Gillespie and the Guards, 1957 Caldecott Honor: A Lasting Impression

 

A runner-up/honoree for the 1957 Caldecott, Gillespie and the Guards is a book of seconds. It is the second Caldecott Honor for illustrator James Daugherty, eight years after Andy and the Lion. It is also the artist's second partnership with writer Benjamin Elkin, two years after The Loudest Noise in the World. It's an enjoyable story about Gillespie, a little boy who decides to take on a king's challenge to trick his Royal Guard, led by three brothers with superhuman eyesight. His plot works, due as much to the guards' arrogance as to Gillespie's ingenuity. Although the artwork is likely not to everybody's taste, it makes an impression while often adding a sense of humor, movement, and scale to the story. 

Gillespie and the Guards: Just Good Fun

Anyone familiar with James Daugherty's work as an artist and illustrator knows that he reveled in tackling weighty subjects. In fact, the majority of his books are biographies or profiles of American historical figures as well as key events from the settling of America to his present day. When Daugherty did take what must have been a well-needed break from such serious topics, he seems to have gone all out. Andy and the Lion was a whimsical twist of a classic fable that barely maintained its grip on reality, while both of his partnerships with Elkin are unabashed fantasy.

The story is very straightforward: Three brothers, each with a different version of penetrating eyesight and x-ray vision, are invited by the king to join his Royal Guards. The king is so impressed with them and confident in their ability that he offers a diamond-studded gold medal to anyone who can trick them. Hope of treasure draws people from all over the kingdom to fool them by trying to enter the palace in costume, the most ridiculous of which is a woman dressed "as a huge stick of peppermint candy" who "looked so real that two children tried to lick her" (p. 17). Thank goodness for the written description; otherwise who knows what we would make of the picture:

As the king predicted, nobody gets past his three glorious guards -- a fact that goes to their head. The once friendly threesome becomes haughty, annoying everyone but especially the prince's friend Gillespie. 

Gillespie decides to bring the guards down a peg by showing them "that no one is so great that he can't be fooled once in a while." He proceeds to leave the palace each day hauling out various worthless things (like leaves and sand) out of the palace. The guards mock him for his efforts to trick them and dutifully record all of the garbage that he is removing. At the end of the story, Gillespie claims victory, showing the king, the guards, and the whole court the dozens of red wagons that he stole from the palace. Impressed, everyone celebrates his win, especially the guards who not longer have to be "so serious and proud" -- a feeling of joy and relief that Daugherty captures in his depiction of their wild wagon ride.

Daugherty's Unreal Effects in Gillespie and the Guards

In addition to joy, the wagon ride picture above also gives a sense of movement, similar to Andy and the Lion: The characters almost feel as if they are going to fly off the page. We see this often in Gillespie and the Guards as well; most notably in the final scene where the king, Gillespie, his dog, and the three guards do a high-kneed march seemingly in mid-air -- in a move that would make a Rockette jealous:

There is also humor in these pictures. In the wagon ride, for example, not only does one guard almost spin into a flip as his wagon bounds down the hill, but Daugherty also chooses to freeze frame the event with the guard's butt facing out. This detail, combined with the other guards comically standing on tiny wagons that would never support their weight and the positioning of Gillespie and his dog almost hovering over their wagon, make the scene completely hyperbolic. In the final scene, above, the king almost looks as if he is going to crash right down on an oblivious Gillespie and his wagon.

As exaggerated as these actions may be, they are not the only thing that makes the pictures fantastic. The characters themselves do not seem at all real. The king's and Gillespie's features seem chunky and distorted. The guards here and throughout the book are strangely proportioned, and often their faces are little more than squinting eyes and moustaches. In fact, many of Daugherty's facial depictions in this book have bizarrely exaggerated features, more akin to cartoons:

Perhaps that was exactly the intended effect: to give this outlandish story more of a cartoon feel. Certainly several of the spreads and poses in the book reinforce this purpose, such as this spread depicting a guard inspecting Gillespie's wagon full of sand. With Gillespie and his dog mimicking the guard's yoga pose as he bends down and peers between his legs to see under the wagon, the scene is pure slapstick:

However, while the humor works in pictures such as this sand hauling scene, above, the distortions in other pictures can make what should be humorous disturbing to some -- as in the child trying to lick the lady dressed as a peppermint stick, seen below again. No matter how much I may know that this picture is intended to be funny, there is a grotesqueness to it that makes me turn away every time I see it; normally I might not mention such a subjective point, but based on the online discussions that I have read about this book, I am not alone:

Daugherty's artistic approach in Gillespie is more consistently successful in its ability to convey a sense of scale. The characters in this tale are meant to be larger than life, and that point is made throughout the book. In fact, often the book seems too small for them. Note this effect in the royal procession where the people in the parade fill the page and almost seem to squash the text:

Another scene where the effect is particularly noticeable -- and thematically important -- is when the guards become too proud of their own success. Again, the page can barely hold them, reflecting how large their egos have become. Also, however, the large size of the picture draws added attention to the faces of both the guards and the horses, all of which look ridiculous. It is an apt commentary on what pride does to a person, making them feel bigger and more important than they should be while actually making them look absurd to observers.

Reflecting on Gillespie and the Guards

Gillespie and the Guards is an example of what I call a "forgotten Caldecott." Long out of print, there are few copies of it available. As of this writing, I found two copies on both Amazon and AbeBooks, and three on Biblio. My municipal library system did not have any copies of it throughout its network of almost 20 branches. 

When I finally locate a forgotten title, I always try to figure out why publishers neglected to keep the book alive. Sometimes, I just blame time and changing tastes: No matter how much I may love the book, I can see why it feels dated and why a publisher would choose to let it go despite being honored. Other times, I am clueless and just blame oversight or failed marketing.

In the case of Gillespie and the Guards, there are so few copies around that I have to wonder if audiences at the time shared the issues I have with the artwork -- and that no matter how well received the book may have been by critics and experts (and I am assuming that it was since it received the honor), people even during the 1950s had a difficult time with it. For me, I see a definite connection between the art and the story, and I appreciate what I think the pictures are trying to do. 

What I cannot do, though, is enjoy the artwork. Everything about the book -- from the story to the composition of the pictures -- suggests that this should be a fun story with little more to weigh it down. Perhaps it is exactly that for some people with much different tastes. However, for me the distortions, odd proportions, and dark black-and-brown/red lithography are just too distracting and often too unpleasant to look at for long. As a result, no matter how much I may realize that I am supposed to laugh or feel joy, I just don't quite get there. 

Nevertheless, this probably says more about my lack of sophistication than Daugherty's illustrations. At the end of the day, Daugherty was too talented of an artist not to have considered my reaction, and he certainly could have made this book look any way that he wanted. I have seen too much of his other artwork to doubt that he could have provided a brighter palette, smoother figures, or more natural expressions. Understanding that his setting was a mythical place where x-ray vision existed alongside feudal kings and where kids were wiser than their elders, he clearly set out to create an other-worldly world that reflected these oddities. Thus, the pictures and people are distorted because the world in which they exist is distorted; red, the color of royalty, is not bright and regal but so earthy that it becomes brown. To put it simply, things here are just different. With this in mind, I have to applaud Daugherty for the risks he took and the impression that he made: I will certainly never forget this book.

See also:

• James Daugherty Caldecott Honoree: An American Artist of His Time
• Andy and the Lion, 1939 Caldecott Honor: Blending "Fact and Fancy"
• Gillespie and the Guards, 1957 Honor: Caldecott & Book Collector Notes