Margaret Wise Brown

by Leonard S. Marcus

  One evening in March, Margaret, the Hurds, and Double-day’s editor, Margaret Lesser, boarded a train in New York for Danbury, Connecticut, for the dinner party Leonard Weisgard was giving to celebrate his and Margaret’s new book about Maine, The Little Island. Weisgard had just completed his paintings for the book, which Doubleday planned to publish that fall.

  Dressed in a favorite old brown corduroy jacket, Weisgard met his guests on the station platform and drove them out past the town to the Victorian house set back from the road against a backdrop of tall maples, which he had purchased during the war.

  It was an evening of small recognitions. When the Hurds had last seen him, almost four years earlier, Leonard still lived in Manhattan. Their friend had evidently taken well to country life; his house, which the visitors investigated while dinner was cooking, was a treasure trove of ingenious oddments, the illustrator’s burgeoning collection of American folk art and other beautiful things. There seemed to be antiques everywhere, the well-worn, homey kinds of objects they all enjoyed rooting around for in New England jumble shops; often, however, the piece inquired about proved of startlingly recent vintage. Weisgard, it seemed, had taken up a second hobby besides collecting—that of “making . . . new antiques.”13 Clem and Posey were delighted by the idea (Clem would one day fabricate a series of bogus Hurd ancestral portraits).

  After a hearty roast turkey dinner, Weisgard led his guests into his small studio, where the paintings for The Little Island hung in a row along the wall. Clem, Posey, and Margaret Lesser had all visited Margaret in Maine at one time or another and had seen for themselves the curiously carved bit of granite and greenery in Penobscot Bay that she had once named Starfish Island. Here again, in Leonard’s richly toned images, was that island haven with its wildflowers, massed rock formations, sea birds, seals, and changing light.

  Her fullest attempt at capturing in words her love of the Maine coastal islands, The Little Island was a special book for Margaret. Although the text falters in its plot line, it is in other respects a poised and exquisite piece of work, a poet’s notations of seasonal change: “One day . . . the seals came barking down from the north . . . And the kingfishers came from the South to build nests . . . And the gulls laid their eggs . . . And wild strawberries turned red. Summer had come to the little Island.”14

  Ample, delicate, vividly imaged, The Little Island points to a sense of the world as a vast and various place in which one need never feel dwarfed or overshadowed: “And it was good to be a little Island. A part of the world and a world of its own all surrounded by the bright blue sea.” Here in this passage is another of Margaret’s searching attempts at a definition of selfhood, a definition framed in her characteristic mode of paradox, but a paradox from which all fear of loneliness has been safely removed. There is none of the muted desolation of Red Light Green Light. The Little Island reveals Margaret at her most comforting, accepting, and resolute.

  In the middle section of the text, however, she turns impatient, apparently confused as to her own intentions, and the beautifully crafted hymn to the natural order, merging the Romantic sensibility with here-and-now fidelity to observed fact, breaks down. The island itself speaks, becoming involved in a portentous dialogue with a naive and rather skeptical kitten. The kitten cannot believe that the island, which appears to stand all on its own, is actually a part of the larger world. A talking fish assures him that the island is, in fact, connected to earth and that in life some matters are to be taken on faith even though they cannot be verified by observation. As philosophy, and more particularly as a rebuff to lessons learned at Bank Street about the supreme value of direct experience, The Little Island is a murky affair, mixing geography pell-mell with fantasy and metaphysics. Once again, Margaret’s conscious striving for a big statement had not worked; grandiose gestures simply did not become her as a writer.

  On Saturday morning, April 13, Charles Shaw took a mid-morning train to Westport, Connecticut, where Michael Strange and Margaret were waiting for him, their weekend guest. They made the short drive to Under the Hill. The house seemed cold and a fire was lit as the three friends sat down to an early lunch. They passed a pleasant afternoon in animated conversation spurred on by rounds of drinks. After a lull for napping and reading, they had cocktails, and then dinner at the long library table in the main room. At one end of the table, as always, stood a dramatic four-foot carved wooden Virgin Mary; at the opposite end were massed banks of Madonna lilies. Later that evening Shaw wrote in his diary: “Immediately after dinner M. S. attacks M. W. B. in most violent and abusive terms. M. W. B. leaves the room and building. Talk with M. S.—standing in front of fire—for about three hours. We then say good-night to M. W. B. who had gone to bed in small house. Turn in 12:30.”15

  At noon the next day Margaret and Michael appeared outdoors together, joining Shaw, who had been painting and sketching in the brilliant sunlit morning. The three friends found a shady spot on the grass and took a leisurely breakfast of eggs and coffee. What remained of the day was given over to long walks and violet picking, cocktails, and supper. A little after nine o’clock Margaret and Michael dropped Shaw off at the Westport station, then returned together to Under the Hill.

  Such eruptions of verbal cruelty as Shaw had witnessed were evidently a common occurrence between the two women, with Margaret, always on the receiving end, generally all too ready to accept Michael’s harsh judgments of her as the clear-eyed if painful insights of a more knowing woman.

  Not long after this episode, with its nearly instant reconciliation, Margaret decided the time had finally come for her to present Michael with a copy of the manuscript she had dedicated to her, The Dark Wood of the Golden Birds. At Harper, Ursula Nordstrom (whose own opinion of the book had not changed) entertained no illusions as to the extreme importance Margaret attached to this project; she was also well aware of the cruel cuts that her now more than occasionally tearful author periodically received from the book’s dedicatee. Perhaps, however, it was only an innocent mix-up when Harper dispatched the wrong typescript.16 Margaret had wanted her gift to arrive as a surprise by May 23, her own birthday, but instead of The Dark Wood of the Golden Birds, Michael Strange was sent a copy of the rejected “War in the Woods.”

  On July 2, before leaving for the Only House, Margaret attended the wedding of Dorothy Wagstaff, the friend she had tutored long ago. Dorothy had been a child then; she was now twenty-four. Her groom, Louis Ripley, was a businessman from a prominent Connecticut family. A dozen or more years earlier, Margaret had watched as her schoolmates married; now the wheel had begun to turn for the generation of her younger friends. Margaret, who was Dorothy’s maid of honor, was happy for her, but if a note sent to the Hollins Alumnae Quarterly a year earlier is any indication, she may have been feeling a bit unnerved as well. “How many children have you?” she had teased her classmates, with a shrillness and an edge that for once betrayed her insecurity. “I have 50 books.”17

  Alone for much of the summer of 1946 on Vinalhaven, Margaret decided the Only House needed a paint job and hired a local jack-of-all-trades, auspiciously named Billy Brown, for the job. Approaching the project with the same ironclad determination she applied to her books, she explained to the unsuspecting young handyman that she had a certain luminous shade of gray in mind for the exterior walls.

  The mixing of paint, as overseen by her, proved to be an arduous business. In the end, however, Billy Brown would reach much the same conclusion about Margaret that her illustrators did—that she was as purposeful a manager and muse as she was demanding. Billy, like many another habitually skeptical islander, took a keen liking to her. And when Margaret gave him his next assignment—to cut off at the halfway mark the legs of all her furniture—he proceeded unquestioningly, however odd the idea would have sounded coming from anyone else. When the work was done, the Only House’s previously cluttered small rooms had been transformed into calmer and airier places of unexpected intimacy.

  The Little
Island had long since gone to the printer; Margaret would see the first bound copies on her return to the city in early fall. In the meantime, she had Starfish Island to herself, clearly visible from her writing desk window, and the cat (named Bobby because he bobbed his head) that she had made into the book’s hero.

  In August, she wrote Ursula Nordstrom, “How is my great fur editor? I am a hermit not working at all.” (By now Nordstrom knew not to take such declarations literally.) “You will be relieved to hear that I have written no more stories [that is, short stories for adults]. I don’t think I ever will again.”18 That Margaret had shown her “serious” fiction to Nordstrom suggests, again, the full extent to which Margaret had let Nordstrom into her confidence.

  “It is so damned beautiful up here,” she went on, “that existence and just watching seem enough. I have a sailboat and I can’t sail, but I sail anyway. I have lots of old fisherman friends—in their 70s and 80s and 1 like them.” She closed her ramble by inquiring if the editor had succeeded in her search for a house in the country.

  Nordstrom, who had been on vacation for most of August, found Margaret’s loosely scrawled communication in the heap of paperwork that had accumulated in her absence. “I love to think of you sailing,” she wrote back warmly, “and wish we could have a publicity picture of our Little Golden Little Fur author at the tiller.”19 Nordstrom did not miss the opportunity to make a gently pointed reference to Margaret’s activities under contract with Simon and Schuster. Although there was little that she could do to counter that development directly, she might at least take comfort in the knowledge that Margaret was not likely to sign an exclusive contract with any one publishing house.

  The first copies of the fur-bound Little Fur Family were due to arrive at Harper’s offices, she reported, in less than a week. She would immediately rush a copy to Maine. The printer had not done as good a job as had been hoped for, but everyone, she said, was finding the book irresistible. The advance sale was expected to run to at least fifty thousand copies, an enormous figure—by all but Golden Books standards. Nordstrom was not taking the competition for her favorite author’s services lightly.

  Never had Ursula Nordstrom’s inspired editorial instincts revealed themselves more clearly than in her choice of Garth Williams to illustrate Little Fur Family. Williams had made an auspicious debut in the children’s book field as the illustrator of Stuart Little. Prior to that, he had been a sculptor and had done some work for the New Yorker, where his bravura comic drawings had caught the attention of E. B. White.

  Like Margaret, Williams was quick-witted and independent—a dedicated artist full of mischief and beans. When he and Margaret got together, new book ideas flew back and forth so freely that they soon adopted the joking precaution of “copyrighting” their more promising utterances in mid-sentence.20 As the illustrator of Little Fur Family, Williams understood perfectly Margaret’s technique of abstracting characters to the point where only the reader can say precisely who or what they really are. As painted by him, the book’s family of creatures might be part bear, part puppy, part human. With no exact real-world counterparts, the members of the little fur family are all the more liberating as springboards to fantasy.

  In 1945 the most widely publicized birth in America—Stuart Little’s—was an imaginary one. But an unprecedented rise in the nation’s annual birth rate was itself fast becoming one of the most conspicuous facts of postwar American life. Since the turn of the century, the number of live births recorded in the United States had remained fairly constant, at approximately 3 million per year. But between 1945 and 1946 more than 3.4 million live births were counted. The following year the figure jumped to 3.8 million, and the numbers continued to rise for some time.

  The postwar baby boom was bound to have great significance for the children’s book world. One small evidence of this awaited Margaret on her return to New York in September of 1946. Bruce Bliven, Jr., had interested Life magazine in a feature-length celebrity profile of her. The widespread popularity of Margaret’s many books was certain now to increase still further; the public, Life’s editors had evidently concluded, would be eager to know about the woman who was capable of writing so knowingly for their preschoolers and even for their babies.

  Over the early fall, Bliven and Margaret met for a series of informal interviews.21 Characteristically evasive about her family, she was amusing about most other matters—her idiosyncratic homes, her practice of writing first drafts on the backs of shopping lists and other odd scraps of paper, her delight in playing mischievous tricks on her friends.

  A high point of the behind-the-scenes work came when Philippe Halsman, the Life photographer, appeared at Cobble Court. Halsman arrived on a brisk autumn day with a princely entourage of attendants bearing his lighting equipment and tripods in elegant camel-colored leather golf bags slung over their shoulders. The photographer stood back from the fray as his well-trained technicians executed his orders. When all was in readiness, he stepped casually up to the camera and recorded image after image of his agreeable subject.

  Margaret and the photographer took to each other immediately. Between poses there was much laughter as Halsman received the full impact of Cobble Court, which Margaret had decked out in its furriest. She told her visitor that she sometimes wrote with a quill pen, that she preferred swan’s plumes but at the moment had only a blue heron feather on hand, that she often wrote in bed. He photographed her scribbling on a legal pad by a favorite student lamp given her by Leonard Weisgard and by the telephone she sometimes used to phone in a book she had “dreamt” the night before. She mentioned having published fifty-three books in her ten years as an author. Duly impressed, the photographer asked to see some of the books, arranged them face up on the floor and persuaded her to lie down to be photographed in the middle of her work. The new fur-covered Little Fur Family merited a photograph all its own. Margaret paused to be photographed in the crooked entranceway to Cobble Court as she opened the door for Crispin’s Crispian.

  Accompanying Margaret to one of the final Goodnight Moon editorial meetings, Bliven was bemused by the cryptic exchanges between the author and her colleagues.

  “I like the rabbit,” someone ventured. “He has real sleepiness.”

  “Yes, but I’m worried about the yarn; it loses personality and softness.”

  Such impressionistic “doubletalk,” Bliven wrote, was “essential, probably” to a medium in which visual images had to be precisely matched in mood and intention to the author’s words.

  In these last meetings several minor changes and one major revision were considered. A framed map on one of the great green room’s walls was replaced by a scene from The Runaway Bunny—a whimsical self-advertisement and, apart from that, an amusing idea. On Nordstrom’s instructions, the udder of the Cow Jumping Over the Moon was reduced to an anatomical blur so as not to disarrange the fragile sensibilities of some librarians—the “Important Ladies,” as she called them. By far the most contentious discussions centered on the question of whether the child in the paintings (and presumably the old lady as well) ought to be depicted as a rabbit or more straightforwardly in human form. Hurd, it was decided, was better at drawing rabbits—and so rabbits it was.22

  In Margaret’s dealings with publishers, there had always been occasional minor flare-ups of impatience and temper. But such incidents occurred more frequently now and were more likely than before to leave residues of disappointment and injured pride. Michael Strange’s self-serving exhortations to higher standards doubtless fueled Margaret’s dissatisfaction. At the same time, however, Margaret was learning to use her considerable power within her field to safeguard the artistic integrity of her projects from mishandling by others less skilled and less sensitive. There had been a literal level of emotional truth to Margaret’s flip remark to the effect that her books were her children. She was more determined than ever that every detail of her work be handled with proper care.

  A new contentiousness was pa
rticularly evident in her relations with William R. Scott, Inc. Others besides Margaret had detected, and doubtless also contributed to, the changed atmosphere at Scott. As Clement Hurd recalled, in the early days everyone there “worked together closely, so it was difficult to say who contributed what to which book. Later, when we all had more confidence and were beginning to feel successful, it was more difficult to collaborate.”23

  William R. Scott, Inc. was still a small publishing house by New York standards. In 1946 the firm published nine titles as compared to two or three times that number of juveniles brought out by older companies like Dutton and Doubleday. But Scott had long since ceased to be a casual family operation within which a privileged few—Margaret first among them—had been elevated to the status of honorary members of the clan. Late in the war years, before he and John McCullough entered the service, Bill Scott hired someone from outside the family, Lillian Lustig, as the firm’s new president. Lustig had previously worked for Pocket Books, Simon and Schuster’s mass-market paperback division. To continue growing, Bill Scott realized, his firm would have to move closer, in a business way, to the publishing mainstream.

  Now, when Margaret phoned Scott’s office, she as often as not found herself on the line with a stranger. Worse than that, when she received the first copies of The Little Fisherman (a 1945 title), her most recent book with Scott, she discovered to her dismay that four lines of text had been dropped from her manuscript and others changed—all without her knowledge. Thus it was with considerable apprehension that she telephoned Scott on returning to New York from Maine in early September, 1946 for assurances that a similar surprise was not in the offing with her next project. The editorial assistant who answered the phone sounded unconcerned; after all, she said, the changes made in The Little Fisherman had been of “no importance since the book was selling. “24