And Then Something Terrible Happened: William Steig’s Children’s Books

Abstract

And Then Something Terrible Happened:William Steig’s Children’s Books Lee Thomas (bio) On the long and chilly trek to school my three-year-old demands an off-the-cuff, completely original story. He graciously supplies the title. (Luckily, we haven’t read him so many books that he can tell when I’m plagiarizing Chekov, yet.) The task is almost embarrassingly difficult. When the story lags, he’s taken to halting our progress on the crowded sidewalk to stop and shout, “And then, something terrible happened!” Which I duly provide (bison attack, the current crowd-pleaser). I’d like to credit William Steig for this innovation in “progressing the damn story already, mother.” Desolation hardly seems like fertile ground for children’s literature, but it should be. If you cannot remember the abject misery of a playground rejection, or the skittering fear when Mom forgets to pick you up from gymnastics and you immediately assume she’s gone for good, you have forgotten not just a significant leg of the journey into adulthood but practically the whole map. In 1968, after nearly forty years as a prolific cartoonist and the designer of 117 covers for The New Yorker, William Steig published his first children’s book. He was 61 years old. But it was with Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, in 1969, that the themes that infused Steig’s books for the next three decades began to coalesce. His seminal works tell the same essential narrative, a kind of Ur-tale of the child: the wish for magic, magical powers granted, trouble follows, the longing to return home, fulfillment. Born in 1907, the son of Polish-Jewish socialists from Austria, Steig grew up on the Lower East Side of New York. He was a man steeped [End Page 523] in the hustle of the street; the metropolis pulsed in his veins. You may not think you know Steig’s artwork, but if you picked up a New Yorker between 1930 and 2003, you saw it. James Geraghty, the magazine’s art editor from 1939 to 1973, once told him, “It would probably not be too extravagant to surmise that in all the history of graphic expressiveness your genius is unsurpassed: for sensitivity and comic perception of the human plight; for loveliness of line, for constant renewal, constant freshness.” His world was peopled with bulbous-nosed grandpas and impish paperboys, carnival barkers touting bikini-clad broads to the knickerbocker set, kids reveling in a summer thunderstorm. The joyful impishness of Steig’s simple drawings, the uneven presence of the nib in his wooly lines, the vivid colors—always precise, never as simple as the lurid primaries of so many books for children—marries his illustrations to his idiosyncratic, perfectly timed prose. The same immediacy that distinguished his drawings he carried over into his books for children. The physical connection of hand to pen to paper springs from the page, with almost a sense of slapdashery if the expression of Steig’s figures weren’t so damn precise. His shadings bleed the lines—as does the watercolor in his children’s books—and the inked lines have a whiskery quality that makes them feel fuzzy and alive. His children have hamhock faces and petulant underbites, his upper-crust adults barrel chests, long noses, and tapering legs, but his regular Joes possess the delicacy of a Bruegel peasant. As the New York Times’ arts and culture critic Sarah Boxer put it, “His squiggly line seems to knot itself spontaneously into the faces of angst or glee.” With Steig, the whole vastly exceeds the sum of its parts. Steig returned again and again to transmogrification—magical metamorphoses—with the pleasing lack of explanation that very small children expect from stories. In Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, the titular young donkey finds a stone that grants all his wishes, but while rushing home to his parents he encounters a lion and wishes himself a rock, with disastrous result. In Solomon the Rusty Nail (1985), a young bunny [End Page 524] discovers that if he wiggles his ears just so, he turns into (you guessed it) a rusty nail. Mishaps ensue. The Amazing Bone...