What Must I Give Up in Order to Grow Up?

The Great War and Childhood Survival Strategies in Transatlantic Picture Books
Galbraith, Mary.
The Lion and the Unicorn, Volume 24, Number 3, September 2000, pp. 337-359 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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What Must I Give Up in Order to Grow Up? The Great War and Childhood Survival Strategies in Transatlantic Picture Books
Mary Galbraith

The Great War was absolutely beyond human imagination . . . . [T]here can never be enough books, plays, films, accounts of the war, never enough means of impressing imagination. Paul Cohen-Portheim, a German noncombatant interned 191518 (12) [O]ne is inclined to believe [that] the creative writer perceives his world once and for all in childhood and adolescence, and his whole career is an effort to illustrate his private world in terms of the great public world we share. Graham Greene, The Young Dickens (106)

The Great War of 191418, now known as World War I, is a psychohistorical legacy carried by all Europeans and European-Americans (Fussell). An estimated eight million men at arms, many as young as seventeen, and at least nine million noncombatants of all ages died in this war, and tens of millions were wounded (Keylor, Shermer). Survivors directly affected by the war had to cope with the shock and grief of primal losses even as they scrambled to orient themselves in an alien world. Even those Europeans and European-American immigrants who were not directly traumatized by the war were compelled to revise their view of existence based on this cataclysmic historical break. Artists for whom the Great War was a part of childhood or adolescence and who produced picture books in the late twenties and thirties were inevitably working with themes of security, internationalism, and the predicament of being a child in the midst of adult danger. But these
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global threats interacted with each artists intimate history of loss, lack of adult understanding, violation, and fear in childhood, producing images that fused both levels of experience. The universe of the picture book must, according to prevailing editorial requirements, be optimistic, light-hearted, and just. These mandates, derived from social norms as well as protective concern for what a child can bear, dictate that childhood trauma be presented in picture books only in such a way that upbeat and culturally sanctioned messages are promoted, while raw and threatening content remains latent or suppressed. Serious writers and artists working in this genre and expressing truths about their own childhood experience thus face the seemingly impossible task of revealing their own pain without dismaying children or their parents (Galbraith, Agony, Primal). A group of picture books that have attained the status of classics in the United States was produced by artists in the aftermath of one world war and in the prodromal stages of another. Their evocation of serious and grand themes in the small world of the picture book makes these books stand out from those coming before or after. Millions of Cats, the original Babar trilogy (The Story of Babar, The Travels of Babar, and Babar the King), The Story about Ping, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, The Story of Ferdinand, Madeline, and Curious George were all published after World War I and before the entry of the United States into World War II. Their publication dates range from 1928 to 1941. All the books creators were born near the turn of the century; most were adolescents at the outbreak of World War I in 1914. In several cases, the books were their authors first works for children, published when they were between thirty and forty years old, and all the books are both autobiographical and allegorical. Finally, all the books are distinctly transatlantic in theme, origin, or publication history; one was even composed to the rhythm of an ocean liners engine during an Atlantic crossing (Mulberry Street). In each book, a child figure is confronted by murderous, abandoning, interrogating, or dismissive adults and must make a profound decision: what needs must I sacrifice in order to keep my (original or adoptive) mother or father(land)? In five of these booksMillions of Cats, The Story of Babar, The Story about Ping, The Story of Ferdinand, and Curious Georgethe child must decide what to sacrifice in order to avoid being killed; a sixth, Madeline, can also be interpreted in this light (Galbraith, Primal). It is my thesis that, because of the historical moment in which these picture books were conceived and written, and the ways in which both

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childhood and national security were thrown into question at that time especially for those identifying themselves as German or Frenchand because of the artistic skill and motivation of their creators, these picture books capture in uniquely effective ways the frightening predicaments children face and the unspeakable decisions they must make when adults behave strangely and dangerously. My argument is based on the following premise concerning childhood in general: that trauma resulting from parental failures is the rule rather than the exception, and that this trauma forces children to develop, prematurely and in solitude, primal laws of self-preservation. Although these private laws are often derived from parental threats, injunctions, and homilies, adults are not normally privy to them, since adult failures in understanding, protectiveness, and attunement have generated them in the first place, and because the content of the laws is unbearable to the childs own self and must be repressed. When the childs primal question, Where is the other whom I can fall into? (Walant 4) must be answered, There is no such one, the child must repress this catastrophic realization even as she forms a law of self-preservation based on it. That adult failures traumatize children is uncontested in the case of intentional beatings, sexual abuse, and extreme neglect. But my premise goes much further, indicting many routine child-rearing practices as creating unbearable breaches in a childs security. Locking children in rooms or forbidding them to leave their beds (LeShan), and stopping of crying by threats, distraction, and offers of food (Solter), for example, show children that their direst experiences cannot and must not be shared with adults and that in essential respects children must face life without adult help. Individually bearable but cumulatively unbearable misattunements between parent and child eventually lead children not to expect adult understanding or sensitive response. Finally, lack of access to attuned, responsive, and protective adults constitutes in itself a break in basic childhood security, whether this lack of access is caused by natural disasters, culturally mandated parenting practices, or pathological individual behavior. (For varying arguments in support of this premise, which challenges the entrenched view that rupture from parents is an inevitable or even desirable part of socialization, see Walant, Miller, deMause, Gruen, Janov, Solter, Welch, Liedloff, Schore, and Galbraith, Goodnight.) The transatlantic picture books preserve the manifestly light tone, happy ending, and portrayal of a just universe mandated by the picturebook genre, but through their suggestive imagery and allegorical evocations, they allow both adult and child readers to revisit traumatic

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situations that resonate on both a cultural and a personal level, while ostensibly sharing a light, heart-warming experience. That is, these books offer a revised or secondary survival schema that is not only bearable but optimistic, while underneath can be discerned a primary survival schema1 derived from an unbearable break in basic security. The near universality of childhood traumas of parental failure accounts for the fact that picture books motivated throughout by an artists own survival schema have a widespread appeal that outweighs and outlasts picture books that are written with pedagogical, commercial, or even therapeutic aims. Picture books motivated (usually unconsciously) by an artists survival schema touch all readers who have had to forge similar crucial laws of life after experiencing an adult failure in basic protection or attunement. Margaret Meek makes a similar point in less volatile and more general terms:
For me the classic childrens book is one where the private sensibility of the author, a kind of primitive autism, is widely shared by children as a group. The way a classic tale is told calls out a strong sense of recognition in a tribe, in this case the young. (Meek 1311, quoted by Tabbart 152)

The psychoanalyst Ronald Britton asserts that literary work that resembles the conscious fulfillment of wishes (daydreaming) is likely to be banal, emotionally undemanding, populist, and critically disparaged[, while t]he more a work resonates with something unconscious and profoundly evocative, the more likely it is to be critically acclaimed (Person et al. 98). Thus, all of the classic picture books that unconsciously evoke both world war and childhood trauma continue to be embraced by children and admired by literary critics (see, for example, lists of recommended picture books in Nodelman and Silvey).2 World War I is for the artists under consideration both a living image of public horror that cannot be denied and an echo of private horrors that cannot be openly shared or perhaps even admitted. By linking the solid and huge images of the warmassacres, trenches, huge artillery guns, mass starvation, and blasted landscapesto private events that feel solid and huge only in the unconscious life of the person who experienced them, the artists communicate the immensity and gravity of certain childhood events as well as the ongoing effects of the war (see figures 18).3 The linkage is not only pictorial but thematic: in early childhood and in wartime, adults almost universally demand that children or adolescents repress instinctual behavior aimed at self-preservation in order to help adults pursue their own goals. But all these evocations of trauma must be disguised because these artists are communicating via picture books. Thus in the books under

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discussion, the images of the Great War are internally motivated by fictional situations unrelated to war or are allegorically disguised and distanced. In Madeline, for example, Miss Clavel takes on the shape and energy of a big gun as she runs fast and faster (see figures 1 and 2), but the fictional situation is seemingly benignshe is running to a false alarm: the children who are crying are merely envious of the attention showered on Madeline at the hospital after her appendectomy (fig. 3). Beneath this cute image, however, the eleven girls in their beds recall soldiers in trenchessoldiers praying in many cases that they could escape this deathtrap through a miracle such as appendicitisand the gravity of the picture is radically altered (fig. 4). The grim tone of the war image adheres to the childrens predicament, and the eleven girls in their beds become children whose access to adult help has been cut off and who have awakened to an unbearable frightthe missile protruding through the door (Miss Clavel asking them whats the matter). It is my contention that readers of Madeline for the past sixty years have been responding unconsciously to the gravity of this image because it evokes our own frightening childhood experiences of adults in doorways aggressive adults blocking doorways, dismissive adults closing the door on a childs distress, or adults losing control of themselves while standing in doorways (see Galbraith, Primal for an exploration of the source of these images in Ludwig Bemelmanss life). People who are motivated and able to restage their childhood traumas in art did not, in my opinion, have worse childhoods than the average person; on the contrary, it is my impression from doing a limited number of investigations that serious picture-book artiststhose whose work resonates with something unconscious and profoundly evocative, in Brittons wordshave had better attunement and protection than most people in infancy, but that at a crossroads in childhood, their access to this adult care was lost. Because of their comparatively strong early experiences, these artists had some foundational strength of their own when their support disappeared and were old enough to have memories of being lovingly held. Thus, their art is motivated by the triple project of recreating a lost world, restaging the alienating break, and working to create a new world that recognizes and overcomes the particular horror they have suffered. As Sartre has observed, Each book proposes a concrete liberation on the basis of a particular alienation (70). The lives and works of the creators of the transatlantic picture books thus mirror world-historical events at the time of the Great War, when, after a period of relative peacefulness and security, public security was annihilated for four years, followed by an era of new artistic and personal freedoms for those survivors whose resilience had not been destroyed.

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Figure 1 (top). From Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans 1939 by Ludwig Bemelmans, renewed 1967 by Madeleine Bemelmans and Barbara Bemelmans Marciano. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.; Figure 2 (bottom). Imperial War Museum, London.

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Figure 3 (top). From Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans 1939 by Ludwig Bemelmans, renewed 1967 by Madeleine Bemelmans and Barbara Bemelmans Marciano. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.; Figure 4 (bottom). Courtesy of Photos of the Great War website. <www.ukans.edu/kansite/ww_one/photos/ use.htm>

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Figure 5 (top). From Millions of Cats by Wanda Gg 1928 by Wanda Gg, renewed 1956 by Robert Janssen. Used by permission of Coward-McCann, Inc., a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.; Figure 6 (bottom). Robert Hunt Picture Library, London.

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Figure 7 (top). From Millions of Cats by Wanda Gg 1928 by Wanda Gg, renewed 1956 by Robert Janssen. Used by permission of Coward-McCann, Inc., a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.; Figure 8 (bottom). Robert Hunt Picture Library, London.

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To illustrate how my thesis and its premises apply to a specific picture book, I will devote the rest of this paper to an examination of the earliest classic picture book from the transatlantic group: Millions of Cats (1928), by Wanda Gg. My investigation and analysis here is guided primarily by my observations of and responses to the picture book in question, supplemented by information from diaries, biographies, historical materials, and critical work. Millions of Cats, by Wanda Gg (1928) Millions of Cats works startlingly well as the story of conception, gestation, and birth. Its voluptuous landscapes, everywhere reminiscent of female anatomy, often replicate specific structures such as oocytes (flowers on cover), the corpus luteum (the empty pond), and the fimbriated ends of fallopian tubes (singular trees in umbrella relationship to the old man or a cat). The millions and billions and trillions of cats journeying across the landscape can easily be visualized as spermatozoa attracted along a narrow path (fallopian tube) to the little house of nourishment (ovum) where only one will be allowed to enter, and where this winner will develop and grow. Arcing across the double page following conception (They took the kitten into the house), ten small pictures linked by wavy lines show the evolution of the tiny kitten as it laps milk, forever like anatomy-book illustrations of the stages of fetal development, and in the final full-page illustration, the now-plump kitten gambols at the feet of the old woman, connected to her as if umbilically by knitting yarn, just the right size relative to the woman for full-term birth. Of the resemblance between this interpretation of the story and Wanda Ggs life, there can be no doubt since it is the life history of all of us. But the survival strategy implicit in this story, the associations invoked by its imagery and rhythms, and its central themelarge numbers and scarce resourcesalso resonate with Ggs early childhood and adolescence, her gender identity, and her perceptions of the Great War. These different resonances pile up on the perinatal allegory to produce a condensed, historically layered, and highly overdetermined narrative.
I was born in this country, but often feel as though I had spent my early years in Europe. My father was born in Bohemia, as were my mothers parents. . . . I grew up in an atmosphere of Old World customs and legends, of Bavarian and Bohemian folk songs, of German Mrchen and Turnverein activities. I spoke no English until I went to school. (Gg 1940, xviii)

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Wanda Gg was born in 1893, her mothers first baby. Her father Anton called her his little black mouse, because of her dark hair and tiny size. Her mother Lissi, whom Wanda resembled closely in both stature and features, was continually occupied through all of Wandas childhood with pregnancy, birth, and the care of newborns. A photograph taken before her second birthday shows Wanda sitting at her mothers feet while her mother holds her infant sister Stella on her lap (fig. 9). Wandas posture in this picture subtly evokes a babys startle reflex: her eyes are wide open, serious, and somewhat frozen, her shoulders are raised and her arms are held stiffly out with her fingers touching a book on her lap. She looks like a child recently pushed out of the maternal nest. Six children were born within ten years of the Ggs marriage. Wanda Gg later wrote: A vague smell of olive oil and mama in bed this combination always meant a new baby (qtd. in Winnan 69). When the seventh and last child was born after a four-year interval, Anton fell ill of tuberculosis and was unable to work, so Lissi turned to nursing her husband while the rest of the young family struggled to care for each other and the new babythe biggest load of housework and childcare falling to Wanda, 14, and Stella, 12. What Wanda Gg lost prematurely was her babyhood; the lap, arms, and face of her mother were too soon preoccupied with others. Because her mothers attention was claimed and her energy exhausted by each succeeding newborn, Wanda lost her mothers cradling and thus her foundational sense of basking in and being mirrored by her mothers face (Schore). In the diary excerpts that have been published, her relationship to her mother is a virtual blank. Her mothers body, on the other hand, is memorialized in all Ggs art by sensual maternal landscapes and shadowy interiors without faces, while the self figure in her picture books is often invisible, that is, not seen by a mother who is quintessentially lying down and giving birth to others or responding to others cries. When her mother died in 1917, ten years after the birth of her last child, it was after fading away before our eyes all these years (Gg, qtd. in Winnan 80). Gg was subject from age eight to mystical experiences in which she suddenly realized that I, little I, should be part of some wonderful All (Gg 1940, 247) and of being just a soul walking aroundmy face and body being invisible (237). These merger experiences were both exhilarating and alarming, and she came to call them part of her childish inexplicables (247). They were experiences that could not be shared with others, though through her art and her close relationships, especially in her sexual relations as an adult, she expressed her ecstatic connected-

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Figure 9. Lissi Gg with Wanda and her infant sister Stella (winter of 189495). Kerlan Collection, University of Minnesota. Photograph probably by Anton Gg. With kind permission of the Estate of Wanda Gg.

ness with others as bodily presences. I conjecture that these experiences are based on recollections of her mothers presence without a face, and a reflection of her first year and a half of life, before she was replaced in her mothers arms by the next child. Wandas father had suffered a great deal of loss by the time Wanda was born. He emigrated from his native Bohemia with his family in 1872 when he was thirteen; his father died in a well-digging accident when he was still an adolescent, and his first wife died after giving birth to their first child, who also died within weeks. He became a fine artist who decorated churches and houses for a living, but he was frustrated that he could not go to Europe to study art seriously. Wanda, the first child of his second marriage, was very sensitive and became his alter ego in art, and she must have been unconsciously privy to his many unresolved griefs. Though the Gg children thrived in many ways as a groupby New Ulm standards, both her parents were exceedingly progressive in their thinking and provided their children with considerable freedom and respect (Scott)the continuing birth of one child after another sapped

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the parents resources and limited the individual attention each child could receive (see Hrdy for a general anthropological argument on this point). In addition, the first five children, all girls, must have felt that each new birth was motivated by a quest for the right childa boy. Anton Gg was so set on having a son that when the fifth girl was born, his first comment was Na, but the child looks stupidly into this world! (Scott 15).
In our family it was one girl after another, which pleased me greatly . . . . Not so my father! Though fond of his collection of incipient artists . . . , he was always a little piqued at the non-appearance of a son. The sixth venture brought the desired result. A boy at last . . . ! Now his family was complete! (Gg, quoted in Winnan 78)

But four years later, and almost certainly unplanned, came yet another girl, and both parents began to break down. The boy, Howard, had come too late to be established as Antons heir. This position fell to Wanda, the first-born. In 1908, when her father died and her mother became depressed and subsequently incapacitated by alcoholism, Wanda Gg became both mother and father to her six younger sisters and brother at the age of fifteen. In his dying hours, Anton Gg called his oldest child to his bedside and said to her, Was der Papa nicht thun konnt, muss die Wanda halt fertig machen. (What Papa couldnt do, Wanda will have to finish.) (Gg 1940, xix). This deathbed bequest had the force of a lifelong obligation for her to be both an artist and a provider for her six siblings. Feeding the millions of cats (her six siblings) was part of this responsibility:
Mew, mew! Now we are hungry! cried the Hundreds of cats, Thousands of cats, Millions and billions and trillions of cats.

During one period after her fathers death, the Gg family was reduced to eating stale doughnuts given away by the local baker for their main sustenance. Wanda Gg several times recorded in her diary that she was hungry after dinner. But by the age of sixteen, she was feeding her sisters and brother with money earned by selling her drawings for greeting cards and newspaper features. The other part of this responsibility was becoming a real artist.
My father handed [artistic power] to me, and its my duty to develop it. If I ever turn out anything worth while I will not feel like saying that I did this, but My father and I did this. (Gg 1940, 239; emphasis in original)

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Paradoxically, the solemn responsibility handed to her by her father had the effect of liberating her from social pressures to quit school and to limit her artistic ambition. She had been the only one chosen to enter the room at her fathers death to receive this charge. Like the small kitten pointed out by the old man, she was the chosen heir, one in a million. The associations between Ggs immediate childhood experience and the story and imagery of Millions of Cats are thus condensed and layered from perinatal experience (conception and birth), babyhood (birth of her siblings, scarcity of parents attention, especially her mothers), late childhood (her fathers choice of her as heir, her responsibility for siblings, scarcity of food). Considering each of these time periods as a separate drama, each produces from Millions of Cats a different coherent allegory turning on a competition: a competition for existence (conception and birth), a competition among siblings for maternal care and resources (babyhood), and a competition for paternal inheritance (childhood). Wanda Gg herself clearly won the first and third competitions, but the second competition could not be won in real life, since her mothers energy had been exhausted by childbearing and infant care. The private imagery of the book also merges into public imagery from Ggs experiences during late adolescence and young adulthood, when people her age were called to fight and die in Europe. The story and its images reverberate with images of war and slaughter that Gg absorbed through public imagery of historical events.4 The image of hiding in a trench to survive a massacre clearly captures Ggs own perspective on World War I, which threatened not only Ggs former homeland, but the two men she felt closest to as an adult, her lover Adolf Dehn and her partner and later husband Earle Humphreysboth of whom were conscientious objectors. Gg herself was passionately opposed to the war (Cox). Seeing the cats as the young people of the narrative, and the old couple as adults in relation to youth, the couples question to the cats functions as the propagandistic inducements to fight that directly caused the deaths of millions of young people. Thus, in this fourth and final competitionthe competition for social dominance and glorythe winning strategy is to perceive that the competition itself is a deathtrap and to avoid entering into it. Of course, as a woman, Gg herself was not subject to the draft, and so, as the kitten says, nobody bothered about me. Significantly, the cats are all referred to as it, but the fact that the provocation is Which one of you is the prettiest? rather than who is the most ferocious, as in The Story of Ferdinand, casts the cats in a feminine light. This makes the kittens humble refusal less controversial than Ferdinands. (Madelines use of a girl as the child self character also allows her to get out of the

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war without arousing controversy, even though this theme is itself well disguised.) Other World War I images and themes pervade Millions of Cats: millions of refugees who threaten to overwhelm the simple culture of the German Volk, the scarcity of food and watercompare fig. 5, the line of cats following the old man, with fig. 6, a photograph of a World War I prisoner-of-war breadlineand the treeless landscape full of fighting bodies who slaughter each other over the title of the prettiest compare the battle drawings in figures 7 and 8 (note the resemblance between the clouds and the puffs of artillery smoke). The refrain Hundreds of cats, / Thousands of cats, / Millions and billions and trillions of cats stays in the memory of all who read Millions of Cats. Like a nursery or jump-rope rhyme, the refrain uses rhythm, repetition, and apparent nonsense to build enjoyment and socially sanctioned excitement about a topic that arouses awe and anxietyin this case, huge numbers. But the refrain also reverberates with the unimaginable tolls of dead found in accounts of the Great War. Compare the following textbook account:
The Great War was the most destructive conflict which the world had yet seen. Its toll of lives was so vast as to defy imagination. Civilian deaths, apart from the influenza pandemic, amounted to at least 9,000,000, though some writers have set the figure at more than 12.6 million. Military loss of life is calculated at over 8,000,000, broken down as follows: Germany Russia France Austria-Hungary Great Britain Italy Turkey British Empire United States 1,770,000 to 2,000,000 1,700,000 1,360,000 1,100,000 to 1,200,000 760,000 460,000 to 650,000 325,000 to 375,000 250,000 110,000 to 126,000

If we include figures for wounded, prisoners, and missing, total military casualties were about 37,500,000over 22,000,000 for the Allies, over 15,000,000 for the Central Powers. (Shermer 239)

These necklaces of zeroes and integers stand for something unfathomable. Less horrifying immensities, those of time and space, are also thematized in the book: shifts in narrative focus in Millions of Cats from the old couple to hordes of cats to the kitten suggest world-historical movements from one era to the next and from one continent to another. If the old couple are nineteenth-century peasant Europeans, and the

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millions of cats are the social catastrophe brought by the Great War, then the kitten can be seen as the shaky modern individual who emerges from the carnage in the 1920s (Eksteins). The cats migration also evokes mass immigration to America through this period, and the kittens adoption by an Old Country settlement in a new home(land). All these resonances converge in Ggs own identification with the kitten who survives unnoticed while its compatriots, one after another, are loudly proclaiming their existenceI am! I am!and fighting to the death for their preeminence, as she survived while her six siblings were born one after another and cried out for life, leaving her quietly struggling to be seen by a mother who was overwhelmed, and as she survived the crisis era of World War I even though both her parents died and she had six siblings to raise in poverty. Although she could not be truly seen by the parent who was her ultimate ground (or by her native Europe, which she longed to visit and never did), she found ways to be adopted by secondary mothers: her father, grandmother, and patrons who helped her through art school. And she mothered herselfmirroring her feelings through her diary and her art, and crying storms of tears that felt cleansing even though no one could listen. In fact, her ability to release her feelings through tears was probably essential to her amazing resilience (Solter). The themes of invisibility and becoming visible run throughout Ggs workone of her other picture books, Nothing at All, for example, is about an invisible dog who becomes visible by whirling around while chanting Im busy / Getting dizzy, and another is called Gone is Gone (dedicated, incidentally, to my peasant ancestors). Her adolescent diary, published as Growing Pains in 1940, shows that as a young woman she was preoccupied with the difference between Myself and My Many Mes (her chapter heading for 1914, the year the war began), and searching for a landscape in a persons face (237) through her drawing. When a drawing mood was upon her, as she put it, she had to draw and draw and draw, as if by drawing she brought Myself into visibility. This invisibility enacts both her early childhood situation and her sense of being discounted as a young woman on the historical stage.5 Millions of Cats captures the flow of human history on a microscopic as well as immense scale in both spatial and temporal dimensions, telling a story of origins that resonates across centuries and continents to the ultimate topography of our first migrations as sperm, ovum, and zygote in the abdominal universe. It also captures the smallness and vulnerability of a child self in relation to the immensity of the parental body and the dangerous but wondrous world, and the shakiness of those who survive a worldwide conflagration.

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The recognizable parents in the storythe old man and womanare not directly censured, but their failures are revealed: the man brought home too many cats; they both provoked the fighting by asking who was the prettiest; and they ran away from the carnage they caused. This is easily mapped onto Wanda Ggs personal life: her parents had too many children to feed and care for, probably due to her fathers wish for a son and over his wifes objections (I asked for one little cat and what do I see?); the seven children had to compete for parental attention; and in the midst of this noise, the parents collapsed, as the old couple in the story ran into the house when the fighting started. The books story and images simultaneously tell a foreshortened version of European history at the time of the Great War: European nations were competing for limited resources, territory, and prestige; the adults of Europe called upon the young to suppress their instincts for self-preservation and to die in glory for their country, which they did by the millions; those who survived the massacre had to begin life anew in a strange land. The story and images of Millions of Cats masterfully symbolize an immense amount of truthful emotional material from four stages in Ggs life, and from the world stage on which she lived. In three out of the four allegories layered in Millions of Cats, the book closely adheres to Ggs historical and emotional reality. But with respect to the competition that I see as most central to the motivation of the storythe struggle for mothering and bodily carethe disappearance of the millions of cats and the happy ending for the kitten is a fantasy fulfillment of a deep desire that could not be pursued in reality: to regain the exclusive attention and care she lost when baby after baby appeared and cried, I am! Both the kitten and Wanda Gg had to sacrifice their right to compete when other babies (or cats) cried out for a mothers lap, arms, face, food, and attention. The magical disappearance of the millions of cats makes possible the fulfillment of the kittens wish to have the womans cradling, brushing, and milk. This was a desire that could not be realized in Wanda Ggs life, so its fulfillment here qualifies as a fairytale endingone that makes the artists impossible wishes come true. Alternatively, one can see the ending as a poignant return to a time that did exist: the time at the beginning of Anton and Lissi Ggs marriage (see the wedding portraits on the wall in the last picture) when they had one babythe most beautiful baby in the world because it was theirs and because it was their only one. Thus ends Millions of Cats. In my experience, what persists after the book is closed is not the ending, but the title and refrain, which memorialize the multitude of cats who vied for glory and did not return. This title and refrain commemorate not only the millions who died in the

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Great War but all those who continue to lose their Myselves in the struggle for life. Like Hans Christian Andersen, Wanda Gg borrowed European folktale motifs to create powerful allegories of her own childhood experience. The child self for both Andersen and Gg is embodied in a nonhuman figure (duckling, mermaid, cat, invisible dog) who struggles to survive, be accepted, and find happiness among humans. Ggs breakthrough was to create this allegory as a fully integrated picture storybook (see Shulevitz, White, Hall, and Nikolajeva and Scott for definitions),6 a format uniquely suited to the depiction of high-arousal childhood moments when sights and sounds dug deep into memory (see Galbraith, Agony). Ggs pioneering achievementan artistically motivated and realized picture book that reveals deep truths about the artists early experiences while providing an entertaining storycertainly influenced other American artists who produced picture books in the 1930s. Three years after the publication of Millions of Cats, and on the other side of the Atlantic, Jean de Brunhoff created another artistic picture storybook in the same genre, Histoire de Babar, le Petit lphant (1931). Babar crossed the ocean in record time to find great success in the United States in the early thirties. Inspired by Ggs and de Brunhoffs examples, and by a similar constellation of personal and historical motives, European-American picture-book artists in the 1930s created many classic works that fused the story of their own childhood survival with indelible images of the Great War. Mary Galbraith teaches childrens literature at San Diego State University. She crossed the Atlantic via ocean liner many times as a child in the 1950s, and her childhood bookshelf included Millions of Cats; the personal reverberations of these long journeys continue here. Notes
The terms primary and secondary survival schemas are my own; however, I derive them from many sources, including Weiss and Sampsons pathogenic beliefs, a term elaborated from Freuds reconstruction of boys decision-making when confronted by the threat of castration:
A person, as a consequence of his experiences, may come to believe that almost any impulse, attitude, goal, or affective state is bad or risky, and will, if pursued, endanger him by threatening his ties to his parents. . . . Pathogenic beliefs generally are developed in childhood. However, they may be elaborated in
1

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adolescence. Moreover, . . . a person in dire circumstances [such as the Holocaust] may develop a new pathogenic belief even in adulthood. (Weiss and Sampson 69)

The primary survival schema is a syllogism about ones existence prompted by a horrible exposure and the subsequent realization that one must at any cost reestablish protection; a law is derived from the premises and logic the child uses in the immediate aftermath of this unbearable exposure in order to avoid a repetition. The secondary version of this schema carries the same behavioral implications as the primary one, but recasts these implications in terms of reasoning and premises that can be consciously tolerated, typically as a choice or as the way I am. Using an example from a transatlantic picture book, Babars primary survival schema after a hunter shoots his mother could be stated as Adult men shoot and kill naked animals on four legs; my mother is dead and they want to shoot me; therefore, I must immediately disguise myself as a twolegged and clothed adult man. The secondary and benign exposition of this schema shows Babar longing for a fine suit as if this were a spontaneous whim.
2 All, that is, except Curious George, which continues to fascinate children but has recently drawn critical fire for its manipulations of the child character (Cummins, Galbraith, Agony, Nikolajeva and Scott). (I include here criticisms of overall artistic intention and integrity, but not criticisms that indict the books stories or imagery for sending the wrong message about, for example, race [Curious George, the Babar books], military service [Ferdinand], colonialism [the Babar books], or gender [Madeline], since my focus is on the authenticity and depth of the experiences evoked, and the degree to which the level of narration lets the child self experience speak for itself, without narration-level manipulation and prescription. Admittedly, this is a fine and contentious distinction to make in the abstract, but intricate argument from the particulars of each book can convincingly draw the line between works that let their characters live and those that manipulate their characters like puppets.)

3 Significantly, Freuds treatise on the repetition compulsion also moves thematically from the devastating psychological effects of the Great War to a detailed description of a one-and-a-half-year-old childs reactions to two breaches in adult care: periodic involuntary separations from his mother and the demand by other adults that he not protest his mothers departures. Though Freud takes pains to characterize the first topicwartime traumaas a dark and dismal subject and the seconda childs renunciation of his instinct to cling and cry when his mother was leavingas the working of the mental apparatus in one of its earliest normal activities (Freud 14; emphasis in original), his polarizing of these two cases is undercut by his comment in a footnote that the child playing the compensatory fort/da game (his own grandson) showed no signs of grief (16) upon the death of his mother four years later. This suggests that Freud himself suspected that the instinctual renunciation the boy had made as a baby

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in order to be called a good boy (14) had numbed his emotional responses in a manner analogous to shell shock. Besides the Great War, the war of the quarreling cats had an earlier historical association for Gg: the Indian massacre at New Ulm in 1862, a shared trauma that was a deep part of the towns identity and the subject of a large and carefully researched public mural painted by her father. When Wanda was three years old, the Ggs moved into a new house in New Ulm that was built
on a bare corner lot only recently wrested from the surrounding prairie. Hidden among the tall grass in the yard was an Indian Hollow, a shallow depression that had once been a deep trench, in which it was said a white woman had successfully hidden from the Indians during the massacre. (Scott 11)
4

Playing Indians in this yard, Wanda identified with both the Indians and the woman who survived by hiding (Scott), and this identification re-emerges in the images of the warring cats and the hidden kitten. For an appreciation of Ggs perceptual experience, see Camerons Green and Burning Tree.
6 The Velveteen Rabbit (1922) and Clever Bill (1926) may be seen as stepping stones from Andersens form to Ggs. 5

Works Cited Picture Books Cited

Bemelmans, Ludwig. Madeline. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939. de Brunhoff, Jean. Histoire de Babar, le Petit lphant. Paris: Le Jardin des Modes, 1931. . The Story of Babar. Trans. Merle Haas. New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1933. Flack, Marjorie. The Story about Ping. Illus. Kurt Wiese. New York: Viking, 1933. Gg, Wanda. Millions of Cats. New York: Coward McCann, 1928. . Gone is Gone. New York: Coward McCann, 1935. . Nothing at All. New York: Coward McCann, 1941. Leaf, Munro. The Story of Ferdinand. Illus. Robert Lawson. New York: Viking Press, 1936. Rey, H[ans] A[ugusto]. Curious George. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941.

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Seuss, Dr. [Theodor Geisel]. And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. New York: Vanguard, 1937.

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Solter, Aletha. Tears and Tantrums. Goleta, CA: Shining Star Press, 1998. Tabbart, Reinbert. National Myths in Three Classical Picture Books. Aspects and Issues in the History of Childrens Literature. Ed. Maria Nikolajeva. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995. Walant, Karen. Creating the Capacity for Attachment. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1995. Weiss, Joseph, and Harold Sampson. The Psychoanalytic Process. New York: Guilford Press, 1986. Welch, Martha. Holding Time. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988. White, Mary Lou. A Structural Description of Picture Storybooks. Elementary English 52 (April 1975): 49596. Winnan, Audur H. Wanda Gg: A Catalogue Raisonn of the Prints. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993.