Reviewed by: Wonders: Writings and Drawings for the Child in Us All Lois R. Kuznets Wonders: Writings and Drawings for the Child in Us All, ed. Jonathan Cott and Mary Gimbel. New York: Rolling Stone Press/Summit Books, 1980. 636 pp. $17.95. Wonders is a BIG BOOK, full of BIG NAMES, arranged alphabetically from Achebe to Woiwode. Faced with the task of reviewing Wonders, I am tempted to dismiss it by re-subtitling it, "Writings and Drawings for the Name Dropper in Us All," but I actually did find the book interesting; I think there are several fine pieces in it, among rather too much perfunctory writing on the part of Cott's and Gimbel's illustrious friends and acquaintances. Their venture, begun by sending out about two hundred copies of a letter "asking writers and artists to contribute a story, or a poem, or a fantasy, or a fable . . . that you might like to tell a child (of any age)," is not a bad idea. The result has certainly confirmed one of their own basic tenets, stated on page 19 of Cott's introduction: ". . . it is extremely difficult to write a great work for children and some writers forget that an inspiring book for kids is almost always a vital and illuminating book for adults as well." Alas, when one badgers famous writers for their pieces (as we children's literature people have often discovered when we badger famous writers to come talk to us), one often simply has to take what one can get. In this very mixed bag, I was especially struck by Helen Adams' poem, "In Harpy Land," accompanied by her collages. The particular child "in us all" to which this poem is likely to appeal is that child who responds to Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market," a child full of "Id" appetites and fears, perverted by "Superego" restraints. Although this poem is the prime example of such tendencies in the book, there were other pieces suggesting that such a request is likely to bring out the "Id" in many writers. Discovering this resemblance among pieces led me to try to categorize other types of responses also elicited by Cott's and Gimbel's request. In addition to calling attention to the appetites and fears still available to most of us (cf. David Felton's "Boogers" which is about nose-picking and playing with snot) , the request also elicited free associative writing, in which the authors apparently felt liberated of a number of restraints, grammatical and structural, as well as substantive. The most extreme of these associative pieces is Christopher Knowles' "Once Upon a Time." None of this latter type comes up to the classical "nonsense" for children and adults, which is based on a quite deliberate and cunning distortion of logic and semantics rather than on someone's "night thoughts" or "automatic writing." William Gaylin's word play in "A World of Just Desserts" comes closer to tapping that source. There are some interesting childhood memory pieces, depicting specific autobiographical incidents, such as Betty Comden's "The Donation." Some of these, like Ralph Ellison's story, remind us of how much adult literature is based on the transformation of childhood autobiography into art. The fable was a form often evoked by this request; some authors, like Grace Paley and Alice Adams, took the opportunity to write a "fable for our time," in both subject matter and language; others, like Achebe, simply did what they have been doing all along: drawing on traditional story forms. The prevalence of the fable also reminds us that both "instruction and delight" are living forces in children's literature. Another form of instruction is given by a couple of naturalist pieces, incidentally telling the reader about the real life habits of real species; of this type, Edward Hoagland's "Walter, the Red-Billed Brown Snake: His Flight Through Space," is most notable. Several of the authors, Ted Solotaroff and Tony Towle for instance, took the opportunity to collaborate with their own children; I suppose this is not cheating, although the collaboration itself might [End Page 43] tend to blur some interesting contrasts between the work of real children and...