A World Charged with Miracles

By Stefan Kanfer

Fourteen volumes bring back the delights of childhood

Toward the end of his career, Picasso observed that it had taken him all his life to learn to draw like a child. It was one of the master's few unoriginal remarks Virginia Woolf, rereading Nicholas Nickleby in 1939, noted."Dickens owes his astonishing power to make characters alive to the fact that he saw them as a child sees them." And in his 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, Andre Breton declared, "Childhood is the nearest to true life."

In fact, every writer and painter recalls the power of childhood, when the tumultuous variety of the real world is charged with miracles, when inanimate objects speak out, secret accomplices assume the forms of animals, and dreams are bigger than the night itself. But remembering and re-creating are different matters, and only a handful of artists can bring back the astonishments and textures of childhood. This season, the handful holds an unusually high proportion of works that manage the child's ability to render objects and emotions by drawing flat and seeing round.

At one end of the trek, the elephant who looks like an unbaked cookie sighs, "Truly it is not easy to bring up a family." And truly it is this hard wisdom that lies at the heart of Babar classics. In his poignant introduction, Maurice Sendak, doyen of children's literature, notes that the first three books in Babar's Anniversary Album (Random House; $12.95) were written by a young, dying father who supplied Babar and the other sensitive pachyderms with a philosophy as warm as their habitat. Jean de Brunhoff's son Laurent wrote the last three works with no falling-off of humor or warmth. Brunhoff pere et fils double-page compositions, replete with elephantine architecture, landscapes and jokes, have the logic of fantasy and the color of gift wrapping.

Seven brothers have been changed into blackbirds, and only their sister can save them . . . The ancient folk tale was collected by the Grimm brothers in the 19th century; yet, in this version of The Seven Ravens (Morrow; $8.95), the principals seem as contemporary as animated cartoon characters. Lisbeth Zwerger's subdued palette and astronomical creatures owe much to Arthur Rackham, but her strange Black Forest birds and rabbits are her own and her heroine has the lineaments and verve of an '80s role model.

Lore Segal is responsible for fluent translations of such fairy tales. Her original composition shows how closely she has studied the source. In her folkloric The Story of Old Mrs. Brubeck (Pantheon; $8.95), the protagonist is the kind of grandmother who makes worry a vocation. She finds trouble everywhere in and under the bed, around the house, in the yard, until she makes a life-altering discovery. The reason why trouble is so clinging and so dark is that it is a shadow closely resembling the klutzy figure of one Mrs. Brubeck. Marcia Sewall's illustrations provide precisely the right balance of half-remembered European tradition and modern selfhelp.

"Whatever be the case with most boys," notes the Chesterton biography, "there was certainly one boy who enjoyed Treasure Island; and his name was Robert Louis Stevenson." Another full-grown youth liked it just as much: N.C. Wyeth. He filled the classic with radiant illustrations that made generations shiver at Long John Silver and his scurvy crew. This reprint (Scribners; $17.95) is a model of restoration; the very type fact bespeaks adventure, and the artworks are reproduced with even greater fidelity than the plates in the rare first edition.

Cryano made a big nose respectable; Pinnochio made it riotous. Warwick Hutton transforms the proboscis into an object of moral instruction in The Nose Tree (Atheneum; $11.95). Three verterans of far-off wars are kind to a homely little man who grants them magical rewards. Alas, a part-time princess and professional witch tricks them out of their finery--until the gnome shows how to change the regal nose into something resembling a length of garden hose. This ancient account of vengeance is little more than an easel for Hutton's watercolors. But they have such dramatic scale that by the final page the short story, like the princess's part, is wonderfully extended.

The Crane Wife (Morrow; $8.95) is another work rooted in a vanished culture. Benisons are given to a Japanese peasant when he saves a delicate, wounded crane from death. A beautiful young weaver appears on his doorstep and immediately rewards his kindness with a bolt of priceless cloth. Enter the villain, avarice. It shows on the peasant's face, and then in his behavior, as he drives his new wife to make more and more fabric. She grows increasingly wraithlike with every thread, until she loses her humanity altogether and recedes into the bird form she had abandoned for love. Katherine Paterson's translation and Suekichi Akaba's line-and-wash drawings provide one of those East-West collaborations piously praised, often mentioned, but seldom exhibited to such effect.

In an epoch when colorful volumes crowd each other out in bookshops, the black-and-white Jumanji (Houghton Mifflin; $9.95) is more than refreshing; it is a revelation. With his second book (The Garden of Abdul Gasazi was a 1980 Caldecott honor book), Chris Van Allsburg has become a master of Conte crayon and diabolical narrative. A brother and sister, Peter and Judy, discover a board game in the park. At home, they begin moving pieces, attempting to get from the deepest jungle to Jumanji, a city of golden towers. As they begin, a lion appears on the piano, monkeys cavort in the kitchen, a monsoon drenches the house, and a python coils on the mantel. Every hair, every blade of grass is meticulously recorded, and incongruities like a rhino charging a telephone are presented with haunting deadpan accuracy.

Hosie's Zoo (Viking; $10.95) is an equally eerie place, populated with recognizable creatures of the jungle, but transfigured by Leonard Baskin's violent line and shadowy backgrounds. Some of the descriptions, by Baskin's wife and children, are worthy of Ogden Nash: "The pygmy marmoset's minuscule lips/ Spew shrieking taunts, fierce orations and quips." Others are freighted with anthropomorphisms and archness. But Paterfamilias Leonard makes no mistakes in his rendering of tigers, camels, bighorn sheep, aardvarks and other forms of animal life: the creatures seem to have an existence beyond the page. Parents should not be surprised if young readers hold the book up to their ears to hear the catcalls, snarls and bellows.

The heroine of William Mayne's The Patchwork Cat (Knopf; $8.95) is Tabby by name: stubborn by nature and depicted by Nicola Bayley. One morning, she is suddenly robbed of her favorite quilt by well-meaning owners. The snatchwork of the patchwork takes the disgruntled feline from garbage can to city dump, where she rescues the beloved bedding from rats and begins the long journey home. For several books, Bayley has been competing with other illustrators for the most lifelike cat postures and psychology. This year Tabby wins by a whisker.

A different breed of cat is the star of A Dark Dark Tale (Dial; $8.95). Here the central role is taken by an unnamed black cat who once upon a time on a dark, dark moor takes a journey through a dark, dark wood to a dark, dark house, up dark, dark stairs . . . Ruth Brown's spooky read-aloud book pretends to be scarier than it is: even the youngest listener should be delighted by the punch line. The book's mysterious power is engendered by the illustrations of weed-choked gardens and abandoned, echoing halls, of mullioned windows and blowing curtains--a child's portion of gothica, easy on the frissons.

If a child has ever wanted to change a frog into a prince, learn the principles of alchemy or snag a unicorn (and who has not?) The Sorcerer's Scrapbook (Random House; $6.95) is an ideal guidebook. Michael Berenstain's straightfaced account purports to be the Life and Times of Nicodemus Magnus, Doctor of Magic and Sorcerer to the Duke, told in his own words. But its true power and humor lie in its chiaroscuro Dark Ages illustrations of dungeons and dragons and a whimsical text that Merlin might have written on the wind.

"Once in a funny, odd-shaped house/ There lived a wee maid and a mouse./ The mouse was fat, the maid was thin./ The house was new--they'd just moved in." So begins the shaggy-mammal story The Maid and the Mouse and the Odd-shaped House (Dodd, Mead; $9.95). Told in rhyme as infectious as the prescriptions of Dr.Seuss, the tale comes complete with the kind of conclusion that dissolves children in laughter at every telling. The house, it turns out, is more than odd-shaped, it is cat-shaped, complete with legs, whiskers and a roar that does not abode well for either occupant. Paul O. Zelinsky draws backgrounds with a studied eccentricity that recalls the works of '20s artists. But his creatures are very much of this time: the mouse treats his saxophone in the manner of Cannonball Adderley.

The Tasmanian wolf, the great auk and the quagga are no longer candidates for pets--or even zoos. All are extinct, a category that has always captivated children, probably because the creatures were equally unknown to parents and grandparents. In As Dead as a Dodo (Godine; $10.95) 16 vanished animals are saluted by Paul Rice and Peter Mayle, who provide answers to such youthful queries as: Why don't we see mermaids any more? Was there ever a blue animal? How do things become extinct? Shawn Rice's accompanying illuminations provide a valedictory Valentine to bygone fauna.

Mobile mothers receive workers' compensation in My Mom Travels a Lot (Warne; $8.95). Caroline Feller Bauer's narrative covers the assets and liabilities of having a peripatetic parent (lots of postcards, only one bedtime kiss, more gifts, a lot of unmade beds). Nancy Winslow Parker's thin-lined illustrations provide a celebration of the ordinary, and make sly, reassuring comments about the characteristics of a single-parent home. --By Stefan Kanfer

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.