SOURCE: "Paula Fox," in A Sounding of Storytellers: New and Revised Essays on Contemporary Writers for Children, J. B. Lippincott, 1979, pp. 55-65.

[In the following essay, Townsend provides an overview of Fox's works for children.]

Of the new writers for children who emerged in the United States in the later 1960s, Paula Fox was quickly seen to be one of the most able. Her books were unusually varied; each had a distinct individual character, but at the same time each was stamped with her own imprint. And they had an air of newness: not merely the literal contemporaneity which almost anyone can achieve but the newness that comes from looking at things with new eyes, feeling them in a new way.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, a traditional and generally reassuring view of children and their role had run through the work of the leading and well-established children's writers. Childhood was part of a continuing pattern—the orderly succession of the generations—and children were growing up to take their place in a known and understood world. As the 1960s went on, it was perceived increasingly that this pattern did not reflect reality. Families and societies were not stable; the older generation was not regarded, and did not even regard itself, as the repository of all wisdom, and it could not be assumed that young people were anxious to grow up and join it. The generation gap had opened up, and before long writers for young people were trooping into it, often in a worried, heavy-footed and anxious-to-be-with-it way.

Paula Fox was one of the small number of writers who brought quick sharp perceptions to the new and in many ways uneasy scene, and also an instinctive sympathy for the young who (just as much as their parents) had to deal with it. A recurrent theme in her work of the late 1960s, and again in Blowfish Live in the Sea (1970), is that of noncommunication and lack of understanding between young and old. But she is not a writer who could be content to mine a single narrow seam. She has written both adult and young people's novels; she has produced picture books and younger children's stories; and her most substantial work on the children's lists up to the time of writing, the award-winning The Slave Dancer (1973), is a historical novel of weight and intensity which stands on its own, at a distance from her other books.

Her early books for children have central characters aged from about eight to ten, but one would hesitate to say that they are 'for' readers of such an age. The audience and the author's position in relation to it seem curiously fluid. One has no sense that the writer, as an adult, is here, in charge, handing it out, while the audience of children is there, duly taking it. If there is a message in the air, it is probably for someone quite different. The first two, Maurice's Room (1966) and A Likely Place (1967), are not telling children anything except a story, but seem rather obviously to be saying something to parents: don't fuss the child, let him grow in his own way. The two books are humorous, even witty, but in a way that one would expect to appeal to readers rather older than their heroes. And the third and best of the early books, How Many Miles to Babylon? (1967), whose hero is barely ten, was one of only two books specifically recommended for teenagers by Nat Hentoff in the Atlantic for December 1967. The conventional wisdom is that children and teenagers don't want to read about children younger than themselves, and this generally appears to be true. But it could be that discussion of the question betrays a more fixed attitude than Paula Fox would adopt. Who says who is to read what? Like many other writers, she raises the question 'For whom?', and as with many other writers I can find no answer except 'For whom it may concern.'

Maurice's Room is in fact a blessedly funny book; and as for readership, one can only try it on and see if the glove fits. Maurice at eight is dedicated to his collection of junk, which spills over everything. His parents feel he needs more constructive interests, and often discuss him with their friends.

Some visitors said that collections like Maurice's showed that a child would become a great scientist. Many great scientists had collected junk when they were eight years old. Other visitors said Maurice would outgrow his collection and become interested in other things, such as money or armies. Some suggested to the Henrys that they ought to buy Maurice a dog, or send him to music school so that his time might be spent more usefully.

And his parents, with the best intentions, get everything wrong. The dog they borrow to be a companion to Maurice is in fact a dreadful nuisance to him, yet Mother is soon convinced that 'Maurice and Patsy are inseparable.' An attempt to get Maurice to learn an instrument is disastrous. The beautiful sailboat that Mr Henry buys Maurice for his birthday is forgotten while Maurice and friend grope for some old bedsprings lying on the bottom of the pond. 'If I had known you wanted bedsprings instead of a beautiful three-foot sailing ketch, I would have gotten you bedsprings,' says poor Mr Henry in despair. Finally, Maurice's parents decide to move to the country, where they hope that everything will be different. And this time at least all is well, for although Maurice isn't terribly interested in the country as such, there is an old barn that already holds the nucleus of a promising new junk collection. It's a hilarious, subversive book, full of casual joys. One can see that Maurice will survive the well-meant but uncomprehending intrusions of adults, just as will Lewis in A Likely Place. Lewis, too, is fussed by the grown-ups, but is fortunately left by his parents in the charge of eccentric Miss Fitchlow, who goes in for yogurt and yoga, calls Lewis 'pal', and lets him off the lead. Which is just what he needed. It is a short, dry, subtle book; and if there is a lesson in it, then I suspect that, as in Maurice's Room, it is really a lesson for parents.

Paula Fox's third book, How Many Miles to Babylon?, is a longer novel of much greater depth and complexity. Its hero, James, is a small black boy living in Brooklyn, whose father has disappeared and whose mother has gone into hospital, leaving him in the care of three elderly aunts. One day he walks out of school and goes to play by himself in an empty house. In his mind is a story that his mother has really gone to her own country across the seas and that he is secretly a prince. Three small boys, not much older than James but tougher, capture him and make him help them work their dog-stealing racket. James travels frightening miles with them on the back of a bicycle, goes to a deserted funhouse on Coney Island, sees the Atlantic. At night he frees the stolen dogs, runs away, gets home to the old aunts, and finds his mother there. She is back from hospital; she is no princess and he no prince. 'Hello, Jimmy,' she says.

On the surface it is a straightforward story, with its strong plot about the fearful boy and the tough gang and the dogs and the juvenile racketeering. But there are strange undertones: the symbolic voyage, the 'other' story of James which is only hinted at. The action, although shadows are cast before and behind it in time, takes place within a day and a night. 'Can I get there by candlelight? Yes, and back again.' Both action and setting are almost dreamlike; the landscape an intimately-known landscape yet glimpsed as if in shifting mists. Everything is experienced through James; and James himself is wandering in a mist of illusion, though eventually compelled by what happens to grasp at rough reality. It is felt in every page, but never said in crude terms, that James is a member of a submerged race and class, and isolated even within that. He is not a sharply-drawn character, nor meant to be, for the reader will suffer with him rather than observe him from the outside; but the minor characters—the three old aunts, the three young racketeers—are clear in outline, defined by the words they speak.

In one sense the outcome of How Many Miles to Babylon? is plain. James has proved himself, has faced the actual world, found and accepted his actual mother. He has come through. But to say that is not enough. Illusion and reality, the symbolic and the actual, are not to be so neatly separated. There is much in the book that the mind cannot simply deal with and eject. The inner mystery is something to be carried about and wondered at from time to time rather than be resolved.

The same might be said of The Stone-Faced Boy (1968), whose hero Gus—the middle child of five, about ten years old, timid, vulnerable, shut-off—goes out into the snow at night to free a stray dog from a trap. Gus, too, proves himself; finds the key that will help him to overcome his problems. But again this is not quite all. The Stone-Faced Boy is a winter's tale, with the quiet, real-yet-unreal feeling of a white landscape. There is a shiver in it, too: a ghostliness. The trap in which the dog is caught belongs to an old man, who takes Gus home to his cottage, full of the debris of the past, for a cup of tea with his equally old wife. And at one point the old man tells the old lady to show Gus how spry she is.

She made a strange little jump and then, holding her skirt out with her two hands, she did a little dance in front of the stove, smiling, wobbling slightly, kicking one foot out, then the other. Then she fell back softly into the rocker, like a feather coming to rest.

On the previous page we have heard that the old lady 'had a light, free laugh, and to Gus's surprise the sound reminded him of Serena'. Serena is his younger sister, aged about eight: nice, dreamy, imaginative. Gus feels it is impossible for Serena to get so old. But of course she will; this delicate tying together of the two ends of life makes one of the book's many quiet yet admirable achievements.

Portrait of Ivan (1969) does not have the mysterious depths of How Many Miles to Babylon? or The Stone-Faced Boy, but has subtleties and satisfactions of its own. It is a brief novel about a boy of eleven who leads a dull, lonely life, walled in by well-to-do, conventional, adult-dominated surroundings. The walls about him begin to crack when he meets the painter Matt and the elderly reader-aloud Miss Manderby, and start collapsing rapidly as he potters about in a boat with a barefoot girl called Geneva. There is a key sentence to the understanding of one aspect of Paula Fox when Ivan realizes that in his life in the city

he was nearly always being taken to or from some place by an adult, in nearly every moment of his day he was holding on to a rope held at the other end by a grown-up person—a teacher or a bus driver, a housekeeper or a relative. But since he had met Matt, space had been growing all around him. It was frightening to let go of that rope, but it made him feel light and quick instead of heavy and slow.

Ivan has needed space in which to open out, yet by a near-paradox, in order to open out he needs a framework, a context for his own life, a sense of who and what he is and how he got here. He has been living in what might be called a cramped void. It is something important when his friend draws for him the imagined sledge on which his mother, whom he never knew, left Russia as a child, a little girl who 'did not know she had begun a journey that led right to this room where her son now lay, half asleep'. That is a link that Ivan needed.

Ben, in Blowfish Live in the Sea, is eighteen and although the book is largely about him, the viewpoint is that of his half-sister Carrie, aged twelve. Though Ben is older than Ivan, his emotional position is somewhat similar, in that, just as Ivan needed the link with his mother in order to orientate himself, Ben needs to find his father. But Ben's father is not dead; he is a drifter, a pathetic, unsatisfactory person. Ben's mother has divorced and remarried, and Ben has a stable, prosperous home, but he is totally alienated. He has dropped out of school, got rid of all his possessions. and Carrie sees him as

a tall thin person in a droopy coat with the collar up. The person's hands are shoved into the coat pockets; the threads that stick out from the places where buttons used to be are a different color from the cloth of the coat. When he walks, the person looks down at his feet as they move forward in cracked muddy boots.

'Blowfish live in the sea' is the message that Ben writes on brown paper bags, on unopened letters, in dust on window-panes; and the explanation is that his father once sent him a blowfish—round as a soccer ball, stiff with varnish, orange and yellow and shiny—with a letter describing it as a souvenir from the upper reaches of the Amazon. Ben's graffito is a comment on this shabby deception. But when his father turns up, a perennial failure with nothing to his name but a seedy rundown motel, Ben decides to join him: 'He needs some help to get it into shape. He doesn't have hardly any money…. The place is a wreck.' We leave Ben starting on the carpentry, keeping his father off the drink; we don't know how long it will last, but we know it is something positive for Ben at last and will be the making of him.

This is the principal strand of the book, but there are others. Running through it all is Carrie's affection for Ben. As she looks at him, dusty and sad, with the rawhide thong round the hair that he won't get cut. Carrie remarks, 'Sometimes I thought I loved him better than anyone.' And in his desultory way Ben returns the affection; in fact there are traces everywhere of a loving, more open Ben. Although Ben belongs strictly to his time, and although people of his age already look different and behave differently, he is not in the least invalidated as a character by subsequent change. The underlying human nature can be seen quite clearly within the pattern formed by its interaction with outward circumstances.

Paula Fox is obviously much concerned with relationships between children and adults. She is conscious that in a complicated and rapidly changing society it is hard for the generations to live together satisfactorily. It will not do for grown-ups to think in terms of feeding a child into the production line and in due course drawing off an adult from the other end; but neither can young people really write off the older generation, ignoring it as irrelevant or hating it as the enemy.

Her books for younger children are a mixed collection, and in my view have not always been successful. They include a curious, way-out picture book Hungry Fred (1969), about a boy who eats his way through the contents of a house, the house itself and the backyard, and is still hungry. Then he makes friends with a wild rabbit as big as himself. 'The rabbit leaned against Fred. Fred smiled. He felt full.' It is difficult to see what young children will make of this. And although one accepts that a picture book, like a poem or story, does not have to be understood in literal terms in order to make its impact, there needs to be an imaginative power and unity which I do not find in Hungry Fred, and which the artist, understandably, could not supply. Good Ethan (1973), about a small boy who ingeniously solves the problem of retrieving his new ball from the wrong side of a street he has been told not to cross, is a simpler and more satisfactory conception, and benefits from pictures by Arnold Lobel which are exactly in key with it. Paula Fox is also the author of The Little Swineherd and Other Tales (1978); a group of short, folk-type stories set in the odd framework of an attempt by a duck—yes, a duck—to succeed in show business. The duck is promoting the actual storyteller—a goose who simply likes to tell stories—and there is dry satiric humour in the account of the duck's attempts at exploitation and his uncomprehending interventions in the creative process. But the book as a whole does not quite work. Russell Hoban would have done this kind of thing better. The title story, however, about the half-starved and neglected boy who takes over a small holding when its owners disappear and has vastly improved it by the time they come back to reclaim their property, is a touching and memorable one; it would have been preferable, I believe, to present it on its own.

I have left until last the book which, so far, is Paula Fox's finest achievement. I do not think it could have been predicted from her earlier work that she would write such a book as The Slave Dancer. It is the story of Jessie Bollier, a boy who is pressed into the crew of the slave ship Moonlight in 1840 for a voyage to Africa, picking up a cargo of blacks to be sold in Cuba. This is a case where the discipline of writing for the children's list has been wholly to the benefit of the book as a work of art. The 'young eye at the centre' is no mere convention of the adventure story for children; it is the one perspective from which the witnessing of dreadful events can be fully and freshly experienced, and at the same time the moral burden be made clear. Jessie is horrified by the treatment of the slaves, but he is powerless to prevent it; moreover he is young, white, and one of the crew, and the oppressors are his fellow-countrymen.

Jessie plays the fife, and his job is to make music to which, for brief periods daily, the slaves can exercise. This is called dancing the slaves. The aim is to keep them (relatively) healthy and therefore marketable, in spite of the crowded and filthy conditions in which they live. A slave has no human value but has a financial one: a dead slave is a lost profit. As the voyage goes on, the slaves, crammed together in the reeking hold, become sick, half-starved and hopeless, most of them suffering from 'the bloody flux', an affliction that makes the latrine buckets inadequate. And Jesse finds that 'a dreadful thing' is happening in his mind:

I hated the slaves! I hated their shuffling, their howling, their very suffering! I hated the way they spat out their food upon the deck, the overflowing buckets, the emptying of which tried all my strength. I hated the foul stench that came from the holds no matter which way the wind blew, as though the ship itself were soaked with human excrement. I would have snatched the rope from Spark's [the mate's] hand and beaten them myself! Oh, God! I wished them all dead! Not to hear them! Not to smell them! Not to know of their existence!

The Slave Dancer is not a story solely of horror. It is also a novel of action, violence and suspense, culminating in shipwreck (which was indeed the fate of a slaver called Moonlight in the Gulf of Mexico in 1840; the actual names of her crew are used). Jessie and a black boy named Ras with whom he has made a precarious friendship are the only survivors; they reach land and there is a limited happy ending. Ras is set on the road to freedom; Jessie gets home to his mother and sister, is apprenticed, lives an ordinary, modestly-successful life, and fights in the Civil War on the Union side.

After the war my life went on much like my neighbors' lives. I no longer spoke of my journey on a slave ship back in 1840, I did not often think of it myself. Time softened my memory as though it was kneading wax. But there was one thing that did not yield to time.

I was unable to listen to music. I could not bear to hear a woman sing, and at the sound of any instrument, a fiddle, a flute, a drum, a comb with paper wrapped around it played by my own child, I would leave instantly and shut myself away. For at the first note of a tune or of a song, I would see once again, as though they'd never ceased their dancing in my mind, black men and women and children lifting their tormented limbs in time to a reedy martial air, the dust rising from their joyless thumping, the sound of the fife finally drowned beneath the clanging of their chains.

Those are the closing sentences of The Slave Dancer. Ultimately the book is not depressing; the human spirit is not defeated. But it is permeated through and through by the horror it describes. The casual brutality of the ordinary seamen towards the slaves is as fearful in its way as the more positive and corrupt cruelty of the captain and mate and the revolting, hypocritical crew member Ben Stout. For the seamen are 'not especially cruel save in their shared and unshakable conviction that the least of them was better than any black alive'. They are merely ignorant. Villainy is exceptional by definition, but dreadful things done by decent men, to people whom they manage to look on as not really human, are a reminder of our own self-deceit and lack of imagination, of the capacity we all have for evil. There, but for the grace of God, go all of us.

Is such knowledge fit for children? Yes, it is; they ought not to grow up without it. This book looks at a terrifying side of human nature, and one which—in the specific manifestation of the slave trade—has left deeply-planted obstacles in the way of human brotherhood. The implication was made plain by Paula Fox in her Newbery acceptance speech in 1974. We must face this history of evil, and our capacity for evil, if the barriers are ever to come down.