A fellow-critic, Tayler Montague, posted a hypothetical query on Twitter earlier this week: “ ‘where did you have your first aesthetic awakening?’ ” Instantly, the question sent me into a rabbit hole of memory, like a fast-motion special-effects scene in a movie that whooshes a character through a montage of memories and into the distant past. I blasted back, bypassing my high-school exultation hearing the title track of Eric Dolphy’s album “Out There,” my middle-school literary illumination reading Willa Cather’s story “Paul’s Case”; and the years of baseball cards (Curt Blefary’s balletic batting stance) and car models (the pointed tail of the Corvette Stingray) until stopping, even further back, at what I recall as the very dawn of my aesthetic consciousness, in my early childhood. I still have the object in question on a bookshelf, dog-eared and torn, yellowing and held together with strapping tape: the American College Dictionary that I got as a present at the age of four, as a preschool reader. It was, of course, much too advanced for me; I could sound out many of the words but hadn’t any idea what they meant. Still, I found delight in the stark yet complex rhythms with which its definitions were phrased; the meanings were, if not beside the point, less important than the verbal music in which they were presented. It’s tempting to rewrite early childhood in the light of later perceptions, to gather the fragments of early experience and impose narrative coherence, yet revisiting that dictionary’s text throughout the years and comparing its taut phrasing to that of others has reaffirmed the authenticity, even the immediacy, of those memories. I wouldn’t have known to call it style, but a framework was surely put in place for me then, reading the dictionary—a sense that the meaning of language was inseparable from the sensations of pleasure that its tone inspired.
Other old books stand out in my mind from right around the same time—especially the navigation manual that my father, who’d served in the Army Air Forces in the Second World War, had brought home in 1945 and kept ever since. When I read it, uncomprehendingly, the navigational part hardly took and the military ideas went right over my head. But the parts about administering first aid and treating wounds stuck: fantasies of abstract carnage and dedicated treatment. (Did my parents want a doctor in the family?) And that interest in gore gave rise to a fascination with monsters, which I got not from movies but from cheesy monster-movie magazines that were sold at local candy stores. From there came my first movie passions: nineteen-fifties science-fiction, such as “Earth vs. the Spider” and “The Amazing Colossal Man” and “Creature from the Black Lagoon,” and classic monster movies, such as “Frankenstein,” “Dracula,” “The Mummy,” and “The Wolf Man,” that were broadcast on TV. I didn’t spend much time on children’s books (I didn’t read many grownup books, either; I watched too much television, and, when I did read, preferred newspapers and magazines), but one children’s book that my mother read to me, and that continued to pique my interest long past the time when its simple text would still have been stimulating, was “Anatole,” written by Eve Titus and illustrated by Paul Galdone, which was published in 1956. (It’s still in print.) It’s the story of a French mouse named Anatole, who, with other French mice, bicycle nightly, in berets and ascots, into Paris in order to slip through the cracks of homes and steal food to bring home to their mouse families.
The book’s narrative is set in motion when Anatole suffers a blow to his honor: while raiding a private home, he hears its owners curse mice, calling them “terrible,” “dirty,” and “a disgrace to France.” “To be a mouse is to be a villain!” they declare. When he gets back to his own home, he confides his shame to his wife, Doucette. (The book reproduces the gender stereotypes of the time—it’s only male mice who do the pilfering; Doucette is home with their six children—Paul and Paulette, Claude and Claudette, Georges and Georgette.) She wonders, in response, “If only we could give people something in return.” And this sparks his idea: instead of raiding homes, he sneaks into a huge cheese factory and, when he samples the wares, pins little cards to each, on a rating scale ranging from “Extra-’specially good” to “No good,” and scribbles his more nuanced judgments, such as “Another pinch of salt” and “Add a little vinegar,” all signed, “Anatole.” The owner of the factory, M’sieu Duval, questions his employees to find out who has been leaving them, but to no avail.
I wouldn’t have known, at the age of five, what it meant to be a critic, but “Anatole” was, in its way, a foundational text for the formation of a critic’s sensibility. (I don’t know whether the writers of “Ratatouille” were familiar with “Anatole” before writing the movie’s story, though it invites the comparison—to the book’s favor, I think.) I learned, through Anatole’s cheese reviews, that, by expressing one’s pleasures and displeasures, one could make a positive contribution to the world, and that the expression of one’s very personal sense of taste, if done the right way, could itself be a creative act. Spoiler alert: when M’sieu Duval follows the suggestions of the stranger (whose identity he is never able to discover), he becomes the most celebrated and successful cheese manufacturer in all of France—and Anatole, unrevealed, regains his dignity. Titus dramatizes Anatole’s critical sensibility as one that coheres with that of the public at large—Anatole picked up, ahead of time, on the pleasures that consumers didn’t even yet know they desired but that, once Duval offered them, they delightedly lapped up. As a child, I couldn’t have grasped the book’s elision of critics’ own potential indignities—it never hints that there could have been a gap between Anatole’s taste and the palate of the public at large. (What if Anatole’s note “NO GOOD, Throw it away!” had been affixed to Duval’s most popular cheese?) On the other hand, the book also instilled, secretly, another notion, one that swallows this little reminiscence by the tail: critics are best heard and not seen.
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Lessons on Being a Critic, from the Classic Children’s Book “Anatole” - The New Yorker
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