Margaret Wise Brown

by Leonard S. Marcus

  The sheets for The House came and I have looked at them a Hundred times. I think the color is wonderful—It is more than a two color book—[it has] the very quality of stone. . . . I will be glad to see the end sheets with it and the whole thing bound in a bright red, I hope or yellow. I only wish the Title Page had been a reverse plate. A little of this unbleached paper goes a long way. Also I don’t like that copyright stuck outside the square. Couldn’t it have been printed on the edge of the window-sill. And I wish the title had been placed with more skill—It all sprawls like a country newspaper add [sic] for a patent medicine. . . . And on the title page and in future copy for adds [sic] and jacket flaps, try and keep the The in the title in small caps as it makes the title too long and hard and as a word has no importance in the title.72

  While in San Francisco, Michael and Margaret had another of their rather routine and predictable quarrels. Margaret, sent packing by her companion, went to stay with Posey Hurd, who was still in the city doing wartime service.73

  Posey had an apartment on Scott Street, with a view of San Francisco Bay. It did Margaret a world of good to see her old friend and to know again Posey’s accepting, even-tempered camaraderie. Before long they were collaborating on a book.

  In honor of the occasion, Margaret proposed a joint pen name, Juniper Sage. She explained that this was a variation on Junipero Serra, the eighteenth-century Franciscan friar responsible for establishing the California mission system, including, of course, the mission at Carmel that Margaret had lately visited. Posey was to be considered as the “Sage” of the team. Margaret would be “Juniper.”

  “Sage” did the legwork for Five Little Firemen, stopping by a local firehouse to inspect the equipment and question the men about their duties—all in the best Bank Street way. Margaret, in contrast, simply disappeared for hours at a time, once returning to the Scott Street flat with a taxi crammed with wild mimosa. On another occasion, just as Posey was sitting down for a work session, Margaret decided to take a bath. Posey, understandably irked, declared that she would start without her. From behind the closed bathroom door Margaret would shout an occasional line that “belonged” in the book. It was for “Sage” to determine just where in the book the line belonged. More often than not, Margaret’s contributions were in fact worthwhile additions—witty, brilliant touches. In this way, Five Little Firemen, which Simon and Schuster published under its Little Golden Books imprint in 1948 (under the coauthors’ actual names), got written that spring.74

  Margaret was back in New York in May in time for her thirty-fifth birthday, which she marked by joining the Authors League. This, too, was a part of her personal “war effort.” Henceforth she became increasingly involved in efforts to demand fair treatment from publishers for herself and the many artists with whom she worked.

  That summer Michael Strange pleased Margaret greatly by offering to give her a new Kerry Blue terrier pup.75 But trouble soon arose; on a visit to the kennel, Margaret found herself drawn to a pup that Michael immediately sized up as having an unusually wild and contrary temperament, even for a Kerry. She proceeded to tell Margaret in no uncertain terms that she simply would not agree to buy her that particular dog—she must choose another one. Margaret, standing her ground, replied that it was to be that dog or none at all, that if her friend was unwilling to pay for the animal, she was quite prepared to do so. Whoever won this latest test of wills, Margaret left the kennel with the Kerry she had wanted from the first. She gave him an extravagant name recalled from Shakespeare’s Henry V, Crispin’s Crispian.76

  Often a canny judge of character, Michael Strange had been quite right about Crispian. Several of Margaret’s friends eventually caught a bit of the dog’s fury on the trouser leg, and Crispian put her to considerable expense, tearing up upholstery and generating veterinarian’s bills for the repair of other dogs he periodically attacked in the street. Crispian was a terror—and this, doubtless, was what Margaret liked about him. He was the wildness of small children, hers at times to rein in, at other times hers only to keep pace with. One day on Park Avenue, Crispian broke his leash and tore down the street. Racing after him, Margaret herself became—as Leonard Weisgard, who witnessed the scene, thought—somehow “not human,” transformed, as she closed in, with absolute certainty and quickness and ease, on her quarry.77

  Chapter Six

  In the Great Green Room

  There is a loving way with words and an unloving way. And it is only with the loving way that the simplicity of language becomes beautiful.

  MARGARET WISE BROWN

  For Clement Hurd, as for many others in the American armed forces, the war wound down slowly, with months of delay following Japan’s surrender on September 2, 1945 before the return trip home. By the time Hurd steamed into San Francisco Bay, rejoined Posey, and boarded a train for New York, it was almost Christmas. Margaret, eager for the couple’s company, had contacted Posey about the welcome she was preparing for them; she sent specific instructions. On their arrival at Grand Central Terminal, the Hurds went directly to Cobble Court.

  When their train finally pulled in at one o’clock in the morning, it was fifteen hours late. The city had just received a light dusting of snow, and the midtown streets, at that hour nearly deserted, had taken on the dim, brownish cast of an old daguerreotype. It was an ethereal, wonderland setting, or so the couple might have thought but for their grueling cross-country trek. The new arrivals climbed into the back of a cab and were duly deposited at 1335 York Avenue. After passing through an unlocked door, they made their way precariously through the dark, damp, narrow hallway they had been told to expect, and which smelled of newly washed laundry. Bone tired, they shared a little gasp of amazement when at last they reached the open courtyard within and came face to face with Margaret’s implausible wooden cottage. The front door had been left unlocked, and once inside they found a fire ablaze in the sitting room hearth, fresh flowers in profusion, fur rugs, fur coverlets, and fur blankets scattered everywhere, and a warm bed for the night.

  Margaret herself was nowhere in evidence. She left the travelers to themselves, to get what rest they could after their long journey. Late the next morning, she appeared at the door to rouse and greet them, and to show them how to survive in the antiquated house. She then gave them the keys and invited them to consider Cobble Court their own for as long as they wished.

  Posey Hurd had continued to write intermittently during the war. But for Clem, the war had meant a complete disruption of his career just at a time when his reputation as an illustrator was being solidified with the publication of The Runaway Bunny and the Hurds’ own early collaborations. Like many another returning soldier, he worried about the difficult task of picking up where he had left off professionally. Margaret had provided for this, too. Early in the new year, on her instructions, Harper mailed Hurd the spiral notebook she had submitted to Ursula Nordstrom—the manuscript of Goodnight Moon.

  Margaret had written the text one morning upon waking and had telephoned Harper’s editor for a first impression, which had been quite positive. On the notebook’s title page, Margaret gave the author as “Memory Ambrose”—a name Hurd recognized as that of a friend’s housekeeper. Beneath the pseudonym she had written “With pictures by Hurricane Jones”—the name of a character in Five Little Firemen (the yet unpublished story that Margaret and Posey had worked on in San Francisco the previous spring). Hurd understood that “Hurricane” was meant to indicate himself.1 In the letter that accompanied the notebook, Nordstrom asked him to make a sample drawing and send it on to her as quickly as possible.2

  Margaret began the new year of 1946 resolved to straighten out her increasingly complex business affairs. As a first step, she wrote Evelyn Burkey at the Authors League requesting advice concerning her “involved situation,” as she called it, “of being an over prolific author with several publishers.”3 She was, she said, about to sign a raft of new contracts with Simon and Schuster and wanted to be certain not to “cros
s wires” with her various other houses by unnecessarily limiting her right to publish with whomever she pleased.

  Margaret had come down with a bad cold and was not taking care of herself. When Ursula Nordstrom phoned her only to find that Margaret had blithely stepped out for the afternoon despite her urgings, Nordstrom dictated a few double-barreled words of motherly and businesslike concern: “I must ask you to take better care of your health, at least until you have a satisfactory text for the LITTLE FUR FAMILY.”4

  The book to which Nordstrom referred was not an ordinary production. Margaret’s nearly full-size mock-up of the book was less than three inches tall. The editor had agreed to this unusual format as well as to Margaret’s still more extravagant proposal that Little Fur Family, which concerned the adventures of an animal child in a wild but fundamentally safe and secure world, be bound in real rabbit’s fur.

  Harper’s editor had a particularly strong motive just then for trying to accommodate Margaret’s most ambitious flights of fancy. Far and away the most significant development in American children’s book publishing during the last half dozen years had been Simon and Schuster’s establishment of its Golden Books imprint. Starting in 1942, in the midst of wartime, the firm had introduced a series of full-color picture books that sold for substantially less than other children’s titles then on the market (a mere twenty-five cents as compared to an average of a dollar seventy-five) and were every bit as good in quality.

  A relatively young, maverick firm during the forties, Simon and Schuster had already pioneered in the mass-market paperback field with its immensely successful Pocket Books. It now applied similar methods to the sale of unprecedented quantities of juveniles; it aimed to print and sell several hundreds of thousands of copies of each of its titles per year (as against the very few thousands that the older houses considered a respectable showing). The idea was to market books in heavily trafficked, nontraditional locales, like five-and-ten-cent stores and drugstores. Greater sales volume made unusually large press runs feasible; this in turn led to economies of scale that lowered the overall production costs and justified the low retail price of the books. Nordstrom was not alone among editors at the older mainstream houses in fearing that talented authors and illustrators would be lured away by the advantageous terms that Simon and Schuster was able to offer. The contracts that Margaret had recently signed with the firm were as good an indication as any that Nordstrom’s fears were well founded.

  At the same time there were compelling reasons for Margaret to maintain her relationship with Harper. Ursula Nordstrom was without question the most creative juveniles editor of her day, a figure within her often rather undervalued field of Maxwell Perkins’ stature in the literary world of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Like Margaret, she approached her work in a spirit of adventure and was continually energized by the prospect of publishing genuinely innovative material. If a book struck a blow at the emotional squeamishness that characterized a great deal of what passed for children’s reading matter, then so much the better. When Anne Carroll Moore attempted to suppress the publication of E. B. White’s first juvenile fantasy, Stuart Little, on the grounds that a story about a normal American mother giving birth to a mouse was indecent, Nordstrom would have none of it and proceeded as planned.5

  Nordstrom was a very demanding but equally fairminded editor. A marginal notation from her of “N. G. E. F. Y.”—not good enough for you—had put a momentary chill in many a heart, but the end result was quite often a better book than the author in question had thought possible. A voluble, emotionally complicated person, Nordstrom thrived on turmoil and generally saw to it that some lively joke—or argument—was always floating about the Harper “Tot Department.” (“Somebody answer it,” she liked to say when the telephone rang. “That could be the next Mark Twain!”)6 However, once she decided to commit herself to an author or illustrator—as she had committed herself to Margaret from the start—there were few lengths of patience, dedication, and friendly concern to which she would not go. Margaret was hardly alone in making a trusted confidant of Nordstrom, one of the very few people to whom she told her troubles. This almost familial level of trust carried over constructively into the writing and illustration of any number of the books Nordstrom published. Her authors and artists wanted passionately to please her, to reward her faith in them. It was not by chance that Harper published Margaret’s two most deeply felt and fully realized picture books, The Runaway Bunny and Goodnight Moon.

  A little elegy and a small child’s evening prayer, Goodnight Moon is a supremely comforting evocation of the companionable objects of the daylight world. It is also a ritual preparation for a journey beyond that world, a leave-taking of the known for the unknown world of darkness and dreams. It is spoken in part in the voice of the provider, the good parent or guardian who can summon forth a secure, whole existence simply by naming its particulars: “In the great green room / There was a telephone / And a red balloon / And a picture of— / The cow jumping over the moon.”7 And it is partly spoken in the voice of the child, who takes possession of that world by naming its particulars all over again, addressing them directly, one by one, as though each were alive, and bidding each goodnight. Nursery rhyme reality and here-and-now reality seamlessly merge, as in a small child’s own thoughts. Odd fellows are joined and familiar pairs are bound together with unexpected poignancy. The nameless, imponderable “nobody” is bid goodnight, along with the homeliest of everyday things, mush. The sense of an ending descends gradually, like sleep.

  The book’s haunting immediacy arises from the authority with which it fixes an irreducible type of human experience. In Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, an older child catalogs his provisions as he prepares to set out alone on his river journey. For Huck, as Alfred Kazin has said, it is as though the very act of naming his belongings has the power to drive out loneliness and fear:

  I took the sack of corn meal, and took it to where the canoe was hid and then I done the same with the side of bacon, then the whiskey-jug. I took all the coffee and sugar there was and all the ammunition; I took the wadding; I took blankets and the skillet and the coffeepot. I took fish-lines and matches and other things—the gun and now I was done.8

  The full-grown “veteran Nick Adams” of Hemingway’s leanly carved psychological stories shows the same “compulsion,” as Kazin calls it, to “say about certain things—only this is real, this is real, and my emotion connects them.”9

  Margaret herself was given to similar compulsions, a certain habit, for example, of squinting intently at the flower market as though to extract the last measure of enjoyment from the beautiful things she beheld. At home, whether in New York or Maine, she often had some small brass object or other in her hand to polish as she chatted with a visitor. At the Only House she saved her cooking grease and rubbed it into the floorboards and furniture. Polishing an object, as the philosopher Gaston Bachelard observed, can, like naming it, become an act of praise:

  When a poet rubs a piece of furniture—even vicariously—when he puts a little fragrant wax on his table with the woolen cloth that lends warmth to everything it touches, he creates a new object; he increases the object’s dignity; he registers this object officially as a member of the human household.10

  To mix the fat of the animal one has eaten with the table one has eaten it on; to be the hunter becoming the hare; to merge subject with object, the actor with the acted upon, each element with its corresponding opposite—this, again, was Margaret, through her robust imagination, struggling to make contact with the world beyond the self. Goodnight Moon is a here-and-now story, but one so supercharged with emotion, with so freewheeling a sense of the fantastic as an aspect of the everyday, as to render it a cunning transparency of Bank Street ideas and their opposites. Margaret’s simple-sounding bedtime story was her most incisive response to the old Fairy Tale War.

  After two refreshing weeks at Cobble Court, Clem and Posey Hurd moved to the country, to rented quar
ters in West Cornwall, Connecticut. All March and for the rest of the spring, the artist worked on the illustrations for Goodnight Moon.

  Margaret had not given the illustrator many suggestions for the art, as she sometimes did. She simply scribbled a few brief notes and, along with them, offered inspiration in the form of a small color reproduction of Goya’s dashing Boy in Red, which she pasted onto the notebook’s front cover. At the top of the first manuscript page, Ursula Nordstrom had written, “Interior of room—fabulous room . . . Little Boy Bunny in bed.” To which Margaret added, “Show both pictures on the wall that are to be enlarged on the following pages.”11 (These were the pictures of the Cow Jumping Over the Moon and the Three Little Bears.)

  The first sample drawings of the great green room met with disapproval on various counts; so did the second ones. In March, Hurd submitted a third set of sketches, noting that the room had been restored to its “original hugeness” and that “the bunny is young and the old lady is loveable if not ‘fairy story.’”12 One reason, he explained, that he could not make the woman in the rocking chair look more like a fairy-tale character was that he thought of all such women as witches, which he was sure was not what Nordstrom had in mind. If, the artist suggested, Nordstrom did not yet feel the bigness of the room, it was probably for technical reasons, which would be cleared away with the laying in of colors. He, for one, thought the book was “shaping up well.”

  Much remained to be done, but by then certain key elements of the design had been established. There would be a sequence of full-color views of the great green room. These would grow progressively darker and would alternate with smaller spot drawings in line and gray wash. As the work progressed, Hurd seemed to summon up everything he had thus far done as an artist. The child’s room, rendered in flattened perspective, has the airy, floating quality of a stage set. The shafts of light cast by the child’s lamp give the heightened emphasis of theater spotlights. The festive color scheme and distilled, geometric approach to image making owed something to the influence of Hurd’s former teacher, Fernand Léger. At the same time, the unstudied candor of the illustrations suggests the manner of the American primitives. And when one looks closely at the book on the rabbit child’s shelf, one can see that it is a copy of The Runaway Bunny.