As a child in Pennsylvania, Elaine Lobl (E. L.) Konigsburg found that the best place to read was the bathroom. “It was the only room in our house that had a lock on the door,” she wrote, “and I could run water in the tub to muffle the sounds of my sobbing over Rhett Butler’s leaving Scarlett. Reading was tolerated in my house, but it wasn’t sanctioned like dusting furniture or baking cookies.” In my house in Washington, D.C., a half-century later, reading was sanctioned. But the books I liked to read—Ann M. Martin’s Baby-sitter’s Club series—my dad called “candy.” He wished I’d devour the literary equivalent of carrots. I couldn’t have been older than eight or nine when someone put in my hands “From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,” and it was both mischievous and metropolitan enough that it didn’t feel too virtuous: the 1967 chapter-book equivalent of the kale salad heaped with pecorino and sprinkled with currants now on the menu at every New York City restaurant.
And speaking of the city, Konigsburg offered a glorious picture of that wonder-island. The book’s heroine—Claudia Kincaid, age twelve—feels grievously unappreciated by her parents. Like every girl of whom it could be written “she was the oldest child and the only girl and was subject to a lot of injustice,” Claudia wants to show her parents a thing or two: she resolves once and for all to up and go. But our sixth-grader is a young sophisticate, not to mention a pragmatist: “Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away. That is, running away in the heat of anger with a knapsack on her back. She didn’t like discomfort; even picnics were untidy and inconvenient: all those insects and the sun melting the icing on the cupcakes. Therefore, she decided that her leaving home would not be just running from somewhere but would be running to somewhere. To a large place, a comfortable place, an indoor place, and preferably a beautiful place. And that’s why she decided upon the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.”
Claudia Kincaid, I learned, was even sassier than the Baby-sitters Club’s Claudia Kishi, with a keen urban know-how. She takes along her little brother, Jamie, because he’s more skilled at saving money, and, after a commute (whose price is equivalent to the cost of three weeks’ worth of hot fudge sundaes) and free admission to the museum, they’re in. It’s a wild rumpus as soon as the Met’s heavy doors close. Each night, when the museum guards lock up for the day, they hide in bathroom stalls, standing on toilets to avoid notice. And when the museum is empty and the grownups out of sight, Claudia and Jamie have the run of the place, playing and sleeping among antiques and paintings. They make a living from the wishing coins in the museum fountain. Japes abound, but the two have the good sense to join school tours, and generally revel in the exhibitions, marvelling at the treasures around them.
When an angel arrives on the scene—a marble sculpture that may or may not have been made by Michelangelo—the hijinks turn to the service of sleuthing. The children get serious seeking the provenance of the sculpture, and eventually spend all they’ve got to get to Connecticut, to talk to an old lady—she of the mixed-up files—to crack an art case. The kooky Mrs. Frankweiler sends them into her cabinets to do the digging. Luck would have it that the sculpture is a Michelangelo, but only they are allowed to know this secret while Mrs. Frankweiler is still alive. She entrusts them with it in exchange for the complete picture of their escapade, which she delights in. In the end, Mrs. Frankweiler leaves the file authenticating the Michelangelo to the kids, and sends them back to the suburbs in a Rolls-Royce. Not bad for two runaways.
When Claudia returns to her family, it may be the same home, but Claudia herself is changed; she’s gained knowledge of the art-historical kind, and also of her individuality. She has become enriched, enlarged, somehow set apart, and it wasn’t just the nights she spent sleeping on a sixteenth-century royal bed. Konigsburg granted Claudia a perfect answer to the great childhood what-if—what if I leave behind my family, which is all that I know? The answer is that Claudia will learn to tell her own story. E. L. Konigsburg was the rare grownup who understood that childhood is a time when “most of us are outsiders.” Children, she knew, feel out of place. They worry. They “want to be the same as everyone else, and they want to be different from everyone else. They want acceptance for both.”
Konigsburg died in Falls Church, Virginia, on Friday, at eighty-three years old, a novelist and illustrator who won the Newbery Medal twice. She lived to see eccentric Mrs. Frankweiler played by both Ingrid Bergman and Lauren Bacall. Konigsburg taught, in her famous novel, that “happiness is excitement that has found a settling down place, but there is always a little corner that keeps flapping around.” She may be gone, but her books still teach that lesson.
