Cravenomena

[Note: This is the first in a series of essays on illustrators who were very influential on Craven as a child.]

To know a little about the soul of children’s illustrator Robert Lawson, you have only to look at the traces he left in graphite and ink in his drawings, which adorned almost 50 books during a 30-year career. Although the physical body it occupied died more than half a century ago, that soul still sings in the gentle washes and intricate lineations of his art.

Take a look at the whisker-twitching vitality of the rabbits in his Newbery Medal-winning RABBIT HILL (1945). Or boggle at the spectacle of a giant mole named General De Gaulle in the strange adventure called MR. TWIGG’S MISTAKE (1947). Whether Lawson’s intention was to educate — as in 1941′s THEY WERE STRONG AND GOOD, a biography of his own grandparents and parents — or to entertain — as in the delightful fantasy McWHINNEY’S JAUNT ten years later — his humor and humanity shine in the quirky, detailed tableaux he committed to paper. And, Lawson was often able to blend education and entertainment in a manner revered by the schoolteachers of five generations.

Take, for example, his marvelous biographical trilogy of BEN AND ME, MR. REVERE AND I and CAPT. KIDD’S CAT. These biographies — of American statesman Benjamin Franklin, revolutionary hero Paul Revere and pirate Capt. William Kidd respectively — are narrated by their famous subjects’ pets. By focusing on history through the lenses of a mouse, horse and cat, Lawson could impart important facts while simultaneously evoking the giddy, primal pleasures of a cartoon with each book’s animal antics.

Indeed, animals were Lawson’s true forte. As a keen observer of nature and possessing a biologist’s understanding of animal anatomy, Lawson imbued the natural creatures he drew with spirit and elegance. In fact, Lawson seemed more comfortable with his animal characters than his humans, who sometimes strike awkward, graceless poses in his work. But his animals are perfect, each whisker limned in loving detail and cocked to just such a degree to show surprise, grumpiness, or any of the other very human emotions that emit from the rabbits, penguins and raccoons of his pages.

This man who could depict nature so beautifully was born in 1892 far, far from its green embrace — in New York City, to be exact. When he was still a baby, his family moved to Montclair, New Jersey, where Lawson grew up showing no predilection for art. But at his mother’s insistence, he enrolled at the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts after graduating from high school and studied under illustrator Howard Giles.

Giles believed that geometry and symmetry were inherent in nature and that the artist should therefore organize his composition into shapes “based in symmetrical triangulation.” Whether Lawson was influenced by this “theory of dynamic symmetry” is unknown, although some of Giles’ famous students — including, among other notables, famed landscape artist George Bellows, NEW YORKER cartoonist Helen Hokinson and designer Olinka Hrdy — most certainly were. At any rate, Lawson’s talents blossomed during his schooling and by 1914, he was working out of his own Greenwich Village studio doing magazine illustration for publications like HARPER’S WEEKLY and scenic design work for local theatre groups. After an 18-month stint in France with the U.S. Army, Lawson returned to the States looking for any illustration work he could find.

Over the next several years, Lawson worked mostly in magazine illustration, but the ’20s saw a great shrinkage of the U.S. illustration market, and he began to set his sights elsewhere. In 1922, he illustrated his first book, THE ADVENTURES OF LITTLE PRINCE TOO FAT AND THE FABULOUS FLIGHT, which did not sell well; he wouldn’t get another book assignment until 1930, when he was hired to illustrate Arthur Mason’s THE WEE MEN OF BALLYWOODEN. Although this title remained in print for some years, it still wasn’t the solid home run hit that would propel Lawson into the big leagues of book illustration.

That hit finally came in the form of an offer from an old pal. In 1935, Lawson’s good friend Munro Leaf offered to write a children’s story that Lawson could illustrate. In the course of an hour, Leaf imagined a gentle bull who preferred flowers to fighting, and cranked out an 800-word tale called THE STORY OF FERDINAND. Lawson’s drawings enlivened the charming book, and it proved an immediate hit upon publication a year later.

Although some critics castigated the book as thinly veiled pacifist and isolationist propaganda, most people were disinclined to find threat in its gentle story and sweetly expressive drawings. Indian leader Mahatma Ghandi called it his favorite book. Walt Disney soon optioned the property and produced the Oscar-winning short, “Ferdinand the Bull.” Although the art was typically “Disney-ized” by director Dick Rickard and lead animator Ward Kimball — with many of the matadors redrawn as caricatures of Disney animators like Fred Moore and Art Babbitt, and with the lead matador bearing the face of Walt himself(!) — some of Lawson’s beautiful drawing shows through in the posturings of Ferdinand himself.

Lawson’s reputation as a great children’s illustrator was reinforced in 1938 with the publication of Richard and Florence Atwater’s perennial classic MR. POPPER’S PENGUINS. The story of a meek house painter who inherits a dozen rascally penguins, MR. POPPER’S PENGUINS owes much of its success to Lawson’s simple pen-and-ink drawings. This classic is still in print, having long outlived its authors. (The Atwaters only produced two children’s books before Richard’s untimely death in 1948. Florence lived until 1979, but never wrote another book.)

Lawson’s next book, the forementioned BEN AND ME, was another huge hit and the first that he wrote himself since PRINCE TOO FAT 17 years earlier. It also became the second of his works to be adapted by Disney, who released their version of “Ben and Me” in 1953, with the great charactor actor Sterling Holloway (who would later be better-known as the voice of Winnie the Pooh in Disney’s mid-’60s series of shorts) lending voice to Amos the Mouse, Ben Franklin’s secret helper. (Disney would go on to adapt one more Lawson work; he illustrated THE SWORD IN THE STONE, the first novel in T.H. White’s epic Arthurian triptych, THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING. THE SWORD IN THE STONE got the Disney treatment in 1964, seven years after Lawson’s death.) BEN AND ME remains in print today, like FERDINAND, MR. POPPER and many other Lawson books.

Lawson continued to churn out books aimed at both the very young and adolescent markets, often illustrating his own stories but occasionally working with other authors. Among the well-regarded books that he didn’t write himself were ADAM OF THE ROAD (1944) which won a Newbery Medal for author Elizabeth Janet Gray, and Mary Godolphin’s 1884 condensation of John Bunyan’s religious allegory, PILGRIM’S PROGRESS (perhaps Lawson’s most frightening work).

However, it was his own stories that gave Lawson his most fertile fields in which to play, and it is those books for which he is so well-remembered today. When the 1941 Caldecott Medal went to THEY WERE STRONG AND GOOD, it served as an official indication of the publishing industry’s respect for Lawson. But when his greatest work, RABBIT HILL — about the clamor that arises among the wild animals of the titular farm when new folk move into the “Big House,” and based on his own property, Rabbit Hill in Westport, Connecticut — won the Newbery four years later, it made history. To this day, no other author has won both the Caldecott and the Newbery.

RABBIT HILL spawned a sequel, TOUGH WINTER, in 1954. These bucolic books are as delightful today as when they were written, half a century before. They have influenced many other children’s books, and some for adults as well; Richard Adams’ 1972 lepine bestseller WATERSHIP DOWN certainly owes Lawson’s books more than a passing nod. Their influence can also be seen in Chris Noonan’s 1995 film classic BABE, with its nefarious house cat and trio of singing mice particularly evocative of characters in RABBIT HILL.

Lawson told an interviewer for the HORN BOOK in 1940: “I have never, as far as I can remember, given one moment’s thought as to whether any drawing that I was doing was for adults or children. I have never changed one conception or line or detail to suit the supposed age of the reader. And I have never, in what writing I have done, changed one word or phrase of text because I felt it might be over the heads of children. I have never, I hope, insulted the intelligence of any child. And with God and my publishers willing, I promise them that I never will.”

Lawson died in 1957 in his beloved Rabbit Hill. He left behind thousands of little joys for the children who have followed since then.

Now you know a little more about the soul of Robert Lawson.