D'Aulaires Book of Greek Myths

by Ingri d'Aulaire

  The d’Aulaires visited Graves and his family on the island of Majorca, in the Mediterranean, “so we could look at each other and talk things over.” They knew and admired Graves’s work and were hopeful about the project—up to a point. They acknowledged from the outset that their idea for the book “was never a collection of myths with our illustrations, but a personal approach and a try to make the gods, the halfgods, the demons and the wood sprites come alive for children.” But they hurried to add that they “would feel very honoured, to work together with you—and between us we might work out a way that would give us all freedom of expression—or we might not—from your side or ours.”

  The d’Aulaires with Robert Graves (center) on the island of Majorca

  Over the next several years, which included a number of visits, the families became friends and even had an incident that became a cherished d’Aulaire family story: One evening, Graves was having dinner with the d’Aulaires in their rented house in Geneva, Switzerland, where they were taking one of their frequent working vacations in Europe to recharge their creative spirits. As they were relaxing after the meal, Graves sat back in an easy chair and, in doing so, tipped over a floor lamp. The shade from the lamp fell onto his head. According to the d’Aulaires’ son Nils, it was “your classic party joke, except it wasn’t intended as a joke at all. My father was laughing so hard that tears rolled down his cheek, and he grabbed some paper and charcoal and quickly sketched Graves sitting in an easy chair with a lampshade over his face.”

  Nils remembers hearing from his parents that Graves was not at all amused at being the subject of the “joke.” Still, the project moved ahead. Graves gave the d’Aulaires a manuscript for the book, and they worked on the project over the next few years. In the end, though, they wrote to Graves in 1959 to say that they “were not able to make yours and our version of the Greek stories into one great book.” As they candidly told Graves, “All we succeeded in was to waste time, at least a year of our lives, which are so short anyway, and to make a mixmash in which our two versions killed each other.” With their wry, acerbic wit, they commiserated with Graves, “Well, there goes our common great dream of security in our old age, as Doubleday so optimistically prophesized, but we still feel that it is better to sacrifice the security of our old age to the joy in our work.”

  The d’Aulaires on a research trip to Greece

  Their editor agreed that the collaboration wasn’t working, and she offered the d’Aulaires a contract to do the book on their own, as they had originally intended. This fortunate turn of events provided the couple with enough money to make numerous trips to Greece from Switzerland over the next year. As they had done with their other books, the d’Aulaires did extensive research, steeping themselves in their subject, visiting libraries and museums, and sketching the landscape, ruins, and artifacts of ancient Greek civilization.

  When the d’Aulaires returned to their home in Wilton, Connecticut, they began the challenging work of transforming their detailed research and the many sketchbooks of images from Greece into a book. They had been told by Doubleday that, to save printing costs for the book, they could no longer use their color-lithography process, which had been their signature style. Lithography, which literally means “stone writing” in Greek, involves using a grease pencil to draw pictures on limestone blocks several inches thick, weighing 75 to 150 pounds. Each picture is composed of four drawings on four separate blocks, one for black ink and one for each of the primary colors—red, yellow, and blue. The ink is rolled onto each block, and the color adheres to the corresponding parts of the illustration. Then the colors are printed on paper, one on top of the other, to create the finished picture.

  In their Wilton, Connecticut, studio preparing lithographs for Benjamin Franklin

  With George C. Miller (left), the d’Aulaires’ lithographer, creating initial proofs from lithographic stones. Miller was considered one of America’s great printmakers and is credited with spreading the interest in lithography.

  Lithography is a complex and demanding artistic technique, but the d’Aulaires had done all of the illustrations in their other books this way, and they had filled the basement of their home with shelf after shelf of these cumbersome blocks of limestone. For each book, the blocks had been transported by truck to the printer on Long Island, New York, and then brought back to Connecticut for storage. All but a very few stones are, to this day, still carefully shelved in the basement of the d’Aulaires’ Wilton home. Their eldest son, Per Ola, estimates that the stones comprise an archive that weighs some forty thousand pounds!

  A collection of the d’Aulaires’ lithographic stones. Each stone can weigh up to 150 pounds!

  When he was a teenager, Per Ola had assisted his parents with this heavy lifting, and they had even thanked him for his help by dedicating D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths to him. Their younger son, Nils, occupied a somewhat different place in the d’Aulaires’ daily working routine. In the copy of the book they gave to him, they joked: “To Nils Maarten, this first copy of the first edition (without whose help this book would have been finished one year earlier) from his parents.” Explaining this inscription, Nils recalls the family’s morning habits: “We would have breakfast together, and then they’d go to work. I learned as a young child that when they were working, they were not to be disturbed. It was a constant, managed presence so that they could get their work done, but I was not always successful in not bothering them.”

  Nils did, however, play a key role in helping his parents in their work—as a critic rather than a lifter of Bavarian limestone blocks. In an interview in 1959, Edgar Parin d’Aulaire told the newspaper columnist Art Buchwald that Nils, who was ten years old at the time, had the final say in everything they did. “If he says it’s not good,” Edgar reported, “we throw it in the fireplace. If he says it’s good, it doesn’t matter what we think of it, we keep it in.”

  Four cutout paper horses used by the d’Aulaires to practice the position of the horses on the book’s jacket. Says Per Ola d’Aulaire: “They frequently cut out portions of sketches, both for covers and illustrations, moving elements around and temporarily attaching them with Scotch tape on an image they were working on to see how things looked composition-wise.”

  For the d’Aulaires, the radical change of artistic methods in D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths involved abandoning their use of lithographic stones in exchange for sheets of clear acetate plastic. With this technique—as with lithographic stones—the drawings with each color ink are printed separately, one on top of the other, as the paper passes through a series of four printing presses. Nils recalls that his parents would have preferred to continue using stone lithography because of the earthy textures it gave to their pictures, but “they were not anyone to cry over spilt milk; they just took it in stride and moved on.” The d’Aulaires were highly disciplined, hardworking artists—sharing an ethos that had been with them from the beginning of their creative life together.

  The d’Aulaires in the Montrouge neighborhood of Paris, 1926

  Ingri was born in Norway and had deep family roots in Nordic culture. She and Edgar spent many summers at Ingri’s family farm in central Norway, where, as Nils observes, his father “fell in love with everything that had to do with Norway because it was the first time in his life that he felt totally at home.” Edgar was Swiss, the son of artists. His parents had divorced and he had endured an unhappy, unsettled childhood. He and Ingri had met in the mid-1920s at art school in Munich, Germany, where they had been students of the artist Hans Hofmann. Ingri and Edgar fell in love, married, and began their bohemian life together as struggling artists in Paris. In 1929, they immigrated to America, where they lived in New York City as struggling artists in Brooklyn and, later, Manhattan, before moving to Connecticut. Edgar created illustrations for other people’s books while Ingri found commissions to paint portraits. As their son Nils notes, they took these jobs “to eat and pay the rent” so that they could both cont
inue to work on their own art. Neither had any interest in illustrating advertisements, which is often how artists make a living. Edgar would later quip to Art Buchwald about commercial artists, “All they know how to do is paint a good potato salad.”

  Yet “even though they didn’t have much money,” Nils explains, his parents “loved to entertain.” Nils remembers his mother as a living expression of the famous folktale “Stone Soup,” in which a big bowl of soup is created by many people coming together to share ingredients. Ingri “had learned to cook in Paris, and she could take the barest of ingredients and turn it into something interesting. But more importantly, they loved to be around people, and they sort of collected people from very different walks of life.” One person who came with a friend to one of the d’Aulaires’ festive parties was Anne Carroll Moore, an influential but intimidating book reviewer and the head children’s librarian at the New York Public Library. Moore saw the d’Aulaires’ paintings hung or stacked all over their small apartment and urged them to consider doing children’s books. Moore was a visionary force in children’s books at the time, and this chance encounter eventually led to the d’Aulaires’ careers as children’s book artists.

  From their first books—The Magic Rug (1931) and Ola (1932)—the d’Aulaires were highly focused, dedicated artists. “They worked ten to twelve hours a day,” their son Nils remembers. “One of them would start a drawing, and the other one would make changes and fix it, and it went back and forth. My mother was the typist in the family, and she, in a sense, held the pen. She would start on something, and then they would read it together, cross things out and make corrections and try to get the flow of the language and the narrative logic right. They did dozens of drafts of their books and multiple sketches toward an ultimate picture that they would use for the book.” This process was firmly in place as they distilled the material from their research for D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths.

  Their visits to Greece inspired Ingri and Edgar to fill their illustrations for D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths with light. They did not leave out the shadows of Greek mythology, and they portrayed many of the darker episodes with brown backgrounds in the illustrations. Yet what is striking about many pictures in the book is the vivid color the d’Aulaires used to convey the bright, sunny yellows, the vibrant greens and lavenders, and the cerulean blues that they had experienced in Greece.

  Another distinct quality of this book is the d’Aulaires’ adaptation of classical art forms, such as figures that appear on vase paintings and relief sculptures, to portray the pantheon of goddesses and gods who inhabited the ancient Greek imagination. We can see this clearly in the lovely procession of the Muses, from Erato to Calliope, flowing across the double-page spread in the center of the book, each holding an instrument or other object associated with her sphere of influence.

  The d’Aulaires’ research for the book was thorough, and they were careful to depict lesser-known Greek figures along with the famous ones. Among the important yet often overlooked gods of the ancient Greeks is Hermes—the trickster, messenger, and conductor of souls to the afterlife. He appears in the pages of D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths as a golden child in a basket, full of joy and mischief. In another half-page illustration, he is serenading his mother, Maia, in her cave, playing the lyre he created from a tortoise’s shell. Later still, we see him—with his winged hat and shoes, bearing his herald’s wand—as he showers humanity with his many gifts, among them the musical scale, writing, and prophecies about the future. There is a playful, radiant cheerfulness in the d’Aulaires’ depiction of this legendary trickster god: their Hermes is lighter than air.

  Sketch of Hermes and his mother in the cave, on paper and acetate. You can see the final illustration on page 52.

  D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths is full of compelling pictures. Here is Persephone’s dark descent into Hades and, in a companion illustration, her eventual return to her mother amidst giant, glowing flowers and dandelion puffs that hover in the air like golden orbs. Aphrodite rises on a cloud of sea foam; the three Graces await her arrival on the island of Cythera while the sky is lit by rays of sunlight. The d’Aulaires offer the reader a swirling portrait of the winds Boreas, Notus, and Zephyr, showing each of these forces trying to break free from the cave in which Zeus has confined them. Pandora is in the book as well, opening her jar and releasing the miseries that will forever plague the world. Each one has a surreal face with an accompanying dipinto, a caption used by the ancient Greek vase painters, to remind readers what they are seeing: Distrust, Gossip, Deceit, Despair.

  One of the most captivating of the illustrations in D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths is that of the creation of life on Earth, when Gaea, the goddess of the Earth, first sees and falls in love with Uranus, the god of the sky. The d’Aulaires bring a reality to this dreamlike vision: Gaea is a person with a beautiful green face, her body dissolving into the rolling hills and mountains of the landscape. Blue Uranus hovers above her, with a sprinkling of multicolored stars ornamenting his hair and beard and filling the sky. In this remarkable picture, old meets new, and the ancient myths feel entirely modern.

  Children are not spared the darker stories in D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. Oedipus, the riddle solver, appears to fulfill the ancient, tragic curse that has been placed upon him; Orpheus, the brilliant musician, fails in his quest to bring his dead wife back from the underworld; Sisyphus is doomed to ceaselessly roll his rock up the hill, only to have it roll down again; Phaëthon, son of the sun god, Helios, can’t control the horses of his father’s chariot and sends it and himself crashing to Earth; Daedalus’s son Icarus, despite his father’s warnings, carelessly flies too close to the sun and falls to his death from the sky. And the d’Aulaires bring it all to life—fearlessly, openly, without dumbing down or sugarcoating.

  There is much to discover in this book about the myths themselves through the vital power of the stories and their all-too-human feelings. In the hands of sensitive storytellers like the d’Aulaires, we see how moving, strange, and tragic these tales can be. It is a fluid, unsettled world in which impossible things are commonplace. On the striking double-page spread at the end of the book, only the head and one hand of the once-colossal Zeus remain, fallen like a broken piece of sculpture on the sands of time, while cast above him is the dream chart that is the eternal legacy of the gods: the constellations of the zodiac.

  In many respects, D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths became a capstone in a long artistic career. The advance and royalties from the book enabled the d’Aulaires to buy an old farm in South Royalton, Vermont, that they used during the summers. (Their son Nils eventually inherited it and still lives there.) Even though they spent many years in America, becoming naturalized citizens in the 1930s, the d’Aulaires’ spirits depended on Europe, and Scandinavia in particular, for regular infusions of creative energy. They frequently traveled to Norway in the summers and often took side trips to Paris and other cultural centers. But with the passing of Ingri’s parents, and the Norwegian farm’s migrating into the hands of others in the family, the d’Aulaires sought to re-create their summers in Norway in the Green Mountains of Vermont, where they could establish their own bit of Norway on this side of the Atlantic.

  When they had finished the renovations of the house in 1965, the d’Aulaires followed the Norwegian tradition of naming their home. They called it Upper Lea, and over the lintel of the front door, they hung a hand-carved sign that playfully echoed their lives spent creating books for children. It read:

  THIS IS THE HOUSE THAT BOOKS BUILT.

  The sign over the door of the d’Aulaires’ house in Vermont, where their son Nils still lives

  Nils d’Aulaire has remarked that his parents always felt fortunate that they could work so long, and with such intense delight, at something they loved doing. Years earlier, Ingri had told Art Buchwald, “We discovered it was a decent way to make a living. Instead of painting bad portraits, we could paint as well a
s we wanted to. We also discovered that when you paint for children, you don’t have to stoop. Children appreciate good art. They instinctively know what has quality.”

  D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths was widely praised when it first appeared. Despite the many books about Greek mythology that have followed, it remains the most beloved, for both the pictures and the lyrical rhythms of the d’Aulaires’ writing, which retells these ancient stories with such directness and style. D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths is a cornucopia of beautiful art and exquisitely told tales that will live on our shelves and in our imaginations for many years to come. In this fresh new edition, it is, quite simply, like having received one of Hermes’ mythic gifts.

  John Cech

  Director of the Center for Children’s Literature and Culture, University of Florida

  D’AULAIRE SKETCHBOOK

  The sketches on these pages are reproduced from the notebook the d’Aulaires used on a research trip to Greece before starting D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths.

  Two early cover sketch concepts

  Winged goblins from the underworld. They appear in two scenes of Hades, on page 103 and pages 126-127.

  Four urns. Compare this sketch with the final image on page 142 and you’ll see that many of the decorative details are identical.

  Sketch of a marble throne at the Theater of Dionysus in Athens. Similarly ornate thrones can be found on pages 68–69.

  Ancient Greek sandals