{"id":9062,"date":"2020-01-28T14:26:04","date_gmt":"2020-01-28T14:26:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/?p=9062"},"modified":"2020-01-28T14:26:11","modified_gmt":"2020-01-28T14:26:11","slug":"pea-soup-and-pink-loafers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/2020\/01\/28\/pea-soup-and-pink-loafers\/","title":{"rendered":"Pea Soup and Pink Loafers"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The following guest post is by Elizabeth Barnett<\/strong>, recipient of the 2019 Billie M. Levy Travel and Research Grant.<\/em> Ms. Barnett is an assistant professor of English at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, where she is the director of the Midwest Poets Series and editor of the Rockhurst Review. Her essays and poems have appeared in Modernism\/modernity, Gulf Coast, and The Massachusetts Review. She is working, with great pleasure, on Marshall\u2019s literary biography, tentatively titled Egads! <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBut how then can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? For death? Why hurry them along? Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don’t give a damn whether they eat or not.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

—Frank O\u2019Hara, \u201cPersonism\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

James Marshall\u2019s voice had two kinds of\ndrawls, the homey \u201cahs\u201d of his Texas childhood\u2014\u201cI was told y\u2019all are shy. You\ncan\u2019t be any shyer than I am\u201d\u2014and the playful \u201cohs\u201d of the queer, East Coast\ncommunities he moved to soon after\u2014\u201cI live in New York as well as Connecticut\nand I go to galleries all the time and everything I see in painting is soooooo\ndull, suuuuuuch crap.\u201d Marshall\u2019s voice maps his identity. It also conceals it.\nA voice, as opposed to the words it speaks, can\u2019t be \u201con the record,\u201d so can\nsupplement, complicate, and contradict those words. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I knew Marshall\u2019s authorial voice\u2014witty,\nwarm, and weird\u2014from gentle hippo friends George and Martha; sweet teacher Miss\nNelson and her witchy alter ego, Viola Swamp; and the tragiocomedic Stupid\nfamily.[1]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Cover<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

More than 25 years after his death, I\ncame to know Marshall\u2019s actual voice when University of Connecticut archivist\nKristin Eshelman guided me to an amazing and extensive cache of recordings.\nFrom 1976 to 1990 Marshall visited his friend, one-time landlady, and devoted\nadmirer, Francelia Butler\u2019s \u201ckiddie lit\u201d class most semesters, reading his\nstories; chatting about the art world, publishing industry, and their\nintersection in picture books; and, most revealingly, participating in\nQ&As. Thanks to the generosity of Billie Levy and the University of\nConnecticut Libraries, I was able to listen to the run of these tapes, which\nbegin at the peak of Marshall\u2019s career and end two years before his death of\ncomplications from AIDS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Marshall\u2019s first visit, from the Fall 1976 class photo album. (The class made a photo album!). Francelia Butler Papers, Archives & Special Collections, University of Connecticut Library<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A question I had for the tapes: how did\nMarshall navigate being a gay artist at a time when it was, full stop,\nimpossible to be an openly gay man making books for children? Eavesdropping on\nthose Regan-era, AIDS-blighted years, I never heard Marshall say he was\ngay.  He never spoke as though he\nweren\u2019t. Marshall\u2019s authorial persona, distilled in his voice, suggests a key\ninsight about his books, which also had to straddle the line between authentic\nartistic creations and market-dictated norms. What he says and how he says it\nare analogous to the words and pictures in one of his books. The voice says\nwhat the words can\u2019t, just as the pictures, at times, undercut the moralistic\nconventions of children\u2019s literature. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Butler\u2019s classroom, for example, I\nheard Marshall gesture to the limits of what he was allowed to say in an\nOctober 10, 1979, interaction with a female student. The student asked if\nMarshall was married. Marshall answered first with several beats of silence,\nthen with a single word, \u201cno,\u201d then another beat of silence, then \u201cI\u2019m not\u201d\nfollowed by a dismissive \u201cnext question.\u201d The question asker perhaps wanted to\ncatch Marshall out or perhaps didn\u2019t understand what Marshall\u2019s voice had been\ntelling her. She asks an \u201cinnocent,\u201d superficially unobjectionable question.\nBut that banal surface hides (or not) the power of the dominant culture that\nthe question summons. It really asks: Are you one of us? The asker uses the\nlanguage of power and Marshall subverts that language by making it superfluous,\nhis answer conveyed through silence and tone, not the words themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This brief interaction reminded me of\n\u201cSplit Pea Soup,\u201d the first story in 1972\u2019s George\nand Martha<\/em>, Marshall\u2019s first book as both author and illustrator. It\nbegins, \u201cMartha was very fond of making split pea soup. Sometimes she made it\nall day long. Pots and pots of split pea soup.\u201d These three simple sentences\namplify each other and give a sense of something a little off about Martha\u2019s\nsoup making, the repetition mirroring Martha\u2019s repetitive actions, recasting\nconventional domesticity as a less-cozy compulsion. Why is she making soup all\nday long? Why is she making so much? What begins in a normal place ends in a\nslightly absurd one. Or perhaps it\u2019s just that the absurdity of normality comes\nthrough in the repetition. In the illustration, the framed slogan \u201cSoup\u2019s On\u201d\nunderlines Martha\u2019s extreme enthusiasm for soup. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Illustration<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

James Marshall, George and Martha<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The illustration shows Martha, a hippo,\nin a massive checkered apron tied with an equally massive bow. She wears no\nother clothes. Her performance of femininity draws attention not to her\nfemininity but its status as performance. (Here I echo and Marshall anticipates\nJudith Butler\u2019s theorization of performativity). She is a topless large animal\nplaying the part of a demure housewife. A drawn border surrounds the image,\nemphasizing that, like Martha in the kitchen, the book itself is performing.\nThe redundant border puts \u201cchildren\u2019s story\u201d in quotation marks by not allowing\nthe page itself to function as the boundary, by insisting on something more\nartful, and by drawing attention to that artificiality.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So Martha loves making soup. We then\nlearn that George hates split pea soup but eats it anyway to make Martha happy.\nHowever, he\u2019s only hippo and reaches a point where he can eat no more. How,\nthough, can he tell Martha that this good, normal thing she\u2019s doing makes him\nmiserable? He can\u2019t\u2014he pours the soup into his loafers. His pink loafers. And\nMartha catches him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

James Marshall, George and Martha<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLight in his loafers\u201d was a common\neuphemism for homosexuality in the mid-century heyday of loafers and sexual\nrepression. Pink is coded as female or gay. Until a new, more economical method\nof full-color printing was pioneered in Japan in the mid-1980s,  most of Marshall\u2019s illustrations were color\noverlays, which means that Marshall drew the picture then traced each thing\nthat he wanted to be yellow, or blue, or red onto separate sheets of paper and\ncolored those in with graphite, indicating if any colors were to be diluted by\ngiving the percentage of that color to be applied. All to say, the pink was\nabsolutely a deliberate choice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Color<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Example of color overlay from George and Martha One Fine Day<\/strong>. de Grummond Children\u2019s Literature Collection, University of Southern Mississippi.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

George\u2019s disposal of the soup in his\nloafers might be read as a symbolic refusal of compulsory heterosexuality. It\nis also a refusal of language, suggesting the complicity between the two.\nGeorge \u201csays\u201d he hates the soup through his actions because language would\nimbricate him in the very power structure he\u2019s resisting. I see Martha as the\nquestion-asker here. She is playing the feminine role as she\u2019s supposed to.\nShe\u2019s aligned with the dominant culture. George is Marshall; he can\u2019t tell\nMartha he hates the soup because here she is doing exactly what she\u2019s supposed\nto do (however inane), and he\u2019s messing it up. George avoids the language trap\njust as author\/illustrator Marshall does\u2014they don\u2019t put the subversive part\ninto words.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The too-pat ending of \u201cSplit Pea Soup,\u201d\u2014Martha\ntells George, \u201cFriends should always tell each other the truth,\u201d and they eat\nchocolate chip cookies\u2014to me signals that Marshall wants<\/em> his reader to feel the tension between what the story says\nand what it means. I probably think that because that\u2019s what I hear happening\nin the classroom interactions on the archive\u2019s audio tapes. Marshall\u2019s\nlanguage, punctuated with strategic silences and curtness, insists on its own\ninadequacy, drawing an arrow to what\u2019s left out. The story\u2019s sharp turn to the\ndidactic reads to me like the drawn border around the illustrations. It signals\nits own performativity, here of the norms of the picture book, which are\nweakened, rather than reinforced, by their inclusion. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frank O’Hara’s 1959 critique of poetry-as-moral-vitamin\nanticipates Marshall\u2019s later refusal of children\u2019s literature\u2019s didactic\nimperative. In both cases, queer writers already existed outside of mainstream\nculture, their morality maligned by that culture. It follows they may have been\nespecially wary of the inherent value of literature being used for ethical\nindoctrination. Both suggest the value of their art form is not the moments it\nteaches us something, but the moments it refuses to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1979 Marshall \u201canswered\u201d the student\nquestion with words that would not endanger his art and livelihood.  Marshall\u2019s delivery suggests he wants the\naudience to know that\u2019s why he\u2019s saying them. The performative conformity is\none way to understand the more conventional moments in Marshall\u2019s startlingly\noriginal body of work. He tells us when he\u2019s playing by the rules to protect\nthe magic of when he\u2019s not.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

[1]<\/sup><\/a> The latter credit Harry Allard with authorship but, as Jerrold\nConnors convincingly argues in his post <\/a>on this site, and Marshall\u2019s\nmaterials confirm, Allard often provided the creative spark for a piece, but\nMarshall shaped the narrative and the finished prose. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following guest post is by Elizabeth Barnett, recipient of the 2019 Billie M. Levy Travel and Research Grant. Ms. Barnett is an assistant professor of English at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, where she is the director of the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9NKyO-2ma","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9062"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9062"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9062\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9078,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9062\/revisions\/9078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}