by
Alice Gregory
Last month, a couple I’m friends with had their first child. She is small and red and cute. This fragrant, strange, round-eyed creature has sent me searching for the books I loved as a kid, even the half-remembered ones, so that I can buy them for her when she comes of age. I’ve done a lot of inelegant Googling in the past few weeks: “elephant roller skates baby brother” turned out to be a weirdly effective search. “Candied fruit wedding cake immigrants children’s book” was not.
The book that my younger sister and I read the most, though, isn’t one I’ll ever forget. Out of print, with only one library copy in circulation where I grew up, Wanda Gág’s “The Funny Thing” had, for my sister and me, an air of exotic pleasure. We’d check it out, renew it as many times as the library allowed, and then wait a month before requesting it again. My father finally took “The Funny Thing” to Kinko’s and had a spiral-bound version printed especially for us.
“The Funny Thing,” published in 1929, is, like Wanda Gág’s other books for children, fairy-tale familiar but also strange and unforgettably specific. It tells the story of “a good little man of the mountain” named Bobo, who lives in a cozy, well-appointed cave and spends all his time cooking customized, delicious-sounding meals for the local animals: nut cakes for the squirrels, seed puddings for the birds, cabbage salads for the rabbits, cherry-sized cheeses for the mice. One day, a haughty, evil-seeming, dragonlike entity named the Funny Thing—a self-described “aminal”—appears and requests a meal made of doll heads, his staple food. Bobo, aghast, refuses, and instead offers him what he feeds the other creatures.
The Funny Thing pooh-poohs it all. Bobo, pitying all the children who would be deprived of their dolls if he did what was asked of him, comes up with a solution. Mixing together a pantry of ingredients, Bobo rolls a motley dough into something he calls a “jum-jill.” He offers it to the Funny Thing, saying it’ll make his tail longer and the blue spikes on his back more beautiful. The Funny Thing, as vain as he is hungry, wriggles his tail “with a pleased motion,” looks down modestly, and rolls “foolishly” on the ground. He agrees to eat the jum-jill, finds it delectable, and smacks his lips with satisfaction. The personalized treat effectively gets the Funny Thing to quit eating doll heads, and the story ends with him sitting atop a mountain, spiky blue tail curling down “contentedly,” eating jum-jills that are delivered to him, one at a time, by a procession of small birds.
“The Funny Thing” is not unlike Gág’s other children’s books. “Millions of Cats,” the oldest American picture book still in print, is a macabre story of an old man with dangerous hoarding instincts and a mass of “millions and billions and trillions of cats” who eat each other until there is only one left. “Gone Is Gone” is a proto-feminist fable about a husband who doesn’t want to do any housework; the book’s climax involves the family cow hanging from the roof, choked by a rope, “her eyes bulging and her tongue hanging out.”
Needless to say, I found all this extremely appealing. Like most children, my taste was perverse; I gravitated toward impish protagonists who played mischievous tricks, threw fits, and caused general mayhem. I liked catastrophes, meanness, and terrible messes. “All successful children’s literature has a conspiratorial element,” John Updike wrote in 1976. It’s true: many, if not most, children’s books presuppose a common enemy in the form of the parent, the one who assigns chores and impinges upon fun. The narrator and the child reader are a united front against grownups. Unimaginative parents aren’t the source of conflict in Gág’s books, but I remember her selfish characters, vaguely morbid plots, and almost edibly appealing language lending the impression that to appreciate the books was to be part of a special cabal.
Though the sinister weirdness of her work seems out of step with contemporary children’s entertainment, which is often sanitized and moralistic, Gág’s stories are not without precedent. We all know that the original versions of fairy tales are stunningly gory, filled with self-mutilation, rape, and draconian retribution (a bride is dragged naked through the streets inside a barrel lined with nails; a queen is forced to dance in red-hot iron shoes; stepsisters get their eyes pecked out by birds). They were didactic texts meant to be read as cautionary tales.
“We make the assumption that anything violent and dark is necessarily inappropriate for children, but that’s what they often gravitate to,” Leonard Marcus, a historian of children’s literature, said. He included Gág’s work in a recent exhibition he curated at the New York Public Library. “But children have a self-censoring mechanism. They’ll either ignore or blank out items that are too much for them.”
It’s easy to imagine a Bavarian patriarch embellishing the most gruesome local crime stories as a means of getting his beloved daughters to heel closely and stay away from suspicious men. What’s harder to picture is a modern woman named Wanda thinking up stories about animal massacre and masochistic, cave-dwelling hermits. But Gág, as Marcus said, “came from a folklore tradition where that sort of dark storytelling was taken as a matter of course.”
Growing up, I never wondered about Wanda Gág; I just liked her books. But recently it occurred to me to be curious. Who was she? What kind of last name is that? Were my sister and I unusual in liking “The Funny Thing,” or did other kids like it, too?
Wanda Gág, Fairy Story
There were, it turned out, answers. Wanda Gág kept a diary, which she published, in 1940, under the title “Growing Pains.” The story of her life appeals to me today in the same way her books did two decades ago. It reads like a fairy tale, with a wily heroine who lives amidst death and disease, and who handles fiascos with aplomb.
The oldest of five children, Wanda Hazel Gag (the accent was a later addition) was born in New Ulm, Minnesota, in 1893. It was a cold winter, and her parents—immigrants from Bohemia and Germany—were burdened not just with a newborn baby but also by a series of rented rooms, all of which were infested with bedbugs. Gág’s father, Anton, worked as a commercial photographer; her sickly, “birdlike” mother was his assistant.
Despite her destitute childhood—she shared a single sweater with her sister—Wanda wrote in a journal that it struck her, later in life, as “rather ‘story-bookish’ to be poor.” She was creative and resourceful and generally kept herself entertained. Wanda earned the nickname Inky because she was always drawing, and she was such an avid reader that a doctor, worried about her tired eyes, once consigned her to a dark room for an entire week.
In New Ulm, the Gag family lived in an immigrant enclave known as Goosetown, where older members of the community eagerly regaled the local children with folk tales, imported from Europe and embellished with time. In her diary, a young Wanda wrote that listening to such stories gave her “a tingling, anything-may-happen feeling … the sensation of being about to bite into a big juicy pear.”
From an early age, Wanda entered and won local art competitions, and earned extra money illustrating place cards for local society ladies to put out at dinner parties. Despite having to drop out of high school after her father’s death, she went to the University of Minnesota to study art, her tuition paid for by a pair of supportive patrons. She stayed for a few years, but her mother grew ill and became an alcoholic, thanks to a doctor who prescribed her a daily tonic of beer, and once again Wanda was forced to interrupt her education. She worked for a time as a schoolteacher, piling her hair on top of her head to appear taller and more authoritative to her small pupils.
Life didn’t pick up for grown-up Gág until she won a scholarship to the Arts Students League in New York City. She moved east, lived in a boarding house, and obsessively went to all of Manhattan’s best museums. She cut her hair into a glossy modern bob and added the European-looking mark to her surname. While studying in New York, she took on commercial work: painting lampshades and doing fashion illustrations, mostly of “stylish stouts” (the nineteen-twenties equivalent of sketching for Lane Bryant), whom she preferred to the thin, flapper-era “artificial females” who she alternately referred to as “simpering misses” and “fashionable ghostlings.”
Meanwhile, she cultivated her own artistic practice. Her drawings from this period are of humble objects—chairs, stoves, frying pans—as well as of bucolic scenes. Despite the familiarity of her subject matter, her artistic sensibility seemed sui generis. Her lines were wiggly; her compositions appeared to sag in a way that made them look almost hallucinogenic. In 1925, a gallery owner saw her work, bought it en masse, put it on display, and sold it all. Gág used the windfall to rent a farmhouse in Connecticut, where she created a body of new work that was given a solo show and met with rave reviews. The New York Post called her perspective “delicious”; in The New Yorker, a writer remarked that “when you see Wanda Gág’s [work] you will jump.”
At the same time Gág began having success with her art, publishers were beginning to set up separate divisions for illustrated children’s books. In 1928, Gág was offered a contract for her “cat book,” a story she wrote and illustrated with the blackest ink she could find, using two cats named Snoopy and Snookie as models; her brother did the lettering. When “Millions of Cats” was published, in September of that year, it sold well, and continuted to do so throughout the Great Depression. Gág never had to worry about money again.
Two years earlier, the English painter William Nicholson had published “Clever Bill,” a wildly popular children’s book about a little girl forced to pack up all her toys. Its success primed the industry for visually sophisticated books for children. In the years after the First World War, there was a burgeoning sense that America needed to stop relying on the United Kingdom and Europe for its art. Simultaneously, libraries were creating children’s reading rooms, where librarians specially trained in children’s literature organized story hours and helped young readers find books. This new trend furthered demand for the genre.
In 1929, Gág published “The Funny Thing,” which also sold well, especially for the time. But when her publisher asked for another book, she refused. Gág thought of children’s books as commercial work, and she didn’t want to get trapped in a cycle of churning them out. Half a decade later, Gág was lending money to family members and going on book tours; her art hung in museums, and newspapers were writing stories about her. She wrote a few more books and began translating Grimms’ Fairy Tales, importing her characteristic specificity. In her translation of Cinderella, the stepsisters, in preparing for the ball, “plaster their pimples and cover their scars with moons and starts and hearts.” They wear “bells that tinkled” and “little birds’ wings” and “jeweled darts.” When, in 1937, Disney made “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves,” Gág was disappointed. She found it too saccharine. Her own fairy tales, she insisted, were “not baby stuff.”
Although Gág lived with her partner for most of her adult life, she didn’t marry until the age of fifty, and then only because her husband’s career demanded it. Shortly after the wedding, Gág died of lung cancer; her ashes were scattered along the path to her studio.
The best children’s books aren’t the ones that impart moral lessons. The best children’s books are the ones that plant indelible memories and teach by way of detail: Madeline’s removed appendix; the “grisly” pigeon that Eloise yells at until he flies over to the Sherry Netherland. Who knows what a young reader will glom onto and why; a growing mind is populated arbitrarily. Great children’s-book authors seem to intuitively understand this, and they lace their work with minutia. Gág’s stories are written and illustrated with precision. I learned the word “homely” from “Millions of Cats,” and, thanks to “The Funny Thing,” I grew up desperately wanting a manual egg beater. Compile enough of these tidbits and you get a sensibility, a vocabulary, a certain set of predilections. This is what I think about when I imagine how much fun it will be to ply my friends’ new baby with books. Will she remember the same things I did? Will she live her life curious about nut cakes, too? Probably not. But I’ll give her a complete set of Wanda Gág books. She’ll read them, and hopefully ferret away some strange thing to remember, years later, with delight.
