Trust Me On This : No One Could Resist Their Smile

I can’t remember if my gently worn copy of M. B. Goffstein’s “Goldie the Dollmaker” was acquired for me or for my children, who were at picture-book age when it was published in 1969. I do know that it still speaks directly to my heart and that for more than two decades I’ve been giving copies of it to youngsters and to adult artists--to the latter because it describes what they do, indeed what they are .

This is the story it tells: Goldie Rosenzweig--a childlike figure with an adult’s self-reliance--lives alone in an isolated cottage whose bare-bones simplicity rivals the Shakers’, carrying on the doll-making trade of her dead parents. Not only has she committed herself wholeheartedly to the ceaseless labor of her craft, bringing it to a fine degree of meticulousness, she infuses her soul into each figure that her devoted hands carve and paint. No one can resist the appeal, at once magical and deeply human, of a doll Goldie has birthed; its smile is heartbreaking.

On a trip to town for her frugal list of supplies, Goldie checks in with the young man who represents the “normal” life of tender connections she has sacrificed to her work. A carpenter (ironically, a woodworker like herself), Omus Hirschbein builds the boxes in which she ships her dolls. The handsomest and friendliest of Philistines, he lives in a world that is entirely square. On the same outing, Goldie buys a Chinese lamp she can ill afford; the beauty of its painted porcelain captivates her, annihilating prudence. Back home, frightened by her extravagant impulse, she allows her aloneness to overwhelm her. The “genie” of the glowing lamp--the spirit of the man who made it--appears to comfort her and to greet her as kin. He reveals to Goldie what she is: a fellow artist, one who communicates across impossible reaches of space and time by creating things for people with the instinct to respond to them--that is, for “friends.”

Moved by the implications resonant in Goffstein’s every line--drawn and written--I haven’t done justice to the book’s succinctness. Each bit of it is necessary, and there’s nothing extra. The text, which begs to be read aloud, if only inside your head, has been refined to its essence. It has the quality of stones and glass cast up on a sun-warmed beach, having become, after long submission to the beating of the ocean’s waves and the drag of its tides, smooth, rounded, comfortable to hold, modestly beautiful. Though Goffstein’s sentences are spare and precise, their rhythm (prose, not verse, rhythm, but musical nonetheless) is cadenced and soothing; it creates an atmosphere of calm and completeness. This manner of expression can suffer from a surfeit of good qualities. In “Goldie,” it’s rescued by the occasional twinkle of an offbeat choice of word or turn of phrase. As a stylist, Goffstein has a cousin in Beatrix Potter.

The pictures are characteristic of Goffstein’s early books. Painstaking black line stands brave and unadorned in a white expanse softened only by dove-gray washes. The outlines have the staunchness and vulnerability you see in the handwriting of those newly literate. The human figures are short and plump--theirs is the endomorphic anatomy often matched to a benign temperament--and as sturdy as forever. The inanimate objects are equally plain and poignant. The place suggested is vaguely rural, vaguely middle-European; the time, a while ago. In other words, the setting, though strongly implying roots, is sufficiently not here and now for it to become the country of the imagination.

In “Goldie,” Goffstein explores her central concern, which is art: the nature of the people who make it and the process of its making. In her 30 books, she keeps moving back to the subject, as if each time she had discovered a new aspect of an immense wonder. She has produced two small compendiums, “Lives of the Artists” and “An Artist’s Album,” each comprising five profiles-in-miniature of visual artists who are historically real and (excepting an anonymous Native American woman whose work is a doll) celebrated. In “An Artist,” Goffstein treats the painter as a generic type, although the luminous pastel washes and the figure of the little old man who is the book’s hero, and its only character, cry out “Monet!” In this lovely work, Goffstein analyzes abstractly what an artist does and expresses it epigrammatically.

‘Goldie” remains my favorite, though, because it’s personal and because it’s so exquisitely understated. In this book, the word art comes up only when Omus tells Goldie he’s finally been convinced that she’s an artist because she’s “crazy.” And Goldie, whose activity might even be passed over as craft, is an ordinary creature in that the blazing light of fame never reaches her and she has no inflated notions about her work. Granted, the act of animation--breathing life into dolls--has traditionally, from folklore and fairy tale to Bunraku puppetry, been regarded as something pretty special. But the Goldie Goffstein gives us is blessedly ignorant of all that. What she does is simply an extension of what she is , perhaps nearly all of what she is. Her work is her vocation, but it is in no way separate from her. In her own eyes, it is not exalted, simply felt as an imperative. To our eyes, of course, she has all the marks of the artist: the sense of necessity, uncompromising attention to detail, the sublimation of the self to the work, the satisfaction in the process of making, which is like no other.

“Goldie” does not sentimentalize the circumstances of a dedicated artist’s life. On this subject it is matter-of-fact. It records the interminable and erratic working hours, the sheer technical difficulty of the labor, and the poverty that must be endured. In the small universe Goldie inhabits, food, clothing and shelter are reduced to basic necessaries; she lives largely on tea and buns. Admittedly, Goffstein, whose other big subject is domestic security, cushions the situation just a little. The menu is tea and buns, after all, not bread and water, and the loving detail with which the spare furnishings of Goldie’s home-workshop are rendered lends the place a climate of coziness. Still, any luxury--even a soul-mate’s art--is beyond our heroine’s reach.

Of all the monastic rigors to be accepted with equanimity, “Goldie” most emphasizes the social isolation that goes hand in hand with the solitude art demands from its practitioners. One of the delights of Goffstein’s treatment is we get to see Goldie temporarily defeated by the demands of her calling--after wandering around her small dark house like a stranger, she weeps until she sleeps--and then is rekindled to her arduous but, for her, irresistible task. Another virtue of the story is it doesn’t need to state outright what impels Goldie, because that is so clearly implied: She is about the business of creation, a holy and reverent act, imitating the work of the first creator. “An artist is like God,” Goffstein begins another of her books, “but small.”