Then and now 8.28

Thursday, August 28, 2003

"Children's literature" is a relatively modern innovation. Traditionally, literature was just literature. Kids cut their reading teeth on the books their elders were reading. I'm not the only one to have misgivings about the idea of "children's literature," of books written just for children. Most of those books now viewed as "children's classics" ("Huckleberry Finn," "Kidnapped," "Gulliver's Travels," etc.) were written simply for readers, who were taken to be ageless. In classics, the line between just books and children's books is thin or nonexistent. A book ought always to be judged for its quality, not some "target audience." But most books aren't classics, and the worry is that setting up book age categories opens the door to lowered standards. The whole modern culture tends to underestimate the intelligence of children, and thus to turn out "dumbed-down" books for them. All this is by way of background to a friendly word about a new novel for "the suggested age level 12 up." A logical definition, I suppose, since folks decades "up" from 12 have enjoyed reading the review copy. But why must it be put down as a mere "kid's book?" "Guerrilla Season," by Pat Hughes, is apparently an entry in a young people's series from a leading New York publishing house, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. Most such series are written to formulas. The publisher provides the "recipe," the writer duteously collects and cooks up the called-for ingredients. Our Lebanon, Mo., friend Ellen Gray Massey so characterized her experience with at least one publisher. Pat Hughes's experience comes as a surprise and a relief, not least of all to her. "I would never write to a formula," she assures us. "But quite frankly it shocked me that Farrar, Strauss & Giroux picked up 'Guerrilla Season' and did not ask me to change one word." "I was convinced that no agent or publisher would touch it," she writes, "for reasons you picked up on: fair treatment of the Southern viewpoint. As I'm sure you know, that's extremely rare coming out of New York City, especially in books for young people." Pat Hughes has strange credentials for writing a Civil War novel laid in Missouri and full of "anti-Lincoln sentiment," damnings of John Brown as "a self-righteous murderer," Union sol diers shown up as drunken brutes, and not a single whipping of a slave! Born and raised in Connecticut, she's now a Pennsylvanian, a copy editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her one link to Missouri, she says, is a childhood interest in Jesse James (she named a son Jesse). "I grew tired of seeing the same old Civil War story repeated in books aimed at my own children (North good, South bad), and decided to try to set the record straight for kids." "Guerrilla Season" is the story of the Howard family of Clay County, Mo., starting in the middle of the Civil War. Matt, the 15-year-old hero, is torn between his itch to run off and fight with the "Secesh" guerrillas, to avenge the depredations of thieving Union soldiers, and his duty, as the oldest able-bodied son, to stay on the farm with his widowed mother and younger siblings. The mother, Northern-born, vainly tries to keep the family "neutral." The informed reader soon identifies Matt's close friend and neighbor Jesse as none other than the future outlaw king himself. Now he's just another angry teenage boy. We're treated to Matt's view of the famous flogging of Jesse by Federal militiamen, and their temporary hanging of his stepfather, an ordeal after which Dr. Samuel was never the same. As a well-known contrarian, with writing pretensions of my own, there were things about the plot and characters of "Guerrilla Season" I just didn't like. But I liked the book, perhaps just for that reason: It's thought-provoking! Lady-friends and I have been belaboring each other over it since the review copy came. Pat Hughes says she wrote the book "with boys in mind," having found it difficult to find boy-minded stuff for her own boys to read. The lady-friends didn't agree, but I found Matt's behavior unboylike; his Hamletlike hesitation to act on his convictions is less than convincing. Like a similar novel by Ellen Massey, it's a pastorale more than a war story: Bucolic scenes from pioneer farm life, with the perils of war a menacing cloud on the horizon. Certainly the pastorale is a legitimate and worthy literary genre, and in this novel the tension between the bucolic and the looming menace of war (tantalizingly just out of sight, mostly) is well and delicately done. Still, when Mall in the end meekly sets off for Northern safety with his mother, I couldn't help feeling a twinge of letdown! Granted, as Pat Hughes argues, there were bound to be a few teenage boys who preferred to stick to farming, and to their mamas, rather than going off to wade in gore with one side or the other; but it's rendered credible only at a steep sacrifice of potential drama. "Guerrilla Season" is Part One of a projected tetralogy. (One immediately thinks of "The Four Seasons" of Vivaldi.) "Growing Season," the next in the series, "will follow Matt through the final two years of the war." "Killing Season" will follow Jesse through May, 1865 (when, as any James fan will know, he rides in to surrender and is shot by drunken Federal soldiers.) "Harvest Season" will take place ten years later, to be told by Matt's brother Tyler, whom we've met as a three-year-old, who's now 13, "returning for the first time since the war to live on the family farm with Matt and his wife and young children." "This is the plan," so the author.tells us, "but when I'll ever get the chance to write these books, I have no idea!" We wish her luck. As many have noted, and I've found out the hard way, women writers can be fiercely maternal about their literary children. Men writers too, of course, often take criticism personally. That "criticism" may mean "appraisal," not "disparagement," is forgotten; and "constructive criticism" seems an endangered species, if not already extinct. I hope Pat Hughes and her potential readers will read this appraisal as praise. I wouldn't have wasted my time on "Guerrilla Season" if I hadn't found it worth the bother. It's a readable, enjoyable tale, true to its historical setting. More than that, it's food for thought. If it could only shed that stigma "for suggested age level 12 up!" "Guerrilla Season," a 328-page hardback, was officially published on August 12.