About William Steig

Article about William Steig

William Steig
This profile appeared in the Summer 2002 issue of Riverbank Review, a quarterly magazine about children's books. (www.riverbankreview.com)

By Christine Heppermann

A zest for life animates this artist's menagerie of characters.

Could illustrating books really be the worst part of William Steig's life? The venerable children's book artist makes this perplexing claim at the beginning of the 1995 Weston Woods video Getting to Know William Steig, soon after we've been treated to a glimpse of Pearl, the young pig from Steig's The Amazing Bone, striding contentedly along a blooming shoreline on a glorious spring day. Surely a scene this effervescent, this pleasing to look at, is just as pleasing to create, isn't it?

Well, no, confesses Steig, because illustrating is work. In contrast to "free drawing," his real passion, it's a chore to have to reproduce the same character page after page. "I often ask myself, 'What would be an ideal life?' " he told The Horn Book in 1992. "I think an ideal life would be just drawing."

At one point Steig also wanted to leave the Bronx, where he grew up, and go to sea, a dream fulfilled vicariously by the mouse Amos in his picture book Amos & Boris. But Steig's desire to lie on a boat deck gazing at stars while traveling "up and down, on waves as big as mountains" was squelched by the market crash of 1929. His father had lost everything, and twenty-two-year-old William took up the task of providing for his family. Having attended the National Academy of Design in Manhattan, where he enjoyed playing touch football in the yard during lunch breaks, he figured art was his most marketable skill. It was then that he began drawing cartoons. He made his first sale to Judge magazine, but earned the "big money" -- forty dollars -- when he sold a drawing to The New Yorker in 1930. Since then, The New Yorker has published more than one hundred Steig covers and well over a thousand of his drawings. He remains the magazine's longest-running active contributor.

Although Steig didn't begin producing children's books until he was sixty years old -- Roland the Minstrel Pig and CDB! both appeared in 1968 -- his work for adults has always had a childlike air. Sometimes this has manifested itself in subject matter, as with his classic kid-centered cartoons, the Small Fry series, of which New Yorker writer and editor Lillian Ross wrote, "If any gallery of children can be said to have the last word, this is it." Yet even when he is depicting a bawdy midnight revel or a man at a bar with his drinking buddy, Steig maintains a decidedly youthful style. When he uses color, it's lush and playful. His loose pen lines gambol about, breaking into mischievous abstraction reminiscent of his idol, Picasso. His pastoral scenes often contain curlicue flora and other winsome decoration, but these never distract from the art's emotional core. Steig has said that he begins each drawing with a face, an expression -- and it shows. Steig reveals something telling in the narrowed eyes or drooping mouth or raised chin of each figure he creates.

Many of Steig's children's-book characters, like their creator, promote an unfettered approach to happiness. There's the endearingly hedonistic hound in his novel Dominic, a protagonist modeled after Steig's father, who dispenses with burgeoning treasure chests because they hamper his trek down the road to adventure. Gorky, the airborne frog in Gorky Rises, takes flight only when he reaches a state of blissful, Zenlike relaxation. Even the Robinson Crusoe of mice -- Abel in Steig's Newbery honor–winning Abel's Island -- schedules "taking it easy" into his survival regimen. "Only when taking it easy, he'd learned, could one properly do one's wondering." On a fundamental level, these animals are philosophers in fur and scales. They encourage children, by example, to open themselves up to what Steig dubs in Amos & Boris "the beauty and mystery of everything."

In a book for adults titled simply Drawings, Steig includes a sketch of a frowning writer with Roget's Thesaurus on one side of his desk, a pistol on the other. Despite the agonies of the trade, writing was one of several occupations -- along with sailing, beachcombing, professional sports, banjo playing, and drifting around like a hobo -- Steig considered as a young man. He finally took a crack at it when fellow New Yorker contributor Robert Kraus founded the Windmill Books imprint at Harper & Row and asked his colleague for a submission. Steig soon became a virtuoso, regarded for his original, effortlessly poetic prose and his refusal to patronize young readers by curtailing his vocabulary.

A quick flip through several volumes in Steig's oeuvre yields any number of challenging words -- irascible, verdure, odoriferous, pachyderm, equinoctial -- yet somehow his narrative voice never sounds pretentious or insincere. Perhaps this is because his intellect is shaped by a reverent, vigorous curiosity about the natural world. Like Dominic, Steig seems to enjoy sticking his nose into life and taking a healthy sniff, and his exuberant vocabulary reflects this gusto. If there's one mark of a Steigian hero or heroine, it's embracing the full range of what life offers. "I love everything," Pearl murmurs in The Amazing Bone on a day when "the warm air touched her so tenderly, she could almost feel herself changing into a flower." Steig appreciates gloomier weather as well, as this snippet from Abel's Island demonstrates:

Rain caused one to reflect on the shadowed, more poignant parts of life -- the inescapable sorrows, the speechless longings, the disappointments, the regrets, the cold miseries. It also allowed one the leisure to ponder questions unasked in the bustle of brighter days; and if one were snug under a sound roof, as Abel was, one felt somehow mothered, though mothers were nowhere around, and absolved of responsibilities.

Steig has said he doesn't miss the Connecticut countryside, where he and his wife lived for many years before moving to Boston in 1992 -- and why should he? It's obvious that he has internalized its beauty, that he takes it with him wherever he goes.

In his 1970 Caldecott Medal acceptance speech for Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, Steig compared his tale of a donkey encased in rock to another tale about a boy encased in wood. Pinocchio was Steig's favorite book as a child, and his own writing frequently returns to the theme of searching for one's true form. Both Sylvester and the shape-shifting rabbit in Solomon the Rusty Nail fear that they might remain stuck forever, impersonating something they are not. Of course they are rescued, because a Steig character, whether he wants to or not, can never escape his essence. Roland's heavenly melodies in Roland the Minstrel Pig prompt a fox to reflect, "It's a shame I'm going to eat him. It will be a big loss to the world. But eat him I must!" He's a fox, after all -- what else can he do? Subsequent Steig villains harbor similar thoughts, including the fox suffering from a toothache who prepares to consume his delectable rodent dentist in Doctor DeSoto. This is after the good doctor has gone against his own policy on not accepting dangerous animals to treat the fox's toothache.

Mice, pigs, dogs, donkeys, goats, even a pygmy elephant: Steig tends to cast animals in his stories because, as he has observed, "You can do things with animals you can't do with people, crazy things." Could it also be because he needs a break from the human race on occasion? This is the stance adopted by Spinky, the disillusioned boy who defiantly retreats to his back yard in Steig's comical Spinky Sulks. "The world was against him, so he was against the world, and that included all living things -- except, of course, the animals." Spinky's repentant family -- we never know exactly what they did to draw his ire -- try frantically to snap him out of his snit. They plead, apologize, cover him with kisses, hire a clown. Still, Spinky lies in his hammock "like a pile of laundry," unmoved. While Spinky's protest is exaggerated and, by ordinary standards, unreasonable, Steig never detracts from his character's dignity, even when Spinky decides he just might be ready to give his family another chance. ("Was it their fault they couldn't do better?") Steig's sympathies in this story lie where they always do: with the child.

When the animated blockbuster Shrek was nominated for an Academy Award in the "best screenplay based on a book" category, many moviegoers must have asked, "Book? What book?" Steig's 1990 picture book by the same name was not widely known. To his surprise, Steig ended up liking the way Dreamworks Studios modified his story. (He especially enjoyed the chase scene with the dragon.) One big difference between Steig's noxious green ogre, whose name means "fear" in Yiddish, and his screen counterpart is that the former never undergoes a crisis of confidence. The only thing that makes Steig's unapologetically disgusting guy glum is when he dreams he's in a field filled with lovely flowers and merry children: "Some of the children kept hugging and kissing him, and there was nothing he could do to make them stop." The nightmare passes, thank goodness, and the storybook Shrek reaches the castle in triumph to gather the gruesome princess into an Oscar-caliber swoon: "Shrek snapped at her nose. She nipped at his ear. They clawed their way into each other's arms. Like fire and smoke, these two belonged together."

Steig's own princess for the past thirty-four years has been his wife, Jeanne. In Getting to Know William Steig, he calls her his best friend and credits her with improving his disposition. The pair are a perfect artistic match as well as a romantic one. They have collaborated on two volumes of light verse and three story collections -- words by Jeanne, pictures by Bill. Jeanne obviously shares her husband's penchant for mischief and his nimbleness with language, tossing an "abhorrent axolotl" and other verbally adventurous ingredients into Alpha Beta Chowder's stick-to-your-ribs poetry.

Jeanne's lively versification spills over into the Steigs' inspired renditions of six fairy tales in A Handful of Beans. Rumpelstiltskin may look like a rough peasant in William Steig's delightfully earthy caricatures, but he displays a refined eloquence when he is taunting the miller's daughter: "I can enter a twice-locked room, / or turn a billygoat into a broom, / I can spin riches, silver and gold -- / 'tis a living creature I long to hold." The Frog Prince and the witch in "Hansel and Gretel" have a similar talent for transforming their speech into gold.

The husband-and-wife team's recent foray into Greek and Roman mythology, A Gift from Zeus, is, in the ancient tradition, downright racy. Some critics have complained that its unexpurgated retellings, fronted by a cover illustration showing voluptuous nudes, aren't appropriate for young children. But who says they have to be? This volume blurs conventional boundaries, as William Steig has done throughout his career, demonstrating that great art for adults can be childlike and playful, and that great art for young people can be intelligent and sophisticated. In his Caldecott acceptance speech, Steig remarked that art serves to enhance our sense of wonder, adding that wonder is "respect for life." The irrepressibly enthusiastic Dominic sums up this sentiment with one repeated word: "Wow! Wow, wow!"

Christine Heppermann is a contributing editor to Riverbank Review and a regular reviewer for The Horn Book Magazine.