Wild Things!

by Betsy Bird

  Fritz recounts how Hancock had no children to survive him: his daughter lived only a short while and his nine-year-old son died during a spill while ice-skating. Here we see the elderly John at his children’s gravesites, mourning their loss. Curiously, the tombstone on the far right in the foreground is blank. If you can locate a first-edition copy of the book — which, for reasons you are about to see, is a collector’s item — the stone will have a name on it.

  The notorious illustration from Will You Sign Here, John Hancock?, with the sniping epitaph removed

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  While acclaimed illustrator Trina Schart Hyman, who later received a Caldecott Medal in 1985 as well as multiple Caldecott Honors, was working on John Hancock, a particularly vitriolic Kirkus review was published, scoffing at the illustrations she created for Snow White, adapted by Paul Heins and published by Little, Brown in 1974. Questioning why Hyman was even chosen to illustrate the book, the review refers to the elements of Hyman’s signature style as “gratuitous” and describes her Snow White as a “Disney paper doll.” Subsequently, Hyman decided to make a statement of her own. On that right-hand tombstone, she provided an epitaph for Virginia Kirkus, then-editor of Kirkus Reviews:

  VIRGINIA KIRK

  US

  A NASTY SOUL

  IS ITS OWN

  REWARD.

  1765–1776

  As it turns out, none of the book’s reviewers at the time caught the snub, nor did the publisher. The vice president and editorial director of Coward-McCann was quoted afterward as saying, “My astigmatism prevented my seeing this. I don’t think it’s very nice.” Many reviewers later lamented the diss they had missed: Said the Publishers Weekly reviewer, “That’s dirty pool. I think it’s unworthy of so gifted an illustrator as Trina Schart Hyman.” Kirkus’s response was gracious, theirs even having been the first review of the book in print. Claiming that they had actually noticed the epitaph pre-review, the juvenile editor for Kirkus stated, “[I]n view of the fact that we do dish it out, then we’ve got to be able to take it — even in this form.” The then-editor of The Horn Book, Ethel Heins, who had just announced it as a Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor Book, also admitted to not seeing the jeer. “It certainly escaped the notice of our three percipient judges for the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award. It is a totally unnecessary detail and I wonder at its snideness. It’s the sort of thing I would never condone.”

  Eventually, Coward-McCann lived up to its name and removed the offending text from the gravestone, and all printings since then (and there have been many) feature a blank slate in the lower right corner, ready and waiting for the reader to scrawl in an epitaph for his or her own favorite enemy.

  Yet that wasn’t Trina’s only dirty trick. In an illustration for Howard Pyle’s King Stork (1973), she gave an all-new meaning to the phrase “naked furniture” by including a copulating couple in the carving of the witch’s table on page 22 of the book.

  Saucy furniture from King Stork

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  Upon winning the 1985 Caldecott for Margaret Hodge’s retelling of Saint George and the Dragon, Hyman feigned an apology in her acceptance speech for the offending images: “I am so happy to take this wonderful opportunity to tell all of you how deeply sorry I am and how much I regret the carving on the witch’s table and the inscription on the tombstone. Not because I didn’t mean every line of them — but simply because I’m sick to death of being asked to explain and apologize. Gotcha!”

  Secret Identities: Some Pseudonyms of Children’s Literature

  • Margaret Wise Brown and Edith Thacher Hurd wrote under the joint pseudonym Juniper Sage.

  • L. Frank Baum wrote Aunt Jane’s Nieces, a popular series of ten adventure tales for girls, under the pseudonym Edith Van Dyne.

  • Newbery winner Laura Amy Schlitz wrote a romance novel under the pseudonym Chloe Cheshire.

  • The children’s book I Am Number Four by Pittacus Lore is really by Jobie Hughes and infamous memoirist James Frey.

  • Theodor Geisel wrote many beginning readers under the pseudonym Theo. LeSieg, the adopted last name being Geisel spelled backwards.

  • Louisa May Alcott wrote under such pseudonyms as A. M. Barnard and Flora Fairfield.

  More Hidden Delights of the Painted Kind. . .

  Or drawn. Or charcoaled. Or engraved. Or, in an increasingly digital world, rendered with a pressure-sensitive pen tablet. No matter the medium, an illustrator, creating a world from scratch on a blank surface, has a myriad of opportunities to slip in subtle or even not-so-subtle dedications to friends and family. No matter the style, the story, or the setting, the possibilities to work in details that memorialize loved ones seem almost endless. “You have to make sure you tell the larger story,” author-illustrator Javaka Steptoe told us, “but in certain sections of your work you might have a part that’s personal to you, a character’s clothing or expression, for example. I think that’s the beauty in creating artwork [that] comes from that inner dialogue that we as artists have with our work.” Adds author-illustrator Tricia Tusa, “I memorize people’s faces without realizing it. I’ll have breakfast with a friend, and she will show up as the character I am drawing back at the studio later that afternoon.”

  “I miss him. What a genius he was.” Author-illustrator Thacher Hurd said in reference to the late, great James Marshall, who created several of children’s literature’s most memorable characters, including George and Martha and the Stupids. In 1996, when Thacher created another of our most unforgettable heroes, Art Dog, he slipped in a loving tribute to his friend: Art Dog lives in a little apartment on West Seventeenth Street, a reference to Marshall, who had an apartment on the same street in New York City.

  British author-illustrator Emily Gravett has also sometimes slipped in loving dedications to her friends. In her brilliant 2005 picture-book debut, the deliciously fun Wolves, the birth dates of her friends’ children are listed on the clever library due-date slip that precedes the tale. She has also featured her relatives in the photo album of 2006’s Meerkat Mail, as well as her partner’s plumbing business in Little Mouse’s Big Book of Fears, published in 2007.

  We know that Trina Schart Hyman had a delectably wicked sense of humor, but she was also fiercely devoted to her friends, memorializing them in her illustrations. “Trina. . . was a sharp-eyed portrait painter,” Jane Yolen told us. “In her Snow White, she is one of the dwarves and several of her neighbors are, too. Her ex-partner. . . was the wicked queen.” Indeed, Trina wrote about this experience in the essay “Cut It Down, and You Will Find Something at the Roots,” included in Donald Haase’s 1993 collection of responses to the Grimms’ tales:

  The story spoke to me as no story had ever done before. I had recently gone through one of those life experiences that involve coincidences, jealousies, a lot of fierce emotions, treachery, rebirths — all the emotional underpinnings of “Snow White.” I put it all into that book.

  Given all this personal baggage wrapped up in the book, it’s perhaps more understandable why she took the negative Kirkus review so deeply to heart.

  And it turns out more than just her responses to these intense emotions went into the book. As Yolen points out, she slipped into her illustrations the real characters from her own world. The dwarves, not given any idiosyncratic personality traits in the Grimms’ text, she based on six people she knew well, throwing herself in as one of the seven little men; the dwarves included her next-door neighbor, her father, her ex-husband, and Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz. “The people in Snow White had been in my head for a long, long time,” she wrote. “Now, at last, they could come out through my hand.”

  The great heroine herself was her own eleven-year-old daughter, “albeit rather idealized and prettified,” and the queen, as Yolen states, an ex-companion of almost a decade in what Trina described as “an astonishingly accurate portrait.” The prince, Trina stated, was Yolen’s husband: “He’s a prince of a fellow, to be sure, but more
importantly his looks convey maturity, character, and strength as well as tenderness — all qualities that I wanted for Snow White’s future husband. I figured the poor kid deserved as much stability and security as she could get, considering all she’d been through.” Yolen isn’t so sure: “She used to tell people that my husband, David Stemple, was the prince, though I think she had drawn it before they met. But I played along. After all, he was a prince to me.”

  And it wasn’t only in Snow White that Trina slipped in dedications. As author Lois Lowry, friend to Trina, once noted, Trina painted the great author Lloyd Alexander into the background of a scene in the 1992 publication of Alexander’s The Fortune-Tellers. On the page that begins “ ‘Better and better!’ said the carpenter,” there is Alexander in the left background at a café table under an umbrella. Lowry adds that Trina “found a particular chortle in the vultures that she posed on the roof above the café where Lloyd sits looking morosely into a drink.” And remember the dwarf in Snow White who looks remarkably like Trina’s ex-husband? He makes another appearance in this book as well, as one of the background figures.

  Trina Schart Hyman’s portrait of a somewhat morose-looking Lloyd Alexander seated in the background of The Fortune-Tellers

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  The late Maurice Sendak memorialized his family members in, arguably, the most iconic picture book of all time, Where the Wild Things Are, yet it constituted more of a catharsis than a tribute. Initially, the Wild Things were wild horses, yet as Sendak once stated, he simply couldn’t draw horses well. (Those of us who are fans of his work in 1955’s Charlotte and the White Horse by Ruth Krauss might contest his modesty.) Landing on Wild Things instead of horses, he wondered what “Things” look like. Sendak stated in an informal question-and-answer session in 1970 during a National Children’s Book Week program that he couldn’t specifically recall the “extremely ugly” people who visited his childhood home, those upon whom he ultimately based the Wild Things, though he eventually said it was one relative in particular — one of those with “great big teeth, immense nostrils, and very sweaty foreheads” — who frightened him and whom he immortalized in his picture book in the form of the Wild Things. Later in life, however, he told Selma G. Lanes:

  I wanted my wild things to be frightening. But why? It was probably at this point that I remembered how I detested my Brooklyn relatives as a small child. . . . I remember how inept they were at making small talk with children. There you’d be, sitting on a kitchen chair, totally helpless, while they cooed over you and pinched your cheeks. Or they’d lean way over with their bad teeth and hairy noses, and say something threatening like “You’re so cute I could eat you up.” And I knew if my mother didn’t hurry up with the cooking, they probably would. So, on one level at least, you could say that wild things are Jewish relatives.

  The Boy Behind the Asterisk

  Richard Berkenbush, who passed away in 2009, was neither a writer nor an illustrator, yet his name appears in a classic picture book published in 1939 that has sold more than 1.5 million copies and is still going strong. Back then, he was known as “Dickie,” and a typo caused his last name to be spelled wrong. “Acknowledgments to Dickie Birkenbush,” it says in small print next to an asterisk on a page toward the end of the book.

  Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel concerns a man and his old steam shovel digging a foundation for Popperville’s town hall. But, as author-illustrator Virginia Lee Burton approached the end of her story, she realized that she’d, quite literally, dug her characters — Mike and his steam shovel, Mary Ann — into a hole and didn’t know how to get them out again.

  Dickie’s grandfather was a minister and a Harvard librarian, and as a result, such folks as composer Leonard Bernstein and authors such as Burton herself would visit. One night in 1938 during one of her visits to the Berkenbush farm, Ms. Burton spoke of her dilemma. Young Dickie Berkenbush suggested that Mary Ann could remain in the town-hall basement as a furnace. Years later, Mr. Berkenbush recalled how he came up with the idea: “My father had a garage in town that had a steam heating system, so I was familiar with it.”

  The author was so thrilled that she gave the boy an acknowledgment smack-dab in the middle of the book. Richard Berkenbush grew up to become a fire chief and police chief in West Newbury, Massachusetts. And Mary Ann the steam shovel — now Mary Ann the furnace — is presumably still keeping visitors warm at the Popperville town hall.

  A Hidden Delight with a Lemony Zest

  In 2008, Grove Press published a book by Bosnian novelist Saša Staniši´c titled How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone. The cover illustration features a man playing an accordion on a beach. Does he look a little familiar?

  The figure on the cover is none other than Daniel Handler, author of A Series of Unfortunate Events under the pen name Lemony Snicket.

  Author Daniel Handler makes an unexpected cameo

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  Handler, who appears at book-signing events with accordion in tow, once had his picture taken by photographer Meredith Hauer. This was early in the author’s career, when he didn’t have much jingle in his jeans. So, in a bartering agreement, Handler allowed Hauer to sell the pictures as stock photography. Years later, that stock photo was used for the German edition of this novel. When Grove published the U.S. edition in early 2008, they used the same cover art. Grove was unaware that their cover boy was a hugely famous literary figure until someone at its sales conference pointed it out. Handler hadn’t known about it until that moment, either.

  Miranda Who? Delights That Almost Were

  You may think merely of Augustus Gloop, Veruca Salt, Violet Beauregarde, and Mike Teavee when you consider the ill-fated children of Roald Dahl’s most famous novel, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, published in 1964, but few know about the nasty-looking, smug teacher’s pet, Miranda Mary Piker. That’s because Dahl eliminated her before the book was published. She did, however, turn up in the London Times when the newspaper printed this “lost chapter” of Dahl’s book in 2005.

  Granted, we get inordinately excited about children’s literature, so stories like this delight us. But if you’ve gotten this far in our book, we think that reading about the hidden delights that nearly happened also would be interesting to you. Let’s explore a few more. The best involves a master illustrator, a top-notch author, and the misunderstanding that led to one very real missed opportunity.

  In 1967, when J.R.R. Tolkien was seventy-five years old, The Hobbit was close to its thirtieth anniversary of publication. An American publisher requested that Maurice Sendak illustrate his own version of the tale. Tolkien wanted to review Sendak’s sample sketches, a request that, by all accounts, perturbed the artist. But Sendak agreed and created two illustrations, one of dancing wood elves in the moonlight and another of Bilbo outside his home, smoking his pipe, as Gandalf nears. However, when the publisher mailed the samples to Tolkien, an editor mistakenly noted the wood elves as “hobbits.” “This blunder nettled Tolkien,” writes Tony DiTerlizzi. “His reply was that Sendak had not read the book closely and did not know what a hobbit was. Consequently, Tolkien did not approve the drawings. Sendak was furious.” Hoping to end the argument, the publisher planned for a meeting of the two men, but at that time, when Sendak was only thirty-nine, he suffered a heart attack, and the meeting never occurred. Sendak donated the image of Bilbo and Gandalf to Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, but the location of the wood-elves illustration (complete with incorrect labels) is unknown.

  Unpublished Sendak illustration for The Hobbit

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  One could always rely on Sendak to speak his mind and argue with abandon. The line on the last page of Where the Wild Things Are, “and it was still hot,” is perhaps the most well-known phrase in all of children’s literature. But the last page’s secret is that it was almost something altogether more tepid. Sendak had to argue with Harper & Row about the use of the word “hot.” Since “hot” c
ould indicate “burn,” Sendak told Newsweek in 2008, the staff wanted “hot” to become “warm.” Sendak in one corner, and Harper & Row in another: “[I]t turned into a real world war, just that word, and I won,” he said. He insisted that “warm” sounded “dopey. . . . Unemotional. Undramatic. Everything about that book is ‘hot.’”

  Sendak’s editor at Harper, the legendary Ursula Nordstrom, was also the editor of E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. Up to printer’s proofs, chapter 21 of that book was titled “The Death of Charlotte.” Nordstrom wrote to Katharine White, the author’s wife, to suggest that E. B. not give the reader hints about the tragedy to come: “When I got home last night I looked in my copy of Little Women. The chapter in which Jo learns that Beth is going to die is called ‘Beth’s Secret,’ and the chapter in which Beth does die is called ‘The Valley of the Shadow.’” When Charlotte’s Web was published, chapter 21 had been retitled “Last Day.”

  Not recommended for purchase by expert.

  — Rubber stamp belonging to influential librarian Anne Carroll Moore

  “EVERYONE’S A CRITIC”

  Some thirty thousand years ago, deep within a cave on what is now called the European continent, two people stood in the shadows of a flickering fire. Acting on a previously unknown impulse, one of the two picked up a charred piece of wood and — hesitantly at first, but with mounting excitement — began to draw a bison on the wall of the cave. In that moment, he became the first artist and storyteller in the human race.

  The second person in the cave stepped back to view the painting, then shook his head and gestured that the bison’s tail should be a little longer. This was humankind’s first critic.