In another dream, Margaret’s first dog, Smoke, was hit by a truck; her first impulse was to run to the dog to try to save him, but she was momentarily distracted by a domestic-minded friend who wanted help in relining her kitchen pantries. Margaret obliged her friend for a time, then left to minister to her ailing dog, recognizing at last the more urgent need.
“Of course,” Margaret wrote, venturing her own analysis, “Smoke is Michael’s lucimia [sic].” The absurd distraction of the pantry shelves was “Michael’s nonsense,” her rantings and accusations. Margaret was apparently girding herself for fresh abuse as she resolved to be of what assistance she could to the dying woman. As the earlier of the two dreams suggested, she was also coming to realize that at some future time she would be able to live on her own.
While at Suvretta House, Margaret telephoned Michael Strange in New York, but Michael refused her call. “I knew it was for myself I called,” she rebuked herself in her makeshift diary,
but she was sick and I wanted to show her how near I was. My conclusion is that she wants to feel deserted and hurt by me. Love turned to hate—Rage raging out to hurt—Anyway—This is the last time I will ever call her and the first time she has ever refused to speak to me. So I must accept that there is no more love coming from Michael till it comes like a wild bird of its own free will and finds me. Sickness and Death be damned. It is Life that is important and the way to obliterate Life is to keep trying to prove there is no death.
Michael had become increasingly preoccupied with speculations about rebirth and resurrection, but Margaret clearly had little sympathy for such ideas. The following morning she wrote in her diary that she felt “better . . . more in than out of life. It is that out of life feeling that is hard to bear.” She wondered whether it was better to live alone, or to suffer the abuse of another person’s hurtful behavior, adding cryptically, “Contact—even negative contact. That is the worse danger. Mother’s isolation—Is there a final quick to which one can be cut.”
In her own separation from Michael Strange, in the latter’s rejection of her, she had found a flash point of identification with Maude Brown, a glimpse of her mother’s painful experience reflected in her own: “I think I was cut to the heart last night. And yet I dreamt of M making a futile love to me and then the great Mother child love that I wanted—Michael being taken to hospital. Comes back to find and cherish me, make room for me in her house.”
From Switzerland Margaret and her cousin travelled by train to Paris, where they stayed for half of March. Leaving behind the costly elegances of the Suvretta House, they entered the outre Left Bank realm of the Hôtel du Danube on the rue Jacob, as different from their previous lodgings as Cobble Court was from 10 Gracie Square.
This was a regenerative if restless time, when Margaret’s capacity for living in the moment served her well. On a trip to the flower market, she bought as many flowers as could be fitted into a taxi and brought them back to her hotel, to the bemusement of the concierge. There Were visits to the Grand Guignol shows in the Luxembourg Gardens and an appointment at Schapparelli, where Margaret met the House’s chief designer, Hubert de Givenchy, and ordered an evening dress, yellow and black in broad horizontal stripes, that made her look, her cousin thought, “like a bumblebee.”27 At an antique shop she purchased as a gift for Charles Shaw an eighteenth-century painting of a monkey and a dog playing cards, with the legend in French “I will kill you if you win.” She also brought back a set of copper pots and pans. Wishing to avoid paying duty on these, she tied them together with little pieces of string and hung them like an outlandish boa around her neck, so that when she stepped off the plane in New York and passed through customs, she might claim to be wearing them.
While Margaret was vacationing abroad, Clement Hurd was home in Vermont illustrating a new project of theirs for Harper, My World. Their friendship had easily withstood the unpleasantness surrounding Wait Till the Moon Is Full. The artist recalled philosophically years later, “Working with Margaret was difficult but at the same time stimulating and satisfying.”28 She had left the manuscript in particularly rough form, and in late February the illustrator wrote Ursula Nordstrom with various questions and dry remarks.
“Our bird in the gilded cage claims that she will be back by mid-March so I guess she will have time to write this fine book.” Margaret had supplied him with a sheaf of miniscule handwritten notes indicating the approach he might want to take; in the sample artwork he was sending Nordstrom, he had “followed partly the so called text and partly what Margaret suggested on one of her multitude of cards. ‘Let’s see how it grows and let it grow out of itself.’ So it did, sometimes a little to my surprise.”29
A question of propriety had arisen. Room by room, My World detailed the domestic life of a typical modern family (a family that happened to consist of rabbits). The author had not neglected to mention the bathroom. Hurd was aware that Leonard Weisgard had once been obliged to redraw a New Yorker cover illustration of a beach scene in which he had indiscreetly included an outhouse, and he recalled the trouble he himself had experienced over the cow udder in Goodnight Moon. What, then, might children’s librarians think of My World? With tongue in cheek, Hurd sought Nordstrom’s guidance: “Is it proper to have the whole family in the bathroom at once in a book published by the House of Harper?? (and Papa in the tub, too?) . . . or do I go too far?”30
The Hurds were expecting their first baby. “We are waiting for a blizzard,” he explained, “for things to start.” In March word came from Vermont of the birth of John Thacher Hurd; and a few weeks after that, along with the news that work on My World was proceeding rapidly and well, the artist wrote to remind Nordstrom of the payment due him: “This is a plea that even though the baby can’t walk he needs a new pair of shoes! Get the idea—Best regards, Clem.”31
The artist promised to deliver the finished paintings in person in early May. Nordstrom put through a check for his advance and said she looked forward to seeing him then—and no later: “This is going to be a wonderful book. . . . So take care of yourself and don’t break a finger—at least not on your right hand! Yours, Ursula.”32
That spring of 1949, Harper published The Important Book to excellent reviews. Critics were quick to recognize it as the innovative, intellectually challenging and playful book that it was. Margaret, however, felt listless, not triumphant. She spent a fretful first part of the summer in New York and then went to Maine, where in a frenzy of organizational activity she put Billy Brown to work completing Michael Strange’s cottage. Margaret “supervised” while the young lobsterman, who had never built a house, constructed a stone hearth, fitted the center beam, and installed the cottage’s most original feature, a “Picture Window” made from an ornate picture frame Margaret had found in a Rockland antique shop.33 From inside the house, the Picture Window framed a splendid view of the magnificent spruce forest that covered portions of Margaret’s property. By a typically witty paradox, Margaret had made nature appear to imitate art. It was the sort of visual joke that Michael Strange was certain to find amusing—if, that is, she could be induced to visit the house at all.
Margaret’s manuscript for “The Ridiculous Noisy Book” was to remain unfinished. Among the many projects she was then actively working on, however, were a handful of other Noisy titles. In November Bill Scott was both shocked and angered to read in Publishers’ Weekly that Harper planned to bring out Margaret’s Quiet Noisy Book, with illustrations by Leonard Weisgard, that spring.
Margaret had not felt obliged to inform him about this in advance. Scott now found himself in a highly embarrassing position. His office was receiving phone calls from people in the trade wanting to know if it was true that his company had sold off its most popular series to Harper. Ethel Scott accepted the delicate assignment of writing Margaret to express the firm’s consternation. A coolly legalistic first draft metamorphosed into a more or less cordial invitation to dinner.34 The company, she said, viewed the situation as gra
ve. She trusted, however, that by sitting down together they might yet sort matters out amicably.
When Margaret withdrew The Important Book, the Scotts had been forced to acknowledge their powerlessness to stop her. But the new situation was of a different order. The “similar manuscripts” clause clearly applied. Determining what constituted a “similar” work might be an obscure business some of the time. There had in fact been several recent instances in which the firm might conceivably have invoked the clause in respect to books that Margaret had published elsewhere, but had chosen not to do so. In the case of the Noisy series, however, an unambiguous definition of similarity had been agreed to. Two distinct elements had been determined to comprise the irreducible essence of a Noisy work: the use of “Noisy Book” in the title and Muffin as the hero’s name. It was obvious from Harper’s ad that the new book satisfied both requirements as to similarity. The Scotts thus had every reason to think themselves on solid legal ground as they awaited Margaret’s reply.
Margaret, however, had left town to go horseback riding on the ranch of some friends, Josephine and Richard Reeve, near Tucson, Arizona. Finding the Scotts’ invitation on her return in mid-December, she replied by letter that she would be happy to meet with them but that as far as she was concerned the matter had long been put to rest: “It’s almost two years now, I think, since I wrote Bill that I didn’t see how we could do any more books together when there were so many complications about the contract and for all the other reasons I went into at that time.”35 Leonard Weisgard, she noted, had likewise decided that he no longer wanted to illustrate another Noisy Book for Scott. This being the case, it was “only logical” that they should continue the series elsewhere.
Friends can choose to adopt whatever course of action seems only logical to them, but parties to a contract may have prior obligations. What had broken down was the informal, at times almost familial, way in which Margaret and Scott had done business over the years.
“Believe me,” Margaret wrote, “I am as sorry and as pulled apart by our particular parting as evidently you seem to be at this late date.” She signed the letter in the cordial manner of their early collaborative days, “Sincerely and affectionately,” but, as was obvious to all, their differences were beyond settling over a meal. Accordingly, shortly after the first of the year, Scott’s attorney, Michael Halperin, drafted a letter advising Harper and Brothers that Margaret was in breach of contract and that Scott intended to press its claim by all means necessary.
Harper’s lawyer, now also Margaret’s, was Morris Ernst, the famed civil libertarian who had won the Ulysses censorship case on behalf of Random House and James Joyce. Ernst responded to Halperin’s accusations with a terse note stating the opinion that Scott had no valid claim against his clients. That same day, however, he wrote Frank S. McGregor at Harper to say that he had recently spoken with Margaret and believed her to be in serious trouble from a legal standpoint.36 His letter to Scott’s attorney, he confided, had been a bluff aimed at drawing the Noisy Books’ publisher into an out-of-court settlement.
Shortly after the New Year of 1950, Michael Strange flew to Switzerland to undergo treatment for leukemia. She was accompanied by Ted Peckham, the enterprising socialite jack-of-all-trades who was among the most loyal members of her entourage. A witty, prankish man, Peckham was always good company. They stopped for a respite in the grand style at the Hôtel Royal in Lausanne before continuing on to the Hirslanden Clinic in Zurich, where Michael Strange registered as “Mrs. John Barrymore.”37 Over the holidays she had had another falling-out with Margaret and had told her that she did not want Margaret to visit her in Switzerland. This rejection, like others in the past, hurt Margaret deeply.
Michael Strange’s medical condition was not promising. As her doctor at the clinic said, she had come to him not at the eleventh hour or at midnight but at “ten past twelve”; still, he told her, there was reason to hope that she might live a few years longer.38 Her fierce determination to live would help her fight the disease.
On January 26, Margaret wrote from New York;
Dearest Michael—the Michael I used to know from the self I used to be. How bewildering all these people are—I walk among them not of them making a broken voiced effort at pretend. You were born a good actress to act for people. I act—an actress for myself and so many actresses for so many selves. But to-night I am so sober like the quiet person I have always been. And I am writing to the you I used to know who was quietly you beyond all those people who came and went.39
On February 1, she wrote again to express her anguish about the “terrible division of pride and impulse” that left her uncertain how, if at all, to respond to Michael Strange’s repeated rebuffs. Yet, she said, “forgetting everything” she still wished to come to Switzerland to care for Michael “while there is time. . . . It isn’t the ocean that separates us. And yet nothing that separates us holds us apart.”40
A reassuring letter from Michael arrived soon afterward and was followed by Margaret’s eager reply, including details of her flight plan and other news delivered in the name of one or another of their imaginary creatures—the Hero, Miss Bambino, Carpe Diem.
Inspired by Michael’s poetry recitations to musical accompaniment, Margaret reported, she was writing song lyrics—an experiment begun about two years earlier with The Little Brass Band, the never-completed “Ugly Duckling,” and several other projects. She had recently met Oscar Hammerstein, Jr., who offered his encouragement; she was now at work on some lyrics for the “light Music Department” of the Manhattan radio station WQXR: “Miss Bambino [Margaret] hides the hero [Michael Strange] in the songs the way she used to disguise him in her books as a rabbit.”41 She would bring her friend the year’s first yellow primroses.
But on February 11, in a letter that stung Margaret all over again, Michael wrote saying that her physician, Dr. Rohr, had expressly forbidden a visit. He had asked her whether the prospect of seeing Margaret made her anxious and Michael had replied affirmatively. She told Margaret this even while assuring her, without a nod to irony, that a visit from her would be as welcome as one from a guardian spirit.42 For the present, however, she urged Margaret not to make any sign or gesture toward her but rather, quite simply, to leave her alone.
On February 28, Margaret flew to London. The following morning, as previously planned, she made a connecting flight to Zurich, where she had arranged to attend to some business on her own and Harper and Brothers’ behalf. At the publishing house of Guggenbuhl and Huber, she discussed the possibility of a Swiss edition of Little Fur Family. Whether she also attempted to contact Michael Strange while in Zurich is not known. After her meeting, she left immediately for the Hotel Mont Cervil, at Zurmatt, for a month of skiing.
Toward the end of her stay at the luxurious Zurmatt resort, Margaret cabled her bank in New York for a fresh infusion of cash, but was declined for lack of sufficient funds. She then sent Ursula Nordstrom an urgent airmail plea (in those days, transatlantic air letters were delivered overnight): “Dear Ursula, S. O. S. The Government seems to have taken my money and I turn out to have minus 670 (six hundred seventy) dollars in the bank.”43
She asked if she might have an advance for any one of a long list of pending projects, “or on a couple of them.” She requested that her next royalty check be deposited as soon as possible in her account in the city.
I came out of the snowdrifts to-day to find this situation. It must have been the Income Tax people. I haven’t my check book with me.
Anyway if you can keep me out of jail AGAIN, please do.
Love from,
Your Favorite Jailbird.”
Nordstrom replied that she had put through Margaret’s royalty check, which came to $1,300. She wondered if that amount would be enough to tide her over. “Your S. O. S.,” she noted a bit irritably, “was not clear on this point.”44 She looked forward to seeing Margaret again and to getting down to work with her. She recalled a manuscript titled “The Fathers
Are Coming Home” that had fallen by the wayside. “I find myself wanting to get back to The Fathers,’” Nordstrom said. “That could be such a lovely book.” She would ask Clement Hurd to join them for a “good long session” as soon as Margaret returned home, which she hoped would be before long: “I really miss you.”
Nordstrom had one other piece of news: “I’ve just met a young artist—pretty good I think—who might be a possibility for some M. W. B. books. . . . You’d make an interesting looking couple on book programs.” Nordstrom, like Margaret, was always on the lookout for new talent. Her judgment in general was extraordinarily keen. Certainly, it had been on this occasion. The artist Nordstrom had just discovered was Maurice Sendak.
From Switzerland Margaret headed by train for Rome, where Garth Williams and his family were spending the year. She had taken her seat aboard the Rome Express in a compartment opposite a man who was puffing heavily on a cigar. When the narrow compartment, occupied by just the two of them, filled up with smoke, the man had lunged at her and administered a whiff of chloroform that rendered her unconscious. When she came to at the Rome station, her assailant had long since disappeared with her valuables. (She had, however, been left the suitcase loaded with manuscripts for Williams’s consideration.) Margaret was understandably shaken when she telephoned her friend from the station. But she soon recovered her composure well enough to joke with Williams about the experience, an episode straight out of an Agatha Christie whodunit. Margaret embellished the incident for her friend, suggesting with forced good cheer that for all she knew she had been raped as well, that in nine months time she and the artist would have to meet again to celebrate the birth of her child—a boy, she said, whom she would name Espresso.
Margaret Wise Brown Page 28