Three Cheers for Charlotte!

Although we probably-abably-abably all knew it would come to pass, I was still delighted when I saw the number one posting at the 100 Top Children's Book poll today. E.B. White's Charlotte's Web is so deserving of this honor, and any other honors it's ever received. Perhaps the best part was reading all the comments (and Betsy posted every comment she got!) which read like a love song to this loveliest of books.

I think I'm particularly glowing since the sweet girl and I just finished a re-read of Charlotte's Web last week. Every time I read this book aloud again (and I've done it many times, beginning with an out-loud read my sister and I once did on cassette tape for our nephew ~ now grown and married and with kids of his own!) I find myself loving the way the elegant prose flows. We love truly great books not just because they offer characters we care about and a story that compels us to turn pages, but because they have a music of their own. Charlotte's music has to do with the sights and smell of a small barnyard, an unlikely friendship, and the ordinary sweetness of the everyday.

I was especially struck this time through by White's propensity for lists. He frequently moves (I almost said "lapses" but that implies a lack of planned artistry, and I think this artistry is exquisitely planned) into lists of ordinary things: the different kinds of food scraps that make up Wilbur's slops, the paraphernalia of a barn, the "veritable treasure" a rat can find in the garbage at a county fair. Charlotte's Web is full of quiddity: White the storyteller is interested in the bits and pieces that make up the world, the names of things, their particularity. By listing them, he draws our attention to them, making us notice them, picture them, smell them. By listing them, he provides a rhythm that reminds us of poetry, litanies, counting blessings.

And of course these lists come in the context of a story that's all about the human propensity to overlook the ordinary, to take wonders for granted. Charlotte's plan to save Wilbur is necessary because the Zuckermans don't see, as she sees (or as Fern sees in the early chapters, when she's still operating out of a child-like wonder) that Wilbur is a wonderful creature: a lovely pink and white pig with a charming, modest personality, someone who makes a good friend. The Zuckermans look at Wilbur and only see, at least at first, what they can get out of him. They look at Wilbur and see bacon. In the same way, few see Charlotte for what she is: an amazing spinner-artist, someone with a talent for words, an ingenious food-gatherer, a loyal friend. She's just a "common" gray spider (White uses that word to describe her more than once, I think) who spins an ordinary web in the corner of an ordinary barn. She's just a spider -- the kind of creature that little boys like Avery poke at with sticks -- and her web is just a web, the kind we've all swept from ceiling corners with brooms.

Something else that struck me this time around is White's interesting realism. It's funny to talk about realism, perhaps, in a story that features talking animals, but it's there. One of the most difficult parts of the book, I think, and one that gets inevitably altered in every screen version, is the subtle difference we see in Fern at the end of the story. At the beginning, she's "up before dawn to rid the world of injustice" and for months her whole word seems to center on the joy of raising a baby pig. The animals are her best friends, and Fern can see and hear so much that the adults can't. By the end of the book, she's so focused on taking another ferris wheel ride with Henry Fussy (her growing interest in boys is viewed with deep relief by her mother, who spends part of the book wondering if Fern will ever grow up and get out of the barn) that she doesn't even hang around at the grandstand to see Wilbur's greatest triumph.

Does that make you sad? I think it's supposed to, even though I think we're supposed to understand that at least for many people, it's a natural and inevitable part of growing up -- this widening of interests, this turn from the simplicities of early childhood to the complexities of later childhood (and adolescence and adulthood). I also don't think we're supposed to see it as a tragedy: Fern's growing interest in boys may make her, at least for the moment, less in tune with her younger self, more self-absorbed and self-conscious and even a bit less caring (she doesn't even have time to give Wilbur a reassuring pat or a congratulatory hug) but that doesn't mean it will always be the case. Fern doesn't have to get stuck there and there's nothing to indicate she will.

Thankfully most of us aren't "done" growing at eight, or eighteen, or even thirty-eight. We learn about new joys, but we don't have to lose our awareness of or gratitude for the older joys. I'd like to think that, because of her hours spent in the barn listening to animals talk, Fern will grow into an adult with a wider propensity for wonder, the kind of grown-up who can see amazing things in the ordinary...perhaps like E.B. White. And that if she ever has a daughter who gets up at dawn to rid the world of injustice, and who claims that the sheep are talking to her, she'll hug the dickens out of that kid. I find it strange, however, that nobody ever seems to take White to task for the changes he introduces into Fern's character, especially given how similar they are (in some ways) to what C.S. Lewis is saying and doing with the character of Susan Pevensie. For years critics and writers have yelled at Lewis about that, refusing (it often seems to me willfully refusing) to understand what he meant, and often indicating ridiculous things they assume he meant. And never stopping to think about the ways that Susan, shaped by her experiences in Narnia as a child, might yet change and grow as an adult.

Well, I've wandered far afield...but then, a great book will do that to you too. Even the familiar, ordinary books you think you've read so many times that they couldn't possibly contain any more surprises. Maybe especially those.