Anthony Arthur is an associate professor in

the English department of the California State University at Northridge. Clifton Fadiman is Senior Editor of Cricket, a magazine for children launched in the United States in the fall of 1973 and subsequently in Great Britain.

Anthony Arthur

An interview with Clifton Fadiman

Cricket- the magazine for children is published by Open Court Publishing Company, La Salle, Illinois.

A n t h o n y Arthur: Mr Fadiman, you've had a varied and distinguished background in education, publishing, writing and entertainment; do you see your new role as Senior Editor of Cricket as a culmination of these other careers? Clifton Fadiman: Culmination? More like a regression . . . . Strange as it may seem, I was once a child. I started to read at three or four - at that time there were no reading-readiness experts around to delay literacy. Now that I'm in m y second, or perhaps third or fourth childhood-well, I've gone back to my original love: reading children's books. A A: What prompted your rediscovery of them? C F: Some years ago, when I was writing for Holiday magazine, I did a few articles on children's literature. I recall being struck .by its great variety and richness. So I started working on a critical history of children's literature, and even wrote the Britannica article on the subject. I had also been for some time a member o f the Editorial Advisory Board o f the Open Court Publishing Company, the people who thought of Cricket. And that's how I came to my present association with Cricket, as Senior Editor. A A: How close are you to completing your history? C F: In a w a y , it's all done; all I have to do now is write it. That may take a few years. My father died at 89, so I have hopes.

Children's literature in education 17

A A: Have you been guided by an particular thesis?

Lewis Carroll Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

C F: No, no central thesis. But all students of the subject remark the pendulum swing from fantasy to moralism, or from fantasy to realism. It's been going on for two hundred years. Another thing we all notice is that the areas open to children's literature are greatly enlarged now over what they used to be. Our so-called realistic teen-age, or even pre-teen-age, literature deals with sex, abortion, insanity, racial conflict-areas formerly limited to grown-up literature. Children's books have gone from religious didacticism through fantasy - Alice in Wonderland is the great benchmark - back now to a different kind of teaching. In the early 19th century a children's story might stress the horrors of idleness. Today children read of the horrors of broken homes, vagabondage and addiction. A A: Is that bad? C F: It can be when it leads to writers following the headlines and writing books to order. I've just been looking at the 1974 publishers' catalogs, and found several books dealing with exorcism. That's what I mean by following headlines rather than the individual creative impulse. I wonder whether we're forgetting that children are not just adults in embryo; they're different beings, intensely imaginative beings who live in their own world of feelings, feelings they often hide from adults. English writers have understood this better than others, t think. A A: How so? C F: I don't know, but it is clear that some adults everywhere preserve within themselves the children they once were, and the English have often confessed a certain reluctance to say goodbye to childhood. Charles Dodgson the mathematician was the rather dull adult self of the Lewis Carroll who was a child of genius. A A: You've referred to Lewis Carroll and others as "starters," writers who initiate patterns of literary expression that have great and lasting influence. Are there any starters working today?

Maurice Sendak Where the Wild Things Are

C F: Maurice Sendak is a starter. In Where the Wild Things Are he uses seemingly horrifying material, the stuff of nightmares really, and mixes the grotesque and the comic in a way that had never quite been done before. It accomplishes-at least I suspect it accomplishes - for the child what Aristotle said tragedy should do, a purging of the self through arousing and then allaying the emotions of pity and fear.

A A: Tolkien seems to do something of the same thing for older readers in J R R Tolkien The Hobbit The Hobbit and in the Ring trilogy; is he a starter? The Lord of the Rings C F: Perhaps: The Lord o f the Rings is a structure of sheer invention on a staggering scale. But Tolkien was working with many of the traditional

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An interview with Clifton Fadiman

Jonathan Swift Gulliver's Travels Mary Norton The Borrowers L Frank Baum The Wizard of Oz

elements of romance and fantasy, including of course the Quest, while Sendak is doing something that seems quite new. We might make a distinction between starters and original writers - that is, those who take an old idea and do something new with it. One of the most original writers I know is Mary Norton, who took the old idea of little people, which was old when Swift used it in Gulliver's Travels, and made something new of it in The Borrowers. Frank Baum was another original with The Wizard o f Oz. I know that some critics deplore his graceless prose. But he's unkillable, all the same. He took the ingredients of the European fairy tale and wrote a homespun midwestern American fantasy. It's American, too, in its interest in machinery. He was a genuine trailblazer. A A: Are there any types of children's literature that have originated in the United States?

Mark Twain The Adventures of Torn Sawyer; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Scott O'Dell The Island of the Blue Dolphins Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe

C F: The English are the great innovators: nonsense, nursery rhymes, school stories, certain kinds of animal stories (think of Kipling), and so on. But perhaps we Americans produced the first classic bad-boy tales: Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Huckleberry Finn, of course, as Hemingway pointed out, changed all American fiction. We also developed the pleasant middle-class, small-town story: for example, Eleanor Estes in her Moffat series, Elizabeth Enright and others. Of course, they're not so popular now that it's the fashion to dump on the middle class. A A: What about realistic fiction? Is The Island o f the Blue Dolphins a starter? C F: I don't think so. It's an interesting restatement of Robinson Crusoe, except that here it's a girl marooned on a desert island, or its equivalent. Robinson Crusoe was a real starter; it spawned countless imitations.

A A: I tried reading Swiss Family Robinson recently and found it tough J R Wyss Swiss Family Robinson going. C F: I did too; all that dreary sermonizing. But the central idea of these books, the situation of being marooned, appeals greatly to children because all children are marooned in a sea of grownups. They're isolated in their own sensibility, which is why the island theme, handled so marvelously by Defoe, Robert Louis has been popular ever since. Suppose the treasure in Treasure Island had been Stevenson on the mainland; it would have been an entirely different book. Treasure Island A A: Is this isolation something that writers for children have to be aware of? C F: Just being aware of it isn't enough. They have to have a quality of innocence and vulnerability; maybe they have to be somehow arrested in their development. It's hard to think of Flaubert having a childhood, much less writing about it, or Dostoyevsky. There were very great writers but in a way they were great because they had lost their innocence. E B White Charlotte's Web; Stuart Little

A A: One of your favorite writers is E B White; besides writing Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little he was an essayist for The New Yorker, a very sophisticated magazine.

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Children's literature in education 17 C F: white is of course sophisticated. Yet he retains a quality of shining innocence almost as William Blake did. It's a quality not easy to find these days; so many writers have replaced their innocence with toughness, because we live in a frightening world and we're scared. A A: Is this quality of toughness what Eleanor Cameron, who is a member of Cricket's editorial advisory board, was objecting to in Roald Dahl's books? C F: Yes, I think it is, among other things. She's harder on Mr Dahl than I would be, but it's true that Dahl appeals to an element of sadism in children. It's there - children are no nearer the angels than you or I, despite Wordsworth, and I respect Dahl for a certain honesty. But there's a difference between Dahl and someone like Sendak. Sendak is giving birth t o a story out of his sensitivity to some deeply e m b e d d e d emotional needs in himself which children respond to; Dahl is merely constructing stories. Roald Dahl Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

A A: Mrs Cameron also characterized Dahl's books as perfect examples of Marshall McLuhan's idea that all experience is seen today as a production or a stunt. The Charlie books are "cool" in the same way that television is a "cool" m e d i u m for McLuhan, requiring neither j u d g m e n t nor attention. You wrote an essay in 1949 called "The Decline of Attention," which anticipated McLuhan by several years in which you said the written word was being displaced by the picture. Do you think attention is still declining? C F: Yes, on the whole I'm afraid I do. But our ctflture is so fragmented that it's dangerous to generalize. Not all of us are slaves of the boob-tube. An increasing number of Americans are reacting against the nonattentional arts; many people are turning off their television sets to make pots and baskets; this requires attention. The book is traditionally a m e d i u m which requires attention. I think we have a double culture in this country. Cricket can respond to one part of it. At least we're encouraged by the response so far. A A: I understand the circulation now stands at about 140,000, after six numbers. Do you have a m a x i m u m figure in mind? C F: Perhaps 300,000, perhaps more; I don't know. I think it's reasonable to assume that there are several million civilized families in the United States. A A: One reviewer said Cricket was a magazine for little highbrows. C F: That's journalistic cant, shorthand for writers who don't want to bother thinking about what they write. Cricket is aimed at normal children whose taste is still unspoiled. Cricket offers "quality and delight," as we say in our publicity releases; those are cant words too, I guess, but they represent what Cricket stands for. A A: In your long article on children's literature for Encyclopaedia Britannica you praised two earlier magazines, The Youth's Companion and St Nicholas, as having encouraged the development of good writing for children in this country. Are these magazines the models for Cricket?

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An interview with Clifton Fadiman The introductory letter from the first issue of Cricket.

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. A LETTEKTo ALl. YOUNcliCK T FIOM

OLD CRICKET.

Dear Crickets, On your mark! Ready! Set! Go! We're off! This is the start of O , i ~ . It's your own magazine. You'll get it every month, for nine months of the year. (The people who make it up have to have a vacation, too.) What w i l l O - i ~ b e like? Well, look it over now quickly. Then read it slowly. It will have stories. Lots of stories. Funny stories. Scary stories. Stories about things that could really happen. Stories about things that could n e v e r happen. (Sometimes they're the best.) It will have riddles and puzzles and tongue-twisters. It will have rhymes for fun, and verses that are just nice to read out loud, or that make you dreamy, or that make you form pictures in your head. "

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_ oos~.,~p!

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It will have tales from far countries and strange peoples. It will have stuff about great men and women of the past and the present, and stuff about the earth and the sea and the stars, and stuff about science and machinery and travel and space and sports. 3

Children's literature in education 1 7 C F: Only insofar as we'd like to revive their standards of excellence. For today's tastes The Youth's Companion would be too didactic and St Nicholas too stuffy, too genteel. We hope Cricket isn't any of those things. But neither is Cricket interested in providing parents with substitute babysitters. We hope it's entertaining, but essentially it offers a real experience in reading. A A: You said once that there are two types of literature for children - lead and gold, an example of the former being "Let's Visit a Cement Factory." What kind of alchemy turns lead into gold? Hendrik van Loon The Story of Mankind T H Huxley On a Piece of Chalk

C F: In factual writing we look for a personality behind the facts; not the perpendicular pronoun, but some sense of the writer talking directly to his readers. Van Loon's Story o f Mankind is an example; T H Huxley's A Piece o f Chalk, (though it wasn't written for children) is a fascinating account of what would seem to be a dull subject. Behind every sentence one feels a real human being. A A: Are you satisfied with the fiction manuscripts you've read for'Cricket?

Rudyard Kipling Just So Stories

C F: We don't get quite enough material dealing realistically with the contemporary world. But we want to encourage both realistic writers and writers of fantasy. We'd like to see writers of grownup literature try their hand at children's literature. Mary Mapes Dodge did that in St Nicholas when she invited Kipling to write the Just So stories. A A: How about humor?

Gianni Rodari "Little Green Riding Hood" in Cricket, vol 1, no 1 Jeff Brown Flat Stanley

C F: It's easier to find humorous verse than prose these days, but that's a problem with adult magazines too. It's hard to produce Perelmans and Benchleys in the age of pollution, violence, the atomic bomb. The New Yorker used to be a magazine famous for its humor; now its pages are filled with social commentary. But we've published a number of humorous pieces: S id Fleischman's tall tales, Gianni Rodari's "Little Green Riding Hood," and a very funny story by Jeff Brown called Flat Stanley. A A: You even ran a satire of sorts, about a comic strip mouse with a limited vocabulary. C F: That was by Rodari too. Satirical humor for children is the hardest to write and the quickest to date. Even slapstick isn't universal. The Germans, for example, still continue the tradition (though it's waning) of scatalogical bathroom writing for children. It wouldn't go here in a magazine - though of course scatology is part of the child's informal pop culture. A A: Why are there so few masterpieces for children, compared with what's available for adults? C F: Partly because children's literature is such a recent phenomenon in terms of literary history, and partly because it is harder in some ways to do.

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An interview with Clifton Fadiman

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Writing for children requires such an unusual combination of personal traits and writing talents. A A: But you said once that if you had to make a list of ten books - all books, not just those for children - that would still be read two hundred years from now, most of them would be those we think of as children books: Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, Gulliver's Travels. Isn't that inconsistent if there are more adult masterpieces than children's? C F: No, that was a different kind of list; I wasn't thinking necessarily of the best books - there are many greater than any of those you mentioned - but of those most likely to last. What I meant was that children are natural conservatives who stay with what they like. It's the children who keep Robinson Crusoe alive, not the English professors. Children are like the spices sought in the 15th century to preserve food; they are what keep a considerable part of the literature of the past alive. A A: You have a lot of faith in children's good taste and good sense. C F: I think children have innate good taste, many of them, but it can be easily spoiled. You couldn't spoil Edmund Wilson's good taste at 70, but peer group pressure at the age of ten can easily corrupt the good taste of a child. A A: A children's magazine recently published a story on Walt Disney's version of Robin Hood which I found hard to distinguish from an advertisement for the movie. Is this another way taste is corrupted?

Nesbit The Railway Children

E

C F: I fear so. Robin Hood is a classic story which everyone agrees children should know, but some editors think it's easier to shove it down their throats with Disney than with Howard Pyle's far superior, if slightly dated, version. Disney's earlier cartoons, The Three Little Pigs, Mickey Mouse were fine art, but the later moneymakers like Cinderella simply traduce literature. Even the color is vulgar. Good movies can be made from literature - The Railway Children was a good movie - but not by the Disney factory. A A: What about popular series such as the Nancy Drew stories? C F: They're perfectly acceptable time-killers for the not very imaginative child. The two things that appeal most to children (and to adults too) are surprise and recognizability. These books have the comforting appeal of recognizability; the child reading them knows he will never be surprised. For most children the stereotypes are soon mastered, and they move on to better things. The images do have a sticking power, though; I can still remember the absentminded Professor Snodgrass from The Rover Boys. A A: You've mentioned a number of factors that operate against the writing and reading of good children's literature today; are there others?

Children's literature in education 17 C F: The most important is the simple misuse, the degradation of our wonderful language. It's under attack from all sides - commerical, political, and cultural. [ think language is a prophecy of the future as well as an index to the past. You can even foretell the political future of a country by examining its rhetoric. You could do it in Germany 40 years ago and you can do it here today. There is a clear connection between the decline of a people's language, the decline of their morals and the decline of their culture. Confusion about life, hatred of life is expressed in syntax and vocabulary. A A: Mr Fadiman, almost 20 years ago you wrote an essay, "On Being Fifty." In it you said, "At 30 one should measure others, at 50 one's self, at 70 mankind." May I conclude by asking you to comment now on that statement? C F: Well, I may have been wiser than I thought when I wrote that. I know myself so well now that the subject no longer interests me - I've exhausted the possibilities of mutual acquaintance. I do think more about mankind now, though I'm not terribly optimistic. We need, we must have, a way of developing better human beings. We don't need smarter people - there are plenty of smart people involved in the mess in Washington - but better people. And I still believe that literacy, the literacy that reaches its highest development in literature - is a prerequisite condition for a society of better people. And if you want better people, it makes sense to start with children.

References Baum, L Frank (1900) The Wizard of Oz Various American editions; London: Dent, Penguin Brown, Jeff (1964) Flat Stanley New York: Harper 8: Row; London: Methuen, Penguin Carroll, Lewis (1865) Alice's Adventures in Wonderland London: Collins, Dent; various American editions Dahl, Roald (1964) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory New York: Knopf; London: Allen and Unwin, Penguin Defoe, Daniel (1720) Robinson Crusoe Various English and American editions Huxley, T H (1965) On a Piece of Chalk New York: Scribner's, Oriole Editions Kipling, Rudyard (1902) Just So Stories London: Macmillan; various American editions Nesbit, E (1957) The Railway Children London: Benn, Heinemann, Penguin; New York: British Book Center, Dutton Norton, Mary (1955) The Borrowers London: Dent, Penguin; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich O'Dell, Scott (1960) The lsland of the Blue Dolphins Boston: Houghton Mifflin, G K Hall; New York: Dell; London: Longman, Heinemann

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Sendak, Maurice (1963) Where the Wild Things Are New York: Harper & Row; London: Bodley Head, Penguin Stevenson, Robert Louis (1883) Treasure Island Various English and American editions Swift, Jonathan (1726) Gulliver's Travels Various English and American editions Tolkien, J R R (1937) The Hobbit London: Allen and Unwin; Boston: Houghton Mifflin; New York: Ballantine Tolkien, J R R (_1965) The Lord of the Rings London: Alien and Unwin; Boston: Houghton Mifflin; New York: Ballantine Twain, Mark (1884) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Various American editions; London: Collins, Penguin Twain, Mark (1876) The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Various American editions; London: Collins, Penguin Van Loon, Hendrik (1961) The Story of Manteind London: Harrap; Buffalo: Washington Square Press; New York: Liveright White, E B (1952) Charlotte's Web New York: Harper & Row, Dell; London: Hamish Hamilton, Penguin White, E B (1946) Stuart Little New York: Harper & Row, Dell; London: Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Wyss, J R (1813) The Swiss Family Robinson London: Collins, Dent; various American editions

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