Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss

by Philip Nel

  Krauss’s poetic insights develop from her careful listening, experimentation, and unexpected juxtapositions. In his mathematical work, Johnson’s insights were largely visual. As he admitted, he was “a desultory and very late scholar” of mathematics. He avoided algebra, he said, “because algebra, or my ineptness with it, tends to make me lose a graphic grasp of a picture.” Instead, he explained, “I played with what I knew in advance to be the elements of the problem, imagining them as a construction in motion, an animated film sequence with an infinite number of frames running back and forth between plus and minus limits across the point of solution.” Johnson worked out solutions by painting pictures of problems, testing different theories on his canvas.17

  In 1968, he found a visual solution for the “squared circle” puzzle and wrote an algebraic explanation to accompany it. With the aim of publishing his discovery, he wrote to mathematicians and the scientifically minded, asking for opinions. He began corresponding with Alex Gluckman, an old friend and mathematician who worked for the Atomic Energy Commission in Washington, D.C.; Martin Gardner, author of Scientific American’s “Mathematical Games” column (and of The Annotated Alice); and Harley Flanders, a math professor at Purdue University and editor of the American Mathematical Monthly. They offered advice, suggesting books and articles he might read. At Gardner’s suggestion, Johnson also submitted his squared circle proof to the editor of the Mathematical Gazette, Dr. H. Martyn Cundy. In late May 1968, Cundy replied that Johnson had submitted what was “certainly a very close approximation to √π—one of the best I have seen. It is also delightfully simple, and I think we can spare a little space for it.” Only a year after deciding that he would not only paint theorems but create them, Johnson was going to become a published scholar of mathematics. His article, “A Geometrical Look at √π,” would appear in the journal’s January 1970 issue.18

  In 1968, Johnson sent a print of Squared Circle to the Museum of Modern Art, though officials there declined to display his work. Other institutions were more interested, however, and for the first six months of 1970, his paintings were on display at the Museum of Art, Science, and Industry in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Yet he did not call himself an artist; he said he “made diagrams.” He continued to work on Masonite rather than on canvas. And instead of mixing the paint himself, Johnson would purchase wall paint in one of the colors available at Brandman’s Paints, a local hardware store.19

  Gene Searchinger asked Johnson, “Are you going to sell these paintings? You know, they must be worth a lot of money. I mean, look at that one, that must be $10,000.” Johnson responded with a scornful look, saying, “$10,000— No!” He thought his paintings were worth a lot more. Johnson explained, “If I sold one, it would give the others value. And if the others had value, then on my death, I would impoverish my heirs.” In one sense, he was making a joke: He had no children to pay tax on any inheritance. In another sense, he was using humor to mask his doubts about being an Artist.20

  While he expressed indifference to selling the paintings, Johnson did consider selling color lithographs of his work. He liked a plan suggested by Los Angeles arts consultant Calvin J. Goodman: Limited-edition high-quality reproductions, sold at between $250 and $350 each, could yield Dave more than $10,000. In 1971, Goodman lined up investors and put his own money into making a few sample lithographs. The financial backers pulled out, however, and the project collapsed.21

  Johnson and Krauss continued to earn a living through the royalties on the children’s books they had published and through the foreign rights for their works. By 1970, his stories were being published in England, Germany, Holland, Italy, and Sweden, while hers were available in Czechoslovakia, Denmark, England, Finland, Holland, and Switzerland. Their income was substantial enough that 1969 saw them take two trips abroad—a February vacation to South America, and another summer cruise to Europe that included stops in Galway and Cobh, Ireland; Rotterdam, Holland; Oslo, Norway; and finally Scotland.22

  In between the two foreign jaunts, Krauss’s back problems recurred, keeping her in bed for nearly a month. As she recovered, she was finishing the illustrations for The Running Jumping Shouting ABC and “thoroughly enjoying the drawing.” Her first poetry chapbook, If Only, also appeared during this time, and her work was gaining a wider audience through its inclusion in Ann Waldman’s The World Anthology: Poems from the St. Mark’s Poetry Project. It featured an excerpt from her Re-Examination of Freedom along with poems by Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, Jim Carroll, Andrei Codrescu, Allen Ginsberg, Gerard Malanga, and collaborations between Frank O’Hara and Bill Berkson and between John Ashbery and James Schuyler.23

  After Krauss and Johnson returned from Europe, Ashbery came to visit them in Rowayton. Though familiar with each other’s work, they had never met. When she told Ashbery that If Only had drawn some inspiration from his work, he suggested “Faust” from his The Tennis Court Oath (1962), which begins: “If only the phantom would stop reappearing!” He offered to send her the poem if she lacked a copy.24

  On 12 December, If Only …: A Ruth Kraus Gala! had its sole performance at the Town Hall in nearby Westport, Connecticut. Sponsored by the recently incorporated Weston-Westport Arts Council, the gala presented “theater poems,” “stories,” “ambiguities,” and “scenes,” according to the flyer, which was designed and illustrated by Krauss. The central image, a smiling girl wearing boots and a loose dress and carrying a star above her head, is a “self-portrait by Ruth Krauss: the artist as a young nut.”25

  Suggesting her affinity for this image, she used it as the title page illustration her 1970 poetry chapbook, Under Twenty, which also included her self-portraits as a flower and as a young star. Making its first appearance in a Ruth Krauss book was a poem that she wrote and O’Hara arranged. One of seven pieces titled “Poem,” it contains the word lost twenty-one times. Playing on the word’s sense of absence (“lost lost / where are you”) and presence (“lost / in my eyes”), this “Poem” conveys an ambivalent mixture of both lack and longing. The only work in the collection that had not previously appeared in print, “Tabu,” offered a lyrical exploration of what we “never name” but can “write what it looks like feels like seems / like resembles.”

  Ruth Krauss, “Self-Portrait by Ruth Krauss: The Artist as a Young Nut,” 1969. Image courtesy of the Northeast Children’s Literature Collection, Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut, Storrs. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.

  In early 1970, concerned that There’s a Little Ambiguity over There among the Bluebells was not selling, Krauss wrote to Dick Higgins, Something Else Press’s founder and publisher. Echoing Ferlinghetti’s assessment five years earlier, Higgins explained that Krauss’s fame as a children’s author presented booksellers with a problem of taxonomy: “You’re too well known—but for something else. Stores put the book in the juveniles section and wonder why it doesn’t go from there. Or if they put it in the poetry section, the poetry buffs don’t know well enough who Ruth Krauss is, so they never pull it down to give it a whirl. And they never put it in the drama section, because the plays don’t look like plays and it just doesn’t occur to the clerks to do so.” To get the work to sell, Krauss needed to become more identified with her poetry and plays than with her children’s books. While the Judson’s presentation of A Beautiful Day had been fantastic, it was also “about four or five years ago,” and “there have only been a few isolated things since.” She needed “a big Off-Broadway GRAND! RETROSPECTIVE!! EVENING!!! OF!!!! RUTH!!!!! KRAUSS!!!!!! Complete with all the frills and trimmings. (Well, On-Broadway would be okay too, but harder to arrange.) Not a one night stand, but a regular production. Probably in repertoire by La Mama, but better, simply a straight commercial production. Ideally, directed by Remy. If you want my advice—and maybe you don’t though I hope you do—I really think you should concentrate as much of your energies as possible toward this goal. If you do tha
t, then I think the book will take off.”26 But Krauss was pursuing art for its own sake and was not interested in marketing her new identity as avant-garde poet.

  Johnson and Krauss remained concerned about the Vietnam War and were regulars at Westport’s World Affairs Center, a bookstore and organization that advocated peace and human rights. She participated regularly in the center’s peace vigil, held each Saturday morning in front of Westport’s Town Hall. Johnson also opposed the war but voiced his opposition through petitions and the ballot box, giving him more time to work on mathematics and painting. Having settled the matter of the squared circle, Johnson moved on to tackle duplicating the cube, the second ancient mathematical problem that had fascinated him. He created six paintings on this theme, including two based on Isaac Newton’s construction and two based on his own original solution.27

  In April 1970, Ruth and Dave took off for a brief holiday, returning to Montauk, at the eastern tip of Long Island, where they had vacationed three years earlier. Ruth thought that either Montauk or the Berkshires would be a great place to have a summer house. Dave was tiring of painting in their Rowayton basement, and both he and Ruth disliked the increased noise that summer brought to their Connecticut home, where “the vicious cutout car and choked-up motorbike noise is so bad we have to flee.” For the summer of 1970, they fled to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where they rented a wing of Erik Erikson’s house on Main Street. Ruth had her leg in a cast after dropping an iron on her bare foot, and the injury was driving her “nuts”: “Never again! No more ironing,” she vowed. But the cast was coming off soon, and she was trying to write a show that Boston University’s drama department had asked her to develop for the spring of 1971. She was also sending book ideas to Harper, including a small poetry collection and a picture book based on a poem. Ursula Nordstrom was increasingly focused on her administrative duties, and Krauss was working more closely with editor Barbara Borack, who encouraged her to send in the poems. Johnson painted and corresponded with mathematicians from his Stockbridge studio but spent most of his time painting, at least until late August, when he “jumped into a lake off an unsmooth rock” and “shattered the most expensive and slowest-healing bone in the body, fifth metatarsal,” landing in the hospital for a week. Ruth enjoyed the “culture-minded” community and was delighted by the many “cultural goings-on”—“theatre, symphony, dance festival, Boston University’s drama school, etc.” Both she and Dave wondered whether Stockbridge might be a better place for them to live.28

  After they returned to Rowayton in mid-September, Krauss sent more poetry to Harper in hopes of interesting her editors in a new book. She had reason to be optimistic. Her latest children’s book, I Write It, had received many notices, nearly all of them laudatory. The Saturday Review thought that the “poetic text bubbles along” and liked Mary Chalmers’s “endearing small figures,” which “romp[ed] through the pages of a book that celebrates the joy of being able to write.” The Christian Science Monitor praised it as an “unpunctuated little enchantment … illustrated in truth and childhood.” The reviews were a relief for Krauss. For nearly thirty years, she had wanted to address racism in her children’s books. Where I Want to Paint My Bathroom Blue argued for integration only through metaphor, I Write It did so directly. She had initially worried that its illustrations of a multiracial group of children were not sufficiently sensitive to race. In light of the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, she had a strong “desire, at this point in our country’s ‘race’ & ethnic problems, not to offend anyone.” It would be her last book for Harper.29

  As 1970 drew to a close, Ruth and Dave’s injuries had made them painfully aware that life is short and that health can be tenuous. Three and a half months after Dave’s accident, he was only just beginning to walk normally again. In July, she would turn seventy, while he would be sixty-five in October. It was time for a few changes.30

  25 “YOU’RE ONLY AS OLD AS OTHER PEOPLE THINK YOU ARE”

  “Tell me what you were like then. And all the exciting things that happened to you.”

  “Well,” said the lion, trying to think back. “I was in better shape than I am now. My stuffing was firmer. I hadn’t begun to come apart at the seams—”

  —CROCKETT JOHNSON, The Lion’s Own Story (1963)

  Slim, petite, and lively, Ruth Krauss appeared to be about ten years younger than she was. Since the year of her birth contradicted her appearance, she decided to do something about it. Through 1971, reference works list her birth year as 1901, if they list it at all. From 1973 on, the books list her birth year as 1911. When she turned seventy, she became more acutely aware that people would see her as old. She felt young. So she changed her birth year. As she would later tell a female friend, “You’re only as old as other people think you are, so always lie about your age—and preferably in increments of ten, because it’s easier to keep track of it.” Not only did Krauss’s lies enter the official record, but when she died two decades later, friends were shocked to learn that she was in her nineties. They had thought her a much younger woman—at least a decade younger.1

  In addition to changing her age, Ruth and Dave were considering changing their address. Rowayton was much busier than when they moved there a quarter century earlier. Increased traffic on Rowayton Avenue made their life noisier. As young New York executives and their families moved in, the village became more like a New York suburb. Dave observed, “It was a nice neighborhood here until the young fogies moved in and spoiled it.” The river, he said, had become “so crowded now that there isn’t even enough room to go sailing.” Further, since the river was right across the street from their house, the basement tended to flood, requiring Johnson to wear rubber boots while he painted, often while standing in water up to his ankles. It was time to move. As they pondered where to make their new home, Ruth and Dave decided to spend a few weeks in Montauk and made preparations for another trip—a cruise through the Arctic Circle. As she put it, “being just barely recovered from last year’s broken-bone syndrome, [w]e are entitled (I think) to a crazy-type rest. (A plain rest—no.)”2

  Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss, n.d. Image courtesy of the Estate of Ruth Krauss. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ruth Krauss, Stewart I. Edelstein, Executor. All Rights Reserved.

  Johnson also enjoyed a rest from his painting and other projects, like the animated adaptation of A Picture for Harold’s Room. Working at his Prague studio, Gene Deitch had been sending Johnson ideas. In an initial attempt, Deitch included “cinematic close-ups, camera move-ins, and cuts.” Johnson called it “the worst storyboard” he’d ever seen. Communicating solely by what he called “penny postcards” (a sly comment on the fact that a postcard had risen to six cents), he helped Deitch understand that for the film to work, Harold must be “exactly the same size in relation to the film frame” and that “the entire film must appear to be one continuous scene.” Ultimately, Deitch and his assistants created Harold’s entire drawing and then shot the film by placing seventy-five hundred different drawings of Harold (one at a time, in reverse order) over this landscape and having him undraw the scenery, erasing the entire picture one tiny increment at a time. Only when the film was projected forward did the picture reappear. It was, Deitch said, “just about the most difficult film we ever made here, and exactly because it looks so simple!” With “no cuts, no zooms, and no backgrounds, … nothing can be hidden. It must be smooth and perfect.”3

  Eager that the book A Picture for Harold’s Room be in print when Weston Woods released the film in 1971, Johnson began asking Harper about the status of his books, an endeavor that led to a series of skirmishes with the publisher. When the Rowayton School’s fall 1970 book fair could not get any books by him or Krauss, he wrote to Ursula Nordstrom, suggesting that since Harper made most of its money through trade sales, book fairs must be “an unwieldy nuisance.” He added, “I am probably romantic about books …, and industry and commerce cannot afford t
o be.” Nordstrom found Johnson’s letter “nasty” and resented his implication that people in publishing were “grasping and greedy”; she blamed the book fair problem on the “stupid Rowayton school people” and had Harper staff resolve the matter. Johnson apologized, but his relationship with the publisher remained difficult.4

  Leaving the publishing world behind on 16 July, Ruth and Dave embarked on a six-week cruise that took them to twenty cities, including Reykjavik, Oslo, Stockholm, Helsinki, and Leningrad. Showing that he bore no hard feelings after their disagreements, he sent Nordstrom a postcard depicting a wintry Russian scene, writing, “No, it’s 70 and sunny in Leningrad, same weather that has been following us from Iceland to the top of Norway and down into the Baltic. We will bring it home with us August 30.” He had long since rejected the Soviets’ totalitarian Marxism, even if a society based on international socialism still appealed to him. From Leningrad, he and Ruth sailed on to Copenhagen; Edinburgh; Scarborough, England; Rotterdam; Zeebrugge, Belgium; and Glengarriff, Ireland.5

  Upon their return, Krauss resumed writing poetry and Johnson returned to squaring the circle, striving to craft a more elegant formula than his original. Two of the three paintings that can definitively be dated to 1972 display his thinking on the problem. He also turned his attentions to another problem posed by the ancient Greeks. Using Euclidean methods, the Greeks had been easily able to bisect angles and construct regular polygons containing multiples of those sides—the triangle led to figures of six, twelve, twenty-four, and so on sides, while the square led to figures of eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so forth sides. But the Greeks were unable to construct regular polygons with certain numbers of sides, including seven, nine, eleven, and thirteen. Johnson wanted to use Euclidean geometry to create a regular heptagon.6