The Seeker — Susan Cooper's Newbery Acceptance Speech: Seeing Around Corners

A talk accepting the Newbery Medal for The Grey King, given at the American Library Association Convention in Chicago, August 1976

The Grey King by Susan Cooper This year marks the centennial of the American Library Association and the bicentennial of the United States of America. It says a great deal for the rugged independence of the Children’s Services Division that they should choose such an anniversary to award the Newbery Medal to a Limey.

A very nervous Limey, too. Not for that reason: I do, after all, live near Boston, where the history of the wicked British pursues me at every turn. Especially as recounted by my American children. No. My problem is one aspect of the Newbery familiar to those of you who have attended this ceremony before—the fact that the winner, accustomed to solitude as a hermit to his cell, can traditionally be expected to stand up here, before two thousand faces, absolutely rigid with fear.

I did think I’d found a way to overcome this problem. I happen to be very, very short-sighted. I should need only to remove my glasses, I thought, to be unable to see any one of these unnerving faces. I might even see something quite different. As one of my fellow-sufferers, James Thurber, once said, “Those of us who are half blind are luckier than you think. Where the rest of you see a paper bag blowing down the street, we see an old lady turning somersaults.”

I gave up the idea about the glasses when I realized that I couldn’t see my audience, equally I shouldn’t be able to see my speech. But Thurber’s remark stuck in my head. He might just as well have been talking about another kind of minority group than the myopic: those of us who write books—like The Grey King—which are classified as fantasy. We live in the same world as the rest of you. Its realities are the same. But we perceive them differently.

We see around corners. It’s a little like abstract painting, or poetry—and not at all like the realistic novel. The material of fantasy is myth, legend, folktale; the mystery of dream, and the greater mystery of Time. With all that haunting our minds, it isn’t surprising that we write stories about an ordinary world in which extra-ordinary things happen.

Nor is it surprising that we should be read, today, mainly by children. Most of us, mind you, have no idea whether we are writing books for children or for adults. We write the book that wants to be written, and let our publishers tell us what it is. (And there I am luckier than most, since Margaret McElderry is the wisest and most sensitive editor-publisher I have ever known, anywhere.) But even though more adults are reading fantasy these days—in a flight, perhaps, from the realities of the machine back to the older realities of myth—even so, children are the natural audiences for fantasy. They aren’t a different species. They’re us, a little while ago. It’s just that they are still able to accept mystery. They don’t bat an eye when you present them, within the framework of the world they know, with things like a flying horse, candles which burn bitter cold, a house in which yesterday will take place tomorrow. Nothing shakes them. Experience hasn’t yet interrupted their long discovery. They still know the essence of wonder, which is to live without ever being quite sure what to expect. And therefore, quite often, to encounter delight.

Those of us who work in the arts never know quite what to expect either. Once upon a time, when I was about twenty-five years old, writing features for the Sunday Times in London, the Literary Editor of the paper came into my office one day and dropped a press release on my desk. He said, “Read that. You ought to try it.”

It was a notice from an English publishing house called Ernest Benn Limited. They’d been the original publishers of E. Nesbit and in her honor they were offering a prize for what they called a “family adventure story.” There was a deadline, and being a journalist I liked deadlines. (Needed them. I still do.) And it sounded like fun—so I did try. I invented three children called Simon, Jane, and Barney, and a rather vague plot about villainy and hidden treasure. And I wrote a first chapter in which they traveled down from London to Cornwall all by train for a summer holiday, as my brother and I had done as children.

And then a funny thing began to happen. The story, somehow, took over. My children were met at their destination by a very strange great-uncle named Merriman (why did I call him Merriman? I didn’t know) and before I quite knew what I was doing, the plot began to change completely. I forgot all about the E. Nesbit prize and the family adventure story—and the deadline. And I found I was writing a fantasy, full of the images which had haunted me since childhood but which I’d never thought to put into fiction. In the final version I even cut that first deliberate chapter. And there I was with a book called Over Sea, Under Stone. Which turned out to be the first movement in a symphonic pattern of five books—one of which is the reason I’m here today.

The pattern didn’t emerge for a long time. I had no intention then of writing a sequel to Over Sea—though I did leave it open-ended, since I’d grown fond of the characters, especially the Merlin-figure called Merriman, and I didn’t want to cut myself off from them forever.

About five years went by, in the space of which I married, came to America to live, wrote a couple of adult books, and had a baby. Then one snowy day I was cross-country skiing with my husband in Massachusetts, where we live. Now skiing is not a sport which produces great conversation. You just get the odd word, like “Help!” So I was tramping along in silence, looking at the snowdrifts, seeing small trees sticking up out of the snow and thinking they looked like the antlers of deer—and then for no good reason at all, I suddenly knew that I was going to write a book, set for the most part in thick snow like this, about a small boy who woke up one birthday morning and found he was able to work magic.

I wrote the idea down, and forgot about it. I wrote two more adult books and had another baby, and three more years went by.

Then one day, something sent me back to reread the first children’s book Over Sea, Under Stone. Perhaps it was all my endless reading about Britain, prehistory, Britain, myth, folktale, Britain… This went on all the time, because I’d never really mastered my homesickness, and I suppose I never shall. I reread something I’d had the old man Merriman say, about the constant recurrence in the history of Britain of the battle between the Dark and the Light. He’d said,

The struggle between good and evil… goes on all around us all the time, like two armies fighting. And sometimes one of them seems to be winning and sometimes the other, but neither has ever triumphed altogether. Nor ever will… for there is something of each in every man…

And out of the shadows came again the image of the snow and the antlered snowdrifts, and the boy waking to find himself with powers he hadn’t had before. And I started thinking, and scribing, and I found coming into my head the pattern not only of that book but of the overall sequence of five, each dealing with different aspects of the long struggle. One was already written, four more were to come. So I made an outline of each, characters and plot and setting, and before I started to write the second, The Dark Is Rising, I wrote the last page of the very last book. That’s still sitting in my file, and I shall use it—unchanged—when I find myself reluctantly reaching the place where it belongs later this year.

I would not have predicted all of that.

But of course, the whole process is a mystery, in all the arts. Creativity, in literature, painting, music. Or in performance: those rare lovely moments in a theater when an actor has the whole audience in his hand suddenly, like that. You may have all the technique in the world, but you can’t strike that spark without some mysterious extra blessing—and none of us knows what that blessing really is. Not even the writers, who talk the most, can explain it at all.

Who knows where the ideas come from? Who knows what happens in that shadowy part of the mind, something between Plato’s cave and Maeterlinck’s Hall of Night, where the creative imagination hides? Who knows even where the words come from, the right rhythm and meaning and music all at once? Those of us who make books out of the words and ideas have less of an answer than anyone. All we know is that marvelous feeling that comes, sometimes, like a break of sunshine in a cloud-grey sky, when through all the research and concentration and slog—suddenly you are writing, fluently and fast, with every sense at huge pitch and yet in a state almost like trance. Suddenly, for a time, the door is open, and the magic is working; a channel exists between the page and that shadowy cave in the mind.

But none of us will ever know why, or how.

Just one thing can, perhaps, be charted, and that’s the kind of stories that are told. If only looking back over your own work after you’ve done it, you can find some thread that runs through, binding it all together. The underlying theme of my The Dark Is Rising sequence, and particularly of its fourth volume, The Grey King, is, I suppose, the ancient problem of the duality of human nature. The endless coexistence of kindness and cruelty, love and hate, forgiveness and revenge—as inescapable as the cycle of life and death, day and night, the Light and the Dark.

And to some extent, I can see its roots. My generation, especially in Britain and Europe, was given a strong image of good and bad at an impressionable age. We were the children of World War II. Our insecurities may not have differed in kind from those of the modern child, but they were more concrete. That something that might be lurking in the shadow behind the bedroom door at night wasn’t, for us, a terrible formless bogeyman; it was specific—a Nazi paratrooper, with a bayonet. And the nightmares that broke into our six-year-old sleep weren’t always vague and forgettable; quite often they were not only precise, but real. We knew that there would indeed be the up-and-down wail of the air-raid siren, to send us scurrying through a night crisscrossed with searchlights, down into the shelter, that little corrugated iron room buried in the back lawn, and barricaded with sandbags and turf. And then there would be the drone of the bombers, the thudding of anti-aircraft fire from the guns at the end of the road, and the crash of bombs coming closer, closer all the time.

We took it all for granted, of course, like the gas masks we carried to school each day, the bits of shrapnel we collected after every air raid, the sight of Father’s rifle and steel helmet in the polite English umbrella stand. And many families, like my own, were lucky; we were never physically hurt, we simply had a rather noisy war. But I don’t think the sensation of threat, of an incomprehensible looming menace, ever went away.

The experience of war, like certain other accidents of circumstance, can teach a child more than he or she realizes about the dreadful ubiquity of man’s inhumanity to man. And if the child grows up to be a writer, in a world which seems to learn remarkable little from its history, then the writing will be haunted.

Haunted, and trying to communicate the haunting. Whether explicitly, or through the buried metaphor of fantasy, it will be trying always to say to the reader: Look, this is the way things are. The conflict that’s in this story is everywhere in life, even in your own nature. It’s frightening, but try not to be afraid. Ever. Look, learn, remember; this is the kind of thing you’ll have to deal with yourself, one day, out there.

Perhaps a book can help with the long, hard matter of growing up, just a little. Maybe, sometimes.

Thank you for giving me the Newbery Medal. The encouragement it brings is impossible to describe. But don’t forget, Newbery winners come and go. Midsummer monarchs, that what we are: set up, and honored, and then, by a natural rhythm, replaced. The real continuity, in this matter of keeping a channel between the imagination of the writer and the development of the child, is made year in and year out by you—librarians, teachers, storytellers, publishers. You remember—every one of us here does—that wonderful feeling of going into a library when you’re young and have much yet to read. It’s like entering Aladdin’s cave: all those books, all that delight, waiting. And someone there to say, “Hey—try this one. It’s good.”

That's the channel of communication that you keep open, and without it we the writers would be powerless. The centennial of the American Library Association makes a happy moment to celebrate the fact. So—happy birthday, ladies and gentlemen. Please keep up the good work for at least another hundred years.

This essay is taken from Dreams and Wishes: Essays on Writing for Children by Susan Cooper, published by Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing in 1996.

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