Topics of Children’s Literature Growing Up : Writers Discuss the Perils, Pleasures of Young Adult Fiction

Norma Klein made a quick visual trip around the room. High above Central Park, the little meeting room in the St. Moritz Hotel was maybe half full. Only the few token men present kept it from being an all-female audience.

“Of course,” Klein said. “It’s always this way. It’s a ghetto.”

Then again, as moderator Herb Kohl admitted, it had been a bit of a battle even to see this panel on “Children’s Literature and the Imagination of the Child” included on the schedule of this week’s 48th congress of PEN International, the worldwide writers’ group. To put it politely, even the writers’ community is not always inclined to view children’s literature as real literature.

A Negative Bias

The general opinion, Kohl said, is that “If you write for young adults you are writing children’s literature. If you write for adults you are writing literature.”

The result is that around the world, writers of books, poems, essays or magazine articles aimed at children are subjected to a kind of collective inferiority complex.

“Absolutely,” Klein said. “And it makes me apoplectic.”

Now, Norma Klein has, in the words of moderator Kohl, “written more books than I can count.” Young Americans devour them, but critics have branded them “adult books”--”not in the sense of plain brown wrappers,” Kohl said, but because they deal with grown-up themes, real-life topics such as lesbian mothers, premarital sex, dating without parental permission, male and female body worship in Playgirl and Playboy.

In that sense Klein is not unlike fellow panelist Walter Dean Myers, whose multiracial characters encounter nothing but social realities, subjects that quite unabashedly tell the truth--that life is not always a total fairy tale--to young people.

“When I first started teaching in the ‘50s,” Kohl said, “people would not even have allowed his books in the classroom.”

Indeed, Kohl added quite admiringly of Myers’ lengthy list of titles, “His are the kind of books that would be privileged to be burned by the Moral Majority.”

Which brought Kohl back to the topic at hand. Especially in these “Falwellian” times, Kohl said, “I am particularly concerned over the ways in which the state controls and attempts to control literature for children.”

In a way, Kohl said, children, at least in North America, are subjected to a kind of “involuntary incarceration for 17 or 18 years.” Except for the rare self-motivated child--the child willing to buck the system, the child willing to risk official reprisals if he dares to explore his environment--children get what they are handed. What happens, Kohl said, is that “we are limiting their knowledge through approved, state-controlled titles.” Though few would attach such a nasty label to this process, “it really is a form of censorship,” Kohl said. “Certain titles are considered to be unfit in our schools.

“Right now in the United States there is what I could call major covert censorship of ideas,” Kohl said. “You can write anything you’d like, but you may not get it published.” Or, “you can get it published, but you may not get it in the schools.”

Or, as Norma Klein found out, you may find yourself on a list of literary personae non gratae.

“Perhaps one of the proudest moments of my career,” Klein said, “was in 1982 when I read in Publishers Weekly that I was one of the most banned writers in America.

“My first thought,” she said, “was that I would never be in such company again.”

After all, Klein and fellow young-adult-audience writer Judy Blume were the only two women on the list. Along with Blume and Klein, the living writers on the most-banned list were Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Richard Brautigan and Kurt Vonnegut. Joining them in the verboten category were D. H. Lawrence, Daniel Defoe, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.

“My second thought,” Klein said, “was to envision a talk show, somewhere in outer space, with all of us, each privately wondering what the collective link was binding us together.”

Mindful that her books contain “truths that children welcome, but that make adults flinch,” Klein received a letter from a librarian recently asking her “if I mind not being banned, but being put on a list of unapproved books.”

Banned in Salem

Not long ago also, Klein learned that one of her books had been banned in Salem, Ore. “A friend said I should have been glad it wasn’t Salem, Mass.,” Klein said. On that occasion Klein packed herself out to Oregon to confront the would-be censors. In a hearing on the issue, however, “the two who had voted for restriction backed down in about two seconds once they saw the tide was against them.”

Still, Klein remembered, “growing up in the ‘50s, I heard about the horrors of the McCarthy era of censorship.” Now, she said, “I am horrified that my teen-age daughter is coming of age in an era where books are being suppressed in a way reminiscent of Soviet Russia.”

The story of suppression of literature, children’s and otherwise, was only too familiar to Wang Qiyun, author of (as Kohl described it) “quote adult, unquote novels,” and editor since 1941 of a children’s magazine. For centuries in her own country’s history, Wang said, “children were seen only as small adults.” With their country locked in a feudal state, children learned that their only duty was to obey their parents.

Then, at last in 1919, “democracy and science” made their way into China. Along with them came a new concern for the next generation, and hence for children’s literature.

“Before this,” she said, “all books for children were written in the classical language. They were too difficult for children to understand.”

‘Create! Publish!’

Then, with the founding of the Peoples Republic in 1949, “the Chinese government called on writers to write for children.” The cry, Wang said, was “Create! Publish!” Suddenly, children’s books were distributed in large numbers. Between 1955 and 1959, she said, 8,959 children’s books were published in China. The number of copies sold was somewhere around 13 million.

But the Cultural Revolution brought a decline. Literature of all kinds went into a sharp decline in China. After 1976, Wang said, “children’s literature has been revived with great difficulty.” At that time, her country was looking at something like 200 million readers. Annually, however, only 200 titles were published. As for “famous writers,” they numbered about 20.

But recent years have seen a sharp turn, Wang said, a “new tendency among some writers to give free rein to the imagination.” Suddenly, “more attention has been paid to education in terms of love and beauty. Writers are very concerned with ethics, and the appreciation of aesthetics by young readers.”

By 1984, 4,090 titles of children’s books were published in China. An astonishing 9 billion copies were sold. One hundred twenty children’s magazines and newspapers were published in China in 1985, with a total circulation of 50 million. In China today, it is estimated that there are about 3,000 writers of children’s fiction, of whom 300 are particularly well known.

Growth of Science Fiction

Oddly enough, science fiction began thriving in China at about the same time. On the other hand, wasn’t it Herb Kohl’s own teen-age daughter who inhaled “War and Peace” at age 13, pronouncing it the finest work of science fiction she had ever experienced.

Tolstoy? Science fiction?

Well, Kohl’s young daughter said, “the people have names I can’t pronounce and they are fighting to maintain love in the struggle for a vast land on a strange planet.”

In a not-so-strange way it makes perfect sense. With its iron-clad set of ethics and pure structure of beliefs, childhood is probably an experience with which adults should do little or no tampering. As Walter Dean Myers observed, “We trust children when they are first born, when they are in their cribs, crying for attention. But we tend to lose the child somewhere along the line, right about when they start talking.”

Trust--that precarious commodity for children and adults alike--is quite another matter. When adults regard children, Myers said, “We do not rely on their intellectual capabilities when they say they want a nuclear-free world, when they say that we can, as rational human beings, simply talk out our differences.” Omniscient adults, “we question their maturity.”

In the child’s view, Myers said, “if people on both sides don’t want war, there simply is no reason to give a war.

‘We Confuse Children’

“It baffles them,” Myers said, “when we talk about love, and zealously guard our levels of hate. We confuse children. We talk about peace, then pass another huge arms budget in order to ensure it. We confound them by supplying arms to dictators.”

Finally, Myers said, “we teach a great many children to think like adults.”

Along the way, the process apparently takes hold, for “the child of 9 who wants peace and sees no difference between the Russians, the Chinese, the Americans, is somehow ready at 19 to vote for someone who will bomb someone or who will put weapons in outer space.

“As writers,” Myers said, “we face no more important task, I believe, than to bring children and adults together, to bring the world to them and explain it, so that they, in turn, can explain it back to us.”

‘A Student of History’

Here, Myers said, is the challenge of the entire undertaking: “If we are lucky, we might even get children and adults one day to trust each other. If we are lucky. One day.”

Virginia Hamilton, the author of 20 widely acclaimed books for young people, spoke of her rural childhood, “a time of light and openness--time for my imagination to soar and grow.” And she said, “I have over the years attempted through my books to bring to children and young adults something of value to their lives.”

Hamilton’s characters are likely to be black, brown or beige, and to exhibit a racial and cultural heritage that can only connote pride. “Through characters, stories, and atmosphere,” she explained, “I have attempted to convey the essence of a race, and its relationship to the rest of society at large.” To that extent, she said, “I consider myself a student of history as well as of literature.” In turn, “I have attempted to express black literature as American literature.”

For in the end, in Hamilton’s view, “If a race has no history, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world.”

In all her works--nonfiction as well as fiction, Hamilton said--one single goal is at work, and that is “the imaginative use of language and stories and ideas to illuminate the human condition--lest we forget to care.”

Arnold Atoff, Hamilton’s husband, has published 25 books for young people. “My young people play sports and eat flying oatmeal cookies and have concern for inter-racial identities, and care about having a good hug,” Atoff said. They are, in short, forces of change, ambassadors of a future that may not be so terrible as cynics envision it.

“I work with kids hungry for hope, and I work with kids who are just plain hungry,” Atoff said. In either case, there is a use for children’s literature, a form that shows “that use of the possibility of change, of moving a kid’s mind from point A to point B, no matter in which community that kid’s head hits the pillow.”

Said Atoff, mindful at all times of his proudly uncategorized audience: “I try to remain as strong and as weird as I can at all times.”

Likewise, Walter Dean Myers said in confronting the idea of an audience of future children, “It sounds vaguely simplistic, but I love children, and I am ready to invest everything I do in children.”

As for a mandate for this next generation, “I would say that the contribution of writers like myself,” Norma Klein said, “is to tell them not false happy endings. I don’t think we should tell them anything we would not tell each other.” Klein shrugged, and her audience laughed: “So let’s have more depressingly honest books.”

Most of all, Herb Kohl said, in considering the realm of children’s literature, “we have to be very, very careful to paraphrase George Orwell, and watch that our current government does not teach us that the best thing in the world is freedom--and that some people’s freedom is better than others.”