Virginia Lee Burton: An Appreciation

I grew up with Mike Mulligan and Mary Anne, and I have lots of company, including my own children. It's a book that encourages the reader to imagine an author as some aged, retiring, nostalgia-soaked children's book author, but Virginia Lee Burton is something else entirely. Today, I'm setting aside the usual eduranting to look at this extraordinary American author.

The author of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel was just thirty years old when it was published, in the midst of a life that was rich and adventurous and even a little unconventional. (For this next section, I depended mainly on Barbara Elleman's brief but illuminating biography of Burton)

Virginia Lee Burton was born in 1909 in Newton Center, Massachusetts. Her father was Alfred Burton, an engineer who was the first dean at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A widower with two sons from his first marriage (one ended up as a Supreme Court Justice, the other an architect), Alfred met the eccentric young Lena Yates on a walking trip in France; they soon married, though she was about 22 years younger. They had three children. In the late teens, citing health issues, Lena took the children to California, ending up in the bohemian art scene of Carmel-by-the-Sea.

After Alred retired from MIT in 1921, he joined the family out West, but in 1925 Lena ran off with Carl Cherry, a man 24 years her junior (and the eventual inventor of the Cherry rivet, leading to the founding of Cherry Aerospace, still kicking today). Virginia was 16; she involved herself in arts, especially dance. In 1928 she was prepared to follow her sister back East and even had a contract with a dance troupe when her father broke his leg. She went to take care of him instead, and her dancing career evaporated. 

In 1930, she took work as an illustrator for a newspaper, eventually signing up for a class with George Demetrios, a teacher of drawing and sculpture at the Boston Museum School. In 1931, she and Demetrios married. After a couple of years, the ended up in a small, turn-of-the-century home in Folly Cove, Gloucester, Mass. 

Burton's first attempt at a children's book was, she said, disastrous. But she learned an important lesson, and ever after she fine tuned her stories by telling them over and over to her own children; the parts where children's attention lagged were targeted for rewrites and tweaking.

Burton did illustrations for other peoples' work, but her signature works are her own. Burton was not so much an illustrator as a designer, working text and layout and art all together. Folly Cove itself became a vibrant center of art and design, energized constantly with music and dance and parties and gatherings and Burton's own work as a teacher of design. 

Burton's body of work is actually not that large. She illustrated (and in a couple of cases adapted) six books, and created seven works of her own. You probably already know a couple--you should know them all.

Written for her son Aris, Choo Choo (1937) tells the story of a little engine who runs away, then gets lost and stranded in a dark wood until her crew find her and bring her home. It is rough and chunky in the illustrations. 

That was followed by Mike Mulligan (1939), written for son Mike. She worked on it for a couple of years, slowly developing and tweaking the story, including the final plot solution offered by a young man at a friend's house. A steam shovel that is outdated finds one last big job.

Calico the Wonder Horse (1941) was conceived as a sort of comics format, but it's graphically very cool. It's a western adventure, with Calico up against some Bad Guys in an adventure that comes down to Christmas Eve.

The Little House (1942) won a Caldecott medal. It was based on their own home. Adapted as a Disney short, but you can skip that. The house starts in the country, and the city grows up around it.

Katy and the Big Snow (1943) is about a snowplough that must rescue the city of Geopolis (based on Gloucester) from a tremendous snow storm.

Maybelle the Cable Car (1952) reflects Burton's school days in San Francisco, and tells the story of the movement to rescue that cable cars of that city when they were threatened with replacement by modern buses.

Life Story (1962) is in many ways Burton's magnum opus. She spent eight years on it, and it tells nothing less than the history of the world, from the Big Bang through life in her country home, all presented as if a stage play. It challenges any sort of categorization. 

There are certain threads that run through the works (beyond the attention to graphic design). Curiously, in all books, human beings are secondary characters. And there is an obvious thread of constructs, like Mary Anne and Maybelle and the Little House, that are threatened with being left behind in a world racing forward into modernity. As Elleman does, I see these not as a romanticizing of the past, but as stories of adaption. Stuff happens, and you find a way to move forward; it's certainly not hard to hear that as an echo of Burton's own childhood and youth in which, faced with challenging events, she kept moving forward without bitterness or anger.

There is a gentleness in her stories. In the end, everyone is okay. Choo Choo decides that her work is not so bad. Stewy Stinker and his Bad Men decide to join in the Christmas celebration. Big Bill the bus decides to be a friend, not a rival, to Maybelle. And of course Henry B. Swap finally smiles in a way that is not so mean. 

When I read these books to the board of directors, I'm struck by one other theme which I think particular fits Burton's own life. It's not about past versus future, city versus country. It's about finding the place where you fit and making it your own. Burton and her family made Folly Cove their own, where they were able to pursue their passions and sing and dance and live the lives they wanted to, and in doing so, made it the center of a larger community as well as the foundation of a whole group of artists and designers. There were classes. There was food. There was a giant slab of an outdoor table, made of slightly irregular quarry stone, that could be a picnic table or a dance floor.

Every one of her characters does this, comes down in the place just right by being willing to move forward to become what they can be. Life Story may seem like it's hunting bigger game, but in the final pages it brings the focus from the entire existence of the world to the passing of the seasons and life in a small house in Gloucester. And here are the last two pages:

And now it is dawn--dawn of a new day, a day in spring. Minute by minute the light brightens in the east, turning from cold gray to deep blue to delicate pink. The birds are singing gaily as they await the return of the sun. Down in the green meadow there is a new baby lamb. Now I leave you and turn the story over to you. Look out of your window and in a few seconds you will see the sun rise.

And now it is your Life Story and it is you who play the leading role. The stage is set, the time is now, and the place wherever you are. Each passing second is a new link in the endless chain of Time. The drama of life is a continuous story--ever new, ever changing, and ever wondrous to behold.

You lose a little without her perfect design, but you get the idea. She has spent seventy-six pages rendering the vast spread of history and the world, and you have a place in that vast picture, you, right here, in this moment. 

Burton had worked forever on a book about design that she never finished. Her last years were dominated by her cancer. She passed away in October of 1968. Her husband created a sculpture to her memory, dancing, smiling, kicking joyfully at the sky. 

Like the best of those who create works for "children" she had made some big statements about life, about art. I'll read through the stack again in a few days and raise a glass to her in the new year when Mike Mulligan and Mary Anne celebrate their 85th birthday.