The troll of children’s literature

Is it not strange that some of the greatest writers of stories for children never had children of their own? Think of the British Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), author of Alice in Wonderland and The Hunting of the Snark, or of the Danish Hans Christian Andersen, author of classics such as The Little Mermaid, The Emperor's New Clothes, The Hardy Tin Soldier, The Ugly Duckling and The Snow Queen. Both remained unmarried and childless. Jacob Grimm, one of the two Grimm Brothers who collected and rewrote German folk stories into immortal fairy tales such as Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel, also never married. And when Dr Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel), the  American author of illustrated classics like Horton Hatches the Egg and How the Grinch Stole Christmas, was asked why he and his wife did not have children, he is reported to have replied, "You have 'em; I'll entertain 'em."

I cannot claim to belong to that club, having written The Glum Peacock not for other people's entertainment but for that of my own children. That it got published as a book is, of course, another matter. As someone who started off publishing poetry and 'serious fiction' (novels like The Bus Stopped and Filming: A Love Story), I was not expected to write The Glum Peacock, which is a simple fable in rhyming, loosely metered verse for young children. Of course, that is not the way I see it. I never set out to write 'serious' or 'high' literature. For me, there are only two kinds of literature – good and bad – though both come in various shades, and one need not like all shades of good literature. For me, good literature is further divided into what my friend, the French writer Sébastien Doubinsky, conveniently dubs 'soft' and 'hard' literature. Hard literature, he claims, engages with the world, literature and language in creative and, at times, radical ways. Soft literature, by inference, is competent stuff that never pushes the boundaries of the established – in the world or in language.