1968: FROM THE MIXED-UP FILES OF MRS. BASIL E. FRANKWEILER by E.L. Konigsburg
Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away.
There are three different possible origin stories for this novel. One is about E.L. Konisgburg going on a trip with her three children to Yellowstone National Park, years before she would write one of the most celebrated children's novels of the twentieth century. The family was eating at a picnic table out in the open air, and one of the Konigsburg kids was complaining about not having the comforts of home nearby. In response, Konigsburg joked that if her kids ever ran away from home, "they would certainly never consider any place less elegant than the Metropolitan Museum of Art".
The second origin story starts with Konigsburg reading a news story in 1965 about a recent acquisition by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met had purchased an obscure Renaissance-era statue for $225, which struck Konigsburg as unusual. Why would such a prominent museum buy a statue that nobody had ever heard of, for a price that suggested it wasn’t worth very much at all? In Konigsburg’s mind, the museum must have known something that other people didn’t about how much that statue was actually worth. They must have known they were getting some kind of bargain.
The final origin story starts with Konigsburg actually at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she took regular art classes (she would go on to illustrate Files, using her children as the models for Claudia and Jamie). Konigsburg’s children would explore the Met on their own while she was in class, and when her class finished, she would join them for some additional exploration. One day, while they were in a furniture exhibit, they found a piece of popcorn on the floor next to an antique bed that belonged to European royalty, well beyond any rope barriers and “do not touch” signs. Konigsburg had to wonder how the hell that piece of popcorn had gotten there. Who was just in the middle of an exhibit, literally lying in a centuries-old bed, eating popcorn?
"Not from somewhere, but to somewhere" is the most famous line from one of the most famous Newbery medalists of all time, Konigsburg's 1968 medalist From The Mixed-Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, and appears on the first page of the first chapter as twelve-year-old Connecticut nerd Claudia Kincaid decides to run away from her home, her parents’ annoying rules, and her responsibilities as her oldest sibling. But Claudia is extremely pretentious in the way that precocious young people usually are, and is determined to not just become another boring runaway, but to use this adventure to become a far more interesting person. So, she decides that she’s not just going to live on the street, she’s going to hole up in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and push herself to learn something new about the world of high culture every day; she also brings along her younger brother, Jamie, mainly because he has a lot of money he made by cheating at cards with the other kids on the playground. These are, obviously, two very smart kids who are kind of troublemakers in their own ways, and Claudia’s plan works astoundingly well for about a week. The kids know when to hide in the bathrooms during the security guards’ shift changes, they sleep in the beds that belonged to French royalty, they sneak into the cafeteria with school groups to get a free meal, and perhaps most famously, they take baths in the fountain overnight, where they find a new source of income in all of the dropped change. Things get a little more complicated after a week when Claudia finds herself in the middle of a mystery about a new sculpture at the museum which may be an early Michelangelo, or a worthless forgery, and the only person who knows is an eccentric octogenarian art collector named Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler who, as it turns out, already knows who Claudia is.
Konsigburg won a second Newbery almost thirty years later for The View From Saturday - which, in my opinion, isn’t as good as this one - but Files endures on its own as one of the most beloved children’s novels of all time. When School Library Journal did their big 2012 poll to determine the greatest children’s novel of all time, Files came in seventh overall, and fourth among Newbery medalists; to give you an idea of the caliber of classic that this book was up against in the poll, Winnie The Pooh came in 26th, and Little Women came in 47th. In my opinion, the reason Files endures is because of the very specific characteristic of young children that this book is able to capture so perfectly: every child is planning something.
Every child, within herself, contains a complex multi-step devious plan for rebellion. Every kid is smarter than they look. I mean, sometimes they are completely divorced from logical cause-and-effect thinking, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t figuring things out in a way that would have occurred to nobody else. Claudia’s plan is, in many ways, brilliant - obviously, she’s successful at hiding in the museum, but she repeatedly adapts and adjusts her plan throughout as she learns new things about where to do her research, where to eat, how to find money, how to stay hidden from the guards. Jamie is brilliant in his own way, too; he contributes to Claudia’s planning and improves it in many ways. The best part of Files is the hilarious bickering back-and-forth between the two siblings each trying to sound more sophisticated and wiser than they actually are (“What woods?” “The woods we’ll be hiding out in.” “Hiding out in? What kind of language is that?” “English language. That’s what kind.”), but early in the novel, Jamie and Claudia both grow into a greater appreciation for the unique skills each of them bring to their scheme, which the narrator describes as such:
“What happened was: they became a team, a family of two. There had been times before they ran away when they had acted like a team, but those were very different from feeling like a team. Becoming a team didn’t mean the end of their arguments. But it did mean that the arguments became a part of the adventure, became discussions not threats. To an outsider the arguments would appear to be the same because feeling like part of a team is something that happens invisibly. You might call it caring. You could even call it love.”
Every child is sitting on a complex multi-step devious plan for rebellion, every child is thinking through where the exits are, where to hide, what you can get away with, what in the room would make the most noise if you threw it to the ground. And every child is looking for a co-conspirator to their plan, if for no other reason than it’s more fun to rebel with someone else.
In my early twenties, I was working in a corporate sales job and spending my free time trying, unsuccessfully, to write and perform comedy. Some of the themes from some of the things I was trying to write got adapted into a novel I self-published later in life titled Kings Of Candyland, which wasn’t very good. One of those themes, which was very good even though I couldn’t articulate it in a story very well, was this: every person needs some act of rebellion to hold onto within themselves. Every person needs, in some way, to feel like they’ve got a plan that’s better than this, that any minute now they’re going to start really fighting the powers that be, because the powers that be are so cruel and absurd and unfeeling that you have to do something to at least pretend you are resisting them, because the cognitive dissonance of knowing that you were subject to forces way beyond your control, and knowing that you weren’t doing anything to change that situation, was enough to drive you insane.
There are three possible origin stories here, all of which got woven into my crappy novel in one way or another. The first was that, at this point in my life, I had just been diagnosed with a chronic illness that I was going to have to manage for the rest of my life. It wasn’t anything that was going to suddenly kill me, and it was something I could manage if I stayed on top of my medication, but it was an illness with no known cause and no known cure, and something that could, at any point and for no real reason, unexpectedly flare up again and suddenly make my life much more difficult. It was, in a very basic sense, absurd. Significant things happened to me for no reason. It did not make sense. And this was how I had to live my life now.
The second origin story is that, at the same time, I was spending a lot of time hanging out with other comedians and learning to perform live comedy (which I wrote about briefly in an earlier essay). It was an extension of my standup hobby that I had started doing in college, and practicing comedy is a way to harness absurdity and make it work for you. Significant things happened to me for no reason, it did not make sense, but I could find a way to make other people laugh at things that did not make sense, and I could learn that the things that didn’t make sense to me also didn’t make sense to a lot of other people, and I could make all of those people, including me, feel a little bit less alone. It made us feel like we could at least acknowledge how stupid and absurd and scary everything was around us.
But the third and most important origin story was that, well, I was working in a corporate sales job. I was working for a for-profit company that laid people off and relocated offices and moved sales territories to force people into four-hour commutes and broke EPA rules and had horrifying labor practices in their factories and generally did a lot of stupid things that didn’t make any sense if you were a human being and not, say, a spreadsheet with dollar signs on it. The company was evil in the way that all capitalist companies are evil - that is, it wasn’t evil as much as it was amoral and determined to find profit while remaining willfully blind to the damage that such a search would do. And I say “it” instead of “them” because while the people who populated this company were all human beings, most of whom had consciences, this incorporated entity desperate to consume the world somehow existed apart from all of those people, had a mind and appetite of its own that were created to destroy everything. But I had to have a paycheck and health insurance to stay alive in the world, so I just kind of had to go with it, I had to show up every day and do my job, even as it became more clear every day that this was not a good place to work, as it became clear that I was selling out, as it became clear that my conscience had a price and the price was not especially steep, and that this company was also going to do bad things to me and the other employees over time but that I probably wasn’t in a position to do anything in response. I do not think I am the first person to have felt this way.
So I needed some small act of rebellion. I needed some sort of outlet to, in a metaphorical sense, run away and live in a museum where I could solve mysteries. I wasn’t a kid anymore, but I still needed some sort of complex multi-step devious plan for rebellion, if only to comfort myself. I needed an outlet for wringing laughs out of my own anxieties, and I needed to stay up late and make other people laugh, and I needed to write about the things that made me miserable and see if I could turn them into something funny, and I needed to just do something to convince myself that I was better than this, that I somehow knew stuff that other people didn’t, that my life was going to be more interesting than this, that of course yes middle-class life was drudgery but that I was supposed to be different, that my life was going to make more sense than this, it was supposed to make more sense than this, and surely I cannot be alone in wanting this.
I’m not alone. Claudia wants it as well, as she struggles to figure out the mystery of the statue’s sculptor:
“I feel as if I jumped into a lake to rescue a boy, and what I thought was a boy turned out to be a wet, fat log…we need to make more of a discovery…if we make a real discovery, I’ll know how to go back to Greenwich…I want to know how to go back to Greenwich different.”
Claudia wants her life to be different. She wants to be a different, more interesting person than she was before she ran away. She wants her life to make sense, to have a story, to have a narrative, to have something that makes her different, to be more than just getting blown around by the winds of everything else around you. I do too, and you do too. Every child is sitting on a complex multi-step devious plan for rebellion against the powers that be, but I think that most children don’t actually outgrow that. As you get older, the desire to feel like you’re pushing back against the suffocating world gets stronger. Claudia Kincaid was born with her need to rebel against what she saw as an unjust and absurd and boring life, but she’s not the oldest person in the book trying to find some outlet for her need to rebel. That person is Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, who sold a Michaelangelo sculpture to the Met for $225 and deliberately left its origins vague so she could know something that the rest of the world couldn’t, “because I need the secret more than I need the money”. And she trusts Claudia to keep her secret, “simply because it is a secret. It will enable her to return to Greenwich different.”
Every kid wants to show up and be different, be more sophisticated, more special, better than this stupid broken world that we’re all part of. And every adult does too, I haven't outgrown this yet and I don't know if I ever will. And Konigsburg captured this all, and captured what a child’s imagination and familial love can do with it, in a more memorable way than most other authors of her era could hope.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1937 medalist, Roller Skates by Ruth Sawyer.