PEARL S. BUCK: CHRISTMAS

PEARL S. BUCK WON THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE in 1938 "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces." Her bestselling, Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Good Earth, detailing peasant life in China, remains a perennial classic. Born to American Southern Presbyterian missionaries, Buck moved to China at the age of three months and lived there until she returned to the United States for college. Despite growing up in a country that did not celebrate Christmas, Buck's family and the families of other American missionaries, along with the English who lived in the British Concession, made Christmas with all the joyous trimmings of home: trees and holly, stockings and presents, parties and feasts. "From such memories of my Chinese childhood," Buck wrote, "it is no wonder that when I had an American home of my own, complete with husband and children, every Christmas was as joyous as we could make it."

For Buck, a large part of that celebration was telling stories, many of which she recorded and published in magazines and as books. "I told my children many stories when they were small enough for bedtime stories, and each year they chose one to make into a book. The Christmas stories, of course, were always special." They included stories such as "A Certain Star," "The Christmas Ghost," "The Christmas Mouse," "Christmas Day in the Morning," and many others, which appeared in special Christmas issues of magazines like Good Housekeeping, Family Circle, Ladies' Home Journal, and Collier's before being reissued as books.

In "Christmas Miniature," a 1956 special insert in Family Circle with art by the Walt Disney Studio, six-year-old Sandy makes the midnight trip downstairs "not indeed to peep at the Christmas tree but only to see what time it was." In so doing, he finds his cat Snips about to eat a mother mouse hiding behind the miniature manger under the tree. He grabs the mouse first, who bites him to escape his grasp, and dashes under the couch to return to her babies. The story was published as a book the next year with illustrations by Anna Marie Magagna, and included in Buck's Once Upon a Christmas with illustrations by Donald Lizzul (seen below).

"The Christmas Ghost," which first appeared in a 1960 issue of Family Circle with illustrations by Gyo Fujikawa, tells the story of Jimpsey, a young boy whose family is celebrating their first Christmas in their new farm house after leaving the city. Mr. Higgins, the hired hand, tells Jimpsey that the ghost of the former owner Timothy Stillwagon walks from the barn to the bridge over the brook every Christmas Eve. When Jimpsey goes out in the middle of the night to see, he only finds Mr. Higgins there, who explains that it is the memory of Timothy Stillwagon that walks with him those nights, and that is what he meant by ghost.

Buck's own gardener "always insisted that the ghost of Old Devil Harry did walk every Christmas Eve at midnight from the big red barn to the bridge, to meet the ghost of a former crony with whom he used to get drunk each Christmas Eve." In the story, Mr. Higgins and Timothy Stillwagon meet to admire each other's Christmas trees. Like "Christmas Miniature," "The Christmas Ghost" appeared as a book almost immediately with illustrations by Anna Marie Magagna. The story was included in Once Upon a Christmas as well.

A story that Buck for some reason did not include in Once Upon a Christmas is "Christmas Day in the Morning," a story that first appeared in Collier's in 1955 (see art at top). "Christmas Day in the Morning" tells of how Rob, the eldest son of a farmer, realizes that the best gift he can give his father for Christmas is to wake up extra early and do the milking before his father has even gotten out of bed. This act grew out of the realization that his father truly loved him when he overheard his father saying to his mother how much he hates to wake Rob in the mornings. When his father finds the milking done, they hug in the darkness, unable to see each other's faces, but communicating their mutual love better than they have ever done before.

"Christmas Day in the Morning" was not strictly a children's story when it was published in Collier's, but it was made into a picture book posthumously in 2002 with some light editing, which removed the adult Rob's memories of his dead wife as well as his dead father. Illustrator Mark Buehner was inspired to illustrate the story after his own children woke up in the middle of the night one Christmas Eve to clean the entire downstairs floor of his house after hearing Buck's story at church, a testament to how touching Buck's work remains decades after her death.

THESE THREE STORIES are really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Pearl S. Buck's Christmas stories for children. That's an understatement when it comes to Pearl S. Buck's children's books on whole, one reason that I have waited so long to tackle her on the blog. I had hoped to have more editions of these stories and some others before Christmas this year, but I waited a bit too long to secure them in time, so there will be some follow up posts possibly into the new year. As a result, I made a very rare exception to one of my rules, which is to have borrowed some scans, from I'm Learning to Share! for the "Christmas Miniature" Family Circle cover, and from The Estate Sale Chronicles for the "Christmas Ghost" cover. In both cases, the original blogs have the entire stories scanned and available to read, so please do click through. The rest of the scans are my own.

If you are looking for more Christmas fun, check out previous year's posts:

J.R.R. Tolkien's "Father Christmas Letters"
Eleanor Roosevelt's Christmas
Warren Chappell's The Nutcracker
Ilonka Karasz's The Twelve Days of Christmas

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WENDY WASSERSTEIN IN THANKS & GIVING

PAMELA'S FIRST MUSICAL was Wendy Wasserstein's only children's book, but it wasn't the only thing she published with children as the intended audience. She contributed to Marlo Thomas's 2004 book Thanks & Giving All Year Long.

Thomas is most famous as the creator of the 1972 classic book and album Free to Be...You and Me, an anthology of songs and stories by celebrities meant to teach that it is okay to break normal gender stereotypes. Thomas has since used the format in several other books, the most recent of which is Thanks & Giving. The title really says it all with regards to this book's message, although some of the entries seem a stretch. (Matt Groening's Life in Hell bunny finds a dollar on the sidewalk and buys a banana split?)

Wasserstein shares a bedtime conversation she had with her daughter Lucy Jane, who was four at the time. In "The Rotten Tomato," Lucy Jane asks for a bedtime story about a rotten tomato. Wasserstein wants to tell a story about a good tomato. Lucy Jane is willing to allow a good tomato to be in the story, but the rotten tomato has to win. They go back and forth with Wasserstein spelling out why being a "good" tomato is better than being a "rotten" one.  As you would expect from Wasserstein, the scene is quite funny. (Click on the scans below to read.) Lucy Jane illustrated the story.

Wasserstein did have work included in one other anthology intended for young people, 33 Things Every Girl Should Know, but the essay comes from one of her collection Bachelor Girls, and was not conceived of as a children's story.

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WENDY WASSERSTEIN: PAMELA'S FIRST MUSICAL

WENDY WASSERSTEIN IS BEST KNOWN as a playwright. Her 1988 play The Heidi Chronicles won the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award, the Drama Desk Award, and the New York Drama Critics Circle. The Tony was the first ever awarded to a female playwright. Her subsequent play The Sisters Rosensweig was then nominated or won almost all of the same prizes. Over her career, she had at least ten plays appear on and off Broadway.

But despite theater being her home, Wasserstein also wrote in almost every other form available. She wrote a movie, a novel, essays, memoirs, books of non-fiction, teleplays, and, of course, a children's book. Pamela's First Musical is, no surprise, about theater. Illustrated by Andrew Jackness, the set designer for Wasserstein's play Isn't It Romantic?, Wasserstein wrote Pamela in the hope that "[my] book would inspire children to fall in love with musicals in the same way [I] had." Dedicated to her niece Pamela (who was in high school at the time the book was published), it tells the story of Pamela's whirlwind ninth birthday, when her Aunt Louise takes her into New York to see her first musical.

AUNT LOUISE MIGHT just as well be called Auntie Mame. She is a clothing designer who goes around saying "Ooooooo, dahling." "(You can tell whether Aunt Louise designed your blue jeans because they are all signed Oooooooh, Dahling on the back pocket.)" While "all of Pamela's friends at school knew grown-ups who went into the city every day to work...Pamela's aunt Louise actually lived there." She also seems to know everybody who is anybody.

After a stop back at her apartment to change "out of her driving clothes into her theater clothes," Aunt Louise drags Pamela to the Russian Tea Room. "'The Tea Room is simply the place to have lunch before your first musical.'"

There they run into the world-famous dancer Bearish Nureyjinsky, who is the first in a list of theatrical celebrities with oddly familiar names that Pamela meets. At the theater, there are the stars Nathan Hines Klines and Mary Ethel Bernadette, the producer Mr. Bernie S. Gerry, choreographer Miss La Tuna, composer Mr. Finnsical, book writers Betty and Cy Songheim (with dogs Roger and Heart), set designer Candita Ivey Zippers, and Jules Gels, the light designer. (Pamela also gets the usher Gladys's autograph on her Playbill.)

Of course, Pamela is entranced with the play. It tells the generic love story, of Billy and Ginger falling in love just before World War II, divided by the war, but reuniting in the South Pacific where Ginger's friend rescues Billy from pirates. Okay, so maybe that last part isn't so generic. The whole thing ends with "a reprise of Pamela's favorite song," and a standing ovation.

After meeting the stars, "the old stage door man waved to Pamela to come stand onstage in the empty house. 'This is the ghost light,' he explained. 'This means the theater always stays lit for all the people who ever performed here. It also means you can come back anytime.'"

That night Pamela recreates the play at home with her dolls before falling asleep and dreaming of "producing, writing, choreographing, designing, and directing hundreds of dancing girls, parades of tapping men...and a cast of thousands, maybe millions."

LIKE AUNT LOUISE, Wendy Wasserstein knew everybody. The back cover of Pamela's First Musical is blurbed by Meryl Streep, Angela Lansbury, Kevin Kline, Glen Close, Cy Coleman, Chita Rivera, Carol Channing, Sarah Jessica Parker, Matthew Broderick, Gregory Hines, Bernadette Peters and others. But despite knowing theater, and knowing everybody, Wasserstein found she didn't know children's books. In an essay for The New York Times about the book tour for Pamela's First Musical, she wrote, "When I look back on my first foray into children's literature, it seems an act of complete naivete and hubris at once." First, she is surprised how similar the children's book business is to theater "in all its ambition, difficulty and quirkiness":

"The boffo book chains of the Barnes & Noble and Borders variety appear to be the Broadway of children's books departments, complete with sets, lights and sizable audiences. There are even over-the-title stars like "Eloise," "Madeline," "Clifford"; and of course the proven box-office talents of Maurice Sendak, Faith Ringgold and Lane Smith."

As she continues to tour she learns that "touring with a children's book required acting, teaching and stand-up skills beyond my playwright's training." It didn't help that, out of town, when she asked audiences of children if they had seen any musicals, only about a quarter of them had if she was lucky. It wasn't until she was back in New York, where "even the boys like musicals [and] the stars of "Pamela's First Musical," Nathan Hines Klines and Mary Ethel Bernadette, are immediately recognizable," that she felt comfortable with the crowd.

WITH MODERN PICTURE BOOKS like Pinkalicious and Fancy Nancy getting adapted into musicals, it is only natural that a picture book about musicals got the musical treatment. Sometime around the book's 1996 release, lyricist David Zippel (who wrote the lyrics for Disney's Hercules and Mulan) “called [Wasserstein] up and said, ‘let’s do a television movie of it.'" Wasserstein liked the idea, and they enlisted Cy Coleman, the three-time Tony winning composer of Sweet Charity, City of Angels and The Will Rogers Follies, who had blurbed the picture book. In 1998, Playbill announced that the piece would be an ABC Sunday night movie.

In 2002, the first public offering of material related to the work was released when Cy Coleman included the main theme from Pamela's First Musical "It Started With a Dream" on his album of the same name. By that time, the musical had transformed into a stage show, a work-in-progress version of which was shown to industry people through Lincoln Center Theater in 2003. Pamela's age was changed, new subplots about prospective stepmothers and stepsisters were added, but at base it was still about going to see a musical with Aunt Louise. In October 2004 it was announced that Goodspeed Musicals would stage a version in 2005, but Cy Coleman died in November 2004, and the Goodspeed performance was cancelled. The team picked themselves up, and prepared for another performance at California Theaterworks in 2005, but Wasserstein's battle with lymphoma forced that production to be cancelled as well. Wasserstein died in early 2006 at the age of fifty-five.

David Zippel was not going to let that be the end of Wasserstein's last play. Pamela's First Musical was virtually complete when Coleman died. All it needed was a venue. At last, on May 18, 2008, Broadway Cares staged a concert of Pamela's First Musical at Town Hall. Kathy Lee Gifford, Joel Grey, Tommy Tune and many others made cameos. Proceeds benefited Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS and Wendy Wasserstein's own charity, Theater Development Fund's Open Doors Program. You can see a performance from that afternoon here.

The real Pamela Wasserstein was in attendance. She told Broadway Cares, “Really it’s Wendy, Cy and David’s tribute to Broadway...I know Wendy and Cy would be so happy. In fact, I just know they’re here!”

I CONSULTED Julie Salamon's biography Wendy and the Lost Boys: The Uncommon Life of Wendy Wasserstein, Wasserstein's essay "Way Off Broadway With Pamela" from the June 30, 1996 edition of The New York Times, and Playbill's website. Much of the information regarding the musical Pamela's First Musical, as well as the photos from the Town Hall performance come from Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS own website. The photo of Wendy Wasserstein is from Wikipedia.

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THE WORLD IS ROUND BACK IN PRINT

LONG TIME READERS might remember a series I did almost two and a half years ago on Gertrude Stein's children's book The World Is Round. There have been many editions over the years, in many different formats, with different illustrations, all of which I examined then, all of which were out of print. But now thanks to Harper Design, The World is Round is back in print in a 75th Anniversary Edition that features the original illustrations, complete with pink paper and blue text, on nice, heavy paper stock. Illustrator Clement Hurd's son Thacher Hurd, who is also a children's book writer and illustrator, provides a new foreword detailing the publication history of the book along with reminiscences of his father at work. But more importantly, Edith Thacher Hurd's afterword, which originally appeared in a limited collector's edition in 1986 is included, containing correspondence between Hurd and Stein during the creation of the book. The only thing I would have liked to see in addition are samples of Hurd's redrawn illustrations for the 1966 edition, but that criticism is extremely nitpicky. In DVD terms, this is really the Special Edition with Bonus Features, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in Stein's children's book.

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PATRICK EATS HIS PEAS BY GEOFFREY HAYES

REVIEWING NEW BOOKS is a little off topic for We Too Were Children, but I've been so negligent in my blogging that when my friends over at TOON Books asked if I would review one of their newest releases, I said yes. Better something on the blog than nothing, I figured. And it didn't hurt that it was the new Geoffrey Hayes book, because I love Geoffrey Hayes. So I hope you don't mind taking a look with me at his latest, Patrick Eats His Peas and Other Stories.

Geoffrey Hayes has been making children's books since 1976, and has over forty titles to his credit. His first book, a picture book entitled Bear By Himself, introduced the appropriately-named character Bear, as he enjoyed a quiet day alone. When Bear appeared again two years later, it was in a book that was over one hundred pages and contained five stories, only now Bear had a name: Patrick. This sudden shift in format was one Patrick would undergo several times as Hayes moved the character from publisher to publisher over the years. Patrick sometimes appeared in a picture book, sometimes in a 8x8 book formatted for a spinner rack, other times as a board book, and most recently in comics. Through each of these incarnations, Hayes often reused stories that had appeared in earlier incarnations, sometimes redrawing the stories from scratch. (See the 1976 and the 1998 editions of Bear By Himself, and the 1989 book Patrick Eats His Dinner below.) With the success of his Benny and Penny comics for TOON Books, it was no surprise that Patrick again followed Hayes to a new publisher and a new format, in a mix of redrawn stories and new ones.

But before Patrick ventured into comics, Hayes garnered critical acclaim (including a Theodor Seuss Geisel Award) for his first foray into the form, his series for young readers Benny and Penny. The Benny and Penny books are masterpieces. Hayes's ability to capture the anxieties, the travails of socialization, and the tribulations of very young children is mind-blowing. Benny and Penny are brother and sister, and their stories take place for the most part in their backyard. They must negotiate playing with each other, meeting new neighbors, playing with friends they don't really like, and braving the dark, all of which they do without adult supervision. Mom is always nearby, and sometimes calls to them from off panel, but really Benny and Penny need to figure things out for themselves. By creating an adult-free world, Hayes allows for his characters and his readers to engage with these social anxieties at an emotional level, the way a child would, and so Benny and Penny and the reader must work through the problem, and find a moral solution. There's none of the heavy-handed guiding message that underpins so many children's picture books. Instead, we get children and situations that ring so true that both children and adults can identify with Benny and Penny, find comfort in recognizing their own insecurities, and learn the lesson by experience rather than by being taught.

The Patrick TOON books have the same verisimilitude as the Benny and Penny books, but for Patrick, his parents are an ever-present source of security. As a result, Patrick reads as a younger character (even though he gets sent to the store by himself in one of the stories), and his relationship with his parents--his mother in particular--is in some ways the main topic of the books. Yes, Patrick must contend with the childhood annoyances of taking a nap, taking a bath, eating his peas, and many other typical, "Aw, ma, do I have to..." scenarios, but with the exception of a bullying story in Patrick in A Teddy Bear's Picnic, the books are about the interactions between parent and child. The trick then becomes the balance between Patrick's perspective and his parents' perspective.

In Patrick in the Teddy Bear's Picnic, Hayes manages to tip the balance in Patrick's favor. Mom is there, and a parent reader can recognize her amusement and annoyance at some of Patrick's foibles, but Patrick's experience is the one that both the adult and child reader identifies with. This is in part because Patrick is alone in more of the book than he is in Patrick Eats His Peas. He retrieves a balloon at the park, endures nap time, and takes the aforementioned trip to the store. But it is mainly because Mom's actions are the way in which a child would experience them. She is on the sidelines, almost always placid, happy, and comforting, except for rare, and brief, bursts of annoyance. The focus is on what Patrick is feeling, and Mom, as far as he sees it, is just there as a source of support.

In Patrick Eats His Peas, however, the balance tips in the parents' favor, and the book is less satisfying. Here Patrick makes a mess of the leaves his father has just raked, offers similar "help" to his mother in the kitchen, trashes the bathroom during his bath, and insists on making fudge at bedtime. At each of these points, Mom and Dad's expression is highlighted, usually given a full panel to the parent alone, and often in classic cartoon style, with shock lines radiating from her head. This makes the moments feel more like parental observations, than children's conflict. The point seems to be, "Isn't it frustrating (or amusing) when your kid does this?" instead of tackling what Patrick is feeling. In the case of Patrick offering help in the yard and in the kitchen, for example, we don't get the loneliness and boredom of an only child whose parents are both busy. We get the parents' frustration at having their tasks hampered by Patrick's "help." In the end, it makes Patrick Eats His Peas a disappointment. Instead of the insightful parsing of the conflicts of childhood that Hayes is so good at, we get something closer to anecdotes. Is it a bad book? No. It's still Hayes, and therefore better than most children's books. It's just not in the same league as his other TOON books.

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