Writing in Pictures

Mirroring these rabbits, across two pages an index-like series of images depicted a bear named Kenny getting out of bed, getting dressed, and going down for breakfast. This would galvanize me to action: I’d take out the book and mimic Kenny, washing my face with a washcloth (which I never did at my own house), brush my teeth, get dressed, and make my bed. Then I’d head downstairs to the kitchen with the book under my pencil-thin arm, where my grandmother would gamely try to serve me the same breakfast Kenny was having, emulating as best she could the individual menu items: pancakes, “warm cereal,” orange juice, bacon, and toast.

A little later in the book, in a two-page spread titled “Mealtime,” a family of orange pigs surrounded a large dinner table laid out with plates and bowls of various foods. The lower left corner of the rightmost page cradled a wooden bowl of evenly green lettuce leaves with three tomato wedges. I don’t know why, but that drawing so thoroughly captured… something for me that, for years at my grandparents’ house, it became my standing side order. While watching television or reading or drawing in the guest room, I’d smell the English muffin toasting and the breaded pork chops and potatoes cooking, and I’d see the setting sunlight warming the house’s old wood shingles—and I’d know my grandmother would have that three-tomato salad on the side, ready for me, just like the pigs were having in Richard Scarry’s book.

I must have been a real pain in the ass as a kid. But Richard Scarry somehow made me feel safe and settled.

this year is the 50th anniversary of Scarry’s 1974 Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, which strikes me as a commemoration worthy of ballyhoo, especially now that, as a dad myself, I’ve spent so much time ferrying my own daughter to and from school and birthday parties in various cars that—well, mostly goed. (I’ve owned five automobiles in my life, all of them cheap, one of which smoked and required the driver’s side door to be kept shut with a bungee cord hooked to the opposite armrest, stretched across both driver and passenger. What can I say? I was a young cartoonist on a cartoonist’s budget.)

Unlike those budget vehicles, however, the new deluxe Penguin Random House anniversary edition of Cars and Trucks and Things That Go is lavishly well-made, attentively reprinted with sharp black lines and warm, rich, watercolors. It includes an especially lively afterword by Scarry’s son Huck, in which he explains, using language even a kid can understand, how his dad wrote and drew the book, as well as hinting at what it was like to grow up as the son of arguably the world’s most popular and successful children’s book author.

Richard McClure Scarry was born on June 5, 1919, in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. His Irish-American father, John James Scarry, ran Scarry’s Department Store so congenially and cannily that even during the Great Depression the whole family—his mother, an aunt, four brothers, and one sister—lived comfortably. According to Walter Retan and Ole Risom’s The Busy, Busy World of Richard Scarry, when Scarry was a boy and his mother asked him to go to the store to get provisions, he would write his grocery list not with words but with pictures. So his mother signed him up for drawing lessons at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where she also brought him to see the paintings and sculptures.

It took Scarry, who was uninterested in school, five years to receive his high school diploma, in part because he spent a fair amount of his time lazing around at the public library and visiting burlesque shows (this time, one assumes, without his mother). This disappointed his father, who pressured him into going to a local business school, a fate to which Scarry acceded but loathed so deeply he soon withdrew and re-enrolled at the Museum of Fine Arts. “You will live in a garret and eat nothing but spaghetti,” his father warned. But Richard’s mind was made up. Then, after a few classes and December 7, 1941, he was drafted.

Scarry later recalled his experience in the military as “the best war ever.” At basic training in New Jersey, his commanding officers discovered that he could draw, leading Scarry to be largely excused from the rigors of pushups so that he could work as a sign painter. Leapfrogging to the rank of lieutenant (a prerequisite for his new post as art director of the Army in North Africa), he arrived at the port of Casablanca in somewhat plum circumstances, tasked with creating morale-boosting propaganda by doing things like illustrating information manuals and guidebooks and drawing maps describing the worldwide progress of Allied fighting. He and his fellow officers discovered a nice villa twenty miles outside Oran where they were permitted to stay, borrowing their colonel’s Buick to drive themselves back and forth to work. Later stationed in Venice and Paris, Scarry’s experience of World War II was, well, charmed.

After his discharge in 1946, Scarry moved to New York, where he briefly worked as an art director for Vogue and then in an advertising agency before acquiring an agent, who was able to secure him an illustration job with the then brand-new but now completely forgotten Holiday magazine. The job paid the princely sum of $2,000. (I can confirm from personal experience that such pay has changed little since 1946; $2,000 is still the average, if not generous, going rate for magazine artwork. But plugged into an inflation calculator, $2,000 in 1942 clocks in at $34,524.73 today.) With his living expenses suddenly covered well into the future, Scarry moved into a nicer apartment. He met an advertising copywriter named Patricia Murphy, and in 1948 they got married.

Meanwhile, in Racine, Wisconsin, a printing company named Western Publishing and its imprint Whitman (which had found great success in the 1930s with the Big Little Books and other novelties) were hatching a new idea for children’s literature, a series that would be christened “Little Golden Books.” Up to that point, children’s books had traditionally been a $1.50-and-up Christmas gift—$25.19 in today’s inflationary dollars—luxurious gilt volumes bestowed by great aunts that told of princes and princesses and things that didn’t go anywhere at all. These new Golden Books, by contrast, were to be cheaply produced and democratically priced at twenty-five cents, and would be sold year-round at pharmacies and, as my grandmother referred to them, “dime stores.”

The brainchild of Georges Duplaix and Lucille Ogle, two editors at Western’s recently opened East Coast offices in Poughkeepsie, New York, Golden Books employed displaced if not just plain refugee artists from Europe like Feodor Rojankovsky, Tibor Gergely, and Gustaf Tenggren. Working in a careful, deliberate, and illuminatory style, they carefully limned every hair of every dog—think The Poky Little Puppy—and set every page aglow with a strangely dark, yet warm light. On the page, their paintings were frequently vignetted in darkness, almost as if the artists still felt shadowed by the lingering specter of war. These books, dismissively looked down upon by librarians, were nonetheless immediately, snot-flyingly popular, with orders mounting into the millions of copies. Such publishing numbers were astonishing then (and are even more astonishing now, when 15,000 is considered a gee-whiz success).

Packaged for publishers Richard Simon and Max Schuster and their vice president Albert Leventhal, the entire series was written, drawn, edited, and printed by Western Publishing. A second wave of refugee artists signed on to their roster in 1948, this time escaping Southern California and Walt Disney’s anti-union practices. Among them were John Parr Miller (designer of Dumbo and Geppetto) and the writer-artist team of Alice and Martin Provensen.

Scarry wasn’t escaping anything, but he was hired amid this group to do up a four-page promotional brochure for Golden’s push into supermarkets. Impressed by his speedy, quality work, Western followed with a four-book illustration contract, which Scarry flexingly went on to exceed, producing not four, but six books before the one-year deal ran out. (Busy, busy world, indeed.) Wowed, Western signed him on for more, and the Scarrys moved to Connecticut, eventually ending up in Westport, where they went skeet shooting and boating, befriended other Golden Books artists who lived in the area (including Miller and the Provensens), and attended many parties. Then, in 1951, Scarry published his first solo writing and drawing book, The Great Big Car and Truck Book.

the great big car and truck book is, in some ways, the seed-germ of Cars and Trucks and Things That Go. But the differences are revealing. The Great Big Car and Truck Book still follows the house style of Western/Little Golden Books—careful watercolor-and-gouache illustrations that illuminate a text that is about the here and now of what people do all day. Moreover, the people driving the cars and trucks aren’t finely haired rabbits, bears, and pigs, but pink-skinned 1950s human suburbanites. The effect is curious, and, given our now-idea of Scarry, very un-Scarry-like. Like Charles Schulz’s early experiments drawing actual adults in Peanuts (the effect of which is psychedelic), Scarry’s humans feel just, like, wrong. There’s also little to distinguish his work here from other magazine illustrators of the day: the people, while charming enough, are too human to empathize with—oddly blank and impersonal, and advertising-art-like. Scarry had almost always preferred to draw animal stories—Good Night Little Bear, The Bunny Book—in books by his wife or other writers such as his good friend, Danish emigre Ole Risom. But it would be several years before he would do the same in his own books, substituting animals for humans as well as dropping the more labored visual approach for what we now recognize as his mature work.

There were, of course, obstacles. One of the less appealing features of Golden’s business practice was that, with rare exceptions, they offered no royalties. This arrangement nagged at Scarry, especially after his and Patricia’s son Huck was born in 1953, so in 1955 he finally asked the imposing white-haired and lavender-blue-eyed Lucille Ogle for a revised contract that included royalties—and an advance. She readily agreed. Surprised, Scarry asked why she hadn’t offered such a deal earlier. “Because you never asked,” she replied.

With this new contract, though, Golden started to send Scarry less work, and he began to wonder if he was being deliberately snubbed because of his higher pay rate. So even as he was producing beautifully wrought paintings for Golden Books, he sought and then secured additional paying work from Western’s competitor Doubleday. He also created some loose storybook proposals of his own authorship in a surprisingly free and zippy pencil style. Freed from the precision of painting, the linework of these sketches—dare I say, cartoons?—came alive on the page like nothing he’d drawn before. I don’t know if the roughs he produced for his efforts were all so lively, but these certainly showed a new direction, if he decided to take it. But when Scarry shopped the proposals around, Golden and every other publisher he approached turned him down, so he shelved them.

In the years that followed, Scarry continued to do exceptional work in Golden’s illuminated-painting mode, most notably his 1963 book I Am a Bunny, with text by his friend Risom. I never read it as a child, but I can now attest to its elegant, quiet beauty, because it was my daughter’s first word book ever, and I read it to her several hundred times. I never tired of its pictures or its words, the simple zen-like magic it evokes of the inevitability of the passing seasons always somehow putting the reader in a pleasant passenger-seat view. I Am a Bunny stands as one of the true tranquil masterpieces of children’s book art.

Even as he was working on I Am a Bunny, Scarry was preparing a proposal for a new kind of word book done in that free pencil style, which he called Best Word Book Ever. This time around, Golden accepted the proposal, and when the book was published, the fully realized Scarry World exploded into view: clean, pencil-line, doodle-like drawings that seemed lively and alive, if not to live on the very page itself. Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever was an immediate hit, becoming one of the bestselling children’s books in history, selling seven million copies by 1975 (including the one my grandmother bought). And though Scarry was only getting a royalty of eight cents a copy (a royalty that, due to the contract he signed, did not rise in value as the price of books went up), the incredible number of copies the book sold meant that money finally started rolling in for the Scarrys.

Scarry produced two more books for Golden in the Best Word Book Ever mold: Busy, Busy World (1965) and Storybook Dictionary (1967), the latter of which further plied the icono-lexicographical approach of images-as-words that had made Best Word Book Ever so compelling—the little pictures practically ask the reader to pluck them off the page and play with them. At that point, Random House swooped in and bought Scarry’s next book, What Do People Do All Day?, and became his publisher from then on. (Interestingly, after a 1990s bankruptcy, Random House also became the publisher of the entire Little Golden Books catalogue.)

Scarry followed What Do People Do All Day? with a series of books all set within the same society, including (among others) Great Big Schoolhouse, Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, and Busiest People Ever! The Busytown books, as they came to be known—with their dictionary-like visual presentation paired with lightly slapstick situations and the presence of recurring, memorable characters like Huckle Cat, the Pig family, and my favorite, Lowly Worm—grew into a real-feeling big world that Scarry seemed to be letting little ones into. (Lowly was perhaps the first children’s book animal character with a real nod to the ADA and the myth of “dis”-ability, and cheerfully makes his linear form work in all sorts of inspiring and disarmingly moving ways.)

Scarry’s guides to life both reflected and bolstered kids’ lived experience and in some cases, like my own, even provided the template for it. And while often sweet and quiet in its depiction of a picture-perfect society functioning measuredly—was Busytown urban or suburban or . . . European? (Where did all those Tudor homes and corner groceries come from, anyway?)—there’s just enough innocent mayhem and tripping and falling to hint at a darker side of things, like failing 1970s marriages and the things on television news that adults were always yelling about.

The busiest Busytown book is Cars and Trucks and Things That Go. As fascinated by the industrial world as any serious truck-spotting four-year-old, Scarry captures the ballet of traffic in a sort of frozen mimesis that’s reanimated by the act of reading and page-turning itself. Every aspect of life, however flimsily related to internal combustion travel, seems herein represented: whipped-cream delivery vans, mobile libraries, jet-fuel trucks, bookshelf-maker’s cars, ant buses, two-seater crayon cars, ambulances—the lot. There’s a simple, child-sized joy in recognizing the same characters driving by again and again in animal- and vegetable- and fruit-shaped cars while being dwarfed by accurately rendered bulldozers, heavy cranes, and thundering trucks, all traveling, page by page, left to right in the direction of the book—and the left to right of reading itself—through towns and construction sites and beaches and snow, ultimately ending in a calamitous (safe!) crash and a skidding of little cars spinning leftwards and finally stopping in front of (what else?) “Home.” Adding to the delight, throughout the book a tiny character named Gold Bug (who is literally a gold bug) hides on nearly every page, giving the engaged child a chance to find him over and over again in an exercise that would today be called “interactive” but we used to just call “looking.”

The Busytown books were enormous successes in America. But Scarry wrote and drew them in Switzerland, where he decided to move in 1967 after a three-week ski vacation with his son. What seems to have been an impulsive decision starts to makes sense if you’ve spent a few days immersed in Scarry’s work writing an essay for The Yale Review: a decidedly un-American tone runs through much of it. By “un-American” I don’t mean anti-American. Instead, I mean there’s a top-down, citizen-as-responsible-contributor, sense-of-oneself-as-part-of-something-bigger that feels, well, civilized. Even as a kid, I noticed that something about Best Word Book Ever felt odd, and I decided that Scarry was a balding Englishman, tweedy with possible pipe and maybe even one of those mountaineering hats with a feather in it. He was not any of those things. But the more one looks at his work, the more one sees how the European daily grocery trip, the walk to a nearby shop or tradesman’s guild, the tiny apple car fit for a worm are not part of the blowout-all-in-for-oneself-oil-fueled-free-for-all toward which America was barreling in the late 1960s. (Except, perhaps, in Cars and Trucks and Things That Go — though Europe has traffic, too.) So it’s perhaps unsurprising that Scarry spent the rest of his life first in Lausanne and then Gstaad, in a lovely chalet, hardly looking back while America slowly ground itself to pieces.

scarry continued to produce books for another two decades, all of them featuring animals in place of humans. This actually caused a mild panic at Random House when What Do People Do All Day? was being published, with the staff asking: Shouldn’t it be called What Do Animals Do All Day? The dispute was short-lived since the answer (“No!”) was so obvious, but it hints at something important about the narrative energy on which Scarry’s engine runs. In children’s books, animals are frequently introduced as the first vessels to receive the natural empathy with which children are born. See: Golden’s own Baby Farm Animals (pictures by Garth Williams), The Lively Little Rabbit (pictures by Gustaf Tenggren), The Animals of Farmer Jones (pictures by Scarry), and about ten thousand other children’s books (pictures by everyone else). The natural inclination to ask “do animals feel the same things we do?” is confirmed with a smile and a tuck-in, what in literary terms is cumbersomely called “anthropomorphization” but in everyday words is just “caring.”

As we grow up, though, the truth will out: Mrs. Cow makes a good burger, those chicken fingers were Miss Clucky, and don’t forget to check the trap to see if we caught Mr. Mouse. This all then slides into discovering that not everyone is as nice as they seem, and it’s good to protect oneself on the playground; before long, one can even end up in ROTC, heading into basic training and rolling away in a tank. Fold in the especially twenty-first-century phenomenon of the “first-person shooter” in kids’ video games—surely the most telling perversion of literary terminology America could have hoped for to permanently indict itself—and children’s literature, to say nothing of the idea of polite civilization, is easily relegated to the category of the hopelessly naïve.

Scarry studiously avoided granting cows and chickens driver’s licenses. But the pigs? Where’s the bacon in Kenny’s breakfast coming from? So his representation of animal society indeed raises some odd questions, but rarely seems to have bothered readers (with the exception of those literal-minded Random House editors). By contrast, when Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus: A Survivor’s Tale received the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, it provoked vociferous criticism from people offended by its depiction of its characters as animals. Jews were mice (picking up on Hitler’s calling Jews “vermin” or “rats”), Germans were cats, Americans were dogs, (Christian) Poles were pigs, and the French were (of course) frogs. Not surprisingly, many readers also objected to Spiegelman choosing the comic book—a form associated with children’s literature—to tell the story of his mother’s suicide and his father’s nightmarish time in Auschwitz.

Such criticisms entirely missed the point of Spiegelman’s work. Originally written as a short comic strip story for Terry Zwigoff’s 1972 underground comic book Funny Animals—which Zwigoff created to benefit animal rights organizations after visiting a slaughterhouse—the strip was later expanded by Spiegelman into a novel-length work. The book turns on the idea of ideas corrupted to the level of Idea: reducing humanity to something to be exterminated by exterminating the ability to see the human being before your very eyes. Had Spiegelman drawn “actual” people, the reader would no longer be complicit in the psychological deformation of the Holocaust itself. Biographically nonfiction in its text yet fiction in its pictures, the book works an ingenious, tortuous turnaround in the mind—and the eye—of the reader. It could not have been told just in words.

richard scarry’s work could not have been told just in words, either. As Walter Retan and Ole Risom argue, Scarry “didn’t write his stories; he drew them.” His bestselling book was not titled Best Picture Book Ever, even though that’s really what it is. As children, we see the world in all its detail, texture, and beauty, but when we learn the word for, say, a bird, we cease to see it as clearly or curiously as we did before we categorized and dismissed it. John Updike eloquently and beautifully captures this confounding contradiction in his short story “Pigeon Feathers,” where the main character only notices the iridescent, divine beauty in a pigeon’s plumage after he’s shot several of them to pieces in the rafters of a barn. Like it or not, just as adulthood runs roughshod over childhood, words chew images to shreds, and it’s up to the artist—or the writer or the cartoonist—to put those images back together again. Pictures are our first language for understanding the world, but that doesn’t mean they should be ignored in favor of a second. Or, as Dave Eggers once kindly put it, cartoonists (and I include Scarry in this group) needn’t be punished for having two skills instead of one.

Scarry drove headlong into a picture-world that he illustrated with words, a world which blossomed into life in a way that his earlier books for Golden, in which his pictures illustrated words, simply couldn’t. He kept in touch with his child self so well that, as both his biographers and other writers have highlighted, he didn’t test his books on children, because he had “remained very childlike himself.” And he knew exactly where the child inside him still lived: his kind heart.