Margaret Wise Brown

by Leonard S. Marcus

  In the spring of 1938, a friend to whom she confided her need to earn more money advised Slobodkina to see a certain “very beautiful, rich and clever girl who writes children’s books” to learn how one went about becoming a juveniles illustrator.49 He offered to introduce her to this dazzling acquaintance of his, whom he knew from parties around town, as soon as the artist prepared some sort of convincing portfolio.

  For want of other ideas, Slobodkina started by making strings of paper dolls. With these repeating images as her building blocks, she experimented at composing complete pictorial scenes, which she pasted in place on a paper background. She then wrote a simple story to go with her designs. When the artist was done, she bedecked herself in a “chic outfit of moderately Bohemian swirling black cape and a beaded, crocheted skullcap over . . . invisibly snooded long hair” and arrived at 69 Bank Street to meet her fate “in the person of the twenty-eight-year-old, slightly chubby and short, but beautiful, blond and mercurial Margaret Wise Brown.”50

  The interview, conducted in Margaret’s tiny office, was polite, a bit formal perhaps, and inconclusive as to the prospects for an assignment. During a rapid tour of the premises—Slobodkina had actually to run to keep up with her guide—an imposing older woman stepped into the corridor. This, Margaret announced, was Lucy Sprague Mitchell, who paused to offer a few words of friendly encouragement before disappearing, also in an unusual hurry, Slobodkina thought. As the artist and editor shook hands Margaret promised to examine her portfolio and telephone her in the next few days. This Margaret did, and on the strength of her highly favorable impression, she arranged for a second interview at Bill Scott’s home where, in a gathering of Scotts and McCulloughs, Slobodkina encountered general praise—and certain reservations. It would be too costly, she was told, to reproduce her artwork well (Scott good-naturedly assured her this was not her fault, citing his own professional inexperience); the story she had written was a bit flimsy, and it lacked a satisfactory ending. Nonetheless, the publisher was determined to use her for some assignment. Margaret, she was told, would contact her again shortly, when a suitable manuscript had been found.

  To the skeptical artist this sounded like a classic brushoff, but she soon discovered it had not been meant as such. As the others present at the meeting already knew, Margaret would simply write a book to order for her.

  The Little Fireman, which Slobodkina illustrated and Scott published that fall (1938), was an elaborate variation on the big-little theme laid down in Bumble Bugs and Elephants. It could also be read as a sly comment on the pattern of Bank Street life itself, where little children and big teacher trainees learned in parallel by engaging in many of the same activities. It doubtless amused Margaret to equate Bank Street rushing-around with the putting out of fires.

  “Once upon a time there was a great big tall fireman and once upon a time there was a little fireman. “51 The big fireman of Margaret’s tale lives in a big firehouse, the little one in a little house. The big fellow fights fires of a suitable scale, the little one fights little fires. And so on. In alternating passages, parallel adventures energetically unfold, with a surprise reversal at the end—in bed at night, the big fireman dreams only a little dream, and the little fireman’s dream is large. At Bank Street, Margaret had learned that the very young find humor in “reversals of observed relations”; in The Little Fireman she applied this principle somewhat mechanically at the end. Endings were always the most difficult part of a manuscript for her, though in her sequels, The Little Farmer (1948) and The Little Cowboy (1949), both illustrated by Slobodkina, Margaret crafted last-page surprises that seem less forced and so more nearly satisfying. As Margaret continued to develop as a writer, she increasingly modified Bank Street theory or set it aside altogether for her own literary purposes.

  For The Little Fireman Slobodkina used the same cut-out-collage method as in her portfolio piece and thereby introduced a fertile new illustration technique to American picture book art. Her intensely hued, poster-like graphics were lavishly printed in five colors, with such a thickness of ink that the printer wondered aloud whether there was need of any paper.

  Margaret was invited to share a house for the summer of 1938 on the island of Vinalhaven, off the Maine coast in Penobscot Bay. Mrs. Gertrude MacCormick, a Bank Street administrative assistant, had arranged to rent an old A-frame ocean-front cottage. Her teenage children, Jim and Joan, were also going, as was Margaret’s good friend Jessica Gamble. They packed their bags with clothes and books and, because the house was situated at Long Cove, a remote part of the island inaccessible by road, with a month’s supply of canned and packaged foods. Mrs. MacCormick, having taken to the cheerful notion of outfitting the isolated holiday retreat with a piano, made the necessary arrangements in Rockland, their point of embarkation. The upright was loaded onto an old green dragger. Then she, Margaret, and the others got aboard, and they were off. “The crazy MacCormicks” the local lobstermen called them, lumping the five together.52

  The vacationers settled into their rough quarters, with Margaret and Jessica sharing an upstairs room under the eaves. More to their amusement than discomfort, their room was also inhabited by bats. The use of a fifteen-foot sailboat came with the house, which belonged to the poet Harry Vinal, whose ancestors had been early settlers of the island. Margaret named the boat “The Bat.”

  She had her own name for almost everything. She called the little island they rowed to for picnics “Starfish Island” for its distinctive shape, and nicknamed sixteen-year-old Jim, who years later remembered having had a secret crush on her, “Old Smoothy.” (To millions of Americans, Bing Crosby was Old Smoothy; Margaret could hardly have paid the teenager a higher complement.) Margaret was a nester. As the summer wore on, she filled first her own room, then the house, with arrangements of pebbles, seashells, lobster traps, bits of driftwood, and feathers collected on walks. Her housemates might well have resented some of these nesting activities but for the fact that she brought them off so interestingly and with such good humor.

  There was also fishing, swimming in the chill, phosphorescent water, and hiking in the deeply scented spruce forest. Because their cottage was situated on high ground along the granite rim of Long Cove, sounds emanating from the house echoed tremendously over the water. Margaret and Jessica eagerly took advantage of this natural phenomenon. On some evenings, the bellowing grunt-tones of what sounded like a gorilla—but was actually Jessica—shattered the Cove’s arcadian stillness, and from their crank-up Victrola the jaunty strains of “Flat Foot Floogie” and Bing Crosby’s plaintive “Don’t Be That Way” piped out over the water.

  A neighbor who doubtless heard these goings-on (and may have been their chief target) was William Gaston, a New York attorney who spent summers on his inherited Penobscot Bay property, Hurricane Island (just across from Vinalhaven) and the unfortunately named nearby Crotch Island, where he had built an extravagant house featuring a deck supported by a grand phalanx of antique ships’ figureheads.

  The grandson of a former governor of Massachusetts, Gaston, at forty-two, had numerous ties to the theater world and to East coast society. His former wives, Kay Francis and Rosamond Pinchot, had both been actresses, and Clare Booth, John Barry more, and Michael Strange (Barrymore’s wife from 1920 to 1928) were among the many celebrities who had made the trek north to be hosted by him. Gaston himself dabbled at playwriting and producing. Although heavy drinking had caused him to put on weight, he still had the dashing good looks of a leading man and (as the steady parade of female guests to and from the island testified) a well-deserved reputation as a womanizer.

  At the time of Rosamond Pinchot’s widely publicized suicide in late January of 1938, she and Gaston had been separated for years. Gaston was nonetheless deeply affected by the news of her death, and he was a man in urgent need of consolation when Margaret met him that summer. Their friendship soon became an affair.

  The relationship went unremarked in a letter Margaret wrote over the s
ummer to Marguerite Hearsey. As though to underscore her new-found professionalism, Margaret typed her communication, but the words sputtered out haltingly. That particular afternoon, she wrote, the air, by a trick of the weather typical of Maine, had suddenly turned cool, turbulent, autumnal; for a moment she had thought herself a Hollins student again, due back on campus. The thought of returning to Hollins pleased her, but she now had other, more pressing matters to attend to. The following day she was scheduled to fly to Vermont for a last-minute review of Scott’s fall list. She would then be sailing on a pleasure cruise. Margaret was reading Steinbeck. “There is more tenderness and good writing in him than in all others,” she declared. She was working on a new book for Harper, though “most of the ink poisoning impulse has gone away for the moment.” She had spent most of the last several weeks

  generating . . . with friends, . . . generating to degenerate this winter. . . . It is wonderful just to know the importance of lying in the sun. . . . Life goes on in Transition. This summer it is better than it has been in a long time, and still [everything hangs] in the balance. . . . This is a silly letter. Maybe it is the typewriter. I’d better stop. Devotedly, Tim.53

  A year earlier, when Harper agreed to publish When the Wind Blew, Margaret had written Marguerite Hearsey to say that at last, in the picture book genre, she had found a satisfying outlet for her literary ambitions. In books for young children, a field of “limitless” unexplored possibilities, it was possible to put the “wildest and best words into literature. . . . What a field it might have been for Ronald Firbank and V. Woolf and G. Stein and all the other playful writers and masters of imagery in our day.”54

  Now, as Scott’s editor, she proposed to invite a number of such writers to author children’s books for the firm. Over the summer of 1938, Margaret and John McCullough drafted a suitable letter and sent copies to Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and John Steinbeck. As Bill Scott’s partner, only McCullough signed the letters. He wagered Margaret what she referred to as a “box of Don Giovannis” (some good seats at the Metropolitan Opera) that no one would reply.55

  Late in August, while Margaret was still travelling, a reply did come from Stein and it was an enthusiastic affirmative. Stein offhandedly reported that she was already well into a draft of the proposed book and wondered only how long it might run and still be appropriate for children. There were routine questions about royalty arrangements. Stein looked forward to the publisher’s response. Elated, taken aback, out the price of a box at the Met, McCullough, having outlined the terms of Scott’s standard contract, assured her, “I apologize if the decorous future conditional has sometimes slipped into future plu-perfect. The prospect of your story is enough to unhorse our decorum which is at best scarce a better rider than the White Knight.”56

  Stein had good reason to hope the project would succeed. She was then sixty-four and the last few years had been difficult ones for her creatively, the more so coming as they did on the heels of her triumphant American tour of 1934-35. Whereas her cunning memoir, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and her opera Four Saints in Three Acts had both been great popular successes of the early thirties, none of Stein’s more recent work had fared half as well in the United States. When McCullough’s letter arrived she was quite prepared to try her luck with a new publisher, a new genre, and new audience.

  During the rapid exchange of cables and letters that followed, Stein, turning unaccountably testy at one point, demanded to know whether McCullough had meant to imply that he did not think her capable of writing a long work for young readers. (McCullough had made no such suggestion.) Did his letter constitute a formal agreement? Half concealing panic, Scott himself cabled a reply: “GREATLY DISAPPOINTED AT MUTUAL MISUNDERSTANDING. WE HAVE FAITH IN YOUR ABILITY TO WRITE FOR CHILDREN AT ANY LENGTH.”57 He would, however, need to see the completed book before making a formal offer. By October 24 friendly relations had been restored. “TERMS AGREEABLE,” Scott flashed in response to a letter in which Stein had given details of the final plan of her work-in-progress.58

  Throughout these exchanges Margaret felt ignored and cheated of an opportunity to become personally acquainted with a writer she greatly admired. When, however, on an unseasonably warm mid-November afternoon, the manuscript of The World Is Round, Gertrude Stein’s first fantasy for children, arrived from France, all hands understood that the evening belonged to Margaret. Bill and John joined her at her apartment after work to read the book aloud, have a drink, and celebrate their good fortune.

  In the happy confusion, everyone forgot about supper and Margaret had not thought to pick up refreshments. The only food in the house was an amusing cake in the shape of a boat, which she had ordered for a friend’s going-away party and which the trio now appropriated in the name of experimental literature. They sat around the kitchen table and took turns reading the manuscript aloud: “Once upon a time the world was round and you could go on it around and around. Everywhere there was somewhere and everywhere there they were women children dogs cows wild pigs little rabbits cats and lizards and animals. This is the way it was.”59

  Suddenly the lights went out. Careless at times about her bill paying, Margaret had neglected the electric company. Candles were groped for, and the reading continued. “And everybody dogs cats sheep rabbits and lizards and children all wanted to tell everybody all about it . . .” There was a knock at the door that went unnoticed. It was Basil Rauch, come to return a borrowed vacuum cleaner. Letting himself in, he saw the three dimly-lit figures huddled absurdly around the cake, and listened—“. . . and they wanted to tell all about themselves . . .”—and fled out the door.

  Margaret and her guests stayed up well into the night, reading and laughing as Stein’s young hero and heroine, Willie and Rose, pursued their adventures, each alone, before being happily reunited at the end. The following morning Bill Scott cabled France: “DELIGHTED WITH MANUSCRIPT. CONTRACT FOLLOWS,”60 and Margaret made preparations for testing the book on the Bank Street nursery students and on older children at the nearby cooperating schools.

  Each of the five books that Scott published in the fall of 1938 was a daring experiment. Cottontails, conceived by Ethel McCullough [Scott], illustrated by Sister Mary Veronica and printed on cloth, was, as Barbara Bader observes, “something new”—a “Tactile Book” with specially sewn-in novelty details for pre-readers to touch.61 On one page silkscreened rabbits had real cotton-ball tails, on another a lamb had a real toy bell around its neck. During the months prior to publication, Margaret and the Scotts had patiently done all the stitching themselves, an inefficient scheme at best, and Cottontails proved to be a book that one stacked in warehouses and sent through the mail at one’s peril. “The spoilage,” Scott later recalled with amusement, “was tremendous.”62 But the idea was sound. Two years later, Simon and Schuster published Dorothy Kunhardt’s tactile book, Pat the Bunny, with resounding success.

  For older children, The Log of Christopher Columbus provided the firsthand experience of reading about the explorer’s adventures in his own words. Lucy Mitchell had long advocated this approach to teaching history, on the theory that the past might thus be brought to life with something of the immediacy of the here-and-now. Margaret adapted a translation of the original text without taking a title-page credit.

  Posey Thacher had a book on the list, a picture-book satire for ages five to nine called Hurry Hurry: A Tale of Calamity and Woe, Or, A Lesson in Leisure with illustrations by Mary Pepperell Dana. The story concerns a babysitter who, by getting a bit ahead of herself, is always falling into man-holes and ditches and the like. Few picture books before had dared so pointedly to take the grownup world to task for its capacity for childish self-importance. The Little Fireman, Margaret’s collaboration with Esphyr Slobodkina, and Bumble Bugs and Elephants, her book with Clement Hurd, completed the list.

  When copies of the books were ready, Bill Scott made an appointment to show them to Anne Carroll Moore at the New York Public Library. B
oth he and Margaret anticipated the meeting with wary expectancy. Moore’s conspicuous silence at the time of Another Here and Now Story Book’s publication was hardly reassuring. Now the librarian would have a fresh opportunity to raise her voice for or against the “new kind of author for children.”

  Moore seemed to ignore Margaret as she looked up from the small heap of books ranged before her and prepared to deliver her verdict.

  “Mr. Scott,” she said with all deliberateness, “do you want to know what I think of these books?”

  “Why yes, Miss Moore,” he replied, sounding a note of forced optimism.

  “Truck, Mr. Scott! They are truck!”63

  The interview at an end, Scott and Margaret collected their things and shambled back downtown.

  Later that fall, on assignment for the New Republic, Bruce Bliven, Jr., drove out to the Flushing Meadow landfill to size up the progress being made at the New York World’s Fair construction site. The young writer arrived with an air of skepticism; four years earlier his father had denounced Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center as a “piece of gargantuan exhibitionism . . . typical not only of the anarchy of modern capitalist society, but of America in particular.”64

  Much to his surprise, the younger Bliven found the “Trylon and Perisphere,” the fair’s monumental ball-and-spike trademark, was genuinely impressive. With rising curiosity, he observed that the avenues radiating like wheel spokes from the central hub formed by this two-part extravaganza had been color-coded (rather like the utility pipes at 69 Bank Street):

  From the warm off-white of the Theme Center the hues along each street will increase in intensity as one gets farther and farther from the central axis, and the buildings and murals and plants will all be in harmony. . . . A Fair visitor, confused by the bigness of it all, can approximate his distance from the center of things by a glance at the color of the nearest flower or building.65