A look at this year’s illustrated children’s books suggests that Gresham’s law may have gone over the rainbow and mysteriously reversed itself. For once, the good appears to be driving out the bad. Specifically, the good is the republication of some of the most popular illustrators of the past. There are reissues of John Ruskin’s King of the Golden River, brief selections from Kate Greenaway’s 1881 Mother Goose and an edition of Great Swedish Fairy Tales by John Bauer. Among the best reissues, too, are some of Arthur Rackham’s Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and a collection of N.C. Wyeth’s paintings and illustrations, including such children’s classics as Treasure Island, Kidnapped and The Last of the Mohicans (see color pages). These are joined by books by the occasional contemporary artist, like Peter Spier, with a fondness for history and artistic craftsmanship.
No one can be sure whether this windfall for young readers is due to chance, publishers’ desire to move with the current run on nostalgia or to a natural re-emergence of a need for detailed illustrations and stories with beginnings, middles and endings. There is one hard fact that may partly account for fine reprints with handsome pictures. Since the Government cutback on book-buying funds for libraries, which account for as much as 65% of children’s book sales, the market is shrinking. This year alone, juvenile-book divisions have cut back their output by 26%. Redoing a classic can be an easy way to sure value.
Terror and Wonder. Through all the golden retreads and business uncertainty shines The Juniper Tree, a splendid mixture of the old and new. Essentially, the package is 27 Grimm fairy tales published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in two boxed volumes for $12.95. Four tales were translated by the late poet Randall Jarrell. The remaining 23 are the work of the novelist Lore Segal (Other People’s Houses). The illustrations—one per story—were done by Maurice Sendak, who at 45 is the Little King of the children’s book world.
Yet The Juniper Tree is not really a children’s book. Mrs. Segal has succeeded in restoring to Grimm the passion, terror and wonder that had been bowdlerized in nearly all the English translations since they first appeared in 1823. Indeed, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm did not have children much on their minds when they sent friends and relatives throughout rural Germany to collect verbatim 210 tales that they edited and published between 1812 and 1815. The Brothers Grimm were scholars and linguists. Their bedtime stories were Ur-texte in the marshy land of Indo-European folklore.
The Juniper Tree even has the compact look of early 19th century German books. Unlike the platter-sized Victorian English editions of Grimm, the two Juniper volumes are small. Sendak’s pen-and-ink drawings, executed to scale, measure only 3½ inches by 4½ inches. But like Dürer’s Little Passion of Christ—an influence Sendak gladly acknowledges—the effect is monumental. Sendak tricks the eye. Rabbits, crows, cats, dogs, devils, skeletons, peasants, princesses loom enormously from the small page. Menace, ecstasy, mirth and wisdom fill the eyes of the animals, as well as such familiar characters as Rapunzel and Snow White.
There is an authority in Sendak’s line detail and composition that permits comparison with such illustrators as John Tenniel and Edward Lear. His Grimm pictures draw on a tradition that encompasses not only the lessons of 15th and 16th century engraving but the lyricism of English illustrators of the 1860s. There is even a personal touch. The stocky shapes and inward gaze of some of Sendak’s bearded peasants suggest the vanished rural world of Polish Jewry that Sendak’s father migrated from early in the century.
For all their fantasy, the tales thrive on very real love, hate, envy, greed, murder and even cannibalism. As Translator Segal notes, nowhere in all the Grimm fairy tales can one find a single fairy. The term seems to have been popularized in England about the time when the Grimm stories were being translated and prettified for children. Take Snow White, for example: in most bowdlerized versions, the wicked stepmother orders the huntsman to bring back Snow White’s heart. In the original folk story, it is her lungs and liver that the bad lady wants—so that she can eat them. The dwarfs, incidentally, are always vegetarians.
More profound alterations can be seen in The Frog King, known popularly as The Princess and the Golden Ball. It is the tale of the repulsive frog who retrieves the little lady’s toy from a pond on condition that she take him back to the palace to share her plate and bed. In many modern versions, the standoffish princess eventually kisses the frog, who instantly becomes a handsome, marriageable prince. In the original, the brat smashes the frog against a wall, and the bridegroom springs magically from the breakage. This is obviously not a sentimental story with a moral such as love conquers all. The ancient theme of painful resurrection is unmistakable.
Death and transfiguration are at the heart of many of Grimm’s tales, most notably in the title story The Juniper Tree. A young mother dies and is buried under a juniper tree. The father remarries a woman who, greedy for his inheritance, kills his little son. She disposes of the body by cooking it in a stew that the father then eats. Little sister, who knows what is up, sadly buries the bones under the juniper. Magically, the boy is transformed into a gaudy bird who eventually kills the stepmother and then is reborn again as a boy.
Sweaty Tales. It does not take much of a scholar to see that this tale contains handcrafted versions of the mythical phoenix rising from its ashes and even the mystical rites of transubstantiation. But common to all fairy tales is the happy ending. In The Story of One Who Set Out to Study Fear, ignorance is bliss if it enables the hero to overcome terrors from which wiser men would flee. In Hans My Hedgehog, ugliness is a curse to be broken by magic. In Pitcher’s Feathered Bird and Brother Gaily, cleverness and sharp practice can outwit the Devil, even the keeper of heaven’s gate. Above all, the tales are sweaty with human nature. Time and again, the message seems to be: “Don’t tinker with the order of things.” Yet this message is repeatedly mocked by the irrepressible truth that man is an incurable tinkerer.
In order to pack the richness of these tales into his illustrations, Sendak spent years soaking himself in myth and lore. He studied German and traveled to the mountains and forests where German children hear the originals. During this time, Sendak and Segal winnowed their favorite stories from the original 210. “By the time I was ready to draw,” says Sendak, “I felt that the stories were my own.” Indeed, he even put his German shepherd Erda into Hansel and Gretel.
It is just such painstaking possession of his materials that earned Sendak his reputation. In 20 years, he has illustrated and/or written more than 70 books. He has won every important children’s book prize in the U.S. In 1970, he became the first American illustrator ever to be awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Medal. Sendak’s books sell by the hundreds of thousands all over the world and are read by children in Arabic, Japanese and Afrikaans.
Sendak has spent most of his life sitting home alone and drawing. His work is profoundly personal, not to say passionate, and he never condescends to children, as he puts it, “those poor midget people who are supposed to have only half a brain.” The long climb began in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1937 when Sendak was nine. He and his older brother Jack wrote and illustrated books that they hand-lettered, decorated and bound with tape. By the time he was in high school, he was illustrating homework instead of doing it. Afternoons and weekends were spent working for All American Comics, where he adapted Mutt and Jeff strips for comic books.
To the Top. After high school, Sendak took a job with a Manhattan window-display house, where he constructed papier-mache and plaster models, including Snow White and the seven dwarfs. “It was the schlock of the 1930s that made up my creative mentality,” says Sendak. He continues: “Two years ago, I saw Walt Disney’s Pinocchio and loved it, even though the Blue Fairy looked like Joan Bennett and Cleo the Goldfish looked like a drag queen.”
In 1951, Sendak’s first published illustrations appeared in a children’s book called The Wonderful Farm. Success started a year later when he illustrated Ruth Krauss’s popular A Hole Is to Dig. But it was the books he both wrote and illustrated that moved him to the top of the anemic children’s book field. Most widely read is Where the Wild Things Are (1963). It is the story of naughty Max, who is sent to bed supperless for, among other things, chasing the dog with a fork. Clad in his “wolf pajamas,” Max petulantly transforms his bedroom into a jungle and sets off to become King over a race of easily cowed creatures who seem to be the offspring of the Minotaur and a Teddy bear.
Perfect Mix. Wild Things was loved by children but frowned on by many adults who thought its cheerful recognition of a child’s ferocious anger and will to dominate would be unsettling. Higglety Pigglety Pop! or There Must Be More to Life (1967) perhaps comes closest to Sendak’s ideal of the perfect mix of original conception, words and pictures. It is the waggish tale of Jennie, a Sealyham terrier. Jennie is the dog “who has everything,” yet leaves home because, as she says, “there must be more to life.” Carrying her Gladstone bag in her mouth, she sets off for new experiences, which include being a nursemaid for a baby who will not eat and losing her charge to a lion who will eat anything. Jennie finally lands on all four feet in the World Mother Goose Theater’s staging of the nursery rhyme: “Higglety piggle-ty pop!/ The dog has eaten the mop!” The book is never cutesie or cloying. Like Alice in Wonderland it can transform a narrative non sequitur into art. At its best, it achieves levels of fond comedy that are more touching if you know —as Sendak’s readers rarely do—that the author actually had a Sealyham named Jennie who died in 1967.
With In the Night Kitchen (1970), Sendak returned to nocturnal fantasy. Mickey, its naked hero, falls past his sleeping parents and into a cake batter being mixed by three bakers who resemble Oliver Hardy. Rejecting this sweet fate, Mickey leaps out, fashions an airplane from bread dough and flies to the top of the Empire State Milk Bottle, where he cracks out of his crust like some reborn pre-Columbian corn god and crows in the new day.
Controversy struck a second time. A naked boy in a children’s book?! In Louisiana and Pennsylvania, Mickey’s budding privates were painted over by nervous librarians. One Mrs. Grundy suggested that “Cock-a-Doodle Doo” be changed to “Whoop-de-do.” Otherwise sensible critics muttered darkly about masturbation fantasies.
Sendak was astonished and depressed. Night Kitchen was written after he suffered a heart attack in 1967. At the time, moreover, his mother was dying of cancer, a disease that would shortly kill his father as well and even the dog Jennie. “The only thing that held me together,” he says, “was working on Night Kitchen.” When Mickey cries “Cock-a-Doodle Doo!” from atop his milk-bottle skyscraper, it was quite literally Sendak’s own rude celebration of life over death.
Ready to Move. Sendak, a bachelor, lives and works in a ten-room house set on seven acres in Ridgefield, Conn. Sendak calls it his Franchot Tone house; indeed it is right out of a ’30s movie about genteel life in the New England suburbs. It is also a perfect setting for Sendak’s antiques, rare prints and perhaps the finest collection of Mickey Mousiana east of Anaheim. With these things around him, as well as his German shepherd and a golden retriever named lo, Sendak is a man completely ready to move on to more—and perhaps even better—work. He is thinking of a TV cartoon special for CBS as well as illustrations for an unpublished story by Randall Jarrell. He is also deeply committed to editing and illustrating a children’s story dictated to him by his father just before he died. It tells of an immigrant boy who leaves his family in Europe to try for a new life in America.
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