THE TRUTH ABOUT MAX, by Alice and Martin Provensen
Alice and Martin Provensen were the American picture book’s Ginger and Fred: a supremely poised and stylish illustrator team who, in a collaboration that spanned nearly 40 years and more than 40 children’s books (19 of which they also wrote and edited), beguiled fans with their deadpan wit, far-flung curiosity and midcentury-modernist flair.
Both were born in Chicago and studied at the University of California. And by the time they met in Los Angeles in 1943, they had both done journeyman work in the burgeoning animation industry and were ready for a change that promised greater creative freedom. After the war and a move to New York (by which time they had married), the couple turned to book illustration, established themselves as mainstays of the phenomenally successful Golden Books list, and branched out from there, tackling subjects ranging from Greek mythology to classical ballet.
In 1951, they purchased the ramshackle Dutchess County property that became Maple Hill Farm, a storybook hideaway and the setting of several collaborations for which their barnyard served as central casting. When not roaming the world for research or pleasure, the Provensens logged long hours at back-to-back drawing tables in their converted barn, patiently developing the ideal approach for their project of the moment.
Martin made lunch, Alice cooked supper; apart from that, the couple rarely revealed much about their division of labor. They “really were one artist,” Alice once explained.
“The Truth About Max,” with a big, brassy cat as its protagonist, is a previously unpublished picture book that was discovered in the form of a dummy, or preliminary version, in 2019 among some papers held onto by Alice’s agent George Nicholson, who died in 2015. Martin Provensen had died in 1987; Alice died in 2018.
Over the years, the couple had come to appreciate as individuals many of the animals living in their midst and, in a series of droll, sketchbook-style volumes, had proved themselves to be canny naturalist-observers. In “Our Animal Friends” (1974), the first of these books, they gave the real Max pride of place by depicting him on the title page with burning bright eyes and an ear-to-ear grin. The book they left behind was clearly meant to be the star turn they felt their farm’s arch-rascal had earned.
The Provensens’ love for animals, like Beatrix Potter’s, was pointedly unsentimental. In “The Truth About Max,” the truth they record includes Max’s bad-cat high jinks and his raw knack for survival: his unfailing instinct for knowing who on two legs or four can be trifled with and who is not to be crossed.
The Max we meet is also quite the hunter, with sleeping quarters that resemble a trophy room “full of squirrel tails.” This casual, and shocking, revelation is enough to make young readers feel they are being treated like grown-ups — another Provensen hallmark.
The illustrations vary in their degree of finish, with the occasional figure or face merely roughed in and the backdrop left sketchy for later. A publisher’s note states that the spidery, faux-naïve cursive used for the text is a redo by skilled calligraphers of the artists’ own place-holder hand-lettering.
The unpolished bits tell a truth of their own, exposing traces of the awkward, trial-and-error not-knowing in which creative work so often has its beginnings.
The Provensens were tireless explorers who spurned the obvious and felt most sharply themselves in uncharted terrain. Having decided to make a book on aviation history, for example, who besides them would have chosen to highlight not the boldface Wright brothers but the comparatively obscure yet equally noteworthy Louis Blériot? (The couple won the 1984 Caldecott Medal for that effort, titled “The Glorious Flight.”)
Max was one more kindred spirit. His story ends on another decidedly grown-up note, this one hauntingly beautiful.
Every evening, we learn, Max, having “tired” of the barnyard, “walks down the lane,/ into the fields./ You would not know him./ He looks like a tiger.”
On his own, just what threshold has he crossed? Perhaps the mysterious one that marks the limit of what anyone can know about anyone else. “Now,” write the Provensens, leaving us to imagine the rest, Max’s “real life begins.”
Leonard S. Marcus is the author, most recently, of “Pictured Worlds: Masterpieces of Children’s Book Art by 101 Essential Illustrators From Around the World.”
THE TRUTH ABOUT MAX | By Alice and Martin Provensen | 40 pp. | Enchanted Lion | $18.95 | Ages 3 to 8