by Philip Nel
Despite her bubbly, outgoing nature, Ruth remained plagued by anxieties. During the 1940s, she discussed her problems with her physician; by 1956, she was seeing a psychiatrist, traveling into New York City for her weekly session at least until the mid-1960s. Her therapist was Dr. Daniel E. Schneider, whom another former patient described as “like a sledgehammer.” A strict Freudian, Schneider saw many creative people, including novelist Tom Wolfe. Schneider liked and respected Ruth, admiring her creativity and success as an artist. He believed that art was not the product of neurosis. Instead, liberation from neuroses left artists “free to develop … technical creative mastery” of their art. He considered writer’s block “the neurotic fear and separation of intuition and cognition,” and his counseling apparently helped Ruth overcome that hurdle, because she published prolifically during this period. Ruth found Schneider’s ideas so persuasive that she referred to them in conversation. Moving her hands as she spoke, Ruth would mention his opinion and then giggle to cover her embarrassment.16
Crockett Johnson, last page from and front cover for Merry Go Round (New York: Harper, 1958). Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.
By October 1956, Johnson had completed his third children’s book of the year; like Time for Spring, it charted new territory. Merry Go Round: A Story That Doesn’t End, was precisely that. With pages to be lifted up rather than turned from right to left and illustrated only on the front side, Merry Go Round invites endless page turning, and Johnson proposed binding it with rings to encourage this activity. The center of every page features the boy on the merry-go-round, but the background shifts, recording the child’s motion. Beneath each picture is a single line of text, minimally punctuated, with the sentence continuing on the next page. The last page (“on he rode, past the yellow sign and on”) does not end with a period, leading the reader directly back to the first page (the front cover), which has the words “and round and round and round and round and round” at the bottom. This experimental work presented several design challenges. When rings proved too expensive, Harper opted for spiral binding. However, since spirals tear pages more easily, they used larger, heavier paper stock. Agreeing to a cover, that did not bear the author’s name, Harper wrapped the book in a thin paper band with Johnson’s name and the book’s subtitle, publisher, and price.17
As the year came to an end, Johnson prepared to send Nordstrom the final version of yet another book, Harold’s Trip to the Sky. Again breaking with picture book conventions, he wanted black pages. More than half the book would follow Harold through the darkness of outer space. To achieve this effect, Johnson proposed that he make his “own photographic negatives, … laying in the color by my own hand.” Overall, this process would be cheaper for Harper than having the printer and engraver make the black pages, but it would increase Johnson’s out-of-pocket costs, and he asked the publisher to reimburse him. He did not mind spending his own money, but “I find that many people nowadays like to receive such bills because they can take them off their corporate income tax, thereby cutting down on the number of atomic bombs the government can make.” Harper agreed to the reimbursement.18
As Johnson’s comment about atomic bombs reflected, the political atmosphere had shifted. By 1956–57, McCarthyism had lost some of its hold on the popular imagination, and people on the left were speaking out. The Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955), and the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School (1957) had begun “to reshape the national and political agenda.” Registering this change in the national mood, Harold’s Trip to the Sky contains some topical satire, marking Johnson’s first venture into political commentary since Barnaby ended its run. After drawing himself into a desert, Harold thinks that “there isn’t much else to do … except play in the sand.” Then, however, “he remembered how the government has fun on the desert. It shoots off rockets.”19
Though topical, the specific target of this wry observation is trickier to pin down. In the context of the 1956 presidential contest, Johnson may be mocking Eisenhower’s push for guided missiles, Stevenson’s call for more missile spending, or both ideas. Whatever its target, Dave’s sly, politically ambiguous reference would likely escape the notice of reviewers, the following fall. Or would it?20
That fall, most reviewers saw in Ruth and Maurice’s latest—I Want to Paint My Bathroom Blue—another beautiful trip into the “innermost feelings of little children,” as the New York Times’s Lois Palmer wrote. “Maurice Sendak’s pictures show the happiness and activity of the little boy in his pretend world,” and children will want to “pretend along with him.” The Christian Science Monitor thought the book “a charming bit of fantasy for imaginative small children, the kind that sets them to dreaming and satisfies something that wants expression deep down inside.” Like Krauss, the little boy in the book likes open windows and believes in racial equality. Sendak drew the child’s friends in a rainbow of colors (orange, blue, brown, purple, yellow, pink), standing side by side, smiling and waving. Krauss considered this depiction “a definite statement in ‘race’ integration,” and although reviewers overlooked this theme, Krauss had at last written a antiracist children’s book.21
After completing a “child-language brochure” for the American Friends Service Committee, Krauss moved on to another project that would reunite her with Phyllis Rowand. Dedicated to Rowand’s daughter, Nina, “when she was a monkey,” Monkey Day marks the first time Krauss recycled an earlier story. The version that had appeared in I’ll Be You and You Be Me presents “a new holiday and a good song / if you have a monkey for a friend friend friend.” A little girl explains the holiday, sings the song (a version of “Happy Birthday”), and concludes with some “special talk / for talking to monkeys”: “Cheep cheep cheep.” Losing the gentle whimsy of the original, Monkey Day is filled with unnecessary details—presents, a wedding, and several dozen little monkeys.22
The decision to rework an earlier tale signaled Krauss’s creative restlessness. In a dozen years, she had published seventeen children’s books, had several other completed manuscripts, and was working on even more. Though she had done well as a writer for children, she never let go of her ambition to write for adults, and in the fall of 1957, she took Kay Boyle’s ten-week course in the history and analysis of the short story. Johnson, too, was seeking new outlets. He considered new types of children’s books and pushed the boundaries of his popular Harold series. Both authors were in the midst of a period of bold experimentation.
18
NEW ADVENTURES ON PAGE AND SCREEN
And, if they weren’t exactly in their right order, none of them complained.
—CROCKETT JOHNSON, Harold at the North Pole (1958)
As she considered pursuing new directions, Ruth Krauss still had to earn a living. To find ideas for her children’s books, she continued to do what had worked in the past—visiting the Rowayton Kindergarten and the Community Cooperative Nursery School. Even though they knew she was older, children accepted her as one of them. If Krauss wondered what the children were discussing, she would ask. They were happy to answer and to let her take notes.1
By the first few months of 1957, Krauss had gathered enough of their stories to show Ursula Nordstrom. In April, the two women began debating which ones to include in a new book. Nordstrom liked “The Happy Egg” so much that she thought it “could make a tiny little book by itself! … 2 year olds would love it.” However, “The Mish-Mosh Family,” a story about a “whole family inside of a child,” should go. They eventually settled on seventeen tales, and Maurice Sendak began creating drawings for each. Marking a change in Sendak and Krauss’s collaborative style, the layout was uncharacteristically straightforward—the text on each left-hand page, the illustrations on each right-hand page. By late July, Sendak had finished his pictures, and he and Krauss had had settled on a title, Somebody Else’s Nut Tree,
after the book’s final story, in which a child finds and adopts a pretty little nut tree, only to learn that it is not hers. That tale’s sudden shift in perspective underscores the book’s major theme—transformations.2
During the summer and fall of 1957, two major changes came to Ruth and Dave’s social circle. First, on 21 July, Simon and Schuster editor Jack Goodman died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of forty-eight. Once central to the social life of Rowayton’s artistic community, the Goodmans’ parties came to an end. Then, Phyllis Rowand remarried. Her new husband was Sidney Landau, the cofounder of Mayles Textiles, and he legally adopted Nina Rowand Wallace, joining his new family as a regular dinner guest at the Johnson-Krauss house.3
Published in the fall of 1957, Krauss and Rowand’s Monkey Day met a mixed reception. Library Journal thought it “cluttered” and “in poor taste” and marked it “Not recommended.” The New York Times Book Review’s George Woods called it “a silly, excessive story of monkey-cult devotion.” Other reviewers, however, thought Monkey Day classic Krauss. “Again it seems that Ruth Krauss has built a simple little phrase into a series of happenings that very little children will savor with delight,” wrote the New York Herald Tribune Book Review’s Margaret Libby.4
The fall of 1957 also saw the publication of Harold’s Trip to the Sky, in which Harold rides a rocket, overshoots the moon, and meets an alien “thing.” As Barbara Bader suggests, Harold’s Trip to the Sky can be read as a dramatization of the “fears of the Fifties”: “To Jung and others, the widespread sighting of UFO’s at the time stemmed from fear of nuclear destruction, and the whole of Harold’s Trip to the Sky can be seen as an expression of [these] anxieties, absorbed and transformed.” Contemporary reviewers, however, noted no political subtext and praised Harold’s Trip to the Sky as “just as funny and unexpected as ever,” in the words of the New York Times’s Ellen Lewis Buell. Booklist alleged that “some of the concepts may be too advanced for the youngest of Harold’s usual audience” but ultimately praised Harold’s Trip to the Sky as “good fun for kindergarten-age space travelers.”5
October 1957 also saw Harold take a journey to the big screen in David Piel’s film version of Harold and the Purple Crayon, narrated by Norman Rose. Johnson urged Harper to be prepared to capitalize on the movie’s imminent release. For the past year, he had been concerned that the publisher was not keeping the Harold books in stores—half a dozen people had told him that they could not find Purple Crayon—and that sales were lost as a result. The movie was due in theaters before Christmas, and he thought Harold would “get quite a bit of attention, at least enough to move a lot of books.” If Harold and the Purple Crayon “really is out of print,” he asked Harper’s Mary Russell to “please rush around the office for me, screaming.” Johnson offered to “subsidize a ‘vanity’ printing of fifty or a hundred thousand of each of [the three Harold books], to be stored in sheets ready for quick binding when a demand is indicated.”6
Harper had no intention of letting Harold and the Purple Crayon go out of print. The publisher was considering launching a line of paperback children’s books and executives thought the Harold series would sell particularly well and “could rival Pogo if we had him in paper.” Nordstrom pursued the idea, though no paperback version of Harold would be produced until Scholastic’s 1966 edition.7
When Johnson, Krauss, and assorted Harper employees went to a screening of the film in late October 1957, they loved it. By December, Piel was in negotiations with British industrialist and producer J. Arthur Rank, who expressed interest in “a series of Harold pictures, to be made with Rank money (and British government subsidy) and using less expensive British production facilities.” But the plan came to naught, and Piel had difficulty finding a distributor for his Harold. A member of the family that made Piels Beer, thirty-one-year-old David Piel was new to filmmaking: Harold and the Purple Crayon was his first. He had financed the production with a lien on the film itself, and when investors foreclosed, the animated Harold and the Purple Crayon fell into legal limbo. As with Barnaby a decade earlier, Johnson’s potential profits evaporated.8
These near misses and Johnson’s involvement in other projects may have dampened his enthusiasm for a new Barnaby book. In June 1957, a year after promising Nordstrom that he would work on it “soon,” he wrote again to say he would be in touch about it “next week.” Six months later, he had “made a start on a middle-of-the-book Barnaby sample. But I keep getting interrupted by more urgent little jobs. I still want to write it.” He never did.9
As Johnson passed on developing Barnaby’s commercial potential and bet on Harold’s, Krauss discovered that other companies were attempting to profit from A Hole Is to Dig without her permission. In 1956 and 1957, Tide, a trade magazine, sold its business services by “borrowing” phrases from the book (“arms are to hug”) and creating similar ones (“a faucet is to splash”). Extolling the benefits of advertising in Tide, one such ad announces, “A business paper is to serve.” Krauss was upset, and Harper not only asked the magazine to stop but appealed to the Joint Ethics Committee of the Art Directors Club, the Artists Guild, and the Society of Illustrators.10
A Hole Is to Dig also inspired many imitators—notably Joan Walsh Anglund’s A Friend Is Someone Who Likes You (1958), Phoebe Wilson Hoss’s Noses Are for Roses (1960), Sandol Stoddard and Jacqueline Chwast’s I Like You (1965), and Art Parsons and Leo Martin’s A Library Is to Know (1961). Parsons and Martin’s work was a tribute—an affectionate satire for librarians—but the others merely echo the Krauss-Sendak aesthetic. Advertisers embraced the child-centric definitions as adorable and sweet, and parodists mocked them out of distrust toward what they perceived as the book’s rosy view of childhood. In September 1961, Mad magazine’s “A Hole Is What You Need This Book Like in Your Head” featured cynical definitions: “A Mother is to hide behind when Daddy gets mad at you,” “Tears are to get your own way,” “A brother is to blame things on.” Though Nordstrom was not amused, Krauss had begun referring to the book as A Hole in the Head even before the Mad parody.11
A bona fide success both critically and commercially, A Hole Is to Dig embodied the best of the relationship between Nordstrom and Krauss. In early December 1957, Nordstrom showed her appreciation for Krauss and Sendak by presenting them with commemorative editions of A Hole Is to Dig, which had sold well over eighty thousand copies and was generating two-thirds of Krauss’s income. Sendak was so touched by the gesture that he promised to put it “on his table right next to the Bible and Shakespeare and Sophocles.” Nordstrom told Krauss, “We’re very glad you stepped off the Harper elevator that day so long ago with the anthropology material. And we hope you are glad too.” Krauss was: “What an absolutely wonderful surprise! I am truly touched!” Since Sendak was keeping his copy in such august company, Ruth said she would put hers on her table “right next to Jimmy Joyce and the play written by Picasso.”12
In August, Johnson turned in a new picture book, receiving the contract (with its thousand-dollar advance) in late October. The Blue Ribbon Puppies is Johnson’s most gentle book. Though it retains his characteristic ironic humor, there is no edge to it. The tone is sympathetic and the story is sweet: A little boy and a little girl decide to award a blue ribbon to the best of their seven pups but discover that each one is so adorable that they must name it the best at something.
It was the last time he did a Harper book with such complicated color separations. Problems had previously arisen with Terrible Terrifying Toby, prompting a June 1957 telegram from the author to Nordstrom: “Hold up printing of Toby at all costs colors wrong very many flagrant errors.” When he submitted detailed color art for The Blue Ribbon Puppies two months later, the work somehow was lost. Johnson had to redraw the entire book and redo the color separations, a prospect he did not relish. To achieve different colors, the offset-lithography printing process used screens to filter out a percentage of each of the inks then available—probably black, red, blue, and yellow. In t
his process, 40 percent blue would create light blue. To create other colors, printers combined inks by printing one layer on top of another: combining 40 percent blue with 40 percent yellow would result in a shade of green. He vowed “that my next book will be in black and white, complete in one piece, and no trouble to anybody.” Though Harper’s insurance reimbursed him $480 for the lost artwork, his next book, The Frowning Prince (1959), was indeed in black and white.13
Crockett Johnson, page from “Harold and the Big Day,” Good Housekeeping, December 1957. The story read left to right across two pages. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.
Ruth Krauss in the living room at 74 Rowayton Avenue, 1959. Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution. Reproduced courtesy of the New Haven Register.
Harold of course continued to draw in purple. By September 1957, Johnson had written a fourth Harold story, “Harold and the Big Day,” which would appear in the Christmas issue of Good Housekeeping. Harper then published a longer version, Harold at the North Pole in 1958. Since Johnson saved no drafts of the Harold books, comparing the thirty-page “Harold and the Big Day” to the forty-six-page Harold at the North Pole offers a rare glimpse into the mind of Crockett Johnson at work. The primary difference between the two tales is a fuller development of the narrative style characteristic of the Harold books: free indirect discourse, a third-person narrative closely aligned with a first-person point of view. In “Big Day,” “The snow stopped falling, but there were drifts everywhere. It looked like the North Pole.” In the book, “The snow stopped falling but it lay in big drifts everywhere. It covered everything.” Extending the scene to a second page, the narrative adds, “From the looks of things, Harold thought, he might very well be at the North Pole.” “It covered everything” both better conveys a child’s sense of size (the vastness of “everything”) and allows Harold to consider the scene before deciding where he is. Adding “From the looks of things” and “Harold thought” reminds us that we are seeing the world as Harold does. Johnson also delivers the insights and language of a more sophisticated, wry narrator—perhaps Johnson himself. “But Harold went speedily to work rounding up the reindeer” becomes “But Harold confidently went to work lining up the reindeer.” Lining up plays on the fact that the lines of Harold’s crayon literally create this line of reindeer. Juxtaposed with Santa’s “doubtful” look, confidently better conveys Harold’s resolve and optimism. These seemingly small differences illustrate Johnson’s genius at creating Harold’s universe—a place where every detail of the crayon’s trail is important and where the imagination has the power to change the world.