Simple Gifts
I’m not crazy about the fact that I’ve spawned a bunch of posts about what we haven’t read, or wish we hadn’t, or wish you wouldn’t, or what-have-you, but one good thing is that attacks will prompt defenses – some of which will be interesting enough to force a rethinking. John Schwenkler certainly has prompted such by besmirching the good name of The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein. And I’m vain enough to turn my own thoughts on same into a post in its own right rather than bury them in the comments to his.
A lot of people seem to be concerned with the message of the book – does it teach a good or a bad lesson to children? It’s interesting; that’s not usually the first question we ask about books for grownups. Does Danny, Champion of the World teach a good or a bad lesson to children? What about the Nicolas books? And of course, Where the Wild Things Are is absolutely notorious for its moral corruption.
The first questions we usually ask about books relate to their truth and their beauty. The Giving Tree is both true and beautiful.
Now, not everything true is appropriate for children. Some truths require a certain maturity before they can be confronted; some will simply be incomprehensible to children. (There are even true and beautiful children’s stories that I don’t think are, in fact, appropriate for children. The movie, “Babe: Pig in the City” – which I love – comes to mind.) I don’t think The Giving Tree runs into that problem, though I do note that I know far more adults who love the book than I do children who do (or adults who loved it as children). I think the book works for kids on a very simple level – children imagine themselves as the boy, not the tree, and from the boy’s perspective it’s a story of unconditional love, something that every child needs. I don’t think there’s a little girl in the world who reads that book and says to herself, “when I grow up to be a woman, I want to be like that tree,” which seems to be the big worry; I think all kids simply note that the tree is always there, and that simple fact is what is reassuring to any child.
For grownups, the book reads differently. For us, this is a much more terrible story, because it is a story precisely about the lack of mutuality in the parent-child bond. A longer-form version of the same story is the movie, Toy Story II. This is the story of Woody’s crisis, when he realizes that his inevitable fate is to be cast aside by the boy who is the center of his universe. And that fate is inevitable – it can be delayed, but it cannot be avoided. At the end, Woody is reconciled to spending eternity in a dumpster next to the broken and similarly-discarded body of his friend, Buzz Lightyear. But he hasn’t found a way to escape that promised end.
It would be really weird to suggest that the moral of “Toy Story II” should be that Andy needs to cherish Woody more, and not throw him out. Do we want Andy to become some kind of bizarre pack rat? Similarly, it’s weird to think that the boy in The Giving Tree should apologize to the tree for making use of her. Should he apologize to the grass he walk on? The bread he eats? The air he breathes? He’s living his life. So, he cuts down a tree. That’s one of the things we do with trees: we cut them down, and build things out of them.
But even if we fully enter into the anthropomorphism, and identify more with the tree than with the boy (as many parents do), do we really want our children to apologize to us for all they cost us? For the amount of our lives we gave to them? For the chances we felt we couldn’t seize, the compromises we made, the full flourishing that was denied us because we put them, our children, at the center? Really?
I think it’s best for a parent to read the book in a different way, though, continuing to identify with the boy, and not the tree. In this reading, the tree and the boy’s childhood merge with one another. When he is a child, the boy lives on, about, and with the tree; the tree is fully alive for him then, and he is the one who imagines it into an almost-human character. But as he ages, that life – that kind of life – diminishes in him. The tree is still there, but it is no longer a living, breathing thing for him, no longer a companion. And so, inevitably, he makes use of the raw material of his childhood in his adulthood – sells it, builds with it, chops it up.
Why does the boy, in his late middle age, chop down the tree to build a boat to go away in? If the tree is, on one reading, his childhood self, what does is the significance of the cutting down, or the fashioning into a boat to escape from the life that he is actually living? Why is the tree not “really” happy with this particular course of action? We all know adults, if we have not been them ourselves, who have built dugouts of their childhood’s hearts and launched themselves upon the water, in search of something they are sure they were promised once, or think they once had, and cannot any longer live without. (Am I only going down this road because I recently saw ‘Up”? Maybe. So sue me.)
This is still not a happy story for adults, but read this way (identifying with the boy in his older years) it is at least a story that says something to adults that they may need to hear, whereas identification with the tree is not (to me) an obviously productive identification.
P.S.: if you want a kids’ book about a truly disfunctional mother-son relationship, try The Runaway Bunny. (Just kidding – have a carrot!)
So in the midst of a lot of travel I was in the hideously ugly city of San Antonio a few weeks past and went to the quite lovely McNay art museum there. Turns out they’d just opened up an Edward Gorey exhibit — awesome. And at he end of the exhibit was a little play table full of Gorey books and little Gorey-themed puppets and Gorey cutouts. The idea was you parked you small child there while you looked through the exhibit, and the little munchkin could make his/her own little Edward Gorey story.
At the time I thought, There’s a parenting fail. But maybe there’s a through-the-Millman-lens interpretation…
— Sanjay · Jul 20, 08:35 PM · #
Of course we don’t, but doesn’t the crucial difference lie in the fact that our children don’t strip us down to nothing in the way that the boy does the tree? I’m all for devoted and self-giving parents, but devoting and self-gift of the sort that the tree goes in for are downright unethical. (Granted this isn’t (or at least: isn’t as much) of a problem when we think of the tree just as a tree, but of course the anthropomorphizing is Silverstein’s, and the boy doesn’t let go of it even as he grows older.)
Put another way: My dad’s mother’s gravestone is shaped like a small bench, and sits on a hill that overlook a beautiful stretch of the Fox River. It’s wonderful that we can go to sit on it and watch the water flow by. But the reason she ended up that way isn’t because we took so much from her that she had nothing left to give; if that were so, then sitting there to take a rest would seem pretty inappropriate to me.
— John Schwenkler · Jul 20, 08:41 PM · #
Sanjay: I think every kid who wants to grow up to be a writer should be forced to read The Unstrung Harp, or: Mr Earbrass Writes a Novel just as a warning.
— Noah Millman · Jul 20, 08:52 PM · #
BTW, I should have titled this post, “Rotten Kids . . . You Work Your Life Out!”
— Noah Millman · Jul 20, 08:59 PM · #
As a child I found The Giving Tree creepy. Going along with Noah’s reading, surely there must be some use of one’s childhood that is productive and yet less destructive of it. ?
— David J · Jul 20, 10:56 PM · #
I think you are probably right about The Giving Tree being true, but it certainly isn’t beautiful.
And the message screams out of every page—Don’t be like this boy! He is an ungrateful wretch!
But perhaps that is why it is on people’s “don’t read” list, no subtlety.
— Guy Murdoch · Jul 20, 11:52 PM · #
Wow. There’s apparently no thread that matoko_chan won’t use as a venue for Republican Party concern trolling. I’m deleting two posts above this one.
— Matt Frost · Jul 21, 02:04 AM · #
“..if you want a kids’ book about a truly disfunctional mother-son relationship, try The Runaway Bunny…”
OMIGOD! When she has the hoe, and is coming after him in the garden, and all he wants to do is hide from his stalker mother…
Our babies are still young enough that we can interject lots of “Run, bunny! Run! She’s going to metaphorically castrate you!” as we read that one.
Um, maybe I’ve said too much.
— Matt Frost · Jul 21, 02:11 AM · #
As for The Giving Tree itself, I’m glad that Noah has chimed in, because I’ve always thought that if were ever to discover a generous reading of it, it would be an implicitly or explicitly Jewish one. I’m more open to the idea that it’s somehow both beautiful and true, but grossly, neurotically misunderstood.
— Matt Frost · Jul 21, 02:21 AM · #
I was recently at a service that included a reading of Psalm 139, and I couldn’t help but think of Runaway Bunny:
7 Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
10 even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
— kenB · Jul 21, 04:32 AM · #
I work in kids’ books, and The Giving Tree is one of those titles guaranteed to start an argument (and, if there’s been drinking, a fistfight). I’m in the Anti camp myself but that’s just me.
You’re joking about The Runaway Bunny, of course. Everyone knows that the true dysfunctional mother-son relationship masterpiece is Robert Munsch’s Love You Forever.
— tim b · Jul 21, 04:55 AM · #
“I’ll love you forever…as long as I’m living”…chills down the spine every time I think I hear that unsteady, unrhyming, unmetered, witchy tune in the distance.
I still lock my windows late at night and call the most secure nursing home I could find to make sure mom’s not wandered out. So many sleepless, sweaty nights. So many therapists and tears.
Yes that’s a powerful, creepy book. The movie would be great if done by someone like Hitchcock or John Carpenter at the height of his powers.
Thanks for the new night-terrors, Tim. No sleep tonight.
— LeVar B. · Jul 21, 06:30 AM · #
I love children’s literature; it was all I read, or had read, for the longest time (outside of English class, of course). I never seemed to transition to “young-adult” and then out into the open ocean of literature itself. It’s frustrating to be left out of this discussion because I don’t have kids and don’t remember any of the books myself.
But Danny, the Champion of the World, now you’re speaking my language. No one needs me to inflate the laudatory windbags in this space at this moment, but as a Roald Dahl child, what strikes me about that book, and specifically in relation to your conflict between message and truth, is the way the novel has taken a redemptive place in my own personal Dahl pantheon. Like many, as an adult I’ve been forced to reconcile the darker sides of Dahl. That is, of course, a discussion that’s been had before, but to recap: there is the somewhat problematic tinge of sadism, the way his sense of right and wrong threatens to veer into bigotry (ugly is evil, pretty is good), and the way his worldview implies a certain natural aristocracy of predestined righteousness whose members display disingenuous degrees of purity.
Danny, to me, is the Dahl book that says, yes, to some extent I write characters that can be poachers or thieves or liars or lies themselves. But look: look at what I am trying to get at here. Look at the core of it.
Anyway, it’s late.
— Daniel · Jul 21, 07:43 AM · #
I’m waiting for the post on books one has begun but not yet finished. I have a list of about dozen or so. Everyday I stare at my hardcover of José Saramago’s The Gospel according to Jesus Christ and say “I’m gonna finish that book starting today…”. And then there’s Trollope’s Barchester Towers I recently bought. Starts off great, love his style…
And so on and so on.
— JB · Jul 21, 09:56 AM · #
Matt, adding commentary to children’s books is one of the great joys of parenthood. Coming in for special derision in our house is a copy of “The Little Engine that Could” that features John Wayne Gacy as a clown. I’m also fond of adding dialog to the various volumes in the “Good Dog Carl” series that makes clear Carl’s intent to bring down the capitalist system and the traditional family.
— JA3 · Jul 21, 11:23 AM · #
“…doesn’t the crucial difference lie in the fact that our children don’t strip us down to nothing in the way that the boy does the tree?”
Yes and no, I think.
The simple line drawings and brief text of The Giving Tree can’t express the whole reality of what parental sacrifice does and doesn’t entail, but from a certain point of view one could certainly say that parents sacrifice more for their children than the tree sacrifices for the boy.
It’s a limited picture, certainly, a half truth, if you like. But a half truth captured with haunting power and economy.
P.S. The Runaway Bunny is a goof, like its kooky author, but I think the key to getting that story is to realize that the whole exercise is simply the mother humoring her child’s pretend rebellion. The child was never really going to run away.
— SDG · Jul 23, 01:48 PM · #
“I work in kids’ books, and The Giving Tree is one of those titles guaranteed to start an argument (and, if there’s been drinking, a fistfight). I’m in the Anti camp myself but that’s just me.”
I heard a fellow on the radio yesterday. He had written a book about retired chimpanzees, and as the show progressed, there was more and more discussion about the level of consciousness various species have; shy octopuses, aggressive fruit flies, wise whales. No mention of trees, though.
Just an hour ago I cut some lilies from our garden to put in a vase that’s sitting just inches from where I am now typing; cut the entire stalk, leaving nothing but a few inches of stem. I felt strangely guilty about this, even though the bulbs were planted expressly for the purpose; with the full intention of making flowers to cut to decorate our house.
Intentions are a strange way to judge a book, or a painting, or a a film, don’t you think?
— Tony Comstock · Jul 23, 04:49 PM · #
Two things. First, it took me decades to realize that the little bird in “Are You My Mother?” was a crane, and that construction equipment it came to believe was its mother near the end was also a crane.
Second, four words. “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Then one day it happened, Jackie Paper came no more. Forget the marijuana subtext. That’s an incredibly sad, guilt-inducing song for a 5 year old, and I recognized that, yet it was one of my favorites. Just saying.
— ryan · Jul 28, 05:25 PM · #