Margaret Wise Brown

by Leonard S. Marcus

  There were a Russian prince, a French count, and assorted theater people, most of them well turned out younger men of the kind that Michael Strange had always surrounded herself with. Joseph Ryle, the advertising consultant Scott had hired to publicize The World Is Round, contributed a jaunty expression to the circle’s private lexicon: “the noon balloon” came to mean “the latest fashionable thing” and afterwards became the title of one of Margaret’s picture books.49 To Michael Strange and these friends, Margaret became known as “Bunny.” Michael was “Rabbit.”

  Michael Strange’s children all lived in or near New York. Of the three of them, Leonard Thomas, Jr., her eldest son, had by far the simplest relationship with her. By nature a business-minded man like his father, Thomas had become a lawyer, had married and had generally fashioned a solid and independent existence. The tattered remnants of Michael Strange’s glamorous Barrymore days seem not to have interested him at all, and he was less than impressed by his mother’s dramatic abilities. On the one occasion when he attended a recital of hers in New York he became bored enough to attempt to coax his wife into leaving early.

  In her memoir Too Much, Too Soon, Diana Barrymore recalled that

  Mother had made a new life for herself after her divorce [from Harrison Tweed]. She had bought a house in Easton, Connecticut, where she lived with a companion, Margaret Wise Brown, a well-known writer of children’s books. Mother still lectured, but now she toured the country giving readings from the Bible, to a harp accompaniment. Though she had a career, Robin [her younger son] was the core of her existence. She literally lived for him.50

  The passage is revealing on several counts, not least for Diana’s having mistaken her often distant mother’s weekend house for her principal residence. More significant is the simple acknowledgment, however oblique, of Margaret’s importance in her mother’s life. At the same time there was a complicated sort of truth to the assertion that Michael Strange “lived for” Robin. She had always doted on him with what friends recalled as an almost cultish fervor. It is as though she had resolved, Pygmalion-like, to make a masterpiece of her younger son. She had imagined (perhaps “projected” is the better word) a brilliant career for him in the arts. But Robin rebelled, removing himself first to Vienna, then London, and eventually to a house of his own near New Milford, Connecticut, where, his stepsister wrote,

  he was living in a fashion that can only be compared to that of Henry VIII. He was the master of the manor: guests were entertained day and night, weekdays and week ends. . . . Mother was unhappy about him. . . . His shining career . . . had never materialized. His friend Tyrone Power had gone on to great things, but Robin had become an eccentric country squire, trying to live a fifteenth-century life in the twentieth century.51

  Margaret, one suspects, was asked to endure many reminders of Robin Thomas’s prior claims on his mother’s affections. Even when considered merely as a promising “work,” she would never fully eclipse Robin in Michael Strange’s eyes.

  Margaret and Diana Barrymore seem to have maintained a respectful distance from each other, with Margaret genuinely wishing the best for the volatile, troubled young actress. In the letters to Michael Strange in which Diana’s name appears, Margaret always had a kind word to say about her.52 As for how Margaret may have been perceived by Diana and her stepbrothers, a recollection of Leonard Thomas, Jr.’s widow, Yvonne, who attended many of their parties, is something of a clue. Yvonne Thomas could recall Margaret only as a shadowy presence within the group.53 As a daughter-in-law whose relationship with Michael Strange turned cordial only by stages, she may well have had her own reasons for not being more attentive to Margaret’s contributions on such occasions. But it was also plain that Margaret felt out of her depth in the company of Newport-bred Oelrichs, and of Thomases and Barrymores, and tended to listen more than to put herself forward. The more frenetic the social whirl, the more isolated Margaret was apt to feel in its midst.

  Having given up her office at 69 Bank Street, which had never amounted to much more than a desk, Margaret now worked at home. Not surprisingly, this arrangement proved problematic. Once, for instance, when an editorial assistant from Doubleday came by to review a set of page proofs with Margaret, Michael Strange suddenly burst into the room and in deeply theatrical tones announced, “Diana is coming!”54 The young publishing aide was suitably impressed by her brush with celebrity. Margaret, for her part, soon realized she would need a separate work place. Accordingly, with the help of her Bank Street friend Jessica Gamble, she found a quiet (and characteristically idiosyncratic) writing studio a mile or so from her apartment. Cobble Court, as the curious structure was already known, was an early nineteenth-century wooden farm cottage, incongruously left standing in a hidden courtyard behind the rowhouse block at York Avenue between 71st and 72nd streets.55

  Evenings, Jessica used the two cramped upper-floor rooms she had rented there as a workshop where she made finely crafted children’s toys—wooden tugboats and the like. Margaret rented the equally compact ground floor rooms, which had waxed brick floors and, as her only heat source, an open hearth. As Margaret worked by day and Jessica by night, the two friends rarely saw each other, which on the whole was probably just as well. What Margaret most needed was a place in which to be alone from time to time. At Cobble Court, where even city street noise ceased to exist, she had found at least that much solitude. (After about two years, in late 1945, Jessica became engaged and made plans to move to Connecticut, and Margaret took over the whole of the little house.)

  Her intentions notwithstanding, Margaret continued to write children’s books and to do so at an extraordinary rate. Many of her new manuscripts—Noisy book sequels, Horses (for which she devised the pen name Timothy Hay), and others—still displayed the direct influence of Lucy Mitchell’s ideas about patterned language and direct observation. At the same time, however, Michael Strange’s forceful personality was bound to effect Margaret’s work and her view of her work in a variety of ways. Unfortunately, much of the toweringly willful woman’s impact was to prove damaging. Henceforward, when Margaret experienced her periods of professional self-doubt, Michael stepped into the breach to confirm her sense of the smallness and insignificance—compared to the true poet’s art—of writing stories and poems for small children.

  It was not that Michael Strange questioned Margaret’s talent—only the uses to which she put her abilities. Had not the older woman, through her poetry recitals, set out to bring the high traditions of literature and music to the people of a troubled world? Michael regarded herself as a sort of latter-day Joan of Arc. She had once recited from Saint Joan for Shaw himself, had written a play, Forever Young, about her, (“to me . . . the most sacredly enigmatic personage in all history”), and had even considered naming her daughter after the martyred saint.56 Placed beside a mission like Michael’s, Margaret’s own work might well have seemed a bit undersized. If Margaret benefited from the weight of her friend’s criticism and reservations, as she doubtless did at times, it was by being driven to write more searchingly and more clearly.

  There were unmistakable signs, however, that Margaret had begun to pay dearly for the other woman’s double-edged admonishments to excellence. At Harper, some new manuscripts were drawing an unaccustomed level of criticism from Nordstrom’s staff. In one internal report a reader commented that Miss Brown’s recent stories had become overly “symbolical,” that in striving for double planes of meaning, the author seemed to have lost touch with the imaginative impulses that gave her best work its extraordinary vitality.57

  One such story, “War in the Woods,” was intended as a patriotic fable of democratic values. The bears who inhabit the forest of this tale have just won a war against their fellow creatures and promptly issue a decree that all animals must live like bears. When this leads to food shortages, the bears order the others to live like any animal but themselves or bears. When this policy results in chaos, they tell the animals to go back to being themselves a
gain and shuffle off for their winter hibernation. “As a lesson in democracy,” Harper’s reader commented, this was a “very sad and inconclusive thing.”58

  Margaret could not have escaped feeling the war’s threat and sadness, and this might well have been enough to prompt her to attempt such stories, but she had never been comfortable in the teacher’s role. Now, however, under Michael Strange’s informal tutelege, she felt a growing obligation to make some contribution to the greater good. Asked on a publisher’s questionnaire to indicate her wartime service, she replied in earnest “writer of children’s books.”59

  The most original of her “war efforts” was a picture book project that did not get much beyond the rough draft stage, primarily, one suspects, because it violated so completely the juvenile book world’s unwritten taboo against openly presenting wartime concerns to toddlers. Margaret’s proposal for “The Bomb Proof Bunnies,” a book on civil defense for preschoolers, displays her characteristic alertness to the small child’s point of view:

  One of the most frightening things an adult can do about air raids for a child, it seems to me, is to evade the issue or keep a strange silence about it all. So a child, quick to sense adult fear and nervousness, is terrified again by the unknown or an evasive unrealistic answer. This book would hope to provoke much practical discussion between parents and their children under five. And because it is once removed to a world of carrots and beets and bunnies and mice, it might be less terrifying and equally practical as it would be to read them the standard air raid precautions.60

  At about this time, Margaret decided to revive an old manuscript that Louise Raymond, Ursula Nordstrom’s predecessor at Harper, had rejected years earlier, a lyrical allegory of the creative process called The Dark Wood of the Golden Birds. A Writers Laboratory colleague had dismissed the piece in its original incarnation as “an overripe tomato,” and Margaret herself had once described the story as an uncertain experiment “toward a new direction” in her work.61 Resubmitting The Dark Wood to Harper in the first weeks of 1944, Margaret added an epigraph taken from Michael Strange’s poem Resurrecting Life: “Somewhere was a white bird once / And singing upon a golden bough—”62 She had begun to view the book as an homage to her friend. As such, it now assumed still greater significance for her.

  Nordstrom’s staff reader, however, in a report dated February 29, proved to be no more enthusiastic about the piece than Raymond had been. “I’m sorry that Miss Brown is so attached to this ms,” the reader stated, “because I don’t think it is good”; the author was doubtless “terribly sincere . . . but that is one of the biggest dangers of terrible sincerity. . . . Your thought becomes so personal that you can no longer know what it would mean to an outsider.”63 Margaret, it was noted respectfully, was a writer who had inspired many imitators; it was a pity in this instance to find her imitating herself.

  None of this was communicated directly to the author. Nordstrom decided to override the staff recommendation to reject The Dark Wood because Margaret had made it clear that her future relations with Harper might stand or fall on the manuscript’s fate. The editor made a notation for her files that “MWB is revising drastically”; she hoped, in vain as it turned out, that her favorite author would be distracted by other projects and redirect her energies elsewhere.64

  By early March of 1944, Margaret was feeling secure enough in her new life to give a small dinner party for the purpose of introducing Michael Strange to some old colleagues and friends.65 Lucy Mitchell and Rosie Bliven (and to a lesser extent their husbands) had been among the constants of her Bank Street days, but Margaret had seen little of them since moving to East End Avenue. Her former teacher must have appreciated the evening’s laboratory aspect, the experiment of bringing together representatives of such different sides of Margaret’s world. All the same, it is difficult to imagine what the first here-and-now author and the author of Who Tells Me True might have had to talk about—what feelings, apart from skepticism, mutual suspicion, and proud disdain, could have passed between them.

  The following month, Michael Strange’s younger son, Robin Thomas, died. Robin, who was twenty-nine, had been distraught following the suicide of a man he had been romantically involved with, Billy Rambo. While languishing in his Connecticut home, Robin had taken a fatal dose of alcohol and pills.66

  Apparently, in fashioning her idealized fantasy of Robin, Michael Strange had left him little room for an independent sexual identity. On the contrary, she had meddled in his relationships, by some accounts even seducing his male lovers. With Robin’s death, her deeply distorted feelings for him seem only to have intensified. With the real Robin no longer around to interfere as it were, Michael Strange was now free to refine her fantasy version of him to cultish perfection. As Diana Barry more recalled,

  Mother . . . brought Robin’s furniture to her home in Easton. She . . . reconstructed his bedroom and study there and made a shrine of them, keeping everything exactly as it had been when Robin was alive—his paintings, his antiques, his books and music. Even his desk remained as it had been the morning he was found dead. Mother had made only one change. She took Robin’s bed into her bedroom and placed hers in his—and for the rest of her life she slept in Robin’s bed. She still wept when she talked of him.67

  Margaret dutifully accompanied Michael to Indianapolis, where Robin was buried in accordance with his wishes in the Rambo family plot. The part of comforter and consoler had once again fallen to Margaret, as it had when she first met Bill Gaston, and for all the emotional upset this must have entailed, the role still suited her. Yet for all the kindness and concern that Margaret was so capable of and so ready to offer, the death of Robin almost certainly marked the beginning of the slow unraveling of the affectionate bond between Michael and herself.

  During 1944 Margaret published eight new books: Big Fur Secret, with illustrations by a French architect and friend, Robert de Veyrac (Harper); Black and White, illustrated by Charles Shaw (Harper); Horses (Harper), published under the pseudonym Timothy Hay, with illustrations by “Wag” (Margaret’s friend Dorothy Wagstaff); Red Light Green Light, a Golden MacDonald book, with illustrations by Leonard Weisgard (Doubleday); Willie’s Walk to Grandmama, with illustrations by a young artist named Lucienne Bloch (Scott); two of the Heath readers that she and Lucy Mitchell had labored over together, Animals, Plants and Machines and Farm and City; and, most interesting of all, They All Saw It, with photographs by the well-known wildlife photographer and adventuress, Ylla.

  Ursula Nordstrom was always eager for unusual new material to publish. One day a friend of hers, Leo Lerman of Condé Nast, brought by a parcel of photographs of animals viewed up close, all taken in the crisp, clear, subtly ironical style for which Ylla had come to be known. Ylla, born Camilla Koffler, was a photographer of animal portraits whose work appeared in Colliers’ and the Saturday Evening Post. She had a remarkable knack for capturing her subjects in moments of heightened attention, with something very much like human expressions on their faces. Lerman deposited the photos on Nordstrom’s desk, suggesting that she find a way to make a book of them. For six months the resourceful editor had been stumped. Then Margaret, come to talk with her about other business, inquired about the photographs, and on hearing of Nordstrom’s dilemma, volunteered to see what she could devise.68 The result was a brilliantly silly bit of manic nonsense, in which the reader is given to understand that each of the various animals in Ylla’s images has been witness to something—the mysterious “It” of the title. Margaret, of course, left it for the very last page to reveal the object of fascination.

  In February of 1945 Margaret and Michael Strange toured California together. From Los Angeles they traveled north to San Francisco, where after staying together for a time at the Mark Hopkins Hotel, with its fine views of the city from high atop Nob Hill, they made the spectacular two-hour drive south along the coastal road to the storybook town of Carmel-by-the-Sea. In Carmel they stopped at the Cypress Point Club for a “whirl�
�� of socializing, as Margaret wrote Ursula Nordstrom, and met “everyone” from the local tycoons and priests to the poet Robinson Jeffers.69

  Margaret paid the northern California coastline her highest compliment, declaring it “the wildest and most beautiful and haunted [setting] west of the west of Ireland.”

  A priest at the Carmel Mission asked her, “My daughter— what are you in love with?”

  “The Fabulous, Father; I’m in love with the Fabulous,” she replied.

  “And so am I, my child,” he said, “and have been all my life.”70

  Among the books that Margaret brought along on the trip were two with green dust jackets: Catherine Drinker Bowen’s biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Yankee from Olympus, and Joseph Campbell’s and Henry Morton Robinson’s Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake, both published within the last year. Margaret folded the two covers into an envelope and sent them to Ursula Nordstrom with a note indicating that the enclosures were printed in the precise shade of green she wanted for the jacket of her forthcoming picture book, The First Story.71

  Another letter written to Nordstrom from San Francisco likewise illustrates the care with which Margaret attended to every detail of the design and illustration of her books. The editor had just mailed her sample proofs of a picture book due to be published that fall, The House of a Hundred Windows. This book, Margaret’s highly innovative young children’s introduction to art appreciation, was to be illustrated with lithographs in two colors by Robert de Veyrac.