Lauren Ford

Chosen as a Caldecott Honor Book in 1940 - the other two titles to be so distinguished that year were Berta and Elmer Hader's Cock-A-Doodle-Doo and Ludwig Bemelmans' Madeline - this picture-book treatment of the youth of Jesus pairs full color artwork on one page with antiphons in Latin, together with their musical notation, on the other. Opening with a depiction of St. Anne in her garden - paired with the "Antiphon at the Magnificat, Second Vespers, December 8" - it moves through the story of the Nativity, concluding with Jesus' return to his parents, after his youthful encounter with the priests in the temple.

An interesting book, visually speaking - although presented in a medieval style, Lauren Ford's paintings are set in a rural New England landscape, and are, atypically for illustrated books in 1940, in full-color - The Ageless Story also offers a fascinating glimpse of the revival of Gregorian Chant in contemporary times. The author's letter to her goddaughter Nina (Giannina Mangravite, to whom the book is dedicated) gives a bit of history of this musical style, and discusses the role of the monks of Solesmes in reestablishing its practice in modern times. It also contains a startling artistic and intellectual denunciation of the Renaissance, a time of "pompous" men who "went back to what the Greeks had done, and the Greeks were worshippers of the body. After that, Church music that you could sing and I could sing, and painting and architecture and all the beautiful things to do with God, lost their spirituality and become humanistic. That is why a Fra Angelico Blessed Virgin looks to be a Heavenly Soul and the Boy is all pure and kingly, while a Raphael one is just a good human mother with a good, fat baby boy."

Despite my appreciation for the simple beauty of medieval art and music - I infinitely prefer plain chant to the polyphony that came to dominate the Renaissance, and have fond memories of my frequent childhood visits to The Cloisters - I found the author's foreword rather distasteful. The intolerance and bigotry implicit in her judgment - it is surely not an accident that the artistic styles deemed "godly" are associated exclusively with medieval Catholicism, while subsequent styles that have been used to create religious art and music valued by other traditions have been deemed less worthy - and her conflation of aesthetic and spiritual significance, took me aback, despite my awareness that there are schools of thought that do indeed hold the Renaissance (not to mention the Enlightenment!) to be the beginning of the end of all good things. I also found that, while the storytelling method here - the antiphons in Latin, paired with paintings and a brief translation in English - was quite interesting, it was also rather unsatisfactory in the end, and unlikely to appeal to children. Likewise, the artwork itself was striking, but also rather odd. Seeing Mary, Joseph and Jesus in a 1940s home makes for an interesting exercise, but I'm not sure I found it appealing.

Ford is allowed to use this updated style, of course, because (as she explains to her goddaughter in her letter) she keeps HIM in mind at all times. Unlike all those other artists, from Raphael onward. Alas. Leaving aside my issues with the philosophical posturing of the author, I don't think this is a book that will have much appeal for today's children, and would recommend it primarily to fellow Caldecott completists.… (mer)

This little book reiterates some negative ideas that were floating around in the 1940s, such as

Now there were on Earth some people who were stupid, and some who were lazy. The stupid people couldn't learn to do anything; they couldn't plant a field, and they couldn't build a house; and they couldn't be of any use to themselves. And some hired themselves out to other people, and some just sat around, and others begged.

On the next page, they all got together and started stealing things from "the good people." It goes on and on about the stupid and lazy people causing all the evils in the world. A pretty little book, all hand-drawn, but not one I'd recommend.… (mer)