Of Pigs and Potions

When my son was five, he came home from school one afternoon looking surprisingly glum. I wondered if he’d had a dust‑up with another kid or been chastised by his teacher. Before I could inquire, he looked at me mournfully and said, “Something terrible happened today.” He paused dramatically. “Charlotte died.” I knew immediately that he was grieving for the barnyard spider who befriends Wilbur, the runt of the sow’s litter in E. B. White’s masterpiece, Charlotte’s Web.

Together we had read White’s much more benign Stuart Little, but I was waiting until my son was older before tackling darker themes of difference, death, and bereavement. Nowadays, I suppose, some parents would be storming the school, insisting that Charlotte’s Web is too frightening, too sophisticated, too whatever for such young children, but back then I watched and waited and reached for my tattered copy.

My son and I both shed a few tears that afternoon and engaged in some damp hugs over the demise of the sagacious arachnid who is Wilbur’s friend and defender. And then we settled down with hot chocolate so I could read aloud the consoling final chapter. Many years have passed since then — my son is now the father of three avid readers of dark fantasies — but I have never forgotten the power of prose to engage the imagination and empathy of small children, not to mention their elders.

Sam Leith, the literary editor of the British weekly The Spectator, tells a similar story in his engaging and chatty study of children’s reading, The Haunted Wood. As Leith was making dinner one evening, he heard a “yelp of distress” from his daughter’s room. It was “the sort of howl of pure pain that makes you drop a knife and bolt upstairs three steps at a time before you’re even aware you’re doing it.” There she was, almost eight, “sitting on the edge of her bed, crying as if she’d never stop,” and holding a copy of Charlotte’s Web. “She had been brought to tears of real anguish by a series of words on a page, written by a timid man who’d lived and died on another continent years before she was even born, describing a series of events that never happened to a character who never existed.”

Even as an adult, I was on edge from the foreboding tone of the novel’s opening sentence: “ ‘Where’s Papa going with that ax?’ said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.” But interestingly, in an early draft, White had eased into his classic 1952 tale, according to Scott Elledge, who reproduced a manuscript page in E. B. White: A Biography, from 1984. “A barn can have a horse in it, and a barn can have a cow in it, and a barn can have hens scratching the chaff and swallows flying in and out through the door — but if a barn hasn’t got a pig in it, it is hardly worth talking about,” the famed New Yorker writer tried at one point. “I am very glad to say that Mr. Zuckerman’s barn had a pig in it, and therefore I feel free to talk about it as much as I want to. The pig’s name was Wilbur. He was small and white, except when he was dirty — then he was small and brown. Wilbur did not get dirty on purpose.”

Would that nostalgic scene from White’s own upbringing have worked as well as the police procedural style of the final version that propels Fern into action? Probably not, though it is too late to do a focus group analysis on the two openings. I’m sharing the draft, which Leith doesn’t include in his study, because it reflects many other tidbits that he does incorporate — snippets that frequently made me put his book down so I could read or reread an author that he had provoked or intrigued me about. Consequently, it has taken me a somewhat long time to finish Leith’s extensive study of children’s reading from the “deep past of the oral tradition” to Kim, Peter Pan, Alice, Toad and Badger and Mole, Narnia, The Lord of the Rings, The Dark Is Rising, Harry Potter, and beyond.

Leith takes great exception to Martin Amis’s sneering comment in 2011 that he wouldn’t condescend to write a children’s book unless he had suffered a “serious brain injury.” Children’s literature, as separate from adult reading, has evolved over the centuries as childhood itself has emerged as a separate life stage, but that doesn’t mean children and adults necessarily read different types of books. Typically adults write for children by drawing upon their own memories, traumas, and experiences. Many of the authors Leith discusses have watched siblings and parents die, have been abused or abandoned, have struggled with traditional gender roles, or have endured racial discrimination. None of this is simple stuff. It is profound and often harrowing. The fact that kids can fall in love with such lowly creatures as a pig destined for the slaughterhouse and a wriggly spider more likely to be squished underfoot than celebrated as a genius provides life lessons for all of us, especially when delivered in eloquent and haunting prose.

Leith borrows his title from a line in W. H. Auden’s chilling poem “September 1, 1939,” a response to the outbreak of the Second World War. “The lights must never go out,” the poet implores. “Lest we should see where we are, / Lost in a haunted wood, / Children afraid of the night.” This “history of childhood reading” is about the many ways the lights have stayed on over the decades, as adults read aloud or as children read by themselves a broad swath of fairy tales, sagas, mysteries, and adventures, ranging from instructive to nonsensical to subversive.

In his own reading, Leith, who tends to be neither judgmental nor restrictive, is demonstrably empathetic to lonely and bereaved children. He raises the question of whether Rudyard Kipling is a racist and then defends him against George Orwell’s contention that he was “a jingo imperialist” who was “morally insensitive” and “aesthetically disgusting.” The truth, Leith feels, is much more complicated: “To be caught between two worlds and two versions of childhood was Kipling’s own experience as a son of the Raj.” Born in Bombay in 1865, Kipling did not speak English as his first language, was raised by South Asian servants, and was shipped half a world away to England at age five to be looked after by bullying strangers before being incarcerated in a boarding school. “The experience is a defining one in his work.” So is the era of thrusting British imperialism in which he lived. Instead of accepting blanket condemnations, as so many do nowadays, Leith wants us to revisit Just So Stories, Kim, and The Jungle Book and make up our own minds. Even Orwell, in a blistering 1941 essay, urged critics to read Kipling’s poetry and journalism before condemning him.

What a delightful meander The Haunted Wood has been. In the chapter on Kenneth Grahame and The Wind in the Willows —“one of the most hermetic worlds of innocence in the whole history of children’s literature”— Leith asserts that the story’s “idyllic quality is in proportion to the personal unhappiness from which it arose.” There are no women in the book, first published in 1908, and as Grahame himself said to Theodore Roosevelt, one of his biggest fans, it is “clean of the clash of sex.” Instead, it is characterized by “unbreakable male friendships, amiable idleness and a pantheistic union with the natural world”— a world that is at odds with the dreadful one in which the author existed.

Grahame’s mother died when he was five, his father abandoned him for the bottle, and he and his two siblings were put into the care of their “chilly” maternal grandmother. As an adult, he had a high-powered job under a tyrannical boss at the Bank of England, a disastrous and largely sexless marriage to a much younger woman, and a doting relationship with his son, Alastair, “a conceited, spiteful, and spoilt little brat” who killed himself during his first term at Oxford by stepping in front of a train. Grahame may well have been “a repressed homosexual,” Leith notes, in an era when being out of the closet could land you in jail.

The more I read about the unhappy Grahame and the idyllic world he created by celebrating male friendships, the more I was reminded of the books that Arnold Lobel wrote and illustrated about the unlikely bond between Frog and Toad and the loneliness of Owl sipping his tear-water tea at night. Lobel too was closeted — but in a different era. He came out to his wife and children in the 1980s, and now his books are celebrated as iconic LGBTQ+ stories. My children and my grandchildren have all loved the Frog and Toad series, but I never thought the title characters could be gay until now. Different, yes, but only in the way that Wilbur and Charlotte are different. I interviewed Lobel in the mid-’80s, when I was a children’s book columnist. How I regret that I never asked him about Grahame and whether The Wind in the Willows was an influence on his own work.

A fan of J. K. Rowling’s oft-maligned Harry Potter series — which not only snagged children and their parents but transformed the publishing industry in the late 1990s — Leith says it “caught the first great wave of online fan fiction,” with sites that became an “ecosystem” for devotees “to respond to and extend Rowling’s world.” As for the author, he describes her as “one of the great magpies,” who created “a fantastically adept mash‑up of some of the most enduring tropes and genres in children’s writing.” Her books are among those that “consciously and openly . . . repurpose fairytale motifs” and that “adapt writers of the generation with whom their authors themselves grew up.” As a result, they “swim happily in the great torrent of school stories, portal fantasies, pirates and witches, and explorers that lead up to their publication.”

It’s easy to spot Leith’s favourite tropes from that encomium, but my own relationship with the orphaned Harry Potter is more complicated. The publicity strategy meant that journalists could not get advance review copies, so we had to speed-read and write faster than Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff — often with equally disastrous results. On one occasion, my then employer, the Globe and Mail, was slapped with an injunction after a headline rashly promoted my upcoming review the day before it was due to appear. All of this is to say that my retention of the series is minimal, especially since my kids were teenagers by then and well able to gobble up the books on their own. By the time I might have read them aloud to my grandchildren, the movies were being released. That’s why, when my twin granddaughters decided to dress up as Fleur Delacour this past Halloween, I needed a briefing to explain her francophone heritage and eventual marriage to Bill, the oldest brother of Harry’s pal Ron Weasley. As for cancelling Rowling because of her alleged transphobia, Leith notes that the criticism on the progressive left is coming mainly from the generation that grew up loving the books.

Rather than dipping back into Harry’s wizardly adventures over his seven-year stint at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, though, I am now going to tackle a work that got lost in the rumpus over Harry Potter and in the deadline-driven chaos that often precludes reading for its own pleasures. I’m talking about Philip Pullman, the Oxford schoolteacher, and his trilogy His Dark Materials. Pullman, who doesn’t consider himself a children’s writer, read C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books as an adult and was repulsed by their overt Christianity. Never mind that they have enthralled generations, he dismissed them in a 2013 interview with Leith as “dodgy” and “unpleasant,” because they “embody a worldview that takes for granted things like racism, misogyny and a profound cultural conservatism that is totally unexamined.”

Instead of launching a cancel campaign, as some former Rowling fans have done, Pullman wrote a high-octane literary riposte to Lewis based on Milton’s Paradise Lost. The result, according to Leith, is an “imaginative multiverse [that] grapples to bring together concepts in theology and in theoretical physics” to produce adventure stories that straddle science fiction and fantasy. “The movement of these books is always toward enlargement: an enlarged vision of the world, an enlarged vision of human possibility, and a struggle against the mental straitjackets into which power seeks to confine its subjects.” Bring it on, and I’ll see if I agree.

I wish Leith had not given such short shrift to picture books, which to me have always represented the beginnings of a dual conversation between adult and child — because as one decodes the words, the other reads the illustrations. And, alas, there are no Canadian materials in what he admits is a very British analysis. To be fair, Kipling’s Just So Stories, which Leith’s father devoured in South Africa and then shared with him in southern England, includes some of the same tales I delighted in reading to my own children in Toronto. We have a common language and heritage, if not location. That’s why I gave my ten-year-old grandson a boxed set of Pullman’s first trilogy for his recent birthday. I’m hoping we can compare notes, and while I am unlikely to have the pleasure of a snuggle as I read the books aloud to him before bedtime, at least I will be spared the shame of being discovered after lights out — reading ahead in my own bed, as his father did, so long ago.