Alfred and Guinevere

by James Schuyler, Harry Zohn (Translator), John Ashbery (Introduction)

One of the finest American poets of the second half of the twentieth century, James Schuyler was at the same time a remarkable novelist. Alfred and Guinevere are two children who have been sent by their parents to spend the summer at their grandmother's house in the country. There they puzzle over their parents' absence and their relatives' habits, play games and pranks, make friends and fall out with them, spat and make up. Schuyler has a pitch-perfect ear for the children's voices, and the story, told entirely through snatches of dialogue and passages from Guinevere's diary, is a tour de force of comic and poetic invention. The reader discovers that beneath the book's apparently guileless surface lies a very sophisticated awareness of the complicated ways in which words work to define the often perilous boundaries between fantasy and reality, innocence and knowledge.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Novella, Adult, Literary Fiction, American, 20th Century

126 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1958

Reviews

[Tony · Rating 3 out of 5]

A charming invention.

Imagine you are young, pre-teen let’s say, and precocious of course, living in somewhat of a cocoon, your world the small family that is the accident of your birth. You are learning the way of things, but mostly from circumstantial evidence: vicariously through books; confusingly from the joking, not always playful nature of adults. And then your family fractures. You are not told directly, the grown-ups still sorting it through. Daddy is off to Europe for work. Mummy will see him off in New York. This may take a while. Till then, go with your sister on the train. Yes, alone, just the two of you; an adventure. Spend the summer with Grandmother and Uncle Saul.

Something very much like this happened to James Schuyler as a boy. It affected him deeply. How to tell it?

Schuyler slides the viewer to the older sister, and has her write the events in her journal. He slides it again in letters the children write. Slides it again for the dialogue of growing up.

There are youthful betrayals:

This was the most horrible day and all because of Alfred. … First had Sunday breakfast with little sausages the kind I like and went to church as per usual. That was all right but walking home Alfred said I only put 10¢ in collection not 25¢. He says he heard it when it fell in the bag that is a lie he could not tell. I think 10¢ is plenty for a child with a small allowance and so it was all right for me to say I put in 25¢ because Alfred was just guessing. Guessing is the same as lying.

practical jokes:

Last night Alfred put an egg in my bed. I almost broke it getting in. I know he did not think of it all by himself and I will fix both of them. So far I have been very smart and not said anything. He kept looking at me at breakfast. I just smiled and asked him how he felt and if he got a good night’s sleep. He is getting scared.

enuretic nights:

”What is it?” Guinevere said.
“I’m getting in bed with you,” Alfred said. …
“You don’t have pajamas on.”
“It got too hot.”
“I knew you shouldn’t drink cocoa at bedtime.”
“I think I had night sweats.”
“Just don’t do it in this bed.”
“You know I never do it twice in one night. I had a dream.”
“Keep quiet. I’m asleep.”
… “I dreamt Daddy said, ‘I’ll teach you to swim.’ Then he picked me up and threw me out the window into a big lake.”
“Then you woke up in a real lake.”
“It was more like Niagara Falls.”
“Or Victoria Falls. They’re the biggest. It’s a terrible habit but I guess you’ll grow out of it.”

Schuyler pieces together moments, images. A ‘colored man’ thrown from a bridge. What did it mean? What did it mean to a child? What does all this mean to the poet he became, always, always looking back?

[Emmeline · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

Deceptively simple story of two children spending summer at their grandmother's (but there's a bit more under the surface than that).

In any case, the pleasure here isn't the story so much as the way it's told, mostly in dialogue between the children, occasionally with the voice of a friend, through letters and diary entries. The result is a very slim volume that seems to contain multitudes, that is charming and dark, naive and knowing.

[Gabriel Congdon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Darling!


So cute. Written in dialogue and a journal, this brother and sister will warm your cold heart and tickle you funny bone. How much story goes on around the scenes and entries? Not a lot, but the amount is perfect. What’s not there allow us to add what’s deemed missing. This is old hat for modernity, but a good hat. It wasn’t too sentimental either, for it being, you know, kid stuff. The extreme emotions of youth are handled tacitly. The loneliness and estrangement the kids go through is more the reader surmisement than the characters, or for-matter, the authors. Feel me? I like books that let you sublet the space. I also like books that make you stare up at the planetarium without blinking, but when push turns to pull, I enjoy my own creativity when the author allows. This is the boon of a poet writing a novel, poets know all about how if they leave the page white, they’re giving you lots of space for your own invisible ink.

[Sylvester (Taking a break in 2023) · Rating 4 out of 5]

How much do I remember about what it was like to be a child? Not as much as I would like. In the children's stories magic is almost the sole province of the young. In the Chronicles of Narnia, for instance, Peter and Susan are told they can not return to Narnia, and that they will gradually forget what happened there, forget that they were once King and Queen of a place where animals spoke and life was a wild adventure where the rules were different from regular life. I often wonder - what have I forgotten? Would I want to revisit it? Is childhood more magical or terrifying? The wonderful thing about this book is that it is narrated entirely by two children, and I don't know of anyone who has captured childhood quite like Schuyler has. This is not merely good writing, but vivid recall and observation.

[Karl Steel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Compulsively readable, suitable for the dinner table, this camp novel is set largely in the dialog of two children, a young boy and his (presumably) 14-15ish sister. Are children naturally campy? After all, can't we say that camp is a funny (or wry? or deliberate: and if deliberate, strike the previous suggestion) version of the uncanny? And what's more uncanny, and prone to sensations of uncanniness, than a child?

A representative bit, when Alfred wants to add something to the letter Guinevere is writing to their mother. The quote starts with what must be Guinevere:

"...What do you want to tell Mother?"
"Something short so it won't take me all day and all night to copy it. I'm thinking. I saw five cows. Are there any g's in that?"
"Wait a sec. No."
"Think of some more to say with g's in it. I can print good g's."

Imagine contouring your prose according to orthography! Hilarious.

It's easy to intermingle my memory of this novel with that of The Young Visitors, The Diary of Adrian Mole, and even, as one reviewer dropped below, Catcher in the Rye.

[Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kind of charming and kind of tedious.

[Kirsty · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had not heard of James Schuyler's debut novel, Alfred and Guinevere, which was out of print for almost fifty years, before I spotted rather a lovely NYRB edition in the Modern Classics section of my local library. I was immediately entranced by its rather charming blurb, and the strength of the reviews which adorn its back cover. Kenneth Koch calls the novel 'witty, truthful, simple, lively, and musical'. Schuyler, best known for his poetry, is heralded as a 'remarkable novelist'.

In his introduction to the volume, John Ashbery writes: 'The reader discovers that beneath the book's apparently guileless surface lies a sophisticated awareness of the complicated ways in which words work to define the boundaries between fantasy and reality, innocence and knowledge.' Ashbery believes that Schuyler 'writes about the past with tenderness and humor', the result of which is 'a timelessly idyllic comedy of manners, where English models are inflected by 1930s small-town life in America, as seen through the gauze filters of the movies and children's literature.'

Alfred and Guinevere are a pair of young siblings, who are sent to spent the summer with their grandmother, Mrs Miller, in the country, after their father travels on a business trip to Europe and their mother is preoccupied with subletting their New York apartment before joining him. Of the plot of Alfred and Guinevere, Ashbery states that it is 'insistently ambiguous, lacking in resolution', with the "grownups" 'barely characters, barely anything but names.'

There are elements of violence throughout Alfred and Guinevere; Alfred is beaten by his father quite often, and the siblings discover the corpse of a murdered 'colored' man in the park. Regardless, the novel is often filled with childish, but rather lovely conversations, in which the siblings endeavour to make sense of the world in which they live, and their parents' abandonment of them. Schuyler pinpoints children's voices marvellously; in fact, it is the real strength of the book. When in hospital after having his appendix removed, for instance, Alfred tells another patient: '"I have one sister named Guinevere who can draw and do back bends."'

The novel is told entirely through 'snatches of dialogue and passages from Guinevere's diary'. The novel proper begins with a series of fanciful stories told by the children, of what they believe their adult lives will be like. Guinevere fancies herself as 'one of the leading woman big spenders of her day', and Alfred see himself becoming a 'great hunter' and polar explorer. Guinevere tends to be quite precocious, but Alfred is endearing from the start. The relationship depicted between the siblings is surprisingly complex at times; Guinevere says: '"It's so difficult, learning how to behave. We got along like cats and dogs until he almost died having his appendix out. It makes him more grown up sometimes."' In a later passage, she writes: 'Last night Alfred put an egg in my bed. I almost broke it getting in. I know he did not think of it all by himself and I will fix both of them. So far I have been very smart and not said anything. He kept looking at me at breakfast. I just smiled and asked him how he felt and if he got a good night's sleep and so on. He is getting scared.'

Whilst Alfred and Guinevere is rather a fragmented book, the reader does end up learning a lot about both children, and how they feel about one another. Alfred provides bursts of amusement, and the differences between the children allow Schuyler to present rather a fascinating character study. There is some semblance of plot, but those who prefer action-packed novels would probably feel a little disappointed by Schuyler's debut. I enjoyed the approach overall, and would have liked a little more substance to pull me in further at times; the novel was not quite as good as I was expecting after reading Ashbery's introduction, but it is a memorable and well written tome nonetheless.

[Corey · Rating 4 out of 5]

A delightful child's eye view of the world, told in a youthful vernacular so precise it crackles.

[Noel Welsh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Extremely charming, very airy read about two kids punching above their weight class in the wit department.

[Aleksandra Pasek · Rating 3 out of 5]

To taki zwiewny szkic, pod którego pozornie lekką i pozbawioną ostrych kantów powierzchnią, czai się napięcie i ledwo wyczuwalny mrok. Fenomenalnie przedstawiony świat dzieci za pomocą zniekształceń języka dorosłych, których dokonują one w komunikacji między sobą. Schuler operuje jednocześnie ironią i nostalgią, tworzy bardzo sugestywne, zapadające w pamięć obrazki. Warto spędzić z tą książką jeden przyjemny wieczór.

[Lukasz Pruski · Rating 3 out of 5]

Schuyler has a pitch-perfect ear for children's voices, and the story, told entirely through snatches of dialogue and passages from Guinevere's diary, is a tour de force of comic and poetic invention."
[from an uncredited blurb on the back cover]

James Schuyler's Alfred and Guinevere (1958), "officially" a novel, but a novella volume-wise, comes highly recommended by several literary critics and many readers as a charming story of a summer spent by two children - a bright window into the magical world of pre-adolescent siblings. Alas I am not as enthusiastic about this novel: probably because I have had the pleasure of reading Amelie Nothomb's masterpiece Loving Sabotage (as well as almost equally good The Character of Rain ). I find Ms. Nothomb's depiction of children's universe more insightful; it is in her books that I can find a little bit of the child that I used to be about 60 years ago. Mr. Schuyler's work, clever and charming as it is, does not come across as wonderfully natural and compelling.

The author never exactly states how old Alfred and Guinevere are, except that the boy is clearly younger than his sister. In fact, I find it one of the best aspects of the novel that we, the readers, may choose the kids' age: I chose Alfred to be seven or eight and Guinevere eleven or twelve. Their father leaves for Europe for business reasons, their mother follows him, and the children are left behind to spend the summer at their grandmother's house in the country. The author lets the reader see the adult world only through the children's eyes: the mechanisms of the grown-ups' universe are obviously opaque to the children. They create their own causal structure of events, which is influenced more by views of other people, adults or kids, than by the actual "facts." Mr. Schuyler succeeds in inducing a sense of some menace that lies underneath the innocent story of one summer, but it is we, the readers, who need to select the menace of our choice.

I like the circular structure of the book: it begins and ends with the bedtime talk between the kids, which sets up the axis of this generally plotless novel. The symmetries seem to go even deeper: I am curious about a mysterious piece of conversation between the children that appears on the sixth page: it is explained by the children's dialogue near the end of the book, exactly six pages from the end. I wonder if this was done on purpose by the author noted for his poetry, a genre that requires precision of literary structures.

However, I tend to disagree with the high praise for the author's "pitch-perfect ear for children's voices." True, many passages are indeed written in the way that children think - some of Guinevere's writing and most conversations between the children - yet other fragments sound awkward and too sophisticated even for precocious pre-adolescents or, in some passages, seem to be artificially infantilized.

Certainly a worthy read but - to me - far from a masterpiece that it is purported to be.

Three and a quarter stars.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short novel about two precocious siblings in the 1920s (?) who are sent to live with their grandmother and uncle while their parents are considering divorce. The novel is entirely in dialogue, letters, and Guinevere's diary entries. I thought it was very creative. Although the protagonists are children, it is not a children's book (I think).

[Hetian bias · Rating 5 out of 5]

when a book becomes your bff

[Joyce · Rating 4 out of 5]

A poet’s story about two children, overlooked by their distracted parents, who try to cope with dislocations. They’re both precocious and articulate far beyond their years, which can be funny (“Finished Madame Bovary by Flaubert last night. The part where she buys the poison and dies is very true to life.”), but my lasting impression was the loneliness of the children. Lovely short book though.

[Lucy Cummin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of course this a niche book for those interested in the subject. Anyone who wanders around the woods in New England is aware that there are stone structures that cannot be explained as built by a yankee farmer. Meticulously piled stones on steep hillsides (usually west or south), oddly snaky, serpentine walls, a cairn that, from one side, looks exactly like a turtle and, hmmmm, faces a wetland or a small mountain pond. Elaborate cairns built in the middle of a marshy wetland . . . no, not built by the stray Celt or Viking, sorry, but by the people who came before us Paleo, Woodland and those still quietly among us. The Gages undertake to describe, from their painstaking research, the ways to identify which was made "historically" and which predate our arrival on the scene. More than a few surviving native americans quietly took up farming and acting like white folk while maintaining their ceremonies privately too, so there are "hybrid" places, but identifiable. The Gages write in clear and direct prose. The work they have done is thorough and remarkable. If you live in New England this and a few other books I could name will change how you see our landscape forever. Enriching! *****

[Dayna Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange, but fun, little novella about two siblings who have been sent to their grandparents' home for the summer. The story is told alternately by both children in various ways, including entries from Guinevere's diary and letters. This was presented as a children's book, but that doesn't seem correct. While the voices of the children are absolutely accurate for their ages, there are adult themes that run through the novel that are never fully explained. Their parents are having issues, but it is never clear why or if they are finally resolved. It sometimes takes concentration to follow who is speaking, but the banter between the kids is priceless and worth the effort. Anyone with a sibling will find at least one conversation they remember having.

[Riana · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked up this book because I wanted something short to read in one sitting (it took me three train rides). This book doesn’t have much of a plot. It’s told from the point of view of two children, Alfred and Guinevere, as they spend the summer with their grandmother. Most of the book is written as Guinevere’s diary with sections of dialogue throughout. It was pleasant to read but I wouldn’t say that Schuyler “has a pitch-perfect ear for children’s voices,” as the back cover’s summary claims. Some parts felt too sophisticated to be relatable. Overall, I wouldn’t go so far as to say this book is bad, but I wouldn’t recommend it either.

​​This review first appeared in a larger article here

[michal k-c · Rating 4 out of 5]

you could easily do a kind of vulgar Lacanian analysis of this … realms of the imaginary and Real coming into conflict… transference… but i’ve been out of my theory programme for so long now.. all of these terms.. like sands through the hourglass

Schuyler is just a good writer. wonderful precocious child voice on display here

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is narrated by the children themselves, to great effect. A gripping and amusing novella, I think suitable for older children as well as grown-ups. So well worth reprinting after all that time.

[Daniel Polansky]

The story of two young siblings, told in diary entries and snatched of dialogue. Schuyler has a great talent for depicting the passionate and confused state of childhood, its jealousies, passions and follies. The structure alone is worth your trouble.

[Sabrina · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book was a little hard to follow, but maybe that was deliberate to emphasize the children's story. Sometimes it was unclear who was speaking. It reminded me of how I wrote in my diary at Guinevere's age. I feel as though their story didn't have a point.

[Fran Faura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Es un libro muy tierno, en el que se ven los problemas de los adultos desde la visión inocente de dos niños. Es una novela corta que no es quizá la mejor obra del siglo pasado, pero cuya lectura se hace amena y ágil.

[Ava Gaulkin · Rating 5 out of 5]

LOVED this book, felt like I was reading right from a kids diary / a real transcription of siblings conversing. Author did an amazing job capturing the mind of a child and sibling/friend dynamics. funny and creative but so simple

[Erika · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very charming.

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

Charming but slight. Much preferred What's For Dinner?

[Ola Sajewicz · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,75

[Garry · Rating 5 out of 5]

If anyone were to ask me -- which no one ever will -- what book is the embodiment of "delightful," this is the answer I would give.

[Domnica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Touching short story about a brother and older sister told only from dialogue and Guinevere’s journal entries. An unique approach to write a narrative.

[Izabela · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ciepełko na sercu <3

[an.ja13 · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5