I have naturally come to know something about children’s books from living so close to them and gazing hatefully at their jackets. A man can’t be dogged from room to room by camels, pandas, and cocker spaniels and not gain some knowledge of their peculiar quality. Besides, although I resent their presence, I am not quite proof against children’s books: yesterday I could have been found flat on my stomach studying, with every evidence of complete absorption, an outdoor handicraft book in which I had discovered a chapter on how to build a tree-house. (There may have been, in this particular case, an unconscious urge to escape to green mansions; but anyway, there I was, and I didn’t stop till I read that the finishing touch to a boy’s 1939 tree-house was to equip it with a small radio.)

  A man today should keep abreast of what the children of his country are reading. Juvenile books seem to follow old familiar paths, but in new clothes and with a new sense of destinations. Indians, animals, fairies, these old reliables still occupy the key positions. Indians seem, if anything, to be gaining—gaining in stature and in numbers. The child of twenty-five years ago had his Fenimore Cooper Indian, his cigar-store Indian, his lead-soldier Indian, and his Indian suit with a feather headdress; but he thought of an Indian as an agreeably bloodthirsty but bygone creature of history, definitely suspect. Today, thanks to progressive education and some appreciative artists and writers in the Southwest, the Indian stands reborn—in a fine clean region of his own, half way between DiMaggio and Christ. He is high class. His pottery, his dance, his legends, his profile are cultural and good. To my own son the American Indian is a living presence, more vivid than Popeye. To my boy next month isn’t December—it is the Month of the Long Night Moon.

  It’s a funny thing about Indians. Everything about their persons and their habits seems to satisfy the imagination of youngsters. The farther the Indians get from the original, as the years roll on, the more dignity and caste they seem to acquire. There is a certain charm in this tardy deification of the American primitive, but it sometimes strikes me as a little far from life: or maybe I don’t meet the right Indians. The only live Indians I’ve come up against in the past few years were a rather pale group I saw in the Grand Central Galleries, sulkily admiring their own paintings, and an extremely brisk master-of-ceremonies at the Sportsman’s Show, squealing into a loud speaker like a moose.

  Close physical contact with the field of juvenile literature leads me to the conclusion that it must be a lot of fun to write for children—reasonably easy work, perhaps even important work. One side of it that must be exciting is finding a place, a period, or a thing that hasn’t already been written about. This season’s list indicates that the authors set about their task with a will. One of them, as I said before, hit upon the valley of the Euphrates. Another one shut his eyes, opened an atlas, and let his finger fall on the Louisiana bayous. Another, with enviable prescience, managed to turn out the third book of a trilogy on Czechoslovakia. Munro Leaf, scouring the earth for another Ferdinand, wound up in the Scot land of the MacGregors and the Maxine Sullivans. (Such is the staying power of success, you can have this rather flat tale in either the standard or the special de luxe edition.)

  The custom of providing an authentic background for books for the young is almost universal. Authors are most specific. This winter, if a child should yearn to read of an American country town, he can have his choice between a country town in the Eighties and a country town in the Seventies. If his fancy turns to the California scene, he can have the Mexican quarter of Los Angeles or a prune ranch in the Santa Clara Valley. If he dotes on the deep South, he can assuage his hunger in the black section of Charleston, the black section of a small town in Florida, or that Louisiana bayou. If depressions are his hobby, he can enjoy the depression of 1817 on the Ohio River or the depression of 1932 on the Potomac. Let his glance rest on the sea, he can amuse himself with the displacement of a battleship, the misadventures of a yawl in a storm, or, tiring of surface matters, he can go right down into the sea in company with nymphs, scuds, and crayfish. If yaks are his passion, he can have a whimsical London yak or a yak of a more practical sort in Tibet. Modern tidewater Virginia vies with Williamsburg before the Revolution. Ecuador competes with Bali. A mongrel of Kips Bay competes with an outlaw dog on a high windswept tract of Exmoor. Hawaii, Bermuda, South Africa, the Gobi Desert, the Ionian Sea—the authors go journeying on.

  Not less impressive than its geographical scope is the polyglot character of this literature. A child who romps around in the juvenile field today picks up a smattering of many tongues and dialects. I have just been browsing hit and miss in a deep pile of books, opening them in the middle and reading a page or two. The experience has left me gibbering.

  The first book I opened was Exploring With Andrews. “Shortly after we left,” I began, “torrential downpours swept away half a dozen yurts pitched at the bottom of a steep bluff.”

  Without going back to find out what a yurt was, I drifted on into the next book, Soomoon, Boy of Bali. It was my luck to alight on page 40, where, from somewhere in the village, “came the deep, hollow tones of a gamelang. “

  Yurts to you, gamelang, I thought to myself, and picked up the next book. It happened to be Benjie’s Hat.

  “Thee is an abomination, Eliphalet!” cried a character in this book.

  “Who’all ‘bomination?” squeaked Eliphalet.

  “Thee is,” declared Benjie.

  I laid Benjie down and picked up King of the Tinkers, which seemed to have an Irish flavor to it.

  “Sit down here wid me,” piped up a fellow in my new book, “we’ll have a long collogue together.”

  “I won’t mind,” interrupted a Hawaiian in Hawaiian Holiday, “if I can have Moki sit on my lanai and tell me stories until I go to sleep.”

  All right, Moki, I muttered drunkenly, thee can sit on my lanai and we’ll all have a good old-fashioned collogue. Groggy, I picked up Olympiad, a book about ancient Greece, but I found no surcease. In fact I immediately encountered a young athlete who was being scraped with a strigil and taken to the konisterion.

  Before I finished my browsing, I had learned how to count up to three in Siamese (satu, dua, tiga), and I knew that a coati mundi is also called a snookum bear, that bei shung is Chinese for panda, that begashi is Navajo for cows, and that gu-bu-du gu-bu-du is Zulu for bumpity bumpity. Right there I rested.

  Like toys, books for children reflect surely the temper of the period into which they are born. With science dominating life nowadays, books for young people are largely scientific in their approach to their subject matter, whatever it may be. Even the cute animals of the nonsense school move against impeccable backgrounds of natural history; even a female ant who is sufficiently irregular to be able to talk English lays her eggs at the proper time and in the accepted manner.

  In this year of infinite terror, when adults search the sky for trouble and when the desire of everyone is for a safe hole to hide in, it is not surprising to find writers of juveniles glorifying the idea of safety. There are two safety books on my sofa. One is called, somewhat wistfully, Safety Can Be Fun. The other, The Safe-Way Club, struck me as not far short of hilarious. It tells about a neighborhood organization started “by some fun-loving children to prevent accidents” and it contains the priceless sentence: “The Safe-Way Club had two weeks to get ready for the Parent-Teacher Association Meeting, and what busy weeks they were!”

  One laughs in demoniac glee at this sort of wild fantasy, but the laugh has a hollow sound. Books on safety for children by today’s grownup authors somehow lack conviction, and the very want of it is sobering. It is an odd place, this front yard of World Crisis, where adults with blueprints of bombproof shelters sticking from their pants pockets solemnly caution their little ones against running downstairs with lollypops in their mouths.

  I have heard it said that rats collect trinkets, that if you expose a rat’s nest, you may find bright bits of glass and other small desirable objects. A child’s mind is such a repository—full of gems of questionable merit, paste and real, held in storage. What shining jewels shall we contribute this morning, sir, to this amazing collection? Educators and psychologists are full of theory about the young: they profess to know what a child should be taught and how he should be taught it, and they are often quite positive and surly about the matter. Yet the education of our young, in schools and in libraries, is a function of home and state that gives every appearance of having brilliantly failed the world. A Sunday night radio invasion of the little people from Mars is still more credible than a book on the courses of the stars.

  Much of our adult morality, in books and out of them, has a stuffiness unworthy of childhood. Our grown-up conclusions often rest on perilously soft bottom. Try to tell a child even the simplest truths about planetary, cosmical, or spiritual things, and you hear strange echoes in your own head. “Can this be me?” a voice keeps asking, “can this be me?” Dozens of times in the course of trying to act like a parent I have caught myself telling my boy things I didn’t thoroughly comprehend myself, urging him toward conventional attitudes of mind and spirit I only half believed in and would myself gladly chuck overboard.

  Such thoughts trouble you when you delve in children’s books. A book like Johnny Get Your Money’s Worth, for example, a primer for the young skeptic, inducting him into the world of consumers, where he mustn’t even buy a pencil without biting it to see if it’s made of cedar. Or a sycophantic book like Favorite Stories of Famous Children (when interviewed Miss Temple wore white linen with hand embroidered triangles in Alice Blue). Or the group of youth novels, which seem almost like parodies of the novel form, and whose expurgated account of life is an insult to the intelligence of adolescents.

  A large amount of the published material is dull, prosy stuff, by writers who mistake oddity for fantasy and whose wildly beating wings never get them an inch off the ground. (Incidentally, one of the few books that struck me as being in the true spirit of nonsense is one called The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, by Dr. Seuss.) Some of the books are patronizing, some are mushy, some are grand. Almost all are beautifully illustrated. From them you can discover how to build everything from a Chippewa water drum to a pair of undersea goggles. The exciting thing about them is that, whatever else they are, they are free to be read, untainted by anything but the rigors and joys of pure creation. From Bumblebuzz to the Boy Scouts Yearbook of Fun in Fiction, there’s nothing that can be construed as government propaganda.

  The gamut of life must seem splendidly wide to children whose books these are. They may begin with Little Orphan Willie Mouse, but they must end with Windows of the World, whose unsparing author fixes them with his eye and asks:

  And if you are in the trenches, what can you hope for? If you’re a man between 18 to 40, that’s probably where you’ll be. You may be burned to death by flame-throwers, riddled by machine-gun bullets, pulverized by hurtling bombs, chewed by rats in the night, suffocated in leaking gas masks, thrust through your eyes, chest, or belly ‘with triple-bladed bayonets, poisoned with drinking water polluted by unburied bodies.

  From such macabre interrogation I had to turn away, being no longer a child. Luckily I found solace in a good wholesome juvenile mystery, that began: “The long, luxurious Rolls Royce, glittering with chromium and enamel, slid over the crest of Cajon Pass and shot down the smooth incline leading into the desert. The hour was sunset.”

  Sunset in Cajon Pass, and a Rolls Royce under me! This was more like it!

  [ December 1938 ]

  PROGRESS AND CHANGE

  My friends in the city tell me that the Sixth Avenue El is coming down, but that’s a hard thing for anyone to believe who once lived in its fleeting and audible shadow. The El was the most distinguished and outstanding vein on the town’s neck, a varicosity tempting to the modern surgeon. One wonders whether New York can survive this sort of beauty operation, performed in the name of civic splendor and rapid transit.

  A resident of the city grew accustomed to the heavenly railroad that swung implausibly in air, cutting off his sun by day, wandering in and out of his bedchamber by night. The presence of the structure and the passing of the trains were by all odds the most pervasive of New York’s influences. Here was a sound that, if it ever got in the conch of your ear, was ineradicable—forever singing, like the sea. It punctuated the morning with brisk tidings of repetitious adventure, and it accompanied the night with sad but reassuring sounds of life-going-on—the sort of threnody that cricket and katydid render for suburban people sitting on screened porches, the sort of lullaby the whippoorwill sends up to the Kentucky farm wife on a summer evening.

  I spent a lot of time once, doing nothing in the vicinity of Sixth Avenue. Naturally I know something of the El’s fitful charm. It was, among other things, the sort of railroad you would occasionally ride just for the hell of it, a higher existence into which you would escape unconsciously and without destination. Let’s say you had just emerged from the Child’s on the west side of Sixth Avenue between 14th and 15th Streets, where you had had a bowl of vegetable soup and a stack of wheat cakes. The syrup still was a cloying taste on your tongue. You intended to go back to the apartment and iron a paragraph or wash a sock. But miraculously, at the corner of 14th, there rose suddenly in front of you a flight of marble stairs all wrapt in celestial light, with treads of shining steel and risers richly carved with the names of the great, and a canopy overhead where danced the dust in the shafts of golden sunshine. As in a trance, you mounted steadily to the pavilion above, where there was an iron stove and a man’s hand visible through a mousehole. And the first thing you knew you were in South Ferry, with another of life’s inestimable journeys behind you—and before you the dull, throbbing necessity of getting uptown again.

  For a number of years I went to work every morning on the uptown trains of the Sixth Avenue El. I had it soft, because my journey wasn’t at the rush hour and Ì often had the platform of the car to myself. It was a good way to get where you wanted to go, looking down on life at just the right speed, and peeking in people’s windows, where the sketchy pantomime of potted plant and half-buttoned undershirt and dusty loft provided a curtain raiser to the day. The railroad was tolerant and allowed its passengers to loll outdoors if they wished; and on mornings when the air was heady that was the place to be—with the sudden whiff of the candy factory telling you that your ride was half over, and the quick eastward glance through 24th Street to check your time with the clock in the Metropolitan Tower, visible for the tenth part of a second.

  The El always seemed to me to possess exactly the right degree of substantiality: it seemed reasonably strong and able to carry its load, and competent with that easy slovenly competence of an old drudge; yet it was perceptibly a creature of the clouds, the whole structure vibrating ever so slightly following the final grasping success of the applied brake. The El had giddy spells, too—days when a local train would shake off its patient, plodding manner and soar away in a flight of sheer whimsy, skipping stations in a drunken fashion and scaring the pants off everybody. To go roaring past a scheduled stop, hell bent for 53rd Street and the plunge into space, was an experience that befell every El rider more than once. On this line a man didn’t have to be a locomotophobe to suffer from visions of a motorman’s lifeless form slumped over an open throttle. And if the suspense got too great and you walked nervously to the front of the train the little window in the booth gave only the most tantalizing view of the driver—three inert fingers of a gloved hand, or a Daily News wedged in some vital cranny.

  One thing I always admired about the El was the way it tormented its inexperienced customers. Veterans like myself, approaching a station stop, knew to a fraction of an inch how close it was advisable to stand to the little iron gates on the open type cars. But visitors to town had no such information. When the train halted and the guard, pulling his two levers, allowed the gates to swing in and take the unwary full in the stomach, there was always a dim pleasure in it for the rest of us. Life has little enough in the way of reward; these small moments of superiority are not to be despised.

  The El turned the Avenue into an arcade. That, in a way, was its chief contribution. It made Sixth Avenue as distinct from Fifth as Fifth is from Jones Street. Its pillars, straddling the car tracks in the long channel of the night, provided the late cruising taxicab with the supreme challenge, and afforded the homing pedestrian, his wine too much with him, forest sanctuary and the friendly accommodation of a tree.

  Of course I have read about the great days of the El, when it was the railroad of the élite and when financial giants rode elegantly home from Wall Street in its nicely appointed coaches. But I’m just as glad I didn’t meet the El until after it had lost its money. Its lazy crescendos, breaking into one’s dreams, will always stick in the mind—and the soiled hands of the guards on the bellcords, and the brusque, husky-throated bells that had long ago lost their voices, cuing each other along the whole length of the train. Yes, at this distance it’s hard to realize that the Sixth Avenue El is just a problem in demolition. I can’t for the life of me imagine what New York will have to offer in its place. It will have to be something a good deal racier, a good deal more open and aboveboard, than a new subway line.

  I suppose a man can’t ask railroads to stand still. For twenty or thirty years the railroads of America stood about as still as was consistent with swift transportation. The gas mantles were removed and electric lights installed, but outside of that the cars remained pretty much the same. It’s only in the past couple of years that the railroads, fretting over the competition from busses and planes, have set about transforming their interiors into cocktail lounges, ballrooms, and modern apartments.