Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss

by Philip Nel

  Crockett Johnson, “Don’t Blab,” cartoon for the Office of War Information, ca. 1942. Image courtesy of the National Archives II, College Park, Maryland. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.

  In the earliest strips, Johnson was still working out his style, the characters, and the boundaries between O’Malley’s world and the world of the grownups. In addition to Barnaby, Dave continued to write the Little Man with the Eyes for Collier’s and served as liaison between the U.S. Treasury Department and American Society of Magazine Cartoonists, helping to promote the War Bond campaign. He wrote the script for a War Bond strip drawn by Ellison Hoover that ran “in house organs of big companies.”6

  Ruth Krauss continued to commute into New York to take anthropology courses at Columbia. Her instructors included Gene Weltfish, whom she considered “a friend,” and Ruth Benedict, whom Krauss “used to go and hear … lecture the way some people go to plays.” She also sought to contribute to the war effort by “fighting ‘Fascism,’ on the home front as well as abroad. Also seeing the disappearance of all attitudes involving cruelty to others or denial of the rights of others; and having these attitudes supplanted by those based on scientific research and a sense of fairness,” as she wrote in March 1944. When the idea of distributing an antiracist pamphlet among the members of the U.S. armed forces came up, Krauss and about a dozen others connected to Columbia’s anthropology program drafted ideas that would inspire Benedict and Weltfish’s best-selling The Races of Mankind (1943).7

  A thirty-two-page booklet illustrated by Ad Reinhardt, The Races of Mankind used science to show that we are all “one human race” and that culture, not nature, explains differences between peoples. In the 1940s, this idea was controversial. Among those who objected, Kentucky congressman Andrew May was upset by Benedict and Weltfish’s use of data from World War I army intelligence tests in which southern whites scored lower than northern blacks and by the authors’ contention that “the differences did not arise because people were from the North or the South, or because they were white or black, but because of differences in income, education, cultural advantages, and other opportunities.” May persuaded the army not to distribute The Races of Mankind, thereby inspiring public protests, garnering media coverage, and boosting sales. The pamphlet sold nearly a million copies in its first ten years and was translated into French, German, and Japanese.8

  Barnaby rapidly built a devoted following among culturally influential people, including Dorothy Parker, W. C. Fields, Terry and the Pirates creator Milt Caniff, and Duke Ellington. When O’Malley and Barnaby visited a radio station in a November 1942 strip, O’Malley said, “Give ear to the strains of this Duke Ellington opus, m’boy … Sizzling but solid—as we cognizant felidae say.” Ellington subsequently wrote in to PM, “Please tell Crockett Johnson to thank Mr. O’Malley on my behalf for coming out as an Ellington fan. That makes the admiration mutual.” He concluded, “Tell Barnaby that I believe in Mr. O’Malley—solidly.” When the first Barnaby collection was published in September of the following year, Parker wrote, “I think, and I am trying to talk calmly, that Barnaby and his friends and oppressors are the most important additions to American arts and letters in Lord knows how many years. I know that they are the most important additions to my heart.”9

  Despite its prominent fans, the comic’s circulation grew slowly. In late 1943, Barnaby was in 16 American newspapers, and by the following October, that number had grown to 33. At its height, Barnaby was syndicated in only 52 papers. (By contrast, Chic Young’s Blondie, the strip with perhaps the largest circulation, was appearing in as many as 850 papers at that time.) As Johnson observed in late 1942, “If Dick Tracy were dropped from the News, 300,000 readers would say, ‘Oh dear!’ But if Barnaby went from PM, his 300 readers would write indignant letters.” Though it never had a mass following, Barnaby was by 1943 already earning Johnson five thousand dollars per year.10

  Crockett Johnson, illustration from Constance Foster, This Rich World: The Story of Money (New York: McBride, 1943). Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.

  In the spring of 1943, Johnson’s career branched in another direction when he illustrated his first children’s book, Constance J. Foster’s This Rich World: The Story of Money. Along with Ruth Brindze’s Johnny Get Your Money’s Worth (1938), This Rich World is one of the first wave of children’s books inspired by the consumer movement, designed to educate children about money and the marketplace. Expressing Foster’s understanding that “many of our problems are economic at root,” This Rich World is also the sole children’s book to display any hint that Johnson was once a New Masses editor. One illustration notes that “Millionaire Cadwalader and thirty-dollar-a-week Tom Kent pay the same indirect taxes,” a not-so-subtle criticism of the flat nature of the sales tax. Another suggests the precariousness of an economic system built on borrowing. One man in a suit gives a thousand-dollar deposit to another man in a suit, identified as banker. The banker then gives a thousand-dollar loan to another man in a suit, who gives a thousand-dollar check to the first man.11

  For her part, Krauss soon became annoyed that when a student did research, the professor’s name went on the publication. Moreover, her anthropological work made her acutely aware that children quickly absorb the values of their culture; effecting change would require reaching children early in life. When she discussed this idea with one of her friends, the friend responded, “You should be writing for children and not doing this.” Inspired, Krauss started writing a book that she hoped would give children progressive ideas. She undertook an anthropological examination of prejudice that would teach children about the dangers of fascism and anti-Semitism.12

  She took her manuscript to Harper and Brothers, riding the elevator up to the office of Ursula Nordstrom. Nearly a decade younger than Krauss, Nordstrom had joined Harper in 1931 and had become director of the Department of Books for Boys and Girls in 1940. When Krauss stepped off the elevator, she met Nordstrom’s assistant, Charlotte Zolotow, who was supposed to screen visitors. Zolotow remembered a young woman with “disheveled hair,” an “off-beat” sense of humor and “perspective about life,” and obviously strong “feelings for children.” After a few minutes, Zolotow went into Nordstrom’s office and said, “You’ve got to see her, you’ve got to see her!” Nordstrom and Krauss then talked for a long while. After Krauss left, Nordstrom told Zolotow, “She’s wonderful, and she’s going to write a book for us.” But it would not be the manuscript Krauss had brought with her: “That was a life of Hitler, and I didn’t think that would do for the children’s book world.”13

  Before the end of World War II, children’s books that tackle prejudice are rare. In the wake of the war, Ernest Crichlow’s illustrations for Jerrold and Lorraine Beim’s Two Is a Team (1945) show black and white children who are best friends. H. A. and Margret Rey, the creators of Curious George and acquaintances of Krauss and Johnson, created Spotty (1945), in which spotted bunnies and white bunnies learn to get along. Ruth’s manuscript was still a couple years ahead of the curve.14

  Johnson, too, was working on what would become his first published book, revising and redrawing the best episodes of Barnaby’s first ten months for publication in a single volume in the fall of 1943. He also continued to work on new daily Barnaby strips, usually at night. Sitting at his desk and smoking a cigarette, Johnson would write and draw from 11:00 at night until 5:00 the next morning. He usually spent two nights writing the week’s script, followed by two nights drawing the strips. Sometimes he was running so late that at 6:00 in the morning, he would bring his strips, ink still wet, to his neighbor Bob McNell, who would drop them off at the PM Syndicate on the way to his job in New York City. Like his character, Harold, Johnson relied on his ability to improvise under pressure. Just as, when falling off a cliff, Harold keeps “his wits and his purple crayon” and draws him
self a balloon, so the approaching deadline focused Johnson’s wit, igniting his imagination at night.15

  9

  A GOOD MAN AND HIS GOOD WIFE

  Then, the man and the girl get married.

  They hold hands

  and they ride home

  —galoop galoop galoop galoop

  galoop galoop galoop galoop—

  together.

  —RUTH KRAUSS, Somebody Else’s Nut Tree and Other Tales from Children (1958)

  Dave’s working methods meant that he and Ruth kept very different hours. Ruth rose at seven in the morning, after which she would take their two dogs for a walk along the Five Mile River. While he slept, Ruth began working on story ideas in her upstairs studio. Dave rose at noon, and Ruth fixed his breakfast and her lunch shortly thereafter. Then he would read for about two hours before working in their Victory Garden or going sailing while she swam. At 5:30, they had dinner, prepared by Ruth. Dave would start work on Barnaby at 8:00 but found that he only really got under way after the 11:00 news. Despite living in different personal time zones, they were a very close couple—so close that, on 25 June 1943, they got married in New London, Connecticut.1

  Harper gave Krauss a three-hundred-dollar advance and a contract for her first children’s book in October 1943. Influenced by her work on Ruth Benedict’s anthropological project on south Italian farming families, A Good Man and His Good Wife offers a novel twist on folktales that mock a husband’s failed attempts to copy his wife. In contrast, Krauss has mimicry supporting the husband’s efforts to teach a lesson to the wife. Nonetheless, as Krauss admitted four years later, A Good Man and His Good Wife “made some mistakes” because “the characters are cast in the conventional roles.” The “good man” can never find anything because his good wife keeps moving things around, explaining, “My dear, I get so tired of the same things in the same place.” Frustrated, he puts his shoe on his head, his garters around his neck, his tie around his knee, his pants on his arms, his coat on his legs, his spectacles on his elbow, and his socks on his ears. He then sits on the breakfast table, eating his napkin and wiping his face with a biscuit. When his wife exclaims, “My dear, this is ridiculous!,” he replies, “My dear, I get so tired of the same things in the same place.” The tactic cures “his good woman of a bad habit”: she stops moving things around.2

  Ad Reinhardt, two-page spread from Ruth Krauss, A Good Man and His Good Wife (New York: Harper, 1944). Reproduced courtesy of Anna Reinhardt. Copyright © Anna Reinhardt.

  Ad Reinhardt received the same advance and worked up a rough dummy of the book while Krauss pondered her next project, an anti-ageist children’s book, I’m Tired of Being a Grandma. Ursula Nordstrom found parts of the beginning amusing but considered the manuscript “forced” and “not a really good follow-up to A Good Man and His Good Wife.” Krauss persisted, sending Nordstrom two new versions of the story because “our concepts of how people think, feel, and behave at certain ages, are socially conditioned,” and these concepts were “practically as bad as race-prejudice, prejudice against women, immigrants, etc.” Krauss pointed to “the Northwest Coast Indians of the United States and Canada” as holding “entirely different concepts about old people”: “Among these Indians, the high point of romantic sex is old-age, about seventy to ninety. You’re supposed to be romantic then; so, consequently, you are romantic then.” Though sympathetic, Nordstrom did not think the idea worked as a story.3

  Crockett Johnson with the cover drawing for Barnaby (New York: Holt, 1943). Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.

  Also in October 1943, Henry Holt published Barnaby, bringing the darling of the smart set to a wider audience. Rockwell Kent praised “Crockett Johnson’s profound understanding of the psychology of the child, of grownups and of fairy godfathers.” William Rose Benét, who won the 1942 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, called Barnaby “a classic of humor” and declared Mr. O’Malley “a character to live with the Mad Hatter, the White Rabbit, Ferdinand, and all great creatures of fantasy.” Ruth McKenney, whose My Sister Eileen had been nominated for an Oscar earlier that year, took delight in “that evil intentioned, vain, pompous, wonderful little man with the wings.” She “suppose[d] Mr. O’Malley has fewer morals than any other character in literature which is, of course, what makes him so fascinating.” Dorothy Parker began her “Mash Note to Crockett Johnson” by confessing that she had tried and failed to write a review of his work: “It never comes out a book review. It is always a valentine for Mr. Johnson.”4

  The first printing of ten thousand copies sold out in just a week, and sales reached forty thousand copies by the end of the year. The 4 October issues of both Life and Newsweek ran features on Barnaby. Reprinting the ten-strip sequence in which Gorgon, the dog, begins to talk, Life described Barnaby “as a breath of sweet cool air” and thought the comic “written and drawn with the intelligent innocence of a Lewis Carroll classic.” Newsweek’s profile reprinted some of the positive press, noting that, although “only seven papers” run Barnaby, “the intense enthusiasm of their small audience more than offsets the lack of numbers.” Indeed, if PM were “to cease publication tomorrow, the first question asked by a large bloc of its 140,000-odd readers would be: ‘Where is Barnaby going?’” On 9 November, New York’s Norlyst Gallery began a four-week exhibition of original Barnaby strips. For two hours on opening night, Crockett Johnson sat at a table between two mounted displays of his Barnaby comics. With cigarette in his left hand and pen in his right, he signed copies of Barnaby for fans, including Broadway actress Paula Laurence and painter Jimmy Ernst.5

  Of all the Barnaby characters, only O’Malley truly captured the public’s imagination. When Barnaby fan clubs began to form, they inevitably named themselves after the club to which O’Malley belongs, the Elves, Leprechauns, Gnomes, and Little Men’s Chowder and Marching Society. Such societies formed not only in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut but also in Colorado and in Italy (founded by a serviceman). One fan urged the postmaster general to issue an O’Malley stamp, and another nominated him as Time’s Man of the Year. In 1944, O’Malley inspired both a song (“Mr. O’Malley’s March”) and an ad campaign for Crown Zippers. To capitalize further on the strip’s success, PM’s Hannah Baker licensed the manufacture of dolls based on the Barnaby characters, although war shortages delayed production and Baker eventually abandoned the project.6

  Krauss continued to envision other ideas for books, none of them successful. In January 1944, she sent Nordstrom Elizabeth Hears the Story of Our Flood, based on her experience of the 1936 Bucks County flood. In February, Krauss sent Nordstrom a rough dummy for what she called “a ‘culture’ book for older children: i.e. putting across the idea that behavior taken by us for granted as natural is actually conditioned.” Nordstrom was not interested in either book but encouraged Krauss to keep trying.7

  Krauss’s next idea came after she found herself imagining a conversation with the five-year-old boy who lived next door. The result was a one-hundred-word story, The Carrot Seed, about a little boy who believes his carrot will come up even though everyone tells him that it won’t. Johnson created an illustrated dummy for the book, and Nordstrom loved it. In late May 1944, Johnson and Krauss received book contracts and advances of three hundred dollars each. Krauss joked that on a per-word basis, she had become “the highest paid author of the printed word.” Ruth was proud of herself. For the first time, she seemed to be succeeding in her chosen occupation.8

  Because Barnaby had given Crockett Johnson name recognition and Ruth Krauss lacked it, Harper’s marketing department initially promoted The Carrot Seed to bookstores as illustrated by Crockett Johnson and “written by his wife.” Angry, Krauss wrote to her publisher that the phrase was “embarrassing because I’m made to trade on another person’s reputation.” The wording implied that the “artist with reputation illustrates this book, not becau
se it is a good book and one that he’s interested in illustrating, by a writer named Ruth Krauss, but because he’s being nice to his wife, Ruth Krauss, who’s [sic] book probably stinks except that he’s probably touched it up here and there.” Nordstrom found Krauss’s attitude “incredible” but nevertheless told her, “OK—we’ll never mention your marital connections again.”9

  With two-color cartoon illustrations by Reinhardt, A Good Man and His Good Wife was published in the fall of 1944. Although it now seems somewhat sexist, reviewers at the time found it funny and offered praise. The Magazine of Art named it one of the year’s best children’s books, “infused … with real wit” that would be “enjoyed by people of all ages.” Three decades later, critic Barbara Bader wrote that “nonsense” is key to the tale’s appeal. The man’s tactic of taking his wife’s words at face value is “not unlike the way kids confound their elders, sometimes innocently, sometimes not, by taking their words literally too.”10

  Once Barnaby became moderately successful, Johnson found that creating a finely tuned daily strip required a lot of work: “There’s nothing worse than the obligation to be funny.” He realized that he needed help. Fresh out of the army, Howard Sparber got a job at PM, thinking that he would be a staff artist. When he reported for work, however, he learned that Johnson had seen Sparber’s portfolio and wanted to hire him as an assistant to do inking on Barnaby.11

  Meeting Johnson’s exacting standards was a challenge. According to Sparber, “I could never quite grasp the tightness of his line. I learned a great deal from him, but I didn’t draw that way.” Sparber saw Johnson as more than a perfectionist: “Perfectionist is sort of ordinary. He was way beyond that.” Johnson’s background in layout and in typography inspired him to set his dialogue in type. Barnaby was the first strip to always use typeset dialogue, with Johnson using italicized Futura medium. Designed by German typographer Paul Renner in the 1920s, Futura embodies the Crockett Johnson aesthetic: it excises needless detail, rendering its simple geometric forms in precise lines of uniform width. This devotion to precision informs Johnson’s diction, too. As Sparber explained, the type “wasn’t just sort of dashed in. Dave would be writing the text as if he was counting characters in his head, because he knew he had to do five lines to fit into a balloon that would be over Mr. O’Malley’s head.”12