Author's Responsbility: Telling the Truth About War, The

ALAN Review, Summer 2006 by Aronson, Marc, Fleischman, Paul, Murphy, Jim, Mazer, Harry, Myers, Walter Dean

Each of the authors of this five-part article was kind enough to allow us to use his presentation from the Books on War panel at the ALAN Workshop held in Pittsburgh in November of 2005. We are indebted to them, not only for their generosity in giving permission, but also for the important message within each talk. We would also like to thank Patty Campbell, Kathleen Broskin, Vicki Tisch, John Mason, Jerry Weiss, Becky Hemperly, and Anne Irza-Leggat for their help.

Marc Aronson

An expanded version of this article is available on Marc's website at http://www.marcaronson.com/ young_adult_books.html

All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys,

The champions and enthusiasts of the state

Herman Melville wrote those lines in July of 1861 just as the Civil War began and his words get to the heart of what we are here to discuss today. We are fighting a war now. All of us here in this room write, edit, review, teach, evaluate books for teenagers who will soon have the chance to be the "champions and enthusiasts" on the battlefield. Can those books play any role in helping those young men? What role might that be? American soldiers are in harm's way. Can any book help protect them? American soldiers, too, have been in the position to notice, participate in, or expose torture and abuse. Could any book be of use to a person who in that terrible position of moral choice and social pressure?

Melville's words, though, are just as important when read in reverse: in his time it was assumed that young men would be fascinated with war, would be preoccupied with imagining themselves as heroes in combat. Yet outside of the authors on this panel-all males as you can see-it is very rare to find realistic YA books in which armed combat is central to the story. There are wars in fantasy novels and in science fiction; video and computer games are filled with weaponry and clashes of arms. But in the novels and nonfiction produced for teenagers you are far, far, far more likely to find emotional combat, the storm and stress of dating, parents, girl friendships, than tales of bands of brothers on battlefields.

Some part of this is the result of the YA lag-most people get around to writing about coming of age a decade or so after the fact. Perhaps ten years from now if ALAN holds this same panel all of the chairs will be filled by guys in their 20s, who made their mark writing about coming of age in Iraq. But mostly I think that we, as an industry, responded to the first set of questions-how can YA books help young people face war-by deciding that war was bad, and best ignored. We treated war the way Victorians did sex-something that we knew people liked, but that we did not want to promote, so had best keep secret. The phrase used over and over was, "we don't want to glorify war."

We, as an industry, determined to be the antidote to John Wayne, to the Green Berets, to the boosterism of war. Fine, except that, as I see with my own five year old, boys have not changed. They crave fighting, crave combat, crave heroism in battle. And, as I discovered in writing nonfiction books about American and British history-war is fascinating to research, exciting to write about, and is, often enough, the essential turning point of both personal and national histories. We simply cannot be true to the past, to the present, or to our readers, and silence war.

I have never, ever, seen a reviewer say we should not write books about two girlfriends having a fight because we don't want to glorify animosity between girls. Just the opposite, the reviewers praise authors of such books for their insightful realism. Similarly, there is a whole industry of books about the most intimate moments in a girl's physical maturation: getting her first period, anxiously tracking the development of her breasts, experiencing a range of sexual sensations. And yet I am certain that a book that was as detailed in describing the gore of combat would be criticized for being too graphic.

There is another interesting thread in this panel-the play of fiction and nonfiction. Harry Mazer served in World War II, and has written a trilogy whose titles-A Boy at War; A Boy No More; and Heroes Don't Run: A Novel of the Pacific War, exactly match our theme today. Personal brushes with war appear in Walter Dean Myers work in two ways-through the clashes on the streets of Harlem, and in the story of his brother in Vietnam. As far as I know, neither of the authors of our nonfiction books related to war-Jim Murphy and Paul Fleischman-has made use of direct personal experience of combat. And yet Jim has told me that his Boy's War-again directly our theme-is one of his most requested school publications. And Paul's Dateline: Troy, which is just now being revised and updated-most directly deals with the war boys are fighting today.

I hope that this panel with these four accomplished writers will mark a new moment for our industry. We are at war. As the world's only superpower, I suspect that war of one sort or another is in our national future. Here together we can end the policy of Victorian delicacy and silence and revisit the questions Melville suggested so long ago: where do boys, war, and writing meet?