On Reading to Children
On the seedtime of a child’s imagination, the transports of picture books, and why I published a special edition of three stories about a cat thirty years ago.
Our Favorite Picture Books
One of the unalloyed pleasures of parenthood is the opportunity it affords the dedicated reader. Led by a child’s bedtime attention, mother and father are encouraged to open the doors — long closed by real age and assumed sophistication — to whole rooms of books whose treasures they had abandoned. Revisiting old friends from their own childhood, or meeting for the first time books they’d sadly missed and despaired of ever knowing, or coming upon the new delights that appeared in the wake of their own receding adolescence, parents are given a happy opportunity to witness once again the widening of the world that is the shaping of a child’s imagination.
During our first daughter’s read-to-me phase, three picture books, written by Tim Wynne-Jones and illustrated by Eric Beddows, were special favorites. About a cat named Zoom and his adventures, they were — and remain — inspired juxtapositions of the cozy and the fantastic. I read the Zoom books dozens and dozens of times to Emma, and repeated that happy regimen when her younger sister, Iris, was ready for them, nearly five years later. By this point, the books had gone out of print and I regretted not being able to share them with the customers of my bookselling catalogue, A Common Reader. There was nothing to be done, then, but to obtain the rights to all three volumes — Zoom at Sea, Zoom Away, and Zoom Upstream — and put together our own omnibus, The Zoom Trilogy, which we published in 1997.
In addition to the three original stories, reproduced in their entirety with their illustrations, this handsome Common Reader Edition included an Afterword, treating the genesis of the works , written for us by Tim Wynne-Jones, and a Preface that I contributed myself, and which I am sharing here, three decades on, because of two recent events that have brought Zoom and his tales back into my ken.
On a night a few weeks ago I was fortunate enough to meet Tim Wynne-Jones in person, for the first time, at the Harbor Springs Festival of the Book in northern Michigan. The evening before, on the eve of my trip to Harbor Springs from my home in Connecticut, I’d read Zoom at Sea to my four-month-old grandson, Charlie, while Emma was feeding him. The coincidence led my thoughts naturally back to that Common Reader Edition I’d published a long time ago, and to the piece I wrote for it — a meditation on the furnishing of a child’s imagination — which is presented, with minimal edits for context, below.
A House of Many Mansions
IN MY DAUGHTER’S HOUSE are many mansions; she is seven years old and unaware of the extent of her dominion, but from her infancy I have watched Emma build berths in her imagination to accommodate the emigrants from the external world that are summoned by a child’s attention.
For, rest assured, experience comes as a pilgrim to an unformed mind: it seeks a lodging where it will be named and savored, honored with significance and awe, a place where it can take up residence as an abiding resource. A fortunate child is always prepared to supply such sanctums, framing new rooms in her imagination as experience demands and furnishing them with the materials — psychological, intellectual, emotional — at hand. In these chambers, the wayfarer “Experience” can dwell and, in turn, be dwelled upon. In these dwelling-places, dreams and destinies gather their wits.
I watch Emma with apprehension, because I know this time must have a stop, and soon. The supple and subtle imaginative haunts she has built to harbor her notions, knowledge, and spirit will come less and less to house and shape her nature. She’ll no longer spend her days lost in these chambers of her own devising, but will be out and about in a wider world of, paradoxically, smaller dimensions. Her imagination will move from the Victorian architecture of childhood — enchanted with nooks and crannies, staircases and ballrooms, spare rooms and window seats, attics and crawl spaces, a habitation endless in its invitations to wonder and wandering — to join the rest of us in the two-room apartment of adulthood, where, as Wordsworth lamented, Getting and spending, we lay waste our power.
What is natural for a child becomes art for an adult, with all the attendant labor and discipline. The world is too much with us. . . . The richly appointed rooms of our early, easy imagination become cluttered with the detritus of our days, dusty with disappointed time, as far from the details of our workaday domain as a foreign country. Still, from time to time we stumble into them: in a garden, perhaps, or a museum; on an especially congenial city street; in the mirror of some silent musing — or in the words and pictures of a book like the one you are holding in your hands.
ONCE I ASKED EMMA how big she thought her head was. She, being shy of four at the time, clasped it in her hands and said, “This big.” I asked her to close her eyes and think about a house. Then a mountain. Then the ocean. “If your head is only this big,” I asked, “how can all those things fit inside it for you to think about?” She was intrigued for a moment — bewildered enough to tuck down into the covers and try to fall asleep — and I was left to consider how she might go about mapping the vast chamber of her imagination. And how that chamber could be stretched, supported, and furnished in her youth to house the hopes of her adulthood. That’s the key to education, I’ve always felt: not the contents of the mind, but the ambience of the space in which those contents are recognized and welcomed, elaborated and set to work.
All of which is a long preamble meant to explain, by indirection, why the Zoom books, collected here, are among the very best children’s stories I’ve ever seen. They tell the story of Zoom, a cat in search of his mysterious, seafaring Uncle Roy. Zoom’s search leads him to his uncle’s friend, Maria, a woman whose house holds not only the ocean (as we discover in Zoom at Sea), but also — somewhere up near the attic — the North Pole (as we learn in Zoom Away), and — behind the books in the library — Egypt and its Nile (Zoom Upstream).
Tim Wynne-Jones’s gentle, whimsical narratives are ideally complemented by the magical capaciousness of Eric Beddows’s visual invention. These two artists lead us — easily and gracefully — into the heady atmosphere of imagination’s chamber. The suggestion implicit on every page of their collaboration — that there are worlds within the world we know, worlds of adventure and wonder within the cozy confines of the familiar — is, indeed, one of the enduring appeals of all imaginative literature. I’ve gotten lost in these tales, quite happily, again and again since Emma and I first discovered them a few years ago; to introduce them to my younger child, Iris, now three, affords me, thankfully, the prospect of lingering with Zoom and Maria (in her own house of many mansions) through many evenings to come. That both Emma and her sister may someday share these marvelous stories with their own children, and thus glance back into the garden of their own seedtime, provides both the impetus and reward for the preparation of this Common Reader Edition.
