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Cynthia Gorney and Stephen Harrigan

the breakfast table
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from: Cynthia Gorney

Sir, I Knew Winnie the Pooh ...

Posted Wednesday, July 21, 1999, at 4:12 PM ET

Dear Steve,

Yes, there is a three-dimensional life-size Goodnight Moon room around here; it's in a tony children's bookshop in San Francisco, or was the last time I checked. (The store may by now have been eaten, You've Got Mail-fashion, by one of the chain gorillas.) And it seems to me that I've seen the idea replicated elsewhere: the whole bed-and-moon-and-mouse-and-light-and-red-balloon arrangement, elevated on a platform in the childrens' wing of a bookshop. By the time I came across one of these setups, my children were long past the Goodnight Moon stage, so I can't give you a direct report on the response from the little guys, but my own first reaction was one of deep distrust. I don't think I approve of hauling the the great landscapes of childrens' fiction out of the imagination and into three dimensions, especially when the core intent is commercial. It's not actually the moneymaking aspect of the enterprise that bothers me the most (A.A. Milne and Roald Dahl didn't give their books away for free, now did they); it's rather the startled, violated sensation that somebody has snatched from me certain voices and images that I cherished precisely because a writer and an illustrator had made them live inside my own head. The first time I happened upon one of the Disney versions of Winnie the Pooh, I nearly lost my lunch. Tigger, with a doofus American accent! Eeyore, sanitized from a dour misanthrope into a squishy cartoon character! What could they have been thinking? I knew what Pooh's voice was supposed to sound like, just as I knew the voices of Mr. Toad and Johnny Tremain and the Moffitt family and the English children in Swallows and Amazons; that is the splendor of good children's literature, to make a kid see and hear invented people and places with nothing but the printed page for cues, and it irritates me when somebody with good intentions and a cash register shows up to take over that work.

I'm trying to think whether I have ever seen a movie version of a great kids' book that didn't affect me this way, but nothing comes immediately to mind; a few of the audiotape renditions have been pretty creditable, I suppose, especially Claire Bloom reading The Secret Garden in her gorgeous low voice, doing all the Yorkshire accents perfectly. But I have more pressing worries just now about the state of children's literature, having watched in my household the summer efforts of the 13-year-old girl who loves to read: it's impressive, these days, how little is out there once you weed out the badly written (like many of her contemporaries, she tends to hold everybody to a high standard, generally set by Dahl and lived up to by a very few), the morbid, the condescending, and the unrelievedly grim. I found this even more true when my son was an adolescent and was looking around for books that might appeal: especially for boys in the 11-to-15 range, nearly every writer seems so beset with themes of Loss and Turbulence and Overcoming Adversity that my son used to ask me in despair, "What if I don't want to read about alcoholism or violence or peer pressure or divorced parents? What if I just want to read about kids who have a good time doing funny things?"

We're shorter on those than we ought to be, which I'm sure helps account for the Harry Potter phenomenon: I gather that they really are very good stories--my daughter read the first volume nonstop, and then before I could borrow it from her to see what the hoopla was about, asked whether I would mind waiting until she read the whole book again. But more to the point, they appear from what I've heard to be good children's stories, satisfyingly entertaining fantasy that pits good guys against bad guys without forcing an adolescent kid into the cold square corners of Relevance. And, as my son put it astutely one night when the opening round of the Potter-goes-international stories had just come out, these books are about what every kid would like to be: secretly the child of persons far cooler and more powerful than the adults professing to be his own parents, and endowed with powerful magic that has yet to be fully understood or appreciated by the world. Add that to an adroit execution and what seems to be a rather brilliant marketing campaign, and presto, transatlantic bestseller. Now, why didn't you and I think of that first, eh?

Yrs,
CG

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516
from: Cynthia Gorney

Sir, I Knew Winnie the Pooh ...

Posted Wednesday, July 21, 1999, at 4:12 PM ET
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Cynthia Gorney, a reporter for the Washington Post from 1975 to 1991, will join the faculty at U.C. Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism this fall. She is the author of Articles of Faith: A Frontline History of the Abortion Wars (click here to buy the book). Stephen Harrigan is an occasional columnist for Slate, as well as a screenwriter and novelist. His recent books include Water and Light: A Diver's Journey to a Coral Reef (click here to buy the book).
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