Edward Eager’s Magic Tales: Half, by the Lake, Seven-Day, Or Not?
“When you have magic powers and know it, it can be a fine feeling, like a pleasant tingling inside. But in order to enjoy that tingling, you have to know just how much magic you have and what the rules are for using it.”
My appreciation of Edward Eager (1935–1964), one of the greatest writers for kids in the twentieth century — and a great writer, period — appeared in Rain Taxi Review of Books in spring 2017.
I was thrilled to get the chance not just to reread his marvelous novels but to buy some expensive “also-wrotes” by him as well … to be sure I was telling a complete story, of course.
Most images on this page feature the original illustrations by N. M. Bodecker, whose art is almost as important to the books’ identity and success as Eager’s words.
Everyone should read Edward Eager. Absolutely everyone. Please tell me that you’ve done so.
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“Idlwdl baxbix! Wah. Oom. Powitzer grompaw”: Make of these words (for now) what you will. The sentences (are they sentences?) are tantalizingly half-recognizable while musically nonsensical. They come from Half Magic, the first novel by Edward Eager (1935–1964).
A successful Broadway librettist, Eager turned to novels to domesticate magic for midcentury children. Or rather, he wrote novels about twentieth-century children and magic in which wit and language are as important as derring-do, and one of the great pleasures of wielding special powers is figuring out how to work within the rules. (At the time of his death, Eager was celebrated perhaps equally for the children’s books and the librettos, as his obituary in the New York Times seems to suggest.)
Oddly enough, I don’t know anyone who found Eager’s books through a friend’s or librarian’s referral. It seems that we who love him came upon his work by chance … or I personally forced it on somebody who had loftily declared him- or herself unimpressed by children’s literature. Naturally I muttered, “Idlwdl baxbix! Wah. Oom. Powitzer grompaw,” while I did so.
In situ, that string of nonsense syllables stems from a rookie mistake — but not Eager’s. One of his lonely little-girl characters, a girl who doesn’t realize she has a magic token, let alone how it works, has wished aloud that her cat might speak and keep her company. No one could be more surprised when Carrie the cat stops meowing and starts making half-recognizable sounds, but somehow the result makes perfect sense: This is how a cat would speak, or almost speak, if her enchantress managed to get a job only half done. It turns out that the talisman grants only half a wish at a time — a lesson hard learned as the four children in the book watch half a house fire and see a neighbor’s iron Scottie dog come half alive. A half-articulate cat would speak like Caliban, cursing her enchanter. Carrie’s talk is both disturbing and delightful, the hallmark of a writer dancing through the eternal battle between moral lessons of discipline (perhaps the children’s literature scorned by weary souls) vs. the pure pleasure of a tale well told.
Out of puns, misunderstandings, and deep allusions, Eager twisted a total of seven witty, rompy, madcap-mishappy books called collectively the Tales of Magic. His magic is wild and thrilling — and sometimes off-putting, as the narrative voice of Half Magic explains in a manifesto for the series: “When you have magic powers and know it, it can be a fine feeling, like a pleasant tingling inside. But in order to enjoy that tingling, you have to know just how much magic you have and what the rules are for using it.” This is the challenge of speaking and working within any symbolic system, spelled out for readers aged eight to twelve.
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Eager’s fiction began as a sideline supplementing his Broadway career. When he had a son, a redhead who apparently disliked his hair, he published a rhyming picture book (Red Head, 1951) about the lad’s appeal to bees and bulls and his saving grace, the fact that his hair might shine like a lighthouse and rescue him from danger. (Ho-hum. Wah. Oom.)
Later, as an established children’s novelist, Eager enhanced complexities of plot and language; working with the quests, time travel, and set pieces of the magical adventure books he read in his own youth, he bent many of the then-rules for children’s literature. Sometimes his novels take advantage of familiar structures, as when a library book brings adventure for only seven days. Elsewhere they rely on a pun or a synecdochal connection: a patch of mixed thyme enables travel through time (The Time Garden), and a lake grants “wet wishes” (Magic by the Lake).
Leaning in this direction, the Tales of Magic carry heady whiffs of postmodernism and magic realism. They are as sophisticated in their allusions as Lewis Carroll’s Alice books and — I dare to say it — they rival Vladimir Nabokov’s wordplay and the metaphors made real in Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo.
Whatever the fancy embrace of plot and phrase, Eager’s Everychild characters do follow the cardinal rule of young literature: make friends with the reader. These are kids we want to hang out with, and they break down into easily recognizable types. There’s always a brave and bossy older girl and a stubborn, impetuous younger one; a boy who “has ideas”; and a nice girl to whom one can turn for comfort when dazzled by the abundance of cleverness elsewhere. Sometimes there’s an outright nerd, like poor Gordy of books five and six, whose “Whaddaya say?” definitely annoys. Simply put, some friends we love and some exasperate, and much depends on self-expression.
The narratives themselves make the most of the magic-adventure novel’s hoary tropes, the kinds of things kids who have read Ivanhoe and Kidnapped (or seen synopses on TV) will want to see and do. In Eager’s second novel, Magic by the Lake, the original four kids go on a first-ever summer vacation, and the eruption of magic is even more dramatic. As they gaze out over the water of the middle-class haven, wishing aloud for another enchantment, every wet spot and obscure island suddenly teems with mermaids, Water Babies, a Kraken, a lady’s hand brandishing a sword, “insipid-looking fairies,” Robinson Crusoe, Davy Jones, and a disgruntled turtle who says, “Now you’ve done it.” They have in fact received magic by the lakeful. It’s positively sublime.
As the dramatis personae at the lake demonstrate, Eager’s books braid together templates of the quest, the crush, the damsel, and most of all the parent in need of assistance that only magic, properly understood and manipulated (or petitioned) by intrepid child-wizards, can provide. The book also delivers a Message, a moral almost universal in children’s literature: the value of restraint, of the Golden Rule, and the (sigh) pleasure of helping those less fortunate.
Perhaps one is tempted to yawn at this last realization. It is the work of but a moment, however, to note that Eager’s great gift is for narrative language, which rises above homily to make good deeds seem like good fun. His style is both erudite and endearingly vernacular, arch and personal. He even inserts an “I” now and again. And for fun, there’s a meditation on infinity and Einsteinian special relativity — though he wisely doesn’t call it that. He never oversteps into didactic prose; who would want an out-and-out lesson? Mark, in Half Magic, complains that many a nonfiction book is both tedious and deceptive: “It’s being made to learn things not on purpose. It’s unfair. … It’s sly.” Well, Eager is sly — but not unfair.
It’s hard not to savor (and use, as I’ve already done) a phrase such as “the work of but a moment,” an infectious gateway to complex constructions the precocious reader may utter in her own real life. Even a stilted phrase such as “I, for one,” which Eager’s children use multiple times per book, is appealing in its self-importance and its awareness of what a simple pronoun can do. In one of my favorite passages involving garden work, the admission that one character’s “first fine careless rapture flagged” is quickly followed by another’s deflating offer: “‘I’ll run it [the power mower] awhile now, if you’re both tired.’”
If the children reading don’t understand the references or the fancy words immediately, there’s always the hope that someday, as they keep living and reading, they will. “We’ve been enjoying the magic, and wasting its sweetness on our own desert air, and never thinking of others at all” may sound odd in the mouth of a nine-year-old girl — but the mysteriously adult echo of “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard,” almost surely to be encountered later in the reader’s life, sweetens the message about selfishness and the challenge to do more good in the world as we mature. And therein lies a powerful incantation.
Ultimately, yes, these books are about learning rules, but the rules aren’t exclusively, or even necessarily, the ones that children’s novels traditionally taught. In addition to the requisite need for hard work and good deeds, Eager’s kids learn first of magic’s rigidity, then of language’s plasticity. These rules have their own cachet; the characters are eager (an unavoidable paranomasia) to acquire them.
Magic always comes with both thrill and unexpected twist, a chastening lesson built into the adventurous fun. Virtuous youngsters — think of Alcott’s March sisters, whom the children of The Time Garden visit and help with good works among lazy cottagers — should serve magic: That is, they should fulfill its purpose by helping the less fortunate, then generously spread magical opportunities to other kids, elders, parents, a new family on the block. Thus the very first characters leave the half-magic talisman for a tired little girl to find, and a different set — who have read Half Magic and wondered about the end as much as we have — wish their way into the scene to see what happens next.
I’ll even propose that there’s pleasure in the pain — in failure and redemption, as the magic makes sure it all works out in the end. When they surrender their talismans or leave their enchanted territories, when they give up the vocabulary of magic (though not of maturity), the children inevitably wonder if more magic challenges lie in the future.
A talisman implies a certain level of independence. A donor figure — a creature for whom the adventurers perform certain favors in exchange for the great gift of magic — is crucial where there’s no specific talisman. These aren’t just teachers, though; they’re also in some sense opponents. In Magic by the Lake, the children negotiate several times with the world-weary Turtle to determine whether they’ll get to choose their own adventures or have them imposed, and they calculate how the scientific rules of evaporation and rain will affect a “wet wish.” The children who enjoy The Time Garden have a Natterjack, a kind of grumpy Cockney toad, to consult and beseech, and in Knight’s Castle, an ancient tiny lead knight guides the way to a nighttime world in which the kids are action figures in the settings they’ve created during the day.
In the final Tale, Seven-Day Magic, the children have no advisor per se, but the leader of the bookish group is excited to “tame the magic and learn its rules and thwart it and make the most of it.” There will, we’re sure, be precious little thwarting — but we’re excited to see them try before bowing inevitably to the magic’s own requirements. A magic book is probably slyer than the dismisser of nonfiction lessons may hope, but the best lessons come from fiction.
No matter who encounters Eager’s enchantment, that potentially frightening (or classically sublime) pleasure in using it requires a good deal of intellectual acumen, much of which can be borrowed from books. Like the teeming lake, the Tales embrace literature and legend — then turn them around, kick their behinds, and make them salute for a moment. Recurring favorites include Victorian author E. Nesbit, to whom Eager paid reverent and repeated tribute as “the one truly ‘great’ writer for the ten-, eleven-, and twelve-year-old.” He also makes abundant use of Louisa May Alcott, Lewis Carroll, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Sir Walter Scott, Shakespeare, and Arthurian legend, so there are allusions enough to satisfy the most ferocious annotator heading for a Ph.D. Only “dear little fairies” and the adults who speak of them are regarded with righteous contempt; any sensible reader will take a cat spitting out syllables over a fairy any day, even if (or maybe because) fairies are tweely perfect.
Just how “real” children fit into a universe composed of read texts is a puzzle, and Eager wasn’t afraid to propose a solution, if not solve it outright. In Seven-Day Magic, the children check out a worn red book intriguing in that identifying marks have rubbed away. Such a well-read/red book demands to be read again — but when they open it, they find an account of their own trip to the library and the conversation afterward. Alarming as this is, the pages ahead are stuck together, waiting to be filled with whatever they do next.
This chapter is a brilliant bit of postmodernist praxis for the middle-grade reader, in which the sober oldest girl wonders if they’re “just characters in a book someone wrote” and the plucky little one bursts out, “I don’t want to be not real.” Their conversation covers identity and mise-en-abyme as beautifully as any black-turtleneck-wearing scholar might have done in the 1980s. The kids could make themselves ill trying to parse reality — or they could surrender to the idea of magic and plunge forward into success, failure, and maturing lessons learned.
It seems that the less aware someone is of magic, the more it affects that person. And the deeper into magic the children get, the more they want to help out — and the likelier they are to bungle the first attempt. Figuring out the rules of the magic naturally means figuring out the world and each other, usually with that philanthropic content that one barely notices as a child but recognizes as a heavy theme when revisiting the books in adulthood.
Eager’s children make so many mistakes with magic that those around them sometimes fear for their lives or their sanity, despite the tenderness the kids show for others. Two children serve primary caretakers for their dotty grandmother, for example, and whole posses try to help fathers’ careers. Aside from a few shifty criminals — jewelry store robbers, Ali Baba’s thieves, kidnappers — adults are an amusing and often mutable part of the world. Daffy elders abound, and many recall Eager’s description of Nesbit in The Horn Book: “stubborn, charming, wrongheaded, parading in flowing gowns, scattering ashes from her omnipresent cigarette.” In that vein, there’s acerbic Mrs. Whiton, who drives an ancient car and swims grimly at dawn, at a seaside estate that includes that garden of mixed species of thyme that are (of course) also different times. Or Miss Isabella King, a recluse unable to keep up with her mortgage, who wispily charms her banker with fanciful cakes after the meddlesome-helpful children introduce the two.
Then there’s the more hapless sort of grown-up, such as the bemused wealthy suburbanites who believe the Magic or Not? children have stolen what the trope-savvy kids have been calling a long-lost heir. And the talented but unfortunately diminutive father in Seven-Day Magic, who is resigned to a career as a backup singer — then thrust into the television spotlight when his partners are struck mute, leaving him to sing solo through an immortal earworm, “Chickadee tidbit, chickadee tidbit, skedaddle skedaddle pow.” It turns out that a well-meaning daughter worded her wish imprecisely: “What she wished was that the important people would discover her father tonight before the show was over.” And so they have, though not at all as expected.
Though each cast of children come to the right conclusions about self-discipline and generosity, the books don’t preach. They lead by example, and morals are part of an enduring cultural language the bright-eyed reader acquires. This moral code varies little among eras, from Queen Elizabeth I to Jo March to the characters of the very last books.
Eager wrote a lot about time, meaning historical eras, different cultures, and the times that were a-changing. In that vein, it must be admitted that moments of controversy arise around non-white races. Overall the Tales are progressive: In The Time Garden, the children rescue slaves on the Underground Railroad, and other kids get funding for a new school and help integrate a neighborhood in the early 1960s. But some readers’ hackles rise when first Arabs and then island “savages” appear in Magic by the Lake. These are cannibals who take a lazy (but fortuitous) nap in the middle of the day, and who speak a half-comprehensible gibberish somewhat more inflected than what’s uttered by Carrie the cat: “Smallum fattum girlum. Roastum stuffed with breadfruit crumbs.” N. M. Bodecker’s illustrations show stereotypical South Sea Islanders in the style of Little Black Sambo.
In the overall picture of Eager’s attitude toward race, this moment is a hiccup. The small, fat girl adventurer in question is actually the first to speak pidgin: “She thought it was time to address the islanders. ‘Ugh,’ she said. ‘Mugwump. Mattapan. Chop Suey.’” Her words are, of course, terms that the reader may already know or might encounter later as part of growing up; in context, they’re ignorant.
And the cannibals have a story that pushes beyond the apparent racism and addresses — in 1957 — the evils of colonialism: “White man always tell the same old storyum. All same likum Captain Cook. Heap big fakum.”
Read correctly, I think, the gibberish is part of a critique of white expansion and domination, still using the tropes of aging adventure stories being sold for young readers — but subverting them. The relationship to history deepens when these four children, tied to stakes and waiting for the cannibals’ nap to end and the cauldrons to be ready for their stewing, meet another set of ghostly kids on a magical adventure … children Eager’s readers will encounter again in his novel for 1958.
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Perhaps so much magic and time coding was exhausting. Perhaps Eager wanted a new challenge. In any event, 1959 saw him publish the first of two non-magic, or aspirationally magic, novels in which a wishing well in a Connecticut exurb may or may not bring true magic to life but nonetheless helps bind children to each other and to a changing 1960s community: Magic or Not? and The Well-Wishers. These are novels of social causes more than fantastic adventure. In The Well-Wishers, which is laudable on many levels, the children mobilize to welcome a family whom some adults don’t want in the neighborhood.
A contemporary child reading the book might wonder what all the fuss is about, but when we look between the lines with the full weight of historical data we realize — though Eager doesn’t say so specifically — that this is the first black family in the neighborhood.
The message may have been revolutionary in its day, but it dates the book, which becomes perhaps most memorable for being written in the first person by multiple narrators — one of whom is Gordy, that wealthy and somewhat dim dweeb who admits to being “really scared much of the time.”
One of The Well-Wishers’s scariest elements is its multiple narrative voices, as the first lines acknowledge in typically disarming fashion: “I know people who say they can read any type of book except an ‘I’ book, and sometimes I think I agree with them.” I, for one, remember reading that sentence at age nine and steeling myself for a struggle; “I” books were unusual back then, though they are perhaps the standard now. Maybe Eager nudged us all toward the “I.” Even as I type now, the rules for first-person narration and its time of narration — past or present — are being debated in book-review columns and writers’ magazines. It’s savage territory.
In another way, the two non-magic (or possibly magic) books are a bit disappointing to those of us who love the witty play of the ones that make shameless use of time travel and imaginative cockups. As worthy as the well-wishers’ achievements are, it’s much more enjoyable to read about infectious goodwill through the magic books — as when the kids in Knight’s Castle fix the mess they’ve made of Ivanhoe with a miniature city built of perfume bottles and toy motorcycles, or when the four from The Time Garden hop invisibly from one theatergoer’s lap to another in order to ensure a positive reception for their father’s debut play.
It’s a disappointment Eager himself seems to have felt. Before his early death in 1964, he tossed off one more “real” Tale of Magic, perhaps his greatest: Seven-Day Magic, that postmodern marvel that opens with four children choosing books at a library and debating their worth on the way home. The very first line says it all: “‘The best kind of book,’ said Barnaby, ‘is a magic book.’” Barnaby, the boy who “has ideas,” elaborates: “The best kind of magic book . . . is when it’s about ordinary people like us, and then something happens and it’s magic.” He’s laying down some new rules, or perhaps returning to the original ones.
“‘The best kind of book,’ said Barnaby, ‘is a magic book.’”
The examples the children discuss thereafter sound very like Eager’s first, “pure” books — and the ones they don’t like sound much like the exurb novels. One child champions a book in which a group of kids find a nickel, “except it isn’t a nickel — it’s a half-magic talisman.” On the way home, Barnaby tests out one tome and closes it quickly in disgust: “Of all the gyps! It calls itself The Magic Door, and there’s not a speck of real magic in it anywhere! It’s just about this boy that learns to get along with these other people by being friendly and stuff.” It seems Eager is rejecting his own speculative books in favor of the firmly magical ones.
Happily for this seventh cast of characters and for Eager’s readers, the children find that one tattered red book in their pile, the book that seems to be reporting their every action as it unfolds. And the chapter ends, most satisfyingly, with the conjuring of a real-life dragon.
Once again, Eager delivers the book we really want to read — witty, literate, a book that makes us better people without trying too hard to do so … a book that, as Alice Hoffman noted in a 2015 Horn Book essay, captures the “literary enchantment” of lonely-child readers who stumble across Eager’s own books as if by magic and (sometimes) remember them forever.
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Soon after Seven-Day Magic, Eager died —far too young, at fifty-three. The seven Tales of Magic are an impressive legacy, though they seem to be his only enduring works.
Completists undertake a tough quest if they want to find his very first picture books, Red Head (1951), Mouse Manor (1952), and Playing Possum (1955). (When I was first researching this article, for example, there was a lone copy of Mouse Manor available on the internet — for three hundred dollars. I didn’t buy it. But oddly enough, after this piece saw print, Mouse Manor dropped to fifty-five dollars, and that was a price I could pay. It’s a far-too-cute story for me, but I’m glad to round out a Collection.)
The Broadway librettos have languished in durance vile (as one of his characters would put it), although he wrote for some high-profile productions such as Gentlemen, Be Seated! (1963) and Call It Virtue (1963), based on his own translation of Luigi Pirandello. True, the works for the stage feel more dated than the magic books. Performing due diligence for this essay, I paid sixty dollars for Miranda and the Dark Young Man (1957), and I must confess it was a bit of a slog — cute, peppy, but very much a product of its time.
But there’s no denying the tingle of the five (by my count) deeply magical, thrillingly literate Tales. And I’m puzzled as to why this Eager doesn’t seem to be entirely canonical. If you mention him by name, whether to a child or an adult, you might face a blank and disappointing stare. But if you start talking about that book in which the kids check out a book from the library’s bottom shelf, where magic has been dripping down into its pages, and they open it and start reading about themselves — light breaks out. Push the conversation, and it seems at least half of us (my irresponsible half-magic number) had read and loved Eager in our youth and will now read him again. We want to dive back into the lake of wishes and bons mots in which, all at once, a casual phrase will conjure up mermaids, pirates, and the Water Babies.
It is fitting for Carrie to have the final words, whatever they mean: “Idlwdl baxbix! Wah. Oom. Powitzer grompaw.” Maybe they’re a blessing.
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Original citation: Susann Cokal, “Eager Magic: Half, by the Lake, Seven-Day, Or Not?” Rain Taxi, spring 2017: 29–33.
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A List of the Tales of Magic, illustrated by N. M. Bodecker
Half Magic (1954)
Knight’s Castle (1956)
Magic by the Lake (1957)
The Time Garden (1958)
Magic or Not? (1959)
The Well-Wishers (1960)
Seven-Day Magic (1962)
Also-Wrote’s
Red Head (1951)
Mouse Manor (1952), illustrated by Beryl Bailey-Jones
Playing Possum (1955), illustrated by Paul Galdone
Plus numerous librettos for Broadway musicals such as adults used to like.
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Susann Cokal writes for both young adults and regular adults. She is a moody historical novelist, a pop-culture essayist, book critic, magazine editor, and professor of creative writing and modern literature. Her latest magnum opus is The Kingdom of Little Wounds, set in the Scandinavian Renaissance; it received starred reviews in Kirkus, School Library Journal, The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, and Publishers Weekly, and an ALAN citation from the National Council of Teachers of English. It was alsowell reviewed in Booklist, The New York Times Boook Review, and other venues. Icing on the honey-cake was a silver medal from the American Library Association’s Michael L. Printz Award series. Her website is full of facts about the books she’s written and has in progress, as well as some other writings. Her head is not normally this huge.
