Writing in Pictures
October 25, 2024 at 02:23AMSince no one asked, Goodnight Moon and The Snowy Day are the two greatest children’s books ever created. But if we’re talking oeuvres, there’s no touching the voluminous, hyperdetailed work of Richard Scarry. (Sorry, Mr. Geisel.) For The Yale Review, the great Chris Ware levels his cartoonist’s eye on the man who gave generations of kids enough anthropomorphized wonder to last them a lifetime.
The Busytown books were enormous successes in America. But Scarry wrote and drew them in Switzerland, where he decided to move in 1967 after a three-week ski vacation with his son. What seems to have been an impulsive decision starts to makes sense if you’ve spent a few days immersed in Scarry’s work writing an essay for The Yale Review: a decidedly un-American tone runs through much of it. By “un-American” I don’t mean anti-American. Instead, I mean there’s a top-down, citizen-as-responsible-contributor, sense-of-oneself-as-part-of-something-bigger that feels, well, civilized. Even as a kid, I noticed that something about Best Word Book Ever felt odd, and I decided that Scarry was a balding Englishman, tweedy with possible pipe and maybe even one of those mountaineering hats with a feather in it. He was not any of those things. But the more one looks at his work, the more one sees how the European daily grocery trip, the walk to a nearby shop or tradesman’s guild, the tiny apple car fit for a worm are not part of the blowout-all-in-for-oneself-oil-fueled-free-for-all toward which America was barreling in the late 1960s. (Except, perhaps, in Cars and Trucks and Things That Go — though Europe has traffic, too.) So it’s perhaps unsurprising that Scarry spent the rest of his life first in Lausanne and then Gstaad, in a lovely chalet, hardly looking back while America slowly ground itself to pieces.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/10/24/writing-in-pictures/
via IFTTT
Watch