On a cool autumn
day, a frog and a toad awake in their separate houses to find that their
yards are filled with fallen leaves. The frog and toad (conveniently
named Frog and Toad) see each other every day, and are particularly
synchronized: rather than clean his own yard, each decides to go to the
other’s house to rake up the leaves there as a kind surprise for his
friend. But, unbeknown to either of them, after the raking is done and
as they are walking back to their respective homes, a wind comes and
undoes all of their hard work, leaving their yards as leaf-strewn as
they were at the beginning. Neither has any way of knowing of the
other’s helpful act, and neither knows that his own helpful act has been
erased. But Frog and Toad both feel satisfied believing that they have
done the other a good turn.
This
story, called “The Surprise,” appears in “Frog and Toad All Year,” an
illustrated book of children’s stories by Arnold Lobel that was first
published in 1976. Its mirrored structure is simple yet ingenious: the
gust of wind disrupts the course of what might have been a more
traditional and didactic children’s tale about two friends who benefit
from mutual gestures of kindness. At the end of the story, Frog and
Toad’s altruism has amounted to nothing more than the feeling they each
got from it. What does a child learn from this? That doing good deeds
can make the doer feel good, even if those deeds go unrecognized? That
those to whom we feel closest will never fully know how much we care for
them? That frogs and toads shouldn’t be trusted with basic garden work?
Lobel’s ending, “That night Frog and Toad were both happy when they
each turned out the light and went to bed,” is a satisfying conclusion
that nonetheless makes the mind roam. One wonders if the friends will
meet the next day and ask each other expectantly whether cleaning up
their yards had been difficult, only to be flummoxed when they heard
that, yes, it was. Instead, like a sitcom that starts each episode with
its narrative slate wiped clean, the next story in the book finds Toad
waiting anxiously for Frog to arrive at his house for Christmas Eve
dinner. After Toad imagines all of the most dramatic things that could
have happened to Frog on his walk over, and prepares to set out to
rescue him, Frog shows up at Toad’s door with a gift in hand. He was
late because he’d been wrapping it. “ ‘Oh, Frog,’ said Toad, ‘I am so
glad to be spending Christmas with you.’ ”
Lobel,
who wrote and illustrated the Frog and Toad series, was born in 1933
and raised in Schenectady, New York. Having begun his career doing work
for advertising agencies, he started illustrating for Harper & Row
in 1961, and the following year published his book “A Zoo for Mr.
Muster,” about a man who becomes a zookeeper so that he can spend every
day with his animal friends. During his career, he worked on dozens of
children’s books, both as a writer and as an illustrator, and also, in
some instances, in collaboration with his wife, Anita Kempler, whom he
met while studying art and theatre as an undergraduate, at Pratt
Institute. His specialty was animals and their misadventures: an owl who
butters his own tie by mistake, a crow who convinces a bear that it’s
fashionable to wear bedsheets for clothes and a pan for a hat. In his
Frog and Toad books, published between 1970 and 1979, the pair visit
each other at home and explore their natural surroundings together,
occasionally seeing other animals, like a snail who is the mailman, or
birds who enjoy cookies that Frog and Toad throw out when they can’t
stop eating them. Many of these stories still make me laugh, like the
one in which Toad wakes up and makes a list of things to do. “Wake up,”
he writes, then immediately crosses it out. “I have done that,” he says.
Lobel’s
daughter, Adrianne Lobel, a painter and set designer who lives in
Manhattan, told me that her father’s sense of humor was influenced by
popular TV series—his favorites were “Bewitched” and “The Carol Burnett
Show”—and by the polished comedy routines of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby,
and Fred Astaire and Edward Everett Horton. (When she produced a stage
adaptation of the Frog and Toad stories, in 2002, the opening number had
the amphibian duo coming out of hibernation, somewhat dreamily, like
the number “The Babbitt and the Bromide,”
performed by Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, in which two men meet
intermittently throughout life, exchange superficial pleasantries, and
then meet in heaven and do the same.) As a child, Adrianne didn’t think
there was anything particularly special about her father reading her the
stories he’d written. “It was just ‘Papa’s written another story—he’s
going to read it to me now.’ ” She recalled a time when she and her
younger brother Adam were fighting in the back of a car on a road trip.
“My father had been very quiet for a long time, and I guess he couldn’t
stand listening to us anymore, and he said, ‘Do you want to hear a
story?’ So we settled down, and he recited from beginning to end in
verse a story he had just written in his head.”
The
“Frog and Toad” books remain in print to this day, and still pop up on
the bookshelves of young parents. I asked Adrianne, who now has a
teen-age daughter of her own, why she thinks the two characters have
such staying power. “It was the only thing he wrote that involved a
relationship,” she said. “I’ve watched children grow up, and that whole
drama that’s kind of the precursor to the hell of romance later in
life—who is best friends with whom and who likes who when, and this
person doesn’t like me now—it’s very painful, and I think that children
really like to hear that this is not abnormal, that Frog and Toad go
through these dramas every day.” Take, for instance, the story “Alone,”
from “Days with Frog and Toad,” in which Toad goes to Frog’s house to
visit him but finds a note on the door that reads, “Dear Toad, I am not
at home. I went out. I want to be alone.” Toad begins to experience a
little crisis: “Frog has me for a friend. Why does he want to be alone?”
Toad discovers that Frog is sitting and thinking on an island far from
the shore, and he worries that Frog isn’t happy and doesn’t want to see
him anymore. But, when they meet (after Toad falls headfirst into the
water and soaks the sandwiches he’s made for lunch), Frog says, “I am happy.
I am very happy. This morning when I woke up I felt good because the
sun was shining. I felt good because I was a frog. And I felt good
because I have you for a friend. I wanted to be alone. I wanted to think
about how fine everything is.” In the end, the trials of their
relationship are worth bearing, because Frog and Toad are most content
when they’re together.
Adrianne
suspects that there’s another dimension to the series’s sustained
popularity. Frog and Toad are “of the same sex, and they love each
other,” she told me. “It was quite ahead of its time in
that respect.” In 1974, four years after the first book in the series
was published, Lobel came out to his family as gay. “I think ‘Frog and
Toad’ really was the beginning of him coming out,” Adrianne told me.
Lobel never publicly discussed a connection between the series and his
sexuality, but he did comment on the ways in which personal material
made its way into his stories. In a 1977 interview with the
children’s-book journal The Lion and the Unicorn, he said:
You know, if an adult has an unhappy love affair, he writes about it. He exorcises it out of himself, perhaps, by writing a novel about it. Well, if I have an unhappy love affair, I have to somehow use all that pain and suffering but turn it into a work for children.
Lobel died in 1987, an early victim of the AIDS crisis. “He was only fifty-four,” Adrianne told me. “Think of all the stories we missed.”
When
reading children’s books as children, we get to experience an author’s
fictional world removed from the very real one he or she inhabits. But
knowing the strains of sadness in Lobel’s life story gives his simple
and elegant stories new poignancies. On the final page of “Alone,” Frog
and Toad, having cleared up their misunderstanding, sit contently on the
island looking into the distance, each with his arm around the other.
Beneath the drawing, Lobel writes, “They were two close friends, sitting
alone together.”
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