“T” is for Tiger?

There was controversy a couple of weeks ago, when Judith Kerr appeared to dismiss the idea, floated by Michael Rosen, that the tiger in her classic 1968 picturebook, The Tiger Who Came to Tea, might have been partly inspired by her own early experiences. 

Said Rosen: “Judith knows about dangerous people who come to your house and take people away. She was told as a young child that her father could be grabbed at any moment by either the Gestapo or the SS - he was in great danger. [...] So I don’t know whether Judith did it consciously or not - I wouldn't want to go there - but the point is he’s a jokey tiger, but he is a tiger.”

 On BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Kerr demurred:

“It’s just a tiger. We’d been to the zoo and we’d seen one and we thought it was absolutely beautiful. It’s not the Gestapo – it doesn’t stand for anything.”

This of course is a perennial problem for those of us who like to talk about literature. On the one hand, we have a sense that there is more behind images (pictorial or otherwise) than the paper they’re printed on; on the other, we don’t want to fall into a reductionist trap of saying that the secondary meanings and echoes that cluster round images are entirely interchangeable with them – that the image has no concrete character of its own. Literature isn’t a puzzle to solved or a code to be cracked.

An ABBA post isn’t the place to resolve this longstanding question (I leave that as an exercise to the reader), but to say that the visitor in Kerr’s book is “just a tiger” is at any rate not the whole story. If it had been a tiger like the one she’d seen at the zoo, after all, it would probably have killed or maimed young Sophie and her mother, and The Tiger Who Came to Tea would now have an altogether more notorious place on the children’s list. On the other hand, it’s not an entirely tame tiger either. Much of the book’s appeal derives from the slightly uneasy, slightly comic tension between the power and potential ferocity of the tiger and the civilized – and quintessentially English – act of taking tea. (That it is tea rather than another meal is important, and not only for alliterative purposes. Think how less well it would have worked had the tiger come for brunch.)

The tiger in Kerr’s book is, in short, a story-book tiger, and that immediately plugs it in to all the ways in which stories have used tigers in the past. William Blake was perhaps the first to identify the ambiguity of the tigerish nature  (“Did He who made the lamb make thee?”), but tigers have made significant appearances in children’s literature, too. One thinks of Shere Khan from Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894), or of Helen Bannerman’s Little Black Sambo (1899), in which a number of vain tigers are outwitted by the hero and eventually melt into ghee (glossed by Bannerman as that essential teatime accompaniment, butter) with which Sambo’s mother proceeds to make pancakes. Those tigers come to tea in a very literal sense – as chimney sweepers come to dust. Then there’s Tigger in The House at Pooh Corner (1928), who barges in on Kanga and Roo looking for food much as Kerr’s tiger does on Sophie and her mother, and thereafter has “Extract of Malt for breakfast, dinner, and tea”. 

We might also notice the cousinhood of Kerr’s tiger with the various hungry lions who have found themselves in close proximity to small urban children in the past. Like The Tiger Who Came to Tea, both Hillaire Belloc’s cautionary poem “Jim” (which famously ends with the admonition to “always keep ahold of nurse/ For fear of finding something worse”) and the Stanley Holloway monologue “Albert and the Lion” exploit a technique of comic understatement, in their case in the face of their heroes’ deaths at the paws of big cats:

Then Pa, who had seen the occurence,
And didn’t know what to do next,
Said “Mother! Yon Lion’s ’et Albert”,
And Mother said, “Well I am vexed!”

But between Albert’s lion and Sophie’s tiger squats the shaggy figure of the lion in Maurice Sendak’s “Pierre”, which formed part of his 1962 Nutshell Library. In this self-confessed cautionary tale Pierre – whose besetting sin is that he doesn’t care – receives an unexpected visitor:

Now, as the night began to fall
A hungry lion paid a call.
He looked Pierre right in the eye,
And asked him if he’d like to die.

In the face of Pierre’s obstinate indifference the lion eats him, and Pierre is only regurgitated (unharmed and cured of his ennui) after his parents rush him to the hospital. Significantly, the ambiguous lion is rehabilitated:

The lion took them home to rest
And stayed on as a weekend guest.

Anyone who has seen the picture of Sendak’s Pierre and the lion on the front cover of the Nutshell Library, sitting companionably at a table, might well be reminded of Sophie and her tiger. And vice versa, of course.

Does this mean that the tiger in The Tiger Who Came to Tea is “really” Blake’s tiger, or Kipling’s, or Bannerman’s, or Milne’s? Is the tiger really a lion? Not at all: but literature is a web in which, when you tweak one thread, all the others respond too.

And of course one’s experience of life is just such another web. Which is, I think, pretty much what Michael Rosen was saying.