Something Good #96: Fierce Good Things
I have these vivid memories of my parents running interference for me as a kid when it came to certain gifts. I was a bookish and retiring child and their adult friends, mistaking a melancholy nature to what was just shyness, got me all sorts of horrifying picture books. There was Heinrich Hoffmann’s grotesque 1845 classic Struwwelpeter, a collection of 10 cautionary fables involving overgrown fingernails and amputated thumbs (consequences of juvenile misbehaviour), images of which are still burned into my memory. And for years the fur-coated, hollow-eyed denizens of a set of lost picture books swam through my imagination, until I identified the author as Edward Gorey; I was lucky enough at that time to pick up some autographed editions at antiquarian book fairs, which I still cherish. Because, inevitably, my parents would intercept the original gifts and either return them or hide them away.
Despite or probably because of these absent presents, children’s books have always been part of my DNA; I was obsessed with Alice in Wonderland and wanted desperately to live in the Fantastica of The Neverending Story and those passionate attachments still live on. And while there is a huge industry of very talented creators still making children’s literature today, I’m almost always disappointed when I go book shopping for my daughter. They just are never weird or grotesque enough to stimulate my imagination. I don’t need titles to be as deeply traumatizing as Struwwelpeter, but I feel like kids’ books are always trying to teach a simplistic moral lesson—usually one I agree with, mind, but I need there to be more than that. I mean, Struwwelpeter itself was a series of moral fables, but at least it seemed to have emerged from the very mouth of hell itself, and all meaningful art, even for kids, has to at least stroll through that neighbourhood.
Writer Clare Pollard sees that thread of darkness running through kidlit and seizes it for all its worth in her wonderful recent book Fierce Bad Rabbits: The Tales Behind Children’s Picture Books, which I tore through recently. Pollard expertly recounts the history of the genre, which she situates as beginning in earnest around the turn of the 19th Century, and interweaves it with the story of her upbringing and her own experience becoming a mother and re-encountering these works, wondering exactly what they mean and who they’re for. She identifies a persistent strain of tragedy in the lives of their writers—Goodnight Moon’s Margaret Wise Brown leaps out of bed and drops dead of a blood clot, Barbar creator Jean de Brunhoff dies at the age of 37 of tuberculosis, to name just two—and her approach is cautiously affectionate, but roundly unsentimental. The colonial fantasy of Babar and its orphaned, supposedly uplifted elephant hero is both “delicate and original” and “actually evil,” with Pollard concluding “Sadly, the Babar books are propaganda for the powerful. They say we must dress properly, work hard and internalize their values. We must respect those in charge, even when they kill our parents.”
Later, she interrogates the values of Roger Hargreaeves’ ubiquitous “Mr. Men” books in a passage that actually made me laugh out loud:
I have read the entire Mr Men and Little Miss box sets, in order, so that you don't have to, and the effect is similar to the time I read the King James Bible in order—you realize there is actually no coherent moral system there at all. The hierarchy of sins is utterly random. Wondering what's happening behind a wall is punishable (Mr Nosey) but physical contact without consent (tickling random strangers, hugging people who don't want to be hugged) is apparently fine (Mr Tickle, Little Miss Hug). Being slow or lazy evokes sympathy but Mr Greedy is force-fed sausages the size of pillows until he feels ill, like a child with a bullying father.
Fierce Bad Rabbits is a wonderful book. I revelled in it, and by the end, I found Pollard’s insights about parenthood deeply moving.
I recommend it!
Post-script: It’s worth noting though, that despite writing perhaps the darkest children’s book, Struwwelpeter author Heinrich Hoffman seemed like a pretty cool and chill dude who lived a long and happy life? He was gregarious, well-liked, an accomplished duellist who dedicated his long life to medicine, and according to contemporary reports seemed to have an effective and humane practice as as a mental therapist. Struwwelpeter was written as a jokey Christmas gift to his three-year-old son.
If you are due some of our beautiful bookplates, check your mailbox. Most of you should have received them already, so if you haven’t by early March or so, please get in touch and I’ll arrange replacements. I still have a bunch leftover; donate to Doctors Without Borders and I’ll send you some.
Bonus track:
This will be was the last issue of Something Good sent from Substack. As promised, I have found a new host, and future issues will be sent from a new platform I already like better. Nothing should change on your end; you’ll continue to receive emails from me in your inbox without any action on your part. It’s been a long process but I’m happy and excited about where we’re going next. Thanks to everybody who reached out with advice, and thank you all for reading.
