48
What the Authors Tell Us
Peter Hunt
‘A lot of discussion about children’s literature’, the author Nina Bawden observed,
‘suffers from pompous inflation’ (Bawden 1987:68), but on the whole children’s authors
display a down-to-earth concern with the complex situation in which they find
themselves. They are commonly reluctant to theorise: Lucy Boston expressed the extreme
view: ‘I’m against all theoreticians. No original writing could result from a theory, could
it?’ (Wintle and Fisher 1974:284). Joan Aiken is a little more tolerant:
I suppose one ought to have theories about writing for children, but with me the
theories seem to come second to the writing. However...what I believe is that
children’s books should never minimise the fact that life is tough; virtue ought to
triumph in the end, because even the best-regulated children’s lives are so insecure
that they need reassurance, but there’s no point in pretending that wickedness and
hardship don’t exist. And one should never, never write down to a hypothetical
children’s level or reduce one’s vocabulary... But I’m sure, really, that the main
thing is just to shove all theories aside and enjoy the writing; that’s the only way to
produce good work.
Townsend 1971:25None the less, children’s authors have continually to confront questions of quite who
their audiences are and how they can entertain and influence them; they have to make
decisions in terms of language and content, and this in the context of pressure from
publishers, parents, the educational establishment and would-be censors. This chapter
brings together comments from over fifty authors, throwing light on many such issues.
It is common, for example, to find that people have a low opinion of the children’s
authorship as a profession—as K.M.Peyton said, ‘My mother asks me, “When are you
going to write a proper book?”’ (‘On not writing a proper book’ in Blishen 1975:123). Ivan
Southall has questioned the suggestion that writing for children is a ‘lesser’ activity:
The viewpoint mystifies me—that works for children must necessarily be minor
works by minor writers, that deliberately they are generated and projected at
reduced voltage, that they evade truth, that they avert passion and sensuality and
the subtleties of life and are unworthy of the attention of the serious artist or
craftsman... Adult scaling-down of the intensity of the child state is a crashing
injustice, an outrageous distortion of what childhood is about.