ELEANOR ROOSEVELT: CHRISTMAS

THE FIRST WORDS that come to mind when you hear the name Eleanor Roosevelt are First Lady. After that perhaps you think, founding member of the United Nations and architect of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. If you lived through her public life, you then might think: writer. After all, she wrote a daily newspaper column for twenty-six years, a monthly magazine column for Woman's Home Companion, autobiographies, and many other articles and books, making writing one of her primary professions. But children's writer?

Starting in 1932, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote or co-wrote many books for children, most of which were civic-minded nonfiction like When You Grow Up to Vote (1932), This Is America (1942), Partners: The United Nations and Youth (1950), United Nations: What You Should Know About It (1955), and Your Teens and Mine (1961). She also served on the editorial board of the Junior Literature Guild's book club, selecting monthly titles and reviewing manuscripts. And in two instances, she wrote chidren's fiction, albeit didactic fiction: A Trip to Washington With Bobby and Betty (1935) and Christmas (1940).

The former is exactly what it sounds like including a lunch with the President. The latter is an earnest and heartfelt story that first appeared in the December 28, 1940 issue of Liberty magazine. (Liberty was a weekly general interest magazine to which almost anyone of any significance contributed at one time or another. Think Albert Einstein, Joe Dimaggio, Mahatma Gandhi, etc.) Christmas 1940, to put it mildly, was not a happy time. Nazi Germany had either conquered or was about to conquer most of Europe. Japan had done the same in eastern Asia. Roosevelt, as First Lady and a humanitarian, was painfully aware of these events, and felt it was important for all Americans to be informed as well. As she put it in the 1940 Knopf first edition of Christmas:

"The times are so serious that even children should be made to understand that there are vital differences in people's beliefs which lead to differences in behavior.
     This little story, I hope, will appeal enough to children so they will read it and as they grow older, they may understand that the love, and peace and gentleness typified by the Christ Child, leads us to a way of life for which we must all strive." 

IN THE OCCUPIED NETHERLANDS seven-year-old Marta and her mother are preparing for a lonesome Christmas. Marta has her mother recount the previous year's Christmas, when her father came home from his post at the border to celebrate with them. Even then, in 1939, Marta's grandparents could not join them as money needed to be conserved for the expected lean year ahead. But her father came on Christmas Eve, St. Nicholas left her "sweets, a doll, and bright red mittens just like the stockings mother made," the whole family went ice skating, and they had a Christmas feast. Marta innocently tells of how, when she and her mother are together:

"'we always say: "I wonder if Father remembers what we are doing now," and we try to do just the things we do when you are home so you can really know just where we are and can almost see us all the time.'"

At the end of the bittersweet visit, Marta's father puts on his uniform, tells Marta "'Take good care of Moeder until I come back," and leaves, never to return.

In the interim, along with her father's death comes the occupation of her country. "There was no school any more...and on the road she met children who talked a strange language and they made fun of her and said now this country was theirs."

In order to persevere, Marta often speaks to the Christ Child. For "God...was far away in His heaven...[but] Marta could believe...that the Christ Child...was a real child." So on St. Nicholas's Eve, 1940, knowing that "St. Nicholas will not come tonight," Marta says to her mother:

"'There is one candle in the cupboard left from last year's feast. May I light it in the house so the light will shine out for the Christ Child to see His way? Perhaps He will come to us since St. Nicholas forgot us.'"

Her  mother consents, Marta sets the candle in the window, and then goes outside to see just how far away the candle can be seen. Outside, she meets a man.

"She was not exactly afraid of this stranger, for she was a brave little girl, but she felt a sense of chill creeping through her, for there was something awe-inspiring and rather repellent about this personage who simply stood in the gloom watching her."

When she tells him why she has come out, he remonstrates, "You must not believe in any such legend...There is no Christ Child."

Marta listens patiently to his diatribe even though "down inside her something was hurt...[The man] was taking away a hope, a hope that someone could do more than even her mother."

When she at last asks permission to return home, the man comes with her, entering the house without knocking. Marta sees at once that her mother is holding the glowing Christ Child in her arms. The man, just sees an ordinary baby. He chastises the mother for teaching her daughter "a foolish legend."

"The woman answered in a very low voice: 'To those of us who suffer, that is a hope we may cherish. Under your power, there is fear, and you have created a strength before which people tremble. But on Christmas Eve strange things happen and new powers are sometimes born.'"

She goes on in this vein and at last the man turns and leaves. But:

"The light in the window must be the dream which holds us all until we ultimately win back to the things for which [her father] Jon died and for which Marta and her mother were living."

IN THE 1986 EDITION, CHRISTMAS, 1940, Roosevelt's son Elliott Roosevelt writes in the introduction, "'Christmas, 1940' is the kind of story that is rarely written today. I suppose our tastes have changed, as has our style." Despite his hope that the message is still valid, he is right that our tastes have changed, and Christmas now reads as heavy handed and didactic. And while that usually does not bother a young child, the subject matter is now too distant to make this a Christmas tradition.

THE ILLUSTRATIONS used throughout this post come from the first edition and are by the graphic designer and illustrator Fritz Kredel. In addition to the 1986 edition, there was a 1963 edition entitled Eleanor Roosevelt's Christmas Book that also included Roosevelt's reminiscences of Christmas at Hyde Park and the White House. For background information, I consulted the Eleanor Roosevelt Encyclopedia. The photo of the book jacket comes from the Bauman Rare Books website.

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HAPPY HANUKKAH: GUEST POST ON VINTAGE KIDS' BOOKS MY KID LOVES

JUST IN TIME for the final candle, I have a guest post over at the magnificent Vintage Kids' Books My Kid Loves: The Adventures of K'Ton Ton by Sadie Rose Weilerstein. Look out for a new We Too Were Children post before the end of 2011. Until then, hop on over to Vintage Kids' Books to finish up your Hanukkah celebration.

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GUEST POST TODAY AND TOMORROW ON VINTAGE KIDS' BOOKS MY KID LOVES

IN CASE YOU HAVEN'T GOTTEN enough Muppets the last few weeks, I'm bringing a daily dose today and tomorrow over at Vintage Kids' Books My Kid Loves. Today, my childhood copy of the photo-adaptation of the original The Muppet Movie (1979). Tomorrow, the first issue of The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984) comic book mini-series. And if you've never been there, you get the added bonus of seeing Burgin Streetman's excellent blog. Subscribe.

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GOOD NIGHT, WENDY: DR. SEUSS

THEODOR SEUSS GEISEL, better known as Dr. Seuss, worked in every possible field that requires writing and drawing. There were the children books, of course, but he also did cartoons and parodies for humor magazines, advertising (most famously for Flit insecticide), book illustration, a syndicated newspaper comic, pamphlets (for propaganda and for causes), political cartoons for PM, the Private SNAFU propaganda cartoons (conceived by Frank Capra, many directed by Chuck Jones and Fritz Frelang, and co-written by P. D. Eastman and Munro Leaf), an Academy Award-winning documentary, Academy Award-winning cartoons, a live-action feature-length musical, magazine stories, animated television specials, and fine art. But throughout his varied career, Geisel reserved his Dr. Seuss persona for his children's work exclusively. Except once (okay, twice, but we'll get to that). The third book by Dr. Seuss was about naked women.

ONE REASON DR. SEUSS worked in so many fields was that he never felt that any of them were respectable enough. This went for children's books too. In the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine review of The King's Stilts, he told his college friend Alexander Laing that it was his "annual brat-book." With two such "brat-books" under his belt, Geisel wanted to expand his purview. So when Random House co-founder Bennett Cerf lured him away from Vanguard in 1939, it was under the condition that Geisel be allowed to do an "adult" book first. That book was The Seven Lady Godivas.

The Lady Godiva legend, of dubious origin, states that in 1037, the Earl of Coventry's wife rode naked on horseback through the streets of Coventry in protest against her husband's unfair taxes. In a later sanitized version of the story, the citizens of Coventry were ordered to remain in their shuttered houses during the ride, but one man looked out, Peeping Tom. He was then struck blind.

Geisel had turned to Godiva as subject twice before in cartoons in the late 1920s (see left). And there had been other instances of nudity in his art, such as his take on the rape of the Sabine women, which hung in the Dartmouth Club for many years. That legend also had bearing on The Seven Lady Godivas as a parody by Stephen Vincent Benét entitled The Sobbin Women appeared in Argosy in 1938 with many of the same story elements that Geisel would use in his own book, namely seven women barricaded in a building refusing to marry their seven suitors. The similarity between the two stories along with the use of a sexually charged legend certainly suggests that Geisel was aware of the story of the previous year. (The Benét later served as the inspiration for the 1954 musical film Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. In another link between the stories, Geisel flew to New York in 1954 to discuss a musical based on The Seven Lady Godivas, which never came to fruition.) So how did one Lady Godiva become seven?

"HISTORY HAS TREATED NO NAME so shabbily as it has the name Godiva...There was not one; there were Seven Lady Godivas, and their nakedness actually was not a thing of shame. So far as Peeping Tom is concerned, he never really peeped. 'Peeping' was merely the old family name, and Tom and his six brothers bore it with pride."

These Lady Godivas are naturists who didn't waste time on "frivol and froth." On May 15, 1066 their father set out for the Battle of Hastings on horseback. ("True, Lord Godiva had been experimenting with these animals for years. But the horse remained a mystery...") Before he is out of the castle gate, Lord Godiva's horse throws him, and "the old warrior was dead" on impact. His seven daughters take a pledge that day:

"'I swear,' swore each, ' that I shall not wed until I have brought to the light of the world some new and worthy Horse Truth, of benefit to man.'"

All seven sisters (Clemintina, Dorcas J., Arabella, Mitzi, Lulu, Gussie, and Hedwig) were engaged to the seven Peeping brothers (Tom, Dick, Harry, Jack, Drexel, Sylvester, and Frelinghuysen), so this was no idle oath. The sisters lock themselves in the castle, Hedwig, the eldest, makes a book with seven pages in which each sister is to inscribe her Horse Truth, and the scientific study begins.

The first Horse Truth ("Don't ever look a gift horse in the mouth!" Discovered after Teenie Godiva gets her nose bit off by the "mare Uncle Ethelbert gave us last Christmas.) is found that very first day. The final Horse Truth ("Don't lock the barn door after the horse has been stolen." Discovered after just that has happened.) isn't found until forty years later, New Year's Day 1106. In between, the girls work through their stable, subjecting horses to carriages above, below, before, and aft ("Don't put the cart before the horse."), driving them to drink ("fermented mash") through nervous exhaustion (the cure for which would be water, but "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink."), powering treadmill equipped boats (sea horses, of course, although "Never change horses in the middle of the stream."), kicking (that leads to the discovery of a lost diamond stickpin; "Horseshoes are lucky."), and getting painted ("That is a horse of another color!").

As each Horse Truth is discovered, the contributor leaves the castle to wed her Peeping, all of whom also stayed true during all of those years.

OF THE FIRST PRINTING'S TEN THOUSAND COPIES, only about twenty-five hundred were sold. The Seven Lady Godivas became the first (and there was only one other) of Dr. Seuss's books to go out of print. Geisel later said, "I attempted to draw the sexiest babes I could, but they came out looking absurd." The lack of eroticism does not account for the books failure, however. The truth is that it's just not very good, a collection of bad puns that goes on too long. Geisel convinced Random House to reissue the book in 1987 "by multitudinous demand," which was "an outright lie, which I wrote myself," but the book was once again remaindered and fell back out of print.

GEISEL DID EMPLOY the Dr. Seuss name on one last book for adults (or "obsolete children" as the cover says). You're Only Old Once! is a book that grew out of Geisel's declining health and many doctor visits towards the end of his life. Waiting in waiting rooms, Geisel began to sketch "what I thought was going to happen to me for the next hour and a half." The resultant book is a light verse take on the frustration with the modern medical system. It was released on Geisel's 82nd birthday, the last book written and drawn entirely by Dr. Seuss. It is still in print. CORRECTION 11/19/2011: Oh, the Place You Go! (1990) is the final book written and drawn by Dr. Seuss. You're Only Old Once! is the penultimate book. Thanks to Philip Nel for the correction.

ALL OF THE QUOTES and information in this post came from The Seuss, The Whole Seuss, and Nothing But the Seuss by Charles D. Cohen, Dr Seuss: American Icon by Philip Nel, and Dr. Seuss & Mr. Geisel: A Biography by Judith and Neil Morgan.

Good Night, Wendy is an occasional series on adult works by children author's. For previous entries, see here.

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PICTURES ADDED TO "DAD'S THE ONE WITH THE PIPE"

I KNOW the lag time between my posts grows ever longer. (The Cummings did take me two weeks to research and write, so it's not just my laziness.) In the meantime, let me direct your attention to a few new images added to my even less frequently updated Flickr set Dad's The One With The Pipe. For those of you who have never visited, the set's description:

"In the halcyon days of mid-20th century children's books, there were visual clues in the pictures to guide the nascent reader. If ever it was in doubt, a little boy or girl could look and know DAD'S THE ONE WITH THE PIPE."

This time around there are five almost identical images by Crockett Johnson of Harold and the Purple Crayon fame (see left) and one from the Little Golden Books master Tibor Gergely.

An interesting commentary on one of my favorite pipe-toting dad books, the Little Golden Book We Help Daddy, is the publisher's own censoring over the years. In the first edition, released in 1962, Dad brazenly smokes a pipe on the cover (and every other time we see him). In 1979 (the edition I have and scanned), Golden removed the pipe from the cover, but left it inside. In 1989, the pipe was gone completely. I'm uncomfortable with these kind of silent changes, but it does say a lot about our attitudes towards smoking. (I, for the record, am of course against smoking near children, or anywhere else for that matter.)

Dad's The One With The Pipe is a Flickr group, so I encourage everyone to join and to add images. I know there are lots more pops with pipes, and I count on you all to share them. I will try to get a real We Too Were Children, Mr. Barrie post up sometime in November. Thanks to everyone for sticking with me.

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