I’ve been thinking about what it might mean to be a pathfinder. And after a lot of pondering, I’ve come to the conclusion that I myself seem to have tried as hard as I could not to find any paths. What I’ve done is try—though without much success—to cling to paths I already have. But the characters in my stories do seem to seek out new paths. Or maybe they don’t; maybe it only looks as if they did. It’s time to try to make some sense of this by comparing my own experiences with theirs.
The world I grew up in was very different from the world as it is today. The year I was born, 1932, was a uniquely scary time. The economy had fallen apart completely, and hundreds of thousands of people, including my father, lost their jobs. Some of them lost their hopes, too, and jumped off bridges or out the windows of tall buildings. My father didn’t do that, thank goodness. He had too strong a sense of humor. But my family, which consisted pretty much only of my parents, my older sister, and me, did do something that I can only suppose was a common thing to do at the time: We drew together into a tight little unit and took a stand, us against the world. My father assumed that everything would eventually be all right.
My mother, who was as strong and determined as a corporate CEO, didn’t assume anything; instead, she reached out to protect us all. My sister has said since that when she was little she used to think of our mother as a stone wall with two blue marbles in it, the marbles, of course, being our mother’s eyes.
In the thirties, I was too little to know exactly what was going on. And I wasn’t told, either. But at all ages you sense things. Even as a preschooler, I sensed danger in the world. If you know you’re being protected, you’re naturally going to assume that there’s something out there to be protected from. At least, that’s what I assumed. So I wasn’t quite as genuinely defiant as my more sensible sister. I could pretend a pretty good defiance if my mother was there to back me up, but I wasn’t very good at it otherwise. And my mother, who liked being in control anyway, was happy to have me stay dependent on her.
Near the beginning of Tuck Everlasting, Winnie Foster thinks about running away, but soon decides against it. Here are a few lines from that part:
“Where would I go, anyway?” she asked herself. “There’s nowhere else I really want to be.” But in another part of her head, the dark part where her oldest fears were housed, she knew there was another sort of reason for staying at home: she was afraid to go away alone.
It was one thing to talk about being by yourself, doing important things, but quite another when the opportunity arose. The characters in the stories she read always seemed to go off without a thought or care, but in real life—well, the world was a dangerous place. People were always telling her so. And she would not be able to manage without protection. They were always telling her that, too. No one ever said precisely what it was that she would not be able to manage. But she did not need to ask. Her own imagination supplied the horrors.
When I go to schools to talk to the kids who’ve been reading my stories, they often ask where my characters come from, and I tell them that all main characters tend to be like the person who wrote the story, because the main character’s eyes are the eyes through which the events of the story are seen. I tell them that Winnie Foster is a lot like me. But I add that she’s braver than I am, and the example I give is that I’ve never picked up a toad and don’t intend to start now. They think that’s funny, and of course it is, in its way. Also, it’s true. I never have picked up a toad. However, Winnie Foster is braver than I am in ways that are much more important than that. Winnie is afraid in the beginning, but in the first of the short few days that the story takes to spin itself out, she tries to defy that fear, and takes the first steps toward overcoming it when she goes into the wood early the next morning.
But I would never have gone into the wood. I would have stayed home where it was safe. Life forces us sometimes to take risks, but the risks taken by the person who doesn’t want to take them are very different from the risks taken by a pathfinder.
I could whine that my fearfulness was and is all my mother’s fault, my mother and the Depression. But my sister was never full of fears, even with the same mother. And as for the Depression, well, I have a friend who lives in New Orleans who is exactly the same age I am, so she went through the Depression, too. Many parts of her life and her reactions to them are exactly like mine. We are both from small towns in the Midwest, our husbands have many things in common, and so do our children and our dogs. We are a lot alike. But a few years ago, Joan decided it was time to wrench herself away from her very demanding family for a couple of weeks. She signed up to be an aide in a research program on orangutans, and went gaily off to Borneo without a backward look. The only thing she was worried about was snakes. There are a lot of snakes in Borneo. But she went anyway.
Nothing—nothing—could get me to go to Borneo. I don’t even want to go to Akron. This is not because of snakes or automobile tires. It is because, like Winnie Foster at the beginning of her story, I am afraid to go away alone. I often have gone away alone, on gigs having to do with children’s books, to remote places all around this country, from northernmost Montana to central Arkansas, and from seacoast California to seacoast Florida. I did it because I was told that I had to. But I never got over being afraid: not of the gig itself, but of being far from home and alone.
Thinking about this in connection with pathfinding has made me wonder, though, about the motivations of writers. An idea for a story comes out of nowhere and presents itself to the front of your brain, and you get excited about it, and then you settle back and become a craftsman, and work out the plot and the casting of characters, and proceed to tell the story the very best way you can. Nobody has to remind you that something has to happen in a story, that a problem has to be there for the hero to face and solve. At least, in a story for children the problem has to be solved. You will long since have learned to be objective about what you’re doing. You don’t go breathlessly along in some kind of haze of love for the initial idea and your cleverness in having thought of it. So most of the time you don’t search out the origins of that initial idea. What does it matter where it came from? Well, actually, it doesn’t matter where it came from. But you see, I have a son who’s a psychologist, and—well, let me back up just a bit. You may not be familiar with a little picture book of mine called Nellie: A Cat on Her Own. The jacket flap, which I had to write myself, says:
Nellie is a marionette, but she is also a cat—a cat marionette who loves to dance. When she is left on her own by the clever old woman who made her, she believes that her dancing is over forever, but her friend, Big Tom—a real cat, with fur—takes her away with him to a moonlit hilltop where there is a gathering of friends. What happens then may be moonshine or magic, or possibly both.
This appears to be a pretty simple story. I didn’t think much about where the idea came from; it didn’t seem to matter. But I sent a copy to my son, who usually keeps his analyzing at a healthy distance from the family. This time, however, when he called me to thank me for the book, he said, “Mom, you know—there’s a whole lot going on here.” So I went back and looked at the story again from his perspective, and was naïve enough to be astonished. Well, gee whiz! Nellie is, in fact, a mini-autobiography! A mini-autobiography with an idealized ending, yes, but a mini-autobiography just the same.
I’ve talked about this with writing colleagues and they all confess to discovering the same kind of thing in their own stories. It comes as no surprise to anyone but us, of course. Everyone except the writer knows that any piece of fiction is going to be full of the psyche of the person who wrote it. But the point is not that I wrote a story about a character who is left alone in a dangerous world. The point is that the character takes charge as well as she can, makes a choice, and builds a life from the available ingredients. In other words, stories can move beyond autobiography into a kind of therapy. Writing about the characters we choose can be a way of redesigning ourselves, if only in our imaginations. Because, you see, if I had really been Nellie, taken away to dance in the moonlight by the real cat, Big Tom, I would have enjoyed it as long as I could dance with him, but the next day, no way would I have stayed behind in a hollow tree the way Nellie does. I would have taken Big Tom up on his offer to find me a new old woman to take care of me. And what kind of a story would that have made of it? Not too satisfying.
And yet, pathfinders come in a lot of different shapes and sizes. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy is never a coward. She faces up to trial after trial. But first and foremost, she is always trying to find a way to go home to Kansas. In other words, she may be finding paths she wouldn’t necessarily have chosen to find. However, the going home is an important ingredient of the path of the classic hero: You have to go home at the end of your adventures. I doubt that L. Frank Baum knew anything on a conscious level about the path of the classic hero, but Joseph Campbell, in his Hero with a Thousand Faces, claims that we all know the pattern subconsciously.
But it’s a pattern. It doesn’t necessarily mirror real life. Let me tell you a little about my ancestors, the ones from whom my father’s mother was descended. Their name was Zane, and they came over here from England before the Revolution. They hurried out to the frontier, which was then more or less in Ohio, and literally made a path which was afterward called Zane’s Trace, a path that angled down southwest across a piece of Ohio and was used for a while by other pioneers. And then they fought in the Revolution. And then—and then—nothing! No more paths. The frontier moved on past Ohio, ever westward; new pioneers hurried by on Lake Erie or on the Ohio River. But the Zanes stayed where they were and did nothing of interest ever again, and this definitely includes my father’s mother. Ohio itself isn’t interesting anymore. Hasn’t been interesting for a couple of centuries. I sometimes feel that my ancestors bear some part of the blame for that fact, but it’s too late now to do anything about it.
Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that there is nothing in my life that bears any resemblance to the finding of paths, either literally or figuratively. On the contrary. So how has this fact influenced the stories I’ve written? I guess my stories are, at bottom, not built around adventures at all, but rather around ideas. Well, I don’t guess; I know. Ideas are the real protagonists. Nice, comfortable ideas you can carry around without leaving the house. Things happen to my characters because there’s no story if nothing happens, but they all go home afterward and never leave again. Winnie Foster in Tuck Everlasting spends the rest of her life in Treegap and is buried there. Just like the Zanes and Ohio. Hercules Feltwright in Goody Hall goes home to Hackston Fen at the end. In Kneeknock Rise, Ada and her family will stay in Instep. Why not? They like it there. Even a cousin like Egan can’t destroy their pleasure in their monster. In The Eyes of the Amaryllis, an irritating visitor says to Jenny’s grandmother, “However have you kept yourself amused in this boring old place?” To which Gran replies, “Why should I leave? This is my home.” And in The Search for Delicious, Gaylen settles down to being mayor of the first town and marries a hometown girl. The minstrel in that story is the only wanderer I’ve ever cast as a character. But I think you feel a little sorry for him somehow, poor homeless nomad. I wrote Delicious in the late sixties, which is not unimportant to the kind of story it is. The minstrel is like many young people in those days, tramping around with guitars, trying to make peace while the world made war.
So my characters have had their adventures, yes, but they’ve always gone home afterward. And it has been the going home I’ve envied them, not their adventures. I’ve moved twenty-nine times, finding new homes on the average once every two and a half years, sometimes down the street and sometimes in a whole new state. That’s what a lot of us do here in America. We move. Nothing unusual about it. I’m different, if at all, only in the fact that the paths I’ve trodden, I’ve mostly trodden kicking and screaming.
It’s possible, of course, that pathfinding means something else. I’ve seen pathfinders described as precursors, pavers of the way who open doors for themselves and others. But you can’t pave ways and open doors without leaving home, or so it seems to me. Leaving home not only physically, but philosophically, too. Is it possible to stay at home physically while you’re leaving philosophically? I’m not sure about that. If it is possible, maybe it’s one of the many reasons why people write stories in the first place.
But I’m not sure about that, either. People like the Brontë sisters seem to have written stories to open up the constrictions of their world. Harriet Beecher Stowe wanted to change society. Some writers want to make money and got the idea from somewhere that writing is easy and will make you rich and famous. Agatha Christie said she wrote to support herself after her husband died. Beatrix Potter stopped writing after she got married. Some seem to write because they enjoy suffering; Leo Tolstoy is reported by his wife to have been so frustrated sometimes with the composition of War and Peace that he literally rolled on the floor and wailed.
I think that on the whole I prefer to believe you can divide all people, writers included, into two groups: those who find paths and those who stay home. Kenneth Grahame understood about this. I think he and I would have gotten along very well, at least on the question of pathfinders and stay-at-homes. There’s a beautiful chapter in The Wind in the Willows entitled “Wayfarers All,” in which the Rat, sitting beside the river, is joined by another rat, a dusty one, says Grahame, who salutes “with a gesture of courtesy” that has “something foreign about it.” This wayfarer turns out to be a self-described seafaring rat whose preferred habitat is in the captain’s cabins of ships in the coasting trade. He is a hugely articulate wayfarer who woos the imagination of Ratty with long, rich descriptions of days and nights on the water, and days and nights in foreign ports. Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, all are familiar to him, and so are Lisbon, Oporto, and Bordeaux, Cornwall and Devon, and the seacoast towns of Spain. “Spell-bound and quivering with excitement,” Grahame tells us,
the Water Rat followed the Adventurer league by league, over stormy bays, through crowded roadsteads, across harbour bars on a racing tide, up winding rivers that hid their busy little towns round a sudden turn … [And so] the wonderful talk flowed on—or was it speech entirely or did it pass at times into song—chanty of the sailors weighing the dripping anchor, sonorous hum of the shrouds in a tearing North-Easter, ballad of the fisherman hauling his nets at sundown against an apricot sky, chords of guitar and mandoline from gondola or caique?
The talk puts Ratty—and the reader, too—into a dreaming state with its beauty, till at last the wayfarer leaves him with these words:
And you, you will come, too, young brother; for the days pass, and never return, and the South still waits for you. Take the Adventure, heed the call, now ere the irrevocable moment passes! ’Tis but a banging of the door behind you, a blithesome step forward, and you are out of the old life and into the new!… You can easily overtake me on the road, for you are young, and I am ageing and go softly. I will linger, and look back; and at last I will surely see you coming, eager and light-hearted, with all the South in your face!
And with this the seafaring rat disappears down the road.
Ratty stumbles home, still half hypnotized, and begins to pack his necessary belongings—moving, says Grahame, like a sleepwalker. This alarms his housemate, the Mole, who grapples with him, forcing him down, and the Rat at last lies trembling, exhausted, and begins to weep. Mole is anxious about him but leaves him alone, trying to bring life around him back to normal, and at last Ratty, still shaken but acknowledging to himself that his fit has passed, begins to sit up and join in. Grahame ends the chapter this way:
Presently the tactful Mole slipped away and returned with a pencil and a few half-sheets of paper, which he placed on the table at his friend’s elbow.
“It’s quite a long time since you did any poetry,” he remarked. “You might have a try at it this evening, instead of—well, brooding over things so much. I’ve an idea that you’ll feel a lot better when you’ve got something jotted down—if it’s only just the rhymes.”
The Rat pushed the paper away from him wearily, but the discreet Mole took occasion to leave the room, and when he peeped in again some time later, the Rat was absorbed and deaf to the world; alternately scribbling and sucking the top of his pencil. It is true that he sucked a good deal more than he scribbled, but it was joy to the Mole to know that the cure had at least begun.
The seafaring rat is a true pathfinder, in the terms described a few paragraphs back: He is a paver of the way who tries to open doors for Ratty, and to challenge the boundaries of his thinking. The fact that he is unsuccessful is not a measure of the beauty of his words or his way of telling what wonders might be Ratty’s for the asking.
And yet, has he really been unsuccessful? We don’t know what Ratty is writing in the above chapter’s end, but we can guess. If I may be allowed to speak for us all, Ratty, who is a poet, has begun an epic about a rat who leaves home and everything familiar behind him for a life of marvelous, groundbreaking adventure. And the pleasure he gains from his writing is as real and as thrilling to his imagination as the thing itself would have been.
My characters would have stayed behind, too, though only one was a poet. I admire pathfinders, but though I said at the beginning of this paper that my characters seem to seek out new paths, I think now that when all is said and done, they don’t, not really. Not like the seafaring rat of “Wayfarers All.” For my characters, each in his or her own story, one adventure will be enough to light up a whole life. Pathfinders will always be welcome in my house. But if they want to go to Borneo, they’ll have to go alone.