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.