A Certain Slant of Light

Claire Huchet Bishop’s Pancakes-Paris is a short book set in Paris just after World War II. Much of France is still in ruins, American soldiers are still in Paris, and although Charles and his little sister Zezette are not exactly starving, they have been hungry as long as they can remember. So after Charles helps a couple of lost American soldiers, he’s thrilled beyond measure when they give him a box of pancake mix as a thank-you.

Crepes! They’ll have crepes for Mardi Gras, for the first time since BEFORE. Or at least, they’ll have crepes if Charles can find someone who will translate the cooking instructions on the box. So he heads off to the American embassy for help, and there the kind receptionist translates the recipe. Then Charles runs into his American soldier friends, who give him a lift home and then show up on Mardi Gras, bringing all kinds of groceries to add to the feast!

To be honest, I struggled with this book: this image of American soldiers as good-hearted liberators later became so destructive in American foreign policy that it now gives me a knee-jerk twitch. The Bush administration, for instance, appears to have expected American troops to receive a rapturous welcome in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and never quite understood why they didn’t.

But Bishop was a Swiss-born writer who spent much of her young adulthood in France: she founded the first American-style children’s library in Paris, which the French professor Paul Hazard describes rapturously in his history of children’s literature Books, Children and Men. She’s not a clueless American projecting gratitude onto France, but an immigrant writer expressing her own gratitude for America’s help to a land that she loved and knew very well.

How was she to know that this gratitude would become an interventionist trope in American politics? “They’ll greet us with flowers, like they did in Paris,” insists the interventionists. And indeed they did in Paris. But that doesn't mean it will happen again in whatever ill-advised adventure the interventionists envision.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Continuing the adventures of the Melendy family with Elizabeth Enright’s The Four-Story Mistake! If you like mid-century family adventures, this is simply a peak example of the genre.

Newbery Honor Books this week: a bonanza! There are just a few books left in the 1950s, and I am racing through.

First, two animal books, Meindert DeJong’s Along Came a Dog and Francis Kalnay’s Chúcaro: Wild Pony of the Pampa. As I worked my way backwards through the Newberys, I thought the 1950s would be the inflection point for Dead Animal books, but in fact the Dead Animal Newbery books reached their peak in the 1960s and 70s; the only one in the 1950s is Old Yeller. Possibly it kicked off a trend because it got made into a Disney movie?

Along Came a Dog is fine, but I really enjoyed Chúcaro, which gives a delightful picture not only of the wild pony, but of life on an estancia in the Argentinean pampas. Infodumps are often maligned, but I love them when they’re well done, and Kalnay often scurries off on a tangent for a short chapter to tell us about quebracha (a type of wood so hard and dense it sinks in water) or bolas, cords with weights on the end to wrap around the legs of an animal and bring it down.

Meanwhile, Claire Huchet Bishop’s All Alone is… a fable about agricultural collectivization? In the French village of Monestier, the motto of the villagers is “Each man for himself.” But when a rockslide traps boy shepherds Marcel and Pierre on the mountain, the villages are forced to work together to dig them out, and the experience so invigorates then that they decide to tear down all the fences separating their little plots of land and “work the whole land of the valley together - one common field under the sun.” And then Monsieur le Maire unveils a shiny new tractor!

I would have expected this as a plot of a 1930s Soviet movie, not an award-winning children’s novel published in the midst of America’s 1950s Red Scare. The world contains multitudes!

What I’m Reading Now

Rather than settle down to any of the books that I’ve begun, I simply seem to be starting more and more, most recently John Davis Billings’ Hardtack and Coffee, which is a memoir about everyday life in the Army of the Potomac during the Civil War. The writing is lively and engaging, and it’s full of fascinating information, as witness this tidbit about the practice of “chumming”:

“Every man had his chum or friend, with whom he associated when off duty, and these tented together. By mutual agreement one was the ‘old woman,’ the other the ‘old man’ of the concern. A Marblehead man called his chum his ‘chicken,’ more especially if the latter was a young soldier.”

What I Plan to Read Next

I need to knuckle down and finish some of those books I’ve already started! They simply do pile up… Also contemplating taking a little breather from the Newbery Honor books once I’ve finished the 1950s. (Five books left!) I’d like to finish the Melendy quartet and read Jean Slaughter Doty’s Can I Get There By Candlelight?