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Su’s favorite CZ story leads to a re-exploration |
 One of this site’s readers, Su, emailed us to tell us about her favorite
of Charlotte’s books, the hard-to-find
Janey,
published in 1973 and illustrated by
Ron Himler. “We discovered this book when my daughter, Janey, was about
10 years old.” Now Su’s Janey is 28, and, says her mother, “fit and
well, married, and away from home. I miss her so much, but am pleased
she is so happy… this wonderful story has always made me cry.”
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So
Crescent
went back to
Janey,
a book now over 33 years old, to reread it,
think about it, and talk to
Charlotte about it. |
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Loss and unwanted change |
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It’s hard to
read this book and not feel sadness. From the very first page the reader
is strongly pulled into the young narrator’s deep, simple sorrow: |
Janey
it’s lonely
all day long
since you moved away. |
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Janey’s best
friend then describes what her life is now, moment to moment, as she
compares it longingly with the time when she shared her days with Janey.
She remembers their particular intimacy, verbal and non-verbal: |
I remember
sometimes
we both talked at once
and when we stopped
we’d said the same thing.
And I remember sitting on the steps
in the sun and not talking
at all.
There is no one else
I can sit with
and not talk. |
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But friendship rests not only on commonality, but in difference ---
differences between friends that recognized, admired, and respected. The
young narrator remembers Janey’s particular abilities and habits, and
admired then: |
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…
you had to touch
everything we passed,
the wet leaves of the privet hedge,
even the stucco part
of the wall.
I only look with my eyes. |
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Thus, she seems
to miss not only her friend, but her friend’s bold and competent ways,
which she compares with her own more timid approaches to life: |
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…
I remember how
you skipped flat rocks
into the pond.
Mine just sank. |
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Feelings that are unadulterated |
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You can see
Charlotte’s special genius in these lines. CZ never had amnesia about
the unadulterated power of childhood’s emotions, and she’s never
condescended to those emotions. In
Janey,
she sees and
expresses grief, pure and simple, from a child’s eye view. And she
resists the formidable temptation (at least, to lesser writers) to back
away from this grief with a false there-there-it’ll-be-all-right pat on
the head. She knows that to honor the little girls’ friendship means
honoring the deep grief at its loss, and at the inexplicable transitions
governed by the not-understood adult world children are forced to
accept. |
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I
didn’t want you to move away.
You didn’t want to either.
Janey
maybe some day
we’ll grow up
and live near each other
again.
I wish you hadn’t moved away. |
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 In this way, by just telling the
truth, she gives children a far greater
gift than “And they lived
happily ever after.” The fact is that uncertainty, loss, and events
outside of our control do color life, for children no less than adults.
But paradoxically, Charlotte makes even this, and even loneliness
itself, more bearable by simply saying this out loud. Young readers may
be lonely in their lives; but after reading
Janey, they
will no longer be isolated in the often inexpressible belief that no one
else in the world can feel this badly. And in this early dawning
awareness, a child takes one step forward into understanding what it
means to be part of the human race.
(In one of Ron
Himler's sensitive illustrations, right, two friends giggle over a
bannister, while Janey's narrator sits alone, missing her friend,
who has moved away.)
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The over layering of childhood and adulthood |
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The analogy Charlotte always used to use, in the pre-digital camera age,
was that writing for children was usually an emotional and experiential
double, or triple, exposure. That is, often something would happen in
her adult life which would call forth certain feelings, which in some
way connected her back to her own childhood and the feelings she had
then. And feelings, she believed, were the same throughout life:
loneliness felt like loneliness whether you were six, sixteen, or
sixty-six. If there was any difference between the feelings of childhood
and adulthood, it was only that adults had the ability to distance
themselves from those feelings, both because they’d had more experience
and their rational selves were more developed. Thus, she felt,
children’s feelings were even more powerful, because there was less
ability to distance from them. |
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What were the double exposures which shaped
Janey? |
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Well, if you go to Charlotte’s biography,
you will see that 1973 was only four years after her divorce from her
husband of thirty-three years, Maurice Zolotow. And if the book was
published in 1973, it was probably written in 1969 or 1970. Even though
Charlotte initiated the divorce, she still mourned the end of the
marriage --- the more so as Maurice moved away, from New York to Los
Angeles. Though they remained in close contact, and indeed, became
friendly again as they aged, at the time she wrote
Janey, Charlotte
was feeling the sting of absence, and the deep sadness that while
sometimes things have to be a certain way, you can still wish that they
could be otherwise.
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But what childhood experience did this overlay for Charlotte? “Well,
we moved all the time when I was growing up, “ she recalled in 2005.
“Norfolk, Virginia; Detroit, Michigan; Brookline, Massachusetts, New
York City.” Did she have to leave best friends behind, then? “No,” she
said, “I never really had any friends when I was a child, not until much
later in life. My dog was my best friend.” To learn more about her dog,
Pudgie, and how his loss affected her, again, go to
Charlotte’s biography.
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Though
Charlotte’s childhood was not a happy one, her memory was long and her
gift great. Thus, in the words of critic and novelist Alison Lurie, she
embodies how “…gifted writers have used children’s literature to
transfigure sorrow, nostalgia, and the struggles of their own
experience.” |
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