Margaret Wise Brown

by Leonard S. Marcus

  Children’s first semantically meaningful utterances, Mitchell believed, continued to reflect that total immersion in what she called the “Here and Now” world of the sensory realm. A four-year-old did not speak (or think) of “climbing a hill”—remote adult conceptualization—but of going up “the place where the legs ache,” as one child had put the matter to her in conversation.33 Everyday language, moreover, was littered with empirically inexact metaphors—“night is falling,” for example—which observant young children were constantly improving upon, as when a Bank Street toddler remarked at the onset of evening, “The big shadow is all around.”34 For Mitchell, the lesson to be drawn from the evidence was that young children made such highly vivid “direct observations” as a matter of course, provided only that they were encouraged to express themselves freely.

  Less than a half dozen years after the bureau’s founding, Mitchell felt confident enough in her findings to take a second step as a researcher and reformer: the creation of a prototype book for an entirely new kind of literature for young children, a developmentally sound here-and-now literature directly based on her own observations of children aged two to seven.

  Her introduction to the Here and Now Story Book, which Dutton published in 1921, combined a vigorous summary of her theories with practical advice addressed to the teachers and parents who would be reading the book to their children. As she well realized, the Here and Now Story Book was certain to be regarded as a strange and controversial work, challenging as it did conventional assumptions about the form and content of stories and poems appropriate for small children. For one thing, she had made extensive use of children’s own invented phrases and sound-alike words—“toot, toot!” and the like—less with a view to creating memorable literary works than to providing stories that children would recognize as their own. Mitchell’s formal emphasis on rhythmic repetition was another attempt to take a direct lead from children’s own speech patterns.

  More striking, however, than these features of Mitchell’s stories (traditional folktales and rhymes also employed repeating devices and contained some play words) was the emphatically modern urban setting of the Here and Now Story Book’s pieces. Much of the children’s literature of the period remained rooted in nineteenth-century Romanticism, with its idealized imagery of the happy child at home in harmonious natural surroundings. In stark contrast, Mitchell’s stories about skyscrapers and airplanes, tugboats and trolleys acknowledged the demographic and social reality that in 1921 the majority of American children lived in cities.

  Mitchell’s writing could be witty but was more often overwrought and a bit dull. She made no exaggerated claims for herself in the literary sphere. Her primary objective was to provide other, more gifted writers with a model on which to base fresh experiments in the virtually neglected field of imaginative writing for the nursery ages.

  The Here and Now Story Book also represented a direct challenge to the widely held view of librarians and publishers that fairy tales, myths, legends, and traditional nursery nonsense—the literature of “once upon a time”—comprised the best introduction to literature for the young. Bank Street research had proven otherwise, said Mitchell. She conceded that the rhythmic language of a “simple folk tale might indeed delight children from the earliest ages. “Moreover, after a child is somewhat oriented to the physical and social world, say at six or seven, . . . he can stand a good deal of straight fairy lore.” At the same time, Mitchell declared, “[for] brutal tales like Red Riding-Hood or for sentimental ones like Cinderella I find no place in any child’s world.” And while she did not wish to reject all fairy tales out of hand, Mitchell argued that “a child’s imagination will surely flourish if he is given freedom for expression, without calling upon the stimulus of adult fancies. It is only the jaded adult mind, afraid to trust to the child’s own fresh springs of imagination, that feels for children the need of the stimulus of magic.”35

  Mitchell’s caustic reference to jaded minds seemed calculated to be taken as a declaration of war on the children’s book establishment of her day. Chief among the objects of her scorn was the formidable Anne Carroll Moore, the New York Public Library’s Superintendent of Work with Children and the olympian authority figure in the field. The struggle of ideas (and to some considerable extent of personalities) that was thus joined in the early 1920s between Mitchell and her colleagues on the one side and Moore and her partisans on the other eventually drew Margaret Wise Brown into its very core.

  When Anne Carroll Moore was appointed the New York Public Library’s first Superintendent of Work with Children in 1906, library service for the young was still in its infancy. Moore was not the nation’s first children’s librarian, but during a career that spanned a half century she probably did more than any other individual to establish the importance of providing children with ready access to books through library service. In the process, Moore herself emerged as the nation’s final arbiter of the standards by which books for the young should be judged.

  A brilliant strategist, Moore went about the business of library reform with Napoleonic boldness and zeal. Under her watchful eye a handsomely appointed Central Children’s Room—with carved mahogany bookcases, glassed-in exhibition cabinets, Italian marble countertops, and Welsh quarry-tile floors—opened in May 1911 in the resplendent new New York Public Library building on Fifth Avenue. From this headquarters Moore oversaw the formation of one of the world’s finest collections of children’s books. To attract the city’s children she initiated a full calendar of events which soon became established traditions: candle-lit story hours, Halloween and May Day celebrations, among others. To ensure the continuance of her efforts, Moore personally trained a small corps of librarian-disciples drawn purposefully, in a city of immigrant children, from a wide range of ethnic and cultural backgrounds. These devoted acolytes often went on to assume positions of responsibility in the New York system’s local branch libraries, or found library jobs elsewhere throughout the country and beyond; others became juveniles editors at publishing houses.

  Under Moore’s leadership the selection of books for the Central Children’s Room was never a casual affair. A New York Public Library purchase order soon came to be regarded as a major critical endorsement. In 1911 Moore formalized the matter, and greatly enhanced her power, by issuing the first of the library’s annual fall lists of new books recommended for holiday gift giving. Such was her reputation nationally that inclusion on the list all but assured a book a respectable sale; omission might just as easily mean oblivion. Editors, authors, and illustrators routinely stopped by to visit with Miss Moore and seek her counsel on their works in progress.

  Moore made an indelible impression on others by appearing on many occasions with an eight-inch wooden Dutch doll—Nicholas—in hand. Nicholas, she explained, represented the “spirit of the children’s libraries.”36 The vigilant guardian of that spirit had commissioned monogrammed luggage for the little wooden man, as well as a bed and numerous other accessories of appropriate size. Guests who dined with her in her lower—Fifth Avenue apartment were expected to acknowledge the presence of their fellow dinner companion, Nicholas, for whom a place setting was always provided; with finicky caprice, Moore treated such occasions as tests of their capacity for “child-like” fantasy (though one wonders how many of them felt merely put upon).

  The growing currency of Freudian psychology, with its powerful rebuff to the Romantic cult of childhood innocence, troubled Moore as a deeply disturbing development. Throughout her long, extraordinary career, she herself remained a Romantic in the mold of Walter de la Mare, whose birthday (along with Shakespeare’s and Hans Christian Andersen’s) was celebrated at the Central Children’s Room. De la Mare, as Randall Jarrell was to observe, still believed in the “romantic’s world,” but could cling to that belief only as to a “sweet ghost” abroad in the “industrial and scientific world that [had] destroyed it.” To such a poet, Jarrell said, the “ordinary rational or practical life
resembles the mechanical and rationalized routine, the hysterical anesthesia, of the hypnotized subject: what is real lies above (God, Beauty) or beneath (dreams, animals, children) or around (ghosts, all the beings of myth or Märchen)”37—to which Moore herself had of course added little Nicholas. For her, as for the authors of such extraordinarily popular fantasies as Peter Pan and The Velveteen Rabbit, the mere capacity to believe had become a sort of desperate, last-ditch ultimate good.

  “You must write a book about Nicholas, Miss Moore. You make him real,” a little girl is said to have urged the librarian one afternoon following a Christmas story hour at which The Velveteen Rabbit had been read aloud.38

  Whether or not the librarian intended Nicholas: A Manhattan Christmas Story as a direct rebuttal to Lucy Sprague Mitchell’s Here and Now Story Book, which had appeared just three years earlier, Moore’s book certainly amounted to one. She had set the opening scene of her fantasy in the here-and-now surroundings of the Central Children’s Room, but from the first, Moore made her impatience with Bank Street realism felt. A “Brownie,” she told her readers, was hiding in the room, “waiting for something wonderful to happen.”39 In her fantasy world, nothing could ever be only what it seemed. A brownie or gnome or Nicholas had always to appear to confer a touch of magic on an otherwise all too prosaic world.

  Moore advanced her campaign for high critical standards and increased her great influence in the children’s book world through the steady outpouring of articles and reviews she published for more than forty years. In 1918 she inaugurated a quarterly column of opinion and review in the Bookman. From 1924 onward she contributed a weekly piece to the New York Herald Tribune’s Sunday supplement, Books. No critic in America had previously given children’s literature such sustained critical attention in print. Moore called her column “The Three Owls” in recognition of the shared responsibility of authors, artists, and vigilant reviewers like herself in the education of the nation’s youth. In 1924 Boston’s Bookshop for Boys and Girls began a newsletter on various aspects of the juveniles field which grew to become the widely respected Horn Book magazine. By the mid-thirties, Moore’s own “Three Owls” column had migrated to the Horn Book’s pages.

  Like Lucy Sprague Mitchell, Anne Carroll Moore was a stoutly self-assured visionary. She never wavered in her criticism of the impact of progressive education on the children’s literature of the day. She argued vigorously that literature could not be cut from the cloth of any scientific theory, that aesthetic creation simply did not work that way. She was right, of course, but she failed to conceive the possibility that insights like those gleaned from Bank Street research might serve as a point of departure for writers of real ability.

  More basically, philosophical differences had led Moore and Mitchell to very different ideas about childhood. The librarian was a moral idealist who regarded childhood as a fixed state of innocence to be shielded from, rather than shaped by, historical change and environmental factors. Moore remained deeply suspicious of Mitchell’s empirically grounded—and thus relativistic—“modern” approach to literature and education. Mitchell, for her part, was convinced that people like Moore lived in a sentimental dreamworld.

  As to the Fairy Tale War itself—their acrimonious debate over the value of folk and fantasy literature for younger children—both sides presented a rather mixed case of blindness and insight. Moore’s responsiveness to the tales was salutary, but there was something stilted about her unquestioning reverence for the “timeless” classics, as though they were to be venerated as sacred relics, as bulwarks against modernity; Mitchell’s tendering of an essentially original view of literature for small children was a worthy contribution to the debate, but her reluctance to recognize that children might appreciate fantastic tales on a symbolic level seems a case of theory winning out over direct observation.40

  The decade of the twenties was a period of national prosperity and widespread questioning of traditional social codes and institutions. Experimental schools of all sorts proliferated throughout the country. The protestations of Anne Carroll Moore and her colleagues notwithstanding, the Here and Now Story Book struck a responsive chord in many critics and educators, who hailed it as an important innovation. The Journal of Educational Psychology declared Mitchell’s work “quite revolutionary.” The New York Evening Post said the author’s stories were “among the most genuine things that have ever been written” for young children. Arnold and Beatrice Gesell called the book a “new impetus to creative work and artistic expression with little children. . . . If the ability to handle words, to make them into patterns, to regard them as tools of expression can be awakened at an early age, the whole technique of language instruction in the schools will be altered.”41

  The Cooperative School for Student Teachers, the program which Margaret entered in the fall of 1935, had not been envisioned in the early plans for the Bureau of Educational Experiments. Its establishment in 1930 marked an important shift in emphasis away from quantitative studies of child development; the new focus was on preparing the next generation of teachers for work in child-centered experimental schools. Significantly, courses in pedagogy were excluded from the curriculum. When student teachers were not engaged in actual on-the-job training they came to the bureau’s new headquarters at 69 Bank Street for classes intended not so much to teach them how to teach as to help them become more experientially grounded, self-aware human beings.

  Lucy Mitchell and her colleagues felt that traditional schooling, with its emphasis on rote learning, had a deadening effect that rendered most adults ill equipped to respond with sensitivity to children’s own needs. If, as William James had said, young children were little empiricists whose “native interests” lay “altogether in the sphere of sensation,” student teachers would have to undergo a wholesale reeducation of the senses, a kind of second childhood, before they would be ready to do their jobs well. For as James had also said, “The child will always attend more to what a teacher does than to what the teacher says.”42

  To heighten their sensory awareness trainees were given classes in painting, dance, pantomime, music—all activities also offered to Bank Street’s nursery school youngsters. Both groups were encouraged to enjoy these experiences without concern for the quality of the end result. It was hoped that the trainees would also come to understand the role that art might play in the “fully rounded development of children.”

  At Bank Street, then, several key elements of the teachers’ and the children’s educations proceeded along parallel lines. Margaret’s dance instructor found her to be “very timorous physically” during their first weeks of work together in the fall of 1935. “Her movements,” the teacher observed in an evaluation filed the following spring, had at first been “ineffectual and sentimental,” but Margaret had worked hard and toward the end of the course had done “surprising improvisations. . . . I think [the report concluded] the work had a rather profound salutary effect in freeing her.”43

  In her painting class, Margaret seems to have allowed herself a heady taste of artistic license, laying down “sheer color” on canvas, as she wrote Marguerite Hearsey, “without form or cerebral intent.” To her own surprise, the results were “most amazing [and] strangely enough, not without meaning, though they are decidedly without coherant [sic] meaning.”44 As with her dance class, her instructor noted that after a “very crude start” and “slight growth for several days” Margaret had made “a jump” into “adventurous and extremely sensitive color harmony.”45

  Pantomime was another regularly scheduled activity for both the nursery school children and the teacher trainees. Lucy Mitchell regarded these acting-out exercises as a technique for literally feeling in one’s bones (and muscles) the rhythmical aspects and sheer physicality of all manner of experience. (Once, following a field trip to a dairy farm with the trainees, she asked the group to reenact the visit in pantomime. When the group came to recalling the milking parlor’s activities, she volunteered to play
the part of the cow.)

  Bank Street’s staff conceived of the child’s reality in terms of a sequence of outwardly radiating circles starting at the center with his or her rudimentary sensory awareness and leading by stages to an ever-expanding interest in home, community, region, and world, the past and future, and purely fantastic realms. They thought that the educational needs of two- to five-year-olds, who were focused on here-and-now immediacies, might be fully served by a well-equipped and supervised nursery school environment. Slightly older children were considered ready to relate classroom activities to firsthand experiences outside the school, a trip to the New York waterfront, for example, to taste the salt water, see for themselves that Manhattan is an island, and learn why some objects float when tossed into the river while others sink.

  The teacher trainees were also taken on exploratory journeys, including one annual “long trip” far from New York which Mitchell led herself and conducted as an informal total immersion course in relationship thinking. The material of the course encompassed everything from the geological features of the terrain through which they passed in their chartered bus to the political concerns of the communities they visited. Field trips that interested Margaret were apt to be those that engaged her aesthetically. She was in her element when Lucy Mitchell, back in New York, asked her class to find a field, close their eyes and record the rush of sensations that ensued. It was autumn as Margaret conscientiously scribbled down her findings: “Sharp/Cold, in the nose/Feeling younger/Long forgotten/Burning leaves.”46

  At Bank Street, child observation was considered an especially fruitful exercise for the teacher trainees; while honing their knowledge of children’s gestures, facial expressions, and speech patterns, they might become keener, less blindered observers.

  It was one thing to strive for an intellectually complex understanding of children’s behavior and development; it was quite another to reconstitute within oneself even a semblance of the actual perceptual framework of childhood—to see the world, as it were, through a three-year-old’s eyes. It amounted to a sobering realization for more than a few of the trainees and staff that children were the only real professionals at childhood, that they themselves were largely destined to remain awkward amateurs. Clever children were quick to point this out to their overseers. Out one day on the rooftop playground, an artistically gifted five-year-old demanded to know what the hapless trainee was writing in her notebook: