Margaret Wise Brown

by Leonard S. Marcus

  The new writing of Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and other modernists excited them greatly and was understood to have a particular relevance to writing for young children. The modernist aesthetic of recreating in art the immediacy of sensory impressions seemed to coincide with young children’s natural reliance on their senses as the primary means of both experiencing and expressing themselves about the world.

  Stein’s work was considered especially pertinent. The inherent playfulness of her verse and prose, her exuberant manner of cadenced repetition (and of subtle variation within repetition), and her peculiar genius for making words seem to speak directly from the page were all elements of attitude and style that Margaret and the others were eager to incorporate in their own work.

  Lucy Mitchell generally listened more than she spoke and resisted the temptation to take charge, except to propose occasional group assignments of one kind or another. She once asked everyone to rewrite a finished piece of theirs for a different age-level of readers. Such experiments forced Margaret and the others to test their assumptions. It was Mitchell’s gift as a teacher to make doing so seem like a form of play.

  Ellen Tarry, the young Harlem journalist with the Federal Writers’ Project who had responded to Lucy Mitchell’s scholarship offer, unsettled the group with the first story she read to them. “Janie Belle” told about a black baby who had been abandoned in a garbage pail on the Harlem streets. A white nurse found the infant, fed and cared for her and—this was the story’s happy ending—adopted the child.

  As Tarry finished reading the piece in her thick Virginia drawl, the others in the room sat stone silent. At last Lucy Mitchell spoke up to wonder aloud whether all children, even those born into well-off “happy” homes, might not at times experience the fear, if not the actual fact, of abandonment by their parents; after an earnest discussion the group agreed that children did know such fears. Over the next several months it was Margaret who most openly befriended Ellen Tarry, though the initial awkwardness felt by both women is plain from a running private joke they shared. When the fair-skinned Harlem woman told Margaret that her ancestors were thought to have been slaves of a wealthy Virginia family named Brown, Margaret replied that in that case the two of them were probably related.39

  Gradually the real writers in the group found each other. Margaret and Edith Thacher, who already knew each other from Bank Street, now became close friends, continuing their discussions over dinner at the Grand Ticino Restaurant on nearby Thompson Street or at Monte’s on MacDougal—both quaint, candle-lit, Italian family establishments a few steps down from the street, where for a dollar one got a big bowl of spaghetti, a bottle of chianti and hours of undisturbed conversation.

  Margaret and her friend, known to everyone as Posey, complemented each other. Posey was a sensitive, hard-working intellectual with a quiet orderly resolve that seemed unshakable. Margaret was quixotic, unpredictable, a sensualist and a poet. Both were astute observers, but in characteristically different ways. What Posey might have seen as a fire engine hurrying past to perform a vital civic function, Margaret registered as a “big, powerful, noisy red color.”40 The two friends poked gentle fun at each other and at Bank Street constantly. Among their “theories” was one concerning inferiority complexes. Dogs, they posited, were as susceptible as humans to this fearful disorder which Alfred Adler had first explicated for the world during the 1920s. Margaret and Posey discussed at length a tongue-in-cheek experiment for testing their idea. They would name a puppy “Nothing” (Posey eventually did so), then observe the effect (“Here, Nothing!” “Nothing, lie down!”) on the poor creature’s self-esteem.41

  For all the good-natured fun that she and Margaret had at Bank Street’s expense, Posey Thacher probably resembled Lucy Mitchell more closely in talent and temperament than anyone in the Writers Laboratory group. Missouri-born and educated at Radcliffe, she was a tall, attractive woman of keen intellect, with a lyrical prairie cadence in her voice, an easy but firm way with children, an unshowy elegance in her writing, and a reserved but determined manner that made her a much admired figure among her colleagues. Thirty years earlier Posey’s mother and young Lucy Sprague had been students together at Radcliffe. The elder Thacher remembered Lucy as one of the chief campus troublemakers; Gertrude Stein had been another. In the fall of 1933, Posey’s parents had resisted the idea of their daughter enrolling in Lucy Sprague Mitchell’s “communist” school.42 Posey, who had found Radcliffe a genteel, intellectually arid place, had remained adamant. From their first meeting she had been deeply impressed by Mitchell’s spirited commitment to discovering the underlying patterns of childhood experience and using these discoveries as tools for effecting concrete change in the world.

  After completing her Bank Street studies one year later, in the spring of 1934, Posey had continued to be a presence at the school, first as a part-time instructor and then as a member of the Writers Laboratory. A short story by her, a droll satirical piece in the Just So vein called “The Elephant’s Delicate Taste,” had appeared in Another Here and Now Story Book. For Posey, as for Margaret, Bank Street would prove to be a way station on the road not to a teaching career but to the literary life; Lucy Mitchell’s ambitions for the Writers Laboratory were starting to be realized.

  Among the parents of the toddlers enrolled at Bank Street in the fall of 1937 was William R. Scott, an engaging man in his late twenties, with a serious interest in books. An English major at Yale, Scott was a skilled letterpress printer and book designer. He had a great reserve of family money at his disposal, and was eager to become a publisher. But a publisher of what? Scott had brought out a miscellany of limited edition art books and poetry broadsides, and he had discussed possible future directions with his wife, Ethel, and his brother-in-law, John McCullough, but without coming to any decisions. Then he met Lucy Sprague Mitchell.

  Mitchell and Jessie Stanton, who directed the Bank Street nursery, told Scott that in juvenile publishing a chance lay open to him to make a significant contribution to the book world, the education field, and society as a whole. They urged him to become the first publisher to devote his list to experimentally tested, here-and-now-style children’s books.

  The two women argued that the growing public interest in progressive education and the emergence throughout the United States of nursery schools for children as young as eighteen months of age meant that a sizeable market existed for the type of book they had in mind. Scott might therefore expect to earn a reasonable return for his efforts. He would not have far to go for publishable material. The Writers Laboratory produced a steady stream of manuscripts, some of them quite fine. Any manuscript that the firm was considering might first be tried out on Bank Street’s nursery school children or on the older children at the affiliated City & Country School and the Little Red School House. A firm that specialized in child-tested books was bound to arouse the book-buying public’s curiosity and establish its name rapidly.

  Overwhelmed by Mitchell and Stanton’s enthusiasm and sense of mission and by the simple logic of their idea, Scott agreed to the plan. With all the determination of a young Crusoe (except that he had had the freedom to choose the ground on which to prove his resourcefulness) Scott set up shop, partly in the projection closet made available to him at 69 Bank Street, partly in the dining room of his Greenwich Village townhouse, and partly at his farm in North Bennington, Vermont, where the barn became the company’s warehouse and summer quarters.

  Lucy Mitchell had been the inventor, instigator, and guiding spirit of the here-and-now movement in nursery literature. Because of other commitments and plans; she could not, she told Bill Scott, also serve as the fledgling firm’s editor. She was pleased, however, to recommend a suitable substitute. Margaret was offered the job and accepted it gladly. Having emerged as the finest of the here-and-now writers, she would now, beginning in early 1938, also act as the new literature’s chief impresario.

  Margaret felt honored to have been entrusted with her new
responsibilities, and she applied herself energetically to the search for authors and illustrators. In a letter to Louise Raymond she asked the editor to forward to her any interesting manuscripts found unsuitable for the Harper list. In the class notes section of the Hollins Alumnae Quarterly, she urged former schoolmates to send to her whatever children’s stories they might be writing. New York bookshop managers made her acquaintance during the long sessions she spent scanning new juvenile titles on their shelves; Margaret invited them to give her name to any aspiring author or artist who came by seeking guidance about their careers. By these and other means, she soon gained a reputation as a highly accessible editor willing to consider projects that other publishers thought too offbeat or commercially risky.

  In her dual role as editor and author, Margaret then and afterward “collected” illustrators, as Bill Scott later recalled.43 While visiting a friend in Greenwich, Connecticut, for example, she became curious about the artist who had painted a series of whimsical semi-abstractions on the bathhouse ceiling. In one picture, a giant octopus held a huge tentacle over the head of an unsuspecting little fisherman. In another, a large, grinning shark was preparing to make short work of a hapless group of recreational swimmers. These paintings depicting the Perils of the Sea were the work of a young artist, recently returned from Paris, named Clement Hurd. Margaret asked to meet him.

  The painter in question proved to be a tall, lanky man with a boyish, shy, patrician manner and a dry, off-tempo sense of humor. He earned his living, he told Margaret, by making decorative hooked rugs, painting murals like the ones she’d seen, and executing other such commissions for society clients, many of whom were school and family friends. He considered painting and scenic design his serious work. He had never thought about illustrating children’s books, but was willing to have a try.

  Born in New York City in 1908 to a family of considerable affluence (his father, Richard M. Hurd, was a mortgage banker, president of the Lawyers Mortgage Company and vice president of the Mortgage Bond Company), he had been educated at St. Paul’s and Yale and had stayed on at Yale for a year of graduate studies in architecture. When his school days drew to a close in the spring of 1931, Hurd might easily have stepped into the comfortable role of gentleman banker that his family envisioned for him. Instead, he announced his intention to go to Paris to become an artist. Once persuaded that his son would not change his mind, Richard Hurd presented him with a parting gift that was a sardonic choice at best. The book that Clem (as friends knew him) received before sailing for Europe in the summer of 1931 was a bitter chronicle of Siberian exile, The Road to Oblivion.

  Hurd’s sojourn in Paris was liberating. It marked the first time in his sheltered life that he had refused to do what his parents expected of him, and he developed artistically as well. In Paris Hurd studied painting with Fernand Léger at the Académie Moderne, where for the equivalent of five dollars a month, the master—a thoughtful, patient teacher then in his fifties—critiqued his work twice weekly. From Léger, he learned important lessons in pictorial design, developing a graphic approach to form and color that was to serve him well as an illustrator.

  Back in the United States in 1933 after his money ran out, Hurd renewed old friendships while becoming increasingly drawn into the cultural and social circle that columnists of the time referred to as the “streamlined intelligencia.” In February of 1934 he was among the New York artists who chartered a railroad car to Hartford for the historic world premiere of Gertrude Stein’s and Virgil Thomson’s “Four Saints in Three Acts” at the Wadsworth Athenaeum. In New York, college friends took him along to sumptuous evenings at 10 Gracie Square, the Manhattan apartment of Wall Street lawyer Harrison Tweed and his celebrated wife, the socialite, actress, and poet (and former wife of John Barrymore), Michael Strange; Carl Van Vechten, James Montgomery Flagg, and George Jean Nathan were among the vast and shifting cast of characters which would eventually include Margaret Brown.

  Early in 1938 Margaret introduced Hurd to Bill Scott and John McCullough, and it was agreed that Clem should try his hand at illustrating a book for the new firm’s list. Margaret presented him with a simply structured text composed of big-little comparisons (“Once upon a time/there was a great bumble bug/and a tiny little bumble bug/And there was a great big butterfly/and a little tiny butterfly . . .”). This manuscript, which she had written to order for Hurd, became their first collaboration, Bumble Bugs and Elephants.44

  The artist soon learned that illustrating a picture book, at least a picture book for Scott, involved more than producing a sequence of paintings in one’s studio. The art, like the text, had to be tested on actual children. Accustomed to submitting his work to the scrutiny of art directors, wealthy patrons, and his mentor, Léger, Hurd was thus understandably ill at ease as he arrived for his appointment at the Bank Street nursery school and was accosted by a swarm of clamoring critics who barely reached his knees.

  The classroom teacher instructed the visitor to arrange his paintings on the floor and step back while the children examined them. The waiting period that followed was unnerving. When the children finally dispersed with what seemed like a killing indifference to the work laid before them, Hurd’s heart sank. The teacher’s cheerful verdict soon revived him. “Congratulations!” she said. “You held their attention for five minutes! I timed them with my watch.”45 Here was a novel measure of artistic achievement, one for which neither Yale nor Paris had prepared him. Hurd modestly accepted the accolade, collected his pictures and his hat, and strode out the door.

  As work on Bumble Bugs and Elephants proceeded in this trial-and-error manner, more revisions were asked of him than he had perhaps originally bargained for. As Scott’s inaugural fall catalog trumpeted, “In bringing this book to its final form, the artist discarded many finished pictures, keeping only those that had met with the children’s ‘complete approval.’”46

  Hurd’s illustrations for Bumble Bugs and Elephants were in any case splendid work. Compared to the Perils of the Sea, their style was more forthrightly representational; small children would have little trouble recognizing the familiar objects in each scene: a door, a window, a table. The artist’s playful humor was everywhere in evidence. In one illustration, two well-behaved small dogs wait patiently while a large dog jumps up to inspect a tempting plate of food on the table. Pronouncing Hurd one of the most innovative young illustrators on the current scene, the critic Louise Seaman Bechtel would observe not long afterward that his art had a “flavor of recent French and Russian bookmaking in [his] use of flat color combined with bold spaces of black and white,” and that there was a “verve” and a “toylike” quality about his simplified, graphic approach to image-making that children were bound to enjoy.47 In his first picture book, Hurd had also demonstrated a sure grasp of young children’s need for reassurance that the world they live in is a safe and secure place. His paintings depicted a fundamentally benign world, a sort of here-and-now peaceable kingdom with a sense of fun. Thereafter Margaret turned primarily to him to illustrate those manuscripts of hers that investigated the child’s elemental feelings of attachment to home.

  Small children, Margaret realized, did not place books in a special category of culturally exalted objects. They tore at, squeezed, and bit books just as they did their toys, their food, their parents. The very young experienced books as sensuous objects that might, for all one knew, be alive. Accordingly, Bumble Bugs and Elephants, as a book intended for the youngest ages, was printed not on ordinary paper but on durable cardboard stock strong enough to withstand the onslaught of toddlers’ bites and tugs. For the same reason it was given an equally unconventional sturdy spiral binding. In all, the book’s design was a remarkable innovation. Such experiments were the norm in the early days of Scott.

  Margaret’s written-to-order text was also experimental in form. The manuscript began with the familiar fairy tale invocation, “once upon a time,” and proceeded as a litany of rapidly indicated contrasting images
(“There were two little dogs and a great big dog”) without ever developing a plot line. Instead, Margaret’s text started over and over again, presenting image after comforting image of a small creature that had found its place in the world alongside a much larger one. Bumble Bugs and Elephants was not so much a story as a game patterned on an emotional reality of early childhood, a game that the very young might extend indefinitely by inventing big-little pairs of their own. Here was a book that did not end except in the reader’s imagination. If it amounted to something less than Literature—Margaret narrowly credited herself as the author of the book’s “word pattern” and gave Hurd top billing—the children on whom the book had been tested evidently did not care.

  Among the artists who showed their portfolios to Margaret in the early months of 1938, while Scott was still preparing its first list, was a vivid young Russian Jewish emigré painter, Esphyr Slobodkina (“Slow-boat-keen-a,” as she had long since become used to explaining to Americans).

  Strong-willed, solidly built, and not easily impressed, she had come to the United States in the late 1920s with a firsthand knowledge of the heady Soviet Constructivist experiments that had become an important influence on American artists and designers by the 1930s. Her first impressions of her adopted country’s artistic life, however, had aroused her deepest skepticism. A self-styled bohemian acquaintance had escorted Slobodkina to the Blue Horse Inn, a Greenwich Village hangout where the waiters dressed in silk shirts and berets and a singing parrot served as vocalist for the late-night dance band. All this had struck the serious-minded painter as merely “dingy.” As she later recalled, she soon decided “not to fall in with the time-wasting, do-nothing . . . Greenwich Village crowd.”48