Children's Features

The Reys Ride Again
Jennifer M. Brown -- 8/28/00
The creators of Curious George fled WWII Paris with a fifth, previously unknown, manuscript



The story of H.A. and Margret Rey's narrow escape from the Nazis by bicycle, their manuscripts strapped to the racks, is now the stuff of legends. Until recently, the Reys were thought to have fled with four manuscripts--including a draft of and the watercolors for Curious George. But with the publication of this season's Whiteblack the Penguin Sees the World (Houghton, Sept.), fans of the Reys' work can view, for the first time, a fifth manuscript that was smuggled safely out of Paris on June 14, 1940.
Smuggled out of France 60 years ago,
H.A. and Margret Rey's Whiteblack
The tale of Whiteblack, Chief Storyteller of Penguinland, who sets off from his Arctic home in search of adventures, might still be unknown to readers if editor Anita Silvey had not journeyed to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, last October. Silvey, publisher of Houghton Mifflin Children's Books (Houghton is the longtime publisher of Curious George and many other works by the Reys), along with Lay Lee Ong, the Reys' literary executor and a close personal friend of Mrs. Rey's, had been invited to the de Grummond Collection at the University of Southern Mississippi to open an exhibit of H.A. and Margret Rey's work. Curator Dee Jones led them on a preview of the exhibit. Silvey came upon a glass case labeled "Unpublished work of H.A. Rey" and says that one illustration in particular caught her eye: a watercolor of a trio of characters--a polar bear, seal and penguin.
Jones asked Silvey, "Would you like to see the whole thing?" Silvey recalled being "amazed, stunned, incredibly excited"; she never dreamed that Jones would produce a complete manuscript. Even as she looked through it, Silvey said she expected to reach a point when the text would stop. But in fact the manuscript was there in its entirety. When Silvey looked at the back of the cover image, she saw the Reys' Paris address, and that's when she realized that this book, too, had been carried out by bicycle in June 1940.

Silvey recalled, "I'm trying not to faint because I have to go [deliver] the lecture. I can't broadcast [the discovery] because I have no right to do it yet." One of the great ironies for Silvey is that she had visited Margret Rey many times before her death in 1996--the author lived just a five-minute drive from Houghton's Boston offices--yet Mrs. Rey had never once mentioned the existence of Whiteblack to Silvey. Ong, however, told her that Mrs. Rey had referred to Whiteblack as "one of her best books" and couldn't understand why it had never been published. It was Ong who also had informed Silvey previously that the Reys had kept the original artwork for Curious George; in 1998 Silvey had the art reshot, with the benefit of modern technology, and published The Original Curious George with an introduction by Leonard S. Marcus.

A History in Letters
According to Marcus, the history of the Whiteblack manuscript can be traced through letters between Margret Rey and Grace Hogarth, the editor who had published a translation of the Reys' Rafiet les 9 singes (Gallimard, 1939) at London's Chatto & Windus under the title Raffy and the Nine Monkeys. Hogarth left Europe, like the Reys, because of the war, and went to Boston to head Houghton's children's department. When the Reys reached New York City in October 1940, they contacted her. "Margret did not want to waste time," said Marcus, explaining that Mrs. Rey asked Hogarth to come to New York City right away, as they were holding off sharing any manuscripts with New York publishers until her arrival. Hogarth wrote back, "Hold your horses," and arrived the following month; one of the manuscripts that the Reys showed her, according to Marcus, was Whiteblack.

Hogarth contracted for the four books that were known to have left Paris with the Reys: two books would be published per year. In 1941 Houghton published Curious George (previously called Fifi) plus one lift-the-flap (or "trick book," as they were called then), How Do You Get There?; the following year Houghton released Raffy, published as Cecily G.and the Nine Monkeys, plus the other "trick book," Anybody at Home?
This unpublished work
was found by Anita Silvey
last October.
Economics were just as great a concern as they are today, Marcus pointed out, perhaps more so because of the scarcity of paper and other materials during wartime. "The reason we have decided to publish Fifi before Raffy is... because it has more pictures and better value for the price," wrote Hogarth to Mrs. Rey on November 15, 1940. Hogarth also published three additional books by H.A. Rey under the pseudonym Uncle Gus (Christmas Manger with a biblical text, Uncle Gus's Circus and Uncle Gus's Farm). According to correspondence between the two women, Marcus said, Whiteblack had been planned for publication in 1943.
Why, then, the Reys showed Whiteblack to Ursula Nordstrom at Harper & Brothers in 1942, and why--after the Reys revised it in response to Nordstrom's letter of October 27, 1942 ("I think Whiteblack can be shortened, sharpened and improved. I hope you will let me see it again")--it was never published, remains a mystery. The Reys did publish other subsequent books with Nordstrom, including Pretzel (1944), the first book Margret Rey ever wrote, and collaborations Mr. Rey did with other authors, such as Margaret Wise Brown (The Polite Penguin, 1941; Don't Frighten the Lion, 1942) and Charlotte Zolotow (The Park Book, 1944). But Whiteblack was not among them.

Silvey pointed out the serendipity of the watercolors and text remaining intact, as a whole, in the intervening years between the Reys' work on Whiteblack and its rediscovery at the de Grummond Collection: "It had all been preserved together and had all aged at the same time." The watercolors thus had a unified look when Silvey went to shoot the artwork for publication. She said that Mr. Rey had attached the text to the art, and that she "followed his layout exactly."

Even as she spoke, Silvey's voice still contained a hint of her initial amazement at the manuscript's rediscovery. It's hard to imagine who wouldn't be enthralled with Whiteblack, a penguin who shares a kindred spirit with a monkey named George.