Otto of the Silver Hand by Howard Pyle
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Otto is no Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn! What would you do if you were the baby boy of the robber Baron Conrad, but lived your first twelve years lived among gentle monks in a monastery, until your father abruptly fetched you to live with him and his hard men in his castle? What would happen were your father to mend his ways and go swear fealty to the new Holy Roman Emperor, taking his men with him and leaving his castle and “little simple-witted boy” unprotected, “a sad mistake”? What would happen were Conrad’s feud-foe Baron Henry to get his hands on you, who know how to read but not to fight? Howard Pyle’s compact novel Otto of the Silver Hand (1888) is that kind of story. It’s full of authentic details of life in the “dark ages” (food, clothes, work, arms, castles, monasteries, illuminated books, morals, etc.), suspenseful action (raids, rescues, pursuits, combats, etc.), vivid painterly descriptions (like “‘Forward!’ cried Baron Henry, and out from the gateway they swept and across the drawbridge, leaving Drachenhausen behind them a flaming furnace blazing against the gray of the early dawning”), and Pyle’s beautiful, arresting monochrome illustrations (from first letter of chapter decorations to full-page pictures). Tom Sawyer (1876) and Huckleberry Finn (1884) were published about when Otto of the Silver Hand was, but Twain and Pyle couldn’t be more different in their approach to literature for children. Otto is sure no Tom or Huck! They speak slangy demotic English, Otto elevated medievalesque English (e.g., “Oh, father!” he cried, “oh, father! Is it true that thou hast killed a man with thy own hand?”). They are “bad boys,” active, spirited, clever, irreverent, independent, and hostile to book-learning and church-going. Otto is a “good boy,” passive, spiritual, religious, obedient, and gentle, and loves reading books, gazing at their illustrations, especially one of the nativity, and listening to stories. Unlike Tom and Huck, who constantly play, scheme, trick, and adventure, Otto never initiates anything: starting when he’s a baby (when his mother dies giving birth to him), without his input or outcry he’s picked up and carried from point A to B to C. The closest Otto comes to making a plan is when Pauline, the daughter of Baron Henry, lets him know his father Conrad is in the vicinity, and the boy asks the girl if she’ll let his father know he’s in Henry’s castle so his father can work out how to rescue him. Otto has no sense of humor, and his novel has but one funny sequence (when One-eyed Hans infiltrates the enemy castle), whereas Twain’s boys and novels are made of jokes, comedy, and humor. Tom and Huck laugh more than they cry; Otto cries more than he laughs. People who meet Otto find him “cracked.” In Otto’s defense, he’s a holy child in the violent world of an allegorical historical fiction set in the German “dark ages,” not a “real” boy in a realistic historical fiction set in 19th-century America. Actually, Pyle may be more realistic than Twain in depicting the lack of a child’s agency in the face of adult tyranny, because Tom and Huck always outsmart any strict or sadistic adults they meet. Too often in real life, kids can only be passive and victimized, like Otto. While Tom and Huck are eternally boys, Otto grows from a baby to a man, so in a sense Pyle packs more of a person's life into his shorter novel than Twain does into his longer ones. And although Otto wants something very different from Tom and Huck, like them he sticks to his own way of thinking, no matter what life brings him. Some people may not like their children reading a story in which a child is mutilated, but though we are in the room when it happens, Pyle finesses the act so we don’t “see” it happen or know it happened till later. The graphic violence he does show in real time occurs between men. Indeed, an interesting thing about the story, especially considering that Pyle also published The Story of King Arthur and His Knights (1903), is that it features no feats of derring-do, no knightly jousts or Arthurian quests. It depicts the violence of men as more horrible than glorious. Although at one point Conrad does heroically hold a bridge alone, the book should make children want to read, not to swordfight. There are two spots of bad writing in the novel. Otto’s mother is disturbingly self-centered, and at one point Otto is said to “lay for a while with his hands clasped” when that isn’t really possible. But mostly it’s really well written, with everything from tense suspense, like-- Minute after minute passed, and Schwartz Carl, holding his arbelast in his hand, stood silently waiting and watching in the sharp-cut, black shadow of the doorway, motionless as a stone statue. Minute after minute passed. Suddenly there was a movement in the shadow of the arch of the great gateway across the court-yard, and the next moment a leathern-clad figure crept noiselessly out upon the moonlit pavement, and stood there listening, his head bent to one side. Schwartz Carl knew very well that it was no one belonging to the castle, and, from the nature of his action, that he was upon no good errand. To strange lyrical imagination, like-- But most of all they loved to lie up in the airy wooden belfry; the great gaping bell hanging darkly above them, the mouldering cross-beams glimmering far up under the dim shadows of the roof, where dwelt a great brown owl that, unfrightened at their familiar presence, stared down at them with his round, solemn eyes. Below them stretched the white walls of the garden, beyond them the vineyard, and beyond that again the far shining river, that seemed to Otto’s mind to lead into wonder-land. There the two would lie upon the belfry floor by the hour, talking together of the strangest things. “I saw the dear Angel Gabriel again yester morn,” said Brother John. “So!” says Otto, seriously; “and where was that?” Pyle’s illustrations, especially the twenty-six full-page ones, are exquisite: beautiful, austere, detailed, absorbing, unforgettable. My mother read the book to me when I was ten, and I just now after fifty years reread it, and though I’d mostly forgotten the story, I had mostly remembered the pictures, and looked at them again with mesmerized deja vu. Unlike with Twain’s works, the popularity of Otto of the Silver Hand has worn off by now, but it must have been popular in earlier times, for I detect its influence on artists like Maurice Sendak (e.g., cross-hatching) and Barry Windsor-Smith (e.g., trees) and writers like Lloyd Alexander (e.g., Taran and Eilonwy). Pyle’s The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (1883), The Garden Behind the Moon (1895), and Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates (1921) are all much more entertaining, but Otto, the classic passive strange outsider children’s literature hero, really sticks with me and makes me think. View all my reviews
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Jefferson Peters
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