During her Bank Street years, Margaret had worked closely with a great many children. In the years since then she had never been without a few child acquaintances, mostly the children of friends and neighbors. But such day-to-day contact with the very young, she insisted, was not the real key to her type of work. To be a children’s writer, she said, “one has to love not children but what children love.” Margaret’s favorite letter concerning her work had come from “a little rich boys [sic] father in Chicago.” He said that after reading Five Little Firemen his child had tried to set the house on fire. “My answer was, ‘Dear Sir, I am glad you caught your son in time.’”
Michael Strange died in Boston on November 5, 1950, with Margaret, their housekeeper Ethel Malcolm, Ted Peckham, and a few others at her side. Extravagant to the end, at the time of her death she was wearing a massive double strand of pearls that countless people had admired over the years. How odd it must have seemed to those present to realize, on top of their grief, that Michael Strange, poet and actress, sayer and celebrity, was suddenly no longer there to fend for herself; how very unlike her it all was. When someone finally spoke up, it was the ever-pragmatic Ethel Malcolm, who said of the pearls, “We’d better take [them] off her—before someone else does.”53
Chapter Eight
“The Fidget Wheels of Time”
And pluck till time and times
are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS,
“The Song of the Wandering Aengus”
In death, Michael Strange was recalled much as she had presented herself to the world. In the many obituaries which appeared in newspapers around the United States and abroad, she was eulogized as a rebellious Newport socialite turned actress and poet, as one of the most strikingly beautiful women of her day, and as the former Mrs. John Barrymore.1 None of the articles noting her passing made reference to her attachment to Margaret. With the help of friends, Margaret amassed a collection of the obituaries and saved them along with what remained of their correspondence.
Michael had left no detail of her funeral arrangements to chance. In accordance with her instructions, her body was dressed in the white-and-gold pleated robe she had worn for her poetry recitals and lay in state in the cavernous living room at Under the Hill, where a recording of Wagner’s Parsifal played continuously as friends and relatives came to pay their respects. The Catholic funeral mass was conducted at the house and followed by burial at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, in a grave beside that of her son Robin. (Robin had originally been buried in Indianapolis, but soon after Michael Strange realized the seriousness of her illness, she had decided—her son’s own express wishes notwithstanding—to remove his body to Woodlawn.) She had ordered twin headstones. On the one reserved for herself, Michael Strange had engraved part of a passage from the Song of Songs: “For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.” On Robin’s headstone was the passage’s refrain: “Arise my love, my fair one, and come away.”2
For Margaret, Michael’s passing was the end of a relationship that had remained as baroquely complex as it had been intense. When Virginia Mathews, the former bookstore manager whom Margaret had last seen in Paris, spent an afternoon with her shortly after her return from Boston, she left with the impression that Margaret was as relieved by her long-time companion’s death as saddened by it.
The ever-loyal Charles Shaw was another friend who was a particular comfort to Margaret. They went for long walks in Carl Schurz Park, in the shadow of the house where Michael had first admitted Margaret into her rarefied social world. They met for dinner often over the next several weeks, and on December 21 it was Margaret who delivered a Christmas tree to his door. They spent a quiet Christmas eve together at Cobble Court, drinking Old Fashioneds.
Michael’s death also meant the end of an apprenticeship. If the older woman had played “big poet” to her “little poet,” Margaret now would assume the larger role herself. “We are no longer amateurs,” she wrote Alvin Tresselt, one of the younger writer friends whose work she was championing.3
Margaret continued to live at East End Avenue, where to keep her company various friends came to stay in Michael’s rooms across the hall. She kept Cobble Court as well, and Pietro stayed on as her butler and cook, arriving each morning in time to bring her her “orange juice and crust.”4 Pietro spent his days polishing and dusting, making runs to the florist, and preparing the elegant small lunches and dinners she still gave for friends.
Under the terms of Michael Strange’s will, Margaret inherited Michael’s poetry library and one highly dramatic piece of jewelry, an outsized fleur-de-lis diamond brooch designed by John Barry-more. The brooch was so massive that Margaret hesitated to wear it in public for fear of attracting thieves. She asked Lucille Ogle, one of Golden Books’ executives, what she should do with the piece. “Wear it,” Ogle replied. “No one will ever guess that the diamonds are real.”5
Margaret was also made coexecutor of Michael Strange’s literary estate. Among the papers put in her care were the various sketches for children’s books she had coaxed Michael into writing. Margaret attempted to interest Ursula Nordstrom in these, but without success. As for the other manuscripts, she apparently decided to let matters rest.
The death of Michael Strange caused Margaret to concentrate her energies with unprecedented intensity. She resolved, in whatever ways lay open to her, to put her house in order. There were pressing money worries to address. Simon and Schuster, nowadays her principal source of income, had sold out the most recent printings of all her Golden Books titles and was not planning to go back to press with them for at least another year. Earnings she had counted on would thus be much delayed.
Just as Margaret learned of this, she received more bad news from Ursula Nordstrom, who had been doing some housekeeping of her own. In the wake of the Noisy Book settlement, as part of which Harper made a substantial cash payment to Scott and incurred heavy legal fees, Nordstrom was under extraordinary pressure to keep a tight rein on her budget. The editor reminded Margaret of an advance Harper had paid her years earlier for a book never published and suggested she should be willing to consider that money as her advance for their next new project together, The Summer Noisy Book.6 Nordstrom’s proposal would have been a reasonable one unless, as Margaret insisted was the case in a letter dated March 16, she had in fact submitted a satisfactory manuscript for her “Little Fat Cat Book” and it had been Nordstrom who had held up the project for six full years. Margaret proceeded to enumerate a handful of other projects which but for delays for which the publisher was responsible would doubtless have earned both her and the house a good profit. To Margaret’s further consternation, Nordstrom had recently declared that she could “see no future market” for the Little Fur Family, the sale and distribution of which had been complicated by an invasion of moths into the Harper warehouse, among other problems. To this Margaret replied that since her “Fur Book” was so “very near to my heart” she was prepared to do whatever was necessary to keep it in print, “even if I have to form my own publishing scheme,” have copies printed in Japan, and “import and distribute them myself.”7
She asked for an immediate clarification of Nordstrom’s thoughts on these and other matters, a request to which the editor responded with such tact and friendly, respectful regard that within two weeks’ time Margaret was assuring her that the “mutual honorable assumptions” between them had not only been “clarified” by their recent skirmishes, “but strengthened.”8
In late March Margaret spent a nostalgic evening with Lucy Sprague Mitchell. Mitchell had lost her beloved husband Robin little more than two years earlier and she was starting to feel her age. Writing afterwards to thank “Brownie” for the visit, she praised her former student: “Your things—all of them, the verse books & Heath readers—have a magic power that words can have but so seldom do. I sometimes wonder—now that my chance
has passed—whether I could have made words magical if my civic conscience had been less domineering?”9
Mitchell was writing her memoirs, a project she had planned, unconventionally, as half autobiography and half the biography of her late husband—a sort of valedictory exercise in relationship thinking. Despite a severe cold, she was forging ahead with the manuscript of Two Lives. But apart from that effort, she confided, she was having a hard time finding it within herself to work: “I am learning the art of procrastination for the first time in my life and I don’t really enjoy it.” She asked Margaret to visit her over the summer in Vermont (“if I go”) and to read her manuscript and tell her what she thought of it. “Somewhere, some time, at any rate,” she concluded, “let’s meet again.”
In mid-May Margaret drove up to see the Hurds in Vermont, hoping to rekindle their old friendship, and had a glorious time. A few days later she wrote Clem and Posey from New York. “Our Spring Trillium Magnum binge is becoming dearer and dearer to my heart. Do you supose [sic] when we are all old and white (not grey) Thacher will explain to his college friends that—They get this way every year about the time the miliums come in bloom.”10 She hoped they would allow her to return the favor by joining her at the Only House in August. Margaret then left for a short trip to Maine, and was back in New York again in time for her forty-first birthday. She had lent Cobble Court to a theater friend of Michael’s, Luther Greene, who organized a surprise party for her. It poured on May 23; the dozen or so invited guests, including Charles Shaw, Margaret’s cousin Judy, and Leonard Weisgard, had to press inside Margaret’s wonderland cottage to toast her health.
For Margaret, a common thread linking the work of Lucy Sprague Mitchell, Gertrude Stein, and Michael Strange was the emphasis they all placed on the musical element in language and literature. In a second essay commissioned by The Book of Knowledge Annual (for 1952), called “Stories to Be Sung and Songs to Be Told,” she made the theme her own as she speculated on the elemental nature of music making within the overall scheme of human activity and argued that her own type of work was simply a contemporary expression of that very basic urge: “In the natural impulse to amuse and to delight and comfort very young children the song came first. . . . The picture book is but a recent development of those early songs that told a story.”11
She proposed this jaunty maxim: “A good picture book . . . can almost be whistled. . . . The Three Bears,’ ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff,’ Millions of Cats . . . all have their own melodies behind the storytelling. When such stories are told well, really told, their cadence and rhythm are a large part of their meaning.” Margaret had once tested this proposition by reading from a French book to a group of small children who did not know the language. “They couldn’t understand a word,” she told a friend. “They loved every syllable.”12
She explained to Book of Knowledge readers that the songs she wrote for children were meant to be “silly simple” lyrics that “might make any child feel that he could do just as well himself.” She offered as an example “The Secret Song,” which begins, “Who saw the petals / drop from the rose / I, said the spider / But nobody knows.” Margaret’s lyric continues in this light vein for four more stanzas about fog and sunsets, night owls and foxes.
She did not disparage the new medium of television out of hand. “Maybe,” Margaret wrote, “television will bring back the ballad singer.” But “most of all,” she declared, “how wonderful it would be to walk along the street and hear children putting their own thoughts to music, making up their own songs.”
What Margaret recalled as the “saddest thing I have heard for a long time”—a remark of one of her Maine lobsterman friends—found its way into the article. “What a pity it is,” he had said, “to never hear anymore a woman singing at her work.”
The advent of radio, Margaret argued, with its steady hum of music and chatter, and more lately of television, rendered urgent the need to encourage the very young to continue their own music making. “I should like,” she said, “to see strolling ballad singers go into nursery schools, to show up suddenly at Story Time.”
Burl Ives had recently recorded Two Little Trains for Columbia Records and was planning to record The Runaway Bunny. In August the popular folk singer wrote Margaret to express his pleasure over this. “I am sure there is a dimension in children’s books,” Ives said, “especially your books, which must delight any adult with imagination.”13
“The cradle, the rocking chair, the crooning mother holding her baby or comforting him through those endless griefs and joys of babyhood before he can communicate in that later rhythm called speech, the father jogging his children on his knee, the child swinging through endless years of rhythmic reflection in his swing”—all these, Margaret said, were instances of musicality in everyday experience. Traditional Mother Goose rhymes echoed these rhythms and were the more memorable for it. So too, she might have added, were Goodnight Moon and a great many of her other books.
Margaret’s essay surpassed the previous year’s article in insight and eloquence. She was proud of it, and in a touching gesture made the more poignant by the apparent unexpectedness of it all, she sent a copy of the manuscript to her father. Robert Brown had remarried and was living in Clinton, New Jersey, where Margaret seems to have seen him occasionally. One suspects that this small gift, her symbolic offering to him, did them both a world of good. The essay was clearly voiced and self-assured, the well-considered summing-up of a master. But in venturing to show the manuscript to her father, Margaret reverted to a half-embarrassed shyness that she had otherwise largely outgrown. She hoped, she wrote him, that the piece would “give him a good laugh.”14
While in Maine Margaret received a letter from Louise Seaman Bechtel that was full of praise for her work. Writing back to express her thanks, she invited the critic to visit the Only House whenever she wished and used the occasion for a sort of stocktaking:
For the past two weeks I have been more or less alone. It is quite an experience. Yet I seem to do it every year, serve my hermitage. Everything is so astonishingly wild and beautiful here and I have developed the ears of a rabbit and the eyes of an eagle. There is little silence in the wildernesse [sic]. Michael used to say that only a great saint or a beast could live alone and I seem to have described the beast.15
Bechtel did not go to the Only House that summer, but the Hurds accepted Margaret’s invitation, sending word of their expected arrival on July 31, with plans to stay a week. Clem and Posey had last visited her in Maine at her old Long Cove house before the war. If they hoped for an easier time making their way to her new place, they were soon to be disappointed. “If you telephone Billy Brown at Vinalhaven,” she assured Clem, “he’ll meet your boat at the black buoy in the narrows. Unless you want to fly over.”16 Flying was more expensive but, she suggested a bit cryptically, in good weather the extra seven dollars per passenger was worth “the experience.” She signed this missive “Love from, Esmeralda, Your father’s Fancy Lady.”
The Hurds chose to come by ferry. With Thacher (then little more than two) along, they were more than willing to forego an unspecified experience in return for an added measure of dependability and safety. The sea route proved perilous enough as the ferry did not actually stop at the buoy in the narrows, but merely slowed down beside it, forcing the Hurds to make a hastier transfer of themselves, their belongings, and their son into Billy Brown’s boat than they might have wished.
Margaret had gone to great lengths to prepare a “Little Fur Room” for Thacher with fur pillows, fur blankets, and a leopard-skin rug set out on the floor complete with the head preserved, teeth displayed, and glass eyes glaring. To her evident disappointment the toddler showed no appreciation for her efforts. On the contrary, at the sight of the rug he screamed in terror. Smarting from the experience, Margaret observed, “Perhaps it’s better for small children to stay in their usual environment.”17
A bowl of soup she made for Thacher from a favorite reci
pe did not appeal to him either. A potato his mother put in the oven for his lunch went unattended as everyone left for a walk in the woods. As they headed back, Margaret and the others could see smoke billowing skyward in the distance. Fortunately, only the potato, not the house, had been reduced to ashes.
And so it went all week. There were the usual wine and lobster picnics, early morning swims and afternoons spent lazing by the water. But all in all, these were not quite the good old times they remembered.
Margaret spent much of the fall of 1951 working on new Noisy books and having quiet dinners with friends. The much-needed calm of this period abruptly ended, however, on October 25, when the electric icebox in her East End Avenue apartment exploded, filling the entire lower portion of her building with noxious ammonia gas. For forty-five minutes, while she waited for the police emergency squad to arrive, Margaret lay on her stomach by an open window, straining for air “with a large dog under one arm,” as she reported in a long, indignant letter to “Captain [Vincent] Astor,” her landlord. The fireproof staircase had also filled with gas, rendering it impassable. She had only gotten out, she said, “by the aid of the tenants on the next top floor—an English lady . . . who had been through the Blitz in London, who opened the door onto the roof and whose husband came through the gas with wet towels.” For weeks afterward she suffered from an aggravated bronchial condition. Submitting a bill to Astor for some minor property damage she had also sustained, she insisted that “as a rational and responsible individual” it was her “humane duty to point out a danger that has such a simple remedy—one ladder”—a fire ladder, that is, to be left in the hall.18
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