The Condemned Playground

On occasion, U.S. publishers have produced some children's books that are both readable and fresh, proving that it can be done. But Christmastime seems to bring out the worst in them. Perhaps on the theory that harried Christmas buyers will not have time to do more than glance at the cover, they have dumped onto the nation's book counters a melange of uninspired and uninspiring trash that must have emptied every bottom drawer in their files.

Some of the worst offenders are those presumably addressed to children who cannot yet, are about to, or can just about read. Are these colored noncomics for the first grade? Or are they to be regarded not as books at all, but as some kind of toy barely distinguishable from building blocks except that they are flatter and can be torn up? The economics of such kiddieware is impressive. One, a book written and illustrated by Tomi Ungerer, is about a cute bat and offers 334 words for $2.95, which would be fair enough if the author-artist personally baby-sat with each small customer. "Bats. Not for me," observed D. H. Lawrence, who wrote notably of game as well as gamekeepers. His Birds, Beasts and Flowers (suitably desexed), might be a better bet for the young.

Totville, 1961. The Christmastide verse for the young is clean and scientific, but lacks the old-fashioned zing of the real thing. Poet Muriel Rukeyser's I Go Out (Harper; $2.95) makes a sort of go at it in verse about a day in the life of a city child:

The streets are long and the street song. The birds fly over the days fly along. The birds all new A new day now for boy and girl for man and lady. This poetic pabulum somehow misses the tragic sense of life remembered from, say, Old Mother Hubbard or Three Blind Mice, and is, moreover, unchantable. Furthermore, those writing for today's young would not dream of mentioning a scandalous one-woman population explosion like Mother Hubbard and her substandard housing, and no farmer's wife would be allowed to behave so sadistically toward three handicapped mice.

The adult may well conclude that the savage world of childhood has been wonderfully pacified and cleaned up since he first heard those Grimm stories or Gulliver made his horrible travels. In The Happy Hunter (Lothrop, Lee & Shepard; $2.75), for example, Roger Duvoisin writes and draws about a Mr. Bobbin, a hunter who never shot any foxes, deer, raccoons, woodchucks, squirrel or quail. Duvoisin has the blessing of the Christian Science Monitor on the book's blurb, but it is going to be a traumatic moment for the Duvoisin reader when he graduates to Gunsmoke and learns that people shoot not only animals but other people. Then there is Patrick Michael Kevin, by Betty Peckinpah (Lothrop, Lee & Shepard; $2.75), an implacably coy account of a little boy with long red hair and eight sisters, and how he survived the Freudian experience of having his curls cropped. Clearly, this sort of thing is aimed not at the child but at auntie and grandma, who will buy the books.

Be a Child. "Be a little man" was the advice once offered to the young. "Be a little child!" is the current command. This doctrine seems to be most firmly held by the illustrators. Among these practitioners it seems to be an article of faith that pictures in a child's book should be doodled childishly. Arthur, the Dolphin Who Didn't See Venice, by John Malcolm Brinnin, illustrated by Andre Franc,ois (Atlantic-Little, Brown; $2.95), is a cautionary example. Venice, the most beautiful city in the world, is a crude sand castle, and the dolphin, the most beautiful of marine animals, is a mudfish. The people who conspire in this sort of thing are doubtless dutifully-minded toward the young, and can claim that no great harm is done--the child will not remember such books. But why protect the young from the beauty of Canaletto on Venice or Pliny on dolphins?

There are exceptions. The Fox, illustrated by Peter Spier (Doubleday; $2.95), has delicate, colored pen drawings, and the text, an old song, is good enough to sing. Mary Britton Miller's Listen--the Birds, illustrated by Evaline Ness (Pantheon; $3), achieves unpatronizing verse. The poet knows enough about chickadees to know they actually say chicka-dee-dee-dee, but the child who hopes to see live birds like the ones illustrated will be sadly deceived. James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl (Knopf; $3.95), has illustrations in good old-fashioned pen and ink, though the subject matter, a magic peach big enough to house a boy and a whole bestiary, is perhaps on the squashy side.

Children and adults who are up to 256 pages will find sophisticated whimsy in The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster (Epstein & Carroll; $3.95), which leads a vagrant young Ulysses on an unaccountable world detour to the Island of Conclusions. Jules Pfeiffer's illustrations fall between Thurber and Searle, but still enhance the best juvenile buy of the season.

Who Counts? It is the very young and defenseless who seem to get the worst shake from the tot-book people. No sensitive pre-Dewey adult could read some of these first "reading aids" without revulsion, and to read a number of them produces an effect of mild narcolepsy. Many have been clearly influenced by the notorious "look-say" teaching method, and if a large percentage of children under eight can barely read, the reason could be that what they are permitted to read is witless and dull. Probably the safest rule for the adult buyer is to avoid any book bearing the endorsement of any educational book or library advisory service. One such--The Man Who Walked Around the World, by Benjamin Elkin (Childrens Press; $2.50)--bears the menacing label, "A Reading Laboratory Book," and offers "skill-builder words beyond the first thousand words for children's reading." Among the skill-builders are lad, lit, below, flew and top, which provoke wonder as to what the first thousand words could be and who counted them.

Tolerance would urge that such productions are not intended to be read at all but to form an expensive, highly colored, temporary parquetry for the playroom floor. But suspicion suggests that the same kind of mind is at work here that tries to purge Huckleberry Finn from the schools, that deliberately holds back "reading skills" to some arbitrary "age-group level."

No Status Symbol. The child classics run from Dean Swift to Tom Swift, from Defoe and his immortal castaway to Mark Twain's raft, adrift forever on the Mississippi. Alice is still in Wonderland, and the Ancient Mariner is there to remind the buyer that man was a poet before he learned prose and that a child who is fobbed off with baby-talk doggerel is not only being robbed but nudged into the cozy horrors of the remedial-reading set. Treasure Island and The Voyages of Dr. Doolittle may still be bought, and it is a good thing to remember each Christmas that children do not try to keep up with current literature. It is not a status symbol with them.

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