by Betsy Bird
But the mascot of this theme is undeniably Max from Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963), a book about a little boy who, having misbehaved, is sent to bed without his supper, sails to the land of the Wild Things, and becomes their king — only to return to a hot supper waiting for him after all, because even when you misbehave, Mama will be there for you. Selma G. Lanes called Sendak’s masterpiece “probably the most suspenseful and satisfying nursery tale of our time.” Sendak’s avatar not only turned the tables on the picture-book norms of its time period but also very simply forged ahead without Mama or Daddy. Our child hero doesn’t run to his parents in the night; he deals with his frustrations and masters his fears alone, reigning triumphantly over the Wild Things.
This was a significant shift from the era of Robert McCloskey and the like. In fact, McCloskey biographer Gary D. Schmidt notes McCloskey’s great success with picture books until the publication of Burt Dow, Deep-Water Man. It was 1963, a time of new trends, Schmidt writes, led by Sendak’s groundbreaking story of Max:
Where McCloskey had always pictured childhood as a time of exuberant joy and wonder, Sendak pictured it as a dangerous period, where the child was prey to destructive impulses, internal fears, and almost uncontrollable frustrations. Where McCloskey depicted the unity, strength, and love that comes from family, Sendak was to depict the child’s alienation from the adult world. The two visions could not have been more different, and for at least the next two decades it would be Maurice Sendak’s vision that would dominate children’s literature.
Most shocking for a lot of parents was Max’s rage against his mother — not a new emotion in the lives of children, but not one oft-depicted in books for them. Here was a picture-book creator immediately provoking young readers on page one with vicarious anger at Max’s mother. For this reason alone, the book was no stranger to controversy. Concerned parents and librarians wrote to tell Sendak he had created a book too scary for children. And they were quick to add that Max himself was hardly a worthy role model and that his bad behavior could perhaps incite similar unruliness in their own children. Esteemed child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim called the “desertion” of Max, the “worst [kind of] desertion that can threaten a child.” (Worth noting, however, is that — at the time Bettelheim made that comment — he had not actually gone so far as to read the forty-page book.) “It is not a book to be left where a sensitive child may come upon it at twilight,” remarked one librarian after the book’s publication.
Needless to say, that librarian wasn’t a member of the librarian-filled committee that eventually awarded the book the 1964 Caldecott Medal, the award granted yearly by the American Library Association to the artist of the “most distinguished American picture book for children.” Certainly the book had its adult fans, but Sendak felt that children saved it: “It was like a children’s crusade. . . . They hadn’t read the criticism [and] they couldn’t care less.” As for its detractors, its editor, Ursula Nordstrom, wisely noted that it would likely scare only a “neurotic” child or adult.
The Sendak/Krauss/Johnson Love Child
Sendak gave tremendous credit for the very existence of Where the Wild Things Are to author Ruth Krauss and her husband, author-illustrator Crockett Johnson. Johnson gave Sendak the word rumpus — for the legendary, wordless double-page spreads in the book’s center — during Sendak’s weekend visits to their home with his work-in-progress manuscript in hand. “[Ruth] turned me into the monster I became, free to express what she knew about children and the bloodlusty child — themes that had not been entertained in the publishing world. In Europe, yes, but not here. . . . [Max] was like our child.”
During this same era, Roald Dahl, a British writer of quirky adult short stories, turned his attention to children’s books and became one of the most beloved children’s authors of all time with such classics as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach. Biographer Jennet Conant revealed in 2008’s The Irregulars that Dahl was once a spy in the United States, so it’s not surprising to see an element of subterfuge in his books for children. On the surface, his novels tout old-fashioned values as sweet as. . . well, chocolate and peaches. The plots can usually be boiled down to a battle between good and evil with the kindhearted, good-doing child protagonist triumphing.
Yet adults sensed something deeper, and many critics and parents had strong objections to Dahl’s books. Writer Christine C. Behr believes this was due to his “horrific descriptions of evildoers,” not to mention the “bizarre and often gruesome sense of injustice that empowers the child hero.” In 2005 in the New Yorker, Margaret Talbot proposed that adults’ objections to Dahl’s books truly had more to do with the notion that the books subvert the adults’ expectations that they should always be in charge. As Talbot’s young son had told her, the kids get to make all the good decisions in Dahl’s tales. Talbot added, “The kinds of elaborate schemes that children are forever concocting — and that sensible adults are forever rejecting as impractical or dangerous — yield triumphant results. . . . The essence of Dahl is his willingness to let children triumph over adults.”
Though Dahl’s protagonists were rarely naughty, Max has many precocious playmates, and they grow in number over the years, never without controversy: Kay Thompson’s impudent Eloise (1955), David Shannon’s No, David! (1998), and the British Horrid Henry series (2009). Bad girls and bad boys — or at least those not simply twiddling their thumbs passively — still make kids happy. So too do delinquent dogs and fractious felines — naughty characters who may not be children but behave with a child’s sensibility. Jack Gantos’s Rotten Ralph books, now more than thirty years old, feature a very bad red cat who positively delights in disrupting life for Sarah, his child companion. And just as Sarah forgives Ralph, and Max’s mother welcomes him home with that hot bedside supper, children know that, despite their occasional dreadful behavior, their parents (in a just world) will still love them. As Selma G. Lanes wrote, “If you would truly teach young children through the books they listen to or read themselves, give them a hero who is an unregenerately bad example, a rotter through and through. Then the young audience will instinctively sympathize with him and, eventually, swallow any lesson — however conventional or goody-goody — that issues from his mouth. . . . What a relief, then, to stumble upon a character undeniably worse than oneself!”
Pushcart Debate: Favorite Subversive Children’s Book
BETSY: OK. I’m pulling out the New Zealand authors here. Mine’s Ultra-Violet Catastrophe! by Margaret Mahy. It’s about a girl and her kooky great-uncle causing major damage to their clothing while on an outing. The pictures are by Brian Froud, who specializes in weirdo fairies most of the time. Seriously.
JULIE: I’ll pick a contemporary book. Well, sort of. Florence Parry Heide’s Dillweed’s Revenge: A Deadly Dose of Magic was originally written more than forty years ago for Edward Gorey to illustrate (how I wish we’d gotten to see that), though Gorey procrastinated too long. It finally saw the light of day with Carson Ellis’s illustrations in 2010. There’s a boy named Dillweed, who has an odd blue creature named Skorped for a pet and a mysterious black box under his bed that releases a smoky monster thingy to exact revenge on lousy parenting. That about covers it.
PETER: Ellen Raskin’s Figgs & Phantoms may be the strangest, most surreal, weird-tastic-est book I’ve ever read. It features a large, eccentric clan with names like Mona Lisa Figg Newton and Uncle Kadota Figg. How eccentric are they? They have their own version of heaven, called Capri. But don’t write this book off as simply silly. It tackles some humongous issues: death, race relations, and personal identity. And threaded throughout the novel is a wonderful appreciation for classic literature. How much of an impact has this book had on my life? Sometimes when I hear “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” I find myself singing the Figg family theme song: “Whatsoever, howsoever, / Wheresover it may be, / All Figgs go to Capri!”
THE BAD BOYS OF PLAYBOY
; On the surface, Playboy, founded in 1953, would probably be the last place you’d consider finding the future stars of the picture-book world. But it was there that the great Harper editor Ursula Nordstrom spotted the cartoons of Shel Silverstein and liked what she saw. Silverstein’s work for the magazine, for which he wrote travel pieces between 1957 and 1968, gave him a level of fame he had never managed to reach on his own. He was meeting people from a variety of creative fields, and few could have predicted his meteoric rise in the world of children’s books. For children of a certain generation, thoughts of Shel Silverstein conjure up his creepy photographs located on the back of his books. As Jeff Kinney wrote in Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw (2009), “Shel Silverstein looks more like a burglar or a pirate than a guy who should be writing books for kids.” But Silverstein somehow managed to straddle the divide between his role as edgy Playboy-artist personality and his friend-of-children persona. This from the man who had once brought the world Uncle Shelby’s ABZ Book. Originally published in 1961, this lovely little work of subversion was reprinted after 1985 in later editions with the warning label “A Primer for Adults Only,” lest any tender young minds be suckered in by its flagrant (and hilarious) jokes. And, yes, portions of the book did originally appear in Playboy‚ hence the adult humor. Silverstein himself even admitted that the book wasn’t really meant for kids but rather for adults and parents who might need a good laugh. Still, the book found its way into the hands of kids who not only loved it but also recognized immediately what it was doing. Los Angeles Times reviewer Robert R. Kirsch even went so far as to change his mind about the book when he realized that his children got the satire. As he put it, “they realized that merely because something was printed in a book, it was not necessarily true.”
Silverstein had his own ideas about what was and was not appropriate for children. For one thing, it really chapped his hide when parents would plop their kids down in front of a television program — but ban fairy tales from the home for being too violent: “They think the kids shouldn’t hear about giants and a wolf eating somebody up, but they let them sit in front of that TV set for twelve hours a day, just to keep them quiet, where they can watch all kinds of horror and cruel murders. . . . But watch out for those fairy tales.” This came from the man who would horrify thousands of parents and delight even more children with poems of cannibalism, man-eating snakes, skinless men, and sheer unending towers of garbage. Not surprisingly, when Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends was published in November 1974, it was almost immediately banned by school libraries, because there were parents who believed that its poetry would entice their sweet little angels to disobey parents, teachers, and other members of authority. Yet, rather than back off from potentially controversial material, Silverstein continued to write for both children and adults. Incidentally, he told Harper that if they had any plans to publish his children’s book A Light in the Attic, they would also have to publish his adult book, The Adventures of a Boy and His Penis (otherwise known as Different Dances).
Editor Ursula Nordstrom might not ever have met Silverstein had it not been for the intervention of a similarly shocking and talented subversive at the time. Tomi Ungerer, a Frenchman who moved to New York from Strasbourg in 1956, is another story altogether. Amanda Renshaw, Phaidon’s editorial director, said of him, “He’s an adult who’s interested in sex and politics and also someone who’s immensely talented at telling stories for children. . . . And the fact that he’s open and honest about everything has really gone against him. I think people just aren’t used to children’s book authors being that honest.”
Ungerer helped arrange the first meeting between Nordstrom and Silverstein, and he had a fair amount of success with his own picture books. Though he’d illustrated for Esquire, Life, Harper’s Bazaar, the Village Voice, and the New York Times, Ungerer — who once wrote, “[my books] are. . . subversive, because I think that all children are subversive. They see hypocrisy, and they know the truth of just about everything by instinct” — also created some of the strangest and most enjoyable works for children. On the one hand, you’ve got The Three Robbers, a rather sweet book, and on the other, the magnificently strange The Beast of Monsieur Racine. In his spare time, Ungerer spoke out against the Vietnam War, for which some folks pegged him a Communist. Then in 1969, he self-published a work of erotica called Fornicon, and that was it. It was all over. In an interview with the New York Times in July 2008, he stated that once the book was published, children’s publishers and libraries wanted nothing to do with him. “Americans cannot accept that a children’s book author should do erotic work or erotic satire. . . . Even in New York it just wasn’t acceptable.”
Ungerer had come face-to-face with a hard truth already known to many American authors and illustrators of children’s fare. You might believe you are able to compartmentalize your adult work from your children’s work. Your audiences, however, may prove to be far less flexible. Once a children’s author-illustrator, always a children’s author-illustrator.
Later interpretations of Ungerer’s work would restore some of his reputation, though by that point he was no longer publishing in America. Barbara Bader’s American Picturebooks from Noah’s Ark to The Beast Within (1976) would call The Three Robbers a “satire of evil and, in time, of society’s evils: gluttony, for instance, and avarice, pomposity, callousness. . . . There is a real badness in Ungerer’s new world and unvarnished stupidity; as there was once in the purview of Hoffmann.” More recently, Selma G. Lanes would invoke Piper Paw in Through the Looking Glass (2004), calling the feline hero of Ungerer’s No Kiss for Mother “the orneriest, most self-centered and willful hero to hit kids’ picture books since the mid-nineteenth-century heyday of Struwwelpeter . . . . Among Ungerer’s endearing qualities are a total candor and lack of condescension.” Hoffmann and Ungerer continue to be perceived as having been cut from the same cloth.
IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD MAGAZINE
Subversive magazines like Playboy might have spoken to grown-ups, but if you were a kid in the ’50s and ’60s, there was really only one socially unacceptable magazine for you. Supremely sneaky and shocking stuff, MAD was the first magazine to tell young people it was OK to regard those in authority with suspicion. And those in authority were more than happy to provide reasons for suspicion when they discovered MAD’s subversive style and found it unacceptable. “MAD was the first full flowering of comic-book geekdom,” writes Gerard Jones, “a comic that celebrated itself as ‘trash’ produced by ‘the usual gang of idiots’ that twisted and exaggerated and wallowed in every excess of the comics and the cheesy, overheated adolescent world that made them.” Embraced by “a generation that hadn’t known how badly it had been craving just this kind of laugh,” MAD took off, yet another instance of a younger generation undermining the values held so dear by “the man.” It was also the “wising up that came with MAD’s skepticism. . . the kind of media savviness that marks the end of childhood” that made it so pivotal, write Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly.
An unexpected result of the MAD generation was its influence on the boys and girls that would later grow up to write picture books themselves. The first National Ambassador of Children’s Literature, Jon Scieszka, took different lessons from his MAD experiences:
I think my pals and I discovered MAD magazine when we were in fifth or sixth grade. And what a discovery it was. In Flint, Michigan, we bought our comics and candy from the local drugstore. Every week, we would hand over our nickels and dimes to a scary-looking guy in a white coat and glasses for the latest edition of Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, and GI Combat. But then one day someone picked up a copy of a comic that was making fun of comics. It was MAD. And I instantly fell for Alfred E. Neuman, “Spy vs. Spy,” parody, satire, and poking fun at all things pretentious, pompous, and deceitful. In sixth grade, one of my pals made the mistake of bringing his new copy of MAD into school. We were taught by nuns. And the nuns, without exception, viewed comic books as
trash. Some of the nuns went even further. They believed comics to be an instrument of the devil. In the lunchroom (where we imagined we were safe), Tim K. was reading me the lyrics to a fantastic parody of the theme song of the TV show Bonanza. We thought it was so hysterical that we didn’t even see the nun swoop in, grab the MAD, and toss it in the lunchroom garbage can. No explanation was given. No appeal was possible. And that’s when I knew for sure that MAD was something dangerously good.
Author-illustrator Michael Rex believes that the effects of MAD are long-lasting:
Recently, MAD magazine started publishing four times a year, instead of monthly. Sure, it may have something to do with the economy, but in my mind it’s really because MAD has done its job. It has made us look at politics, family, and mostly media in entirely different ways. At this point, there’s just no way it can be as radical as it has been in the past. It has raised generation after generation of kids who can question, and laugh at, almost everything.