Recently I have been thinking fairly often about Babar the Elephant. What with a child on its way and what with the 'Book People' project (more on this one day: it's the next serious project I intend to do about the history of the 'literary world'), I guess it's natural enough that my own favorite books when I was very young often come to mind. I have acquired a few early Babar editions over the years, including my favorite, a first French edition of Le voyage de Babar published by Conde Nast (under the wonderfully named 'Le Jardin des modes' imprint) in folio size in 1932. It's a marvel of style: a combination of cutting edge chic, popular visual modernism and just faintly ironic narrative aimed at children of about five I guess. The first Babar book appeared in 1931, two years after the crash and just before the World Depression really took hold but there's no trace here of anything like slump realism or leftism. Not a sliver. And what's really marvellous is the combination of text and print: the print is in some font that imitates handwriting (I remember finding it difficult to read as a kid) and is usually but not always placed at the bottom of the page in chunks of about 3 or 4 lines. But sometimes the print floats above the illustrations, offering a kind of rhythm to the reading sequence. The images themselves owe something to Matisse I think and the school of illustration he helped establish: they are strikingly pleasurable: simple, not carefully perspectivilised, not aimed at the kind of sentimental, detail-packed 'beauty' of much current art-children's-book-illustration, instead mainly relying on line, but occasionally, especially in images of night's darkness that most of the books, including this one, contain, turning to a sophisticated form of cross-hatching.
But of course from a political and maybe moral point of view there are problems. The representations of Africans belong to the conventionalism racism of the time, there's little doubt about that. And Babar himself is the kind of native colonial ruler that metropolitan colonial powers dream of: more interested in shopping for designer clothes in Paris and having fun than in independence and resistance. Is this a barrier, when it comes to reading Babar to children? To what extent, and how, does it damage the glamour and beauty of these books? I want to write about this one day, in an essay in which I will describe the rather different American and British Babars (the books were translated by different folk in each place) and the fate of the luxury children's book in general as well as the relation between reading as a child and reading as a parent to a child and, probably, after Walter Benjamin, on collecting children's books in more general terms. There's already stuff on at least some of this, a good essay by Alison Lurie published in the New York Review of Books a few years back when some kind of Babar exhibition toured the States (I think), and a book I haven't seen dedicated to praising Jean de Brunhoff, his son Laurent (who continued the franchise) and Babar too.