Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs

James again, Fred thinks: a Jamesian phrase, a Jamesian situation. But in the novels the scandals and secrets of high life are portrayed as more elegant; the people are better mannered. Maybe because it was a century earlier; or maybe only because the mannered elegance of James’ prose obfuscates the crude subtext. Maybe, in fact, it was just like now…

Because, after all, isn’t Rosemary the classic James heroine: beautiful, fine, delicate, fatally impulsive? She thinks of Posy and Edwin as her best friends; she is too generous to see them as they are, too lighthearted and trusting. She needs other, better friends-better in both senses-friends who will shield her from scenes like tonight’s-

Well, isn’t that what he’s here for, the sterling young American champion James himself might have provided? For the second time that day Fred has the giddy sense of having got into a novel, and again it is dizzying, exhilarating. He laughs out loud and plunges into the blackened shrubberies, toward the house.

VINNIE M INER is sitting on a bench in a primary school playground in Camden Town, watching a group of little girls skipping rope. It is a windy April afternoon; gray and white clouds like jumbled soapy washing slosh across the sky, sending alternate brightness and shadow over her notebook. She already has a thick folder of rhymes recorded in this school and several others; but as a contemporary folklorist she is interested not only in texts but in the cultural settings in which they occur, how they are passed on and by whom, the manner of their delivery, and their social function. So far today she has seen and heard nothing strikingly new, but she isn’t disappointed. She has spoken to one class and collected material from this and from two others, concentrating her efforts on the ten- and eleven-year-olds who are usually her best informants: younger children know fewer rhymes, and older ones are beginning to forget them under the pernicious influence of mass culture and of puberty.

Overall, Vinnie’s working hypothesis about the differences between British and American game rhymes has been supported. The British texts do tend to be older, in some cases suggesting a medieval or even an Anglo-Saxon origin; they are also more literary. The American rhymes are newer, cruder, less lyrical and poetic.

More complex analysis will come later; she can see already, however, that violence is common in the verses of both countries, something that wouldn’t surprise any trained observer and doesn’t surprise Vinnie, who has never thought of children as particularly sweet or gentle.

Polly on the railway

Picking up stones;

Along came an engine

And broke Polly’s bones.

“Oh,” said Polly,

“That’s not fair.”

“Oh,” said the engine-driver,

“I don’t care.”

How many bones did Polly break?

One, two, three, four…

The chant continues, repeats itself; the rope revolves, a vibrating blur in the air, enclosing an ellipsoid of charmed space. Within it a child jumps, her long hair blown out, the gray pleated skirt of her school uniform fanning wide above thin knobby legs in gray wool stockings. Her expression of unselfconscious concentration, skill, and joy is repeated on the face of the girl next in line, who is already bobbing to the scuffed beat of oxfords on damp tarmac. As Vinnie watches, her strongest sensation-far stronger than professional interest or a shiver whenever the sun skids under a cloud-is envy.

Since she is an authority on children’s literature, people assume that Vinnie must love children, and that her own lack of them must be a tragedy. For the sake of public relations, she seldom denies these assumptions outright. But the truth is otherwise. In her private opinion most contemporary children-especially American ones-are competitive, callous, noisy, and shallow, at once jaded and ignorant as a result of overexposure to television, baby-sitters, advertising, and video games. Vinnie wants to be a child, not to have one; she isn’t interested in the parental role, but in an extension or recovery of what for her is the best part of life.

Indifference to actual children is fairly common among experts in Vinnie’s field, and not unknown among authors of juvenile literature. As she has often noted in her lectures, many of the great classic writers had an idyllic boyhood or girlhood that ended far too soon, often traumatically. Carroll, Macdonald, Kipling, Burnett, Nesbit, Grahame, Tolkien-and the list could be extended. The result of such an early history often seems to be a passionate longing, not for children, but for one’s own lost childhood.

As a little girl Vinnie too was unusually happy. Her parents were good-tempered, fond of her, and comfortably circumstanced; her first eleven years were passed in agreeable and varied semirural surroundings. It was no handicap not to be beautiful then, and all children are small. Vinnie was clever, energetic, popular. Though her size prevented her from excelling at most sports, she gained authority through her self-confidence and her good memory for games, rhymes, riddles, stories, and jokes. She loved everything about those years: the hours in the classroom and on the playground; the thrilling exploration of overgrown vacant lots, alleys, woods, and fields; the visits to stores and museums; the picnics and summer trips to the mountains or seaside with her parents. She loved the books-indeed, she still prefers children’s literature to most contemporary adult fiction. She loved the toys, the songs, the games, the Saturday matinees at the neighborhood movie house, the radio programs (especially “Little Orphan Annie” and “The Shadow”). She loved the round of holidays, from January first-when she helped her parents toast the baby New Year in nonalcoholic foamy eggnog-to Christmas with its elaborate family ceremonial and gathering of aunts and uncles and cousins.

Then suddenly, when Vinnie was twelve, her parents moved to the city. In her new school she was skipped a grade, and found that she had lost everything important to her in life and become a disadvantaged adolescent-an undersized, pimply, flat-chested, embarrassingly plain “grind.” The pain of this transformation is something she has never quite got over.

As it turned out, though, Vinnie didn’t have to relinquish childhood forever. No one really has to, she believes, and often declares. The message of all her lectures and books and articles-sometimes explicit, more often implied-is that we must, as she puts it, value and preserve childhood: we must “cherish the child within us.” This isn’t of course an original theme, but one of the basic doctrines of her profession.

The cloudy laundry overhead has thickened; the school building, a castellated structure of sooty Victorian brick, intercepts the declining sun. The skipping rope ceases to define its magical space, falls limp, becomes only a length of old clothesline. As the little girls prepare to leave, Vinnie consults with them to check on some of the textual variations she had heard; she thanks them, and writes down their names and ages. Then she puts away her notebook and follows the children’s route across the chilly, darkening playground, wrapping her coat closer, looking forward to her tea.

“Hey! Hey, missis.” The girl who has accosted her is standing against the smoke-stained, graffiti-scrawled brick wall of the narrow passage that runs past the school to the street. She is older than the children who were jumping rope-perhaps twelve or thirteen-skinny, and poorly dressed in a semi-punk style. A soiled once-pink Orion cardigan is pinned together over her school uniform skirt and a red-and-black T-shirt advertising some rock group. Her complexion is bad; her cropped hair has been dyed a nasty shade of pale magenta, and resembles the synthetic fur of those stuffed toys that are won-or more often not won-at Bank Holiday fairs.