From Rome she travelled by train to Paris, arriving there on April 13. She checked into her favorite room at the Hôtel du Danube. “The Captain’s Cabin,” as she called it, was hung with red satin in such a way as to remind one of a high-toned bordello, or so Margaret liked to tell friends. From her windows she had a particularly fine view of a stand of trees in the small park below.
Throughout her stay an uneasy peace prevailed between Margaret and the hotel’s proprietress. Mme Legrand tolerated some of her guest’s outlandish attempts at interior decoration, notably the carting up of several ornamental orange trees to her quarters. Live birds proved another matter. A frequenter of the open-air bird market, Margaret returned one day with a pair of oiseaux d’île which she released in her room so as to be able to enjoy the sight of them flying up into the curtains. Mme Legrand, in the tradition of the ever-vigilant French concierge, soon got wind of this and protested to Margaret, conjuring the spectre of the mice which birds were bound to attract.
Margaret generally travelled alone, meeting friends at various points along her itinerary. Among those she had arranged to see in Paris was Virginia Mathews, an American in her twenties whom she had known since the war. Mathews until recently had managed Brentano’s children’s book department. She was already a great admirer of Margaret’s work when they met, and was soon equally impressed by her generosity of spirit. Another writer might have foraged the shelves with a jealous eye to finding chinks in the armor of her competition; Margaret never seemed to begrudge another person his or her success, but appeared genuinely glad to see others advancing.
She enjoyed her talks with Mathews, taking a particular interest in her family history. (Mathews, in contrast, learned very little about Margaret’s family.) Virginia’s mother had attended Margaret’s Swiss boarding school, the Château Brillantmont. Her father, a full-blood Osage Indian, was the tribe’s historian. In 1945 John Joseph Mathews published a book of Osage nature lore, Talking to the Moon, which Margaret had soon read. Its title alone might well have struck a responsive chord in the writer who later that year would awaken one morning to compose the text of Goodnight Moon.
The two friends made several excursions around the city. At the Louvre, Margaret had certain paintings in mind, those by Jacques-Louis David in particular, that she wished to study. The monumental works of the Emperor Napoleon’s court painter were an improbable choice for her—but for the fact that Margaret knew the paintings appealed to Michael Strange. Margaret’s Paris stay included many such allusions, conscious or unconscious, to the woman she missed.
There were trips to the Musée Carnivet, with its luminous Impressionist canvasses, and to the Musée de Cluny, where the author of The Runaway Bunny surveyed the famed Unicorn tapestries, the fifteenth-century allegorical hunting scenes that filled an entire gallery like a picture book writ large. On their way out of the Cluny, Margaret purchased a set of postcards of the tapestries. “Wouldn’t it be interesting,” she said to her companion, “to make up a new story to go along with the pictures?”45 She wanted to reorder the scenes, she explained, in such a way that the unicorn might elude his captors. At a nearby stationer that Margaret knew, she bought a parchment album. Returning to her hotel, they began arranging the cards.
In time they had their story, and after inscribing it on the album’s leaves Margaret said that it “would certainly be interesting to have the album bound in red leather.” She knew a bookbinder in the neighborhood, a M. Esperon in the rue Visconti, and before long they had deposited the album with him. Then Margaret thought of having a small medallion inset on the cover. They wandered off to a local flea market where she found just the right bronze medallion with the image of a hunting horn emblazoned on it. They brought this to the binder. Margaret, it seemed, knew precisely where to find virtually anything she wanted in Paris, usually without having to venture more than a few blocks from her hotel.
She stopped briefly in London on her way back to New York in early May. Among her purchases while abroad were a dart board for herself and an elaborate service of old English pewter flatware with pistol-design handles as a gift: for Leonard Weisgard. She also brought home a brace of eighteenth-century dueling pistols. She told Weisgard she planned to challenge John McCullough to a duel. Margaret’s gift for Michael Strange had been in preparation in New York while she was away.
Earlier that year, Ursula Nordstrom had at last scheduled The Dark Wood of the Golden Birds for publication. Michael was dying; time was growing short. Two illustrators had been dropped from the project, presumably because Margaret had not found their sketches suitable, and Leonard Weisgard had reluctantly agreed to complete the perilous assignment. By the late spring of 1950, the book was at last done. The Dark Wood was due out in July.
The Dark Wood of the Golden Birds is a haunting, albeit vexingly elliptical allegory of the artist’s heroic struggle against the dark forces that constitute the wellsprings of creativity. In it, Margaret achieved a somber grandeur of expression that is unmatched in all her work. The text, however, is overly obscure—certainly for a children’s picture book. It is like a locked secret compartment: fascinating to contemplate but ultimately beyond one’s grasp. Margaret may have come closer to realizing the piece’s true potential when she proposed it as the subject of a ballet. At John McCullough’s suggestion in the spring of 1947, she sent the manuscript to Lincoln Kirstein of the Ballet Society; he respectfully declined.
Margaret described the story as that of a boy who
goes into the dark woods in search of the song of the golden birds. . . . He eludes madness and destruction only because he has gone not for himself but for some one in the world who has become sick through denying the voice of the golden birds. And because he goes into the wood from which there is no return, not for himself, but to bring back and to give away to the old man he loves the song that alone can restore balance to his understanding, he can come back. For in all dark intensity in all dark woods lies both the power of life and the power of death, the powers of good and of evil, and the magic of the golden birds is the song bursting forever new out of the dark warring forces of the wood.
The boy is the Artist.
And the golden feather that pierces his heart [not killing him but presumably extracting a price for his heroic defiance] is the symbol of his difference.46
Does the “boy” represent Michael Strange, whom Margaret in letters had often called “the hero,” “the boy?” Does the boy’s journey into the woods stand for Michael’s exertions as a poet and public lecturer or “sayer,” whose “Great Words With Great Music” performances were aimed at bringing spiritual renewal to the world? Is the “lady,” mentioned early on in the text—the woman who went into the woods “just a little way” but then came back speaking “in words that none of the other people could understand”—meant to suggest Margaret’s mother, who had once aspired to a creative artist’s life but abandoned her ambitions? Is the “golden feather” Michael Strange’s illness, the tragic personal cost of having undertaken so selfless and godlike an enterprise?
Leonard Weisgard was convinced that the book held a key to its author’s innermost makeup. Ironically, although he illustrated The Dark Wood of the Golden Birds, he never felt he understood the allegory. Whatever Michael Strange may have thought of the book is not known.
During Margaret’s absence her dispute with Scott (now also Harper’s dispute) became the focus of intensive legal negotiations. An out-of-court settlement was deemed in the best interests of all, and considering the bruised feelings that the episode had caused, the accommodation that was finally reached showed admirable resilience all round. Harper agreed to purchase outright the entire Noisy series, including all five titles already published by Scott. Instructed in her obligations under the law, Margaret agreed thereafter to clear her potentially “similar” projects with Scott in a timely way.
“It was pretty straight shooting there for a while,” Margaret, sounding relieved, told Evelyn Burkey
at the Authors League.47 (The dueling pistols had, however, remained in their case.) That summer she wrote John McCullough that Simon and Schuster would be sending Scott her manuscript for a Little Golden Book to be called The Train to Timbuctoo. As Scott had published her Two Little Trains (illustrated by Jean Charlot) the previous year, she wanted to make certain that the new book’s title posed no problem. She described the book as a “poor old Mike O’Finnigan Begin again pattern with onomatoepoetic sounds . . . and my big little device thrown in.” A second manuscript based on the same device, Little Indian, was also in the mail from Simon and Schuster to Scott. “I trust,” she said, allowing some irritation to show through,
you will find no objection to these and will write me your reaction. As you know I used the pattern in Big Dog Little Dog, you used it to some-extent in A Very Little Dog [a book McCullough himself had written] and Ylla used it years ago in Grands et Petits. . . . Anyway I’d go crazy if everything I wrote had to be held up legally. One idea evolves out of another as in music adding something new and carrying along something old. And each of us alas plays only one or two themes many times in what we write and act in infinite variation. I wish it were not so.48
She warmly thanked McCullough for his recent letter concerning the enthusiastic critical response to Two Little Trains. Even the New York Public Library was championing the book. That was something that she and John could laugh about together—and be gratified by.
The spring and summer of 1950 was a time of seeking reconciliation and renewal wherever such could be found. On June 15, Margaret drove to Harlem to attend a party at the Countee Cullen branch of the New York Public Library. It was there, years earlier, that she had gone to scout out prospects for Lucy Mitchell’s Writers Laboratory. The present occasion was a gathering to mark the birthday of the late James Weldon Johnson, in whose memory the children’s room at the library had been renamed. Among the two hundred guests were many authors and illustrators whose works were represented on the library’s shelves: William Pène du Bois, Fritz Eichenberg, Marie Hall Ets, Harold Courlander, and Margaret’s old friend Ellen Tarry, who had gone on from the Writers Laboratory to publish a number of picture books.
Since the time of Margaret’s first visit to the library in 1937, modest progress had been made toward the goal of providing black children with books about their own experiences. The evening was also a celebration of achievements in that vein. When Margaret pulled up in her car, Lucy Mitchell, who had been one of the first people outside the black community to encourage the publication of such books, was seated beside her. It had been a half dozen years since they had last gotten together for a talk.
That summer of 1950, for the first time in two years, Margaret dispatched a note to her Hollins class secretary, reporting the diverting if not very current news of her Swiss ski holiday. “Those Alps,” she wrote, “look awfully high when you’re on top of them looking down with two sticks tied to your feet.”49 That was the old “Tim”: athletic, supremely good-spirited, unflappable. And just before leaving for the Only House, she made a quick trip to Glens Falls, New York, to call on another old acquaintance.
Montgomery Hare, a college friend of Clement Hurd’s and a regular at Michael Strange’s evenings at 10 Gracie Square, was in Glens Falls directing the Barter Theater, a romantically conceived traveling stock company which operated on a shoestring, as its name implied. Margaret, who had not seen Hare in years, had decided to lend the actors a hand and had gone to the trouble (and considerable expense) of purchasing at Hammacher Schlemmer a shiny new aluminum cookstand, an elegant version of the sort of cart that hotdog vendors operated around town. As she pulled up in her massive Chrysler, the cookstand in tow, Hare was delighted as well as more than a little taken aback by her sudden appearance. Over the next few days she presided over her refreshment stand, crooning jolly songs to attract customers. Margaret’s show was easily the equal of the one being presented under the tent. Her departure, days later, was just as unexpected as her arrival. Margaret needed little diversions, temporary escapes from the inexorable fact of Michael Strange’s imminent death, and there was no end, it seemed, to what her imagination could devise.
Determined against all odds to resume her recital work, Michael Strange had returned to New York from Zurich by late May. She stayed at East End Avenue for a time, but as climbing steps became too taxing for her, she made the Plaza Hotel her second home when in town. Margaret remained as eager as ever to help her, and there is little reason to doubt that their old pattern of flare-ups and reconciliations continued as before, with Margaret falling in and out of favor at the other woman’s whim, and all the while pursuing the full range of her projects.
No recognition that Margaret received for her work seems to have pleased her more than the commission that came her way from The Book of Knowledge for an essay on the theme “Creative Writing for Very Young Children,” for the encyclopedia’s 1951 Annual. She worked on the piece over August and September in Maine. Michael had decided once again to vacation in Bar Harbor—not at the house Margaret had specially built for her on Vinalhaven. Margaret shuttled back and forth between one retreat and the other.
Writing the essay gave her a chance to take stock of her accomplishments, and the finished piece suggests that she had begun to emerge from the shadow of Michael Strange’s influence and to know that she was not such a “little” poet after all. A new steadiness and certitude were sounded in the article, her fullest accounting till then of her career: “Children are keen as wild animals and also as timorous. So you can’t be ‘too funny’ or ‘too scary’ or ‘too many worded.’ All these are things not as easy as they sound for grown people. There is always that old problem of learning how to write. We speak naturally but spend all our lives trying to write naturally.”50
She compared the poetry of Chaucer, who had lived “when the English language was young, when it was a joy to name all the things about him,” to the delight young children routinely take “in murmuring the names of the things in the world.” In writing for the very young, the end result was bound to seem simple, but the art required to achieve that end was no less demanding than any other.
Writing was like carpentry: “One must humbly learn and serve the craft.” To write honestly and well for children, one had also to look inward to the “child that is within all of us always—perhaps the one laboratory that we all share.” It was to this inner laboratory, rather than to the Bank Street–style tryouts of manuscripts, that Margaret herself had increasingly turned for inspiration and guidance: “A child’s own story is a dream, but a good story is a dream that is true for more than one child.”
She recalled the origins of several of her innovative works. Her very first picture book, When the Wind Blew, had been inspired by a Chekhov short story about “a very sad and bitter man trying to drown a fly in an ink blob and then suddenly deciding to save its life and by that one small gesture feeling better.” She had wanted to write a sad story for children, “believing,” she said, paraphrasing Lewis Carroll, “that many of the graver cadences of life are there at any age.”
The Runaway Bunny “was an attempt to put the bold, tender, repeated cadence of an ancient French love song into the loving world of a child.” In Bumble Bugs and Elephants, A Child’s Good Night Book, and Little Fur Family, she had “merely dared to be very simple.” Elsewhere she had given the very young child a “form to put his own observations into—as in the ‘Noisy’ books and The Important Book published by Harper.” (Margaret gave Scott no such free publicity.)
She noted with amusement her own childhood habit of citing The Book of Knowledge as her source for the outlandish stories she told her sister and friends. “Story teller,” Margaret recalled, was “a polite word in our family for . . . liar.” What a delicious irony to find herself now actually writing for that same Book of Knowledge which had once stood her in such good stead. She offered this summing-up:
A book should try to accomplish something more th
an just to repeat a child’s own experiences. One would hope rather to make a child laugh or feel clear and happy-headed as he follows a simple rhythm to its logical end, to jog him with the unexpected and comfort him with the familiar; and perhaps to lift him for a few moments from his own problems of shoe laces that won’t tie and busy parents and mysterious clock time into the world of a bug or a bear or a bee or a boy living in the timeless world of story.
Michael Strange was in and out of hospitals for much of the summer. On July 8, she was discharged from New York’s Memorial Hospital and checked into the Plaza. On the twelfth, she returned to 186 East End Avenue, but within days was readmitted to the hospital, where her cousin by marriage, the society bandleader Eddy Duchin, was also a cancer patient. Glad for each other’s company, the two ailing celebrities amused themselves by racing their wheelchairs through the corridors. From her hospital bed Michael telephoned Charles Shaw, already vacationing in Bar Harbor, to say that she would join him there soon. Shaw, in his diary entry for that day, July 27, commented, “I doubt it very much.”51 But on July 28, she boarded the Bar Harbor Express for the strenuous thirteen-and-a-half-hour ride north.
While in Maine, Michael took another turn for the worse. On October 8, she was admitted to Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital.
Margaret, who had returned to New York from Maine in late September, now took a room in Boston’s Hotel Eliot, where she tried to work between visits to Michael’s bedside. Golden Books had asked her for excerpts from the letters she received from children. Most letters, she replied, “30 or 40 at a time,” were essentially form letters, “writing exercises in Block Letters and Neatness copied from a blackboard [and] written by a teacher. I love children but distrust teachers, librarians, and policemen.”52 When children wrote on their own, however, she was delighted, “touched in the heart,” and made a point of responding, “especially if the child is perceptive enough to challenge me on some naturalistic phenomenon that I have made a mistake in or that he thinks I have.” One young correspondent, she reported, had been disturbed because in The Country Noisy Book she had written, “The stars came out.” “He said the stars were always there. And I wrote that he was right and I would change it next time.” It was for such moments of insight that she had always found it worthwhile to test her unpublished work on groups of children. “All children’s letters end, please write another story. That is perhaps more important to them than answering every dear unnatural grubby little letter.”
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