypes...
...That volume will almost certainly approve Marion Dane Bauer's On My Honor, a 1987 Newbery Honor Book (runner-up to the medalist) which may serve as an exemplar of the problem genre...
...We owe our students powerful reading experiences, which include them in a vital way," writes an incoherent teacher in praise of Bauer's On My Honor and other "realistic" children's books...
...Among the titles: Jack Dandy's History of Birds and Beasts, Tom Thumb's Folio, The History of Little Goody Tivo-Shoes, and a modified English version of Perrault's 1697 collection Contes de ma John R. Dunlap teaches English at Santa Clara University...
...In a somewhat precarious business, then, the publisher of chancy books for adults can hedge against losses by supplying a generous stock of children's books...
...we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves...
...That an Englishman should be responsible for such a development in book publishing is not altogether happenstance, according to the French historian Paul Hazard...
...Of course, the times too have been erratic and strange...
...if teen promiscuity is not a sensible "option" for healthy youngsters...
...The list even includes fantasies—albeit, to be sure, fantasies of a sort disciplined by a realistic problem...
...O n both sides of the Atlantic, something else was happening as well—something like Washington Irving, Mark Twain, Howard Pyle, Louisa May Alcott, Lewis Carroll, Mary Mapes Dodge, Robert Louis Stevenson, Kenneth Grahame, Rudyard Kipling...
...Using the (trend-setting) Newbery award-winners as a yardstick, we can say that something like two-thirds of those 3,000 children's titles being cranked out each year are not books that a sensible parent would be eager to see in his child's hands...
...And of course there are nature stories, a staple of good children's literature...
...And a lot of kids are buying into the fibs...
...Trimmer...
...Silvey seems to be aware...
...The ALA's Children's Services Division Board rescinded the rule of 1932, despite a risk that the Newbery Medal might become a spoils trinket reserved to a favored group of established authors...
...But William Armstrong's Sounder (1970) and Mildred 'Taylor's Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry (1977) are both fine stories, told with spirit and narrative authority...
...Such moralism exhausted itself during the nineteenth century and gave way to precisely the tastes bemoaned by Mrs...
...A good story, by his reckoning, "should be absorbing and voluptuous...
...Unsympathetic and devoid of humor, such books violate what the late Elizabeth Nesbitt called the "rightful heritage of children'—their brief interlude of escape from immediate confusions and from the peculiar twists that a given era imposes on perennial human troubles...
...This engaging fantasy tells about Ronia, a robber chieftain's independent daughter, whose affection for the son of a rival chieftain brings drastic changes in both their lives...
...Taken with John Locke's theory that children should delight in their instruction, he spent the last two decades of his life bringing out more than forty titles for young people, each copy bound in gilt and flowered boards and selling for sixpence...
...In the past decade, children's book production has grown to an annual average of more than 3,000 titles...
...Paul's Churchyard against the north door of the cathedral, the Bible and Sun Bookshop for boys and girls was opened by a little man of bustling energy...
...We can't do much about it, she says, because children's books merely "reflect the times...
...Melcher's influence can also be credited with the decision by many publishing houses to open children's divisions, beginning with Macmillan in 1919...
...But not 1. 1 didactic, mind you...
...For 1989 alone, sales of children's books will top $1.5 billion (up from $500 million in 1983...
...One may be tempted at this point to speculate, unkindly, about the evolution of children's literature as an outlet for writers troubled by personal disorders, but it's enough to point out that the "field" of children's books is disproportionately populated by maiden aunts and bluestockings...
...if militant feminism is not a serious response to life's deepest yearnings...
...Basil E. Frankweiler (1968...
...Now among thirty-eight books to receive Newbery Medals from 1922 until 1959, only two are "problem books" of the sort defined by Willard...
...Although actual divisional profits are kept secret, publishers who will discuss the matter admit that their children's divisions are the most lucrative...
...The record over the past three decades has been erratic and very strange...
...Some idea of that profusion may be got from a change in the rules of the Newbery Committee...
Vol. 22 • December 1989 • No. 12
