Margaret Wise Brown

by Leonard S. Marcus

  Like Harper and Brothers, Doubleday, Doran and Company (as the house was then known) was among the industry’s most profitable firms. The publisher of such distinguished picture books as A. B. Frost’s Carlo (1913) and C. B. Fall’s ABC Book (1923), and of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories (1902), Doubleday had been among the first American houses to establish a juveniles department. May Massee, one of the field’s most respected figures, had been the department’s original editor. More recently, under Margaret Lesser, Doubleday had become known for the kind of cautious, mainstream approach with which librarians generally felt quite comfortable. While caution was hardly the watchword of Margaret’s aesthetic, Lesser was a valuable new ally with a far better chance than Scott, certainly, of placing her books in the nation’s public libraries.

  A former newspaper reporter, the editor had become curious about the here-and-now style of writing for young children, and was not averse to considering manuscripts in this vein. Moreover, Lesser seemed disinclined to fuss with a text once she had accepted it for publication. Almost to the extent that she had done at Scott, Margaret could edit herself, an arrangement made the more enticing by the understanding that Weisgard would illustrate all her Doubleday titles. Partly to celebrate and partly to keep the market from appearing glutted with her work, she chose a pen name—Golden MacDonald (the name of an elderly Maine handyman of her acquaintance)—under which all her books for Lesser would appear.

  No one within the juveniles publishing world doubted for a moment who Golden MacDonald really was—least of all Ursula Nordstrom, Bill Scott, and John McCullough. But most people, it is fair to assume, never thought to link the two authors. For her own part, Margaret seems rather to have enjoyed concealing her identity from her readers. She was convinced, for one thing, that children are generally oblivious to authorship. As she recalled once of her own favorite childhood books, “It did not seem important then that any one [sic] wrote [them] . . . they were true.19 She also savored the quixotic theater of assuming different literary identities and the idea that she wrote differently under each of her names. Whether or not she actually did is far from clear, but the mere belief that she did may have been as important to her creative work as the Runaway Bunny’s quick change act is to his expanding sense of self. The power to change oneself, to be a part of the ceaseless changefulness of life, was always for Margaret a transcendent ideal.

  The most interesting of the Golden MacDonald war years books was Red Light Green Light (1944), a jazzy, percussive improvisation—not so much a story as an “interlude,” as Margaret called such fusions of poetry and prose:

  Red Light

  they can’t go.

  Green Light

  they can go. . . .

  The horse came out of the horse’s house

  a barn . . .

  And a mouse came out of the house of the mouse

  a hole.20

  A striking feature of Red Light Green Light is the piece’s plaintive, abstract, modernist atmosphere: “And they all went down their own roads . . . / Dog roads, / Cat roads /And mouse roads through / the / grass.” It was as though, Margaret implied, being oneself required one to live in terrible isolation from one’s fellows.

  The wish to rise above such feelings of isolation reverberates through an undated letter written to Michael Strange some time early in 1942.21 Margaret and Michael had continued the friendship begun in 1940, but in recent months they had seen little of each other. Michael was preoccupied with the fate of her marriage, the brittle nature of which had been apparent to Margaret during her stay at Montauk. The marriage was at last in its final phase. (By July 1942, documents providing for the division of the couple’s property would be signed; the divorce took effect that November.) Margaret’s letter was in part an apology for a recent quarrel the two women had had on meeting for the first time after Michael had moved out of 10 Gracie Square.

  Over the last weeks, Margaret explained, her psychoanalysis had caused her to feel “completely abandoned” in life. It was not usually the case, she said, that such emotions, however strong, “spill[ed] over” into her relations outside the doctor’s office, but in this instance “that desolation . . . did spill over in spite of all I would wish . . . and I hung onto you so that you had to in all decency brush me off.” Caught up in the emotional turmoil surrounding her impending divorce, Michael could hardly be expected, Margaret now realized, to have deep reserves of comfort and reassurance to offer her.

  Margaret proceeded to defend her decision to remain in analysis despite Michael Strange’s scornful protestations. She explained that she had resolved to put “my trust and my energies” into psychoanalysis only as a “temporary treatment.” She considered the process to be a sort of “operation,” an “uncovering of forgotten desolations and traps in a forgotten past.” She recalled having once, in a conversation with Michael, characterized psychoanalysis as an “obscene process.” (Curiously, she seems to have forgotten that Michael Strange herself, in her memoir Who Tells Me True, had called Freudian analysis obscene.) By this Margaret said she had meant only to suggest that “from the outside and from the pleasure, excitement and hook-line-and-sinker absorption in it of most of the devotes [sic] of analysis I have met, it seemed obscene to me. It still does, as a whole.” But the “real experience” of analysis, she insisted, might be otherwise:

  To go in to that hour feeling suddenly alone on the rock itself with no one. Every one you love is lost. You may blame your own childishness and stupid loving or not. This is an experience of desolation curses and prayers and terrible tears. They say that if you relive this desolation and face it, as you once met it and couldn’t face it then you are free of it. Perhaps, that is what one hopes. You don’t even have to know what incidents caused the pain you are facing, as long as you do feel it again and stand it.

  She granted that there was a danger in this: “It is certainly far from the intellect—this frightful purging of the emotions. And all for the hope of a greater clarity. That hope you must respect, however misguided you may think it.” She did not view her own analysis as obscene because it was a “treatment for a purpose,” not a self-indulgence.

  I suffer it but do not revel in it and don’t think much about it outside the hour. In fact it leaves you freer not to think about yourself when it is working properly, which isn’t all the time by a long shot. I too am filled with a horror of something behind all this . . . but the horror is real.

  Sessions with the doctor, she argued, might be useful to one’s work. Her writing, Margaret said, was a “big angry issue” in her analysis. She did not elaborate on this point, but doubtless this was a reference to her often expressed, long frustrated wish to be able to write for adults.

  Psychotherapy, Margaret wrote, had helped her realize that ever since childhood she had been drifting “deeper and deeper into the aloofness of a lonely illusion—the illusion that one is separate and so far away from others that only by playing a part . . . could one meet one’s fellows. No wonder it hasn’t worked. Fortunately this has never deceived a few people.” Here she might have been thinking of Marguerite Hearsey, Lucy Mitchell, Dr. Bak, and not least of all, Michael herself. “And perhaps too much lack of coherence has been forgiven in me. And a long habit of mixing words and deserting my own thought for other thoughts in the middle of a sentance [sic].” How humbled by Michael Strange’s extraordinary facility as a conversationalist and dramatic reader Margaret must have felt. She had, she said,

  a frightening hopeless feeling every time I open my mouth. That is why someday I will have to write and write honestly since to speak simply and honestly from the core that is me is difficult. . . . The first great wonder at the world is big in me. That is the real reason that I write.

  She hoped, in any case, that through her work she would eventually prove herself worthy of the faith and fellowship that Michael had extended to her and for which she remained ever grateful.

  Michael I have listened to you harder than to any
one in the world and I have heard you. 1 still listen and I still hear you. And if my life ever makes any sense who you are even more than what you say will not be lost in me or in what I write. I believe in you. And I see you too, being greedy child and pristine child, ruthless pig and generous by your quickness as few could be. I have seen your self-confidence the size of a mouse and the size of an elephant and I have seen you in between apart from all fluctuations of confidence love or hate. For Michael is greater than Michael.

  This last declaration clearly suggests the high reverence Margaret felt for her friend; it seems she was utterly determined to believe that Michael was indeed the figure of boldness, originality, and strength she claimed to be. Such adulation notwithstanding, Michael Strange’s disapproval of Margaret’s analysis remained unqualified.

  In early July of 1942, Margaret, having not yet left for Maine and feeling unusually tired, went to see her doctor. The examination revealed a growth on her left breast; he advised her to have the growth removed immediately. It proved to be benign, and after a terrifying week in the hospital and another week spent “wilting about New York” and trying (unsuccessfully) to find a friend interested in “braving the wilds” of Vinalhaven with her, she left unaccompanied for Long Cove.22

  “At present,” she wrote Lucy Mitchell from Maine, “I am so relieved and grateful for my returning strength that I feel like offering myself as a propitiation to Life itself and starting a brand new life at twice the reality.”23

  She had gotten an “old fisherwoman” to cook for her and to “act as a left arm” because her own was to remain out of service for another few days. “I carry one bucket of water up from the stream instead of two and if I want to row the boat I have to row with one arm in an endless circle. But fortunately or unfortunately readers get written with the right arm so I will tackle them this afternoon.”

  The massive basal reader project, begun in 1940 and still in preparation, had become the chief remaining link between Margaret and her former teacher, but the two women rarely saw each other. Margaret expressed the wish to meet Mitchell for lunch one day, “free of readers,” the following fall.

  I am in transition, one never knows towards what until we get there. But am trying to read and not write for a while, only it is hard to sit still as long as it takes to read, sound by sound and image by image and word by word with an echoe [sic] if I like it. All very progressive.

  “Please remember me warmly to Mr. Mitchell,” Margaret added in formal farewell, “and to yourself, aways”; then, suddenly flush with a mischievous impulse, she signed her name “Brownies—They get more and more plural.”

  Margaret and Bill Scott’s disastrous interview with Anne Carroll Moore in the fall of 1938 had far-reaching consequences for public library sales. Between then and August of 1942, when Scott paid a courtesy call on Moore’s successor, sales of Scott books to libraries had suffered not just in New York but nationally.

  Having resolved to try his luck with the new regime of Frances Clarke Sayers, Bill Scott adopted the gingerly attitude of a relative newcomer eager for the advice of more seasoned professionals. He arrived at Sayers’ office alone and with no books in hand. He had come, he explained, with a simple question: Why had the New York Public Library taken so little interest in the work of his small publishing house?

  “He is an extremely fine person—young, idealistic, and sincere,” the new chief librarian wrote Bertha E. Mahony at the Horn Book; they had had an “interesting conference . . . about books for little children.”24 When Scott had asked her why his company’s books failed to meet with the library’s approval, she had replied, “Because the books have nothing in them but some words, some color and sometimes a very thin shadow of an idea.”

  “Mr. Scott, as you know,” the letter continued, “was apparently ‘born and bred in the briar patch’ of Nursery School Progressive Education. . . . He has an open mind, however, and he said upon leaving, ‘you only confirm what I’m beginning to feel myself.’”

  Of Margaret’s new collaborations during the war years, the most memorable was certainly the one begun at Scott with the French and Mexican artist Jean Chariot. Chariot was a distinguished printmaker, muralist, and authority on pre-Columbian art. During the 1920s he had been a member of the group of Mexican populist artists that included Rivera, Orozco, and Merida. By the time he taught at Bank Street for a brief stint during the mid-thirties, he had also made several brilliant forays into book illustration. Among these was a picture book compilation of Toltec, Aztec, and Spanish legends retold by Amelia Martinez del Rio, The Sun, the Moon and a Rabbit.

  Charlot shunned all attempts by critics to distinguish between “high” and “low” art. Making books for children, he asserted, was no less serious and dignified an activity than fresco painting. “A painter accustomed to run the gauntlet of grown-up criticism,” he would later write, “should not expect an easing of the ordeal as he switches to children as his onlookers. . . . Shorn as they are by nature of their parents’ pretense, children do meet by instinct the artist’s exacting requirements as regards picture books.”25

  John McCullough met Chariot through the writer Anita Brenner, whose collection of Mexican folk stories, The Boy Who Could Do Anything, Scott published with pen-and-ink drawings by Char-lot in 1942. Anita Brenner had a distinctly low opinion of the here-and-now style of books for the young, which she called the “Beep beep crunch crunch” school of children’s literature.26 (Scott’s decision to publish folklore books for older children did not in itself mark a departure from Bank Street orthodoxy, though it came at a time when Lucy Mitchell and her colleagues were themselves showing greater flexibility in their views on fantasy literature.)

  Charlot agreed to Scott’s invitation to illustrate a new manuscript of Margaret’s, a bedtime lyric called A Child’s Good Night Book, in which animals go to sleep one by one in the way natural to each: “The little fish in the darkened sea sleep with their eyes wide open. Sleepy fish. The sheep in the fields huddle together in a great warm blanket of wool. . . . Sleepy sheep . . .”27 The spare, telegrammatic text offers comfort by calming the listener with repeated sounds and phrases and by conferring dignity on the mere fact of being at home at the end of the day: “And the cars and trucks arid airplanes are all put in their houses—in dark garages and hangars. Their engines stop. Quiet engines.” Careful not to refer to inanimate machines as sleepers, Margaret, in the best Bank Street way, achieved an uncomplicated poetry for the very young which intensifies reality without contradicting known facts.

  Margaret’s manuscript had come to Scott in the casual way that the old friends still did business; she had simply telephoned John McCullough one day and announced that she needed a hundred dollars—would he please “come by and see what you would like to buy” of her current stock of unpublished work.28 The text of A Child’s Good Night Book was scribbled on the back of an envelope. McCullough, having made his selection, presented the author with a hundred-dollar bill. The next day he sent Margaret a contract indicating that the money tendered was to be considered as an advance against royalties.

  Charlot was then living in Athens, Georgia, where he was teaching art at the state university. He and Margaret were not in touch while he worked on his prints for the book—twelve lithographs, completed during April and May of 1943, which he drew (in four colors) directly on the plates. Chariot’s terse diary entries for the period—“pm: litho book” (April 7th); “Scott . . . satisfied” (May 29th)—give no hint of the difficulties he wrestled with before arriving at his finished designs.29 Years later he would tell an interviewer of his exasperation on contemplating the line of text which reads “Night is coming. Everything is going to sleep.” How was he to depict “everything” (Margaret had intended this to mean all the animals in creation) in a single image? “I was a little mad at the author,” Chariot recalled, “for that particular page.”30

  More than any other of her collaborators, Chariot shared Margaret’s commitment to an ae
sthetic that merged the elemental pith and candor of folk art with modernist verve. Childhood was the theme of several of Chariot’s most evocative prints; the image of the child represented for him, as it did for Picasso, Klee, and others, pure possibility and creative renewal. His powerful totemic figures and electric pastel colorwork expressed a joy-in-being that seemed well attuned to what Margaret, in a biographical note written for Harper, called the “young child’s most excessive awareness.”31 As a poet of the primitive, Chariot was an illustrator with few peers in the picture book realm.

  When Margaret returned to Vinalhaven that following summer of 1943, she went for the first time not to her old quarters at Long Cove but to an abandoned quarrymaster’s house that she had been gradually making over for herself and would soon buy. The Only House, as she called it, was the only home Margaret ever owned. It was not, of course, the only house on the island (the population of Vinalhaven when she purchased the property in the mid-forties was just over 1,600) and some islanders were said to have been a bit irked by the name she chose for her summer haven. Describing it to the Hurds, Margaret managed to convince them that it occupied a separate island unconnected to Vinalhaven. “Later,” Clem remarked, “I found it wasn’t true.”32

  The native islanders, in turn, had their fun with her. Passing Margaret out on the water one day, a lobsterman tossed a scrawny fish into her boat and shouted across to her, “Well, Maaagrit, there’s your supper.”33

  Her neighbors soon learned, however, to respect her for her tenacity and physical stamina, two qualities required of them by local conditions but which they did not as a rule look for in “summer people.” Islanders were touched by a certain fearless vulnerability in Margaret that led her, at times literally, to venture into turbulent waters. On fogged-in days, some fisherman always took care to go by her house to make certain all was well there. Mr. Ames delivered her firewood. Others kept up her supply of fresh lobster. Margaret herself made sure that her larder was well stocked with champagne, fresh cream, imported cheeses, and other such necessities. “Comforts aren’t for me,” she told a visitor, “luxuries are.”34 No one would have called the Only House comfortable, but it was an extravagance from end to end—the world made over in its chief occupant’s ineffable image.