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Part II Then What? “ To ask the question, "Then what?" is to ask what corollaries follow from the original axiomatic "What if?" AXIOM (what-if): What if a New York City mouse went to visit a friend in the country? corollary (then-what): Like the hero of George Selden's Tucker's Countryside (Farrar), he might get hay fever; and, lacking citified things like Kleenex, he would have to blow his nose on a fern. axiom: What if a little girl discovered a secret colony of Lilliputians? corollary: She might fly one of them in her toy airplane, with disastrous results. (In Mistress Masham's Repose, T. H. White thinks up some of the most brilliant then-whats of all.) axiom: What if a girl woke up one morning and discovered she had turned into her mother? corollary : She might stay home from school, watch television, and fire the cleaning lady, as did Annabel in Mary Rodgers' Freaky Friday (Harper). It is important to see that once the fabulous axiom has been cited, the writer must cleave to logic. He must rack his brain to answer the question, "Given such-and-such a situation, what would really happen?" It is the really that is to be stressed. Realism sharpens fantasy. Take a magic boy, take a Neverland, take some flying children, take a fairy, take all of these fabulous things — what is it that makes this mishmash work? Homely touches that have the feel of truth: The fairy is jealous of Wendy; when Peter Pan loses his shadow, it is sewn back on with a needle and thread. Of course, the most important key to the then-what question is the realness of the characterization. Sharply-drawn characters — whether children, miniature people, elves, or animals — make the cleanest rip in the cloth of reality. Commonsensical Alice, for example, is the handle by which we are able to grasp at Wonderland. Her down-to-earthness throws the Mad Hatter into wild relief. Without her solidity the nonsense would be tenuous and meaningless. And it is the human qualities of Milne's animals that make his Hundred-Acre Wood an enchanted place: Pooh's kindness and humility, his gluttony and courage. And meet in person young Maria, who stumbles upon the Lilliputians. She nearly rears up off the page in passages like this one. She was one of those tough and friendly people who do things first and think about them afterward....Her happiest times were when the Vicar was in London and Miss Brown was in bed with a headache. Then she would be mad with pleasure, a sort of wild but earnest puppy rushing about with the slipper of her imagination, tearing the heart out of it.(18) Thus when the Lilliputians turn up, we believe in them instantly, because we believe so wholeheartedly in Maria. Any experienced plotter of books for children knows another dread necessity, another then-what question to which he must provide an answer right off-the-bat. The child reading the book must be made to care what happens next, to read on, to be caught on a hook of suspense. The writer must set his stakes high, as soon as possible. In Rabbit Hill (Viking) Robert Lawson gets you worrying about his young rabbit hero. Little Georgie, by having him recite for his father a list of the dogs on the route of a journey he must make. "House on Long Hill: Collie, noisy, no wind — Norfield Church corner: Police Dog, stupid, no nose—On the High Ridge, red farmhouse: Bulldog and Setter, both fat, don't bother—Farmhouse with the big barns: Old Hound, very dangerous."(19) You can bet Little Georgie is going to encounter that old hound, and so you read on eagerly. Here's another, a terrifying conversation between a tactless sheep and E. B. White's young spring pig in Charlotte's Web (Harper). "Well, I don't like to spread bad news,” said the sheep, "but they're fattening you up because they're going to kill you...." "They're going to what?" screamed Wilbur.(20) So What? Two young friends of mine read a thousand books between them one summer when they were about twelve. They will forget most of them, but they will remember some. What is it that makes a book unforgettable? What does it all add up to, the what-ifs and the then-whats? After all the invention and the action and the pretty devices, so-what? What makes for quality? I can think of two things that set some books of fantasy apart. The first thing, surely, is a strongly realized personal vision. It is the writer himself and his interests and obsessions that count, not simply his vague fondness for children or for the good idea he has systematically worked out. William Pène du Bois is a writer with an obsession. Here he talks about Auguste Piccard's attempts to go a mile up into the sky and a mile down into the sea. There was something in this ambition of his which excited me...turned me on....Thus in my books the most often found prop is the ladder. Peggy Moffit falls down coal holes. Peter Graves goes up, straight up — all of my nuts go up and down. Otto digs dinosaurs. The three policemen go to sea in fish suits. Angels fly to work pulled by kites. The star performer in my latest book, Bear Circus, shoots straight up through a hole in a circus tent.(21) The obsession comes first, and the books come after. The result is a succession of books with a special quality all their own. When you open one of them and turn the pages, you are traveling in a place invented by William Pene du Bois, one that belongs to him and to nobody else. Other writers have discovered and mapped their own personal geographies, and they are places as real to us now as Iowa or Tibet or the Bronx: Laurent de Brunhoff's Celesteville, where Babar is king; the Cherry-Tree Lane of P. L. Travers and Mary Poppins; Maurice Sendak's land where the Wild Things are; C. S. Lewis's Narnia; the foolish villages of Isaac Bashevis Singer; Milne's Hundred-Acre Wood; Antoine de Saint Exupéry's Asteroid B-612, inhabited by the Little Prince; Edward Lear's Torrible Zone and the hills of the Chankly Bore; Tolkien's Middle Earth; Tove Jansson's Moominland; Hugh Lofting's Puddleby-on-the-Marsh; Margery Sharp's Black Castle and Diamond Palace; the various hilarious provinces of Dr. Seuss. This gazetteer could go on and on. Each of these places is somehow whole and perfect and entire — real-ized and altogether there. With the borders of these imaginary territories placed end-to-end, a child's mental dominion can stretch all the way to Homer's Ithaca or Shakespeare's forest of Oberon. A world like this is rich freight to carry around inside any child's head. The other quality that sets apart some books of children's fantasy is, of course, a second level of meaning — significance, symbolism, allegory; a stab at a moral, a message, a lesson. The meaning may be as bald as the last sentence in one of Aesop's fables ("slow and steady wins the race") or as unpretentious and delicate as the distillation from the modest adventures of Milne's animals (what it means to be a friend). Meaning is not easy. Sometimes the attempt at it is too vaguely vast, too preachy-teachy, too thin and scant. But when it works, the book gains a value that may outlast the short time-span during which a young reader is available to us. It may last him all his life. James Thurber's Wonderful O (Simon) is an example. It is an artful allegory that explains what freedom is. And the famous chapter in The Wind in the Willows (Scribner) about the piper at the gates of dawn interjects into the story about Rat, Mole, and Toad an experience of God. [A]nd, then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fullness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight....Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads.(22) Hugh Lofting's Dr. Dolittle embodies a Schweitzer-like reverence for life. Dr. Seuss's elephant Horton discovers that a person's a person no matter how small. And Seymour Leichman's book, The Boy Who Could Sing Pictures (Doubleday), praises art, poetry, and storytelling. It was like no song they had heard before. His voice was high, sweet and clear. He sang about the farmer and he sang about the land and he sang about the doves and he sang about the river and the rainbow…. He knew he would sing forever against the sadness. The miracle did not happen all at once. It happened first when he sang about the doves. And they appeared. And the people saw them. Then the rainbow. And the people saw it. They could see in the air above them, everything that he sang. Ben saw it too, and more. He looked into their faces, into their eyes and the sadness was gone. They had seen a beautiful thing. Ben left the stage. No one cheered. You do not cheer a miracle.(23) You do not itemize and analyze a miracle either, which is what I have been trying to do. And it has leaked through my fingers, spilling numbered headings and subheadings. Now I want to pick it up and rearrange it differently, because there is one thing that hasn't been said. Perhaps it is the only thing that can truthfully be said of all of these books, and it is the secret of their deathless charm. They are all dreams. They are waking dreams. They make up to us for the sense of loss we feel when we wake up and find our dreams shrinking out of memory. A literary fantasy gives us a dream back to keep. Here is one of Lewis Carroll's, straight from the edge of the bed. "He thought he saw
a Banker's Clerk Most children's fantasies are not as midnight-pure as that, but surely the reason why we are so inexhaustibly delighted by mice that talk and spells that work and the Dong with the Luminous Nose is that we spend a third of our lives asleep, with bankers' clerks dissolving into hippopotamuses. Nonsense pleases. We want the laws and verities to be different from the ones by which we are trapped during the day. Like Dr. Seuss's foolish king we want something new to come out of the sky, not just this everlasting sunshine, rain, and snow, even if the new thing turns out to be sticky green Oobleck, and a disaster. And when the writer of a literary fantasy adds real children to this surreal landscape, when he inserts a flesh-and-blood Alice into his Wonderland, we are given in one package both ends of our daily experience. It is a mixture of waking and dreaming, and that has a pungency that satisfies. It feeds a hunger we didn't know we had.
18. T. H. White, Mistress
Masham's Repose (New York: Putnam's, 1946) pp. 9, 12. (back)
From the December 1973 issue of The Horn Book Magazine |
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hen
once you have thought of big men and little men,” said Samuel
Johnson of Gulliver's Travels, "it is very easy to
do all the rest." He was wrong. It took a Jonathan Swift to
decide that the best way to capture a sleeping giant was to attach
to the ground every hair of his head. "Big men and little men"
was Swift's what-if. The Lilliputians' technique for capturing
Gulliver was part of his then-what. While it is true that
the what-if question establishes the axiomatic ground-of-all-being
for each book and that in itself it must be fresh and interesting,
the consequences of this what-if — Well, what happens then?
— must be worked out successfully. Samuel Johnson to the contrary,
it isn't easy. But the more diligently, searchingly, carefully,
and cleverly the author figures out what happens, the more convincing
and absorbing his book will be.
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