Games with Childhood: On Zilpha Keatley Snyder
“Belief in mysteries — all manner of mysteries — is the only lasting luxury in life.” (ZKS)
This essay about one of my all-time favorite authors of books for young readers was published in Rain Taxi in fall 2015.
I say “books for young readers,” but I’ve been reading Zilpha all my life, and I’m far from young now. I was heartbroken when I heard she’d died; she’s on my list of people, living or dead, whom I really want to meet and have lunch with someday. Maybe that’s a reason that I, like her legions of fans, feel entitled to call her Zilpha. She was also an influence on and supporter of another favorite: Daniel Handler, a.k.a. Lemon Snicket. He wrote a preface to one of the last books she published, The Bronze Pen.
Images: Unless otherwise identified, images of Zilpha are from her website. To represent the books here, I’ve chosen covers from different eras of Zilpha’s life and the books’ history. Can you identify the decades by the changing styles in artwork and typeface?
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Zilpha Keatley Snyder, who died in October 2014 at age eighty-seven, came into her own as a writer of the late 1960s and early 1970s — a writer for children of that turbulent era. In forty-six books published from 1964 to 2011, she offered middle-grade readers (aged approximately eight to twelve) telescoping worlds of refuge and invention. This was a childhood without video games or helicopter parents, when we were pretty much expected to take care of ourselves and make our own amusements, a childhood of imaginative freedom balanced with accountability to younger siblings and needy elders — perhaps a risky, lonely childhood, but also one of mysteries worth preserving.
Living in the San Francisco Bay Area, as Snyder wrote in a brief autobiography published on her website, she “watched in wonder from the sidelines while lifestyles changed, traditions crumbled, and protest, drugs and violence became a part of American life.” This was nonetheless her golden age, from which she drew material for the rest of her life. Three of her early books took Newbery Honors: The Egypt Game (1967), The Headless Cupid (1971), and The Witches of Worm (1972).
A former teacher, Snyder claimed to share an “organic” optimism with children that would not have been possible if she‘d written for adults. One of her best-loved creations, Ivy Carson of The Changeling (1970), sums up that enchanted island of time with an incantation: “Know all the Questions, but not the Answers — Look for the Different, instead of the Same — Never Walk where there’s room for Running — Don’t do anything that can’t be a Game.” It is an anthem for self-expression that reverberates with the best folksongs of the era.
(Do we have time for a personal aside? When I finally got married in 2014 — on the front porch of the circa-1900 farmhouse where my husband, Greg, and I live with seven cats [one of whom is very Worm-like], my stepson read the anthem as the vows between Greg and me. After that, everybody, including all the guests, sang the very best ABBA wedding song,“Take a Chance on Me.” But enough about us …)
A former teacher, Snyder claimed to share an “organic” optimism with children that would not have been possible if she wrote for adults. For example, The Egypt Game (1967) was her first huge success and an example of the conceit that would become her signature: Two mismatched eleven-year-olds come together to recreate a version of ancient Egypt in the back lot of an eccentric antiques dealer. Before long, the game expands to include other friends, even a couple of boys usually known for bullying, and it continues despite a string of murders in the neighborhood.
Snyder would repeat the formula in the imaginative play of monsters and Tree People in The Changeling, in the solitary reading of a diary in the secret nook of the Depression-era The Velvet Room, and in later paeans to independence and imagination such as Libby on Wednesday (1990). The fantasies grew more real in the later part of her career, with novels such as The Magic Nation Thing (2005) and The Bronze Pen (2008) offering real enchantment, if the kids can figure out how to use it.
Some of today’s parents, those who don’t allow their offspring out of adult sight, might recoil in horror at the suggestion of so much youthful independence playing out in a world beyond the videogame screen. In Snyder’s novels, kids of middle-school age watch over younger siblings: Melanie of The Egypt Game has her four-year-old brother, and Ivy takes care of an even younger sister. The very small children become key figures in the story-games the older kids play. And whatever the age of the participants, play is full of evils as well as wonders. A lumpy clay god broods over the “horrible and bloody sacrifice” by would-be Egyptians; an angry little girl hears witches speaking through her cat.
Adults are not completely shut out of this world, but it is a rare one who helps foster the games outright. Some are immature, like the single mom in The Witches of Worm; some are ill, like the wheelchair-bound father in The Bronze Pen. The entire family of The Velvet Room, down to the youngest children, has to work pitting apricots. Even the loving parents of And All Between (1976) — the second volume in a fantasy series that grew out of The Changeling’s Tree People Game — tell their daughter that she has to give up her pet “lapan” (rabbit) so the city under the roots can have meat to eat.
These parents force their children to grow beyond their years in certain ways while the kids still dwell in the elastic worlds of fantasy.
Other adults are surprisingly benevolent, fairytale donor figures who will reward kindness with treasures and treats — there’s Bridget, the kindly bruja with a secret in The Velvet Room; Mrs. Smith, who helps Ivy and Martha rescue a beloved horse bound for the dog food factory, even the eccentric “Professor” who watches over the Egypt Game.
Young adults — kids on the brink of adulthood — are the ones who pose dangers that can barely be imagined. A lazy young man who works at a variety store in The Egypt Game knows more than most people do about murdered children; an orchard foreman’s teenaged son plays nasty pranks on child workers and helps to plot a crime that will destroy a sanctuary in The Velvet Room. And it is always a shock when reading The Changeling to discover that Martha’s teen-idol brother has been taking drugs to escape the pressures of being a football star. Through these characters, a gritty ugliness pokes into the books, making them cousins to the “problem novels” that populated teen-reading shelves in the 1970s — those quick-read volumes about alcoholism, life as a runaway, or enduring divorce.
Not all of Snyder’s books deliver on their promises. The Truth About Stone Hollow (1974) remains frustratingly dodgy about the eponymous truth, denying its protagonist a firsthand experience of magic witnessed by a mysterious friend.
Other books have found fans and accolades precisely because of their problems. Of these, The Witches of Worm is perhaps the most celebrated and most disturbing. Its protagonist is by many measures a horrible little girl, neglected by her too-young single mother and abandoned by the friend with whom she used to act out stories. When Jessica finds a kitten too small even to look like a cat (“a disgusting little monster”), she gives him the contemptuous name Worm and declares he might as well die. A sense of foreboding keeps her feeding and cleaning him, although over the months she grows ever more suspicious of and susceptible to the evil spirits she believes are using him to command her to do harm. She even plots a murder.
It is a miracle that Jessica’s worst acts bring her back to a more innocent, kindly childhood and let her renew relationships with a clearer perspective. It’s the outcome we would have liked to see for the kids at Columbine, for bullies and victims everywhere: the organic optimism that keeps us changelings returning to enchanted groves and empty lots.
As a neighbor happily named Mrs. Fortune tells Jessica in The Witches of Worm, “Belief in mysteries — all manner of mysteries — is the only lasting luxury in life.” Good and bad, child and adult, in Snyder’s books those mysteries are our lives.
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Citation: Susann Cokal, “Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s Games of Childhood.” Rain Taxi 20.3 (fall 2015): 48–49.
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Some Books by Zilpha Keatley Snyder (admittedly a very skewed and personal list taken from the 46 books)
And All Between. New York: Atheneum 1976.
The Bronze Pen. New York: Atheneum 2008.
The Changeling. New York: Dell Yearling 1986 (first published Atheneum 1970).
The Egypt Game. New York: Dell Yearling 1986 (first published Atheneum 1967).
The Magic Nation Thing. New York: Delacorte 2005.
The Truth About Stone Hollow. New York: Atheneum 1974.
The Velvet Room. New York: Scholastic edition 1971 (first edition: Atheneum 1965).
The Witches of Worm. New York: Atheneum 1972.
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“Know all the Questions, but not the Answers — Look for the Different, instead of the Same — Never Walk where there’s room for Running — Don’t do anything that can’t be a Game.”
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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 head isn’t usually this enormous.
