Millions of Cats by Wanda Gág
Poetry and perception in the first-ever picture book
The more I look at Wanda Gág’s lithographs, the less I see them. Or maybe it’s not that I’m seeing too little, but too much? To fully appreciate her prints requires a shift in perspective. It’s like looking at one of those Magic Eye illusions; stare too hard, and the image remains flat, but if you look closely and loosely, at the same time, it starts to stretch, the edges soften, while the center sharply comes into focus. It pulls your vision into its core, then right past it, where something new, something that was once hidden, is revealed. No magic glasses are required. You create the image yourself. But to get beneath the surface, your vision must be supple enough to bend freely without breaking; it needs to be pliable.
Children are born with pliable vision. Their lenses are more flexible, allowing them to focus on objects both close up and far away, but as they age, their lenses become rigid, and they lose their ability to change shape and adapt. Children literally see things differently. But it’s not just their vision. They also hear, feel, and experience the world differently than adults. They are richly sensuous and more rhythmically attuned to the world around them. For children, even commonplace objects possess idiosyncratic beauty (just watch them marvel at a cardboard box to see what I mean). Because of their flexible mindset, children are more comfortable stretching their imaginations between the ambiguous space of reality and fantasy. This is why I like reading children’s books; they help me see the world from a child’s perspective and make my vision less rigid—at least metaphorically.
I especially like reading fairy tales. One of my favorite writers, Sabrina Orah Mark, said “I don’t know if you’ve ever held a fairy tale in your hand, but it has this amazing pliability. Try to stretch it from your childhood all the way to where you are standing right now. See? Isn’t that amazing?”1 Fairy tales and the oral tradition of storytelling—stories told to children in the dark, before bed, have, as Mark suggests, “a fluidity, are bodiless in certain ways or at least the borders are a little bit more blurred…and because of that blurring, it does make the story itself, the mode of storytelling, or the way that it enters the body that much more powerful, and also much more dangerous because you can’t contain it. It’s a kind of wind, it’s a kind of air that we breathe, that we share.” 2
In all children’s stories sound is important, but especially in fairy tales. Mark explains, “fairy tales and children’s stories like nursery rhymes, like songs, like prayer, like spells, like poetry, are all intricately connected, they feel very intended for the ear…if you think about the stories you were told as a child, not the stories you had read, but the stories that were told to you, like don’t they get into your bones in a way that’s very different than let’s say, a story you read online, even if it’s the same story?” 3
In Wanda Gág’s introduction to Tales From Grimm (1936)—a set of Grimm’s fairy tales she freely translated and illustrated—she writes about the profound bodily experience of hearing these stories read out loud to her as a child:
“The magic of Märchen is among my earliest recollections. The dictionary definitions—tale, fable, legend—are all inadequate when I think of my little German Märchenbuch and what it held for me. Often, usually at twilight, some grown-up would say, ‘Sit down Wanda-chen, and I’ll read you a Märchen.’ Then, as I settled down in my rocker, ready to abandon myself with the utmost credulity to whatever I might hear, everything was changed, exalted. A tingling, anything-may-happen feeling flowed over me, and I had the sensation of being about to bite into a big juicy pear.”
Wanda Gág didn’t just breathe in the air of these stories; she devoured them.
But before Tales From Grimm, there was Millions of Cats (1928), Gág’s first book for children and arguably the first-ever picture book. At the time, Gág’s lithographs were gaining success in the fine art world. Her distinctive style caught the attention of the editor Ernestine Evans, who believed Gág had the talent and ingenuity to revolutionize children’s books. She was right.
Millions of Cats is Gág’s original folktale story of a lonely old man who sets off to find a cat companion for him and his wife. But instead of one cat, he comes back with “hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats!” Unable to choose just one, he decides to keep them all, that is, until his wise wife reminds him the cats will eat them out of house and home. They decide to keep the prettiest cat but let the cats choose who that is. Chaos ensues! The cats quarrel and, presumably, eat each other up because they all disappear—except for one homely little kitten. The old man and woman take it in, and with a bit of love and care, the kitten turns out to be very pretty indeed.
There are many remarkable things about this Newbery Honor award-winning book, one of them being Gág’s powerful sense of rhythm. The story’s refrain, “Hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats,” is repeated throughout the book. The cadence of the rhythmic phrase gets stuck in your head, like the chorus of a catchy song. It builds momentum and emphasizes the enormity of the situation. But what really sets this story apart is the illustrations. Gág knew she could enhance the rhythm of the verse by drawing scenes that feel like they are literally moving across the page. In the scene where the cats begin to quarrel, right before they supposedly eat each other up, you can sense the sheer anarchy; it feels as if the page is going to swallow the book whole.
Gág designed Millions of Cats from cover to cover, including the endpapers, and her brother Howard hand-lettered the text. Despite it being her first book, she understood how to use design as an expressive vehicle for her texts. Unlike its predecessors, it tells a story through the interplay and animation between text and image across a double-page spread (two facing pages illustrated into one). Before this, illustrations in children’s stories were decorative and were typically placed on one side and the text on the other—they were embellishments rather than a storytelling technique. In Cats, Gág created a story that moves cinematically across each page from left to right and up and down as you follow the old man and his hundreds, thousands, millions and billions and trillions of cats. The filmic effect makes you feel like you’re watching the story rather than reading it.
In the book’s final scene, the old man and the old woman sit happily together, admiring their pretty little kitten. The three of them are snug in their den; the old woman is knitting, and the old man is smoking a pipe—it all feels very warm and cozy. And if you look closely, you’ll notice Gág’s use of circles: the rug, foot cushion, table, mugs, and lamp are all circles—the effect is pleasing and harmonious—you feel as if they truly will live happily ever after.
Another thing that sets Cats apart is its rejection of the maudlin and sticky sweetness of the children’s stories that dominated that era. It’s dangerous, delicious, familiar, and strange. The carnivalesque atmosphere would be terrifying if it weren’t so funny and warm. In the introduction to Tales from Grimm, Gág writes about balancing these ingredients:
“A certain amount of ‘goriness,’ if presented with a playful and not too realistic touch, is accepted calmly by the average child. In this way sanguinary passages can be rendered harmless, without depriving them of their salt and vigor.”
When asked about illustrating fairy tales, the acclaimed children’s book author-illustrator Maurice Sendak said,
“The tales [Grimm’s] themselves are claustrophobic. They work on two levels: first, as stories, second, as the unraveling of deep psychological dramas. I’m not so interested in the top layer, the story, as I am in what goes on underneath…I wanted my pictures to tell any readers who think the stories are simple to go back to the beginning and read them again.” 4
Gág knew, and Sendak too, that hidden realities are revealed through diverse effects. But what hidden realities can we uncover in Millions of Cats? There are many theories. Some adults believe it’s about pacifism and anti-capitalism. Others think it’s about aesthetic philosophy—the study of beauty, taste, and art, and how people experience and judge these things. In a review for the Spaghetti Book Club, Charlie, a first grader, wrote, “I think others should read this story because it is really good. It is beautiful and great, but it will make you feel lonely.”
Knowing Gág’s history and political beliefs, I think many of the adult interpretations ring true, but children don’t connect with this story because of those specific ideas (and let’s be honest, most adults aren’t thinking of them either), they connect with it because it makes them feel things: fear, excitement, delight, satisfaction, and yes, even loneliness. When Sendak was asked whether children had the maturity to understand the implicit meanings of fairy tales, he responded, “I think children read the internal meaning of everything. It’s only adults who read the top layer most of the time.”
Noticing the internal meaning of things was Gág’s genius. She was distinctly aware of the energetic, vibratory qualities in nature and of objects. Even the atmospheric space surrounding things was, in her view, enveloped in layers of rhythmic forces, a sort of shimmering, pulsating aura of nothingness. It sounds very erotic, and for Gág, thinking about shape and form was the ultimate turn-on. She wrote in her diary in June 1935:
“Perspective has for many years had an ecstatic effect upon me—I remember again the time that I had a climax (in the midst of a treetop with Earle) while and because of thinking of the mathematical recession of planes which is perspective. The inevitableness of it, its potential thereness even in space, its utter right-ness—all these things excite me, not only aesthetically but apparently emotionally too.”
She often compared the rhythmic qualities of her depictions of nature to music. She felt she could best see music in the form of a picture:
“I feel a long note with little repetitions dropping and rising from it, and the building up of large masses to a climax is so easily perceived as to scarcely warrant mention. All this is new to me. It has always been more or less a matter of two dimensions, a flat design. but today I came closer to appreciate its third dimension…I may not have attained to a sculptural conception of music, but I have some idea of it as a bass-relief5. Not only as a frieze6, I mean sounds running along from left to right, with its ups and downs like statistical diagrams of consumption or grain production, but modeled into an all-over drawing, somewhat more rectangular in shape.”
Gág’s metaphysical relationship to perception provided depth and energy to her lithographs, but it also made Millions of Cats a picture book phenomenon. In “The Shape of Music,” an essay by Maurice Sendak in Caldecott & Co.: Notes on Books and Pictures (1988), he considers this quickening quality essential to the picture book form. He writes:
“To quicken means, for the illustrator, the task first of comprehending the nature of his text and then giving life to that comprehension in his own medium, the picture…It suggests a beat—a heartbeat, a musical beat, the beginning of a dance.”
That’s precisely what Gág did for children’s books: she gave them a heartbeat—she brought them to life.
Want More Gág?
If you’d like to learn more about Wanda Gág, check out my alphabetical portrait of her:
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Sabrina Orah Mark in conversation with Martin Riker, Granta Magazine (2023)
Sabrina Orah Mark, Between the Covers Podcast (2023)
Sabrina Orah Mark on telling fairy tales designed to wake us up. Keen On Podcast (2023)
Referenced in The Art of Maurice Sendak by Selma G. Lanes (1980)
“Bass-relief” is a sculptural relief in which the projection from the surrounding surface is slight, and no part of the modeled form is undercut.
A “frieze” is a long stretch of painted, sculpted, or even calligraphic decoration. They often provide a visual narrative that enhances the story.
“The filmic effect makes you feel like you’re watching the story rather than reading it.” - Yes! Loved this analysis. And I agree, folk and fairy tales are haunting in ways you just can’t compare to other stories.
An essay on a genius, by one of my favorite geniuses. Perfection, as always.