William Steig, out of ‘Shrek’s’ shadow

By Sonja Bolle

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The first job of any book lover celebrating the 100th birthday of William Steig this month is to rescue him from spending eternity as the creator of “Shrek!” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $6.95). As popular as the “Shrek” films are, it would be dreadful for anyone to know Steig only as the creator of the rubbery green ogre with the Scottish accent and Eddie Murphy-voiced sidekick. If everyone who enjoyed the movies went out and read one of his 30-plus children’s books or saw the exhibits of his New Yorker cartoons and other artwork (now at the Jewish Museum in New York or soon to be touring in the exhibit from the National Center for Children’s Illustrated Literature), I would rest peacefully.

Steig, who died in 2003, was one of the great 20th century New York characters. Raised in the Bronx, he titled his last children’s book, a memoir of his childhood, “When Everybody Wore a Hat” (HarperTrophy: $7.99). He was the son of a Polish house painter who advised his children never to work for anyone (to avoid being exploited by the rich) and never to be anyone’s boss (to avoid exploiting anyone else). The arts, Steig said in interviews, were what was left.

In college, he played water polo and wanted to go to sea, but during the Depression, he became the financial support of his family with the first sales of his cartoons to the New Yorker; he would continue to work for the magazine for 63 years, drawing 117 covers. He was a patient of rogue psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and was a lifelong user of Reich’s “orgone accumulator” – a device for the sale of which Reich was imprisoned. Steig was married (in one of his four marriages) to a sister of anthropologist Margaret Mead.

Childhood does not come off sunny in Steig’s cartoons. His first for the New Yorker in 1930 showed one convict telling another: “My son’s incorrigible, I can’t do a thing with him.” Christopher Hawtree’s obituary of Steig in the Guardian noted of his drawing titled “The Agony in the Kindergarten”: “Who can ever forget that picture of a mother’s full-throated scream, ‘Willie!’ while, in the darkness between her teeth, is the white outline of a despairing boy?”

His children’s book career began late and, although equally thought-provoking, represents a contrast to his darker work for adults. “The child is the hope of humanity,” he told an interviewer (for “Children’s Books and Their Creators”). “If they are going to change the world, they have to start off optimistically. I wouldn’t consider writing a depressing book for children.”

Not that he pulls any punches for young readers. For Steig, the world is a dangerous place. Kids respond to this; they know it to be true and appreciate getting a few tips. Steig’s heroes are often faced with death, but they are plucky and overcome their troubles with courage and dignity. My favorite Steig book is “Amos & Boris” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $6.95), about a mouse who takes to the sea. While contemplating the beauty of the night sky, he falls off his boat and finds himself treading water a thousand miles from land. Just as his strength is giving out (“He began to wonder what it would be like to drown. Would it take very long? Would it feel just awful? Would his soul go to heaven? Would there be other mice there?”), he is rescued by a whale.

The playful quality of Steig’s children’s book art comes from the fact that he considered himself a doodler rather than an illustrator. “I was flattered,” he told an interviewer (again for “Children’s Books and Their Creators”), “by someone’s comment that ‘Steig is a sublime doodler.’ With illustration you have to repeat the same characters over and over again.”

When he worked on a book, he said, “I do as little drawing as possible in the beginning; I imagine the character. I draw when I create the dummy; then when I illustrate, I try to get the spontaneous quality of the drawing in the dummy.”

Even Steig’s books that are the simplest child-pleasers demonstrate an underlying wisdom about what people, including kids, suffer. “Pete’s a Pizza” begins with a child’s disappointment that the weather has ruined his plans for the day. His father “thinks it might cheer Pete up to be made into a pizza.” So he carries the limp child to a table and begins kneading, stretching, sprinkling and baking until – hurray! – the sun comes out, the pizza is ready to go out and play with his friends, and another soul is saved from despair by a well-timed cuddle.

Love is certainly important, but it doesn’t automatically make everything peachy. “Caleb the carpenter and Kate the weaver loved each other, but not every single minute,” Steig pithily describes the daily realities of cohabitation in “Caleb and Kate” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $6.95; also included in “The One and Only Shrek!” below). Several of Steig’s books, such as “Caleb and Kate” and “Sylvester and the Magic Pebble” (Aladdin: $4.99), dramatize through magical transformations those times when people can’t communicate to ask for or offer help even when they have deep affection for each other.

It’s not only for kids that Steig’s work offers revelations. He’s one of those writers whose observations one can contemplate at different ages with different insights. In “Abel’s Island” (Square Fish Books: $5.99), Abel, a mouse accustomed to a life of luxury, is wrenched from his beloved wife by a violent storm and spends a year as a castaway, sustained only by his desire to return to her. Although he discovers hidden resources in himself that allow him to devise ingenious escape plans and ultimately to survive the winter, what gets him off the island is simply lasting a year until the dry season, when the river is low enough to ford. If Abel had known at the outset that he wouldn’t be able to escape for a year, he would never have made it. It’s a deep meditation on time and endurance.

Since one of the great pleasures of Steig’s books is the language he uses, it’s a particular delight to have the recording of “The One and Only Shrek! Plus Five Other Stories”(book version: Square Fish Books, $29.95; audio version: Macmillan Books for Young Listeners, $9.95) read by Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci. You can really hear that the brilliance of “Shrek” lies in the language Steig uses rather than in the slender story. The ogre’s extreme repulsiveness gives Steig plenty of opportunity to trot out a vile vocabulary, but one of the most delightful moments is when Shrek accosts a peasant, who is busy “singing and scything,” and Tucci snarls Shrek’s greeting: “You there, varlet, why so blithe?” Shrek then robs the yokel of his lunch: “Pheasant, peasant? What a pleasant present!”

And in this age of poorly thought out endings to books, it’s a treat to end with one of Steig’s many stunning last lines, this one from “The Real Thief” (Square Fish Books: $5.99), which he singled out as his favorite among his books:

“There was peace and harmony in the kingdom once again, except for the little troubles that come up every so often even in the best of circumstances, since nothing is perfect.”

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For more information on reissues, go to the Square Fish website.

http://www.squarefishbooks.com/news-and-press/

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Art exhibits:

“From the New Yorker to Shrek: The Art of William Steig,” now until March 16, at the Jewish Museum in New York. The exhibit catalog, “The Art of William Steig,” by Claudia J. Nahson, is published by Yale University Press, $40.

The touring exhibit of William Steig’s work from the National Center for Children’s Illustrated Literature in Abilene, Texas, will be at the Rancho Mirage Public Library from Jan. 11 to March 21.

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Sonja Bolle is a critic and freelance editor. Her Word Play column appears monthly.