Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever delighted my sister and me when we were little, and it’s continuing to see a lot of action our kids’ generation, too. But after wiping the dust off my memories about the book, I find a fascinating time capsule of popular culture, some of it charming, some not so charming.

This page from rotten dot com (an archive of disturbing illustration) provides a thorough biography of Scarry, including discussion of complaints over the stereotypical and demeaning depcitions of female and “ethnic” characters. (Eventually all the characters he drew were animals, but he drew them in clothing which clearly marked them. Then there were all those vocabulary words.) At the end of the 1960s,

Random House urged him to change with the times, and he wasn’t too difficult to persuade once he learned sales were being affected. His Best Word Book Ever was still his number-one bestseller, and it was accused of being the worst offender. And so he drew new art, using women workers on the job, and depicting men taking a more active interest in household duties.

Alan Taylor’s Flickr photoset documents some of the revisions made to this book’s original edition (1963, the vintage we have) for its republication in 1991. Fathers pop up in the kitchen, where they had never tread before; “beautiful screaming ladies” hanging out of burning buildings get expunged and replaced with “cat in danger”; and odious ethnic stereotypes are scrubbed.

I don’t have a copy of Busy Busy World from my youth, but if I did, I’d be interested to review after reading this account:

…changing times and buckets of hate mail at Random House suggested that characters like Manuel of Mexico (with a pot of refried beans stuck on his head), Ah-Choo the near-sighted panda bear from Hong Kong, and Angus the Scottish bagpiper were no longer acceptable role models for children.

Yegods! Shades of Babar! Because when you revisit this sweet elephant, you’ll see he’s often adventuring in front of a wince- or nausea-inducing colonialist backdrop. Last July I wrote about a lengthy essay on the Babar oevre in the New York Review of Books by Alison Lurie. In it she charts both the ignominy of this series and the attempt by the author’s son to repair it:

Jean de Brunhoff had drawn caricatured Africans in The Travels of Babar, and they must have seemed a reasonable subject for his son Laurent, who was only twenty-three at the time Babar’s Picnic was written. Soon, however, as people all over the world became aware of the hateful and harmful stereotyping of not only African but Asian and Native American people, Laurent was one of the first children’s book artists to make amends and include realistic drawings of black people in his public scenes.

What’s interesting in both these cases is how, eventually, either the author himself or the author’s offspring has worked to rectify onerous, dated characterizations. It certainly gets me to wondering what social changes will emerge in the upcoming generation, and how they’ll cast a telling light on the books we’re now reading to our kids. Like so many of us in alternative families, I look hard for stories that reflect not just my kids’ family structures, but those of kids in other kinds of alternative families, whether what makes them “different” from the norm has to do with who’s in their family, or how their family came about, or what-all. Because each of us who’s “different” in any way makes more space for “difference” generally, and our kids are definitely aware of that.

In the future, I get the feeling we’ll see more and more depictions of alternative families, in every which way. A lot of literature is already out there (here are just two lists, for LGBT and interracial families). More is sure to follow. But not a moment too soon: every kid needs them, whatever their family looks like.

Color-your-own Babar family, courtesy L. de Brunhoff.

Okay, so what was I doing not knowing that the dear, beloved Babar stories open with (a) the shooting death of his mother, and roll onward inexorably toward (b) the poison mushroom-induced death of the King of the Elephants, and (c) the marriage of Babar to his cousin Celeste? Since when was Celeste his cousin?! How did I not remember that?! And I haven’t even gotten to (d) the romanticizing French colonialism thing yet!

Parenthood, apparently, entails the shocking revisitation of any number of submerged traumas from one’s own childhood, one by one.

To answer my own questions, I did a little armchair sleuthing, and discovered that it was not the illustrator Jean de Brunhoff but his wife Cecile de Brunhoff who came up with the original tale; her husband then went on to illustrate and proffer it to a family friend in the publishing business. One must imagine that (a) she sure wanted her kids to appreciate her? lest she up and get shot by cruel hunters one day?; (b) she sure wanted her kids to lay off the ‘shrooms; (c) hooking up with one’s cousin was not, in 1930s France, the creepy untoward thing we consider it today; and (d) critiquing colonialism, as opposed to romanticizing it, was clearly not en vogue for your average white Western mid-century artist.

Further notes to the above irregularities about the tale: (a) Bambi, released 15 years after the publication of the first of the Babar stories, struck the same ominous founding note; clearly it is just be too hard to resist this kind of mother-loss terrorizing in children’s tales. Fortunately Mme. de Brunhoff managed not to get shot, instead living to the enviably ripe age of 99, beloved, one must imagine, by her three sons, her four grandchildren, and her four great-grandchildren. Next, (b) it’s quite true that folk tales have as their common function to inform children about and properly terrify them of the world’s dangers (c.f. Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and Der Struwwelpeter, or Shockheaded Peter). “When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall/ and down will come baby, cradle and all.” And so forth. Furthermore, (c) maybe the French are just different from us. The film Cousin, Cousine, featuring an intra-cousin love story, came out in the fairly recent mid-1970s, after all. The whole topic is plain eeby-jeeby so I’ll just stop there.

Finally, (d) Herbert Kohl, in a 1995 book, asks the question Should We Burn Babar? I’ll have to re-read the Babar Å“vre, plus Kohl’s book, before I can fairly answer that question. Though I’m more inclined to look for insight to Jack Zipes’ Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, since I’m anti-censorship on General Principle, and the idea of burning any book, even in jest, seems about as savory as shooting an elephant’s mother out from under him.

Jean de Brunhoff’s son Laurent, took up the pen and the Babar legacy when the de Brunhoff pere died at a very young 37, of TB. Laurent evidently greatly regretted his own early depictions of Africans, and decided for instance that Babar’s Picnic never be reprinted because of this. Random House, who has the rights to the franchise, has decided to continue to publish Travels of Babar, though. I learned this from Alison Lurie’s December 2004 New York Review of Books survey of the entire Babar panoply, including five works of criticism about it. She notes that the current Amazon description of Travels with Babar calls it “as far from politically correct as you can get.” Looks like I have some research ahead of me.

Let us leave the whole Pandora’s box of elephants with parting wisdom from Ashleigh Brilliant, whose post card witticisms delighted my mother thirty years ago, and still delight me. He has one with a sketch of Rodin’s the thinker, accompanied by the thought: “It’s all very simple, or else it’s all very complex, or perhaps it’s neither, or both.”