Beethoven's Five Legless Pianos Inspire
Winter's Wacky Kids' Book

The 39 Apartments
of Ludwig Van Beethoven
by Jonah Winter
(Schwartz & Wade)
ISBN 0375836020
Buy this book
via Amazon.com.

With the success of 1991’s Diego (Knopf), his vivid profile of artist Diego Rivera, Jonah Winter discovered his talent for penning the picture book biography. Illustrated by Jonah’s mother, Jeanette Winter, Diego was a Reading Rainbow selection and won a NY Times Best Illustrated Children’s Book award.

Choosing subjects who interest him—Benny Goodman because Winter plays clarinet, baseball players because he loves the sport—Winter’s built a bios-for-munchkins career with critically-adored titles like Once Upon A Time In Chicago: The Story of Benny Goodman (Hyperion, 2000), Fair Ball!: 14 Great Stars from Baseball’s Negro Leagues (Scholastic, 2002), Roberto Clemente: Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates (Atheneum, 2005), Frida (Arthur A. Levine, 2002), a companion to Diego, and this fall’s Dizzy (Scholastic), a profile of jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie.

Winter’s The 39 Apartments of Ludwig Van Beethoven (Schwartz & Wade), also due this fall, is a delightfully zany take on the classical composer in which Winter muses on how Beethoven managed to move five legless pianos so many times. The offbeat angle is sheer brilliance, the writing gleefully irreverent, and the illustrations by Barry Blitt outstanding

WINTER: I have my good friend Cedric Tolley to thank for this brilliant but lesser known fact of Mr. Beethoven’s difficult life. And he got it from a biography.

AUTHORLINK: How and where did you research this one? How long did it take to research and write?

WINTER: “Research?” Ha! Oh, years and years and years of painstaking research went into the making of this very thorough biography. Figuring out what works he composed while living in the basement apartment with the stinky cheese smell—that was the hardest task.

AUTHORLINK: How do you categorize 39 Apartments? Creative nonfiction? Historical fiction?

WINTER: I don’t know. You tell me. What is this book? The publisher calls it a “mockumentary.” Did it make you laugh? Did it confuse you, or make you angry? It is certainly neither “creative nonfiction” or “historical fiction.” It is exactly what it claims to be—a theory on how Beethoven might have moved his five legless pianos in and out of 39 different apartments, and on why he might have felt compelled to move so often, and on what these apartments might have been like, and on what works he might have composed while in the various apartments. You know—funny.

WINTER: This is not a biography of a great composer. This is a detailed theoretical description of his “moving adventures,” as U-Haul might put it. When I first heard about this fact of Beethoven’s life, I knew immediately what the tone of this story would be, the only thing it could be—deadpan. My goal, pure and simple, was to amuse.

The “FACT” organizational principle came from trying to meet my editor’s demand of separating fact from fiction in this story. Originally, I had made no such separation. And I do think the editor was right to push me in this direction. After all, this is a children’s book, about an actual historical person, so one needs to be as clear as possible in distinguishing fact from fiction.

But, hey, aren’t you going to ask me the question “why”? Why in the world would I write a picture book manuscript with such an absurd premise? Well, I’ll tell you. As it says on the back flap, I have, in fact, lived in 25 different apartments, and only two of those have been in the last eight years. From age 21 through age 36, I lived in 23 different apartments. One of them was a fifth floor walk-up. My friend Cedric was helping me move my very cumbersome futon up four flights of stairs, when we both collapsed on the stairway, unable to go on, laughing hysterically. I can’t even remember how many times I must have moved that futon in and out of various apartments, that and my 40 boxes of books.

Now, close your eyes and imagine, really imagine, trying to move five legless pianos in and out of 39 apartments, twice or three times a year. And somewhere in the midst of all these moves, you manage to write the Fifth Symphony and countless other masterpieces.

"Anne Schwartz’s immediate reaction was that it totally cracked her up. She loved it."
—Winter

WINTER: Anne Schwartz’s immediate reaction was that it totally cracked her up. She loved it. She was a bit confused by it, and how to make it a successful picture book—but from the get-go she was a big, big fan of it, and for this I am very thankful. For years, this manuscript had been circulating, garnering a very different kind of response from different editors, most of whom were confused about my motivation for making fun of such an important historical figure.

But, thankfully, Anne Schwartz has a sense of humor, and she appreciates and encourages other people’s senses of humor. I will say this, the book originally was under contract at Atheneum, when Anne was still there. The absolutely inspired choice of illustrator, Barry Blitt, might have been that of Ann Bobco, the art director at Atheneum (who, if she reads this, will personally flog me if I don’t give her some credit). But then again, it might have been Anne Schwartz’s idea. Hmmm.... Excuse me one minute, I’m going to get my shovel.

AUTHORLINK: Biography is obviously your forte, no pun intended. Why do you write biography, and why write it for children?

WINTER: I do various types of writing. Much of the writing I do is for adults, and it has been called “poetry” by some people. This writing satisfies my need to amuse, to entertain. I’m also a jazz clarinet player, and I recently embarked on an operatic career. I like to perform.

However, my picture book biographies are almost entirely, for me, a political endeavor. I used to go to protest marches in Washington. But that doesn’t seem to work anymore in the current dismal political climate, in terms of real results. So now I write children’s books about people who matter to me, in the hopes that these books will help the children who read them create a better world and become better people.

WINTER: I write books about people who matter to me, but also about people who matter to the world, and whose life might lend itself to the picture book biography format. Sometimes, I like a challenge, as with my book Frida, about Frida Kahlo, whose life was anything but a children’s fairy tale.

In fact, more and more, with upcoming books, I find that my goal is to take a figure that no one else would touch, because of the difficulty of the subject matter, and turn that person’s life into a picture book story. On the other hand, certain subjects are no-brainers—for instance, Dizzy Gillespie. He is not only one of my heroes, for so many reasons, but his life is absolutely spotless and utterly translatable into a picture book story. Well, maybe it’s not absolutely spotless, but compared to other jazz musicians, he was a choirboy.

In terms of dealing with the “mature” nature of certain pivotal events in my subjects’ lives, it’s like this: difficult things happen in the world, and sometimes you have to explain those things to a child. So, you find a way to explain it that will give just enough information so as not to be upsetting or confusing. It’s the same with writing a picture book biography.

AUTHORLINK: How do you decide whether to tell the figure’s entire life story, or to focus instead on an important event/phase/period of the person’s life? If you choose to highlight just a portion of the life, how do you decide which one?

WINTER: You can never, never, never—did I say never?—tell the whole life story in a picture book. That’s Picture Book Biography Writing 101, Day One. You have to decide which particular story is most essential to the figure and will create the strongest picture book. And, perhaps most importantly, you have to come up with a basic idea and a plot which will be most likely to appeal to a child with a short attention span. Hey, look—an ice cream truck!

AUTHORLINK: Did the work of your mother, a respected illustrator, influence your decision to write children’s books? What was it like working with her on Diego?

WINTER: Mainly, what influenced me to write children’s books was that I was broke and grasping at career straws. I was a children’s book editor in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. I got my first job in publishing right out of college. I had a degree in English and had no idea how I would make money other than in publishing. So I went to my mother’s editor at Knopf, Frances Foster, and she and Dinah Stevenson gave me my first job in children’s book publishing as an editorial assistant. I am thankful to my mother for putting in a good word for me with her editor, but other than that, she really didn’t influence me to go into children’s books. It was a practical decision, born from desperation.

As far as Diego goes, my mother gave me the illustrations and I wrote a text from just looking at her pictures. She knew that I was a minimalist in my adult writing, and she needed someone to write a minimalist text, since her original text, which I purposefully didn’t read, was way too wordy. This book was what gave me the idea—and the cash!—to make my big break into the wide world of freelancin’. Yeeeeeeeee-HAW!

WINTER: Yes, I am a poet, but my feet don’t know it. They’re Longfellers. HUCK HUCK! Well, eh-hem, I uhhh... I started writing poetry for adults at the age of five. So, that came first. But you know what, it’s kinda hard to make a living as a poet. Many poets support themselves as teachers, and I know for many this is a very amenable field and lifestyle. Maybe someday I’ll do that too. But I do enjoy the children’s book world precisely because it has everything the poetry world doesn’t—economic validity; political substance, at least in the case of a picture book biographer; an audience; fun, unpretentious people. I love picture books—I love the way they look, feel, smell. I love the fact that most people can understand them. And I hate the fact that most people can’t understand, and don’t care to, most adult poetry.

The stuff I write for adults is informed by my kid’s-book-writer need to be understood, need to communicate. But, again, mainly, with the adult stuff, I am just trying to entertain, not educate. I’m most known for a sestina I wrote called “Sestina: Bob,” which uses the name “Bob” to end each line, 43 times. This sort of thing brings me endless, unmitigated joy. And if I can crack myself up, then, by golly, I’ve done my job. The willfully obscure, pretentious, overly-serious (even when attempting to be funny) poetry world can go leap off a cliff. Does that answer your question?