Meet my metaphors #2: Richard Scarry

  

    I'm on vacation for the next few weeks. To give you SOMETHING to read, I've prepared a self-indulgent look at some of my favorite metaphors. Feel free to add your own in comments, such as "Neil's foray into butter-churning made me feel sad that, with so much momentous news going on, he'd decided to turn his back on the news and wander off into the fading past."

   The Boston Marathon Bombing occurred on gorgeous spring day in 2013. Before news of the awful crime hit me, I was strolling happily around the leafy suburban paradise of my hometown, Northbrook, taking in the splendid weather and nature reborn.

     In the solemn-though-resolute column that appeared two days later in the Sun-Times, I tried to convey the sense of comfort of that stroll, the sense of security that such terrorist attacks are intended to shatter: 

     Pedestrians smiled at the cute dog, a little girl on a scooter cast a longing look. We paused to let Janet, the always-friendly crossing guard, pet her. If you gave the people kitten faces and piglet tails, it could have been a page from a Richard Scarry children’s book.

     Perhaps that's asking a lot of the average reader. If I say my basement is the setting of a Stephen King short story, there's a good chance most people will at least have some idea what I'm talking about when I deployed that metaphor. 

     Then again, I should probably define my terms. A metaphor uses an image to explain something — my daily walk is a spread in a Richard Scarry book. As opposed to a simile, which uses "like" or "as" — my routine is like a Bear's in a Richard Scarry book.

     That said, who is Richard Scarry? Not an obscure reference, surely — the man illustrated 150 books, selling 100 million copies. But not a household name either. Chris Ware, the genius cartoonist whose work has settled into art — think of him as this generation's Saul Steinberg, to employ another metaphor — wrote a tribute to Scarry last year in the Yale Review. He describes the "big blue, green, and red shiny square of Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever" this way:

     The largish (even just plain large if you were smallish when holding it) book offered a visual index of the everyday puzzle pieces of life in humble, colored-in line drawings. Each page was a fresh, funny composition of some new angle on the world, making the book a sort of quotidian picture-map containing everything imaginable and unimaginable a kid might be curious about: where and how people lived, slept, ate, played, and worked.
     The thing is, “people” weren’t anywhere to be seen in Best Word Book Ever. Instead, the whole world was populated by animals: rabbits, bears, pigs, cats, foxes, dogs, raccoons, lions, mice, and more. Somehow, though, that made the book’s view of life feel more real and more welcoming. A dollhouse-like cutaway view of a rabbit family in their house getting ready for their day didn’t seem to just picture the things themselves — they were the things themselves, exuding a grounded warmth that said, “Yes, everywhere we live in houses and cook together and get dressed, just like you.”  

     "Didn't seem to picture the things themselves — they were the things themselves." That's metaphor in a nutshell. Ware is seven years younger than I am, and while Scarry's books were essentials in his deep childhood — he would carry them around, mirroring his activities to the animals in the book — to me, they were a step removed, books for my younger brother, two years older than Ware. As with Sesame Street, which debuted when I was 9, I could coolly appreciate Richard Scarry from the relative maturity of being 10, but it wasn't embedded in my heart, though I agree with Ware that, "Richard Scarry somehow made me feel safe and settled."

Policeman Small

     In my pre-kindergarten years, my formative text was Lois Lenski's "Policeman Small" (1962), the last in a series of books that began in 1934 with "The Little Auto" and moved through "The Little Fire Engine," and "The Little Airplane," and such,  starring Fireman Small, Pilot Small, etc. Stories that also modeled regular life, such labelling parts of a hook and ladder truck. To compare the two artists is to realize just how complicated, how busy, crowded and diverse life can get in only a decade. Everybody in Lenski's world is white, for instance, and her books have faded compared to Scarry's work, which benefits from the characters being pigs and bears and rabbits. "Policeman Small" stood out from the others for another reason, beside its star finally making it into the title. There was music to a song at the book's beginning, "Oh, Do You Know Policeman Small." My mother would play it on the piano and we would sing together, but I would still never use Lenski's world as a metaphor — how many readers would know what I am talking about? 

     A situation I struggle against — employing an image that sails over 99 percent of readers' heads. A writer has to please himself; but, ideally, not only himself.

     With Scarry, there's at least a shot of people getting it, though I imagine most know nothing of his life and never bothered to find out — I didn't, until I read Ware's piece.

     The man himself was born in Boston in 1919, Scarry's father ran a department store, and when his son, an indifferent student, began to study drawing at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, delivered this classic and very wrong prediction: "“You will live in a garret and eat nothing but spaghetti.”

     Drafted, Scarry drew his way through World War II, enjoying "the best war ever," with posts in Oran, Venice and Paris.

    Scarry was so successful that by 1967 he could take a three-week ski vacation in Switzerland and decide to never come back.  He died in 1994 in Gstaad.

    Ware makes an interesting observation related to how Scarry's ex-pat status colored his work:

     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...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 American was barreling in the late 1960s."

      Toward the end of the Yale Review piece, which I encourage everyone to read (It's worth the price of admission just for Random House fretting pre-publication over the title, "What Do People Do All Day?" soon to be a massive best-seller for half a century, because there were no people actually in it). Ware lets loose this glorious sentence: "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."

     I certainly view my reality as far darker than Scarry's lovely world, and at times the two collide, as in this 2014 post, when I try to step out of my own jolly self-perception and imagine what my neighbors might actually think of me:

     While most suburbanites don't visit their neighbors without getting in a car, I like that we live cheek-by-jowl to downtown, or to what passes for a downtown in Northbrook, and can walk everywhere. Doing so makes me feel like a character in a Richard Scarry story, if you remember those brightly colored children's books where friendly animal characters are always going about quotidian tasks, bakers baking and police officers directing traffic and such. My self-image during these strolls is not precisely a bear in a fedora waving his paw at a pig in a white apron. But very close. (I won't speculate on how I'm actually perceived, the likelihood of Northbrook mothers cautioning their naughty children with, "Now you behave, or I'll turn you over to the Scary Wandering Man and he'll put you in a pie and eat you for his dinner.")

Frontplate of "Policeman Small" by Lois Lenski (Walck, 1962)