How sad to learn that Norton Juster, one of those writers made world-famous by a single book, died on Tuesday. He was 91 and would soon have been celebrating the 60th anniversary of the publication of the novel forever associated with his name, The Phantom Tollbooth, which was launched in 1961 and has remained in print ever since.
It tells the story of an amiable American boy named Milo, 10 years old and bored with everything. He is puzzled when a strange parcel arrives in his bedroom, containing a model tollbooth through which he can drive his toy car. So he does – onto roads that lead into the Lands Beyond, peopled with curious creatures, kindly or menacing. The book appeared 100 years after the pioneering work in its genre, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, was conceived by Charles Dodgson, an Oxford don with a passion for puzzles, conjuring tricks, verses and limericks. Alice launched a new staple for children’s literature, which would go on to include wizards, wardrobes and yellow brick roads. Like all those familiar fantasy worlds, The Phantom Tollbooth was judged the kind of book parents could also enjoy: ideal for reading at bedtime.
I was astonished, while recently helping to home-school grandchildren during lockdown, that I had never come across Juster’s book before. But The Phantom Tollbooth turned out to be a favourite of Kitty and Elfie, aged 12 and 10 – an inspired gift from their clever Aunt Polly, who said it encouraged a love of puns and word games. As I duly discovered.
I also gathered – from YouTube videos – that Juster was a genial Father Christmas figure, rosy-cheeked and white-bearded. The lasting success of his book, he explained, was due to the unchanging nature of children. When writing, he remembered his own childhood thoughts about the illogical way the world operated. “Why did I have to learn so many strange things that didn’t seem to have any importance to my life at the time?”
His meeting with his book’s illustrator, the cartoonist Jules Feiffer, was a happy coincidence. They were born a few months apart, and immediately bonded when they met in 1956. Two young New Yorkers from Jewish immigrant families, who had served in the Korean War, they were billeted together in Brooklyn Heights (where neighbours included Truman Capote, Norman Mailer and Arthur Miller) and shared a fondness for the zany wordplay of the Marx Brothers. Feiffer was newly established as a cartoonist, with a neurotically sketchy style: he already had a strip in The Village Voice called “Sick, Sick, Sick”.
