About seven years ago a typographer brought Miss Massee to my house for dinner. It was a dreary building of six rooms in a noisy neighborhood. The windows of my living room looked out at a cobweb of telegraph wires, a water tank, and a Claude Neon sign that flashed “Two Pants Suits at $15.00.” To hide this mise en scène, and because I was homesick for my mountains, I had painted outside of my windows a field with blue gentians, the foothills around Innsbruck, and a peasant house with a Forester sitting in front of it, on his lap a wire-haired dachshund, and a long pipe dividing his white beard. “You must write children’s books,” decided Miss Massee.

And with her help I started to write. I bought a typewriter; he became my enemy, and after walking around him for days I locked him up. I waited for “the good hour,” when the little silver bell rings inside, when writing seems effortless and right. These good hours come between long stretches of time, and they arrive unannounced, in a street car, in the bathtub, in bed, in the corner of a cheap restaurant. I never have paper or pencil with me; and so the manuscript was written with stubs borrowed from waiters, on the backs of envelopes, old menus, the inside cover of paper matches, and on wrapping paper. I numbered them, and took them to Miss Massee, and then started to illustrate the story. The pictures were either too big or too small and never finished on time — and somehow it was put in order and became a book, with all my pet phrases intact; and when it was finished the brave lady said: “What’s the next one going to be?”

The next one was written in a string of “good hours” that took two years to happen. It is finished now — and here I am in a train with an old envelope, and on the back of it are printed the first words for the third.

This article, originally published in the July 1936 issue of The Horn Book Magazine, is part of our Caldecott at 75 celebration. Click here for more archival Horn Book material on Ludwig Bemelmans and Madeline’s Rescue.

The post May Massee: As Her Author-Illustrators See Her appeared first on The Horn Book.

Every writer leaves bits and pieces of his own story in his books whether he knows it or not, so I thought I’d look through some of Ludwig Bemelmans’ books to see what he says about himself here and there. The trouble is, I find a paragraph that shows what a good story teller he is and half an hour later I realize that I’ve just gone on reading and haven’t written a word about Ludwig.

I’ll begin again, with My War with the United States, the first book he published for adults, after he had written Hansi and The Golden Basket for children. Those books showed that he could tell a simple story with clarity and sparkle which with his pictures made the whole book sing.

The chapters of My War with the United States were translated from the pages of the German diary he kept during his service in the United States Army. He must have been about eighteen and he had been in this country only two years. Here are unforgettable characterizations and descriptions that show an eager young mind learning to understand the American character, so different from the German, and recording pictures of everything he saw.

The Field Hospital, Unit N, to which I belong, was recruited in New York. The men are mostly college students or graduates, not ordinary privates. Some of them are older, and professional men; for example, the one who has his bed next to mine in the barracks is a Professor of French at one of the large universities … I am very glad of his friendship; he seems to take the whole business we are engaged in as if it did not concern him, as a vacation, never has a serious thought … But he is happy, and most so when we push a wagon with bread from the bakery back to the barracks every evening; then he sings and says that this is the best time he has ever had, that he IS completely happy. Perhaps he has been in some terrible life and now feels happy because he is away from that. He tells me that Schopenhauer states with authority that Happiness is the absence of Unhappiness, which is so obvious and foolish that a backward child could make this observation, but he says I must think about it. I looked this up and it is right; only Schopenhauer says the absence of ‘Schmerz,’ which is pain, and in German the word pain covers more than just pain — it means sorrow, trouble, unhappiness. And so Professor Beardsley is perhaps right…

In our free time we go to motion pictures and entertainments for the soldiers. One is as dull as the other. On Sundays we go to churches, and afterwards people ask us to their houses for dinner. In all these houses is a soft warm feeling, a desire to be good to us, and the food is simple, good, and plentiful. We also take walks together, and Beardsley has pointed out a piece of scenery which he named ‘Beautiful Dreck.’ It was a bitter landscape composed of railroad tracks, signal masts, coal sheds, a factory building and some freight cars, a gas tank, and in the background some manufacturing plant, black with soot. Some of the windows of this building were lit by a vivid gray-blue light and yellow flames shot out of several chimneys. ‘That is,’ he said, ‘beautiful Dreck, and we have lots of it in America.’

Dreck is a German word for filth and dirt but it also means manure, mud, dirty fingers. It is a large, able word, patois, almost bad; it covers all that was before us, and thereby it can be seen that Professor Beardsley knows much. He told me St. Louis had a particularly good portion of ‘Beautiful Dreck,’ but that the best he knew could be seen in the Jersey Meadows, where it covers almost a whole countryside.

I wish we had space to quote the story of the time one of the prisoners he was guarding took Ludwig’s gun to pieces to show him how it worked and Ludwig couldn’t put it together again. It’s all very unorthodox and very soberly told as true comedy should be. And there is deep tragedy here too as must be in an army hospital for the insane. The young man observed and studied about it all and his judgments were wise and kind. There is a beautiful chapter “Tirol in Buffalo,” full of almost unbearable homesickness, that gives the Austrian background the boy loved.

In short, if you would know the young Ludwig you could not ask for a better script than My War with the United States. The diary must have been written in 1917–18. The book was published in 1937. The twenty years between had been crammed with living and working — the banquet manager, storing up more tall tales of hotel life, the artist perfecting his own style of drawing, the traveler shuttling from New York to the West Coast or from New York to Europe and back again. His restless energy can never let him alone — he has so many skills that he is driven from one to another and in between he writes a play or opens a restaurant or takes a Mediterranean cruise — it’s all the same to Ludwig.

Hansi (1934) and The Golden Basket (1936) and My War with the United States (1937) established Ludwig as an import ant writer-artist or artist-writer with a cosmopolitan genius all his own. He has written many brilliant, witty, amusing books from then to now. But Father, Dear Father (1953) is my favorite and to me is the best portrait of Ludwig today — probably because it is largely the story of a trip to Europe with his small daughter, Barbara, and a remarkable miniature poodle, Little Bit. Barbara asks searching questions and her father’s answers give background, philosophy and hopes. Here is a sample:

“‘Some of the people you write about are awful — most are.’

“‘Yes, some are awful, and I have portrayed them as best I can. I have written some very bitter social satire.’

‘“Well, I’m sorry, Poppy, but I never got that. You make them all charming and too, too utterly divine.’

“‘I’m not a prosecutor. I don’t condemn. I put the form, the shape, the being, on canvas and on paper, and I let the reader decide for himself.’

“‘Well, maybe you start out that way, and then, no matter how awful, you fall in love with your characters, and they all turn mushy and nobody is really bad — they’re just odd. In fact, sometimes the bad are much more lovable than the good. And now that I come to think of it, almost always. Anyway, it’s not social satire.’

‘“Well, maybe it’s not social satire but comedy of manners and in a world in which there are less and less manners, especially among the young, it’s a very hard thing to write. As for hating people, I’m sorry, but I find it hard to hate anybody, and impossible to hate anybody for long.’”

Another day they had been talking about Ludwig’s Austrian accent which he has never lost, and Barbara asked:

‘“Do you think in German?’

‘“That’s another thing that puzzles me — no, I don’t.’

‘“In English?’

‘“No, I don’t think in either. I think in pictures, because I see everything in pictures, and then translate them into English. I tried to write in German; I can’t. I made an attempt to translate one of my books, and it was very difficult and sounded awful. Then the Swiss publishers Scherz engaged an old lady, the widow of a German general, to translate the book, and when I read it I said to myself, “How odd! It’s another book.” I liked it, but I never could have done it myself.’

‘“What do you mean by pictures?’

‘“Well, when I write, “ A man comes to the door,” I see it as a movie — I see the door, precisely a certain kind of door, and I see the man.’

‘“In color? Do you dream in color?’

‘“That depends on the subject. Happy dreams are usually in color, especially flying dreams.’…

‘“You love painting more than writing?’

‘“Yes, I would rather paint than write, for writing is labor.’

‘“Do you think you could be a great painter?’

‘“Yes, the very best.’

‘“But why aren’t you?’

“‘Because I love living too much. If I were unhappy as Toulouse-Lautrec was, or otherwise burdened, so that I would turn completely inward, then I would be a good painter. As is, I’m not sufficiently devoted.’

‘“Is it the same with writing?’

‘“Well, yes. My greatest inspiration is a low bank balance. I can perform then.’

“‘To make money?’

‘“Yes, to make money.’

‘“But that’s awful!’

‘“Well, it has motivated better people than I.’

‘“For example, whom?’

‘“For example, Shakespeare.’

‘“And if you had all the money in the world would you just be a cafe society playboy and waste it?’

“At such turns in the conversation I impose silence.

‘“Poppy—’

‘“Yes, what now?’

‘“About the people you write about.’

‘“We’ve had that argument before, and I’ll run through my little piece again for you. I was born in a hotel and brought up in three countries — when I was six years old I couldn’t speak a word of German, because it was fashionable in Europe to bring up children who spoke nothing but French. And then I lived in other hotels, which was a very lonesome life for a child, and the only people you met were old ones, below stairs and upstairs. In my youth the upstairs was a collection of Russian grand dukes and French countesses, English lords and American millionaires. Backstairs there were French cooks, Roumanian hairdressers, Chinese manicurists, Italian bootblacks, Swiss managers, English valets. All those people I got to know very well. When I was sent to America to learn the hotel business here, I ran into the same kind of people, and these I know very well and I can write about them, and one ought to write about what one knows. I can write about you, or Mimi, or a few other people, but I can’t write about what you call “ordinary people” because I don’t know them well enough. Besides, there are so many people who do, and who write about them well.’

“‘Could you write about German ordinary people?’

“‘I can write about Tyroleans, and Bavarians, whom I have known in my youth, woodchoppers, teamsters, boatmen, peasants, and the children of all these people.’

“‘But how did you find out about them, and understand them, when you didn’t speak their language?’

“‘Oh, I understood them, as a foreigner does.’

“‘When you were older?’

“‘Oh no, in my childhood; or better, when I started living and occasionally ran away from the hotel.’

“‘And did you like that more than the hotel?’

“‘Of course. The hotel was like an all-day theater performance and one played along, but the other was real and important and something you never forget. I ran away often and played with other children, but I was always brought back.’

“‘Do you speak German with an accent too?’

“‘Yes, of course.’

“‘Do you speak any language correctly?’

“‘Well, I have the least accent in French, or else the French are very polite, for they always say how very well I speak it for a foreigner.’

“‘That’s all rather sad, Poppy.’

“‘Well, it has its advantages. It’s like being a gypsy, belonging everywhere and nowhere. When you are in Paris you want to be in New York and vice versa.’”

Right now he is in this country to accept the Caldecott Medal but tomorrow he flies back to Paris.

This article, originally published in the August 1954 issue of The Horn Book Magazine, is part of our Caldecott at 75 celebration. Click here for more archival Horn Book material on Ludwig Bemelmans and Madeline’s Rescue.

The post Ludwig Bemelmans appeared first on The Horn Book.

*Paper read at the meeting of the American Library Association, Minneapolis, Minnesota, June 22, 1954.

My deep gratitude to the members of the American Library Association for the Caldecott Medal.

Now we shall talk about art.

There is one life that is more difficult than that of the policeman’s and that is the life of the artist.

I have repeatedly said two things that no one takes seriously, and they are that first of all I am not a writer but a painter, and secondly that I have no imagination. It is very curious that, with my lack of these important essentials, the character of Madeline came to be. It accounts perhaps for her strength; she insisted on being born. Before she came into the world, I painted. That is, I placed canvas or paper on an easel before me and made pictures. I found in this complete happiness and satisfaction.

The unfortunate thing about painting is that the artist must exhibit, and at exhibitions, along with his work, exhibit himself; that he has to see his work, which is as his children, sold; see it wrapped up and taken away. I felt sorry for many of my pictures and those of other painters. I wish that there were a way of acquiring dogs or paintings other than by walking into a store and paying for them. The art market, then, the faces of the people who come and look at pictures, the methods of arriving at success, which entail self-advertisement and the kissing of hands, were not my dish.

I looked for another way of painting, for privacy; for a fresh audience, vast and critical and remote, to whom I could address myself with complete freedom. I wanted to do what seemed self-evident — to avoid sweet pictures, the eternal still lifes, the pretty portraits that sell well, arty abstractions, pastoral fireplace pictures, calendar art, and surrealist nightmares.

I wanted to paint purely that which gave me pleasure, scenes that interested me; and one day I found that the audience for that kind of painting was a vast reservoir of impressionists who did very good work themselves, who were very clear-eyed and capable of enthusiasm. I addressed myself to children.

You will notice in Madeline that there is very little text and there is a lot of picture. The text allows me the most varied type of illustration: there is the use of flowers, of the night, of all of Paris, and such varied detail as the cemetery of Père la Chaise and the restaurant of the Deux Magots. All this was there waiting to be used, but as yet Madeline herself hovered about as an unborn spirit.

Her beginnings can be traced to stories my mother told me of her life as a little girl in the convent of Altoetting in Bavaria. I visited this convent with her and saw the little beds in straight rows, and the long table with the washbasins at which the girls had brushed their teeth. I myself, as a small boy, had been sent to a boarding school in Rothenburg. We walked through that ancient town in two straight lines. I was the smallest one, but our arrangement was reversed. I walked ahead in the first row, not on the hand of Mademoiselle Clavel at the end of the column.

All this, as I said, for many years hung in the air and was at the back of my mind. Madeline finally began to take shape in France, where I had gone to paint. My daughter Barbara was about Madeline’s age when we went to the Isle d’Yeu for a summer vacation. This was then an island without any pretensions, and has since become famous as the place of detainment of Marshal Pétain. There was the usual Hôtel des Voyageurs and the Café de la Marine. The house we rented was twenty-five dollars for the season. It had its own private beach and the beds were always full of sand. A few miles away lived a man who owned a few lobsterpots and a fishing boat, and I bicycled there regularly to buy the makings of a bouillabaisse or a fish stew.

One day, pedaling along the road home with the sack of seafood over my shoulder, both hands in my pockets, and tracing fancy curves in the roadbed, I came to a bend which was hidden by some pine trees. Around this turn, coming the other way, raced the island’s only automobile — a four horsepower Super Rosengart belonging to the baker of Saint Sauveur, the capital village on the island. This car was a fragrant, flour-covered breadbasket on wheels. I collided with it, and it threw me in a wide curve off the bicycle into a bramble bush. I had taken the car’s doorhandle off with my arm and I was bleeding. I asked the baker to take me to the hospital in Saint Sauveur, but he said that according to French law, a car that has been involved in an accident has to remain exactly where it was when the crash occurred so that the gendarmes can make their proper deductions and see who was on the wrong side of the road. I tried to change his mind, but he said: “Permit me alors, Monsieur; if you use language like that it is no use at all to go on with this conversation.”

Having spoken, he went to pick up his pain de ménage and some croissants that were scattered on the road, and then he spread the branches of the thicket to look for the handle of his Super Rosengart. I took my lobsters and went to the hospital on foot.

After I had waited for a time, an old doctor came, with a cigarette stub sticking to his lower lip. He examined my wound, cleaned it, and then with a blunt needle he wobbled into my arm. “Excusez moi,” he said, “but your skin is very, very tough.” I was put into a small, white, carbolicky bed, and it took a while for my arm to heal. Here were the stout sister that you see bringing the tray to Madeline, and the crank on the bed. In the room across the hall was a little girl who had had an appendix operation, and, standing up in bed, with great pride she showed her scar to me. Over my bed was the crack in the ceiling “That had the habit, of sometimes looking like a rabbit.” It all began to arrange itself. And after I got back to Paris I started to paint the scenery for the book. I looked up telephone numbers to rhyme with appendix. One day I had a meeting with Léon Blum, and if you take a look at the book, you will see that the doctor who runs to Madeline’s bed is the great patriot and humanitarian Léon Blum.

And so Madeline was born, or rather appeared by her own decision.

Now we come to the sequel, which is the bearer of this medal and the reason why I am here tonight…

In this story Madeline shares the pages with a dog. This dog came about in a strange way. My wife’s parents live in Larchmont, and in a house next door to them is a family of outwardly respectable folk — that is, no one in that solid community would suspect that this quiet and respectable suburban house was occupied by a poet. Her name is Phyllis McGinley and she writes for The New Yorker.

She has two little girls, and they said, “Why don’t you write another Madeline?” So I offered them fifty cents apiece if they would give me an Idea, for I was paralyzed with lack of imagination. The children did not even go out of the room. They came with hands held out, and after I paid them they stated the plot:

“There’s a dog, see — Madeline has a dog. And then the dog is taken away but it comes back again, maybe with puppies so all the girls can have dogs.”

That was tight and clever dramatic construction, and now there remained the dog to find. I said, “What kind of a dog?”

“Oh, any kind of a dog.”

I went back to Paris and started to look for any kind of a dog. And of that breed Genevieve is a member.

I had a studio at the time in a house on the Seine at number one Git de Coeur, and I walked down to the quay and promenaded along there. Under one of the bridges there lived an old man with his dog. He loved it very much and he combed its fur with the same comb he did his own hair, and they sat together watching the fishermen and the passing boats. I started to draw that dog, and observed it. It loved to swim.

I now had the dog and I sat along the Seine, and thought about the new book. But as yet there wasn’t a plot I could use, and the little girls who might have done it for me were in America.

Then one day something happened. An object was floating down the Seine, and little boys ran along the quay, and as the object came near it turned out to be an artificial leg. One of the little boys pointed at it and said, “Ah, la jambe de mon Grandpère!”

At that same moment a long line of little girls passed over the bridge des Arts, followed by their teacher. They stopped and looked, holding onto the iron rails with their white-gloved hands. The leg was now very close, and the dog jumped into the Seine and retrieved it, struggling ashore and pulling it from the water by backing up the stones.

There suddenly was a great vision before me. The plot was perfect.

There are many problems ahead. Who are Madeline’s parents? Who are the other girls, what are their names, what new disaster shall Mademoiselle Clavel rush to? The next Madeline on which I have been working for two years concerns a boy called Pepito, the son of the Spanish Ambassador who lives next door to the little girls and is a very bad hat.

I’m looking for him now. That is, I’ve been to Spain three times and searched for him and for his house. As yet, nothing has come up, but with patience it always does, for somewhere he is, lives and breathes. The portrait of life is the most important work of the artist and it is good only when you’ve seen it, when you’ve touched it, when you know it. Then you can breathe life onto canvas and paper.

This article, originally published in the August 1954 issue of The Horn Book Magazine, is part of our Caldecott at 75 celebration. Click here for more archival Horn Book material on Ludwig Bemelmans and Madeline’s Rescue.

The post Caldecott Award Acceptance* appeared first on The Horn Book.

Elizabeth Orton Jones at work in her studio

One afternoon, a year ago last February, Elizabeth Jones came to tea. It was quite an occasion, for although we had known her incarnate, so to speak, for a comparatively short time, we were very much at home with her because of our long and intimate friendship with Ragman of Paris, Maminka’s Children, and Twig. Deirdre’s first pet-names for Steven came from Elizabeth Jones: “My sweet raisin, my little mouse, my rather small beetle.” And Steven had felt such an immediate kinship with Elizabeth that he spoke of her as “ our Miss Jones,” and behaved with her as if she were his own age.

On this particular afternoon she told us she was having a little difficulty in finding the right models to sit for the drawings of “Toys whose shapes I know” in Rachel Field’s Prayer For A Child. She had lived with the text and let the pictures grow in her mind until she knew precisely what she wanted: toys that had been really loved by some child, but were not so worn and tired that they’d lost their shape and color. She needed one woolly one, a good friend for sleeping with; one small one, the right size to fit into a child’s hands; one toy of wood or paper; and one “good old soul of a doll.”

Deirdre and Steven went upstairs, and if we’d been noticing particularly we might have thought they’d grown tired of our party. Presently they came down again, and with them came Prowlie, the second-generation teddy bear; Teddy Wear-wee, his inseparable companion; Salisbury, the small gray rabbit from England; the big Swedish wooden spoon known as the “tuvebon,” Steven’s favorite plaything from the time he could almost have been picked up in it; and Abigail, the Brown County pioneer doll handed on to Deirdre years ago by someone who had loved her dearly, and now Steven’s cherished friend and confidante. All of these were piled into Elizabeth’s lap. Elizabeth examined them gravely, asked a few questions about their ancestry (this out of understanding of their owners’ pride, not from concern with their social fitness), and then said, “Of course!” So they all went home for a long visit with “our Miss Jones.”

The next week the Duff children came down with measles, and the companions of the nursery began to be missed rather badly through the tedious feverish nights. There was much talk of how the toys were faring, whether Miss Jones remembered to put them to bed comfortably, and if they were homesick at all. But before the expected appeal came to have them brought home, there arrived a most enchanting letter with a beautiful colored picture of the toys sitting in Miss Jones’ studio chair, and a long account of the trip to Highland Park, of being tucked in for the night under warm blankets, and of Miss Jones’ pussy, Piley, who “makes a noise like a little washing-machine.”

After that, until the spots were all gone and the two Duffs restored to a state of unrelenting vigor, we talked endlessly about the book Miss Jones was making, wondering if all the pictures would be as lovely as the one she’d made of the toys, and growing more and more excited at the prospect of seeing a finished product in which we’d had a little share.

Well, we did see all the pictures before they went off to the printer, and found them so full of “innocent beauty and childlike truth” that it seemed almost impertinent to try to put our feeling about them into words. Then, just at Thanksgiving, the book itself arrived, with Hannah’s sweet little kneeling figure on the jacket and inside on the fly-leaf this inscription:

For Deirdre and Steven Duff—bless them. And bless their dear Prowlie, their dear Abigail, their dear wee Salisbury, their dear Teddy Wear-wee, and their dear spoon—who so graciously consented to be in this book, and who were such a help and such a comfort.

With love and with thankfulness,

ELIZABETH ORTON JONES

Thanksgiving Day, 1944.

Prayer For A Child was not, for our children, so much a beautiful new book as a beautiful new experience, a visible linking up of the Unseeable with the seen and felt and known. Their own deep sense of thankfulness for the comfortable, everyday simplicities of food and sleep, companionship and security, was expressed for them in the words of Rachel Field’s prayer and made infinitely alive and intimate by Elizabeth Jones’ pictures. It gives us much happiness to know that “other children far and near” have felt the same response, and that their elders have recognized the value and beauty of the pictures in Prayer For A Child by awarding to the creator the Caldecott Medal.

Years ago, when Deirdre Duff first read Maminka’s Children, she hazarded the opinion that “Miss Jones must be a very special kind of person to make such a wonderful book.” Miss Jones is a very special kind of person, so special that you’d never single her out from a crowd as having the unmistakable aura of the artist. She is a person.

The first time I ever saw her to know who she was, I recognized her right off because in the first place I was looking for her — it was at a performance of Gladys Adshead’s Brownies, Hush! for which Elizabeth had done the pictures; and in the second place she was so unmistakably the same kind of Jones I’d known in her brother and sister, who had been students in my husband’s classes some years before. Only, whereas Tom and Annette are strikingly dark as to eyes and hair, this Jones has the lovely russet-brown look of her mother, very attractive with her small, delicately modeled features — the straight nose, chin square and firm without being aggressive, and a mouth that never smiles by itself but helps with the lighting up of her whole face when she is amused or pleased. It isn’t easy to describe the appearance of someone who has such mobility of expression; talking or listening, laughing or serious, she has always an animation that is never tiresome because it is so honest and spontaneous. A quite unpretentious person, this Miss Jones, who nevertheless is a positive presence when she’s there, and always leaves behind her a sort of sparkle.

To say that she is at her best with children might seem to suggest that she withholds something from her grown-up friends, and this is not so. She is a thoroughly satisfactory companion, informed and responsive, full of lively imaginativeness, stimulating ideas and penetrating common sense. But in her relationship with a child there is a subjective understanding, a subtle sympathy that creates an immediate at-homeness. I am inclined to think that this accounts for a good deal of her success at making books for children because it comes from her ability to identify herself with the child she once was and has never lost.

One of my pleasantest occasions with Elizabeth Jones was an evening when we sat by the fire drinking coffee and wandering from one subject to another with fine disconnectedness until she began to tell me about herself as a little girl. Several times since, I’ve thought about some episode or another that she described, and have wondered, “Now what book had that in it?” — only to remember that it was part of the Autobiography of Elizabeth Jones as told to Annis Duff in the dead of night.

There was small Elizabeth, living in a little house — “oh, a very little house” — by the side of a deep ravine. A narrow bridge led across to where the road was, and the grand piano had to be carried over by several staggering men. She had no companions of her own generation until she was nearly six, but Pantzy and Mamie, the Bohemian girls of the household, gave her their love and care and companionship then, and for many years after Tom and Annette joined the family circle. She lived in the kitchen, she says, listening to their colorful tales, hearing their songs, watching them dance, and seeing them cook the wonderful Bohemian food.

Elizabeth glows with a sort of wondering delight as she tells about their radiant and untiring happiness in devising pleasures for a responsive child: the tiny doll’s dress, begun at suppertime, and brought for her to see in all its embroidered beauty by a blink of lamplight long after midnight, and left for her to find like a dream come true in the morning; the miraculous appearance in the kitchen one evening (when Pantzy had mysteriously disappeared upstairs) of an old Bohemian beggarman who with complete rightness proved to have known Mamie’s family in the Old Country, and told fine tales of their life and times; and—what later became one of the most delightful episodes in Maminka’s Children — the making of the Christmas bread, which is traditional in the Jones family to this day, though Pantzy and Mamie long ago carried their gift of happiness to other spheres.

When Elizabeth was about five, her family moved to a more spacious house, and she was given a beautiful walnut bed with a broad polished headboard, so that she might learn to enjoy and respect beautiful things. She had at this time a rather glamorous night-life of her own devising. Partly from loneliness, and partly from imagination clamoring for an outlet, she created a setting in which her home was an orphanage presided over by one Miss Brown. Every bedroom was a dormitory with rows of beds down each side, each bed having a headboard perfect for use as a blackboard. Each night when she’d been left alone to go to sleep, Elizabeth played with her equally orphaned companions. Night was the time for lessons: arithmetic, reading, grammar, spelling, and finally, and best of all, drawing. For this Elizabeth took a piece of chalk to bed, and just before she went to sleep she would draw a picture on the sleek headboard, and first thing in the morning she would rub it out. One morning her mother, coming in to close the window, found the chalky adornment still there. A mild reproof, combined with practical instruction as to the relative merits of chalk and olive-oil in the care of fine furniture, provided Elizabeth with a new kind of situation for her nocturnal adventures, and her prestige was greatly heightened among her shadowy companions.

Like many children gifted with imagination, Elizabeth thought herself “different,” and had no means of discovering whether or not her school friends felt as she did about books, or made response to the beauty all around. So she was all bottled up and lived in a state of bewilderment, badly needing a like-minded companion, but not quite knowing how to reveal her need.

When her brother and sister were of an age to be away from home, the three spent their summers in a little house built for them on their uncle’s plantation in Virginia. Here, free to pursue her own pleasures in congenial company, Elizabeth found a satisfying outlet for imaginative energy. A beagle-hound was their favorite playmate, and the Jones children talked a private jargon known as Beagle Language. Elizabeth at this period made a practice of setting difficult tasks for herself — reading the Bible all through, staying up all night, or making a dictionary of Beagle Language. She usually accomplished what she set out to do, and if the immediate results were not always essentially practical, the strengthening of her determination and ability to carry through an appointed task doubtless served her well in the fulfillment of her intention to develop skill and understanding as an artist.

“When did you find you wanted to be an artist?” I asked her — a silly question, now I come to think about it. She naturally couldn’t answer with any definiteness, but supposed she must have settled on drawing as the most satisfactory of her gifts when she realized that in spite of having had much music at home all her life—her father and mother are both gifted musicians — she didn’t want it as a career. When, after completing her work at the University of Chicago, she studied first at the Art Institute of Chicago and later at the School of Fine Arts at Fontainebleau, she discovered that there were people who felt and thought and saw as she did. “They talked about beauty right out loud! It was wonderful!”

Then she went to Paris, to study with Camille Liausu. “And when,” I asked, “ did you begin to draw children?” She said that she was working in the studio one day, fearfully tense and serious, when M. Liausu told her to get her coat and go out into the park. “Don’t take pencils or paper. Don’t do anything. Just watch the children playing and then come back and see if you can get some movement into your drawing.” She watched one child; she watched two children; she watched groups of children. And then she went back and drew something of what she had seen, and it was good.

She spent other and more days watching children and getting them down on paper. She came home to the United States and had a one-man show of color etchings of children at the Smithsonian Institute. And she wrote and made pictures for a little book called Ragman of Paris. I remember reading the closing chapter of it, reprinted in the May/June Horn Book in 1937, and thinking what a jolly book it would be for my six-year-old son — if I had a six-year-old son. It all came back to me the other day as I watched Steven crouching down to talk to a prowling pussy in the woodlot, and later heard him explaining that he was looking for the pussy’s green whisker.

Maminka came along before our son did, and when I think of Deirdre’s shouts of laughter as we read the chapter about the big noodle, I can scarcely wait until Steven is ready for it, too. Then there was Twig, funny and wistful and very spacious in its understanding of a child’s strength in imagination; and Small Rain, to me the most perfect of all books of Bible literature for children because of the quality of sheer joyousness that shines in all its pages. This quality is a reflection of Elizabeth herself, whose own “joyous inner wisdom” sees the eternal verities as a perennial source of happy well-being, and knows that children should have them so.

With every new book, Elizabeth Jones shows a greater sureness of technique, a finer, freer, lovelier expression of her delight in “clear-eyed, soft-faced, happy-hearted childhood, and the coy reticences, the simplicities and small solemnities of little people.” When first we used to read Prayer For A Child and look at the pictures, every time we came to “Bless the hands that never tire,’ Steven would add; “Bless the hands of our Miss Jones.” So say all of us. Hands that can bring into concrete form the vision and beauty and humor of Elizabeth Jones’ particular kind of seeing from the top of her own particular hill have a great gift to bestow on the children of this world.

This article, originally published in July 1945 issue of The Horn Book Magazine, is part of our Caldecott at 75 celebration. Click here for more archival Horn Book material on Elizabeth Orton Jones and Prayer for a Child.

The post “Our Miss Jones” appeared first on The Horn Book.

*Read at the Awards Luncheon when the Caldecott Medal was given to Elizabeth Orton Jones for her illustrations in Rachel Field’s Prayer for a Child (Macmillan).

There was once a little girl who found it very puzzling to say “thank you.” The words were too small for the feeling, the feeling too big for the words. She would slip away — crawl under the piano or under the dining room table and sit there in silence, with the big feeling inside her…Oh, to crawl under a table right now! The feeling is very big — thank you!

Much of the big feeling is that I am in no wise worthy. The Caldecott Medal — full-sized — for me? Surely it should be in miniature, for me! I do not consider myself an artist. Not yet. The very word “artist,” to me, carries with it a little vision of the state of having arrived. I think of being an artist as an achievement I may work toward my whole life and even then not arrive. Though I should like to be able to say, right out loud to myself, on the morning of my 99th birthday, “Old girl, you are an artist!” The same applies to the word “author.” And as for “author-artist”…! Whenever I am asked, point blank, what my profession is, I carefully avoid those words and answer, “I draw pictures. I write stories.”

I suppose I could answer, “I make books — for children.” But would the person to whom I was giving the answer understand that that little statement works both ways, that the reverse of it completes the truth? I make books—for children. That’s only half the truth. For as soon as a book I have made is in children’s hands, they shoot back into my hands the makings of another book. It’s very like a game of “catch” — a magical, never-ending game of “catch.” I make books — for children: children make books — for me. There’s the complete truth.

In a sense, I am standing before children at this moment as surely as I’m standing before you. In another sense, I am talking to children through you. What do they think of all this? Is it with their consent that I receive the Caldecott Medal, full-sized, and the full-sized honor that goes with it?

It would be difficult to talk directly to them about the honor. The meaning of honor is singularly lacking in their particular way of looking at things. And, for the most part, the extent of their knowledge of reward is finding it in the doing. As for the medal itself, if I were to pass it around among them, they would be interested, of course. Very interested. They would look at it, feel of it, turn it upside down and rightside up. They would say, “It’s pretty!” And then they would say, “What’s it for?” It would be difficult to talk to children about the use of the medal. In fact, it is difficult to talk to children — period! — unless what you say has something to do with something they know about. Has the Caldecott Medal something to do with something they know about? Of course it has. Drawing.

It is not difficult to talk to children about drawing, for they are fellow-indulgers, all. To them, drawing is as natural a part of everyday life as eating or sleeping or washing your neck — far more natural, usually, than the latter. To them, drawing is not tied and bound to talent, nor to theory, nor to technique, nor even to subject matter. To them, the possibilities of drawing are by no means limited to things visible. To them, it is no more unusual to sit down and draw a picture of God than it is to sit down and draw a picture of a potato. To them, drawing a picture of how happiness feels on a bright sunny morning doesn’t present any more of a problem than drawing a picture of Daddy’s blue overalls hanging on the line.

When the manuscript of Rachel Field’s Prayer for a Child came to me in the mail, one bright sunny morning, with Doris Patee’s suggestion that I draw pictures to go with it, I knew at once that I should like to try.

I sat down with the little prayer. It was not new to me. I had already read it in the Memorial Horn Book for Rachel Field. I already loved it. There is a difference, though, between reading something to take into yourself to keep and reading something to take in and then give out again through your own interpretation.

I remembered, the first time I read it, how it seemed to breathe — as things written for a particular child often do. Rachel Field wrote the prayer for her little girl, Hannah. It was Hannah who had caused it to breathe.

I wondered. Who was I to make pictures for Hannah’s prayer? I didn’t know Hannah. I had never met Rachel Field actually — only through her books. What kind of pictures did she see when she first read the prayer to Hannah? What kind of pictures did Hannah see as she listened? What kind of pictures was I going to draw for Hannah and other children to look at?

For a long time I sat with Hannah’s prayer.

“Bless this milk and bless this bread.” — I thought of my old silver cup and how it used to feel to my hand, heavy with milk and cool and shiny.

“Bless this soft and waiting bed…” — I thought of the blue and white patchwork quilt made by Mamie, with pictures from Mother Goose and from Æsop on it. I got my old silver cup out of the cupboard and polished it. I got the blue and white patchwork quilt down from the shelf and unfolded it.

“Through the darkness, through the night, let no danger come to fright my sleep…”…I ran to the window seat and knelt there, to feel again how it used to feel looking out into the dark sky.

I had no little girl. The little girl closest to me was the little-girl-I-used-to-be.

“Bless the toys whose shapes I know;” — I got out the toys I had kept and put away in cardboard boxes.

I’d have to pretend. I’d pretend that I and the little-girl-I-used-to-be were two separate people. I’d pretend we both lived in my studio. She would go to sleep and wake up, get dressed and undressed, think thoughts and dream dreams in my studio. While I drew.

“Bless the lamplight, bless the fire…” — I would try to draw the quiet, comfortable happiness a child feels at bedtime. I would try to draw the change of thought that comes softly as a change of breeze at the end of a day — when everything in the outside world begins to fade, and everything that means home, especially what is a child’s very own; begins to shine with nearness and dearness and familiarity.

“Bless the hands that never tire in their loving care of me.” — I would try to draw security.

“Bless my friends and family.” — I would try to draw companionship.

“Bless my father and my mother…” — I would try to draw love.

“Bless other children far and near, and keep them safe and free from fear.” — I would try to draw the feeling of fellowship that exists, without the necessity for a San Francisco Conference, among all children.

“So let me sleep and let me wake in peace and health, for Jesus’ sake…Amen.” — I would try to draw the confidence a child feels in being sure of the presence of God.

All this I would try to draw.

I couldn’t actually see all this, of course. Not with my eyes. I couldn’t actually see the little-girl-I-used-to-be. So a real little girl came to pose for me. Her job was to pretend she lived in my studio. She pretended very well. There was no milk in the cup; the piece of bread was a pad of paper; she had to get undressed and go to bed at eleven o’clock in the morning. But such things are not at all puzzling when there’s a reason. And pretending is as good a reason as any.

I found that the toys whose shapes the little-girl-I-used-to-be knew were simply too worn out to pose. So I put them back in their cardboard boxes and administered anesthetic in the shape of more moth balls, to insure their well-earned rest. I went uptown and looked around in the stores. But I couldn’t buy what I was looking for; not for any amount of money. Only after a long life of being much-slept-with does the real character of toys begin to show. I gave voice to my need one day while taking tea with a friend. The children of the house happened to be present, but seemingly paying no attention. After a while, however, the little boy who lay on his stomach on the floor, drawing, left his picture and ran upstairs. His sister followed. In a very few minutes they were down again, and my lap was filled with what I had been looking for. Their most cherished toys — the ones always taken on long trips — the ones always slept with — were hereby offered me to take home to keep as long as I needed them. I got up in the night, that night, I remember, and went into the studio and lit the lamp. There were the toys, patiently waiting out the first night they had ever been separated from their owners. Prowlie, the teddy bear, had his arm around Abigail, the rag doll, in whose lap sat Salisbury, the rabbit. Gentle patience and utterly selfless loyalty showed, if anything ever showed in Prowlie’s shoebutton eyes, in the smudge which was Abigail’s nose, in the patch which covered Salisbury’s whole behind. Prowlie seemed to be saying, “Of course they’re all right, Abigail. Don’t worry! Whatever this is, we’re doing it because they want us to, remember. Whatever is expected of us, we must do it well.” With a feeling of truly humble respect, I went back to bed.

Drawing is very like a prayer. Drawing is a reaching for something away beyond you. As you sit down to work in the morning, you feel as if you were on top of a hill. And it is as if you were seeing for the first time. You take your pencil in hand. You’d like to draw what you see. And so you begin. You try.

The result depends on a good many things. On how much you know about drawing, for one. If you don’t know much, the picture isn’t very good. Good or bad, however, it is never what you tried to draw. The picture is never what you saw from the top of your hill. Never. But if somebody — a grownup or a child, a little old beggarwoman or a king — anybody! — can, by looking at your picture, catch a glimpse of what you saw…if somebody — anybody! — can in that way understand what you tried to draw, then — likening drawing to a prayer again—your prayer has been answered.

I have a picture — or, rather, a postcard print of a picture — at which I am very fond of looking. It is a picture of a whole countryside of little hills, with a wide blue sky above. And on top of each little hill sits a child, singing. I like to look at that picture and think: Every child in the world has a hill, with a top to it. Every child — black, white, rich, poor, handicapped, unhandicapped. And singing is what the top of each hill is for. Singing — drawing — thinking — dreaming — sitting in silence…saying a prayer.

I should like every child in the world to know that he has a hill, that that hill is his no matter what happens, his and his only, for ever. I should like every child in the world to know that what he can see from the top of his hill, when he looks down and around, is different from what can be seen from the top of anybody else’s hill — that what he can see when he looks straight up is exactly what everybody else, looking straight up, can see, too.

I should like, if you don’t mind, to accept the Caldecott Medal, and the honor that goes with it, as a trust. I should like to try to express my gratitude for that trust on every page of every book I’m ever to make — for children.

This article, originally published in the July 1945 issue of The Horn Book Magazine, is part of our Caldecott at 75 celebration. Click here for more archival Horn Book material on Elizabeth Orton Jones and Prayer for a Child.

The post Elizabeth Orton Jones’s Caldecott acceptance speech appeared first on The Horn Book.

Tchrr-r-r-r! The phone would ring. I’d answer, and after a considerable while I’d hear a faint little quavery voice, as if someone were calling me from beyond the Pleiades…“E-li-i-izabeth?”

It would be my dear friend Bertha Mahony Miller, calling from Ashburnham, Massachusetts, about seventeen miles from Mason, New Hampshire, where I lived then (and still do), about something very important — always something important! Could she come over right now to talk about whatever it was?

“Why, of course, Bertha!” I’d say. What other answer could there be?

In an unbelievably short length of time, a great big automobile, with no driver visible above the steering wheel, would swerve into the parking place at my house and stop with dramatic suddenness. The driver’s-side door would open, and out would step a demure little smiling white-haired lady in a pale blue dotted-Swiss dress with a neat lace collar, wearing a stylish navy-blue straw hat and lugging a giant-size briefcase, or perhaps a purse roomy enough to hold a couple of picture books plus a thick sheaf of typewritten pages.

“Oh, E-li-i-i-i-izabeth!” Her blue eyes would twinkle. “I have an entirely new idea to share with you. I can hardly wait to know what you think!”

Up into the woods we’d go. Bertha would always prefer, weather permitting, to talk over a matter of import in the woods rather than inside a house. Out would come a brand-new book, just off the press, or several clipped-together typewritten pages — an article, an editorial for the next issue of the Horn Book, or simply an idea, a plan, a broader view. The talk would always be about imagination, originality, beauty of expression, inspiration, depth of concept; about truth, about things waiting to be which had not yet been. There we would sit on two mossy rocks with birds flitting hither and yon, and now and then a butterfly, with pine boughs moving gently according to each passing breeze, talking about the world and children, about dreams, high hopes transformed into actualities through words and pictures — Bertha’s specialty.

I didn’t know her when she had brown hair. I didn’t know her before she married William D. Miller and became mistress of that beautiful estate in Ashburnham, with its rambling house, its 
classic tiered gardens outside, its wealth of books inside. I didn’t know Bertha until she had fly-away white hair (such as I have now—wouldn’t she be surprised!). She was a year older than my father, yet I never had the slightest inclination to think of her as belonging to the “older” generation. I thought of her as my contemporary, even though the year The Bookshop for Boys and Girls opened in Boston was the year I entered first grade in Highland Park, Illinois. Publication of The Horn Book Magazine commenced the year I graduated from eighth grade. Not until after I graduated from college and had spent a year studying art in France, then another year in New York trying to find a place for my work, was I introduced to Bertha through a happenstance that I described at length thirty-five years later in the October 1969 issue of the Horn Book. I told about how my mother, having just presented my watercolors at a Newbury Street gallery and having received a disheartening verdict, was plodding doggedly ahead on Boylston Street when she suddenly stopped, fascinated, before the window of The Bookshop for Boys and Girls, and ventured inside to see more. She met Beulah Folmsbee and then Bertha, and the outcome of this happenstance was Bertha’s curiosity to see what was in the portfolio that Mother was carrying, followed by Bertha’s insistence on an exhibit of those watercolors and more, at the Bookshop: my first one-man show, the first stepping-stone on the path to my future, and the beginning of a significant and unique friendship that was to last for thirty-five years.

Rich years they were, holding unforgettable experiences: the Caldecott Medal, for instance, in 1945. Bertha wrote to me in May of that year:

I hope you will see that the amplifier at the dinner is fixed just right for you when you speak, and that you will “speak” your paper, not read it. I want the audience not to miss a bit of it.

The intensity of her interest reached beyond her own plans and projects in behalf of children and their reading. When I was involved in trying to create a children’s room in our small public library here in Mason — painting old discarded furniture in bright Czech folk style, trying to create something out of nothing, fairy-tale-fashion — Bertha would come with cartons of new books sent by publishers for Horn Book reviews, along with window curtains trimmed in rick-rack and peasant-design braid, sewn by herself. She would bring important people in the children’s book world to see the new room, to show them what could be done to bring reading to the children of a small town at no cost.

When I was painting the murals-that-never-got-finished at the Crotched Mountain Rehabilitation Center in Greenfield, New Hampshire, Bertha would bring armloads of picture books for the children as well as such people as the Cronans (the storytellers of Boston) to delight them. Not only did Bertha coax me to write about this magic mountain place for the Horn Book, but when we gave a Christmas pageant, the first in which most of these handicapped children had ever taken part, Bertha insisted on publishing the story of it in book form: a small volume entitled How Far Is It to Bethlehem?

She had no children of her own; yet in a rarer, more long-lasting sense, all children everywhere were hers.

Now and again I happen to meet someone I’ve never met before, and in some mysterious way, the conversation may lead to a mention of the Horn Book.

“The Horn Book, did you say? Do you know the Horn Book?”

“Know it!” exclaimed the person I met just the other day. “I love it! To me, the Horn Book is indispensable!”

Wow! Did you hear that, Bertha, wherever you may be, beyond the Pleiades, perhaps? I somehow know you heard.

As for you, dear beloved Horn Book: Happy seventy-fifth birthday to you! May you continue to thrive and to be indispensable for many and many a year to come!

This article, originally published in the September/October 1999 issue of The Horn Book Magazine, is part of our Caldecott at 75 celebration. Click here for more archival Horn Book material on Elizabeth Orton Jones and Prayer for a Child.

The post Horn Book Reminiscence appeared first on The Horn Book.

An illustrator comments in each issue of The Horn Book upon a new picture book he particularly likes.

Who Dreams of Cheese?
comment by Elizabeth Orton Jones

Who can draw dreams? Who can draw thoughts? Who can tell with a few words and a paint brush how it feels to be a bird — so aptly and simply that suddenly we are a bird? We never really knew before how it was to fly — to peck quickly at a grape with a sharp bill — to be afraid of a squirrel. But now, somehow, we do. And with this knowing comes a new ableness to feel, through our whole being, the meaning of that nest, deep in the weeds, with eggs in it. We feel and we dream a bird’s dream. And having felt and dreamed, we are now part bird. And this moment of experience will never leave us. This bit of understanding is ours, to keep. Who can give such a gift?

We turn to the next page, in the picture book of my choice. Who dreams of a picture book wherein we can be completely reconciled to that disconcerting necessity of going from color to black and white and back again? How reconciled? By our acceptance of the simple fact that there are all kinds of dreams: big and little, funny and sad, dark and light, color and gray —. Instead of black, however, brown is used here — the warm brown of a warm brown blanket…Just as we became a bird, now we are a mouse. And now we know who dreams of cheese.

We were asked this question very loudly, in huge letters, on the front of the jacket — CHEESE being an almost screeching yellow which didn’t seem to go, quite, with the mood of the whole. It was like a gaudy trumpet-call used to introduce a most tender piece of music. Perhaps tenderness needs such a call to attention…“Who dreams of CHEESE?”…“Come into my book,” said Leonard Weisgard, humbly, in small letters, down at the bottom, “and you will see.”…It was an invitation we could not refuse.

We opened the book and its mood came out to meet us. Like a dream it enfolded us and carried us easily — oh! so easily — on.

Direct brush strokes, a feeling of freshness and transparency everywhere, an ingenious background treatment, words that sound like the pictures and pictures that look like the words—all merge and lose themselves in what seems the essence of dreams. We become a rabbit — a fox — a pony — a squirrel — a fish under water — a boy — a girl. We peck we scamper, we nibble, we laugh, in this series of transforming experiences. It’s all such fun we scarcely realize that with each one we grow, until we are big enough to know the grown-up dreams of a father, a mother. And finally, we seem to be everything at once — everything we have been, in the book, and everything we are going to be, outside, in life. It is a big feeling. And underneath — deep underneath — is a bigger feeling still.

“What I see here is nothing but a shell,” the Little Prince told us, several years ago. “What is important is invisible.”

There is a gratifying trend — I might almost say compulsion — which has entered into the making of picture books today: to use the tangible as a transparency, a lens, through which to look and find the intangible, the invisible, the really real.

We close the book. On the back of the jacket is a slender moon, and soft streaks of paint which look like the layers of sleep, and some translucent ferns, and two white daisies growing on invisible stems.

Shall we turn the book over and begin again? The children will want to, I know.

This article, originally published in the November 1950 issue of The Horn Book Magazine, is part of our Caldecott at 75 celebration. Click here for more archival Horn Book material on Elizabeth Orton Jones and Prayer for a Child.

The post Artist’s Choice appeared first on The Horn Book.

INGRI AND EDGAR PARIN D’AULAIRE, Author-Illustrators
Abraham Lincoln (Doubleday)

“Deep in the wilderness down in Kentucky there stood a cabin of roughly hewn logs. It was a poor little cabin of only one room. But the flames flickered gaily on the hearth….In this cabin lived a man named Thomas Lincoln with his wife and his little daughter, Sally. And here it was that his son, Abraham Lincoln, first saw the world on a Sunday morning (in February). It wasn’t much of a house in which he was born, but it was just as good as most people had in Kentucky in 1809.” A young assistant in the children’s room of a large city branch said when she had finished looking at it, “How the refugee children will love this book!” The d’Aulaires have told the story of Lincoln well and their pictures are bound to interest children and to be interesting and arresting to grown-ups.

reviewed in the May 1939 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

1941

ROBERT LAWSON, Author-Illustrator
They Were Strong and Good (Viking)

A country made up as is ours of many different racial strains may well take pains to see that its children are conscious of their heritage. Robert Lawson has made an unusual contribution to such an objective in this boylike record of his own ancestors. His fine line drawings accompanied by short, straightforward text give a picture of these forebears who are a pride to him, not because of wealth or position but because of character. “They were strong and good.” The touch is a light one — you can trust Robert Lawson to bring his glinting humor into play — but none the less is the book a bit of social history out of the family album.

reviewed in the November 1940 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

1942

ROBERT MCCLOSKEY, Author-Illustrator
Make Way for Ducklings (Viking)

The Boston Public Garden has never appeared in more attractive guise than in this engaging book. The story of the family of ducks, raised on the Charles River and brought back to the pond in the Garden, through the traffic of city streets by its anxious mother is founded on fact as many Bostonians can testify. Robert McCloskey’s unusual and stunning pictures will long be a delight for their fun as well as their spirit of place.

reviewed in the November 1941 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

1943

VIRGINIA LEE BURTON, Author-Illustrator
The Little House (Houghton)

In the most fascinating picture book of the season, Virginia Lee Burton tells the story of a Little house which wins its way into the very center of our heart. Stunning pictures in color show the changing scene of summer and winter, as the house watches the sun rise and set, and lights begin to twinkle in the nearby city, until she felt the city grow up around her, step by step. Both city and country children will study these pictures with absorption, for there is much exciting detail in them. Besides the seasonal sports and activities of children who played around the house, there is the panorama of the passers-by, in horse-drawn vehicles at first, and then in every kind of motor car you can think of. The pictures are full of life and movement, of work even more than play. And in the end we have the joy of seeing the little house, now shabby and forlorn, move back into the green and sunny country, where the stars shine over her at night. This is the best of Virginia Lee Burton’s books, so far, and we predict for it a long and favored life.

reviewed in the November 1942 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

1944

JAMES THURBER
Many Moons (Harcourt)

Illustrated by Louis Siobodkin. A charming picture book about an imperious ten-year-old princess who wanted the moon, and what her father did to get it for her. The Lord High Chamberlain, the Royal Wizard, the Royal Mathematician were all called upon in vain, and at last it was the Royal Jester who helped the princess find her own answer to the troublesome demand. Louis Slobodkin’s many lovely pictures have an important share in making a distinguished book of this amusing fairy tale — the first book James Thurber has written for children.

reviewed in the September 1943 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

1945

RACHEL FIELD
Prayer for a Child (Macmillan)

Pictures by Elizabeth Orton Jones. This childlike prayer, written for Hannah, has been printed before, but not in illustrated form, as a book by itself. A realistic, unsentimental picture on each page makes the meaning of the phrases more clear to little children, closer to daily life. This is a choice book for a reverent mother to use at home with a young family.

reviewed in the January 1945 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

1946

MAUD AND MISKA PETERSHAM, Author-Illustrators
The Rooster Crows (Macmillan)

“A Book of American Rhymes and Jingles.” Counting-out and rope-skipping rhymes bring up visions of generations of American children, in the playground and the street; familiar finger-plays and folk-jingles recall the nursery and the home. “Mother may I go out to swim?” and “Star Light, Star Bright,” come back to the memory as easily as “Yankee Doodle.” The Petershams have made delightful pictures, in soft harmonious colors, with plenty of humor for these and many other rhymes that American children chant freely. They have made a beautiful book and the publishers have given it clear large type for young readers.

reviewed in the March 1946 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

1947

GOLDEN MACDONALD
The Little Island (Doubleday)

Illustrated by Leonard Weisgard. In some of his most brilliant and exciting pictures Leonard Weisgard shows the changes that the seasons bring to a little island out in the ocean. The rhythmic story tells of the kitten who came ashore from a sailboat and found out the secret of being an island from a wise and talkative fish. A picture book of great charm.

reviewed in the January 1947 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

1948

ALVIN TRESSELT
White Snow Bright Snow (Lothrop)

Illustrated by Roger Duvoisin. Lovely full-page pictures in color convey the joyous feeling of beauty and wonder and frolic that comes to little children when snowflakes are in the air. The text describes some of the work snow brings to grown-ups.

reviewed in the November 1947 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

1949

BERTA AND ELMER HADER, Author-Illustrators
The Big Snow (Macmillan)

Lovely pictures in color and in black and white show the different animals of the woods getting ready for winter after they see the wild geese flying south. Here are the cottontails eating plenty of food, the chipmunks busy with their store of nuts; bluejays and cardinals, robins and pheasants, all preparing to stay with the mice and the deer, thinking they are ready for the winter. Then  come the snow in all its whiteness and heavy abundance, the need of the wild creatures and the feeding of the birds by two kindly folk in the country.

reviewed in the November 1948 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

These reviews of 1940s Caldecott Medal–winning titles are part of our Caldecott at 75 celebration. Click here for more archival Horn Book material on Elizabeth Orton Jones and Prayer for a Child.

The post Horn Book reviews of Caldecott Medal winners, 1940-1949 appeared first on The Horn Book.

This article provides historical background information on Ms. Horning’s “Caldecott at 75” article, “Mei Li and the Making of a Picture Book,” published in the January/February 2013 print issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

Thomas Handforth drawing in Beijing. Photo courtesy of Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Archives.

Thomas Handforth

Thomas Schofield Handforth was born in Tacoma, Washington, in 1897. He was an artistic child, and one of his earliest memories was his delight at age three in walking across a rustic moon bridge in one of Tacoma’s city parks. “For me the great experience was the sight of the arc’s reflection in the lily pond, forming the other half of the perfect circle. It was the circle of the Yin and Yang, Chinese symbol of the universe.” A few years later, he drew the symbol as one of the first pictures in his childhood drawing book, followed by Hokusai’s Blue Wave, and a page of dragons. His early interest in Asian art was also fueled by a great uncle who gave him a two-volume set of reprints of Hokusai’s One Hundred Views of Mt. Fujiyama.

Handforth dropped out of the University of Washington after a year, and went to New York and then Paris to study art. But he found school dull, so he spent the next decade traveling through North Africa and Mexico, finding subjects to draw. He was especially drawn to common people in motion — dancers, wrestlers, and children. In the 1920s, he created 120 etchings and began to make a name for himself in the American art world. One of the people who collected his work was an American attorney, Edwin de Turck Bechtel, whose wife was Louise Seaman Bechtel, head of the new children’s division at Macmillan. She was looking for an illustrator for a new book by one of her star authors, Elizabeth Coatsworth. Since the book was set in Marrakesh and Handforth was living there at the time, she arranged to have him meet the author, who was also staying there, and Handforth agreed to illustrate the book. Neither the book, Toutou in Bondage (Macmillan, 1929), nor the illustrator made much of a splash at the time. His second illustrated book, Tranquilina’s Paradise (Minton, Balch, 1930) by Susan Smith, drew on his experiences in Mexico, and also quickly faded into obscurity.

In 1931 Handforth received a Guggenheim Fellowship for travel to Asia where he could pursue his work as a graphic artist. He expected to spend two weeks in Beijing, but he felt so at home there that he ended up staying for six years, renting a space in an old house that had fallen into disrepair. In Beijing he turned from etching to lithography because he felt that the spirit of China was better captured with a brush and a “greasy crayon.” He bought himself a new press for his lithography and worked in stone, experimenting with different techniques.

He found no shortage of subjects in the courtyard surrounding the old palace, where there were always acrobats, dancers, wrestlers, old men and children, as well as farm animals. A shy man, Handforth was most comfortable around the children, and he frequently imitated Charlie Chaplin to entertain his models. A favorite of his was a nine-year-old boy who was a sword dancer, who never seemed to tire of posing. A young girl acrobat was another favorite model. But it was a bossy four-year-old girl named Mei Li who soon claimed his attention. With her pet duckling and her little white dog, Mei Li ruled over the courtyard, finding adults to pose for the American artists and instructing them on just how to do it. “If they ever weakened in this job of posing,” Handforth wrote, “she would give them a piece of her mind.”

Handforth wanted to somehow put all of his favorite subjects together, so he decided to create a picture book, using them all as models. Mei Li, of course, would be the protagonist. The author/artist recalled: “She assumed such importance, which she rightly deserved, as the leading lady, that she crowded many of my other friends out of the story. She was that kind of a girl.”

He worked on the book for two years, taking his inspiration not only from the people who lived and worked around the courtyard but also from the Chinese art that he loved. Handforth connected his affinity for Chinese art with his understanding of how picture books work:

My goal in etching and lithography is to do, without imitating its technical manner, a Western Hsie-y, i.e. “to write the meaning.” (The Chinese Hsie-y is closely related to Chinese calligraphy.)

…The rhythm of Hsie-y is not contained within the frame. What is visible is only like the fragment of melody carried in and out of the picture frame toward infinity on a two-dimension plane.

From this approach the Picture Book seems to me to present possibilities analogous to those of the Chinese scroll: giving a larger segment of “melody” with variations and with a definite progression in time from beginning to end.

Although the people who lived around the courtyard were the inspiration for his picture book, the story Handforth wrote was original. In it, he imagined Mei Li as a little girl, determined to attend the New Year Fair, even though girls of her station were not allowed to go. Taking three lucky pennies and three lucky marbles, she follows her older brother, San Yu (modeled after the son of a rickshaw driver) to the walled city of Beijing where she sees camels, horses, a trained bear, circus performers and acrobats, and has her fortune told by a young priest: “You will rule over a kingdom.” After a day filled with activity, she and her brother just make it out of the walled city before the gates are closed (thanks to a beggar girl who holds the door open with her feet, in return for the lucky penny Mei Li had given her on her way into the city). They get home in time to greet the Kitchen God, who tells Mei Li that “this house is your kingdom and palace. Within its walls all living things are your loyal, loving subjects.”

Contemporary critics have been quick to call Mei Li sexist due to its conclusion that the only “kingdom” Mei Li can possibly rule over is her own household. In fact, whether we like it or not, it represented reality for most Chinese girls and women in the time it was written, and Mei Li’s spirited response to the Kitchen God’s prophecy is strikingly modern: “It will do for a while, anyway.” Those who charge the book with sexism seem to ignore that the whole story is set in motion by Mei Li breaking with tradition by following her brother to the fair, where she continues to prove her brother wrong whenever he points out things girls can’t do. And, of course, it is Mei Li — and not her brother — who is the hero of the story. A year later, Handforth wrote of her: “No Empress Dowager was ever more determined than she. A career is surely ordained for her, other than being the heroine of a children’s book.”

Pu Mei Li holding the book she inspired. Photo courtesy of Zi Tan and Peggy Hartzell.

Pu Mei Li

The real child who inspired the story was Pu Mei Li, born during a famine in the Anhwei Province in 1934, and left on the doorstep of a missionaries’ home as a baby. She spent her second year in an American mission foundling asylum, and was adopted at age two by Helen Burton, an American businesswoman who had lived in China since 1921. Mei Li was the youngest of four Chinese girls adopted by Burton, who owned a popular gift shop called The Camel Bell Shop (or The Camel’s Bell Shop), located in a popular Beijing hotel. Burton had been born and raised in Bismarck, North Dakota, and like Thomas Handforth she had developed a strong affinity for China, coupled with a robust wanderlust. Prior to moving to China, she had worked as a stenographer for the Chamber of Commerce in Honolulu, Hawaii, where one of her duties was to send form rejection letters to other women seeking similar work. She always took the time to add her own handwritten note: “I came and it worked out fine.” Soon after she arrived in Beijing, she noticed how fascinated Westerners were with the bells worn by the camels there, and she began to buy them in bulk to sell to tourists. She ran her popular shop for twenty-two years until she was sent to an internment camp in 1943 during the Japanese occupation of China. While in the camp, she established a trading post called White Elephant Bell (or White Elephant’s Bell), where inmates could trade personal items for necessities. She was one of the lucky few who was sent back to the United States as part of a prisoner exchange.

As a result, Burton was separated from her adopted daughters, and lost contact with them. In 1948, she went back to China to try to find all four girls. Three older daughters were married with families of their own, and teenaged Mei Li was attending a Methodist Mission School. In a letter to friends, Burton said of Mei Li: “Her teachers report great latent strength—a born leader, as they say. The children about her submit to her commands as readily as the masses are swayed by any dictator. Let us pray that hers will be a benevolent dictatorship at least.” Burton left China and Mei Li, expecting to return soon, but another dictator came to power soon after she left, making her return impossible and resulting in the Communist-ordered imprisonment of her eldest daughter. Pu Mei Li was not heard from again during Burton’s lifetime.

Behind the Wall

At the exact same time Helen Burton was in China, searching for her daughters, Thomas Handforth had decided to settle down to work on his art and was searching for a house in Los Angeles. He wrote his friend of the perfect house he had found, which he called the Castle of Mystery: “But if I should become lord of the castle, you would never have to guess my address again. I would be anchored for life in a pile of reinforced concrete blocks from which it would be impossible to extricate myself. And there is on the grounds a building (a garage to which there is no access for cars — just the place for those two presses — litho and etching — which too would help to hold me down.” He longed to get back to Beijing to retrieve the printing presses he had sealed behind a wall there. But a few months after he had bought his house, he died suddenly of a heart attack.

News of Thomas Handforth’s death came as a shock to all who had known him and his work. He was just fifty-one when he died and was at the beginning of a promising new era in his career, one that might have included more picture books. Instead, he is remembered for just one.

And what of Pu Mei Li?  A few months ago I heard from Thomas Handforth’s niece, who had just made contact with the son of one of Mei Li’s sisters, now living in the United States. He was able to confirm that Mei Li had indeed survived and lived to old age in China. We’ll probably never know what sort of career she had or whether she ruled her own kingdom, but at least we’ll always have this testament to her life and spirit, captured like a “fragment of melody carried in and out of the picture frame toward infinity on a two-dimensional plane.”

This online-only companion to Ms. Horning’s “Mei Li and the Making of a Picture Book” article is part of our Caldecott at 75 celebration. Click here for archival Horn Book material on Thomas Handforth and Mei Li.

The post Thomas Handforth, China, and the Real Mei Li appeared first on The Horn Book.

*Paper read at the meeting of the Section for Work with Children on the occasion of the American Library Association Conference in San Francisco, June 20, 1939.

Thomas Handforth self portrait, 1939.

My progress to the Orient began apparently with my first baby steps and observations. I was born in Tacoma and spent my childhood on the Pacific Coast. I had, as early as I can remember, instinctively turned toward the East. At the age of three my favorite outing was to be taken to the lily pond in Point Defiance Park and to be allowed to climb alone across the rustic Japanese half-moon bridge. The perilous ascent and descent of its slippery slopes should have been excitement enough for any three-year-old, but for me the great experience was the sight of the arc’s reflection in the lily pond forming the other half of the perfect circle. A perfect circle divided by a wave — a symbol of which I did not know the meaning, but which was soon to become familiar to me in its prosaic use as the insignia of the Northern Pacific Railway — the symbol of the Yin and Yang, the negative and positive atoms of all matter interlocked in the Ta Y, the Great Universal.

I had begun to draw even before I went to kindergarten, and at the age of seven or eight, when I was using a real artist’s sketchbook, the Yin-Yang circle occurs on one of its first pages, with Chinese characters used also as magic symbols. They are followed by a page of dragons, then a Buddha in a landscape setting, copied from one of my books of Japanese fairy tales which were dearer to me than those of Andersen or Grimm; then portraits of two Japanese dolls whose smooth and subtly smiling faces were fixed in the imagery of my childhood. One of my best efforts at realism at this time is a memory sketch in water color of three blue-gowned pigtailed Chinamen whom I had seen on a trip to Victoria, British Columbia. There were no Chinese in Tacoma, they had been driven out and their possessions burned on the tide-flats about the year that I was born. The Chinese smugglers’ cave alone remained and into it I used to peer with childish fascination. It was said to continue through the hills to the sea — perhaps to China itself.

But my horizon was not to be bounded by China and Japan alone. In that first sketchbook are drawings of Egyptian pyramids and sphinxes and of far-away lands of my own creation. I conceived the idea of an immense opus upon which I worked intermittently until my tenth year. It was left unfinished, but I find myself working on one volume of it again at the present time. The title page proclaimed it to be “A Great, Marvelous, Misterious Circus of Birds, Beasts, Animals, Insects and Beings from a Far Off Planet!” I declined to have the voyages of my imagination limited to the mere oceans and continents of the geography book.

A copy in my drawing book of Hokusai’s famous blue-wave expresses the same sentiment. The wave sweeps across the page in a long arc, a segment of that greater circle of the Yin and Yang, carrying one out into worlds beyond worlds. This print was my favorite of all the work of the Japanese Ukeyoie school, which I came to know at that time, thanks to Miss Katherine Ball of San Francisco, who did so much to stimulate an interest, especially among the school children of this city, in the decorative arts of the Far East. She gave a series of lectures on the Japanese printmakers to a group of club women in Tacoma and I managed to slip in behind my mother’s flaring skirts of 1907.

I was very happy to meet Miss Ball again in 1934 when she spent a winter in Peking, and to be able to tell her that her talks, which the club ladies probably considered very mild afternoon diversions, had profoundly affected the whole course of my life. Now I was able to identify two little volumes which had come to me from a great-uncle who had served under General Gordon in the Taiping rebellion and had become a Chinese mandarin. These volumes were very old reprints of Hokusai’s well-known One Hundred Views of Mt. Fujiyama. This series of little genre pictures of little human beings of the soil carrying on their myriad transient activities against a background of Nature, of which they remained as much an inseparable part as the leaf on the tree or the snow on the peak of Mt. Fuji, had for me a spirit which later I was ever trying to recapture in my own work.

My-summers, as I grew up, were spent in wanderings about the Puget Sound country and I was never without my sketchbooks. The pine-serried hills, the snow-capped peaks, the irregular sea with its many islands insistently recalled those prints of Hokusai and those of Hiroshigé. On the ocean coast of the Olympic peninsula, the great jagged rocks, jutting up from the foam-flecked sea, and striped with ribbons of mist, seemed to be a continuation of one of these masters’ landscapes.

The Indians of the Far West, too, were a link with the Orient. Their totem poles, their masks, the Thunderbird and the Lightning Serpent, as we now know, have a close affinity with not only the Mayan art of this continent but with the earliest Chinese ideology. In the dream-world of my childhood they had already been fused into one.

After graduating from high school and before my one year at the University of Washington I had decided upon my profession and was trying to learn to paint. It was a rather precious period of jade and ivory towers and yellow furniture; one admired especially Edmond Dulac and Aubrey Beardsley and Kay Nielsen and the then modern Viennese decoration. During this period I painted my one and only mural — a Chinese fantasy with much Dulac influence, and produced my one and only ballet, based on the Babylonian story of Ishtar and Tamuz. I not only did the sets and costumes and arranged the choreography but danced in the chorus. It was one of my few reprehensible outbursts in this form of expression — an urge which I have since managed to preserve discreetly in the category of a suppressed desire. To the dance of others, however, I have remained one of the most ardent of devotees and have recently been investigating its various forms in India.

The first esoteric dancing that I had seen as a small child was that of Raymond Duncan, originally from San Francisco, as you know, and his wife, who were touring America in their sandals and homespun robes. Their two-year-old son, Nicoliades, also in Greek robes and sandals, was with them. Fifteen years later in Paris Raymond Duncan reported to the police that his son was lost. He described him as a youth of surpassing beauty and perfect harmony. Nicoliades was found a week later in a little café seated between two Parisian midinettes and dressed in vulgar modern clothes. He was on a spree — enjoying the novelty of behaving like an average youth for once.

After the mural and the Babylonian ballet I went to the San Francisco Fair of 1915 upon which legend has bestowed the epithet: the most beautiful of all expositions. For me, sentiment if not justice will always concede it that distinction. New realms of European and American art were opened up before me. However, I find myself still most absorbed in things Oriental; my notebooks record: in water color, the great green and gold Dibutsu of the Japanese pavilion against a hot blue sky; motifs of Chinese design seen here and there, and the curved roofs of San Francisco’s Chinatown.

The curved roof, by the way, has utilitarian value, as well as esthetic, since it helps prevent malignant spirits from falling upon people. The spirits, who are fond of sliding down roofs like small boys sliding down a banister, are shot unexpectedly up into the air again by the curve at the roof edge.

While here I went timidly to Gump’s wondering how much I might be able to see before I was earmarked as an unwelcome non-purchaser. To my astonishment cases of rarest porcelains were opened for me, to feel the textures of Sung celadon and white, of Peach bloom and Ox Blood Ming ware, and the fine “famille verte” porcelains of Kanghsi. On that day one youth became an amateur if not a collector of Chinese ceramics.

About two years later in New York, I saw Benrimo’s play The Yellow Jacket, a production inspired by San Francisco’s Chinatown theatre. It made a most vivid impression upon me. By what simple means the imagination of the spectator was stimulated! Four square stools placed in a row made a flower boat upon which the luscious maiden “Autumn Cloud” reclined with the august prince, Wu Hoo Git, beside her. The indifferent property-man went through the gestures of propelling the boat with a long bamboo pole across the ‘most unworthy’ stage while he complacently smoked a cigarette. The tremulous and scraping tones emitted by the orchestra, back center stage, suggested the lapping of wavelets and the crackling of reeds against the flower boat. Yet a picture of exquisite beauty was evoked. In another scene two stools were placed upon two tables to make a lofty mountain top over which the august prince dragged himself, while a snowstorm of white confetti, thrown by the supposedly invisible property-man, encircled his sublime legs and impeded his progress. Quite without naturalistic technique the essence of the mountain snowstorm was there before one’s eyes.

Of the two principal techniques in Chinese painting one is called Hsieh Y, “to write the meaning.” It is a technique related to the calligraphic and is employed by poets and therefore considered the highest form. The brush is used freely as in writing, the very pressure of the brush upon the paper, the shape of the stroke of ink, expressing the quality of the subject. Again, as in the theatre, it is the essence rather than the representation of a specific object that is being sought.

When Kenneth Hayes Miller, with whom I studied painting for a brief time, used to urge us to paint “the cosmic essence of white” or our “inner consciousness of blue,” perhaps he was trying to lead us toward the same goal. But at the age of twenty I couldn’t digest a precept in that form. I just didn’t get it. It was easier for me to understand another of my teachers, Mahonri Young, when he said, “Draw the space about the figure rather than the figure itself.”

Most of my training in draughtsmanship in New York and at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris was completely academic. Each week one did a charcoal drawing of a nude model on a large sheet of paper, beginning at 9 o’clock on Monday morning, with the head at the top of the page and finishing at the bottom of the page with the feet at exactly noon on Saturday. I often wonder how I survived it. I used to flee from the ateliers of Paris to the Cathedral at Chartres, seeking consolation in those quixotic faces of Gothic sculpture, smooth and subtly smiling faces, now of Madonnas instead of Japanese dolls; in those elongated figures of Gothic sculpture with tenuous flowing lines of drapery which were quickened into flame-like shapes of fresh exaltation; sharp flaming movements which come to one again in the fifth century Wei sculpture of China when Buddhism made its first impact upon the Far East.

In Paris, the Expressionists, the Cubists and the Dadaists, who were the parents of the Surrealists, were holding the center of the stage. The tender pathetic boy Harlequins of Picasso’s “blue period” appealed to me especially — adolescent, supple bodies balancing upon spheres, or stepping out from groups of circus people, or in compositions with strong prancing horses. The cool sharp line of some of the modern French engravers I admired too, but I suspected many of the Modernists of being preoccupied with their manner rather than with the animating spirit. And so I welcomed the opportunity of hearing the opinions of an unbiased critic: Dr. James Cousins, who had just come from India. Some of you may remember him from his lectures given here in 1931 and ’33. A large part of his life had been devoted to encouraging the so-called new renaissance in India, but for sixteen years he had been completely out of touch with the European trend. He had come to Paris to assemble a collection of contemporary Western painting for the Maharaja of Mysore, but the names and styles of even the better known Modernist painters were unknown to him. I was enlightened by his reactions, for he was always able to select without guidance examples of those painters of the ultramodern school who were recognized as significant by the West, since, he said, they had something fundamentally in common in their abstract qualities with the great traditions of the East.

However, my interests were in present aspects of life, call it journalistic if you will, and not with the abstract or theories concerning it.

The first painter with whom I came in contact who was able to interpret successfully the living scene, using an Eastern style of painting, was a Georgian friend of mine named Goudiachvili, which means radish. He reveled in the life of the moment, in the scenes of the cafes, in the festivities of the people, in the cabbies and their carriages and their girls of his native town of Tiflis. Yet he painted these scenes in his traditional native style which had come directly from Persia.

With Mr. Radish in mind, and Persia, and also thinking of the adventures in ports, and of what a life was that of a sailor, and a lot of other ideas muddled in my head, I sailed from Marseilles to Tunis. I had intended to go to Ragusa but I missed the boat. It really did not matter where I went. I hoped to be amused. I was hilariously so, especially while trying to etch it all on copper. From Tunis I went to Morocco. Then I jumped back to the Great Northwest, to the somber silent coast of Vancouver Island and I recalled my first love, Hokusai. Then to Mexico, breathtakingly magnificent and barbaric — and I found that Diego Rivera was doing on a grand scale and in his own manner what Hokusai had achieved in his little wood block prints. I started to do a series of etchings which were to have been called The One Hundred Views of Mt. Popocatepetl. Eleven of them were completed when I was awarded in 1931 a Guggenheim Fellowship for travel in the Orient.

I am sure that you are finding it difficult to follow my grasshopper leaps from place to place and are being quite confused by my vagueness concerning the time element. But I hope, before I finish, to have brought you to the point where the time and place no longer matter.

I sailed on a freighter which took a month and a day from New York to Yokohama and the one other passenger on board was a baker from Trenton. There were long hours to hang over the rail and wonder what I was going to do with the Orient or what it would do with me. As you may guess, I had, during my grasshopper leaps, dropped into a good many ports, both on the Atlantic and on the Pacific shores, in the Mediterranean and on the North African Coast. A collection of sketches of these ports had begun to accumulate and it seemed to me that it would be a worthy aim to continue on the same sort of theme, making a sequence of impressions of Ports of the World. Also I wanted to see more of the Dances of the World: in Java, Bali, and India. I would stop in Japan only long enough to corroborate the knowledge which I thought I already had of that country’s arts.

Japan, with its passion for the perfection of arrangement, turned out to look exactly as it was expected to appear. Aside from its blatant scars of western modernization, every view in front of one, or behind, might be of Hiroshigé’s pictures. After all, too much was enough. Such perfectly ordered and regulated nature was unreasonable.

In the homes of the potters of Kyoto, where each family for generations had specialized in the manufacture of some special ware, one sat for restive hours while the brothers and the cousins and the fathers and the aunts discussed the decoration on a simple dish; whether the stroke of the flower stem should turn slightly more toward the right or slightly more toward the left. For business reasons, of course, it was important, because the dish was to be sold as an original Chinese piece of the 11th century!

At the Miyako Hotel I met the John Alden Carpenter family who had just come from Peking. They were all enthusiasm.

“You must go as quickly as you can to Peking,” said Mrs. Carpenter. “It is inexhaustible! Peking is inexhaustible!”

“No,” said I. “I am traveling to do a series of pictures of ports of the world. No more tinkling temple bells for me, thank you. Nor ivory pagodas, nor porcelain ones either, thank you. One must beware of these lands of sweet and pretty dreams — these lands of exotic fantasy. I want to be a waterfront rat and see life as it really is.”

I was stubborn and went to Shanghai.

A few weeks later, on a humid drizzling day in May, I was passing by the American Express Offices near that Shanghai Bund which was already beginning to pall upon me, when I noticed a crowd of coolies gathered about a foreign lady who was having an argument — the usual one — with her ricksha man, and threatening him with her umbrella. I stepped up to watch how this financial disagreement would be settled. The foreign lady saw me and stopped with upraised umbrella. Then the blow fell, not on the ricksha man, but upon me.

“What are you doing here!” screamed the lady in good American. “Didn’t I tell you to go to Peking?” It was Mrs. Carpenter. “Get out of this town at once! You go to Peking tomorrow!”

The next day I took the train to Peking.

Within the thick walls of Peking is a city which, as Mrs. Carpenter had said, is inexhaustible. Mystery, intrigue and international modernity mingle with its crumbling culture. Fabulous Ming palaces are hidden behind new little Japanese shops. A cloud of black crows flies over the yellow roofs of the Forbidden City, while cosmopolites dance on the roof garden of the French hotel to the American music of the Russian orchestra. On the dance floor might be seen a boyish Chinese woman dressed in dinner jacket and trousers from Bond Street, or in military uniform. She had become a major in the army of the notorious war lord Chang Sung-ch’iang for her services as procuress of concubines. Below on the broad avenue by the hotel, among the motor cars and rickshas, pass camels and herds of sheep and squealing pigs, and near the avenue in the hollow of a tree live two old wrinkled beggars. The smell of the dust of the Gobi Desert is in the air, the smell of caravans and of trade routes to Mongolia, Turkestan and India.

Within the walls of the Legation Quarters diplomats move complacently about from dinner party to dinner party like goldfish in an aquarium, and Chinese political offenders seek sanctuary in the German hospital. Foreigners ride Mongol ponies through the pine groves by the Temple of Heaven, whose conical blue-tiled roof is supported by pillars of Douglas pine brought from Oregon. Beside the temple is the circular white marble Altar of Heaven, so perfect in design and intention that one may stand there face to face with the Universe or dance upon it as Ruth St. Denis did. Yet around the borders of that same sacred precinct is a ditch so foul in its stench that even mangy, refuse-seeking dogs avoid it. Near the entrance to those grounds, elderly gentlemen in robes of snow-lavender velvet or moon-white gauze congregate with their birds in lacquer cages and their crickets in ivory boxes. Across the road gather a much larger throng of young and old to watch the public executions. Farther along in a dust-blown square are the coolie entertainers: jugglers, wrestlers and contortionists, men with strong-bows, and wandering child actors and lithe young acrobats with smooth and subtly smiling faces and yet, too, like Picasso’s pathetic Harlequins, who here become, in these dusty streets, a part of the daily scene.

In the shade of pine trees by the Palace moat may be seen, at the propitious hours, old scholars teaching young boys the slowly postured movements of the T’ai Chi, an ancient dance especially suitable for people who read books, since it harmonizes and soothes the spirit. And gray uniformed soldiers might have been seen there too, dancing the equally ancient Woo Shoo, suitable for those who do not read books and who want to harmonize the body. Like figures from the Russian ballet they swing their flashing broadswords now to the terror of the Japanese soldiers, who wear iron collars to preserve their necks.

Mongols in greasy red brocades stomp the streets in their heavy leather boots, but those fragile Manchu girls with their ivory-white and pink complexions and flower-decked headdresses seldom appear now in their glass carriages. The mechanical canary in its gilded cage has been carried away with the other Palace treasures; the old eunuchs of the place have retired to a temple in the Hills; bolts of tribute silks and satins, and furs from the store rooms of the Palace are sold publicly on Sunday mornings, and mandarin robes are dragged in the dust of the old clothes market. When the iron-bossed gates of the city are barred and bolted for the night, the antique dealers from London and Berlin will sit up until dawn over their wine cups, with Chinese merchants, dividing the spoils of a newly opened grave, and in the icy bitterness of morning, beggars will be found frozen to death in the streets.

Gentlemen of the Embassies play the ancient game of polo on the drill grounds of the International Guard, and students from the universities, demonstrating against the Japanese, are driven bruised and bleeding from the city by the police. Funeral and wedding processions continuously block the traffic of the teeming thoroughfares — funeral processions in which officiate not only Taoists and Buddhist priests, but Lama priests and sometimes Christian clergymen as well. Being a practical people, the Chinese neglect no aids to getting on in the next world.

In the New Year season, graceful modern youth skates upon the artificial lakes of the Empress Dowager’s Winter Park, and in the heat of summer white cranes stand sentinel there amongst the lotus. The sweating coolie, naked to the waist, slacks his thirst with the green striped melon freshly cut, and sleek-haired, blue-gowned women spit sunflower seeds from the balcony of the tea house.

In the spring a Manchu prince sits in his garden under a flowering crab-apple tree painting on a silken scroll, in an idiom of a thousand years ago, a nostalgic dream of mountain gorges and waterfalls. The garden is so planned that one never sees the end of it, even though it may be in the heart of the city and surrounded by a high wall. A vista of water in a valley of volcanic rocks like abstract sculpture will make a sudden turn behind a screen of artificial mountains at the foot of the garden, leading one to believe that the valley continues on indefinitely.

Young modern China is learning from American moving pictures that being modern means to kiss girls in the park. Still, in spite of the cinema, the classical drama has remained by far the more popular form of theatrical entertainment, and the female impersonator has remained a most interesting example of the Chinese point of view in the art of the theatre.

Chinese impresarios and directors of the theatre will tell you that an actress could never play a feminine rôle in the traditional drama as convincingly as a female impersonator. The boys who are to play these roles are trained by the severest discipline from earliest childhood. They spend hours every day walking on short stilts to learn to mimic the lily-step of the bound foot. Their voices are trained in a high falsetto, and every gesture of delicacy and grace is acquired. Their very faces are altered by the temporary face-lifting operation of stretching back the skin under the headdress with bandages. Artifice here produces an effect of femininity which no woman could rival, even though she should have the same training, for she being merely a woman would in her heart believe, no doubt, that being feminine was sufficient.

Neither on the stage nor in painting nor in sculpture does allegory enter into the Chinese scheme of life interpretation. Nothing would seem more ridiculous to them than a Rubens nude representing “Virtue,” or a marble by Rodin called “Harmony,” or a fresco by Michelangelo representing “Peace.” These qualities are not to be abstracted from the scheme of the great Universal.

Although the Chinese are especially fond of pictures of babies one almost never sees motherhood portrayed. I personally cannot recall ever having seen a Madonna painting by a Chinese artist. Yet motifs of little children at play are most popular: the well-known “one hundred babies” pattern is repeatedly used on textiles, ceramics, wallpapers and metal objects of art. But most often the baby is associated with old men, with venerable and happy old age finding immortality in the child — a continuous flow of life without end, the convoluting circle of the Yin and Yang.

The use of the nude in art is limited solely to the pornographic, to the Ch’ün Hua or Spring Pictures which were used for instruction for those newly wedded. In these albums which were often the work of some of the best artists, so little concern was given to the correct observation of anatomy that the figures look more often like sawdust-stuffed dolls than humans. They have no sensuous quality whatever. They may become involved in esthetically exciting patterns, but they remain manikins substituted for the observer of the picture who becomes subjective in it, and whose senses under such a situation would be keyed to a sharper perception of things. One sees and feels more keenly under the tension of the instant, suddenly becoming more sensitively aware of the environment, focusing on the setting of the action. Every detail of the sleeping chamber, or of the library, or the latticed porch, or the nook in the rock garden now stands out in crystal clarity. One of the best records which exists of Ming period houses, of the arrangement and decoration of rooms, of the furniture and bric-a-brac, is from the illustrations of the erotic novel, the Hung Lou Meng — The Dream of the Red Chamber; and from other albums of pornography which were produced in quantity, much authentic documentation is to be derived concerning the modes and manners of the various epochs.

All the houses in Peking face south. They consist of separate one-story pavilions built around courtyards, the number of courtyards depending upon the size or wealth of the family. I rented a section, which in itself consisted of several courtyards, of one of these large old houses. The last Chinese occupant had been an official who had been active in the Boxer uprising. He had been obliged to flee and the house had been turned over by the Chinese government to an English mission school for the blind. From the mission it had been purchased by an English resident of Peking. It was a handsome house but in an advanced stage of decay. For six years I made it my home. Then came the China Incident.

For several seasons Japanese war planes had been swooping down over the houses of the city. Japanese troops had been indulging in sham battles at the most unexpected hours in the most unexpected places on the streets and the populace had courteously refrained from showing its feelings. Then the cannons began to rumble, and the rumble came closer and closer to the walls. Streets were sandbagged and trenches dug and the Chinese soldiers courteously retired from the city, leaving their dying and wounded to be picked up and washed and bandaged by the ladies and gentlemen of the foreign colony. With the streets lined by Japanese school children and hired coolies waving red-spotted white flags, the victorious army of the Mikado entered the Celestial City.

Then the most unworthy Peace Preservation Corps of the Autonomous State of Hopei and Chihli courteously massacred the entire honorable Japanese colony of four hundred men, women and children at T’ung cho, twenty miles from Peking. After that we knew little of what was happening; newspapers were suppressed, there was no rail, telegraph or radio communication even with the port of Tientsin: when trains did reach Tientsin they took twenty hours instead of the normal two and a half. It seemed to me it was a very good time to take that long-postponed trip to India, and so, sealing my etching and lithograph presses into a hidden passageway in the six-foot-thick wall of my house, I went to Japan to catch a boat for India.

My departure from Japan was delayed because instead of going to the steamship office I went each day to sit on padded matting floors before the golden screens of the Buddhist temples of Kyoto, golden screens which told a story of centuries of tender, warm communion between man and nature. Here on these gold leaf screens were the chrysanthemum and the cicada, the flight of heron, the tiger drinking at the pool, the pine tree and eagle, the fish in the spray of the waterfall.

Behind the tranquil images of Buddha in these temples are auras of quick, sharp flames which had come from India to Gandara, Miran, Turfan, Tung Huan, through China and to Japan in the 7th century, burning with a freshly kindled life and awakening the spirits of the men in the lands through which they had passed and bringing with them a passionate creative activity in the arts.

The symbols of Buddhism are here, too: the lotus, the e1ephant, the conch shell, the palm leaf scriptures, the ceremonial umbrella, the drums and lutes of the heavenly musicians, and the floating, wing-like scarfs of the Apsaras — all motifs which had come from tropical South India with those quick flames which encircle the contemplative Buddha.

Now I was about to go to the source of these symbols and to the source of Buddhistic art. At the steamship office I bought a passage to Colombo, southern port of India.

About a year ago I was alone in the temple of the Kailasa in the rock caves of Ellora in the State of Hyderabad in India. The Kailasa represents the peak of Brahman art; as one might say, Chartres Cathedral does of the Gothic. It is one of the caves excavated in the eighth century in the side of a solid rock escarpment which rises abruptly from a broad sun-bleached plain. About thirty other caves, some of them Buddhist and Jain, as well as Brahman, extend along the side of the cliff for a mile and a quarter. To approach the caves one climbs up narrow footpaths and rock-cut steps from the road below.

An emaciated Mohammedan guide with a chartreuse turban and squeaking imitation English shoes, had attached himself to me. Since he did not speak a word of English nor I of Hindustani we might have gotten along, if it had not been for his squeaky shoes. He was trying to sell me some postcard views of the caves. He seemed to insinuate that I would do better if I bought his postcards, and sat myself down comfortably under the shade of a tree and looked at them, rather than drag myself wearily around from cave to cave, merely to make sure that all the caves were there. Besides, I might have been kind enough to relieve him at once of the necessity of camping on my trail and torturing his feet in those ill-fitting shoes until he made a sale. In desperation I bought his pictures hoping to get rid of him. But when he saw that I was still determined to climb to all the caves, he thought I was mad, or else a suspicious character, and dogged every step I made. Where I looked he looked, when I looked at him he looked at me and squeaked his shoes. Simple gestures, meant to signify that he might remove his presence, made no impression. The only sign language which he understood was a hefty push down the steep trail which we had just ascended. At last I was alone.

For about ten days previously I had been living with those bright-eyed, happy children at the Theosophical College at Madanapalle. One evening at the headmaster’s house their Hindu teacher of philosophy had been telling me that the only moments of real happiness for him were those when he was able to pierce the illusion of his individual separateness of existence — when he was able to identify the atoms of which he was composed with the atoms of the things about him, such as the table at which we were sitting, for instance.

I thought of the Chinese, who, being a reasonable people, sought to pierce the illusion through their art. The Hindus being an unreasonable people sought to escape more directly. But after all, it wasn’t such a far cry from William Blake trying to find himself in the soul of a flea.

Now I was alone in the Kailasa with all the images of the cosmogony of the South Indian world about me, carven from the living rock; rows of stone elephants supported the temple, birds and flowers of stone adorned its roof. There must have been a flea carved in stone somewhere, but I didn’t see it. On the walls danced cobra-headed demons, and slim-waisted, large-hipped goddesses; and the skeletous Kali, goddess of Vengeance, danced there too. Beside his consort Parvati, the four-armed Shiva danced his cosmic dance, creating the world with his rhythm and destroying it again by his own vibration. His face was not subtly smiling, but transfixed — immobile — expressionless as a mirror of polished stone.

Suddenly I felt strangely to be part of the dance. I was merely one vibration of it, yet all its vibrations were within me. Timelessness and spacelessness enveloped me. Nothing seemed to matter, not even next month’s rent, or working wages, or totalitarian states. This, I suppose, was cosmic consciousness — about six seconds of it.

One might, perhaps, experience a similar six seconds without ever leaving Tacoma.

This paper by Thomas Handforth, reprinted in the October 1950 extra issue of The Horn Book Magazine, originally appeared in the July/August 1939 issue and is part of our Caldecott at 75 celebration. Click here for more archival Horn Book material on Thomas Handforth and Mei Li.

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