Freddy's Cousin Weedly by Walter Rollin Brooks
My rating: 3 of 5 stars “I like honesty, even in an enemy” OR Home Alone on the Bean Farm OR Draw a Fierce Mustache and Angry Eyebrows on a Timid Piglet at Your Own Peril In the main plot of Freddy’s Cousin Weedly (1940), the seventh entry in Walter R. Brooks’ humorous and savory Freddy the Pig series (twenty-six books published from 1927 to 1958), Aunt Effie and Uncle Snedeker show up at the New York farmhouse of Mr. and Mrs. Bean, who are absent vacationing in France. The aunt and uncle aim to locate and abscond with the silver teapot Effie believes that her mother should have left to her instead of to Mrs. Bean. Needless to say, Freddy the pig and his fellow Bean farm animals will do everything they can to foil the interlopers. The sub-plot consists of Jinx the black cat adopting Freddy’s timorous cousin Little Weedly and trying to instill confidence in the piglet. The book is a comedy of manners: uninvited house guests, contested heirloom, practical jokes, apologies and forgiveness, and so on. The aunt and uncle who seem like villainous invaders turn out to be responsible house guests, helping the animals protect the Beans’ garden from an invasion of martial caterpillars, maintaining the farm in good order, and even, finally, inviting all the farm animals and a number of local wild ones to a consummately polite tea party. As Freddy and company learn that Effie has redeeming qualities, so she learns that pigs and other animals can be at least as well-mannered as people. Effie thinks that being “polite to people even when they’re your enemies” should be in her etiquette book. The book posits that “There are two things you can do if you have a disagreement with somebody. You can try to settle it by fighting, or you can try to settle it by being friendly with them.” Through all that runs an allegorical commentary on race relations using animals as stand ins for people of color. (This is not as offensive as it sounds, because Brooks respects and likes animals at least as much as people and writes most of his stories from the animal point of view.) When Effie goes to watch a movie, she discovers Freddy (a pig!) sitting next to her and demands his removal, only to be told, “We make no class distinctions in this theatre, madam… Bankers, working men, Eskimos, Hottentots, elephants, lizards—we treat them all alike. If they have the price of admission.” It may seem condescending to minorities when Freddy comes off as admirable (and wins Effie’s approval) for offering to leave to avoid causing a disturbance. But as the book was published before the Civil Rights era, Brooks’ attempt to open child readers’ minds about “people” who are different is impressive. Like the other Freddy books, this one is pretty funny. Brooks here presents many amusing animal “facts” like, “Cows do a good deal of resting. They are not very ambitious, and few cows have ever made great names for themselves in the world. They would much rather sit around in the shade and talk. But they are often very wise animals, and their opinions are well worth listening to.” Indeed, the cow Mrs. Wiggins says several wise things. Once she explains the difference between manners and politeness: “Aunt Effie’s only polite when her etiquette book says she ought to be, and that’s when she’s having a party, or maybe when somebody else is being polite to her. I guess with her it’s just manners, and not real politeness.” Elsewhere she explains why she doesn’t open letters: “As long as it isn’t opened, I can think of lots of nice things it might be. But as soon as I open it, then it means I’ve got to do something.” Brooks also writes interesting animal behavior that seems like something real animals might do, as when Jinx tries to get Effie to let him into the house: “Jinx had used his saddest and most mournful mew. It made you think of little children crying and cats dying of starvation and all sorts of sorrowful things, and you would be pretty hard-hearted if you could keep from going to the door.” There is plenty of humor for adults here, too, like when the narrator says that “Uncle Snedeker was usually considered to be a pretty good husband. That is, he almost always did what Aunt Effie told him to.” Brooks usually writes unadorned, straightforward, demotic English suitable for kids, but he’s also capable of vivid, original, and poetic figures of speech like, “The first raindrops pattered like mice running over the shingles.” Freddy is a charismatic protagonist, a protean pig whose interests run from detective work to poetry. Yet he is quite lazy, so that he trains his animal staff at his First Animal Bank to say “good morning” when he shows up late in the afternoon. And he likes poetry too much: “Freddy should have seized the teapot and made off with it without a moment’s delay. But he was a poet as well as a pig of action.” The illustrations by Kurt Weise are perfect: realistic (his animals look like real animals, not Disney cartoon creatures), accurate (he has carefully read the story), well-chosen (he illustrates important and or funny scenes), and witty (his minimalistic picture of Emma the duck trying to look like a wicked tiger is comical). Finally, this is a solid, if not stellar book, being sillier, lighter, and less tightly plotted than the best Freddy books (like Freddy the Detective and Freddy and the Poppinjay), but it has many virtues. The high point is an absurd tour de force play in verse written by Freddy, performed by the Bean farm animals, and featuring Queen Elizabeth I (the cow Mrs. Wiggins), her ladies in waiting (the ducks Emma and Jane), Sir Walter Raleigh (Weedly), Captain Kidd (the horse Hank), Sherlock Holmes (Freddy), a G-man (Jinx), and an unsanctioned marriage plan, stolen jewelry, a lot of ordered executions, and a bad rhyme competition. A smaller-scale high point is a Paul Revere-esque mouse-back midnight ride by the husband-and-wife spiders Mr. and Mrs. Webb (the illustration by Kurt Weise is prime). Oh, and the idea of Jinx (a cat!) adopting Little Weedly (a piglet!) and the timid piglet turning into a cocky prankster after Freddy paints a fierce mustache and angry eyebrows on him is funny. Hey, it’s starting to sound pretty good after all! View all my reviews
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