Tales , it’s a translation. It isn’t my territory but I need the money. I’ve had the typescript three weeks, I haven’t come up with any final illustrations yet. As a rule I work faster than that.
The stories aren’t what I expected; they’re like German fairy tales, except for the absence of red-hot iron slippers and nail-studded casks. I wonder if this mercy descends from the original tellers, from the translator or from the publisher; probably it’s Mr. Percival the publisher, he’s a cautious man, he shies away from anything he calls “disturbing.” We had an argument about that: he said one of my drawings was too frightening and I said children liked being frightened. “It isn’t the children who buy the books,” he said, “it’s their parents.” So I compromised; now I compromise before I take the work in, it saves time. I’ve learned the sort of thing he wants: elegant and stylized, decoratively coloured, like patisserie cakes. I can do that, I can imitate anything: fake Walt Disney, Victorian etchings in sepia, Bavarian cookies, ersatz Eskimo for the home market. Though what they like best is something they hope will interest the English and American publishers too.
Clean water in a glass, brushes in another glass, watercolours and acrylics in their metal toothpaste tubes. Bluebottle fly near my elbow, metallic abdomen gleaming, sucker tongue walking on the oilcloth like a seventh foot. When it was raining we would sit at this table and draw in our scrapbooks with crayons or coloured pencils, anything we liked. In school you had to do what the rest were doing.
On the crest of the hill for all to see
God planted a Scarlet Maple Tree
printed thirty-five times, strung out along the top of the blackboard, each page with a preserved maple leaf glued to it, ironed between sheets of wax paper.
I outline a princess, an ordinary one, emaciated fashion-model torso and infantile face, like those I did for Favourite Fairy Tales. Earlier they annoyed me, the stories never revealed the essential things about them, such as what they ate or whether their towers and dungeons had bathrooms, it was as though their bodies were pure air. It wasn’t Peter Pan’s ability to fly that made him incredible for me, it was the lack of an outhouse near his underground burrow.
My princess tilts her head: she’s gazing up at a bird rising from a nest of flames, wings outspread like a heraldic emblem or a fire insurance trademark: The Tale of the Golden Phoenix. The bird has to be yellow and the fire can only be yellow too, they have to keep the cost down so I can’t use red; that way I lose orange and purple also. I asked for red instead of yellow but Mr. Percival wanted “a cool tone.”
I pause to judge: the princess looks stupefied rather than filled with wonder. I discard her and try again, but this time she’s cross-eyed and has one breast bigger than the other. My fingers are stiff, maybe I’m getting arthritis.
I skim the story again for a different episode, but no pictures form. It’s hard to believe that anyone here, even the grandmothers, ever knew these stories: this isn’t a country of princesses, The Fountain of Youth and The Castle of the Seven Splendours don’t belong here. They must have told stories about something as they sat around the kitchen range at night: bewitched dogs and malevolent trees perhaps, and the magic powers of rival political candidates, whose effigies in straw they burned during elections.
But the truth is that I don’t know what the villagers thought or talked about, I was so shut off from them. The older ones occasionally crossed themselves when we passed, possibly because my mother was wearing slacks, but even that was never explained. Although we played during visits with the solemn, slightly hostile children of Paul and Madame, the games were brief and wordless. We never could find out what went on inside the tiny hillside church they filed into on Sundays: our parents
The stories aren’t what I expected; they’re like German fairy tales, except for the absence of red-hot iron slippers and nail-studded casks. I wonder if this mercy descends from the original tellers, from the translator or from the publisher; probably it’s Mr. Percival the publisher, he’s a cautious man, he shies away from anything he calls “disturbing.” We had an argument about that: he said one of my drawings was too frightening and I said children liked being frightened. “It isn’t the children who buy the books,” he said, “it’s their parents.” So I compromised; now I compromise before I take the work in, it saves time. I’ve learned the sort of thing he wants: elegant and stylized, decoratively coloured, like patisserie cakes. I can do that, I can imitate anything: fake Walt Disney, Victorian etchings in sepia, Bavarian cookies, ersatz Eskimo for the home market. Though what they like best is something they hope will interest the English and American publishers too.
Clean water in a glass, brushes in another glass, watercolours and acrylics in their metal toothpaste tubes. Bluebottle fly near my elbow, metallic abdomen gleaming, sucker tongue walking on the oilcloth like a seventh foot. When it was raining we would sit at this table and draw in our scrapbooks with crayons or coloured pencils, anything we liked. In school you had to do what the rest were doing.
On the crest of the hill for all to see
God planted a Scarlet Maple Tree
printed thirty-five times, strung out along the top of the blackboard, each page with a preserved maple leaf glued to it, ironed between sheets of wax paper.
I outline a princess, an ordinary one, emaciated fashion-model torso and infantile face, like those I did for Favourite Fairy Tales. Earlier they annoyed me, the stories never revealed the essential things about them, such as what they ate or whether their towers and dungeons had bathrooms, it was as though their bodies were pure air. It wasn’t Peter Pan’s ability to fly that made him incredible for me, it was the lack of an outhouse near his underground burrow.
My princess tilts her head: she’s gazing up at a bird rising from a nest of flames, wings outspread like a heraldic emblem or a fire insurance trademark: The Tale of the Golden Phoenix. The bird has to be yellow and the fire can only be yellow too, they have to keep the cost down so I can’t use red; that way I lose orange and purple also. I asked for red instead of yellow but Mr. Percival wanted “a cool tone.”
I pause to judge: the princess looks stupefied rather than filled with wonder. I discard her and try again, but this time she’s cross-eyed and has one breast bigger than the other. My fingers are stiff, maybe I’m getting arthritis.
I skim the story again for a different episode, but no pictures form. It’s hard to believe that anyone here, even the grandmothers, ever knew these stories: this isn’t a country of princesses, The Fountain of Youth and The Castle of the Seven Splendours don’t belong here. They must have told stories about something as they sat around the kitchen range at night: bewitched dogs and malevolent trees perhaps, and the magic powers of rival political candidates, whose effigies in straw they burned during elections.
But the truth is that I don’t know what the villagers thought or talked about, I was so shut off from them. The older ones occasionally crossed themselves when we passed, possibly because my mother was wearing slacks, but even that was never explained. Although we played during visits with the solemn, slightly hostile children of Paul and Madame, the games were brief and wordless. We never could find out what went on inside the tiny hillside church they filed into on Sundays: our parents
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