Margaret Wise Brown

by Leonard S. Marcus

  The hostess’s husband has come out from the city for the weekend. He sits in silence “like a great Irish Wolf-hound” across from her at the long table. All attention centers on the hostess, however, who is “outrageous” as she speaks in the “clear ringing voice” that brought her a measure of fame as a lecturer and radio personality if not as an actress:

  She kept talking about the house she wanted . . . and kept sketching a whole life that she wanted to live that completely left him out of the picture. And he sat there talking and watching . . . and the currents shot like bullets between them. His silence bored into her . . . and she flung her dark head and ranted on never unconscious of him in her complete ignoring of him until a dark battle raged there unseen and unspoken between them.

  In this story, Margaret theorized that the wealthy attorney had become an “infuriating symbol” to his wife of “something necessary to her existance [sic] . . . [a] security . . . she could return to after her necessary flights to the fantastic, . . . the haunting awareness of poets. For she was a poet”—even if the hostess’s husband will not acknowledge this. He shuffles off to bed alone, preceded only by the ailing sculptor, leaving the two remaining male guests to their after-dinner conversation, a discussion of intellectual matters in which it is understood the women do not participate.

  “‘I am the Poet, for God’s sake why don’t they ask me just once,’” the hostess sighs with only her younger friend to hear her as the men’s discussion turns to the relationship between poetry and science in the modern world. “And the blonde girl told her to listen just once. And obediently she did for a few minutes and then impatient again the ladies went to the icebox, for such was the interminable length of the argument.”

  In her copy of Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria, Michael Strange underlined the following passage: “The intensity of her [Victoria’s] determination swept them [the British Cabinet] headlong down the stream of her desire.”42 This, doubtless, was life as she thought it should be lived. Strachey had dedicated Queen Victoria to Virginia Woolf. Michael Strange had come to view her own life as a classic example of the thwarted destiny of the woman writer as described by Woolf in A Room of One’s Own.

  It was plainly not, however, for lack of a room or of opportunity that Michael Strange had failed to achieve the artistic stature she considered her due. By 1940 she had published four books of verse and two versions of a play, Claire de Lune.43 Early on in her gladiatorial marriage to John Barrymore (which lasted from 1920 to 1928) the celebrated actor had championed the play, arranging for a Broadway production, stepping into the principal role himself, and recruiting his sister Ethel to star opposite him. (Apparently unmoved by the lines provided her, Ethel Barrymore petulantly improvised her way through opening night.) When the bad reviews began pouring in, Barrymore could barely be restrained from responding publicly in his wife’s defense during the second evening’s performance. “For the love of Mike,” as Alexander Woollcott commented.44 Strange’s various forays as a dramatic actress had been met with similar if not even less favorable reaction. On stage she lacked the charismatic self-possession that she effortlessly assumed in most other situations. The one role she excelled at playing was that of Michael Strange.

  In his profile of her, which appeared in the December 3, 1927 issue of the New Yorker, Charles Shaw judged her a “marvelously unkempt” woman of “extraordinary imagination” and original taste who was “seldom without some new enterprise” to occupy her.45 Michael Strange, he wrote, never lacked for the precise “trenchant simile” with which to seize the spotlight while leaving a slower-witted companion in the dark and dust. She “allege[s],” Shaw archly reported, to be a “great lover of classics.” But he found her “classical foundation,” while “vivid,” to be of the “sketchiest texture.” He continued with rising mockery,

  In her own opinion she is greatly influenced by the opinions of those she respects. . . . While outwardly a scoffer at superstition, she possesses a shadow of belief in many superstitions . . . [She is nonetheless] wholly unaware of the trivial. . . .

  Children divert her greatly and she wonders if it might not be possible to recapture somehow their unselfconsciousness and eternal spirit of picnic.’ . . .

  Aesthetically she longs for simple emotion charmingly phrased. . . .

  Her style is completely her own.

  The name Michael Strange had simply come to her one day “in full . . . from nowhere,” as she explained in her memoir Who Tells Me True, which Scribner’s published in the spring of 1940.46 She had been a young married society woman when in 1916 a publisher accepted a collection of her poetry. Well known on the social circuit and hoping to establish a separate identity as a writer, she had resolved to conceal her authorship behind the memorable pseudonym by which she was thereafter known to friends and the public alike.

  There had been three marriages in all. The first, to American career diplomat Leonard Thomas, produced two sons, Leonard, Jr. and Robin. The couple drifted apart as the young woman’s literary aspirations drew her into a circle of friends within which there could plainly be no place for her rather proper husband. She and Thomas were still married when Michael met John Barrymore in April 1917. Their affair culminated in her first divorce and her marriage to the actor in 1920. The following year, their daughter, Diana Barrymore, was born. The stormy tenor of the couple’s years together, their “incessant and endless arguments” (in the words of Barrymore biographer Hollis Alpert), quickly became public knowledge.47 Shouting matches, self-dramatizing grand gestures, and even traded suicide threats were the norm of a shared life played out against the backdrop of the best hotels of London, Paris, and St. Moritz. “We are exactly alike in many respects,” the actor concluded, looking back on the marriage. “Those respects separated us.” Nearly thirty years later, their grown (and deeply troubled) daughter, Diana, offered much the same assessment:

  Their intense egos galled them: they were in competition with each other as artists, as lovers, as parents; each insisted on being the only focus of attention in the home, on the street, at parties; each had an uncontrollable temper—madly theatrical, they could explode in a rage at the turn of a word. Both seethed with jealousy; it was no secret that women shamelessly pursued Daddy or that there was hardly a gentleman acquaintance of Mother’s who hadn’t felt impelled to try his charms on her.48

  As her second marriage came undone, Michael Strange had made new efforts to advance her career in the arts, appearing (to generally poor notices) on stage and later taking to the lecture circuit with a selfconsciously Whitmanesque talk on democracy and a somewhat less ponderous harangue on “The Stage as the Actress Sees It.” In 1928 she married for the third time, opting for calmer but no less opulent circumstances as the wife of one of New York’s most distinguished attorneys, Harrison Tweed. Her lectures, in the meantime, had evolved into recitals of poetry, her own as well as others’, all painstakingly set by her to musical accompaniment. For a time during the thirties she gave regular performances of what she later called her “Great Words with Great Music” programs over the radio. A White House command performance for the Roosevelts came her way. By 1940 she had parted company with her producers, but was still often on the road, declaiming works by Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Poe, Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course, Michael Strange. (She noted in a promotional brochure, “It has seemed to me a good thing in such times for poets to shake themselves out of their habit of reciting only their own poetry, and to resume their ancient, their eternal role, that of the sayer.”)49

  All this she recounted in Who Tells Me True, an elaborate self-advertisement that afforded the public numerous glimpses of the artists, actors, literary lights, and other public figures, from Charlie Chaplin to Mrs. William Randolph Hearst, whom she had known. The book was above all a defense of herself as a poet—a plea, albeit a shrill and deeply contradictory one, to be judged not by her social pedigree (which she had, however, carefully mapped out in the book�
��s early chapters) but by the strength of her art.

  That her editor at Scribner’s, Maxwell Perkins, seems genuinely to have thought well of the book was partly a measure of her moderate talent for characterization. However, it was doubtless also due to her far more considerable talent for charm and persuasion. (Perkins was smitten to the point of carrying her photograph in his wallet.)50 She radiated an aura or allure that all but pulled down the distinction between willfulness and art in the relentless whirlwind of her activities. After years of presenting herself as a sort of high priestess of poetry, she had in fact become a celebrity.

  Reviews of Who Tells Me True were mixed but far from entirely unsympathetic. The New York Times Book Review, which ran a substantial piece, declared:

  It has the faults one would expect, but it has also an interest which is not wholly casual. Its point of view is egotistic; its writing is pretentious and involved, more diligent in effort than objectively successful; its author’s mind is apparently allergic to simplicity. Yet sincerity the book does possess, along with incident, its “temperament” and its unquenchable springs of self-confident enterprise. . . . This is a glamour girl who sought something of wider allurement than merely traditional glamour, and went after it in her own individual way.51

  By November 1940, sales of the memoir had proven disappointing, and Perkins found himself in the classic position of the editor obliged to console an author over the public’s modest response to a book. In October, Harrison Tweed had tried to intervene on his wife’s behalf, asking Perkins to consider investing more money in advertising in time for the Christmas trade. Perkins had replied briskly that this was impossible, Scribner’s had already done all it could, but “for some reason which I cannot explain the public were cool about the book.”52 An anonymous New York Public Library cataloguer ventured a more caustic appraisal of Strange’s memoir—in the space provided for “Subject” on the catalog slip, “None” was entered.

  In the late spring of 1940, Margaret was experiencing a new period of agitated self-doubt. She wrote to Lucy Mitchell, who had gone to Vermont for the summer, that she wanted to read for the next six months and not do any writing at all, “feeling,” she said, “my ignorance instead of my oats, these days, or perhaps my five year old literary existance [sic] is wearing down.”53

  Margaret had words of encouragement for Mitchell, with whom she was then collaborating on a large and difficult project. Apart from her participation in the Writers Laboratory, Margaret’s chief responsibility at Bank Street was her work as coauthor and coeditor with Mitchell of a series of here-and-now-inspired “basal readers,” primers that they hoped might replace the monotonous “I see the dog” books then in general use in schools. Margaret was more or less dutiful about carrying out her assignment, which entailed, among other things, a tedious correspondence with the publisher, D. C. Heath and Company. Margaret, knowing how trying even her stoically self-disciplined former teacher was finding the whole affair, observed, “I supose [sic] that you as author, editor, educator and geographer, are still bearing the brunt of [Heath’s] Doctor Byrle Parker’s omnipotence. But if I can be of any help in writing revision or indignation, please let me know.”54

  For Margaret, vacationing on Vinalhaven had become an annual summer ritual. On July I, just before leaving for Long Cove, she wrote Mitchell again with additional news of Heath and to say, “I feel clear about my decision to get . . . into another field. And this is the beginning.”55 In the meantime she would immerse herself in the peace and solitude of the “wild and deserted” islands off Rockland. “It is the best place left west of Ireland,” she wrote from Maine. “I am healthy and happy as a cricket hauling rowboats and carrying buckets of water and painting pictures.”56 Margaret hoped that the Mitchells, whose own rustic summer quarters were in Greensboro, Vermont, might visit her at Long Cove. She promised to take Lucy out painting on the granite rocks overlooking the water. Mitchell declined the invitation, remarking that though Maine as Margaret described it sounded good, Vermont was good, too. “We are not wild but we are isolated (at least I am).”57 She had once done a great deal of painting, she said, but the only kind she now allowed herself was furniture painting, and still there was too little time for work. She wished her young friend a happy summer.

  Margaret, as she reported rather cryptically to the Hollins Alumnae Quarterly, spent part of the summer writing “other things under another name.”58 Random House had hired her to ghostwrite a series of natural history picture books for famed African explorer Osa Johnson. Pantaloons, an adventure story featuring a young elephant, was the first of the series. In addition to a flat fee of $500 for each volume, she received a pair of leopard slacks. Margaret’s reasons for having undertaken the project are unclear; she told friends that she simply wanted the leopard slacks. Perhaps writing books under another name also provided her with a way of keeping busy while she considered her future. By August, in any case, she had rededicated herself to writing and editing picture books, and was holding court as various collaborators made their way by seaplane or ferry to Long Cove.

  The Hurds were the first to arrive. They had chosen the air route, and they had just enough time to snap a photo of Margaret rowing vigorously below them as they glided down to a landing by the black buoy that served as their point of rendezvous.

  Once ashore, Margaret deposited her friends in the upstairs bedroom under the eaves, where (as she well knew) bats made their home. “Get me out of here!” Posey was heard to demand moments later, after Margaret had wandered off to give her guests time to unpack.59 Bats notwithstanding, the Hurds stayed for several days, sailing, swimming, dining outdoors on lobster, and occasionally doing a bit of work. The couple had brought along a book they were collaborating on, and while they were “cutting pasting and typing at a dummy in the next room,” Margaret sat down to write Lucy Mitchell. “We are having wonderful days with a few of those early fall days that creep into August and wring your heart with the poignancy of another season.”60

  When Esphyr Slobodkina arrived soon afterward, she seemed in a huff, as she often did to others associated with Scott. As she stepped from the seaplane into Margaret’s boat she was carrying an armload of mailing tubes containing sample art for a book she was illustrating for Margaret, Red Light Green Light. While the others mainly lolled about, Slobodkina put in long hours of work each day, at one point remarking scornfully that she had to earn her living.61

  Margaret had previously spoken to “Phyra” about Bill Gaston, describing him as the man she loved. But some hesitancy in Margaret’s voice had impelled the artist to make further inquiries. Finally she asked Margaret directly, “Is he married or something?” Margaret had answered, “Yes, he is sort of married.”62 Slobodkina “raised a questioning eyebrow” in response. And here they all were together, with Gaston himself occasionally dropping by in his motor launch, sometimes accompanied by his wife, Lucille.

  As this drama was unfolding, a letter from the Whitman Printing Company arrived for Margaret, proposing that she write a children’s book about manners using Disney characters. “Hell said Donald Duck that aint [sic] polite,” she joked as she reported the news in another letter to Lucy Mitchell, adding, “I think the idea has possibilities. I never could get progressive on manners. I think they are important as weapons if not graces and good props for shyness uncertainty and difficult situations and the more automatic they are the more effective. Is this herasy [sic]?”63 Meanwhile, while they were out rowing one day, Phyra made some remark that caused Margaret to realize, apparently for the first time, that her companion was a Jew. To the artist’s shock and dismay, this revelation seemed to irritate Margaret. “Why didn’t you tell me that before?” she replied, as though her guest had somehow failed her in an obligation that might have spared her some trouble.64 Margaret went on to insist that she disliked herself for harboring what she called a “Jewish prejudice,” yet she had the prejudice all the same. Slobodkina soon left the island.

  M
argaret’s attitude, however frankly acknowledged, was certainly one that Lucy Mitchell would never have condoned. When Margaret turned to Posey Hurd, who had gone rowing with them that day, to ask if she shared such sentiments, Posey responded indignantly, “Why, certainly not.”65 Anti-semitic feelings, however, were far from uncommon among Americans of the period, educated and otherwise. Margaret had thought twice about her own prejudice, but, alas, hardly more than twice.