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"FEELING BACK INTO CHILDHOOD" THE PICTURE BOOKS OF CHARLOTTE ZOLOTOW
What happens to childhood when we leave it behind?
For most of us, it becomes something reconciled to photographs, and memory--that sometimes
vivid, sometimes hazy place where we collect, and often sort, the pieces of our past.
As adults, we often want to make sense of childhood—our own, or the childhoods of
children we've come to know. That's human nature. And that's one of the reasons why
it's so very hard to write an authentic picture book for young children. Because you have
to able to let go of the need to explain, let experience and emotion just be.
And to do that, you have to trust that children can handle it—even the hard parts. And of
course, they can. Because they live it, every day. The intensity of experience and emotions
in childhood is simply and profoundly part of being a child.
No explanations required.
That perspective is something that Charlotte Zolotow has understood and embraced throughout
her career as a writer of books for young children. In more than 90 books—of which
I will only mention a handful here-- she has done so much more than carefully craft words—another
essential quality of her writing—she has also masterfully revealed and responded to
the emotional landscape of childhood.
Writing about childhood for children is a very different thing than writing about childhood
for adults.
As Charlotte herself put it in a 1998 article for Horn Book Magazine, "The writers writing
about children are looking back. The writers writing for children are feeling back into
childhood."
Here's an example of her doing just that:
When I walk in the rain and the leaves are wet
and clinging to the sidewalk I remember
how we used to walk home from school together.
I remember how you had to touch everything we passed,
the wet leaves of the privet hedge
even the stucco part of the wall. I only look with my eyes
I still have the pebble you found on the playground.
And I remember how you skipped flat rocks
into the pond. Mine just sank.
Several things strike me about those lines. First, they are filled with details of the
physical world. "The stucco part of the wall": reading that I can feel the roughness beneath
my hand, worry about the child's hand getting scratched. Indeed, at first it seems like
a passage weighted with nothing but physical detail, and yet there is sense of longing
that is undeniable, captured in two simple, repeated words: "I remember."
Adults unfamiliar with this book—Janey--might be thinking it's a story about a child dealing
with death. Because to our adult experience, that depth of longing, the implied absence,
is something we often associate with death. But it isn't a book about death. You see,
I cheated—I didn't read you the opening page:
"Janey it's lonely
all day long since you moved away."
And yet, Janey is about death in a way. Because to a child, that sense of loss and absence
and longing when a friend moves to someplace beyond their geography of neighborhood and
now---that sadness is grief, no less intense in its way. Clearly, Charlotte understood
this.
Before she was a published author of books for children, before she became a distinguished
editor of books for children and teenagers, Charlotte was, of course, a child.
It turns out she was a child who moved often.
Born in Norfolk, Virginia in 1915, she would eventually go from Norfolk to Detroit, Michigan,
to Brookline, Massachusetts, to New York City.
Charlotte was a shy child. I'm guessing there are those among us who were shy children too—who
can imagine how hard so many moves, so many starting overs, might have been.
Did she ever think back on a missing friend who could skip a stone where she could not?
Who knows? "Feeling back into childhood" isn't necessarily about reiterating one's own experiences
verbatim on the page—fiction writing never is. But fiction writing for children—good
fiction writing-- is about acknowledging and authentically reflecting the intensity of
childhood feelings and experiences, and that is something at which Charlotte has excelled.
Before she became a writer and editor of books for children, Charlotte was a child who read.
One of her favorite childhood books was Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden. As an
adult she said, "I loved the wisdom of the children in it, and their connection to the
natural world and its cycles." (Re. slide: No, she wouldn't have read the edition illustrated
by Tasha Tudor)
Before she became a published writer, Charlotte thought about being a writer. It was something
she wanted to do from the time she was young, saying, "I loved the idea of not only expressing
myself in words but, because I was very shy in conversation, reaching other people through
my writing.
And before she became a writer for children, Charlotte, was
... a Badger! She attended the University of Wisconsin from 1933 to 1936, on a writing
scholarship. One of her most influential professors was
Helen C. White. Yes, THE Helen C. White. The one for which the building in which the CCBC
has been located since 1971 is named. It's a coincidence worthy of fiction, but in this
case true.
Charlotte said Professor White helped "people with talent to learn how to draw on their
own inner thoughts and feelings .... To reach readers through these as well as intellect."
In 1938, Charlotte got a job as secretary to Ursula Nordstrom, the (now) renowned editor
of children's books at Harper & Row in New York City.
In his delightful and informative Dear Genius:
The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom, children's literature historian Leonard Marcus tells
the story of how Charlotte came to write her first picture book. One of the authors Ursula
Nordstrom edited was Margaret Wise Brown . Charlotte had an idea for a picture book that she thought
Margaret Wise Brown might write. Ursula Nordstrom asked Charlotte to put her idea into writing.
The memo Charlotte wrote—with some additional work—became the manuscript for The Park
Book, which was published by Harper in 1944.
The Park Book is an almost stream-of-conscious narrative, a cavalcade of details as a mother
describes what a city park is like in response to the question of her little boy, who lives
in the country.
Here's just a taste of what she offers:
"In the very early morning when the light is pale gold the park cleaner comes with his
long pointed pole. He spears the things of yesterday: the ice-cream wrappers, the cigarette
butts, the pink paper from chewing gum, and peanut shells the wind has blown across the
grass."
And later
"Baby-sitters and grandmothers and young mothers come joggling carriages before them. Soft
little babies look out with wonder at boys and girls big enough to scuff along beside
the carriages. The sunlight dances in the branches of the trees and reaches down to
the low-looped iron fence that holds the green grass in."
I hope you heard the delight of the language in those passages. I said before this is an
almost stream-of-conscious narrative, but I lied. (I'm becoming a very unreliable narrator.)
There is careful crafting in every line—in
the internal rhymes and cadence and allitration, in word choices like "joggling" and "scuff."
These are all elements of which wonderful picture books are made.
The Park Book launched Charlotte's career as an author for children and a pre-eminent
writer of childhood experiences and emotions and ideas. Her insights into not only the
feelings but the minds of young children are remarkable.
Consider the back-and-forth between the little girl and Mr. Rabbit in her classic picture
book Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present. In this story, the little girl is in search of
a birthday gift for her mother:
"Mr. Rabbit," said the little girl, "I want help."
"Help, little girl, I'll give you help if I can," said Mr. Rabbit.
"Mr. Rabbit," said the little girl, "it's about mymother."
"Your mother," said Mr. Rabbit. "It's her birthday," said the little girl.
"Happy birthday to her then," said Mr. Rabbit. "What are you giving her?"
"That's just it," said the little girl. "That's why I want help. I have nothing to give her."
"Nothing to give your mother on her birthday?" said Mr. Rabbit. "Little girl, you really
do want help." "I would like to give her something that she
likes," said the little girl. "Something that she likes is a good present,"
said Mr. Rabbit.
"But what?" said the little girl. "Yes, what?" said Mr. Rabbit.
"She likes red," said the little girl. "Red," said Mr. Rabbit. "You can't give her
read." "Something red, maybe," said the little girl.
"Oh, something red," said Mr. Rabbit. "What is red?" said the little girl.
Well," said Mr. Rabbit, "there's red underwear." "No," said the little girl. "I can't give
her that."
"There are red roofs," said Mr. Rabbit. "No, we have a roof," said the little girl.
"I don't want to give her that." "There are red birds," said Mr. Rabbit, " red
cardinals." "No," said the little girl, "she likes birds
in trees."
Eventually, they arrive at the idea of apples. But everything that came before those apples
matters, because everything that came before those apples (and later bananas and pears
and grapes) is the child's mind at work. Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present is not only
pitch-perfect when it comes to dialogue, but also when it comes to capturing a young child's
way of thinking—the process by which she or he gradually make sense of the world.
In a 1985 article in Horn Book Magazine, Charlotte
wrote : "The more fully we feel good and bad experience, the more fully we live. Children
live more completely than we do. For them, each experience is isolated in time. They
are the truth existentialists of the world."
Lois Lowry talked about this in a slightly different way when she delivered the 2006
Charlotte Zolotow Lecture at UW-Madison. (The Zolotow lecture was established by the CCBC
to honor Charlotte's career as a distinguished editor of books for children and teens. The
Charlotte Zolotow award was established to honor her career as an author.)
Lois Lowry's speech, "Lovely Presents: The Encountering of Rabbits," pays lovely tribute
to Charlotte in general and Mr. Rabbit in particular. She references both of them over
and over again as she winds her way through comments on her own life and books and issues
of "credibility" in children's literature. In the speech, she related a story from when
she was a young mother and saw a moose walking down the middle of their residential neighborhood
in Maine:
"Kids!" I called. "Come look! .... There was a moose ... walking right down our street
this afternoon."
"Uh huh," they said. "We saw it." "Ben grabbed my cookie," Kristin said.
"I can wiggle my loose tooth," said Alix.
Lois Lowry continued:
"I had probably always known this, but it was that moment when I became really aware
of the way young children see the world. Everything is new to them .... And it is all of equal
value, equal interest, equal surprise."
Charlotte knew this, too. And she knew making sense of it all was part of the hard work
of childhood. She shows such respect for children—respect for them as characters, and respect for them
as listeners and readers of her books.
In The Old Dog, Charlotte writes about a child trying to understand what has happened after
waking one morning and discovering his dog won't open her eyes. "She's dead," his father
tells him, but of course Ben has no idea what this means. Gradually, however, he begins
to piece it together. At one point, the narrative reads:
"He picked up a good stick, but there was no one to throw it for. ... When the phone
rang, no big dog came rushing to bark at the sound. .... Death means someone isn't there,
he thought."
[SLIDE]
In Who Is Ben? a little boy heads upstairs to go to bed and stands at his window in the
dark:
He couldn't see himself, he was part of the indoor blackness,
which was part of the outdoor blackness. It was a strange secret feeling.
He felt that he was all there was. He felt he was not really here.
He was really the blackness itself, smooth and velvety and dark and safe,
he was blended with the black night with no moon, no stars.
A few minutes later, the little boy surprises both himself and his mother:
"Where was I before I was born?" he asked. But he felt the answer,
He had been part of that strange trembling huge blackness
with no light and no sound no beginning and no end.
"And where will I be when I die?" But again he felt the answer,
and he felt that lovely soft enfolding blackness...
And I love how Charlotte handles that often-asked question, "What do you want to be when you
grow up?" in I Like To Be Little. In a loving exchange between a mother and
daughter, the little girl summarily rejects that question's relevance to her life in the
here and now by cataloging the many reasons why she likes to be little. She concludes:
"When you're little you know you'll grow up. Grown-ups already are. I like to know I'll
grow up someday. But right now, I like being little."
Charlotte has a way of doing something magical in her picture books. Of taking her characters
and her readers on a journey that is often imaginative and always child-centered, and
concluding that journey in a way that is somehow both surprising and inevitable, not to mention
immensely comforting.
In Flocks of Birds, a little girl is having a hard time falling asleep.
"Think of flocks of birds," her mother said. "Close your eyes and think of flocks of birds
flying south."
Her mother goes on to describe the flight of a flock of birds, from morning's first
light to the end of the day. The book concludes like this:
"The birds fly over the water, over the silvery sand, over the city where people are hurrying
through the autumn wind on their way to work. .... They fly through the long purple clouds
of sunset and through the gathering blackness of night.... And on over another small town
where the houses are dark and little girls like you are sleeping, dreaming of lovely
things, like flocks of birds flying through the night and the fall."
Her picture book A Father Like That begins:
"I wish I had a father. But my father went away
Before I was born.
I say to my mother, You know what he'd be like?
"What?" she says.
If he were here, We'd leave the house together every day.
We'd walk to the corner together. And he'd go left to work.
And I'd go right to school. So long, kiddo
Til tonight, he'd say.
The narrative goes on to describe the boy's life with this imagined father a part of it,
and it's full of such wonderful details describing moments in which that absence is now filled.
And then it concludes:
And all the while I'm telling this to my mother,
she is sewing very fast.
"I'll tell you what," she says when I stop talking.
"I like the kind of father you're talking about.
And in case he never comes, just remember
when you grow up, you can be
a father like that yourself!"
There's no false promise in that conclusion, no contrived sense of comfort. But it is comforting,
and hopeful. Because what is so apparent in those final words is how much this child is
loved already.
In But Not Billy—the favorite book of CCBC Director KT Horning when she was a very young
child, by the way—a baby is named Billy, but his mother never calls him that. Instead,
she calls him "little duck...but not Billy" because he sounds like a duck when he cries
for his dinner; she calls him "little frog...but not Billy" because his legs bend like a frog's
when he sleeps; she calls him "little rocking horse...but not Billy" when he sits up and
rocks back and forth just prior to learning to crawl, and "little bear...but not Billy"
when he first stands and wobbles like a young bear cub. Here's how But Not Billy ends:
Then one day he did something that no little animal and no little bird and no little insect
and nothing but a baby can do.
His mother came to see why he was quiet. Billy was standing up in his playpen watching the
door. When he caught sight of her he said m m m m m m m m m m MA MA.
And his mother picked him up and hugged him and called him
Not little bunny, not little bear not little duck, not little owl
not little fish, not little frog not little pigeon, not little bee
not little rocking horse but
BILLY!
And in Williams' Doll, perhaps one of her best-known books, published in 1972, a little
boy who wants a doll is given a basketball, and then an electric train by his father.
He gets very good at basketball, and he likes playing with the electric train, but he still
wants a doll "to hug and cradle and take to the park." So his grandmother buys him one.
The story ends like this:
But his father was upset. "He's a boy!" he said to William's grandmother. "He has a basketball
and an electric train and a workbench to build things with. Why does he need a doll?"
William's grandmother smiled. "He needs it," she said, "to hug and to cradle and to take
to the park so that when he's a father like you, he'll know how to take care of his baby
and feed him and love him and bring him the things he wants, like a doll, so that he can
practice being a father."
Like the best-known works of writers and writer/artists such as Margaret Wise Brown, Ruth Krauss,
Maurice Sendak, Donald Crews, and others, Charlotte's stories are timeless. They speak
to children and about childhood, and about their experiences and interests with such
honesty and insight that, in most of her books, the only thing that becomes dated are the
illustrations.
Many of Charlotte's books have been reissued over the years.
Thankfully. And it says something about the universality of the childhood experiences
and feelings she writes about that some of them have been reissued with illustrations
featuring children of color
and the pairing works wonderfully.
Charlotte's writes about elements of childhood that transcend race and culture—
that speak to human experience.
In that 1985 Horn Book Magazine article, Charlotte wrote, "I am pleased to have books of mine
-- written in the forties, fifties and sixties—reissued because the reissues show that the text is
still emotionally valid for children today. The children of the forties, fifties, sixties
and seventies feel the same as children of 1985 when they are lonely or frightened or
jealous or angry or happy."
And of course we can say the same is true of children in the twenty-first century. Even
William's Doll, which most certainly feels like a book of the era in which it was published—the
early 1970s, when feminism was rising and gender roles were beginning to be openly questioned—is
still, sadly, relevant for many children today.
In his collection Portait Inside My Head,
the essayist and poet Phillip Lopate wrote:
"What is important to an adult and what matters to a child are so often at variances that
it is a wonder the two ever find themselves on the same page."
It made me think of Charlotte. She understood that children experience the world differently
from adults—with immediacy and intensity that can be frightening or invigorating, with
delight that can be unparalleled. In that 1998 Horn Book article she wrote,
Their emotions are the same as those of adults, except for that one tremendous difference—children
experience anger,
loneliness, joy,
love, sorrow, and
hatred whole and plain; we, through our adult protection and veneer."
Charlotte wanted to write about children for children. And so she sought to strip away
that veneer in the books she wrote: She felt her way back into childhood.
In doing so, she has given generations of children and the loving adults in their lives
the opportunity to be on the same page through the books she has written,
I think THAT is a wonder, too.
[MUSIC]