A view from New York
Diane Peck THE ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL ELOISE, ELOISE IN PARIS, ELOISE AT CHRISTMASTIME, ELOISE IN MOSCOW by Kay Thompson, with drawings by Hilary Knight Sometime in the past few years, the word 'parenting' selfishly drowned out 'child-rearing' here in media-driven New York. Not coincidentally, 1 believe, 'sophis- ticated' lost its joie de vivre and confined itself almost exclusively to dead people, like Frank Sinatra, and technological toys for the cross-generational consumer public and government, like DVD players and surface-to-air missiles. The infantilisation of America, encouraged by journalists whose jobs depend on following the orders 'Dumb down!' and `Skew young!,' mani- fests itself paradoxically: pre-teens with 'attitude' adopt the look of sullen hookers on heroin, and their overbearing parents wear baby-blue jogging suits and try to get in touch with their inner child.
What does all this have to do with the revamped edition of the first Eloise (1955), billed as 'a book for precocious grown-ups, about a little girl who lives at the Plaza Hotel', and the reissuing of its three sequels (1957, 1958, 1959), which have been out of print here for 35 years? Quite a lot, I think, judging by the way they've been repackaged and censored by their publish- ers and misrepresented by many commen- tators. I feel I have to defend my favourite (along with the equally rebellious Jane Eyre) childhood heroine Eloise, a dishevelled six-year-old dynamo, whose cannily illustrated, frank accounts of exploring the real-life wonderland of city sophistication were instant bestsellers with
children and grown-ups alike. Noel Coward said, 'Frankly I adore Eloise.' And so do I.
Funny how the more sophisticated you are, the more prone you are to fits of wild childish frivolity, as if you were a dressage horse let loose in a field. Think of Edward Lear and his nonsense verse. Think of the screwball comedies of the Thirties and For- ties and their most silly and worldly practi- tioner, Preston Sturges (The Lady Eve). Satirical cartoonists had a field day in Punch and the New Yorker and thought nothing of applying their talents to chil- dren's books, too, during most of this cen- tury. In the Fifties, when even a poet like Frank O'Hara could afford to live in Man- hattan, artists and high society partied together as freely as fashion and high cul- ture did in Harper's Bazaar (which, along with The New Yorker, is the only reading matter pictured in Eloise). So everyone got a big kick out of watching the 1957 Gersh- win musical movie, Funny Face, when Kay Thompson spoofed Harper's Bazaar's fash- ion editor Diana Vreeland and sang, 'Red is dead, blue is through, green's obscene and brown's taboo, and there isn't the slightest excuse for plum or puce — or chartreuse. Think pink! Think pink when you want that quelque chose.'
Eloise embodies New York's spirit of experimentation, iconoclasm and energy in the Fifties. (Think abstract expressionists like de Kooning at the Museum of Modern Art, think Balanchine and Stravinsky's bal- lets at City Center.) Thompson and Knight flouted all the rules of book publishing, in much the same way that Vreeland and the art director Alexei Brodovitch did at the Bazaar, as it was then called. Thompson echoes Vreeland's voice in Eloise's pen- chant for French phrases, American slang, Britishisms, neologisms, exaggeration and inspired opinionatedness. (A vocal coach at MGM for many years, Thompson is credit- ed with putting the sob in Judy Garland's singing, and her mimicry was impeccable.) Significantly, the first Eloise is all Dior colours: grey-pink, lipstick-red, dove-grey, and (the designer's favourite) black. And Hilary Knight's page mistreatment — char- acters running off the page, movie-frame- like repetitions, changes of scale, blocks of text placed erratically in the vicinity of the illustrations — recalls Brodovitch's layouts at the Bazaar. Knight — a former student of Reginald Marsh, who founded the 'ash- can' school of painting and was famous for his soft-hued, ink-and-watercolour street scenes featuring New York prostitutes and drunks — drew in details that, together with the text, make you laugh (you literally read between the lines). Text and drawings exchange witty repartee. Here is one exam- ple, from Eloise in Paris: the heroine, prac- tically falling off the upper berth of a transatlantic jet (pink-striped pyjamas stretched to the point of baring her bot- tom), shines a flashlight on the man and woman below, who are cringing. She says, 'During the night the motors are on fire.
Absolutely no one slept.'
Not that you're cracking up every time you turn a page. The beauty of these books is their naked honesty. Eloise is such a completely realised character — perhaps, to borrow a Fifties concept, the most outer- directed child in all of literature — that she reveals the full palette and musical range of her emotions, one of which is her poignant love of her 'mostly companion' nanny, a rather past-her-prime, world- weary version of Margaret Rutherford. Nanny, in turn, is full of charity in its truest sense — indulgence and forbearance in judging others. She knows that children, like certain admirable dogs and horses, hate scrutiny and hypocrisy, and compen- sates as best she can for Eloise's absent mother and for a father who is never even mentioned. In the middle of the night, Nanny will drag herself out of bed and chase Eloise's nightmare demons away by putting cotton soaked in witch-hazel on her charge's toenails. Love, indeed.
That's why I'm shocked by how crudely Simon & Schuster (who will publish the books in England in March) have over- hauled the original first Eloise. They've obliterated the coverline 'for precocious grown-ups' with a marquee-like advertise- ment for their edition's 'new scrapbook', a messy kind of afterword with photos and other 'Eloisiana', thereby ghettoising the book in the children's section. And they've done their level best to destroy the cover image's sly subversion of Sir John Tenniel's delicate drawings of Alice climbing onto a mantelpiece about to enter a mirror in Through the Looking Glass. On the origi- nal's cover, Eloise, very Alice with her long blond hair tied in a bow and her unvarying child's uniform, is pictured climbing down from the mantel having contented herself with scrawling her name on the mirror with a very adult lipstick; on the new cover, vul- garly glitzed-up — not unlike the way Don- ald Trump garishly regilded the interiors of the Plaza — the mirror is festooned ridicu- lously with a banner declaring 'The Abso- lutely Essential'. Whole phrases are changed or omitted from the text: I partic- ularly despise the replacement of a refer- ence to Lilly Dache with the name Coco Chanel, next to a drawing of Eloise with a cabbage leaf on her head. Dache was a milliner, Chanel wasn't — hell, women were so into hats in the Fifties they even wore moods. The line 'Here's what I hate: Peter Rabbit' has been taken out, I'm guess- ing for pc reasons. They tout an afterword 'by Vanity Fair writer Marie Brenner', which is so egregiously idiotic and error- riddled that I can't bring myself to say any- thing about it. (Okay, one example of its slovenliness: Brenner asserts that Eloise never hops when there's a whole page on which Eloise is not only seen hopping, but actually tells us she loves to hop.) Newsweek's heavy-minded Anna Quindlen takes the opportunity in her introduction to Mad About Madeline: The Complete Tales (books I found tedious as a child) to insult Eloise with near lunatic viciousness:
Truth to tell [writes this Pulitzer winner] I have always found Eloise's chaotic existence and her self-protective little asides about her mother shopping at Bergdorf's a bit pathetic and lonely, a decidedly grown-up version of the madcap child. When I think of Eloise grown up, I think of her with a drinking problem, knocking about from avocation to avocation, unhappily married or unhappily divorced, childless. When I think of Made- line grown up, I think of her as the French Minister of Culture . . . Perhaps they have apprehended all this, but while my children like Eloise, they live Madeline, which makes all the difference.
Other critics, sadly, say nasty things about this mischievous, but not mean- spirited, little girl. I think they disapprove of Eloise for the simple and bad reason that she happens to be rich. One reviewer actually refers to her as 'an icon of crass consumerism'. My response is to quote Charlotte Bronte, from her preface to the second edition of Jane Eyre, an occasion she took to champion Thackeray's Vanity Fair: 'Conventionality is not morality. Self- righteousness is not religion. They are as distinct as is vice from virtue.'
'Mummy doesn't want to leave daddy either, but this is the high point of his earnings.'
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