Lloyd Alexander

Among the infant Baroquelina's favourite all-time books were the Chronicles of Prydain - a series of children's fantasy novels based on the ancient Welsh repository of myth, the Mabinogion, by Lloyd Alexander. The Book of Three, The Black Cauldron - The High King, with its vague Narnian overtones - I loved them all.

When I was eighteen, en route to North Carolina with a group of friends, I happened to be passing through Philadelphia. I knew Alexander lived in a suburb of Philadelphia called Drexel Hill (its name is still engraved on my memory, since I had to figure out how to get there). I think he must have been in the phone book - I think I must have got my courage together and called him - because I made the pilgrimage and sat, or rather perched, in Lloyd Alexander's living room (without my friends). He talked to me about being a writer, and my writing, and his lifelong friendship with another childhood hero of mine (I might have known), Maurice Sendak. (There was a framed drawing of Mozart, by Sendak, on the wall, which I looked at longingly throughout our conversation.) He must have told me about his years in the Army, stationed in Wales and then Europe, and how he read the ancient myths... and we both had a passion for the Arthur legends. It was a wonderful afternoon and probably more important to me than I even knew.

Lloyd Alexander died last Thursday, May 17th, in the same house I sat in those years ago. That fact feels surprising to me now. His wife of 61 years - whom I also met that day - had died two weeks earlier.

A childrens' books website called kidsreads.com quotes Alexander, talking characteristically modestly, about how he came to write:

"My parents were horrified when I told them I wanted to be an author " Alexander recalls. "I was fifteen in my last year of high school. My family pleaded with me to forget literature and do something sensible such as find some sort of useful work. "I had no idea how to find work useful or otherwise. In fact I had no idea how to become an author. If reading offered any preparation for writing there were grounds for hope. I had been reading as long as I could remember. Shakespeare Dickens Mark Twain and so many others were my dearest friends and greatest teachers. I loved all the world s mythologies; King Arthur was one of my heroes; I played with a trash can lid for a knightly shield and my uncle's cane for the sword Excalibur. But I was afraid that not even Merlin the enchanter could transform me into a writer."

This lack of self-importance also determined his career as a children's author. I don't have a source for it, but I read years ago - before I visited him, I think - that Alexander said, "Children's books are written to be read. Adult novels are written to be talked about at cocktail parties." (Strangely, even as a kid - and one with passionate loyalty to the books and authors I loved, and one who knew full well the depth of the importance of children's fiction - while I could see what he meant by this, I couldn't quite see what was so bad about the other. I thought, well, if they're talking about them, they must think they're important - right? It's as if, through my haze of sun-bonnets and magic pigs, I saw my own grown-up self.)

Anyway, Alexander decided to write for the people who cold most benefit from the particular thing he had to give, and a wonderful gift it was. Over a long career he wrote over forty books, mostly for children, and those children have grown up into adults who still love his books. He was very generous as a writer, and certainly very kind to me.

Thanks to Edward Champion for the sad news.