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Mouse in Pants |
A well-researched article in last week's New Yorker magazine got me thinking again about children's books. I haven't read a children's book catalog in almost two years, and I miss those glorious glimpses of picture books to come.In her essay "The Lion & the Mouse" Harvard professor Jill Lepore retells the story of how "official" children's literature arrived in New York, both at the big library on 42nd street and on the desks of publishers.
When books for children entered libraries and made their way into dedicated editorial departments the question arose: What makes a useful, worthy book for young people, and ought there be such books in the first place?
Lepore takes as her main subject the tale of E. B. White's first book for children, Stuart Little, and how it almost came not to be published. It's a story of generational shift and a different way of thinking about books for children.
Among the many sophisticated questions Lepore raises is one first voiced by Katherine White. White named her book review column The Children's Shelf.
"Maybe," Lepore says, "all kids needed was a shelf." She quotes White:
A girl of twelve may take up Jane Austen, a boy Dickens, and you wonder how writers of juveniles have the brass to compete in this field, blithely announcing their works as 'suitable for the child of twelve to fourteen.' Their implication is that everything else is distinctly UNsuitable. Well, who knows? Suitability isn't so simple.Those of us who have had the pleasure of reading and being read to, we understand the blessings of reading whatever we wish. We instinctively object to those who would remove a children's book from library shelves because it's too sexy, or adult, or controversial, or seems to espouse an unapproved life-style.
We understand that more varied is more better than more restricted. We know this in our guts and from personal encounters with amazing books.
When Stuart Little was published in 1945, the year I was born, it arrived to mixed reviews. Not everyone got the joke; the somewhat existential ending made some readers uneasy.
Authorities on literature were presented with a two-inch-high mouse dressed in a gray hat and carrying a small cane who from the day of his arrival in the Little's household could walk, shinny up lamp cords and find rings lost in a sink. Stuart made himself useful, but he was no Meg, Jo, Beth or Amy, or D'Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, Aramis.
54 years later Stuart Little became "Stuart Little" the movie, forever wiping Garth Williams' charming illustrations from childish memory. This transformation has happened to numerous other books, but most survive. They remain, however overlooked, to be enjoyed in the original format: ink on paper, book in hand, child on lap.
It's a wonderful old story, this thing about reading and books. People pick up real books every day despite E-readers, E-tailers and the E-opportunities of our iPhone-enabled E-world.
Aired Sunday July 27, 2008 at 10:55 am and Wednesday July 30, 2008 at 1:00 pm
Orders/Information:
"The Lion and the Mouse" essay appears in the July 21, 2008 issue of The New Yorker magazine, the same issue with the sarcastic cover depicting the Obamas as Muslims and terrorists performing a fist-bump in the White House.You can read the article online: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/21/080721fa_fact_lepore
Stuart Little by E. B. White, pictures by Garth Williams. HarperTrophy paperback $5.99. ISBN 978 006 4400565.
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Check out the programming on KZYX, Mendocino county's own public radio station.
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