SYLVIA PLATH: THE BED BOOK

IT MAY BE HARD TO RECONCILE the idea of Sylvia Plath, the patron saint of suicide, the confessional chronicler of depression, with her children's books. That a woman who expressed so little happiness in all her other works had hidden away light, silly verses and stories is jarring. Perhaps that is why it was not until over a decade after her death that any of them appeared.

Written in 1959, but published in 1976, The Bed Book was the first of Plath's children's books to see print. Encouraged by Atlantic Monthly Press editor Emilie McLeod, Plath took the idea of fantastical beds, and composed an almost Seussian poem of imagination.

She wrote in her journal for May 3, 1959:

"I wrote a book yesterday. Maybe I'll write a postscript on top of this in the next month and say I've sold it. Yes, after half a year of procrastinating, bad feeling and paralysis, I got to it yesterday morning, having lines in my head here and there, and Wide-Awake Will and Stay-Uppity Sue very real, and bang. I chose ten beds out of the long list of too fancy and ingenious and abstract a list of beds, and once I'd begun I was away and didn't stop till I typed out and mailed it (8 double-spaced pages only!) to the Atlantic Press. The Bed Book, by Sylvia Plath. Funny how doing it freed me. It was a bat, a bad-conscience bat brooding in my head...A ready-made good idea and an editor writing to say she couldn't get the idea of it out of her head."

Emilie McLeod loved it, but she suggested removing the two children, Wide-Awake Will and Stay-Uppity Sue who had acted as a framing narrative. Plath rewrote the book within a week of receiving McLeod's edits, and was very optimistic that it would soon be accepted for publication. She dedicated it to her friend Marcia Plumer's adopted twins.

That Plath herself still had no children of her own (despite The New York Times's erroneous claim that The Bed Book had been written for Plath's children) was still a source of much anguish to the young poet. Her husband Ted Hughes had turned to writing children's books at the same time. (He went on to have a long successful career as a children's writer, a subject for a future We Too Were Children.) Writing in her journal of both his and her books, Plath mourned, "And no child, not even the beginnings or the hopes of one, to dedicate it to...My god. This is the one thing in the world I can't face. It is worse than a horrible disease."

Plath had to wait until the middle of August until she got back definitive word about the fate of her book. Little, Brown, then the publisher of Atlantic Monthly Press books, felt "that the book is not simple and basic enough, that some of the beds are too farfetched, and that it has more appeal to adults than to children." At the time, while Plath had published many poems and stories in magazines, she had not yet published a book, and so could not rely on her name to carry the book through. Emilie McLeod was genuinely sorrowful that she had to pass on the bad news.

THE BED BOOK THAT EVENTUALLY DID APPEAR deserves none of Little, Brown's criticisms. It begins:

Beds come in all sizes--
single or double,
cot-size or cradle,
king-size or trundle.

Most Beds are Beds
for sleeping or resting,
but the best Beds are much
more interesting!

Plath said in her journal that she had chosen ten beds, but in the final book there seem to be a few more than that. Of course, she may have intended some of these beds to be the same bed. They are: a bed for fishing, a bed for cats, a bed for acrobats, a submarine bed, a jet-propelled bed, a snack bed, a spottable bed, a tank bed, a bird-watchers bed, a pocket-size bed, an elephant bed, and a North-Pole bed.

The Bed Book was later included in Plath's Collected Children's Stories with different illustrations. In the original book, illustrator Emily Arnold McCully infuses her pictures with warmth, depicting a sort of nostalgic idyll.

But the later pictures by David Roberts come closer to the zaniness the book intends.

The collected version also retains additional verses that had been cut from the book's first appearance. Why those particular lines had been removed is unclear.

Jack Prelutsky included an excerpt from The Bed Book in The Random House Book of Poetry for Children, but the book itself fell out of print. It would be twenty years more before another one of Plath's children's works was published

In addition to Plath's own published journals, background information for this post came from Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath by Anne Stevenson, and Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath by Paul Alexander.

COMING SOON: The It-Doesn't-Matter Suit by Sylvia Plath

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GUEST POST ON VKBMKL: SINNICKSON'S WIZARD OF OZ

IN HONOR OF THE NEW OZ MOVIE, I've contributed this beautiful Wonder Books edition to the greatest kids' book blog there is, Vintage Kids' Books My Kid Loves. Click the link to check it out. Head on over to my Flickr to see the whole book.

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CARSON MCCULLERS: SWEET AS A PICKLE AND CLEAN AS A PIG

CARSON MCCULLERS WROTE ABOUT CHILDHOOD. Her two most famous works, the novels The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and Member of the Wedding (later adapted for the stage) both have as central protagonists young girls trying to navigate the borders between girlhood and adulthood. They are haunting and insightful portraits, but writing insightfully about childhood is not the same as understanding children, as McCullers revealed in her one publication intended for children, the book of poems Sweet as a Pickle and Clean as a Pig.

Written towards the end of her life, Sweet as a Pickle and Clean as a Pig was in many ways an exercise that allowed McCullers to write something, anything. Plagued with ill health all her life, writing became progressively harder in her later years, as pain and fatigue made prolonged writing sessions difficult. Light children's verse was a way to practice her vocation, and the idea that the poems might entertain the children of her friends only added to the pleasure. Published almost by chance, when the editor Joyce Hartman happened upon several of the poems and asked to see more, McCullers dedicated the book to Emily and Dara Altman, the children of her lawyer, and Tony Lantz, the son of her agent.

The book was not well received, and it's not hard to see why. The poems alternate between light nonsense verse in the vein of Mother Goose, and free verse observations and reminiscences tinged with melancholy.

It's hard to imagine what child would be drawn to such disparate work, especially since the poems are neither funny nor particularly rhythmic.

The crude illustrations were provided by Rolf Gérard, a painter and longtime set designer for the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

The book is a footnote to an illustrious career that leaves readers wishing McCullers's ability to evoke dreamlike realities had carried over to her work for children.

WHAT LITTLE INFORMATION I could find came predominantly from The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers by Virginia Spencer Carr. I also consulted Carson McCullers: A Life by Josyane Savigneau. To see Sweet as a Pickle and Clean as a Pig in its entirety, go to my Flikr set here.

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UPTON SINCLAIR: THE GNOMOBILE ILLUSTRATED BY MARCEL TILLARD

I HAVE ALREADY WRITTEN extensively on both Upton Sinclair's novel The Gnomobile, and the Walt Disney movie it inspired. In my original post, I talked about the minor differences between Upton Sinclair's 1936 first edition and the 1962 reissue. There is, however, one major difference between the editions that I did not address: the illustrations.

The Gnomobile was released in France in 1959 as En Gnomobile à travers l'Amérique with illustrations by Marcel Tillard. Tillard was a children's book illustrator and comic book artist who illustrated tales from the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and Chinese tradition.  There is very little information in English about Tillard, but based on what I gleaned from Google translation, he was born in Orleans in 1913, and studied Fine Arts in Tours and Paris. He started contributing illustrations to several different magazines in the early 1950s, and in 1955, he began a long collaboration with Jean-Pierre Chabrol on Le Barlafré, a comic book series that ran for 410 albums.

When Upton Sinclair reissued The Gnomobile in America in 1962, Tillard's illustrations were included. It was the only English-language work to sport Tillard's art.

The art alternates between four-color and two-color illustrations with four-color outnumbering two-color by two.

Tillard's work is stunning, reminiscent of classic Little Golden Books' illustrators such as Gustaf Tenggren and Tibor Gergely. He died in 1976, and the only work of his that is still in print in France is a book and CD set of Peter and the Wolf. It is a shame that his work is both out of print and unavailable in the U.S.

I have posted all of Marcel Tillard's illustrations for The Gnomobile on my Flickr, and other examples of his illustrations are available online here, here, and here.

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J.R.R. TOLKIEN: THE FATHER CHRISTMAS LETTERS

WITH THE HOBBIT COMING OUT IN THEATERS and Christmas only two weeks away, the time is right to bring out J.R.R. Tolkien's The Father Christmas Letters. Tolkien, in case you somehow have missed this, is the most important fantasy writer of all time. His Lord of the Rings defined high fantasy: an intricately detailed fictional world (Middle-Earth) and a heroic epic quest (Frodo's imperative to destroy the one ring). Tolkien, a professor at Oxford, spent much of his life chronicling Middle-Earth's history, creating whole new languages and alphabets, complicated mythology, and international politics. And since the books' release in the 1950s, billions of dollars in revenue from books, films, and merchandise have proven that almost everyone loves it.

Now imagine if the guy who did all that was your dad. What kind of cool bedtime stories would he tell? What would he say when you asked him if Santa Claus was real?

Tolkien had four children--John, Michael, Christopher, and Priscilla. Starting when John was three in 1920 and continuing for the next twenty-four years, Tolkien wrote and illustrated a personal letter from Father Christmas to his children each year. The letters were delivered to the house in envelopes bearing North Pole stamps and postal cancellations, except when they were marked "By Elf Messenger" or "by direct Reindeer Post." Father Christmas's handwriting was often shaky--he was "nineteen hundred and twenty-four, no! seven! years old on Christmas Day" 1923, and it was cold at the North Pole. Eventually his elfin secretary Ilbereth took over some of the writing duties in 1936.

But what did Father Christmas write about? Well his boon companion was the North Polar Bear, who had a way of getting himself into trouble. In 1925, he climbed the North Pole to retrieve Father Christmas's hood, and the North Pole broke, destroying Father Christmas's house in the process. In 1928 he fell down the stairs and in 1936 he fell asleep in the bath, flooding one of the gift sorting rooms.

Eventually, the cast of characters grew to include two of the North Polar Bear's nephew's, Pasku and Valkotukka, and countless unnamed Elves, Snow-Men, Red Gnomes, Green Gnomes, Cave-bears, and starting in 1932, Goblins.

Apparently, Father Christmas has been at war with the Goblins for centuries. In 1932, the North Polar Bear stumbles into one of their deserted underground caves, the walls covered with paintings, some by goblins, some by men. Soon, sensitive to the smell of Goblins, the North Polar Bear uncovers a system of tunnels that lead in to the kitchen of Father Christmas's old house. Father Christmas thought the goblins were taken care of after the trouble they caused in 1453, but with evidence of at least one hundred years of activity, Father Christmas knows he must take action. He smokes the Goblins out into the hands of the Red Gnomes who chase them out of the land. The threat has passed, although Father Christmas believes "they will crop up again in a century or so."

They crop up the next year, however, and the North Polar Bear in single combat takes down one hundred of them before the Gnomes arrive to handle the rest. This sets the Goblins back many years, but they spend that time rallying their forces. When World War II breaks out, and so much of the world is occupied with the conflict, the Goblins see this as their chance to mount another attack on the North Pole. They are, of course, defeated.

The Father Christmas Letters were published in 1976, three years after Tolkien's death. The original edition omitted many of the letters from the early 1920s, as those letters were short and lacked the narrative elements of the later letters. It also left out the letters from the early 1940s. A complete edition of the letters, along with scans of many of the envelopes and letters in addition to the illustrations, was published in 2004, a paperback of which is still in print.

While written for children, the letters from Father Christmas were written for a very specific group of children with the conceit that the letters were authentic, so the book might not be of that much interest to children today. But it is of great interest to any fan of Tolkien, a way to imagine what it was like to have a dad who invented Gandalf, Bilbo, and Frodo.

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