The Fresh-Air Kids, or Some Contemporary Versions of Pastoral

Pastoral literature traditionally demonstrates the human need for the healing powers of the simple, rural, or rustic life, by contrasting that life with the complex, urban, or urbane one. Such traditional pastoral needs and contrasts can be seen not only in adult literature but also in children's literature, including contemporary books such as Jean George's Julie of the Wolves and Betsy Byars's The Midnight Fox and classics such as At the Back of the North Wind, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Wind in the Willows, The Secret Garden, Heidi, and of course Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, seen by Empson as prototypically pastoral, with Alice as "swain."

Even the contemporary children's books that I examine here—Felice Holman's Slake's Limbo set in modern Manhattan and Paula Fox's How Many Miles to Babylon? set in modern Brooklyn—evoke pastoral contrasts within urban settings.¹ The two books manage to arouse and satisfy our need for pastoral reconciliations in different ways: the first through a story of primitive survival that reaches back to seasonal myths promising pastoral rebirth, and the second through a story of a dangerous journey that echoes pastoral romance. Both books treat Manhattan and Brooklyn realistically yet avoid the bitter irony that usually pervades adult books in which protagonists seek pastoral healing in an urbanized world.

These urban novels—whose protagonists perhaps will never have the opportunity to visit the country except as fresh-air kids, temporarily breathing, as Holman says of her hero, "someone else's fresh air"—initially seem to vary in important ways from those children's books that are set primarily in wilderness or country.² The two books considered here have buried the pastoral imagery deep within the psyches of the protagonists and similarly buried the pastoral plot of retreat and renewal deep within the structures of the novels themselves. When the pastoral imagery emerges from the individual psyche in dream and fantasy, it often does so in exaggerated and distorted forms. And it is the problem of the novel as a whole to bare the essential aspects of the pastoral plot itself, giving the protagonist an opportunity to turn pastoral dreams into an urban reality devoid of ironic overtones.

This process is clearest in Slake's Limbo, the strange and wonderful story of thirteen-year-old Aremis Slake, virtual orphan, who made his home for one hundred and twenty days of winter in a cave off the subway tracks under the Commodore Hotel, and who was there transformed from a "worthless lump" (p. 5) into a "vendor of papers, a custodian of a small thriving coffee shop and a discriminating scavenger. And he was also a hobbyist" (p. 73).

Slake's potentiality for transformation is first expressed in his propensity to dream, usually of "somewhere else. Anywhere else" (p. 4). But these dreams seem impotent and essentially debilitating in the context of tenement, street, and school: "Dreaming thus led him into lampposts, up to the ankles in puddles, up to the elbows in spilled things, sprawling down stairways while teachers scolded and classmates scoffed, pushing him down again as soon as he gained his feet" (p. 4). His fantasies are also distortions of pastoral images, turning natural, cyclical gardens into desperate illusions of eternal Gardens of Eden. So, though we may applaud, we also grimace at Slake's attempt to climb a tree in Central Park, to tie back on to it the last of the autumn leaves in order to fulfill "an old fantasy that this year the leaves would stay on the trees" (p. 10).

The ways in which well-meaning people have hoped to give him a brief taste of pastoral life are satirized in Slake's nightmare during his first night in his subway cave. He dreams that he is back as a terrified fresh-air child being chased by his "family's" pet pig (p. 22). Later, noticing a man helplessly caught in a subway rush, he is reminded of a trip to the beach, during which he first got sick in the...