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Article Excerpt
One of the most pleasurable aspects of belonging to a community of book lovers is the development of a shared language of catch phrases from our favorite books. "Pooh pooh," we'll say, or "Spit-spot." "Don't muck about" is always useful, as is "Something is not right" or "I'm a Bear of Little Brain." With those close to us, it can be a kind of coded shorthand: when a particularly fearsome customer walks through the bookshop door, we've been known to exclaim, like Babar, "Three seconds in which to act--and no gun!" And what higher praise can there be than the warm approval inherent in Farmer Hogget's "That'll do," equally applicable to pigs and people.
In the household in which I grew up, we often invoked the phrase "Gone is gone," from Wanda Gag's endearing fable of the same title. And what a world of wisdom was reflected in those simple words: the acknowledgment that things didn't always have a happy ending, that some things can't be fixed, that regrets are counterproductive, and that sometimes it's best to just move forward. These are hard lessons to learn in the best of circumstances, and I'll always be grateful to Gag for leavening the message with her characteristic humor.
In recent years, Millions of Cats (1928) has been the only Wanda Gag title in print, so I was delighted this year when the University of Minnesota Press decided to bring back six of her titles: The Funny Thing (1929), Snippy and Snappy (1931), The ABC Bunny (1933), Gone Is Gone: Or, the Story of a Man Who Wanted to Do Housework (1935), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1938), and Nothing at All (1941).
My mother read Gag's stories to us countless times, and they became an integral part of my childhood. From Millions of Cats we all learned the chant "Cats here, cats there, / Cats and kittens everywhere, / Hundreds of cats, / Thousands of cats, / Millions and billions and trillions of cats." From Nothing at All came "I'm busy / Getting dizzy." And like the Funny Thing, after trying any dubious new food we could say, "And very good they are--jum-jills."
We felt a special connection to Wanda because she grew up in New Ulm, Minnesota, as did my grandmother, her contemporary. We could point out the house, and had seen the murals that Anton Gag, Wanda's father, had painted in Turner Hall, at the Schell Brewery, and at the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity. Many of our old family photographs were taken at the studio. Wanda was an accepted part of the fabric of our lives, and I can still remember the shock of discovering in my first college-level children's literature course that our Wanda had a reputation far beyond the rolling farmland of southern Minnesota.
She was born in 1893 to a German-Bohemian family in New Ulm. Her parents were both artists, which led to a rather unconventional upbringing. When my mother casually mentioned that my grandmother had actually known Wanda, I couldn't wait to pump her for information. What was Wanda like as a girl? Was she amazingly talented? Did they go to school together? Were they friends? I can still remember my grandmother clicking her tongue in her very Germanic way and saying, "Ach, we didn't have much to do with those Gags. They were too bohemian, you know." In her orderly, industrious mind she disapproved of the children running wild, the numerous failed business attempts of Anton as he tried to supplement his income as an artist, and especially the fact that the family didn't attend church. It was all too much for the good German Catholic folk of New Ulm, and Wanda was to recall in later years that she was always aware of the disapproval of her neighbors.
In 1908, when Wanda was fifteen, her father died. On his deathbed he instructed her to take care of her six siblings, and she spent the next five years trying to keep the family together while she finished high school and taught in a one-room schoolroom for a year. Finally in 1913 she was...
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