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Good books, old friends

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By Kara G. Kvasnicka

Tuesday, November 29, -0001

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But award-winning children's author and illustrator Barbara Cooney's Eleanor (Viking, 1996, $15.99, 40 pages) is a refreshingly unique look at former United States First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt's childhood and youth.

I highly recommend Eleanor as bedtime reading for children, 5 to 10, looking for intriguing words and pictures to enliven their dreams.

Cooney, the illustrator of more than 100 books for children, has won Caldecott Medals for her illustrations of Chanticleer and the Fox (T. Y. Crowell, 1959) and Donald Hall's Ox-Cart Man (Viking, 1979).

According to the book jacket, Cooney spent three years researching Eleanor, visiting many of the places where Eleanor lived and consulting Eleanor's memoirs, letters, family photographs and other archived resources.

Her finished product is an insightful narrative that defines the shaping forces in Eleanor's life.

It is also beautiful pictures that capture both Eleanor's own distinctive childhood persona and the life in general of a child growing up among wealthy people at the turn of the century.

The book traces events in Eleanor's life from her birth to her graduation from an English boarding school at 18.

In between is a markedly sad childhood during which she suffers the death of both her parents and is sent to live with an assortment of mostly indifferent and intimidating relatives.

Cooney reveals how Eleanor was traumatized as a young child by a bizarre series of life-threatening incidents. A ship carrying the Roosevelts to Europe collided with another ship when Eleanor was only 21. She was dropped from the deck of the damaged ship into a lifeboat below. Although her father caught her, "from that day forward she was terrified of the ocean, and of heights as well."

Cooney also describes the experiences in Eleanor's childhood that laid the foundations for her later work on behalf of poor and disadvantaged people. She shows us a 6-year-old Eleanor helping her father serve Thanksgiving dinner at a lodging house for poor newsboys, thoughtfully absorbing the remarkable difference between their lifestyle and her own.

Eleanor's childhood mentors play important supporting roles in the story. Although her father often neglected her, Eleanor felt closer to him than any of her other relatives, treasuring his letters to her as her dearest possessions.

His letters urged her to become "truthful, loyal, brave and well-educated." She became all these things with the help of Mademoiselle Souvestre, the headmistress of Allenswood, a school near London where Eleanor studied from ages 15 to 18.

According to Cooney, Mlle. Souvestre inspired Eleanor "to think for herself, to ask questions, to be passionately committed to life and the lives of others."

Mlle. Souvestre, you will learn through Cooney's endearing characterization, also had some amusingly practical suggestions for refining Eleanor's appearance.

Cooney's accurate, detailed portrayal of Eleanor is only what a reader would expect of a good biography. (Although Cooney cleverly leaves just enough unanswered questions about the Roosevelts to stimulate interest in reading more about them.)

It is the intimacy of Cooney's words and pictures which distinguishes Eleanor from other biographies.

Cooney makes us feel as though we are beside Eleanor as she struggles to find her place in a hostile world. By the end of the story, she is not just another dead person who did good deeds in her lifetime, but a warm, dynamic woman who seems very much alive.

By emphasizing Eleanor's obscure, unpromising beginnings, Cooney implies that all children, whatever the circumstances into which they are born, have the potential for greatness. Any child can be Eleanor.

From its opening lines, Cooney's fairy-tale-like narrative will capture children's interest in a heroine who had to overcome many odds before achieving immortality
"From the beginning the baby was a disappointment to her mother. She was born red and wrinkled, an ugly little thing. And she was not a boy."

This ever-present sadness in Eleanor is comparable to that in Frances Hodgeson Burnett's 1909 story, The Little Princess.

With the care and sensitivity any young girl not destined to be a super model would appreciate, Cooney shows that Eleanor unfortunately did not fit the image of a typical princess like Burnett's beautiful Sarah Crewe did.

Eleanor's shyness, plainness and always serious demeanor prompted Eleanor's mother to nickname her "Granny," making all the more heartwarming her eventual transformation into a person who selflessly put the world's problems before her own.

Cooney's illustrations evoke in rich detail the era in which Eleanor grew up. Readers can learn a great deal about turn-of-the-century Americans just by studying Cooney's carefully conceived and exact paintings.

More importantly for children who are just learning to read, the illustrations alone convey Eleanor's storybook childhood, from its sad beginning to its optimistic end.

We first see Eleanor on the book cover, a small, anonymous girl solemnly gazing out the window of an imposing brownstone house – alienated and alone.

She remains this poignantly aloof figure in each illustration until the story shifts to her happier experiences at Allenswood. There her growing self-esteem manifests itself in the form of a tall, slim, elegant, young woman who confidently reaches out to little girls who represent the vulnerable and lonely child she once was.

One of Cooney's final images of Eleanor, and my favorite illustration in the book, shows her wearing a "beautiful long dark red dress" made in Paris.

She is gazing at her reflection in a long dressing room mirror. She is clearly pleased by what she sees. She is prepared for her future destiny as First Lady and "fearless advocate of human rights."

She knows she will never be beautiful in the conventional sense of the word, but she is undeniably a princess of sorts and a queen of hearts.

She is definitely worth dreaming and reading about in this engaging, multi-layered story again and again.

Kvasnicka, a former East Village Magazine news editor, has been the magazine's contributing editor and research consultant since 1989. She has a master's degree in information and library studies from the University of Michigan and works for the Genesee District Library.

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