"The Pleasure of Children's Books"

Sydney M. Williams

Essay from Essex

“The Pleasure of Children’s Books”

April 25, 2020

“A book, too, can be a star, ‘explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly,’

 a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.”

                                                                                                            Madeleine L’Engle (1918-2007)

                                                                                                            Speech, “The Expanding Universe”

                                                                                                            August 1963

In our (relatively) new digs at Essex Meadows, shelf space is limited. About 750 books make their home in our apartment’s library, a small fraction of what lined the walls of our much larger library in Old Lyme. Nonetheless, a number of children’s favorites made the trip. They are reminders of a past that goes back eighty years and provide comfort as well as pleasure. This essay speaks to five, somewhat obscure, children’s books, four of which date to my childhood. All can be appreciated by adults.

In his essay, “On Three Kinds of Social Intercourse,” Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) wrote of slipping off to his library: “There I can turn over the leaves of this book or that, a bit of time without order or design. Sometimes my mind wanders off, at others I walk to and fro, noting down or dictating these whims of mine.” Lying in bed just before falling asleep, when time knows no borders, my own youth sometimes returns in kaleidoscopic fashion – images appear, disappear and reappear. Before nodding off, I sometimes think of books I knew and loved as a child, of years long ago.

Wolf Story, in the 1947 edition by William McCleery, sits between David McCord’s 1927 essays, Oddly Enough, and a signed edition of Horace Mann’s Inaugural Address at Antioch College in 1854[1]. Mr. McCleery was born in Nebraska and moved to New York (and then Princeton, NJ) as a playwright. In 1947 he was offered a Fellowship at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, NH, which is where he wrote Wolf Story. The book was written for his son Michael, who, with his mother, had gone to Reno for a “quickie divorce.” It tells the story of fictional five-year-old Michael who is put to bed every evening by his father, who must tell him a story – “a new story,” Michael demands. The story is about a wolf named “Waldo,” “the fiercest wolf in all the world,” and a hen “Rainbow,” named for her colorful feathers. Michael confused the feathers of a rooster with those of a hen, which his father explained but for which Michael didn’t care. One reason I bought this copy in Philadelphia in 1972, when I found it half hidden on a dusty back shelf, was because it included one of my favorite lines. Michael is told to brush his teeth and wash his face before getting into bed: “Then he took a damp washcloth and gently touched his face with it, being careful not to disturb the dirt inside his ears.” Every time I shower, those words return, and I smile.

When my mother died in 1990 and the house in Peterborough was emptied, a favorite book from my growing up years ended up in our house in Greenwich. It subsequently moved up the shoreline to Old Lyme and more recently to Essex. An Island Story: A History of England for Boys and Girls was originally written in 1905 by H.E. Marshall. My copy now sits between two newer books: A Glorious Disaster, by J. William Middendorf written in 2006, the story of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 Presidential campaign, and Frank Bruni’s 2015 book on the college admission’s process, Where You Go is not Who You’ll Be. My copy of An Island Story is the first American edition, published in 1920 and in which “An” was substituted for “Our” in the title. Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall was born in Scotland in 1867 and died two weeks before I was born, in January 1941. The fact that the book was considered inaccurate from an historical perspective never troubled Ms. Marshall. In the introduction she wrote: “There are many facts in school histories that seem to children to belong to lessons only. Some of those you will not find here. But you will find stories that are not to be found in your schoolbooks – stories which wise people say are only fairy stories and not history. But it seems to me that they are part of Our Island Story and should not be forgotten…” The book begins with Neptune’s son Albion being given an island at the request of a mermaid: “It’s a beautiful little island. It lies like a gem in the bluest of waters.”  The story ends, in the American edition, as the Great War came to a close and the founding of the League of Nations. Reflecting a hope that the Great War had made the world safe for democracy, Ms. Marshall concludes with, sadly unprophetic, words from Isaiah: “The nations shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore, and none shall make them afraid.” The story covers King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, Canute and his attempt to hold back the tide, Edward V, the king who was never crowned, Richard III and the princes in the Tower, the long reign of Victoria and the short one of her son, Edward VII. All eight of my siblings read Ms. Marshall’s book. They devoured it, almost literally, as my copy had pages torn out, and re-inserted in the wrong order. The book was put back together and rebound by master bookbinder Shui-min Block (wife of retired rare book dealer and friend David Block). Shui-min also saved the watercolor illustrations by A.S. (Archibald Stevenson) Forrest, 1869-1963.

Barnaby was a cartoon character, begun as a comic strip in 1942.  It was printed in “PM,” a liberal-leaning New York newspaper that refused to accept advertising. It was a weekly, published by Ralph Ingersoll and financed by Marshall Field III and operated briefly between 1940 and 1948. The comic strip later ran in the “New York Journal American” until 1952. Barnaby was a cherubic, five-year-old boy who was visited by his short, cigar-smoking, four-winged fairy godfather, Jackeen J. O’Malley. He was created by children’s author Crocket Johnson, also known for the 1955 Harold and the Purple Crayon. Barnaby’s fairy godfather arrives one night, flying in through an open window, answering Barnaby’s wish to his mother for a fairy godfather: “Cushlamochree! Broke my magic wand!” [in reality, his cigar] “You wished for a Godparent who could grant wishes? Yes, my boy, your troubles are over. O’Malley is on the job.” Barnaby and his godfather get into and out of a number of scrapes, bringing joy for those like me. In 1943 Henry Holt and Company published Mr. Johnson’s comic strip in book form, titled Barnaby. I had long forgotten Barnaby when, about thirty-five years ago, I saw a copy in Avenue Victor Hugo Books, a seller of used books in Lee, New Hampshire. On my shelves, Barnaby snuggles between a 1952 edition of Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl and the 1886 copy of Little Lord Fauntleroy by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

Another book from my youth was a childhood favorite of my mother’s: The Adventures of Miltiades Peterkin Paul: A Very Great Traveler Though He was Small.  In my copy, no author is listed, though it does cite John Goss and L. Hopkins as illustrators. It was published in 1916 by Lothrop, Lee, Shephard & Co., Boston. The book was in fact written by John Brownjohn, a pseudonym for Charles Remington Talbot (1851-1891) and originally published circa 1877. Talbot was an author of children’s stories, often in verse. The reader is not given much detail as to when and where Miltiades was born, only that it was New England and that he was the fourth child of a farmer named Gray. While missing annual birthdays, Miltiades takes comfort in the fact he was born on February 29^th, because, as he says, if there had been no Leap Year that year “I suppose I should never have been born at all.” His brother John Henry Jack, a mean older brother, tells him that the day he was born “the sun darkened.” Like Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Miltiades goes forth on adventures, many of which occur as he sits, eye lids closing, in his father’s library “with his feet higher than his head.” His head droops, he dreams, reminiscent of Alice, and his adventures begin. We learn that his great grandfather Deuteronomy Gray was “sitting in the same position more than a hundred years before, on the morning that young Israel Putnam came down the road with his old flint-lock rifle on his shoulder and called out for him to come over to Pomfret with him.” It was not the Revolution, but a wolf that had raised the alarm, inspiring Miltiades toward a new adventure. My copy, like An Island Story, had to be rebound, and was then boxed by Shui-min Block. Miltiades Peterkin Paul now resides between The Headmaster’s Papers (1983) by Richard A. Hawley and a boxed presentation copy of Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng, written in 1986.

A book picked up later that had no connection to my childhood, but which makes for delicious book burrowing is a short one with cardboard covers by T. Put, published in 1905. The title: A Catalog of Doggerel or Jokes that Was. It is eleven pages long, illustrated and includes this short poem:

The scientific students see

All bent on Zo-ol (O, gee!).

Say, are they here from interest, -

Or did they come intorest?

[If for true knowledge they would look,

They ought to read this little book.]

How could a lover of verse resist? I have been unable to find anything about Mr. T. Put or the publisher, A.M. Coit. There is no library of Congress number, suggesting it may have been privately printed. Its dedication reads: “To His Birdship the Record Owl,” which offers no clues, but does provoke a smile. The book, now encased in a handsome box, sits happily on a shelf between an 1834 edition of Miriam Coffin by Joseph Hart and an 1888 copy of Sara Crewe or What Happened at Miss Minchin’s, another book by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The latter was a discard from the Middle Haddam Public Library; their waste became my treasure.

Childhood is a magical time. Despite instant communication and social networking, it still is for those born today. Do not let Cassandras frighten you into believing otherwise. In childhood, everything is new and magical. In our time, we experimented, and we learned. I envied birds in their flight, the freedom they had, disappointed that my hands and arms weren’t feathered. I wanted to look down from a hundred feet – not for perspective but to spy on my sisters. Books of our childhood, such as the ones mentioned here, keep us grounded, not in the realities of science and data, but in the precious moments and magic of childhood that helped make us who we became. In Matilda, Roald Dahl wrote about his heroine: “The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to to amazing people who lived exciting lives.”

Children’s books conjure memories. They remind us of our families, that we descend from long lines of those who came before, that we are part of a continuum. They make us think of the awesome responsibility we have to future generations, to maintain hope and avoid the cynicism of a technological age. As we age and our runway shrinks, we know we must do for our grandchildren what our parents and grandparents did for us. Let them be children, encourage their reading and their imaginations. Childhood lasts only a few years. Let them be good ones. There will be time enough to be an adult. William McCleery, Henrietta Marshall, Crockett Johnson, John Brownjohn, T. Put and a host of other authors of children’s stories are allies in this process.

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[1] Horace Mann became president of Antioch College in 1853. He and my great, great grandfather Sydney Williams married sisters, Charlotte and Caroline respectively, daughters of Asa Messer, then president of Brown.