 |
 |
|
| From
the November/December 2002 issue of The Horn Book Magazine Open Questions
The whole writing of the book involved answering puzzling questions. All I had when I began to think about Jip’s story was the image of a child falling off the rear of a wagon, a child no one comes back to look for. First of all, how could such a thing happen? We have four children, and I could imagine either of our sons rolling off the back of almost anything, but I couldn’t imagine not eventually noticing that I was missing a child, nor, having realized it, not searching heaven and hell to find him. Here was a child intentionally left behind on a country road. I had a few clues: the wagon indicated pre-automobile days. I chose to put the wagon in Vermont, where I live, because it is easier to do historical research where you live. My next question was, What would happen to a nineteenth-century child abandoned among the Vermont hill farms? Well, of course, some kindly couple could take him in and raise him as their own Happy Ending! But what kind of a plot would that be? While researching Lyddie, I had come across the poor-farm phenomenon in Vermont history. The poor farms were conceived as a compassionate and economical way to take care of the community’s homeless. I decided to put my abandoned child on a poor farm and began to research the farms of the mid-nineteenth century. That was where I met Putnam Nelson, one of the few characters in any of my books modeled after an actual person. I was reading a town history of Hartford, Vermont, when, in a section about their town poor farm, I came across a paragraph about a resident, a man named Putnam Proctor Wilson. Wilson was one of two lunatics for whom the town had built wooden cages. These men, the writer says, “were raving crazy most of the time, and there caged up like wild beasts in narrow filthy cells, [I] often saw them and their pitiable condition, was impressed with the conviction that the inhuman treatment to which they were subjected, was sufficient of itself to make lunatics of all men. Poor old Putnam had some rational moments and was always pleased to see children to whom he would sing the old song, ’Friendship to every willing mind,’ etc., as often as requested.” Chills went up and down my spine. How could such a man be? A man seen as so dangerous by the authorities that he is confined to a cage and yet, in those times when he is lucid, children come to hear him sing. These children were somehow not afraid. They knew him well enough to know that he could sing at least one old favorite and, like an indulgent grandparent, that he would never tire of singing it for them. I was determined to put Putnam into the book I was contemplating. But would any reader believe him? A psychiatrist friend spent hours reading nineteenth-century medical texts, searching for a diagnosis. His conclusion ran something like this: I totally believe that such a man really lived, but I can’t give you a twentieth-century diagnosis. Our ways of looking at mental illness have changed radically, and, perhaps, for all we know, the illnesses themselves have changed. So my unanswered question to both Putnams is the question of Parzival. What aileth thee?
|
n Wolfram’s romantic poem Parzival, the fisher king
cannot be healed until the grail knight comes to his castle and
asks the question, What aileth thee? This is the question I long
to ask Putnam Nelson in Jip, His Story.
 |
  
 
  |
||||||||
