Margaret Wise Brown

by Leonard S. Marcus

  Margaret’s mother, Maude Johnson Brown, was better educated than her husband, having earned an “Eclectic” degree from Virginia’s Hollins Institute (afterwards known as Hollins College) in 1899.8 A striking, well-spoken woman (she had received high marks in elocution at Hollins), Maude had, according to family legend, dreamed of going to New York to become an actress. She seems to have stuck to her goal through college, where she completed advanced classes in dramatic arts, but in opting for the security of marriage, Maude made a decision in keeping with both convention and common sense. With the leisure that married life afforded her she pursued her aesthetic interests along the avenues then open to women of comfortable means: decorating china plates, gardening, reading poetry, collecting early American glass, dressing her children. During her married years, only concern for her children’s welfare seems to have emboldened her, as when she insisted, over Robert Brown’s strenuous objections, that Margaret and Roberta, as well as Gratz, be given the chance to attend college as she herself had done.

  Margaret grew up knowing considerably less about her mother’s family than about the illustrious Browns. Maude’s father, Berkeley Estes Johnson, had been a Virginian and a fervent supporter of the Confederacy. As a young man he had gone west to Kansas and Missouri, working for the railroads as a civil engineer. Maude’s mother, Margaret Naylor Wise Johnson, was the only grandparent whom Margaret, her namesake, ever met. A pious woman whose conversation was laced with quotations from Scripture, Grandma Naylor, as the children called her, was also an opera lover. When she came east to visit, the family gathered for long sessions around the living room victrola and the children were briskly dispatched to Sunday school, which neither Maude (an Episcopalian) nor Robert (Presbyterian) otherwise encouraged them to attend. Grandma Naylor was staying with them in the summer of 1915 as the Browns prepared to leave Brooklyn for the fresh air and unspoiled natural surroundings of nearby suburban Beechurst, Long Island. Margaret, then five, later fondly recalled Grandma Naylor, “that singing Welsh lady,” as a great presence sitting beside her on moving day in the open family car.9

  Popular magazines of the period, like the Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, and the Atlantic Monthly, were filled with “back to nature” articles extolling the virtues of fresh air and the country—especially for families with children.10 Margaret’s parents—Maude especially—seem to have needed little persuading. Once the decision was made to move, Margaret’s father commissioned an architect friend to design the Brown family’s new home. That summer of 1915, while awaiting the completion of construction work, the family took up temporary lodgings in a nearby rented house not far from the beach where the children would now be able to play.

  Beechurst was a prosperous village inhabited by businessmen, professionals, and show people. A short commute from the city by automobile or rail, it bordered Long Island Sound and had its own yacht club, which the Brown family joined. Houses were spaced far apart, apple and cherry trees dotted the landscape, and the children soon discovered a narrow dirt lane that ran past the elaborate gardens of wealthier neighbors on its way to an expanse of woods abundant with jack-in-the-pulpits, black-eyed susans, and other wildflowers.11

  The Browns’ new three-story brick and stucco home, though far from the largest in the neighborhood, was spacious and comfortable. Off to the left as one entered was the dining room; to the right was the living room with its victrola and upright piano, a chime clock which sounded throughout the house, and the hearth. One Christmas Eve, Margaret, in the ritualistic way of small children, convinced herself that by scrubbing the hearth she could insure St. Nicholas’s safe and satisfactory arrival. However, no sooner had she finished her work than bluff, querulous Robert Brown decided that the house was too cold and the time had come to build a fire; Margaret shuffled off to bed that night feeling sullen and furious. It was with utter surprise and gratitude next morning that she found that Christmas presents and a beautifully decorated tree had nonetheless appeared during the night.12

  Both parents were cautious about money, though Maude Brown was determined to spare no expense over the children and her husband seems generally to have gone along with her, if not always graciously. Margaret and Roberta each took piano lessons for a time but without much success. All three children were enrolled at a local dancing academy.

  Occasionally, their father took the initiative in providing for them; each year before Christmas he drove them down to the local hardware store, where toys were also sold, and observed the threesome as they inspected the shelves. By this rather remote but effective means, he determined what their presents should be.

  Neither girl ever wanted a doll; they preferred action toys like Gratz’s train set and the toy steamer they discovered one year hidden in the closet in its holiday wrappings and secretly launched in the tub before repacking it in hopes their parents would suspect nothing.13

  The Browns’ house did not have a formal library, but they owned the usual sorts of books, including a set of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels, a conventional fixture of turn-of-the-century middle-class American homes, especially those of Southern heritage. There was also a set of Mark Twain’s works, which, more for its Missouri associations than its literary ones, stirred Robert Brown’s enthusiasm to a pitch otherwise foreign to him in aesthetic matters. The only other books he is known to have enjoyed were Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus collections, which, like the Twain novels, he read aloud to the children, sometimes becoming so engrossed in a story that he read ahead in silence, momentarily forgetting his young audience.

  The children had a standard set of The Book of Knowledge, and along with the National Geographic, the family took the popular children’s monthly St. Nicholas. Books of fantasy were known to the children early on. Margaret recalled having read The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Black Beauty, The Song of Roland, and Andrew Lang’s Rainbow fairy tale collections. Margaret said later that her favorite story had been “Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp,” while insisting that on the whole she had not read much as a child: “I was too busy.”14 When the girls were old enough for series novels, they preferred adventure fiction published for boys. Among their favorites were the dog stories of Albert Payson Terhune; the Browns named their collie for the hero of Terhune’s popular novel Bruce.

  Margaret and Roberta’s large second-floor bedroom was heated by means of a gas grate framed with decorative ceramic tiles depicting nursery rhyme characters—the Three Little Bears and the Cow That Jumped Over the Moon that Margaret would recall in Good-night Moon. Because their parents put the children to bed early, the two sisters had hours each evening in which to devise new games and stories for their own amusement. Some of these revolved around Margaret’s black cat, Ole King Cole, and the fireflies they brought indoors in summertime in Mason jars. One night, after all the Browns had gone to bed, a moment’s diversion came their way from an unexpected quarter when the sisters heard a suspicious noise in the yard. Margaret leaned out their bedroom window and, borrowing an expression from the family’s Irish cook, shouted, “Burglar, you burglar, get going while your shoes are still good!”15

  Before Roberta was old enough to read, Margaret gallantly read aloud from their Andrew Lang Rainbow series. However welcome at the time, these story hours later caused Roberta some embarrassment when she realized that the tales she had learned were by no means the same as the “Red Riding Hood,” “Cinderella,” and “Hansel and Gretel” that other children knew. While gazing intently down at the page before her, Margaret had felt free to stray from the printed word, adding horrific details to the plot just to frighten her rapt listener, and taking care that in the stories about three siblings it was not the youngest of the three who triumphed, as is the convention in such tales, but the middle child.

  Two more bedrooms completed the second floor, and the sleeping porch occupied its own level a few steps down. Margaret must have loved the phrase “sleeping porch,” with its suggestion of a languorous interior lif
e of the woodwork. She stargazed from the porch and by the age of six she held court there regularly, telling outlandish stories of her own devising to other neighborhood children. If, after sitting through one of these tales, someone in the audience demanded to know whether the story was true, Margaret merely referred the questioner to The Book of Knowledge, her sole source and authority, she said. She recalled years later with sly satisfaction that “the twenty-four red volumes were too voluminous to betray me.”16

  Under the eaves of the third floor were the cook’s room and a playroom with Gratz’s coveted electric train as its centerpiece. Once when the rest of the family was out for the day, young Gratz, in search of adventure, climbed out the playroom window onto the roof and, losing his balance, slid down to the rain gutter. There he remained until rescued by the postman. The physical punishment administered by Robert Brown following such escapades could be harsh. Nonetheless, Gratz preserved his reputation with the local girls as an efficient prankster who would deny everything when confronted by his accusers: “Did I do that?”17

  For most of childhood, Margaret and Roberta were a study in contrasts and all but inseparable. Margaret was hale and hardy, Roberta fragile, more prone to illness. Roberta was a model of diligence, persistence, and responsible behavior; Margaret was a trickster who more often than not escaped blame for her misdeeds. Boys found Margaret attractive early on, were drawn to her, as her brother recalled, “like [bees to] honey”; Roberta was plainer.18 Their mother dressed them in identical outfits which a seamstress who visited the house for a few days each month made under her supervision.

  Much of the year the Brown children lived outdoors. In the yard to one side of the house, they had a joggling board—a flexible, narrow, thirty-foot plank that their father had shipped specially by train from California. It came with low, movable metal supports that could be placed under the center of the board or at either end, depending on whether there were two children who wanted to seesaw, or one or more who wanted to stand at the middle and jump up and down. A joggling board was a leveler: two players jumping together on the quavering platform could compete to see who would last longer. Margaret, a sensuous, physical child, was a fine athlete with exceptionally quick reflexes. More often than not it was she who was left standing.

  School was a more decisive leveler. While Gratz performed well and Margaret earned a reputation as a keen-spirited day-dreamer with reserves of untapped potential, Roberta positively shined. Roberta’s intellectual prowess and her efforts to be a dutiful child did not necessarily inspire friendly treatment within the sometimes ruthless subculture of childhood. Margaret and Gratz could put aside their differences long enough to leap on her from behind the woodpile with cries of “Witch, witch!”19 By the second grade, Roberta had advanced a full year beyond her classmates, to close half the gap in academic standing between Margaret and herself. She repeated the feat a few years later; when the two sisters entered boarding school at Dana Hall, they were members of the same class.

  For both girls, schooling would always be associated with disruptive change. After starting in public school (Robert Brown had thought the rough and tumble atmosphere would be good for a boy), Gratz was sent to a Long Island boarding school, where he remained until college. In contrast, by the end of Margaret’s seventh year of studies, she and Roberta had changed schools four times.

  The vagaries of small town private schooling accounted for some of this fitful shuffling about. The school most convenient to the Brown home did not offer a complete grammar school course; Margaret and Roberta simply moved on after exhausting its limited program. But another factor contributing to the girls’ choppy school life was the disruption caused by Robert Brown’s business travels; he was periodically dispatched for lengthy intervals to his company’s plants in Scotland and India. Before leaving on one such year-long journey in 1919, he closed the Beechurst house and moved the family into temporary quarters in the Garden City Hotel, an arrangement intended to make housekeeping easier for his wife during his long absence. Gratz’s boarding school was in Garden City, and the girls were placed in nearby St. Mary’s.

  Margaret and Roberta could hardly have been expected, under the circumstances, to form lasting friendships with schoolmates, and because few children lived in their neighborhood, they had relatively little companionship, apart from each other, during the Beechurst years. Years later, Margaret recalled having spent much of her childhood playing alone, in the “countries of the worlds I made up.”20

  Summers, children home from boarding school added somewhat to the pool of playmates. Foremost among these was Jane Thurston, an outgoing, athletic child and the daughter of one of the world’s best-known stage performers, (Harry) “Thurston the Magician.” Jane’s lavish home and the ample grounds surrounding it became a focal point for all the neighborhood children. Margaret later recalled with delight the impromptu magic shows Jane’s famous father gave for them and the visits he permitted them with the monkeys, snakes, and other exotic animals of his private menagerie. In the Thurstons’ attic, which was large enough for Jane’s mother to have considered converting it into a ballroom, trunk-loads of old theater costumes were stored; it was in these incomparable circumstances that the girls played their dress-up games.

  Even summers, however, were not times of uninterrupted companionship. Because Robert Brown suffered from severe hay-fever, the family went north to Penobscot Bay, Maine, for a month or more each year. Once in Maine, Margaret’s father disappeared on deep-sea fishing expeditions, sometimes taking Gratz along but leaving Maude and their daughters to entertain themselves at their hotel.

  Gratz, who had a larger allowance than his sisters, financed the Brown children’s animals. During the warmer months, they kept as many as twenty rabbits at a time in mesh cages stacked beside the backyard woodpile. It was the children’s responsibility to feed the rabbits and clean their cages (though Margaret was frequently absent when it came time for these disagreeable chores). They learned to hold the soft, wary creatures in their own small hands, and it was from watching the rabbits that the children first learned about sex. Once, when one of the rabbits died, Margaret, in her startlingly fearless and unsentimental way, skinned the carcass for its fur, perhaps recalling as she did so her father’s boyhood tales of bear-hunting. She attempted to shock the other children further by insisting that when she grew up she was going to be a “lady butcher.”21 The comforting softness and sensuality of fur, and the quickness and vulnerability of rabbits, captivated her, and later became poignant emblems in her published writings and her personal mythology.

  A few blocks from home was a woodlot known as Robin’s Woods, where Gratz, while playing one day, discovered an underground chamber, large enough for a grown man to crawl through, which the children afterwards used as a hideaway, as doubtless the bootleggers who dug it must also have done.

  For Margaret, as for the others, there were the usual turns of childish mischief that might have had serious consequences, but didn’t. Once she was bitten by a squirrel she had foolishly taken in hand. Another time, the two sisters set fire to the woodlot. When the fireman asked if they knew how the minor blaze had started, Margaret and Roberta replied as one, “Oh, no! No!” shaking their heads innocently.22

  Together, in the privacy of the woods, the children smoked their first cigarettes. (Only Margaret enjoyed the experience and later became a heavy smoker.) There she and Roberta also gave plays for their friends, including a sort of precocious sexual farce concerning a cowherd (Margaret), a milkmaid (Roberta), and a cow (played by the family collie, Bruce), in which the climactic speech, delivered by the dashing swain, went: “It’s not her I want [motioning to the cow], but her!”23

  It was also in Robin’s Woods that the Brown children buried a small dead animal they had found in the road. Margaret later recalled the incident in “The Dead Bird,” one of her first published stories for children. Taking the measure of young children’s real (but also quite limited) capacity to g
rieve, she wrote, “And every day, until they forgot, [the children] went and sang to their little dead bird and put fresh flowers on his grave.”24

  In “Discovery,” one of Margaret’s many unpublished autobiographical pieces, a six-year-old girl, playing in a woodlot with her older brother and younger sister, announces one day that the woods all around them belong to her. The girl does not explain how this could be so, she simply offers to let the others buy a bit of her property and proceeds to sell her sister a tree stump for a dime and an oak tree to her brother for a nickel. Returning home, the girl enjoys a good laugh in private. “How could they believe it?” she asks herself in amazement, laughing some more.25

  But this discovery—the gullibility of children less quickwitted (if in other respects more accomplished) than herself—is just the beginning of the knowledge she acquires that day. Late in the afternoon, the girl wanders into the dining room, “cool and empty with the great magic places she knew under the table.” Her attention focuses on the sideboard, and a thought “begun over the roast beef on Sunday” is rekindled. She wants to see her father’s carving knife, the big long knife he “flourished over the sharpener before he carved, back and forth, back and forth. What a fine thing to do, and that was father. Sharpening the knife and carving the roast.”

  Opening the drawer in which the knife is kept, she touches the blade very lightly and withdraws her hand. “It was so sharp you could hardly touch it. . . . She picked it up and slowly and sol-omnly [sic] she brought the point of the knife towards the heart in her little flat chest. She held the rough bone handle very tight and very steady. She looked at her arm . . . as it bent and the thought that finished under the tight golden hairs of her head was as big as life itself. It was as big as death. It was bigger. In that small arm that bent as she told it to or stopped bending as she made it do was the power to live or to die. Amazement brought the knife close to her chest. . . . She put the carving knife back in the drawer. . . . She closed the drawer.” The little girl’s second discovery of the day also concerns power, but power of a different order. Margaret’s six-year-old realizes that with selfhood—growing up—comes a certain power to shape one’s own destiny.