The Influence of Middle-Grade Fiction on Wes Anderson

Movie director Wes Anderson, born in 1969, grew up reading the children’s books that librarians praised in the 1970s. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

That influence was clear the moment that the narrator of The Royal Tenenbaums tells us that two of the siblings had lived surreptitiously in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, just as in E. L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Newbery winner for 1968. That scene took less than a minute, as I recall; any longer, and it would have moved from homage to outright theft.

Anderson of course adapted Roald Dahl’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox, published in 1970.

According to Hollywood.com, Anderson had some more fantastic middle-grade models in mind for his latest movie, Moonrise Kingdom:

…Anderson returned to many of books and movies he loved as a kid. Anderson recalls Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time [Newbery Medal, 1963], Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (which the director suggests shaped the characterization of his young hero Sam Shakusky) and Susan Cooper’s ’60s [actually 1965 and 1973-77] fantasy series, The Dark Is Rising [Newbery Honor in 1974, Newbery Medal in 1977].

Anderson calls the first book in the saga, Under Sea Under Stone, “a tease,” in that at the core of the epic tale was a touching family story. But that didn’t stop him from immersing himself in the more fantastic elements as a kid.

Anderson was right in detecting something different about that first volume: Cooper didn’t envision the more fantastic sequels when she wrote it. In the US it even came from a different publisher. The epic qualities arrive in the second volume:

“There’s a poem that includes all these different symbols and talisman, and there’s this whole sort of mythology associated with it,” Anderson fondly remembers. “But it does not have the complexity of Tolkien. It’s young adult novel feeling, from the ’50s, ’60s, so there’s a sort of simplicity at the same time that there’s a very fleshed-out fantasy world. I remember carrying and wearing objects that I was imbuing with the powers of these talismans that were in the series.”

I don’t think the term “young adult” applies to any of those books, however. (Even Huckleberry Finn is either middle-grade or adult.) They’re all middle-grade novels, most about finding capability instead of finding identity. But of course “young adult” is a hot term today.

TOMORROW: The greatest influences on Moonrise Kingdom.

What Made Maus YA?

More remarks on our cultural assumption that comics must be appropriate for kids from Dwight Garner’s review of Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus in the New York Times:

When the book won a young-adult award from librarians, he was peeved. “I’d made something as mature as I was capable of making, and it seemed unfair that I was a victim of a prejudice against my medium,” he says. Ultimately, he says, “I reconciled to the fact that if ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ and ‘Huckleberry Finn’ can be considered children’s books, I can settle for ‘Maus’ being on those shelves.”

Gulliver’s Travels is considered appropriate for young readers because of its fantastic element, and because many retellings have been bowdlerized of such scenes as Gulliver putting out a fire for the Lilliputians. Huckleberry Finn gets on that shelf because it has a child as protagonist and narrator. Maus is there because it’s in comics form, with talking animals.

Dick Gray and Richard Grayson

Marc Tyler Nobleman, author of Boys of Steel: The Creators of Superman and an upcoming biography of Bill Finger, co-creator of Batman and Robin, recently alerted me to the sensational character find of 1903: The Boy Wonder, Dick Gray!

Appearing in one story in the pulp magazine Brave and Bold, Dick Gray was “athletic in figure and singularly agile in his movements”—but then so were most other dime-novel heroes.

In the Comic Buyer’s Guide, David Frank reported that “The Boy Wonder, or Dick Gray’s Marvellous Pump” is “about the adventures Gray gets into with his anti-gravity device.” It thus seems to be of a piece with the Stratemeyer syndicate’s Tom Swift series, L. Frank Baum’s Master Key, and similar young men’s tales from that age of technological wonder.

I doubt this 1903 magazine had any influence on the creation of Dick Grayson in 1940. Finger, Jerry Robinson, and Bob Kane weren’t even born when Dick Gray was pumped out. But the similarity of the characters’ names highlights one ubiquitous aspect of American pop fiction until recently: the WASPiness of its heroes and heroines.

Both Baum and Edward Stratemeyer had German surnames, but practically all their main characters had surnames from the British Isles. Two generations later, many of the first generation of superhero creators were Jewish: Finger, Bob Kane (originally Robert Kahn), Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Will Eisner, Joe Simon, Jack Kirby (originally Jacob Kurtzberg), Stan Lee (originally Stanley Leiber), and so on. But they created heroes with names like Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Denny Colt, Steve Rogers, Reed Richards, and Peter Parker.

That trend in popular culture both reflected and amplified the trend in real life for some Americans to shed their “ethnic” names. Which brings me to a real Richard Grayson.

Back during the national crisis over the edition of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn published without ethnic slurs, one small electronic press announced the publication of The Hipster Huckleberry Finn. It replaced the “n word” with “hipster.” The editor and publisher of that edition is a writer, teacher, and activist named Richard Grayson.

In this autobiographical essay he explains:

I was born Richard Arnold Ginsberg in Brooklyn on June 4, 1951, two years after my parents, Marilyn and Daniel, had married. When I was six months old, Mom and Dad changed our Jewish last name to the ethnically neutral Grayson.

At that time, superhero comics were in a doldrum. Robin was one of the handful of costumed heroes who continued to appear often in comic books—Batman, Detective, and World’s Finest—but even he had lost his cover slot on Star Spangled Comics.

The Batman newspaper comic strip had stopped years before. The low-budget movie serial Batman and Robin had appeared in theaters in 1949 and then disappeared, and there was no TV show in daily reruns.

As a result, most Americans might not have seen any particular meaning in the name “Richard Grayson,” aside from the “ethnically neutral” quality this man’s parents were seeking.

But as the former Richard Ginsburg grew up, superhero comics came back. He even read them:

I also was a big fan of superhero comic books. I proudly possessed the early issues of Justice League of America, Green Lantern, Spider-Man, and Daredevil. At 11, I would pretend to be The Flash – Fastest Man Alive – as I bicycled around the neighborhood, playing hooky from Hebrew school.

Alas, Grayson doesn’t discuss whether he identified with Batman’s Boy Wonder, or was teased for sharing that character’s name. Perhaps one day he’ll make a story about it.

Chabon Feeling Torn on Twain

At The Atlantic, novelist Michael Chabon clocks in on the new, worst-epithets-free edition of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. As he notes, he’s criticized that volume for all the applaudable reasons.

Yet when reading Twain aloud to his own kids, Chabon found himself changing the text just like Prof. Alan Gribben:

Reading Tom Sawyer occupied the entire summer, and during that time I don't remember wrestling at all with the question of what to say, out loud, with my actual lips and tongue, when my eyes arrived at that strange little word. A cursory search of Google Books suggests that it makes a total of only 10 appearances in the entire book, which is, after all, not told by a backcountry boy in his own dialect but narrated, with a great deal of mock-decorum, in the third person. Ten is probably fairly close to the number of times that I have said "nigger" in my life, never once without some kind of ironizing or sterilizing quotation marks of tone fitted carefully around it, and, somewhat humiliatingly given the choice made by Professor Gribben of Auburn, which I heartily and firmly, piling on, condemn for its cowardice, mealy-mouthedness, and all-consuming fallaciousness, I recall that in those fleeting spots where I encountered the word I would substitute, without missing a beat or losing any literal meaning, "slave." It was no big thing. The kids had no idea that a switcheroo had been run on them.

But then comes Huckleberry Finn, because the kids want to hear more about those characters (and Tom Sawyer Abroad is, let’s face it, no substitute).

Chabon faced this awkward situation in a most comfortable setting: with his own kids well before their teens, in a bohemian-bourgeois coastal bedroom, without listeners who might be personally affected by the epithets. (Okay, there’s at least one more comfortable setting to consider the matter: my own, right now, with no big-eyed kids looking up at me and wondering why I haven’t started reading.)

Would the Chabon family stick with Huck Finn as Twain depicted him? Or would they find, like Prof. Gribben, some open compromise with the work? Read the rest of Chabon’s essay for the resolution they found. But don’t miss:

"Hey, Dad," the little guy asked me at one point. "How come if you can't say you-know-what, when you were reading Tom Sawyer you kept saying INJUN Joe, because that's offensive, too."

The NewSouth edition of Twain has already dealt with that issue.

Chabon’s essay reminded me of a story I heard about fifteen years ago at a PEN New England forum from an author whose name I’ve tried and failed to recall. Her mother was Native American, her father European-American, and one of her favorite bedtime readalouds was Peter Pan. Her father insisted that she not read that book on her own; she had to wait until he could read it aloud—the book was that special.

Only after this author had grown did she realize that her father was silently editing J. M. Barrie’s passages about the Indians to sand down the offensive stereotypes.

(Photo above courtesy of Judy Baxter, via Flicker under a Creative Commons license.)

A Modest Technological Solution for Offensive Language

Several years ago, a fellow member of the CW email list wrote about her idea for a book inspired by (as I recall) a Little League teammate of her son who did a lot of swearing. So much as to embarrass other young teen boys—which must really have been a lot.

This aspiring author foresaw a big challenge for a book about that situation, however. How could she convey a character’s foul language powerfully without using foul words? If she used those words, wouldn’t that undercut her message about the costs of using coarse language, and the ability to express oneself without it? On the other hand, if she used euphemisms, wouldn’t the book come across as namby-pamby and lose readers’ respect?

Polite people and craven mass media have long used:

• watered-down terms that sound quaint: “Darn!” “Gosh!” “Jiminy Cricket!”
• oaths that no real person says: “Golly gee!” “Holy chicken feathers, Batman!”
• transparent substitutes that don’t fool anyone: “friggin’,” “bleeping”

But those don’t have the power of real profanity.

It’s easier in fantasy, where writers can come up with horrible curses for one society that carry no connotations for ours: “Hippakaloric!” “Grife!” “Belgium!” And of course comics have developed a symbolic language. But those solutions wouldn’t work for this writer.

Her remarks made me imagine and describe an electronic book that includes two texts: expurgated and unexpurgated. Readers might not see the fully profane language, either because of their choice or because of a parent or teacher’s choice. But they would know that that language exists, floating in some aether just below the words they see, only one access code away. Such a book would, I posited, be more powerful than a watered-down text alone.

The same technology could address Huckleberry Finn’s “nigger” problem. Mark Twain’s original text could exist alongside a version that doesn’t put that insulting word in readers’ eyes 200 times. Readers could choose which text to read, teachers which to read aloud or analyze in class—but the original text would still be part of the package.

How difficult would it be to create a two-level electronic book compatible with existing standards? I don’t know. But I see that the Nerdy Teacher reports there’s already an iPad edition of Huckleberry Finn with the original illustrations, for full historical context.

(Incidentally, now that I think of it, one of those illustrations had to be altered during printing because an engraver had rendered it obscene. That could be something else to put behind the access code.)

Standing Up for the Public Domain

As we consider the current kerfuffle over an edition of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Americans are united on several points:

Opposing censorship is a Good Thing. Preserving our history (even of Bad Things) is a Good Thing. Preserving our culture (especially the Great American Novels) is a Good Thing.

But standing up for the public domain is also a Good Thing.

All the books that Mark Twain published in his lifetime are in the public domain. (Canny author-publisher that he was, he managed to figure out how to generate new copyrights and new publicity.) That makes changing Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn different from demanding changes to, or restricting access to, a book still under copyright with limited availability.

For one thing, such censorship won’t work. With Project Gutenberg, Google Books, more cheap “classic” paperback editions than you can swing a dead cat at, and millions of copies already printed, there’s no way the original texts of Twain’s best novels will disappear.

One edited edition of Huck Finn from one small press doesn’t erase all the other books on the market. It doesn’t stop bookstores, libraries, and schools from using unexpurgated versions if they decide those are more desirable. I can’t imagine a credible scenario in which this edition pushes out the original text.

Furthermore, because Huckleberry Finn is in the public domain, Prof. Alan Gribben has every right to do whatever he wants with the text. He chose to remove the word “nigger” and insert the chapter from Life on the Mississippi that Twain himself edited out, and in his introduction (PDF download) he explains why.

We all have the same right. For very little money I can put out an electronic edition with the word “nigger” replaced with “n!gger” and that extra chapter pulled out. White supremacists could issue an edition that replaces the word “nigger” with “naturally ignorant nigger.” Less stupid authors could rewrite the book to make Jim less childish, or substitute a better plot in the last third. People can write sequels, and fanfiction. The public domain makes all that possible. Then it’s up to the reading public to choose which uses have value.

Yesterday I noticed that several blog posts about this controversy are illustrated with the cover of the Troll Illustrated Classic edition, shown above. Perhaps that’s an ironic commentary on watering down the book to a childish level, but I suspect it’s because that edition has a big, iconic illustration of Huck and Jim on their appropriated raft.

That Troll edition clocks in at 48 pages. Obviously it’s been abridged for younger readers, another possibility made cheap and easy by the public domain. I’ll bet that a lot of Twain’s words were taken out of that book, and that “nigger” was one of the first to go. Nobody seems to have objected.

I can imagine a philosophical argument for barring people from making any changes to a reproducible work of art that its creator didn’t approve. But the cultural cost of such a restriction would far outweigh the benefits.

As long as no one misrepresents a changed edition of Twain as the original, then it’s up to readers which to choose. Gribben is quite explicit in his Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn edition about what he changed—probably more explicit than the folks at Troll Illustrated Classics.

TOMORROW: A modest technological solution.

Cutting Through the Huck Finn Weeds

The edition of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn that I wrote about on Monday hit the national news today, with boringly predictable results: lots of complaints about “political correctness,” censorship, how other people are simple-mindedly misreading the book. I made up a few rules for myself for sorting through the noise.

1) If you say that it’s appropriate to use the “n word” in classrooms, but completely avoid using it in your own essay, then you lose a point. And for that reason, I’m going to use offensive terms with scare-quotes instead of euphemisms. Internet filtering programs, beware.

2) If you’re personally affected by the use of the terms “nigger” and “Injun,” then I’m more interested in your opinion than if you’re (like me) a white person for whom the issue is more abstract. Those words aren’t generically offensive—they’re particularly offensive because they derogate particular people.

Thus, I’ve sought out responses from African-American writers like Jamelle Bouie at The Atlantic and Elon James White at Salon, and from folks with African-American family members like Ann Freeman at Upside My Head. (But Freeman loses a point under rule #1. [REFEREES’ RULING: Freeman supports the use of the unedited Huckleberry Finn in the classroom, but opposes teachers’ or students’ use of the word in classroom discussions. So is that worth a point or not? It’s unexpected nuances like these that can make the issue so thought-provoking.])

3) If you’re a teacher who’s used Huckleberry Finn in the classroom recently, then I’m more interested. Some examples I’ve found include Sara Goodman as Sara*ndipity; David Ulin at the LA Times’s Jacket Copy; and Biblioklept before news of this edition broke. (But Goodman loses a point under rule #1.) Jinx as a former classroom teacher and a black woman gets double points.

Students and parents do sometimes object to Huckleberry Finn because of its language, as this news item from Seattle in 2003 explores. Teachers do sometimes choose not to use it, as described in this article from Multicultural Education in 2006. It’s more valuable to see how educators and students address the book’s challenges than to see an outsider loftily insist that they should.

I’d especially like to see some professionals address not just how to draw useful lessons from Twain’s use of “Injun” and “nigger,” but also how to do so in an environment increasingly concerned with preparing kids for standardized tests. Is there enough time in the school day? Does the book work better in certain schools, or certain grades?

4) If you use this incident to complain about “political correctness” on the left, I simply laugh at you. Not just because of the tired cliché, but because you’ve made a foolish assumption. The editor, Prof. Alan Gribben of Auburn, presented himself as a victim of the radical left in a political-academic controversy at the University of Texas back in the 1990s. For details, see Julius G. Getman’s In the Company of Scholars: The Struggle for the Soul of Higher Education, John K. Wilson’s The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack on Higher Education, and Gribben’s own version of events.

Gribben is quite clear in his introduction to the new edition about why he feels it has value. I quoted that introduction on Monday (PDF download). Opponents should take his arguments into account before making any assumptions about the thinking behind this book.

5) If you make up ridiculous scenarios of what this editing might lead to, then I’m not interested in your opinion. This is about changing one word (or 236, depending on how we count) in Huckleberry Finn and two in Tom Sawyer. It doesn’t change the book’s plot, characters, or themes. It doesn’t affect any other editions or copies already on shelves.

And it’s not about just any offensive language. Novelist Walter Kirn joked, “Let's add offensive words to American novels that don't have enough of them. Little Women could use a few more 'shits.'” But “shit” doesn’t demean a particular class of people. If we want an equivalent, the joke would suggest renaming Little Women to “Little Cunts.” But who would say that (outside of the porn industry)?

TOMORROW: What the public domain means.

The Slave Jim and Indian Joe

The John F. Blair company is about to publish an edition of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn that:

• refers to Huck’s companion as “the slave Jim,” leaving out the “n word,” since that has such a powerful negative effect on today’s readers.
• refers to Tom’s bête noire as “Indian Joe,” for a parallel reason.
• substitutes “half-blood” for “half-breed” when discussing Joe. The editor says the replacement term is “less disrespectful and has even taken on some panache since J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2005).”

Alan Gribben’s introduction (PDF download) explains:

This NewSouth Edition of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn is emphatically not designed for academic scholars studying Twain’s precise texts. I simply came to believe that a significant number of school teachers, college instructors, and general readers might welcome the option of an edition of Twain’s paired novels that spares the reader all contact with a word that never seems to lose its vitriol, despite the occasional efforts of rap and hip hop musicians to re-appropriate it and the well-meaning but usually futile (from my own personal experience) endeavors by classroom teachers to inoculate their students against the “n” word by using Huckleberry Finn as a springboard to discuss its etymology and cultural history.

Gribben points out that Twain himself was a commercial writer, keenly sensitive to his audience’s reactions (even if he didn’t always try to comfort them). And that there are plenty of other editions with the original language, should a reader or teacher wish that.

Indeed, I think the fate of this approach will be determined in the commercial marketplace. If people wish a slightly bowdlerized edition of these two novels, they can buy this book, and it will remain in print. If not enough people do, this text will fade away.

Gribben is to be commended for declaring and discussing his choice up front and giving us the choice. I’m happy with the editions I have—but the words being changed have never been applied to me.

(Thanks to Bookshelves of Doom and Book Haven.)