by Roger Angell
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Many friends of mine, I discovered, have kept the Steig books on a special shelf in their memories even after the prime consumers of the books have grown up. Mention a title or a hero to them, and their faces light up. “They’re so clear!” is a common response, and the erstwhile reader-aloud sounds no different from a contemporary young parent in the midst of the same happy experience. “I think Elizabeth loved ‘Gorky Rises’ best,” a newspaper editor said to me the other day, speaking of her eight-year-old and an intrepid Steigian frog aviator. “All that floating and zooming around.”
Other friends recalled Steig himself, along with the books; there seemed to be no dividing line. Warren Miller, a younger colleague of Steig’s at the magazine, and himself the illustrator of two works for children, said, “I love his books. I remember him years and years ago, in the Village. I’d be playing my trumpet in some jazz cellar and I’d see him sitting over in the corner, listening intensely.” Miller hunched over slightly and drew in his elbows. “You know, he’s always paid such attention. And I like the writing in his books almost as much as the illustrations. There’s one phrase I’ve never forgotten, from ‘Amos and Boris,’ when the whale is stranded on the beach—”
“ ‘Breaded with sand,’ ” I said, breaking in.
“That’s it!” he cried. “ ‘Breaded with sand’—what a writer!”
Frank Modell, a New Yorker artist and children’s-book writer who is a little closer in age to Steig than the others I talked to, said, “He’s always worn dark clothes and sneakers. Even among the artists, he was informal. I always felt that he stood aside from the rest of us and watched. He and I used to live near each other in the Village—he had a place just off Sixth Avenue. I was there one day when he suddenly told me that he liked his apartment better than mine. I was living on Ninth Street then, in a ninth-and-tenth-floor apartment that had a terrace and a view, so I was surprised. Steig drew me to a window in his place and pointed, and then I realized that we were on the second floor and that what he saw, just below us, was men and women and kids and dogs and traffic going by. It was as if he had a television set that brought in the whole world.”
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IN STEIG’S BOOKS, CLARITY and comedy feel as easily conjoined as words and pictures, and a little magic sometimes helps as well. In “The Amazing Bone,” the garrulous object that Pearl puts in her pocket previously belonged to a witch, from whom it picked up almost more powers than it knows what to do with. After it has disposed of that gourmet fox, it stays on with her and her family: “Pearl always took it to bed when she retired, and the two chatterboxes whispered together until late in the night. Sometimes the bone put Pearl to sleep by singing, or by imitating soft harp music…. They all had music whenever they wanted it, and sometimes even when they didn’t.”
Foxes fare poorly in the Steigwerk, usually after a brief losing battle with their consciences. “I regret having to do this to you,” the fox says to Pearl as he totes her toward the cookstove. “It’s nothing personal.” In “Doctor De Soto,” the fox is grateful to the tiny mouse-dentist who has pulled his bad tooth. (The deft, white-smocked D.D.S. does the extraction with a winch, working, with his wife-hygienist, from the top of a tall ladder.) “I really shouldn’t eat them,” he muses. “On the other hand, how can I resist?” Fortunately, De Soto is a top mouse in his field, and he requires only the magic of science to handle the situation. Dentists can do anything these days.
Steig’s second book, “Sylvester and the Magic Pebble,” which won the Caldecott Medal (the most prestigious American prize for juvenile-book illustration) when it appeared, in 1969, is still his masterpiece. In the story, Sylvester, a young donkey, collects pebbles for a hobby and one day comes upon a strange red one, which has the power to grant him any wish. On the way home, he encounters a lion and saves himself by rashly wishing to turn into a rock. It happens, and then he is stuck—a rock in a field, with no way to wish himself back or to call out for help. He is searched for everywhere, mourned by his parents, almost forgotten, but then one day…The inexorable quiet of the tale is deepened by the simplicity of the underpopulated landscape illustrations: the rock that is Sylvester seen under a blazing firmament of stars; the rock in a winter snowstorm; the rock in the springtime. The text is just as spare: “Night followed day and day followed night over and over again. Sylvester on the hill woke up less and less often…. He felt he would be a rock forever and he tried to get used to it. He went into an endless sleep.”
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The book is about death, nothing less, but it is death in the way that young children first think about it. What can it be like to be still and not speak and never move again? Steig himself does not entirely agree with this interpretation. “I think Sylvester’s being that rock has to do with his relations with his parents, too,” he says. “Sylvester inside that rock is an armored creature, but when he realizes how loved he is, he can come back. Coming back to a family in the end is natural for kids. These things are symbolic, but never in a thought-out way.”
Steig is an artist of sunlight (in contrast to Maurice Sendak, for instance, who is an artist of night), but he has a fondness for starry skies and the long thoughts of small creatures alone under the heavens. Amos, lying out on the deck of his sloop, the Rodent, thinks himself “a little speck of a living thing in the vast living universe,” and then, “overwhelmed by the beauty and mystery of everything,” rolls off his boat and into the sea. Dominic, off on his own adventures, is susceptible to moonlight, at one point forgetting his doggy daytime self to the point where he declares to the heavens, “Oh, Life, I am yours! Whatever it is you want of me, I am ready to give.” It’s all too much for him, and he falls into a good, long bout of howling.
“Dominic,” which was Steig’s seventh book, was an achievement of a different order. Encouraged by Michael di Capua, his editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Steig set out to write a novel, rather than a book told largely through pictures, and he pulled it off with élan. It is illustrated with lively pen-and-ink instead of his customary watercolors, but the writing picks up the added burden without strain. It’s a book for slightly older kids—to be read, perhaps, rather than read aloud—and part of why it works is that Steig never writes down, never patronizes his audience. The younger books are full of words (“discombobulated,” “lunatic,” “sinuous”) that a parent may have to stop and explain; and in the books for, say, ten-year-olds, “palsied,” “sequestration,” “ensconced,” “circumstantial,” “rubescent,” and the like show up, with no more than a trail of context to help out. Good writers and painters, I suspect, compliment their audiences by expecting only the best of them; the responding thrill of understanding is what art is all about.
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IT IS CLEAR THAT Steig’s stories and small creatures speak for him. It’s harder to say how his line and his opalescent watercolors do the same thing. Perhaps because he puts colors and inks directly on paper, with no preliminary sketches or pencillings, his paintings always feel as if he had just placed them in your hands. The Steigian palette and medium, in any case, shift freely from book to book, in response to each new story. “The Real Thief,” his third—and shortest—novel, concerns a sentry goose wrongfully accused of stealing the royal jewels, and its darker tones, of injustice and suffering and forgiveness, are conveyed in ink and a gray watercolor wash. Pearl, of “The Amazing Bone,” is Steig’s youngest ingénue, scarcely more than a baby; the world is new and fresh to her, and what she sees are springtime swards of yellow, lavender, and the palest green. When she is accosted by a band of small brigands, possibly cats and dogs, they are wearing brilliantly colored Japanese masks.
“He’s such an observant artist,” Frank Modell said to me. “Everybody thinks that people with artistic ability can draw anything, but that isn’t true. You can’t draw a dog unless you know dogs. His pictures are full of things that other artists avoid—horses, dogs, rocks. He knows them all. Steig has never
been afraid of being alone—you can tell that.”
Lee Lorenz, Steig’s New Yorker art editor and longtime colleague (and fellow children’s-book writer, as well), says, “I don’t know how he does it. You’re never conscious of the medium, but it has occurred to me that the only romantic thing about him may be his colors. He’s not circumspect, and his approach is so personal that you can’t learn or borrow from him. You can only admire. Along with Arno, Addams, and Steinberg, he’s one of the heroes around here.”
There was an echo in this—a clang of considerable proportions. Just days before my conversation with Lee Lorenz, I had been talking with Mary Pope Osborne, who has written more than thirty books for children (she is also the president of the Authors Guild), and when I told her that I was writing a piece about Steig’s children’s works she said, “You know, he’s been a hero for a whole generation of writers like me. Somehow, he managed to accomplish the feat of writing in a strange and different way that you instantly understood. I never knew how he did it. He helped me take chances with my own writing. For me, he’s been like E. B. White and Arnold Lobel and James Marshall—the band of young people’s writers that I always put together in my mind. I wanted to be in their company.”
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LATE IN DECEMBER, I pressed a call on Bill Steig and his wife, Jeanne, at their roomy, sun-filled apartment in the Back Bay section of Boston; they moved there in 1992, giving up what had been their home for many years in Kent, Connecticut, after they reached an age when they foresaw that driving would become difficult. Steig says he does not miss Kent or country life at all. Jeanne is an artist, too, busy at the moment with a collection of small panels containing elegantly detailed near-Romanesque figures which she assembles from street-found bits of wood and metal. (She has also been a writer, supplying light-verse texts for three books that she and Bill did together.) Their place feels stuffed with art, but there’s not much Bill Steig on the walls. “He won’t have it—it makes him uneasy,” Jeanne said. “He says his work is made to be reproduced.” She did point out a couple of small, bright tapestries that have his unmistakable touch. “He had to have something to do while we were watching the Watergate hearings,” she said. “He invented the stitching as he went along.”
Bill Steig attended the National Academy of Design as a youth, but he claims not to have learned anything there. “I enjoyed playing touch football in the yard,” he said. He is short and solid-looking, with blue eyes and a calm, workmanlike air. His hair, still in a boyish, upstanding brush, is gray now, but he doesn’t look like a man in his eighties—or a man of any particular age. He looks like a student. He speaks quietly, in tentative sentences, sometimes throwing in an unexpected question or a fresh idea that imparts a swervy, back-roads feeling to the conversation.
“I like change,” he said at one point. “But I try not to do it deliberately. I’m trying to have fun. I used to use different materials a lot—try thicker pens or brushes, or bamboo pens—with the idea that that’d make me change. If the pen stutters on the page, that’s a new thing.” He said that finishing drawings for the children’s books was sometimes daunting for him, because he had to put the same characters down on the page again and again.
He got into children’s books in the mid-sixties, at the urging of a fellow New Yorker artist, Bob Kraus, whose entrepreneurial fervor also inspired juvenile books from colleagues like Charles Addams, Whitney Darrow, and Lorenz. (Nowadays, New Yorker artists become children’s-book authors in even greater numbers, and a stroll through the juvenile section of a bookstore can turn up works by the likes of Warren Miller, Ed Koren, Frank Modell, Roz Chast, and—in brilliant profusion—James Stevenson.) “Bob Kraus got me to write ‘Roland,’ which was great for me, because it got me out of advertising work,” Steig said. “I was almost in my sixties and I was supporting a lot of people.”
I said that family seemed to be a recurring chord in his books.
“I’ve always felt that family was a nuisance,” he said. “My parents were very dependent—in fact, I supported them all my life. When I started working, instead of going out in the world I had to begin supporting my family. But I did it with good will.”
Steig, who grew up in the Bronx and still carries a whisper of it in his consonants, was the third of four brothers. His father was a housepainter. After Steig finished writing “Dominic,” it came to him one day that the spirit of its eager, adventurous hero was a portrait of his father. “I was never read to as a child,” Steig told me, “but reading was big back then. We had no radio, no TV. The movies were big, too. We went to the Nickelettes—so called because you could get in for a nickel. There was one of them that would let two of you in for a nickel if you sat in the same seat. We used to go to the library—only we said ‘liberry’—on Tremont Avenue, where they allowed you to take out two novels and two nonfiction books on each visit. Sometimes you tried to find a novel that looked like nonfiction, so you could beat the rule.”
“Were you a street kid?” I asked.
“Sure, I was, along with the other guys in the Claremont A.C.,” he said. “My part of the Bronx was between Crotona Park and Claremont Park, but the gang was just the boys who lived in our building. We were very small kids. We admitted a couple of girls later on—Sophie Kozanski and Pearl Bimlich—and then we called it the Claremont Athletic and Social Club.”
He seemed surprised when I said I felt that these kids seemed familiar to me, but then he brightened up and said, “Oh, yeah, sure—‘Small Fry’ came from all that. And maybe Pearl, in ‘The Amazing Bone,’ came from Pearl Bimlich. On the other hand, Jeanne and I had a dog named Pearl when we lived in Kent, a dog that died just before we moved up here.” He paused, thinking it over. “Maybe the dog was named after Pearl Bimlich, too.”
Steig, one notices, is never guarded in conversation but never loquacious; he seems unwilling to draw attention to himself by sounding wise or consequential. He said at one point that he had enjoyed writing “The Real Thief,” because it dealt with more difficult and more adult ideas—his only book with a message. “Unfortunately, I made a mistake in it,” he added at once. “The second half of it goes back in time and repeats the same events in a different context. It confuses things. I ran into the same thing once in a Conrad book I was reading—as an adult, I mean. Then I had to go and give kids the same problem. As somebody once said, you’ve got to remember that you’re writing for kids—otherwise, you might end up writing ‘War and Peace.’ ”
We had moved into the dining room by now, and the three of us were demolishing a luncheon salad, with beer and pickles and Italian bread on the side. Steig suddenly said, “Are you the kind of person who pays attention to birthdays and anniversaries?” It was one of his swerves. I said yes, I was, and Jeanne, across from me, began to laugh. “Our anniversary was yesterday,” she said.
“I knew it was around the end of the year,” Bill said cheerfully.
Jeanne broke the piece of bread she was holding in half and handed a morsel to him. “Happy anniversary, Bill,” she said.
“What are your feelings about Picasso?” he asked me, chewing.
I did a quick inventory and ventured that he was clearly the premier artist of my lifetime—the right answer, I learned later on, because Picasso, another artist who thrived on change, has been Steig’s artistic idol, his one and only. Steig once ended an extended friendship with a man who’d expressed some revisionist doubts about the Master.
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MY VISIT WAS FLYING away very quickly, and I did not want to overstay. Steig had told me that he suffers from emphysema, which saps his energy. “Some days, I go to my workroom and just do a crossword puzzle,” he said. His attention, I noticed, did not weary, for our conversation had also ranged to sports (he misses the Giants—the New York football Giants—on television now that he’s moved to Boston) and to his children: his son, Jeremy, a celebrated jazz flutist; and his daughters, Lucy, who is a psychologist and a painter, and Maggie, an actress now also
employed as a party planner, who lives in Boston. Frank Modell had told me that he recalled Steig’s talking about Jeremy one day, many years earlier, and saying, “My son is one of the nicest people I know.” And Frank had said to me, “I wonder how many of us wish our fathers had ever thought something like that.”
For Steig, apparently, the emotional and spiritual sectors of life were no farther away than the daily and offhand. I knew that he had been a patient of Wilhelm Reich, the Viennese radical psychologist, and he told me now that he still regularly climbed into his Orgone Accumulator, a metal-lined, telephone-booth-like container in his workroom, as part of the therapy to which he attributed his own long survival, as well as his mother’s recovery, years before, from a serious cancer invasion. “I’ve been an ardent Reichean,” he said. “Just the other day, I read somewhere that guys who think about the universe say that seventy-five per cent of it is still beyond their ken. Well, I think that seventy-five per cent is orgone, which, for some reason, we refuse to get in touch with.”
The talk went back to his work. “Drawing is something I feel impelled to do, but I don’t feel an undeniable urge to write these books,” he said. “I’ve done more than I originally intended. It’s not inspiration, but I take it seriously, writing for kids.”
I asked the obligatory question. Was writing the books perhaps a way for him to remain a child?
“I enjoyed my childhood,” he said. “I think I like kids more than the average man does. I can relax with them, more than I can among adults. I’m what you call shy—it’s been a lifelong problem. Children are genuine, which is such a big problem with grownups. After we’re about thirty, we have to give up being children. You can’t try to stay young—that would make you old in no time—but I like to think I’ve kept a little innocence. Probably I’m too dumb to do anything else.”
