Why do people not like The Giving Tree book?

I really don’t like “The Giving Tree.” I’d even go so far as to say I hate it as a story. If I seem to be picking a fight with a much loved children’s story, bear with me, because I think this is a crucial question. The stories that we tell our children help them learn how to form healthy relationships, as well as form a picture of what to avoid.

For anyone who isn’t familiar with ‘The Giving Tree’, or hasn’t read it recently, here is a very rough paraphrasing of the story.

‘The Giving Tree’ begins when a young boy meets a tree, a female tree to be precise. This gender distinction might matter quite a bit, as we delve deeper into the book’s backstory, so hold onto that thought.

As the boy grows, he visits the tree often. He carves his initials into the tree, plays in her branches and rests in her shade. Initially, all seems well. However, as he ages, other pursuits and interests distract him. Eventually, he needs more of her than her shelter, seasonal fruit and companionship can offer, and he begins to make additional requests.

First, the tree gives him all her apples, which he sells for income. Then she provides him with her branches, which he uses to build a house. Finally, she sacrifices her trunk, so he may make a boat and sail away to find his fortune. Eventually, after a long time he returns, as an old man. The tree has nothing left to give, and so he sits on her stump to rest. The end.

You may be forgiven for thinking that is a rather abrupt and stark ending. It doesn’t seem that either of them has really benefited from the relationship. The tree is effectively dead, with nothing left to give. The boy has taken everything and seemingly learned nothing from the tree’s sacrifice.

Strong relationships are built on a foundation of collaborative and mutually-sustaining respect, support and contribution. Generosity and self-sacrifice are not the same thing, and too much self-sacrifice can create a parasitic relationship that is detrimental to both. We see this in the starkest terms in ‘The Giving Tree’. The tree literally consumes herself in providing for the boy, leaving her with nothing left to give. I intensely dislike the message this gives. It’s a bad model of relationships. Perhaps the story shouldn’t be called ‘The Giving Tree’ but ‘The Taking Boy’.

An abbridged story of Shel Silverstein

All of this begs the question of what might motivate someone to write such a story. For that, we need to turn to the complicated story of Shel Silverstein, a story that has more layers than first appears.

Shel Silverstein was born in 1932, in Chicago. Not popular as a young man, he turned to writing and cartoons as a way to connect with others and with himself. In 1950, he served in the US armed forces, providing satirical cartoons to the US armed forces publication ‘Stars and Stripes’. He served in Japan and Korea, while continuing to hone his artistic skills.

Once back in the United States, he turned to a rather unexpected publication to host his work, the adult magazine ‘Playboy’. Throughout the 1950s, he continued to develop his writing persona, aka ‘Uncle Shelby,’ shaped around the counter-culture Beats movement.

His first presumed ‘children’s’ book, ‘Uncle Shelby’s ABZ Book’ actually appeared in an edition of ‘Playboy’ in 1961. The work is sometimes sub-titled as a ‘book for adults only’ and sometimes as a ‘primer for young minds.’ The story is filled with darkly cynical humour, and poor advice, such as keeping termites as pets, playing hopscotch with real Scotch whisky, and giving your father a haircut while he sleeps.

In 1963, he published ‘Uncle Shelby's Story of Lafcadio, the Lion Who Shot Back’, about a lion who learns to shoot a hunter’s gun and gradually ‘civilises’ himself to the point where he does not belong to either lionkind or humankind. Again, it was a book that was  seemingly aimed at children, but had a decidedly darker cast. ‘The Giving Tree’ came out shortly afterwards, in 1964.

While Silverstein’s career up until this point might be unexpected, what most provides some insight behind ‘The Giving Tree’ is perhaps his relationships. Throughout his life, it seemed that Shel Silverstein was destined to have distinctly transitory relationships, moving quickly from woman to woman, some of whom had appeared within the pages of ‘Playboy.’

Although one of his relationships resulted in a daughter, she was raised by her mother. And when her mother died, the five-year-old was sent to live with relatives, until she, herself, died of an unexpected medical condition at the age of eleven. Silverstein dedicated a book to her. Later, he had a son with another woman, thankfully spending a little more time with his son than he had with his daughter. He also dedicated a book to his son.

Alongside his work as an author and cartoonist, Shel Silverstein was always a prolific songwriter and playwright. I don’t dare reproduce some of his lyrics about his ambivalence to the value of children. The Silverstein estate has a reputation for being quite litigious about any reproduction of his work.

Satire is fine, when it’s satire

It is not that I don’t appreciate satire. Edward Gorey is one of my favourite macabre children’s book authors, with a body of work that is full of rich and dark humour. His own alphabet book, ‘The Gashlycrumb Tinies’ starts with “A is for Amy who fell down the stairs…B is for Basil assaulted by bears…C is for Clara who wasted away…D is for Desmond thrown out of a sleigh…” All accompanied by little ink sketches that spell out the impending doom. It’s wonderful, dark stuff. Satire at its best.

I think children enjoy this boundary-challenging dark humour and I embrace it. With the satire so bright and sharp, it’s easy to distinguish the ‘forbidden’ enjoyment of ‘ghastly’ concepts from real life behaviour.  But ‘The Giving Tree’ doesn’t feel like satire. It’s certainly not considered satire by the millions of parents who read it to their children. It’s played too straight.

In an interview for the New York Times in 1975, Silverstein noted of his book

“Now Mr. Silverstein says of the book merely that “It's just a relationship between two people; one gives and the other takes.” (NY Times)

I think this quote says it all. A blunt observation from the author that the heart of ‘The Giving Tree’ is a message, not about giving, but about taking. It’s hard not to see parallels between the story and the author’s own lived experiences. After all, so much of art comes from within; from our own capabilities, vision and our limitations.

In an interesting literary analysis of Shel Silverstein’s strange authorial persona and duality of messages, Joseph T. Thomas, Jr. notes of ‘Of “Uncle Shelby’s ABZ”’,

“The book [‘Uncle Shelby’s ABZ’] is a con, an elaborate, unbelievably—absurdly— intricate con, and thus it shouldn’t announce that it is not for children, for it is for children, at least metafictionally; but it is a poison pill—albeit sugar-coated. I use the word “metafiction” advisedly, but, really, it is metafictional, as part of the story is a fictional, authoring persona who has generated a text disguised as children’s literature (fooling editors and publishers and parents alike) so that children will read it and, in the end, get what they so richly deserve.” (Joseph T Thomas Jr.)

Likewise, I think we’ve all been suckered when it comes to ’The Giving Tree’. It’s not a book about generosity and it’s not a book about good relationships. We’ve been told its about kindness, when in reality it the story of a who ends up learning only how to take, and a tree that gives up everything in a subservient submission to the boy’s demands.

Lifting up better relationship models

Good relationships just don’t work this way. If the tree had set limits on what she was giving, the boy might have learned some self-restraint and true partnership. Even ecologically, the metaphor doesn’t make any sense at all. The tree might have lasted for generations, had her needs been tended to. She might have provided fruit and shelter for the boys children and grandchildren for years to come.

I don’t appear the only person to reach this conclusion.

The artist Topher Payne seems to have as many issues with ‘The Giving Tree’ as I do, except that he took his dislike one step further and literally re-wrote the end of the book. In his version of the story, the tree sets boundaries and teaches the boy how good relationships work. Over time, the boy and the tree start an apple pie business and the tree goes on to be a part of the boy and his descendants’ lives for years to come. Now that is a story worth reading.

If “The Giving Tree” was satire, it played far too closely to the ambivalence with which Shel Silverstein lived his own relationships. My argument isn’t with the right of an artist to make art. Nor is my argument with someone’s own life choices and ways of forming or not forming relationships with others. That’s up to each of us to decide for ourselves.

But I can disagree with how we have lifted up this story as an unconscious model of how to be a true partner. And so perhaps the real flaw, in the end, is with us. We failed to see the unpleasant side of the relationships played out in ‘The Giving Tree’ and idolised it as a template for our children. Perhaps the joke is on us.

References

Bee, Stacey (2009) The Many Sides of Shel Silverstein. Neatorama. Retrieved May 2021, from: https://www.neatorama.com/2009/05/17/the-many-sides-of-shel-silverstein/

Frank Dohl. (2022, November 14). Brown Tree Trunk on Green Grass (Image, Unsplash Public Domain). Unsplash. https://unsplash.com/photos/-Gr3DSmccp0   

Grant, Adam. Grant, Allison Sweet (2020) We Need To Talk About The Giving Tree. New York Times. Retrieved May 2021, from: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/parenting/we-need-to-talk-about-the-giving-tree.html

Payne, Topher (2021) Topher Fixed It. Retrieved May 2021, from: https://www.topherpayne.com/fixed-it

Popova, Maria (2011) The Gashlycrumb Tinies: A Very Gorey Alphabet Book. Brain Pickings. Retrieved May 2021, from: https://www.brainpickings.org/2011/01/19/edward-gorey-the-gashlycrumb-tinies/

Thrift, Olivia (2019) Is this generosity or self sacrifice? The Psychology Company. Retrieved May 2021, from: https://thepsychologycompany.co.uk/is-this-generosity-or-self-sacrifice/

Thomas, Joseph (2013) Executors or Executioners? Why can’t my biography of Shel Silverstein quote the works of Shel Silverstein? His censorious estate. Retrieved 2021, from: https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/my-shel-silverstein-biography-cant-quote-shel-silverstein-why.html

Thomas Jr., Joseph T. (2011) A Speculative Account (with Notes) of thee Development and Initial Deployments of Shel Silverstein’s Persona, Uncle Shelby, with Special Care to Articulate the Relationship of Said Persona to the Question of Shel’s Ambiguous Audience(s). Children's Literature Association Quarterly. Volume 36, Number 1, Spring 2011, pp. 25-46, https://doi.org/10.1353/chq.2011.0000