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Mangling Modern Masters.

Article Excerpt
The dark stacks of academic libraries are not usually good places to find gems of children's literature. One day, however, while doing a little research on modern English and American poets, I stumbled across a treasure trove: one children's book by Robert Graves, another by Theodore Roethke, and a third by Richard Wilbur. All were published around the same time (1962-1963), in the same large portrait format, with the same publisher, Crowell-Collier, and the same series title, Modern Masters Books for Children. The research trail through more dimly lit corridors quickly led to other jewels in the series: Jane's Blanket by Arthur Miller and William Saroyan's Me. The general editor for all of these modern literary masterpieces for children was Louis Untermeyer, famous American poet and anthologist.

I wondered why I hadn't known about the series, why it wasn't an important marker in the history of children's book publishing. And I wondered why books that, I initially assumed, must once have shone brightly in literary circles were relegated to the gloomy oblivion of controlled-access library stacks.

Though the twenty-first century is rife with celebrities slumming it as children's book authors (Madonna, Jamie Lee Curtis), none of the Modern Masters books I came across appear to fall into that category. On the contrary, all read as genuine works of imaginative literature--with everything going for them. They are quirky, intelligent, and glittering with verbal pyrotechnics, yet fully within the ken of children. There are tender moments and funny moments and intensely observed moments. There are deliciously transgressive flirtations with behaviors usually forbidden to children. And there are poignant observations on the transience of childhood and expressions of righteous indignation at the way children's voices are silenced. Tricksters and rebellious characters abound.

Lying, cheating, and disguise define The Big Green Book (the only book in the series I'd known previously) by Robert Graves, who was, of course, one of the most significant British literary figures of the twentieth century. A young Maurice Sendak illustrated the book, so the trickster protagonist, a little boy named Jack, is drawn in the wickedly cheerful style we've come to associate with Max (from Where the Wild Things Are) and Mickey (from In the Night Kitchen). Jack is disguised as an old man who tricks his good aunt and uncle into gambling away their money: "Each time they were sure that they would win everything back, and doubled the dollars, but they always lost, until they owed Jack about a hundred thousand dollars." Jack laughs, inverting the expected adult moral order that would condemn both gambling and laughing about it.

Richard Wilbur, too, disturbs the moral authority of normal adult order and makes a hero of a young robber mouse--a "loud-mouse," the antithesis of the conventional quiet-as-a-mouse mouse. Like Graves, Wilbur riffs on the dreary...

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