From the May/June 2004 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

Reader at Large
Cutting the Cheese

By Christine Heppermann

ccording to the March 2003 issue of Harper’s magazine, Spencer Johnson’s Who Moved My Cheese? sold 1.6 million copies in China “despite the fact that most Chinese have never tasted cheese.” Not only that, but the book’s success apparently prompted Chinese publishers to take a chance on a smorgasbord of other cheese-related titles, including Whose Cheese Should I Move? by He Jun; Can I Move Your Cheese? by Chen Tong; Agitating, Alluring Cheese by Lian Yuming; and the pragmatically named Chinese People Eat Cheese? — Who Took My Meat Bun? by Chuan Xiang.

The Chinese aren’t the only ones with reason to ask “Where’s the beef?” Last year in this country, Johnson’s Who Moved My Cheese? for Kids (Putnam) — preceded the year before by Who Moved My Cheese? for Teens — took his simple-minded allegorical sermon about dealing with change out of the corporate team-building seminar and repackaged it as a picture book for an audience whose idea of “rat race” is something they might construct for the second-grade science fair.

This kiddie portion of “cheese” is just one example — albeit a particularly crass one — from an ever-expanding menu of picture books in which adult material has been re-worked and presented to young children. Elvis Presley, Walt Whitman, Leo Tolstoy, Ursula Hegi, Henry David Thoreau — these aren’t names you’d expect to find on the same shelves as Eric Carle and the Berenstains, but there they are. It’s enough to inspire yet another potential “cheese” title, namely Whose cheese is this, anyway, and what is it doing HERE?

Sometimes the positioning isn’t hard to understand. In Johnson’s case, it’s almost harder to understand how his original volume charmed so many adults into swallowing a story about mice in jogging shoes and “littlepeople” dreaming of life in “a big house atop Camembert Hill.” The crux of his message is about adapting to change, after all, and whose life changes more than a kid’s? Kids change teachers every year, shoe sizes every six months, best friends every other week.

But, like citizens of different countries, children and adults have different reference points. A story, song, or poem written for adults doesn’t automatically become child-friendly just because it’s been condensed and given cartoon illustrations. For instance, when Rosemary Wells depicts a shampooing guinea pig alongside the lyrics to “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair” in her compendium of Rodgers and Hammerstein tunes (Getting to Know You!: Rodgers and Hammerstein Favorites, HarperCollins), chances are a four-year-old won’t take it metaphorically; he’ll be looking for one of the “littlepeople” amidst the bubbles. Similarly, Johnson’s advice to “Smell the Cheese Often So You Know When It Is Getting Old” might be bracing to a downsized middle-manager re-entering the workforce, but bewildering — not to mention useless — to a seven-year-old trying to cope with moving to a new neighborhood.

The cynical view would place the blame for these adaptations solely on greedy publishers trying to cash in in two markets. But often they seem to result, at least in part, from blinding affection for the material on the part of the picture book artist. Because the chosen text has such profound meaning for the artist, he or she assumes it should have meaning for everyone. Rosemary Wells reminisces in her illustrator’s note for Getting to Know You! about hearing Rodgers and Hammerstein productions on the radio as a child and laments that “Children no longer know these haunting melodies and lyrics as we once did.” But how haunting can these undeniably catchy tunes be for a modern child reader of Wells’s book without a little context beyond her portrait of a group of dogs enjoying “a real nice clambake”?

A common way for an illustrator to try to make adult material accessible to children is to draw a kid (or kid-animal) into the scene. Collage artist Susan L. Roth went this route when she enlisted a smiling cut-paper kitten and its parents to act out an excerpt from Leaves of Grass in the picture book Nothing but Miracles (National Geographic). Reflecting on his own poetry in 1891, Walt Whitman wrote that “the reader will always have his or her part to do, just as much as I have had mine. I seek less to state or display any theme or thought, and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere of the theme or thought — there to pursue your own flight.” It’s debatable whether Whitman would extend that “flight” to Roth’s kitten-on-a-swing interpretation of his line about “dart[ing] my sight / over the roofs of houses / toward the sky.” But the main issue here isn’t whether Roth’s illustrations are true to Whitman’s vision, but whether they effectively make the free-floating amalgam of images from his poem Miracles appealing to the book’s intended audience of three- to six-year-olds. Roth’s personal attachment to the poem — she confesses in her illustrator’s note to perceiving a connection between the way Whitman “draws together diverse wonders of life into a cohesive whole” and “the essence of collage” — doesn’t change the fact that Whitman’s formality of language and lack of narrative renders his poem a less-than-ideal candidate for a picture book text.

By performing a few alterations, Jon J Muth tries to help young listeners hear the “golden bell” that he claims rang inside him when he first encountered the Zen-like Tolstoy story “The Three Questions.” In Muth’s retelling, The Three Questions (Scholastic), a young boy replaces Tolstoy’s tsar, and a stork, monkey, and dog take on the roles of the tsar’s advisers. The three questions asked by both tsar and boy — “When is the best time to do things? Who is the most important one? What is the right thing to do?” — are indirectly answered in the first case by a wise old hermit and in the second by a wise old turtle named Leo.
Muth’s tranquil, naturalistic watercolor paintings do suit the contemplative mood of his narrative and highlight the Buddhist sensibility he found in the original tale. But, in modifying the story for a young audience, he has taken out much of Tolstoy’s bite. In Tolstoy’s version, the tsar pauses in his quest to help the hermit dig a hole. Consequently, he is around to provide aid when a bleeding man comes running into the hermit’s yard. This man, it turns out, is the tsar’s enemy, wounded by the tsar’s bodyguards as he leaped onto the path in ambush. By stopping to dig the hole and delaying his return home, the tsar both escapes death at the hands of his enemy and wins his enemy’s allegiance. A 1906 translation of “The Three Questions” by Louise and Aylmer Maude relates the hermit’s response to this as “Remember then: there is only one time that is important — Now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power. The most necessary man is he with whom you are, for no man knows whether he will ever have dealings with anyone else: and the most important affair is, to do him good, because for that purpose alone was man sent into this life!”

Muth’s turtle agrees that “the most important thing is to do good for the one who is standing at your side.” But the picture book retelling takes the boy out of mortal danger, having him save an injured mother panda and her baby instead of his vengeance-obsessed enemy. This removal of the self-preservation aspect also removes the spine-tingling moment when the reader processes the hermit’s words and confronts the fragility of his or her own life. Of course it’s nice that the boy was around to rescue the baby panda in Muth’s version, but let’s face it, it doesn’t have the same resonance as a missed appointment with the Grim Reaper.

D. B. Johnson’s three “Henry” picture books — Henry Hikes to Fitchburg, Henry Builds a Cabin, and Henry Climbs a Mountain (all Houghton) — demonstrate that it is possible to engage a young audience while preserving the spirit of an original text. In each book he uses a short passage from Henry David Thoreau’s writings as a jumping-off place for a playful yarn, illustrated with cubist-style bears in the roles of Thoreau and his buddies, that puts Thoreau’s philosophy of life into practice without parroting him line-by-line. A pointed contrast can be made between Johnson’s Henry Builds a Cabin and Henry David’s House (Charlesbridge), edited by Steven Schnur and illustrated with paintings by Peter Fiore. Both picture books grow out of Thoreau’s chapter in Walden about constructing a one-room house by Walden Pond; but the latter tells the story entirely in Thoreau’s words, while the former has the bears perform a concrete and good-humored dramatization of Thoreau’s thriftiness and appreciation for nature. The bear stand-ins for Emerson and Bronson Alcott worry that Henry’s cabin is too small, but he counters that “it’s bigger than it looks.” That’s because he plans to use his vegetable garden for a dining room and two other lovely outdoor spots for his ballroom and reading room, pronouncing the indoor space to be “just the room I wear when it’s raining.” Schnur and Fiore’s much more sedate, slower-moving narrative methodically recounts Thoreau’s building process, including hefty chunks of text such as “I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by fifteen long, and eight-feet posts, with a garret and a closet, a large window on each side, two trap doors, one door at the end, and a brick fireplace opposite.” There’s no denying that countless people all over the world have been inspired by Thoreau, but Henry David’s House won’t make many disciples out of young children, most of whom will have nodded off before the first plank is laid.

With so much adult fiction featuring child protagonists, it’s a wonder there aren’t more picture books like Ursula Hegi’s Trudi & Pia (Atheneum), which retells a segment from her bestselling novel Stones from the River. Hegi’s main character, Trudi, seems a natural transplant into children’s literature, as her physical abnormality — dwarfism — allows Hegi to trumpet the common children’s book theme that it is our differences that make us special. Trudi & Pia spotlights the moment in Trudi’s childhood when, during a trip to the circus, she meets another dwarf for the first time. This dwarf, Pia, is not a freak-show attraction but an animal tamer, who sticks her head in a lion’s mouth and commands elephants to bow before her. When Pia needs a volunteer from the audience, all the children raise their hands, but it is Trudi who is chosen; and for the first time in her life she feels envied and admired rather than scorned and pitied. Giselle Potter’s blocky and caricatured yet refined style of illustration complements the story perfectly, lending dignity and agility to Trudi and Pia’s disproportionate features.

The problem is that Hegi’s picture book, by the standards of her novel, is rather disingenuous. It’s not so much that she eliminates the novel’s highly charged setting — a German village during the volatile period from the beginning of World War I to the end of World War II. It’s that the picture book implies a fixed point of self-acceptance for Trudi, whereas the novel acknowledges that her image of herself is complex and ever-shifting. A line appearing in the novel but stricken from the picture book is telling. While both volumes inform us that Trudi, before she steps into the circus ring with Pia, longs to be noticed for something other than being a dwarf, the novel admits that the negative attention she usually received had become such a part of her “that she craved and expected it.” Coincidentally, the difference between the picture book Trudi and the novel Trudi can be summed up with an observation from Trudi herself. In Stones from the River, Trudi’s father runs the town’s pay-library, but she prefers real-life stories over the ones on the library’s shelves. “To Trudi, those books seemed as flat as her mother’s paper dolls: even though you could alter their appearance by folding the tabs of elaborate gowns across their shoulders, they stayed flat, and their smiles remained as constant as the happy endings in the books.” It hardly seems fair to present children with the paper-thin Trudi while adults get treated to the full-bodied one, who, as the very first paragraph of Stones from the River reveals, experiences both the “power” and the “agony” of being different.

Perhaps the most unsettling adaptations are those that take adult romantic love songs and give them the Guess How Much I Love You treatment. So, for instance, instead of The King in cowboy duds beseeching Debra Paget to “Love me tender, love me dear; Tell me you are mine,” we have, in painter Tom Browning’s picture book Elvis Presley’s Love Me Tender (HarperCollins), a dad wrapping a towel around his adoring young daughter as she emerges from the bath. It’s a little . . . creepy. Children might recognize the tune to Bacharach and David’s “I Say a Little Prayer” from a recent nondairy creamer commercial. Perhaps Karin Littlewood illustrating the lyrics (I Say a Little Prayer for You, Scholastic) with sunny watercolors of an African-American mother expressing love for her daughter will make a little more sense than a man dancing around his kitchen, crooning to his coffee mug. But such books are doubly self-indulgent, as they take songs that already evoke nostalgia in adults and add a new layer of sentimentality — i.e., grownups gushing over the parent-child bond.

Let’s just wash these books right outa our hair, shall we?

A former children’s bookseller, Christine Heppermann is a member of the Horn Book review staff. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband and daughters.