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C.S. Lewis and Fiction Fit for Kids

by N.S. Gill

Introduction:

The following article appeared in The Grapevine, the newsletter of the Minnesota Homeschoolers Alliance.

"...there are now two very different sorts of 'writers for children'. The wrong sort...carefully 'make up' the tastes of these odd creatures--like an anthropologist observing the habits of a savage tribe...." On Juvenile Tastes, by C.S. Lewis

A homeschooling mother once asked how I knew which books to check out of the library for my son. The answer was that as a child my adults practically drowned me in books, fiction of all sorts, and I remember them well.
 

Ever since my son could understand half the words, I have been reading him my old favorites. Since I was never allowed to pick books on the basis of illustration as a child, I do now. Some of my most serendipitous finds have been in pursuit of books illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman or Michael Hague. One book leads to another and I've been well satisfied.
 

Once, however, I picked out a book about time travel using a VCR-no beloved author or illustrator, just an interesting concept. Now, we're not prudes in my family and we do discuss sex with our son (then seven), but I found the discussion of pornography in this work of juvenile fiction uncomfortable. When I mentioned it to the homeschooling mother, she said something about selecting books on the basis of criteria she trusted. The day my son asked me to check out the other book in the VCR series, I realized I, too, needed help with book selection.
 

C. S. Lewis is one children's fiction writer almost universally accepted by parents. I read his expert advice in "On Three Ways of Writing for Children" in Of Other Worlds, a collection of his essays and stories. He says there are three types of children's stories:

1. where a writer gives children what she thinks they need, often using gimmicks--no famous examples because their boring stories are quickly forgotten;
2. the type of story written by Kenneth Grahame (The Wind in the Willows), Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland and J.R.R. Tolkein (The Lord of the Rings), a story invented for specific children and written down later; and
3. the type of story that, because of current fashions, fits the genre of children's literature better than any other medium, such as C.S. Lewis's Narnia series or Edith Nesbit's stories (including Five Children and It, The Railway Children, and The Book of Dragons). Gulliver's Travels falls in this category. Swift wrote his satire for adults but today children read him. The same with fairy tales which, originally for adults, have been "reduced" to childrens' entertainment.

Lewis then addresses parents' concern about violence in fantasy. There are two types of violence children can read about, realistic and fantastic. To the extent that realistic violence leads to phobias and fears about insurmountable real world problems, Lewis agrees it should be avoided, but brave knights saving imprisoned, luckless maidens from fantastic dragons, offer hope and redemption to the young reader/listener. (Hardly the best reason to secure scary moralistic stories for our young ones, but C.S. Lewis believes he needed his childhood nightmares to write his rich fantasies as an adult.)
 

Lewis's attitude towards children and violence makes sense. For millennia people have heard the story of Odysseus tricking and mauling his adversaries; for centuries we have read how St. George slew the dragon. Maybe these violent stories have helped perpetuate humankind kind as we know it, complete with violence, but I don't believe the alternative-where everything is purged and sterilized-will be a nation with imagination, a country worth living in.
 

So I'll follow Lewis's advice, look carefully at stories I want to read. If the story has a healthy dose of fauns or talking lions doing battle with eternal curses and demons, so much the better. From the passage quoted at the beginning, Lewis continues:

"The right sort [of writers for children] work from the common...ground they share with the children, and indeed with countless adults. They label their books for children because children are the only market now recognized for the books they, any way, want to write."

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