Margaret Wise Brown

by Leonard S. Marcus

  When a friend on the staff of Life arrived at Long Cove with a copy of the magazine’s September 16 issue, Margaret, slipping comfortably back into the role of teacher’s helper, dashed off a letter to Mitchell to report on a photo essay in the magazine. The photographs, collected under the title “Flight Over America,” amounted to an aerial national portrait, with views of farmlands, factories, and prairie plains as they had rarely been observed before. Here, Margaret declared, was a brand new visual tool for engaging school children’s interest in geography.

  Referring, for once, to the European war, Margaret added that the news from abroad had given the fine Maine weather an elegaic piquancy. “Don’t you hate,” she wrote, “to see this summer go. With the world in such a fireworks of horror, it seems like the last summer. I seem to cling to it as such and don’t want to get back to New York where the radios and the newspapers seem more real.”66

  Margaret’s ugly scene with Esphyr Slobodkina continued to trouble her. In an unpublished short story which seems intended as a coda of sorts to that incident, she described a meeting (possibly imaginary) with Slobodkina back in New York. In “Oh Gentle Jew,” two women sit at one of the green-and-white tables at the Hotel Breevort’s outdoor café. It is a beautiful October afternoon with the “first autumn leaves . . . drifting down on the sidewalk in the warm Indian Summer breeze.”67 They order drinks from the hovering French waiter and make small talk about the season just past. Margaret (unnamed in the story but described as “blonde, green eyed and wind blown”) speaks of weeks of “fooling around in boats and thinking little thoughts that didn’t bother me” and of seeing “a friend”—an obvious reference to Bill Gaston. Then the conversation takes a more serious turn as the blonde woman confirms that this friend of hers has a “Jewish prejudice.” She proceeds to relate what she calls the “important dream” she had over the summer.

  It was a large courtroom. The courtroom was full and I could see every face in it and you [Slobodkina, identified in the story as the “dark, deep eyed” Jewess] were there and the Judge asked, “Who here has a Jewish Prejudice,” and no one rose and I had to rise up in the witness box and stand there admitting it. It was like being a traitor, and yet it was the time to be honest. You looked amazed and hurt and I found your eyes . . .

  The narrator’s dream implies the rather shrill hope that she and the other woman might remain friends despite everything. To this suggestion the other woman replies ruefully: “Love the Jew and hate the Jews. I wonder if it is possible.” The conversation then drifts in other directions.

  As for Red Light Green Light, the book she and Margaret were then collaborating on, Slobodkina, by her own account, proceeded to botch the illustrations. (The project languished for a time, to be taken up and published in 1944 by Doubleday, with illustrations by Leonard Weisgard.)

  Margaret’s friendship with Slobodkina did not, however, come to an end. Over the next two years or so they saw each other occasionally in the company of their mutual friend, Charles Shaw, and as both Margaret’s and Slobodkina’s business relationships with Scott became increasingly antagonistic they turned to each other for comfort and support with greater frequency. Margaret and Phyra also admired each other’s work, and well before the decade was out they were again collaborating on new projects. As the illustrator, never one to mince words, recalled:

  Margaret, whatever her personal faults might have been and there were quite a few from my point of view, was a superbly honest and dedicated worker . . . [who] possessed that rare quality of generosity and willingness to share her knowledge with those whom she befriended. . . . Greater tribute I cannot pay to anybody.68

  Margaret had always been non-ideological, apolitical. Her quarrel in the summer and fall of 1940 with Esphyr Slobodkina was more a reflection of the childish cruelty she was sometimes capable of—of a certain pattern of lashing out while grasping for straws—than of mature, deliberate conviction.

  It was also in 1940 that Margaret entered psychoanalysis. She hoped to sort through the pain and confusion occasioned by her parents’ failing marriage, her own frustrated attempts at love, and her continued inability to write convincingly for her peers. Her analyst, Dr. Robert C. Bak, was a respected young practitioner, a Freudian and a future president of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and Society. Margaret approached her sessions with Dr. Bak with a healthy skepticism considering the aura of cultish fascination that analysis had acquired in recent years in artistic and fashionable circles.

  Faith in Freudian treatment was not, however, universal, even within Margaret’s rarefied world. Painfully for her, Michael Strange, whose judgment had come to mean so much to her in other matters, was among the most relentless detractors. In Who Tells Me True Strange had summarily condemned psychoanalysis’s “fussily obscene hands” for forever meddling in the work of the “deep-eyed fates.”69 As to Margaret’s earnest experiment, her hope that analysis might help to free her from certain vexing old encumbrances, Michael simply gave no ground.

  William R. Scott, Inc. had grown modestly but well in its first two years. The firm’s initial list had consisted of five titles. In 1940 eight new books appeared. The 1940 offerings maintained Scott’s reputation for dash and daring. There were two new infant books printed on washable cloth; a “modern fairy tale” called The Tinker of Turntable; Skinny Gets Fat, an “eating is fun” book for finicky eaters; Charles Shaw’s “young mystery story,” The Giant of Central Park; Margaret and Leonard Weisgard’s Country Noisy Book; and a picture book that was to prove an enduring classic, Esphyr Slobodkina’s Caps for Sale.

  Completing the list, The Comical Tragedy or Tragical Comedy of Punch & Judy, written by Margaret and illustrated by Weisgard, was perhaps the most unconventional book of the lot. Everything about Punch was designed to involve readers actively. The dust jacket was printed on heavy stock and could be refolded and stood on its end to become a puppet theater. Paper cutout characters were provided so that children could stage their own Punch and Judy performances. Even the flap advertising had a mischievous slant: “Notorious Villain Captured: That gay, witty, and wicked rogue Punch, who for over three centuries has boisterously lived here and there abroad on the puppet stage and in the hearts of his admirers, has at last been captured alive and put into pictures and print.”

  To celebrate the book’s publication, Scott gave a gala party at 69 Bank Street, complete with a puppet show and spaghetti dinner. Several Scott authors arrived in costume and mingled with book buyers. As an additional publicity stunt, McCullough arranged for a week of puppet performances at Bloomingdale’s. Scott’s decided flair for public relations did not, however, often translate into robust sales. Despite all the hoopla, Punch proved an even more short-lived experiment than The World Is Round.

  Gertrude Stein’s second children’s book, “To do,” had meanwhile arrived in manuscript at the firm’s office, where it was not faring well. There was general agreement that the text was too abstract. Margaret in particular opposed talk of revision; “To do,” she argued, was a completed work, only it happened not to be a book for children. Returning from a short trip to Maine in late November, she said as much in her second letter to Stein. The new manuscript afforded the immediate occasion for writing, but plainly Margaret still hoped to establish a personal exchange with her. She spoke offhandedly but awkwardly of her summer on Vinalhaven, of having tried to “break away from children’s books” in order to write fiction. “The result,” she confided with a nervous lunge at conviviality, was “twenty canvases of wild and wooly [sic] oil paintings”—who had said anything about her being a painter?—”which I enjoyed the manual labor of thoroughly, and a story about an old bum in Brooklyn which was really a story about Irland [sic].”70

  She expressed her regret that no contemporary writer had yet produced stories worthy of the folk tales of ages past. She rambled on about this:

  I wish someone would do a book of modern folk or fairy tales—the world we know to-day and values
in it, or if it’s a fairy story with princes on tanks and forsaken mermen in a sea of submarines. Which is silly, perhaps because tanks and submarines are not yet symbols in the brain like white horses and dolphin’s tails. Or are they? Anyway. Once there were folk tales about the world people lived in and now there arn’t [sic]. But maybe this would be too hard a book for anyone to write now.

  Perhaps, she suggested, Stein would feel challenged to do so herself.

  She mentioned her own collection of Brer Rabbit stories, begun back in 1937, which Harper planned to publish in 1941. Perhaps Margaret herself would one day write the stories of which she now spoke, but “for the time being,” she told Stein, “I know only one, about an old woman who lives on a barge and won’t sell her pile of scrap iron for a river of gold.” She ended her second, and apparently last, letter to Gertrude Stein with good wishes for the author’s new dog, Basket II, and with news of the birth of eight puppies to her own Kerry Blue terrier, Smoke.

  Stein responded with a postcard congratulating Margaret on the puppies while ignoring the more serious, literary portions of the letter, including, of course, the part critical of “To do.” Margaret’s criticism could hardly have been expected to put Stein in a particularly friendly or responsive mood; moreover, her flippant reference to military tanks could only have struck her correspondent as extraordinarily insensitive, as doubtless it was, given the depressing and terrifying facts of the European war. As Margaret read the papers only occasionally and seems almost to have prided herself on her ignorance of world events, she was not likely to have anticipated Stein’s reaction.

  In an undated story-memoir about this exchange, Margaret, referring to herself in the third person, wondered: “Why hadn’t she written Gertrude Stine [sic] in answer to that terribly nice card of hers. . . . It was nice—No she had never liked that word ‘nice.’”71

  What name, then, would she attach to utter disappointment? Stein evidently had little in the way of friendship, wise counsel, or encouragement to offer her, unless one counts a passage from The World Is Round, in which Rose is “going up and up the green grass meadow that went right to the top” of a mountain: “It is hard to go on when you are nearly there but not near enough to hurry up to get there. That is where Rose was. And where was there. She almost said it she almost whispered it to herself.”72

  “There,” for Margaret, was not Bank Street. It was not exclusively Scott’s offices either. By the end of 1940 that much had become clear.

  John Macrae, who as E. P. Dutton’s president had published Another Here and Now Story Book and Margaret’s book The Fish with the Deep Sea Smile, was delighted when he received a new manuscript from her in the first weeks of 1941. Over lunch Margaret spoke candidly to the publisher of her wish to quit the juveniles field and write fiction. Macrae was understanding; at the same time he offered to publish not only the story she had sent him, The Poodle and the Sheep, but also her next three children’s books. Urging her to consider bringing all her future work to Dutton, he held out the prospect that her writing for adults would also be given a sympathetic reading there. It was an enticing offer, but Margaret had too deep a resistance to investing all her loyalties in any one publisher or person to accept. Writing Macrae on February 11 from Mont Tremblant, Quebec (where she had gone for a brief ski holiday), she declined, promising nonetheless to send him three more stories, “for I fear I will always write children’s books by accident, even if I concentrate on other forms of writing.” Touched by his generosity and good will, she added, “I will always remember with deepest gratitude, the vote of confidence you gave me as a young and comparatively unproved author.”73

  The oddly humorous, not very satisfactory Poodle and the Sheep was Margaret’s first attempt at writing a moral tale. As such it represented a conscious departure from her Bank Street training. As she told Macrae in the letter from Mont Tremblant, it was he who had indirectly inspired the story, and that was why she had sent it to him:

  Do you remember that you once gave me a copy of Careless Jane? 1 liked that book because it amused me even while the voices of the people around me who make it their business to lay down the laws of what young children should have in books said “No morality for children.” Then I watched children for awhile, and more and more my evidence and my instinct about what concerned children made me believe that a concern about right and wrong is of vital interest to them. The usual desire of little children to be good little children in the long run, seems most touching to me. And little dogs are not so unlike that either. So that when 1 spent an afternoon chasing a little poodle in Maine who was chasing sheep, and then, because the offence was so serious, I had to chastise the little poodle, much to his bewilderment and pain of heart, this incident began to grow in significance into a children’s book.

  In the class notes of the Hollins Alumnae Quarterly for spring 1941, Margaret listed six books due to be published that fall: Young Animals, The Polite Penguin, Brer Rabbit Stories, The Seashore Noisy Book, Red Light Green Light, and The Poodle and the Sheep. She was also, she reported, working on a play about the war in England. (Margaret’s unfinished two-act drama, “The Earth Will Have Us,” is an inconsequential romance about a group of young people, Europeans and Americans, who befriend each other at a youth hostel in Wales before the war, then meet again as enemies after the outbreak of hostilities.)74 In contrast to her news, other classmates announced the births of their children. The class secretary, Leonora A. Orr, also commented, “Imagine my surprise when reading the March [8] issue of the New Yorker to discover in an article called ‘Tallyho’ that Tim Brown had inveigled the reporter [E.J. Kahn, Jr.] into accompanying her on an afternoon of beagling!”75

  Kahn’s piece about a certain friend named “Brownie” described with mild mockery the socially inbred atmosphere and physically daunting activities of the Buckram Beagles. A great many of Margaret’s friends accompanied her at one time or another on these expeditions, though it was a rare friend who did so more than once. John McCullough was typical in his recollection of an exhausting afternoon of running through the woods with occasional time off for a sip of champagne.

  As Kahn tells it, on the chilly, overcast afternoon of his outing (Bruce Bliven, Jr., was also along that day) “Brownie” proved herself a woman of extraordinary stamina, able to run for miles through underbrush and mud, over fence rails and hedgerows, without betraying the slightest hint of fatigue. Pressing ahead, she assured her less fit writer companions that there was “really nothing like fresh air.” She also said that hares were in short supply on Long Island, that the Buckram Beagles actually knew by sight certain hares that had eluded them in the past. She told Kahn how one such hare, Flora, had at last been overtaken by the beagles and torn to shreds. A kill, on the rare occasions when one occurred, did not, she said, disturb her; her thoughts then were with the hounds, which reminded her at such moments of “the grooms in ‘Macbeth.’ “Here was a hair-raising analogy, especially, Kahn observed, from a writer of children’s books with “quite a few sentimental references to . . . soft, cuddly bunnies.”76

  This last suggestion was, of course, in the Bennett Cerf “baby books” vein of casual abuse. But The Noisy Book and its sequels, Margaret’s adaptation of the Fables of La Fontaine, Punch and Judy, and the soon-to-be-published Brer Rabbit, among others of her books, were all the work of a dry-eyed and cunning sensibility. If a friend could write so dismissively of her type of work in the New Yorker, it is not hard to see why Margaret’s own doubts were so vexing, and so long-lived.

  After Gertrude Stein, the writer whose work had meant the most to Margaret since college was Virginia Woolf. On April 3, 1941, she was shocked to read in the New York Evening Post that Woolf had committed suicide just a few days earlier. Margaret had bought the paper having glimpsed Woolf’s name on the front page, with hopes of reading of some new literary triumph. With the somber realization of her death came memories of having walked shyly past the Woolfs’ Bloomsbury residence in the late
summer of 1937 and of having written the author a letter before leaving for Europe that summer, a letter she had never mailed. Now Margaret learned that the house she had surveyed from a distance that day had been destroyed in the wartime bombing raids. Still, she considered in a reminiscence prompted by the news, “what I went to see to remember I remember.”77 Margaret tried to imagine the author leaving a note for her husband and heading out the door of their country house for the river and “the last cold shocks of sensation . . . the last arrows of sensation.” She recalled with a shudder a passage spoken by Bernard in Woolf’s novel The Waves: “Sometimes indeed, when I pass a cottage with a light in the window where a child has been born, I could implore them not to squeeze a sponge over that new body.”78

  As Margaret typed her eulogy, the late night silence was broken by the clacking of horses’ hooves as an old-fashioned Victorian hansom cab rolled past. She pulled the detail into her essay: “So the old horse returning to the darkly lighted stable is an obituary . . . the unknown driver thinking his own thoughts out in the night.” Margaret, it would seem from remarks she made to the Hurds and to Leonard Weisgard, had hoped one day to meet Virginia Woolf, perhaps even to establish with her the sort of literary relationship that had failed to materialize with Gertrude Stein. But now those hopes, too, were at an end.

  Chapter Five

  Other Houses, Other Worlds

  I am of old and young, of the foolish

  as much as the wise,

  Regardless of others, ever

  regardful of others,

  Maternal as well as paternal,

  a child as well as a man,

  Stuff’d with the stuff that is coarse

  and stuff’d with the stuff that

  is fine, . . .

  I resist any thing better than

  my own diversity.