Interview: The Darker Facts of Life

Many of us have grown up reading Morris Gleitzman’s novels. So far he has written twenty-seven novels for children from the age of eight years and up. His first, The Other Facts of Life, came out in 1985 and Second Childhood, one of my first proofreading jobs, came out in 1989. The wonderful Two Weeks with the Queen, published by Pan, also came out in 1989 and became a huge hit as both a book and a stage show. Other novels include Misery Guts (1993), Bumface (1999), Toad Rage (1999) and Boy Overboard (2002). His books are now published by Penguin Books and his most recent novel is Then (2008). Then is set in Poland during 1942 and its main character, Felix, is being hunted by Nazis. It is a sequel to Once (2005), which won the Children’s Book Council (CBC) Book of the Year in 2006—indeed over the years his novels have won dozens of awards, including many Children’s Choice awards.

Morris and I have become good friends over the years. We have a ritual where we walk around the Botanic Gardens in the late afternoon, every couple of months or so. Last year, when Morris was finishing Then, he was clearly feeling very down and that is when we began to talk about writing on dark subjects for kids and whether or not it is any different to writing on dark subjects for adults. This is a continuation of that conversation.

Sophie Cunningham: Are Once (2005) and Then (2008) the first two novels in a trilogy?

Morris Gleitzman: I’m thinking about a book called Now, which I’ll write over the next couple of years. Then has only been out a couple of weeks and I’ve already had a lot of emails from young readers urging me to write a third book. It’s a bit spooky that they’re all guessing what the title is going to be. Felix [the central character in Once and Then] will be a man in his seventies, though the main character in the story will be his granddaughter called Zelda … and their relationship will be charged with stuff that happened a long time ago.

SC: The first novel, Once has got more jokes and it’s slightly more light-hearted—as much as the subject matter allows. But Then is very gothic and dark.

MG: I’d hesitate to say ‘gothic’ because that to me is a kind of cultural literary style. And there is humour in Then because Felix is still optimistic despite the grim circumstances. I’m trying to re-create some of the darker moments of our species’ behaviour in a way that will have meaning for younger readers. I knew when I decided to write a book for my age group of readers—which is pretty much eight and up—set against the Holocaust, many or most of my readers wouldn’t be familiar with the circumstances of World War Two or the Holocaust.

SC: Aren’t these subjects taught?

MG: They’re taught at some schools but there’s a lot of freedom at primary schools for teachers to devise their own areas of curriculum. So there are some primary schools where they’re doing the Holocaust, perhaps as a part of related studies or maybe as part of World War Two. But there are many students who don’t touch on all this until two or three years into high school. So I couldn’t count on all of my readers understanding the historical context and the social context. I didn’t want to make these books a history lesson in terms of the full sweep of the information of the time, but I needed to have enough of the historical context so it would make sense to readers fresh to the whole thing. That is why I decided to structure the first book as a journey of discovery for Felix. I wanted to do it that way for some other reasons as well but I realised it would allow my younger readers to go on that journey of discovery with him and gradually encounter some of the realities of that time and that place.

SC: What are kids’ responses to the books?

MG: Pretty much the same range of responses as you’d expect adult readers to have: moved, dismayed, but also touched by the strength of the relationship between the two kids.

SC: When Felix and Zelda see a grave full of the bodies of children it’s like a nightmare … it’s hard for them to believe what they’re seeing, whereas adult readers would know that such things really did happen. Have kids said they think you’re making the horror up?

MG: Certainly it can be shocking for young readers to realise that we live in a world where adults will kill children systematically and methodically … but I certainly haven’t had any responses from young readers along the lines of ‘oh you must have made that bit up, that couldn’t possibly happen’. I’ve tried to make it clear in the author’s notes that these are two pieces of fiction that are very much inspired by real events. And I guess in subtler ways I tried to do that with the choice of titles. In Once I start each chapter with the word ‘once’ and I have one or two sentences in the past tense to remind readers that this does relate to a historical context, but then I move into the present tense because it was very important to me to also remind young readers that history, for the people experiencing it, was the now.

SC: Yes, you’ve got those great jokes where the kids are imagining inventions that are actually commonplace now …

MG: Exactly, yes. Because for kids today sixty-six years is an awfully long time ago. You invite young readers to consider that this was pre-television, pre-iPod, pre-computer, pre-internet, and you see in their eyes a telescoping of about 10,000 years of human history. It’s like, ‘What? No TV? So you mean we were living in caves and eating bison?’ And that’s one of the great challenges, and one of the delights, I think, for young people as they encounter the details of history.

SC: There’s a line in Then which is an extraordinary line: ‘I’m Zelda’s evidence.’ Tell me about that line.

MG: Felix’s resolve is that he should survive and get back into the normal world. That he’s Zelda’s evidence, partly to let the world know who killed her and why, but more importantly he’s living evidence of who she was and of what she embodied … her love. Stories are really important to Felix. I wanted to write about something that I and all writers, certainly of fiction, know to be true—that the imagination is not only an infinite and powerful and wondrous place but it can be a place of refuge and consolation. It’s also a great problem-solving laboratory, it’s a place where we can rehearse aspects of our lives as well as fondly relive the past. We can encounter our own histories through our imagination and do a bit of a rewrite if that’s what suits. For an ordinary working writer it’s a huge part of daily life, and I’ve never forgotten how it’s also a huge part of children’s daily lives. Many of the creative processes that are part of my profession were part of my daily life as a kid.

SC: Zelda is a little girl, and she dies. It is very shocking, not because there’s anything in the writing that is gruesome, but because of its suddenness.

MG: When I meet young characters in my imagination, sometimes I have to deal with the fact that their problems are not able to be solved, so the conventional happy ending is not possible. In this case, I look at the history books and see that between 1.5 million and 2 million Jewish kids died in the Holocaust, and I haven’t done the sums but the ones that survived represent a tiny percentage. So if I’m going to write a story about two of those kids, I have to respect the historical probability. Zelda’s death was also important to me because I wanted to write about a type of love that can’t be killed, even when individuals are.

SC: Why did you choose to make Zelda the daughter of Nazis, rather than Jewish?

MG: There were a number of reasons I made Zelda non-Jewish. Felix and Zelda’s friendship, the ten-year-old boy and the six-year-old girl, for me is the absolute heart of these two books. Sometimes I get strange looks when I say that for me these are not stories about human hatred and cruelty and genocide, they are primarily stories about love and friendship. It was a very conscious decision to write about these things in the context of the complete opposite. The best our species is capable of surrounded by the worst we’re capable of. I wanted Felix and Zelda’s friendship to cross the Jewish–non-Jewish boundary that condemned so many millions and that literally became a matter of life and death. Between these two kids it isn’t important at all. Though in another sense it is, of course, because when Zelda starts identifying as Jewish she doesn’t fully understand the implication of that, but she loves Felix and she wants to be what Felix is. So through her love she places herself at great risk.

SC: I’m interested in the process of writing these books and how it made you feel to work with this kind of material because I know that some people research and write books about the Holocaust over years but as a writer for children you’re under some pressure to produce books much more quickly. You actually have to compress a lot of really complicated and difficult material into a short period of time …

MG: For the reader, yes. Once was a ten-year process for me. I wrote it within a period of a year but I was reading about the Holocaust over many years, and more importantly I was thinking about how I was going to write the story. So a lot of the work was done before I ever put any words down. The conscious starting point for me was when I read a biography of Janusz Korczak, the children’s author and doctor …

SC: The doctor you’ve kind of based the dentist on?

MG: Barney in Once is based on him, yes. When I read how he chose to go to his death with the Jewish orphans he was caring for, despite being offered his freedom because he was a known children’s author …

SC: It’s useful to know, Morris, that there’s a loophole for you if genocide is looming.

MG: I’m just going to have to hope that if ever we’re oppressed by a murderous regime that at least some of the architects of that regime have read Bumface … For me the sacrifice Korczak made at the end of his life embodied that expression of ultimate human goodness in a context of the most appalling human behaviour, and that was the spark. I knew I wanted to write about both those things, side by side. Having love and friendship at the heart of the story probably made it easier for me to write about the Holocaust. The years of reading about it were harder … certainly the twelve months or so before I actually started writing the book. And it took its toll—I got shingles, but luckily not long-term. Writing is always an emotional experience for me and there’s sadness in most of my books as well as humour. Most of my books probably cause the odd tear to be shed by readers and certainly by me as I’m writing them, none more so than these two. Writing about Zelda’s death was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do as an author.

SC: Reading it really affected me.

MG: I can see it did. Perhaps you should put in brackets ‘interviewer sobs’.

SC: I keep thinking of that recurring phrase she loves, ‘Don’t you know anything?’

MG: That started out just as an ironic trope because the first book is the story of Felix’s journey of discovery, so he starts off not knowing anything about the Holocaust, but it quickly came to define an aspect of Zelda’s spirit that I just fell in love with.

SC: Did you know she had to die? What I mean is, do you plot your stories out in detail?

MG: Yes, I always write a plan. So I did know Zelda would die before I started writing this book. But that didn’t make it any easier. I feel a great duty of care to my young characters. And this is the first time that one of the main characters in any of my books has died …

SC: You structured it very specifically because she dies in one of the few moments when she and Felix are separated. Did you know all along you were going to do that or did you do that so there’d be a sense of shock for Felix and the reader at the same time? Did you do it so the scene didn’t have to be too distressing?

MG: Fascinating questions because you’re causing me to think about things I haven’t ever consciously thought about. I think you’re probably right. I did want Felix to encounter her death as a sudden shock because I knew that Felix was moving towards the very state of mind that he cannot understand at the beginning of the story when he says, ‘How can people kill each other?’ I knew that seeing her death would trigger in him the desire to kill other human beings, and so there was the technical requirement that it be like a short, sharp shock. But now you’ve asked, I realise I also didn’t want to have to see or describe or have readers imagine the specifics of her death. Partly because for Felix, and for me and I hope for readers too, in an emotional sense Zelda is still alive, her spirit is alive.

SC: On Felix’s murderous rage … there’s something quite shocking in the current political climate about having Jewish suicide bombers. Did that actually happen?

MG: I didn’t find any specific instance where Jewish children of that age became suicide bombers to hit back at the Nazis. But there were many communities—not just Jews but Poles and Ukrainians and others—who suffered terribly and didn’t really have the means to defend themselves against an overwhelmingly powerful enemy. And there were instances where people tried to strike back. Sometimes their actions could be described as a suicide response because there was no way they were going to survive. Kids’ power is always limited, so if you’ve got kids wanting to do something that’s outside the scope of what’s normally available to them, such as kill as many Nazi soldiers as possible … as much as anything it was a logistical thing of, right, how can a ten-year-old kid kill as many adults as possible? Felix’s rage at that point wasn’t limited by his being a child, so I didn’t want his actions to be.

SC: Are you Jewish?

MG: I’m a bit Jewish. I’m always careful to acknowledge—even as I’m ordering another matzo soup—that my mother isn’t Jewish. One of my grandfathers was a Polish Jew from Cracow. I know he left Poland as a young man early in the twentieth century. He and some other members of the family (I’m not exactly sure who) had been out of Poland for decades before World War Two, but some of the extended family remained there.

SC: Where did the direct family move to?

MG: London. My grandfather married a Jewish woman in London, had some kids, but she got sick and died, and he married a non-Jewish woman, and my father was one of the kids of that second marriage. So he wasn’t brought up in the Jewish faith, and my grandfather died when my father was about six. When I started thinking about these stories, it was a few years before I realised there was a distant family connection for me here, and maybe subconsciously that had been a part of it all along. When I went to Cracow for the first time it was just as part of a holiday really and not with any specific consciousness that I was researching this book, but as soon as I was there, on the streets of that town and in the Jewish cemetery and the fact that there was ‘Gleitzman’ on a couple of gravestones and things, it suddenly started … I started to feel some connections. It was only after I finished Once that I then did a fairly obvious sum that I probably should have done earlier, and realised that if my grandfather had not left Poland and if my father had been born there, he would have been within a year or so of Felix’s age, and that obviously has significance too. I learnt a long time ago that one can pretend to be the world’s best researcher and to have the world’s most muscular imagination, but the truth for me is that the protagonists of all my books, even the cane toads, are essentially me or aspects of me. I think fiction is always pretty autobiographical.

SC: Young adult publishing does seem to be better at handling ‘issues books’. Is that right? I know that a lot of people say there’s not enough political writing in Australia, and they always mean by that ‘adult fiction’, they don’t bother to notice if there is political young adult fiction.

MG: ‘Young adult’ these days refers to thirteen to seventeen …

SC: And you’re more writing for younger kids?

MG: Yes, I see myself as writing for eight- and nine-year-olds and up. My readers have a much less world-weary and cynical demeanour than some adult readers. I think they’re much more open—less compassion fatigue. But a story still has to be a good story. It has to be about characters we care about grappling with things that are really important to those characters, and to us. We want to care about characters enough to see something of ourselves in them. There’s got to be big feelings, it’s got to be about life-and-death stuff, even if it’s just emotional life and death. And if that’s a given, then because younger readers are so open to discovering anything and everything about the world, in a story, say, about a couple of kids from Afghanistan trying to come to Australia as refugees with their parents [as in Boy Overboard], young readers will become interested in the political and cultural context of these two young characters’ emotional journey.

SC: Your books are quicker to read than adult books, but it doesn’t feel like you’re reading a kids’ book when you’re reading it, you just feel that the main character is a kid.

MG: The age group chose me in terms of the characters I wanted to write. When characters started to come to me with stories I wanted to tell, they were always ten or eleven years old. And I agree with you that a story about characters of that age can also be for adults.

SC: One of the very beautiful things about the relationship between Felix and Zelda is that it’s genuinely platonic. You couldn’t do that in a teen novel.

MG: That’s right. I think there’s a magic two or three years we all have, and the timing varies slightly depending on our personal biologies, but there’s a magic two or three years immediately before the hormones start to flow, at around nine or ten years of age, when we start to get a sense of how the world works in terms of right and wrong and we start to have some strong feelings about that. We start to develop our own moral landscape, which is a crucially different thing to the prescriptive morality that some types of parenting and schooling attempt to impose on us. So I love writing about young people when they’re able to feel keenly a sense of how the world and their lives and relationships and the circumstances of the people they care about could possibly be improved. This is the thrust of a lot of my stories. I keep them, by and large, free of biological distractions. Very rarely does sexual romance enter my stories.

SC: When I asked the question about issues, were you saying in a kind of roundabout way that it’s unusual to be tackling AIDS, refugees, the Holocaust. Is it unusual?

MG: I think it happens more frequently in books for young people these days perhaps than it does in adult books.

SC: But does it happen at the age group you’re writing for?

MG: No, not so often.

SC: Does that make your publisher nervous?

MG: If it’s ever made them nervous it has only been a flicker, because they have never suggested that I shy away from any of the things I want to write about. Laura Harris is a brave publisher, but she also shares my philosophy. We see that young people do want to have stories about the tough aspects of life, and are capable of using them creatively—as long as those stories also confirm that our strengths are as powerful as our weaknesses.

SC: But do you believe that? It would be hard when writing about something like the Holocaust to hold onto that.

MG: Clearly the weight of human history says that our propensity to do bad far outstrips our propensity to do good. However, I take an optimistic view, and I’m helped in that by the unshakable optimism of the young characters that I spend so much of my working days with. Stories have been around for thousands of years and one of their functions is to remind us of what we could be, of what we can be, rather than what we are. But—and this is where I have sent nervous tremors through some of the teaching and librarian and parenting community with some of the things I like to write about for younger kids—I don’t think we can truly come to understand what we can be without coming to understand what we are, and feeling able to face squarely and honestly what we are. I think it’s very valuable for that to happen in those crucial years that I was talking about earlier, those immediately prepubescent years, before the biological imperative sets in, when we have that beautiful, clear focus on our new moral landscape. I think stories can help young people develop the basis for a lifelong personal moral dimension and a personal optimism, which is going to be absolutely essential if this next generation and future generations are going to be able to get the balance right. But I do understand when caring adults get nervous about this process. We adults are hardwired to want to protect kids and cotton wool them from the worst in the world.

SC: Do the sales of your books change dramatically depending on the subject?

MG: I’ve written twenty-eight books and as a rule the sales have been counterintuitive in that the books whose subject matter you would think might be most off-putting have almost always been the books that have sold the most. Take Two Weeks with the Queen, in which a boy’s younger brother is dying of cancer and he has some of the emotional experiences he needs to be able to deal with this by befriending an adult gay couple, one of whom is dying of HIV/AIDS. That caused quite a bit of consternation when it was published.

SC: What year was that?

MG: ’89.

SC: You used to write television comedy …

MG: I took over writing the Norman Gunston Show about two to three years after it started, and I did that for about five years. Then I became a TV comedy writer for hire. I wrote for Daryl Somers, Pamela Stevenson, Rolf Harris …

SC: You must be about 110 by now …

MG: I started in about ’76, so I was twenty-three. I’d like to add a bit more to your earlier question about being able to write about burning contemporary issues for young people. I think maybe adult fiction reflects the tendency of us busy multitasking adults to mute our awareness of social injustice, to avoid burdening ourselves with big problems we can’t solve, because our lives are full of more personal ones that take up most of our energy. Adult fiction tends to deal more with those personal problems. So I think it’s very useful for us to have books that, while as adults we might see them as being a little naive and a little simplistic because we see youthful optimism and a burning sense of social justice as being a bit simplistic, it’s still useful to have them around as kind of touchstones. None of us can go back to being eleven with a fervent belief that we can change the world, but it’s not a bad thing in our literary culture to have the odd simplistic flame of optimism, just to remind us that’s how maybe we once were and that’s how a part of us still is, even though it perhaps doesn’t get much of a say in our daily lives. I’ve noticed often with those of my books that fall into that category, I get a lot of emails from adults, some of them slightly sheepish. I love hearing, for example, from a bloke who tells me that he read Once on the train inside a newspaper, and when the tears started to roll down, he hoped people were thinking he was just reading about his Babcock and Brown shares.

SC: Do you think that the literary establishment is dismissive of writing for children?

MG: I’m only interviewed in magazines like this when I write books with ‘adult’ subjects like these books about the Holocaust. If all my twenty-eight books had been stories like Aristotle’s Nostril, where the main characters are two germs living in a human nostril—I think their journey is quite metaphysical in some ways, but there’s a lot of snot involved and most adults don’t see beyond the snot—you wouldn’t be talking to me here today, and I don’t say that in an unkind way but it’s the reality. There’s this absolute contradiction that kids have to deal with. It’s made clear to them from very early on by the adults in their lives that they are precious objects, and yet very quickly they realise that kid culture is not taken seriously. And we adults often make the mistake of thinking that because kids are physically small, that what goes on inside them is commensurately small. But you don’t have to remember very much of your childhood to know that when you’re ecstatic or when you’re full of rage as a seven-year-old it fills the universe just as much as it does when you’re big. I think part of the problem comes from the fact that most people love their own kids totally, would nominate their kids as the most important things in their lives, but don’t actually feel a great deal towards children in general.

SC: Certainly people have trouble modifying their behaviour so that the children, their children, any children might inherit a better Earth … or at least one that’s not in total disarray.

MG: What we all have to battle with is that it’s very hard for us to connect in any meaningful way with young people in general without also simultaneously connecting with the kid we once were. And while our own experience of having been a child can be useful in helping us empathise, it can also get in the way if we start confusing the two. I’ve been talking a lot about optimism but actually optimism can have a dark side … there’s an optimism abroad which says, look, human technology’s got us through in the past and it will get us through in the future. There are different types of optimism, and blind optimism that someone else will always solve our problems is not helpful. For us to truly understand that our kids and their kids are going to have this world after we’re dead, for us to make sacrifices for things that are going to happen after we’re dead, we have to draw on our tradition of stories. Remember that we’re the protagonists in our global story. And protagonists take action to try and solve problems. But a lot of our wiring goes against that, and that I think is why the whole global warming thing is a particularly difficult one. I’ve also realised that within a couple of years all of my core readers, the eight- and nine-year-olds, will have been born since 9/11. They won’t have known a world without that image, and I’m becoming increasing interested in the ways young people respond to the governing ideas and beliefs in their families and communities and world. I’m planning a couple of books about that.