Margaret Wise Brown

by Leonard S. Marcus

  WALT WHITMAN,

  “Song of Myself”

  In the summer of 1941, Margaret returned to her rented cottage at Long Cove, where as in previous years she rested, painted, read, entertained friends, lost the weight she had a tendency to gain when in New York, and pursued the “hobby” that (on a publishers questionnaire) she called “Cat Life—which means doing nothing and just watching.”1 As her professional commitments multiplied and the circle of her New York friends continued to expand, the importance of these annual summer interludes increased correspondingly. As she later wrote Lucy Mitchell:

  Isn’t it strange what complete faith one can have in a place . . . I suppose [sic] wisdom is to know ones [sic] necessities and not to live without them. And this huge silence, with the woods and the ocean together, and the air full of kelp and the sound of fish hawks and seagulls and nothing else, seems to be something I perish and get parched without.2

  Margaret hardly left her work behind when she went north to Maine, however. Clement Hurd once remarked that while one could not be sure just when Margaret actually worked on her books, it may well have been that she worked on them “all the time.”3 Writing, daydreaming, and “just watching” were never entirely unrelated activities for her.

  A great deal of her Maine “Cat Life” found its way into the pages of her books, as in this passage from The Little Island: “Autumn came and the yellow pears dropped slowly to the ground . . . Winter came and the snow fell softly like a great quiet secret in the night, cold and still.”4

  Her work contains dozens of similar passages. Vinalhaven also provided the setting for a number of autobiographical stories. As Margaret reported later that summer to Lucy Mitchell, she had “finally discovered the obvious, again,” and was writing a story a day about “things and people I know about instead of fictional themes, just batting them out without rereading trying to get over my shyness and blocks in front of writing older stories.”5 Almost as an afterthought she noted, “I have sheepishly written a few children’s books too that the side of me that isn’t hell bent to get into older writing is quite interested in.”

  One autobiographical piece from that summer concerned the visit of a writer friend, Preston Schoyer. Margaret had met “Pres,” a novelist and journalist widely travelled in the Far East, in New York the previous April, at a costume party given by the Hurds. A charming, handsome man of about her age, Schoyer had come as Groucho Marx, Margaret as a blowsy blonde. They hit it off immediately, left together for Margaret’s apartment, and spent the next two days there together in the first flush of romance. Two or three months passed without their seeing each other again; then Margaret asked Schoyer to visit her in Maine.

  Her account of his arrival at Carvers Harbor is a study in self-doubt and a curiously detached kind of longing:

  Walking by his unfamiliar side she heard her own voice chatting along, overchatting in order to sound at ease. And she wondered why he seemed such a stranger to her when he had been in her mind so long. . . .

  . . . They picked up old threads, he told her more about China. They talked of publishers and unconsciously they vied with each other so that in retrospect they found themselves boasting of contacts with publishers, using a few first names quoting remarks—like two little kids boasting nervously and boring themselves by the act.6

  The story continues in this vein, its tone an accurate reflection of the emotional confusion, desperation even, that had given rise to it. Aptly, Margaret left the piece unfinished. Friends later recalled having heard that Margaret had wanted to marry Schoyer but that he had not been interested. To his sister, Polly Brooks, who had been Posey Hurd’s best friend at Radcliffe, he confided, “She’s too mystical for me.”7 When Schoyer’s book, The Foreigners, was published the following spring, the author inscribed a copy:

  For dear Margaret

  from a foreigner who never feels foreign in 21 W. 10th.

  Always the best,

  Your old China hand,

  Pres,

  who will always remember

  the house in the fog and the

  long still rocks which look

  Westward to the Sun.8

  After Schoyer left Vinalhaven that summer of 1941, Margaret turned her attention to work. A letter to Lucy Mitchell in late August said nothing of the romance but was full of news about her many current projects. She enclosed a draft manuscript that she described as the “skeleton beginning” of a picture book, scribbled down that same morning. SHHhhhh . . . BANG, she said jauntily, was to be her revenge on librarians: “Can’t you see children in the hushed atmosphere of a library tiptoeing up to a librarian and asking for it—Sshhhhhhh B A N G! [sic]”9 Margaret had printed out the title by hand in letters of contrasting size that made their mischievous point with the expressive force of an Apollinairian calligramme.

  Among the other books she worked on while in Maine was one begun the previous summer, The Runaway Bunny. Margaret had come across a medieval Provençal love ballad, the “beautiful pattern” of which, she had written Lucy Mitchell, might “be applied . . . to our ends” as the basis for a picture book.10

  In the ballads (known to Chaucer) of the Provençal troubadours, love was the moving force behind all of humankind’s noblest undertakings. The song Margaret had found was a love story recast as a hunt involving magical transformations:

  If you pursue me I shall become a fish in the water

  And I shall escape you

  If you become a fish I shall become an eel

  If you become an eel I shall become a fox

  And I shall escape you

  If you become a fox I shall become a hunter

  And I shall hunt you . . .

  “I may use it for a picture book,” Margaret had warned her teacher with a sporting flourish. “So, beat me to it and use it toward a more serious end.”

  In The Runaway Bunny, Margaret changed one type of hunt for another. Working with the structure of the original ballad, she transformed the story of a lover’s pursuit of his beloved into a fable of childish adventuring and maternal devotion and strength. Margaret’s text is a stirring evocation of the universal need of two- and three-year-olds to test the world beyond the mother’s protection in such a way as to be assured that the mother will always be there should something go wrong:

  “‘If you run away,’ said his mother, ‘I will run after you. For you are my little bunny.’

  “‘If you run after me,’ said the little bunny, ‘I will become a fish in a trout stream and I will swim away from you.’

  “‘If you become a fish in a trout stream,’ said his mother, ‘I will become a fisherman and I will fish for you.’”11

  For the young reader, the mother emerges as a reassuring bridge between the real and imaginary worlds, for while the bunny child escapes into a succession of other-than-human guises—as a fish, a flower, a bird—his mother nearly always overtakes him by adopting a familiar human form, as a mountain climber, a tightrope walker, a gardener seeking “a crocus in a hidden garden.”

  In the final exchange the bunny child, as though tired out at the end of a long day, vows to become a human child and “run into a house,” which of course is no escape at all from a child’s point of view. The young hero has come to the end of his tether and, tellingly, what he is left with there is the here-and-now world of real little boys and girls, their houses and other mundane realities. The rabbit mother replies, “‘If you become a little boy and run into a house . . . I will become your mother and catch you in my arms and hug you.’” The bunny child thinks better of this.

  “‘Shucks,’ said the bunny, ‘I might as well stay where I am and be your bunny.’ And so he did.”

  Margaret thought to end the story here. She sent the manuscript to Ursula Nordstrom, who had bought the book for Harper on the strength of an earlier draft. The editor found the revised version extraordinary, except for the ending; the bunny child’s resignation, followed by the last few throw-away words, seemed t
o Nordstrom to end the piece too abruptly—a touch of whimsy was needed to release the powerful emotions built up in the exchanges between mother and child. She cabled Margaret in Maine (there were no telephones at Long Cove), asking her to come up with something appropriate.

  “‘HAVE A CARROT,’ SAID THE MOTHER BUNNY,” Margaret wired back. Nordstrom was delighted.

  Margaret, however, was reluctant to let go of the manuscript. In October of 1941, while spending a few days at the Hurds’ Vermont farm, new doubts began to plague her. (Margaret had recommended Clement Hurd to illustrate The Runaway Bunny and Nordstrom had agreed to the choice.) Curiously, it was not to Nordstrom but to Lucy Mitchell that she turned for help, writing from North Ferrisburg,

  I wallow in uncertainty about punctuation, wording, and form. Whether I should use If you become I will become, or If you are I will be or mix them both up so that the rythm [sic] gets broken from page to page and isn’t too soporific, or what is consistancy [sic] and what makes the best poetry. . . . Which is stronger the sense of a line or the meaning.12

  Perhaps Margaret needed to include Mitchell in the writing of the book which more clearly than any other until that time marked the withdrawal of her deepest loyalties from the Bank Street founder and her ideas. Margaret would continue to write sequels to the original Noisy Book and many other works that plainly bore the mark of her Bank Street training—the clear and memorable patterning of The Runaway Bunny, though adapted from an old chanson, was a device that Mitchell had taught her to use—but the bunny child’s rejection of the here-and-now was a telling clue to the private meaning the book had for its author. Mitchell’s empiricism had begun to pale for Margaret, who was increasingly preoccupied with the insights to be gleaned from dreams, from memory, and from the “child that is within all of us . . . perhaps the one laboratory that we all share.”13 In writing The Runaway Bunny, it is as though Margaret had set out, like the wayward bunny child, to see how far astray she might go and still remain within her teacher’s protective ken.

  As for the unruly SHHhhhh . . . BANG, Margaret had reminded Lucy Mitchell on sending her the manuscript that summer, that “even a here and now story can be a dream and you have written plenty of them yourself which your litteral [sic] heavy footed followers have failed to notice—Anne Carrol [sic] Moore has retired.”14 Except for the last reference, which must have amused her greatly, it is hard to imagine Mitchell reading Margaret’s comment without a slight shudder, for here was a rather faint-hearted attempt to recast her in an image more compatible with Margaret’s own changing aesthetic. The real significance of the gesture lay in its lack of conviction.

  In December of 1941, Margaret received word that her mother had suffered a serious stroke. On December 7, the day Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Margaret, Roberta, and Gratz (who now lived in Michigan) gathered in Great Neck for a rare family reunion, shuttling back and forth on roads where military guards had been hastily posted between the Brown family home and their mother’s hospital bedside in Garden City.

  Maude, whose health had been in decline for some time, made a partial recovery, becoming well enough to come into Manhattan for Theosophical Society meetings and occasionally to see Margaret for dinner, but little happiness lay in her future. She and her husband had been steadily growing apart for years, and at the time of her stroke Robert Brown was living at his yacht club in nearby Port Washington. Work had always satisfied him in a way that home life seems not to have done. With two children married and the third well launched on a career, still less had remained to keep the couple together. In late 1942 or in early 1943, he moved out of the family home permanently, taking up residence in a new house of his own in Port Washington. After presiding over the closing of the house at 8 Ridge Drive, Maude Brown lived alone for a time in a Manhattan hotel before moving to Ann Arbor to stay with Gratz.

  A few years earlier, as a Bank Street student, Margaret had written a note to herself under the heading “What is Focus.”15 She was always, it seemed, making lists of one kind or another; this was another in the order-and-self-discipline genre. “Intellectually,” the prescription began, to have focus meant “to discover and explore; to do this in some way through writing; to contribute something new. Emotionally, [it consisted of] marriage, leisure and children. Combined—To know always the excitement . . . in mere living. To somehow justifie [sic] my place on earth.”

  Margaret, like countless young women of her own and earlier generations, had been raised to equate married life with the promise of personal fulfillment. How desperately—recalling the broken engagement with George Armistead, the ill-fated affair with Bill Gaston, and most recently, the forced romance with Preston Schoyer—she must have wanted to bring the matter right. And now her parents’ separation must have seemed a stern caveat issued against whatever hope still remained to her, at more than thirty, that such a future might be hers. Some years later, Margaret’s Bank Street friend, Rosie Bliven, told Lucy Mitchell that the effect of Maude and Robert Brown’s separation on “Brownie” had been devastating, and that the intense relationship that developed between Margaret and Michael Strange could be understood in terms of Margaret’s need for a mothering figure to replace, in some sense, Maude Brown.16 There can be little doubt the separation (which coincided with the break-up of Michael Strange’s third marriage) caused Margaret to question where, if it was to be had at all, love might be found.

  Margaret’s work seems not to have suffered as a result of the turmoil of her family life. Perhaps, on the contrary, her manuscripts served as safe harbors in which tumultuous feelings could be calmly examined and transformed. She published five books in 1941: The Poodle and the Sheep, with illustrations by Leonard Weisgard (Dutton); The Polite Penguin, illustrated by H. A. Rey (Harper); Baby Animals, illustrated by Mary Cameron (Random House); The Seashore Noisy Book, with art by Leonard Weisgard (Scott); and Brer Rabbit, with adaptations of the illustrations by A. B. Frost (Harper). There would be four new books in 1942, five in 1943, eight in 1944, and three the following year.

  The war likewise had little impact on the overall pattern of Margaret’s activities as a writer. Certain collaborations were interrupted, but others were begun, continued, or renewed. Some projects were delayed or scaled back due to wartime shortages, especially of paper. (The juveniles departments at the major publishing houses, which had approximately 25 percent less paper at their disposal than before the war, generally dealt with the problem by foregoing marginal projects while printing somewhat larger editions of their best authors’ and illustrators’ new work.) But Margaret’s reputation was such that she was not likely to have had trouble placing the lion’s share of her manuscripts, even in a time of narrowing possibilities.

  The major interruption caused by the war for Margaret was occasioned by Clement Hurd’s departure for military service. Both Clem and Posey had always considered themselves pacifists. Recent events, however, had convinced them of the absolute necessity of fighting Hitler. In early 1942 the illustrator enlisted in the U.S. Army and was commissioned a second lieutenant. It seemed likely he would be stationed in San Francisco, where Posey had taken a job as a researcher in the Office of War Information.

  That spring, while Clem awaited his orders, The Runaway Bunny was published to strong reviews. The Horn Book ignored the book, as did the New York Public Library in its annual holiday list issued later that year; but the Herald Tribunes May Lamberton Becker summed up the views of many critics when, after commenting on The Runaway Bunny’s “rich” folkloric background, she declared it an “up-to-date, affectionate picture book” in which “pictures and text are in complete collaboration. Brilliant, in color, the large scenes show the dreams, while realistic black-and-whites show that this is really a mother-play.”17

  Clem did the cover illustration for the April issue of Town & Country, a pitch for War Bonds and a plum assignment. Two picture books by the artist and his wife, The Annie Moran and Speedy, the Hook and Ladder Truck, were due to be published by
Lothrop within the year and Posey’s first juvenile novel, The Wreck of the Wild Wave, was expected from the Oxford University Press. Then in May a telegram arrived instructing the illustrator to report for temporary duty to Jefferson Barracks, Missouri; on November I he sailed from San Francisco Bay for the Pacific theater. Ten years earlier, as an aspiring artist heading for France, Clem had passed the time on shipboard reading The Road to Oblivion. Now, feeling hopelessly unprepared and bound for points unknown a half a world away, he read his three-volume Everyman edition of War and Peace.

  Leonard Weisgard, who failed his Army physical, illustrated books throughout the war, rising to the top of his profession. One day Margaret, who always had some project in the works with him, approached him with a sporting challenge. During the war years, one way that publishers economized was by limiting the extent of color printing in their illustrated titles. Margaret invited Leonard to collaborate on a picture book to be done entirely in black-and-white, a book in which the restricted palette—here was the trick—would be revealed as the best choice in terms of its suitability for the story. The text of Night and Day is a somewhat slight and precious fantasy about two cats, one of which (the black one) loves the night while the other (a white cat) must overcome his fear of the dark in order to feel fully at home in the world. Margaret and Leonard were determined to make Night and Day the “most beautiful book” they had “ever done.”18 Weisgard’s illustrations were in fact quite good. In the end, however, Harper refused to print the book by the relatively costly gravure process, which yields a creamy, richly layered, almost tactile kind of black, and the subtlety of the experiment, such as it was, was thereby lost.

  Leonard Weisgard was every bit as prolific as Margaret. As much to serve notice that publishers ought not to take their work for granted as to keep their output appearing without delay, they both continued to add new publishers to the list of those with whom they worked. Margaret had opened the door for Weisgard at Scott and at Harper. Early in 1942 he returned the favor, introducing her to his Doubleday editor, Margaret Lesser.