The Missing McCloskeys

Tonight I took in the Robert McCloskey exhibit at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts through 18 June. And I realized I deeply know only half the man’s work—the first half.

In the 1940s McCloskey put out four fine books, including three extraordinary ones: Lentil (1940), Make Way for Ducklings (1941), Homer Price (1943), and Blueberries for Sal (1948). I grew up with copies of all those books in the house, along with Centerburg Tales, the 1951 sequel to Homer Price.

But I didn’t grow up in an intimate relationship with One Morning in Maine (1952), Time of Wonder (1957), or Burt Dow, Deep-water Man (1963). I knew those books from the library, perhaps, but at a much shallower level. Most of the art felt new to me.

All of McCloskey’s books were published before I was born and were thus available to me as a child. But only the first batch were published before my mother’s adolescence. So perhaps she chose those for me because she remembered them fondly from her own childhood.

Notably, this one-room exhibit didn’t include work from any of the books McCloskey illustrated without writing, such as Journey Cake, Ho by his mother-in-law Ruth Sawyer (1953, a Caldecott Honor Book) and the Henry Reed books by Keith Robertson (1958-1970). Both of which I recognize immediately without remembering anything about their contents. In fact, I realize I’ve got the latter series amalgamated with the Henry Huggins books by Beverly Cleary. Much to revisit.

Another Childhood Illusion Shattered

Tonight I attended Leonard Marcus’s talk about Robert McCloskey on the centenary of the author-illustrator’s birth. (It turns out he was born in Hamilton, Ohio, now home of this sculpture. But I digress.)

Marcus showed a photo of the doughnut-making machine from Homer Price and remarked how there are only two places to see such a machine now.

“Well, it’s good that someone preserved that model of doughnut-maker,” I thought. “I’m surprised there are so few left—maybe it really didn’t work well, so most of the machines were pulled apart.”

But that wasn’t what Marcus was saying. If I understood him correctly, only two examples of that machine were ever made. One was for the Walden Wood film studio when it adapted Homer Price as a short film in 1963. McCloskey was a friend of the studio owner and spent a lot of time there in later life; as a lifelong tinkerer, he might well have helped to build that machine.

The other was a replica built and displayed in the Municipal Building back in Hamilton, amid McCloskey’s architectural decorations. It’s not clear whether that one was made to work or just to look like the picture in the book.

All along I’d thought that was a standard type of doughnut-maker from the 1940s. After all, I’d seen it in action in that movie, operated by a boy who looks just like Homer Price (and couldn’t act for beans).

But it sounds like McCloskey made it up, based on real, less compact doughnut-making machinery. I feel like Freddy and Louis discovering that the Super Duper can’t lift his car out of the ditch.

Birthday for Ducklings

This Saturday, 29 September, the Friends of the Public Garden in Boston will celebrate the 25th anniversary of the installation of Nancy Schön’s Make Way for Ducklings sculpture.

The duck family from Robert McCloskey’s book were already local heroes when these bronze statues were installed, but they’re now truly iconic. Every seven years or so someone on a drunken lark steals one of the ducklings, only to return it sheepishly and anonymously a few mornings later, so the ducklings remain in the news and public hearts.

The celebration is scheduled from 10:00 am to 1:00 pm.

The party features a variety of games and activities including music, magic, and juggling. Children may create their own birthday card to wish Mrs. Mallard and her ducklings well on their birthday, and be sure to stay for a reading of Make Way for Ducklings.

Of course, a birthday party isn't complete without singing "Happy Birthday" to the ducks!

Last month Anita Silvey shared some behind-the-scenes stories of how McCloskey created the book on her Book-A-Day Almanac:

He went to the parks and the Museum of Natural History—and hundreds of duck drawings emerged from his pen. Finally, in an act of desperation, he went down to a market in Greenwich Village, bought some ducks, and brought them back to his apartment and put them in his bathtub. Then, every day, he woke up with a tissue to clean up after them in one hand and a sketchbook in the other. But the ducks still moved too quickly for McCloskey to capture them in detail.

The solution was perhaps too typical for mid-20th-century American authors and artists: liquor!

Homer Price: “a universal and delightful brat”?!

Eric Gugler began a short essay in the November 1943 Horn Book like this:

When I thumb through this decidedly provocative bunch of illustrations made by Bob McCloskey for his new book, Homer Price (Viking), hundreds of tangent thoughts pop up.

Evidently not among them was “I should read this book.” Because it quickly becomes apparent that Gugler hadn’t read Homer Price.

“What a universal and delightful brat, this Homer Price,” Gugler proclaimed two sentences later, leading into a rhapsodic ode to mischievous boys:

They rings bells at front doors; when maids answer they snitch ice cream and cakes from the kitchen door and run away with bubbling glee; and they know they are never going to amount to much in the future unless they sell newspapers.

At no point in Homer Price or its 1951 sequel, Centerburg Tales, does Homer play any pranks like that. Instead, most of the time we see him working: in his mother’s hotel, in his uncle’s lunch room, at the greenhouse, at the library, in the town pageant.

For fun, Homer builds a crystal radio and goes to a movie, but he passes up fishing because of a job. Neither he nor his young friends makes trouble. Instead, it’s the adults of Centerburg who avoid work, put things over on each other, and tell outlandish tales. Level-headed, hard-working Homer helps to keep the town together.

Gugler was obviously less interested in reading McCloskey’s stories than in sharing “reminiscences of other boys I knew very well indeed.” Maybe he was busy, on deadline, and anxious to say nice things about “Bob’s” new book. He provided a lively disquisition on the “lovable bad boy” type established by Twain, Aldrich, Tarkington, Shute, and Peck. But Gugler didn’t know young Homer Price at all.

What was Gugler’s connection to children’s literature? How did he come to The Horn Book? He was an architect who helped design the West Wing of the White House. Among Gugler’s other work was the office of his good friend May Massee at Viking Press—editor of Homer Price. So this little essay looks like those excited but empty five-star Amazon reviews you can’t help suspecting were written by the author’s friends and relations.

The same issue of The Horn Book contained a better appraisal of Homer Price by James Daugherty, Newbery winner in 1940. He focused on its gentle satire of “the daily life of the Mid-Western small town” and McCloskey’s “solemn and devastating humor.” Daugherty noted how “Homer and his friends cope with, and master, such surprising emergencies as radio robbers, Superman, musical mousetraps, ferocious doughnut machines, housing problems, and mass production.” He didn’t neglect the delight and craft of McCloskey’s pictures, but it’s clear that Daugherty had read the text as well.

I Think This One Would Be Named Thwack

Apparently another bunch of collegiate drunks have stolen another of the Make Way for Ducklings statues from Boston Common.

If events proceed according to pattern, there will be a minor public uproar, followed by a new casting from artist Nancy Schön, a restoration of the missing duckling, and quite possibly a sheepish anonymous return of a now-superfluous piece of bronze. (One time this happened, thieves returned the duckling they had stolen the time before.)

Meanwhile, Irvine, California, gets public art like this, from the campus of the Blizzard videogame company. I bet no frat boys lever this thing off the ground.

(Thanks to Acephalous.)

UPDATE: Pack is back.

The Pitfalls of Picking an Official State Children’s Book

The Columbus Dispatch is reporting on an Ohio legislator's proposal to make Robert McCloskey's Lentil the official children's book of Ohio. McCloskey was a native of Hamilton, Ohio, and Lentil's fictional setting of Alto, Ohio, rather resembles that town. Which, not by coincidence, is the area that the act's sponsor represents. The town already has a Lentil statue, as I reported back here.

Curiously, this proposal wasn't initiated by a set of schoolkids cajoled into proposing a state symbol as part of a unit on government, the way the "third grade class at the Dean S. Luce Elementary School in Canton" made McCloskey's Make Way for Ducklings into Massachusetts's official state children's book. According to StateSymbolsUSA.org, Massachusetts is the only state to have designated an official book of any kind.

Aside from lack of such grass-roots support, the major problem for the Lentil proposal is that Ohio, being a large state, has produced other important children's authors and illustrators: Natalie Babbitt, Virginia Hamilton, Lois Lenski, R. L. Stine. Here in Massachusetts we've addressed that problem by dubbing Dr. Seuss our official state children's author-illustrator so his partisans don't feel left out.

Another problem is that, with all due deference to Lentil, McCloskey's greatest Ohioana are the Homer Price books. Nothing else can compare.

(Thanks to Publishers Weekly for the pointer.)

Countless Bear Encounters

I heartily enjoyed teacher Mrs. G's story of reading Robert McCloskey's Blueberries for Sal to a group of third-graders, some of whom had already learned all about bears from the Discovery Channel. Sample of the classroom dialogue: "that mom is dead meat." (Thanks to Chris Barton at Bartography for the link.)

Some folks take issue with Blueberries for Sal for its unrealistically amiable portrait of wild bears. For instance, this camping columnist calls it a "delightful but erroneous book" and warns:

In my opinion, Blueberries for Sal should be on the banned books list as it can lull people into a false sense of security. . . . I am afraid this book may have caused countless bear encounters to go horribly wrong.

In fact, it gets worse. The success of Blueberries for Sal (1948, Caldecott Honor Book) led naturally to Lynd Ward’s The Biggest Bear (1953 Caldecott Medal winner). I read that picture-storybook (perhaps for the first time) at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art last weekend. It shows young Johnny Orchard, like Sal's mother, meeting a bear cub in the woods, and he brings it home.

Then Johnny watches his bear cub grow into, well, a bear. I don't want to spoil the ending, but no characters are shot or eaten in the making of this picture-storybook. However, Ward's ending doesn't fit with our current sensibilities either.

Where’s My Teddy?, by Jez Alborough (1992), explores some of the same territory: young human and young bear meet in the woods. But it's a less realistic story from the outset: the text is rhyming verse, and the cub has a teddy bear of his own. What's more, Alborough writes from the safety of Great Britain, which hunted down its last wild brown bear about a millennium ago, so we can't expect him to understand the dangers these books create.

Soon we may not have Blueberries for Sal to kick around anymore--at least not in new copies. In May booksellers started to report that the book was out of stock and not being replenished. In August the publisher told Publishers Weekly: "We have been in negotiations with [McCloskey's] estate and we are hopeful that we may be able to put Blueberries for Sal back into circulation." The book is still listed on the Penguin website, but I couldn't find any online retailers with new copies in stock. So in this case, protracted contract negotiations may have saved lives.

Bronze Lentil

Hamilton, Ohio, calls itself the "City of Sculpture." Among the many realistic bronze statues in its public spaces is this rendering of Lentil, the harmonica-playing hero of the picture book by native son Robert McCloskey.


The book never names the dog following Lentil, but a town contest came up with the name Harmony. The sculptor, Nancy Schon, also cast the duck family in Boston's Public Garden based on McCloskey's Make Way for Ducklings.

Other sculptures in Hamilton are less inspiring.

Balloons and Other Ways Comics Show the Invisible

Probably the most visible hallmark of comics style is the use of speech balloons. For centuries artists have conveyed the idea that people are speaking by writing words into their art and connecting those words to particular figures. Over the last hundred years comics artists have developed sophisticated systems of using words in balloons to convey tone, emotion, pace, sources of sound, and other aspects of speech. In fact, in some ways this approach outperforms prose in conveying the nuances of how we talk. Here’s a small sampling of variations from Web Comic Triage.

Seeing speech balloons in a picture book or illustrated novel seems to cue people into saying those books have a "comics" style. I think that's another big reason why people view Maurice Sendak's In the Night Kitchen as different from other picture books. As the page image back here shows, Sendak sprinkled some speech balloons into his recipe.

Another example of such a hybrid is the recent bestseller Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Jeff Kinney conceived that as a novel with some comics-style illustrations supplementing and commenting on the prose. When his story was first published in installments on FunBrain.com a couple of years back, the web format called for art on every page. I noticed then that other websites were reviewing Wimpy Kid as a webcomic--it had come to look as much like a comic as like a novel.

Speech balloons are just one part of the visual language of comics that makes visible many experiences that we can't ordinarily see in a still image. In addition to spoken words, these things include:

• Verbal thoughts. Words can appear in puffy thought balloons. Artists can also depict thoughts visually, showing a character's fantasy or fear or plan.
• Nonverbal emotions and states of mind, conveyed through beads of sweat popping off a forehead (as in the "Mr. Wonderful" comic in today's New York Times Magazine), cultural symbols (broken heart, bleeding nose, birds circling the head), chibi versions of characters acting out their emotions, and more.
• Sound effects. POW! sssssss. Fwapfwapfwapfwapfwap... These visual elements are especially difficult to deal with in translations since the letter forms themselves become integral to the art.
  
• Motion and impact. Different artists convey speed by adding motion lines behind the moving object, blurring the object, blurring the background, and/or drawing multiple images.
• Labels from the narrator for the benefit of the reader.
  

Some critics even see this visual language as crucial to distinguishing comics from other forms of sequential art. R. C. Harvey reportedly says in The Art of the Funnies: An Aesthetic History that Hal Foster's Prince Valiant is "not comics" because of its resolute separation of words and pictures; it famously doesn't include speech balloons. Other critics say that's ridiculously judgmental, that Prince Valiant has earned its place among comics through longevity and graphic quality. All I can say is that one look at Prince Valiant shows that it's different from everything else on the funny pages. It alone uses pictures and prose like a traditional picture book.

Traditional picture-book storytelling eschews the visual language of comics in favor of a more realistic approach. That may seem odd, considering that picture books abound in talking animals, cartoonish people, magic, and other unrealistic things. But still, it's rare to see the techniques listed above in today's full-color picture books.

Picture-book artists seem most comfortable with the less verbal and symbolic and the most visual of those techniques. Eric Rohmann's My Friend Rabbit has motion lines, for example. (His more traditional Cinder-Eyed Cats does not.) Robert McCloskey's Lentil used a few motion lines and a lot of musical notes--almost necessary for telling a story about music.

It's still a rare picture book which incorporates sound effects into the art or shows characters' speeches and thoughts inside balloons, however. And when an artist does use those techniques, as in Little Vampire Goes to School, librarians seem to be shelving those books with "graphic novels" simply because they all use the visual language of comics.

Homer Price, small-town hero

One of the models I keep coming back to for some of my stories are two collections of tall tales by Robert McCloskey: Homer Price (1943) and Centerburg Tales (1951).

A big part of their appeal is the old-fashioned, small-town setting. I'm not sure that can be nostalgia on my part since I've never lived in such a town. But the books were nostalgic from the get-go, showing how Centerburg modernizes slightly with each fast-talking businessman who comes through. We can see that theme in the machines slipping into the lunch counter, the development displacing the old Victorian homestead, and even (on a thematic level) the way most of Grandpa Hercules's stories are about little changes gradually adding up.

But the biggest change from the first book to the second, I realized on a recent rereading, is in Homer himself. Most of the first book's stories start with him doing kid stuff: playing with radios, reading comics, visiting relatives. Homer helps his Uncle Ulysses at the lunch counter, but that's more a family chore than a job. In Homer Price the boy proves himself so capable that in Centerburg Tales he has at least three regular jobs. In fact, he often seems to be the only local doing any work.

That shift is most clear in the story called "Experiment 13." Not only does Homer seek out a summer job, but that job involves standing on the roof of a greenhouse smashing panes of glass with a hammer—does his mother know? Later, the town leaders frighten themselves with the Cold War potential of ragweed seeds, planning to send a delegation to Washington, D.C.—and then entrust those dangerous items to Homer and his pal Freddy.

The narrative reflects that shift in how the "Experiment 13" point of view sticks with the adult characters, not Homer. He goes across the street to the bank; we readers wait with the grown-up men to find out what he's learned. Homer recognizes the giant plants, and McCloskey ends the scene; we find out what he's realized along with Uncle Ulysses and the sheriff. We're not in the room as Homer and Freddy decide what to do with those seeds; we're once again outside with the grown-ups. This is opposite from how most stories from kids are written, but then everything has been gently turned upside-down in Centerburg.