New Books for Children

by HELEN DORE BOYLSTON and JANE COBB

ADULTS who deal with books for children are eternally confronted with two problems: what, in real literature, they should read, and how much unexpurgated life is good for them.

The juvenile writers of today make every effort to keep their stories encouraging and optimistic, while the English departments of our schools endorse Silas Marner, The Scarlet Letter, and Charles Dickens’s merry account of a little boy named Oliver Twist. Who is on the right track?

We were stimulated into a consideration of this on receiving a new book by Stephen W. Mender. Mr. Mender is the author of such firstclass books as Jonathan Goes West and River of the Wolves. His new story is entitled Whaler ‘Round the Horn, and in the opening chapter a mysterious stranger urges young Rodney Glenn to ship aboard a whaler. This is reasonable in view of the period and locale, but the stranger goes on to speak of a white whale. Then, as the chapter ends, Rodney asks the stranger’s name. The reply is, “Call me Ishmael.”

As neither the white whale nor the stranger’s reply has any significance unless one has read Moby Dick, we turned to the front of the book for Mr. Meader’s explanation, and found ourselves in hearty agreement with most of it. Moby Dick, he maintains, is not, properly speaking, a boy’s book at all. It has a depth and sweep far beyond the understanding of an adolescent — and as far as we are concerned, we feel that it shouldn’t be read by anyone much under thirty.

Mr. Meader, however, ends his foreword with the hope that his book will lead young people to a fuller enjoyment of Moby Dick — a hope which is both inconsistent and impossible. Whaler ‘Round the Horn is not a come-on for Moby Dick, nor any preparation for it, despite the fleeting and unnecessary appearance of Melville in the first chapter. The nature of Captain Ahab’s tragedy, with its elements of implacable hatred, terror, and defeat, cannot be transposed into terms comprehensible to the young — as Mr. Meader well knows. He has written a fine book which doesn’t need to hang on Melville’s coattails.

We wonder, indeed, if any device should be used to lure children into reading adult books before they are ready for them. Certainly, it is unfortunate that the efforts of Jane Austen and Thackeray should be forcibly turned into schoolbooks. We have always admired Bernard Shaw for refusing to allow such a thing to happen to his plays, and he might — or might not — be interested to know that we came upon his collected works by accident when we were fourteen, and thought them wonderful.

On the other hand, we have never recovered from a Christmas Eve when we were told that we were to hear the ultimate in Christmas stories. The air was scented with pine, holly hung at the windows, flames danced in the fireplace - and somebody was going to read to us. We settled back in a warm anticipation which turned to cold horror with the first paragraph. The story began: “Marley was dead. . . . Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.” We burst into frightened tears.

And this brings us to a discussion not so much of the censorship of books as of the censorship of life in the modern juvenile. The Victorians were far more hard-boiled than we are in their attitude toward the young. They eliminated sex, true enough, but a run-through of the works of Louisa M. Alcott will reveal everything from drunkenness to death. It is doubtful if any book for children written today would include so harrowing a scene as the death of Beth in Little Women, or, for that matter, the scene in Rose in Bloom in which Cousin Charlie turns up roaring and passes out cold.

We are not complaining. Nobody, we are convinced, was ever corrupted by Rose in Bloom, but it does give us pause —to ask what should be left out of books for young people. We think we have two answers, at least. Defeat and despair are not proper topics for pre-adolescents; and as for the teen-agers, if they must encounter unredeemed tragedy in their reading, let us hope that they will not be able to identify themselves with it.