It is always unsettling to me to hear what we storytellers and picture makers do described as “radiant” or “enlightening.” It seems to me that what we really do is more like crawling through a dark and very long tunnel toward that proverbial light glimmering at the end. It may be that at the very beginning of the creative process, once in a while, there is kind of a flash of light, which is one way to describe the sensation of being grabbed by a good initial idea. But the initial idea is such a tiny piece of the whole effort that by the time a book is finished, that particular flash of light has long since been overwhelmed. And if what we’ve managed to produce can ever be called enlightening or radiant, I think that’s got to be more of a fluke than anything else. In any case, one man’s radiance is another man’s fog. Or so it has seemed in my experience.
Let us remember that while radiance may, in rare instances, describe a book, it never describes the book’s creator. We’re rather a motley crew, we makers of stories and pictures. We come in all shapes, colors, and sizes, from all regions of the country, and we have next to nothing in common with each other except our product. Some of us are pleasant; some are crabby. Some talk easily; some are silent as the tomb. Some make a lot of money; some barely survive. Some of us look like stereotypical artists with long hair, sandals, and a tortured expression, while some of us, like me, only look like someone’s grandmother. It would be nice, I suppose, if we were marked in some way, if we looked radiant and enlightening, but we’d have to be radiant and enlightening to begin with in order for that to happen. And we’re simply not.
In that magnificent movie Amadeus, Mozart’s envious colleague, Salieri, is outraged to find Mozart’s genius housed in what he calls “a boastful, lustful, smutty, infantile boy.” In describing his first encounter with Mozart to a young priest who has come to see him in the insane asylum, Salieri says, “That was Mozart. That giggling, dirty-minded creature I’d just seen crawling on the floor! Why would God choose an obscene child to be his instrument?”
Well, Mozart, who was indeed a genius, is one thing, of course, and we are another thing altogether. I certainly don’t want to put any of us in the same class. But Salieri’s point is well taken: The creator is neither radiant nor enlightening.
And yet once we are out in the world, away from the isolation of our work space, we are sometimes treated as if we were radiant and enlightening, and that’s very bad for us. It makes for a particularly debilitating form of schizophrenia. Because we do have this one thing in common: We are very uncertain people, with about the same degree of self-confidence as a rabbit on the highway at rush hour.
I have never understood why teachers and librarians are so kind to us, why they set us up so high. The fact is that our careers are utterly and completely in their very capable hands, to be made or destroyed on the pages of a review journal or in the classroom. I refer you briefly to accounts by Sir James George Frazer in his famous work The Golden Bough, where he discusses the killing of sacred animals. He talks about a people called the Ainu, on the Japanese island of Yezo, who worshipped the bear as their “chief divinity.” The bear, according to Frazer, received “idolatrous veneration” from the Ainu. But when the time came around, they sacrificed the bear, after first apologizing to it, because, says Frazer, they had “treated the bear kindly as long as they could.” So much for idolatrous veneration! This is a drastic comparison, I know, but it behooves us to remember, always, who’s really in charge here.
If, as I have suggested, storytellers and picture makers are fundamentally unselfconfident, many have learned to hide that fact. Many seem to take themselves with enormous seriousness, so that it’s not always easy to see through the sheltering layer of arrogance down to the quaking vulnerability beneath. Well, everybody is to some degree an egotist, regardless of profession. It almost seems as if we are all kept afloat on the sea of life by inner tubes of vanity—the only other choice being to push off in nothing but a sieve of humility and very soon sink completely out of sight. Inner tubes make a pretty good metaphor for the human ego; they are easily deflated and just as easily patched and reinflated. And maybe, if it’s true that storytellers and picture makers are especially vulnerable, they need bigger inner tubes just to keep their heads above water.
But we are still nothing but rabbits, and we are not at all radiant. Nevertheless, many of us do take ourselves pretty seriously, especially if we’ve recently been exposed to “idolatrous veneration” like the Ainu’s sacred bear. I wish there were a lot more humor in the field. Humor helps to keep things in balance. When I was in high school, I had a truly fine studio-art teacher who used to take us, from time to time, down to the art museum in Cleveland to study paintings firsthand. And I can remember being irritated, once in a while, at the utter lack of humor and objectivity displayed in some of the paintings we looked at. I always wondered what the artists were like who created those pictures. I guessed they were as humorless and stiff-minded as their work. Janet Moore, my teacher, would tell us that a certain painting was a masterpiece, and I would want to know why. How could a painting be called a masterpiece when it was so smug and self-satisfied? Surely more was required of a masterpiece than perfection of brushwork! We had some good debates, Miss Moore and I. (Years later, she won praise as the author of a fine book about art called The Many Ways of Seeing.) She was the soul of patience, given the annoying snip of a teenage heretic I must have been. But the thing is, you could take a smug, self-satisfied painting such as Raphael’s portrait of Pope Leo X with the cardinals in the background—a miraculous painting indeed, but very pleased with itself—and you could put into the foreground a large dog, with an expression of utter seriousness on its face, every bit equal to that of the pope and cardinals, except that the dog would be wearing a funny hat. Instantly the painting would acquire another dimension—it would have truth; it would have humanity; it would become accessible—all without losing one iota of its astonishingly beautiful brushwork. Now, that would be a painting! And I, for one, would have liked Signore Raphael personally all the better for it. Still, perhaps Raphael was as uncertain of himself as the rest of us, in spite of his genius, and was only trying to cover up. We’ll never know.
The point I’m trying to make is that storytellers and picture makers had better not get themselves confused with their product. We’d better not believe that we ourselves are some kind of beacon to readers. If something we have created somehow becomes a beacon, then we’d better remember it didn’t do that all by itself. It had a whole lot of help from teachers and librarians. It would not, in fact, have attracted even a dim-witted night moth, let alone a bright fifth grader, if someone hadn’t held it up to be seen. People say a lot of nice things to me about Tuck Everlasting, and I’m grateful for every word, but the fact is that I know perfectly well, from the letters I get from the children themselves, that very few of them would ever get past chapter 2 without a gentle but firm push from their teachers.
So here’s where I stand on all this: Pictures and stories can be wonderful, and life would be very dreary without them. We are lucky to be living at a moment in time when there is a great accumulated wealth of good books for our children. But so great is the accumulated wealth that, finally, those of us who are making the new stories and the new pictures don’t matter. I will repeat that: We don’t matter. Childhood is brief—so achingly brief—and there isn’t nearly enough time for the children to get around to what’s already there for them to look at and to read. If there were no new pictures and stories for the next fifty years, children would feel no lack at all. Think about it. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is still going strong after 128 years; Treasure Island after 110. The Wind in the Willows is eighty-five years old; Winnie-the-Pooh is sixty-seven; Millions of Cats is sixty-five; and Mary Poppins is fifty-nine. Even Charlotte’s Web, which somehow seems new, is forty-one years old this year, and Where the Wild Things Are is thirty. I’m not saying that we want children to know only the older, proven books, but on the other hand, we don’t want them to miss those books, either. So we don’t need the four or five thousand new books that make their appearance every year. We simply don’t need them.
This being the case, no one should try to make celebrities out of us. We work hard, yes, and sometimes very nice things come out as a result, but we are merely craftsmen who make things nobody really needs. We do it because it’s what we can do, and what we do best—what we want to do whether the need is there or not. We have, I suppose, what could be called active imaginations, but an active imagination is not always a blessing, and by no means does it always ensure a worthwhile piece of work. My active imagination is much more apt to furnish me with doomsday visions of highway driving than a good idea for a story.
Perhaps those not directly involved in the bookmaking part of our field have a romanticized view of what our working lives are like. Perhaps they envision a light-filled studio where the Muses hover and where, like magic, we touch a sheet of paper with a paint-filled brush, or tap out a word with a typewriter or computer, and what emerges is something made with joy and ready to be received with joy by a hungry public. But in reality the process is absolutely nothing like that. We are craftsmen. And what that means is that we start with what seems like a good idea—which may have come to us in a flash of light but is far more likely to have emerged after weeks or months of being pushed, pulled, stretched, squashed, laundered, dyed, thrown out, retrieved, reshaped, and finally settled—and then the work begins. The work is hard and long and painstaking. Our legs go to sleep, at least mine do; we bash our heads against the wall; we drudge. And little by little the work gets done.
I have just recently finished a new picture book, after nearly four years. In order to get the pictures to look even remotely like what I saw in my head, I had to make costumes and then plead with my family and my dog to get into them and pose for me while I took hundreds of pictures. I had to find somebody who played the lute so I could see what one really looked like, and how the hands went when they were playing it. I had to comb through dozens of books to find the proper historical settings and props. Then I had to paint the pictures, learning as I went along. When I began, my grandson, who is a prominent character, was one and a half years old. He insisted on getting older all the time, till at last his costume didn’t fit him at all and I had to use his little sister instead.
Friends would ask, “How’s it coming?” and I would groan and say, “The problem is, I don’t know what I’m doing.” And they would turn their eyes up to heaven and say, “Yeah—sure!” But it was true. It’s always true, especially if we’re always trying to break ground that is new to us. I read somewhere that Maurice Sendak spent weeks testing dozens of different tools before he settled on the ones he used for In the Night Kitchen. It’s no simple matter, going out to the art store to buy a paintbrush or a pen, to choose just the right kind of paper. And half of what we do has to be done over again, sometimes many times. My picture book has twelve full-page pictures in it, plus a frontispiece and a jacket. Each one took at least six weeks to complete, which doesn’t count the costume making and the picture taking, and then the first three had to be done over again because, by the time I got to the twelfth, I knew better how to do what I was trying to do, so that the first three looked inexcusably inept. So—we are craftsmen. We labor and sweat. Almost nothing comes easily. And we’re something else, too: We’re crazy. We’re crazy because nobody asks us to go through all that agony. We just do it to satisfy some obscure impulse that refuses to be denied.
We’re craftsmen, we’re crazy, and—we are expendable. I said that once to a prominent colleague, and he was so shocked that his mouth dropped open. But it’s true. We are expendable. It makes no sense to see us as celebrities. The people who deserve celebrity, the true bringers of light, are the very ones who never get any: the teachers and librarians. Over and over they take a back seat to everyone else. They take a back seat to us crazy people where books are concerned, and what is even more annoying, they take a back seat to their colleagues, the college professors. College professors are held in high esteem in the world. After all, they have PhDs, and they write long books and articles on difficult subjects, and they understand things no one else can make head or tail of. Right? Well, I say phooey. I have spent all of my adult life in the academic world because my husband is a college administrator. Most of my friends are college teachers, and I know that they work very hard and that they aren’t well paid compared to people in other professions. But they don’t work any harder than elementary-school teachers do, and their salaries, by comparison, are downright princely. And anyway, college professors wouldn’t have anyone to teach if it weren’t for the elementary schools. And furthermore, I know firsthand from my frequent school visits that the dedication of elementary-school teachers and librarians is unmatched anywhere. It is embarrassing to me, a crazy person who has just spent two whole days painting a picture of a birdcage, to be lionized by one of these amazing people. The injustice of a system which creates this kind of upside-down reasoning makes me angry. I am dispensable. But without them the nation’s culture would collapse. It’s probably not true that the meek shall inherit the earth—and maybe, seeing the shape the earth is in, the meek wouldn’t want it anyhow—but I wish with all my heart that things could be ordered differently, and that credit could be given, with a lavish hand, where credit is due.
I also hope we won’t forget the reason for all these labors. I hope we won’t forget the children. I don’t know whether I’m simply getting sentimental as I approach my dotage, but more and more frequently, when I come away from school visits, I find I am moved very near to tears by the children I’ve just been talking to. They are nearly always fifth graders—my choice—and they seem to me unfailingly wise and calm and beautiful. I am always struck first off by how beautiful they are. I’ve gone back to my old scrapbook again and again to look at my fifth-grade class picture, and I always find that we were not beautiful, my friends and I. We were scrawny and pasty-faced, and our clothes didn’t fit very well. Maybe we were wise and calm—I don’t know about that—but we were not beautiful. Well—Janie Dorner was beautiful, of course, but every class since the beginning of time has had a Janie Dorner in it, so she doesn’t count.
But today’s fifth graders are beautiful. They sit there and look at me skeptically as I come in. They’ve been told, you see, that I’m a famous author and they should be grateful I’m there. Well, their faces say as I look back at them, they’ll be the judge of whether to be grateful or not. I don’t look famous. Pretty soon, after I’ve been there a few minutes, they relax. I’m only a person who makes stories and pictures. They do that, too. The skepticism disappears, and soon we are just talking to each other. They are open, honest, and direct. They laugh easily, but they are not silly. We talk about the Loch Ness monster, about magic water and what an ancient idea that is, about why movies are so often terrible, about pets, theirs and mine—a whole wide range of things. They tell me how boring and confusing the beginning of Tuck Everlasting is, and then we talk about what time might look like if you could draw a picture of it. They are wonderful. I know, watching them and listening to them, that in a matter of months they won’t be wise and calm anymore, or even half so beautiful. They will turn into hormone machines, as we all did in our turn, and for a few years they will forget how to be open and direct. But for now they are full of imagination; they are radiant; they are luminous; they enlighten. They are, themselves, beacons. They don’t know these things about themselves, so I try to tell them. But once again they look skeptical. If the magic water were real, they tell me, they wouldn’t drink it now. They wouldn’t want to be ten years old forever. Well, of course not. But I’m lucky. I can, and do, go back to the same classrooms year after year, and they are always full to the brim with the same enduring light.
So this is the light that matters. This is why we do the work we do, all of us. We will go on doing it the very best we can, whether we are the necessary ones or only the crazy, expendable ones. I only hope that we, the writers and illustrators, will stop congratulating ourselves, for the miracle doesn’t reside in us at all. I don’t want to put down what I and my immediate colleagues do. There are always genuine moments of inspiration, and of those we can all stand in awe. It’s just that I think the makers of stories and pictures have been in the limelight too long. There are a lot of very good writers and illustrators working hard in our field, and what they do is important, but the part that’s important is not our own books and art. It is the gift of a love of books and art in general. The gift won’t be accepted by all children, not even by a majority. But if a child learns to love books and art while he’s in elementary school, chances are he’ll love them all his life. And oh, what a privilege that is! To know you have helped to prepare the way for Charles Dickens, for Herman Melville, for Jane Austen, for any of the great writers for adults. And for all the painters from Michelangelo to Georgia O’Keeffe. But, you see, the people who make the stories and pictures for children are only a small part of the number laboring toward that end. We have the publicity departments behind us, we get the prizes, we get all the attention; but that is misleading and unjustified.
My fifth-grade teacher’s name was Mrs. Wilson. I have remembered her with love for fifty years: what she looked like, how she sounded, what she did for me. But except for the children’s classics that were read aloud to me, I remember very few of the books I took home from the library every week, or the names of their authors and illustrators. All I remember is how much fun it was to go to the library and take out the books and read them.
Acts of light were performed every day by Mrs. Wilson and my librarian. We take those acts of light for granted, like the daily rising of the sun. But this is a mistake. We should never take them for granted because without them we couldn’t see to read. There is a disagreeable old saying that goes, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” I would like to correct that old saying, which is long overdue for a rewrite. Let it read: “Those who can, teach. Those who can’t, be grateful for those who can.”