Russell Hoban Reads Russell Hoban: Children's Books

What I want to do is come at you from several places at once. The emphasis is on my writing for children. It is not separate from my other writing, and, really, children don't live in a world that is separate from the grown-up world. It's just one world and my writing is just one way of writing. And some of it is within a child's frame of reference and some of it isn't. But all of it, and especially the children's writing, has to come from as deep a place in me as there is to write from.

Before I start, I want to show you the Mouse and His Child in what has become a little ritual, so you can see what got me started in novel writing.

[Hoban unwraps and winds up the clockwork toy after which he named his first novel, placing it on a table for the audience of around 400 to watch. There are Ooohs and Aaahs as the tiny toy father circles, applause as he lifts his little son, and laughter as the two wind down and stop. Hoban smiles and carefully re wraps the toy.]

I want to tell you something about how I work and how I get the story for a book together. I will be talking to you about The Mouse and His Child, but I want to begin with a lion because my first novel, so-called for grown ups, was The Lion of Boaz Jachin and Jachin Boat, and the lead-up to that is perhaps a better example of the kind of thing that gets me started than the mouse and his child, so I'm going to read to you from it. But first I'll tell you something about it.

In Westport, Connecticut in 1968, I bought a book on Mesopotamian art, a big thick square book—I could hardly lift it up. And in this book there were wonderful clear photographs of sandstone carvings of a relief of a lion hunt in King Ashurbanipal's north palace at Ninevah. The photographs were remarkable because the sculptor was quite gifted, and his observation was accurate and strong and full of vitality. The human beings in this animal hunt—the huntsman, the men on the horses and leading horses, the men on top of the lion cages, and the men in the chariots—all of the people looked like nothing. The people were conventionalized and stereotyped and they all looked pretty much the same. The upper-class people had very fancy curled beards and hair and they were totally boring, but each of the lions was an individual tragic portrait very carefully observed. The sculptor had obviously looked at lions being hunted and being wounded and dying, and he had cared about the lions. He carved them with great force and with great artistry and I thought about it and thought about it, and mind you, this was only the book—I hadn't yet seen the real thing. The real thing was in the British Museum, far away. So I began to think about these lions. I read up on some Mesopotamian myth and got a little bit of material about what happens after death in that society about the netherworld of Cor and Ereshnigal and Nergal and the boatman who takes people across the river. Then I began to develop some mythology of my own to account for the feeling for the lions that was developing in me.

[Hoban then reads from some of his "made-up mythology" about the lion hunt of the king and the dying lions and the observant sculptor. Since the material has not yet been published, it will not be reproduced here.]

I wanted to start with that because I guess I want to stress that writing anything is a serious business that requires close attention and requires fidelity. As to fidelity, I'll read you a couple of lines from The Medusa Frequency [his 1987 novel] in which a not...