Aardvark Tales Ease the Way for Children

HINGHAM, Mass. —  It was a day Marc Brown couldn’t possibly forget. The college where he was teaching art had gone broke, leaving Brown downsized before the term was invented. The horses on his small farm had broken from their corral, and the chickens were boycotting their coop. His first wife was no longer living with him. His mother-in-law was.

“Tell me a story, Daddy,” his 4-year-old son Tolon demanded at bedtime.

Brown began describing an animal who disliked his nose.

“What’s the animal’s name, Daddy?” Tolon asked.

Brown searched: “Arthur!” he decided.

“And what kind of animal is Arthur?” the child pressed.

“Umm,” thought Brown, hesitating as long as a 4-year-old will tolerate: “An aardvark. Arthur is an aardvark.”

And so was born a small, thoughtful beast who has starred in more than 25 titles, accounting for more than 6 million books in print. Arthur has become a cult creature with his own fan club, reading program and CD-ROM series. A cuddly Arthur doll--vastly more appealing than an actual aardvark, a chubby, nocturnal mammal that feeds on ants and termites--was recently introduced, along with a set of Arthur puzzles. A few weeks ago, Brown’s fictional aardvark vaulted into a new sphere of renown with the debut of “Arthur,” an animated adventure on PBS.

But the flurry of acclaim since “Arthur’s Nose” (Little, Brown, 1976) has done little to shake Arthur’s modest, self-effacing nature. This is an aardvark who navigates life’s potholes with humor and youthful dignity. He learns to accept his prominent proboscis. He gets glasses. When his classmate Muffy schedules her birthday for the same day as Arthur’s, he works out a compromise worthy of Yasser Arafat and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Arthur survives “Teacher Trouble” (1986)--with an instructor like Mr. Ratburn, this is no small accomplishment. He loses a tooth (but not without some encouragement from Dr. Sozio, his philosopher/dentist). He gets a puppy, then sets up a pet business. He weathers the arrival of a new baby sister.

Arthur’s creative approach to solving these quotidian crises attracts a steady supply of early elementary school-aged readers, and has earned him a spot on the “children’s choice” list of books issued by the International Reading Assn. “Brown knows what appeals to children,” notes School Library Journal, “and he serves up a generous portion.”

Children identify with the aardvark-in-a-perpetual-pickle because, Brown believes: “Kids feel that Arthur is a lot like they are. He doesn’t have super-intelligence or superhuman powers. He’s dealing with the same issues they’re dealing with in their own lives, every day.”

Grown-ups often find it easy to dismiss some of these dilemmas, Brown went on. “But when you’re the only second-grader who hasn’t lost a tooth, you wonder what’s wrong.”

Brown, 49, speaks from experience. The Arthur stories are culled from his own childhood in Milcreek, Pa., with large doses of the escapades of his children Tolon, Tucker and Eliza thrown in. “Arthur Babysits” (1992), for example, traces directly to Brown’s brief tenure caring for a maniacal set of twins. For fun, they tied Brown to a chair, then hid in their cavernous mansion.

Some ongoing characters, such as Grandma Thora, are named for Brown’s family. Mr. Ratburn, “the meanest algebra teacher ever,” was inspired by Brown’s own math teacher. D.W., Arthur’s bratty little sister, is a combination of Brown’s younger sisters. The imperious Francine is a mirror of Brown’s older sister.

Even more authentic is the resemblance between Brown and his central character. Paired next to a snapshot of Brown at 8 years old, the age that Arthur will remain forever, aardvark and author are the personification of “separated at birth.” Both are small and compact, with quick, contagious smiles. The two are diplomatic, and if Arthur is above all a tenacious little aardvark, Brown affirms, “I think tenacity is my best personality trait.”

That sense of perseverance has served Brown well, starting from when he lost a competition at the Cleveland Art Institute because his portfolio included drawings for children. He went on to create and illustrate more than 100 books for young people, ranging from African folk tales to an allegorical set of books he writes with his wife, educator Laurene Krasny Brown, in which dinosaurs confront issues such as death and divorce.

Along the way, Brown has been a truck driver, a soda jerk, a chicken farmer and short order cook. When he sat down to translate Tolon’s bedtime story into the book that became “Arthur’s Nose,” he studied the works of James Marshall, creator of the well-known “George and Martha” series about a pair of highly human hippos.

“I was so in awe of Jim Marshall,” Brown said, sounding sensationally immodest and as a consequence, suspiciously like Arthur. But when Brown began to write his own books, he remembered, “something very bad happened. I started using paragraphs where I should have been using sentences. I wasn’t trusting the fact that the pictures could tell the stories.”

Still, “Arthur’s Nose” sold to the first publisher he submitted it to. Brown immediately began making preparations for the champagne dinners and wild shopping sprees he assumed would follow when royalty checks began to arrive. “Instead, I was lucky if I could go to the supermarket,” he recalled. In his darkest moments, Brown found himself dreading an author-artist’s worst nightmare: “Should I get a job?”

Anything but that. In addition to being witty and charming, Arthur is now a very wealthy aardvark. Brown and his family live in a landmark home built in 1840 in this colonial-era village on the coast south of Boston. This same landscape often appears in the Arthur books. So do the initials of his three children, a signature that fans know to look for.

Brown is a tireless worker, meticulously attending to every detail of the innumerable projects he keeps in immaculate files behind a desk too spotless to believe. Again, this fastidiousness is a quality he shares with Arthur.

“Do you think Arthur has a control issue?” Brown wondered. “I do. Look at this TV thing,” the PBS “Arthur” programs. “It’s been very hard for me to step back and let these animators do their work.”

Brown nearly passed out when he learned that one of the television animators was also working on “The Simpsons.” “I was terrified that Arthur would come back with a jagged yellow haircut, cussing at everybody.”

Blessedly, none of his fame or good fortune has gone to Arthur’s head. Arthur still answers his own mail, all the letters that arrive each day in giant bundles. But there was one recent occasion when Arthur was not available. The phone rang at the Brown house, and after a nervous pause, a tiny voice asked, “Is Arthur there?”

It was late at night. “I told him Arthur had already gone to bed,” said Brown. “And so should he.”