In “Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult,” Bruce Handy does as his title promises, proceeding through children’s literature like someone determined to cook every Julia Child recipe. But since, of course, the number of children’s books out there far exceeds the number of Child’s soufflé and marbled steak dishes, Handy selects a few titles to represent each age, from babydom on up to whatever it is children become before they become us. Some of these are from his own childhood, some are books he read to his (still growing) children, and some seem chosen to answer a curiosity about what so-called girl books really are. This not-quite-method leaves the book occasionally feeling dutiful — but mostly not. “Wild Things” doesn’t have much of an argument to make other than its premise that we should take children’s literature seriously, which I think many people already do, and yet the book succeeds wonderfully, not so much as an argument but as an eccentric essay, and an emanation of spirit.
The trivia alone offers quite a bit of joy. Maurice Sendak altered his original plan for “Where the Wild Horses Are” because he lacked proficiency in equine anatomy. Also: L. Frank Baum’s first publication was a guide to breeding Hamburg chickens. Margaret Wise Brown of “Goodnight Moon” fame gave just one piece of visual instruction to her illustrator, Clement Hurd — a photograph of Goya’s “Red Boy.” And Theodor Geisel (a.k.a. Dr. Seuss) not only worked on the screenplay for “Rebel Without a Cause,” but also tried, early on, to make his fortune with an invention called the Infantograph — a machine that used images of prospective parents to predict what their offspring would look like.
But as a consistently intelligent and funny companion, Handy offers considerably more than charismatic trivia. He doesn’t just let you know that Brown’s “Runaway Bunny” — an unsettling book you may remember, in which a little bunny can never escape his mother, but is supposed to feel good about that— is based on an obsessive medieval love ballad in which the lover follows the beloved into the grave. He also talks through the book’s structural affinity to Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint.” That journey into the question of girl books leads Handy to the worthy observation that while boy books tend to end with boys still being boys, girl books sometimes let girls, or lead them to, become women. And in pointing out how classic girl books aren’t always as conventionally girlish as you may think, he notes of the “Little House on the Prairie” series not only that Laura relishes playing, as though it were a balloon, with an inflated pig bladder that belonged to the animal her father has just skinned before her eyes, but also that “from the denatured vantage point of 21st-century urban fatherhood, where bantering with the super as he fixes your toilet counts as manly self-sufficiency, Pa cuts an intimidating figure: Not only does he feed and shelter his family using his own two hands … he also makes his own bullets.”
The early chapters read as Handy-the-adult thinking about kids’ books; then it starts to seem more like Handy-the-parent, watching the kids in these books — and, by proxy, his own kids — getting older. Eventually we start to feel more fully the child ever-present in the adults who are both reading and writing kids’ books. I hadn’t known that C. S. Lewis, an Oxford don, didn’t publish the first of the Narnia books until he was 51, or that he seemed never to have gotten over his own childhood. Handy quotes Lewis on his own memory of reading the Beatrix Potter book “Squirrel Nutkin” when he was young: It “troubled me with what I can only describe as the Idea of Autumn.”
The subject of childhood, even more than old age, seems always to be about its ending. My favorite chapter was the last one — about death in children’s literature, but also about endings generally. Handy looks most closely at “Charlotte’s Web” by E. B. White, with its powerful opening sentence: “‘Where’s Papa going with that ax?’ said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.” Young Fern runs to tell her father that his planned killing of the runt pig is “the most terrible case of injustice I ever heard of.” The runt, Wilbur, is of course saved, but Handy dwells on Fern’s father’s reaction to his daughter’s plea: He gets a “queer look” and appears almost ready to cry himself. Handy reads this look as (maybe) the father having a brief, sad sense of Fern as a child for now, but not forever.
There is also a long quote from the “benediction” offered to Wilbur by the spider Charlotte, his in-effect mother, shortly before she dies: “You will live, safe and secure, Wilbur. Nothing can harm you now. These autumn days will shorten and grow cold. The leaves will shake loose … All these sights and sounds and smells will be yours to enjoy, Wilbur — this lovely world, these precious days.” Once again Handy focuses on the parent-figure as much as on the child. Charlotte dies because that is what happens after her egg sac is spun, her spider-babies ready to be born; it’s the cycle of spider life. Handy says that when he finished reading the book to his kids, they said, “What are you crying about, Dad? Wilbur has all these new friends now.” We, the readers, know those Handy children won’t always have that child-resilience, that soon autumn will get to them, too.
The Handy children’s appearances are brief but disproportionately memorable. Just as almost all kids’ books, with their frequent appearances by talking animals, are part emotional masquerade, “Wild Things,” too, is in disguise. It reads as a companionable romp through all the stories you sometimes tire of reading to your own children. But like “The Runaway Bunny,” it’s really a gently obsessive tale, a man gathering up so many words and ideas as if to create a magical stay against his own children growing up.
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