Caboose Thoughts and Celebrities

By Timothy Foote

It has been glumly observed that a children's book, like cat food, is rarely bought by the actual consumer. Probably not even Ralph Nader could correct this situation. But what it means is that young readers are peculiarly at the mercy of pedagogues, packagers and harried parents, especially in the U.S., where juvenile books are a $150 million-a-year business. This year commercial fashions--some new, some old--are once more depressingly in evidence.

Tomes for tots are still dominated by the Art Director Look. What small children love best is plenty of handsomely presented visual detail, so that they can pore over a book again and again. What they keep getting is sweeping, uncluttered spreads in yummy pastels, or Neanderthal collages depicting, say, one mouse, two frogs and a lily pad, accompanied by perhaps seven fatuous words per page. Pleasant enough, but nothing in it to justify the price or keep the mind alive, even for a single rereading.

Trying to correct not the slightness but the sunniness, a number of publishers now seek relevance by bringing out urban ghetto stories, but many, alas, are daubed in dark, impressionistic slabs of color so that the characters look as if they were under water in some murky river like the Hudson.

Books for older children are also a problem. Many are still written by English authors whose upper-class vocabulary, easy for a literate nine-year-old in Britain, is at a level sometimes not reached by American children until they are older. As a result, all that wholesome British chatter about ripping adventures during the long hols seems, well, childish--and alien corn to boot. To provide up-to-date reading, American juvenile writers have for some years been drearily confronting such Now subjects as sex, violence and drugs.

Yankee Enginuity. Their basic failure is not choice of subject but lack of talent, and the error of putting message before magic. Anyone considering the folly of seeking topicality in children's books might ponder the evolution of one railroad theme in books for toddlers. The literary genre began with The Little Engine That Could (Platt & Munk; 1930), an Establishment epic in which a coal-burning hero learned to serve the military-industrial complex by applying Yankee enginuity ("I think I can, I think I can ... I know I can, I know I can . . ."). Then came Tootle (Golden Press; 1946), who almost flunked out of locomotive school because he did not want to run on the capitalist rails, taking to the meadows near by. This revolutionary behavior was corrected by the good people of Lower Trainswitch, who conditioned him by waving red stop flags at him in the fields until he learned that true freedom lies in conformity.

In 1953 came The Little Red Caboose (Golden Press), who resented the status of "the big black engine, puffing and chuffing" way up at the front of the train. But when the Little Red Caboose saves the train by slamming on its brakes on a hill, it is reconciled to an inferior status. Now we have Bill Feet's The Caboose Who Got Loose (Houghton Mifflin; $4.95). Not an "it" but a "she" longing to be liberated, Katy Caboose not only resents the "proud and powerful" male-chauvinist engine; she hates the noise and the jolting and the smoke, and longs instead to become "something quiet and simple like a lovely elm tree." Eventually Katy flies off the rails to lodge between two tall hemlocks, a permanent one-woman commune for birds and squirrels.

Another commercial trend is juvenile creations by celebrities. In Mandy (Harper & Row; $4.95), Julie Andrews tells about an eponymous orphan girl who longs for a family, finds a deserted cottage outside the orphanage grounds, and is adopted by the lord of the local manor. Though Mandy is selling like The Whole Earth Catalog, it mainly proves that Julie Andrews has fondly read The Secret Garden and deserves every success as a singer and film actress.

How the Mouse Was Hit on the Head by a Stone and So Discovered the World (Doubleday; $5.95) is an effort by the renowned Swiss educational philosopher Jean Piaget. In a chesty preface, he explains that he worked with Illustrator Etienne Delessert, as well as "a good psychologist" and 23 children, aged five and six, who were asked to approve or disapprove every line of the story as it went along. The children, Piaget reports, were "keenly interested" and "sometimes even laughed a lot." Perhaps How the Mouse etc. loses in translation. In English, anyway, it simply suggests what Piaget--the foremost exponent of adjusting the process of learning to the individual--should have known: individuals can write books; committees can't.

The other celebrities, dead or alive, include Eugene Ionesco, Nobel Poet Miguel Asturias, Federico Garcia Lorca, Donald Barthelme, Willie Morris, R.F. Delderfield, Anne Sexton, Christina Rossetti, Ernest Gaines and Nathaniel Benchley. Some of their juvenile works are included below.

For the very young:

Amos & Boris by William Steig. Unpaged. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $4.50. A seagoing rodent and a whale sign a long-term mutual-assistance pact in a variation on the old lion-and-the-mouse caper. In an off year, the year's best.

Father Fox's Pennyrhymes by Clyde and Wendy Watson. 56 pages. Thomas Y. Crowell. $4.50. A clever, cheerful, jazzy Vermont general store of a book. Foxes, rabbits and such go sashaying around in galluses, corncobs and calico, all presented in comic-strip scenes, sight gags and family gatherings. The text is a lacing of verse that ranges from nonsense to nostalgia.

Bear Circus by William Pene du Bois. 48 pages. Viking. $4.95. The author can do more with 26 koala bears in a gum tree, a plague of locusts and a pocketful of friendly kangaroos than you could imagine. Scenic but thin.

Violetta by Erich Hoelle. 39 pages. Harvey House. $3.95. A svelte Belle Epoque horseless carriage rolls down through the century, from snug childhood as a famous racer to old age in a vintage car museum. Automotive anthropomorphism at its most arch, but well preserved.

Theodore and the Talking Mushroom by Leo Lionni. Unpaged. Pantheon. $3.95. A mouse with an inferiority complex uses a mysterious mushroom for an Adlerian power play that fails. Leo Lionni is a well-known designer and ex-art director, whose collages, this time out, would scare a hoptoad. But anyone who figured that a talking mushroom would just naturally say "quirp" isn't to be lightly overlooked.

The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine by Donald Barthelme. Unpaged. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $4.95. Fantasist Barthelme goes through his own looking glass and comes back with a young Alice named Mathilda, some elegant chatter, "a hithering thithering Djinn," and a Chinese lunch that includes sweet and sour ice cream. Most of the pictures--cutouts culled from Victorian-style engravings --are too static for children, though the storm scene (from Gustave Dore's illustrations for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner) is splendid.

For the not so young:

Good Old Boy by Willie Morris. 143 pages. Harper & Row. $3.95. In North Toward Home, the former editor in chief of Harper's told about a grownup visit to his tiny home town, Yazoo City, Miss., back in 1967. This book, written for his son who lives in New York, celebrates Morris' boyhood in Yazoo before World War II. It is drenched in crawdads, squirrel dumplings, Delta woodlands, and Peck's-bad-boy jokes. But Morris eases out of realism into fantasy and back with no strain, and it's nice to think that somebody more contemporary than Huck Finn could remember it all that way.

Too Few for Drums by R.F. Delderfield. 253 pages. Simon & Schuster. $5.95. The author has had two more or less adult books (God Is an Englishman, Theirs Was the Kingdom) on the bestseller lists. This one skillfully concentrates on a slightly different audience, using a story about class consciousness, a camp follower with a heart of gold, courage, and coming of age in the British army's retreat from Spain during the Napoleonic Wars. A discreet amour in a moonlit glade is an agreeable throwback to the decorous ways of Horatio Hornblower.

The Pair of Shoes by Aline Glasgow. Pictures by Symeon Shimin. Unpaged. Dial. $4.95. A spare parable about poverty in a family of Polish Jews that turns upon who gets to use its only pair of shoes. With fine pencil and wash pictures, it briefly reaches a rare moment of emotional power and wisdom.

A Long Day in November by Ernest J. Gaines. 137 pages. Dial. $4.95. Gaines (TIME, May 10) is one of the best writers in America, of any color or persuasion. This book, adapted from the longest story in his fine 1968 collection Bloodline, tells about a Louisiana black boy and his young parents, who are separated because the wife objects to her gadabout husband's secondhand car, coming together again only when he burns it up publicly to get himself back into his wife's good graces. Painful, hilarious and humane, it is so good a story that the illustrations, which are not bad, seem like a desecration.

Gone and Back by Nathaniel Benchley. 144 pages. Harper & Row. $3.50. The way west, from Nantucket to the Oklahoma territory, told as a tale of comedy, confusion, hopeless ignorance and random death. Though it has its moments, the new realism applied to U.S. history is thin even for a juvenile. The author appears to have read Thomas Berger's Little Big Man.

Friend Monkey by P.L. Travers. 284 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $6.95. The first book in nine years by the creator of Mary Poppins. Despite great expectations, it turns out to be a curious, poky narrative that starts and ends on a tropical isle, concerns a dotty Victorian family, a monkey and a band of men who steal animals from the zoo and smuggle them back to their native haunts. It might make a fine movie, but in print it is very trying indeed.

Sour Land by William H. Armstrong. 117 pages. Harper & Row. $3.95. The author sometimes seems to be listening in on his own homely eloquence, and he can be more sentimental than is the fashion. His fine book, however, starts with the death of a farm mother and ends with the murder of a Negro teacher who helps her husband and small children live on without her. Armstrong deals evenly and gently with love and death and the land, never exploiting pain for show but never forgetting it either. To considerable effect, his black teacher quotes Lincoln: "Sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it."

The Cuckoo Tree by Joan Aiken. 314 pages. Doubleday. $4.95. The creator of one genuine miniature masterpiece (The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, 1963), Poet Conrad Aiken's daughter this time carries on the adventures of an 18th century tomboy with the preposterous name of Dido Twite (see Nightbirds on Nantucket and Black Hearts in Battersea). Before the doings are over, the girl has helped foil a dastardly Hanoverian plot to collapse St. Paul's Cathedral and put a German prince on the British throne. The author is better at creating villains than anybody since Dickens, and as good as Georgette Heyer at peppering her prose with antique words. Readers who hang in there soon take such things as "blobtongues" (squealers) and "mouldywarps" (moles) in stride.

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