New Yorker Russell Freedman, a 58-year-old bachelor, loves kids. He loves to tell youngsters the truth about the past so they may come to grips with the present. Thoughtful, tough, down-to-earth and a master at what he does, Freedman doesn`t try to reach all children. Not by any means.
”I`m writing for the readers,” he says. ”We keep hearing that kids today aren`t reading as much as they did before. Well, I doubt if more than 10 or 15 percent of kids have ever been readers. It`s true of adults. Why should kids be different?”
Freedman`s realm is the nonfiction children`s book, a genre that the literary establishment has tended to brush aside, he says. But after 34 books, ranging from studies of animal behavior to biographies and stories of the old West, Russell Freedman refuses to be brushed.
His latest work, ”Lincoln: A Photobiography,” published last year, won the 1988 Newberry Medal as the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children.
The coveted award, named for the 18th Century publisher and seller of children`s books, John Newberry, has been granted annually since 1922 by the 50,000-member American Library Association. The medal represents the highest honor a children`s book may receive.
Previous winners include such modern fictional classics as Hugh Lofting`s ”The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle,” Robert Lawson`s ”Rabbit Hill,”
Marguerite Henry`s ”King of the Wind,” Madeleine L`Engle`s ”A Wrinkle in Time” and Robert Armstrong`s ”Sounder,” to name but a distinguished few.
Freedman, however, is the first nonfiction author to win the Newberry in 32 years.
Of the 67 Newberry Medal books, in fact, only 6 have been nonfiction. The last was Jean Lee Latham`s ”Carry on, Mr. Bowdich,” a 1956 biographical novel about Nathaniel Bowdich, a Revolutionary-era mathematician-astronomer whose manual of celestial navigation still is used by the Navy.
About 4,000 children`s books are published each year, and half of them are nonfiction, Freedman says. Yet the literary community seems to be unconvinced that nonfiction writers can write literature.
”You`ll still get an argument on that,” he says. ”I think it`s rubbish.
` ”Walden` is nonfiction and may be the greatest American book ever written. Every kid reads `The Diary of Anne Frank.` If that`s not literature, I don`t know what is.”
Any society`s view of truth, Freedman argues, gets reflected in the nonfiction books children are encouraged to read. And nonfiction authors formerly were not allowed to be truthful.
”Condescension used to be the rule in children`s nonfiction,” he says,
”the belief that we needed to dramatize history to make it palatable and keep kids reading.
”So we lied.
”We created unbelievable characters-bland stereotypes-and fictionalized their lives.
”Biographies, almost without exception, were adulatory and reverential. We tried to paint the life that was exemplary, dreaming up idealized role models that children should worship and copy.
”For example, one of Lincoln`s favorite boyhood books was `The Life of George Washington` by Parson Mason Weems, published in 1800. In the fifth edition of the book, published in 1806, there comes the first appearance of the cherry tree myth that Weems made up to teach a moral lesson. So after four editions of the book, suddenly little George Washington couldn`t tell a lie to his father.
”That sort of convention went on to become an accepted and established tradition in biographies for children. It has echoed the educational values of the time.
”Now, we can`t fool kids anymore. They want the facts. They want to know that history is driven along by human nature, and human nature is what they recognize in their daily lives.
”I think it`s more encouraging for a kid to read the truth. Lincoln is a mythological figure because of who he was and what he did, not because of a bunch of invented anecdotes.”
As Freedman tells children: ”Lincoln may have seemed like a common man, but he wasn`t. His friends agreed that he was one of the most ambitious people they had ever known. Lincoln struggled hard to rise above his log-cabin origins, and he was proud of his achievements. By the time he ran for president he was a wealthy man, earning a large income from his law practice and his many investments. As for the nickname Abe, he hated it. No one who knew him well ever called him Abe to his face. They addressed him as Lincoln or Mr. Lincoln.”
For the book, Freedman visited all the historical sites, immersed himself in Lincoln lore and traveled across the nation, combing through photographs and prints of the president, his political allies and foes, family, chilling battlefield scenes and key incidents of Lincoln`s life from his boyhood to assassination and funeral procession.
The high point for Freedman, he says, occurred in the Illinois State Historical Library in Springfield, where Thomas F. Schwartz, curator of the Lincoln collection, invited him into the Lincoln vault.
”Tom showed me all sorts of original documents-letters to Mary, drafts of speeches, scraps of paper with doodles and notes about what he was going to say to a jury after the other attorney finished talking in some remote country courthouse 150 years ago.
”The experience deeply moved me. This is as close as you can get to the real Lincoln. I could feel his presence quite strongly in my mind, almost as if he were there in the vault with us.”
In Freedman`s hands, Lincoln, instead of a marble statue, becomes a hard- working, circuit-riding Illinois lawyer who regaled his clients with stories but was a slob as a bookkeeper and a terrible businessman.
”Lincoln was bigger than life,” Freedman says, ”but it was a struggle for him to become so. When he started out, he was weak, indecisive, insecure, a crybaby. Yet in my book, I can show the process of growth taking place. If kids see that our greatest president had the same fears, doubts and failings they have, they realize that Lincoln, whose picture hangs on every schoolhouse wall, was not all that different from them.
”I`m not destroying a myth but making it accessible and more meaningful, I believe. No longer need kids be confronted by some paragon, some phony image of perfection that they can never live up to.”
Freedman particularly wanted to undermine the myth that emancipation, the liberation of the slaves, was a cut-and-dried issue for Lincoln. Freedman traces the history of Lincoln`s thinking. In 1837, as an Illinois state legislator, for instance, he said that slavery was ”founded on both injustice and bad policy.”
A decade later, as a congressman, Lincoln introduced a bill banning slavery in Washington, D.C. Ten years later, he skirted Sen. Stephen Douglas` attempts to make Lincoln look like an abolitionist in favor of interracial marriage: ”There is no reason,” Lincoln said, ”why the Negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence. . . .”
Lincoln did not enter the war with emancipation in mind. ”My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union,” he said in 1862, ”and is not either to save or destroy slavery.” He was reluctant to press the issue, fearing it would prevent him from ending the Civil War and bringing the Union back together. It was only later that his attitude changed.
”Every day,” Freedman says, ”when kids are presented with insoluble problems in the newspaper and on television-such as the civil wars going on in northern Ireland and Israel-it`s important for them to know that such problems have always been difficult to solve. When they realize why Lincoln had to struggle with his decisions, he really gains in stature.”
Freedman views himself as a journalist who researches exhaustively but uses other people`s scholarship. He finds that truth is elusive, slippery and like a chameleon-”You think you have it pinned down, and it appears somewhere else in a different guise.
”Writing biography is an art because there`s no clear-cut way to do it. Do you understand yourself fully? It`s impossible. So, how the devil can you understand Lincoln or Mary Lincoln 150 years later? You make educated guesses. You live with your subjects every day. You grow to like them.”
The Newberry medalist has evolved from his early years as a writer who abandoned his first children`s book halfway through because he lacked the confidence to finish.
”I grew up in California in a house of books and always wanted to write but had trouble figuring out what,” he says. ”I was a college poet at Berkeley, then went to work as a reporter for the Associated Press in San Francisco. I didn`t want to spend my life in a provincial city, so I moved to New York and got a job writing TV publicity for the `Kraft Theater,` `Father Knows Best` and other shows.
”One day I read an article about a 16-year-old blind boy who invented a Braille typewriter. I thought that was remarkable. Then as I kept reading, I learned that the Braille system, itself, as used around the world, was invented by another 16-year-old blind boy, Louis Braille.
”I decided to write a book for young adults and call it `Teenagers Who Changed History.` By the nature of the subject it was a book for young people. There was no malice aforethought. I hadn`t set out to write a kid`s book. Then I had a lot of trouble completing it, but my publisher encouraged me. It was published in 1961.”
His first book taught Freedman a painful lesson that other writers long have known: Writing for kids is no pushover.
”It`s almost like working on a sonnet,” Freedman says. ”Your space is restricted, and you`re speaking to a young mind, so there are conceptual limitations.
”When you first try to write a children`s book, you quickly learn that you really don`t know anything about your subject. You must master it to the point where you can distill it, really boil it down, and find its essence. You must get rid of everything that`s extraneous, trivial, marginal.
”You must know what you really want a kid to take away from that book and remember, maybe, for the rest of his life.
”Then you must write the book over again and again. I once did a book for 2d graders about what animals do in winter-`When Winter Comes.` I wanted kids to read the book for the pleasure of its language, as well as for the information it was conveying.
”Well, I wrote 40 drafts of that book before I was satisfied. By
`Lincoln,` my 34th book, I was more practiced. That took only six drafts, although some tough passages-the key stuff that I wanted to be unforgettable- took many more.”
The audience for any Freedman book determines its style.
”I think all children`s-book writers are cases of arrested development,” he says. ”I can remember being a kid and what I liked to read. I do a traveling road show each year, visiting schools. I`m supposed to be entertaining them, but my secret purpose is to engage the kids in dialogue, to determine what excites them, what makes them lose interest or drift off. I pick up something of their enthusiasms, what they want to read and what they can. It rubs off.
”Then, when I`m writing for a 3d grader, he`s sort of over my shoulder and I`m talking to him. If I`m shooting for a 6th grader, I know that kid, too.”
A decade ago, Freedman happened to attend an exhibit of archival 19th Century photographs on display at the New York Historical Society. The exhibit, ”New York Street Kids,” changed his life and his work.
”I remember standing before a photograph of a newsboy and newsgirl, about 10 years old, on a street corner. They were very much time-bound, locked in their own era-the clothes they wore, the architecture in the background, the horses and wagons, the filthy street.
”But as I stood there, I was struck by the timeless magic of the old photograph. These were kids.
”I knew they had grown up, grown old, died. They were long dead and gone. Yet they were children looking right out at me from a hundred years ago, and they were still very much alive.
”I decided to learn about archival photographs and write books for kids using them. I learned to do photo research and how to lay out an entire book. I do mockups. I know what every double-page spread will look like, where each picture will go, how much text I can write. The text and picture have to be inextricably linked.”
The first book, ”Immigrant Kids” (1980), viewed the anxiety and apprehension of uprootedness through the eyes of children. Next came
”Children of the Wild West” (1983), featuring kids who traveled in wagon trains, lived in sod houses, learned in rustic schoolhouses. It was a paean to the resiliency of childhood. That work led Freedman to ”Cowboys of the Wild West” (1985), a vividly gritty saga that stood in stark contrast to the fanciful cowboy stories Freedman had grown up with.
”In this job, you get to be a perpetual graduate student. While researching cowboys, I had to learn what really had happened to the Indian tribes. The story has been suppressed too long.”
The result was the magisterial ”Indian Chiefs” (1987), a moving biography of six powerful personalities-Red Cloud, Santana, Sitting Bull, Quanah Parker, Washakee and Joseph-and the cunning and bravery they exhibited as they desperately tried to save their people from near-genocide.
Freedman`s control over all aspects of his books is very evident in
”Lincoln” and has paid off. The work is expected to sell 80,000 to 100,000 copies this year, he says, fondly.
”And a good children`s book has a long shelf life.”
Does he miss not having any kids of his own?
”Anyone who doesn`t have kids is sorry about it, at some level,” he says. ”But it was a conscious decision, to the extent that anything is. I don`t think many decisions in life are conscious decisions. Life is a series of accidents, which may or may not be fortunate.
”I`m fortunate to have a satisfying profession that does involve kids. I`m crazy about kids and relate to them very easily.
”Writers must compete more for their time now, but we`ve gotten more sophisticated. Besides, I don`t think anybody has been able to demonstrate that television has affected children`s reading all that much.
”The kids who don`t read probably weren`t ever going to. Those who do will probably always be readers. They`re the ones I want.”
