Rabbit Redux

I grew up in the time where there were never enough books for a youngster to read. Children's publishing was a timid business, run with sublime confidence by three-name ladies who knew what was right. There existed then (as there is now) only a small critical mass of people who could really write and draw well for children.

That critical mass was made up of extraordinarily well-trained artists and writers. The generation born at the time of the First World War drew with a highly educated hand and wrote with tongues of angels and great waggish humor, peppered with idiosyncrasies. It produced the first great body of literature for children. Its artists were paid poorly in what was called the flat fee. Its writers had never heard the word re-tell, and its publishers did not give us a 133rd version of "The Night Before Christmas."

A few hundred books a year were published for children instead of 5,000 new books a year. As a consequence, my generation luxuriated in reading the same books again and again. I often wonder if those constant re-readings have not placed these certain books, The Little Princess, Charlotte's Web, Ben and Me, Dr. Doolittle, in the realm of ether called classics. "Classics" is a somewhat corrupted word in an age when soft drinks and football games are also called classics. I believe certain stories and the pictures in their pages were imprinted like a DNA code in the minds of those of us who devoured them and memorized them.

Devouring favorite books happened while teachers were not watching us, during the endless hours of adult conversation on rainy afternoons, on long trips, at the seaside, where their stained linen covers bleached in the sun. Our childhoods were much longer then. Recorded time on the calendar has nothing to do with the length of the youth we were given back in the '40s and '50s. Our days were not filled with supervised activities, lessons, tutoring, or shopping. Most of all it was not spent in front of screens. Nothing we did was particularly exaggerated in importance by adults. Left to my own devices, I spent much time playing king of the mountain with neighborhood kids on a dirt hill behind the firehouse. We rode bicycles everywhere, because no one drove us. We built bridges of fallen tree branches over June streams that would dry up in July. Time bled out without dilution and the space between birthdays was at least five years for myself and every other child I knew.

Being a well child, which I had the good fortune to be, the greatest joy of getting sick was to load my bed with 20 books and spend a day consuming treat after well-known treat. I remember lying, knees drawn up, under the covers in January and finding grass blades and sandwich crumble from the summer caught in the sturdy bindings of my favorite stories.

The books of my youth bubbled over with a sense of whimsy and individuality very rare in today's commercial and politically stiff environment. Big-time, market-driven publishing thins the gruel far beyond the critical mass of truly original talent to create books. It publishes thousands of books a year beyond what anyone could have imagined in the heyday of Robert Lawson and his friends. This is heresy for me to say, but one part of the truth of our age and our beloved field of children's literature is that any child born today, and given the contents of a good library or children's bookstore, would have little real need for one new book for the next 20 years.

Any field of human endeavor is really like a train with many cars. I was born in the year 1943. In my young childhood, the very oldest ones, Beatrix Potter, Hugh Lofting, and Ernest Shepherd, sat in the last cars on the train. It mattered not. Their images stayed fresh in the books that never changed on my shelf. In the middle cars were those who were younger or had quite a bit of time yet to live, Robert Lawson, of course, Jean De Brunhoff, E. B. White, Margaret Wise Brown, Garth Williams, Ludwig Bemelmans, the D'Aulaires. They produced new books, anxiously awaited. Then, there were the people just getting on to the very first cars at the end of my childhood, and they included Edward Ardizzone and Maurice Sendak, who put a baby foot in the dining car in the early 1950s. There were many more artists and writers on that train than I have mentioned. Nonetheless it's easy for me to decide one thing. The hero of my childhood, after Duke Snider and Adlai Stevenson, was Robert Lawson. He published his work in illustrious company but he was still my favorite.

What I can never decide is whether it was his hilarious and exquisite drawings that influenced me most as a professional, or his intimate and equally hilarious writing. I believe I read Mr. Revere and I, Captain Kidd's Cat, and I Discover Columbus at least a hundred times each. I pored over the line drawings, trying passionately and misguidedly to copy Lawson's technique on the precious white typing paper my father allowed me to draw upon with a scratchy crow-quill pen and very lumpy, filthy India ink. It never occurred to anyone in my family to give me art lessons, for which I am endlessly thankful. My parents were the most supportive and indulgent parents I knew. But people did not buy serious art supplies for children in the year 1950. It never crossed my mind to investigate better paper, to use sharp quills, or to clean my ink.

I was continually amazed at the depth and liveliness of Mr. Lawson's drawings. That meant that one never tired of looking at them, any more than one tires of looking at the ocean or mountains. The ocean and mountains never change, but they are never quite the same either. This staring and never tiring is the single and simplest test of a great work of art.

When I was 10, I studied the soft Wolff pencil animals of Rabbit Hill, The Tough Winter, and Edward, Hoppy and Joe with the awe that I now save for Vermeer. No one has even tapped on the door of Robert Lawson's supremacy as a line artist except Maurice Sendak. No one has approached his genius with a pencil except perhaps Chris Van Allsburg. Lawson had these two mediums, ink line and pencil rendering, so mastered, with so little fuss and fanfare, that the drawings still sing from the page, as do Da Vinci's and Rolandson's.

I tried in vain to imitate his easy technique. I did so clumsily, faithfully edging my line with tiny hatch marks, not knowing that this would give dimension and roundness if I did it right, which I didn't. Learning to show expression in the human or animal face with the touch of a sideways glance and shrugged shoulder, the placement of a foot or finger which said all; learning to compose so that the eye of the beholder was as directed and controlled as the eyes of a magician's audience—it took me years to understand what I was seeing. I believed Robert Lawson's drawings moved in the night between the closed covers of my books. There was no other explanation of why they were so fascinating. More than anything, I wanted to learn to do it, too.

What I saw and did not understand was color. Lawson lived at a time where color work was rarely printed for children. It was too expensive. When color was allowed, it was done horribly, in one or two overlay blobs that would have most times been better left out. Lawson was a Houdini at making you not even notice the color was not there. His line and pencil are so good that color would have intruded. I should add that I hope no publisher, in their zeal to make things appeal to a television generation of book-light children, ever colors in these magnificent pages. Lawson himself was not as great an artist when he worked in color as he was in black and white.

Lawson's stories are another thing altogether. Here is an awful confession to make. If you were to ask me have I read War and Peace, Madame Bovary, and David Copperfield, I would answer you truthfully, "yes indeed!" I suppose those books are still in my brain, attached to some dusty dendrite like Christmas ornaments in attic boxes. But I don't believe I could recall anything of significance about them even after two cups of coffee at nine in the morning. I could however, with little difficulty, recount the whole story of McWhinney's Jaunt or The Great Wheelor The Fabulous Flight at midnight after three glasses of wine.

Robert Lawson, the storyteller, had the superb gift of breezy intimacy. His stories compel because they give the reader this certainty: "You are speaking privately to me alone." This is the essence of great writing. Without it, we see the seams of effort and we forget what we have read almost immediately, because it doesn't enter our souls. With it, time can pass and fashions change, but none of this matters.

When you read Robert Lawson, you are in the easy presence of a best friend. You have come a long way to be with him. There's rain on the windowpane and the fire is dancing in the grate. The dogs sigh from their comfortable sofa. There are lamb chops and baked potatoes for supper. He understands everything that you need to know and he serves it up with a twinkle in his eye, and you can't resist any of this for a moment.

From Christopher Columbus, his manipulative wife, and his beloved chatterbox parrot, I leaped to another world of literature as I grew up. It is the equally compelling one of Bruce Catton and Barbara Tuchman, the two giant torchbearers of 20th-century historical writing. There are many steps and accidents that cause every significant act of our lives. Because of Robert Lawson, I learned to love historical writing and because of that, in my drawer I have a manuscript now 85 pages long. It is about a 12-year-old girl who survives the Civil War in northern Virginia. It is largely a true story with much made up, but made up with huge research all around me. I have no more important book to write than this one, because it is about the power of forgiveness. Long ago, the seeds for this story were planted by this playful and brilliant man, in books like Mr. Revere and Captain Kidd.

And so I can never decide whether it was as artist or writer that he so influenced my work. Robert Lawson was not appreciated as a so-called fine artist might have been during his life. All of us in the field of illustration face the rather senseless distinction that the world makes between us and what it calls fine art. If you look closely at the top corners of Lawson's original drawings, you will find, erased but still visible, prices like $5 and $10. That is what he sold his drawings for in the '50s. That is how much he was valued in dollars in his life. That is how much he needed to pay the rent. But the true value of what any of us do is reflected in how long our work lives on, fresh and brilliant as the day it was drawn or written, long after we leave the last car on the train.

For me, Rosemary Wells, there is also the substance underlying Robert Lawson's art and stories. It is his basic decency and good humor. He was a well-read man who spoke eloquently and loved our beautiful language. That man in his time shines through all his stories and pictures. His maxim for living was: Never take yourself too seriously or your work too lightly.

I hope to follow his example.

This text has been adapted from writer-illustrator Rosemary Wells's keynote address, delivered at the inaugural Rabbit Hill Festival in Westport, CT. The festival, which was held in the spring to celebrate children's books and to honor Robert Lawson's legacy, will be an annual event.