A Lively, Profitable World of Kid Lit

By Stefan Kanfer

Stories to please critics who neither fake laughs nor suppress yawns

In 1700 a new kind of volume appeared in New England: A Token for Children. The subtitle of America's first juvenile book was less inviting--Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children.

In the intervening centuries, the very young remained much the same: still struck with wonder, jubilation and fear. It is children's books that have changed.

Once upon a time, those works were below the eye level of publishers as well as buyers. They were all right in their place, but their place was the end of the book review section, the bottom of the shelf and the back of the catalogue. Today that illustrated literature has become a $200 million business whose profits are often handsome enough to compensate for deficits in the sales of adult books. Says Frank Scioscia, sales manager for junior books at Harper & Row: "The children's book business has enjoyed a consistent increase in sales, even though school funds have dried up, inflation is hurting, and local funds are not available. Prose, poetry and pictures for the young may be paying the rent in many bookstores."

This dog-wagging tale is told by most publishers. Jack Artenstein, publisher of juvenile books and adult paperbacks at Simon & Schuster, finds that "the children's book business is stronger this year than any other year I've seen. The first half of the year juvenile hard-covers were up 8% and juvenile paperback sales up 63%."

Terrence Daniels, president of Western Publishing, is equally bullish: "Every year our Little Golden Books sell 35 million in the domestic market and about 10 million abroad in 90 different countries. This is a growth business."

The dollar is not the only sign. A majority of educators now recognize the value of written works for those ten and under. Knowing what children like and what books best serve to spur their curiosity is a field that is growing in importance. Says Harvard University's Howard Gardner: "The evolution has been tremendous. There is so much material out there that teachers have to have some sense of the world of children's literature."

To gain some sense, courses in "kid lit" are becoming part of the curriculum at most major universities. The adult who was once the main focus of medical and psychological scrutiny now has a competitor. Today, says Historian Philip Aries, "our world is obsessed by the physical, moral and sexual problems of childhood."

In The Uses of Enchantment, Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim addresses those problems by examining the implications of fairy tales. Weary of bedtime books that ignore or sugar-coat the real world, Bettelheim ransacks the stories for Freudian subtexts. In his view the Oedipal drama plays itself out in the giants that Jack slays and in the demands of scheming stepmothers. "While it entertains the child," he concludes, "the fairy tale enlightens him about himself, and fosters his personality development." The psychologist does not neglect aesthetics: "Fairy tales are unique not only as a form of literature, but as works of art which are fully comprehensible to the child, as no other form of art is."

Isaac Bashevis Singer goes further. In his Nobel Prize address he cites ten reasons why he writes for the young:

"1. Children read books, not reviews.

They don't give a hoot about the critics.

2. Children don't read to find their identity.

3. They don't read to free themselves of guilt, to quench their thirst for rebellion, or to get rid of alienation. 4. They have no use for psychology.

5. They detest sociology.

6. They don't try to understand Kafka or Finnegans Wake.

7. They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff.

8. They love interesting stories, not commentary, guides or footnotes.

9. When a book is boring, they yawn openly, without any shame or fear of authority.

10. They don't expect their beloved writer to redeem humanity.

Young as they are, they know that it is not in his power. Only adults have such childish illusions."

Singer is not the only contemporary "serious" writer to have sought a small audience. Novelists and poets like John Updike, Randall Jarrell, Alison Lurie, John Gardner, Elizabeth Janeway and Ursula Le Guin have produced exemplary children's books. Of course, scholars and artists are not new to the libraries of kid lit. A generation ago, Essayist E.B. White composed his classics Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web, and Humorist James Thurber wrote The Thirteen Clocks, just as, a decade before, Oxford Don J.R.R. Tolkien had written The Hobbit, and before him, another Oxonian, Lewis Carroll, had produced the Alice books. But seldom have parents and children been offered such a multitude of first-rate works (see box) along with the customary flood. Such volumes are candidates for two librarians' awards of growing importance in the industry: the Randolph J. Caldecott Medal, named for a prominent 19th century illustrator and given "for recognition of the most distinguished American picture book for children"; and the John Newbery Medal, named after the 18th century printer and bookseller who is the "father" of children's books in English and given "for recognition of the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children." Both awards are worth more than prestige; a dust jacket carrying a Caldecott or Newbery medallion promises a sales increase of more than 100,000 copies.

Clearly, the best of these writers and illustrators apprehend the power of Ingmar Bergman's insight: "All of us collect fortunes when we are children --a fortune of colors, of lights and darkness, of movements, of tensions. Some of us have the fantastic chance to go back to his fortune when grown up."

For children--and parents--books are both the instruments of fortune and the vehicles of return. From those pages, most boys and girls sample their first rhymes and games, their initial sense of the miraculous: talking animals, furniture that sings, commoners made into kings and queens, and everyday life charged with the tragedy of loss and the humor of discovery. Which is why the jingles of Dr. Seuss have outlasted the prescriptions of Dr. Spock, and the works of the dean of American illustrators, Maurice Sendak (see box), have been accorded the kind of international recognition and retrospection normally reserved for artists like Matisse and Picasso.

For book collectors, children's literature used to exert the same appeal as children's aspirin. Recalls Book Dealer Raymond Wapner: "They were referred to as 'kiddie books,' looked upon with disdain. Then Sotheby's started devoting a small part of its sales to children's books. Today investors pay thousands for a single illustration or a first edition. People realize that great artistry has gone into these works and that those who write and illustrate the books have an enormous effect."

The financial and emotional potential of juvenilia is now so great that publishers are inundated with manuscripts--most of them destined for the return mail. "At Harper & Row," reports Vice President Charlotte Zolotow, "we receive over 8,000 manuscripts a year, some of them from children. Out of the batch, only about 70 are published." The ratio is not very different from those of other major firms, which can only advise their applicants to join what Zolotow calls "the revolution. There used to be too much sweetness and light in children's books. Now we look for real emotion--love, hate, jealousy, loss, separation. A good writer gives shape and form to an experience that is otherwise baffling to a child."

Barbara Lucas, editor in chief of the children's book department of Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, looks for new authors with "a knack of being able to go back to childhood, not just look back." Author-Illustrator Arnold Lobel, who seems to have that knack, advises writers to produce "a well-constructed story that has a clear logic and structure that works. Remember that a book for a boy or girl has to bear reading many, many times."

If this consuming interest is recent, the effect of children's literature has always been there. Writers of the dread volumes of early America knew their readership well. Their puritanical tracts deliberately terrified the little colonials with warnings of disorder and early sorrow. With good reason. Plagues frequently carried off whole populations, and as headstones in the old cemeteries testify, hardly an 18th century family was exempt from the fatal fevers of childbed and youth.

But by midcentury, children were looked upon as far more than short, and often short-lived, candidates for damnation. Education and moral training were conveyed through small pages designed for big eyes. The imagery of oral tradition found an outlet in the illustrations for Mother Goose and Aesop. In the 1750s London Publisher John Newbery issued a Juvenile Library with pared-down versions of Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels.

By the 19th century, such works had made their way to the New World, where the young were transfixed by the pictures of the Fox and his sour grapes and the Lilliputians surrounding their beached giant. The great caricaturist George Cruikshank produced such memorable illustrations for tales and novels that Connoisseur John Ruskin appraised them as "the finest things next to Rembrandt that have been done since etching was invented."

With Dickens' Little Nell, literature began to sentimentalize the child into something too good for this world. Notes British Art Historian William Feaver: "After The Old Curiosity Shop, the cult of childhood ... became endemic. If babies are cherubs, the theory went, then little girls are angels and angels are fairies and fantasy a form of spiritual rebirth. There was a great demand for paintings of fairies, which smart painters ... hastened to satisfy." The reverberations can still be seen in some saccharine books merchandised in gift shops, and obviously designed more for doting relatives than for children.

The Alice books proved an ideal antidote to the treacle that threatened to drown juvenile literature. Like all jokes, Carroll's nonsense verse, his encouragement to "speak roughly to your little boy and beat him when he sneezes," liberated children from the chains of cause and effect, and his Mad Hatter and March Hare, immortalized by Sir John Tenniel's illustrations, reintroduced literate laughter to the Victorian nursery. It has never stopped.

Soon afterward, art broke through the halls of museums and galleries and made its way to the library. Painters Maxfield Parrish and Edmund Dulac brought the soft-focus colors and atmosphere of the Pre-Raphaelite movement to their books. By the turn of the century, the four-color printing process became an economic alternative to lithography. Tipped-in pages showed a new wealth of detail; Arthur Rackham's peopled trees and magic dwarfs were the new favorites, and hints of Continental expressionism and art nouveau showed in the work of Lyonel Feininger and Kay Nielsen; N.C. Wyeth painted oceans that seemed to swell on the page, and Howard Pyle's illustrations of Robin Hood influenced three generations of moviemakers.

Although adventure stories attracted the most ambitious illustrators, young children turned elsewhere for their deepest fantasies. Reminiscing about his early years, George Orwell noted, "Most of the good memories of my childhood ... are in some way connected with animals." Millions of adult Americans can echo his sentiments. But their animals were not zoo creatures or household pets. They were the fauna of imaginative literature: the classic tales of Mother Goose and Aesop, plus the new additions: Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit, the Pushmi-Pullyu of Dr. Dolittle, Dr. Seuss's manic Cat in the Hat, Wihnie-the-Pooh, the whimsical elephant Babar, and, when Walt Disney reversed the customary procedure of story into film, the book-length adventures of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.

Today, animals and quasi-animals remain a child's earliest modes of transportation to the province of fantasy. Sesame Street, whose pervasive commercialism makes Disney's appear dwarfish, provides a world of tactile monsters; Sendak's night creatures and Arnold Lobel's Homeric tales of friendship between Frog and Toad, Dr. Seuss's Zizzer-Zazzer-Zuzz, Richard Scarry's Best Mother Goose Ever, and the omnipresent Snoopy and Woodstock are leaders in a procession that could populate a fleet of arks. Still, if anything appears with a tail or a mane, a small human is usually waiting in the wings. It is those child-heroes and heroines who become the first extraparental guides to the world outside the front door, and the main competitor to television's inanities.

Oddly enough, even with the erosion of family life and the advent of electronic baby sitters, books still manage to provide the lessons of life for millions of minors. According to Theodor Geisel (a.k.a. Dr. Seuss), "The time taken to watch the screen certainly detracts from time to read books. But the paradox is that good kids' books are selling more than ever." Indeed, the broken rhythms of television seem to have encouraged certain forms of literature. "Ten years ago," says Poet and Critic Karla Kuskin, "when I read verse to third-graders their attention span seemed" even shorter than usual. Today they seem attracted to the concentrated image and the fragmented line."

Society's altered states have brought unpredictable caroms. Western Publishing's Daniels notes, "More women are working, and there are more surrogate parents. They're paying more attention to their children's development and to the books they buy. More children have two sets of parents--and two sets of books."

This is not to say that all is dragon-free in the world of children's literature. The fragmentation of the nuclear family, the new consciousness of black and women's history and of human rights in general have engendered a series of "problem books" that confuse as often as they enlighten. Lower reading scores have been reported in grade schools throughout the country. And although specialists regard children's literature as a rich and complex genre, its artists and writers are too frequently appraised by critics as a species of emotional retards.

"We who work on children's books inhabit a sort of literary shtetl," says Sendak. "When I won a prize for Wild Things, my father spoke for a great many critics when he asked whether I would now be allowed to work on 'real' books." It is a complaint voiced by almost all his colleagues. Their books may be of shorter than usual length, and child centered. But they are not childish, and most are as serious as any adult novel or history. It was because of the patronizing attitudes that greeted her work that Beatrix Potter denied creating for the young: "I write to please my self," she insisted. And P.L. Travers, creator of Mary Poppins, sardonically concurred: "I didn't write for children at all ... the idea simply didn't enter my head. I am bound to assume that there is such a field as children's books -- I hear about it so often -- but I wonder if it is a valid one or whether it has not been created less by writers than by publishers and booksellers. I am always astonished when I see books labeled 'From 5 to 7' or 'From 9 to 12,' because who is to know what child will be moved by what book and at what age? Who is to be the judge?"

Even the masterpieces are constantly swamped by competitors with pretentious texts or gaudy illustrations aimed to snag an adult's wallet, not a child's mind. For success breeds venality, and many a pub lisher acts on the principle that the small change in piggy banks is just as negotiable as the currency in vaults. That money has recently made publishers more willing to experiment with packaging than with fresh content. Books that float in the tub, or smell of perfume when they are scratched, or assume the shapes of trains, or pop up with paper cutouts, can take the place of stories that children need to frame their perceptions of life. "It is vir tually impossible to earn a living at writ ing for children unless you're well estab lished," says Arnold Lobel, 47. "The only people who can still do it are us old guys."

Even the superficially attractive books have their drawbacks, says Richard Scarry, whose volumes have sold over 80 million copies in 27 languages. "Some are too sophisticated. The illustrations may be good enough for framing. But they really aren't children's books. The text is either too demanding for youngsters or not on their wave length. Children want stories to satisfy their natural curiosity."

If beauty is only scan deep, how can the buyer beware? The best arbiters of children's books are still, as I.B. Singer says, the children who can neither fake a laugh or suppress a snore. It is they who will be formed by the pages they hold in their hands and in their minds. It is they who will decide which books will be read over and over and which will lie neglected until the next garage sale.

"In childhood," Graham Greene observed, "all books are books of divination telling us about the future, and like the for tuneteller who sees a long journey in the cards or death by water they influence the future." This child-centered season is only a small portion of that future. A book should be a permanent gift, not a onetime matter. This week and all weeks it is well to remember that what children read from Christmas to New Year's is not nearly as important as what they read from New Year's to Christmas.

-- By Stefan Kanfer

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