Margaret Wise Brown

by Leonard S. Marcus

  “What are you writing now?” (The trainee continued to take notes throughout the exchange.) “Are you writing about my Dutch costume?”

  “Yes,” the trainee replied, a little sheepishly. “I’m writing about all the children’s costumes.”

  Whereupon the child issued a stern warning: “I’ll follow you till you tell me what you’re writing. Or I’ll smack you good and hard—’cause I mean what I say!”47

  Child observation was sometimes conducted less openly. Concealed behind the cheerfully appointed walls of the school’s four spacious nursery rooms were observation booths fitted with two-way mirrors. By the mid-thirties, the entire range of investigative techniques in use at Bank Street and the research results that flowed from them had become a matter of such general interest among psychologists and educators that a steady parade of visitors from as far away as the Soviet Union and Australia came to observe the observers observe the children, and to be observed by them in turn.

  To her Bank Street colleagues, Margaret, although generally seen as a good-spirited and engaging companion, remained elusive, an indefinable presence who “operated in a highly individual mode,” as the staff psychologist, Barbara Biber, put it.48 Other new arrivals at the school usually “merged” (as Biber said) with Bank Street culture, with certain inbred nuances of the school community’s style of thought and talk and behavior. But Margaret somehow managed to remain an ironic observer among observers. She was a wonderchild. What others at the school pored over psychology texts, studied the children, and strained their memories and imaginations to achieve—an unselfconscious identification with the young child’s experience—was Margaret’s as if by second nature. The very completeness of her identification with the children put her curiously at odds with her peers.

  It was a Bank Street custom—an element of the merging process—to adopt a pet name; quaint diminutives like “Clover” and “Boots” were generally chosen. Effecting a characteristic evasion, Margaret allowed herself to be known as “Brownie,” a different nickname from the one she was still called elsewhere, “Tim,” one she might therefore leave behind at the end of the day, as stacks of paperwork are left at the office.

  As for her efforts as a teacher’s assistant at the Little Red School House, Margaret’s mid-year report (filed in January 1936) indicated that she had tried her best to put in a creditable performance and that she had largely succeeded.49 The supervising teacher, Dorothy Stall, found her “open and frank” and intensely curious about everything that happened in the classroom. She believed that “Brownie” had won the children’s “love and respect”; Her principal shortcoming was in managing groups of youngsters, but even this weakness was related to her overall sensitivity: “Large group problems worried her because in solving them it seemed necessary to forget the individual child or ignore his personality and sometimes perhaps his rights.” Margaret, Stall wrote, exhibited a “strong sense of justice . . . as if she remembered her own childhood and wanted to make good to ‘the spirit of childhood’ for the grown-ups who did not understand her.” She also reported that Margaret had decided [again] that she did not want to teach professionally. “[Her] interest in children is no more real than [her] interest in all types of personality.” With some candor, she added, “[Margaret is] decidedly not the ‘school-teacher’ type, and in spite of all the progressive education I’m afraid most of us fall into a ‘type.’”

  But Margaret was an original, a classroom presence both her supervisor and the children were unlikely to forget. The report concluded, “While many of the details of the work, especially connected with academic work were neglected, . . . the spiritual contribution Miss Brown made . . . far outweighed the defects. . . . The whole tone and attitude of the children toward each other and toward adults owes much to having had her with us.”

  Lucy Mitchell’s abiding faith in learning by firsthand experience had inspired her to attempt her Here and Now Story Book. How better to determine children’s literary priorities and needs than to write a variety of stories, try them out on groups of young listeners, revise as the children’s responses dictated, and thereby gradually refine the manuscript—and one’s understanding. Pursuing the logic of the experiment a step further, Mitchell resolved that each of the trainees in the Cooperative School for Student Teachers should try her hand at writing as well. The students’ efforts might not be very accomplished, but the primary goal was simply to make them more aware of the range of children’s experience as readers and listeners.

  Mitchell taught the children’s literature workshop herself, and it was as a member of that class, in the fall of 1935, that Margaret first considered the possibility of becoming a children’s author. She seems to have recognized Lucy Mitchell from the start as a teacher as worthy of her wholehearted respect as Marguerite Hearsey had always been. Mitchell’s immense range of learning, her fiercely independent and playful manner, and her selfless dedication to her work all impressed Margaret. The questions she posed about childhood development in the literary sphere, as in others, stirred Margaret’s curiosity deeply. And she was grateful for her new mentor’s eagerness to encourage her writing.

  The first piece Margaret produced in Mitchell’s class was, she afterwards said, a “silly story” that “tried too hard to sound like a children’s story.” It had been “all decked out like a Christmas tree with echoes of all the fairy stories I had ever read.”50 Nevertheless, Mitchell soon spotted something special in “Brownie”: “crazy, penetrating, blind instincts and feeling for language,” as she later told the critic Louise Seaman Bechtel.51

  In Margaret’s first term evaluation, filed in December 1935, Mitchell noted, “I’m inclined to suspect she may go precious if not more related to external things. . . . [I] believe her a person of unusual capacities who needs her interests widened. Let her remain an artist but have more to say!”52 Four months later, Mitchell’s next report was equally balanced and appreciative:

  Probably she has the most consistent and genuine interest in language of the group, perhaps of all our students. Her product, though slight, always shows sensitivity to form, sound and rhythm. Her paper on the language of the 8’s showed real insight and was quite her own. She might go far—might even make a real writer for children.53

  As her own recollection of her gaudily embellished first story bears out, Margaret had evidently mounted some initial resistance to the here-and-now view of appropriate subject matter. Mitchell’s report continued, “Still inclined to think of our content for children as . . . of ‘spinach’ variety. I should like a chance to work with her over a period of years. She is waking. . . . Be very careful about next year. Don’t let her degenerate to a think specialist.” Under Lucy Mitchell’s extraordinarily capable guidance, Margaret’s Bank Street years continued to be a fertile time of acquiring understanding and of being understood.

  A notebook Margaret kept at this time provides a glimpse of the ideas that had begun to focus her attention. She was evidently intrigued by Lucy Mitchell’s developmental theory of humor. She noted that for two-year-olds, humor arises out of “physical incongruities; reversals of observed relations”; a year or so later, children are ready to see the fun in “plays on words; obvious untruths; . . . [in a] routine or sequence . . . reversed. ‘Suppose we washed our hands after dinner instead of before.’”54

  Margaret also formulated (or copied into her notebook), assorted aphorisms, exhortations, and study exercises related to writing for children: “In the development of an expressive act, the emotion operates like a magnet drawing to itself appropriate material”; “To make words give a vicarious experience”; “Whenever a child says something that expresses a pattern, tells his interest, analyse, or tell why a child likes one thing, not another. To what extent are they quoting. What springs from them?” To what extent she quoted Lucy Mitchell in these passages or was recording her own observations is not always clear. “The ruthlessness of theory vs. the sympathy of experience—limitations in both”�
��that, more than likely, was Margaret, who was always quick to view any matter as a contest of wits and who in the end was rather more willing than her teacher to set theory aside as the moment dictated.

  One reason she may have enjoyed the prolonged hours of child observation that she and her fellow students were required to perform was that Margaret viewed the experience as another battle of wits, a type of sport. A note to herself concerning one of her research projects renders the assignment in the language of the hunt, almost as though she were contemplating an afternoon outing with the Buckram Beagles: “A behavior record of the child I will chase . . . Take [George] because he’s an imaginative child still in the half-tones of reality.” Some years later, recalling the feverish note-taking she was obliged to carry out as part of her field research, Margaret again chose a hunting metaphor: “One had to be absolutely still and write very fast to catch” the stories and poems the children improvised.55

  In all likelihood, Bank Street’s exacting regimen was more than matched by the internal demands Margaret placed on herself. She was doubtless as aware as her instructors whenever her work fell short. She admonished herself in her notebook not to forget that “subconscious maturation precedes creative production in every line of human endeavor.” If she had not yet become the writer she wished to be, she had at least begun attending to the prerequisites. That there were also moments when waiting for the egg to hatch seemed almost too much for her to bear is also plain. “I’m about to boil over,” Margaret sighed one day into her notebook, “with nervous energy and apprehension.”56

  For much of her long, relentlessly productive writing career, Lucy Sprague Mitchell spoke almost apologetically of her “art expressions” and “art indulgences” rather than of her literary art.57 She considered her substantial output as an author—essays, magazine articles, lectures, and radio talks for adults; stories, poems, and nonfiction for children—as primarily a form of social service, only marginally as creative work done for her own satisfaction.

  It was reason, the mind exercised in conscious witness of itself, that Mitchell had learned from early childhood to trust as her own best parent or guardian. Her poetry necessarily suffered as a consequence and would always be self-consciously methodical, emotionally tepid. Yet her powers of introspection were such that she had also devised ingenious stratagems for tricking herself—and later her students—into a less deliberately controlled, more “childlike” state of mind. Some of these ruses became the assignments—the “five-finger exercises”—she gave the Bank Street student teachers. Time and again she exhorted them to trust, not disparage, their imaginative instincts, for, as she assured a group of teacher trainees one day, “All that glitters is not guilt!”58

  Mitchell was always to remain skeptical of any force or fact or system that could not be clearly charted or consciously known. Hers was a brilliant daylight intelligence. Content, in the spirit of intellectual inquiry and democratic fair play, to have Freudian theory taught at Bank Street, she was made uncomfortable by the notion of applying Freudian analysis as a practical means of resolving one’s personal difficulties; the idea doubtless offended her Sprague sense of rugged individualism and Puritan self-abnegation, a cast of mind she had perhaps not fully succeeded in shedding after all.

  “Sally,” she began one day, in a mischievous stage whisper addressed to a student sitting beside her in class, “You don’t think everyone needs to be psychoanalyzed, do you?”

  “Why no, Mrs. Mitchell,” came the correct response.

  “Sally,” she continued, her voice rising so that others might also hear. “Don’t you think there is too much psssssychoanalysis around here?”59

  In contrast, mapmaking and the study of geography were among Lucy Mitchell’s most absorbing interests. She taught a class in geography for the teacher trainees in which maps were presented as tools by means of which older children might learn to generalize from their earlier here-and-now experiences. To prove her point, Mitchell proposed to the trainees the puzzle of a European map on which major rivers, mountain ranges, and mineral deposits were indicated but not political boundaries. She asked the class to speculate, based on the distribution of natural resources, where conflicts leading to war were likeliest to be centered. This exercise typified Mitchell’s engrossing, game-like teaching methods. It illustrated as well her deep-seated and characteristically American preference for environmental explanations of human behavior, whether on the scale of the individual, the classroom, or society.

  Margaret had heard and been properly amused by her teacher’s quip about psychoanalysis, but she had also long taken a more than passing interest in her dreams and suspected that the unconscious interior life, in all its mysterious operations, was a resource that writers ought not to shun. One day in geography class she turned to the teacher she respected and adored, and in her own loud stage whisper inquired pointedly, “Mrs. Mitchell, what are sssssocial studies?”60

  Chapter Three

  Bank Street and Beyond

  We cannot guess the limits or reality to the child any more than we can always understand why he laughs.

  LOUISE SEAMAN BECHTEL,

  Books in Search of Children

  Margaret’s arrival at Bank Street could hardly have been better timed. By temperament and training, Lucy Sprague Mitchell was a teacher supremely suited to guiding Margaret toward the vocation she so urgently required. In turn, Margaret’s emergence as a writer presented the Bank Street founder with an extraordinary opportunity to advance her own life-work a step further. Lucy Mitchell realized that “Brownie” and a handful of others at the school represented the potential core of a whole new generation of here-and-now authors. She proposed a new collection, a sequel to the landmark Here and Now Story Book, as a collaboration in which Margaret and the others might all become involved.

  Always a steady seller, the original Here and Now Story Book was in its eighteenth printing in 1936. Not surprisingly, the publisher, E. P. Dutton, was quite receptive. In typical fashion, Lucy Mitchell threw herself completely into all phases of the project, with Margaret as her assistant. “I am in the process of looking over recent publications for children,” Mitchell wrote Dutton’s president, John Macrae, who was editing the anthology personally.1 She was determined to hold the retail price of the book to two dollars (about average for the time) so as to make it widely affordable, and studied similar books to determine how much color art might be feasible at the price. (She was convinced that the earlier book’s quaintly stylized black-and-white drawings by Hendrik van Loon were “of no significance for small children”; a new illustrator would be needed.)

  Taken together, Mitchell’s introductions to each section of the new volume were a book in themselves, a substantial monograph composed of subtly observed, year-by-year developmental profiles of children from two to six. Describing a typical two-year-old, Mitchell wrote:

  Mollie . . . has got her legs, though she often loses them. For she still has a baby’s legs—short and weak. . . . She has not far to fall, and her frequent sudden sitting-downs seem to amuse rather than to discourage her. . . . “Da, Mollie, da,” she says solemnly each time. To whom? To herself, of course. For at two Mollie’s conversation is not cramped by lack of an audience. It burbles on, accompanying almost every activity. To practice new words? To reinforce the emotional quality of the activity? Who but two-year-olds know? And they never tell us! . . . Sometimes Mollie’s remarks are repeated over and over until they trail off into a rhythmic chant. . . . Mollie is still changing. . . . But while she is two, the stories that Mollie seems to enjoy (presumably because she understands them) are about Mollie and Mollie’s emotional waverings between dependence and independence, her adventures with her own bed, her own dinner, her own blocks, her own places to sit, her own kitty. . . . She enjoys very brief stories about her intimately personal world.2

  The import of these observations was not lost on the future author of Goodnight Moon, but little by Margaret and her fellow
contributors to the anthology proved memorable. There were, to be sure, occasional flashes of wit and signs of promise—in Margaret’s “Fifteen Bathtubs,” for example (a story for four-year-olds about a young contrarian who for all the numerous tubs in his parents’ house managed to remain the “dirtiest little boy in the world”), and in Lucy Mitchell’s own buoyantly titled “How Jimmy Jim Jam Got His Name,” a story for “Fives.”

  Although Mitchell remained adamant about the validity of the here-and-now approach, she was willing to strike a moderate tone in a prefatory note addressed directly to those critics who “felt that [her] philosophy might be jeopardizing something precious to children—the sheer beauty of classical literature.”3 After restating unequivocally that children under the age of seven were not yet ready to appreciate classical mythology and folklore, she wrote: “If the stories in this book are less lovely than Cinderella or Little Red Riding Hood or Pandora’s Box, it is because we lack the requisite artistry, not because we do not value loveliness. The great writer for the young children of the ‘here and now’ period is still to come.”

  In mid-October of 1936, just weeks before the manuscript was due at the publisher, Margaret moved out of her parents’ house for good, taking a ground-floor apartment in a well-kept brick row house at 21 West Tenth Street in Greenwich Village, within a few minutes’ walk of Bank Street.