Culture
Book Review: ‘Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children,’ by Mac Barnett
MAKE BELIEVE: On Telling Stories to Children, by Mac Barnett
Mac Barnett is an irrepressible creator of zany books for younger readers. Breezy, frisky romps, dozens of them. (My favorite is Mac B., Kid Spy, Book 1: “Mac Undercover,” which features the former queen of England and her corgis.) He’s an entertainer at heart. In his fiction he knows how to keep young audiences engaged, with droll characters and deft reversals of fortune.
So what are we to make of “Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children,” the first book for adults by Barnett, our current national ambassador for young people’s literature? This tidy volume of scarcely a hundred pages serves as a succinct defense of his career choice, which he takes as a ministry. (He notes some of the more common disses that well-meaning citizens fling at children’s writers. I particularly cherish something said to me at a fund-raiser when I was being ushered to the microphone: “I would love to write a children’s book, if only I could clear the weekend!”)
I trust it’s fair to start with the single tonal misstep in the volume, which occurs early, on Page 6. With fanfare and too much white space: “A children’s book is a book written for children.” Carry on.
The rest of the book, presented in three chapters, is compulsively readable and doesn’t require a higher degree to appreciate. It has the chatty tone of a slightly obsessive, over-caffeinated friend sitting in your passenger seat with 90 minutes until the next exit.
You can’t help admiring Barnett’s sympathy with the urgent struggle of the young to unlock the riddle of the world. Here he is describing his son’s first tantrum: It involved an intention to go out the front door and in again, over and over. The patient dad eventually lets his toddler straddle the doorsill, wailing, unable to decide in or out. “My son was experiencing the agony of wanting two things that were impossible to have at the same time,” he realizes. “My son wasn’t being a toddler; he was being a person.”
Barnett’s understanding of his child’s dilemma is crucial to his argument: To care about sharing books with children, we have to care about who they are as people. He makes one of his strongest points by calling out the fact that our culture generally holds children in low esteem. To which I might add that while we give lip service to our cherished young, their teachers are underpaid and overworked, their school and library budgets are slashed, and their food security is threatened. Children with big eyes are served up as an emblem of our caring society before the votes against supplying their basic needs carry the day. Don’t get me started.
“Make Believe” isn’t a history. You’ll find little reference to the many narrative forms that feed into the family tree of what we now call children’s books. No Hesiod, no Ovid, no Homer. No Aesop or La Fontaine. No chansons de geste or Chrétien de Troyes. None of John Newbery’s commodification of children’s stories into printed works, nor any mention of the penny dreadful or the funny pages. The great golden age of children’s literature (the mid-19th century to the end of the Edwardian era) — largely though not entirely British writing — does get its due. But Barnett’s laser focus is the reality of life, and books, for the younger child.
He is incisive in his selection of a few examples. I, for one, have never viewed Richard Scarry’s Busytown books as worth analyzing. Perhaps that’s because I didn’t encounter them in my own long-ago childhood? But I’m corrected, and I’m thankful for it. Meanwhile, Maurice Sendak and Margaret Wise Brown, two midcentury creators fostered by the great Harper & Row children’s book editor Ursula Nordstrom, are given proper pride of place. Barnett tells us what these three godheads brought to our modern understanding of the complexity, if inarticulacy, of the emotional lives of children.
In the book’s central section, Barnett trains his attention on Brown’s classic picture book “Goodnight Moon.” Like a sapper defusing a bomb, he examines those familiar pages in a revelatory and even clinical way. He elucidates the famous double-page spread accompanying the text “Goodnight nobody/Goodnight mush.” Anyone who has ever held a child on a lap at bedtime while reading Brown’s book aloud has encountered the Dadaist conundrum of a blank page to connote “Goodnight nobody” — certainly one of the most potentially frightening concepts for a young rabbit, um, kid, who in falling asleep will be more alone than it is possible to be while awake. That “Goodnight mush” is on the opposite page is a eucatastrophe: “We exist! We are alive! We eat food! What a relief!” It’s “Always look on the bright side of death” for the youngest minds. Barnett’s entire treatise is worth this epiphany — and there are a lot more I could trot out for you.
“Fiction is a kind of game, and reading is a way of playing.” This has the sound of a koan at a poetry workshop, and yet the grateful reader of “Make Believe” can make believe they understand it. And making believe is the first step toward making sense. Kudos to Barnett.
MAKE BELIEVE: On Telling Stories to Children | By Mac Barnett | Little, Brown | 112 pp. | $20
We’ve come to the end of our Poetry Challenge. In four days, we’ve committed the four stanzas of “The More Loving One” to memory, and taken some time to ponder its intricacies and appreciate its meaning. (Just joining us? Start here anytime.)
Now what?
In one of his notebooks Auden observes that “a poem or a novel is a gratuitous not a useful object, like a lathe or an automobile.” He wasn’t being modest or dismissive. The impracticality of poetry is a feature, not a bug. It doesn’t do anything, which may be why, as a species, we can’t seem to do without it.
This is how Auden assessed poetry’s value in his elegy “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”:
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
Poetry is part of everyday human reality, and also one of our tools for taking stock of that reality and commemorating our passage through it, alone and together.
A poem is a gift — a gratuity, you might say, offered for no special reason. Auden’s gifts were abundant, and his generosity was legendary. His biographer Edward Mendelson has documented a pattern of discreet, sometimes secret kindness directed at friends, colleagues and strangers: money lent; hospital bills paid; hospitality offered freely along with food, companionship and advice.
Auden’s later work often operates in a similar spirit. Some of his best verse of the postwar era takes the form of letters, wedding toasts, public remarks and dinner-party witticisms, as if poetry were a grand game of words with friends.
“The More Loving One,” first published in Britain at Christmastime in 1957, is a modest, thoughtful present for the reading public. (A few years later, as it happens, it ran in the Book Review.) At first glance, its intention seems to be, above all, to provide a bit of amusement. Anyone can pick it up, pass it along, tuck it away, find a time and place for it — as we have done this week.
Should we hear it once more, before we go?
As we have seen, there is much more to these lines than clever words and pleasing sentiments. Auden applies the balm of irony and rhyme to matters that might otherwise be too grave, too daunting, too scary to deal with. Are we alone in the universe? How should we love? Why should we care?
Instead of a definitive response, Auden offers a thought experiment. Suppose the worst: stars that don’t give a damn; asymmetrical affections; an empty sky. What are we to do?
The answer — care anyway! — reflects the eccentric, stubborn Christianity of Auden’s later years. Faced with the possibility of nothing, the speaker nonetheless chooses to surrender, to love, to believe. This is not a practical decision. It’s an aesthetic impulse, an entirely gratuitous choice.
It’s also a refusal of solitude. We picture the speaker alone, looking up at the chilly night sky, talking himself through his mixed feelings about it. But of course he isn’t alone. We’ve been here the whole time, accepting the gift and sharing it, standing beside our poet as he beholds the stars.
Fill in the entire poem! Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite it.
Question 1/8
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
The final challenge: You’ve been training for this all week. Now show off what you know.
We’re going to do the whole poem, starting from the top. You’ll have emoji hints for each round.
👀👆✨🤓🧠🙂↕️4️⃣🫂🏃🏻😈
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
Here we are on Day 4 of the Poetry Challenge, looking up, again, at the sky. (If you’ve just arrived, click here to catch up.)
We’ve considered “The More Loving One” as a witty, teasing love poem, and also peeked into the life of its author, W.H. Auden, to see what it might have meant to him. But maybe it’s time to take this poem at face value, as a meditation on our place in the universe.
You can read the whole poem here, but to recap: We start by admiring the stars even though they don’t feel the same way (or any way, really) about us. Then we wonder … do we care about them all that much? At last, we imagine them extinguished, leaving an emptiness that we tell ourselves would be just fine. Eventually.
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
Tracy K. Smith, poet
The poem resolves with a sigh that seems to linger, as if the poem didn’t quite want to end. Unlike the concluding lines of the previous stanzas, all of which clocked in at precisely eight syllables, the last line of the last one extends to nine. That may sound trivial, but we know that Auden counted his syllables carefully.
And it isn’t hard to identify the extra particle, the one tweezed in among the others. Auden could just as well have written, “Though this might take a little time.”
That would have maintained the pattern without altering the meaning. The “me” is implied. Adding it might seem redundant. Which is exactly why Auden does it.
Though this might take me a little time.
W.H. Auden, poet
That scant word makes the poem last a little longer. It also emphasizes the human presence of the speaker, a person whose perceptions and feelings are what this is finally all about. He is asking for patience, for grace, as he adjusts his eyes and heart to a stark new situation.
But how much time is “a little”? The split second it takes to utter that extra, unstressed “me”? However much is needed to heal all proverbial wounds? Or are we thinking in astronomical measures, as those stars invite us to suppose? In that case, it might take our poor stargazer more time than he has. Millions of years. Hundreds of millions!
What does it mean to exist as a solitary being in such a vast, incomprehensible cosmos? This may have been an especially timely question when this poem was written; early versions date from 1957, the year the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, marking the beginning of the space age. But poets have been looking at the sky for a very long time.
Some find comforting news of heaven, like William Wordsworth:
The stars are mansions built by Nature’s hand,
And, haply, there the spirits of the blest
Dwell, clothed in radiance, their immortal vest’
Others, like Ada Limón, see the projection of our own curiosity:
Arching under the night sky inky
with black expansiveness, we point
to the planets we know, we
pin quick wishes on stars.
Occasionally a poet (Stephen Crane in this case) will hear an answer that makes Auden’s silent stars seem kind:
A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
Auden himself came back to the subject a dozen years after “The More Loving One,” in a poem called “Moon Landing,” which ambivalently hailed the Apollo II mission as a “phallic triumph,” “a grand gesture” of male self-regard. And while he acknowledges the spirit of adventure behind the mission, he doesn’t admire the moon enough to want to see it up close:
Worth going to see? I can well believe it.
Worth seeing? Mneh! I once rode through a desert
and was not charmed
He’d rather contemplate the moon above him — one who “still queens the Heavens” — than tread like Neil Armstrong on its dusty, lifeless surface. The feats of NASA and its astronauts belong to a world of science, politics and media spectacle; Auden prefers the realm of mythology and aesthetics.
He’s in good poetic company. In “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” Walt Whitman, at a lecture, finds himself “tired and sick” of charts and diagrams and scientific discourse.
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
He did not give a damn if they gave a damn.
For Auden, as for Whitman, demystifying the stars risks stripping them of their poetry. A sense of wonder flickers through “The More Loving One,” along with the wit and the romantic weariness. The poem concludes with an almost defiant commitment to awe, the search for sublimity in the heavens.
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
Matthew McConaughey, actor and poet
Stars or no stars, what matters is the attitude of the person below: receptive, yearning, more in love than he may be willing to admit, even if — or indeed because — he doesn’t quite know what it is he’s worshiping.
As we approach the end of the poem, our own feelings might be in a bit of tangle: admiration, amusement and something else that’s harder to pin down in words or themes. A feeling that, having spent time with a poem largely about solitude, we are less alone.
Let’s nail down those tricky last lines, and come back tomorrow to talk about the whole thing.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the final stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
The result has been a terrible irony for a country that was founded as a refuge from intolerance: “How is it that the appeal to humanitarianism, tolerance, the rule of law and protection of minorities that characterized the beginning of Jewish self-emancipation gradually acquired all the traits of the relentless, remorseless and increasingly racist ethnonationalisms from which Zionism sought to liberate European Jewry?”
To answer this painful question, Bartov uses all the tools at his disposal, weaving together history, personal anecdotes, even some literary criticism, including a close reading of a poem — by Hayim Nahman Bialik and known to “every Israeli schoolchild” — about the perils of vengeance that has been misinterpreted and warped for political ends. Bartov writes unsparingly about Hamas’s murderous attacks, in which about 1,200 Israelis were killed and about 250 others taken hostage, which he calls an unequivocal “war crime and a crime against humanity.” It was a “slaughter of innocents” that “evoked collective memories of massacres and the Holocaust.”
Indeed, in a May 2024 poll of Israelis that he cites, more than half of the respondents said Oct. 7 could be compared to the Holocaust, and the Israeli media repeatedly depicted the massacre as a pogrom. Bartov understands why — for traumatized people, new traumas will revive old ones — but he maintains that the label is a category mistake. Israel is a state; it has an army, laws and government. A pogrom “is a mob attack, condoned or supported by the state authorities, against a minority lacking any attributes of a state.” (“To be sure,” he adds, “pogroms have occurred within the territories controlled by Israel, but when they take place, they were and are being carried out, with increasing frequency and ferocity, by settlers in the West Bank.”)
Israel doesn’t have a constitution. After its founding, its government was supposed to codify the protection of religious freedom and minority rights, but efforts to adopt a constitution were waylaid and arguably thwarted by political figures like David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister. Bartov believes that a constitution could have made Zionism “superfluous” after it succeeded in establishing a state that could be a refuge for Jews. Citizens could have turned toward the task of building a “just society” that aimed at “peace, truth and reconciliation with the Palestinians.”
This sounds nice, if fanciful; constitutions don’t magically prevent authoritarianism. Not to mention that attacks by surrounding Arab states did nothing to alleviate Israelis’ sense that they were constantly embattled.
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