By the time Hans and Margret Rey went to the bicycle shop, the only one left was a bicycle built for two. It was June 11, 1940, in Paris. The radio was announcing that the city would not be defended from the approaching Nazi army. The couple didn’t have a car; none of the trains were running; two million Parisians had already fled. Hans and Margret tried out the tandem bike but realized that they couldn’t manage. They instead bought spare bicycle parts, which cost them as much as they had been paying for a month’s lodging at a nice hotel—the manic inflation of exodus. Hans somehow built two bicycles that night. The couple left the next morning porting some food, a little clothing, and the drawings for a children’s book about a perilously curious monkey.
The Curious George books seemed out of fashion once my daughter was old enough for them, when a friend passed on a “Curious George and Friends” anthology with some ambivalence. That night I read the first story to my daughter. The Man with the Yellow Hat captures George in the jungle and puts him in a bag. George is visibly distressed; the text describes him as sad. The Man in the Yellow Hat then brings George aboard a ship, informing him that he’ll be delivered to a zoo, and advising him to stay out of trouble. The tone is cheerful, if also charged with a fear of the unknown. The main event on the boat is that George tries to fly like the seagulls he sees, and nearly drowns.
You can see how it’s not a book that would be written in the same way today. The text seems oblivious to the resonances with the Middle Passage, and those resonances now feel at once buried and overwhelming. Yet the backstory of the Reys, which was largely unknown for years, makes the dream logic of the story seem different than it at first appears to an adult. The Reys were taken in by strangers, even housed in a barn along the route of their escape. They arrived in New York with almost no money, with their main luggage gone. And they must have also arrived with a tremendous sense of their extraordinary good fortune, their ultimate safety.
More in this series on the power and pleasures of children’s books.
On my first green reread of the George story to my daughter, the perils felt almost too intense for primary colors, primary readers. But the books are also suffused with a reassuring and almost fantastical sense of wealth: when George makes it to the city, he is given a pipe, nice striped pajamas, and a cozy, golden child-sized bed in which to sleep. And, in the beginning of the second book, he escapes—and never returns to—the zoo.
There are seven original Curious George tales, and seven other well-known and anthologized Margret and Hans Rey stories. Hans received most of the credit for many years, but the stories are now seen to have been true collaborations. The two had known each other as children in Hamburg. They were both from Jewish families. Before moving to Paris, they had spent years together in Rio de Janeiro—Hans had moved there first, not long after serving in the German Army during the First World War. In Rio, the couple fell in love and went into business together, designing large posters and maps. Though they had no children—not then and not ever—they did live with two marmoset monkeys. When they decided to travel back to Europe for a belated honeymoon, the marmoset monkeys came with them. It was a long, rainy crossing; Margret knit the marmosets sweaters to keep them warm; still, the monkeys died.
That first Curious George story was published in 1941. It reads as notably longer than most books pitched to the same age group these days. (Some of the later Curious George tales are even longer, which surprised me—I didn’t remember that.) After arriving to “the big city,” George finds himself in prison after unwittingly calling the fire department when there is no fire. He then escapes prison by walking on electrical wires, with the balance of a circus performer (or monkey). After that, George ends up in peril again, when he clutches too many helium balloons at once, but again he escapes his peril. “Curious George Takes a Job” (1947) is even more hectic: he escapes the zoo, rides atop a bus, has a spaghetti fiasco, becomes a happy four-handed dishwasher, works as a window-washer, impulsively paints a room in a high-rise building as a jungle scene, escapes down a fire escape, breaks his leg, passes out from ether, and then ends up—with more of that characteristic nineteen-forties glamour—starring in a movie.
In the nineteen-nineties, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt commissioned and distributed additional early-reader Curious George stories that were not written or illustrated by the Reys. Those stories were short and tended to focus on one simple mishap that was then made right. The seven original tales by the Reys are more like mini-picaresques. In them, George’s arc is almost more like that of, say, Cervantes: losing a hand in battle, captured by Barbary pirates, becoming the writer of an immortal classic.
“Curious George” was published after the Reys had made it out of France to Spain and then to Portugal and then to Rio and finally up to New York. They lost their luggage but still had their prints for a story about a monkey named Fifi. Their American publisher suggested that they choose a less French name. The Reys were accustomed to name changes: in Rio, Hans had begun signing his pieces as “H. A. Rey” in place of Hans Augusto Reyersbach. Margarethe Waldstein became Margret Rey. They had new business cards made, with their more marketable last name, and ran an advertising agency. In a “Curious George” manuscript draft page that shows the scene where the firemen arrive, you can see a note pencilled in next to the typed text: “No fire! Only a naughty little monkey.” In all of the Reys’ Curious George stories, physical peril is a constant: George floods a house, gets carried off by a kite, breaks a leg, crashes on a bike. The other constant is the reliably happy ending.
Little was publicly known about the Reys’ wartime experiences until a 2005 book, “The Journey That Saved Curious George,” written by Louise Borden and illustrated by Allan Drummond. A journal entry of H. A. Rey’s from 1940 included in that book tells us something of Hans’s temperament: Work was going “very slowly on account of events,” he noted, of the week the Nazis breached the French border. A letter of intent to publish “Curious George” from the English publisher Chatto & Windus specifies plans to publish the book barring any international “incident involving force majeur.” And later, a 1944 New Year’s card written from New York reads, “Let us think of the future; that’s where we shall spend the rest of our lives.” The Reys were enormously successful after coming to New York, but they lived modestly.
It doesn’t seem like a given that the Reys would use their artistic talents to entertain children. One of Hans’s first ideas for a book was a new way to envision the night sky’s constellations—a project he began while serving as a German soldier in a foxhole. (The constellations book wasn’t published until 1952.) Margret studied art and photography at the Bauhaus school. The Finnish writer Tove Jansson also turned to writing for children at nearly the same historical moment. Jansson had been a brilliant political cartoonist; the winter the Soviet Union invaded Finland, she began writing and illustrating a gentle story about a family of hippo-like woodland creatures, called Moomins, who are escaping a flood. The Moomins eventually absorbed most of Jansson’s artistic energy, as they faced comets, drank whiskey, lived in lighthouses, and took in easily frightened ghosts. And Michael Bond wrote the story of Paddington—“Please look after this bear. Thank you.”—after having seen Jewish refugee children arriving at London’s railway stations with signs around their necks. These stories are written not necessarily for children under duress but, instead, by adults who are themselves in duress, and who now prefer to devote their time to making children happy.
I had exactly seven illustrated children’s books when I was young, so I remember each one vividly. One featured a dog no one wanted to adopt, another an orphaned doll, a third a boy with a long name who falls in a well and almost drowns on account of it taking so long to say his name—a name that, it is implied, is a vanity. Another of the books was the somehow charming tale of a bully called Tulip. The emotional standout was “Curious George Takes a Job,” which remains one of the very few books that my mom seems to truly respect. What distinguishes the George stories is where the trouble is—almost never in a person, never in humanity. George lives in a super benign world, even if it is often strange and unfamiliar to him. This is different than living in a world that is familiar but crowded with evil or indifference.
It has been noticed over the years that George has no tail. Even as all monkeys have tails. And the Reys, who lived with monkeys, are likely to have known this. Also, tails are fun to draw. So why doesn’t George have one? It’s impossible to say. But we know that apes—that includes us—have no tails. George is at once an impossible monkey, a fantasy, and also, simply, one of us.
