William Steig: The Two Legacies

William Steig, the well known New Yorker cartoonist, turned to children's books in his seventh decade and brought to his second career a rich and poetic legacy that was already flourishing in his first. What he also brought with him, was a range of themes and concerns that did not suffer diminishing, when they were addressed to a younger, less sophisticated audience. Whereas many picture books concern themselves with the everyday affairs of having a bad day, or the fears of nighttime, or sibling jealousies (and these are just concerns too), Steig paints with a large canvas, no smaller than the universe itself. He travels happily between the cosmic and the mundane, peoples his world with identifiable, sympathetic, sometimes villainous sorts, giving us characters we can easily care about. He embroiders unexpected tales full of magic, searching, death, and love of life; so that thematically his work is classic in scope, yet absolutely accessible in nature.

This happy state of affairs exists no doubt partly because, in one sense, Steig is not writing for children at all. "You probably write for yourself as a child,"* he has said. The ease with which he does this may itself come from his experience in working for an adult audience. When a writer addresses other adults he is at eye level with his readers, and can usually use contemporary language. But in writing for children, he has to wander through his childhood. He must be willing to recreate who he was and what concerned, feared, or delighted him, and then find a syntax that will invite his readers in. These two different worlds create a duality that some writers span with grace, even genius. But others fail to remember or reinhabit those distant, mistier times of childhood. And thus we get books that make the whole field seem like a secondary art form. This is not true of Steig's books. It is possible, his books remind us, to reach out distantly, deeply and profoundly. It is possible to entertain, ponder the universal order, shiver, long for a friend, wonder what death is, all in as little as thirty-two pages, and satisfy us on all these fronts.

When Steig creates a cartoon, "the idea and the drawing are one . . . you draw what wants to come out."* For his children's books, he is often propelled by the visual image. A picture comes to him, and the story grows from that visual moment.* Sometimes he gives himself a theme, as in the case of The Real Thief,¹ where he started with the idea of a child suffering from an injustice.* However, he cautions, "it's only when you're consciously aware of what you're doing in a book, that you're in trouble."* So it seems that by drawing or picturing something first, Steig reacts to his own unconscious images. He sees them, they stir him in some way, and from them the story comes. By not working from the outset with the idea of accomplishing some "lesson" or theme, but rather from exploring some idea or moment, Steig's stories become freewheeling, liberated from contrived logic, and thus take many unexpected turns.

He uses the unexpected in several ways. One is purely as a plot device. With an almost slapstick sense of timing, Amos, the brave and determined mouse of Amos and Boris,² languishing in a sense of oneness with the universe, is dumped right into the huge ocean. "Amos, a little speck of a living thing in the vase living universe, felt thoroughly akin to it all. Overwhelmed by the beauty and mystery of everything, he rolled over and over and right off the deck of his boat and into the sea" (p. 7). It is just this potentially disastrous event that enables Amos to have his adventure, and make the friendship of his life.

In Abel's Island³ the rather foppish, spoiled and indulgent hero, impulsively leaves the shelter of a cave during a "storm that has lost its mind completely," to dash after his wife's gauze scarf. Abel is then not seen...