Wisest Thing I’ve Read Today

Over the weekend the Boston Globe ran an interview with eleven-year-old actor Aidan Gemme. He’s currently starring as Peter Llewellyn in the unfathomable stage musical adaptation of Neverland, the unhistorical movie about J. M. Barrie writing Peter Pan.

One of Gemme’s earlier Broadway jobs was alternating in the role of the Boy in Waiting for Godot. Here’s how he described preparing to play that frustrating character:

The Boy doesn’t really have a personality, and you can’t get information on him. I didn’t step into him. I just stepped out of myself.

When Fanfiction Took Over British Children’s Publishing

The Horn Book just published Caroline Fraser’s excoriation of how Penguin has recently exploited Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit with an aggressive copyright claim, broad product licensing, spin-off titles, and, most recently, commissioning sequels from actress and writer Emma Thompson.

British publishing seems to be crazy about such latter-day sequels lately. Such books have always been with us, of course, but the latest wave is distinguished by a couple of features:

• Many of the intellectual properties involved are still under copyright, meaning the new books were authorized or commissioned by the companies or trusts controlling those properties.
• The authors of those latter-day books aren’t work-for-hire hacks or even solid writers without a recent hit (like David Benedictus, author of Return to the Hundred Acre Wood) but well-known authors who could get reasonably well paid for their own original work.

Thus we have Oscar-winner Thompson writing about rabbits (though not, as Sutton says, with the zoological precision of Potter). Penguin can thus benefit from the Peter Rabbit brand name and good will, Thompson’s celebrity, and the now-increasingly-common media story of a new sequel to a beloved classic.

Likewise, we have Carnegie Medal winner Geraldine McCaughrean writing an authorized sequel to Peter Pan, and competing in the marketplace with the not-originally-authorized American titles from Ridley Pearson and Dave Barry. Dame Jacqueline Wilson was commissioned to extend E. Nesbit’s Psammead trilogy. Former British poet laureate Andrew Motion penned a sequel to Treasure Island.

In other worlds, it appears the British children’s literature establishment has turned to fanfiction.

One-Page Wizard of Oz

This is an unabridged publication of L. Frank Baum’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz in poster form, available from Spineless Classics in the UK.

The same outfit has versions of Peter Pan, Treasure Island, and other classics, all in appropriate silhouettes.

But for £40?!

(I understand that expressing the price with the singular form of the currency—“Forty pound?!”—conveys indignation in British speech. But I could be wrong.)

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.)

Anthony Horowitz: "How Depressing It Is"

A while back I linked to this complaint in the tabloid Daily Mail from Anthony Horowitz, creator of juvenile spy Alex Rider. Reading the graphic novel adapted from the movie script adapted from the original novel brought that article to my mind again today.

Horowitz claimed it was just too hard for him to create villains when he had to avoid ethnic and other stereotypes:

How depressing it is that Herod Sayle, the Lebanese businessman that Alex Rider fought in his first adventure, Stormbreaker, quietly morphed into Darrius Sayle, Californian trailer trash, by the time the film came out last summer.

In the UK edition, he's the son of a failed hairdresser, but in the American edition that had to be changed when I was accused of homophobia - because to some people hairdressing would seem a gay profession.

Over there, he's the son of a failed oral hygienist.

Horowitz's article didn't acknowledge that the original name "Herod Sayle" was a cheap pun to begin with. It left out how the character had already "morphed" from Lebanese to Egyptian in the US edition of the book, undoubtedly with his approval, so he had long compromised the original characterization.

What's more, Horowitz's whinging about losing "hairdresser" in favor of "oral hygienist" obscured how that he apparently believes boys who grow up poor in the Third World must have a "failed" father. Actual grinding poverty has no place in this view of life.

Whether Egyptian, Lebanese, or Californian, Herod/Darrius Sayle is born poor and tumbles into an elite British education. In the books, he as a young child saves rich people's lives. In the graphic novel, his mother wins a lottery. Sayle hates the bigotry and bullying at his new school so much that it motivates both his success as a computer magnate and his genocidal scheme.

Of course, anybody would hate bigotry and bullying directed at them; I've already written about Horowitz's lack of understanding and compassion on that point. His implied lesson in Stormbreaker, in all its forms, is not that the future prime minister shouldn't have bullied Sayle at school, but that Sayle shouldn't have been sent to that school in the first place; he would have been happier in the Lebanese slum/Egyptian slum/California trailer park where he began.

Just as Horowitz's characterization and plotting seems to play to bigotry, so does his Daily Mail essay. It's a standard-issue rant against the constrictions of "political correctness"--yet how in the world does that follow from the essay's start?

When it comes to children's literature, the most fun that a writer can have is creating the bad guys ... and the fact is that there's nothing kids like more than a good villain.

At the end of the day, Peter Pan is just a girl in green tights, but when Captain Hook enters the stage, the theatre comes alive to the sound of jubilant boos and hisses.

Who is it we remember from Treasure Island? Is it Jim Hawkins, the cabin boy, or the effortlessly stylish Long John Silver?

Ethnicity and "political correctness" never come up with those classic villains. Stevenson and Barrie didn't build those characters on stereotypes, and they didn't write to newspapers lamenting how much easier it would have been to do so.

In fact, the roots of Captain Hook's character rest in--irony alert!--an elite British education. In the stage play, Hook's last words are "Floreat Etona," the motto of Eton College, and Barrie later wrote a speech titled "Captain Hook at Eton." In the novel, Barrie's narrative voice whispers, "Hook was not his true name. To reveal who he really was would even at this date set the country in a blaze." Captain Hook was an insider, not an outsider, which made him a character for the ages.

Given Horowitz's article from last year, we might wonder what he came up with as the antagonist in the newest Alex Rider adventure, Snakehead? The Telegraph reports he's the leader of an "Asian crime network" named Winston Yu:

In typical Horowitz fashion, though, he is far from being the usual two-dimensional villain. He is the son of a Chinese woman who has sent her boy to an expensive public school (Harrow) on the strength of her earnings as a hired assassin.

Yes, that's "typical Horowitz," with more than a little ethnic stereotyping at the foundation.

Dueling sequels to Peter Pan

In this corner, the Miami Herald offers an interview with its former star columnist, Dave Barry, and novelist Ridley Pearson on their second sequel to Peter Pan. Weighing in at 541 pages, it's Peter and the Shadow Thieves!

And in this corner, from Britain, the Times of London profiles Geraldine McCaughrean, author of Peter Pan in Scarlet. She knocked out all other contenders to be chosen by the Great Ormond Street Hospital to add value to its Peter Pan copyright just before it expires (barring another special act of Parliament).

But wait! The fix is in. After Barry and Pearson's Peter and the Starcatchers spent 47 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, the hospital made a late deal to allow a British edition in exchange for a cut of the profits. So now their book is also legal in the UK. But not to worry, Ms. McCaughrean! It's all for the kids, right?

Meanwhile, I can swivel my chair to the right and spot Peter Pan and the Only Children, by Gilbert Adair, published in the UK in 1987. Did the hospital get a piece of that? I can't tell.

The hospital did license James V. Hart to publish Hook: The Adventures of a Notorious Youth last year. Its author also wrote the screenplay for the 1991 Steven Spielberg movie Hook, starring Robin Williams, Dustin Hoffman, Julia Roberts, but we shouldn't hold that against him.

Four years ago Disney, never one to let money rest in parents' wallets, released Return to Never Land, sequel to its animated Peter Pan. (This time it was personal!) And, coasting through the air on that property, the company licensed a series called "Disney Fairies" through HarperCollins, featuring the character of Tinkerbell. The first title was written by Gail Carson Levine, author of Ella Enchanted.

So Peter Pan may never have grown up, but he's sure had a lot of offspring.

My favorite recent adaptation of Peter Pan is P. J. Hogan's CGI-heavy movie version from 2003. The makers of that film understood that Peter's a bit of a monster, and that even off the stage his story's about playing roles, not just playing. The latest news from that quarter: Hogan has been tapped to direct a movie of Blue Balliett's Chasing Vermeer. Didn't I say that novel is really a fantasy?