Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss
Page 19
But Johnson’s art was often overlooked. Though the Harold series earned favorable reviews and sold well, Johnson’s other children’s books received little critical attention. One reason is that until recently, the Caldecott Committee has ignored cartoonists. In the 1950s, the award went to such beautiful watercolors as Ludwig Bemelmans’s Madeline’s Rescue (1954), Marcia Brown’s Cinderella (1955), and Robert McCloskey’s Time of Wonder (1958). Sendak’s magnificent india ink illustrations for Where the Wild Things Are would win in 1964. Dr. Seuss got Caldecott Honors in 1948, 1950, and 1951 but never received the top prize. Not until 1970, when William Steig won for Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, did a cartoon artist win the Caldecott Medal. The following year, Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen (1970), inspired by Winsor McCay’s turn-of-the-century Sunday strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, won a Caldecott Honor, and the medal subsequently has gone to several artists who either use a comic style or deploy the narrative techniques of comics. Though the Caldecott eluded him, Crockett Johnson received some recognition in 1958 when the American Institute of Graphic Arts awarded him a Certificate of Excellence at its Children’s Book Show. He designed the poster for the New York Herald Tribune’s spring 1958 Children’s Book Festival, depicting Harold standing atop a stack of purple-crayon-created books and reaching up over his head to draw a moon.
Sendak remained a regular visitor to the Krauss-Johnson home. He so loved his weekends there that he considered his time in Rowayton his “precious life.” That said, working with Krauss could be trying. He would paste an illustration in one place, and she would rip it off the page and place it in another. On many occasions, their fights brought him near tears. Johnson would step in to referee, quietly making a suggestion about the composition of the page over which Krauss and Sendak had been arguing. Sendak believes that “part of her fury was educating me, the dumb Brooklyn kid, into a more interesting human being. She was determined that I have more insight, that I think higher.” In contrast, Johnson was a welcoming, gentle presence who “looked just like everything he drew. The face was Barnaby. And yet it was a beautiful face…. He was not a beautiful man, but it was a beautiful face.” The two men sat by the fireplace and talked about books, with Johnson offering reading suggestions. Since Sendak had been reading Tolstoy, Johnson suggested that he try Dostoevsky and Chekhov. There was no test; Johnson never checked to see that Sendak had read the recommended books. Rather, he simply wanted to give his friend an opportunity to expand his intellectual horizons.9
Arriving one Friday, Sendak headed upstairs to begin unpacking. Happy to be in his room, with windows that looked out onto the water, he was shocked to discover that he had not packed his work for Krauss’s book. “It was one of those Freudian moments where clearly I just wanted to be with them,” he recalled. Embarrassed and nervous, he went downstairs and to explain that he did not have his work. Krauss was furious. “What the hell are you here for?,” she shouted. “What do you think this is, a hotel, for Chrissake?” Johnson swiftly intervened, saying, “Maury can come when he likes. And I think I’m going to take him for a sailboat ride.” He understood Sendak and was happy to accept him as their guest and friend. Krauss also understood but was not going to let Sendak know that. As he and Johnson walked out of the house and down to the dock, Sendak was so grateful that he didn’t mention his fear of water. He thought, “If I drown, at least I’m drowning with Crockett Johnson.” Sendak was safe with Johnson, but his “precious life” in Rowayton was ending.10
Krauss loved mentoring young people, helping them get started in their careers. By the latter half of the 1950s, however, Sendak was doing well professionally and was much in demand as an illustrator. Between 1953 and 1958, he illustrated between three and six books a year and published two books of his own. Krauss was happy for him but felt that he no longer needed her help.11
She began cultivating a professional relationship with another young gay artist she admired, Remy Charlip. Krauss loved his illustrations for David’s Little Indian (1956), a Margaret Wise Brown book, and wrote him a fan letter suggesting that he contact her. Charlip knew A Hole Is to Dig and especially liked I’ll Be You and You Be Me. He telephoned Krauss, and she invited him to visit. When he arrived, she explained the concept for her Book of First Picture Ideas. She had by then abandoned her attempt at a linear narrative, instead structuring it as a series of scenes, the same format A Hole Is to Dig followed. Charlip liked her idea and set to work creating full-color illustrations.12
Enthusiastic about his pictures, Krauss brought Charlip to see Nordstrom and Carr at Harper. Charlip put his colorful paintings on Nordstrom’s desk. Nordstrom was irritated by Krauss’s insistence on working with another young, inexperienced artist, and the editor’s first response was “No color! Anyway, it’s black-and-white that separates the men from the boys.” Losing her temper, Krauss leaned over Nordstrom’s desk, gathered Charlip’s artwork in her arms, and flung it into the trash. Crying, Krauss then ran out of the office toward the ladies’ room. Nordstrom ran after her. In the end, Nordstrom agreed to have Charlip as illustrator, though he would have to work in black and white. But she was particularly irritated by Charlip’s insistence that the book be in A Hole Is to Dig size: “It will look as though you are imitating Krauss and Sendak, and enough other publishers do that these days without Harper getting into the game.” Nordstrom did not want A Moon or a Button to detract from Philosophy Book, the “companion book” to A Hole Is to Dig on which Krauss and Sendak were working. When Krauss had suggested that project four years earlier under the title New Words for Old, Nordstrom had been lukewarm, but she had now agreed to publish it, and it was slated for Harper’s fall 1959 list.13
Delays on Harold at the North Pole almost made it miss Harper’s fall 1958 list, but it came out in time for the holiday season. Reviews were again laudatory, with Kirkus calling it “a whimsical holiday treat” and the Oakland Tribune describing it as “just as funny” as earlier Harold books. Only the New York Times Book Review was critical, having “expect[ed] more ingenious of Harold.” The positive reviews were welcome news to Johnson. His attempts to market the four-way adjustable mattress had failed, but his career as a children’s author was going well.14
Harold at the North Pole did not prove as popular as the other books in the series and ultimately went out of print. Figuring out how to sell Crockett Johnson’s books’ sly humor was sometimes challenging. For all his concerns about how well Harper was marketing his work, Johnson was not always sure which age group would want to buy his stories. After Johnson finished the manuscript of Ellen and the Lion, Carr and Nordstrom asked for a better title. He offered Talks with a Stuffed Lion because it “is as direct and descriptive a title as I will come up with and, … I kind of like it.” Although he recognized that such a title “may not sell,” “that is not important.” At least a few buyers, he thought, “will make a fond connection with ‘Talks with the Reverend Davison’ and the old inspirational and sex misinformation books of fifty years ago, which shall sufficiently delight us all.” Carr found this title “direct” but “also flat” and asked him to do better. When he came up with only Ellen and the Lion and Ellen’s Lion, Johnson proposed choosing the less ordinary of the two: “If there aren’t quite as many books called ’s Lion as there are and the Lion how about calling the fall book Ellen’s Lion instead of Ellen and the Lion?” Though it is impossible to know whether the title Talks with a Stuffed Lion would have helped, sales of Ellen’s Lion did not meet Harper’s expectations.15
Krauss was pleased to find resonances between her work in children’s books and “serious” art. Coming across James Thrall Soby’s Arp (1958), she was struck by the similarities between Jean Arp’s art—especially his Moustache Hat (ca. 1918), a visual combination of the two title items—and the art for A Moon or a Button. Her awareness of the continuities between the avant-garde and her own work not only speaks to her ambition to write for adults but also stems from her frustration with critical conde
scension toward children’s literature.16
The persistence of this attitude in the Authors Guild annoyed the members of its Children’s Division and had been irritating Krauss since she had joined the group in the 1940s. In 1948, recalling a guild discussion on this subject that nearly became a fight, Krauss wrote, “The whole field of books for children bears somewhat of the same status accorded children themselves in our culture. Even though they are felt to be greatly desirable, they are still look[ed] down upon.” Children’s writers were paid less, as were the staffs of each publisher’s juvenile division. A possible reason, Krauss thought, was that “except for a very few men, the publishers [of children’s books] are women, and this is also true in greatest measure the writers.”17
A decade later, some of the guild’s left-leaning children’s writers began to discuss the less remunerative book contracts offered those who wrote for a young audience. In 1959, they formed an informal caucus called the Loose Enders. According to Julia Mickenberg, the group “began to meet periodically for dinner, whenever they felt at ‘loose ends,’ and collectively they became an important force in the field.” Regular members included Krauss and Johnson’s old friends Herman and Nina Schneider and Mary Elting Folsom and Franklin “Dank” Folsom. Other core members included William R. Scott editor May Garelick and Scholastic’s Lilian Moore, Beatrice Schenk de Regniers, and Ann McGovern. These editors also wrote for children: de Regniers’s The Giant Story (1953) and What Can You Do with a Shoe? (1955) featured illustrations by Maurice Sendak. Krauss attended the Loose Enders, but as group member Leone Adelson recalled, “not regularly, because Ruth never did anything regularly.” Johnson attended only rarely.18
Though the members’ politics varied, all leaned left. As Mary Elting Folsom explained, that some were “more radical than others” was not an issue: “We just took it for granted that each of us shared with the others what I can only call a sort of basic liberal code.” Mickenberg notes that some Loose Enders turned to children’s books because McCarthyist purges had forced them out of teaching or other jobs. Others, however, turned to the field “not because other avenues had closed to them but simply because they discovered they liked to write for children.” But all Loose Enders “were opposed to the war in Korea and, later, the war in Vietnam. All were deeply concerned about the effects of racism upon children.”19
The Schneiders were perhaps the most financially successful of the Loose Enders, thanks to the National Defense Education Act, which created a market for their science books. Underwritten by that money, parties at their 21 West Eleventh Street brownstone in New York attracted an elite crew of artists and intellectuals, including Krauss and Johnson; Jules Feiffer; poets Stanley Moss and Stanley Kunitz; novelist Philip Roth; abstract painters Giorgio Cavallon, Linda Lindeberg (Cavallon’s wife), and Mark Rothko; illustrator Mary Alice “Mell” Beistle (Rothko’s wife); and electronic music pioneer Vladimir Ussachevsky and his wife, Betty Kray, director of the Academy of Poets. Mingling with other culturally important people and friendship with Nina Schneider, who also wanted to write for adults, nurtured Krauss’s dream of writing for older readers.20
In January 1959, A Moon or a Button was going to press, but Krauss was making no progress on Philosophy Book. “These damn books of this sort of feeling or essence-of-something-or-other are truly difficult,” she wrote to Nordstrom. A book of this type “just has to develop by itself.” More important, Krauss’s mind was no longer focused on this project. She wanted to be a poet.21
20
POET IN THE NEWS, CARTOONIST ON TV
And me I am writing a poem
for you
look! No hands—
—RUTH KRAUSS, “Drunk Boat,” There’s a Little Ambiguity over There among the Bluebells (1968)
In that same January 1959 letter, Ruth Krauss announced, “I have become a Poetry Nut. I’m not kidding. It has become the major interest of my life—at this point.” She was reading and writing poetry for an adult audience and wondered whether Nordstrom would be interested in a book of children’s verse. It would “have every kind of poem in it from strict ballad form to dramatic poems, looser narrative forms, little couplets just coupled (honeymooners), rhyme, unrhyme, assonance, alliteration, strict meters of every kind and no meters of every kind too.” She knew that it would “never sell like a Hole in the Head, but it will probably amble along and gather its own moss.”1
To pursue her new interest, Krauss began taking Kenneth Koch’s poetry courses at Columbia University in 1959. Though he joined the faculty only that year, Koch was an up-and-coming poet of the literary avant-garde, a founder (with John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara) of what would be known as the New York School of poetry. Some of his students (and Krauss’s classmates) in the early 1960s included Ron Padgett, David Shapiro, Gerard Malanga, and Daphne Merkin. As a teacher, Koch promoted the aesthetic sensibilities he would later summarize in “The Art of Poetry” (1975): “Remember your obligation is to write, / And, in writing, to be serious without being solemn, fresh without being cold, … Let your language be delectable always, and fresh and true.” While “poetry need not be an exclusive occupation,” Koch wrote, “You should read / A great deal, and be thinking of poetry all the time. / Total absorption in poetry is one of the finest things in existence.” Krauss considered dropping out of the children’s book field so that she could immerse herself in poetry.2
Krauss, who turned fifty-eight in 1959, was the oldest student in Koch’s class but also one of the most active participants, poet and filmmaker Gerard Malanga remembered. She “spoke up” in class, unafraid to “put [her] two cents in.” She was “really the best one in the class.” Although Koch and other teachers knew of Krauss’s successes in children’s books, most students did not; they were impressed by her poetry.3
Crockett Johnson remained immersed in an impressive array of projects. Though earlier attempts to adapt Barnaby for a weekly television show never got off the ground, in March 1959 Johnson found that it was “so live a TV property that I am almost constantly involved with some packaging outfit, network, or sponsor claiming to be on the verge of bringing it to the idiot’s lantern in a big way.” He suggested that Harper add a reference to Barnaby on the dust jacket of the forthcoming Ellen’s Lion, since a TV Barnaby “just might possibly happen about the time the book comes out.” The jacket was already in production, but Barnaby kept making progress toward the small screen, and Johnson worked on a new, more philosophical book for children.4
In October 1958, Nordstrom had asked if Johnson would be interested in writing a Harold story for the I Can Read series, Harper’s response to the Why Johnny Can’t Read crisis. Nordstrom had been planning this series for years, but Random House beat Harper into the field of reading instruction with Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat (1957), published four months before Harper’s first I Can Read book, Else Holmelund Minarik and Maurice Sendak’s Little Bear (1957). At the time that Nordstrom suggested that Johnson write an I Can Read book, Harper had just published Syd Hoff’s Danny and the Dinosaur and was recruiting other authors: Both Esther Averill’s The Fire Cat and Gene Zion and Margaret Bloy Graham’s Harry and the Lady Next Door would be published in 1960.5
Johnson said he would be interested. Working to keep his vocabulary at a slightly lower reading level than he had for his other Harold tales, he began work on a Harold I Can Read book. Inspired by the legend of the Fisher King, however, Johnson found himself writing not about Harold but about loss and imagination in what would be his most beautiful, poetic, and abstract story yet, Magic Beach, which he sent to Nordstrom in early April 1959.
In the story, two children, Ann and Ben, walk along a beach. Ann says, “I wouldn’t mind if we were in a story” because “interesting things happen.” Ben replies, “Stories are just words. And words are just letters. And letters are just different kinds of marks.” (As Maurice Sendak later observed, these are two “Beckett-like kids.”) When Ann is hungry, Ben spells JAM in the sand. A wave
washes over the letters, receding to reveal “a silver dish” full of jam. They have a snack. Ben observes that “things like this don’t happen … except in stories.” Ann agrees: “In stories about magic kingdoms, usually.” After Ben draws the word KING and a wave washes over it, the king appears, sitting on a rock, fishing. The two children explain to the king how the beach works, and they summon a horse so he can ride to his castle. Then he gives them a seashell and orders them to “leave the kingdom.” With the tide coming in, Ben and Ann rush back up the steep sandbank to safety. Watching the kingdom disappear beneath the ocean, they wonder whether there was time for “a happy ending” or if the “tide came in too soon.” Ann concludes, “The story didn’t have any ending at all! … When we left, it just stopped!” She then revises her claim: “The king is still there, in the story…. Hoping to get to his throne.” Ben says nothing but puts his ear to the shell, listening to the sea.
When he sent the manuscript of Magic Beach to Nordstrom, Johnson acknowledged the Fisher King influence, adding, “I am happy to say that I have avoided adding to the confusion by making sociological analogies as [T. S.] Eliot did.” He continued,
I believe I have restored to the legend some of its pre-Christian purity by making the grail a mollusk shell. You will notice I have used no part of Mallory’s or de Troyes’ cloak and dagger crap. Perceval (or Parsifal) becomes in this version a couple of typical American kids and the wasteland is nothing but an ordinary old sandbar. I am just telling you all this in case you happen to publish the book and somebody writes in, say a librarian, asking what it is supposed to be about. It is a variation on a poetic theme, a lesson in physical geography, a Safety council message, and a spelling bee, all rolled into one.