SOURCE: "The Fresh-Air Kids, or Some Contemporary Versions of Pastoral," in Children's Literature, Vol. 11, Yale University Press, 1983, pp. 156-68.

Pastoral literature traditionally demonstrates the human need for the healing powers of the simple, rural, or rustic life, by contrasting that life with the complex, urban, or urbane one. Such traditional pastoral needs and contrasts can be seen not only in adult literature but also in children's literature, including contemporary books such as Jean George's Julie of the Wolves and Betsy Byars's The Midnight Fox and classics such as At the Back of the North Wind, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Wind in the Willows, The Secret Garden, Heidi, and of course Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, seen by Empson as prototypically pastoral, with Alice as "swain."

Even the contemporary children's books that I examine here—Felice Holman's Slake's Limbo set in modern Manhattan and Paula Fox's How Many Miles to Babylon? set in modern Brooklyn—evoke pastoral contrasts within urban settings. The two books manage to arouse and satisfy our need for pastoral reconciliations in different ways: the first through a story of primitive survival that reaches back to seasonal myths promising pastoral rebirth, and the second through a story of a dangerous journey that echoes pastoral romance. Both books treat Manhattan and Brooklyn realistically yet avoid the bitter irony that usually pervades adult books in which protagonists seek pastoral healing in an urbanized world.

These urban novels—whose protagonists perhaps will never have the opportunity to visit the country except as fresh-air kids, temporarily breathing, as Holman says of her hero, "someone else's fresh air"—initially seem to vary in important ways from those children's books that are set primarily in wilderness or country. The two books considered here have buried the pastoral imagery deep within the psyches of the protagonists and similarly buried the pastoral plot of retreat and renewal deep within the structures of the novels themselves. When the pastoral imagery emerges from the individual psyche in dream and fantasy, it often does so in exaggerated and distorted forms. And it is the problem of the novel as a whole to bare the essential aspects of the pastoral plot itself, giving the protagonist an opportunity to turn pastoral dreams into an urban reality devoid of ironic overtones.

This process is clearest in Slake's Limbo, the strange and wonderful story of thirteen-year-old Aremis Slake, virtual orphan, who made his home for one hundred and twenty days of winter in a cave off the subway tracks under the Commodore Hotel, and who was there transformed from a "worthless lump" into a "vendor of papers, a custodian of a small thriving coffee shop and a discriminating scavenger. And he was also a hobbyist."

Slake's potentiality for transformation is first expressed in his propensity to dream, usually of "somewhere else. Anywhere else." But these dreams seem impotent and essentially debilitating in the context of tenement, street, and school: "Dreaming thus led him into lampposts, up to the ankles in puddles, up to the elbows in spilled things, sprawling down stairways while teachers scolded and classmates scoffed, pushing him down again as soon as he gained his feet." His fantasies are also distortions of pastoral images, turning natural, cyclical gardens into desperate illusions of eternal Gardens of Eden. So, though we may applaud, we also grimace at Slake's attempt to climb a tree in Central Park, to tie back on to it the last of the autumn leaves in order to fulfill "an old fantasy that this year the leaves would stay on the trees."

The ways in which well-meaning people have hoped to give him a brief taste of pastoral life are satirized in Slake's nightmare during his first night in his subway cave. He dreams that he is back as a terrified fresh-air child being chased by his "family's" pet pig. Later, noticing a man helplessly caught in a subway rush, he is reminded of a trip to the beach, during which he first got sick in the bus and then was knocked over and nearly drowned by the surf. A day at the shore, a fortnight in the country—neither was a healing experience.

Paralleling Slake's distorted pastoral fantasies and indicating their pervasive nature among urban dwellers are the distorted pastoral dreams of a subway driver, Willis Joe Whinny, who once saw a movie about Australian sheepherders and longed to become one, until he traded in his dream for the promise of a motorman's pension—in spite of the fact that Willis, unlike Slake, had country connections, a grandmother whom he used to visit in Iowa. She actually once had known a Montana sheepherder. By the time we met Willis, his dream has resumed but has been distorted into an image of his subway passengers as soulless sheep whom he herds from station to station.

Throughout the book, the middle-aged Willis and the young Slake are moving toward each other as inevitably as Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Dublin, but we are most immediately aware of the contrast between the two. The first becomes more and more alienated from humanity in the distortion of his pastoral dream, becoming, as Holman says, not really the herder but simply the "lead sheep"; the second becomes more human, more connected, more farsighted in establishing his underground home, changing from an "outlander in the city of his birth (and in the world)" to one who is "oddly in touch with the flow of the world."

The motif of renewal pervades the novel, but it is so realistically implemented, and renewal is so rarely elsewhere exclusively associated with the underground, that we may not initially recognize this motif as outlining a pastoral story of retreat and regrowth. It is not usual for us to accept a freshly cleaned public bathroom as an omen of a new life, nor are we accustomed to thinking of the recycling of urban waste as a basically pastoral image. Yet Slake's first business is the reselling of secondhand newspapers, and his first meal is the restaurant leftovers of a hurried businessman. By the time a cleaning woman to whom he talks daily gives him her son's old jacket, mended, and he makes for himself a pair of adequate glasses from among the many dropped lenses he has scavenged, we know that recycling applies to wasted human possibilities as well as to trash and garbage: we are witnessing an example of true urban renewal.

Holman continually pushes in the direction of the pastoral discovery and settlement theme by her similes: "He began to know the signs of the subway as a woodsman knows the wilderness," and "surely as any explorer who had first set foot anywhere—the Arctic, the Moon—Slake was certainly at least one of the few and only settlers in this piece of dark continent." Slake thus takes his pastoral place among frontiersmen.

Holman also pushes underground imagery back to its origins in nature myths. We have tended recently to associate the underground with death, hell, or insanity from which modern heroes are rarely able to emerge. Holman disassociates the underground from its hellish finality and reassociates it with the cyclical wintering place of Persephone from which she is annually reborn, albeit with struggle, into the arms of her earth mother. In these terms, the one hundred and twenty days that Slake spends underground clearly constitute a period of germination. He experiences anxiety that makes him actually sick when he discovers that his cave will probably be covered over in much-needed subway repairs, but his being pushed out of his underground home in the spring is as cyclically inevitable as his going down into it in the fall. When Slake lies ill upon the tracks, holding a sign that says "Stop," it is also inevitable that Willis will be driving the train that screeches to a halt a few feet from the fallen Slake. Willis himself reconnects with humanity, holding Slake "as he once held his new son and daughter." Mothered by the cleaning woman, Slake, the orphan, is in his rebirth fathered by the motorman.

If we now think of Slake's Limbo in terms of its relationship to children's literature in general, we see that, although the urban reality depicted in the book in some ways serves to mask the pastoral allusions, the very detailed and circumstantial nature of that reality also links it with certain emphases characteristic of children's novels, particularly those with rural settings.

The emphasis on practical means of survival in a new environment is particularly evident in this context. We are fascinated by Slake's strategems for survival, his transformation from ineffectual dreamer to effective actor. The practical survivalist aspect of Robinson Crusoe and Swiss Family Robinson, strong elements in their fascination for young and old alike, generally have been carried over into books more specifically directed toward the child reader. There seems to be an understanding on the part of writers and publishers of children's books, both classic and modern, that the more urban becomes the experience of the child-reader, the more fascinating become the details of feeding, clothing, and sheltering oneself. The relative simplicity, directness, and recent novelty of doing these things in a rural environment account for some part of the enormous popularity of Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods, with its detailed description of processes of meeting basic needs, processes in which even the very young can participate in some capacity.

For older children, the idea of being able to survive alone becomes more attractive and tenable, although frighteningly formidable in modern times. Erik Erikson describes the seven-to-twelve-year stage of development as a period in which "industry" attempts to overcome "inferiority" and "the child becomes ready to handle the utensils, tools, and weapons used by the big people." How attractively reassuring it is to read about Karana in The Island of the Blue Dolphins and Julie-Miyax in Julie of the Wolves who, forced to put into practice the ancient lore and skill of their peoples, are able to survive through the use of relatively simple tools (in contrast to the complex machinery of modern industrial society). Slake makes it look relatively simple, too—recycling the waste of this society in a way not unlike Mary Norton's Borrowers!

Over and over in children's books, we find practical details of living in a simpler society emphasized and fulsomely described, whether this society exists in rural fields, desert islands, or big woods. Sometimes in this existence, direct experience and experimentation are specifically contrasted to booklearning. This is certainly true in Slake's case since the newly alert Slake is, of course, playing hooky from school, in which he had wandered in a daze: he is Wordsworth's "growing boy" on whom "Shades of the prison house begin to close." Such a contrast also is surely part of the pastoral element in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Alice, one recalls, tries frantically to bring to mind some imperfectly mastered booklearning that would serve her underground, but only reasoning from experience and experimentation will get her into the garden she first glimpses. In A Wild Thing, a modern young-adult book that resembles Slake's Limbo in many interesting ways, Morag, a runaway who has been deemed retarded by the school system, is capable of learning to survive, at least temporarily, alone in the Highlands.

The simple order that Slake imposes on his daily life signifies an understanding and control of diurnal rhythm that is also characteristically emphasized in other children's books that partake of the pastoral. Eating, sleeping, and working begin to become meaningful activities—no longer imposed from above—once Mary Lennox gets into the secret garden. Morag, too, in A Wild Thing, experiences the need for meaningful orderly activity in her life, even if it is no longer dominated by the clock (or perhaps because it is not).

Moreover, we are not at all surprised in Slake's Limbo to discover, in keeping with a pastoral convention well honored in children's books, that Slake's growth underground includes the nurturing of an animal (that the creature should be a rat seems both inevitable and weirdly pastoral in the identification of child keepers with their animal charges). In adult traditional pastoral, of course, shepherds and shepherdesses do not engage in much practical care of sheep. Shepherding simply seems to provide a leisure for the composition of poetry. But animals and birds do have symbolic functions there, especially in pastoral romance, where they serve as guides into the gardens and forest groves where the hero will experience whatever epiphanies he is meant to experience. The robin for whom Mary Lennox feels the first glimmerings of positive emotion functions not only initially to stimulate her nurturing instincts, but also as the traditional pastoral guide into the garden. In children's pastoral, animals require nurturing and provide companionship, serving in both roles as guides into the essential pastoral experience. The use of animals is even more true of How Many Miles to Babylon?, which will be discussed below, than of Slake's Limbo. It is certainly true of Tom's midnight fox in Byars's novel, the wolves and bird in Julie of the Wolves, the wild dogs, birds, and others of The Island of the Blue Dolphins, and the nanny goat and kid of A Wild Thing.

Linked still further with developmental ideas of children's literature is the rite of passage suggestion in Slake's age, thirteen. Slake can be seen as having won his entrance into adulthood by the trial of his underground independence. The pastoral experience in children's books can often be seen as such a testing-ground for life in the wider world, presaging a reentry into society and into a larger maturity. As in Tom's return to the city after his experience with the midnight fox in the country, the protagonist often emerges not only wiser but often sadder. Some of this sadness clearly is related to a loss of innocence that marks the return from a pastoral world.

Be that as it may, Slake (who is not necessarily sadder, but certainly wiser) has won his independence as well as his right to society through his experience underground. After being briefly cosseted in the hospital and having his existence in the minds of others confirmed by the receipt of a card from Willis, Slake slips away at the suggestion that the "juvenile authorities" will step in to help him. We are once again reminded that, in literature if not in life, when orphans finally find their parents they usually no longer need them as parents, having found an identity that first incorporates and then transcends them. Indeed, the parents themselves are often in need of the help of their children: Slake rescues Willis as surely as Willis rescues Slake; James of How Many Miles to Babylon? calls his mother back to real life from a mental institution—facts that certainly contribute to the theme of pastoral healing in these two books.

The experience of James, the ten-year-old black protagonist in How Many Miles to Babylon?, shares these urban pastoral characteristics in a less pervasive and concentrated way, but the pattern of distortion and transformation of the pastoral through urban experience is similar. Although the three aunts who take care of virtually orphaned James are clearly more attentive and concerned than Slake's vaguely present aunt, James's life prior to the main experience of the book is just as fragmented, dream-dominated, and haunted by failure.

He has Willis's nostalgia for a pastoral life known by his ancestors and solicits stories from his aunt of country days gone by:

But James wanted to hear all about that—about the country store where you could buy everything from a pork chop to a hoe, about the long dirt roads where the soft dust slipped around your bare toes, about the black stove in the kitchen where pine wood burned all winter long.

His longing takes the form here of creation of imaginary "felicitous space," such as Slake finally creates for himself in the subway cave. The pastoral fantasy that he conjures up to make his tenement, street, and school existence tolerable is one in which we find fragments of traditional pastoral romances of the sort that Shakespeare used in The Winter's Tale: royal babies left to be brought up by rustics, their identity to be revealed only in the crisis of adolescence:

He was being guarded by those three old women so that no harm would come to him. His mother had gone across the ocean to their real country, and until she came back, no one was supposed to know who he really was. She had to fix everything…. He knew he was not the only prince. He knew there were others. When everything was all right, all the princes would come together in a great clearing, dressed in their long bright robes and their feathers, and after that everything would be different.

James's version of the pastoral romance is obviously derived from stories of African ancestry that James's mother had told him before his father left them and before she herself disappeared one night into a mental hospital. It is not much different from Geeder's fantasy about Zeely in Virginia Hamilton's Zeely. But James has started to act out his fantasies—when he finds a dime-store ring in the dirt, he is sure it is a sign from his mother that she will send for him soon. By the time we meet James, we can see that the fantasy has taken over even those parts of his life that are not particularly unpleasant. His teacher, though pastorally named Miss Meadowsweet and demonstrably concerned about him, is unable to reach him through his fog of daydreaming. He, like Slake, plays hooky, slipping away from the school to the basement of an old condemned brownstone, where he has worked out an elaborate ritual designed to bring home again his queenly mother. Urban reality breaks into his dance in front of a cardboard figure of Santa Claus left behind in the household debris; three young dognappers find him, make fun of his ring and ritual, and put his innocence to work for them in conning the dogowners.

James's experience is much more like the pastoral journey-return plot than is Slake's four-month sojourn in the underground. (Comparing their titles—Slake's Limbo and How Many Miles to Babylon?—confirms their respectively different emphases on stasis and movement.) After acquiring Gladys, a small white poodle with a red bow, Stick, Gino, and Blue force James to accompany them on their bicycles out to Coney Island, where they are already hiding another expensive dog in the funhouse. James's growing feeling of responsibility for Gladys, although he has hitherto been afraid of dogs (just as Slake had hither to been afraid of rats) is a central part of his maturing experience, and, of course, a pastoral convention of animal companionship. When they first pick her up, he is annoyed by this responsibility—"With what he had on his mind why should he fuss about a dog?"—but by the time they arrive at Coney Island his concern about her overshadows his own anxiety:

James felt terrible about Gladys at the moment. She must be frightened and homesick. He felt he cared more about Gladys than anything in the world except his mother. The thought of his mother surprised him. He hadn't had a picture of her in his mind for awhile. Well, she couldn't help him now. He was completely alone.

The projection of his own fear onto Gladys, his immediate association of Gladys with his own mother, his ensuing feeling of responsibility for his own fate are all neatly tied together in this paragraph. Reality is overtaking fantasy.

Still another true pastoral image acts as a corrective to the old one. Arriving at Coney Island in the evening, James experiences the ocean for the first time; it is appropriately invigorating: "James felt almost hopeful, smelling the water, listening to the sound of the waves breaking." But he also learns something about the distorted nature of his fantasy: "No matter what he pretended, he knew she couldn't have gotten across the Atlantic Ocean."

Like Slake, James moves from dreaming incompetence to alert competence, and does it in a similarly incongruous place, not a subway cave but the Coney Island funhouse. Once upon a time, back in the classroom, James had been admonished by Miss Meadowsweet, who claimed that he was such a dreamer that he couldn't "find his way out of a paperbag." Yet, after they are locked in the funhouse by a passing security guard, it is James who, as a result of a previously aborted escape attempt, knows a possible way out behind the merry-go-round. When they crawl among the painted horses, Blue shouts, "Get those horses in the corral," reminding us of still another type of pastoral fantasy.

James's ultimate escape, after spending part of a tense night in the brownstone (during which we acquire some sympathy for his young exploiters as well) seems sure. We also expect him to fulfill his responsibility to Gladys by taking her home first—which he does at the expense of a long and frightening walk. James has earned the name "Prince," which the boys have begun to call him, in earnest before the long journey is over.

His return to his own tenement is also celebrated by his aunts and neighbors in the traditional heroic way: "We thought you was dead." "He's back. Look! He came back." And, of course, his mother is there waiting for him, brought back from her "funhouse" by his ordeal. Again, the Persephone myth of the return from a trip to hell and back into the arms of a parent is invoked, at a number of different levels. And again, by the time he finds his parent, he is as ready to help his parent as his parent is to help him. James enters the room and walks toward his bed:

A small woman was sitting on it…. She was hardly bigger than Gino.

James stood still. But where were her long white robes? Her

long black hair? Where were her servants, her crown?…

Why, she was hardly any bigger than he was!…

How could she be his mother?

The process of role reversal can begin even at the age of ten, but his mother still has the power and responsibility, in this case, of granting him the birthright of his own identity:

He thought, who am I? I'm not a prince. How can I be a prince? Who am I?

As though she had read his mind and heard his question, his mother held out her hand.

"Hello, Jimmy," she said.

Slake and James are both heroes, not anti-heroes. The city is not the end of them. Take away their fresh air, lock them in the funhouse, and yet they have the internal strength to make it anyway. If there is an irony in these endings, it is not a bitter one but a gentle irony—and the joke is on the cosmos, not the protagonists.

And what is this strength inside? It's the same strength of which pastoral dreams are made, albeit at first distorted. It is no mere chance that our heroes are at first incompetent, bumbling dreamers. James has a moment early in his captivity by the boys when he realizes the power of his own mind:

They hadn't known what he had been laughing about, James realized. They couldn't tell what he was really thinking. They could make him go where they wanted and they could search him. But they couldn't get inside his head where his thoughts were. Maybe he'd have a great thought that would show him how he could get home.

James gets home. Again, Slake's Limbo carries out this theme in a more encompassing way. Holman shows us that she is concerned with the concept of the human soul when Willis's country grandmother tells him an anecdote about the Montana sheepherder who, when she complained that he smelled like his sheep, replied: "'The only difference between me and a sheep, ma'am, is that I've got a soul.'" Willis is about to lose his soul in distorted fantasies. Slake has a soul that is developing, it appears, as it does in much traditional literature, in the metaphor of a bird. The bird first gnaws our hero from within and then, being freed, becomes a talisman and a leader. From the beginning of the story, and even after his rebirth, Slake felt hunger combined with anxiety, and then anxiety alone, as if a bird had settled in his gut and was pecking him from within. In the hospital, he feels a release from this bird, as if he has finally coughed it up. And then, when he leaves the hospital, he envisions it soaring above him toward the rooftops and wants to follow where it leads him. The last words of the novel, as upbeat as James's mother's greeting, are, "Slake did not know exactly where he was going, but the general direction was up."

I should reemphasize that the concern here with baring both the pastoral skeleton and the soul has largely ignored the very interesting urban flesh with which both are clothed. This depiction of the city is not only interesting but extremely realistic. These are urban novels written by urban writers who know New York, in all its terror, its shabbiness, and its wit, very well indeed. They are also writers who clearly, consciously play with specific types of settings—the underground subway, the Coney Island funhouse—that, in adult literature, have served as metaphors for the disturbed minds of anti-heroes, beginning with Dostoevski's narrator in Notes from Underground. Such settings are, in adult literature, permeated with bitter irony.

This bitter irony, which neither Holman nor Fox evokes, is not particularly suitable for a child audience, but it has certainly not been avoided entirely in pastoral books for children or young adults such as Julie of the Wolves and A Wild Thing, where the female protagonists learn pastoral skills to no seeming, lasting avail in the modern world. Holman and Fox, however, seem determined to confirm the value of the pastoral dream in an urban reality and to assert the possibility of realizing it, even when growing up poor and/or black in a polluted city that has already obviously defeated many adults. It is a message that is conveyed not just by the relative triumph of the protagonists, but by the assertion that the young protagonist can redeem some of these defeated (or corrupted) adults, as Slake, in some way, saves Willis, and James, in some way, saves his mother. In classic children's pastoral, as in pastoral romance, the old can be redeemed by the young, as is Colin's father by Colin and Mary, and Heidi's grandfather by Heidi. Part of the irony of Julie of the Wolves and A Wild Thing comes from the fact that neither Julie nor Morag can influence the old, who may, or do, respectively destroy them.

Both Slake and James move from distortions of their pastoral needs into living out, within an urban context, true pastoral adventures of primitive survival or dangerous journeys—seemingly to redeem some adults along with themselves. Holman and Fox know that both children and adults are haunted by such frightening questions as "Where has all the fresh air gone?" Yet these authors also seem to say that we still must breathe and can even be inspired.