Editorial
BRAND-NAME FICTION

hen Harriet Stratemeyer Adams died this spring at the age of eighty-nine, she stimulated an enormous amount of news coverage, a fraction of which would have delighted any one of the more original but far less notorious creators of children’s books. With cool efficiency the woman wrote, or superintended the writing of, hundreds of books during her half-century career — a phenomenon which probably deserves a place in the Guinness Book of World Records (Sterling) rather than in a history of children’s literature.

It is usually the nature of journalism to stress the sensational rather than to seek out the profound. So it was not surprising that the much-honored Mrs. Adams — 1979 Mother of the Year, recipient of the Alumnae Achievement Award of Wellesley College, and holder of two honorary degrees — was eulogized in major newspaper editorials and feature articles a well as in programs on radio and television. It was said that among her other virtues she instinctively knew what her dependable readers wanted — and what was good for them: cliff-hanging situations and characters who, though thoroughly up-to-date, still had “old-fashioned, sound moral ideas.”

Harriet Adams’s favorite offspring was the indestructible Nancy Drew, “a perfect daughter who never misbehaves” and who obliged her author by generating the sale of over seventy million copies of the books in the USA alone; in addition, thousands — or maybe millions — have appeared in a dozen foreign languages and been eagerly seized upon by devotees scattered all over the world. Nancy Drew inspired a day’s offering from Ellen Goodman, a sensible, articulate Boston Globe columnist, who wrote: “To my own generation, she was an alternative to the passive princesses. To my daughter’s generation, she must be, in turn, a relief from the emotion and angst of the Judy Blumes . . . She’s a confident, curious, straightforward young woman making her way through Harriet Adams’ world and ours.” And a commentator on a nationally televised morning show observed that although times change, children don’t, and that Mrs. Adams left a memorable collection of book as “durable moral entertainments.” Her defenders point to astronomic sales figures to prove that the young are being given exactly what they want. Of course. The same might be said of the new waves of squeaky-clean young adult romances, as carefully formulated as a doctor’s prescription. After all, ours is a commercial culture that permits television advertising of cosmetics for four-year-old girls.

Some years ago, as a book reviewer still working with children in a school library, I was asked to speak at a library conference on the topic “The Ivory Tower Versus the Firing Line” — a subject which raised the old specter of elitism by suggesting that an unbridgeable gap exists between quality and practicality, between art and audience. But in and out of libraries I have constantly insisted that one cannot lead children away from the mundane and the mediocre without first meeting them face to face — on their own terms.

In a now famous essay, “A Defense of Rubbish,” the superlative writer Peter Dickinson said, “I have always believed that children ought to be allowed to read a certain amount of rubbish. By rubbish I mean all forms of reading matter which contain to the adult eye no visible value, either aesthetic or educational. First I believe that it is very important that a child . . . should have a whole culture — at least one whole culture — at his fingertips . . . It is also especially important that a child should belong, and feel he belongs, to the group of children among whom he finds himself and he should feel that he shares in their culture.” Dickinson thinks that in a verbal culture it is better for children to read something rather than nothing; but he firmly states that he is not “advocating that children should be encouraged to read rubbish. None of the ones I know need much encouragement.”

Precisely. I have no quarrel with the industrious Harriet Adams and other assembly-line workers in fiction factories. I do raise my voice against the literate editorial writers, the intelligent columnists, and the smooth sophisticates of national television who apparently neither know or care about the function or the power of literature. I think of what James Thurber once wrote in a letter to his good friend E. B. White. “I brood at your book coming so close to Book of the Month . . . and then not quite making it. The United States does not read the right books in large numbers, which may be what is the matter with the United States, and what is right about the books.” E.L.H.

From the June 1982 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

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