The rabbit with the umbrella in George Plimpton’s children’s book, The Rabbit’s Umbrella, is every bit as real as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny: that he might exist matters more than that he actually does. In this case, the rabbit, plus three robbers, shouting parrots, and a giant dog named Lump serve as bait to entice a boy to listen to Plimpton’s story, which is essentially a shaggy dog tale. To give him credit, though, there really is a shaggy dog in this tale:
The Rabbit’s Umbrella takes place in the town of Adams. And where is Adams? Well, “It’s simple enough to get to Adams once you find the station from which the train leaves.” The main industry of Adams is thimble-making, as is obvious from the sign at the edge of town.
Mr. Montague, who owns the thimble factory, wants only to make his wife and son happy, which is why he buys Lump the dog. He brings Lump home on the town’s one electric streetcar, which is the thing dearest to the heart of Doctor Trimble, the town’s world-traveled scientific expert (Expert in what? Never mind.).
The three robbers — Pease, Punch, and Mr. Bouncely — have one gun among them and plan to use it to steal great fortunes, starting with Mr. Montague’s.
Unfortunately, they haven’t quite got a clue just how to go about being robbers, so when they do manage to break into Mr. Montague’s house, the only thing they make off with is Lump. This leads to a high-speed chase by Doctor Trimble, Mr. Montague, and the town cop on the electric streetcar — which is probably the last thing you’d want to chase a gang of robbers in (Never mind again). But all ends happily, though the rabbit with the umbrella never does appear.
Still, the boy demands at the end of the book, “I want to know about the rabbit with the umbrella.” And so Plimpton explains:
You want to know about the rabbit with the umbrella. Doctor Trimble would be the one to explain it to you. He has not only seen the rabbits but also chipmunks with parasols and sun helmets and squirrels with small pianos in their houses, and he has seen the mice skate on the frozen lakes in winter. He has seen so many umbrella-carrying rabbits that if he were writing this epilogue it would be as long as the book itself. He told me once he had seen a whole field full of rabbits opening and shutting their umbrellas after a summer rainstorm, the drops shaken off sparkling like diamonds in the new sun. I have never seen one myself, though I think I saw one smelling a petunia when I was a boy your age, playing in my great-grandfather’s garden. But Doctor Trimble tells me the reason dogs roll their tongues out and laugh is that they recall suddenly how funny a rabbit looks, leaping through a hedgerow with an open umbrella bouncing above him.
… Life is full of mysteries, and it’s nice to have a mystery that is a rabbit with an umbrella.
Which is as good an explanation as anyone really needs.
George Plimpton wrote this book, inspired by The Twenty-One Balloons, the Newbery Medal-winning book by William Pène du Bois, then working as the art director for the The Paris Review. Plimpton’s amiably absurd narrative notwithstanding, it’s Pène du Bois’ illustrations that are really the star of the book. Plimpton imagined it as a bedtime story he might tell Lucas Matthiessen, the son of his The Paris Review co-founder Peter Matthiessen — although the Matthiessens had returned to the U.S. by the time the book was published.
After the book was accepted fr publication by Viking, Plimpton wrote his parents, forwarding the latest copy of The Paris Review and apologizing for the angry tone of its stories. “The contents, you’ll be glad to hear, are hardly reflections of my own character, which remains merry enough and full of hope and enthusiasm,” he assured them. He also predicted that, successful or not, The Rabbit’s Umbrella would not be considered “the product of a tormented mind.”
The Rabbit’s Umbrella is available in electronic formats on the Open Library: Link.