Personal History: Babar At The Library, Babar At Home
- Babar At The Library
Memory is, as the saying goes, selective. With that in mind, (so to speak!) one from my earliest days, is more than fleeting.
It begins with my 4th grade class on a field trip — a mile walk — to the public library. The walk itself was unusual — our class never walked further away from school than a few hundred feet (we did go by bus on field trips, mostly to New York City).
The long walk to the library — all of us in a ducklings row — is quite clear as is the memory of walking up the steps to the library, a handsome building (as you see here). For me, it was my very first visit to the library.
Once inside, these snapshot memories: marveling over the impressive front desk and the atrium; a glimpse of stacks of books upstairs. And then being seated at a classic long wooden library table, with a large hardcover book in front of me — The History of Babar, by Jean de Brunhoff (did I take it off a shelf, or did someone select it for me? I don’t know). The book, because of its size, was/is a reader’s visual playground; turning the pages that day in the library I lost track of whatever else was going on around me. Being deep into Brunhoff’s Babar world was yet another transporting jolt, equal to the best times at home, reading comic books, and drawing.
Many decades later I found the well-read copy of the Babar book (a french edition) shown above. Every time I see it, it transports me.
2. Babar At Home
Not long after I moved to Manhattan with the thought that being close to The New Yorker’s offices would somehow help me get into The New Yorker, my then partner and I adopted a puppy from a couple living in Tribeca. One of the couple was a composer, who at that time was working on music for some project connected to the Babar story (perhaps an animation — I can’t remember). One of the puppies they were offering for adoption loved to lie under the baby grand piano while the music was being composed, and so they named the puppy, “Babar.” This was the puppy that came home with us, and was with me the morning I learned I’d sold my first drawing to The New Yorker.
One last Babar-New Yorkery intersection: my immediate downstairs neighbor in New York was The New Yorker writer, Donald Barthelme. In his story, “Great Days,” he mentions Babar:
–Last night the barking dog in the apartment above stopped barking. Its owners had returned. I went into the kitchen and barked through the roof for an hour. I believe I was understood.