by Philip Nel
On 5 May 1960, Dave and Ruth were having martinis and dinner in their living room with two other couples, Ken and Jackie Curtis and Jimmy and Dallas Ernst. After dinner, a news bulletin interrupted the game they were watching on TV. The Soviet Union had shot down an American U-2 plane, claiming that it was a spy plane. According to the U.S. government, the plane had been “studying meteorological conditions found at high altitude, had been missing since May 1,” when the pilot reported difficulty with his oxygen equipment while flying over Turkey, near the Russian border. Dave immediately said, “Oh, what a cock-and-bull story.” Though they were liberals, the Curtises and the Ernsts did not share his skepticism. Jackie Curtis asked, “Well, why would the U.S. government lie about such a thing?” Within a week, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev would produce the pilot, Francis Gary Powers, who had survived the crash, along with the film in the plane’s surveillance camera. Dave’s suspicions were warranted.27
As the news grew stranger, Krauss’s “surrealist-type news-items,” as she called them, were finding readers—in June 1960, the Village Voice agreed to publish a dozen. Krauss also thought that if Nordstrom would publish “If Only” in “picture-book form” but “not for children,” the result “could be pretty popular.” Nordstrom disagreed but was willing to help reissue A Good Man and His Good Wife with new illustrations. They tossed some names back and forth. Jules Feiffer had drawn up a dummy for the book some years earlier, but “he’s terribly popular” now and has “never done a children’s book.” Krauss added parenthetically, “probably never will now,” not knowing that Feiffer was then illustrating Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth (1961). She and Nordstrom also considered R. O. Blechman, author-illustrator of The Juggler of Our Lady (1952), and Marc Simont.28
The original illustrator of A Good Man, Ad Reinhardt, came up to Darien and Rowayton on 30 July to visit Jimmy and Dallas Ernst, Abe and Betty Ajay, and Johnson and Krauss. A few years had passed since they had seen Reinhardt, now a famous abstract painter. The visit reconnected the two men, and they began to correspond.29
Spending time with old friends who had become successful artists and with Abe Ajay, who was abandoning his commercial art career to become a painter and sculptor, prompted Johnson to ponder his own future path. He was creating fewer children’s books and hoped Barnaby might yet prove an on-screen hit, but he was growing creatively restless. His wife also served as a role model: She was now submitting her poems for publication in both smaller venues and larger ones. The year 1961 would be the first since the start of her career without a new Ruth Krauss children’s book.
21
LORCA VARIATIONS AND HAROLD’S ABC
Harold had to think of some other way to speed his trip. I is for Idea. He went to work on the next letter with his purple crayon.
—CROCKETT JOHNSON, Harold’s ABC (1963)
Ruth Krauss was so invested in her new career as a poet that at age fifty-nine, she decided to learn French. Having read Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, and Arthur Rimbaud in Kenneth Koch’s class, she felt that she should learn the language in which they had written. She and Dave planned a summer 1960 vacation “for a week or so only—maybe Quebec so I can practice reciting French poetry.”1
Before leaving for Canada, Crockett Johnson sent a dramatic adaptation of Barnaby to E. Y. Harburg. But Harburg was too busy to take on the project, and although he thought Barnaby “one of the classics of our day,” he did not have enough “time and energy” for the project. “I am both flattered and sad,” he wrote.2
The Hall Syndicate, however, was interested in a revival of the Barnaby comic strip. Enlisting Warren Sattler to do the artwork, Johnson updated the original plots for the 1960s—the Hot Coffee Ring became the Counterfeit Credit Card Ring, and the Victory Garden sequence became a story about Barnaby’s attempts to start a garden. He also added some new story lines that focused on contemporary topics such as marketing and questionnaires. Looking back at his old comic strips as he prepared them for the new series, Johnson was “amazed and stand in awe as I see how the characters solved their problems, seemingly without any aid from me.” Privately, however, he complained about breaking in a new assistant and because “the size of newspaper strips has shrunk so that I am having to rewrite and redraw everything.” Still, initial sales to newspapers were promising, and on 12 September 1960, the new Barnaby appeared in papers. Johnson created some inspired new episodes, but he was much less emotionally invested in the strip. Despite the year’s close-fought presidential election, the updated strip largely remained a passive observer of the political scene.3
His energies may have been too divided to give the strip the attention it needed. After the anticipated theatrical release of David Piel’s film version of Harold and the Purple Crayon, which still lacked a distributor, Johnson was planning to film five other Harold stories. He also had plans to adapt Barnaby strip material for a full-length feature film and for a series of 130 five-minute animated films to be shown on television. His collaborator on both projects would again be Lou Bunin. For a recent paper industry trade show, the two men had created an ad: Johnson drew the backgrounds, and Bunin used puppets to demonstrate why American Cyanamid’s new “wet strength” paper processes made stronger napkins and paper towels.4
The new Barnaby may also have lacked the earlier incarnation’s political focus because Johnson’s political views had become more complex. By the early 1960s, he was skeptical of those on the left as well as those on the right and believed that all politics was corrupt. Although he had supported Democratic candidates since the early 1950s and probably voted for John F. Kennedy in 1960, at a party soon after the election, Johnson remarked, “Kennedy’s just a thug.” When the crowd of liberals reacted in surprise, he continued, “Oh, well, his father was a bootlegger.” Johnson’s impulse to puncture his liberal friends’ optimism may have stemmed from his political disillusionment or from his distrust of Joseph Kennedy Sr., who supported British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s and remained a friend of Senator Joseph McCarthy into the 1950s.5
Johnson rarely talked politics, and he had friends across the political spectrum because he was reluctant to impose his convictions on others. As Shelley Trubowitz put it, “You could be the most reactionary bastard and be at his house. It didn’t make any difference to him. Whatever you thought, go ahead and talk. He didn’t have anything against you unless you were a Hitlerite or something like that.” Though Johnson had long since grown suspicious of the Communist Party, he continued to believe that the best solution to the world’s problems would be to start over with international socialism. But he voiced that opinion only to his closest friends.6
Through the winter of 1960–61, Johnson oversaw the production of revised Barnaby strips, and Krauss worked on her poetry. Atypically, she did not involve herself in Marc Simont’s reillustration of A Good Man and His Good Wife. She was busy writing a group of poems inspired by Federico García Lorca. Harper’s Magazine editor Kay Gauss Jackson had turned down Krauss’s submissions to date but encouraged her to send more.7
Jacqueline Kennedy, Caroline Kennedy, and Ruth Krauss’s I Can Fly, 1961. Image from Leonard Marcus, Golden Legacy: How Golden Books Won Children’s Hearts, Changed Publishing Forever, and Became an American Icon Along the Way (New York: Golden Books, 2007). Used by permission of the Estate of Jacques Lowe.
Krauss and Johnson spent Easter weekend visiting the coastal town of Cohasset, Massachusetts, where they picked up one of the Boston Sunday papers. In the Parade magazine insert, Ruth read a story about Caroline Kennedy, “the little girl in the White House.” In an accompanying photograph, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy smiles down at her three-year-old daughter, who holds a copy of I Can Fly, Krauss’s decade-old Little Golden Book. Despite her husband’s skepticism toward the Kennedys, seeing her I Can Fly in Caroline’s lap increased Krauss’s warm feelings toward the new first family.8
Determined to make an impression as a po
et, Krauss was submitting poems to many journals, including the Evergreen Review and Locus Solus. The latter’s summer 1961 issue, edited by Kenneth Koch, would include works by Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, William S. Burroughs, and Gregory Corso along with five of Krauss’s “news” prose poems and her “Uri Gagarin & William Shakespeare.” One of her more serious pieces, it alternates between Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 and the words of the cosmonaut who in April 1961 became the first person in outer space. It begins,
compare thee
more lovely
and a single spin around the earth
winds do shake
withstanding well the state of weightlessness
too short
too hot
and often could see the earth my native.
Mingling the words of the Soviet pioneer with the Renaissance playwright aligns space flight with classic verse, figuring technological advance as an enduring art. Noting the sublime achievement of the man who beat the Americans into space, Krauss’s poem also takes a stand. Against those who reviled all communists, the verse suggests at least that scientific advances transcend national boundaries and at most that the Soviet space program is as powerful as one of the English language’s greatest poets. The poem is a political statement, too.9
Keeping his politics mostly to himself, Johnson was busy with other projects—the new Barnaby, advertising work, and children’s books. By December 1960, with Nordstrom clamoring for Johnson to do the seventh Harold book, he confessed that he would like to do one, but only if “had an idea or a subject.” He suggested that if Susan Carr, who had just been made managing editor, could “write a jacket blurb in a spare moment,” he was sure he would “be able to write the book for it.”10
In April 1961, Carr sent jacket flap copy for Harold’s Republic:
“Here is the flap copy,” said Harold, “and anyone knows that books have flap copy. Therefore, if there is flap copy, it stands to reason that there must be a book.”
Harold, inimitable hero of purple crayon fame, once again proves his versatility (and the versatility of his creator). Starting with only the flap, this Lilliputian Aristotle weaves himself into one adventure and out of another in a story that is as lovable and logical as Harold’s basic premise.
Crockett Johnson’s many fans, as well as students of philosophy, will recognize the truth of the following syllogism:
Books are good.
When Crockett Johnson writes one, they’re better.
This new book about Harold is Crockett Johnson’s best.
Carr’s blurb planted the seed for another Harold book, but Johnson would not find time to work on it for another year.11
Ladies’ Home Journal asked him to write a monthly story about Ellen and her lion. He submitted three new tales, and the editors sent him a handsome advance and promised to publish a new story each month for a year; the stories could then be collected into a book for Harper. However, an October editorial shake-up at the magazine derailed the project. Hoping to give new life to the stories, Johnson asked whether Harper would want another Ellen book. His last statement for Ellen’s Lion showed only eighty-nine copies sold at the regular trade price; however, the book “seems to have picked up a tiny hard core of unusually ardent fans and this is a kind of encouragement.” Two of those fans were Susan Carr and Ursula Nordstrom. Nevertheless, when Johnson submitted eight new Ellen stories in June 1962, the Harper editors were not enthusiastic. Carr found “a sameness about all these stories that never came up in the first book,” with “Ellen always goading the lion, and being sort of horrid.” She passed the manuscript on to Ann Jorgensen Tobias for a second opinion: Tobias believed that Ellen and the lion were “battling” too much and that the new stories lacked the “lightness of touch” in the originals. Nordstrom agreed, breaking the news to Johnson as gently as she could: The editors liked some of the stories a lot but were “terribly puzzled by the general tone of crabbiness.”12
While Johnson faced rejection, Krauss continued to mull over her book of experimental poetry for children. After asking again whether Nordstrom would be interested in the idea, Krauss expressed some ambivalence about her status as a writer of picture books, signing the letter “Wm. Shakespeare the 15th (anti-pictherbooks campaign in session here).” Nordstrom quickly expressed interest and advised Krauss not to worry. Krauss sent in more poems, but Nordstrom responded less than enthusiastically: Though “lots of things in them are marvelous,” she was “dubious about a lot of the poems’ appeal” for children. However, “do send anything that you may write or that you may find filed away in your refrigerator. We would dearly love another Ruth Krauss book, of course.”13
Krauss then sent Nordstrom “Yuri Gagarin & William Shakespeare” and a duet between Winnie the Pooh and Shakespeare. Using the cut-up technique pioneered by the surrealists (and later adopted by William S. Burroughs), the poem creates a dialogue between the “When daisies pied and violets blue” song from the final scene of Love Labour’s Lost (1598) and Pooh’s “Cloud Song” from the first chapter of A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), bringing in the Latin translation of Pooh for added flavor. The short conversation begins,
WINNIE: How sweet to be a cloud
W.S.: when daisies pied and violets
WINNIE: floating in the blue
W.S.: and lady-smocks all silver-white
and cuckoo buds of yellow hue
WINNIE: Iniquum fatum fatu
W.S.: Cuckoo cuckoo cuckoo
Nordstrom was “delighted with” both poems, especially “Yuri Gagarin & William Shakespeare,” and would be happy “to keep reading whatever you send.” In October, Krauss received more poetic encouragement, as Harper’s published her “Variations on a Lorca Form,” marking both her first appearance as a poet in a mainstream magazine and the first time she had been paid for her poetry. Each of the poem’s seven short stanzas begins with the phrase “When I live again,” suggesting the possibility of reincarnation.14
After sending these back in July, Krauss had left for a ten-day writers’ conference at Wagner College on Staten Island, where she met editors from magazines (Mademoiselle, New World Writing) and publishers (Fawcett, Lippincott, Dial, Bantam, Scribner’s). She also met literary agents. Like many of their contemporaries, she and Johnson had dealt directly with publishers. However, because she was moving into a new field, she began to consider representation. At the conference, she also met and befriended poet and Wagner English professor Willard Maas and his wife, filmmaker Marie Menken, the couple who inspired the intense, fractious George and Martha of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), the Pulitzer- and Tony-winning play by Edward Albee (himself a participant in that year’s conference). If Krauss had not yet met O’Hara, then this conference introduced her to him, and he would soon become her teacher and poetic mentor.15
Krauss was also serving as mentor to younger writers. In 1961, Doris Orgel and her husband, Shelley, a psychiatrist, moved to Westport, Connecticut, and met Krauss and Johnson through Maurice Sendak. Doris Orgel was just getting into children’s books, and Sendak illustrated her first, a translation of Wilhelm Hauff’s Dwarf Long-Nose (1960). With Krauss presiding, Orgel, Mary Ann Hoberman, and another aspiring children’s author began meeting at a little bar on South Norwalk beach. Over Bloody Marys, they talked about writing and publishing books for children. Krauss advised them to do as she had done: participate in the Bank Street Writers group and observe children on playgrounds. Back at the Johnson-Krauss house, Johnson advised them not to fret and wait for publishers to reject their manuscripts. “Why do you put up with it?” he said. “I submit a manuscript of mine, and if I haven’t heard back in three weeks, I go there, and I pick it up and I leave. I’m not going to wait longer than that.”16
Ruth and Dave also became friends with the Orgels. When they went out to dinner, Doris Orgel was struck by Dave’s ability to hold his liquor: At nearly six feet tall and with an ex-football player’s build, drinks did not seem to aff
ect him. As Gene Searchinger recalled, at restaurants, Dave would ask for two martinis. When waitresses would ask if one was for Ruth, he would respond, “No, two,” pointing to two places on the table in front of him—“Here, and here.” Next to those spots, he would neatly arrange his cigarettes and a stack of matches. Out with the Orgels, Dave might start with a boilermaker, followed by several other drinks. But Doris Orgel never saw him drunk. Rather, two martinis for Dave was equal to one martini for any other person.17
During the summer of 1961, Dave and Ruth took another vacation, driving up through New Hampshire and into Maine. Ruth suggested they drive up to Denmark, Maine, where she had spent two formative summers at Camp Walden forty years earlier. Within a mile of the camp, however, memories overwhelmed her, and she could not go on. Dave turned the car around and they headed back south.18
Not encouraged by the new Barnaby’s performance, Johnson decided to walk away from the strip. In January 1962, he told syndicate head Robert Hall that Barnaby had been written through March, at which point Johnson wanted either to bring the strip to and end or have someone else carry on the writing. He had, he thought, “turned out a respectable year and half of strips” and “a few even brilliant episodes.” However, sales were not strong, and readers did not seem to be paying attention: The new strips “haven’t provoked the slightest murmur of reaction from anybody (not even a harsh word).” Children’s books “and maybe old age” were slowing him down; a “young and energetic fellow” might be able to give the strip the “push it needs toward popular reception.” No one took the job. Sattler drew the strip through March, at which point Johnson took over, writing and drawing the final sequence, which recycled the ending he had created ten years earlier. The new Barnaby concluded on 14 April 1962.19