“They smiled at the good and frowned at the bad and sometimes they were very sad.”
I have a curious aversion to the pantheon of picture books. I’m talking about the ones so famous that people don’t even bother getting them for you, because it would feel like getting someone a housewarming gift of paper towels; it’s assumed that they’ll somehow materialize on your shelves, if they aren’t there already.
Goodnight Moon makes me feel as if I’ve taken a bad, time-congealing drug that is just now, horribly, beginning to take effect. The Giving Tree reads like a case study from the DSM. Even Where the Wild Things Are elicits primarily a feeling of wonder-free bafflement.
One of the few exceptions to this curmudgeonliness is Madeline, which I’ve loved since the moment I opened it and which has stayed in my daughter’s rotation long past the point at which most picture books have been recategorized as little kid stuff. It’s a melancholy masterpiece — a child’s first introduction to the homeopathic principle of art: that sad songs make us feel better.
The story, which unfolds in forty-four sparsely worded pages, is about a boarding school in Paris. A young student, Madeline (sometimes blonde, sometimes red-headed, never granted a nose), engages in some mild hijinks (standing on a wall, blowing a raspberry at a tiger in the zoo) before developing a stomach-ache that turns out to be appendicitis. She doesn’t die, she doesn’t even seem to suffer particularly — she enjoys the glamour and perks of being at the center of a medical drama, and the punchline of the book is that her classmates, fresh from a visit to Madeline’s hospital room, end up wishing that they could have their appendixes out too.
The first thing to notice about the book is that it is made out of worldlier stuff than most picture books. Imagine Eric Carle or Margaret Wise Brown building a children’s book around appendicitis. (Buy this special commemorative edition and get a plush vestigial organ of your choosing!) The book’s contact with reality — its this-worldliness — shines through in every detail: the house covered in vines, the crank on the hospital bed, the crack in the ceiling (with its “habit of sometimes looking like a rabbit.”) It is, like Ezra Jack Keats’ books, set squarely in the world of stairwells and radiators and traffic lights.
And so you might expect its darkness (it is, after all, about surgery) to trigger particularly acute terrors. Will a dragon eat me? is a lot easier to answer than Will my appendix burst? But the book works like a hot water bottle: potentially painful material presented in a form that comforts or even heals. What is Bemelmans’ trick?
The first answer has to do with the book’s visual palette, which is insistently minimal and plaintive. Thumb through Madeline flip-book style and the dominant impression is of a particular shade of yellow — the yellow of a lantern in someone else’s tent, or of a warmly lit living room viewed from a nighttime street. When I read Madeline it’s always fall, and I’m alone in a strange city, experiencing the special painful pleasure of wandering through unfamiliar streets without dinner plans or anyone with whom I might conceivably make them. This is the color of sadness you can tolerate and even enjoy.
The linguistic answer, the writing answer, has to do with pacing and spacing. A picture book is, much more than a novel, a musical composition. By placing only a certain number of words on a page, the author can slow you down or speed you up. With rhyme he can even impose something of a melody.
“They smiled at the good and frowned at the bad and sometimes they were very sad.” If this sentence appeared in a novel you would be concerned for the author’s mental well-being (cf. that Beach Boys song in which Brian Wilson sings over and over, with a bareness both moving and alarming, “Sometimes I feel very sad”). By breaking the sentence up over three pages, though, and setting it alongside a sequence of pictures, each with its own story and weather, Bemelmans transforms it. They smiled at the good — pause — and frowned at the bad — pause — and sometimes they were very sad. The line’s stately rhythm, its rise and fall, becomes a mini-lesson: feelings come and go as dependably as the seasons. Sadness, even deep sadness, can be borne — can be turned into music— because of that important word sometimes.
And Madeline doesn’t teach the reader how to tolerate difficult emotions for nothing. Having encouraged the reader to look inward at her own feelings, and further inward at the strange worrisome stuff that is her organs, Bemelmans directs the reader’s gaze in a final, still-scarier direction: toward the adult holding the book.
It wasn’t until my thousandth reading that I realized what’s unusual about Madeline — that it features scenes of adults unobserved by children. Dr. Cohn calls the nurse to tell her about Madeline’s appendix — we see both doctor and nurse alone in their respective rooms. Miss Clavel, Madeline’s teacher, twice wakes up in bed, in the dark, with the feeling that something’s wrong. She even stops in front of the mirror to put on her wimple! Here are adults in all their harried fragility, their poignant absurdity. They don’t have secret chambers stocked with wisdom and remedies; they have rooms with dressers and mirrors. They want the best for you but they’re limited, they’re preoccupied — they’re covered in vines.
Kids know all this, at some level. The intuition can, at various stages, terrify them (toddlerhood), infuriate them (adolescence), or fill them with bittersweet appreciation (adulthood). Madeline, though, with its cadence and its calm light, renders this insight workable — an occasion for a bemused shake of the head rather than a bug-eyed stare into the abyss. When I read it beside my daughter I feel that we are, truly, beside each other — I may be a few steps ahead of her at the moment, but I have little more sense of how we got here or where we’re going than she does. And this strange fact (which I’m convinced she senses too) does not, under the spell of Bemelmans’ artistry, overwhelm her. It fascinates her. It seems even to excite her. And maybe, once I’ve turned out the light and she, like Miss Clavel, like Madeline, is alone, it makes her feel sensibly, survivably sad. Sometimes.
Ludwig Bemelmans, Madeline
A lovely analysis of the enduring popularity of this classic.
Yes but. A word in defense of Margaret Wise Brown. Goodnight Moon is a dull book, but some of hers are magic. My particular favorite is Little Fur Family, known back in the day to our daughter as "Fur Fam". But many others are also quite lovely. As to The Giving Tree, agree 1000%. I owned a bookshop for many years and hated that book with a passion.