First Page Excerpts from Signal #89, May 1999 [please, note that italics and other formats are not reproduced in this excerpt] ---------------------------------------------------------- INDEX: The Signal Poetry Award 1999: Margaret Meek & Heather Kay 79 Emil and the Detectives: A Publishing Story Gerda Faerber 100 Aesop in the Shadows -- The Annual Linder Memorial Lecture -- Peter Hollindale 115 Books about Children's Books 1998: Sheila Ray 133 Endpapers including Morag Styles responding to Neil Philip 148 ***************************************************** The Signal Poetry Award 1999 MARGARET MEEK & HEATHER KAY The Signal Poetry Award for work published during 1998 has been given to The Frog Who Dreamed She Was an Opera Singer by Jackie Kay (Bloomsbury). The award carries a £100 prize and is marked by a certificate designed by Michael Harvey. The most important aspect of the award is the selectors' writing about the winning book and other poetry published for children and young people during the given year. The booklist appears on pages 98-9. Margaret Meek writes: This is the twenty-first occasion of the Signal Poetry Award. Thanks to Nancy and Aidan Chambers, who established it, the first of its kind, there is now a rich archival resource of contemporary comment on books of poems that acknowledge children as readers and possessors of this literature. The invited judges have an opportunity to set in array a year's publications, to explain their choice of a prizewinner and, if they are so inclined, to comment more generally on what they have read. The challenge is to make plain to other adults, in particular readers of Signal, the continuing significance of poetry in the lives of young people, especially when the early deep play of reciting rhymes and verses, both traditional and modern, seems to give way to sterner reading lessons. As a year in poetry, 1998 will be added to my memories for a series of events linked in significance with this judging. The publication of Birthday Letters, and the death of the Poet Laureate, its author, meant that the major poetry prizes he earned became coronal obsequies. Ted Hughes was the first winner of the Signal Award in 1979 for Moon-Bells and Other Poems. In 1983 he shared the prize with Seamus Heaney for their joint editing of The Rattle Bag. Hughes was honoured again in 1985 for What is the Truth?: A Farmyard Fable for the Young. There is no doubt that his poetry stamped its authority on the nature of the award. In an article about Hughes, Lissa Paul quotes a letter he wrote to her about his work, in which he says: 'Writing for children, one has a very definite context of communication. Moreover, it's one where the audience is still open. For the most part, a child knows what it feels-and what it likes, and looks at things with a comparatively unconditioned eye.' I wonder about 'a very definite context', but I support the virtues of the 'still open' quality of children's reading, a quality that writers make much of but which often disappears in contemporary classrooms. And here I find an interesting if depressing parallel between the way ... ********** Heather Kay writes: As I stepped off the bus at Finsbury Park a small woman in a crocheted hat clutching a shopping bag and her Freedom Pass touched my elbow. 'Excuse me, I hope you don't mind, but I couldn't help noticing what you were reading.' I fingered the brightly coloured poetry paperback I had slipped into my pocket-caught in the act-a fellow conspirator-seditious stuff, this! The enjoyment of this shared moment changed the colour of my day. I have also been caught out learning poetry aloud, rehearsing for performances to audiences in every conceivable venue. Selecting material for these shows involves extensive trawling for poems, especially those that are 'longing to be set free from the page', to quote Roger McGough in his foreword to The Macmillan Treasury of Nursery Rhymes and Poems. Although Margaret and I have been in agreement about which of the Signal Award entries to put on our shortlist we have come to the task from different perspectives. (M. 'Have you read that one?' . . . H. 'Listen to this.') I am the newcomer, the infant still testing out everything by mouth. The books arrived from the publishers: the glossy hardbacks and the hasty cheapos, the picture books with minimal texts struggling for attention and, thankfully, books of poems which are given space to speak for themselves. As we began to sort them out, I tried to confront my prejudices and sort out my criteria. I am surprised to find how much these have shifted over the months. The process of building programmes for performance has made me aware of the perils of theme collecting. In the excitement of the chase you net an indiscriminate catch, much of which needs to be thrown back. A cool audience reception provides immediate, realistic quality control. How I agree with Max Fatchen. If you hear a dinosaur Knocking loudly on your door, Through the keyhole firmly say, "Nobody is home today." If the bell should start to ring Tell the beast, "No Visiting." If you see there's more than one, Turn around and start to run. .... ***************************************************** 'Emil and the Detectives': A Publishing Story Gerda Faerber When I'm 30 years old I want people to know my name. At 35 I want to be acknowledged, at 40 even a bit famous. Being famous is not that important though. Anyway it's on my schedule, so it has got to work. You see? Erich Kästner was twenty-seven when he expressed this wish in a letter to his mother dated 26 November 1926. He didn't have to wait so long for fame: his dream came true when he was thirty, with Emil and the Detectives. Kästner's brainchild is one year younger than Mickey Mouse, and his story, which has become a classic, was soon translated into English. Despite its importance in the history of English children's literature, being the prototypical detective adventure story for the young, little has been written in England about its author apart from a critical study by Rex William Last in the Modern German Authors series and the foreword by Rodney Livingstone to a new edition of Cyrus Brooks's translation of Fabian. In this article I have tried to trace the people-publishers, agents, translators-who helped to pave Emil's way from Germany to America and Britain. Emil und die Detektive, published in Germany in 1929, was Erich Kästner's first book for children, but he already had a reputation as writer and poet, although his work appeared under various pen names. He wrote regular reviews for newspapers, and he contributed to a children's magazine called Beyers für alle. As one of the left-wing intellectuals of the late Weimar Republic he wrote for the critical pacifist journal Die Weltbühne, which numbered Bertolt Brecht among its contributors. Die Weltbühne was edited by Siegfried Jacobsohn and, after his early death in 1926, by his wife. Edith Jacobsohn, like her husband of Jewish descent, came from a family of publishers and art dealers. As a young woman she had been sent to England by her father to practise her English and there became a close friend of Edith Williams, who later married a German, becoming Edith Weinreich. In 1924 the two Ediths founded a publishing company, to which they gave the English name of Williams. Edith Jacobsohn not only knew the English language but had learned a lot about English literature. For her own firm she translated Winnie-the-Pooh and some of the Doctor Dolittle books. .... ***************************************************** Aesop in the Shadows Peter Hollindale The name of Leslie Linder is rightly an honoured one for students of Beatrix Potter. It can be an intimidating one too. How can we match the dedication and the scholarship that he brought to the task he set himself? To Leslie Linder we owe the breaking of the code in which Potter wrote her journals, and hence the publication of a text which has permanently altered the way we think and write about her. For Linder it was a labour of love. All literature-and especially children's literature-ought to be the province of the amateur as well as the professional, but Linder was the most formidable kind of amateur, who can beat the professionals at their own game without even being aware of a spirit of competition. For Linder there were no rivalries; just love of a chosen author, and unstinting industrious pleasure in the work. He is a salutary model for professional academics, and for me it is a great pleasure to contribute to the lecture series founded in his memory. Leslie Linder the code-breaker is the special model I have in mind. His work reminds us that Beatrix Potter was a specialist in concealment, a person not habitually disposed to show her hand. Literary critics love writers who offer them the challenge of codes. Like Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, we delight in saying 'Ha! There's a double meaning in that!' But the ingenuity can often be the critic's rather than the author's. So I shall proceed with caution, and try to show the importance of a much simpler and more obvious code than the one that Linder unlocked: the partially coded presence of Beatrix Potter the naturalist in the work of Beatrix Potter the artist and storyteller. Alison Lurie, in her essay on Potter called 'Animal Liberation', makes a key point: 'If Beatrix Potter had been born in this century, or if she had been born a man, there is little doubt that she would have become a famous painter, a well-known naturalist, or both' (90). It seems there's quite a tendency to claim Beatrix Potter for some other potential role in life-something else that she did or might have done rather than make books for little children. After all, she staked her own claim to different ways of life and achievement-as a mycologist before she wrote the books, and after them as a farmer and sheep- ........... 'Aesop in the Shadows' was the Annual Linder Memorial Lecture of the Beatrix Potter Society for 1997, delivered at the Royal Entomological Society, London, on 14 May 1997. ***************************************************** Books about Children's Books 1998 SHEILA RAY When I visited the Signal office in the summer of 1998, Nancy lent me First Finds,1 a charming memoir of early childhood by June Barra-clough who, like me, was born in 1930. I had already decided to use this as a framework for the survey of books about children's books published or first distributed in Britain in 1998 when Nancy sent me Eileen Colwell's equally delightful memoir of an early childhood spent in a Wiltshire village in the first decade of the twentieth century.2 Both memoirs are written in the third person. Eileen, born in 1905, becomes Lucy; June calls herself Jill. Their memories of reading and writing interwoven with other recollections of happy childhoods provide an accompaniment to the publications of 1998. Both Lucy and Jill were what I regard as 'reading children', children who would learn to read and practise the art whatever their personal circumstances. Both had the loving support of parents who read and told them stories and, beyond their home circles, they came into contact with sympathetic teachers and, in Jill's case, librarians like the grown-up Lucy. All the pupils went into a large room, and listened to Miss Cochrane reading a poem . . . [Lucy] In Standard Two they learn poetry as well as copper-plate writing. Miss K has them all reciting poems together ... [Jill] Throughout their memoirs both Lucy and Jill refer to poetry in its widest sense-hymns, nursery and playground rhymes, verses of all kinds and literary poetry. Lucy wonders about the Lucy Lockett whom Miss Cochrane tells her not to be like, Jill reflects on Little Boy Blue and a sheep-could it be one of Bo-Peep's?-on a porridge bowl. Lucy remembers her mother reciting 'The Owl and the Pussycat' as a bedtime treat, Jill calls the local lamplighter 'Learie' after Stevenson's Leerie in A Child's Garden of Verses. In her long-awaited From the Garden to the Street,3 the first significant history of poetry for children, Morag Styles stretches her net equally wide to embrace religious verses and nursery rhymes as well as the work of Stevenson, Lear and poets whom Lucy and Jill would meet only as adults, such as Charles Causley and Ted Hughes, and the Caribbean poets including John Agard and James Berry. .... ***************************************************** Endpapers Sheila Ray writes: Neither reminiscences nor contemporary documents constitute a historical account but both can make a useful contribution to it. Elsewhere in this issue of Signal I have suggested, in relation to Children's Book Publishing since 1945, that the reminiscences on which it is partly based provide a good basis for future research. I have myself used two sets of reminiscences as a framework for the survey on pages 133-47; they flesh out the skeleton of recorded history. Grace Hogarth's memories of the Porpoise series throw more light on Marcus Crouch's historical record published in Treasure Seekers and Borrowers. I have just prepared a short paper on the career novels of the 1950s; as a librarian at the time, I have memories of titles and their value and popularity but I needed to consult contemporary booklists and reviewing periodicals to get a more complete picture, and I found that these modified my memories. It was with these thoughts in mind that I returned to a comment made by C. Walter Hodges in Elaine Moss's celebratory essay in the May 1998 Signal. It so happens that, as Honorary Secretary of the Library Association Youth Libraries Group, I was a member of the committee which selected the Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Medal winning books from 1962 to 1965. I was therefore present at the deliberations which led to Walter Hodges being awarded the Greenaway Medal for Shakespeare's Theatre. In 1965, when that discussion took place, the selection procedure was very different from what it has since become. There was just one meeting of a Sub-Committee of the Publications Committee of the Library Association, to which three members of the Youth Libraries Group were invited. No report of the discussions was ever published-the final decisions were reported, with bare bibliographical details, to the Publications Committee and from there to the Library Association Council. My memory of what happened thirty-three years ago may be slightly dimmed, but I do clearly recall that the debate was not about the merits of The Namesake, but about whether it would be more appropriate to award the Carnegie Medal to Shakespeare's Theatre for the quality of the text rather than the Greenaway for the illustrations-or even award it both medals. It was and remains an outstanding book. The Namesake also has its virtues, but in 1964 it was just one of the many excellent historical novels being published at a time when, as Elaine Moss says, there was a 'thirsty library market' for such books. The Namesake was com-mended along with J.G. Fyson's The Three Brothers of Ur (who now remembers that?) and K.M. Peyton's The Maplin Bird. Although there is no problem in checking which books won the Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Medals and which books were commended, it is a matter of some regret that many libraries now seem to be discarding back files of periodicals and outdated books and booklists relating to children's literature; these are invaluable research tools. Morag Styles replies to Neil Philip's article 'The Shared Moment: Thoughts on Children & Poetry', January 1999 Signal When you launch a book into the world with all its imperfections on its head you hope for a fair wind and an understanding critic. I am grateful to Neil Philip and Signal for giving serious consideration to discussion of my book and for allowing me to make a short reply. My motives are not just to debate points of disagreement with my reviewer or admit 'mea culpa' about shortcomings, but to share with Signal readers some of the challenges in writing a history of children's literature .... ***************************************************** (c) The Thimble Press, 1999 END For further information about Signal, please, contact The Thimble Press, Lockwood, Station Road, Woodchester, Stroud, Glos. GL5 5EQ England phone: 01453 87 3716; fax: 01453 87 8599