This is a journey into the unknown between reality and ideal, with a ride across the most formidable bridge that exists between them.
Six weeks prior to my grandmother’s birth on the other side, I was in the hospital. Brooklyn Daily Eagle announced the publication of a book described only as “a children’s story of a bull,” sold for $1.
The Story of Ferdinand is a story about a young, gentlehearted misfit who refuses to listen to his bullies and instead chooses to sit under his cork tree alone. His mother, at first worried about his bullness, recognizes her son’s difference and trusts that he would find his way.
So he does.
Ferdinand continues to grow up as a complete individual.
The day he is taken to the bull ring, he models for the violence-hungry crowd — as he would for millions of readers in the century since — a saner way of being in an insane world.
Wilbur Monroe Leaf is better known by his pen name of Munro Leaf (December 4, 1905–December 21, 1976), wrote the story in the first year of his thirties, on a yellow legal pad, in half an hour, as a creative prompt for his friend Robert Lawson (October 4, 1892–May 27, 1957) — he wanted to give the illustrator something to tickle his artistic imagination out of a lull.
Their collaborative creation went on to become one of the most beloved children’s books of all time — cherished by Eleanor Roosevelt and Gandhi, adapted by Disney into an Oscar-winning film, translated into sixty languages, continuously in print for nearly a century.
It is a “children’s book” in the same way that The Little Prince is — a miniature work of philosophy, delivered with simplicity and warmth, radiating immense and eternal ideas about the meaning of human life. Like a great poem, it can be read many different ways and taken to mean many different things — a story about otherness that can speak to modern-termed styles of otherness like queerness and neurodivergence; a story about the quiet power of nonconformity; a story about the world-shifting power of personal example.
The book’s threat to dictators and militants was due to this latter aspect. In a stark affirmation of Iris Murdoch’s timeless observation that “tyrants always fear art because tyrants want to mystify while art tends to clarify,” the book was deemed pacifist propaganda, banned in Franco’s Spain and burned in Hitler’s Germany.
Similar The Little Prince — a book published eight years later and inspired by its author’s wartime experience in the desert — Ferdinand: The StoryIts roots lie in the lives of its creators. Lawson and Leaf both had experienced the destruction of the entire world during its first global conflict. When drafted, Lawson had joined the U.S. Army’s first camouflage unit. As the young artist Franz Marc was painting his extraordinary hill-wide canvases across the French countryside in another army’s camouflage unit, Lawson was putting on plays and music shows for French children. We have always survived history’s dark patches by making our own light and meeting brutality with beauty.
Similar Winnie-the-Pooh — a book published a decade earlier, inspired by a real-life rescue baby bear its author had visited with his son at the London Zoo — Ferdinand: The StoryIts roots lie in the real story of an actual bull from the Spanish countryside.
Don Juan Cobaleda had been a rancher all his life, but he had never seen what he saw one morning in the mid-1930s: Carmelita — his seven-year-old daughter — was petting his blackest bull, bred as a toro bravo for bullfighting; the beast was eating flowers out of the little girl’s hand.
Don Juan must have been both touched by the sight and dismayed by his prized animal’s Corrida prospects, for he named the bull Civilón — “Large Civilian,” a colloquial slur Spanish soldiers used for ordinary citizens.
Soon, other children were flocking to the farm with bouquets of wildflowers and succulent grass for Civilón to eat from their hands as photographs of him populated the human interest sections of Spanish newspapers.
Then, when Franco’s fascist forces threatened to attack Barcelona in the late spring of 1936, the enterprising manager of city’s historic bull ring set out to do what Facebook algorithms do today — prey on the way violence and sensation scintillate the weakest parts of human nature.
Civilón was taken from his bucolic paradise, carted to Barcelona, and released into the arena packed with thousands of scintillated spectators who had come to see what would happen to the famous furred pacifist under the bloodthirsty threat they took for entertainment.
Like any reasonable animal faced with another animal’s aggression, Civilón pushed through the pain the picadors were stabbing between his shoulders and charged back, chasing them behind their barricade.
But when the rancher called out to the wounded animal from the side of the arena, Civilón trotted quietly over and leaned in for a caress — he hadn’t let the violence erase his memory of kindness, or his trust in it.
The spectators were so moved by this a supreme manifestation of the bull’s natural nobility, known as noblezaOne woman was so shocked when the famed matador entered the arena, carrying his sword, to perform the brutal finale, she cried out. un indulto — that rare “indulgence,” or pardon, by which a bull is spared death in recognition of his bravery and nobility. Her voice was soon joined by others. A crowd of people rose as one to chant its unison demand. Indulto.
It was such a powerful moment — the people acting as a people, acting human — that the president waved his orange handkerchief, granting the pardon. Civilón, mobbed by photographers and fans, was sent to the city stables to recover before being sent home to his peaceful pasture.
After you have completed the Corrida, he appeared on the cover of the July 4 issue of the popular women’s weekly EstampaHe is embraced by a lovely woman who holds his horn while he looks on.
“The Adventure of Civilón in Barcelona’s Bull Plaza,” announced the headline. “The Women Saved Him,” declared the subtitle.
The declaration was premature.
In mid-July, with Civilón still in Barcelona, Franco’s militiamen burst through the city gates. In their looting and ransacking, they broke into the stables, killed Civilón, butchered him and ate him for breakfast before the resistance drove them away that evening. The July day Civilón was murdered is the day the Spanish Civil War began in full force, maiming the country for three years and stirring in Europe’s bosom the violent passions that soon erupted into the next World War.
Ferdinand: The StoryIt was published 3 months after the Spanish Civil War had begun. The great Spanish cellist Pablo Casals would live through it to emerge with his impassioned insistence on our shared duty “to make this world worthy of its children.”
Twenty years later, at the peak of the Cold War, three months after Robert Lawson’s death and four days before the release of the Hollywood film based on Hemingway’s bullfighting novel, LIFE Magazine dusted off the story of Civilón — “a huge bull… so bravo y noble that his life was spared.” Above one of Lawson’s Ferdinand illustrations, the magazine noted that bulls of his disposition may be spared death in the ring but are “disgraced” for being “too timid to fight.”
That year, the pioneering X-ray crystallographer, Quaker, and peace activist Kathleen Lonsdale wrote in her quiet masterwork on moral courage and the key to a nonviolent world that “those people who see clearly the necessity of changed thinking… must persuade others to do so.” She believed that children must be nursed on this ethic, for they are the stewards of tomorrow. “What is essential,” she wrote, “is that every member of the family, even little children, should learn at whatever cost not to give way to wrong or to co-operate in it.”
Ferdinand: The Story was Leaf and Lawson’s quiet, courageous act of persuasion — a testament to Ursula K. Le Guin’s insistence that what imaginative art and storytelling give us is the ability to imagine alternative endings as attainable.
In the story’s alternate universe, the peaceful bull’s peacefulness does save his life — he makes it home unharmed, modeling a different way of being for a savage world, embodying the power of personal resistance that Eleanor Roosevelt knew furnishes the cumulative force of cultural change.
“And for all I know,” Munro Leaf writes in the final pages, “he is sitting there still, under his favorite cork tree, smelling the flowers just quietly.”
To me, The Story of Ferdinand is the picture-book counterpart of Auden’s poem “The More Loving One” — that eternal masterwork in the art of alternative endings, defying the unhappy ending not on the miniature scale of the bull ring but on the grand scale of the universe. To be human means to yearn for great cosmic. IndultoThat would be a significant exception to the general fate of all matter. All the art we make — the picture-books and the poems, the paintings and the songs — is our act of resistance to the blade between the horns that menaces us with its unpardonable promise from the moment we are born.
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