‘Curious George’ writers’ picture book released

WHITEBLACK THE PENGUIN SEES THE WORLD, by Margret Rey and Hans Augusto Rey, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 2000, 32 pages, $15.

New children’s books are coming out all the time, hundreds of titles each year, each one vying for a place on the shelf and in your heart. Out of these many volumes a few alone make the pantheon, remaining in print so that succeeding generations will be delighted by the same text, the same engaging illustrations that captured your imagination.

Sometimes these classics come in series. A husband-and-wife team of German Jews wrote one of the most famous of them. Together, Margret Rey (1898-1977) and Hans Augusto Rey (1906-1996) created Curious George, an impetuous yet good-hearted monkey. He may have been based on one of the primates the couple encountered while living in South America before World War II (Mr. Rey sold bathtubs along the Amazon River, and he and Margret founded the first advertising agency in Rio).

Ask anybody about George and you will hear how he was always getting into trouble, pulling down a dinosaur skeleton at a museum or making an armada of boats out of the newspapers he was supposed to be delivering. Like Ludwig Bemelmans’ Madeline, he became a part of the national scene and surely, as I’m writing this, Hollywood is busy scripting the first full-length Curious George movie, quick on the heels of the new MasterCard television commercial that exploits the little monkey to capitalist ends.

So vast was the appeal of the “Curious George” books that at one point a sequel series was created to satisfy the demand (the work of hired authors, not the Reys). Publishers have been known to exploit readers’ affections, with occasional dreadful results of this sort. So it was with some skepticism that I greeted the news, recently reported on National Public Radio, of the publishing of a new Rey collaboration.

The manuscript for “Whiteblack the Penguin Sees the World” was discovered among the Reys’ papers in the de Grummond Collection at the University of Southern Mississippi. According to an informative afterword by Anita Silvey, the book was conceived in 1937, when Mr. Rey was working in the Brazilian Pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair.

The manuscript, along with an early draft of the first Curious George book, was strapped to the racks of the bicycles the Reys rode out of Paris, barely escaping the advancing Germans in 1940. They eventually immigrated to America, met up with Grace Hogarth, founder of Houghton Mifflin, and began their rise to children’s book fame (my mother remembers seeing them at the Breadloaf writing colony the summer she waited on tables there).

“Whiteblack” has all the qualities we associate with the Reys: the husband’s bright-colored, simple watercolor illustrations featuring marvelously adept animals, the wife’s cheerful and inventive story line.

This book is bound to attract nostalgic readers, like myself, nurtured on the exploits and misadventures of a monkey. I still recall with apprehension that scene when George was sent up into the sky to test a rocket – would he be able to pull the parachute lever? Would he live? Surely the medal ceremony that took place after his safe landing was as stirring to a child as any great Olympic moment might be to an adult.

It’s too soon to tell whether “Whiteblack” will make it into the canon of children’s picture books. I found it entertaining and clever, but I’m not sure it will win over everyone– and it’s not just the roller-skating-in-the-desert trick that makes me say this. Even the cleverest of penguins, in my humble, grown-up opinion, can’t hold a candle to Curious George.