What the mother sings to the cradle goes all the way down to the Coffin.
—HENRY WARD BEECHER
Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel) has written more immortal works than any other twentieth-century American author. Think about it: Virtually every child in this country has read, is reading, or will read The Cat in the Hat, Horton Hears a Who, And to Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street, The Butter Battle Book, and perhaps a dozen others equally splendid. Consider too that each of Seuss’s more than forty titles is read not once, not twice, but scores of times, usually to pieces. In a library they become, literally, things of shreds and patches.
And what do we learn from Seuss? The joy of words and pictures at play, of course, but also the best and most humane values any of us might wish to possess: pluck, determination, tolerance, reverence for the earth, suspicion of the martial spirit, the fundamental value of the imagination.
This is why early reading matters. At any age, but especially in childhood, books can transform lives. As Graham Greene once wrote, “In childhood all books are books of divination, telling us about the future, and like the fortune teller who sees a long journey in the cards or death by water they influence the future.” For the young are all what college English professors would label “bad” readers: They identify with a story’s hero or heroine, and they daydream about being as resourceful as the Boxcar Children, as brave as Brave Irene, as clever as Dido Twite or Ulysses. And what children behold, they become.
As a boy I never read Winnie-the-Pooh or The Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan or Charlotte’s Web. Perhaps our local library didn’t stock them, or maybe I judged such works too feminine for the tough guy buried inside my pudgy, nearsighted body. Once I could actually read, and my mother turned her pedagogical attentions to my younger sisters, my dad started to take me regularly to the Lorain Public Library. There I checked out Curious George, The Five Chinese Brothers, and Danny Dunn’s series of misadventures with antigravity paint and homework machines. I vividly recall Miss Pickerell Goes to Mars and Treasure at First Base and the maritime derring-do of Howard Pease’s young heroes. A little later my elementary school class joined a paperback book club, and I soon began to build my own personal library: Big Red, Secret Sea, Mystery of the Piper’s Ghost, Snow Treasure, Revolt on Alpha C, Mystery of the Spanish Cave.
In fifth grade the book club’s newsletter offered three of the best adventure stories ever written: Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World and The Hound of the Baskervilles. What has ever been better than to be ten years old with books like these to open on dark and stormy evenings? Late one happy fall I settled down with the complete adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown, as well as Verne’s The Mysterious Island, all checked out from the branch library in the kind of thick volumes you could live in for weeks.
Alas, city libraries then refused to stock many popular juvenile potboilers, in particular the innumerable exploits of the Hardy Boys and Tarzan; still, one could always unearth yet one more new adventure of these and other similarly resilient heroes in the cluttered basements of neighbors and relatives. To this day, I remember a certain Saturday afternoon, a paper bag of candy corn, and the sun streaming onto the glorious pages of Tom Swift in the Caves of Nuclear Fire. Life has been downhill ever since.
By the time I finished elementary school my tastes had shifted to grown-up novels of the fast-moving sort: Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu thrillers, the science fiction of Robert Heinlein, the adventures of James Bond. For many years thereafter I utterly disdained “kiddie lit.” In my midthirties, though, I unexpectedly found myself asked to add children’s literature to my responsibilities as a writer and editor for Book World. Being conscientious, I consulted librarians about recommended reading, checked out several dozen juvenile classics, and studied the criticism and history of the field. Somewhat to my surprise, I found myself particularly entranced by the complex synergy of words and illustrations in classic picture books.
As I would learn, the late 1970s and ’80s ushered in another golden age of children’s literature to rival the earlier one of Peter Rabbit and The Wizard of Oz. Think of just a few of the authors, artists and eye-popping works of that era: Maurice Sendak’s complex Outside over There, numerous masterpieces by Chris Van Allsburg, including Jumanji and The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, William Joyce’s Dinosaur Bob and A Day with Wilbur Robinson, picture books by Leo and Diane Dillon, William Steig’s Dr. De Soto and Shrek, David McCullough’s Black and White, Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith’s The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, and those are just the beginning. The past thirty or so years have also seen Gary Paulsen’s survivalist adventure Hatchet, Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s classic Shiloh, award-winning novels by Katherine Paterson and Walter Dean Myers, Russell Hoban’s touching fable The Marzipan Pig, the metaphysical comedies of Daniel Pinkwater, Joan Aiken’s rambunctious tales of Dido Twite, and the intricate fantasies of Alan Garner, Richard Kennedy, and Diana Wynne Jones. And let’s not overlook that most elegantly structured of all juvenile time-travel novels, the gravely beautiful Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce.
Then came the tsunami of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, shortly followed by—in my view—the finer but more controversial fantasies of Philip Pullman (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass). More and more adults began to read “kiddie” books—and not aloud to their offspring but on the beach, in bed, and at the beauty parlor.
Obviously I should have been one happy children’s book reviewer, but another development of the 1980s troubled me. In 1950s Ohio, a boy could slide easily into daydreams about King Solomon’s mines, mysterious islands, swordplay in Ruritania, cackling master criminals, and dark avengers. Books fed the imagination. Then suddenly CD-ROMs, video games, and digitalized movies began to surpass any child’s wildest fantasies. But all they exercised, as far as I could tell, was hand-eye coordination. Yet more and more it grew clear that computer monitors and wide-screen TVs were becoming, in Keats’s phrase, “charmed magic casements” to transport us to “faery lands forlorn.”
While I sometimes think it’s wrong to be concerned, it has been a long while since I glimpsed a kid sprawled under a shade tree lost in a book. After all, we can’t count on J. K. Rowling alone to create or sustain a passion for turning pages. Like Aristotelian virtue, reading is a habit. Children need to read, then to read some more. Quantity matters far more than quality—there will be plenty of time for classics. But when starting out, the young should be immersed in a culture of the sentence, not the screen.
Anxious parents—are there any other kind?—long for advice on just how they can encourage their kids to read more. Here are some suggestions, most of which fall into the category of common sense.
1. Read aloud to your children. Joan Aiken once said, “If you’re not prepared to read to your children an hour a day, you shouldn’t have any.”
2. Read yourself. Grown-ups often pay lip service to the joys of reading, but do the kids see you watching TV or do they see you with a book in your hands? Here is the litmus test: How often have you said to your child, “Just a minute, I want to finish this chapter”?
3. Fill your house with print. There should be paperbacks, comics, magazines, and newspapers everywhere the children look. Books should be a part of a family’s daily life, not something special. Ideally, each member of the household should have his or her own bookcase.
4. Visit the library and bookstore regularly. Allow the kids to check out whatever they want, even if you find it sophomoric and immature. After all, children are immature. A trip to a bookstore can be a family adventure, and even hesitant readers usually enjoy purchasing a shiny new book of their very own.
5. Ask older kids to read to younger siblings. This will yield numerous benefits: It will improve the older child’s reading skills and diction, show the younger that reading is fun for people other than adults, and encourage the two siblings to, as they say, bond.
6. Limit TV, video, and computer time. Don’t be too draconian here: a house rule of no television after 8 or 9 p.m. during the school week might be sensible, with some leeway for special programs. Your goal is not to deprive the child of television so much as to make him or her indifferent to it. Ideally, evenings should be a time for reading, homework, quiet games, conversation. I know, I know: I’m a dreamer.
7. Encourage any reading interest—no matter how frivolous or unacademic you find it. If your daughter enjoys one Nancy Drew mystery, buy or check out a couple more. If she likes learning about constellations or witches or the Civil War, make sure you pick up books and pamphlets about them. As with anything, you start from where you are. The child who hunches over the Hardy Boys today will read Agatha Christie tomorrow and Crime and Punishment a few years after—if he or she is encouraged. The worst thing you can do is to ignore or denigrate a child’s taste.
8. Don’t harp on “good books.” Remember how boring you thought required school reading was? Nothing kills what pleasure a novel might offer like ordering a kid to read it just because it’s won a Newbery or Coretta Scott King award. Roald Dahl pointed out that what really matters in children’s books is that they be so entertaining that they “convince the child that reading is great fun.”
9. Ask librarians and booksellers for advice. These professionals nearly always know what works and what doesn’t.
10. Talk about books with your kids. Mention your own reading. Draw their attention to items in the Sunday paper. Ask them which is their favorite Lemony Snicket or Judy Blume title— and why.
11. Encourage kids to write. By writing stories, journals, letters, what have you, young people learn about the structure of prose, the flow of sentences, the importance of charm, and the nature of argument.
12. Take kids to meet writers at libraries and bookstores. A book becomes even more special when it’s inscribed by a favorite author. On such occasions, a YA novelist can suddenly possess the glamor of a rock star or celebrity athlete.
13. Give the kids time with books. Allow them to stay up late reading, or to spend Saturday morning in bed with a novel. Boys and girls don’t always need to be out and about; quiet time with a book ought to be fostered, encouraged—and not just a paltry fifteen minutes or so. Offer a plate of cookies, and the kids may settle down for a couple of hours.
Sylvia thought how all parents wanted an impossible life for their children—happy beginning, happy middle, happy ending. No plot of any kind. What uninteresting people would result if parents got their way.—Karen Joy Fowler
Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment, and especially on their children, than the unlived life of their parents.—C. G. Jung
A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success.—Sigmund Freud
It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.—George Santayana
In Owl Babies—by Martin Waddell, with pictures by Patrick Benson—little Sarah and Percy and Bill are three baby owls who live in a hole in the trunk of a tree. As the book begins, “One night they woke up and their Owl Mother was GONE.” Sarah tries to react intellectually: “Where’s Mommy?” Percy is stunned: “Oh my goodness!” and Bill goes directly into shock: “I want my mommy!” Benson’s picture of the forlorn Bill is a marvel: The little fellow looks perplexed, burdened with sorrow, a bit comic, yet still an owl. On the following pages the small white birds try to account for their mother’s disappearance, but each such gambit ends with Bill repeating the primal wish of all who suffer, “I want my mommy!”
Eventually the fearful siblings cluster together on a single branch for comfort and mutual support. Then “the baby owls closed their owl eyes and wished their Owl Mother would come.”
The next two facing pages carry only three short words: “AND SHE CAME.” Across the full expanse of this oblong album, her wings spread wide, a full-grown brown owl swoops through the night. The next page shows us her view of three fluffs of white, hunched tight together on a tree limb. Then Waddell presents the sheer joy of the baby owls as they “flapped and they danced and they bounced up and down.” This would have made a wonderful end, but Waddell doesn’t stop there. The Owl Mother looks down and says, “WHAT’S ALL THE FUSS? You knew I’d come back.”
At this point, any child will be smiling at this grumpy, realistic mom. Maybe you will be too—at least until remembering that for each of us there will come a time when we can wish and wish but the Owl Mother will never come back again.
All of us recognize that our childhoods were different from those of our parents. How could we not? Parents are constantly reminding their offspring of this very fact: “You kids today don’t know the value of a dollar. . . . Do you and your brothers think money grows on trees? ... All you teenagers care about are clothes. . . . There’s more to life than just playing the guitar. . . . Girls used to have a sense of modesty. . . . Boys tried to earn their father’s respect.”
I heard phrases like this when growing up yet, to my astonishment, find myself mouthing similar ones to my own sons. I used to assume this was something hormonal—that adults were obliged by their aging biology to look upon youth as feckless, irresponsible, and profoundly annoying. No doubt envy plays its part too. Unlike us, the young have yet to squander their lives. So we lay into them, hoping to rescue the apparent yahoos from their downward slide and somehow transform them into what they really ought to be—roughly ourselves, but better, smarter, richer.
Sadly, we grown-ups can’t help these shameful desires. To feel proud of one’s children—this is the drug that every parent hungers after. Only when the kids start to disappoint our expectations, as inevitably happens, do we settle for wanting them to be merely happy.
Back in the 1960s the psychologist R. D. Laing announced that the family was a machine designed to inflict insanity. After all, accusation and self-exculpation frequently seem the essential mode of familial communication. Surely, every child comes to feel, sooner or later, that his own parents and siblings have somehow been transformed into actors in a low-rent version of Eugene O’Neill’s tumultuous drama of domestic unhappiness, Long Day’s Journey into Night. Let the shouting and breast-beating, the rants and the weeping begin!
Just look at that recently popular genre, the memoir. To write a successful one it clearly helps to be born into a bad family. Drunken mothers, brutal fathers, manic-depressive brothers, drugged-out sisters, predatory uncles—such is the grim stock company of the modern reverie over childhood and youth. After all the early horror and trauma, the memoir can then close with a spiritual conversion or an intellectual epiphany. Nothing less will do. Besides, a happy childhood would sound so . . . schmaltzy.
Given all this, we should nonetheless also remember that the mass of moms and dads do their best. Every day they drive car-pools, commute to work, run late to PTA meetings, wash clothes, dishes, and mud-covered goalies. They argue with teenagers who view them as necessary evils or merely the source of pocket money. When fathers and mothers look into mirrors, they see that their own once-bright faces have grown hollow-eyed and furrowed, as haggard as those of nineteenth-century dirt farmers photographed while they huddle before a sod hut in Nebraska just after the cyclone has wiped out the alfalfa crop. Staring into the gray distance, they wait for the next blow to fall. It is their children—whether aged ten, twenty, or forty—who have done this to them.
So a bit of advice to the young: Cut the old folks some slack.
The Christmas season—which is also, of course, the Hanukkah and Kwanzaa season—always brings out the worst in children. Greed, of course. But also gluttony, envy, and persistent whining. Older kids will whisper to three-year-olds that there is no Santa Claus. Brother will take up arms against brother, sister inform on sister. Interfamily poking soon grows pandemic: “He hit me.” “I did not.” “You started it.” “No, you did.” Bam, bash. Exaggerated yowls of pain. “It was his fault.” “I didn’t do anything.” “You did.” “You always blame me.” “You always start it.” “You’re a sissy” “You’re a tattletale.” Meanwhile, gifts marked fragile are vigorously shaken, then dropped, then stepped on. Invariably, somebody will crash into the newly decorated tree, or slip on the ice, or be hit with a snowball. Really an ice ball. With a stone in the center.
Meanwhile, frustrated parents daydream of what the holidays are supposed to be like: neighborhood caroling on moonlit evenings, plates of star-shaped sugar cookies and mugs of steaming cocoa, Grandma reciting “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” little ones, snug beneath comforters, imagining the approaching sound of reindeer hooves.
For as long as there have been holidays, there have been complaints that they have grown overly commercial and that the true spirit of the season has been forgotten. Is there nowhere known some bow or brooch or braid or brace that will help us bring back the holiday feeling we yearn for—that feeling of warmth, coziness, spiritual joy, and family happiness? Well, family reading—you saw this coming, didn’t you?—can be a start. The traditional choice is A Christmas Carol, either in its entirety or in the version Dickens abridged for his one-man performances. Scrooge’s redemption remains a powerful and moving fable, but it may be so familiar that many families hunger for other seasonal texts. Consider some of the following, whether for reading aloud or privately to refresh your own harried spirit.
1. The Gospel account of Christ’s birth. Presumably Christians hear this spoken aloud during church services, yet even non-believers can appreciate the story’s power and beauty. Try reading Mark or Luke’s narrative at home, preferably in an English version with some grandeur to it: the King James, the Revised Standard (largely based on the King James), or even William Tyndale’s early modern translation. The happy few who know the languages might even attempt the Latin Vulgate or Greek original; just hearing those ancient sounds should soothe and touch the soul.
2. John Masefield’s The Box of Delights; Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales; the “Dulce Domum” chapter of The Wind in the Willows; Henry Van Dyke’s “The Story of the Other Wise Man”; O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi”; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. These are holiday classics—rich with mystery and blazing fires and selfless generosity, beautifully told. Masefield’s novel, a plum pudding of strange adventures, English legend, and spiritual feeling, should be more widely appreciated: During Christmas week, some devilish criminals attempt to steal a very old box, from an aged Punch-and-Judy puppeteer, who gives it to the schoolboy Kay Harker for safekeeping. Dreamlike marvels ensue. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—a high point of Middle English literature—relates the surprisingly sexy tale of how Gawain travels north to face certain death at Christmas but meets a strange and bitter destiny instead, one that leaves the proud knight thoroughly chastened.
3. Ghost stories. Victorian magazines fostered the practice of serializing shivery tales in December. The more restrained English-style ghost story is what you want this time of year, not the serial murderer with a chainsaw. I recommend The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories, and any comprehensive volumes devoted to Sheridan Le Fanu (In a Glass Darkly), Vernon Lee (Hauntings), M. R. James (Ghost Stories of an Antiquary), Arthur Machen (The Three Impostors), Algernon Blackwood (The Tales of Algernon Blackwood), and E. F. Benson (Spook Stories), as well as the work of A.M. Burrage, H.R. Wakefield, Walter de la Mare, Robert Aickman, and Robert Westall. Don’t overlook our North American masters, either, especially the eldritch (or kitsch) H. P. Lovecraft, the almost theological Russell Kirk (look for his powerfully emotional tale “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding”), and the tongue-in-cheek Robertson Davies (see his cozy High Spirits). Individual classics like James’s “Count Magnus” or Blackwood’s “The Wendigo” almost demand firesides, down comforters, and mugs of mulled cider or Irish coffee.
4. Golden-age mysteries. What could be better on a chilly night than a seemingly impossible-to-solve murder, preferably in an isolated country house? Try Agatha Christie’s Murder for Christmas and Nicholas Blake’s The Corpse in the Snowman. Or almost anything by Rex Stout, Dorothy L. Sayers, or Ellery Queen. John Dickson Carr’s locked-room masterpiece, The Three Coffins, takes place against a backdrop of wintry weather, snug eating-places, and lots of warming drink. Of course, one of Sherlock Holmes’s greatest cases, “The Blue Carbuncle”—the problem of the goose and the missing jewel—remains the ideal short Yuletide mystery. Neither should one overlook those classic authors of “true crime,” William Roughead and Edmund Pearson. They possess a winey, period flavor all their own, as they describe the ancient malefactions of the “Resurrection men” Burke and Hare, the poisoner Madeleine Smith, and our own Lizzie Borden.
5. Children’s stories. Christmas is primarily for children, or so they say, and there’s nothing like sharing a good picture book with a young boy or girl to generate that longed-for shared seasonal contentment. Consider those wordless classics, Raymond Briggs’s The Snowman and Peter Spier’s Christmas, any illustrated version of Clement Moore’s A Visit from St. Nicholas (the older the pictures the better), Russell Hoban’s touching The Mole Family’s Christmas, William Joyce’s adventure-filled Santa Calls, Barbara Robinson’s very funny novel The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, Chris Van Allsburg’s The Polar Express, or the perennially popular How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Dr. Seuss.
6. Of course, there’s a long list of sui generis holiday favorites: Max Beerbohm’s perfectly pitched set of literary parodies, A Christmas Garland; Milton’s ode “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”; P. G. Wodehouse’s hilarious “Jeeves and the Yuletide Spirit”; that gallows-humored chiller by John Collier, “Back for Christmas”; Arthur C. Clarke’s disturbing science fiction miniatare, “The Star”; Somerset Maugham’s beautifully crafted novel of lost illusions, Christmas Holiday; any number of Tolstoy’s compassionate and inspiring parables, especially “Where Love Is, God Is”; and, not least, Damon Runyon’s inimitable account of “The Three Wise Guys.”
Though books can obviously help create a holiday spirit, do not neglect other traditional activities. Listen to Christmas songs on the radio. Go caroling in your neighborhood. Take in a performance of Handel’s Messiah or Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. At the least, put up a few colored lights, a wreath, maybe some holly or mistletoe. Light the candles. Bake gingerbread and sugar cookies. Help the less fortunate. Even if you don’t observe Christmas, be with those you love, be festive and thankful. Rejoice.