In Defense of the Artist

KEYNOTE ADDRESS In Defense of the Artist by Susan Cooper I must make it clear to you from the beginning that I really don't belong here. Not just because of the accent — though, mind you, as I frequently point out to American friends, I don't have an accent. You do. I don't belong because I don't really write children's books. More accurately, I don't write books for children. Like so many authors, I simply write the book that bangs at my head asking to be written, and then my publishers tell me what it is. Quite often they surprise me. In 1962 I wrote a straight adult novel set ahead in 1980, and to my astonishment it was published as science fiction . Later on I wrote a straight adult novel set back in World War Two, based on my own experiences at the age of eight, and to my further astonishment this was published as a children's book. What do authors know? But I've never thought about my audience when I've been writing a book. Perhaps I had to think about them too much when I was writing stories as a journalist. My books are a reaction, a retreat — I write them for me. And very early on, I learned that it was also unwise to listen to what the audience said. Long ago, when I first came to this country, I wrote a rather brash study of the U.S.A. entitled Behind the Golden Curtain. It was fairly widely reviewed — I even had my picture in Time magazine, which won't happen again — and, of course, being young, I gobbled up every word. It was obvious why the bad reviews were depressing, but I couldn't understand why the good ones were depressing as well. It was only later that I read something the playwright Sydney Howard once wrote to a younger colleague» After a while you'll learn about notices. The bad ones attack you for saying something you didn't say, and the good ones praise you for doing something you never intended to do. It comes out even in the end. He was right. So after the America book, I retreated into a vacuum. Suitably, I work in an attic. There I sat with my typewriter for years and years, writing what my publisher now told me were children's books. I sat there refusing to look at any reviews, reading hardly anything but ray own background research, and ignorant of all journals except the Horn Book. (That was a great comfort, since it reassured me that the writing of books published for children didn't necessarily mean that one was either a little old lady in tennis shoes or retarded.) It was a lonely but uncomplicated life. But then something µ?ß??ß??ß? happened. One of the books I had written won the Newbery Medal. Now there is a certain fate that overcomes a prizewinning author, in this land of labels. After being obscure for years, he (or she) suddenly finds himself being asked to make speeches, and to give lectures and papers and seminars, all over the place. Suddenly he is desirable — or as they say in the theatre, "hot." But although hot, I was terrified of audiences. So I refused to do any of these things, until my publishers began to get nervous. They knew that I would shortly have to stand up in front of 2,000 librarians and accept the Newbery Award, and they were afraid I'd make a fool of myself. So they persuaded me to make a couple of speeches, for practice, and as a result I had to come out of my attic and start finding out about children's literature. So like everyone else conditioned by a degree in English, I began to read not just children's books, but books about children's books. Criticism. And I was appalled. It almost sent me running back to the attic right then and there . Counterbalancing every book or paper that seemed to me wise and sensitive , like Lillian H. Smith's marvellous book The Unreluctant Years, there were a dozen...