In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Pearl S. Buck distinguished between the impulse to produce and the impulse to create, which she described as “an enormous extra vitality, a super-energy, born inexplicably in an individual.” Four new books celebrate the inner life of that creative vitality — a wonderful vaccine against our culture’s pathology of deadening productivity.
“Cloth Lullaby” honors the influential French-American artist Louise Bourgeois, nicknamed “Spiderwoman” for her large-scale spider sculptures. The lyrical story begins with Bourgeois’s early life in a family that restored tapestries for a living. (Fittingly, the book is bound with a vibrant ultramarine fabric spine.) In this act of repairing broken threads, Bourgeois came to see her mother as a patient, loving spider. Amy Novesky captures the young girl’s expansive interiority: “Louise would study the web of stars, imagine her place in the universe, and weep, then fall asleep to the rhythmic rock and murmur of river water.”
This poetic tone follows Bourgeois as she migrates to Paris to study mathematics and cosmography. Devastated by her mother’s sudden death, she pivots from the illusory certainty of science to the guaranteed uncertainty of art. So begins her lifelong quest to render tangible her mother’s loving spirit.
Novesky’s writing is alert to young readers’ voracious appetite for the aliveness of language. The story is strewn with beautiful, pleasantly challenging words (“indigo,” “fragments,” “trousseau”), words that have earned the right to make themselves at home in a child’s imagination. Isabelle Arsenault — a master of expressive subtlety and one of the most exceptional illustrators of our time — offers the perfect visual counterpart to that aliveness, rich in consummate patterns and a regal palette of blues and reds.
My only lament: The story glosses over Bourgeois’s lifelong choler at her father. Even if young readers are understandably spared its main source — the formative trauma of discovering his affair with her governess — its emotional aftermath undergirds her autobiographical art. The artificial sweetening of luminaries’ lives does a disservice to creative culture, and to the mythos of success we instill in the young. Yes, life is difficult and messy, but transmuting trauma into art seeds so many great artists’ creative restlessness. Indeed, late in life Bourgeois wrote in her diary: “To be an artist is a guarantee to your fellow humans that the wear and tear of living will not let you become a murderer.” Still, “Cloth Lullaby” is one of the loveliest picture books I’ve encountered — a tender homage to an extraordinary woman.
“The White Cat and the Monk” retells the ninth-century Old Irish poem “Pangur Ban” — a monk’s simple, sage meditation on the parallels between his scholarly lucubrations and his feline companion’s playful hunts. In the tiny candlelit home they share, each relishes the day’s rewards, delighting in but not competing with the other’s.
Sydney Smith’s distinctive art (he also illustrated the magnificent “Sidewalk Flowers”) falls partway between modernist fairy tale and graphic novel, opening an inviting portal between past and present as the ancient story comes to life in a decidedly contemporary aesthetic. Jo Ellen Bogart’s text stretches the poem past the length of most translations — surely necessary for turning a handful of verses into a book.
Indeed, it’s a marvelously inspired choice to make a picture book out of an ancient poem by a forgotten monk. The text’s subtle moral is timeless but also sings with elegiac timeliness — what a wonderful counterpoint to modern life’s hamster wheel of achievement and approval, this idea that there is poetry in every pursuit executed with purposefulness and savored with uncompetitive joy.
Zena Alkayat and Nina Cosford’s “Virginia Woolf” — part of a series of life portraits of cultural icons aimed at adults but certain to captivate bright young readers — follows Woolf’s life from a childhood marked by love and loss to her dogged rise as one of humanity’s most significant writers to the March morning on which she filled her coat pockets with stones, walked into the River Ouse, and drowned. Intersecting her life are larger threads — the women’s suffrage movement, the artists and intellectuals of the Bloomsbury group, the world wars. Alkayat narrates with succulent concision, but her affectionate admiration for Woolf shows. “Fiction was never the same again,” she writes of “Mrs. Dalloway.” Cosford’s charming illustrations contain echoes of the Provensens and Maira Kalman, yet stand as thoroughly original. Spliced into the story are Woolf’s own beguiling lines. “I will not be ‘famous,’ ‘great,’ ” she writes in her diary at 51. “I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped.”
“Ideas Are All Around,” by the prolific Caldecott medalist Philip C. Stead, is a meandering meditation on the nature of the mind and its communion with the world, a splendidly unusual prose poem about how creativity works.
Illustrated with an inventive mixed-media medley of drawings, stencils and Polaroids, the first-person story follows an archetypal artist tussling with creative block as he awakens one morning to write a story but is out of ideas. On a walk with his scruffy dog, Wednesday, he revels in the jubilant simplicity of life we habitually take for granted: the turtle in the pond, the Stop War graffiti on the sidewalk, the kindly neighbor on top of the hill, the people in line at the soup kitchen, the ducks floating downstream. Emanating from this wandering wonderment is a sense of our deeply intertwined denizenship and the generous good will permeating our world, if only we pause to notice — a beautiful testament to that old William Jamesian notion that our experience is what we agree to attend to.
Perhaps the story’s loveliest aspect is the readiness with which it embraces the unpredictability and impermanence of life as the wellspring of its very vitality. When the narrator trips and spills a bucket of blue paint on the sidewalk by his neighbor’s house, she exclaims: “How Wonderful! A Blue Horse!” And so it is with the imagination, and with life — we can will neither into submission, but we can choose to remain awake to the twists and turns that become the raw material of both art and the art of living.
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