It appears the time has come, not to put away childish things, but to produce them.
With the premiere last week in Madison, Wis., of a play that Orson Welles wrote at the age of 17, the famed filmmaker joined a long list of luminaries whose childhood scribbles and scrawls have been unveiled recently for public inspection.
One of the year’s blockbuster art exhibits is a show of Pablo Picasso’s earliest paintings–and “early” means as early as age 11, when the Spanish lad painted a picador. This spring, CBS aired an adaptation of the “lost” novel Louisa May Alcott penned at 17. Various other works have turned up in the past two years by the gum-snapping, pimple-prone versions of everyone from Margaret Atwood to Frank Zappa, as well as Margaret Mitchell, William Morris and John Ruskin.
Many of these artists’ creations, of course, weren’t so much lost as tactfully overlooked, much like your younger sister’s unfortunate experiment with pink hair in 10th grade. Others were relegated, like most children’s artistic output, to the attics and basements of those who prized them for their sentimental value.
Now, though, it seems there is a broader interest in such arcana as Ernest Hemingway’s high school newspaper account of a track meet or 9-year-old Stephen King’s creatively spelled story, “Jhonathan and the Witchs.”
The proper term for these works is “juvenilia,” which despite being used often in the same sentence as the words “Jim Carrey,” has nothing to do with the artistic immaturity of an adult.
Instead, juvenilia refers to what an established artist produced as a teenager or child. Indeed, that’s what Liz Phair called an EP of old songs she released in 1995, a name that could be considered as much warning label as title, given that the lyrics to one include the immortal line: “I’m gonna get drunk and **** some cows.”
Celebrations of bestiality aside, the fascination with juvenilia is understandable, if not quite as high-minded as people like to pretend it is.
Scholars, of course, can claim to parse these works for clues to artistic development.
Ah, they say, did you notice that the main character in the Welles play “Bright Lucifer” is named Eldred Brand, and that “brand” evokes the mark of Cain, which, it really goes without saying, suggests Kane, as in “Citizen Kane?”
Yes, the rest of us might answer. But do you think that Welles, who was a cigar-smoking orphan like his character, hated his guardian as much as Eldred hates his?
The human connection is what counts, the portrait of the artist as a young man, not as a young artist. This curiosity springs from the same source as that peculiar obligation to publish the high-school yearbook photographs and blurbs of serial killers, as if choosing “I want to rock-n-roll all night” as one’s senior quote offered some glimpse into a dark and twisted soul.
We want to know what these people were like as children and how much they were like us.
“We have a way of lionizing authors once they reach a certain amount of success,” said Paul Mandelbaum, who persuaded 42 contemporary authors to donate samples of their childhood writing for his thoroughly enjoyable anthology called “First Words: Earliest Writing from Favorite Contemporary Authors.”
“Juvenilia reminds us of the very human link between the author’s developing humanity and this stuff we end up calling art,” he said. “It connects it in a way that is so readily apparent.”
In reading “First Words,” who doesn’t revel in the fact that Michael Crichton, who spits out best sellers with the frequency and emotional depth of an ATM dispensing cash, wrote short stories his high-school teachers criticized as too subtle?
Who doesn’t recognize their own 3rd-grade essays in Amy Tan’s meditation at age 8 upon “What the Library Means to Me”?
“I love school because the many things I learn seem to turn on a light in the little room in my mind,” Tan wrote, experimenting in metaphor, even back then.
OK, so maybe Amy Tan’s essay isn’t a typical 3rd-grade effort, but that’s the nice thing about juvenilia. No matter whether it’s good or bad, it reassures us of our own place in the world.
If someone’s childhood work isn’t exceptional, well, it means that the author was one of us, after all. So what if Stephen King is a millionaire, he couldn’t spell worth a darn in the 4th grade.
If, instead, the talent smacks us in the face, as the Picasso exhibit does, it demonstrates that no amount of art lessons or violin lessons or tap lessons would have altered the course of our lives. Our parents can’t be blamed for letting us drop out of ballet after the first class. Genius will out.
That Mandelbaum got his book idea during an Iowa Writers’ Workshop cocktail-party conversation about what people had written as children suggests another truth about juvenilia. It’s almost impossible to think about famous people’s juvenilia without reflecting upon our own.
Imagine if everyone’s childhood portfolios emerged: the research papers copied from Encyclopaedia Britannica, the book reports copied from book jackets, the odes to love copied from Journey’s “Infinity” album.
One colleague has confessed to writing a poem for her high school prom memory book that concluded: “Spring is tonight/ And tonight is forever.” Another friend, inspired by “Harriet the Spy,” kept a record of her neighborhood goings-on. The Oct. 6, 1974, entry read: “The neighborhood smelled real good for about an hour.”
Most people can’t talk about their juvenilia without wincing, and one has to wonder whether Jane Austen wouldn’t do the same if she knew more than 500 people attended a Jane Austen Society of North America lecture analyzing stories she wrote as a child.
Would these artists and authors–particularly the dead ones, who have no say in the matter–want their catalogs of work to include the 18th Century equivalent of “What I Did on My Summer Vacation”? Can the world survive without knowing Ernest Hemingway reviewed his own performance in a high school play with the phrase, “Hemingstein felt queer before the play and acted as he felt”?
Some take preventive measures. Fanny Burney, a contemporary of Austen’s, conducted a ritual bonfire on her 15th birthday to destroy all her previous writings. (In retrospect, this seems rather extreme, given that hardly anyone outside academia has heard of her today). Cynthia Ozick reportedly keeps her juvenilia in her attic, in a box labeled “Do Not Open Upon Pain of Death.”
Warnings may not be enough. Margaret Mitchell left explicit instructions that all her papers and letters were to be burned after her death because she wanted her reputation to rest upon her only published novel, “Gone With the Wind.”
But the son of a high school friend discovered in a long-forgotten box of his father’s papers a novella that Mitchell wrote at 15 and gave him as a gift. Within a year, “Lost Laysen” was published to no great critical acclaim and the almost certain rustle of Mitchell cringing in her grave.
Others almost certainly would get a chuckle out of the idea of people poring over their detritus for meaning. No one promoted the mythology of Orson Welles, child prodigy, more assiduously than Welles himself. He might well have claimed to have written “Bright Lucifer” at 7, not 17, and produced it himself.
Charlotte Bronte could be relieved to have the image of her childhood as isolated, unrelieved misery on the moors brightened a bit by wider familiarity with the adventure tales she wrote with her siblings on manuscripts tiny enough to belong to her brother Branwell’s set of toy soldiers.
Juliet McMaster, an English professor who runs the Juvenilia Press at the University of Alberta, a small operation that has published 14 volumes of authors’ childhood works, looks at it this way:
“I suspect that when it’s close to you, you’re embarrassed about it,” she said. “But you’d feel pretty good 100 years later if you were there to see it.”
Perhaps it’s worth holding onto that prom memory book, after all.
