Walter Wangerin and the cosmic equation - myth and children's literature - Cover Story

CHILDREN EXPECT stories to tell them something true about the world. We all enter the world with very little information about life or what's expected of us. Large, towering people shape our lives in ways. and for purposes mysterious to us. Often we don't have enough experience to comprehend their explanations. So stories supply us with our first information about the big picture. They give us not just details, but show the general shape of human life--that we move through time; that fortunes alter; that we too will change one day. Stories tell us which actions are admirable, which bring disgrace. This is why children ask with such urgency, "Is it true?" They don't want to know if dragons are a recognized zoological species. What they're asking is, "Does the universe really harbor powerful, treacherous creatures which can destroy small children?" Or put more abstractly, "If the world is such a dangerous place, how can I ever survive?"

Every cluster of human beings has gathered myths to contain their group's painfully acquired clues as to the overall shape of life. Like a vessel in which seed corn is stored for the next year's crop or as insurance against drought, myth held the precious, accumulated knowledge that made it possible to five together and survive.

At some point, however, and for reasons still debated, myth turned into something we in the Western world call fiction. And fiction has several advantages over myth. Stones now are filled with lots of interesting details and are marked b their inventors' individual styles. But fiction can't supply shape as well as myth can. Fiction's contours are indistinct. Sometimes it's hard to know when you've come to the end of the story. When anyone asks the old question "Is it true?" we think the person is naively inquiring whether the details can be verified. The very term "fiction" warns against such a childish question. While we look to myth to tell us the truth about life in the real world, we require fiction only to be internally consistent. What we once relied on stories to tell us, fiction no longer promises to deliver.

But children continue to arrive in dire need of basic survival training. They aren't yet smart enough to know that "Is it true?" is a foolish question. And a few storytellers still write with that childish question echoing in the back of their minds. One of these is Walter Wangerin Jr. He believes that "genuinely true stories are the expression, even the manifestation, of their teller's faith," and he often uses mythic means to manifest his faith.

WANGERIN'S OWN childhood supplied a goodly portion of both his story material and his faith. The eldest of seven children, he grew up in a series of Lutheran parsonages. His family legacy was literacy. His parents' use of the English language he describes as both "formal and fire-bright--the formality my father's, the sharp shooting of a flaming metaphor my mother's." His father's pastoral duties exposed him to human struggles--sickness, alcoholism, divorce, death. The church rituals he saw constantly enacted--marriage, baptism, confirmation, worship--shaped what might otherwise have seemed a chaotic welter of trouble into manageable, or at least ponderable, proportions.

Wangerin's father was a storyteller. On Saturday afternoons after he had finished preparing his sermon he would gather his four eldest children around him in the frigid North Dakota bedroom and tell them tales he had invented about Ambrose, a medieval knight in rusty armor. For young Wally, such tale-telling tamed "chaotic existence by the cosmos of a story."

Walter went away to college and then to graduate school at Ohio's Miami University. He had all but completed a doctorate in medieval literature when he decided to enter the ministry and to write fiction. At about the same time he met and married Thanne Bohlmann. By the time he was ordained and settled in a parish in Evansville, Indiana, the family included four children. Against this backdrop of family and parish his own vision began to emerge. And it had a mythic shape.

By 1978, Wangerin had written five slim, and in his estimation "unremarkable," books for children. That year, however, Harper published The Book of the Dun Cow, set in the same kind of meta-time as Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. Critical notice began immediately. The New York Times voted it the best children's book of the year. In 1980 the National Book Awards committee gave it the prize for best children's fiction. Unfortunately, the name of the prize was changed that year to the American Book Award in an attempt to attract the same kind of attention that the Academy Awards receive. When news of the prize arrived only a week before the ceremony to be held in New York, Wangerin, unaware of the award's prestige, decided not to cancel his scheduled confirmation class. Only when his award check arrived, accompanied by a congratulatory letter from William Buckley, the master of ceremonies that year, did he realize he'd missed his moment in the literary spotlight.