Photograph by Timmy Straw.

In childhood, books have a smell. Not an actual smell: I’m not talking about the sweet mustiness of a Knopf hardcover circa 1977, or the creaking sawdust odor of a Bantam paperback. I mean that, in childhood, books have the hunch of a smell: the way, later in life, you might suspect that each thing has a noumenon, a reality independent of our apprehension of it. In childhood, a given book’s particular smell—though it might actually smell, like snow, of absolutely nothing—emits a kind of hovering mysterious message: here is something you can give yourself up to, it seems to say; here is something you can give yourself over to, and at the same time never quite reach. In this sense, in childhood, books are more serious than they’ll ever be again.

In childhood, you find a book in the library, or you’re handed one—in my case, my reading program circa 1990 was shaped by a saturnine and pinchingly generous librarian named Cynthia, who noted our shared inclination toward what I might now call optimistic gloom and gave me, at the age of eight, a children’s series on environmental disasters: Chernobyl, Bhopal, Three Mile Island, Love Canal. It was Cynthia—alarmingly old, nimble, with fraying hair, and whose face seemed to shatter when she smiled (a wonderful moment in itself, though it was scary to see her face reassemble into its usual austerity, like watching the breaking of a water glass in reverse on VHS)—it was Cynthia who gave me Robert Cormier’s 1977 YA novel I Am the Cheese.

The cover of the book was promising, I saw. It showed a boy, such as I both thought and wished I was, maybe twelve years old, with a wistful, reluctant look, big ears, and sharp elbows; he’s in the gray wash of a prison cell with cracked concrete walls, a wood pallet for a bed, a key (weirdly—why the key?) on a peg behind him. And I had a hunch of the book’s smell, certainly: it was something contiguous to the feeling of a fall morning, and to the horizon looking south, out of town; contiguous, too, to the brackish salt sense of future adulthood, of workdays and money fear, of someone, someday, mysteriously wanting to kiss you. In it I sensed some shadow of the future—as adulthood is, for kids, both inevitable and impossible; as childhood can be intuited, when you’re a kid, as the long shadow of your own adult body cast back onto your child present. I Am the Cheese contained a message for me, I felt. I read the whole thing in one go, one morning in the back of our Datsun Maxima, headed to the mountains, probably, the Oregon Cascades, with the ever-present smell of cut grass and gasoline in the car from my father’s landscaping work; I read the whole thing as though goaded to—whipped on like a dog in a pack of dogs behind the musher of the book.

It’s a paranoid book, and desolate—written, I now understand, at the end of the Vietnam War, around Watergate, the grimmer surfaces of world order newly visible in the first hints of Cold War melt-off—and it was hypnotizing. I dread descriptions of plot, blow-by-blow accounts, but suffice it to say here: I Am the Cheese involves a family swept up in the nascent witness protection program via the father, a small-town-journalist-turned-whistleblower to the violent excesses of government corruption. The book unfolds through the consciousness of the family’s only child, a quiet boy named Adam, and it takes place in the fall, in New England (itself a thrill: me, who had never left Oregon except to visit, once, Fresno). And it is threaded through with references, tightening my ignorant heart to anticipation: references to jazz; to Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel; to petty shoplifting; to the perpetual haunting of the father; to shabby motels, diner hamburgers, pay phones; to conspiracies, details, forms of love and betrayal organizing like ice crystals just behind the surface of things.

It turns out, however, that this anticipation of the heart feels quite different in reverse—rereading the book this month, I was unnerved to discover how many fantasies, desires, impulses that I had thought my own were in fact informed by it. I saw that I had, for instance, unconsciously interpreted a number of difficult and very real events in my own family through its fictions; I saw too that several people with whom I’ve fallen in love share a glimmer of psychic resemblance to the girl Adam loves. I was unnerved to discover, in short, that a YA novel could be the source of a greater portion of my instincts and reflexes than seemed at all appropriate; that it could make desirable—so desirable, in fact, as to seem outside of desire—a whole array of emotional tendencies: toward shame, melancholy, irreverence, estrangement. As in: hi-ho, the dairy-o, the cheese stands alone. 

In childhood, you find a book in the library, or you’re handed one; and how you find the book, and when, and precisely where you are when you read it—these things matter enormously. The quality of the light, the mood at home, the facts of material circumstance, so normalized as to be both total and unconscious—in childhood these are as much the experience of the text as is the text in itself. The book and the situation in which you read it form a single weather, and this weather contains you—it enfolds you, as Walter Benjamin writes in the fragment “Child reading,” “as secretly, densely, and unceasingly as snow.” It’s easy to think, then, that there is some aspect of yourself still sitting, mittened and suited up, strangely warm, in that same falling snow; still turning the pages, even now. And to think, too, that this is true no matter how ridiculous, or desolate, or paranoid, or merely competent the book—in the light or dark of your adult present—now appears. Or maybe it’s this: that your hunch of the book’s smell—its noumenon, if I may—is in some strange way bound up in an awareness of your own.

Timmy Straw is a poet, musician, and translator. Their poems “Brezhnev” and “Oracle at Dog” appear in the Review‘s Winter 2022 issue, no. 242. They are the author of The Thomas Salto, published in October by Fonograf Editions.

Scene from Mabou Mines Peter and Wendy with Karen Kandel. Photograph taken by Richard Termine.

I remember reading Peter Pan as a kid, a version based on the 1953 Disney movie—based on J. M. Barrie’s story. It turned me on. I’m six or seven, and I’m flipping through the pages, and there’s a picture of Peter with his arms crossed and his back to Wendy. He’s angry with her for some reason, and it turned me on. The words, the image, the anger? All of it, some kind of thrill-ball a kid has no words for.

All kinds of people become aroused, in one way or another—when we’re children and when we’re old. It doesn’t start or stop. Aliveness is erotic, the senses awakened. Everyone knows kids get turned on by this thing or that thing without instruction by adults. If you want to know why people lie about this fact and pretend that children—and often female humans along with them—start out sexually “innocent,” I can refer you to Nietzsche, who blames Christianity. Sexual feeling is anarchic, sudden, and sometimes inconvenient. It can’t really be contained.

What to call the feelings you don’t have words for? A kind of fainty, oh my God what is this sensation I wouldn’t have spoken about. It wasn’t because I was masturbating. I didn’t learn to masturbate, so I could come, until after I’d had sex. I’m twenty, maybe, when one day I say to myself, “If he can do that, so, probably can you.”

As a child, I wouldn’t have spoken about my “funny feelings” perhaps because shame moves in early. Also, in childhood, secrecy is all we have—our private inner lives—in a world where adults control so much of us. Maybe, as children, we keep arousal to ourselves because we don’t want anyone tampering with our pleasure. Also, in childhood, there’s no end of feelings we don’t have language to describe—grief, fear, and anxiety about things we anticipate, come to mind. Secrets are sexy.

With Peter Pan, the feeling came from reading and looking at pictures on the page. Oh my God, words could do that! Later, when I discovered porn, I was even more impressed by the excitement reading could produce. The metaphysical properties of words, bundled into grammar, producing an inner world you could see and smell in your mind and also made your body vibrate.

Is Peter Pan a particularly sexy story? I think it is. Kids as flying runaways, escaping through the window of their house. Freud might not have been right about a lot of things he theorized, but I think he was onto something when he said flying in dreams is sex. Remember all those dreams of flying you had and maybe still have? Until not that long ago, I would dream I was flying down Broadway, close to the ground. It was like swimming, except in air.

Peter Pan is a boy who refuses adult life. As a girl, you identify with his confidence and daring. I mean, who else are you going to identify with? Five minutes after arriving in Neverland, Wendy becomes a mommy figure, tidying up after the lost boys and reading them bedtime stories. In Barrie’s play Peter and Wendy—it debuted in London in 1904 and became a huge and lucrative hit—Peter was played by a woman, a tradition that continued far into the twentieth century. Famously, when I was young, Mary Martin played Peter in a musical version of the play that was broadcast on TV year after year, with Mary and the kids harnessed to ropes that lifted them into the air.

The eros of the adults who create children’s literature can’t help but wash over their stories, too, and it goes into us, as children, in a way that’s not mediated or judged. Think of Lewis Carroll’s infatuation with his neighbor’s daughter Alice Liddell, the model for Alice in Wonderland. Similarly, Barrie was deeply attached to the five sons of the Llewelyn Davies family, who were near neighbors of Barrie and his wife, and who were the models, he said, for Peter and the lost boys.

In 1997, Mabou Mines, the great avant-garde theater company, presented a version of the Barrie tale that mined its eros of longing, lostness, and escape. I wrote about the production, directed by Lee Breuer and presented at the New Victory Theater in New York, for The Nation, unaware at the time of its connection to the stirrings I’d felt as a kid. Only now do they whoosh together, the girl alone in her bed and this show that lifted off its moorings of innocence and sentimentality to become a meditation on exile so plangent all of us in the audience sobbed.

Scene from the Mabou Mines production of Peter and Wendy, with Karen Kandel. Photograph taken by Richard Termine.

The brilliant actor Karen Kandel played Wendy and Mrs. Darling. She also spoke as ventriloquist for all the other characters, who were represented by puppets and manipulated by a crew of handlers in beekeeper costumes—as Edwardian-style equivalents of Bunraku handlers. Some puppets required several handlers, like Nana the dog, who appeared in act two wearing a crocodile mask as she hunted for Captain Hook. Some puppets were mere toys and two-dimensional shadow puppets on sticks. Some sets were as simple as origami-style models that looked like the miniatures in pop-up books.

There was live music as well, based on Irish shanties, with tough-minded lyrics by Breuer, Liza Lorwin, and Johnny Cunningham. In the songs, the characters struggle for a balance that humans can’t actually achieve. The nursery has mommy but no freedom. Flight is glorious but lonely. Everyone wants a mom, including Hook, but no mom can measure up to the fantasies people form, and even Wendy’s mom, who is devoted to her children, has “a mocking mouth with one kiss Wendy could never get.”

Tinker Bell glories in being abandoned. Peter is sexy but infantile—he’s everyone’s trick and no one’s dependable object of desire. “It is only make-believe that I am their father,” he says, referring to the lost boys. No one can ever really be man enough, the show says, unless they remain a little boy.

At the end of act one, the wolves of Neverland lament their outsideness at the same time they howl for the joy of running free. The mother tries to tidy up her children’s minds and can’t. The map of a child’s mind is Neverland—a sky with stars depicted by pin lights. At the play’s end, the lost boys, having returned to humdrum existences, ache in phantom parts of themselves they no longer have but can still sense, singing for all of us, “Oh magic island, dream of us, set us free.”

Laurie Stone is the author of six books, most recently Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing that is Happening, which was long-listed for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She writes a column for Oldster Magazine, and the Everything Is Personal Substack.

Cat Playing by Oliver Herford. Public Domain, Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

What’s your favorite Dawn Powell book? I’m beginning this way because critical essays on Dawn Powell always emphasize her obscurity, her failure to achieve fame or fortune in her lifetime (1896–1965) despite her enormous output. Just once, I want to skip that part. Let’s pretend I’m writing this from a parallel universe where Dawn Powell is the literary legend she deserves to be, where everyone knows the story of the Ohio-born New Yorker whose sparkling, lacerating fiction distilled the spirit of the city. And maybe you really do have a favorite Dawn Powell book. Mine is A Time to Be Born (1942), no question—the other day I was rereading it in the park and attracting stares because I kept laughing at its farcical scenes and snappy one-liners (“They couldn’t have disliked each other more if they’d been brothers”). But you might instead be partial to The Locusts Have No King (1948), or to her luminous short-story collection, Sunday, Monday, and Always (1952). Or maybe you prefer The Diaries of Dawn Powell, 1931–1965, which weren’t even written for publication (they weren’t printed until 1995) but rank among her funniest work. If you love those diaries and have a trollish sense of humor (which, if you love Dawn, you probably do), you might give me a joke answer: Your favorite Dawn Powell book is Yow.

Yow was Dawn Powell’s first and only children’s book project—as she put it in her diary, “a story to be read aloud.” All its characters were cats; the conceit was “a complete cat-world with humans as pets.” She wrote it in 1950. No, 1952. Actually, 1954. Make that 1955. Okay, 1956. Just kidding. Yow doesn’t exist. Or, rather, it exists only in the diaries, as a project that Powell is constantly on the verge of starting. She spent the final sixteen years of her life resolving over and over—for real this time!—to write “the cat book.” Even on her deathbed, Powell refused to give up on Yow. “Drying up, weak, no appetite,” she wrote in one of her last entries ever. “Will take liquid opium plus pills I guess. God how wonderful if I could get some writing done—if, for instance, I could knock off the cat book just for fun.”

Heaven knows it’s not unusual for writers to have ideas and not follow through on them. (You should see my diaries.) But it fascinates me that Powell was so utterly defeated by a kids’ book about kitty cats, because writing usually came so easily to her. From the twenties onward, she published a new novel every other year, in addition to ten plays and around a hundred short stories in her lifetime. On the side, for extra cash, she churned out book reviews and the occasional Hollywood screenplay. She did all this while managing her institutionalized son’s medical care, her husband’s alcoholism, and her highly active social life in New York City (and, relatedly, her own borderline alcoholism). Powell had many problems, but writer’s block was never one of them. On February 14, 1962, she recorded the death of her husband: “Joe died at about 2:30.” Five days later, she wrote: “Fatigued, numb, brainfogged yet must reassemble novel. … Must have it done by Monday.” And she did.

Yet Yow wouldn’t come. Hubris, it appears, was at least partly her downfall: she assumed that a children’s book would be easy to write, a mindless hack job. Her diaries are full of self-reminders to get Yow over with, as if it were a dental cleaning. On April 2, 1950: “Remember to do cat book for Julia Ellsworth Ford juvenile prize.” July 15, 1954: “Plan to finish Eva story, also ‘Yow’ story over weekend, maybe.” December 16, 1961: “Will do the Scrubwoman story and ‘Yow.’ ” March 15, 1965: “Getting excited and clarified on novel. Would like to rush it—also do the lovely play and the ‘Summer Rose’ one and the cat one.” Even in that deathbed entry, “the cat book” isn’t a grand plan; it’s something she hopes to “knock off.”

Perhaps a lesson here is that writing a children’s book is much harder than it looks. But it really is a loss for children’s literature that Powell never got the hang of it, for she understood children as very few writers do. She may not have been particularly fond of them (March 23, 1952: “The Child Dictatorship. Visiting parents must use language and ideas suitable for children. … Censor is present. Revolt possible”), but enjoying the company of children is not necessary for understanding them. A Time to Be Born contains a throwaway observation about childhood that knocked the wind out of me the first time I read it:

For some reason women, flouted in love, invariably find an incomprehensibly satisfying revenge in soaring socially. “I will give a white-tie dinner for eighteen,” they promise themselves. “How he will burn up when he hears about it.” … The idea that the defaulting lover will be hopelessly chagrined by this social soaring (no matter how he may abhor such a formal life) is as fixed in the female mind as is the child’s dream of avenging itself on Teacher by slowly flying around the room with smiling ease.

It’s so casual, so tossed off, and yet this turn toward childhood fantasy is so vivid. Had she had traveled through time and read my fourth-grade diary, in which I detailed this exact fantasy? No, she simply remembered—genuinely, viscerally remembered—what it feels like to be little.

She remembered it well enough, in fact, that she got an entire novel out of it, the autobiographical My Home Is Far Away (1944)—my second-favorite of her books. As the novel recounts in lightly fictionalized form, Powell was seven when her mother died, and her traveling-salesman father remarried a monstrously abusive woman. A precocious child, Powell kept diaries and wrote stories even then; when she was twelve, her wicked stepmother burned them all as a punishment. In response, Powell ran away from home to live with her favorite aunt. One could easily imagine a version of this as a novel for children, but Powell rendered it as adult literary fiction. As she wrote in a 1945 diary entry, “This book must not be merely the story of an ‘interesting child.’ It must show the adult which is already in this child and her impatience with the delay.” It’s a view of childhood that echoes another one of my favorite passages from A Time to Be Born:

As a child she could not remember having any child feelings, but only a sense of outrage at the indignity of a superior person, a full-grown princess, like herself being doomed by some mean witch to what seemed endless imprisonment in the form of a child, suffering all the humiliations of smallness, dependence, tumbles, and discipline. It disgusted her to be buttoned into leggings on some one’s lap and to be afraid alone in the dark and to hurt when she fell down when her mental inferiors, namely her parents, suffered none of these things.

It’s a classic Powell cocktail of comedy and empathy, and it hints at what might have blocked her from writing Yow. Powell was a cat person, and her diary is quite sweet on the subject of her cat, Perkins. Named after Powell’s editor, Maxwell Perkins, she was the only pet Powell ever had; when the cat died in 1945, Powell declared, “I cannot have another pet—it would be unfaithful to my little dear who liked no one but me, knew no other cats, no mice, no love but mine.” Her obituary for Perkins is one of her most charming character sketches: “Very dainty from the start, she waited like a modest bride till I was in bed with the lights out, then washed herself and leapt softly onto the bed, tucked herself in my neck and nuzzled off to sleep.” But sweetness and charm were not what animated Powell as a novelist, and maybe cats weren’t complex enough to sustain the attention of an author whose interest was human beings in all their undainty immodesty. To put it another way: Powell liked cats, but she loved people. “The artist who really loves people,” she wrote in a 1948 entry, “loves them so well the way they are he sees no need to disguise their characteristics—he loves them whole, without retouching. Yet the word always used for this unqualifying affection is ‘cynicism.’ ”

I won’t speculate that the name Dawn Powell would be better known if she’d succeeded at writing for children. It would be greedy, in any case, to wish for more than the treasure trove of work she gave to us. Still, I’m a little obsessed with the slender empty space on the bookshelf where Yow should be. You’d think the cat book would have been easy to write. You never know what’s possible and what isn’t, in the span of a lifetime, until you try, and try, and try, and try, and try.

James Frankie Thomas is the author of the novel Idlewild.