Imagine inventing a new form of communication, noodling around with it a couple times, and then abandoning it forever in pursuit of new experiments! A couple of years ago, I started coming up with new codes in the vein of CDB! as a hobby. Steig repeated the mode with a second book, CDC? (“See the sea?”), and then dropped it. If they did, it was probably doodled on a napkin or scrawled on a grocery list instead of published in a book. CDB!, for example, translates to “See the bee!” I don’t think anyone on earth had hit upon this mode of expression until Steig did. To figure out the captions, a reader had to verbalize-or mentally verbalize-a sequence of letters. CDB! featured loose illustrations paired with coded captions. In 1968 he published CDB!, his first book for children. Though Steig is best known as the creator of Shrek, he didn’t turn his art towards juveniles until he was in his 60s. Which, thank God, because I don’t have health insurance. I do this because it’s the one profession, in my case, that doubles as an antidepressant. Why else would I choose writing as a job? Not for the money or the imminent danger of offending someone on Twitter and immolating my whole career in ten seconds.
I wasn’t articulating these thoughts at age eight or whatever, but they penetrated. They turned an ugly condition into art-and wit! And beauty! The moment you discover that a bad thing can be redeemed by creative human intervention is the day you unlock the reason, or a reason, to keep existing. That must be why I remember the Steig books that rhymed with my tantrums. Steig had a Dickens-level command of childhood misery, depicting it as an endless tunnel of denials and supervision.
If you were a fan of the man’s work as a child, you may have been attracted by the verbal shenanigans, the breadth of subject matter (he wrote about dentists and talking bones), the mammalian heroes, or, perhaps, the streak of subtextual misery. That’s the man in a nutshell: hellfire fury and imaginative splendor. When he had trouble sleeping, he envisioned himself the owner of a magic long-range dart that he could use to destroy enemies. He regarded his education as “defective.” And his book titles, sheesh: The Lonely Ones, All Embarrassed, The Agony in the Kindergarten, Rotten Island, Our Miserable Life, and The Rejected Lovers, to name a few. He considered despair the human condition. For someone who wrote children’s books, William Steig was as adult as they come.
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