The Bee-man of Orn

It will be charitable to assume that Mr Lynch encountered this delicious story in some anthology, or even in an early printing. (Frank Stockton was an American humorist and his story first appeared there in book-form in 1887.) The bee-man hero is persuaded by a Junior Sorcerer to go into the world to seek his True Identity for he had surely been the victim of some unknown transformation and the tale tells of his comic quest after selfhood. There is a kindly mockery behind the story which reads beautifully as a fireside folktale (I know, I’ve done it) but its peaceable good humour is sadly disrupted under Mr Lynch’s vulgar attack. His whacking great square album sports the predictable over-emphatic, heavily detailed artwork (Michael Hague out of Arthur Rackham) which beats Stockton’s text into submission and corrals it off higgledy-piggledy alongside fancy designer-borders.

There is however a horrid possibility that Mr Lynch was not moved to his painterly effusions by finding his text in a story collection but by seeing it in the picture-book edition that was made by Maurice Sendak in 1964 and has often been reprinted since. If that is so then it is hard to see how an illustrator of Mr Lynch’s distinction could have dared even to think of giving the story a makeover – and certainly not an over-dramatic one like this. For Sendak’s Bee-man is, quite simply Illustrative Perfection. We require no other.