Eric Carle on creating The Very Hungry Caterpillar: 'I wanted to call it Willi the Worm...'
Eric Carle died on May 23, 2021, aged 91. This article was first published on May 4, 2019
“In the light of the moon a little egg lay on a leaf.” Read it aloud. Feel it trip off the tongue. It’s one of the great opening lines in modern literature. If you were born in the past 50 years, there’s a reasonable chance it was the start of your very first book.
Since it was published in June 1969, The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle has become one of the most popular children’s books of all time. Somewhere in the world, a copy is sold every 15 seconds; a stage adaptation has been seen by almost a million children; and, just two weeks ago, a species of spider was named after Carle for its resemblance to his book’s hero.
It all started with a hole-punch. “I was punching holes into a stack of paper, and I thought of a bookworm,” Carle tells me from his home in the Florida Keys. “And so I created a story called A Week with Willi the Worm.” His editor wasn’t too keen. “[She] suggested a caterpillar and I said ‘Butterfly!’ And the rest is history.”
Fifty years later, a couple of months shy of his 90th birthday, Carle still isn’t wholly certain why the world fell in love with his little green gourmand. “For a long time I did not know the reason. But I have come to believe that it is a story of hope – ‘You too, little caterpillar, can grow up and spread your wings and fly into the wide world’ – and this is why it has struck a chord with many readers.”
Of course, the 200-word story is slight enough to bear any number of interpretations. Once, after a reading in the former East Germany, Carle met an earnest librarian who thought it was an allegory for capitalism.
Though he went on to publish dozens of books, Carle doesn’t think of himself as an author. He prefers the title a young fan gave him of “picture writer”. It’s his instantly recognisable illustrations that tell the story – collages created from painted tissue paper and crayon, with a tactile quality that makes them irresistible to children.
“I have been creating my own coloured tissue papers for over 40 years,” he explains. “Over the years my painted papers have become more detailed, complex and richer.” He sends me a photograph of one of his more recent works, from a series of angels made using “found objects” in his studio, “paint and cardboard, aluminium and fabric”.
It’s an homage to the Swiss-German artist Paul Klee, a figure with whom the German-American Carle clearly feels a sense of kinship. It’s not too much of a stretch to see in Carle’s work something of Klee’s Angelus Novus – that childlike, melancholy figure that the critic Walter Benjamin imagined as the angel of history, striving in vain “to awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed”.
It was in the broken world of wartime Germany that Carle first encountered Klee. Spotting Carle’s talent, his high school art teacher showed him banned work by “degenerate” artists such as Klee, Matisse and Picasso.
Carle had been born to German parents in Syracuse, New York, in 1929, but his homesick mother moved the family back to Stuttgart six years later. When war broke out, his civil servant father was conscripted, and would spend eight years in a Russian prison before returning home a haunted man. He was never the same, but Carle still cherishes memories of their time together before the war.
“I believe my father had artistic talent,” he says now. “I remember sitting with him and reading the Sunday funny pages, and how he’d point out the way cartoonists used perspective in their drawings.”
At 15, Carle was conscripted and forced to dig trenches on the Siegfried Line. On his first day, three people were killed just feet away from him. It’s easy to see why he has called the bright colours of his children’s books an “antidote to the greys and browns of my childhood”.
When Carle moved back to America in 1952, he arrived with just $40 in his pocket, but used a portfolio of posters he had created for Stuttgart’s US information centre to land a job at the New York Times. He made his earliest forays into children’s art as the illustrator for books by Bill Martin Jr (including 1967’s Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?) after Martin had admired a lobster that Carle had drawn, and suggested they work together.
“It reawakened in me struggles of my own childhood, which remained hidden until the opportunity and insight presented themselves,” Carle would say. “Through my work with Bill Martin, an unfinished area of my own growing up had been touched.”
Later, while working as the art editor for an international advertising agency, Carle met his future wife Barbara; they married in 1973 and stayed together until her death in 2015.
Today Carle leads a quiet life in Key Largo, taking pleasure in small things – “I enjoy making my own fresh-squeezed orange juice, and having bread with German honey” – and reading fan letters, which arrive in their thousands.
“Some of the artwork I have received is so beautiful I have hung it on the wall of my studio,” he says. “One of the letters that stayed with me was from a fan in Texas. He said he would like to come and visit me, but he wasn’t allowed to cross the street. This made me smile.”
The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle is published by Puffin at ￡6.99. To order your copy call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop.
