When I was in (maybe) first grade, children’s book writer Robert Munsch came to my school and performed The Mud Puddle.
In the story, Jule Ann puts on clean clothes—pants, shirt, socks, shoes—and goes outside on a sunny day, only to be jumped by a seemingly sentient mud puddle. She returns to her house, sopping and dirty. Her mother washes her until she’s squeaky clean. She puts on new clothing. But the mud puddle is waiting for her.
Munsch performed it without consulting a script, using a huge paper doll and paper clothes, to illustrate the story to a crowd of elementary school kids. He was exuberant and rubber faced. By the middle of his performance—I remember so clearly the giddiness, the joy—all of us were rolling around on the library floor, helpless with laughter.
It is maybe one of my favorite memories.
He was exuberant and rubber faced. By the middle of his performance—I remember so clearly the giddiness, the joy—all of us were rolling around on the library floor, helpless with laughter.It is maybe one of my favorite memories.
Munsch is probably best known for books such as The Paperbag Princess, the story of an unglamorous royal who, using her wits and determination, saves herself in more than one way, and Love You Forever, a divisive—usually deemed either heartbreaking or obsessive—story that follows a mother and her boy until the son is a grown man and the mother is frail and old.
Munsch is not as well-known in the United States as he is in Canada. Nevertheless, Love You Forever is one of the bestselling picture books in North America of all time.
When he came to our school, he probably would have been early in his career as a children’s writer. The Mud Puddle was his first book. He performed a couple of other stories—we were a delighted audience. I don’t remember what they were.
There is a lot I don’t remember clearly or accurately. That troubles me, because this column is about, among other things, the impact of my childhood recollections. I say I was maybe in first grade when I saw Munsch perform. I say it is one of my favorite memories. But the truth is that my recall of it is piecemeal. I didn’t know it was Robert Munsch who read to us at the time. I had no idea who he was. I don’t remember being told that we’d get a special treat that morning or afternoon. If my parents asked how my day was, I probably forgot to tell them.
I say I was maybe in first grade when I saw Munsch perform. I say it is one of my favorite memories. But the truth is that my recall of it is piecemeal. I didn’t know it was Robert Munsch who read to us at the time. I had no idea who he was.
But even as I write this, I’m trying to put it back together, trying to figure out when I remembered—when I knew, when this story grew to greater personal significance. I pulled up pictures of my first elementary school, Betrun E. Glavin, on Google maps and learned from an architecture site that it still stands, that its “design avoids ornamentation beyond the beauty of its limestone facing.” That it was built “to express the learning philosophy of open spaces and individual progress without need for external distractions.”
I can remember the outside of the building with its tetherball poles and climbing structures—now replaced. The sunken library in the middle where Munsch read to us. I found a picture from 2014 of my third-grade teacher, Ms. Copp—she looks very much the same. She was interviewed on the closing of her parents’ garden center and convenience store, a store my friends and I biked to buy candy and Wacky Packs. I can’t find my first-grade teacher, though. Although now I realize that she was probably very young when she started teaching us.
There are later, more defined memories of my fifth-grade teacher, Monsieur Campbell, reading us The Paperbag Princess in French. (By then I was at a different school.) There is one picture where Princess Elizabeth flatters the dragon—and M. Campbell pointed out how the dragon was checking his nails, preening. By then I think that Robert Munsch was a household name in Canada, but I don’t think I made the connection that he was the person who’d come to perform for us long ago.
How astounding that one person’s stories permeate the texture of so much that I do and don’t remember.
I suspect that it wasn’t until Munsch began to appear regularly on a children’s television program that I figured out the truth. By then, I knew his name, and even though I was supposed to be a cynical teen, I made time to watch it. He wasn’t even the headliner. The host was a clown named Piccadilly Circus. I can’t recall her whole schtick, but I think there was some mime involved. I don’t remember the name of the show. I’ve tried Googling variations of “CTV,” “children’s program,” “Piccadilly Circus,” and “Munsch” to see if I can find clips on YouTube.
This morning, I wiled away an hour on Musipedia trying to place the theme—a fairly well-known classical piece for piano. I can play back the tune on the keyboard, but the title remains elusive.
Chasing down every thread leads to another thought, another flash of recollection, another small part of my life. These fragments seem like loose ends. But as I gather the memories of this one person—one storyteller—together, I see how all these bits appear at so many stages of my youth, how they are woven into all aspects of my childhood. How astounding that one person’s stories permeate the texture of so much that I do and don’t remember.
A more recent memory: last year, my daughter brought home a copy of Moira’s Birthday. The book, first published in 1987, was in her class’s library. She thought it was very funny, and she asked me to read it out loud to her—she knew that it was a book that should be read out loud.
My husband tells me that I read Moira’s Birthday differently. That become more animated. I yell. I exaggerate. I tell him that when I read them, I guess I’m performing them the way they’re supposed to sound—I’m reading them like Robert Munsch.
“For my birthday, I would like to invite Grade 1, Grade 2, Grade 3, Grade 4, Grade 5, Grade 6, and Kindergarten,” Moira tells her mother.
When her mother balks at the number of children involved, Moira goes to her father. “For my birthday, I would like to invite Grade 1, Grade 2, Grade 3, Grade 4, Grade 5, Grade 6, and Kindergarten.”
Her father tells her she can have six children over. But when the day of the party comes around, who shows up? Grade 1, Grade 2, Grade 3, Grade 4, Grade 5, Grade 6, aaaaand Kindergarten. The joy in the book—in most of Munsch’s books—is in establishing the rhythm of storytelling and humor, then changing it up. It’s in the repetition of elements (Grade 1, Grade 2, etc. etc.), followed by absurd variation.
Afterward, we had a good time looking up people reading Munsch’s other stories on YouTube. My daughter still sometimes brings that book home.
My husband tells me that I read Moira’s Birthday differently. That become more animated. I yell. I exaggerate. I tell him that when I read them, I guess I’m performing them the way they’re supposed to sound—I’m reading them like Robert Munsch.
But it’s funny, because I think I still sound very much like me.
In fourth grade, my Language Arts teacher read us The Trumpet of the Swan, a children’s novel by acclaimed American writer E. B. White.
The story opens when Montana boy Sam Beaver, on vacation in a remote part of Canada, discovers a nesting pair of swans. The boy saves the female swan—the pen—from a fox and becomes a trusted observer of the pair and their cygnets. The pen and cob soon discover that one of their newly hatched swans, Louis, cannot beep or honk. Louis (pronounced LOO-ee, like Louis Armstrong) proves himself a strong swimmer and flyer, but his parents worry that his inability to trumpet will harm his chances when it comes time to find a mate.
When he grows older, Louis’s desire to communicate drives him to seek out Sam Beaver, who brings the swan to school. Louis learns to read and write and thenceforth carries a slate and chalk around his neck. But this does not help him with other (non-writing, non-reading) swans, especially when young Louis falls in love with a pen named Serena.
The cob determines to help his son by stealing a trumpet from a music store in Billings. The debt weighs heavily on the cob, and Louis, with Sam’s help again, finds a job playing Taps and Reveille at Sam’s summer camp. Louis goes on to earn more money—and fame—playing trumpet for the swan boats in Boston, and in a club in Philadelphia.
Gigging proves lonely for Louis, but soon fate and high winds blow Serena into back into Louis’s life. She awakens after her journey to the sound of Louis playing Stephen Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer.” White writes, “It was love at long last for Louis; it was love at first sight for Serena.”
Louis wins the girl with his hard-earned skills. And after misadventures with the zookeepers, the swans fly back to Montana, where they give Louis’s father the money and the cob is able to discharge his debt.
White is best known for such children’s classics as Charlotte’s Web (1952) and Stuart Little (1945). But he is also an important figure in American letters; he wrote the essay “Here Is New York,” was the White of Strunk and White’sElements of Style, and was a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker. In a lot of ways, White has shaped what American literature is now.
Trumpet is a later work, written in 1970. Key facets of the novel have aged badly.
Trumpet is a later work, written in 1970. Key facets of the novel have aged badly. Louis himself and other characters refer to his disability in ways that are jarring and possibility upsetting to modern readers, and White frames Louis’s condition of “being without a voice” as a problem to be “overcome at last.” Sam Beaver is probably supposed have Native American blood, but the book never says outright that Sam is not white. It mentions several times that he is “like an Indian,” in appearance, in habit, in the way he walks by putting one foot in front of the other. Sam is also imbued with almost magical properties of being able to communicate with birds and animals, and always having solutions for Louis and his family when the need arises.
I suspect that my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Stephenson, had an agenda when she selected The Trumpet of the Swan to read to our class.
Fourth grade was the year that I left my English-language school and entered a French immersion program. Twelve—maybe thirteen—of us primarily Anglophone children went from being educated in one language to being thoroughly confused in another. For the first few weeks, we understood almost nothing that our teachers said to us: We didn’t know when we were being told to stand up. We couldn’t understand when we were asked sit down. Nevertheless, science and math took place in French. For music, we sang along to French records. Monsieur Campbell, who also taught an aerobics class in downtown Winnipeg, was our PE teacher. The only class that wasn’t conducted in French was Language Arts—English. It was such a relief to be able to do little things like read and speak.
Perhaps we did identify with Louis—I’m sure many of us did. But we didn’t come from nothing. Louis’s situation was imperfectly mapped onto ours; it allowed us to identify with the underdog—underbird?—without actually having to truly experience hardship.
And maybe Mrs. Stephenson chose to read The Trumpet of the Swan because it was a bit like how we were living in our first weeks of French immersion. Like Louis, we were unable to construct simple sentences, to make ourselves understood. We were unable to communicate.
But—that wasn’t the full story, was it? The difference was that we had our voices, and our teachers did actually understand English, they just chose not to speak it so that we could learn French. And we could talk to each other in English during recess or when the teacher wasn’t listening. We were not alone.
Perhaps we did identify with Louis—I’m sure many of us did. But we didn’t come from nothing. Louis’s situation was imperfectly mapped onto ours; it allowed us to identify with the underdog—underbird?—without actually having to truly experience hardship. We were in an environment engineered to make us helpless for a time, but which was ultimately about providing us with more tools, another language, more power.
After reading Trumpet, I thought about a passage that poet Patricia Lockwood tweeted about from Elif Batuman’s novel The Idiot. Batuman writes:
I found myself remembering the day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo, a Disney movie about a puny, weird looking circus elephant that everyone made fun of. As the story unfolded, I realized to my amazement that the kids in the class, even the bullies… were rooting against Dumbo’s tormentors… But they’re you, I thought to myself. How did they not know?… Everyone thought they were Dumbo.
Lockwood was struck with it because, she notes, at this point in history, everyone thinks they’re the underdog. The current US administration is composed of billionaires who complain of being vilified by media and who tell themselves that they are being attacked by poor people, people of color, the disabled, LGBTQIA, and all combinations thereof.
And I realize that in the story I just recounted about starting French immersion, I elided facts and identities. I wrote as if my class was uniform in our confusion, in being English speakers. We weren’t the same. A couple of kids knew some French. And maybe some of us didn’t care or weren’t listening as avidly to the story about the musical swan. At least one girl in our class was First Nations, and I wonder what the Sam Beaver sections of the story meant to her—if anything. As I reflect on the differences among my classmates, I find that I can’t—shouldn’t—speak for who we might have been and our what our reactions were.
All I know is that I was eager to map myself onto Louis’s narrative.
It is seductive, this story of the underdog, but one key to its appeal is that fact that Louis propels himself upward and onward. It’s part of American mythology to imagine oneself starting off with nothing except maybe some bootstraps and a pair of biceps with which to pull oneself up. I was not even American, and I found myself drawn to it.
Adding to its power is the fact that the writer behind Louis’s story is E. B. White, shaper of American discourse. He writes of Louis’s journey:
Almost anybody can find Philadelphia who tries. Louis simply rose into the air with all his things around his neck, and when he was about a thousand feet high, he followed the railroad tracks to Providence, New London, New Haven, Bridgeport, Stamford, Cos Cob, Greenwich, Port Chester, Rye, Mamaroneck, New Rochelle, Pelham, Mount Vernon, and the Bronx. When he saw the Empire State Building, he veered off to the right.
In passages like these, we can hear the voice of the author of “Here Is New York.” Louis is following well-worn American paths and White sweeps us along, allowing us to imagine traveling upward with Louis. But we don’t all begin at the same geographic points, and we don’t start out with the same amount of nothing.
But we don’t all begin at the same geographic points, and we don’t start out with the same amount of nothing.
At the end, with all their debts paid off, it would seem that Louis’s dealings with the world of money—and people—are done. Sam’s father asks him if he hears from Louis anymore.
“No,” replied Sam. “He doesn’t write anymore. He ran out of postage stamps and he has no money to buy stamps with.”
That’s not quite the truth.
Louis and Serena return year after year to the old campground, to the swan boats of Boston to play for a day, and to Philadelphia to visit the zoo and Sam, who has become a zookeeper there. At times, they deposit one of their needier cygnets there. Ostensibly, they have no need of money or people—they’re animals. Animals don’t need money. Unless they are not quite animals but stand-ins for something else; unless, as this whole story seems to indicate, they do.
Louis has so much at the end, and he is generous with his time and skills. He can afford it.
At the beginning of Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, eleven-year-old Margaret Simon and her family move from New York to New Jersey just before Labor Day.
The story takes place over the school year. We see Margaret adjusting to a new classes and new friends, including her next door neighbor, Nancy. Nancy also initiates Margaret and two other girls into her secret club, the Preteen Sensations, and she plants unflattering rumors about Laura Danker, a tall, busty classmate.
Margaret is entering adolescence. She has questions about bras, getting her period, and boys. She also wonders about religion. Her father’s family is Jewish, and her mother’s is Christian. In their suburban New Jersey town, she does not know whether to join the YMCA or the Jewish Community Center (JCC).
Attempting to find out what she wants to be takes the form of a yearlong class project. She goes to temple and to church—and she finally meets her estranged Christian grandparents.
Although it was fiction, I do remember Margaret also had the status of a manual of adolescence.
Judy Blume is the much celebrated—and oft-banned—author of children’s, young adult, and adult novels. Blume’s books deal with adolescence—particularly sex—in a matter-of-fact way. Like Margaret and Nancy, my friends and I were curious about sex. Sometimes we whispered about it via Tiger Eyes, Forever, and Deenie—via the books of Judy Blume.
Margaret was published in 1970. I read it the 80s when I was in fifth or sixth grade. I may have received my purple paperback copy of the book from one of my friends for my birthday. Margaret dealt with menstruation, breasts, and bras. There was a Spin-the-Bottle scene. Although it was fiction, I do remember Margaret also had the status of a manual of adolescence. It was in libraries and recommended by teachers because it was seen as “realistic.”
So while Margaret had the aura of being forbidden (and was banned on occasion) because it was about tricky subjects, it was also seen as educational. That’s how its existence in libraries was justified, and that’s why it was probably handed to me.
Margaret is the first-person, present-tense narrator. She works hard at school, but she’s not a genius. She’s not tall, not precocious. She is a middle-class Everygirl trying to find her place. Margaret’s search stands in contrast with the certainty of her frenemy, Nancy Wheeler.
Nancy brings up every topic that will shape the book (and Margaret’s thinking) in that first meeting: sex/adolescence, insecurity, and religion.
Nancy defines many of the terms of Margaret’s first year in the suburbs. “Oh, you’re still flat,” Nancy notes on meeting Margaret. Margaret is immediately on the defensive: “‘Not exactly,’ I said, pretending to be very cool. ‘I’m just small boned, is all.’” Nancy says later, “I figured you’d be real grown up coming from New York City. City girls are supposed to grow up a lot faster.”
Nancy brings up every topic that will shape the book (and Margaret’s thinking) in that first meeting: sex/adolescence, insecurity, and religion. Nancy is the one who tells Margaret that she has to pick Christianity or Judaism or risk being socially stranded. She tells Margaret how she should dress for the first day of school. In later encounters, she polices their friend Gretchen’s weight. She tells her girls that they have to wear bras and that they all have to like one boy—Philip Leroy. And she tells Margaret how she should react to their classmate Laura Danker.
Laura is taller than anyone in the class. She’s pretty—this is in fact the first thing that Margaret observes to Nancy. Nancy does not like this. She calls Laura, “The big blonde with the big you know whats.”
She adds that Laura has a bad reputation. “My brother says she goes behind the A&P with him and Moose.”
There are, by the way, no queer people, no disabled people, no people of color in Margaret.
Nancy is saying that because Laura is pretty and mature looking, she is promiscuous. As the year goes on, Nancy adds to the rumor, claiming that their sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Benedict, has a crush on the girl.
Laura Danker is the object of Nancy’s jealousy and fascination—and despite having doubts, Margaret chooses to believe Nancy.
Nancy enforces the standards in Margaret’s peer group. According to Nancy’s vision, girls are supposed to be attractive, but not too beautiful—like Laura. They should be uniform.
There are, by the way, no queer people, no disabled people, no people of color in Margaret.
This, I think, is the triumph of this book: how Blume manages, despite the tight focus on Margaret’s consciousness, to show that her assessments aren’t always right.
Blume captures the push-pull of Margaret’s conflicts very well—the tension between what Margaret sees and thinks about Laura, about the boys in her class, about life, and what Nancy tells her she should see.
Margaret is a normal girl. Sometimes she is mean. Sometimes she parrots her friend and her parents and she doesn’t think for herself. By the end, Margaret sees just how fallible these people often are.
This, I think, is the triumph of this book: how Blume manages, despite the tight focus on Margaret’s consciousness, to show that her assessments aren’t always right. Margaret is an unreliable narrator whose friends and family are also proving unreliable. The reader sees how her judgment can be led astray. We can sympathize with Margaret’s feelings and in turn form our own judgments.
Near the end, Margaret confronts Moose—her secret crush—about the rumors that Nancy goes behind the A&P with the boys:
“Nancy told me that Evan told her that you and Evan—” I stopped. I sounded like an idiot.
“You always believe everything you hear about other people?” Moose replies. “Well, next time, don’t believe it unless you see it!”
Margaret was pushed on me as realistic, but I knew—I saw—that there were limits to its realism.
As I’ve said, there are no queer or disabled people in Margaret. Everyone is white. “I have not tried being a Buddhist or a Moslem because I don’t know any people of these religions,” Margaret writes about her yearlong religion project.
Of course there were Buddhist and Moslem, disabled, and queer people in the suburbs in the 1970s. My parents weren’t white. They lived in the suburbs.
“Next time, don’t believe it until you see it!” Moose says.
Well, what I knew—what I saw—was that I was alive and living in the suburbs—that my parents were there. Margaret was pushed on me as realistic, but I knew—I saw—that there were limits to its realism.
There is a relatively recent update to the book where Margaret gets her period and her mother shows her how to use a pad. “Now look, Margaret—here’s how you do it. The pad fits inside your panties and—”
In the version I had, Margaret used a belt to hold the pad in place—and belts were mostly outdated even when I was growing up. But it’s funny the things we choose to update in the name of staying “realistic,” isn’t it?
But if I had doubts at the end—if I still had uncertainty about what was real and what was not—well, asking, doubting, and questioning is what Margaret taught me to do.
I still love Judy Blume. I like Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Yes, re-reading this book frustrated me at times. But I admired the way, despite the narrow scope and focus of the narration, that Blume shows that there is a wider world, that Margaret should doubt what she’s told, that what her friends tell her, what her parents and grandparents and teachers say, is open to question.
Teachers probably told me that Judy Blume’s books were realistic; in many ways they are. But if I had doubts at the end—if I still had uncertainty about what was real and what was not—well, asking, doubting, and questioning is what Margaret taught me to do.
In E. L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, twelve-year-old Claudia Kincaid hatches a plan to run away from her home in Connecticut to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, taking along her money-grubbing younger brother, Jamie.
The children roam the galleries during the day, blending in with crowds. They sleep in the antique beds on display and bathe in the fountain, supplementing their money with the coins they find in it. When an angel sculpture recently acquired by the Met from a Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler begins to attract crowds, Claudia and Jamie become fascinated with the piece. They use their access to the museum to try to prove that it was indeed crafted by Michelangelo. And in their attempt to discover its provenance, they travel to visit Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler herself. (For some reason, I can never think of her as a mere Mrs. Frankweiler—so I’m just going to keep typing out her whole, grand name.)
The story is prefaced by a letter from Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler to her attorney, Saxonberg, and is narrated by Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, complete with trenchant and sometimes cryptic asides.
From the Mixed-up Files was published in 1967. It took the Newberry Award, and Konigsburg became the only writer to have both won and been runner up for the prize in the same year (for her first book, Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth). She also illustrated From the Mixed-up Files, modeling Claudia and Jamie on her children.
I’d forgotten Claudia’s deep and fundamental dissatisfaction with her life. I’d forgotten about Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler’s files—the entire meaning behind the title, the heart of the book—probably because I didn’t understand what I was reading.
I read From the Mixed-up Files when I was in fifth or sixth grade. I picked up my copy from the paperback carousel in the library of my suburban Canadian school.
But memory had softened the story into a soulless romp. Over the years, my mind fashioned it into a dreamy urban version of those children’s survival novels that I also liked to read as a kid; instead of weaving reeds and baiting fish hooks, Claudia and Jamie hid in bathrooms and ate at the Automat. I’d forgotten the opening letter from Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler to her attorney. I’d forgotten about Jamie’s cheerful, avaricious practicality, and about how the children wander not just in the Met but over Manhattan. I’d forgotten Claudia’s deep and fundamental dissatisfaction with her life. I’d forgotten about Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler’s files—the entire meaning behind the title, the heart of the book—probably because I didn’t understand what I was reading.
Claudia is a self-assured and earnest twelve-year-old. She has a sense of mission and tries to make her museum stay educational rather than an anarchic escape. Mrs. Frankweiler notes:
Claudia informed Jamie that they should take advantage of the wonderful opportunity they had to learn and study… her ambitions were as enormous and as multidirectional as the museum itself.
Jamie says he prefers an adventure untainted by grown-up regulations—but he lives in thrall to the rule of dollars and cents. When Claudia suggests trying to find the origins of the angel, brother and sister end up researching. In libraries.
Yes, two school-age children at loose in New York City willingly and deliberately go to the library.*
(*Sorry NYPL, I love you.)
Claudia makes increasingly poignant and quixotic attempts to give their trip a shape and a mission without being quite sure what will change it. She wants the difference she feels in herself borne out. She wants to be a heroine but has a muddled sense of how to go about accomplishing it. At one point, she sees a guide at the United Nations dressed in a sari:
When she was grown she could stay the way she was and move to some place like India where no one dressed as she did, or she could dress like someone else—the Indian guide even and still live in an ordinary place like Greenwich.
(Frankly, I see a lot of grown-up white people who are as misguided as young Claudia.)
She wants to be different. She wants this trip to have significance and change the way people see her—or change how she sees herself.
She wants to be different. She wants this trip to have significance and change the way people see her—or change how she sees herself. She tells Jamie brokenly that she wanted to prove the provenance of the angel because then she would be a heroine—others would see her as heroic, and she wants to herself: “I feel as if I jumped into a lake to rescue a boy, and what I thought was a boy turned out to be a wet, fat log. Some heroine that makes. All wet for nothing.”
But it is in her conversation with Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler that she learns to think of herself as one. Those secret files record her as a heroine.
I re-read this book while watching my daughter’s swim lesson on the Upper West Side of Manhattan—across the park from the Met, across the park from where Claudia and Jamie hid.
Because I now live in New York, the fantastical landscape of my childhood imagination has supposedly become a part of my day-to-day reality. Judy Blume’s Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Mary Rodgers’ Freaky Friday, and Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy, among others, all take place on streets I’ve walked.
Twelve is often the age when girls lose what self-assurance they had. And I wish I’d understood this book better at twelve. I wish I’d carried more away from it.
I think of these books sometimes—I think of Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing when I’m in posh doorman buildings with mirrored elevators, like the one Peter and Fudge lived in. But most of the time I don’t remember the fact that I share a setting with favorite childhood books. I don’t feel like a heroine.
I first read From the Mixed-up Files when I was around Claudia’s age. I left for New York when I was ten years older than that. At both those times in my life, I was earnest, like Claudia, but more anxious than she was. Much less confident.
To read—and understand—From the Mixed-up Filesof Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler can be vastly and secretly affirming: Claudia learns as long as she knows she’s a heroine, she is the heroine of her life.
Twelve is often the age when girls lose what self-assurance they had. And I wish I’d understood this book better at twelve. I wish I’d carried more away from it. To read—and understand—From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler can be vastly and secretly affirming: Claudia learns as long as she knows she’s a heroine, she is the heroine of her life. “Now she wouldn’t have to be a heroine when she returned home… except to herself.”
I re-read that last fierce and tender section of From the Mixed-up Files while watching my kid’s swim lesson, and I tried not to cry. I still don’t know what I felt: grief? mourning? a sense of losing something I wasn’t sure I had? My daughter was learning to float and blow bubbles—she was learning to save herself in the water. I hope these skills last her for a long, long time.
Central to Anne Stuart’s 1991 contemporary Southern Gothic romance, The Night of the Phantom are kidnappings, violence, fanaticism, revenge. There’s also attempted suicide, ableism and perhaps appropriative and exploitative depictions of race. Frankly, I lost count of possible issues one might have with this book because I got sucked in.
Again.
Let this serve as a warning.
On the eve of upstanding executive Megan Carey’s departure for a European sabbatical, she finds her construction-mogul father in his office pointing a gun at his head.
Reese Carey is threatened with exposure by reclusive, genius architect Ethan Winslowe, who has proof that Megan’s father knowingly ignored the specs and used shoddy materials in his projects causing the deaths of several people after a building collapse. At the time, flaws in Ethan’s intricate design were blamed and now Ethan wants Reese to show up at his isolated Arkansas home and beg for mercy.
Reese maneuvers his daughter to go in his place to negotiate with Ethan. Megan agrees, even after realizing that her father never intended to go through with suicide (the gun isn’t loaded and her father has already made travel arrangements for her). She arrives in Oak Grove, Arkansas, a creepy, unfriendly small town whose residents are prone to gnomic and menacing pronouncements about reclusive hometown boy, Ethan.
Megan finds her plans to plead for clemency for Reese and to move on with her European trip derailed. Her rental car is trapped in the mud. Ethan has no telephone. (?!?) And, oh yes, through his henchman, Salvatore, the mysterious architect demands that Megan stay on in his labyrinthine estate in place of Reese.
Ethan is rumored to be severely disfigured or ill, or kept alive on ventilators. In reality, he is not sickly; in fact, he’s prone to running miles and miles on his indoor track and hefting fainting ladies around his vast maze-like home.
Ethan is rumored to be severely disfigured or ill, or kept alive on ventilators. In reality, he is not sickly; in fact, he’s prone to running miles and miles on his indoor track and hefting fainting ladies around his vast maze-like home. (A robust-looking Fabio stares skeptically out from the original Harlequin American Romance cover, perhaps doubting his fitness to play the lean and agonized Ethan.) His so-called disfigurement consists of (spoiler) a dark birthmark which bisects his face and chest. (I spent some time before re-reading trying to remember where the birthmark ended and—uh—whether it split Ethan’s ween. It does not.) When he does finally meet Megan, he has her escorted to the bowels of his home and he speaks to her from the shadows. She’s moved to a succession of theme rooms every night: a tower room with a pallet, a Roman room featuring lewd frescoes, an angular, ultramodern pad—basically the worst fantasy honeymoon hotel in the world. He outfits her in diaphanous, low cut caftans and spies on her via video camera. Because of course he’s fascinated with her and she with him.
The story is a little Beauty and the Beast, a little Phantom of the Opera. Ethan sits at the center of it all, orchestrating a series of convoluted revenge plots against Megan’s father, against the town’s white-hooded, cross-burning religious fanatics who he blames for his father’s death.
The story is a little Beauty and the Beast, a little Phantom of the Opera. Ethan sits at the center of it all, orchestrating a series of convoluted revenge plots against Megan’s father, against the town’s white-hooded, cross-burning religious fanatics who he blames for his father’s death. A gentle but bossy garden ghost counsels Megan. And she and Ethan grow closer and more obsessed with each other until an angry fanatical mob descends on his house.
Phantom first was passed on to me in a box of Harlequins someone gave my parents in the early 1990s. I was 22 or 23.
Among the books was also a novel about a virginal Englishwoman who falls in love with the renowned Italian portraitist, and a romantic comedy about a crusty computer engineer who gets to know her boss via a proto online forum. I’d be interested in finding these novels again, but I don’t recall the names or the authors. I didn’t remember Anne Stuart’s name either, but Phantom is the one I managed to come across again years later—entirely by accident—while systematically (and obsessively) attempting (and failing) to read all of the New York Public Library’s romance e-books.
Phantom was part of a collection of re-issues, called appropriate enough Out of Print Gems, put out by Stuart herself. I began reading, and as Reese Carey started talking about his reclusive genius architect that recognition—and joy!—dawned.
I remembered this book. I remembered it because I devoured it greedily. And because this book was completely banana sandwiches.
Anne Stuart herself knows it. According to the introduction in Out of Print Gems, “I threw everything I had into the book, going completely over the top and holding nothing back.”
Now, Stuart is famous for male leads who skate on the edge of being irredeemable—some would say they are irredeemable. True to form, Ethan Winslowe is compelling, single-minded, great at sexing, the standout sociopath in a book rich with DSM-worthy personalities.
Phantom was popular and controversial enough to inspire the Silhouette Shadows line.
For Stuart, Phantom marked her turn into writing the dark stories with sinister heroes. Now, Stuart is famous for male leads who skate on the edge of being irredeemable—some would say they are irredeemable. True to form, Ethan Winslowe is compelling, single-minded, great at sexing, the standout sociopath in a book rich with DSM-worthy personalities.
In a lot of ways, Phantom is the kind of romance novel that people who hate romance novels point to when they argue that the genre is terrible. (I love romance novels and now I write them, so these are not my people and they probably wouldn’t much care for me, either.) There is, for example, Megan and Ethan’s relationship: Ethan blackmails Megan, lies to her, locks in her room and watches her in person and on video cameras. He leaves her with nothing but Stephen King novels to read. She cracks wise and protests her captivity, but Stuart herself alludes to Megan’s lassitude in face of Ethan’s sexual power.
“She was his to do whatever he wanted with, and if she felt passive, it was an oddly, intensely erotic passivity.”
Megan and Ethan do not always model a healthy relationship. But listen, at 22—an earnest and callow 22 at that—I got that this was so not the point of this particular book.
Hand in hand with this is the possibility that Ethan Winslowe can be read as biracial—as black. This is maybe not the accepted reading—the Fabio cover probably means most readers and editors default to white—and it wasn’t obvious to me before but now it is pretty much impossible for me not to read Ethan as black.
A far more troubling element for me now is how Ethan is presented as an exotic and uncontrollable Other, more legend than reality. Even after they knock boots, Megan spends more time discussing him with other people (and a ghost) than she does talking with Ethan himself. Hand in hand with this is the possibility that Ethan Winslowe can be read as biracial—as black. This is maybe not the accepted reading—the Fabio cover probably means most readers and editors default to white—and it wasn’t obvious to me before but now it is pretty much impossible for me not to read Ethan as black. I mean, look at the townspeople’s reaction to him:
They were dressed in white. White sheets to be exact, with hoods, eye holes cut out, and there had to be at least thirty of them…. In front of them, providing illumination, was a burning cross.
And aside from the Birth of a Nation scene, there is the fact that Ethan’s body is, y’know, two colors. (And he’s the initially scapegoat when Reese Carey’s—a white man’s—building/institution literally crumbles.) And believe me I really do understand that having a two-toned face and body is not how being biracial works but we’re not exactly reading a textbook here. The hints are there. But if this reading holds true, then this book, while sympathetic to Ethan, is also troublingly exploitative of him.
I don’t quite know what to do with this. I don’t know.
I found Night of the Phantom compelling and fascinating in the 1990s and it remains so for me in 2016, but it has never been a comfortable fascination.
I found Night of the Phantom compelling and fascinating in the 1990s and it remains so for me in 2016, but it has never been a comfortable fascination. Of course, finding pieces of pop culture, terrible, wonderful, appropriative, and enthralling—oftentimes all at the same time—is pretty much the permanent condition of living as a non-white woman in North America.
I read once that dreams aren’t really symbolic or portentous—that they’re just the place where the brain processes external stimulus.
Phantom is dreamlike in its overt use of symbols, but also in the way it processes all that cultural flotsam and jetsam, remaking stories that we’re told and re-tell, binding them together with the organizing principle of the happy ever after.
Megan wasn’t sure what she’d expected. Lon Chaney with his skeletal face in The Phantom of the Opera. Freddy Krueger, dripping blood. As Ethan Winslow turned slow to face her, she was ready to see almost anything. Except what she did see.
Stuart touches on Ethan as the Beast, or a creature of horror. At another point, Ethan gives Megan a ring with a picture of Janus, the two-faced god.
Another part of me really likes the idea that these cultural stories can be re-written, that outcomes can change—that eventually I can change them.
In Night of the Phantom we are given many stories. The alchemy of these elements what I respond to—this is what makes me find it compelling even while I don’t always know what to do with it, or how to find my way out. And in that refashioning lies—for me at least—some great part of romance’s power. Part of me finds its genre-ness fascinating; my mind enjoys the repetition and refinements of tropes, which are, after all, the themes and stories that propel our culture for better or for worse. Another part of me really likes the idea that these cultural stories can be re-written, that outcomes can change—that eventually I can change them.
(And other times I just like fun banter. I find that in romance, too.)
For me, romance novels serve many functions. They aren’t always escape or comfort reading, although that’s fine if they are. They don’t always reflect women’s desires, or supply role models, although sometimes they do.
For me, romance novels serve many functions. They aren’t always escape or comfort reading, although that’s fine if they are. They don’t always reflect women’s desires, or supply role models, although sometimes they do. After all, in that box in which I found Phantom back in the 1990s was also a book about a thorny female computer engineer. I’d be writing about that book, too, if I could find it again.
I reject the notion that all romance novels are crappily written, mass-produced heteronormative mommy porn, responsible for making women long for things they can’t have and also somehow setting women back hundreds of years. But I reject the standard response to these charges: that romance is actually super-duper feminist. That peppy vision of the genre is in its own way whitewashed; that notion seriously undervalues the motivations of readers and writers. What I do accept is that the genre is vast and heterogeneous, and that our reasons for reading it can be complicated and simple, and both at once.
At the beginning of Robin McKinley’s 1982 young adult fantasy novel The Blue Sword, Harry Crewes has been living in a colonial desert outpost after the death of her parents. The Homeland, where Harry is from, is a thinly disguised Victorian England. The lone Homeland city of Istan shares uneasily a border with Damar, a mysterious, magical Afghanistan concealed in the mountains.
War is brewing between Damar and the North, and when King Corlath of Damar comes to negotiate with the Homelanders, his magic—the kelar—demands that he kidnap the young woman to aid his people.
Harry, it turns out, has plenty of kelar in her blood, too. As a result, she has visions of legendary Damarian queen Aerin, she learns the language at a prodigious rate, and she adapts quickly to bridleless horsemanship and battle training. After a brutal six weeks of swashbuckler boot camp, she wins the laprun trials (the Damarian cavalry Olympics), becomes one of the king’s elite Riders, and rides out to war against the demonic Northern army.
While I was re-reading the novel, I told my husband rather helplessly, “I love this book. I loved it when I was a teenager. I love it now.”
But Harry clashes with Corlath on a major point: she wants to warn the Homelanders—or as the Damarians call them, the Outlanders—about the Northern army and to ask them to defend a narrow gap in the mountains through which the Northerners could overrun Harry’s old home and ambush Corlath’s army. Corlath has exhausted his diplomacy with the pseudo-Victorians. “Let them take the Outlander city,” he says of the Northerners. “[I]t will keep them amused.”
Despite the fact that Harry loves Damar—and is falling for Corlath—she cares about the Outlander station: her brother still lives there, she has friends there. It was her world not long ago. She defies the king and risks betraying Damar—and Corlath—in order to go and warn her old countrymen and to guard the pass herself.
The Blue Sword won a Newbery Honor and an ALA Best Book for Young Adults. It was followed by The Hero and the Crown—a prequel, which tells the story of Lady Aerin. While I was re-reading the novel, I told my husband rather helplessly, “I love this book. I loved it when I was a teenager. I love it now.”
That does not mean it’s without problems:
Harry is a white savior. The Damarians are dark haired and dark skinned, and Harry is a towering blonde. Yes, it’s revealed eventually that she has a quarter Damarian blood, so maybe Emma Stone can play her in the movie.
It can be seen as colonial apologia. The authorities and military stationed at Istan seem to love the desert and respect the people. The colonizers are excised of brutality; they are bumbling and well-intentioned.
Then, there is also the fact that Corlath kidnaps Harry—or rather, his kelar forces him to do it. The abduction of women is a charged act—sexually and politically—and the characters know it. But the way McKinley rewrites kidnapping is interesting. First of all, Corlath feels pretty terrible about it:
She was smiling a little in her sleep, but it was a sad smile, and it made him unhappy… He knew only too well that by stealing her from her people he had done a thing to be ashamed of, even if he had no alternative.
McKinley takes pains to make sure that Corlath’s intention isn’t rape. Indeed, out of Corlath’s sympathy for her grows respect, and love.
On Harry’s end, instead of the abduction being an instrument of a sexual awakening that leaves her in thrall to love, she is bestowed with power. Corlath gives her swords, a horse—a means to leave. Her magic asserts itself. She has the kind of freedom she didn’t enjoy while trying to be a lady at the colonial outpost—and more. An early signal of her autonomy is her clarity and humor about the situation:
Corlath didn’t look at her the way a man looks at a woman he plans to share his bed… He looked at her rather as a man looks at a problem that he would very much prefer to do without. She supposed it was a distinction of a sort to be a harassment to a king.
Throughout the episode, Harry retains her ability to think. The book is full of these dry asides—the characters are aware that the situation is epic, but their reactions are not grandiose. They’re very funny and human, and I found that—still find it—appealing.
The Blue Sword combines feminist power and magic—and that is and was seductive. But the book’s flipping of one script does not make it perfect on all other issues—although the seductiveness remains in place.
Another thing I loved about the book when I was younger was the idea of a foreigner coming into another culture and, despite many struggles, thriving in it.
She was a figure in some story other than her own—an embroidered shape in a Hill tapestry, a representation of something that did not exist in her Homeland.
Harry feels that she has no history in the place she is living—but it is making history out of her. At another point, Harry tells the Oracle, Luthe:
Oh, I know—one never sees ahead of behind. But I see even less. It is like being blindfolded when everyone else in the room is not. No one can see outside the room—but everyone else can see the room. I would like to take my blindfold off.
It explicitly talks about being caught between two cultures. And it interweaves this all with mystical powers and Fate, leading young me to wonder if maybe there was a point to all of this terrible uncertainty. Maybe this alienation, this uncertainty, was exactly what would make me powerful.
In a way, the book captures the helplessness and the vitality of adolescence—the feeling of being perched on the cusp of something huge, but of not knowing what that will be. But more important to me when I first read it, it explicitly talks about being caught between two cultures. And it interweaves this all with mystical powers and Fate, leading young me to wonder if maybe there was a point to all of this terrible uncertainty. Maybe this alienation, this uncertainty, was exactly what would make me powerful.
As I said, it’s very seductive.
The Blue Sword informs who I am. I can see its fingerprints all over me. Here is where I learned what “bohemian” meant and that swords and sorcery could be interspersed with wit. Here is where I learned to mine a book for offpage sex. Here is where I learned about bridges.
Luthe, the mage whom Corlath consults before battle, tells Harry:
Friends you will have need of, for in you two worlds meet. There is no one on both sides with you, so you must learn to take your own counsel…It is not an enviable position, being a bridge, especially a bridge with visions.
I bought in wholeheartedly to the idea of being the bridge—even though it meant I bought into the idea that I would always be struggling.
I bought in wholeheartedly to the idea of being the bridge—even though it meant I bought into the idea that I would always be struggling. No—it meant I would always see myself as struggling and that that struggle was for a noble and perhaps magical cause.
But the truth is that I was never in a foreign land. I have always lived here in North America. And it isn’t always struggle. The idea of being this bridge has lost its luster. I think of my daughter who is biracial—a classic born of two worlds child—and I think that she should not have to follow that template unless she wants it. She was born here, too, and the dominant narrative of her life doesn’t have to be one of never feeling quite at home.
It is okay to feel out of place or foreign. But it doesn’t have to be the only way she can see herself in books.
I can also give my daughter other books and dreams and characters to follow and identify with—characters who are not necessarily white, people who inhabit their worlds fully.
I love The Blue Sword. It is a part of who I am. But I can also give my daughter other books and dreams and characters to follow and identify with—characters who are not necessarily white, people who inhabit their worlds fully. When she’s older, I can give her Zen Cho’s Sorceror to the Crown, or Saladin Ahmed’s stories. If she likes The Blue Sword, great—we’ll have plenty to talk about.
But my daughter doesn’t have to see herself as a bridge in order to reconcile her place. Because the thing about bridges is that people walk all over them to get to other, more fantastical lands.
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