The Children's Writer (14 page)

‘And did he pay you?’

Eve laughed. ‘For one month. Never again.’

‘Four weeks? I thought you were on a contract.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Lootie. That’s what he told her.’

‘Garbage. I was on a weekly wage. I was paid for a month. That’s how green I was.’

‘But he can’t do that.’

‘Yeah? Who’s going to care if some stupid girl from Tasmania gets ripped off? Nobody, my friend. Nobody.’

‘Well, I do.’

‘Thanks for your commiserations, Charlie, but they won’t pay the rent.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I guess not. So what are you doing now?’

‘I’ve got part-time work in a bookshop. I get by. But the irony is, Chanteleer has still got one of the gigs I arranged to go. He had me put an ad in
The Age
for a writer’s workshop that he’s going to run. At his house. In two weeks.’

‘A writer’s workshop?’

‘Two hundred dollars a head for the weekend. Lunches and morning teas included. The numbers are limited to
twelve people. Just enough to fit around that dining-room table.’

‘What’s the agenda?’

‘Writing for children, naturally. That’s what he reckons he’s good at. Have you read any of his books?’

‘Sort of,’ I admitted. ‘They don’t do much for me…which reminds me, what about his lousy covers?’

‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed,’ she said, ‘but he really doesn’t have good taste.’

‘The house is okay,’ I said. ‘The dining room, the study. What’s been furnished.’

‘That’s the mother’s influence,’ Eve laughed. ‘But you know that the house is rented, and any decent furnishings and fittings belonged to her Pooh-Bah family. Sebastian has no taste at all.’

‘His study
is
pretty nice,’ I reminded her.

‘Charlie,’ she said, looking at me patronisingly, ‘how can you go wrong with a desk and two leather chairs? It’s the same with his clothes.’

‘He looks like a geek.’

‘He wears fancy dress. What he thinks a children’s writer would wear. Haven’t you worked that out?’

‘Sorry?’

‘That silly bow tie, odd socks, that houndstooth waistcoat. It’s a costume. There’s nothing original about him. Hence his bloody boring book covers. Knights and fire-breathing dragons and fairy helpers. Shit! His books are worse. So formulaic. So twee…’

I told her what his mother had said about his knowledge of children. Eve laughed. ‘Actually,’ she said,
‘Constance is quite fun when she’s had a drink or two. That’s when she lets fly with a few home truths. What she says about her precious number one son is spot on. He not only knows nothing about kids, he positively dislikes them. Have you ever actually had a proper conversation with him? Like one on one?’

I confessed that I hadn’t, that others had always been there. Besides, Lootie was his main target, not me.

‘You should talk to him,’ she said. ‘He really is remarkable. A very smooth operator. He had me sucked in. I took the stupid job, didn’t I? You start off thinking that he might be of service to you and end up by listening to some saga about his own life, his own suffering, his own triumphs and next thing you’re nobody. Just another pawn in his game. Don’t be too hard on your Lootie. Honestly, she’s up against one hell of an ego.’

‘Eve,’ I said, ‘you’ll never know how much I appreciate all that you’ve told me. Just to meet you has meant a lot. But how can I help Lootie? I mean, she won’t listen to me. She won’t hear a bad word about him?’

‘Have you thought of challenging Chanteleer?’

‘How?’

‘Actually confronting him?’

‘You mean saying, “Leave my partner alone”?’

‘Why not?’

‘I’m not made like that,’ I said. ‘I’m no good at confrontations.’

‘Charlie,’ she said, ‘you have to do
something
…’

‘Like what?’

‘How about trying reverse psychology? Why not let Lootie think that you’re becoming one of his disciples too? How about going to this workshop that he’s got coming up? Lootie would think that was great, that you were beginning to believe in him, while in reality you would be observing the man in action. Getting to know the opposition better. You might even get the chance to talk to him alone. Knowing what you’re actually dealing with might provide an answer. It might help you work out a way of beating him at his own game. I reckon it’s worth a try…’

‘But the workshop costs two hundred dollars,’ I said. ‘I can’t afford that.’

‘Only you can put a value on your relationship. And if you don’t try, you’re going to lose your girl.’

She was right and I knew it. I thanked her for all she had done for me, promised to stay in touch, and said our goodbyes.

I set out to follow the tramlines home but since it was spring, and the force that through the green fuse drives the flower, blah, blah…I veered off to wander through the park.

I
said nothing to Lootie about my meeting with Eve, figuring that to do so would lead to disaster (even now I find it hard to address, as I have already said), but that didn’t mean I stopped thinking about what we had discussed.

I found a copy of
The Age
that carried the ad for Chanteleer’s workshop:
Writing for Children
, the piece was headed, with the subtext,
Let Your Quest Begin
. How cheesy was that? The lines almost cost me my confidence in Eve. I mean, if she placed the ad on Chanteleer’s behalf, she must have had something to do with the wording. Then again, if he was as predictably twee as she said, maybe the banal wording was his and his alone.

Another thing: the ad said that the fee of two hundred dollars could be paid on the day or by cheque made out to Sebastian Chanteleer. What self-respecting author would have a cheque made out to themself? This detail alone confirmed what Eve had told me. Surely if Chanteleer was as successful as he claimed to be, any monies due to him would pass through his agent—which, evidently, he didn’t have.

Still, since the advice that Eve had given me was more than reasonable, I determined to go and sent off the cheque indicating my intention to attend. As I did, I thought,
What harm can come? Chanteleer’s an author. I might learn something
, even as I had when I agreed to go to the Redmond Barry lecture, and the garden party, and the dinner.

But have I learnt anything?
I wondered.

True to Eve’s predictions, Lootie was delighted when I told her of my decision.

‘You’re beginning to see the light,’ she said, giving me a squeeze. Gratified as I was at this rare show of affection, I chose not to reply. After all, someone had once said to me (probably Rory), ‘You can tell the length of a relationship by the number of notches on your tongue.’

The next phase of my strategy was not so easy to implement. I intended to read some of Chanteleer’s books—in their entirety—and make sure that Lootie noticed.

At least, I figured, we would have something to talk about. And in talking, hopefully arrive at some resolution to our problem.

I found the novels on Lootie’s bedside table. I’d bought two at the Redmond Barry lecture, Lootie had bought three at top dollar off the net. So I sat on the bed and looked at them, wondering which I should read first, although I was revolted at the idea of reading any. Only when I had reached this point did I realise how nasty, how deceptive, this Chanteleer business had become.

Lootie was my partner and I loved her. As an adult (as Charlie Bloome continued to remind me I had become), I wanted my life with Lootie to be a mature relationship that might, one day, result in marriage. Even kids, dare I say?

Stooping to reading certain books as part of a scheme to stop my partner from slipping away didn’t make me happy, nor did it convince me of my own maturity. I knew of uni couples who affected interest in each other’s studies just to keep the flame alive. I knew of others who pretended to enjoy ice skating, football, dragster meets, collecting Elvis memorabilia—whatever—for the same reason, but sooner or later the truth would out. No long-term relationship could be based on deceit, of that I was convinced. Still, there I sat, a grown man, holding five children’s books in my hands, wondering which I should read first to keep my partner happy. And being as obsessed with my rival as she was, Lootie unwittingly came to my aid.

‘What are you doing?’ she wanted to know.

‘I was thinking that I should read one of these before I go to Sebastian’s workshop,’ I said. ‘Any recommendations?’

‘The Aryon trilogy,’ she said. ‘It’s my favourite.’

‘Trilogy?’ I said. ‘I don’t reckon that I can read three. I’ve only got two weeks. And there’s my uni work…’

‘Forget that,’ she said, the very picture of joy. ‘You wait and see. Once you start you won’t be able to stop. They’re fantastic. That psycho crap you read for uni will be the furthest thing from your mind. Sebastian’s novels are so graphic, so
lucid
. That’s the word!’

I groaned inwardly. ‘Which is the first?’ I asked, feigning interest.

‘
Aryon, Apprentice to the Mage.
’

I looked at the cover. I had seen this before, the day I had found the books on the coffee table, and the impression I had of them then (‘corny’) hadn’t altered. Why was it that the cover illustration (showing a gormless youth: black page-boy haircut, patched medieval hose), conjured an image of Mickey Mouse as Disney’s
Sorcerer’s Apprentice
? Saying nothing, I took the book and went to lie on the sofa, determined not to nod off.

Lootie was right. It didn’t take me long to read the first novel, though not for the reason she had given. I found the book shallow in both plot and style.
Lucid
was not the word:
overwritten
might come close.

I made no comment (another notch on my tongue) and fetched the second in the series:
Ayron, Journeyman to the Mage
. And I confess to glancing at the title of what
had
to be the third,
Aryon, Mage
.

Why was I not surprised?

I read the second in an afternoon and the third the following day. I read them thoroughly too, being determined to find the reason for their acclaim.

It seemed that Chanteleer’s concept of the fantastic hinged entirely upon two elements (neither of which I could call literary): the first I would call ‘excess’, the second ‘exhaustive detail’.

With reference to excess, in Chanteleer’s work, one troll was never enough. He needed to add another, bigger, uglier, then another—the more the merrier. If he wanted a subterranean lake, he gave it icebergs with frozen princes trapped inside; if a fiery dragon, it breathed
magma rather than flame; if a man-eating spider, Chanteleer gave it ten legs, not eight.

When it came to detail, in any scene, any action, Chanteleer spelt everything out in mind-numbing specifics. No gap was left for the reader to enter the text and explore, to think for themselves, to react to the text creatively. Every weird tree, every gallant sword thrust was specified by Chanteleer’s iron fist. There was no hint of the influence of that elegant pen. No suggestion of sophistication. No hint of class. The narrative was Chanteleer’s and Chanteleer’s alone, never did he trust his reader to seize on a concept and fly. Never did he allow any interactive space for the reader’s imagination to enter into the text and individually interpret a word.

Patronising was a word that came to mind. The novels patronised children, giving them no opportunity to think for themselves, treating them like idiots, which Chanteleer no doubt believed they were. The pity was, he had found a successful formula: why would children need to think if the adult author had done it all for them?

Tramlines
, I thought.
Every line is a tramline
.
There will be no diverging into the lively park here.
And I thought of Lootie, and why she liked these books, then put them away, confused.

After a beer in the garden, under the sprouting elm, I checked to see if Chanteleer had a website. There it was—including the membership for his fan club, with a Kew address (his home), where gilt dragon stick pins were evidently still available (courtesy of Adrian, I didn’t
doubt)—but for all the hoo-ha, Sebastian Chanteleer, had published nothing new for years.

Why couldn’t Lootie appreciate this?

Was it the prizes that he had won? And Chanteleer
had
won prizes, the site confirmed that.

As he had so proudly announced in his study that night (and I had seen the award with my own eyes), the Aryon trilogy had won the British Children’s Fiction Award.

Why, escaped me.

I decided to consult the experts and checked the website of the British Children’s Fiction Award. Chanteleer had won this in 1986. The judges (five children’s librarians) had awarded the prize on the basis of ‘the author’s remarkable gift for stimulating and expanding the child reader’s imaginative horizons’.

The site also informed me that these judges were eminent children’s librarians from cities such as Birmingham, Sheffield and Newcastle-on-Tyne—evidently authorities.

Maybe the problem rested with me.

I looked at the award citation again.

What was meant by ‘imaginative horizons’?

I appreciated the concept of the Romantic Imagination, as in Wordsworth and Blake: ‘To see a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower’, but there was no evidence of the expansion and stimulation of such an imagination in the work of Chanteleer. The child reader was told what to think and how to think, under circumstances engineered by the author himself.

Furthermore, any fantasy worlds (as opposed to
imagined
worlds) created by Chanteleer were surely
derivative: Disney’s at worst, Tolkienesque at best. And while I had reservations about Disney (in the imaginative realm, at least) and had read and enjoyed as much of Tolkien as I cared to, Chanteleer’s trilogy did nothing to expand
my
imagination.

I looked at the citation again. The award was given to a children’s writer for expanding the ‘child reader’s imagination’. Was there a difference between the ‘child reader’s imagination’ and the Wordsworthian notion of the imagination? Is that where I was going wrong? Then again, weren’t kids as imaginatively sophisticated as adults? I mean, how had the little girl at Ho’s seen golden rings forming in soy sauce? Surely that was the same as Blake’s ‘Seeing heaven in a wild flower’? She hadn’t said this was ‘fantasy’, or ‘magic’; to her, the sauce rings were gold, pure and simple. She might even have used that currency to pay the bill if she hadn’t felt slighted.

And so I remembered Wordsworth’s lines: ‘Heaven lies about us in our infancy, trailing clouds of glory do we come from God’, but according to the poet, as children grow older and more worldly wise, these celestial trails ‘fade into the common light of day’.

Maybe Rory, who was rougher than me (and more worldly wise), had dampened some of my childhood clouds of glory when he told me that the cricket bat my mother had given me was a ‘crock’. Maybe Father Florian had extinguished a few more of my childhood comets when he caned me for obeying my mother, who, in my naïveté, was a greater authority than him. That pie she had made me was a precious thing, the product of love,
rendered rank by Father Florian’s narrow-minded adult rules. And so as I grew older, as I faded more and more into Wordsworth’s adult ‘common light of day’, I had cast off my admiration for those holy saints and martyrs, those childhood heroes who had long since ceased to bloom and blaze.

Was this why Chanteleer was using his overwrought, adult-imposed images, his ‘read this my way style’ with kids—those achingly derived, those endlessly detailed, those cliché-ridden, bubbling cauldrons, apprentice magicians and dragons—in an attempt to convince his readers that the imagination (both his and his readers’) was not dead? That those glorious trails of unsullied childhood glory still existed?

And were his child readers convinced?

Eminent judges aside, I doubted that they were.

So far as I knew, a clothes peg wrapped in a handkerchief meant just as much to a child as a china doll that blinked and wailed ‘Ma Ma’. And wasn’t the empty box as much a thing of imaginative pleasure as the jaw-gnashing, eye-flashing, batteries-included robot that it had come in?

Maybe I had stumbled on the answer. Chanteleer was no fool. Realising that he lacked the imaginative wherewithal to appeal to kids, and knowing that he didn’t like them anyway, did he overwrite on purpose? Did he wear that silly bow tie and those mismatched socks to cover his inadequacy? Had he constructed the ‘eccentric author’ persona (like making the goofy face? or being Monkey Boy?) that he hoped would win hearts?

It’s fair to say that even the truly great children’s writers used a few winning wiles to get kids on their side. Charles Dodgson, dull as ditchwater Oxford don, had changed his name to Lewis Carroll and kept a cupboard full of toys in his academic rooms to attract kids; Hans Christian Andersen sat children on his knee while he made wonderful paper cutouts and James Barrie played piratical games with the Llewellyn-Davies boys who would later figure in his Peter Pan stories—but for all of their monkey-suited goofy face making tricks to suck kids in and make them laugh, these men could still summon sufficient of their childhood clouds of glory to make their stories appealing. More than anything else, it was through their writing that these iconic children’s writers had succeeded with kids, through their skills in exciting the childhood imagination that their young readers had found something of themselves in the stories those adult authors created.

So I began to understand why Chanteleer had failed to capture Lootie’s class. He had relied on his funny clothes to see him through, and the kids were too smart to buy that.
The Creature from the Black Lagoon
was old news; kids had long since seen the zip up the monster’s back. And when Chanteleer did read from his novels, those same kids saw them for what they were: overwrought and hackneyed special effects, the stuff of Hollywood—bubbling potions, frozen kingdoms and fire-breathing dragons. While this might have worked once, in the twentieth-century, now that movies could do better, kids expected more from books. Special effects might satisfy fluffy-slippered adults
to whom TV was a night’s entertainment, but kids of today inhabited their own dark kingdoms—worlds where aircraft cut buildings in half—for real.

And so, feeling very smug, I decided that Sebastian Chanteleer, acclaimed children’s writer, had lost his understanding of childhood: his original ‘cloud of glory’. The odd-sock-wearing author that I knew lived in a self-serving fantasy. The only problem was, no one had told him.

Then I remembered how Lootie had loved his books and Michael the school principal at the garden party loved them too. I doubted that every child who liked Chanteleer’s books did so because some distant librarian had awarded the author a prize. So for all of my reading, all of my brain waves, all of my cogitations, my theories behind the reasons for Chanteleer fame didn’t amount to a hill of beans.