From the May/June 2001 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

A View from the Island
Editors Abconditi

By Brian Alderson

nsconced in Crusoe-esque fashion on my outlook hill, I see that a grovelling apology is in order. I am sorry, but I have no plug-in rapid communicator, no website, no e-mail address. I do actually have a telephone, but it’s the kind with a revolving dial at the front into which you poke a finger to call up whatever number is required.

The Horn Book editors speak to me feelingly about this state of affairs, especially when an ill-typed manuscript reaches them from these distant shores and they have to transfer it into their patient processors (it is usually typed on a machine that I bought at a jumble sale for four dollars). Other editors too get restive; publishers worry that they have to telephone me, or even send letters via the much-maligned Post Office; and I hear with wonderment of friends picking up rare copies of Little Goody Two-Shoes dead cheap from Amazon dot com.

However, I am not entirely bereft. I have sons who seem to live a comfortable life at the professional end of a keyboard and who are trying to rocket me out of my lone orbit in the Gutenberg Galaxy; I have a local library on whose machine I spent 51⁄2 hours trying to e-mail a book review to the New York Times; and I have friends who are subscribers to all the most genteel lists and who seek to lighten my darkness by sending me bundles of print-outs from the Interface (if that’s the right word).

These last give a fuddy-duddy like me pause for thought. Let me leave aside the indisputable, and hitherto rarely imagined, benefits of the new systems: the speed of communication, the accessibility and opportunities for analysis of large bodies of information, the economic benefit (to publishers anyway) of having works submitted that do not have to be handed to typesetters. Leave aside, too, frivolous misgivings about what happens when electricity fails in California, say, or the net gives way under the weight of its catch; and also social ones, like the creation of an underclass of citizens — like me — who have no opportunity, or no desire, or insufficient income, to get booted up. (News comes, as I write this, of an English university which is proposing to make it compulsory for all its undergraduates to own or hire laptops.)

No — what seems to me to be a discussable matter is the freedom that has now been handed to those who wish publicly to express their opinions on one thing or another. It may seem a bit parochial of me to restrict my remarks to the subject of children’s books when “one thing or another” may include the recrudescence of Nazism, or shared accounts of child-abuse (one contributor to the “exlibris” list notes that the sentence “some children’s books with many pictures are on-line” is likely to generate “porn spam” for sender and list), but the editor in Boston likes me to keep to our fairly narrow subject.

And indeed, in the word editor lies the essence of the debate. In the unredeemed days of quill pens, and snail mail, and galley proofs, the process of formulating a written opinion had to go through several stages of development, with an editor somewhere, directly or indirectly, shaping or modifying what was being said. There was never much alternative. Now though, the Internet enjoins upon us a brave new world with the editor absconditus. Members of lists, subscribers to sites, inhabitors of chatrooms (isn’t the vocabulary appalling?) seem to have leave to key in everything that comes into their heads without the necessity of having to find the right language for it or to think through its implications. Take, for example, what happened when an article by Philip Pullman, “Fire and Ice: Children’s Literature in the New Millennium,” was published as hard copy in the spring issue of Youth Library Review last year. It was a gloomy assessment of the decline of the British book-trade and the stultifying effect of official schemes to improve literacy (I noted some of the shortcomings of this “initiative” in my March/April 1999 column), which Pullman sought to mitigate with homilies about looking after personal development, caring for language, reading great books, and being cheerful. This inspired a large quantity of replies through a list called “children-literature” (apparently aimed “primarily to benefit the UK higher education and research community”), and those of us outside the magic circle who were privileged to read them were able to observe how the majesty of the electronic revolution is harnessed to the promulgation of indeterminate gossip.

Now my sources may be rationing my supplies, but most of the other “threads” that are unpicked for me have much the same character as that — a sort of seminar with inexperienced freshmen. The chat is mostly triggered either by H.P. and You-Know-Who or by books that scarcely count as children’s literature.

Thus there has been a debate over the winner of the 2000 Carnegie Medal (our equivalent to the Newbery), Postcards from No Man’s Land (Bodley Head) by Aidan Chambers — who contributed Horn Book’s “Letter from England” for a dozen years from 1972. Aidan has, for most of his writing life, been a champion of young adult literature, refusing “to sell young people short by compromising on language or subject matter,” and Postcards gave journalists and listserv lovers the chance (neglectful of the full nature of the book) to bandy around their worries about its treatment of euthanasia and ac/dc sexual currents.

In similar fashion there were muted shrieks about Melvin Burgess’s Bloodtide (Andersen Press, 1999) in a thread about what to read on the beach! This work, like his earlier celebrated novel Junk, is dismal primarily because of its drab, anaesthetizing prose, but the fuss was occasioned by his “pushing the limits” of what was deemed suitable in a YA novel (“the word fuck appears at least 5 times — yes I counted,” says one aggrieved contributor, getting her sums about half right).

Well, that’s an old journalistic debate; but the surprising thing was that in this site dedicated to the “research community” there was no serious discussion of Burgess’s treatment of a source which he acknowledges as the “Volsunga saga.” A contributor who reckoned that the book “is quite as brilliant as what Seamus Heaney did for Beowulf” seems to have been allowed to get away with that as a critical judgement, and her belief that it was Loki who hung upside down in the lift-shaft suggests an uncertain grasp of the sagas too. Indeed, if you set the book alongside its source — or alongside a YA novel of incisive mythic terror like Janni Howker’s Martin Farrell — then Burgess’s factitious performance is readily apparent.

I see that I may be accused of a grave misunderstanding here. The function of these lists, I am told, is not that of a refereed journal (although such do exist on the Internet) but rather that of a conference-bar where participants informally exchange opinions after a hard day in the lecture-room. “Hi” is an appropriate greeting, and no one worries too much about Mr. Pullman’s demands for linguistic precision.

But that accusation itself rests on a misunderstanding of the different registers involved. Most of the bar-discussions that I enjoy take place in the snug of the Black Lion in Finkle Street rather than on any campus, but in both arenas any editing that is needed is done on the hoof. Forceful corrections, justifications, and redirections of fire take place as the argument progresses (if it ever does). But a computer keyboard is far removed from these varied — and sometimes potent — stimuli, and the on-floor editorial process of the snug now falls to a solitary operator and accompanying mouse. Spontaneity of expression may well be there but it zings off into the ether, and who can tell if its wisdom, or its foolishness, or its infelicities of expression will meet with any appropriate response?

What’s more, on the evidence that has come to me, most of the subjects that are taken up relate to fictions, like Bloodtide, which are on the edge of, but not quite capable of, becoming adult novels. Not much seems to be about children’s literature proper: the picture books, folktales, poetry, and storybooks that lay the foundations for the development of language and intelligence that Philip Pullman was keen to foster.

No one is asking that persons studying children’s literature at the level of higher education should be instant authorities on the entire subject, but the reading-base from which they operate looks too astonishingly narrow. On the evidence of the short-winded exchanges that take the place of the living intensity of a bar-room, the “research community” seems to rely on its own childhood reading and the more newsworthy titles of the last few years. As Samuel Johnson might say, there’s no bottom in that.

Furthermore, there is no individual rhetoric. A couple of pints of best bitter can work wonders for eloquence, but the cramped cells of a chat-room inspire only the banal monologue of schoolchildren’s letters home. Where’s the intellectual excitement? Some passionate thinking wrenched away from everyperson’s platitudes? (One of the greatest editors I know once claimed that she would personally wring the neck of the next reviewer who began a piece, “This interesting book . . .”)

A model is available. True, it is beyond my, and probably your, aspirations but it shows how the conventions of our subject may be pieced with ideas about the force of literature brought into harmony with ideas about the growth of a child’s understanding. The Natural History of Make-Believe (Oxford, 1996) is one of the few sustainedly absorbing books that we have on imaginative literature for children. It is a guide which leads us from the Proverbs of Solomon to the fables of Max, Charlotte, and Pogo of Okefenokee, and every work it touches upon is illuminated — or sometimes eviscerated — with perception and wit. It’s hard to single out examples since the whole book is exemplary, whether in its own shimmering prose (Pinocchio as “a wastrel’s comic parable of childhood”; Rackham as “poseur of the Dark Sublime”), or in its continually apt juxtapositions (Dr. Seuss hatched out of the Quangle Wangle’s hat; the daringly-argued parallels between Uncle Remus and Sis Beatrix), or in the whole curve of its argument, which seeks to distinguish make-believe as either “an education in the fullness of reality or a schooling in intellectual fraud.” (The author’s battle with Lewis Carroll on this score is rightly designated “a book-length study in its own right.”)

I bring the work in here because its author, John Goldthwaite, is the product of no faculty staff-room and no conference-bar. He is an American who moves with an enviable ease between the cultures on both sides of the Atlantic and a writer whose concern is not with place-hunting but with the mysteries of his craft. He and his great book bring to mind what the late Francelia Butler was after in 1972 when she began her crusade to bring children’s literature into the circle of humane discourse. She noticed an embarrassing triteness about the way the “experts” in the field conducted their discussions and hoped that a more mature critical authority might edge the subject towards the sunny uplands of academic respectability. A laudable ambition, I’m sure, but to anyone aware of the implications of the classic term litterae humaniores the current evidence of mature debate is not only disheartening but still very embarrassing.

STOP PRESS. Evelyn Waugh writes children’s fantasy!

Soon after the above article was finished a PhD. student (no less) applied to the “children-literature” list for assistance in gathering titles of fantasies written in the UK during the last ten years. (Are PhD. students no longer trained in the conducting of literature searches?) This applicant was rewarded by list members — engaged, of course, in higher education — with the information that Evelyn Waugh was a possibility; but another suggestion — William Mayne — was queried on the grounds that his work did not qualify for that category. Phew!

Brian Alderson is the author of The Tale of the Turnip (Candlewick); a revised version of his edition of Harvey Darton’s Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life has been published by Oak Knoll Press.