WILLIAM MAXWELL: THE HEAVENLY TENANTS

WHEN KATHERINE WHITE, first fiction editor at The New Yorker and wife to essayist and children's author E.B. White, did her annual round up of children's books in the December 7, 1946 issue of the magazine, she wrote:

THE HEAVENLY TENANTS, by William Maxwell, illustrated by Ilonka Karasz (Harper). Wholly mater-of-fact children may be unable to sense the rare quality of this book, but imaginative ones will like it. It is to be recommended, too, to adults, for the distinction of its writing and its illustrations....The author's compound of realism, humanity, humor, and fantasy is unique, and the artist and publishers have designed a book of unusual beauty.

She did not mention that William Maxwell had been working at The New Yorker as an associate editor of fiction for ten years, or that Ilonka Karasz had illustrated nearly one hundred of the magazine's covers. (Maxwell's total tenure as a New Yorker fiction editor would last forty years, and Karasz's final tally of covers would reach 187.) During his career as an editor, Maxwell edited and often mentored a list of writers that includes J.D. Salinger, Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, John Cheever, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Eudora Welty, Mavis Gallant, and Frank O'Connor. At the same time, he wrote acclaimed novels such as They Came Like Swallows (1937) and So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980), which received the William Dean Howells Medal for the best work of fiction in the preceding five years. And twice, in 1946 and much later in 1995, he wrote books for children. His first was The Heavenly Tenants.

 "THE MARVELLS WERE GOING to Virginia to visit the children's grandmother." Mrs. Marvell runs about the house, frantic to get the whole family--Mr. Marvell, eleven-year-old Roger, eight-year-old Heather, and the five-year-old twins Tom and Tim--ready for the three-week trip. Mr. Marvell, an unusually inquisitive farmer with academic inclinations, takes the children out to the field just as the sky grows dark in order to share his newest interest: the stars.

"'The zodiac is a beautiful broad region in the sky,' Mr. Marvell said, 'a pathway that the sun travels in the daytime and the moon and the planets at night.'" He points out the constellations and gives a basic lecture: their origin as navigation aids for shepherds and farmers, their names, and their order.

After their lesson, the children go to bed, everything prepared for their trip in the morning. When they rise, their hired man August has not arrived to do the morning chores. The Marvells tend to the farm and then leave. Just as they pull out of the drive, Mr. Marvell sees August down the road and is reassured that the farm will be taken care of. Only it's not August, who is laid up with his sciatica. And there is nobody to look after the farm.

They arrive in Virginia, and everything is as it should be at Grandma's. As soon as night falls, Mr. Marvell retrieves the telescope from the attic, and the family heads outside for another lesson. This time, Mr. Marvell regales his children with a story.

"'Once upon a time there was a man who borrowed a ladder from his next-door neighbor to clean his well.'" From the bottom of the well, the man learns that the stars are out even during the daytime. He spends months down the well, using the narrow view as an asset to study the sky in detail. Eventually, when the man is away learning more about astrology from a schoolteacher, the man's wife goes down the well to do the cleaning her husband has neglected to do. Just then, the neighbor comes to retrieve his ladder, leaving the woman stranded in the well. At last, her husband rescues her, and once she is wrapped and warm in bed, he teaches her about the astrologers of old.

Mr. Marvell then informs the children that Roger was born under Sagittarius--the Archer--and Tim and Tom under Gemini--the twins. Heather wonders if the people of the zodiac are like the family. Then Mr. Marvell notices something funny. The constellations seem to be missing.

At home, the neighbors have noticed something odd at the Marvells' vacant farm: a faint glow emanates from the place at night. The whole town comes to investigate. The firemen rush to the farm, but there is no fire, just a glow. The town wonders about it until "one of Art Anaker's geese was found dead right in the barnyard," at which point they are more concerned with "what kind of an animal killed it..."

"After two weeks August's hip still bothered him, but he grew tired of sitting in a rocking chair, and wondered who was looking after the Marvells' house and animals." He goes to the farm where he finds two glowing fish in a nearby stream, a young archer, who looks much like Roger, two little boys who "almost [could] have been Tom and Tim," a man with a crab in one pail and a scorpion in another. "He had about decided to go when a little girl about Heather Marvell's age came out of the house..." She goes to pick flowers that have grown in droves along the river. Flowers August has never seen before.

At just three weeks, the neighbors notice the glow at the Marvells' has disappeared. The Marvells come home late at night. "Tired though Mr. Marvell was, he went outside to look at the stars." The constellations have returned to the sky. In the morning, the family finds the farm in better than good condition. Everything is like new with odd sparks bursting like an aura around every object. Soon it fades away, and the family concludes "'sparks or no sparks, it's nice to be home.'"

AT THE OPENING TO THE ANNUAL EXHIBIT OF HOLIDAY GIFT SUGGESTIONS at the New York Public Library, William Maxwell and Ilonka Karasz both spoke about their featured book. Maxwell's speech may have featured the story he included in his author's bio at the end of The Heavenly Tenants:

THE HEAVENLY TENANTS is [Maxwell's] first book for children and owes its existence partly to a spell of homesickness on the island of Martinique. To pass the time while waiting for a boat to take him away from that romatic place, he walked along the sea shore night after night, watching the bright stars and recalling every detail of the Wisconsin farm with love and longing. Years later, when Ilonka Karasz showed him a drawing she had made of the spring equinox, he remembered the equatorial stars and his homesickness, and the two of them, collaborating closely, did this book about the zodiac in Wisconsin.

Harper must have felt strongly about the book's potential, featuring it in advertisements in the New York Times with other now classics The Little Fur Family by Margaret Wise Brown and Garth Williams, Pretzel and the Puppies, by the creators of Curious George Margaret and H.A. Rey, and other established greats such as Ruth Krauss, Meindert Dejong, and Marc Simont.

This support was either justified by (or paved the way to) Maxwell's reception of a Newbery Honor the following year for his first outing as a children's author.

A modern reader has to wonder at the buzz and accolades heaped on The Heavenly Tenants. Or rather, he can see clearly that it was a political celebration of two well-regarded and well-connected artists. The book is bogged down by Mr. Marvell's didactic lectures and the absolute lack of conflict. The reason for the constellations' visit is wholly unexplained, and the ending is unsatisfactory. Still, Maxwell's evocation of his childhood love of astronomy, like all of Maxwell's fiction, carries with it a tender warmth and a careful eye for nature that any fan would recognize.

To see all of Ilonka Karasz's excellent illuminations for The Heavenly Tenants (and especially the two color endpapers and title page), see my Flickr set here. Tomorrow I will feature more of her work as a book illustrator, just one facet of a career that involved painting, designing china, textiles, wall paper, and furniture.


All images are copyrighted © and owned by their respective holders.

GEORGE PLIMPTON: THE RABBIT'S UMBRELLA

GEORGE PLIMPTON MADE A NAME FOR HIMSELF by being like no one else. He founded The Paris Review, he played with the Detroit Lions, he boxed with Sugar Ray Robinson, he played on the PGA Tour--all as an amateur--he was with Robert Kennedy when Kennedy was shot, and he hawked Intellivision on television. But in 1952, at the age of twenty-five, Plimpton faced a very common situation: he was graduating from university and had no idea what to do with himself. Or more accurately (but just as common), he knew he wanted to be a writer, but he didn't know what to do as a day job.

Luckily for him, a friend he had known since grade school got in touch to ask if he would be interested in moving to Paris to act as editor-in-chief for a new small literary magazine. His friend was Peter Matthiessen (later to win two National Book Awards, among other things), and the small literary magazine was soon to be called (with Plimpton's input) The Paris Review. But there was no money in running a small English language literary magazine from France. (In fact, just the opposite. It was a constant question of where would the money come from?) But another founding member of the Review and its first art director, William Pène du Bois, had already made a nice career for himself as a children's book author and illustrator. He had won the Newbery Medal in 1948 for The Twenty-one Balloons. Whether it was by example or by suggestion, George Plimpton followed Pène du Bois's lead, and wrote what was to be his first published book, a children's novel, The Rabbit's Umbrella (1955) with illustrations by William Pène du Bois.

"YOUNG BOY SITTING IN A LARGE ARMCHAIR: Well, now that you've finally decided to tell me a story, what sort of people are you going to tell me about?"  This framing conceit, that the book is told to a specific boy who interjects as the plot does or does not suit his interest, sets up the tone of the book exactly: cozy and casual, irreverent and slightly nonsensical. The narrator replies:

"The characters in the story you're about to hear include Mr. and Mrs. Henry Montague; their son Peter; a pet-shop owner called Mr. Perkins; Mr Otway, the streetcar motorman; Mr. Delaney, who is a police officer; and finally, a doctor, Doctor Trimble...But may I hasten to add that other characters in my story that might interest you more include an enormous dog named Lump, three robbers--Pease, Punch, and Mr. Bouncely--a number of shouting parrots, and a rabbit with an umbrella."

This unlikely cast of characters live in the small American everytown Adams, a map of which is provided on the endpapers and often referred to, despite it being almost wholly obscured by the slumbering rabbit of the title. It is a bucolic and welcoming place.

There, one of the town's longest standing institutions is threatened by the imminent vote of the mayor's council to discontinue trolley service, and to allow for the sole operational trolley to be converted into a diner. Its operator Mr. Otway, Officer Delaney, and Doctor Trimble, trolley enthusiasts of childlike proportions, are much distressed by this impending doom.

At the same time, nine-year-old Peter Montague, proud owner of  a single passenger pedal car and son of the thimble manufacturer Henry Montague, decides he wants a dog. Mr. Montague, knowing his wife abhors dogs, gives his permission as long as Peter obtains his mother's permission. Due to the fine showing a poodle had recently made at a tea Mrs. Montague had attended, she unexpectedly gives her approval. And so, eight years before the appearance of Clifford the big red dog, Lump enters the stage.

And on the outskirts of town, in an old haunted house, the cowardly and incompetent burglars, Pease, Punch, and Mr. Bouncely have set up house.

The three robbers have never succeeded in stealing anything of note, and are, as a result, so famished, that all of their burglaries take the shape of a meal Punch prepares with whatever food stuffs are at hand.

And so, when Mrs. Montague sees how enormous Lump is--"'Mr. Perkins says it's probably a very large type of poodle'"--she demands that he be returned, even though Peter has already fallen in love with the dog. The mayor's council finally votes to end trolley service in Adams. And Mr. Bouncely, appalled that Pease and Punch's complete take home haul from their burglary at the Montague residence is a chess pawn and a pincushion with one pin in it, demands that they return to the Montague's and burgle something big.

And so the stage is set. Pease, Punch, and Mr. Bouncely enter the Montague's, but are startled and grab the first big thing at hand: Lump. Still panicked, they make their escape in Peter's peddle car.

Lump lets out "a wild, drawn-out cry of fright and misery and dejection and anger; and this cry rolled across the meadows and the forests like a thunderclap." It brings Mr. Otway, Officer Delaney, and Dr. Trimble in pursuit on the trolley car. When they arrive, Lump has subdued the criminals, and Officer Delaney makes the arrest.

Lump is now a hero, and therefore socially acceptable to Mrs. Montague (which means Peter can keep him). Punch, with his experience cooking under severe circumstances, suggests that the trolley be converted into a moving restaurant with himself as cook, and after Dr. Trimble defends him in court (by simply talking about how insulted the real dregs of society would be if Pease, Punch, and Mr. Bouncely were given the badge of burglars), the town puts that plan into effect, saving the trolley and rehabilitating the criminals. Happy ending.

THERE IS NO QUESTION that The Rabbit's Umbrella is on the other end of the literary spectrum from what Plimpton was himself editing in the first issues of The Paris Review. As he assured his parents in a letter dated March 20, 1954:

Here is another Paris Review, the fifth. I'm not sure as usual that you're not going to be shocked by most of the content...The contents, you'll be glad to hear, are hardly reflections of my own character, which remains merry enough and full of hope and enthusiasm. You'll have to wait for The Rabbit's Umbrella for proof, which in its way may make you laugh twice, or even three times, and I doubt will be considered the product of a tormented mind....

When The Rabbit's Umbrella first appeared, Plimpton's bio read, "George Plimpton, an American in Paris..." When the book was reissued many years later, the bio had been altered to, "George Plimpton wrote The Rabbit's Umbrella soon after he went to Paris to edit The Paris Review..." So the dichotomy between the serious but untested work at The Review and the humor of the children's book was very strong at the outset. In both bios, Plimpton goes on to tell the story:

When I first came to Paris I happened to frequent a restaurant where the proprietor's pet was a dog the size of a young bear...One day in the restaurant I happened to read of a burglar who'd climbed in the window of a house he thought deserted and found himself in the middle of a small party...I suppose the big dog and the burglar stuck in my mind...."

Despite the seemingly two different worlds that Plimpton's early work seemed to straddle, it was William Pène du Bois who no doubt acted as midwife to both. Russell Hemenway, director of the National Committee for an Effective Congress and a friend and witness to Plimpton, Matthiessen, Pène du Bois at the creation of The Review, said:

Billy Pène du Bois is the reason there is something called The Paris Review, I'm convinced. Because even though the first issue didn't have much content, it looked great, and it looked great because Billy Pène du Bois worked over the stone with the printer for days...This was no amateur. He spoke French, and he had six or eight children's books in circulation and was one of the great illustrators. He had great style. The Paris Reveiw looked great. That's what everyone talked about.

It was William Pène du Bois who designed The Paris Review's logo, an eagle holding a pen and wearing a Phrygian hat, in some ways, as humorous as a rabbit with an umbrella that had holes for its ears to stick through.

     YOUNG BOY: But there are more things I want to know. I want to know about the rabbit with the umbrella.
     Well, in that case we'll have to have an epilogue.
     YOUNG BOY: What is an epilogue?
     It's used to explain what hasn't been explained, to tie up loose strings, and generally to tidy up the book. Turn the page and you'll see.

The rabbit with the umbrella never explicitly appears in the novel. They are referred to by Dr. Trimble, whose claims, the reader knows, are suspect. But in the epilogue, Plimpton makes the rabbit the manipulator behind the scenes, the person pulling the strings, in short, the rabbit with the umbrella is Plimpton himself.

All background research and quotes that weren't from The Rabbit's Umbrella come from the delightful George, Being George: George Plimpton's life as told, admired, deplored, and evnied by 200 friends, relatives, lovers, acquaintances, rivals--and a few unappreciative observers edited by Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr.

William Pène du Bois is indeed a master, and he has not made his last appearance on We Too Were Children, Mr. Barrie by a long shot. To see, for now at least, all of his illustrations from The Rabbit's Umbrella, visit my Flickr set here. For a cover gallery of Pène du Bois's work, see Page Books.

And as an epilogue of sorts (really a post script), I share the cover illustration by Pène du Bois of My Brother Bird by George Plimpton's Aunt Evelyn Ames (one of Plimpton's two Aunt Evelyn Ames's), whose maiden name, Perkins, Plimpton lent to the pet shop owner who sold Lump to the Montagues.

All images are copyrighted © and owned by their respective holders.

VIRGINIA WOOLF: THE WIDOW AND THE PARROT

WHEN JULIAN AND QUENTIN BELL'S family newspaper The Charleston Bulletin began publication in 1923, it was the second private newspaper some family members had known. The first, The Hyde Park Gate News, had been run the generation before by Julian and Quentin's mother Venessa Bell, with uncle Thoby Stephen, and aunt Virginia Woolf.

Virginia Woolf, in 1923, was already an established author and publisher, and a member of The Bloomsbury Group, the influential intellectual collective made up of the Woolfs, the Bells, and their friends. Her greatest works--Mrs. Dalloway (1925), The Common Reader (1925), and To the Lighthouse (1927)--were just ahead of her, written at the same time her young nephews were publishing The Bulletin. But despite these "adult" affairs, when fifteen-year-old Julian and thirteen-year-old Quentin solicited submissions from family members, Aunt Virginia, perhaps with memories of The Hyde Park Gate News in mind, took the time to contribute.

"The result," Quentin Bell writes in the afterward to the 1988 Hogarth Press edition of The Widow and the Parrot,

was a tease. We had hoped vaguely for something as funny, as subversive, and as frivolous as Virginia's conversation. Knowing this, she sent us an 'improving' story with a moral, based on the very worst Victorian examples.

"SOME FIFTY YEARS AGO Mrs Gage, an elderly widow, was sitting in her cottage in a village called Spilsby in Yorkshire." News reaches the destitute woman that her brother has died and left her a house, all of his belongings, and three thousand pounds sterling. She borrows money from the village clergyman in order to make the trip to her brother's (now her) home in Rodmell to survey her new belongings.

In Rodmell she finds that the house and all of its contents are in pitiful condition, disused and worthless. The only thing of any value is a seaman's parrot who only repeats the phrase, "'Not at home.'" She feeds the parrot, and resolves to go directly to Lewes in order to retrieve the three thousand pounds from her brother's solicitors.

At the solicitor's offices, however, Mrs Gage is asked to take a seat. "'You must prepare to face some very disagreeable news,'" the solicitor begins. "'Since I wrote to you I have gone carefully through [your brother] Mr Brand's papers. I regret to say that I can find no trace whatever of the three thousand pounds.'"

Broken, and now in debt to her clergyman with no means to repay him, Mrs Gage makes way for her brother's (now her) home. On the way back to Rodmell, night falls. All is pitch black when Mrs Gage comes to the dangerous ford on the river that lies just outside of town. But "at that moment a wonderful thing happened. An enormous light shot up into the sky..."

The flames offer enough light for Mrs Gage to ford the river and make her way into town. There, however, she finds that it is her house that is burning. "'Has anybody saved the parrot?"' she cries, and the neighbors, assuming she's crazy with grief over her losses, lead her to a neighboring cottage, where she is put to bed.

Then, in the night, there is a tap at the window. It is the parrot, alive and eager for Mrs Gage to follow him, which she does. He leads her to the smoldering ruins of her brother's cottage, and through a series of taps and pantomimes, directs Mrs Gage to remove the bricks from the ground where her brother's hearth used to be. Beneath she finds the missing gold sovereigns. They are enough for her to live out the rest of her life in comfort with the parrot as a companion.

Moral: "Such is the reward of kindness to animals."

THE WIDOW AND THE PARROT remained locked away in the archives of The Charleston Bulletin for over fifty years. It at last saw publication as part of the year long celebration honoring one hundred years since Virginia Woolf's birth, in the July 1982 issue of Redbook.

What might have been more startling than the text even, was the revelation shown in a reproduction of the first page of the holograph, that Woolf was the story's first illustrator. But it should not come as too great a surprise that Virginia occasionally dabbled in the visual arts (even if only as a doodler). After all, Virginia's sister (Julian and Quentin's mother) Venessa Bell was a painter who designed the book jackets and sometimes provided interior woodblock prints for many of Virginia's books. Quentin provided most of The Charleston Bulletin's illustrations, and his son Julian (named for his uncle who died in the Spanish Civil War) offered the more fully realized illustrations in the children's book edition of The Widow and the Parrot (seen above).

In fact it's interesting to compare Julian's book illustrations (from Hinton's The Heart's Clockwork):

With his grandmother Vanessa's (from Woolf's Kew Gardens):

Despite how public they made or make their lives, the Woolf/Bell's work never strays far from the family.


Background information for this post comes from Quentin Bell's "Afterword" in the Hogarth Press edition of The Widow and the Parrot, the notes to The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf where the text of The Widow and the Parrot is currently available, and from Peter Robins's and the BBC's articles on the acquisition of The Charleston Bulletin archive by The British Library.

Julian Bell is a painter and art historian. His 2007 book Mirror of the World: A New History of Art was released to rave reviews. He has illustrated other books (see my Flickr set here for more from Hinton's book), but the widest selection of his art can be found on his website.

All images are copyrighted © and owned by their respective holders.

THE OTHER JAMES BALDWIN

ALMOST AS THOUGH THEY WERE TRADING PLACES, the birth in 1924 of James Baldwin, the author of Go Tell It on the Mountain,  prefigured the death of James Baldwin, the writer of over fifty books for children, by a matter of months. At the time of his death in 1925, the name James Baldwin was known to millions of children. They read his books in school, and they read his books for fun. Not only had he written over fifty of his own books, but as an education editor first at Harper and Brothers and then at the American Book Company, he oversaw countless other works, edited numerous anthologies, and wrote instruction books for teachers on how to use literature in the classroom. It was estimated at one time, that Baldwin had been involved in over fifty percent of all children's books then used in schools.

Baldwin believed that moral instruction should come through a study of classical literature. Much of his output, starting with his first full length fiction for children The Story of Siegfried (1882), consists of retellings of well known stories. As he says in his introduction to his bestselling Fifty Famous Stories Retold (1896): "There are numerous time-honored stories which have become so incorporated into the literature and thought of our race that a knowledge of them is an indispensable part of one's education."

It was with this attitude that Baldwin wrote in 1897, the series known as The Baldwin Readers, which were used in many schools, and were one of at least three readers series that Baldwin either wrote or co-wrote. Other representative Baldwin titles include, Old Greek Stories (1895), Old Stories of the East (1895), A Story of the Golden Age (1902), and The Wonder Book of Horses (1903).

Most of Baldwin's work is now in the public domain, and much of it can be viewed online, often as scans of original volumes complete with their phenomenal illustrations. With such tremendous circulation, however, it is no surprise that Baldwin was often reissued and often re-illustrated. See my Flickr sets for examples of art by Peter Hurd, student and son-in-law of N.C. Wyeth, from later editions of The Story of Siegfried and The Story of Roland than the editions scanned by Google.

THE PHENOMENAL BEST IN CHILDREN'S BOOKS series published by Doubleday Book Clubs from 1957-1961--something of a minor league for children's book illustrators with stories drawn by artists such as Maurice Sendak, Ezra Jack Keats, Peter Spier, and Barbara Cooney--includes eighteen Baldwin stories in total.

Volume 26 reprints "Alexander and Bucephalus" from Fifty Famous Stories Retold as "A Horse for a Prince" illustrated by Don Freeman, the creator of Corduroy. Because the illustrators' names are not included on the title page in Best in Children's Books (they only appear on the dust jacket flaps and at the actual entries), brilliant illustrators often have "lost" work hidden away in the forty-two volume series. I have found no other reference to this work by Don Freeman, and so I take this opportunity to share it now.

IN ANOTHER WE TOO WERE CHILDREN, MR. BARRIE chance meeting, Don Freeman, long before he invented his famous teddy bear with the missing button, wrote and illustrated several articles on Beauford Delaney, the mentor and father figure of the African-American writer James Baldwin. Freeman and Delaney maintained a warm relationship (and on Freeman's side, a deep respect for Delaney's art). For more on their relationship, and to see scans of Freeman's illustrated article on Delaney from the April 1944 issue of Newstand, visit Don Freeman's website, maintained by his son.

Biographical information was taken from The Baldwin Online Children's Project (where you can see a photograph of the educator himself), and from an article on the History of Literacy's website. A brief history and thoroughly cross-referenced index of the Best in Children's Literature series can be found here.

All images are copyrighted © and owned by their respective holders.

JAMES BALDWIN: LITTLE MAN LITTLE MAN

JAMES BALDWIN SHOT to international fame with his first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953). It is a bildungsroman about a slight African-American boy growing up in 1930s Harlem. It is a novel about childhood, but it is a novel for adults. Twenty-three years later, long established as one of the most important African-American writers, Baldwin wrote another story of childhood, Little Man Little Man (1976). It is also the story of a boy in Harlem, but this time, Baldwin addresses it directly to its subject, children.

Little Man Little Man introduces the world of four-year-old TJ. For him, his block in Harlem is his world.

This street long. It real long. It a little like the street in the movies or the TV when the cop cars come from that end of the street and then they come from the other end of the street and the man they come to get he in one of the houses or he on the fire-escape or he on the roof and he see they come for him and he see the cop cars at that end and he see the cop cars at the other end.

WT, TJ's surrogate older brother, Blinky, the girl across the street, Mr. Man, the janitor, and his wife Miss Lee, the next door neighbor Miss Beanpole, and his parents: these are the people that fill TJ's life. He can bounce his basketball so high and catch it. He can run to the corner store for Miss Lee, and even to the store several blocks away for Miss Beanpole."He going to be a bigger star than Hank Aaron one of these days."

The story is told in black American joined with the language of children. The present flows easily to the past.

The illustrations were done by Yoran Cazac, a French artist, and Baldwin's close personal friend. Cazac asked Baldwin to be godfather to his third child, and Baldwin dedicated his novel If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) to Cazac.

TJ was based on Baldwin's seven-year-old nephew who went by TJ. In the novel, after his monumental trips to the store, and his interactions with WT and Blinky, TJ's day is shattered, literally--"It like a big explosion, like a bomb falling on him."--when a glass bottle falls from the top of his building and lands on his head. TJ is unharmed, but in racing to his aid, WT slashes open his foot through the hole in the sole of his shoe.

The children manage to get WT to the basement where Mr. Man sets him on his bed. Miss Lee is sent for, and when she arrives, she attends to WT's wounds. While the children see her as a healer--"'Did you used to be a nurse?'"--the adult reader understands that Miss Lee is an alcoholic, and it is she who dropped the bottle. The event casts a somber pall over the day until Mr. Man puts on his record player and Blinky begins to dance, which starts TJ to dancing, and soon all of them, the adults included, are laughing away.


THE NOVEL IS DEDICATED to the eminent African-American artist Beauford Delaney. Baldwin met Delaney when he was fourteen, the first self-supporting artist he had ever met, and like Baldwin, Delaney was black and homosexual. Delaney became a mentor to Baldwin, who often spoke of him as a "spiritual father." In later years, as Delaney succumbed to mental illness and was unable to care for himself, Baldwin legally acted in the role of family to oversee his affairs. It was Delaney who introduced Baldwin to Yoran Cazac in Paris.

Outside of the scant information above, taken from James Baldwin: A Biography by David Leeming, I have been unable to uncover more about Yoran Cazac. If anyone knows anything further, please get in touch and I will append it to this post. To see more of Yoran Cazac's art for Little Man Little Man, see my Flickr set here.

For a much superior treatment of Little Man Little Man, see Julius Lester's New York Times review.

I wish I could love this book, because I love James Baldwin. But it is a slight book, and it was written by a man I will always honor [and] cannot alter this assessment. Children's literature is a province of its own, a fact which the literati do not take seriously enough.

For more on the relationship between James Baldwin and Beauford Delaney, see Rachel Coehn's beautiful A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists.

And in a We Too Were Children, Mr. Barrie chance meeting, when Chinua Achebe received a UNESCO travel grant in 1963, he chose the United States as one of his two destinations with the particular hope of meeting James Baldwin. Baldwin was in France at the time, and Achebe was much disappointed. But many years later, in 1980, the two men met at an African Literature Association conference in Gainesville where they had both been asked to speak. Achebe speaks warmly of the occasion in his remarks made at a commemoration ceremony at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. It is reprinted in James Baldwin: The Legacy, edited by Quincy Troupe.

All images are copyrighted © and owned by their respective holders.