when hans and margret rey went to the bike shop, the only thing left was a bike built for two. It was June 11, 1940 in Paris. the radio announced that the city would not be defended from the approaching Nazi army. the couple did not have a car; none of the trains were running; two million Parisians had already fled. hans and margret tried the tandem bike, but found they couldn’t do it. instead, they bought spare bicycle parts, which cost them as much as what they had been paying for a month’s accommodation in a good hotel: the manic inflation of the exodus. Hans somehow built two bikes that night. the couple left the next morning with some food, some clothes, and drawings for a children’s book about a dangerously curious monkey.
curious george books seemed old-fashioned once my daughter was old enough to read them, when a friend passed me a “curious george and friends” anthology with some ambivalence. That night I read the first story to my daughter. the man with the yellow hat captures george in the jungle and puts him in a bag. George is visibly distraught; the text describes him as sad. Then the Man with the Yellow Hat takes George aboard a ship, informs him that he is being taken to a zoo, and advises him not to get into trouble. the tone is cheerful, but also full of fear of the unknown. The main event on the boat is George trying to fly like the seagulls he sees and nearly drowning.
you can see how it is not a book that would be written in the same way today. the text seems oblivious to resonances with the middle passage, and those resonances now feel both buried and overwhelming. however, the backstory of the kings, which was largely unknown for years, makes the dreamlike logic of the story seem different than it does at first to an adult. the kings were taken in by strangers, even staying in a barn along the route of their escape. They arrived in New York almost penniless, without their main luggage. and they must also have come with a tremendous sense of their extraordinary good fortune, their ultimate security.
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In my first green rereading of george’s story to my daughter, the dangers felt almost too intense for the primary colors, the primary readers. But the books are also suffused with a reassuring, almost fantastical sense of richness: When George arrives in town, he’s given a pipe, nice striped pajamas, and a comfortable, child-sized gold bed to sleep in. and, at the beginning of the second book, she runs away, and never returns, to the zoo.
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There are seven original Curious George stories and seven other stories by Margret and Hans Rey known and anthologized. Hans got most of the credit for many years, but the stories are now seen to have been true collaborations. The two knew each other as children in Hamburg. both were from Jewish families. Before moving to Paris, they had spent years together in Rio de Janeiro; hans had first moved there shortly after serving in the german army during the first world war. In Rio, the couple fell in love and went into business together, designing large billboards and maps. Although they had no children, neither then nor ever, they lived with two marmoset monkeys. When they decided to travel back to Europe for a belated honeymoon, the marmosets accompanied them. it was a long and rainy journey; Margret knitted the marmosets’ sweaters to keep them warm; still, the monkeys died.
The first Curious George story was published in 1941. It reads noticeably longer than most books aimed at the same age group today. (some of the later curious george tales are even longer, which surprised me, i didn’t remember). After arriving in “the big city”, George finds himself in prison after unknowingly calling the fire department when there is no fire. he then escapes from prison by walking on electrical wires, with the balance of a circus performer (or monkey). After that, George ends up in danger again, when he grabs too many helium balloons at once, but again escapes the danger from him. “Curious George Takes a Job” (1947) is even more hectic: he escapes from the zoo, gets on a bus, has a spaghetti fiasco, becomes a happy four-handed dishwasher, works cleaning windows, impulsively paints a Room in a high-rise building like a jungle scene, he escapes down a fire escape, breaks his leg, passes out through the ether, and then ends up, with more of that trademark 1940s glamour, starring in a movie.
In the 1990s, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt commissioned and distributed additional Curious George stories for early readers that were not written or illustrated by Kings. those stories were short and tended to focus on a simple mishap that was later fixed. the original seven tales of kings are more like mini-picaresques. In them, George’s bow is more like that of, for example, Cervantes: he loses a hand in battle, is captured by Barbary pirates and becomes the writer of an immortal classic.
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“curious george” was published after the kings left france to spain and then to portugal and then to rio and finally to new york. they lost their luggage but still had their prints for a story about a monkey named fifi. his American publisher suggested that they choose a less French name. kings were used to name changes: in rio, hans had started signing his pieces as “h. a. king” instead of hans augusto reyersbach. margarethe waldstein became margret rey. they made new business cards, with their last name more marketable, and ran an advertising agency. On a draft page of the “curious george” manuscript that shows the scene where the firefighters arrive, a penciled note can be seen next to the typed text: “no fire! just a naughty little monkey.” In all the stories of curious george of kings, physical danger is a constant: george floods a house, is carried away by a kite, breaks his leg, collides with a bicycle. the other constant is the reliable happy ending.
Little was publicly known about the royals’ experiences during the war until a 2005 book, “The Journey That Saved Curious George,” written by Louise Borden and illustrated by Allan Drummond. a journal entry of h. a. The 1940 king’s note included in that book tells us something of hans’s temperament: work was “very slow due to the events,” he noted, of the week the Nazis crossed the French border. a letter of intent to publish “curious george” from the english publisher chatto & windus specifies plans to publish the book barring any “international incident involving force majeure.” And later, a 1944 New Year’s card written from New York reads: “Let’s think about the future; that is where we will spend the rest of our lives.” The Kings were hugely successful after arriving in New York, but they lived modestly.
It doesn’t seem like a given that kings use their artistic talents to entertain children. one of hans’s first ideas for a book was a new way to visualize the constellations of the night sky, a project he began while serving as a german soldier in a trench. (The book of constellations was not published until 1952.) Margret studied art and photography at the Bauhaus school. Finnish writer Tove Jansson also turned to writing for children at about the same time in history. Jansson had been a brilliant political cartoonist; The winter the Soviet Union invaded Finland, she began writing and illustrating a gentle story about a family of hippopotamus-like forest creatures called Moomins who escape a flood. The Moomins eventually absorbed most of Jansson’s artistic energy, as they battled comets, drank whiskey, lived in lighthouses, and took in easily spooked ghosts. and michael bond wrote the story of paddington: “please take care of this bear. thank you.”—after seeing jewish refugee children arrive at london train stations with banners around their necks. these stories are not necessarily written for children under pressure but instead for adults who are also under pressure and who now prefer to spend their time making children happy.
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