Garth Williams, American Illustrator by Elizabeth K. Wallace

Author:Elizabeth K. Wallace
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beaufort Books
Published: 2016-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

Illustration for Little Fur Family.

But the indeterminacy of the animals is only the beginning of the strangeness of Little Fur Family. The language of the story itself has a rhythm and cadence that can only be Margaret Wise Brown’s.

There was a little fur family

warm as toast

smaller than most

in little fur coats

and they lived in a warm wooden tree.265

The setting, with its images of softness, warmth, coziness, and perfect safety, is recognizably the same as in Brown’s most famous book, Goodnight Moon (published a year later, 1947, with illustrations by Clement Hurd). But where the coziness of Goodnight Moon leads to the perfect interiority of sleep, the little fur child goes out from his home—somehow losing his clothing in the process—into a vertiginous wood.

A “wild wild wood,” and yet hardly frightening—wild flowers, wild nuts, wild grass, with nothing more threatening than a sneeze. There the fur child catches “a little tiny tiny fur animal / The littlest fur animal in the world.” Brown’s text doesn’t say so, but Williams’ picture makes the tiny animal a double of the little fur child.

The fur child is the one who might be a threat here, but he behaves with the gentlest of intentions, kissing it on its nose and putting it “gently back in the grass.” Then, as evening comes on and “the sky grew wild and red,” the fur child runs home (clothing mysteriously restored) and is carried off to bed by his father. His parents sing him to sleep. So an ancient classic pattern of exile and return ends in safety and sleep—“warm as toast” indeed.

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