The voice of Blume
Garvey, John
Of several minds: John Garvey THE VOICE OF BLUME AN ORTHODOXY THAT DOESN'T RECOGNIZE ITSELF LAST SUMMER while we were on vacation I bought my daughter, who was eleven then, a set of books...
...In these books there is at best a small satisfaction: you learn to line up with the Right Attitudes...
...Our sexual information was on a par with our belief that two aspirins and a Coke would make you drunk...
...But they all remembered Ralph...
...This grandma is nothing like mine, who found the Andrews sisters risque...
...I remember two titles, Nice Going, Red and Brass Knuckles...
...The robber girl in Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen is wilder than anything Judy Blume could imagine...
...O'Brien's kids always encountered wise adults, often in the form of priests, who helped them out...
...sneaked glimpses at pornography also helped...
...Love, Grandma...
...Her Mom, the Wolf Man, and Me is about a child who lives with her unmarried mother, and the novel deals with the way the little girl manages to accept and like her mother's lover...
...At her best Judy Blume is a kind of training bra for Ann Beattie...
...This relating should be done with maturity and understanding and responsibility, seasoned with the bittersweet knowledge that love affairs may end, but you have to go on whatever happens, so be careful (and don't get pregnant...
...This grandma sent Katherine "a whole bunch of pamphlets from Planned Parenthood on birth control, abortion, and venereal disease...
...and if parents and schools won't tell their children about sex, better they should learn from Judy Blume than not learn at all...
...He was separate from the main characters, in his inarticulate way, just like their relationship...
...A few minutes later she looked up again and asked, "What's a wet dream?'' I noticed that she was reading Judy Blume's Then Again, Maybe I Won't...
...An orthodoxy which does not admit that it is an orthodoxy is hard to deal with...
...Judy Blume's planned parenthood grandma may be less traditional than Fr...
...The same point of view is shared by many of the educators who have pushed "values clarification" in the schools: people can find their own values, they assume, as if values were innate things...
...Forever features a grandmother Commonweal: 392 who sends Katherine the following letter: "I hear you and Michael are officially going together...
...An ideology is on the prowl here, meaning well every inch of the way...
...I would rather my children learn about Darwin in science class, and I don't want them to believe that America should "return to God," because this is idolatry: America was never God's chosen nation...
...They frequently seem, like Ralph, to have lives independent of the characters who are supposed to be having the relationships...
...at her worst she reads like Woody Allen without the humor...
...The landscape of children's literature is broad and wild and sometimes horrifying...
...That's the case of the kid whose father goes through a sex-change operation, so the kid is suddenly forced to deal with having two mothers...
...They seem so self-evidently right to the authors that I am sure they don't see what an orthodoxy they have accepted...
...A few school boards have tried to make this fundamentalist objection to certain texts and library books look like the inquisitors versus us non-judgmental professionals, but frequently that isn't the case at all...
...The boy and girl, Katherine and Michael, have a pet name for Michael's penis: they call it Ralph...
...O'Brien was close to traditional story-telling (which knows that evil is interesting in itself) and far from Judy Blume, who has reasons for everything: for her, an unpleasant child must have an unhappy home life, and could never be simply a pain in the ass...
...But then I sat down and started to redd...
...His books were first-person narratives, usually, about confused kids who were, surrounded by Bad Companions...
...Relationships are a form of heavy weather, and people participate in them, sometimes endure them...
...The main work of these books is teaching children to cope...
...But the fundamentalists have perceived one thing clearly: there is a new orthodoxy...
...O'Brien's helpful priests, but she is certainly intended to be just as didactic...
...The prose in these books reminded me of the Reverend Raymond J. O'Brien, who wrote books for Catholic kids several decades ago...
...Many of the opponents of liberal orthodoxy are themselves an unattractive lot...
...The problem is that here one orthodoxy confronts another...
...I thought, even then, that there must be some more direct way to get answers, but you do what you can...
...It turned out she had sent me a lot of valuable information...
...Naturally the child has few problems...
...She once asked her students to read Judy Blume's Forever, a book for older adolescents about a first love affair...
...It is being pushed in some schools, on television, and in a lot of children's literature...
...I read a few of them and then talked to a woman I know who has written several books for children and who also teaches a course on books written for children and adolescents...
...I don't judge...
...in this, Fr...
...You go through your feelings and reactions—it is like looking for lice—until you find your values...
...A book called Freddy's Book, by John Neufeld, tells about a little boy's frustrating attempts to find the meaning of the mysterioiis word "fuck...
...the main obstacles have to do with hung-up adults...
...a point of view is being urged on kids...
...and children are, after all, the people who chant cruel skip-rope jingles and poems like ' 'Little Willy, with a shout,/ Gouged the baby's eyeballs out...
...Most of my generation learned the answers to these questions from graffiti and friends who were more or less sure that babies came through the bellybutton...
...Bayer and Coca Cola stood to benefit from this idea, but I don't know who gained from our sexual misinformation—homes for unwed mothers, maybe, though only the most mean-spirited cynic could believe that they wanted to increase clientele...
...The message of Forever is that sexual relationships come and go, and what matters is how you relate to the things that happen to you...
...These books say next to nothing about choice and commitment, but they are full of feelings and the right attitudes towards feelings, and the tricks chance can play on children who would rather their parents stay together than get divorced...
...My friend asked her class the names of the novel's main characters, and no one could remember...
...Her kids talk like real kids," she said, "and they get into fights.'' One night she looked up from a book and asked, "Dad, what's masturbation...
...But I expect that one to come along any day now...
...they are in there somewhere, covered over with hang-ups and insensitivities...
...There is something dismal about teaching children to cope, where in previous generations books for children encouraged a larger imagining, a thrill at the size of the universe they might encounter...
...Relationships mean a lot in these books...
...And remember, if you ever need to talk, I'm available...
...I just advise...
...Blume would have a counselor—a sensitive one—deal with Huck Finn...
...It is important for adolescents to understand that feelings which are demanding and confusing are also quite normal...
...But more than information is being delivered here...
...I can think of only one topic that hasn't yet made it to juvenile literature," she said...
...Is it really luck, or does some sort of commitment have something to do with love...
...JOHN GARVEY 4 July 1980: 393...
...Of several minds: John Garvey THE VOICE OF BLUME AN ORTHODOXY THAT DOESN'T RECOGNIZE ITSELF LAST SUMMER while we were on vacation I bought my daughter, who was eleven then, a set of books by Judy Blume...
...No doubt they think of their attitudes as simply true, and of more traditional attitudes as reactionary or unenlightened...
...There are fundamentalists who want to censor school texts, move them to the right, and get Biblical creation taught in science classes...
...Now it can be argued that some things ought not to be dealt with in children's books, but as soon as I try to think of something that shouldn't be dealt with I think of exceptions...
...In Klein's It's Not What You Expect a couple of kids help to raise money for a needed abortion, and at the end of the novel Mom confesses that she herself had an abortion, before it was legal, and she is very glad that the times are changing...
...There was not always a clear reason for their being Bad...
...What a distance this is from a search for the Grail...
...Finally, his kind older friend David tells him what it means and concludes, "If you're lucky all your life, Fred, that's what fucking will be: making love with someone you love...
...Grandma is jumping to conclusions again, I thought...
...Thought these might come in handy...
...This preachiness can also be found in Norma Klein's books...
...Anyway, books for young people which are frank about these things are new to me...
...At first I was angry...
...I thought they would help to relieve some of the longer hours we would spend in motels and airports, and I knew she liked Judy Blume...
...The assumptions which saturate these books are the assumptions of upper-middle-class white liberals...
Vol. 107 • July 1980 • No. 13
