In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Amy's Eyes Examined
  • Peter F. Neumeyer (bio)

This voyage will be with hurt and much damage, not only of the lading and ship, but also of our lives.

Acts 27:10; Amy's Eyes, 159

The Style

For a children's book, it's a leviathan, worthy of our attention. Richard Kennedy is a prolific author, and his work becomes more exciting over the years. Amy's Eyes, a unique curiosity, is no exception.1 Reflecting Kennedy's rich reading—the influence, seemingly, of Stevenson, Disney, Jonathan Swift, Keats, and above all Mother Goose and the Bible—the book is a mythopoeic collection of Kennedy's greatest strengths and repeated themes, as well as, perhaps, occasional lapses.

Kennedy's greatest strength, his wild imagination and his inventive fancy, surprise and delight continually. At the very outset, in the second and third paragraphs, we are confronted and unsettled by a succession of perceptions and shifts in perspective that foreshadow future metamorphoses. The little baby, Amy, is left in a basket, with a small sea captain doll, on the steps of St. Anne's orphanage, by her father, a seaside-town tailor out of work and unable to care for her. The main personages in the orphanage are the dramatically good and evil Misses Eclair and Quince, respectively, drawn in bold relief. After six years in the orphanage with her, Amy's sea captain doll begins to unravel, and Amy stitches him together. She snips off his ears to sew them on firmly anew, but as she does so, she accidently pushes the needle deep into his head, whereupon the doll exclaims, "Ouch!" From that moment, he is alive, transforms, and eventually grows full-size and real before our eyes. Not long after the Captain goes off to seek his fortunes, Amy herself becomes a doll—a fact announced with Kennedyesque nonchalance—"Her face was now of cloth and her hair was yellow yarn. She lay staring at the ceiling with her blue button eyes . . ." (64).

Hardly less surprising is the invention and genesis of a number of other characters. "The Captain" before long becomes, in fact, a captain of his own ship, rescues Amy from the orphanage, and explains to [End Page 58] her how, sitting in his cabin reading the Bible and pondering whether, if God first may have created man from a doll, he, the Captain might not do likewise. And so the Captain "took a pair of long underwear, stuffed it with laundry, bunched up a towel for a head, and tacked it all up on the wall and started reading the Bible to it. . . . "Making it short, Sis, [the Captain's mode of address to Amy] I read the Bible clear through to that pair of long underwear. Then I stuck it in the head with a sailmaker's needle, and there's Skivvy for you. 'What hath God wrought?' Those were his first words, and he's still wondering aboutit . . ." (119).

The creation of Skivvy is typical of the mad inventiveness of the book as a whole—and the confident insouciance of Kennedy's creation. Or, to take just one of the other most singular inventions in the book—the villainous, mutinous, but comical Davy Duck, who speaks like early Disney, rationalizes his feelings of superiority over the captain and the ship's animal crew by disdaining as inferior all those who are born with lips:

"Aye," said the duck. "That's the trouble with the world, that's exactly what it is, and I can see a fellow creature what knows it. It's those with lips that cause all the trouble in the world. Now tell me if that's not so. . . . Aye, those with lips, that's where the misery comes from. Us without lips has got to stick together. . . . I seen the Captain come out of his cabin after a meal, smacking his lips together as he passes by, pretending like I'm not there, just lording it over me 'cause he got lips to smack together and I ain't. Aye, ye see 'em, puckering up their big fat lips—aye, all of em, sucking on apples, blowing out blubbering...

pdf

Share