Norton Juster

In The Dot and the Line the question was, “who is it for?” And I never know when I write books who they’re for. They’re mostly for me. I write them because I think an idea is interesting or funny or whatever, but it just seems to work. And I know an idea is good because I want to work on it. If it’s an idea that I don’t want to work on, then it’s no good. Maybe good for someone else, but it’s not for me. And even when “The Phantom Tollbooth” came out, everybody was convinced it wasn’t a children’s book at all. It was too difficult. It was too, the ideas were things that kids wouldn’t connect with. The puns and wordplay they wouldn’t understand. But then every book of mine is that, and that same question is asked. And finally, again, Michael, my editor now, when I brought “The Odious Ogre” in he answered, he asked the first question, who’s it for?

And I went through the whole thing again. And a day or two later, he called me and he said, “you know, it doesn’t really matter.” He said, “every one of your books is the same way and you can’t say, who’s it for?” And that’s what I like. As far as I’m concerned, books are for whoever wants to read them. I think The Dot and the Line started as just a little idea, vaguely influenced by a character I knew at about that time who was a friend, not a close friend, but someone I knew who was outrageous and did all the kinds of things I wished I was able to do when I was that age, in my twenties. And he was a terrible person. He did everything he shouldn’t do. He was untrustworthy. He wasn’t particularly honest. He was, had terrible manners. He dressed like an unmade bed. And yet whenever we went anyway, he was always the one that ended up with a girl.

And I never had the nerve to do any of the things that he did. And he was always in the back of my mind as the squiggle. I, of course, was the line. I had no idea who the dot was, but she could be any one of the innumerable, idealized figures that I knew I’d never get to first base with. And the thing just started to form as a little story. And I just loved the way it was going. I wrote it very quickly. It didn’t take me more than a week or two to write it. And then I said to myself, “oh my goodness. How am I going to illustrate this?” I couldn’t think, you can’t give a book like this to an illustrator. And there were little books of humor then, but there was never anything like this. So there was no precedent, nothing you could talk about. So I started to do it myself. And around the corner from where I lived was a blueprint shop in the days when they still used blueprints and photostats. And I knew the guy who ran the photostat machine. And I would do these little squiggle and I’d take them in and I’d say, “okay, enlarge, do a series of little enlargements.” And when it got to the point where the squiggle, when you enlarge a line enough, it starts to get coarse and hairy. And I said, when it reached that point, I knew we had the squiggle, right? The dot was no problem. Of course, then the line, but then all those other geometric figures. And I discovered a place, Yeshiva University in New York had a magazine called “Scripta Mathematica,” and it was a very erudite magazine, none of which I could understand. But they had this library and it was a big central room with an enormous table. And the first time I walked in, I had to sign a lot of things. They were very careful about who they let in. There were about three or four people sitting around, none of whom looked to be under 90 and bookshelves all around all four walls.

And I would take things out and find all of these diagrams — illustrated, various kinds of mathematical equations, and I would pick out the ones I wanted. And they were wonderful. They were so beautiful. So a lot of those ended up in there. Then I went to some of the daily news newspaper file to get some of the photographs that are in there. The hardest thing for me was to find a portrait of Euclid to put in the book. But it took me months to get all these things together. And again, when it was all done, I just had this terrible feeling, who’s going to think this funny? Nobody’s going to think, I think it’s funny, but that’s me. Nobody else is going to, and that one’s been around now for 46, 47 years. So.

Lesson plans and activity books or outlines that you get about not just my book, any book, worry me, because they start to channel you into responses that are not really yours. You have to then deal with someone else’s or what someone else wants you to do. I have an enduring memory when I was a kid of reading things, coming into class, bubbling over with my insights. I didn’t call them insights then, of course, and telling and learning from the teacher when she would let all the kids go through and say things and then would sit and explain what it really meant. And you would sit there saying, how could I possibly have missed all that? And I didn’t miss anything. I just made it mine, which we should allow kids to do and don’t. So I don’t like the idea of directing all of this stuff.

There’s a wonderful old Peanuts cartoon that from some years ago, and I can’t remember exactly, I think it’s Linus or Charlie Brown and Lucy talking about poetry. And the next to the last box, one of them says to the other, “but how do you know what it means?” And the last box, the other one says, “someone tells you.” And of course, that’s pretty much the way poetry is taught or has been in schools for a long, long time. And I object to that strenuously. So always when I visit schools, the question comes up rarely from the kids, but mostly from the teachers about what I’m trying to show them or tell ‘em or teach them or what the message is and everything. And it isn’t, I mean, I have things on my mind of course, when I’m writing about it, but when they read it, they may not be the things that they’re thinking about.

Because if it touches something, a chord and then it makes them think about something or has some importance for them, it may be entirely different, but it’s real and it’s right. So you have to let them talk. And most important, you have to listen. This is the thing I think so many parents are not terribly good at. Yes, they hear what a child is saying, but quite often I’m not really listening to it or not really responding in the same spirit that the child is. And I think that’s the great art form. And that’s for teaching too, I think is listening more than lecturing or teaching or getting a point across or making sure someone understands the lesson. I remember when I was in service, we did a little bit of teaching. There were various kind of courses and things, and they always told you the military method, tell them what you’re going to tell them. Tell them and tell ‘em what you told them. And so the message always got through was if someone had a hammer and a big nail pounding it into your, because at that level they weren’t interested in your ideas. They were interested in getting a message across. That’s not my idea of literature.

There’s not a lot that surprises me in the letters, what sometimes they’re perfectly ordinary letters that tell you what they like in the book or don’t understand. Every once in a while there’s a letter that touches you. I remember not so long afterThe Phantom Tollbooth came out, I got a letter from a young Hispanic girl who was writing and very troubled by why all the princesses were blonde and blue eyed. And I stopped and said, “oh my goodness.” I fallen into the trap that was made for me when I was a kid. All princesses were blonde and had blue eyes. And so I just continued it. And every once in a while you get something like that, a comment or a question that forces you to stop and say to yourself, “okay, where am I in this world right now?” And sometimes the surprises are ones of reconnecting with a child’s perception of things.

This is not a letter. I was at a school not so long ago when a little boy got up and said, “Mr. Juster, what was the technology like in your time?” And I knew what he meant suddenly because my time was back in the Middle Ages and I stopped for a minute and I said, “well, we had fire.” And I looked up and all the teachers were on the floor laughing, and none of the kids had any idea I was putting them on. And I remember, suddenly remembered all the things about my father that I used to ask him, which were very similar. And those things are wonderful because they really stop you and make you think about yourself and the world and what’s happening. A letter I got not so long ago wrote, a little girl wrote, “Mr. Juster, I’m writing you because I’ve heard you are still alive.” Which is comforting of course, but of course, again, kids don’t have that. It’s a very different sense of time. It’s why, and place even. It’s why a book like The Phantom Tollbooth works because they’re perfectly willing to accept.

I’m Norton Juster. This is my new book, which I did with Jules Feiffer who did these wonderful illustrations, and it’s called “The Odious Ogre.” And let me start and give you a sense of what it’s about. “There was once an ogre who had a terrible reputation, not that ogres usually have good reputations, but this ones was worse than anyone could remember or cared to remember. He was, it was widely believed, extraordinarily large, exceedingly ugly, unusually angry, constantly hungry, and absolutely merciless. At least that’s what everyone thought or supposed or had heard from someone else or read somewhere or had it on good authority from the Gross’s wife’s nephew. Nobody, however, could claim to know anything about him. For sure to tell the truth. There wasn’t anyone to be found who had actually made his acquaintance and was still around to talk about it. As it was.

The very thought of him was simply too frightening to think about. And for anyone who might accidentally get close enough to see him stalking through the countryside, indescribable misfortunes were indescribed. The one thing everyone did know for sure was that they couldn’t think of anything to do about him. Every time there was even a hint, he was in the neighborhood. People stuffed their ears with stale cake, blindfolded themselves, clutched their knees and rolled up in a ball under the kitchen table. Since this was not the most effective defensive posture, the ogre would wander through the town making a leisurely buffet of the local population. His every appearance increased. His fearful reputation for all that was left after each unfortunate visit was a contented smile on the ogres unseen face. So the days passed uneventfully for him and unhappily for the towns and villages that nestled apprehensively in the countryside.

But the ogre, it was quite a relaxing life. And as happens, he grew a bit lazy and self-satisfied, maybe even smug, and definitely spoiled. Everything came so easily for him. He grew to expect it and to count on it. No one can resist me. He had to admit, I’m invulnerable, impregnable, insuperable indefatigable insurmountable. He let each satisfying word roll smoothly off his tongue. The ogre did have quite an impressive vocabulary, do mainly to having inadvertently swallowed a large dictionary while consuming the head librarian in one of the nearby towns. What can they do? No one can resist me. He sighed and leaned back, taking his morning nap. That’s the way it was for him. No doubts, no concerns, no worries. I’m invincible. He was sure himself. And then to make absolutely sure, absolutely invincible. One afternoon as he ambled down the road towards one of the nearby villages in search of dinner, he saw a small cottage way off in the distance that he hadn’t noticed before. Maybe I’ll stop for a little snack. He grunted, and then he lurched down the long narrow track to see what tasty tidbit he might find.” And from there, the adventure begins.