It’s a surprisingly melancholy thing, the reading of children’s books as an adult. Maybe even the reading of children’s books as a child, given how sad those books often turn. Remember Charlotte's Web, as young Wilbur the pig watches his spider friend Charlotte die? But to the ordinary sorrows of the world, the adult brings as well an awareness of the fading of childhood: mourning tinged with the self-consciousness of self-loss. Or, as Bruce Handy tells the reader of Wild Things, his new set of personal ruminations about children’s literature, "you are holding in your hands a work of sublimated grief."
Handy—a comic writer known for his snarky Spy magazine work and wide-ranging Vanity Fair essays—has given a pair of explanations for what prompted him to write about children’s books. The first is that he was struck anew by the power of the stories while reading them to children, and the second that, helping his mother with a move, he came across references to the books he himself had devoured as a child. From those beginnings, he found himself launched on a reading (and in most cases a rereading) of the books that seemed to speak to him of childhood, now that he’s an adult.
Systematic, Wild Things is not. Nor does it seem entirely coherent. There can be a relief to reading books that aren’t thesis driven, but Handy has stepped past lacking a thesis to a full-on refusal to give the reader a unified sense of his critical judgments or even his taste. Instead, we get a fine examination of Dr. Seuss, a weaker take on A.A. Milne, a sharp analysis of Goodnight Moon, an excursus on Beverly Cleary’s Ramona the Pest, and an odd reflection about Laura Ingalls Wilder. Handy is funny enough, his analogy-riven prose good enough, that any one of these essays is worth reading. The sum, though? Less than its parts.
With his lack of systematic coverage—especially when combined with the nostalgic impulse that prompted the project, driving him back to the books he knew while young—Handy misses the changes that have overtaken children’s literature in the past 20 years. There’s something amazingly old-fashioned about Wild Things in both its comic belle-lettres structure and its picture of the history of children’s books.
As it happens, the old picture of the genre proved amazing stable for decades. When the Victorians discovered the need for children’s books—maybe by inventing the modern idea of childhood itself—they started by pressing into service a handful of existing books not originally written for children: Pilgrim’s Progress, Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, and the like. But they also began writing their own, from Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales to Alice in Wonderland.
By the end of the 19th century, the genre of children’s books had been perfected, and with the late Victorians and the Edwardians a golden age arrived. With Mark Twain on the early end, and A.A. Milne on the late end, the era saw nearly everyone we think of as classic children’s authors and nearly everything we think of as classic children’s books: The Prince and the Pauper and Heidi. The Wizard of Oz and The Wind in the Willows. Peter Pan and Anne of Green Gables. The Jungle Books and Treasure Island.
Admittedly, later years would add in a few volumes: the Little House on the Prairie books, for example. The 1950s and early 1960s even formed a kind of silver age, with such works as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Cat in the Hat, and A Hundred and One Dalmatians. Still, all in all, the canon of children’s books was built for us by the Edwardians, and with the Edwardians it would stay.
Or, at least, that’s the old way of telling the history of children’s books, and it’s the picture from which Bruce Handy works in Wild Things—insofar as there’s any coherent account of the overall genre in the book. The problem is that this history has come unraveled in recent decades. Maybe the Edwardians really did see a golden age. It’s hard to imagine a more perfect book than the 1908 Wind in the Willows. But we saw a golden age of our own, in books from Neil Gaiman’s Coraline to Lois Lowry’s The Giver. Wild Things is a fun, quick read: a set of essays that are a little bloated but generally worthwhile. It’s just badly out of date—which is rather an odd place for a hip Vanity Fair writer to find himself, isn’t it?
Beverly Cleary and Maurice Sendak are the most recent authors with whom Handy seems comfortable. That’s not to say he isn’t funny and even insightful about the authors he’s reread from his own childhood. "Portnoy’s Complaint is the Runaway Bunny turned rancid," he writes. Dr. Seuss’s The Butter Battle Book "reads as if the Sneetches had invaded Dr. Strangelove’s war room." Beverly Cleary writes like "Henry James with much shorter sentences."
The chapter on Dr. Seuss proves especially good. Handy is deeply impressed—as well he ought to be—by the use of only 222 words in The Cat in the Hat and the amazing feat of writing Green Eggs and Ham using only fifty words (and all but "anywhere" of only one syllable). And the analysis of Charlotte’s Web seems serious and right—with Handy concluding that E.B. White’s work is "a masterly novel of ideas about what it means to lead a good life and how then to face death with grace."
Maybe that’s the origin of the melancholy, the "sublimated grief," that accompanied Handy’s reading of children’s books. For the child reader, Charlotte’s death is an imaginary experience of the death of others: the tears for things in this world. And perhaps the adult reader can recapture something of that feeling. But adults also know that they themselves will die, and the loss of Charlotte is a lesson not just in accepting the death of others but also in accepting the death of ourselves.
Even reading the children’s books with lighter endings can prove a little sorrowful. The escape from the self into the world of Watership Down, The Jungle Books, or The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was a lot easier back when we had less self to escape. Handy’s adult reaction to the old books he knew when young derives in part from the fact that he remembers the absorption of the child reader—and can’t quite re-create it. None of us read as adults with the unselfconsciousness, the total loss of self, we had while young.
Most of the time, a little readerly self-consciousness is a good thing: That’s where critical judgment begins, and that’s what allows Bruce Handy the distance to write a book like Wild Things. Still, it is a decline from the purity of childhood that we recollect when we reread children’s books. Who wouldn’t be a little melancholy—who wouldn’t feel a little grief—when we remember that we used to be able to go visit the places where the wild things live?