“Of course I hit the ceiling,” Margaret wrote Lillian Lustig,
and had every right to a second bounce on the phone [with Lustig herself] the other evening. If it ever happens again, and it never has happened with any other publisher but Scott, that will naturally be the end. In spite of certain pretentions in your catalogue— which by the way I called up to tell you I thought by and large superb—a writer still writes the story and an artist draws the pictures and I am too old a hand to be told in your letter “The type must go with the pictures and must fit the page size.” . . . Obviously. . . .
I didn’t mean to go into all this because I am in perfectly good spirits about it all. [Obviously.] So let’s have lunch some time.25
Her relationship with Harper remained good, so good in fact that Margaret routinely showed Ursula Nordstrom her new work before submitting it elsewhere. However, she was also determined not to let Harper take her services for granted, and to keep Nordstrom on the run. And Margaret knew that to do so she had only to make an occasional reference to Simon and Schuster. Thus, in a sporting mood she and Garth Williams telegrammed Harper on October 26 with an ultimatum which, though obviously meant as a joke, still served her purpose:
HAVE OFFER FROM SIMON AND SCHUSTER TO TAKE ON IMMEDIATE PRODUCTION OF 250,000 COPIES OF LITTLE FUR FAMILY IF YOU ARE NOT ABLE TO FILL IMMINENT INCREASED DEMAND FOR COPIES DUE TO LIFE’S SIX PAGE FEATURE ARTICLE ON BOOK APPEARING NOVEMBER IOTH. WIRE REPLY IMMEDIATELY. APRIL FOOL BUT WITH INTENT.26
Nordstrom, who had little trouble recognizing this particular bolt from the blue for what it was, scribbled in the margin “very funny,”27 but she also ordered her staff to determine whether Life had in fact scheduled the piece. The magazine, it turned out, had not yet done so. Margaret having made her point and Nordstrom having effectively stood her ground, the two friends were soon back on the best of terms. Before long they would share a good laugh over a report from a mother whose little boy had held open his fur-bound copy of Little Fur Family at dinnertime and tried to feed the book his supper.
Children’s Book Week, celebrated with posters and special events at libraries and bookstores around the country, came in mid-November. This was the week when the New York Public Library announced its annual list of recommended children’s books. In the fall of 1946, anticipating her exclusion from the list (only one book by her, A Child’s Good Night Book, illustrated by Jean Charlot, had received this important endorsement), Margaret wrote a caustic note to Ursula Nordstrom from Under the Hill. The Book Week poster slogan for 1946 was “Books Are Bridges,” a catch phrase meant to suggest the power of books to help unify a world so recently torn apart by war. Margaret insisted, however,
if I were a child, and saw [on posters] “Books are Bridges” I’d go out and make channels of diverted water from a stream through the sand and stretch the Books across the little streams for my imaginary armies to march across. . . . If I were a child and read “Books are Bullets” I and other children would throw them at each other. If I were a child and read “Books Around the World” I would wish that I had gone myself— If I read “Friendship Through Books” I would have wished the Book weren’t there between us. Therefore for next year I propose “Books are Books” for the Book Week slogan. A fact any child would recognize with relief.28
As a literary document, Margaret’s letter was an impromptu display of her astonishing facility for generating variations on a theme without end; as an emotional artifact, it was an amply justified exercise in the venting of spleen. Margaret’s association with the progressive education movement, through her work at Bank Street and for Scott, had long since rendered virtually all her books suspect in the eyes of Anne Carroll Moore, her successor, Frances Clarke Sayers, and others in the New York library establishment. Their suspicions had proven remarkably durable and as Margaret well understood, her newly forged association with Simon and Schuster was likely only to make matters worse. The librarians bitterly attacked Golden Books as an ominous intrusion of commercial values and practices into the uniquely important and gentle-spirited realm that they themselves had long labored to hold above crassness. Although these critics correctly understood the potential for mediocrity on a massive scale that a publisher like Golden Books represented, they had closed their minds to the possibility that the new publishing imprint might produce some books of lasting merit.
One reason for their rigid outlook doubtless boiled down to a question of power. The traditional publishers of juveniles relied on public library purchases for as much as a half (or even more than half) of their total annual sales; hence the extreme importance of an endorsement of a given book by a librarian like Moore. But by marketing its lists directly to parents, to the customers of drugstores and five-and-dimes, Simon and Schuster had for all intents and purposes factored the librarians out of the system. From the librarians’ standpoint, where culture had flourished anarchy might soon reign.
The Life piece by Bruce Bliven, Jr., which appeared in the magazine’s December 2 issue, provided Margaret with another opportunity to reach over the heads of “the Important Ladies.” Whether or not her books were chosen for the library lists, millions of parents were now certain to know about them. (Life’s cover that week featured Ingrid Bergman as the valiant Joan of Lorraine; Margaret, having fought a few battles of her own lately, probably considered herself in good company.)
Bliven’s article presented a portrait of an attractive, sophisticated, unpredictable young woman who led a charmed, fairy-tale existence while racking up publication credits on an Olympian scale. As of that fall, the journalist estimated, at least 835,000 copies of her various books had been sold. In October alone three new titles had appeared: The Little Island, Little Fur Family, and The Man in the Manhole and the Fix-It Men (the last a collaboration with Posey Hurd under the joint pseudonym Juniper Sage)—each published under a different name and by a different house. For the curious book buying public, Bliven offered appealing snapshot impressions of the eccentric “Miss Brown” sporting “some startling accessory . . . a live cat in a wicker basket or a hat made out of live flowers.”29 Readers may also have been surprised by Bliven’s assertion that the apparent simplicity of Margaret’s books was not evidence of a literary deficiency—that, on the contrary, simplicity was the very hallmark of her wonderfully distilled poetic writings for the very young.
The most startling portion of the piece for most readers, however, was undoubtedly Bliven’s tongue-in-cheek account of the author’s rabbit hunting activities, which he juxtaposed with Margaret’s thoughts about small children:
Whenever anybody points out that beagling is an odd hobby for a girl who lives by writing books about the hopes and aspirations of small furry creatures, Miss Brown is likely to counter with: “Well, I don’t especially like children, either. At least not as a group. I won’t let anybody get away with anything just because he is little.”30
Intended primarily as a defiant swipe at the librarian-critics who deprecated her work and whose own more sentimental view of childhood Margaret scorned, these remarks had evidently been weighed carefully. On October 7, while the article was still in manuscript, Margaret sent Evelyn Burkey a copy at the Authors League, with a request that she look the piece over: “I would like your opinion and so would he [Bliven] on the advisability of it. It seems a little risky to me.”31 No sooner did the profile appear, in early December, than the predictable uproar began.
“Did you see the article on Margaret Wise Brown in Life?” Louise Seaman Bechtel (critic and former Macmillan editor) wondered in a letter to Bertha E. Mahony at the Horn Book. “Surely everyone’ saw that!”32 Bechtel, who had been an early and steadfast champion of Margaret’s career, ventured no further comment except to say that she did not ordinarily read Life herself; three friends had clipped the piece and sent it to her. Bechtel had been preparing an essay of her own about Margaret for the Horn Book, but, she added, sounding a bit put out, “no need to finish mine now.”
Ma
hony, for her part, made no bones about her own view of the Life piece: “Such an article, I suppose, is meant as a caricature. I think it’s horrible. Plain destructive for an author of picture story books for little children.”33 The Horn Book’s editor had long since become an admirer, albeit a somewhat cautious one, of Margaret’s work. One can only imagine in what caustic terms Anne Carroll Moore (who had retired from the Central Children’s Room but was still a regular presence there) and Frances Clarke Sayers must have dealt with the profile.
Throughout the forties Margaret continued to have little to do with her family; such was the impact of the article in Life, however, that the reactions of at least two family members are recalled. Having learned from the piece that Margaret was earning ten thousand dollars a year from her books, Basil Rauch is said to have toted up the number of words in a typical annual output, divided the number into ten thousand, and concluded from the result that Margaret did indeed have a serious vocation. Her father, Robert Brown, was evidently just as impressed by the size of her income. His reaction, according to family legend, was to announce that he planned to stop giving Margaret her annual allowance. Whether he actually did so is not known. If he had, however, Margaret would almost certainly have understood the gesture for what it was, a genuine if oddly circumspect show of paternal affection—Robert Brown’s brusque way of acknowledging that she had at last become her own person. Margaret spent large sums of money each year on fresh cut flowers for Cobble Court and her East End Avenue apartment. During one of her very occasional conversations with her father, he had advised her that as a writer she was clearly entitled to claim her florists’ bills—were not flowers a writer’s inspiration?—as a business expense on her tax returns. The remark was a bit of mischief worthy of Margaret herself. She accepted the suggestion, with mixed astonishment and gratitude, as a precious gift.
Whether Margaret’s mother read the Life article is not known. By then Maude was living with Gratz and his wife in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She was ill much of the time. In early January of 1947, word reached Margaret in New York that Maude Brown had died.
Margaret arrived by train for the funeral in Ann Arbor, where Roberta and Gratz, whom she hadn’t seen in years, met her at the station. Stepping showily, her brother thought, onto the platform, Margaret, dressed in mourning, was holding a Madonna lily.34 It was a stubbornly Wildean gesture, the aesthete on parade, though she proceeded to conduct herself with appropriate dignity. In her conversations with Bruce Bliven, Jr., Margaret had spoken with pride of her mother’s old Virginia family without mentioning her father’s far more notable background of governors, senators, and judges. Perhaps, in her curiously limited way, this had been a last attempt at honoring Maude Brown, at righting the balance between her mother and her father. In any case, much was left unresolved between Margaret and Maude.
Back in New York a few days later, she found the jacket copy for Goodnight Moon awaiting her approval. In late March she flew down to Florida for a brief vacation and returned to the city at the wheel of a spanking new, honey-colored Chrysler Town & Country convertible. New cars were still scarce commodities in the postwar industrial northeast; she had purchased the deluxe Chrysler in St. Augustine for the princely sum of thirty-six hundred dollars. Margaret timed the trip so as to be down south for the onset of spring, and back in New York in time to see spring arrive all over again.
In San Francisco that summer, Leonard Weisgard attended the American Library Association’s first annual meeting since the war. There, on Wednesday evening, July 2, he accepted the Caldecott Medal for The Little Island. Weisgard had not only won the coveted prize but had also emerged in the voting as first runner-up for another picture book called Rain Drop Splash, written by Alvin Tresselt.
Such a double success would have been a remarkable achievement for any illustrator. Nonetheless, Weisgard’s mood in San Francisco was decidely grim. For one thing, he dreaded having to make a public acceptance speech. Even casual conversation had always been a nerve-wracking experience for him. Margaret had once surprised him by remarking, accurately he thought, that when he talked he sounded “like someone translating from a foreign language.”35 Lately, he had also begun to question the validity, within the larger scheme of things, of his artwork. Had he not originally intended to paint and to design for the ballet? With bittersweet irony, the attainment of the highest recognition in his field now served to fuel his misgivings.
In his address to the American Library Association, Weisgard gracefully submerged his private doubts in a public meditation on the role of children’s literature in an uncertain world. Wondering aloud whether books for the young ought to concentrate on presenting honest reflections of the world as it is, or whether they ought instead to venture beyond the bounds of realism, Weisgard asked:
Should we think of the world as we would like to make it? Should we wish it were better, so that we could all sit back, marvel at it and at little children looking at us, all safe and secure? . . .
Our adult reality is a world of precarious balance. Some of us enjoy all the ingenious complexity of today’s machinery. . . . Some of us . . . yearn for the basic truth of the primitive.
But those original realists, the children to whom primitive mysteries are plain and natural, are for me the most exciting examples of the curious balance that swings the world.36
Years later Weisgard remarked that he had learned to illustrate children’s books by “learning to dance, living, breathing, being with children, with people, being alone, reading, writing, traveling, brooding, dreaming, beachcombing, wondering, and, mostly, listening to Margaret Wise Brown.”37 As a thoughtful reconciliation of the conflicting ideals of Romanticism and here-and-now realism, Weisgard’s Caldecott address might almost have been written by Margaret herself.
In a touching tribute published in the Horn Book, the Hurds sounded a valedictory note as they speculated about their “unusually sensitive” and “restless” friend’s future plans. Would he continue to illustrate, they wondered, or would he instead venture into some other phase of art or design, or simply stay at home in the manner of Voltaire’s Candide and make more “new antiques for another old house?”38
To celebrate Leonard’s success, Margaret presented her collaborator with a pocket watch, a resplendent platinum Gübelin special edition, on the reverse side of which she had had engraved the following:
Leonard Weisgard
from
Margaret Wise Brown
To keep time with
“And many a green isle still must be
In this sea of misery.” 39
The quotation, from Shelley’s “Lines Written Amongst the Euganean,” was an affirmation that sounded distressingly like an epitaph. At issue for both Weisgard in his broodingly intellectualized way and Margaret in her more intuitive way was the survival, in an age of mass conformity and atomic destruction, of the wild green nature of Romantic solitude that The Little Island celebrated.
Margaret’s gift had been solemn and formal. Putting self-doubt momentarily to one side, Weisgard responded in a playful mood, presenting her with a boxful of the impressive-looking gold foil Caldecott medallions that would henceforth adorn the dust jackets of copies of their book. Delighted by her new treasure, Margaret made good use of the seals, pasting them (occasionally more than one) on the dummies of her works in progress.40
Later that summer, Michael Strange gave Margaret a copy of Kathleen Hoagland’s One Thousand Years of Irish Poetry, and a gold wishbone small enough to fit in the palm of one’s hand, a good luck charm for travelers. And in mid-August Margaret flew by herself to Ireland, green isle and great green room, where she had not visited since before the war.
Arriving at Shannon Airport on Saturday, August 16, she rented a car and drove southwest with plans to spend the night in Tralee. The flight over had been comfortable and had seemed surprisingly short, though “something invisable [sic] in it,” she wrote Michael the next day, had crept up on her, and had lef
t her feeling exhausted two hours after landing.41 She had pulled off the road at Listowel, taken a room at the Listowel Arms and gone to sleep in mid-afternoon. Next morning, awakened by the sound of “little donkeys [sic] feet bringing the milk across the square and hidious [sic] shrieks as some of them howled at the hot weather,” Margaret inhaled the “smoky sweet smell of burning peat” and began to feel herself again. As she dressed, she watched from her window as women in black shawls and a man leading a pair of greyhounds passed in the square. After a good breakfast she drove off toward her final destination, Dingle, County Kerry, a sleepy coastal village in the oldest inhabited part of the island.
In Dingle, a village of fifteen hundred inhabitants and a different pub for each week of the year, Margaret took up lodging at Benner’s Hotel, a hospitable old house frequented by the more adventurous sort of well-heeled traveler from England, the United States, and Ireland itself. Guests stayed long and returned often to the gracious small establishment, with its well-run dining room and well-kept garden, and with the ever-attentive Mrs. Benner herself always ready to minister to one’s needs. From this snug haven, Margaret ventured forth each day by foot, bicycle, or car into the “wildest” landscape (as she said) that she had ever known.
“This is a world wilder than my own fantasy and that is one reason I love it so,” Margaret wrote Michael from Dingle on Monday.42 That same day, she bicycled on the coast road around the Ring of Kerry and had her first look at the mysterious, ancient “beehive” stone huts and fortifications and the Gallarus Oratory, all built without mortar and perfectly preserved from early Christian times.
Margaret Wise Brown Page 24