I’ve been looking at a letter from Eric Carle, written in a frail script in 2019, in which he told me that his health was failing. It was the last of many letters, some typed, others handwritten, he had sent me through the years.
Carle, who died in May, often sent me pictures, too, sometimes a collage that he was working on. One was of a yellow duck — it looked more like a chicken — that was wearing pinstripe trousers and had big light-pink feet. Another was of a man and his wife sitting in their kitchen eating cake with chocolate frosting. But the image of the man was upside down. (“It’s not a mistake,” he wrote. “It’s just how they eat cake.”) He said it was part of a “nonsense book” that he hadn’t finished yet.
In some of his letters he described his childhood and early education in Syracuse, N.Y., where he was born in 1929. He said that he had “a perfectly happy kindergarten year” and a first-grade teacher, “old Miss Frickey,” whom he remembered fondly because she was “kind and supportive” about his love of drawing. But he said that his parents, who were German immigrants, returned to Germany in 1936 when he was 6 years old and that his teacher at a school in Stuttgart was a cold, unfriendly person who had no interest in the artistry of children. He called the man “a monster.”
It was out of the grimness of those dark and loveless days that he believed he had evolved his longing for bright and joyful colors. Under a glorious collage of a multicolored angel that he mailed to me one winter, he had written, “Homage to Paul Klee,” who, he said, was “my favorite artist” and “painted many angels, the earliest recorded when he was 5 years old.”
Most of his letters — those I have not mislaid in the chaos of my cluttered home — were mailed to me from the Florida Keys, where he lived for “the greater part,” he said, of his final years on the island of Tavernier. He had previously lived for more than 30 years in Northampton, Mass., but now returned there, it appeared, only intermittently.
His health, he told me in 2015, had gone into a serious decline the year before. “I was six weeks in the hospital,” he wrote — “stroke, heart, lung and kidney” — and had “almost died.” But he kept on writing lively and amusing letters, some of them surprisingly irreverent and political. “As far as our dear leader goes,” he said of Donald Trump, “his grandfather should have stayed in Germany.” He asked me, “Did you know that the Heinz tomato sauce guy” (actually, the father of that “guy”) “came from the same village at about the same time” as our dear leader’s family did? His letters were full of odd little detours like this that he found intriguing.
And he kept on sending pictures. One was of a reindeer that had flowers growing from its antlers. Others were abstractions. One was just a swirl of red and purple strokes that looked like squirmy creatures against a yellow-speckled background. Another consisted of vertical and horizontal strokes that seemed to be defying one another.
In the winter of 2018 he told me, “Just bought a red car yesterday.” He said he couldn’t “figure out all the new gizmos” on the dashboard, but he seemed to be exuberant (I hope this isn’t disrespectful), like a very young boy who had been given a new toy. “After cataract surgery,” he wrote, “my eyes are good,” so he was free to drive himself around. Still, he noted, “nature is chipping away at us.” He had lost his wife to cancer more than two years before. “I miss her,” he wrote, “every day and hour.”
When his own death at the age of 91 was reported in the press, many of my readers and old friends and teachers of young children sent me thoughtful emails, because I’d spoken frequently of how much his work had meant to me. It was a teacher in a first-grade classroom in the early 1980s who had introduced me, and managed to addict me, to one of the early Eric Carle books she loved. My memory is fuzzy, but I think the book she showed me was probably “The Very Hungry Caterpillar.” I soon discovered others by him in the classrooms I was visiting. There was a book about a “Little Cloud” who wanders off and changes into different shapes: a soft white sheep, a puffy-looking rabbit with long ears. There was a book about a lonely mouse — “Do You Want to Be My Friend?” And, of course, there was the endearing “Grouchy Lady Bug” with big black spots against her shell of red. And one book led me to the next.
At one point around that time, I fell into the habit — probably a bad one from the point of view of logic and continuity — of interrupting a lecture I was giving to an audience of teachers or college undergraduates who were planning to be teachers, and talking about the safe and healing world that Eric Carle created. If I had a copy of one of those books, I’d hold it up so they could see the picture of the mouse or bear or whatever other creature might be on the cover. I did this, in part, to clear the air for a moment or two of my usual solemnity, but I also hoped to get across that there’s nothing wrong with treating children or yourself to a bit of whimsy and wonderment and unimportant foolishness in a world that’s all too full of tears.
By the mid-1990s, as the get-tough ethos of “no-excuses” education was beginning to hypertrophy and stiffen up the atmosphere of learning in low-income districts, teachers who had come to education because they enjoyed the company of children and loved the diversity of their personalities told me it was difficult to deviate from regimens that guaranteed predictability and uniformity of “product” (a horrible term, I thought, to be applied to children). I sometimes looked in vain for stacks of books along the walls that weren’t didactically aligned with state-ordained, “testable” proficiencies.
But perhaps the tide is turning now, as terms like “no excuses” and the cult of standardized rigidity have been increasingly rejected by enlightened principals and teachers, even when they run the risk of penalty or censure for being less than suitably austere with very little people.
Only a few years ago, I was in a school for children of farmworkers in the impoverished town of Weedpatch, Calif. A young Latina teacher had put aside the rote-and-drill curriculum and those too-familiar worksheets from a testing corporation and, instead, was using “The Tiny Seed,” an enticing early work by Eric Carle, to introduce her 6-year-olds to their first words of English. The children obviously loved the book. They leaned way out across their desks and waved their arms and took turns reading words and learning to pronounce them.
It’s a short and life-affirming story. One seed drowns in the ocean. One seed dies in the desert. One seed is eaten by a big blue bird, another by a hungry mouse. But the tiny seed flies on until it finds a good safe place to nestle in the ground, where, in the spring and summer, it grows into a flower with red and yellow petals that will climb into the sky.
The principal, who was standing at my side, whispered to me as the children read the story. “Our children’s lives are very hard. They worry that the immigration will take their parents from them. I look for books that give them hope and bring out smiles in their eyes.”
This is one of the gifts that Eric Carle has left to us. Now he is gone, but the tiny seeds he planted will live on.
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