a gallimaufry

brian wildsmith

One of my very favourite childhood books (admittedly, I have a lot of favourite childhood books) is a picture book called Blue Bird, which my parents gave me for my birthday when I was five. The story is a simplified version of Maurice Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird and is wonderful, but what makes this book special is the beautiful, beautiful pictures. I loved it so much I devoted not one but two Puffin Club bookplates to it.

(Illustration of one of the secret rooms in the Palace of the Night, from Blue Bird, OUP 1976; from here)

(Madam Berlingot, from Blue Bird, from here)

(The Fairy Bérylune, from Blue Bird, from here)

If you are a child of the 1970s like me, you will almost certainly have recognised the unique style of the illustrations even if you don’t remember the name of the artist. He was Brian Wildsmith, and although he died in 2016 today is his birthday and he would have been ninety years old. Tamsin Rosewell (@autumnrosewell) and James Mayhew (@mrjamesmayhew) are organising a Twitter celebration (#wildsmith90) so I thought I’d add something here, as a tribute to one of the greats of illustration. I have drawn on his Wikipedia entry as well as other sites and interviews to which I’ve linked.

Brian Wildsmith was born in 1930 in Penistone, West Riding. He went to school in Sheffield and at seventeen, determined not to follow his father down the mines, studied at the Barnsley School of Art, from where he won a scholarship to the Slade in London. During his time there (1949–52) he was something of an outsider, unable to afford oils and canvas so spending his lunchtimes drawing and studying the Old Masters in the National Gallery. In 1955, after his National Service (he taught music at the Royal Military School of Music), he got married, started teaching art at Selhurst High School and began designing book jackets for John Murray and drawing line illustrations for publishers including Faber and Faber and Oxford University Press.

(Brian Wildsmith at work; photograph from his obituary in the Guardian by Julia Eccleshare)

Wildsmith was foremost a painter and loved colour, and it was his great good fortune that the 1960s saw enormous improvements in colour-printing technology. His other piece of great good fortune was Mabel George, of Oxford University Press, who gave him his first chance to illustrate a children’s book in colour. Mabel George was a brilliant editor who took over the children’s department of OUP in 1956 and also launched the careers of Charles Keeping and Victor Ambrus as well as many writers. As an experiment, she commissioned Wildsmith to illustrate the Arabian Nights (1961). The TLS review savaged it:

‘We now descend to the lowest depths with Brian Wildsmith's vicious attack on the Arabian Nights [...] these pointless scribbles, which do duty for drawings, wander aimlessly about the page[...]’

Mabel responded magnificently:

‘Take no notice, Brian. We make up our own minds here. We’re now going to do an ABC.’

Brian Wildsmith’s ABC went on to win the Kate Greenaway Award in 1962 and his career was made. (I learnt about Mabel George, who was a truly impressive person, here.)

But according to this lovely interview he gave to Joanna Carey in the Guardian, that horrible review remained engraved on Wildsmith’s heart for ever.

(Illustration from Fishes, OUP 1968; from here)

In 1971, Wildsmith and his family – he had four children – emigrated to France with a grand piano and settled in a house in an olive grove in the south. The Blue Bird, my beloved picture book, was published in 1976. It sprang from an invitation Wildsmith received from George Cukor two years earlier: Cukor was going to film Maeterlinck’s play in the first ever US/Soviet co-production in cinema: would Wildsmith like to design the sets and costumes? I had never even heard of this film which apparently was a flop; a pity, but still it gave rise to this marvellous book.

Wildsmith was prolific: he published 82 books, mainly with OUP. Many of them he wrote himself, despite initial reservations which he expressed to Mabel George. In an interview for the Independent, he told Susie Mesure:

‘I said, “But Mabel, my English is terrible. I always got terrible marks at school.” But she said, “Brian, I have editors with inkpots full of full stops and commas. It’s ideas that count and you’ve got them.” And it took off from there.’

I have a couple of other books he illustrated, which I also love very much:

(Illustration of Mother Goose from Mother Goose: A Collection of Nursery Rhymes, OUP 1964; from here)

(Illustration from Mother Goose: A Collection of Nursery Rhymes, from here)

(Illustration from The Oxford Book of Poetry for Children, edited by Edward Blishen, OUP 1963; from here)

Looking at his pictures on the internets, I recognise others that we must have borrowed from the library:

(Birds, OUP 1967; from here)

(The Lazy Bear, OUP 1973; from here)

His use of colour is striking; it can be bold or subtle, but he’s also acutely aware of pattern and uses patchwork a lot in his pictures of houses and landscapes. The colours can be very intense but are often balanced by large areas of white space. You can see the influence of 1960s psychedelia in some of his work too. The other very striking element is the texture of his pictures. They are very painterly, and again vary from thickly laid swirls and dabs to delicate washes and splashes, given extra clarity by the pencil drawing beneath, embellished with waxy strokes of pastel or layers of collate. When you look at his pictures, they are alive and joyful.

As they sing, he is big in Japan, where a museum dedicated to his work was opened in 1994 and in 1996 he illustrated Katie and the Dream Eater, written by Her Imperial Highness Princess Takamodo of the Japanese Imperial Family. But he is not so big in the UK and many of his books remain out of print; perhaps today’s celebration will go some way to rectifying that.

(Illustration from Wild Animals, OUP 1967; from here)

In the Guardian interview with Carey, Wildsmith said this, which seems a good note to end on:

‘Children are all-important, and so is art ... Art is food for the soul. And books are a child's first encounter with art so I felt it was a way I could make a contribution to the world. A drop in the ocean maybe, but picture books offered a chance to communicate the importance of things such as kindness, compassion, friendship, beauty.’

(from The Lion and the Rat, OUP 1963; found here)

EDITED TO ADD: fellow Wildsmith fans, there is a new website devoted to his work here! His son has also set up a Twitter account, @brian_wildsmith, and you can see all the pictures posted by readers in celebration of his birthday if you follow the hashtag #wildsmith90. Joy!

The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, by Theodora Goss

(Detail from Fernand Khnopff, I Lock the Door Upon Myself (1891), inspired by a poem by Christina Rossetti; found here)

I’m very fond of Theodora Goss’s short stories, so when I saw that she was publishing a novel I was excited and ordered a copy straight away. Goss’s stories are often formally quite experimental and fantastical; if you like Lud-in-the-Mist or Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, her work will appeal to you. This novel in fact grew out of a short story called ‘The Mad Scientist’s Daughter’, which you can read here. While I feel that ‘daughter’ and ‘wife’ have become overused in titles, here that use is appropriate, since it is their fathers and their fathers’ work which form the common bond between the main characters. It also alludes to Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which as you will see is also appropriate.

Mary Jekyll has just buried her mother; her father predeceased her some years before and in mysterious circumstances. A provision in her mother’s will leads her to the Society of Mary Magdalen and a young girl named Diana Hyde who claims to be her sister. The fate of their father(s) is intertwined with an investigation into a series of brutal murders of prostitutes in London’s East End, conducted by Sherlock Holmes. For yes, this London of the 1890s is a London in which monsters abound, there’s a nefarious secret society and Mary and Diana are not the only young women with monstrous fathers.

It isn’t actually necessary to have read Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Frankenstein, Rappaccini’s Daughter, The Island of Dr Moreau and Dracula, but I must say that part of the fun of this novel is seeing what Goss has done with the original texts. All of the female monsters have their first appearances, however fleeting, in these Gothic classics. During the course of Goss’s novel they recount their own versions of the stories, which differ significantly from the originals. The differences imply a feminist commentary on the originals, while destabilising them and insisting they are not ‘true’. Questioning the factual ‘truth’ of fiction and claiming it is poor biography is a nice inversion of the accusation sometimes levelled at autobiographies that they are not ‘true’ but ‘made up’ like fiction. There are some good in-jokes too, such as Justine having ‘Miltonic’ English prose.

Goss’s playing with the idea of text and fiction continues in a lovely innovation. One character is the ‘author’ of the novel; she writes the main action and she ‘rewrites’ the other characters’ stories, presumably to their satisfaction because they all chip in with their comments. Here Diana has been telling/writing the story of her origins – Mrs Poole is the housekeeper.

‘To think that you were born in such a place!’ said Mrs. Poole. Suddenly, her heart swelled with pity for the poor orphan child, and she regretted her earlier harshness.

MARY: It’s a good thing Mrs. Poole is sorting laundry, or whatever she’s doing. I don’t want to hear what she would say to that!

DIANA: How do you know her heart didn’t swell with pity? Mrs. Poole can say what she likes, but she always gives me the largest chop and the most pudding.

CATHERINE: That’s because you’re so scrawny.

DIANA: How do you know? Wouldn’t it be rich if our precious Mary wasn’t her favorite after all?

MARY: For goodness’ sake, can you just finish your section?

DIANA: You were the one who interrupted in the first place.

‘Yes,’ said Mary, also feeling a surge of pity for her long-lost sister.

MARY: Oh please!

This questions the ‘truthfulness’ of this account too; after all, Catherine admits that she is using her imagination when writing it all down. It also enacts, on a textual level, the mutual co-operation of the characters who must work together to defeat their common enemy, and the reclamation of their own voices.

By doing this Goss diverges from a tendency of the classics on which she draws to use their monsters and their plots to externalise fear. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, for instance, is at a very basic level concerned with our relationship with our ‘dark side’ and our terror of being overwhelmed by it: the characters and plot externalise this. In Goss’s work, the female monsters are a marginalised group who turn their differences to their advantage, whether this be by appearing in a circus or running an apothecary. There is little of the psychological darkness and horror here other than the division of London into two distinct cities: the ‘nice’ London of the West End and the poorer, darker one of the East. Goss instead creates a very detailed and physical world in which the efforts of the main characters are often hampered by practical issues. Such matters as housekeeping, the supply of clean clothes, the lack of pockets in women’s clothes, food, the cost of a cab, the propriety of entering certain places: these all prey on our heroines’ minds. This focus on the mundane makes the monsters and the monstrous more acceptable. Sherlock Holmes mansplaining to Mary Jekyll the story of her own father’s death made me chuckle.

Do I have some quibbles? I do indeed, although this shouldn’t distract from the fact that this is a very enjoyable book to read and clearly written in a spirit of fun. It’s a very plot-driven novel and the pacing is good but the plot itself holds no great surprises or twists. The real strength of the book is its premise – female monsters telling their own stories! – and the literary games it plays. I wished Goss had pushed the commentaries which interrupt her narrative further; they sometimes became a bit repetitive or even redundant and that was a pity. I should also have enjoyed a little more introspection on the part of the characters, especially about their monstrousness, in between the somewhat breathless action. One of the victims of the serial killer is named Molly Keane; I couldn’t help wondering what an innocent Anglo-Irish novelist had ever done to Theodora Goss that she had to meet such a gruesome end. However, it seems there is a sequel in the works – our heroines have been invited to Vienna by one Lucinda Van Helsing, an orang-utan is on the loose and surely heading for Paris – so perhaps some of my quibbles will become superfluous. Certainly Theodora Goss is a writer to watch; if, for me, this didn’t quite match up to her stories, it’s entertaining and bodes well for future novels. (Meanwhile, you can find some of her work online here.)

Untitled poem ('Roses on the brier'), by Christina Rossetti

It’s been a fragmented and rather discombobulating week here chez gallimaufry. I have started teaching an English language course at an adult education college (I gave my first ever lesson yesterday – not what one might call a cracking success, but nobody died and I am lucky in having lovely students). It’s only three hours’ teaching a week but there have been meetings and paperwork and ahem a party so that I have been busy to a degree I had forgotten was possible. Actually I have found it rather difficult and keep forgetting important things, but I am hoping that my brain will adjust and meanwhile am exploiting my colleagues’ extremely generous natures to the hilt. Meanwhile, my daughter has been strapping on her schoolbag for the first time. In Belgium most children start attending ‘school’ once they’re two and a half, and she has just – just – reached that age. As she’s never been in a crèche or even spent much time away from one or other of her parents it has been enormously difficult for her, but today she suddenly turned a corner and while I cannot imagine her skipping there joyfully in the next few days, at least I need not worry that we are pushing her into something for which she’s not ready. I am also, of course, very proud of her.

In such a week my rediscovered enthusiasm for poetry has been a great comfort: I can always squeeze a few minutes of reading before I go to bed and when even a short story is too long for the time available a poem is just right. I was thinking that I might post here some of the poems I find which I like, copyright and length permitting, in an irregular, undisciplined and unschematic sort of way. I’ll tell you why I like them, and I’d love to read your thoughts too.

My first poem is by Christina Rossetti, a poet I first encountered as a child. My mother has a beautiful edition of ‘Goblin Market’ and other poems illustrated by Arthur Rackham. It was kept in a glass-fronted bookcase in the sitting-room with her other most loved and precious books and as long as I was careful, I was allowed to look at it. The pictures were what first drew me to it, but then I started reading and enjoying the delicious words.

I thought I would post one of her lesser-known (and short!) poems here, written in 1884/5 and untitled. It is from her Poems and Prose edited by Jan Marsh and published by Everyman (1994).

Roses on the brier,
            Pearls from out the bitter sea,
Such is earth’s desire
            However pure it be.

Neither bud nor brier,
            Neither pearl for me:
Be stilled, my long desire;
            There shall be no more sea.

Be stilled, my passionate heart;
            Old earth shall end, new earth shall be:
Be still, and earn thy part
            Where shall be no more sea.

I like the way it is apparently simple in vocabulary and structure but full of tension. The bud, brier, pearl and sea which are rejected seem much more attractive than the ‘new earth’ which is a unimaginable, empty. The rhyme is all me–sea–be; it flows across the stanzas like the ‘long’ desire and the sea and it seems to be arguing against the command to ‘Be still’ and earn your place in heaven because it is insisting – me, sea, be. They won’t disappear as the speaker wants them to.

Do you like it? (I won’t throw things at you if you don’t.)

(Dante Charles Gabriel Rossetti, Portrait of Christina Rossetti, head and shoulders, turned three-quarters to the left, pastel on paper, 1877; private collection; photo © Christie’s Images/The Bridgeman Art Library. This image seems to capture Rossetti’s melancholy and subdued, but still smouldering, passions)