All young children, we
know, are imaginative and creative; and while they remain young these qualities
are usually fostered. The grubby but delightful paintings and naive verses are
extravagantly admired, shown to visitors, tacked to the kitchen walls. But as
children grow older, encouragement of imaginative creation is often quietly
replaced by encouragement of what have begun to seem more important traits:
good manners, good marks, good looks; athletic and social success; and a
willingness to earn money mowing lawns and baby-sitting—traits that are
believed to predict adult success. Children who seem unlikely to do well along
these lines sometimes find that their work stays on the kitchen wall longer
than usual; and so it was with me. I was encouraged to be creative past the
usual age because I didn’t have much else going for me. I was a skinny, plain,
off-looking little girl, deaf in one badly damaged ear from a birth injury, and
with a resulting atrophy of the facial muscles that pulled my mouth sideways
whenever I opened it to speak and turned my smile into a sort of sneer. I was
clever, or, as one of my teachers put it, “too clever for her own good,” but
not especially charming or affectionate or helpful. I couldn’t seem to learn to
ride a bike or sing in tune, and I was always the last person chosen for any
team. I knew all about Old
Maids from the Victorian and Edwardian children’s books that were my favorite
reading. Old Maids wore spectacles and old fashioned clothes and lived in
cottages with gardens, where they entertained children and Old Maids to tea.
They were always odd in some way: absent-minded or timid or rude or fussy.
Sometimes they taught school, but most of their time was devoted to making wonderful
walnut cake and blackberry jam and dandelion wine, to telling tales and painting
watercolors, to embroidery and kitting and crocheting, and to growing prize
cabbages and roses. Occasionally they shared their cottage with another Old
Maid, but mostly they lived alone, often with a cat. Sometimes the cat was
their familiar, and they were really witches. You could tell which ones were
witches, according to one of my children’s books, because there was always
something wrong with them: They had six fingers on one hand, or their feet were
on backward, and so on. By the time I was 8 or
9 I was aware of these disadvantages, and it was my belief that as a result of
them nobody would wish to marry me and I would never have any of the children
whose names and sexes I had chosen at an earlier and more ignorant age. I would
be an ugly old maid, the card in the pack that everyone tried to get rid of. All right, that would
be my future. I knew it was so because of the kind of positive reinforcement I
was getting from adults. Just as with the Old Maids, all that I produced was
praised: my school compositions, my drawings, my fudge brownies, my rag rugs
and especially my stories. “Charming!” “Really beautiful.” “Perfectly lovely,
dear.” Nobody ever told me that I was perfectly lovely, though, as they did
other little girls. Very well, then: perfection of the work. Not that it seemed to me like work. Making up stories, for instance, was what I did for fun. With a pencil and paper I could revise the world. I could move mountains; I could fly over Westchester at night in a winged clothes basket; I could call up a brown-and-white-spotted milk-giving dragon to eat the neighbor who had told me and my sister not to walk through her field and bother her cows. And a little later, when I tried nonfiction, I found that without actually lying I could describe events and persons in such a way that my readers would think of them as I chose. “Dear Parents - We have a new English teacher. He has a lovely wild curly brown beard and he gets really excited about poetry and ideas.” Or, if he had written an unfavorable comment on my latest paper: “He is a small man with yellow teeth and a lot of opinions.” Or any two, three, 20 other versions of him, all of them the truth - if I said so, the whole truth. That was what you could do with just a piece of paper and a pencil; writing was a kind of witch’s spell. |
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