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I was playing a tape of Peter Pan in the car
recently (my children love it, they know it
by heart). I tried not to listen but found
myself stiffening with disapproval as we
neared the end. I dislike J.M. Barrie's fey
insistence that to grow out of childhood is
to relinquish joy forever. As a child, I
feared Peter Pan - I would have hated it if
he had flown in through my bedroom window.
I am in urgent need, it turns out, of Alison
Lurie's new book as corrective. In her
wonderful collection of essays about
children's literature, Boys and Girls
Forever, she lightly exposes critics
who, throughout the history of children's
literature, have undervalued books because
they did not care for a message themselves -
and especially those who could not
countenance, even briefly, the notion of
childhood as superior to a drab, second-best
maturity.
The Wizard of Oz was banned by
American libraries when it was first
published because, Lurie explains, L. Frank
Baum's books promised children: "You can
have exciting but safe adventures, make new
friends, live in a castle, never have to do
housework or homework, and - maybe most
important of all - never grow up." It was
this last point that was most subversive. Oz
was off the map; "authorities in the field
of juvenile literature, like suspicious and
conservative travel agents, refused to
recommend it or even to handle tickets".
Alison Lurie is a liberal and inspiring
travel agent. She dishes out tickets for the
most unfashionable destinations (John
Masefield, Walter de la Mare). But she also
recommends popular resorts (freshly
reappraising J.K. Rowling). If she does feel
a duty to be negative (about, say, Disney's
reductive affect on children's imaginative
worlds), she manages to retain a lightness
of touch that could never offend.
Her particular gift is to link children's
classics, as if by hook and eye to the
modern moment. Occasionally, she takes this
to unconvincing extremes. I like, but do not
agree with, her argument that Beth (in
Louisa May Alcott's Good Wives, sequel to
Little Women) dies in order that readers may
subliminally learn that it is a kind of
death for women to stay at home. On the
contrary, Beth is perfected for the childish
reader through death. And her deathbed scene
is one that those greedy for sentimentality
(like me and my mother) miserably luxuriated
in as children.
Lurie keeps track - and even, sometimes,
score - of the way in which girls are
written about in children's literature. She
counts in Dr Seuss' You're Only Old Once,
a female receptionist (with just an arm
visible) and a nurse. She tots up a male
patient, male orderly, 21 male doctors and
technicians and one male fish.
She has a keen eye, too, for male writers
who were good around the house. Baum was a
good cook, de la Mare was a good housekeeper
who could improbably, "change diapers and
bake a cake". At the same time, she has a
sharp eye for women writers' habit of
self-denigration. She observes: "Even today
no mother has been admitted into the Library
of America."
Lurie gets mileage out of comparisons
between classics. She is a little hard on
Alice and her adventures amid hostile
eccentrics. She prefers Dorothy: heartier,
less snobbish, content with less. I was
sorry, too, that she was down on C.S. Lewis
(albeit subtly). Hogwarts, in her view,
beats Narnia every day.
But Lurie always stimulates: she reminds us
that the best children's books are
unshackled, have a freedom about them that
no adult book can ever rival. She is erudite
but without a trace of pedantry. More than
once, she makes fun of academic vanity. In
her fine essay on "What fairy tales tell
us", she praises a T.H. White story in which
the hero discovers that a neighbouring
professor is a troll who has just eaten his
wife. Lurie comments calmly: "We know that
some men, even some professors, are really
trolls..." - Dawn/Observer News Service
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