September, 2007: I first encountered the incomparable Freddy the Pig in our neighborhood public library, when I was about nine years of age. I can't remember which specific work it was in the Walter Brooks series of 26 Freddy books, but I was immediately hooked by the spirited porker's wit, decency, chutzpah and all-too-human flaws, and went on to read several more Freddy adventures (all that our local library owned). He was a detective, a magician, an astronaut, a politician, whatever role was required to solve the problems at hand on a farm full of talking animals. Talking animals? A porcine sleuth? My older brother, a teenager then, sniffed at such anthropomorphisms. "Kid stuff. Juvenile." Yes, but...they were exceedingly well written by New Yorker staff writer Brooks and imbued with droll humor and sly satire. They are just as entertaining for adults as for children, and certainly not for the dull-witted. They have the age-spanning appeal of the Harry Potter books, which I much enjoyed, although I would say the Freddy the Pig novels are more original and far more subtle. It pleases me to no end that the Brooks books, published between 1927 and 1958, are once again widely available. Below is a great look back at the Freddy the Pig series from the New York Times:
 

Remembering Freddy the Pig
by Adam Hochschild (Excerpt)

May 22, 1994: The moral center of my childhood universe, the place where good and evil, friendship and treachery, honesty and humbug were defined most clearly, was not church, not school and not the Boy Scouts. It was the Bean Farm.

The Bean Farm, as all right-thinking children of my generation knew, was the upstate New York home of Freddy the Pig and his fellow animals. They were the subject of 26 books by Walter R. Brooks, a New York advertising man and a staff writer for the New Yorker, that appeared between 1927 and Brooks's death in 1958, One of Brooks's many triumphs of tone was that his human characters were surprised, but only mildly surprised, that the animals talked. Mr. Bean, whose farm they lived on, barely said a word, so he appeared the unusual one.

Brooks had many admirers, from my fifth-grade classmates to the mighty Lionel Trilling, who called the books "delightful." Other loyalists have claimed Freddy as the ancestor of more famous literary pigs such as those in George Orwell's "Animal Farm" (1945). In fact, in "Freddy the Politician" (first published in 1939 as "Wiggins for President" ), the animals foil a crafty gang of woodpeckers who try to seize control of the Bean Farm by making extravagant promises - a revolving door for the henhouses, cat-proof apartments for the rats and so on. In his book "Fairy Tales and After," the critic Roger Sale pointed out that :Freddy the Politician: "not only preceded Orwell's work but is a good deal more careful with its materials and, for that matter, shrewder about its politics…The actions emerge much less mechanically than do Orwell's."

Freddy's readers have called him a porcine prince, a pig of many parts, a paragon of porkers, a Renaissance pig. As the problems he faces require, he is by turns a cowboy, a balloonist, a magician, a campaign manager, a pilot, and a detective. But he is the most unheroic of heroes: he oversleeps, daydreams, eats too much and, when not suffering from writer's block, writes flowery poetry for all occasions. His tail uncurls when he gets scared. Although lazy, he accomplishes a lot, because "when a lazy person once really gets started doing things, it's easier to keep on than it is to stop."

Walter R. Brooks's gentle genius shines even brighter in his villains. Take, for example, Watson P. Condiment, the comic book magnate, who has six big houses, 15 big cars and a yacht. A blustery blackmailer, he is "a tall thin man who always looked as if he had a stomach ache. That was because he did have a stomach ache." But the animals can thwart Mr. Condiment's evil plans, because "people who read comic books will believe almost anything."

Almost all the other villains foiled by Freddy are representatives of the Establishment. The bank president, Mr. Weezer, who appears in many of the books, has glasses that fall off anytime anyone mentions a sum over $10. General Grimm is "short, stocky and red-faced and looked as if his uniform was too tight for him but nobody had better mention it." Mr. Gridley, the high school principal "never came close to anybody he was talking to but always stood off several yards and shouted."

The pompous, timid Senator Blunder flees the scene when pursued by the animals, because "should I be struck down, into what hands would fall the reins of the ship of state?" The fabulously wealthy Margarine family tears up farmers' fields with fox hunts in "Freddy Rides Again." (The fox, of course, is a friend of Freddy's, and the Margarine's are undone.) And, until he is exposed by the animals, a conniving real estate man pretends he is a ghost and haunts houses he wants the occupants to sell.

Poking fun at generals, realtors, bank presidents and the like was unusual fare for children's books of the 1940's and 50's. Other volumes make a few digs at the space program and at the FBI - Freddy's bumbling Animal Bureau of Investigation often misses the evidence right under his snout. In a subtle way the books even prefigured the spirit of the 60's.

In "Freddy and the Bean Home News" the animals start their own paper because Mrs. Underdunk, the rich, haughty newspaper owner, and her editor, Mr. Garble, distort the news. When the evil Mr. Condiment hits Freddy, Freddy thinks: "He slapped me because I am a pig….If I were a boy or a man he wouldn't have done it." When Freddy becomes mayor, he solves the traffic problem by banning all parking within city limits.

Small wonder, then, that some of the children who grew up on these books went on to found alternative newspapers, to march for civil rights and to become ardent environmentalists. Still, you don't have to be in the 60's generation to appreciate Freddy. As with all books that last, their attraction is broader and deeper. Essentially, they evoke the most subversive politics of all: a child's instinctive desire for fair play. Brooks speaks powerfully to his young readers' moral sense without ever overtly moralizing. The local sheriff, for example tells Freddy's sidekick, Charles the rooster, that he will get much tougher penalties for pecking the face of a rich man than that of a poor one. Truer words were never spoken. But how can a reader feel preached at when it's someone talking to a rooster.

Above all, it is Brooks's moral words that sticks with his readers. Geoffrey Stakes, in a 1992 article in The Village Voice pointed out that the Bean animals had "a one-animal, one-vote rule in place long before the human Supreme Court established our version." Wendy Wolf, a New York book editor, learned that the Nuremberg defense is no good. Like when the children of Simon the Rat say, "Our father made us do it,' they're told: 'Forget it, you're going to jail.'" --New York Times Book Review.

Freddy the Pig books by Walter R. Brooks
 

Children's Literature