My 10 Favorite Children's Books
When I arrived safely in America in 1936, the only “children’s books” I had read were Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter and Wilhelm Busch’s Max und Moritz, two books so beguilingly illustrated that they had been as pabulum for generations of little Germans. Whether 100 years of nurture on books as sadistic as these helps account for 20th century German atrocities is a question beyond my expertise.
I had also once briefly seen the original, full-size, L’histoire de Babar, le petit Elephant (1931), and to this day it remains among my most magical memories. And my father had first sought to introduce me to America by giving me a copy of Josephine Lovell’s Eight Little Indians (Platt & Munk, Co, Inc. 1935), which lies here in front of me now.
Kate Seredy’s The White Stag (1937), the legendary story of the founding of what eventually became Hungary, was a thrilling book in that distant past, partly for its mock epic language, but most especially for unforgettable pencil drawings of muscled heroes sitting in noble ease on their beautiful horses. That the hero of the book is Atilla the Hun, and that this tale of ruthless and relentless violence in the interests of Lebensraum (Hitler’s term for “necessary territorial expansion”) should have been published in 1937, the year of the opening of the Buchenwald concentration camp, baffles me today. But the book had a tone of Wagnerian elevation that seemed to have been just right for a romantic nine-year-old.
Pyotr Yershov’s Russian tale, The Little Humpbacked Horse, a book from the 1920's, teeming with horses and Asiatic splendor, peopled my dreams in those earliest times. And some years later Howard Pease’s The Ship Without a Crew enthralled me and every other boy on our baseball team. We all secretly deemed ourselves, to be young Tod Moran, third mate of the steamer, Araby. Wilfred Grenfell, author of Adrift on an Icepan, a missionary doctor who is still considered a hero in Labrador and Newfoundland, was an idol for me early. But except for Babar, and a paperback The White Stag, these books, although available, are out of print, and I shouldn’t further indulge myself.
In fact, beginning in high school, like most kids, I no longer read children’s books at all. But twenty years later, when I was teaching at Harvard, I had more-or-less accidentally, written one children’s book and my graduate students erroneously drew the conclusion that I knew something about the subject, and requested a course. In truth, I didn’t know a thing; had never thought about the matter. But now I was forced to learn and fast! So I came upon these treasures very late indeed; but I have loved their stories and especially their illustrations with a passion ever since. So this is the narrative of a late conversion.
1. The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902)
At the top of my list is surely Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902), which I still consider the most perfect matching of text and illustration. One can make a case that the great painter, John Constable, was an artistic influence on Potter, who, herself, became a superb painter of mushrooms, flowers, and mice -- of the minuscule in nature. This natural inclination, Potter synchronized with a sometimes acerb honesty of verbal expression, to create as exciting, terrifying, and, finally, satisfying book as I have ever encountered. Mrs. Rabbit, in archetypal motherly fashion, sends her pink-clad, good little girls off into the fields with the startling admonition to take care because their father had been caught and baked as rabbit pie. Naughty, blue-jacketed Peter, immediately pictorially distinguished for his independence, looks off in the other direction. Soon he’ll violate Mother’s injunction, gorging himself on lettuces, French Beans, and some radishes, to the point that he feels rather sick.
Even at my age, I felt keenly when I saw Mr. McGregor with his terrifying rake, saw Peter caught fast in the net for two pages, and trembled at the sight of the great sieve, which McGregor seeks to pop upon the top of Peter -- and just read that phrase aloud, and you’ve got Potter at her finest. And for sheer humor, ponder the multi-media joke, as when Mr. McGregor puts Peter’s lost blue jacket up as a scarecrow to frighten the blackbirds, and the illustration shows three of those birds looking up quizzically at the strange creations. Even the end papers in this tiny book will not let you go, as they feature each little animal reading one of Potter’s other little books, each decorated in the finest art deco swirl. This remains for me a perfect book, both in illustration, in text. It is the book by which to measure any other in the genre.
2. Little Black Sambo (1899)
And at risk of raising eyebrows, I recall that I was captivated by Helen Bannerman’s Little Black Sambo (1899). Looking back on it so much later, my recollection is correct: the story is economically told, with a keen sense of suspense and plot, and it features a vital and ingenious little boy with a clever mother and a generously providing father. The book has been pirated, disemboweled, and reprinted hundreds of times, at least thrice in the last decade, twice using Helen Bannerman’s original clear, precise language -- more or less--and once reworded by Julius Lester (1996), not necessarily to the story’s advantage. And as I reread the story today, it still seems irreproachable. Bannerman wrote it for her two little daughters in India, which is the setting of the story. Tigers roam Asia, not Africa; the brass pot in which the boy’s father brings the tiger ghe (Indian word) is clearly Indian; and it is highly questionable that “Sambo” was a derogatory term in Bannerman’s 19th century environs. For better or worse, the name is retained in Christopher Bing’s 2003 edition, achieved with encouragement and assistance from Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Chair of Afro-American Studies at Harvard. Bing’s solution to the perceived problem was to make “Sambo” a patently African boy living in India. (Perhaps his mother was the Senegalese ambassador in Delhi?) Fred Marcellino’s new edition plays it safer (and sillier) by dressing the boy’s parents in saris and turbans, and re-naming him Babaji—although he looks to me as though his name should be Li Wu. Passion distorts and memory plays tricks, as when, in a 1987 Stanford Law Review article, the author refers to the boy as a “tragic and ugly hero.” Tragic? That the original illustrations are a stereotype of something is self-evident, and as they cause pain, they should now no longer be reprinted. But given the facts in the text itself, if offense is taken, maybe the complaints should come from Bombay or Madras. The story remains as exciting as it always has.
3. The Story of Ferdinand the Bull (1937)
Munro Leaf’s The Story of Ferdinand the Bull (1937) is another book that has been censored, banned, burned, reviled worldwide. It’s another perfect book, seemingly with the ideal illustrator for a fine writer. Robert Lawson’s powerful black ink drawings are distributed throughout this story in paced rhythm. Every moment of tension is protracted over a number of pages: Ferdinand’s rear end settles slowly on the bumblebee. The climactic bullfight itself is breathtakingly extended over many pages as, first, enter the Banderilleros with their long, sharp pins, then the Picadores, whose spears make a striking abstraction on the page, then the vain, silly Matador himself, with his Salvador Dali moustache. Ferdinand peeks through the gate, enters the ring, sits his peaceable self down imperturbably in the middle, and is sent back home, to recline blissfully “under his favorite cork tree, smelling the flowers just quietly.” And we’re treated once again to the visual joke from an earlier illustration--the nicely cylindrical bottle corks that grace Ferdinand’s tree.
4. I Saw Esau: The Schoolchild’s Pocket Book (1992)
Currently, we have stored away for our grandchildren two copies of Iona and Peter Opie’s I Saw Esau: The Schoolchild’s Pocket Book (1992). The Opies were the finest collectors of children’s folk rhymes, and this was their first book. The rhymes themselves are, as Iona put it, “clearly not rhymes that a grandmother might sing to a grandchild on her knee.” Rather, they are useful rhymes that occasionally serve a subversive practical purpose: verses to ease school tasks; insults for your tormentors, lamentations, incantations, curses for those who desecrate your books, and satirical perversions of saccharine lullabies:
Good night and sweet repose
I hope the fleas will bite your nose;
And every bug as big as a bee
And then you’ll have good company.
These rhymes are graced with irreverent drawings by Maurice Sendak, drawings of anarchic rascals tumbling and cavorting, charming little drawings of babies safely in their mothers’ arms, and for Freudianly inclined adults, a good joke about all-consuming infants, to accompany “I one my mother. . . . I ate my mother.” Indeed, fans will find echoes of many of Sendak’s earlier books, as well as one of his most important references to the Renaissance painter, Mantegna, which Sendak used centrally in We Are All in the Dumps, which he as working on at the time. This is the richest and most irreverent little nursery rhyme book I know, for tiny ones, or for sophisticated adults. And its chunky 5 1/2 by 7 1/2 inch format is a pleasure in the hand.
5. Stuart Little (1945)
In an obscure footnote somewhere in the middle of The Annotated Charlotte’s Web (1995), I confess that, in fact, Stuart Little (1945) is E. B. White’s book closest to my heart. I love the picaresque tale of the “little boy who happened to look like a mouse”—White’s own correction whenever someone referred to Stuart as “a mouse.” Tiny Stuart’s nonchalantly reported birth to Mrs. Frederick C. Little, which in later editions was termed Stuart’s “arrival”, is one of the best beginnings to a novel that I know. And as to his poignant infatuation with lovely Harriet Ames, in her charming plaid skirt, and his adolescent attempt to impress her by showing off his crawl stroke, how well I know all that. I was, maybe still am, Stuart. Showing off my crawl stroke on the slightest provocation!
The charm of the book lies in its premise, the same as in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, of which Samuel Johnson, in the 18th century, said something like, “first you have some little people, then you have some big people, and the rest goes as you expect.” The basic assumption is that Stuart is mouse-size, and the rest is a logical extension: he gets whirled up into a window shade, he captains a toy sailboat in Central Park, the gasoline in his little car is filled up with an eye dropper. The possibilities must have been a delight for the author.
6. The Araboolies of Liberty Street (1989)
A book little noted, but quite marvelous, is Sam Swope’s The Araboolies of Liberty Street (1989) a heartfelt case on behalf of childhood exuberance and imagination. Liberty Street is in the iron-handed grip of General Pinch and his skinny wife, both ever on the lookout for “trouble like tulips growing or robins building nests.” When the astonishing Araboolies, with their dozens of moms, dads, aunts, porcupines, elephants, walruses, popaloks, and especially with lots of kids of all colors of the rainbow—when all these wondrous people move in next door, General and Mrs. Pinch have conniptions, and he calls in the army. But the children had a plan and, in the end, it’s the Pinches who have their comeuppance. Barry Swope’s illustrations are fine, or, good enough. I’ve always been immensely fond of this little-known book, less for its art than for its cause.
7. Noah’s Ark (1977)
Noah’s Ark books abound, of course. The very idea of the book--the animals two-by-two, their crowded life below decks, and Noah’s husbandry-- this subject is appropriately irresistible for artists. But nobody has matched Peter Spier’s Caldecott Award-winning Noah’s Ark (1977). The opening end papers depict a proud city laid waste by the military legion we can see marching out, dead cattle and humans littering the countryside, while on the facing panel, bearded Noah tends his vineyard, his family and his cattle peaceful in the visible light of God’s blessing— all that is before the book itself starts, a sort of overture to Spier’s 60 line poem written in tri-syllabic lines that march along like animals walking up a plank. The diversity of beasts betokens a playful creator (whatever his wrath now), and housekeeping on the overcrowded ark is vividly and humorously evoked in the illustrations. The ark floats through time, under everlasting gray skies and rain, till finally it comes aground on Mt. Ararat. The dove brings the olive branch that confirms the receding of the waters, and the animals de-ark, as it were, still two-by-two, except for the rabbits, who seem to have behaved shipboard according to their fecund nature. At book’s end, Noah plants his vines anew, his family tends their own chores, and over all is the rainbow of God’s covenant with human-kind.
Along with Spier’s beautiful book, I certainly would recommend Arthur Geisert’s The Ark (1988), picturing the animals and their lodgings touchingly, humorously, and with affection, all by way of Geisert’s etchings, which make for his hallmark atmospheric linearity.
8. The Wind in the Willows (1908)
Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908) may be difficult reading for children living in the era of sound bites. The sentences are long, the action is sometimes subtle, but that is hardly the book’s deficit. Grahame did tell it as bedtime stories, and then wrote it down for his small son, Alastair. To see for yourself, just for instance, read aloud the opening paragraph, or merely the second sentence that, in fact, does not have a grammatical subject. You will hear the English language as clear as a flute, as melodious and as touching as that of any author since the seventeenth century. And if you have children with any talent for listening, the adventures of the keenly delineated traits of domestic Mole, of adventurous Ratty, and of incorrigible Toad, are sufficiently harrowing that they can leave you breathless. And the friendship and the loyalty among these little beasts, and their notions of (admittedly, all male) domestic bliss, are so deep and so personal that this book for children belongs on a shelf with the works of Dickens, Twain, Thackeray. Whether you have a copy with the cunning little illustrations by Ernest H. Shepard, illustrator of Winnie the Pooh, or the original, evocative ones of Walter Rackham, you possess an entirely singular work of literature.
9. The Bat-Poet (1964)
Moving away from the cozy to patently broader issues, the children’s books of Randall Jarrell have large aspirations: “What is the nature of poetry?” and “What are the creatures on this earth, and whence have they come?” Jarrell asks in what passes for children’s books, again appropriately illustrated by Maurice Sendak, who knew the magic of their worlds.
Jarrell was one of the finest poets of our era, as well as a keen literary critic, largely responsible for the revival of interest in Rudyard Kipling in the 1940's. The Bat Poet (1964) is nothing less than one of the slyest and most thorough introductions into the nature of poetry, recounted disarmingly by a little bat, an odd fellow who is a bit solitary for a bat. He is dazzled by the bright sunlight in which he sees what his blind brothers and sisters cannot see. And he is a fledgling poet who explains his craft as he learns it to his animal companions, a blue jay, a chipmunk, and a mockingbird. By the end of the book, he has grown into an accomplished poet who can in verse set forth for us the whole world of a bat—and, not incidentally, the introduce the reader into the basic nature of poetry itself. The wonder of this bat existence is signified by Sendak’s allegorical central double spread, telling us that we are in an Edenic country of rocks and trees and lions and babies and moonshine, such as can transform the world of any small child who stumbles upon just the right story.
10. The Animal Family (1965)
One year after The Bat Poet, Jarrell wrote the sentence, “The land is new.” These are the first words the Mermaid speaks to the hunter in The Animal Family (1965), also illustrated by drawings, which Sendak calls “decorations.”
“Once upon a time, long, long ago, where the forest runs down to the ocean, a hunter lived all alone in a house made of logs. . . .” is the traditional, time-honored path by which Jarrell leads us into the magical world of a first family on earth: a hunter, a singing mermaid who talks “in a voice like water,” a baby found by the hunter, a bear cub, and a lynx who sits on the rafters “like a cloud by moonlight, staring at them with his big steady silver eyes,” himself looking like “a spell the forest had cast on the house.” At the end, the Mermaid tells her own “once upon a time” story, and we no longer know quite where we are, on earth or in time.
Before the book itself begins, there is a two line epigraph that well describes a story such as this, or any book, for that matter, that has cast a spell on you:
Say what you like, but such things do
Happen, not often, but they do happen.
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