Remembering the lovely things we have for-gotten is one of the reasons for all art. Surely the customs officer Rousseau knew those jungles he painted. And Marlowe, having Satan cry out,
Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it!
Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternal joys of Heaven
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells
In being depriv’d of everlasting bliss?
knew hell himself, for we know the terrible things as well as the beautiful. Bach, setting down the soprano and alto duet in the 78th Cantata, knew such heavenly joy that it is shared by all who hear the music. In the act of creation our logical, prove-it-to-me minds relax; we begin to understand anew all that we understood as children, when we saw wee folk under the leaves or walked down the stairs without touching. But this understanding is—or should be—greater than the child’s because we understand in the light of all that we have learned and experienced in growing up.
George Eliot says, “If we had a keen vision of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of the roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well-wadded with stupidity.”
Despite this wadding, the artist in the moment of creation does hear the tiny beating of the squirrel heart and does indeed die to self on the other side of silence, where he retains the vision which includes angels and dragons and unicorns. The great artists never lose this quality which the world would limit to children. And along with this “wadding with stupidity” comes the denigration of children’s books and the writers of children’s books. A year or so before she invited me to come to the conference on Ayia Napa, Dr. Marion van Horne asked me to give a talk on Christian children’s books. A large part of my job was to give a definition of what, in fact, makes a Christian children’s book.
Such a definition would seem to be a simple task, but it is not. It used to be answered the easy way: how many times is Jesus mentioned? But that doesn’t work. Jesus may be mentioned on every page in a book that is for neither children nor Christian. It perturbs me to observe in how many contemporary novels “Oh, Christ!” and “Jesus!” are spattered over the pages, side by side with the four-letter words.
So the use of the name of Jesus is no criterion. And the fact that “Christian” stories are still story further complicates things, for story touches on the realm of art, and art itself is looked on as something unfit for the real world. There’s another New Yorker cartoon that shows a woman opening the door of her house to a friend. We look through the door, and in the back of the house a man is writing at a typewriter, with a large manuscript piled on the desk beside him. The friend asks, “Has your husband found a job yet? Or is he still writing?”
A successful businesswoman had the temerity to ask me about my royalties, just at the time when my books were at last making reasonable earnings. When told, she was duly impressed and remarked, “And to think, most people would have had to work so hard for that.” I choked over my tea, not wanting to laugh in her face.
A young friend of mine was asked what she did, and when she replied that she was a poet, the inquirer responded, amused, “Oh, I didn’t mean your hobby.”
So it is not only the church that fobs off art as untrue or unreal, and art for children is the most looked-down-on of all.
Whether a story is to be marketed for grownups or for children, the writer writes for himself, out of his own need, otherwise the story will lack reality. There is no topic which is of itself taboo; if it springs from the writer’s need to understand life and all its vagaries and vicissitudes, if it is totally honest and unself-pitying, then it will have the valid ring of truth. If it is written because it is what is at the moment fashionable, and not out of the writer’s need, then it is apt to be unbelievable, and what is unbelievable can often be shocking and even pornographic—and this includes some recent children’s books.
The world wants to shove us into what it considers the appropriate pigeonhole. I do not like to be labelled as a “Christian children’s writer” because I fear that this will shove me even further into the pigeonhole which began to be prepared for me when A Wrinkle in Time won the Newbery medal. If I am so labelled, then the implication is that I am to be read only by children, and Christian children at that. Though the chief reason that Wrinkle was rejected for over two years and by thirty-odd publishers was because it is a difficult book for many adults, the decision was made to market it as a children’s book; it won a medal for children’s books. Therefore, I am a children’s writer, and that is all I’m allowed to be.
But I’m a writer. That’s enough of a definition. (I infinitely prefer to say that I am a Christian than to mention any denomination, for such pigeonholing is fragmenting, in religion as in art.) So. I am a Christian. I am a writer. When I am grappling with ideas which are radical enough to upset grownups, then I am likely to put these ideas into a story which will be marketed for children because children understand what their parents have rejected and forgotten. Because I am a struggling human being; trying to make sense out of the meaninglessness of much of life in this century and daily searching for revelatory truth in Scripture, it’s highly unlikely that I’ll ever want to write novels of pessimism or porno, no matter how realistic my work. But I don’t want to be shut in, labelled, the key turned, so that I am not able to grow and develop, as a Christian, as a writer. I want that freedom which is a large part of the Christian promise, and I don’t want any kind of label to diminish that freedom. It is sad and ironic to have to admit that it does.
To write a story is an act of Naming; in reading about a protagonist I can grow along with, I myself am more named. And we live in a world which would reduce us to our social-security numbers. Area codes, zip codes, credit-card codes, all take precedence over our names. Our signatures already mean so little that it wouldn’t be a surprise if, sometime in the near future, we, like prisoners, are known only by our numbers.
But that is not how it was meant to be. Coleridge writes,
The Jews would not willingly tread upon the smallest piece of paper in their way, but took it up; for possibly, said they, the name of God may be upon it. Though there was a little superstition in this, yet truly there is nothing but good religion in it, if we apply it to man. Trample not on any; there may be some work of grace there, that thou knowest not of. The name of God may be written upon that soul thou treadest on; it may be a soul that Christ thought so much of as to give his precious blood for it; therefore, despise it not.
The name of God is so awe-full, so unpronounceable, that it has never been used by any of his creatures. Indeed, it is said that if, inadvertently, the great and terrible name of God should be spoken, the universe would explode. The letters YHWH are a jumble of Hebrew consonants, and a better translation than “Jehovah” is “The Lord.”
But we, the creatures, are named, and our names are part of our wholeness. It used to be a moment of great importance when someone said, “Oh, don’t call me Mrs. X. Call me Anne—or Katherine. Alex or John. My name is a gift which I offer to you.”
Now the name is taken automatically—grabbed away. On television programs, the interviewer immediately calls whoever he is interviewing—head of state, composer, scientist—by the first name.
I love the rare moments when I am permitted to offer my name to someone. And I love the letters which begin “Dear Madeleine,” because the writers feel that I have already given the gift of the name through the books. And I remember times when I have been given a name—and to be given a name is an act of intimacy as powerful as any act of love.
A French priest, conducting a retreat, said,
To love anyone is to hope in him always. From the moment at which we begin to judge anyone, to limit our confidence in him, from the moment at which we identify [pigeonhole] him, and so reduce him to that, we cease to love him, and he ceases to be able to become better. We must dare to love in a world that does not know how to love.
We are to be children of the light, and we are meant to walk in the light, and we have been groping along in the darkness. The creative act helps us to emerge into the light, that awful light which the disciples saw on the Mount of Transfiguration, and which the Hebrew children saw on the face of Moses when he had been talking with God on Mount Sinai.
If we are blind and foolish, so were the disciples. They simply failed to understand what the light was about—these three disciples who were closest to him. They wanted to trap Jesus, Elijah, and Moses in tabernacles, tame them, pigeonhole and label them, as all of us human beings have continued to do ever since.
It seems that more than ever the compulsion today is to identify, to reduce someone to what is on the label. To identify is to control, to limit. To love is to call by name and so open the wide gates of creativity. But we forget names and turn to labels; there are many familiar ones today, such as:
• Fairy tales are not real and should be outgrown.
• Christians are people who are not strong enough to do it alone.
• Bach is mathematical; therefore he does not write with emotion.
• Chopin is only a romantic.
• El Greco must have had astigmatism to account for his elongated people.
• All Victorian poets had TB.
• Roman Catholics are not Christians.
• Protestants cannot understand Holy Communion.
• People who write for children are second-class and cannot write for adults.
And the list could go on and on and on…
If we are pigeonholed and labeled we are unnamed.
Last spring I was briefly in Jerusalem as the guest of the publishers who were bringing out a book of illustrations of the Old Testament by children all over the world, wonderful people who asked me to write the text to go with the pictures, and who knew me by name. During my stay, in which I was driven about the countryside to see as many Old Testament sites and sights as possible, I was entirely within the Jewish community. To my surprise, several times I heard, in times of stress or irritation, “Oh, Christ!”
So, I repeat, the number of times the name of Jesus is invoked has little or nothing to do with whether or not a book is Christian. But before I struggle further with what is or is not a Christian children’s book, I think it’s important to ask: What is a children’s book?
Added to the assumption that if you don’t have enough talent to write for adults, you might try writing a book for children, is the further insult that if you really work hard and discover that you have more talent than you thought you had, you might advance enough to write a book for adults.
If you are not good enough to write a book for adults, you are certainly not good enough to write a book for children. I had written and published several “regular” novels before I dared try my hand at a children’s novel. (I say “regular” novel because I was gently told by a friend that today the word adult in front of novel means porno.)
And that’s just another example of pigeonholing.
Nancy Berkowitz, long a great friend of children’s books and their writers, told me last year that I’d given her the best definition of a children’s book that she’d heard. Having completely forgotten ever giving such a definition, I asked eagerly, “What was it?”
“A children’s book is any book a child will read.”
First my children and now my grandchildren are proof of this, moving from children’s books marketed for their own age range—the girls are ten and eleven years old—to any grown-up novel I think would appeal to them. All they require is a protagonist with whom they can identify (and they prefer the protagonist to be older than they are), an adventure to make them turn the pages, and the making of a decision on the part of the protagonist. We name ourselves by the choices we make, and we can help in our own naming by living through the choices, right and wrong, of the heroes and heroines whose stories we read.
To name is to love. To be Named is to be loved. So in a very true sense the great works which help us to be more named also love us and help us to love.
One summer I taught a class in techniques of fiction at a midwestern university. About halfway through the course, one of the students came up to me after class and said, “I do hope you’re going to teach us something about writing for children. That’s really why I’m taking this course.”
“What have I been teaching you?”
“Well—writing.”
“Don’t you write when you write for children?”
“Well—but isn’t it different?”
No, it is not different. The techniques of fiction are the techniques of fiction. They hold as true for Beatrix Potter as they do for Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Characterization, style, theme, are as important in a children’s book as in a novel for grownups. Taste, as always, will differ (spinach vs. beets again). A child is not likely to identify with the characters in Faulkner’s Sanctuary. Books like A Wrinkle in Time may seem too difficult to some parents. But if a book is not good enough for a grownup, it is not good enough for a child.
So what, then, are the differences?
Most of them are minor, and apparent. A child wants to read about another child, a child living in and having adventures in a world which can be recognized and accepted. As long as what the protagonist does is true, this world can be unlimited, for a child can identify with a hero in ancient Britain, darkest Africa, or the year two thousand and ninety-three.
When I was a child I browsed through my parents’ books when I had finished my own. What was not part of my own circumference of comprehension I simply skipped; sex scenes when I was eight or nine had little relevance for me, so I skipped over them. They didn’t hurt me because they had no meaning for me. In a book which is going to be marketed for children it is usually better to write within the child’s frame of reference, but there is no subject which should, in itself, be taboo. If it is essential for the development of the child protagonist, there is nothing which may not be included. It is how it is included which makes its presence permissible or impermissible. Some books about—for instance—child abuse are important and deeply moving; others may be little more than a form of infant porno.
Children don’t like antiheroes. Neither do I. I don’t think many people do, despite the proliferation of novels in the past few decades with antiheroes for protagonists. I think we all want to be able to identify with the major character in a book—to live, suffer, dream, and grow through vicarious experience. I need to be able to admire the protagonist despite his faults and so be given a glimpse of my own potential. There have been a few young-adult novels written recently with antiheroes; from all reports they are not the books which are read and reread. We don’t want to feel less when we have finished a book; we want to feel that new possibilities of being have been opened to us. We don’t want to close a book with a sense that life is totally unfair and that there is no light in the darkness; we want to feel that we have been given illumination.
One summer at a writer’s conference I felt that something was wrong with most of the juvenile manuscripts I received—not all of them, but enough so that it worried me, especially because I couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong.
On the last day of the conference all the workshops were open, and almost everybody attended them all. Most of the students had been in two or three workshops, so I had the opportunity to listen to poems, stories, sections of novels, written by the men and women from my workshop. In almost every case, the work in the other workshops was better than the work they had turned in to me, and I discovered to my horror that they had been writing down, not so much down to children as down to themselves, writing below their own capacity. I listened to an excellent story written by a young man who had turned in some indifferent material to me, and after class I figuratively shook him as I said, “That is the way you write for children: the way you wrote that story, not the—junk you wrote for me.”
A child is not afraid of new ideas, does not have to worry about the status quo or rocking the boat, is willing to sail into uncharted waters. Those tired old editors who had a hard time understanding A Wrinkle in Time assumed that children couldn’t understand it either. Even when Farrar, Straus and Giroux, to which house I am devoted, decided to risk taking it, they warned me that they did not expect it to sell well, and they did not think it could possibly be read by anyone under high school age. This is the typical underestimation of the adult as to the capacity of children to understand philosophical, scientific, and theological concepts. But there is no idea that is too difficult for children as long as it underlies a good story and quality writing.
As to Wrinkle, it reflects my discovery that higher math is easier than lower math, that higher math deals with ideas, asks questions which may not have single answers. My reading of Einstein, Planck, Dessauer, Eddington, Jeans, Heisenberg, etc., was for me an adventure in theology. I had been reading too many theologians, particularly German theologians. I was at a point in my life where my faith in God and the loving purposes of Creation was very insecure, and I wanted desperately to have my faith strengthened. If I could not believe in a God who truly cared about every atom and subatom of his creation, then life seemed hardly worth living. I asked questions, cosmic questions, and the German theologians answered them all—and they were questions which should not have been answered in such a finite, laboratory-proof manner. I read their rigid answers, and I thought sadly, If I have to believe all this limiting of God, then I cannot be a Christian. And I wanted to be one.
I had yet to learn the faithfulness of doubt. This is often assumed by the judgmental to be faithlessness, but it is not; it is a prerequisite for a living faith.
Francis Bacon writes in De Augmentis, “If we begin with certainties, we will end in doubt. But if we begin with doubts and bear them patiently, we may end in certainty.”
The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing writes, “By love God may be gotten and holden, but by thought or understanding, never.”
Love, not answers.
Love, which trusts God so implicitly despite the cloud (and is not the cloud a sign of God?), that it is brave enough to ask questions, no matter how fearful.
It was the scientists, with their questions, their awed rapture at the glory of the created universe, who helped to convert me. In a sense, A Wrinkle in Time was my rebuttal to the German theologians. It was also my affirmation of a universe in which I could take note of all the evil and unfairness and horror and yet believe in a loving Creator. I thought of it, at that time, as probably a very heretical book, theologically speaking, which is a delightful little joke at my expense, because it is, I have been told, theologically a completely orthodox book. The Holy Spirit has a definite sense of humour.
I’ve finally discovered a way to make the point that writing is writing, whether the story is for the chronologically young or old. I give whatever group I am teaching two assignments. The first is to write an incident from their childhood or adolescence which was important to them. “Write in the first person. Nothing cosmic, just an incident. And do not write this for children. Repeat: Do not write this for children. Write it for yourselves. Write it for each other.”
When I am giving this assignment as part of a juvenile’s workshop at a writer’s conference, I will already have read the stories and chapters of books which the conferees have submitted. Thus far, in every case, the work they hand in for this assignment is better than the stories they wrote “for children.”
I repeat, “But you don’t write ‘for children.’ You write for yourselves. Do you understand how much better this work is than the story you submitted when you were writing ‘for children’?”
The second assignment follows: “Rewrite this story, this time in the third person and from the point of view of someone else in it.”
This is a useful assignment for teaching the beginning writer point of view, and it is not always easy. Often I get wails of, “But I can’t!”
One eleventh grader in the class of techniques of fiction I teach at St. Hilda’s and St. Hugh’s School in New York, wrote a story of her move from the country to the city, to Harlem, when she was seven or eight years old. She was frightened by the tall buildings, the crowded streets, the constant noise of taxi horns and shouting and sirens. So she would escape to the park, where she found an old tree which had branches onto which she could climb. The tree became her friend, her confidante, her solace. At the end of the summer the tree was struck by lightning and felled. She had lost her best friend.
The tree and the child were the only characters in the story. When I gave the second assignment there was the expected, “I can’t.”
I gave her no hints. “You can. Use your imagination.”
Her second story, written from the point of view of the tree, was much better than the first, and the class was delighted—and everyone had a glimpse of what imagination can do.
A Catholic priest at the Baptist, Green Lake Writer’s Conference in Wisconsin, wrote a story about a man, a fly, and God. We switched the point of view to God in the second assignment and realized that this was a mistake; it would have been better for him to have tried the point of view of the fly.
I can’t take credit for these assignments. They were given me by Leonard Ehrlich in the one “creative writing” class we were allowed in college. After graduation, when I went to New York and started sending the stories I had written during my four years at Smith around to various magazines, the result of this second assignment was one of the first to be sold.
From these assignments I will learn everything I need to know about the student’s strengths and weaknesses in writing fiction and will have a good idea of where to go next in teaching techniques. I also learn a great deal about the students, which can in itself be helpful. So I gave these two assignments my first two days at Ayia Napa. Many of the eleventh and twelfth graders I teach in New York have had hard lives, come from broken families, have learned too early about anger and death and despair. But I had never read anything like the first assignments I had from the young men and women at Ayia Napa. Edith is married to a Kenyan and is becoming African, but she was born in the U.S. and schooled in an affluent suburb. One day the science teacher at her high school came to talk to the students about evolution. “I can prove we came from monkeys,” he said. “Look at her.” And he pointed at Edith.
Edith’s second story, which she wrote from the point of view of the science teacher, was a lesson to me in Christian compassion. The teacher is forgiven, wholly forgiven, because she can look at that experience without feeling the hurt all over again.
Joseph, from Papua New Guinea, wrote about his father’s experience as a cook in the Australian army when Joseph was a child. One evening there were fifty extra men, and Joseph’s father had not been told they were coming, and he didn’t have enough food. So he was beaten by the Australians, and then boiling water was poured over him. The message of Joseph’s story was love; it had not been easy for him to learn not to hate Australians, but he had learned. He is married to an Australian, and they have a charming baby. And he has taken hate and turned it to love.
And perhaps that is an essential ingredient of a Christian children’s book (or any Christian book): the message of love. A Christian children’s book must have an ultimately affirmative view of life.
So a children’s book must be, first and foremost, a good book, a book with a young protagonist with whom the reader can identify, and a book which says yes to life. Granted, a number of young-adult books have been published with a negative view of life, just as with antiheroes. Again, from all I hear from librarians and teachers, they may be read once, but they are not returned to.
Not long ago a college senior asked if she could talk to me about being a Christian writer. If she wanted to write Christian fiction, how was she to go about it?
I told her that if she is truly and deeply a Christian, what she writes is going to be Christian, whether she mentions Jesus or not. And if she is not, in the most profound sense, Christian, then what she writes is not going to be Christian, no matter how many times she invokes the name of the Lord.
When another young woman told me that she wanted to be a novelist, that she wanted to write novels for Christian women, and asked me how was she to go about it, I wrote back, somewhat hesitantly, that I could not tell her because I do not write my books for either Christians or women. If I understand the gospel, it tells us that we are to spread the Good News to all four corners of the world, not limiting the giving of light to people who already have seen the light. If my stories are incomprehensible to Jews or Muslims or Taoists, then I have failed as a Christian writer. We draw people to Christ not by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.
If our lives are truly “hid with Christ in God,” the astounding thing is that this hiddenness is revealed in all that we do and say and write. What we are is going to be visible in our art, no matter how secular (on the surface) the subject may be. Some of those angry etchings of Hogarth, depicting the sordidness and squalor and immorality caused by the social inequities of his day are profoundly incarnational, for they are filled with anguished pity for the thief and the prostitute and the scum of the earth, and this compassion is Christ’s.
When my mother was a little girl, there was a popular series of books about an appallingly pious little girl named Elsie Dinsmore. As I remember the story of one of these volumes, Elsie had a worldly papa whom she nevertheless adored and yearned to convert. One Sunday her papa had guests for lunch, and he asked her to play for them—something appealing and wicked by a composer such as Bach or Mozart. But on Sunday Elsie would play nothing but hymns. Papa insisted. Elsie refused. So she sat at the piano bench, martyrlike, refusing to soil her hands with secular music, until she fainted and hit her head. Then she had brain fever and nearly died, and papa was converted.
It is possible that in its day and age that book might have qualified as a Christian children’s book. Much of it was familiar to my mother. When she was a child, children were not allowed secular music on Sunday, nor were they allowed to read secular books or play secular games. They had a game, much like Authors, which substituted Bible characters for authors, and with such diversions Mother and her numerous cousins always managed to have fun on Sundays—but there was none of the piosity which makes Elsie so unattractive and which limits her to her own setting and day. Sunday, no matter how differently we observe it in various times and places, is a day for remembering the Resurrection, and although we observe it with reverence, we also celebrate it with joy. Few children are reading the original Elsie Dinsmore books today, but they are reading other stories by other writers of the same era.
I read my mother’s copy of The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett when I was a child. During a rainy weekend at Crosswicks I read it to a small group of eager little girls and, a generation later, to the children of some of those little girls, up in the attic bedroom as autumn winds shook the house. The Secret Garden is probably the most successful and most read and reread of Burnett’s books; it is also Christian, though I don’t remember whether or not it ever mentions Jesus. And it is more successful than Little Lord Fauntleroy, for instance, because it is a better piece of storytelling, less snobbish, and the message doesn’t show, like a slip hanging below the hem of a dress. I think we can all recognize ourselves, at least to some degree, in Mary Lennox, who is as spoiled and self-centered a child as one can find, thoroughly nasty and unlovable, basically because she’s never been taught to love anybody but herself. The secret garden is as much the garden of Mary’s heart as it is the walled English garden, and we watch Mary’s slow growth into the realization of other people’s needs and then into love. Mary’s journey into love is, in fact, her journey into Christ, though this is never said and does not need to be said.
E. Nesbitt was a nineteenth-century woman whose fantasy and family stories are still popular with children. It has sometimes been remarked upon as odd that she writes about warm and happy families when her own childhood was often lonely and full of traumas. But I think that’s probably why she wrote about families, the kind of family she would have liked to have had. My own lonely childhood is very likely the reason why family is so important to me—my own present family of children and grandchildren and the families in my stories.
I probably didn’t answer the young women who wrote to me about writing for Christians. Their chief job right now is to learn the techniques of fiction, to read as many of the great writers as possible, and to learn from them, without worrying about how often they went to church or to what denomination they belonged. The important thing to look for is whether or not they could write.