The editor, it soon became clear, was not satisfied with Charles Shaw’s illustrations. Nordstrom was personally fond of Shaw and was working with him on other projects. She was determined, however, to make The Important Book a major success. Accordingly, she replaced Shaw with Leonard Weisgard, who had recently won the prestigious Caldecott Medal for illustration. As part of the book’s special promotional campaign, Harper printed up sheets of Important-Book commemorative stamps bearing the images of the author and illustrator. Nordstrom clearly hoped to cement Margaret’s loyalty to Harper once and for all.
Once Weisgard was on the project, Nordstrom showed him a copy of a curious memo that Margaret had sent his predecessor. Shaw, while experimenting with page layouts, had altered some of the author’s original line breaks. Upset to have her manuscript treated so casually, Margaret had written:
The important thing about the break in typesetting is
That you break here
It is true that you might want to break els[e]where
And breaking elsewhere makes a pretty picture
And that you for[g]et the break is for the reader
And that the break is to make a pause
In which the child will chime in
And that that is the purpose of the book
So that the important thing about the break is—
That you break here.11
Nordstrom told Weisgard that Margaret had written several more pages of stanzas than could be fitted into a standard thirty-two-page picture book and had suggested that the three of them meet to make the final selection together.
On May 1, Margaret telephoned her Hollins friend Adeleide Dana—now Mrs. J. Gilbert Parker—and sang with her, as they did each year, their May Day class song: “We are the best of friends / Everyone agrees / Little nixie pixie folk / Helping to paint the trees!”12 On May 23, her thirty-eighth birthday, she wrote Bill Scott declaring an end, apart from the two books then under contract with his firm, to their business relations.13
Considering herself free to exclude Scott from her future plans, Margaret showed Harper an outline for “The Ridiculous Noisy Book,” which was to be the next in the popular Noisy series that Scott had published in the past. Here, Nordstrom thought, was a still bigger coup, assuming that Margaret actually had the legal right to change publishers in the special case of a series already closely identified with another house.
Margaret’s previous contracts for the Noisy series seem to have clearly indicated otherwise. It was standard practice for publishers to protect their interests by limiting, by means of a variety of restrictive clauses, an author’s right to publish related works with a competing firm. While Margaret had regularly resisted her various publishers’ exhortations to offer all her work to a single house, she had always agreed to these restrictions on “similar” manuscripts. Books belonging to the same series were clearly similar.
Wishful thinking on Nordstrom’s part, an overeagerness to assume that Margaret had effectively severed all obligations to Scott, may have accounted for Nordstrom’s apparently hasty offer of a contract for the proposed “Ridiculous” work. A highly competitive businessperson, Nordstrom may also have seen good sport in the situation. She set aside an unusually generous advance for both Margaret and Leonard Weisgard (who was to illustrate the book) and told them that she hoped the project would bring the three of them “closer together.”14 Margaret had yet to write the book; for the time being it fell by the wayside.
Margaret had rarely been able to persuade Michael Strange to join her during her long summer stays on Vinalhaven. When Michael Strange went to Maine, it was more often to relax amid the creature comforts and high society of Bar Harbor, forty miles to the northeast, where cottages were mansions and one did not draw one’s water from a well.
Margaret’s spirits were high in July of 1948 when Michael Strange arrived at the Only House with plans to stay the week, but the visit proved to be an unmitigated disaster. Garth Williams and his wife were also staying with Margaret, and when all her guests were gathered together and the illustrator took out his guitar time passed pleasantly enough, but in private Margaret confided to Michael that she had been thinking a good deal lately about her mother and was wracked with guilt over not having done more to help Maude Brown during her final years.
Margaret’s words aroused little sympathy; instead Michael Strange replied with impatience to confessions of remorse which, to judge from the diary she kept in a ledgerbook that summer, she had heard Margaret express many times before. Margaret, she said, had from childhood been unwilling or unable to accept her fair share of responsibility in life; she had always sought out someone to lean heavily on when the going got rough. Michael accused Margaret of having resorted to psychoanalysis out of just such an impulse to escape responsibility. In her diary she pounded away at the bombast and prattle of psychoanalysis.15 Michael was not about to allow Margaret to use her as a crutch. She left the island early.
Margaret was still at the Only House in mid-August when she wrote Ursula Nordstrom to thank her for the sizable advances she had lately received. She reported that she was using the money to build a granite house on her property. This second house (as she did not explain to Nordstrom) was intended as a gift for Michael. Margaret had always been better at places than at people, more skilled at remaking her surroundings in conformity with her wishes and needs than at reaching a meaningful parity with others. Now she hoped, surely against all hope, that a grand gesture of this kind would suffice to induce her friend to return to Vinalhaven the following summer. To Nordstrom Margaret boasted that she had hauled “seven pink rocks 10 X 20 square”—all before breakfast. “Quite an exercise. Develops criminal muscles. . . . The wind is blowing a Hurricane—the way I like it.”16 She invited Nordstrom to visit her in September, giving detailed travel instructions that made the exhausting journey to her remote island sound easy. Replying by telegram a week later, Nordstrom declined:
SORRY CANNOT ACCEPT GRACIOUS INVITATION. WISH I COULD.
HAVE IMPORTANT DATE WITH IMPORTANT LIBRARIAN ABOUT
IMPORTANT BOOK. WILL WRITE WHEN I AM LESS IMPORTANT
—Love, Ursula.17
Just as Margaret was inviting Harper’s editor to Maine, her Golden Books editor, Dorothy Bennett, arrived there. A hearty, capable, small woman, Bennett had at one time commuted to her Manhattan office from a houseboat. She was a skilled brick mason and carpenter. On a previous visit she had noticed that the Only House had no fireplace and decided that it needed one; she now came prepared to build the fireplace herself, aided only by an illustrator, J.P. Miller, whom she had brought along ostensibly to discuss new projects.
In Rockland Bennett purchased bags of cement, a thousand bricks, and a trowel. She and Miller soon got down to business, first by piling granite rocks in the crawl space under the ground-level floor boards to support the weight of the construction. When Margaret was not sailing serenely offshore by herself, she observed the proceedings, now and again voicing a vague concern that her house would soon collapse from the visitors’ efforts. As usual, however, Bennett knew precisely what she was about and managed to put the last brick in place on August 31. She and her artist companion had done a first-rate job and Margaret mustered all her considerable graciousness to express her appreciation. “You have given this house,” she said in her halting, gravelly voice, a voice that might have been coming from the next room, “a heart.”18
Of the five books Margaret published in 1948, three were Golden Books and one each was published by Scott and Harper. The Scott book, The Little Farmer, appeared in the spring and marked the revival of Margaret’s collaboration with Esphyr Slobodkina. Despite their past differences, the two women had come to regard each other as comrades in arms in their various disputes with Scott. As work proceeded on The Little Farmer, the second sequel to The Little Fireman (the first sequel, The Little Fisherman, had been drably illustrated by Dahlov Ipcar), Margaret assumed her usual role as her illustrator�
�s protector and demanding muse.
As the artist recalled:
Anytime I seemed to stray from the narrow path of strict honesty and complete integrity, [Margaret] raised loud, bitter objections. When I failed to draw the pigs from nature and, instead, relied on some children’s books [sic] illustrations, she returned the drawings with a cutting remark to the effect that why didn’t I leave the cutie-cutie junk to Walt Disney and do my own, honest-to-good-ness stuff.
That remark was gratefully accepted and guided me . . . in all my subsequent work. She fought the introduction of [human] facial features in our books to the extent that, once, when alarmed that I might succumb to people’s blandishments, she sent me an urgent telegram to stand pat while she was away . . . and unable to defend the integrity of my style.19
The end result was a splendidly illustrated picture book— “your masterpiece,” Margaret wrote her collaborator in a congratulatory letter.20 The full brilliance of Margaret’s wit shone through in the text, except in the ending, which was somewhat flat. Margaret could turn endless fresh variations on an imaginative theme; here as elsewhere in her work, letting go of the impulse proved more difficult.
The background of Wait Till the Moon Is Full, which Harper published in the fall of 1948, was in some respects more tumultuous. Garth Williams, who illustrated the book, had been hired only after Margaret dismissed Clement Hurd from the project.21
A reviewer for the Library Journal had predicted that The Runaway Bunny might “well become a very-small-child’s classic.”22 Since then Margaret and Clem had half-jokingly referred to their Harper collaborations as their “classic series.” Wait Till the Moon Is Full was to be the next installment. Margaret’s “dark night book,” as she called it in her letter to Hurd which accompanied the manuscript, had originally been a tale about rabbits, not (as it later became) about raccoons.23
In the same letter to Hurd, Margaret had provided a detailed sketch of the double-page illustration she wanted him to prepare as a sample. Her drawing showed a nocturnal forest landscape with moon and clouds and a cutaway view of the subterranean world where a rabbit family had their home, with its “warm glow warm lit interior and security.” Hurd proceeded to do the painting and was very pleased with the result. (Years later he described it as his finest single piece of illustration work.) But during a walk in Central Park Margaret told him that she did not like the picture and that she wanted Garth Williams to illustrate the book.
This was a cruel stroke and one which is not easily explained on the basis of artistic merit alone. The fact was that Garth Williams took a positive view of Michael Strange and the Hurds did not. Williams had gotten on well with Michael from their first meeting, when he mentioned being distantly related to the Barrymores; he came to believe that Michael had helped Margaret break out of the conventional mold of her family upbringing. Both Clem and Posey Hurd, on the other hand, were more alert to Michael’s assorted pretensions and destructive impulses. They never forgot the comment of one of their Vermont neighbors, who after the briefest of encounters with Michael Strange had pronounced her an “educated damned fool.”24 Nor had Clem and Posey ever tried to conceal their intense dislike of her. In the present instance Margaret had evidently decided to use her considerable power in such a way as to let Clem feel her displeasure.
In Wait Till the Moon Is Full, Margaret returned to the compelling theme she had previously explored in Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny—the small child’s gradual development from a condition of absolute dependence to one of increasing self-possession. The animal child of Wait Till the Moon Is Full has outgrown the Runaway Bunny’s ambivalence about the desirability of venturing out into the world. His impatience is real: “This little raccoon wanted to see the night. He had seen the day. . . . But his mother said, ‘Wait. Wait till the moon is full.’”25 The mother of the piece is knowing, patient, sensible, and true to her word. When the night sky is at last illuminated by a full moon and the world thus made safer for small travelers, she lets her son leave. The text lacks the emotional intensity of the two earlier books. The cumulative structure of the narrative becomes cumbersome; the mother’s songs are self-conscious attempts at verse. Williams’ drawings are wonderfully accomplished works, mixing whimsy with tenderness, but the book as a whole lacks the overall integrity of Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny. Like the small hero of the story, it addresses questions of self-sufficiency that Margaret herself was only just ready to consider.
That fall of 1948, Michael Strange kept to an extremely demanding schedule as she toured with her “Great Words With Great Music” program. Margaret had purchased a wire recording machine (a precursor of tape recorders), and when Michael was home in New York she helped her prepare for the stage by recording her rehearsals and playing them back. Audiences were proving to be less than enthusiastic, and Margaret (to the extent that the other woman would allow her to do so) increasingly took it upon herself to help Michael polish her performance. In the meantime, to bolster lagging ticket sales, Margaret secretly bought up blocks of seats and distributed tickets to friends in the vain hope of packing the house.
It was also at about this time that Margaret persuaded Michael to try her hand at writing a children’s fantasy. Michael worked fitfully at the project, with guarded encouragement (which one assumes was completely forced) from Ursula Nordstrom, and found the going unexpectedly difficult. But whether this experience caused her to realize that Margaret’s type of writing was neither obvious nor easy is not known. Other concerns, in any case, crowded in on her attention. Until recently an extraordinarily vigorous woman, she now found that performances left her unaccountably weak. She went to see the doctor. By year’s end it was clear that she was gravely ill with leukemia.
She had scheduled a series of recitals at Manhattan’s Times Hall for January of 1949 and Michael resolved to keep the commitment regardless of her health. She had always prided herself on her fiery disregard for conventional wisdom. As she put herself on special dietary regimes and (with Margaret’s help) searched for doctors willing to hold out any promise of a cure, she felt increasingly certain of the importance of her work. It was her destiny to bring a measure of spiritual solace to a troubled world, and she would not be stopped.
Michael’s illness only deepened the fracture in her declining relationship with Margaret. Her diffuse rage (and doubtless the jealousy she felt in respect to her younger, more accomplished, and healthier friend) found a particularly insidious new focus in cruel suggestions that Margaret was somehow responsible for her illness. The accusations were of such an extreme nature that even Margaret, vulnerable as she was, does not seem to have believed that they could be true. She was, however, left feeling terribly hurt and confused, and in the first weeks of the new year of 1949 she cast about listlessly for some temporary way of escape.
During the years just after the war, Margaret had continued to see little of her sister and brother, and she seems to have visited her father only occasionally. In recent months, however, she had formed a new friendship with Judith Thorne, a younger cousin of hers from her father’s side of the family. “Little Judy” was the daughter of Robert Brown’s younger sister Judith, whom Margaret’s family had visited from time to time when the children were growing up. But it was only now that Judy had graduated from college and come to live in Manhattan that she and Margaret became acquainted. They soon developed a sort of big-sister—little-sister relationship, a friendship predicated—as so many of Margaret’s were—on distinct differences of age and experience. Margaret could be a wonderfully good listener and sympathetic adviser; she found it deeply satisfying to assume that role. On February 11 she and her cousin flew to Switzerland for a ski holiday at St. Moritz.
They stayed at Suvretta House, a deluxe hotel where Don Juan, the pretender to the Spanish throne, was also a guest during their visit. Margaret met the king-in-exile and a brief flirtation passed between them—”that flashing laughing moment,” as Margaret called it in the
diary notes she kept for those few days, in which she also jotted down dream fragments and scattered reflections on what was in fact a most precarious time for her.26
“Michael and a big bottle of Port—didn’t offer me any. . . . Rearranging furniture in mother’s house to get sofas in front of the fire. But said she wouldn’t like it.” Here were unsettling images of love, warmth, pleasure, and home comfort denied. “Michael’s always telling me that I have killed her and that’s what is wrong—Nuts!”
For the moment at least, Margaret recognized the unfairness of Michael Strange’s abusive accusations. “Wake up with courage to look at myself.” She thought herself overweight, tired- and sad-looking, and she was overtaken once again by the recurring, painful sense of having “no attachment” to the people and things around her. She felt like a “small unattached particle sitting on the rocks on the crest of a very beautiful world. The mountains frighten me. They are so much the upper edge of the world, above which there is no connection with the earth.”
How at variance this was with the buoyant immediacies of The Important Book:
It is true that it is blue,
and high, and full of clouds
and made of air.
But the important thing about
the sky is that it is always there.
In Margaret’s book, the sky is one of the great constants of experience, a godlike or parental presence, a source of encouragement and calm. In contrast to all this, Margaret in Switzerland now counselled herself in a radical skepticism: “Must be careful not to ever depend or count too much again [on anyone or anything]. Change the need.”
She had dreamed of being back in New York and unable to find her way home. Arriving at last at the correct address (186 East End Avenue), she discovered that in her absence the building had burned to the ground. Searching through the rubble, she found a single room still intact. Curiously, it did not belong there—it was one of the rooms of her old West Tenth Street apartment. She sensed right away that she could no longer live in that room. Looking on nearby, Michael Strange now spoke up to remind her of Cobble Court—she was not without a place of her own in the city.
Margaret Wise Brown Page 27