All parents who make a habit of telling bedtime stories to their kids know that on occasion a tale composed by accident has enough nice features to make it seem worth keeping. The greatest of these improvised-and-then-impaled-on-a-card stories is, of course, “Alice in Wonderland,” extemporized on a golden afternoon and recalled at leisure later. Mark Twain, who loved the Alice books, once calling Carroll his “dream brother,” was no exception to this general truth of bedtime hopes — and anyway, no good writer ever misses a chance to scribble down a promising story. Out of the countless pillow tales that he told his two daughters, Clara and Susy — tales set off by either girl pointing at random to a picture in a magazine — one seemed promising enough to scribble down as a set of notes. This skeletal outline of incidents — almost literally skeletal, one gathers, as the random picture in this case was a medical illustration — was discovered in 2011 among the Twain papers at the University of California, Berkeley, and then, rather like John Lennon’s “Free as a Bird” demo being offered to the surviving Beatles to finish, was eventually handed to the Caldecott Medal-winning husband and wife team of Philip and Erin Stead, to see if they could make something of it.
Surely this sounds, even to those of us who revere Twain and admire the Steads, like a less than perfectly promising platform for a satisfying book. Writerly bedtime performances usually get their energy from small whimsical jokes — a prince named after the most mundane of domestic products — that cheer the tired teller and his listeners more, perhaps, than they can hope to entertain young readers a century and more later. And then Twain in particular, for all that he wrote so well about children, is not always at his best writing for children. He excels, as in “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” still perhaps our greatest fable, when most connected to the demotic and the vernacular and to the painful truths of human existence. He’s least good when, as in “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” or, for that matter, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” he is being purposely “entertaining.” The Steads, meanwhile, even to those who delight in the slightly old-fashioned, pale and limpid perfection of their style, seem oddly suited to the 19th-century vigor of the white-suited author.
If art were logical, life would be dull. In truth, the thing works. For what is now called “The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine,” Philip Stead has come up with a text that, in an unpretentious way, is almost postmodern, nearly Calvinoish in its self-consciousness about its own entangled origins. Stead has Twain appear regularly throughout his text — convincingly grim and even misanthropic, as he so often was in old age — to offer his take on the tale and comment on it, while Stead himself listens, comments himself and then is left alone to write an ending. (Twain’s sketch apparently ends abruptly with this notice about the prince’s castle: “It is guarded by 2 mighty dragons who never sleep.”)Photo
The tale as the Steads carry it over from Twain tells of the plight of Johnny, a uniquely luckless rural boy in an unnamed country — “this land has a name, but it is much too difficult to pronounce” — whose only companion is his chicken, Pestilence and Famine, a name that, it seems, Twain had previously used mordantly for the family cats. Johnny is drawn as an African-American child, a choice that has proven puzzlingly “controversial,” suggesting that it is possible to create a controversy about anything. Twain, one of the least racist men of the 19th century, would surely have seen the choice as neither “right” nor “wrong,” merely plausible and — as beautifully drawn by Erin Stead, and underplayed by Philip — the decision seems, to these eyes, neither ostentatious nor banal, just mysteriously apt. (Erin Stead has been quoted, convincingly, as saying that the choice was, in the spirit of the thing, improvised, not politicized.) The story is in any case clearly set in not in America in the 1870s or at any other time but in that different nameless realm, and so the choice does what “casting” of this kind ought to do: make us aware of the humanity of the protagonist first and of his identity only after. (How soon after we have been made aware of a character’s humanity we should become aware of his or her identity is a proper subject of controversy, and “right away” is one reasonable answer, but the order in which we discern the two should not be prescribed.)
The tale of Johnny, his chicken, a cast of subsidiary talking animals and an arbitrary-minded king whose posted edicts supply much of the story’s humor, and eventually its title, is perhaps underdramatic by the standards of modern storytelling for children. Bad fortune follows on worse. Twain is brought on to comment often, drily, on the Darwinist truth that everything dies, and the action involved in the final rescue from Twain’s unfinished dragons will not, let’s say, inspire a Pixar movie.
The book’s delights lie elsewhere. Erin Stead’s illustrations are a pleasure in themselves, spacious, sad, washy — her animals drawn with a graceful cross-hatched intelligence that seems close to the best of Wyeth. The book is also designed with great intelligence, with large areas of calming white space around both text and drawings, adding a note of pensive longing to the tale. Stead’s drawing of the queen of Johnny’s kingdom, strange and worried and beautiful, is one of the nicest drawings you will find, and so is her study of the animals seen from the back. She has the knack of drawing animals that, magically, are wholly bestial, whisker for whisker, and yet animated without seeming too cheaply humanized.
Impatient readers may find the slow processional pace of the book imperfectly stimulating. The skunk, the chicken, the king’s edicts seem less formidable than absurd, and the recurrent introduced voices of both Twain and Stead may please postmodern-minded adults more than children. But the stately unfolding of Twain’s adapted outline also feels refreshing in its rejection of the hyperhysteria and violence that fills so many children’s books now, putting in its place of a kind of charmingly paced lugubriousness. Real life, after all, takes place in the microdramatics of incident, not in the frenetic kitsch of adventures, with adversity producing neat “lessons” for the protagonists. Stories told by masters tend to reach us best by hints and understatement: Real growth, in life and nature alike, takes place almost invisibly.
And so, if the book is a bit slow and sad, well, it is the recognizable slowness and sadness of life. At the climax, Johnny says some words that the narrators assure us “could save mankind from all its silly, ceaseless violence, if only mankind could say them once in a while and make them truly meant.” They turn out to be no more than: “I am glad to know you.” A quieter ending to a quiet tale is hard to imagine, but this book, coming back from the dead, feels less ghostly than gently reanimated, and once again alive.
No comments:
Post a Comment